The Quality of Mercy Page 7

  “He has yet to return home from Uncle Jorge’s.” She sighed. “I suspect he’ll spend the night there. By and by you’ll know of Father’s intention. He’s never been one to hide from you his plans.”

  “I wish he’d leave me in solitude.”

  “That is impossible, dear Becca,” Sarah said. “While you’re still somewhat young, the years do pass by quickly. Best to have children while your womb is strong.”

  “I wish—” Rebecca realized how quiet was the night and dropped her voice. “I wish our religion allowed us nunneries.”

  “Black is a color ill-suited for your complexion,” Sarah said. She kissed her daughter’s cheek. “Have you said your proper prayers for…for Raphael?”

  Rebecca nodded.

  Sarah said, “God will hear them.”

  Rebecca asked, “Have you told Grandmama about Raphael?”

  “I didn’t tell her, yet she knew,” Sarah said. “Sometimes I think my mother a witch rather than an addled old woman.”

  “She is neither,” Rebecca said. “She is a marvelous woman.”

  “Tis most inappropriate for you to doubt my love and affection for my mother, Becca.”

  Sarah’s voice held a wounded note. Rebecca picked up her hand and kissed it.

  “I apologize, my gentle mother.”

  Sarah squeezed her daughter’s hand and said,

  “Grandmama shows no fretting over the news. She keeps her tears inside. Yet we both know she feels deeply. Raphael had been kind to her.”

  “May I spend my mourning in Grandmama’s room?”

  Sarah thought for a moment. “Father would never permit it. Guests will come to comfort you—”

  “They come to eat.”

  “Nonetheless, you must be visible and behave appropriately. Accept their platitudes of sorrow as if they meant something to you.”

  “Playact, aye?”

  Sarah sighed. “Yes,” she said. “Playact.”

  “At least may I pass my nights with her?”

  Her mother lowered her head and said, “Father prefers to keep you away—”

  “Father errs,” Rebecca interrupted. “Father thinks Grandmama’s an old harpy with a head full of mush. You know that’s not so.”

  “Rebecca, my obligations come first to my master, second to my mother and children. You must learn that else you’ll make a poor English gentlewoman and wife.”

  “I’d rather become not an English wife but an English spinster,” Rebecca blurted out. “I’ve no desire to marry!”

  She expected to hear reproachment from her mother. Instead Sarah patted her hand in sympathy.

  “Time will alter your desires,” she said.

  Rebecca noticed for the first time how her mother trembled from cold. She held open her cover for her, bade her to come inside. Sarah shook her head.

  “I must get back to my chambers. Father will be furious if he finds me sleeping with you. He thinks I’ve spoiled you beyond redemption.”

  “In sooth, his assessment is not far from wrong.”

  Sarah smiled. “Do try to sleep.”

  “Mother?”

  “Aye.”

  “Can you request of Father to allow me to sleep with Grandmama? I’d find it most comforting.”

  “I’ll pose the question to him. But I think you’ll mislike the response.”

  “Plead with him.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Becca.”

  Rebecca hesitated, then said, “I’m being selfish, Mother. Plead not with him. Ask him most noncommitally. Don’t risk his wrath for my sake.”

  Sarah kissed her daughter. “I’ll do what I can,” she repeated. “Should I call the chambermaid to rekindle the fire?”

  “Not necessary,” Rebecca said. “I’m very sleepy.”

  “Well then,” Sarah said. “Good night, Becca. Things will be better come the morning light.”

  Rebecca nodded, watched her mother’s shadow disappear from the room. Her mother, the hours of her life divvied up by Father and his work, by her and Ben, by Grandmama. But never a moment for herself. Sarah had once told her that she thought of herself as an extra arm for the members of her family. Rebecca also remembered when her mother had confided her reveries as a young girl—how one day she’d live in the clouds made of spun sugar, fly upon the back of a golden eagle and touch the sun. Where did those dreams go? Her mother—her heart in the sky, her muscles saddled with duty.

  Chapter 6

  Shakespeare knew he was lost. He’d passed the same bridge-shaped rock an hour ago. Madness to come up North alone, trying to retrace a dead man’s last steps, chasing revenge as elusive as the wind. He should have insisted to Margaret that the trip would accomplish nothing. But something had propelled him forward, something more than a widow’s pleas.

