Shakespeare's Rebel Read Online Free PDF Page A

would make him doze again, he was wrong. He ignored the banks, the jostling humanity in the wharves and warehouses. The river better suited his mood, drew him eye, ear and nose. Streaked with daubs and paints of different hues, sheened with effluent from the tanneries, dotted with spars of wood and broken rafts twined with rope on which perched gulls and gannets. Carcasses floated, a bloat sheep here, a piebald dog, a cat; once, a human, gender rendered indeterminate by long immersion and the pickings of fish and bird.
    So much flotsam was a match for the jumble of his mind. It was always thus, after a month’s debauch, detritus swirling around his head, with him unable to alight on any item for long. Yet settle he must. This summons from Richard Burbage? Did opportunity lie in it? Would he be sober enough to seize it if it did?
    A harsh cry drew his eyes from murky surface into the air. More a bark, for ravens did not call like other birds. He knew this for he had spent months listening to them, when he had little else to do but learn to distinguish between their voices. He had even befriended one, a blue-black brute he called Jeremiah, in the time when they’d shared the dwelling.
    He raised his eyes to that dwelling now. The Tower rose like a stone mountain from the water, dwarfing every building nearby, the weight of its stones pressing upon the city and upon himself. It appeared almost as a continuation of his dream from the morning, for his capture by the Spanish that day in Cadiz, his imprisonment in Seville afterwards had led, within a year, to imprisonment there. It was what the English authorities did with prisoners who had, by whatever means, escaped the clutches of the Inquisition. For many had been released only on the promise to return to London and assassinate the heretic queen, and that John had reported this mission on arrival had not led to the hailing of a hero and the rewards he’d expected but to three months of close examination.
    ‘A foul place!’ exclaimed the skin trader, seeing the direction of John’s gaze. ‘Gives me the fears each time I pass by.’
    John grunted agreement.
    ‘Well, to happier thoughts, eh?’ the man said, leaning on his oar against the current, swinging the prow of his boat away. ‘And fairer prospects.’
    Fair was not a word oft used to describe what was before him now, but for once John thought the description more than apt. It wasn’t the vista, the usual huddle of riverfront warehouses, many with the fug of industry rising from them, slaughterhouses alongside fish smokeries, tanneries beside glue factories. It wasn’t the byways beyond which would be the same twisting, narrow, gloomy, cessfilled alleys and streets that were upon the opposite bank.
    It was the people who thronged them. It was the life upon them. It was the pleasure that could be had along them. It was the Liberty of the Bishop of Winchester, and contained more taverns, more brothels, more cockpits and bear bait rings, more gaols and more playhouses than any other square half-mile in the known world.
    ‘Southwark ho!’ the trader announced. ‘It’s where we’re stopping, so unless you want to ride back to Wapping on the next tide, you’d best alight.’ The prow nudged into a wooden wharf and the labourer leapt off to make the vessel secure. ‘Pickle Herring Stairs. Will they suit?’
    John rose from his hide bed, wobbled to the gunnel, paused there to get his balance. He inhaled, filling his nose with the acrid, sweet, rancid scent emerging from the warehouse that gave the stairs their name. For the first time in a long time, he tried a smile. Words accompanied it. ‘They suit well. And I thank you for your kindness.’
    The man reached out a steadying hand and braced John as he stepped on to the wharf. He looked surprised. ‘You’re English?’
    ‘I am.’
    ‘God’s teeth, I thought you was, you know . . .’ He shrugged. ‘. . . foreign. On account you’re so dark and you don’t