Prince - John Shakespeare 03 - Read Free Page B

elegant, mournful figure. He smiled wanly at Shakespeare. George Peele, the poet and playmaker, cut an equally desolate figure in an outrageously costly doublet and hose of green and gold satin that would not have been out of place at court.
    Shakespeare took his brother by the hand, then drew him close in an embrace. ‘This is a fine place to meet, Will.’
    ‘Self-defence, they say. Do you believe it, John?’
    ‘No, of course not. If Rob Poley said the sun was yellow I would believe it blue.’
    ‘First Thomas Kyd is tortured within an inch of his life, now Kit is dead. Which of us will be next?’
    Shakespeare frowned. He had not thought of this killing in the context of a threat to London’s players and poets. Yet when he looked again at the group of men mourning Marlowe he saw anxiety as well as grief in their eyes. Also, despite the death and the arrest and hard questioning of playmaker Thomas Kyd for supposed heresy, he saw defiance in the crowd. He felt sick to the depths of his soul.
    ‘Come, John,’ Will Shakespeare said. ‘Come with us to St Nicholas and see Kit interred at least. And then I shall head home to Stratford. This city has become unhealthy.’
    A small cart clattered westwards from Aldgate through the mid-morning streets of London. It was a Friday and the roads were busy with heavy drays nose to tail, drovers with flocks of geese and sheep at every turn.
    The little cart pushed on regardless. The two men at the front drove their reluctant horse through the dung-thick streets with a lash. Every now and then one of them glanced over his shoulder at the barrel that bounced and jostled in the back. It looked innocent enough; onlookers, had they been interested, might have guessed that it contained biscuit or salt pork. They would have been wrong. It was packed tight with fine corns of gunpowder.
    ‘The city is like a farmyard today, Mr Curl.’ Luke Laveroke spoke in an accent that seemed to have no home, though there was certainly a little Scottish in there somewhere. Easily the taller of the two men, perhaps a foot above his companion, Laveroke was a good-looking man, but his face was in shadow today beneath a close-fitting leather workman’s cap. His greying hair, usually shoulder-length and well groomed, was neatly tied away from view. If anyone had cared to look closely, they might have noted his well-trimmed spade beard and fine features. But none would look at him today, for he wore the attire of a working man – a wool jerkin and knee-length brown hose – and had nothing to distinguish him from the common horde that cluttered these streets.
    ‘Indeed, Mr Laveroke. One cannot think for the cackle of geese and the lowing of the great beasts heading for slaughter. If only the nobility and their Dutch friends were accompanying them.’ Holy Trinity Curl was of an altogether different cut to Laveroke. His eyes were amber and piercing; so, too, his hair, almost concealed beneath a leather cap.
    The cart arrived at Broad Street, its destination. Laveroke, who had the reins, pulled the unwilling horse to a halt.
    ‘Well, Mr Curl, here we are. The Dutch church.’
    ‘Not by right, Mr Laveroke. Not by right is it a Dutch church. A sad lapse by the poor young king, may God rest his soul. No part of England should ever belong to a scurvy foreign nation.’
    ‘Quite so, Mr Curl. So let us give the Council something to consider in the matter of strangers – following the recent sad events at Deptford.’
    ‘Sad events, Mr Laveroke, sad events.’
    They drove the cart on a little further and stopped outside the colossal church, once the home of the Augustine friars but given to the Dutch nation by the boy king Edward VI in 1550. From inside, as they unloaded their deadly cask from the cart, they could hear the drone of prayers. The road and yard were busy; no one paid the two gunpowder men heed.
    Together, they hauled and rolled the barrel along its bottom rim through the churchyard towards the