  Past images. A costume and a scroll being shoved under his nose as he tended the horses of the playgoers. Harry slapping him on the back…

  Fiacre Nits, who plays the watchman in the second act, has just turned ill. Vomited all over the ground. Good hap that he wore not his costume.

  Harry had turned nearly purple from laughter.

  You want me on stage? was all that Shakespeare had been able to say.

  You’re the only one who’s sober enough to memorize the lines on such short notice.

  More laughter. Whitman’s laughter. It played in Shakespeare’s head. A painful reminder, the sound so hollow now.

  Shakespeare kicked the haunches of his horse, sending it into a gallop. He cursed, wondered where the hell he was.

  So far he’d managed to follow Harry’s path quite closely. But this particular route, although the most direct to the burg of Hemsdale, was full of nature’s detours—hilly rocks and sudden dales, steep crags and crevices that plunged raggedly into the ground, circumscribing the knolls like a moat around a castle.

  He pulled the horse to the left, hoping he’d find a decent inn before dusk. Polished, windswept ledges of sandstone erupted out of rocks and grassland abloom with clumps of purple heather. The summits of the hills reflected the gold of the sun, setting them on fire like a flame on a candle. At least this terrain allowed easy riding—soft, gritty soil that yielded under each beat of the hoof—far more comfortable on the body than the hard slate rock he’d experienced in the extreme northern regions.

  He’d been fortunate. The weather had been accommodating, allowing him to cover much ground in a short time; barely a week since he’d left the walls of London. He’d fallen prey to only a few days of hard rain, and this morning just a thin blanket of haze covered the sky—that already burning away in the afternoon sun. His horse trampled over a heather bush plump with baby grouse. They scampered off in all directions—a delicious feast of tender meat dissipating before his eyes. He groaned, suddenly, realizing how long it had been since he’d taken a stomach. He would eat, but not while the sun was out. No time to be wasted.

  Days of riding with nothing but a sore bum to show for it. So far the trip had illuminated nothing about Harry. Questions had been asked and answered by protestations of ignorance. Shakespeare had spoken to at least two dozen innkeepers. Three hostlers told him that the great actor had indeed blessed their modest hostel with his drunken but amusing presence. They smiled as they told Shakespeare that Harry had entertained the guests with a (cough, cough) randy soliloquy. But beyond that, Whitman had been a gentleman. He had stayed the night, paid his bills, and left early the following morning in fine health. One hostler did recall Harry speaking with excitement about his impending visit to his relatives up North.

  Anything else, Shakespeare asked.

  The innkeeper shook his head no.

  His friend’s last days of life seemed ordinary. What could Harry have possibly done to instill murder in a man’s heart? What nefarious creature had done him in? And the ever nagging question of why.

  Shakespeare had been determined to find answers—for Margaret’s sake as well as his own. But now, after much wasted time, the ardor for t
ruth had cooled. He missed London, his cell, his poetry writings and books.

  But he’d come this far. Might as well finish his task. From the inns Shakespeare learned that Harry had visited his relatives—a first cousin, Viscount Henley and his family.

  And, as Whitman had once mentioned in passing, Lord Henley was genuine peerage. He’d been granted a township in Northumberland. Brithall was the name of his castle, and an impressive pile of bricks it was. Before Shakespeare left, Margaret had told him that all of her husband’s kinsmen were secret Papists, followers of Rome, like many of the northerners. She said that Harry had once confided to her that Brithall held a secret underground chapel where votive candles were kept along with icons of the Virgin. But the boldest act of outrage was a fugitive priest in their hire—a Jesuit who narrowly escaped capture from the authorities by hiding in one of the castle’s priest holes. Harry later recanted his story about the priest, saying it had been a tale told in jest—to scare her. But Margaret felt his denial had been a lie.

  Margaret had always been nervous about Harry’s excursions—the length of the trip, the dangers of the highways—but after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, with anti-Catholic sentiment running high, she’d actively protested his visit.

  What if that priest were discovered?

  Harry had always taken pains to reassure her. Queen Eliza was a tolerant woman, God sing her praises. Hadn’t it been rumored that Eliza’s private chapel mimicked those of the High Church despite her excommunication from Rome?

