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  He went to the makeshift crib by the hearth and stroked the baby’s head. It was marvellous to him how much little Hal had grown, even in the space of a few weeks. He lay on his back, chubby fists stretched above his head. His pink, dewy cheeks and blond curls reminded Tom of the angels in a painting he had once seen in Salisbury Cathedral.

  ‘I’ve sent Bel and Jack out to try and buy some cloth to make a shift for him,’ Janey remarked. ‘The only time he stays still is when he’s asleep. I shan’t be surprised if he isn’t crawling about soon. I’ve told Bel those rags she wraps him in won’t be no good then.’

  ‘Maybe Lamotte will let me play some of the bigger parts soon and I’ll make more money.’

  She smiled. ‘You’ve helped us already, Tom, and we’re very grateful, but you mustn’t spend all your money on us.’

  Tom went over to the table and took an apple from a bowl. ‘What else should I spend it on?’ he asked through a mouthful. ‘You and Bel and Jack are the closest thing I have to family.’

  A lusty bellow came from the crib and Janey frowned. ‘Pick him up for me while I find something for him to eat.’

  Hal butted Tom’s chest with his head. ‘That won’t do you any good,’ Tom laughed. He took the bowl of gruel from Janey and tried to spoon some between Hal’s lips. Most of it dribbled down his chin but what went in seemed to satisfy him and he squirmed to be let down. Tom put him on the floor and he crowed and kicked his feet in the air.

  ‘He won’t be a quiet one like my granddaughter,’ Janey chuckled, ‘all for keeping herself to herself, she is,’ she glanced at him. ‘She’s a good girl, you know, just a bit of an innocent, believing the promises some men make her.’

  ‘Like the one who was here the first time I came?’

  ‘And the soldier who got her with Hal, God rot him. But then she wouldn’t be the first girl to make that mistake.’

  She heaved herself out of her chair and grabbed Hal before he rolled into the embers of the fire. His face purpled and he squalled. Tom scooped him up and jiggled him on his knee until the crying turned to laughter.

  ‘You’re good with him,’ Janey smiled. ‘Just like Jack, but then he’s always been on Bel’s side. They could be brother and sister, those two. I remember when his ma died and I brought him here, how Bel used to cuddle and comfort him. That was eight summers ago and look at him now; he’ll be taller than her in a year or two.’

  ‘Who was his mother?’

  ‘One of the girls at Henslowe’s place,’ – Tom recognised the name of one of Lamotte’s rival theatre managers who also owned several brothels – ‘Jack can’t have been much above three years old when she died.’

  ‘When I first met him, he told me his mother was a great lady and his father a general.’

  ‘And I’m the Queen of Arabia.’

  Tom finished his apple and took another.

  ‘There’s some bread and a bit of cheese in the crock. You have that as well or you’ll be starved afore you finish tonight.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ll get something at the theatre. You keep it for the three of you.’

  He stood up. ‘I’d better be off. See you later, Janey.’ He rumpled Hal’s curls. ‘And you, little fellow, be good for Janey while I’m away.’

  On the way to the theatre, Tom turned Janey’s words over. From her remarks over the last few weeks, he knew what she was hoping. He sighed: Bel was not for him, but was he a fool not to look for another girl? Clearly Master Lamotte thought so.

  Meg’s face hovered in his mind. He wondered what she was doing now. Had she already forgotten him? Remembering the day of the May Fair and the smiles she gave her husband, Tom kicked at a stone in his path. Perhaps she was perfectly happy with her life after all and his leaving troubled her no more. After all there were plenty more necklaces and fine clothes for Stuckton to give her. A rising tide of bitterness almost unmanned him then it ebbed, leaving him hollow with shame. It was too easy to blame her and wrong to wish her a wretched life because they had to be apart.

  At the Unicorn, an actor was perched on the edge of the stage with his head bent over a sheaf of papers. He looked up. ‘Lamotte’ll skin me if I don’t know these lines by tonight,’ he groaned. ‘He wants to see you, by the way. You’ll probably find him backstage.’

  Lamotte was supervising two men who were preparing the stage cannon.

