Cry Murder! in a Small Voice Read online

  Table of Contents

  Venice, 1604

  Southwark, All Hallows 1603

  Cheapside, Advent 1603

  The Moorfields, Midwinter 1603

  Venice, Ash Wednesday, 1604

  By the White Lion, Venice, Lent 1604

  At the Sign of the Goat and Pipes

  London, Whitsun 1604

  Hackney, Midsummer Eve 1604

  Southwark, All Hallows Eve 1604

  Whitehall, May Eve 1606

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  CRY MURDER!

  IN A SMALL VOICE

  Greer Gilman

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  Cry Murder! in a Small Voice is no. 11 in the Small Beer Press chapbook series.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

  in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Cry Murder! in a Small Voice copyright © 2013 by Greer Gilman. All rights reserved.

  greergilman.com

  Cover illustration copyright © 2013 by Kathleen Jennings. All rights reserved.

  tanaudel.wordpress.com

  Paper edition printed in the hot summer of 2013 in a saddle-stitched edition by Paradise Copies of Northampton, Massachusetts.

  Paper edition text set in Centaur 12 pt. Titles set in Caslon Antique.

  Ebook edition text set in Minion 12 pt.

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  [email protected]

  www.smallbeerpress.com

  weightlessbooks.com

  Ebook edition.

  September 2013

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gilman, Greer Ilene.

  Cry murder! in a small voice / Greer Gilman. -- First edition.

  pages cm. -- (Small Beer Press chapbook series ; no. 11)

  ISBN 978-1-61873-077-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61873-078-7 (ebook)

  1. Jonson, Ben, 1573?-1637--Fiction. 2. Murder--Investigation--Fiction. 3. Mystery fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.I453C79 2013

  813’.54--dc23

  2013028995

  For Will

  “The Devil is an ass,

  I do acknowledge it.”

  Ben Jonson

  Venice, 1604

  A coil of scarlet round the sweet boy’s neck: swan-white he lay, his whiter smock outspread as snow, his hand—O piteous!—imploring still. Venetia dead. Above her stood her lord and lover, still as if he held the loop of cord. A silence—

  Mummery, thought Ben, remembering. The play was trash. Unworthy of the getting up, the less at court. ’Twas tailor-work: a deal of bombast and a farthing lace. And yet these shadows haunted him, foreshadows of an act unseen: the boy, not feigning now; the sullied smock; the cord. The Slip-Knott drew him in, inwove him in a play of shadows; now had tugged him halfway to Byzantium in its service. Enter Posthumus: a player-poet with a hand in Fate. Though he’d a quarrel to his fellow maker, History: that it wanted art. To lay a scene in Venice, helter-skelter—! Bah. The unities—But soft. On stage, the tyrant speaks.

  O! That nothing that hath made her nothing. Aye

  Hath wounded in her stifling Air itself.

  Wrong’d Venice . . .

  Faugh, the stink of her. ’Twould make a maggot puke, this excremental reek, merdurinous, this stew of charnel house, this gallimaufry of dog and rat. The Thames is Pierian to this, unsullied, and the Isle of Dogs Hesperides. A prod of pole lets matter as a surgeon’s probe. The vent of Popery, said a cold voice in his head. A priestly pus. He could write that speech and rail it down, as puppet buffed at puppet in a show. The quarrel made his faith.

  A stinking courtesan.

  He’d kept his hand to hilt this while. Had kept his wits: the city treacherous. Her body was a-crawl with vermin: thieves, assassins, fireships.

  And yet—how beautiful her nighted mask, her play of fires on the deep. Her torches all her stars. All planetary. Qualmish as he was, yet he could gaze with pleasure on the spangling of her watery gown. Fie, poetastery.

  Not midnight yet. He eased his Pelion of flesh, but warily: the wharf was rotten by its give and groaning. Naught gained by his tumbling in; though he floated like a tun yet he would rot.

  “Fat weed . . .” What line was dogging him? “That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf . . .” Will’s. Damn him for a country crowder, he could fiddle tragedy extempore, from some old playbook and a backless Ovid, make celestial music of the “Carman’s Whistle” and a dancing master’s kit. Of Hamlet’s ghost.

