Текст книги "The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez"
Автор книги: Ann Swinfen
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‘I could. I chose not. For me, the theatre is my world, not to be cloistered away in some dusty Oxford college, conning ancient texts in Greek or Hebrew!’
‘I would dearly have loved to go there.’ I could not keep the longing out of my voice. I had begged my father, but we both knew it was impossible. Living and sleeping with three or four young men in our tutor’s rooms, I could not have kept my secret long.
‘Why did you not?’ he said.
‘Oh, my father could not spare me.’ I drank the last of my ale. ‘I must go. I’ve no leave to take a holiday.’
‘Come to the play!’ He had risen as I did, and caught me by the wrist. ‘I can get you in free. Come and see me as the French princess!’
I was sore tempted. I had not seen a play in months and I loved the magic of the playhouse, which can help you forget, if only for an hour or two, the world of lies in which you live, by weaving its own sweet web of lies.
‘I shouldn’t.’ But already I was allowing myself to be drawn back through Bishopsgate and along past Bedlam to Shoreditch High Street. We turned left on Hog Lane, then at Curtain Road turned right, passing the Curtain theatre. When we drew level with Holywell Lane, Simon pointed out the lodgings of famous actors and managers: James Burbage and his sons Cuthbert and Richard, the great comic wit Richard Tarlton, and John Bentley and Tobias Mill.
Simon gave ‘Good day!’ to a young man not much older than we were.
‘That’s Thomas Kyd,’ he said, with something like awe in his voice. ‘He’s writing a new play for us, called A Spanish Tragedy. It will be wonderful, it puts the old plays to shame with their sing-song verse. I have seen part of it that’s already written.’
‘Will you play another pretty maid?’ I could not resist it.
He kicked the ground, raising a little puff of dust.
‘We won’t stage it until next year. I hope by then I may play men’s parts, but our company is short of boys, and those we have are too young to take the difficult women’s roles.’
We came to the Great Barn, once part of the convent that stood here until the time of the Queen’s father. Nowadays the Barn is used as a cattle pen and slaughterhouse, filling the air around the Theatre with the rank, bloody Smithfield smell. Beyond it an archway had been knocked through the old convent wall to give admittance to the theatre audiences. We turned away from the outside staircases which led to the more expensive seats. A narrow door opened on to a passageway under the banked galleries to the area before the apron stage where the penny groundlings stood to watch the play. Simon whispered something in the ear of the man collecting the pennies and he motioned me through without paying. Simon disappeared along another passageway towards the back of the stage.
I do not remember much of The Famous Victories of Henry V. Since then a much finer play has told of those events which so stir an Englishman’s heart and thumb the nose at the French. If they tell the truth (and who can know the truth, after so many years?), Henry was one of England’s greatest kings, in something of the same mould as our own Elizabeth, but he died young and his death brought years of war and suffering. Elizabeth had been luckier. Or perhaps wiser. For she had avoided war whenever she could, and the careful men around her, like Walsingham and Burghley, had kept her safe from the assassins bent on destroying her.
Though I remember little of the play, I do remember Simon. It seemed to me that whenever he stepped on to the stage, the play came to life. As the French princess he was beautiful and desirable, intelligent and merry. When the king took the hand of the princess to plight his troth and bring peace to the two kingdoms, a sigh of satisfaction and pleasure filled the theatre. I saw an old dame near me wipe her eyes on her apron, and a group of apprentices (who, like me, should have been about their masters’ work) whistled and cheered and called for the lovely maid at the end.
I hurried off as soon as the play was over, making my way around the north side of the town wall to Smithfield instead of going through the crowds of the City, for I thought to save myself some time. I had been gone several hours longer than I should have been and my father might have begun to worry. As I hastened along the tenters’ fields and past Cripplegate, my mind seethed with confusion. Simon had looked so delicate and convincing as a girl, yet he surely believed me to be a boy, and one who could never pass for a maid. Maid or man? Jew or Gentile? Portuguese or English? My meeting with Simon had left me floundering in my own muddy thoughts.