  But Margaret hadn’t been easily consoled.

  Who could say that Eliza will always be tolerant, she’d told Harry. Is not the Queen older, more eccentric? Did not she hang six hundred northerners for treason? Papist northerners? Priests—and their followers—had been burned before. They could be burned again.

  But Harry had continued his visits.

  Harry as a Catholic: that had surprised Shakespeare. His friend and mentor had always been irreverent, and religion was his favorite topic of scorn. How he’d mocked the Puritan, ridiculed the pious parish priest. And now to discover that it wasn’t the institution that had offended his sensibilities, but rather the method of worship.

  A side of Harry Shakespeare knew little about.

  Yet he had known a side of Harry that he loved. He knew him as the man who had coached his voice, had taught him how to project over the shouts of the groundlings and the boos of the twopenny rowdies. He knew Harry as the man who instructed him in dance, as the man who had insisted that the fellowship take Shakespeare on as a sharer. He knew Harry as a money lender, the one who paid the enormous sharer’s fee of twenty pounds for his ’prentice, Willy.

  Yes, once Harry had taken care of him. But Shakespeare had loved him deeply even when the roles had reversed. Shakespeare, apologizing to an irate tapster for Harry’s big mouth; Shakespeare, pulling him out of brabbles with younger men ready to kill them both; Shakespeare, patting the back of a stuporous man, hugging him as he cried.

  His love for Harry flowed through his veins as sure as blood. Shakespeare’s quest for Harry’s murderer, for his mentor’s eternal peace, was strong and potent—like the sting in the loins.

  He’d ridden farther, thinking about the different side of Harry—the one which he’d not been privy to know.

  A secret Catholic. Yet Harry had left Brithall alive and well. Or so had said Viscount Henley. Shakespeare had spoken to Henley briefly as they strolled the Brithall’s formal gardens. Shakespeare had asked the lord as many questions as manners would allow, but Henley knew nothing about Harry’s murder. Shakespeare hadn’t broached the subject of the priest. It hadn’t seemed necessary. By the time Shakespeare had departed from Brithall, he was satisfied that Henley had nothing to do with his kinsman’s death.

  Perhaps the murder was as reported. Harry’d been victimized by the scurrilous highwayman and dumped in the sheep’s pen. But perhaps someone—a secret member of some anti-Papist guild—had found out about Harry’s Catholic sentiments, stalked him, and had taken his life in the open countryside, away from alert eyes.

  Guesswork.

  Endless hours of riding, endless hours of nothing.

  The sun was bowing low, readying itself for final exit. Clouds were coalescing into thick gray foam. The ground had become wetter; sparse shrubbery had thickened into wooded copses of cotton grass and bilberry bushes and newly budded gnarled oak.

  Shakespeare realized he was famished. Another night under a coverlet of stars. He found a pocket of fresh water, not much bigger than a puddle but enough to satisfy the thirst of a tired animal. After the horse had drunk his fill, Shakespeare dismounted and tied him to a tree. The winds were gentle, redolent with the pungent aroma of fermenting bilberries. He opened up his leather bag and pulled out a slab of ham, eating it in three bites. His supper was followed by sips of ale from his drinking gourd and fresh bilberries. He lay undisturbed except for the occasional scurry of fleeing woodland creatures—red deer, grouse, squirrel, hedgehogs. The thought of fresh game aroused his belly—meat crackling over an open fire. A lover of hunting, he reminisced of his days as a boy, hare coursing…deer poaching. Though plagued with an unsatisfied stomach, he drifted off to sleep.

  Shakespeare was awakened by trampling in the brush. Clay-cold and rigid, his clothes damp with morning dew, he opened his eyes but didn’t move. Dawn was waging battle against a metallic sky. He reached for his falchion, grasping the handle tightly, and waited.

  Sounds of footsteps. He sprung upward. A startled gasp and a shower of bilberries. Then he saw her.

  She was a plump girl, no more than sixteen, with dark, loose hair and alabaster skin—a perfect white except for smidges of rosy pink on her nose and cheeks. Some of her front teeth were missing.