  A darkened boat slid by, as might be Charon in his gondola. A white face—like the moon her skull—peered out at him. And moonlike, drew him on. Not yet, he’d not embark—

  Wrong’d Venice. Ah, the boy had played her rarely, little Whitgift. And would never play a man. They’d forked him from the Thames, stewed livid, like a collop from the devil’s cauldron. Ben had seen him laid on Southwark shore, the eager curs whipped back. Not so the groundlings: they had thronged the player’s boy as if he were a new bear or a Jesuit to hang. The Men had known him by his ring, a lording’s gift.

  Not robbed?

  The bells were striking now.

  So many gone: dead queens and witty pages, all the pretty boys who changed their hose for petticoats, their masquing petticoats for breeches. Brief as rime. Within this year, betwixt the old Queen and the King of Spades (Death trumps), two player’s boys—no, three—were gone: this Peter; quick Salathiel, who spoke his lines; his Ben, his poetry itself.

  And Ben remembered how as Prologue to his Cynthia’s Revels, he had made three boys, his puppets, quarrel for the Prologue’s part. While he, who set them on, had scolded their unruly speech; and they, in his words, spoiled (Stop his Mouth) his play. Their voices not their own. He’d made them rivals for possession of a cloak (what, will you ravish me?): the speaker’s all-enfolding garb, black velvet as this night. How fiercely they had snatched at it (I’ld cry a Rape, but that you are Children), as if they quarreled for oblivion.

  The last deep stroke on strokes died muffled in a rising fog.

  The player’s wish: to be obliterated in a part, unselved; to shine in it, at once the overshadowed and the star. So they’d cast lots for the player’s cloak—O blasphemy unmarked by Revels—as if for Christ his mantle. And Salathiel had won and lost: his cloak would be his shroud.

  O, you shall see me do that, rarely; lend me my Cloke.

  Another: Soft, Sir, you’ll speak my Prologue in it.

  No, would I might never stir then.

  So the boy had sworn. And so had forfeited. His death—and Benjamin’s—would Ben endure as Job did, with complaint: God’s will. But something, that walks somewhere had killed Peter Whitgift: cut his thread. Who knew that dreaded Atropos was puppet-master?

  “Maestro Giansono?” An unearthly voice, as of a spirit prisoned in a tree.

  Ben swung his lantern round.

  A shadow, eyeless, in a cloak of night.

  Southwark, All Hallows 1603

  The player’s boy was buried north and south, beyond the glutted churchyard in a patch of no man’s land: tipped in unsanctified, unboxed, unclean. Past praying for. At his graveside stood a cronying of upstart crows, unfeathered popinjays: King’s Men.

  Ben lingering at the grave, spoke silently; then hurried on to where his rival players gathered in an alley. Glancing back, he saw a figure kneeling by the new-turned earth: a boy. Not with the Men. He held a something to his breast with both hands, bowed his face to it—a kiss?—then laid it on the grave. An orange.

  Strange. And pagan
ish: to leave an offering, as if the dead could eat. It glowed in the unwilling day, November’s daylong dusk. A lamp for the underworld.

  He would have turned and spoken with the mourner; but his fellows pulled him on. They wanted company. They wanted drink. So did he.

  At the playhouse door they parted severally.

  Will’s grieving was distracted, and his mourning ink. He had this next week’s plays to fit with one less boy. So needs must write a paltry for the tyrant or the wit to speak—a patch of nothing—while the boy, sent off upon an errand to himself, was changed, came out new-gendered, and sailed on. Enter the Lady. Will could fit a metamorphosis within a fool’s soliloquy, and to a line.

  And being Will, ’twould all be Mabwork. True, his ecstasies were brave in show—good silk expended on bad tawdry—but they wanted cutting. And his quibbles! Glovery, lithe words turned inside out.

  Ben laid stone on stone, well cut and justly set: would leave behind him, like the Romans, Works. An Amphitheatre. Even now he saw it rise. But the English poets made themselves a gypsies’ camp amid the ruins: thieveries and gauds.