After this encounter, I tried to put Simon out of my mind, together with the confusion in my mind prompted by it. We were busy at the hospital after an outbreak of measles, a dreadful disease which seems to prefer to attack children. It heralds its entrance into the body with fever and sweating and the child complains of terrible pains in the head. With a young baby, too young to speak, there is constant crying and thrashing about. Indeed, once the epidemic had taken hold, the wards of St Bartholomew’s reverberated with the constant crying of babies and children. We had to move many of our other cases, who needed peacefulness and rest, away from the stress of the unrelieved noise. My own head throbbed with it.
We treated the outbreak of fevers with the usual febrifuge herbs – borage is good and readily available and the extract from the bark of willow – but by the end of the first week it had become clear that it was not just fever we were dealing with, but measles. The telltale rashes were beginning to appear, first on the chests of our young patients, then spreading to faces and all other parts of their bodies, driving them mad with the itching. It is very difficult indeed to stop a young child from scratching, and of course the scratching causes the rash to explode into pustules which grow inflamed and infected, oozing pus and causing pain as well as the itch.
It seemed as though we made bucketsful of the salve which is mainly composed of the ground root of camomile, a task in which I leant a hand to Peter Lambert, one of the young assistant apothecaries who had been assigned to help us. We were of much the same age and had started work at St Bartholomew’s within a month of each other. He was a charity boy, but one of the senior apothecaries had noticed how quick and neat he was, working as a servant in the hospital. He had been taken on as an apprentice and trained up. In a few years he would be licensed himself.
‘We need to shade the windows,’ my father said, as soon as we had ascertained that it was measles we were dealing with. I looked at him questioningly. Peter also raised his eyes from the mortar where he was grinding yet more camomile root.
‘Strong light is dangerous for the eyes of those suffering from measles,’ my father explained. ‘What are the worst effects of measles, Kit?’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘Blindness, of course. And deafness. In very severe cases it can cause serious damage to the brain, leaving the victim forever confused and childlike.’
‘Quite correct.’
I noticed that Peter was listening carefully, with a horrified look on his face. He glanced around at the rows of cots and small beds.
‘You mean it will happen to these children, Dr Alvarez?’
‘To some of them, yes. I’m afraid whatever we do, some of them will suffer these terrible after-effects. That is why it is so important to detect and treat measles quickly, and to try to stop the outbreak from spreading. So you see, I am not being cruel when I ban visitors to our young patients. We cannot risk the disease being carried to others who are not yet infected. Now I must see about ordering the cloth for the windows.’
By the next morning all the windows in the measles wards had been covered with red cloth, nailed to the frames, and we worked in the strange rosy glow they cast over everything. It was noticeable that the children seemed less distressed in the dimmer light, though the fever and the painful rash continued to torment them.
At the end of the first week, we had our first death, a little boy about three years old. We had feared for him from the start, because he had been very ill when the parents brought him to the hospital, already in a dangerously high fever and unconscious. After that, three babies died. I began to dread going to the hospital, though I only left it for about three hours during the night, to go home and snatch a little sleep, before changing places with my father, so he could do the same.
During the second week, my father called me over to the bed of a little girl of about ten. She was sitting up quietly, having come through the worst of the rash, which had begun to fade from her cheeks. Instead of a mass of ugly red weals, her forehead and cheeks were now spotted with small red bumps, each with a tiny scab at the centre. As one of the older children, she had understood she must not scratch and had done what she could to stop herself, sitting on her hands. Indeed she was one of our best patients, quiet and uncomplaining.
My father had a candle in his hand and was moving it back and forth in front of the girl’s face. Her eyes were open, but they did not follow the movement of the flame.
‘What do you think, Kit?’
I swallowed. ‘I think her eyes are affected,’ I murmured softly, not wanting the child to hear me use the word ‘blind’.
My father nodded and sighed. He blew out the candle and set it down on the stool at the foot of the bed.
‘Yes, you are right. And you do not need to whisper. She cannot hear you.’ He turned to the child and raised his voice slightly. ‘Can you hear me, Lizzy?’
She did not respond.
I turned away, filled with a sudden great rage. Her parents had brought her in quickly, we had treated her at once, and she had done everything we told her to do. Now, this. Not only blind, but deaf as well.
For the rest of the time the epidemic lasted, another ten days, I went about my work in a kind of numb fury. Four more children died. Two others were blind. And one boy of twelve babbled and dribbled like an infant.
