Carey was looking thoughtful. “Well, we’ve read the invisible ink now and it shows, but we haven’t cracked the cipher so we’ve no way of telling who it was addressed to. I wonder if…”
“Ay,” said Dodd who was well ahead of him. “We should try giving it to her. Only I might get in trouble for not giving it to her before.”
“She won’t be very pleased, but at least she won’t box your ears and call you clabber-brained,” said Carey with some edge.
Dodd hid a smile. Carey stood and went out the back to the jakes. He came back with a small purse of gold that he must have been keeping in his codpiece, gave it quietly to Dodd.
“I’ve taken half out of it and I want you to look after it for me and not give me any of it, understand?” said Carey very seriously. “If we’re going to play in the King of London’s game, I want still to be solvent afterwards.”
“We’re gonnae go there, are we?”
Carey blinked at him. “Of course. I’ve been before but we were very clearly invited tonight and I’m going. Only…” He spread his hands and shrugged.
“Will they be cheating?”
“Oddly enough, they won’t. Laurence Pickering, the King of London, guarantees his game against all pricksters, card-sharps, and highmen and lowmen, and kicks out anyone who breaks that rule. Which makes it more difficult for me because if I’m playing against crooked players, I can usually guarantee to win whereas if I’m merely playing against good players, I can’t be so certain.”
Thursday 14th September 1592, evening
According to Carey, Pickering’s game moved around a lot so you could only find it if you were invited. When the sun started to go down they walked into the city and along the busy wharves until they came to Three Cranes in the Vintry. There the men inside the great treadmills that worked the three enormous cranes were just finishing and jumping down to drink their beer and be paid for a day’s work. The last of the barrels of Rhenish and Gascon wine were being hurried on handcarts into warehouses to be locked up, watched by the Tunnage and Poundage men who put the Queen’s seal on the locks.
Other brightly dressed young men were standing around in casual ways, so Carey and Dodd took their ease on a bench by the water and Dodd kept his hands away from his tobacco pouch. They saw the lad in cramoisie and tangerine, large ruff, haughty nose, highly coloured, acned and with a target all but pinned to his back.
Once the Tunnage and Poundage men had gone off in their boat, things changed. At the back of one of the securely sealed warehouses, a part of the wall slid aside and two imposing men in buff coats came to stand stolidly by the opening. Dodd recognised one of them but Carey held Dodd back from going in at once.
“Let’s see who’s there,” he said, and watched the other well-dressed courtiers and merchants who went in by the entrance after a muttered conversation with one of the men in buff coats.
At last Carey stood and followed them, trailed by Dodd. At the door he nodded at one of the men. “How’s your wife, Mr. Briscoe?”
Briscoe smiled and nodded back. “Near her time, Sir Robert,” he said. “It’s a worry. She says she’ll stop wearing herself out about her brother now she knows it was a man called Jackson and it wasn’t him. Which is a relief, you know.”
Carey smiled. “By the way, did you happen to hear about the veney I played the other night with some Smithfield brawlers working for Topcliffe?”
Briscoe’s broad face broke into a grin. “Nearly split my sides, sir. And what came after. I heard it was that mad poet Marlowe wot hired ‘em and he’d better be careful if he goes near Smiffield again, cos none of ‘em are ‘appy about it.”
Carey laughed.“Well if you should happen to hear anything else about it, I’d be grateful if you’d pass it on.”
“I will, sir.”
“Anything else going on?”
Briscoe’s brow creased. “Well, Mr. Pickering’s very worried by the plague in the city, though none of the City Aldermen is bovvered. It’s in the Bridewell now, you know?”
Carey grimaced. “Thanks for the warning.”
“And I heard tell one of the bearwardens was sick of it yesterday and died and one of his bears run wild for sorrow.”
“Not Harry Hunks?”
“No sir, he’s retired now. Gone back to the Kent herds to sire more bears. That was Big John and they ‘ad to shoot him in the end.”
Carey shook his head as he handed over the price of entry in gold. “The city fathers think all they have to do is shut the theatres and the plague will disappear, even though it never does.”
Dodd was thinking of what that poor apothecary had said a couple of weeks before-that the plague always started in St Paul’s, not the playhouses. He resolved not to go near the place again, never mind the rats in the crypt gnawing on only God knew what remains from two hundred years before.
Briscoe tipped his hat and they climbed the wooden stairs to an upper room lit with ranks of candles and glass windows, with fair rush mats on the floors and painted cloths on the walls. It all seemed very wealthy and respectable until you looked more carefully at the cloths which were covered with pictures of shockingly naked people wearing leafy hats and playing cards and dice and drinking. Some of them seemed to be doing…what they shouldn’t have been. Dodd’s eyes stretched as he took in the details. Somewhere at the back of his mind he wondered if he and Janet..? He gulped and turned away, hoping his face hadn’t gone guiltily red.
Carey had put on the Courtier again and was also wearing a suspiciously knowing look. Dodd was beginning to suspect that the real article was the Berwick man who showed up occasionally when Carey was under pressure, but Carey as Courtier never failed to irritate him with his breeziness and arrogance. As the Courtier sauntered into a group of glaringly-dressed young men and greeted them affably, Dodd found a padded bench to park his padded hose on and felt for his pipe.
A small bullet-headed man with a smiling face sat down next to him and offered him a light so Dodd passed him the pipe.
“You’re the northerner, ain’t you,” said the small man, puffing away appreciatively, “what’s come sarf wiv Sir Robert?”
“Ay,” said Dodd, taking the pipe back.
“I’ve ‘ad the word out to leave you be and not try to tip you any more lays.”
Dodd nodded politely at this because he had no idea what the small man was talking about.
“Fing is,” said the man, “I can’t be seen talking to Sir Robert in public and he knows it, ‘cos that cove over there is one of Cecil’s boys…”
Dodd followed the man’s glance and saw the pale oblong face of Poley.
“So when you see ‘im go in the back, I want you to go wiv ‘im. Understand?”
Dodd bridled slightly at being told what to do but simply nodded. “Ay,” he said.
The small man smiled, held out his hand. “’Course, I can see you don’t know me. I’m Laurence Pickering.”
Dodd shook. “Ah…Henry Dodd, sir. Sergeant of Gilsland.” He blinked. Was this the King of London in dark brocades and furs, his balding head bare? Brother-in-law to the London hangman and master of the thieves of the City? He looked like a very prosperous merchant. Which in a way he was, just as Richie Graham of Brackenhill was very much the lord of his manor, never mind where his family came from nor how they got there.
Pickering winked at him, jumped up, and headed into the throng of players in the corner. The way everyone parted for him told Dodd a lot more than the man’s compact size and modest manner.
Carey was deep in a game of primero, with the boy in cramoisie and tangerine clearly set out before him like a peacock ready for carving. He drank and smiled and laughed and shouted eighty-five points as he always did and casually tossed an angel-a genuine gold angel this time-into the pot.
Dodd, shuddering at the idea of a week’s wages being where you started in this game, stood up and wandered over to the dice players. They were playing with very fine ivory dice with gold pips-perhaps to make them more difficult to palm and swap which had been one of Barnabus’ specialities-the women cheering as one of them threw two sixes and scooped the pot. It was all shillings and crowns there and as Dodd generally played dice for fractions of a penny, he didn’t fancy that game either.