The Twelfth Night Murder (3 page)

Suzanne looked around to see if any of her Players were there, and her heart lifted to find an entire table of them. The small one at the back was surrounded by actors and musicians from the Globe. Matthew, Liza, Louis, Big Willie, whose physique belied his name, and Horatio, whose wig just would not stay straight on his entirely bald head. It canted to one side, though he was forever straightening it with an absent shove.

And Ramsay. Diarmid was there, wearing his bright red kilt and a clean, white linen shirt with the drawstring at its neck untied and hanging loose over his chest. His Highland bonnet of blue wool sat on the table before him, next to his cup of whisky. At the moment he was laughing at something someone had just said, but when he looked up and saw Suzanne on Daniel’s arm his smile died.

Then he resurrected it, for Ramsay was not one to let himself appear defeated. Or even damaged. He leapt to his feet and gestured to his chair that Suzanne should sit instead of himself. Suzanne sat, gladly, for she didn’t care to stand and had not come with Daniel. She didn’t mind letting Ramsay play the gentleman in front of the actual gentleman.

Now Ramsay and Daniel stood, Ramsay with his whisky and Daniel looking around for somewhere to sit. Louis, knowing his place as the least man present, hopped to his feet so the earl could take his chair. But Daniel, though he gazed at it for a moment to consider sitting, smiled and shook his head. His glance at Ramsay told Suzanne that though his rank entitled him to the chair, he would stand as long as Ramsay did. Daniel was a veteran of the civil war, and he liked to remind everyone that Ramsay was nothing but a soft actor. He gestured to Young Dent, the proprietor, for a whisky for himself and wine in a clean glass for Suzanne.
Expensive
wine.

Matthew said, loudly over the roar of voices in the close room, “I’m surprised, Suzanne, to see you so near the river tonight.”

She laughed. “It takes more than dark mutterings from an old witch to keep me away from the Goat and Boar.”

“What dark mutterings do you mean, Suze?” Ramsay asked. His far northern brogue had smoothed out some during his months in London, but his speech was still quite crisp with rolling Rs and slender vowels.

She waved away the subject as if it were nothing, though she didn’t really feel it was. “Oh, just an old woman who told me to stay away from the water for some weeks.”

“Said she was going to drown, she did,” said Louis.

“Did not. She only said my life would change and death was involved.”

“Sounds a great deal like drowning to me.”

She shrugged and laughed. “In any case, I can hardly stay away from the Thames for so long. Most weeks I cross it more than once. I’d hate to be utterly trapped in Southwark.” She tossed an insouciant grin to Ramsay and Daniel, and found them staring hard at each other, their postures with chests out and chins up, like roosters in a fighting ring. A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. Men had fought over her before, but only when very drunk, and the contest had always been over the money she cost rather than her affections. To see Daniel and Ramsay like this was not just a surprise, but a pleasant one.

One of the tarts moving through the room in search of a patron for the evening sidled up to Daniel, clearly the more affluent of the men at that table. The girl was uncommon-pretty. Her cheeks glowed with natural, ruddy health beneath porcelain skin. Her lips were full and soft, and when she smiled they showed dimples at the corners that seemed in turn to light up her eyes. Her high spirits and quick laugh made her eminently likeable, and Suzanne found her fascinating. There was something about this girl that simply lit up the room with joie de vivre. Suzanne couldn’t help smiling with her.

She pressed her bosom to Daniel, batted her eyes, and vowed she was so thirsty she could just blow away on the slightest breeze. The way her mouth caressed the word “blow” with O-shaped lips, it was plain what she would give in return for a drink.

Daniel replied, “Nonsense. You’re as full of piss and vinegar as any girl I’ve ever seen.” Suzanne knew he would buy the girl an ale, but he’d give her a hard time about it first. He might even expect her to take him upstairs immediately and save the drinking for after, but she thought probably not tonight. He wouldn’t care to leave herself and Ramsay in the same room.

The tart’s bosom wasn’t as ample, and therefore not as revealed, as those of other girls in the room, but her lips were very soft and plump. They were painted a bold crimson that stood out in her very pale face like a winter rose on snow. When she smiled her teeth were large and quite white. Surely she must have been younger than she at first appeared. Tall for her age, and therefore no more than twelve or thirteen. Hardly old enough to have a bosom at all, never mind an ample one. During Suzanne’s day as a tart, she’d seen so many young girls such as this, she came to realize that at seventeen she’d entered the profession very late. She’d been nearly a hag when she’d started at Maddie’s, where other girls had arrived so young many couldn’t remember any other life.