When at last the wards were clear of measles cases, the rooms washed from top to bottom under my father’s severe scrutiny, and the red cloth taken down, we moved the regular patients back in from other wards where they had been crowded together. We went home late that evening and as soon as we were through the door, I sank down on a kitchen bench. I felt like a cloth doll which has lost its stuffing and hung my head between my knees. The iron grip in which I had held myself for so long collapsed and I began sobbing uncontrollably.
My father sat down beside me and put his arms around me.
‘Hush, Kit, hush, child. It’s over.’
‘But it will never be truly over, will it?’ My voice came out thick and blurred and shaking with anger. ‘How can God visit such suffering and punishment on innocent children? Killing some. Leaving others blind or deaf or mad? Is that the work of a benign God? I do not think so! How can I go on being a doctor in a world of such wickedness, a world where even God seems evil?’
He said nothing for a while, letting me sob into his shoulder. At last he said, ‘I cannot understand the ways of God, or His plan for any of us. Do not give way to despair, Kit, because you cannot understand Him either. All we can do, as doctors, is to relieve suffering and to cure those we can. Remember, far more of those who came to us were cured than endured the effects we all grieve over. A doctor must be courageous and carry on, in the face of distress and agony. Our strength must uphold our patients and give them strength and hope. I know that you can do this, or I would never have allowed you to take up medicine.’
His words comforted me a little. I vowed I would try to be strong and not allow distress to undermine my work. But I would never forget that epidemic of measles, or the girl sitting up in bed, neither seeing the flame of a candles before her eyes nor hearing our voices when we spoke to her.
Although we had finished that first mountain of letters, several times in the weeks following the outbreak of measles Phelippes sent a servant to fetch me when he wanted help in deciphering. He had the key to some of the codes, but fresh ones were always turning up and it can be a time-consuming business, breaking a new code. And it was due to the volume of documents that must be deciphered swiftly that he needed my assistance. Another large bundle of them, letters to the Scots queen, had been intercepted on the way to her from the French embassy by the courier Gifford. From what I read, Mary’s chief agent in Paris, one Thomas Morgan, was busy organising treason even from within his prison cell at the Bastille, where he had been held, at the request of the English government, since the discovery of the Parry conspiracy. England had asked France to hand him over for trial, but the most the French would do was to confine him to the Bastille, where he appeared to have considerable freedom, receiving other agents and controlling the Scottish queen’s correspondence in its two stages, from France smuggled into England and then from the French embassy carried on to Mary. Or at least he thought he controlled it. Little did he guess that much of it ended up on my desk.
Phelippes and I worked together quietly in his small back office with Arthur Gregory in the adjoining room. Here I still had my own table and copy of the codes. I climbed up there by the back stairs and only rarely saw Walsingham himself. It could be dull work, merely a matter of transcribing from code and then (since most of these latest documents were in French) translating them into English. When a new code appeared I pounced on it eagerly, as relief from the boredom, much to Phelippes’s amusement.
I had not seen Poley for some while, to my relief. Thomas Phelippes was a different breed of man from Poley, whom I sensed he did not altogether trust. Phelippes was heart and soul Walsingham’s man.
‘Sir Francis uses Poley to pose as a Catholic and infiltrate the network of Catholic exiles and citizens who plot the Queen’s downfall,’ Phelippes explained to me, after I had noticed Poley twice more about the house soon after I began to work there.
There was something in his voice which made me wonder whether Poley’s allegiance was sometimes open to doubt.
‘Poley is on good terms with the French embassy, carries papers for the French and Spanish, visits the Scots queen under the guise of a sympathiser. And all the while he passes information and copied papers to us.’
But could he be trusted? From the little I had seen of the man, I suspected he changed his loyalties as easily as he changed his doublet. I tried to sound out Phelippes tentatively on this point, for I felt the more information I possessed about Poley, the better I might be able to arm myself against him.
‘You say he passes information to us,’ I said, ‘but can you be sure he does not also pass information from us to the Scottish queen and her circle?’ I was now so much a part of Phelippes’s work that I regarded myself as included in ‘us’.
Phelippes looked at me over his spectacles and seemed to ponder how much he should say to me.
