The Playmakers (45 page)

“Is it him?”

“Of course it’s him,” said Polly, “I would
know that scrawny figure anywhere. In fact, I saw more of it in
London a few years ago than most people, perhaps including
you!”

Anne Shakespeare turned and looked at her
life-long friend and glowered.

“Accidental-like, of course, Anne,” continued
Polly quickly. “You remember. I told you, I interrupted him and his
…”

“Girl-friend.”

“Er, yes, that floozy of his, and he was
naked, with just a silk ruff hiding his wots-it.”

A tiny smile came to Anne’s lips. That was
her Polly. Straight up. Loud. Telling it like it is.

And like the loyal friend she was, Polly had
informed her well of William’s situation in London, after that time
all those years ago she had visited him to pass the news on about
his son Hamnet’s illness which, sadly, led to the boy’s death
shortly after, at the tender age of eleven.

Anne hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry
when she heard how Polly had found him in his love-nest above a
tavern in south London. The image of him delicately holding a
flimsy fragment of garment in front of his otherwise naked himself
made her laugh. But the thought that he was with another woman only
made her feel melancholy.

That was the funny thing. She never felt
anger when William’s name was mentioned, or if gossip was passed on
about him, or when she heard of the success of another one of his
plays.

She felt sadness more than anything.

Yes, their marriage had got off to the
rockiest of starts.

Yes, he had been a rather ordinary
father.

Yes, he had stormed out of her life, leaving
her with three tiny children.

But there had been moments of passion,
moments of tenderness, moments when she had really loved him.

A little corner of her heart occasionally
told her that all was not entirely lost.

Besides, there was the money.

Money that had forged a new and inescapable
bond between them.

Apart from causing considerable mirth,
Polly’s visit to London had sparked a remarkable change in Anne’s
financial situation. Suddenly, a monthly stipend from William had
begun turning up. Cash, brought with unerring regularity to
Stratford by a nice chap named Mr Mullins. He had mentioned one day
that this was not his normal job, that he was really a maintenance
man. But he had added that he also did any work as directed by a
chap named Budsby and one of the Walsinghams - although not Francis
Walsingham, the queen’s advisor, rather a cousin.

“Besides, ma’am,” Mr Mullins had concluded,
“I enjoy the opportunity to get out of London with its foul smells,
pimps and crooks.”

The money began to accumulate, so much so,
Anne had begun to invest it in property, her only misgiving that
she could not put the purchases in her own name.

“That will have to go in William’s name,” had
come the stern reply from the keeper of the Stratford records
office when the deal for the New Place had all but gone
through.

“But it’s me that is buying it!” Anne had
retorted.

“True,” the fat, bloated bureaucrat replied,
his bursting coat and bulbous red nose indicating a distinct love
of a dinner wine. “You’ve got a bargain here ma’am. Very canny
buying, I must say. Whoever your advisor is, he knows the game. But
you know as well I do, Mrs Shakespeare, women are not allowed to
hold property in their own name. And you do have a husband.”

“In name only.”

“In name enough, Mrs Shakespeare, in name
enough …”

And now, here she stood, twenty-six years on
since William had marched defiantly out, watching as the
well-dressed figure alighted from the carriage and began to cross
the muddy High Street and head toward them.

He looked tired.

Not just tired from the bumpy, grinding
journey in the carriage. Rather, he looked tired of life, tired of
London, tired of whatever it was it had taken to bring him so much
glory. Not that he ever seemed capable of achieving such success,
as far as Anne was concerned.

“Behold the great writer,” she mumbled to
herself. “Yet, when he left Stratford, he could barely scrawl his
signature …”

And William was feeling tired.

Tired of many things.

Tired of the years of deception, tired of the
constant battles of getting a play staged, tired of being used and
abused by others.

Certainly
, he
thought on the bumpy journey to Stratford,
there
had been benefits.

He had achieved notoriety
as a playwright and was now officially a Gentleman.