  All was Troy-town at the Globe, in uproar. Hurly-burly. They had lain the most part of the year in quarantine, becalmed. And now to catch a wind of scandal, they unfurled: would run before it—but for tempest—into Martinmas. Uncertain seas. Yet, like sailors on a ship in storm, they knew their compass and their craft. They pulled together. One overboard? and so another to the sheets. He watched, as he would watch a gang of workmen for a quarter hour: carpenters or printers, smiths, musicians. How it was done. Their faults.

  Three or four were at swordplay: which least of all can be unstudied. Any fool could temporize—sing, sneeze, fart, fill in with Gorboduc—an eyeless player begged. Still others roughed a scene, each player with his piece of it: hooked cue with speech, framed passages, and so the house was raised. And down it fell, unpegged. Unequal in its timbers. Colloquy. A shortening.

  Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t, said his earwig.

  Sneck up, Will.

  Again it rose and was dismantled. Done undone, like the knot of swords that Northern hobnails make in dance. A third attempt. Upheld. And now the boy stepped in their circle: Hesperus and prey.

  Ben cast a shrewd eye upwards on the O of cloud: a coming storm? A loss of coin, a breathing-space.

  But now his inquiry was to the tiring-house.

  Within was all a fume of vile tobacco and a passion of tears. Smalter the tireman sat stitching on a coffin, any king’s, and wept. He the rain; and Figgs, who kept the properties, the lightning and the cloud.

  “Morn t’ye,” said Ben.

  “Good morrow,” said the tireman. Figgs quirked his pipe, and leaned a little faster to the wall. “Yet not good neither. Did you see our little Whitgift laid in earth?”

  “I did.”

  “No rite? No passing bell?”

  Ben shook his head. “The coroner—damned Pharisee—held fast to his contempt. Had Heminges not bribed him, it would have been the crossroads. He would drive the stake himself.”

  “O the wickedness! The pretty innocent!” The tireman wiped his tears with Gertrude’s petticoat. “Hath Hell then swallowed him?”

  “Afire and whole,” said Ben. “Flapdragoned for a devil’s revelling.” Oh, he could spit Beelzebub for this, storm hell. “Thirteen. What harm in him?”

  “Boys,” said Figgs. “Is monkeys. Lapdogs else.”

  “And which was he?” said Ben.

  “A moonish boy,” said Smalter.

  “Mad? Distracted?”

  “Waterish. It comes o’ playing ’Phelia.”

  “No vi’lets here on Bankside. Mud,” said Figgs.

  Restless, Ben was pawing through the properties. He tried a blunted dagger on his palm; held up a stomacher to his expanse.

  “Here, put that down,” said Figgs. “’Twould not fit thee.”

  “’Twill thee,” said Ben abstractedly. “Ha! Osric’s bonnet.”

  Smalter spat his pin. “What, the Oyster? Any gallant’s. Out o’ fashion now. The better sort do weary of it, but the groundlings stamp and cry, halloo! We bring it on whene’er some droning tragedy begins to lag.”

  Like mine? My Sejanus? Still gnarring on that bone.

  A stitch. “We had it of my lord of Oxford’s man.”

  “Did you now?” A scent. He dropped the bone. “Doth he cheap with ye?”

  “Aye. Yon goose-green doublet but this week. ’Twill make a smirking courtier, recut. So I told Will.”

  “Another Osric? What, to prank in Oxford’s frippery? You dare?”

  “’Twas ’Gustin’s impudence to play him so, before his lordship’s eyes.”

  “I heard. And was not slain?”

  “By Vere his men? He knew not he was mocked, I think.”

  “Like an Ape who sees his image in a glass, and mocks it for another.” How went that satire Harvey made on Vere? His Speculum? So: fisnamy smirking / With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward. Flourishing just so, he mimed it. “Ah, ’twas then his lordship vented, bowing to the Queen: which afterward she did recall to him: My lord, I had forgot the fart.” Ben twirled the bonnet on his fingertip, and grinned. A little Apish flat couched fast to the pate like an oyster. English hexameters, in long and short. ’Twas barbarous conceited in old Gabble-ratchet, twisting sense to the measure; yet he bit. If mumbling dogs had teeth. Himself? Would satyrise in brief: not vanity but hinder eloquence:

  One lord fair-fortuned was

  Whose fame is rotten;

  His fart remembered is

  Because forgotten.

