The Bookman's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

imbecile and I could assemble it next to the bishop’s tomb. Then it took all our combined strengths, along with a couple of iron bars, to prize the bishop’s effigy and its marble slab from the top of the tomb and slide it onto the wooden support.”
    “And what did you find?” said Lyly.
    “Dust, the smell of a few centuries of decay, and the good bishop. It was unnerving the way he stared up at me with those empty eye sockets, and I swear I heard moaning echoing through the cathedral when I first looked on him.”
    “The wind?” said Peele.
    “That’s what I told myself,” said Harbottle.
    “And what about the book?” said Marlowe.
    “Clasped in his hands right where it had been for nearly two hundred years. It took me a minute to prize it loose, and I’m afraid I broke a few of the episcopal fingers in the process, but when I had it free and blew the dust off, well . . . it was as beautiful an illuminated Psalter as you could ever hope to see. Eleventh century, I’d say, maybe even earlier. Once I had that in my bag, it was just a matter of pushing the top back on the tomb, slipping out of the cathedral, and giving my companion enough to drink that he’d remember nothing in the morning.”
    “And what did this Robert Cotton think of your find?” asked Peele.
    “He had only two things to say,” said Bartholomew. “That he didn’t want to know where it came from, and would twenty pounds be sufficient.”
    “Twenty pounds!” cried Peele, sputtering ale all over the table. “For one book?”
    “Twenty pounds should keep us all in ale until the plague is long gone,” said Marlowe, pounding his empty mug on the table. “What say you buy us another round and we drink a toast to the late bishop of Winchester.”
    When the next round was served, Bartholomew, blushing with the triumph of his story and with his third mug of ale, turned to the great playwright.
    “Now, Marlowe,” he said. “You’ve not yet told me what brings you to London when the plague is abroad.”
    “I came to bid farewell to our dear friend Robert Greene,” said Marlowe.
    “Greene? Why, where’s he going?”
    “As good a question as any,” said Lyly. “For he lies this day on his deathbed.”
    Bartholomew set down his mug and felt the blood drain from his face. Among them all, there had been no better drinker, no better whorer, none more prone to lose half a crown in a card game and laugh at the loss while pissing into the Thames than the poet Robert Greene. Bartholomew had the unusual good fortune never to have lost a close friend, and despite his lifestyle he was capable of affection. That Greene should be no longer there for a friendly night of debauchery hit him harder than he would have expected.
    “Plague?” he whispered.
    “Hard living,” said Marlowe. “He reckons it was a dinner of pickled herring that did him in, but I think we all know it took more than one dinner to push Robert Greene to the edge of this world.”
    “Where is he?” asked Bartholomew.
    “Lodging with a shoemaker in Dowgate,” said Marlowe. “A Mr. Isam. The wife looks after him. Seems a bit smitten, I’d say. Greene hasn’t a halfpenny to his name to repay her.”
    “I should like to see him,” said Bartholomew.
    “You’re not the only one,” said Peele, laughing. “Emma Ball was here not an hour ago looking for him.”
    “His mistress?” asked Bartholomew.
    “More than that, to judge by the crying bundle in her arms,” said Peele.
    “I’ll show you the way,” said Marlowe, draining his mug and pushing back his chair.
    Bartholomew had no wish to betray the tenderness of his feelings to his drunken companions and so banged his mug on the table with false enthusiasm. “Lead on,” he said to Marlowe. “For though you say he dies in poverty, a bookseller can often find profit on a deathbed.”
    Bartholomew parted with Marlowe in front of the narrow house in Dowgate where Robert Greene lay dying. Mrs. Isam let him