The girl wore a wig of nearly white blonde, and a dress of blue satin adorned with a profusion of cream-colored lace at wrist and breast, where it somewhat mitigated her lack of mature curves. Her waist was miniscule, so narrow Suzanne might have spanned it with her own rather small hands. Daniel’s one hand rested at the small of her back, and was barely hidden by it. The girl held a fan she waved before her face in tiny, precise movements while she eyed Daniel like a large cat sizing a doe for a kill, with an energy and mischief that mesmerized. Suzanne watched with an amused smile, as if enjoying a well-acted play.

Then she realized what she was seeing was a true act. More than the usual feigned interest of a prostitute for a client, Suzanne sensed this was a put-on from the very bottom of it. The veins on the girl’s hands stood out in bulging blue ridges. When her fan dropped a little too low, in her throat could be seen a distinct Adam’s apple. A small one, to be sure, but it was there. She began to notice other things. The girl’s posture was just a tiny bit
too
feminine. Like a caricature of a female rather than a girl who has been one her entire life. The voice was too soft. Too . . . practiced. Suzanne realized what she was looking at was a boy in a dress. A boy just beginning his entry to manhood.

A smile of mischief spread across her face as she watched Daniel flirt with the boy. Did he know, or would he soon learn a handful of what awaited beneath those skirts was more than he’d bargained for? Suzanne in the past had sometimes passed herself off as a boy, for men of that persuasion rarely cared for the boy bits and she could often service such a client without even disrobing much. She knew there was a demand for boys in dresses, but she’d never come across one. The laws against sodomy being what they were, those who practiced it kept to themselves for the most part. So far as she knew, this was the first male tart she’d ever seen.

Daniel’s expression never betrayed a knowledge he was about to go upstairs with a boy. Furthermore, as his conversation with the young sodomite progressed, it became plain Daniel did intend to take him upstairs. His hand went into the slit at the side of the boy’s dress, as the boy pretended coyness and stepped away from the earl. He snapped his fan closed and wagged it side-to-side in a
no-no
gesture. Daniel laughed as if the boy were joking, and pulled him by the waist to press himself against his belly. Suzanne watched closely to see whether Daniel would sense something beneath the copious skirts, but he seemed not to notice anything amiss. His grin was wide as the boy smiled behind his fan and looked up at him with dewy eyes and dimpled cheeks. Daniel looked as if he might steal a kiss.

It was definitely time to put a stop to this lest he embarrass himself. “Daniel!” she cried, and put a hand on his arm. “Daniel, you must taste this wine! ’Tis the finest Young Dent has ever served here!”

Daniel was awfully taken with the boy in his arms, if not smitten. It took another pull at his arm to get him to even look at her. She grabbed his collar and yanked him hard enough to bend him at the waist so she could speak directly into his ear. “Daniel! Stop that now!”

He laughed, ready to ignore her as if she were only jealous of the prostitute, and that surely was the reason for this display. But she held tight to his collar and continued, “That is a boy you’re about to bed!”

He laughed again, certain she must be having him on.

“Heed me, Throckmorton! Look at him!” She shook his arm in an attempt to bring him to his senses.

Daniel saw her eyes, and the smile left his face. A frown put a crease between his eyes, puzzled, and he looked at the boy. For his part, the boy maintained his femininity though he knew he’d been revealed. He graced Daniel with the softest, most adoring eyes and pursed lips Suzanne had ever seen, even in a skilled prostitute.

But Daniel finally saw through the ruse. He straightened and reddened. Then he looked around to see who else had seen, and found the entire table of Players watching, some grinning and others unsure where to look from embarrassment. There was no saving the moment. So, with all the social grace bred into him by generations of noble ancestry, he took the boy’s free hand and quite formally bent and kissed the back of it in the Continental manner. Then he straightened and said in the warmest tones he could manage at the moment, “I must apologize, mistress. I fear I’ve just remembered a commitment I’ve made elsewhere. I hope you will forgive me, for I must cut short our conversation.”

The boy said, “Another time, then?”

There was a snort of laughter from someone at the table. Suzanne looked to see who it was, but couldn’t tell by their faces. They all listened intently for Daniel’s response.

He replied, “I doubt our paths will cross again.”

The boy’s eyes betrayed disappointment, but he curtsied with utter grace and said, “As you wish. I should have liked to make your acquaintance, but one must accept what one cannot change.”

