Shakespeare's Rebel Read Online Free PDF Page B

his head. ‘It is yet a little early for food.’
    The man did not turn, spoke over his shoulder. ‘Anything else?’
    ‘My sword. Nay, do not fear, old friend. I ask it now for protection, not vengeance. No man should go unarmed within the Bishop’s Liberty.’
    ‘ You shouldn’t.’ Peg Leg nodded. ‘I will fetch all.’ He turned, paused, turned back. ‘The day after you were here, two men came seeking you.’
    John, who’d begun to hack at his vast beard with some shears, stopped. ‘Who?’
    ‘They did not vouchsafe their names. But they seemed most keen to find you. And . . . they wore tangerine sashes.’
    He hopped off. John raised the shears above the water. His hands shook, worse than a man with the palsy. ‘I’ll wear a sword this day,’ he murmured, ‘and pray God and all his angels that I have no cause to draw it. Not for myself ’ – he shuddered – ‘and certainly not for my lord of Essex.’
    Peg Leg’s lendings were the innkeeper’s third-best wear – the beige woollen doublet had holes under the armpits; the breeches, a poorly contrasting green, had been made to accommodate a leg removed below the knee. The netherstocks beneath were wool, threadbare and baggy over the ankles. Still, his long black cloak, as deloused as the attentions of the tavern boy could achieve, covered the worst of the clothing, and a wide-brimmed hat pulled down concealed the poor job he had made of trimming his beard. Anyway, he doubted that any would be looking to judge him for fashion.
    Burbage’s note had said only to meet him, but not when or where. He wondered again how the player had tracked him to Wapping when John had thought himself invisible there. Like his return to Southwark and his breaking of Peg Leg’s door, it was a mystery lost to memory. He wondered if anyone else knew of his debauch. Especially . . . she. He would not have it so.
    He was making for the Globe, thinking that the most likely place to find the actor would be in his place of labour – the playhouse he owned, ran and barely left. Yet something nagged at him as he walked, set off by his surroundings. What was it about this day? Southwark rarely slept, yet it seemed twice as busy as any other noontime. Higglers lined the main thoroughfares. ‘Humble pie! Lovely braised cow tail! Rich saveloys! Cock and bull puddings!’ came the competing cries; most seemed to be purveying some kind of meat. And it was that fact, combined with a crowd of blue-aproned apprentices who should have been at labour but instead were running shouting down the roadway, that finally pierced the fog in his head and told him what day it was.
    ‘Shrove Tuesday,’ he muttered, the thought halting him. The day before Lent, the four-week period when meat must be put aside – so this day all consumed excess of it. Excess of everything. One fact lodged unleashed many more, enabling him to see – the whores already out upon the streets or leaning to whistle from windows; the doormen bellowing from taverns, urging entrance for cheap ale; the boys calling people to bear-bait or cockfight.
    But not to the Globe, John remembered, this final fact penetrating. For the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played this Shrove Tuesday at the palace, by royal command. And John had ended his debauch three days before to be as sober as possible for the event. For it was not every day that a Lawley appeared before her majesty.
    Not he. His son.
    Ned, he thought, the name smashing another dam in his brain, flooding him with thoughts he’d pickled these four weeks. For it was not the news that his son, newly apprenticed to the Chamberlain’s Men, would be treading the platform John himself longed to retread that had set him drinking again. It was the news that came almost concurrently, the bad with the good, as news so often did.
    It was the boy’s mother. Her plans for Lent’s end.
    John stepped forward again, his bent no longer for the Globe. Burbage would be across the water,