‘It is a difficult business, this, Kit. Sir Francis’s secret service. Some of our agents have been turned from traitors to informers loyal to the Queen. I know you have seen Gifford. He is one such.’
I gave him a startled look. I had not realised that Gifford was a former traitor.
‘Oh, yes,’ he went on, ‘Gilbert Gifford comes of an old Staffordshire Catholic family. That is why he is so readily trusted by the Scottish queen. And his knowledge of the county is useful. Chartley lies in Staffordshire, not far from Lichfield.’
‘But can you be sure of his loyalty?’
‘Yes. With Gifford I think we can. He is loyal to the Queen and opposed to the invasion of England by foreign armies. There are many English Catholics like him. They would rather a settled England under our Queen than the dangerous prospect of invasion by France or Spain. That is why the Queen is prepared to turn a blind eye to their faith as long as their loyalty to the state and the throne remains firm.’
‘But Poley – is he a Catholic?’
Phelippes gave a mirthless smile. ‘Not to my knowledge. I do not believe he has any strong religious faith, though he is an accomplished play-actor and can pass for Catholic or Protestant as the situation demands.’
I had already been told that – when I met him first – Poley had been covertly placed in the Marshalsea as a supposed Catholic sympathiser, while all the time his purpose was to glean information about plots from those incarcerated there, and to learn the names of secret Catholics. No wonder that he had supposed himself poisoned, if one of his fellow prisoners had found him out.
After this conversation, I became more than ever convinced that both Phelippes and Walsingham were uncertain of him. My own judgement was simpler. Robert Poley, I was sure, would pursue the interests of Robert Poley and no one else.
‘At this particular time he is a member of Sidney’s household,’ said Phelippes, ‘which is known for its religious tolerance. To the Catholic plotters, Poley seems safely placed, working for them near the heart of our network, since Sidney’s wife is Frances Walsingham, Sir Francis’s only child.’
I nodded. ‘So that means Poley has the trust of the Queen’s enemies, but can reveal all to you and Sir Francis?’
‘Exactly.’ There was a note of reserve in his tone.
To this day I do not know for sure whether Poley did honestly reveal all to Walsingham and Phelippes at that time, or whether he had half a foot in the Catholic camp. I did not know. And I do not know. But I do know what I believe.
Poley was a traitor.
Chapter Five
It had been a bitter, unforgiving winter, but at last there were signs of spring, even here in London. We had no garden with our miserable hospital lodging, and I had no reason to be invited into the fine gardens of the wealthy, though my father sometimes attended his few private patients in their great houses. Yet for anyone with eyes to see and a longing for the lost beauties of the countryside, there are unexpected corners and pockets of wild loveliness even in London.
There are the churchyards, for one thing. Although some are grazed by sheep to keep down the grass, there are others – small neglected patches beside tottering ancient churches – where wild flowers, which some would call weeds, can flourish undisturbed by human foot or ovine teeth. Daisies, poppies, eye-bright, St John’s wort, forget-me-not riot amongst the long grass. Honeysuckle clambers over crumbling walls, not in flower yet, but that will come, and those spiked arms clutching the stones will break out into sweet eglantine in the summer. There are useful herbs here too: peppermint and sweet Cecily, borage and feverfew, fennel and wild garlic.
Not only the churchyards had now begun to don their spring dress. In muddy corners of filthy, overcrowded, unpaved London lanes, violets put forth their shy blooms, and primroses opened their faces to the hesitant sun. I saw a swathe, a scarf, a river of golden cowslips running down the side of a midden behind a livery stable, their clustered bells as delicate as any I had gathered with Isabel on the edge of our grandfather’s meadow. Surely they were early? But the steaming warmth of the midden must have tricked them into believing the year was further advanced than it was.
My days had been too full, and my fingers too cold and stiff with chilblains, during those bitter winter months, to think of my lute, which lay beside my clothes coffer in my chamber. Now, however, when the first balmy air of spring could be felt, I carried it down to our small parlour. In winter we lived almost entirely in the kitchen, for the benefit of the fire, not being able to afford a second fire in the parlour. Now the unbearable winter chill of the room was gone and my father and I had taken to sitting there in the evening, reading. That day our work at the hospital had been undemanding and no summons from Seething Lane had come for me. After seeing the golden abundance of the cowslips on my way to the hospital soon after dawn, I was in the mood for music.