  “Ho, wench,” Shakespeare said. “What are you doing here alone at this hour?”

  The girl cowered in the brush, fear etched in her black eyes.

  “Met your lover, did you?” Shakespeare said.

  She said nothing. Just quivered in the bushes. An idiot to be sure, he thought.

  “Be gone,” he said testily.

  She didn’t move. It was then that he noticed the empty basket stained a deep plum. He bent down, picked it up and tossed it over. It hit her on the left leg, but she didn’t react.

  “Picking berries, were you?”

  Nothing.

  “Go on,” he said. “I’ll not be bothering you.”

  She smiled. Despite the toothless gaps, she was pretty. Shakespeare felt a tug under his breeches.

  “Off with you,” he said. “Lest you be enticing the man to act the animal.”

  She smiled again and hiked up her skirt.

  Dumb, he thought. But not deaf.

  She was as warm as fresh milk, as sweet as cream and as soft as butter.

  She was also not a mute. As she lay, nestled in his arms, she told him her story.

  She was the bastard daughter of a whore, orphaned at eleven when her mother died of sweating sickness. Left destitute, she continued her mother’s profession of providing aid and comfort to the village men. A year ago, six months pregnant, she’d been inflicted with ague. The baby had died in her belly. Vividly she described to him her fits and fevers, her bloody vomit and stools.

  But somehow she had survived, nursed her ills with poppy water, the juice of red nettles, juniper berries, and flat ale with dragon water. She was still weak, she claimed, but at least she was alive. And yes, she was still a punk servicing the local men as well as the foreigner. She lived in a village not far away from this spot.

  When she wasn’t whoring, she was busy in her still room, preparing remedies and potions. Rising early, three or four in the morn, she’d come to the heather moors to pick bilberries and herbs for her medicines. They were well received throughout the countryside, and often in the plague-infested summertimes, her special mixtures made her more money than her stewing. The only thing that worried her was talk that she was a witch.

  N
ay, tis not so, she had said. Simply flapping tongues of the gossip mongers.

  As she told her tale, her hands moved over Shakespeare’s body, reawakening his lust once again. He stroked her pillowy thighs, parted them and boarded her. Afterward he offered her money, but she had refused.

  Your kindness, good sir. Tis ’nough.

  He stood up and brushed dirt off his hose.

  “Where is your village?” he asked.

  “Yonder,” she said, pointing to her left.

  “Will you accompany me there?”

  She smiled. “Me whorin’ is free, but me guidin’ will be costin’ ye.”

  “A survivor you are.”

  “Aye. Ten shillings.”

  Shakespeare gasped. “That’s robbery!”

  The toothless smile widened to a grin.

  “Ifin it be too much, you be findin’ it yourself.”

  “Blood of a Jew, you have,” Shakespeare said. “I shall simply wait for you to return, idiotic wench. Then I shall follow you.”

  “Aye, and wait all of the day for me to pick me herbs. Whatever pleases you, sir.”

  Again the smile. It had become venal.

  “A penny’s more the cost,” he said.

  “You insult me, sir. Five shillings.”

  “A penny.”

  “A shilling.”

  “Tuppence.”

  “A sixpence.”

  “A tuppence,” Shakespeare repeated. He mounted his steed. “Keep kicking a jade, wench, and you’ll have a dead horse at your feet.”

  “A tuppence it is,” she said, hopping up behind him.

  Her knowledge of the terrain was flawless, her senses keen, her skills swift. A large ground squirrel darted in front of their pathway. A moment later it lay dead, impaled to the ground, her dagger through its belly. She dismounted his horse, pulled out the knife and flung the bloodied carcass over her shoulder.

  The animal would give her money and food for the week, she explained.

  “I shall keep the meat for me meals, sir. The innards will be stuffed with rye and oats, boiled, sliced, then sold to the Fishhead to be eaten cold. The pelt and tail will be a hat, the spleen and liver will be roasted in an open pit and sold at the marketplace, the blood will be mixed with ale and sold to the apothecary as a remedy for virility problems. The brains, heart, lungs, and kidneys shall be minced and made into pies. The teeth shall be ground into powder and mixed with cinnamon and mint. When stirred with warm ale and a teaspoon of dragon water, tis good for the brain.”