“Indeed.”

There was another snort, and this time Suzanne caught Louis laughing into his cup. She threw him a sharp look, and he looked away, struggling not to giggle.

The boy tart tapped the end of his fan against Daniel’s chin, then ran it down his chest as he turned away from his would-be client and the rest of the table, immediately off on his quest for someone with interest as well as money. He disappeared into the press in an instant, and Suzanne looked to Daniel for his reaction.

The red cloud of embarrassment hovered over him as if he were smoking that tobacco plant from the New World. Suzanne could almost see it rising from the top of his head, in waves of heat.

Ramsay said, “That boy is one of the most beautiful women I’ve seen in my entire time here in London. ’Tis a pity he lacks the one grace I find indispensible.”

“Quim?” asked Louis.

“Bosom. I like a nice cushion for my face.” He gestured to his chin with a mannered flourish of his fingers in wicked satire of the upper classes, and his accent was for the moment straight from Puritan Parliament. The table roared with laughter.

“Polite little fellow,” remarked Matthew. “He didn’t even seem studied.”

Suzanne agreed. There was a difference between those who studied manners and those who had been born to them, and that boy had appeared utterly natural.

Daniel finally was able to speak. “He might have been a bit more honest about his . . . equipage. That would have been more polite, I think.” Then he turned to Suzanne. “And you might have told me.”

“I did. As soon as I realized it myself. He was extremely good, wasn’t he? I’ve never seen better, on or off the stage.”

Ramsay turned to look after the boy, though he’d quite disappeared into the crowd. “I wonder if he even has his
equipage
, as you say. I saw no hint of a beard. Could be a castrato?”

“No beard yet. If he was over thirteen, I’ll eat my hat.”

“My hat, you mean.”

She laid a hand against the Cavalier’s hat on her head. “I suppose you must have eaten the bird already. All that is left is this feather.” She flicked the long feather so it flipped up and down like a horse’s tail.

That brought another roar of laughter about the table, and the ugly mood was entirely lifted. Daniel could now shrug off his embarrassment, and conversation turned to that evening’s performance. The boy tart was tucked away in everyone’s minds, to be brought out again for a good laugh on another day.

Suzanne had no idea at that moment that nobody would ever again laugh about that boy.

T
he next morning Suzanne attended rehearsal for
Julius Caesar
, playing the role of Calpurnia, Caesar’s wife. It was a small role, and suited her for that, for it meant little work. She’d recently played Lady Macbeth and was ready for a rest. Besides, she’d resigned herself to smaller roles these days. The few large roles for women were usually for younger women, and there were still many men to take the meatier roles for older women. Today she wasn’t needed in any of the scenes being rehearsed, but sat in a lower gallery to observe the development of the rest of the play. She felt it always went better for the play as a whole if the entire cast paid as much attention as possible to the other scenes if they could. A play was never rehearsed as a whole until its opening, and so the actors were kept busy throughout the morning working on this scene or that, but Suzanne encouraged those who had less to do onstage to pay attention to scenes that didn’t involve them. It made for a more cohesive performance when it all was finally strung together as a whole. Sometimes the difference was negligible, but most times it was significant.

Though this play was currently onstage with the Duke’s Men on the other side of the river, and The New Globe Players’ patent required they not stage any Shakespeare within two weeks of either of the royal troupes, their experience this past year was that the safest play to rehearse was one that was currently on one of the royal stages. By the time The New Globe Players would be ready to put it on themselves, the other troupe will have finished with it, their audience will have been saturated, and the royal troupe would be unlikely to suddenly decide to perform it again at a whim, thereby cutting short a run by The New Globe Players. Too many times the royal troupes had thwarted them by choosing the very play The New Globe Players were readying for the stage at that moment. Following the two royal troupes was always the safest strategy, and since their Southwark audience was a different set of folk entirely, it never mattered to their coffers that the play in question had already played out the nicer neighborhoods.

On the surface of it The New Globe Players appeared at a terrible disadvantage to other theatre troupes, but the truth was quite the opposite. By the timing of Suzanne’s request for a patent, and by the fact that her theatre was best suited for an audience disparate from the more fashionable ones who frequented the royal playhouses, with their new-style farces from France and the invention of the thing they called a “proscenium arch,” which framed each scene like a picture and allowed for more complex set pieces, her Players were privileged among the commons troupes about town in that they were permitted to perform Shakespeare at all. Lesser troupes than they were limited only to ancient mummeries and the commedia dell’arte plays that predated even Elizabeth. The Globe, built by Shakespeare decades ago, was now the only London theatre dedicated to Shakespeare’s work in its purest form, without editing or extempore additions of any kind. The stage, of Elizabethan design, was unsuited to those newer plays being written since the king’s return from France.