  ‘Ah, Tom, just the fellow. Will Pooley fell down drunk last night and cracked his head open.’ Lamotte bundled a yellow wig and a midnight blue robe, spangled with golden stars, into Tom’s arms. ‘You’re playing Juno,’ he added, dumping a small stack of paper on top of the dress. ‘These are your lines. You’d best be getting on with them. Don’t look so worried; just speak clearly and try not to bump into anyone. Oh and here,’ he fished a penny out of his pocket, ‘get a shave, or the groundlings will hiss you off stage.’

  In the queue for the barber’s chair, Tom scanned his lines. Fortunately, there weren’t too many of them but it was a bigger part than the walk-ons he had done so far. The evidence of Lamotte’s confidence in him made him happy; he mustn’t let him down. Whatever else has gone wrong for me, Tom thought, I was lucky to fall in with him.

  The barber took the penny and soaped Tom’s face, then scraped away expertly at the light-brown beard which had grown since he left Salisbury. Rinsed and dried, he got up to leave, glancing in the small mirror hanging by the door as he passed. He looked his old self once more. Before the shave, even Meg might not have recognised him at first sight. He had been rather proud of the beard though, perhaps he would grow another one some day.

  A nearby church clock struck the hour. He quickened his pace. He didn’t have long to learn his lines and work out how to put on the wig and dress.

  *

  Later that evening, when the performance had ended, Tom walked out with Lamotte into the courtyard separating the theatre from Shoreditch Street. Most of the food vendors had packed up their stalls and gone home but a cockle woman was sweeping up the shells her customers had discarded and stuffing them into a sack. Close by, the remains of a spit-roasted hog turned slowly over a fire, tended by a burly man. An apron spattered with cinders and grease covered his capacious belly.

  Lamotte stopped. ‘Evening, Ned.’

  ‘Evening, Master Lamotte. Will you have some of this fine hog? The best meat in London, even though I say it myself.’

  ‘Then I’ll take some,’ Lamotte grinned. ‘And you’d better give my friend some too. He’s had a hard night of it.’

  Tom’s mouth watered as the man carved thick slices of the succulent meat, slapped them between doorsteps of bread and handed them across the trestle. ‘No charge,’ he said.

  ‘That’s very good of you.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘How was business tonight?’

  ‘Could be better, but no use complaining.’

  Lamotte shrugged. ‘It’s the same everywhere. People feel the pinch and we suffer.’

  ‘You never said a truer word, Master Lamotte. A merchant up from the West Country told me there’s riots there over the price of food. A farmer who supplies him lost a dozen head of sheep to rustlers a few weeks back. It’s a disgrace. Mark my words - times will get worse before they get better.’

  ‘You’re right about that. Well, good evening to you.’

  ‘And to you, master.’

  Out in the street they walked along munching in companionable silence.

  ‘You did well with your speeches tonight,’ Lamotte remarked when he had finished the last mouthful. ‘But you’ll have to practise walking in a dress. You gave a better impression of a calf with the staggers than the Queen of Olympus.’

  Tom flushed. ‘It was harder than I thought it would be.’

  ‘Never mind, it raised a laugh, even if that wasn’t quite what the author intended. Will Pooley’s head will mend soon, you needn’t do it for long.’

  They turned in at the Dolphin. Lamotte led the way to his usual tabl
e in one corner and sat down. He took a tobacco pouch out of his pocket, crumbled a few dried leaves and packed them into the bowl of his clay pipe. Lighting a taper from the flame of the table candle, he puckered his lips around the pipe stem and drew a long breath. The tobacco began to smoulder and glow. He leant back with a sigh of satisfaction.

  ‘So, when shall I put on this play of yours?’

  Tom’s heart skipped a beat. ‘You mean you think it good enough now? I don’t know how to thank—’

  ‘Most people want to know the price I’ll pay before they thank me,’ Lamotte chuckled.

  ‘The price doesn’t matter.’

  Lamotte tapped the bowl of his pipe and an oaky smell drifted across the table. ‘The price always matters, lad. Never sell yourself short, it gives the wrong impression. Shall we settle on a sovereign? We’ll put it on in a few weeks’ time and if it goes down well, I might be able to stretch to a bit more.’