  He perched the thing on Figgs’s gunstone of a noll, where it sat like a dejected egret. Ha. “Thou look’st like Antichrist in that lewd hat.” A good line: he noted it.

  “There’s an angel o’ plumes left yet on her.” Figgs doffed it, stroked it tenderly. There now, my dandling. Did the man affront thee? “She’ll do for Ercles in a wooing vein.”

  As if in idleness, Ben asked, “And Venetia?”

  Smalter sighed. “There is great clamor for’t. While there is light, we’ll play it, even to the snuff. The piece distastes me: ’tis unseemly now. But some—our men and boys—do whisper of it as ill-fortuned.”

  “What, do they boggle at it?”

  “Aye.” He bit his thread. “But there’s silver in’t. The commons love a moral death as they do love a maypole. An they cannot gaze upon the broadside walking, they will crowd to see his double.”

  “Who’s to play Venetia’s fetch?”

  “Here’s great ado. There’s little Timmins hopeful, but an egg as yet. ’A plays like a candle in gutter, up and down.”

  “The Fool’s page, he that sang?” A cade-lamb, fit for Cupid in a masque.

  “Aye, he.”

  Here’s fox, grain, goose for Will. Shall the page sing to the lady, himself to herself? Paradoxical. Then at her window? No: for she must in and pop out again, like Death in a town clock. Ludicrous. Cut the song? No: those who psalmed it in the streets came but to hear the owl cry, Hu! Tohu! So then: the Owlglass to entreat the owl. Let Robin Armin sing, and farewell, page.

  A knot. “Jenks hath it word for word by heart, aye, and business; but his voice is cracking.”

  “Let him to the barber then, and cut his lamentations short.”

  “Timmins hath it,” said Figgs. “Will’s hearsing him his lines.”

  “Is there not a third?” said Ben.

  “A green boy, lately prenticed. Plucked—” Smalter sniffed. “—on our late country progress, from a hedge.”

  “What, the crow? Venetia’s waiting-woman?” Not a score of lines and yet well-played. Struck home.

  “A very shrewish peevish boy. A malapert. You’d think his mother’s paps were sloes.”

  “And so? Can he not act?”

  “’A queens it rarely. Or will play you any ranting girl. But die? ’Tis not his humor.”

  Wit and fury. He must know this boy.


  “Whose prentice?”

  “Calder? Ruddock’s boy.” He signed himself. “With Peter Whitgift. They were—Ah. But here’s my lady to be fitted.”

  Smalter beckoned to the new Venetia: the boy whom Ben had seen rehearsing. Fitted? No: to wed the devil, by his look. Aghast, yet sensible of elevation.

  Now the tireman unfolded from his perch, and bustled, pulling out a chest. “Here’s deaths by jealousy.” He knelt and opened it, pulled out its cloth of silver, silks and velvets, rich with embroidery and rank with sweat. Sleeves, stomacher, gown, petticoat—He sat back on his heels, and clicked his tongue. “Did I not fold it here?” And then he looked again, and yet again, unfolding, fanning out: in this trunk and the next, in all the trunks, and everywhere. At first the man seemed baffled, vexed; then frantic.

  “Figgs!”

  “Aye.”

  “Hast seen Venetia’s smock?”

  “Naught leaves here.”

  “O ’tis wicked, wicked. Half an ell of Venice lace to either sleeve-hand, and the square on’t wrought with gold—”

  “What, stol’n? From our house?” said Figgs. “That’s hanging nine times o’er.”

  And Smalter wrung his hands and wailed, “Bone lace! She cannot die without. O masters, here is tragedy itself at end.”

  And Figgs, “What, stol’n?”

  “Cord and all.”

  A pretty thing, that smock: the Queen had wept for it. At Whitehall, but a brief month since, where Ben had seen it first and last—aye, and the paltry mumming it adorned. Like snow it lay about the dead Venetia. Above her stood her tyrant lover, great with speech. A silence, keeping measure; then: “O! That nothing that hath made her nothing—”