That Suzanne’s Players weren’t permitted to stage those plays mattered little to her troupe, for by their location and by their admission prices, the Globe attracted the lower classes who generally preferred the plays staged in the old style. That and the larger capacity than the other houses, due to the galleries having benches rather than chairs, put The New Globe Players in a rather tidy niche all their own. Suzanne had learned long ago that the trick to successful sub-rosa existence was to always be just barely below the notice of those who might cause her trouble. The Globe happened to be on the right side of the river for that.

Horatio, who had long ago named himself after Hamlet’s friend and had never revealed his real name to anyone, rather enjoyed his role of Protector of the Text and didn’t mind at all the constraints put on the troupe regarding altering it. He worshipped the work of the bard, and would never change a word. He often exhorted the actors under his direction to do their clowning around and rude invention during rehearsal, for it would not be tolerated during performance before an audience, by the audience, the king, or himself. Were he to allow any noticeable change, and were such behavior to be told around at Whitehall, the Players could lose their patent. Because the king was known to drop in on them incognito, discovery was a real possibility.

Today Horatio watched patiently as Louis, playing Marc Antony, delivered the central speech of his role with the pommel of his stage dagger pressed to his breeches like a large, silly erection. He strolled about the stage, waggling it and his hips eloquently each time he uttered the words, “
Brutus says he was ambitious
.” His deadpan was perfect, and not a twitch of a smile. He finished to enthusiastic applause, and brought the scene to a stop as he accepted the acclaim of his fellows with deep bows and flourishes.

Horatio waited for the hilarity to die, then said, “Very well, Louis. Now let’s try it a little less à la commedia. This is, after all, a tragedy.”

“It surely is a tragedy.”

A few of the troupe chuckled, but Horatio frowned his lack of amusement. “If the quality of today’s rehearsal isn’t to your liking, Louis, then perhaps you should look to your own performance.” Sober silence fell over the actors on the stage. Horatio let it sink in for a long, disgusted moment, then said, “Once again, Louis. ‘
Friends, Romans
,’ et cetera, and so on.” He waved a hand to gesture that the work should continue.

As Louis began again, the large audience entrance door at the front of the theatre opened just enough to allow someone inside. Suzanne looked to find Constable Samuel Pepper shoving the thing closed after him. It was heavy, and so he couldn’t get it entirely shut by himself. After a couple of attempts, putting his shoulder to it, he gave up and left it ajar. Suzanne left the rehearsal and went to see what it was he wanted. A visit from the constable was never pleasant and never good news. She approached him with a great deal of trepidation in her heart. She met him near the door, out of earshot of the rest of the Players.

“Good morning, Constable.” She greeted him with far more warmth than she felt, and a smile she hoped at least appeared sincere.

Samuel Pepper was a lazy man, who carried far more weight on his short frame than would have been practical for someone much taller. His walk was a rolling trundle, and even a short stroll for him required enough effort to make him red in the face. He didn’t sweat so much today as he usually did, for the sun hung behind a thick overcast and the temperature had sunk low in this midwinter season. The heavy, dark wool cloak bundled about him had wicked dampness from the street when it brushed the ground, so an inch or two of wet rimmed its hem. The collar was far too wide, even for a man as wide as himself. All in all, the garment was plainly too large for him. His black hat pointed sharply to the sky, which betrayed it as from Cromwell’s time. Even Puritans didn’t wear pointed hats anymore. It therefore bore no feather, but neither did it have a buckle. Not even a small one. It struck her as rather feminine, the sort of hat one might find on an old woman. Today his breathing wheezed with congestion, and Suzanne feared to come too close lest he be catching in the winter cold. Breathing ailments held a particular horror for singers and actors, who, even if they survived the illness, could not work without a voice while recovering.

“Good morning, Mistress Thornton,” Pepper greeted with a smile that struck her as even more forced than usual. He was certainly not happy to be there and more than likely wished to be back at his office, imbibing the French brandy he kept there for his morning company. Probably he would have liked the brandy to dull the illness she now saw in his eyes and heard in his voice. Whatever had brought him there that morning surely must be important, for him to have given up his brandy on such a day.

