Barnabus appeared in the mouth of the alley and thoughtfully tripped the man up. Dodd was onto him, kicked the dropped rapier away, hauled him up by a fistful of doublet and slammed him against the wall.
‘Careful, mate,’ said Barnabus confidentially over his shoulder from where he was robbing the man on the ground. ‘Don’t kill ’im; Sir Robert’s right about juries round here.’
Dodd was snarling at his prize. ‘If ye ken who I am, ye’d ken that Wee Colin Elliot’s dad killed mine, ye soft wet southern fart. Wis it robbery ye were after, eh? Eh?!’
The man’s eyes were swivelling in his head and he was gobbling. Dodd slammed him again. ‘By Christ, did ye think I wear ma sword for a fucking decoration, ye long slimy toad’s pizzle, who the hell d’ye think…’
‘Well, ’e wasn’t to know, was he?’ said Barnabus reasonably. ‘He just thought you was some farmer up for the law-term, what with yer homespun suit and funny talk. Poor bugger, look at ’im, he’s gone to pieces.’
Dodd realised to his disgust that the man was actually crying now, and dropped him in a convenient pile of dung. Barnabus rolled him expertly, tutted and led the way out of the alley back to Ave Maria Lane, with a quick glance either side at the turning for further ambushes. Dodd, whose blood was up, rather hoped there would be someone, but put his sword away again when Barnabus hissed at him.
Feeling witty, Dodd paused, went back, found the rapier and broke it in two with his boot. Barnabus shook his head at the waste.
‘Nasty foreign weapon,’ Dodd explained. ‘When d’ye think they’ll come after us wi’ their kin?’
Barnabus laughed. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘Not the way you think. Though I’d keep a weather eye out for coney-catchers-they’ll want your purse one way or the other, believe me.’
‘What’s a coney-catcher, for God’s sake?’
Barnabus rolled his eyes at this display of ignorance. ‘Someone what wants to help you rob yourself, someone what fools you and draws you in with your own greed and fear. It’s philosophical, really. They say nobody can coney-catch an honest man. Mind you, I shouldn’t think there’s ever been one come to London before.’
Dodd grunted, suspicious of compliments, however back-handed. Not that it mattered. With luck, once the Lord Chamberlain and Vice had satisfied themselves that Carey wasn’t working for Spanish spies nor likely to become King James’s new catamite, the lot of them could go north again.
A scurrying down by the entrance to the crypt caught his eye. There were black rats on the steps, crawling over and under each other brazenly in daylight. Two rat corpses lay close by, swollen out of shape by death.
‘Good God, look at that,’ he said in horror. ‘Look at the size o’ them.’
Barnabus glanced over and shrugged. ‘Oh yes,’ he said off-handedly. ‘They say the biggest rats in the world prance up and down Paul’s aisle.’
‘Ah hadnae thought they meant real rats.’
‘Well both, it’s one of them witty comments, innit. You coming in again?’
Suddenly he felt choked by all the buildings rising up around him, hemmed in and trapped. Your eyes were always coming up short against a wall, and he was trammelled and crowded with people, the stink would fell an ox. And he had always hated rats.
He stopped at the side door of the church, unable to bear the thought of entering the high solemnity of the place with its faded paintings too high up to be whitewashed and the human trash prancing to and fro nibbling meatpies beneath the hard-faced old-fashioned angels. And God knew what horrors were underneath, in the crypt where no-one went.
‘I’ll take a turn round about the churchyard,’ he said, hoping Barnabus wouldn’t notice how pale he felt. ‘Take the air.’
Barnabus nodded. ‘You’ll be safe enough, I should think. It’ll take them a day to work out what to do about you. You could buy yourself a book.’
‘Good God, what would I want to do that for?’ said Dodd. Barnabus grinned and winked at him, before disappearing into the gloom.
Dodd glowered around but found no more would-be friends. He ambled past the stalls of the churchyard, looking with growing astonishment at all the different books, just casually lying there, higgledy-piggledy in piles with the first pages pinned up on the support posts of the awnings and the brightly coloured signs over the stalls-there was a cock, a pig, a blackamoor, a mermaid, all different like inns.
He stopped under one awning, picked up a small volume and opened it, squinted to spell out the words under his breath. It was poetry-some tale about foreigners, he thought, from the funny names. Dodd couldn’t be doing with such nonsense.
Suddenly he caught sight of a familiar face, Mistress Bassano’s servant, the balding young man called Will. He was not in livery but wearing a dark green woollen suit trimmed with brocade and a funny-looking collar that wasn’t a ruff, but looked like a falling band starched so it stood up by itself. He was standing with his hat off in front of another of the men with inky aprons, though skinny this time, under the sign of a black swan. Will was proffering a sheaf of closely-written paper. The printer shook his head, arms folded, legs astride.
‘Nobody’s interested in rehashes of Ovid,’ grumbled the printer. ‘I’ve told you before, there’s no demand for that kind of thing.’
Will’s response was too soft for Dodd to hear it, though he caught a whining note. The printer rolled his eyes patiently.
‘I know the market, see,’ he said. ‘It’s my business. Your stuff wouldn’t sell, believe me. I’m always looking for new talent, of course I am, but I’ve never known trade so slow and I have to be careful what I take on. Now if you could do me a nice chivalrous romance, or a coney-catching pamphlet or two, like Mr Greene’s work-there’s something that sells like hot cakes.’
Will’s answer to that was sharp.
‘Oh, did I?’ sniffed the printer. ‘Well, listen, mate, not everybody can write like Greene or Nashe or Marlowe. Maybe you should just stick to playing, hmm?’
Will turned away, looking dejected, with his papers under his arm. Not wanting to be caught eavesdropping, Dodd slung the book he was holding back amid all the piles of them, and went reluctantly back into St Paul’s to find Barnabus. There was no sign of him. Dodd made two circuits of the Cathedral, trying to spot him amongst the throng, then decided he was no wean to be feared of getting lost; he’d go back to Somerset House on his own.
Dodd had never got lost since he was a lad. He always knew instinctively where he was and where his goal was in relation to him. He knew where Somerset House was now, could have pointed to it, but the trouble was, you couldn’t just head straight across country to it; you had to walk along the streets, and the streets were uncooperative. They kept starting in roughly the right direction and then twisted round bewilderingly to spit you out heading away from your goal again. The people and the noise from the shopkeepers roaring out their wares and the children and the dogs and the pigs and goats made him feel breathless and confused. In his own country he was a man to respect, people made way for him even in Carlisle. Here they jostled past him and not one face was familiar, face after face, all strange, more people than he had ever met in his life before and he didn’t know one of them. Rudely, not one of them so much as acknowledged he was there. They were so finely dressed, even the streetsellers wore ancient wool trimmed with motheaten fur, not homespun russet. Once or twice Dodd thought he heard people snickering at him for his countryfied clothes. His neck stiffened and his face got longer and sourer by the minute as street after street seemed to conspire to bewilder him and drive him further from Somerset House.
At last he stopped and decided to take the Courtier’s advice and head for the river. Once there he could follow the bank westwards, he thought, or even take a boat. That would be the sensible thing to do.