Despite Walsingham’s
insistence that he send half of his royalties to Stratford every
month, he had accumulated a modest amount of money and purchased a
few parcels of property around London. But at what cost?

My life has never been my
own,
he reflected as the familiar poplar trees flashed past
the open carriage window
. I was never allowed to
marry the woman of my choice. Not the first time, with Anne
Whateley, nor the second time, with Sarah Fletcher. I lived a lie
as a writer of plays I could barely read, was dragged into a
conspiracy under threat of death by association, and held to ransom
for years.

In the end, I am glad I
had him killed.

Shakespeare always snapped his head back
whenever that thought entered his mind.

The thought, the memory, the overpowering
realisation that he had been party to the murder of Sir Thomas
Walsingham …

For it was something that he certainly never
said aloud, something that he kept buried deep in the darkest
recesses of his mind, and something only him and three other people
knew. The three now in the carriage with him - Budsby, Soho and
Samuel Davidson.

When he started out on life’s journey he
never thought that he would organise the death of another person.
But had this man not dominated his life for nearly two decades? Had
he not held threats over his head for most of that time, especially
the link between Shakespeare and the recruitment of the German
actor Derek Berkhardt, now lying in an unmarked grave at Deptford
and assumed to be Christopher Marlowe? Had he not insisted that
William give half his profits to Anne?

Above all, had not the ruthless spymaster
organised the cruel death of his beloved Sarah and their just-born
little boy, Rufus Christopher Soho Samuel Shakespeare?

That was the thing that finished it for
William.

He had been speechless, mortified, stricken,
when he was told this piece of information – news so sickening, it
had plunged him into a mental fog for days.

The memories of that day had kept flashing
back. Of how Sarah and the baby had just kept getting weaker and
weaker, and that fool of a doctor didn’t seem to be able to do
anything about it.

Even then, it was only by accident that
William found out the real cause of their death - via a scrap of
conversation overheard by Samuel Davidson between Walsingham’s two
senior henchmen, the dreadful Richard Poley and the evil Ingram
Frizer.

“I heard it with my own ears,” Samuel had
reported to William the next day. “You know how I used to get
around the taverns in the old days to see what was happening? Well,
last night I went for a wander, force of habit I guess, and ended
up in that little place in Spitalfields, the one with the bull’s
head out the front, and the pair of them, very drunk, were at a
table behind me.

“Frizer was saying how, in his whole career
of dirty tricks, that that was the toughest job he had ever done
for Walsingham, and Poley said ‘What, poisoning the mother and
child?’ and he said, ‘No, shaving my beard and putting on that
silly silver-haired wig to fool everyone and play the doctor.’ And
they both roared laughing, Mr Shakespeare, roared laughing. He put
his hands back behind his head and I saw this horrible tattoo of a
coiled snake. It made my blood boil and I wanted to stand up and
thrash both of them there and then, but I thought I had better tell
you and Mr Budsby first.”

“And it is a good thing that you have,”
Budsby had said. “Dishing out any punishment to those two is just a
waste of time. They are merely henchmen of a greater power, and
will get their just reward in the after-life.”

“What are you saying?” William had replied,
still glassy-eyed from the news.

“I’m saying that the man who gave the orders,
the man at the top, is the one who should have to pay for this most
heinous of crimes. Pay him in kind,” had said Budsby evenly, “an
eye for an eye.”

“But Mr Budsby, we are not that type. We
don’t go around murdering people.”

“Who said anything about murdering him? We
will simply do what Sir Thomas has always done - set up an early
appointment for him with his Maker. I don’t care how much money
this whole plot has brought us, the point is we now have discovered
after all these years it was him that took away from you the two
most precious things in your life - your true love and your baby
son.