My father looked up as I began to tune the lute, which was sadly awry.
‘Excellent!’ he said. ‘It is weeks since you played your lute.’
‘Months. I hope I have not neglected it so long that the strings will play me false.’
It took a long while, but at last I had it tuned to my satisfaction. As I worked, my father took his treble recorder out of its case and played a few notes so that I could tune my strings to harmonise with it.
‘Morley, I think,’ I said. ‘Oh let my tears fall.’
‘Rather sad.’
‘We can play something more cheerful afterwards.’
I bent my head, gave my father the nod to begin, and soon we were lost in that private world of music-making that only those who know it can understand. I sang the words softly as I played. My voice is true, and fairly sweet, but I have no real power behind it. I could never fill a theatre, as I supposed Simon must sometimes have to do.
We had been playing for perhaps half an hour, everything ranging from jolly Portuguese folk dances to some of Tallis’s pieces with tricky harmony, and were in the middle of Byrd’s My Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home when we heard a knock on the street door. Joan had been dozing by the fire in the kitchen (and probably not appreciating our music much), but we heard her chair scrape on the floor and then the creak as the door opened. The newcomer’s voice was unmistakable.
‘It’s Master Harriot,’ I said, starting to lay aside my lute as Joan showed him into the parlour.
‘No, no, please don’t stop playing,’ he said, beaming from one to the other of us. ‘I could hear the sweet sounds from the street through the open window, and wondered whether I might join you.’
‘Oh dear!’ said my father. ‘We shall have our neighbours complaining tomorrow.’
‘Not at all. It was the very music of the spheres!’
I gave a snort of laughter. ‘I think not. I am sorely out of practice. You will take some refreshment?’ Laying my lute down beside my stool, I stepped into the kitchen and told Joan to bring in glasses and the cake she had made earlier that day. Behind me, my father was drawing the cork from one of his few precious bottles of wine. It was not often that we had the honour of a visit from Master Harriot.
When I returned, Harriot had picked up my father’s other recorder, a tenor, and was playing a snatch of melody on it. The melody was heart-wrenching, with a dying fall that made me want to weep.
‘What is that?’ I asked.
‘A new piece by John Dowland,’ Harriot said. ‘Not published yet, I believe, but I heard it played at Raleigh’s house last week. Do you think you could extemporise to it?’
Harriot could remember exactly any melody once heard, as I could, and both my father and I could improvise at will, so within minutes the three of us had our instruments winding their melodies about each other like human voices entwined in a madrigal.
At some point Joan must have brought in the tray, but none of us noticed until we had brought our impromptu composition to an end and looked at each other, laughing.
Music and mathematics – surely the most sublime and ethereal of God’s gifts to Man!
Harriot mopped his forehead with a fine silk handkerchief, which he then screwed carelessly into a ball and shoved into his pocket.
‘Ah, I should visit Duck Lane more often. Do the authorities at St Bartholomew’s have any idea what jewels they have buried in their crowded lodgings? Dr Alvarez, you and Kit deserve better than this.’
I saw my father shrug as I moved to pour out the wine and slice the cake.
‘We are given these lodgings free. We could move to one of the better hospital houses, but then we would have to pay rent. I prefer to put the money aside for my old age and Kit’s future. You know that we lost everything when we left Portugal.’
Harriot accepted the wine and cake I passed to him and shook his shaggy head sadly.
‘It is a cruel world we live in. There is so much ignorance and bigotry abroad. I know what they call me – ‘the Conjuror’ – because the ignorant believe that mathematics is some kind of magic. At least we do not have the Inquisition in England.’
‘Yet what could be further from magic,’ I said, ‘when it rests on the most rigorous reasoning of the human brain?’
‘Exactly. But even educated men, who should know better, pretend to subscribe to this view of mathematics as magic.’
‘It comes, perhaps,’ said my father, ‘from their fear of men who may be cleverer than they are. By calling you the Conjuror they demean you, make you less dangerous.’
Harriot shrugged. ‘I’m in no contest with men of power. That is not my world at all.’ He took a large bite of his cake and washed it down with a hearty sip of his wine.
‘And you, Kit? You have not come for your studies with me for weeks now.’