  It would have taken Tom many weeks to earn as much from William Kemp. A haze of delight warmed him.

  ‘It’s a good piece, but it remains to be seen whether audiences like it – you can never tell in advance. Your audience is an unpredictable beast, ready to lick your hand one minute and savage it the next.’

  For a few moments, Lamotte directed his attention to his pipe. Tom took the opportunity to revel in silent glee.

  ‘I expect your family will be glad for you,’ Lamotte observed when at last the pipe drew to his satisfaction.

  ‘They’ll never know, I fear.’

  Lamotte gave him an enquiring look.

  Tom’s brow furrowed. He didn’t fully understand why he felt such an urge to confide in Lamotte. Perhaps because he had been kind about the play, but perhaps also because it was a long time since an older man had shown some sympathy for him.

  ‘My mother died of the sweating sickness when I was fourteen.’

  ‘Go on,’ Lamotte prompted gently.

  ‘After that, my father cared for nothing and neglected his business. He stopped going to Antwerp to strike his own bargains with the cloth merchants there and trusted all his negotiations to agents, who cheated him. I’ve heard people say he held on too long to the old ways of trading as well. By the time he died, everything had gone.’

  Lamotte nodded. ‘My father dealt in cloth too, but I was the youngest son of four and I wanted to make my own way, so I trained in the law and went into government service. I understand something of how the cloth business works, though. Life grew hard for the men in the provinces when the London Staple became so powerful.’ He shrugged. ‘The world changes and we must all change with it. Were your parents all the family you had?’

  ‘I had a sister, six years older than me. She was already married to a Dorchester physician. He agreed to pay for me to be apprenticed to a local lawyer, but then he wanted nothing more to do with me.’

  ‘And your sister obeyed him?’

  Tom nodded.

  A serving girl came past with a jug of ale and Lamotte motioned her to refill their pewter mugs. ‘Let us drink to better days, and the destruction of all Spaniards.’ He drained his mug and banged it down on the table.

  ‘I had a family once,’ he said after a pause, ‘a wife and a young son. I lived in Paris then, the city where I was born.’

  He fell silent once more as if he had forgotten Tom was there. Tom waited for him to speak.

  ‘You’re too young to have heard of the St Bartholomew’s massacre,’ Lamotte said at last, ‘but even though it happened fourteen years ago, the horror of it will be etched on my memory for ever. It started with a marriage, which should be a time of joy: the celebration of the union of the King of France’s sister and the Huguenot prince, Henry of Navarre. Most of the Huguenot nobility were in Paris for the occasion.’

  ‘Huguenot?’

  ‘Forgive me, the Huguenots are what you call Protestants in England. In France, though, their situation is not the same as it is here. They are less powerful than the Catholics and the king only pretends to champion them while really he’s terrified of offending the Catholics.’

  Tom frowned. He felt very ignorant. In Salisbury no one talked of France except to complain that the French were taking away trade in good English cloth with their silks and satins. He listened as Lamotte went on.

  ‘The leader of the Huguenots, a man called de Coligny, was invited to attend a meeting with the king and his council at the Palais du Louvre. Even though it was high summer, the roads in Paris were deep in mud and rutted by carriage wheels. When de Coligny made the journey to the Louvre, he wore overshoes to protect his fine footwear. Those overshoes saved his life. At the very moment when he bent down to adjust the straps on them, a shot was fired at him from the window of a house nearby. The bullet shattered his left elbow but did no further damage. His men carried him home bleeding.’

  Lamotte paused again. His pipe lay smouldering and forgotten on the table. Tom had never seen him so serious before. His usual jocular tone was quite gone.

  ‘Two days later, at midnight, the bells of St Germain rang out. It was the signal the Catholics were waiting for to begin the killing. De Coligny was one of the first to die, stabbed as he lay convalescing in his own bed. The killers flung his body out of the window into the street where men waited to hack off his head and drag his body away. They hung it in chains on the public gibbet at Montfaucon.’

  Tom remembered the cruel scene he had witnessed at Tower Hill and shuddered. ‘But didn’t you say that the king’s sister was to marry a Huguenot prince?’ he asked. ‘Did the king do nothing?’