“And,” Budsby had continued, “all because, we
now know, alas, too late, she stumbled across the secret of the
Marlowe conspiracy when she opened the drawer containing
Christopher’s plays one day … Naïve as she was, she was smart
enough to work it out. The full story materialized before her eyes
as she shuffled through the papers, especially with Christopher’s
covering notes which showed that undoubtedly he was still alive,
and that he was the real writer of the plays, and you had deceived
the work, including her, by taking the credit. In shock and
amazement she had blabbed the whole story to the only person in her
life she felt she could now trust - Uncle Percy.

“Their death warrants were signed when Percy
began wandering the streets of London in his own confused way,
saying, ‘Marlowe is not dead. Marlowe is not dead. He has gone to
Norwich. That bastard of a town.’ When Percy was found accidentally
drowned in his bath a day after the death of Sarah and the baby,
Walsingham had made his point clear. No word of the great scheme
was ever to get out - not from the mouth of one so close to a
principal player, and not even from the lips of a poor old harmless
fool.”

In the end, Walsingham’s own final moment had
been a simple matter – at odds with the complex life he had lead.
Samuel had simply climbed into the big house in Surrey one night
and held a pillow over his head.

“He was nearly at his end, anyway,” Samuel
had reported next morning. “He was coughing and farting and
sneezing before I put the pillow over him, like he was going to die
before week’s end.”

And so, with Walsingham out of the way, the
theatre scene crumbling, the cash drying up, and no word from
Marlowe - not even a small personal note for years now, indicating
that he had either tired of the whole affair or had died - William
had decided the best place was to go back to where it all
started.

“There are three plays left that we could do,
but I am not interested,” he had said to the trio in the
carriage.

“That is a more than reasonable view,” had
replied Budsby. “There is no better place to seek fulfilment in
one’s latter years than one’s place of origin. And besides,
considering all that money that you have forwarded to your wife
over the years, there must be a pretty penny waiting for you!”

“One would hope so, Mr Budsby,” replied
Shakespeare brightening. “One would hope so. Perhaps I will just
spend my time in Stratford, dabble in a bit of property, and enjoy
life.”

Thus it was he found himself alighting from
the carriage and picking his way through the mud toward Anne,
laying eyes on her for the first time in more than two decades.

She looked as strong as ever, he thought.
Still handsome, but not pretty.

He thought of the good times. The times they
rolled in the hay when he was but a boy. The times she cooked him
wonderful meals and they made love. The marvellous moment she had
pulled the curtains back to reveal her strong naked body.

Yes,
he thought to
himself as they came closer,
I’m sure we can live
together again. Without too many pots being thrown …

They embraced, stiffly at first, but then a
small tingle of warmth ran through William’s body. He lifted her
and spun her around, and they embraced again.

Looking over her shoulder, he could see three
figures in the distance picking up their bags from the back of the
carriage and heading off down the main road leading out of
town.

One was a short, squat figure with huge
shoulders and powerful looking legs, obviously a very strong
man

The second, a stocky figure with leathered
hands, obviously used to hard work.

And the third, a large fat fellow dressed in
an enormous brown coat, with a big hat, now a little stooped, but
walking with vigour on surprisingly dainty feet.

The big man was talking and his bassoon voice
reverberated along the street.

“If I recollect correctly, gentlemen, there
is an icy stream just a little way out of town,” he boomed. “Who
knows who we might meet down there that will lead us on to our next
adventure …”

THE END

GRAEME
JOHNSTONE had a long and successful career in journalism before
moving into writing novels and musicals. He worked for many years
with Australia’s biggest selling newspaper,
The
Herald Sun
in Melbourne
,
including
a seven year stint writing its popular daily column,
A Place In The Sun
, catching the vibe of the city for
more than 1.3 million readers every morning.

Graeme and his wife Elsie later established
The Wordsmiths business and out of that he began collaborating as a
lyricist with composer Pete Sullivan. His first major musical,
Normie
, based on the 1960s experiences of
Australia’s King of Pop, Normie Rowe, was premiered in 2012.