‘My days have not been my own. We have had a difficult time at the hospital, and when I am not there I have been working for Walsingham.’
‘Ah, yes. The code-breaking. I did not realise that it would still be occupying you. When I was approached by that fellow – Robert Polling? – I was able to praise your skills with ciphers, but I thought Sir Francis had just a brief task in mind.’
‘Robert Poley,’ I said. ‘That is his name. Whatever he gave you to understand – and I can well believe he was not honest and straightforward – it seems Sir Francis feels he can call on me whenever there is more work than his own man can do. And that is often.’
‘Well, I suppose it is worthwhile work, for Sir Francis is an upright and honourable gentleman. And I am sure it is bound to be secret in nature.’
‘It is.’
‘I know you can keep your counsel. Yet I have scarce seen you since I returned from the Chesapeake expedition.’ He rubbed his hands together enthusiastically. ‘You remember, Kit, that I told you how I had been compiling a dictionary of the native language from my interviews with the two captives before we left?’
‘I do. And were you able to learn more of the language?’
‘Indeed, indeed. It is most curious. Quite unrelated to any other language I have encountered. Remarkable. And the people are not so savage as we have been led to believe. With a little gentle guidance, I think they will come to accept true faith and civility. They express astonishment at our modern engines such as clocks and compasses, but they do not hate or fear them. When next you come to my rooms, Kit, I will show you the drawings I have made, and my wordlist. Who knows, they might even prove useful in Sir Francis’s codes!’
We all laughed at the idea of Sir Francis using the language of savages from the New World to outwit our country’s enemies. And I could not help smiling to myself that Harriot had not said one word of the Chesapeake expedition when I had seen him last. I had been very curious to hear about his adventures, but had waited for him to open the subject. However, all his enthusiasm on that occasion had been for optics. That was the very essence of him, and it was one of the things that made him so exciting as a teacher, the way he embraced so many branches of knowledge and opened up new countries of the mind where none had travelled before.
‘I have never returned your book on optics, Master Harriot,’ I said, getting up and fetching it from where it stood on our shelf of books.
‘You have read it? And what did you think?’
‘Very interesting. But I thought I noticed a few miscalculations.’
He beamed. ‘I hoped you would. When next you come to me, we will put our heads together and see whether we can do better.’ He put down his glass. ‘Tell Joan her cake is excellent. More? Ah, I think you can persuade me. Afterwards, shall we have more music? Once I am sure that I will not fill your recorder with blown cake crumbs, Dr Alvarez! Was that Byrd you were playing when I arrived?’
We made music far into the night and no more was said of the New World or mathematics or code-breaking or Sir Francis Walsingham.
Sir Francis, however, had not forgotten me. The next day, as we prepared to return to the hospital after our midday meal, Phelippes’s serving man, whom I now knew as Thomas Cassie, arrived with a summons for me.
‘Master Phelippes needs me this afternoon?’ I said. I was anxious to return to my patients and resented being fetched away like this.
‘No, Master Alvarez. It is Sir Francis himself who wishes to see you.’
My heart quickened uncomfortably in my chest. Why should Sir Francis want to see me? After that first interview, my dealings had been entirely with Thomas Phelippes, although Sir Francis would look into the office from time to time and discuss our work with us. Had Poley said something to betray me? I looked at my father for guidance.
‘Of course you must go, Kit,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. I do not have too much work this afternoon. I can check your patients for you.’
No escape, then. Nevertheless, I picked up my satchel of medical supplies, in case there would be time for me to go to the hospital after seeing Sir Francis, and I followed Cassie out into the street. The increasing warmth of the sun brought the stench of the Smithfield slaughterhouses coiling about us. Leaving home now in answer to this unexpected summons, I was suddenly reminded of that other summons, back in January, when Simon had fetched me to the Marshalsea, setting all of this in motion. I had not seen Simon for some time, not since before the measles epidemic, and I found myself wishing quite painfully that we could meet again. Could we be friends? I knew so few people of my own age, apart from Peter Lambert at the hospital and Sara Lopez’s daughter Anne. Somehow I had warmed to Simon, strange as it seemed, when we came from such different worlds. Perhaps I would seek him out one day soon. But I did not question my reasons too closely.