“What can I do for you, Constable? I hope you’re feeling well enough to be out and about in this cold.”

He coughed to demonstrate just how sick he really was, and said, “I come to ask a favor.”

A favor? And he was admitting it? His errand must be even more serious than she’d thought. But a weight lifted from her heart, for she realized he must not be there to arrest anyone. He was the one who needed something from her this time, and that put her at an advantage. “What might I do for you?” She cared very little about helping Pepper, but it was always good to be on the right side of the law in a neighborhood where on any given day most folks were guilty of one minor thing or another. More than once she’d had to talk him out of taking away someone she cared about, and had not always succeeded.

“I . . .” He paused for a long, painful coughing fit. Suzanne stepped back as he bent and hawked phlegm onto the stones at her feet. Then he straightened, dabbed his wet lips with a handkerchief, and continued, “Mistress Thornton, I am here about your boy.”

“Piers?” Panic rose in her chest and she placed a palm over her heart as if to hold it in place. “What has happened to my son?” Piers lived in some rooms in the neighborhood, but she hadn’t seen him since yesterday and so couldn’t be certain he was all right.

Pepper’s eyes narrowed in puzzlement for a moment, then it cleared as he remembered Piers. “No, my dear woman. Nothing like that. Not your son, but your other boy. This lad is one of your Players.”

“Christian?” Other boys came and went in the troupe, as they were needed for small and female roles, but since most theatre troupes were beginning to cast real women to play the roles of women, the demand for adolescent boys was declining. The Players had only Christian living on the premises who could be termed a “boy.” He was ten last October. She turned toward the stage to look, and there he was, looking at her to see what she wanted. She asked Pepper, “What do you want with Christian?”

Pepper squinted at the boy on the stage, puzzled once more. “That is your boy actor?”

“It is.”

“He’s the only one in your group?”

“Currently, yes.” She gestured to Christian that he should never mind, and should return to the rehearsal. The boy complied, and once again attended to Horatio.

Pepper thought for a moment, then said, “It appears I’ve made a mistake. It also appears I do need your help even more than I’d thought.” He seemed deeply disconcerted by this unexpected development, whatever it was.

“Perhaps if you told me the story from the beginning.”

He nodded, and frowned as he thought for another moment. Then he began, “There was found this morning a body floating in the river.”

Suzanne’s interest piqued, and so did her sense of alarm. “In the river, you say?”

The constable nodded. “Indeed. Not far from here.”

“Who is it?”

“I couldn’t say. Though I thought I knew.” He glanced over at Christian again. “I find I was mistaken.” Pepper returned his attention fully to Suzanne and continued, “He was found caught among some flotsam near one of the waterwheels in an arch at the south end of the bridge.” He gestured in the general direction of the bridge, which was the only route across the Thames in the city except by ferry.

“Did he fall from the mill above?” This certainly wasn’t the first body ever to be pulled from the river near that bridge. People jumped, were pushed, or fell accidentally with appalling regularity. The hundreds of shops and households ranged along the sides of the road crossing the bridge all had windows looking out over the river, and the bridge was one of the most crowded streets in London. The waterwheel that turned the mill at the south end of the bridge had claimed many victims over the years.

Pepper shrugged. “Hard to tell, I vow. Not from the street, I think, the way the structures are situated on that side of it. A fall from a window, perhaps, but by the way he was stuck in the current against the pier I should have thought he’d come from farther upstream.”

“Bank Side, then?”

A doubtful nod, and a shrug in reply. Pepper appeared at a loss, but Suzanne had a sense she wasn’t being told everything. She asked, “What brings you to me today?”

“As I said, I thought he was one of your actors.”

“What made you think that?”

“He looks a mite like your boy, Christian.” He nodded in the direction of the stage. “I remember interviewing him last summer.”

“But even though your dead body is not our Christian, and you plainly don’t know its identity, you still think I can help you with this investigation. What makes me so likely?”

“He must be an actor.”

“You don’t know his name, or anything else about him. You now know he’s not our boy; how can you still think he’s an actor?”

“It’s true. Apparently I’ve never seen him before, and there is no telling what his name is, nor from whence he came. But his attire told me he must be an actor in a play somewhere, and your theatre is the closest playhouse to where the body was found.”

Impatience rose, and Suzanne wished the constable would simply spit it all out for her. “What attire? Why must you be so circumspect?”