  Lamotte grimaced. ‘As I said, he is terrified of the Catholics. Royal guards were supposed to protect de Coligny but they stood aside and watched him die. After that, the Catholic mob was mad for blood. Henry of Navarre escaped, but many of the other leaders lost their lives.

  ‘Then the mob turned its attention to lesser folk like my family. White crosses were daubed on the doors of Huguenot houses to make sure the mob knew where to go. The bloodshed went on for three days and by the end of it, more than three thousand lay dead in the streets: men and women, young and old, slaughtered without mercy. Even children were not spared. The Catholic butchers laughed and joked as they went about their work, stopping to refresh themselves at taverns when they tired. The streets were crimson with blood; it was as if the rivers of Hell ran through them and their banks were heaps of corpses, blackened by flies. The stench of death was unbearable.’

  ‘Were your wife and son spared?’ Tom asked quietly, fearful of the answer.

  ‘On that first morning, we did not expect the horrors to come, so I went as usual to my work at the Palais de Justice, but by midday, everyone left and hurried home. I ran to mine. There was a man I believed would help us if we could just reach him, but our door was kicked in and the house had been ransacked. My wife and son were nowhere to be seen.’ Tears gleamed in Lamotte’s eyes. ‘I searched for hours, hiding from the soldiers when I had to, sickened when I witnessed them cutting down their victims, and sickened too by my own powerlessness to help those tormented souls.’

  Tom waited for him to go on.

  ‘When it was over, I clung to the hope I might still find Amélie and Jean, but I never did.’ His head drooped. ‘Once I loved Paris, she seemed to me the greatest city on earth, but after that night, I hated her for taking away the family I loved.’

  For a few moments, they sat in silence. Tom tried without success to think of words of comfort then Lamotte picked up his pipe and reached for another taper. Suddenly, he was brisk as if he wished he had not said so much.

  ‘So I came to England,’ he remarked, in between drawing on his pipe, ‘and she is my country now.’ He shrugged. ‘I started a new life in the theatre. People say lawyers and actors are not so far apart. It was hard at first, I won’t deny it. The English don’t always welcome foreigners, but I have tried to make myself into an Englishman to pacify them. Forgive me, it’s better not to dwell on the past, we can’t change it alth
ough perhaps we can learn from it.’

  He caught the elbow of the serving girl who passed. ‘Bring us more ale.’

  She nodded.

  Lamotte leant back in his chair and blew out a puff of smoke. ‘After that we should be on our way. I want to be up early tomorrow to make sure those lazy carpenters hurry up with the new seating. I’m losing money every day it is not ready.’

  They parted outside the tavern and Lamotte walked home to Throgmorton Street. A sleepy servant unbolted the heavy oak door. ‘A message came for you, master,’ he said as he shot back the bolts.

  Lamotte took off his cloak and hat. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In your study, master.’

  As he mounted the creaking stairs, Lamotte noticed the dust at the back of the treads. For the second time that day, he thought sadly of his wife. Amélie had never allowed anything to remain dusty or unpolished. The house in Paris had smelt of beeswax and lavender. This house was a bachelor’s abode, the furniture dulled by neglect, the rugs frayed and the walls scuffed. Was it a wonder when the place had no mistress?

  He shook his head with a sigh. Occasionally he had come across a woman who might have changed that, but nothing ever came of it – perhaps he had not really wanted it to.

  In his study, he sat down at his desk. This room at least was cosy, with its dark oak panelling, its shelves crammed with papers and books and a chair that welcomed his weary bones like an old friend.

  The message was from Sir Francis Walsingham. Folding the paper, Lamotte leant back in his chair and stroked his chin. Walsingham rarely summoned him at short notice unless it was urgent but it was too late to set out for Barn Elms tonight. There would be no boats going upriver. He would leave at daybreak.

  7

  The tide was turning as the ferry slipped from its moorings and set off upriver. The air was humid and oppressive and the stench of the murky, rubbish-strewn water was strong. Lamotte pulled his cloak over his nose to shut it out. He hoped this visit would be worth leaving his bed for.