London - Edward Rutherfurd [349]
The sun was already starting to sink, sending red shafts along the river, when they reached the Dogget yard. With surprise, Jane watched while he dragged planks and timbers away from the back of the boathouse. He lit two lamps, hung them from a beam and commanded her: “Turn your back.” She heard him pulling covers off something, while she stared out at the red sky above the water, then his voice said: “You can look now.” And to her astonishment, she saw the long, gleaming and magnificently gilded form of Dogget’s secret treasure. He beamed at her.
“Could we use this? To ferry people to the Globe?”
He had at last found a role worthy of King Harry’s barge.
“We could take thirty. She wouldn’t sink,” he said.
For another half-hour they tested it, sitting this way and that, laughing happily like a pair of childish conspirators.
It was dusk when he offered to escort her home.
The play was done.
It was Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice that had given him the idea originally. A rogue tries to do a great evil, but the forces of good triumph. Simple enough. But what had especially struck Edmund was that the villain in the play was an outcast, and a striking presence. That was what he needed: a villain who was unusual, memorable, threatening not just because of what he does, but what he is. Someone mysterious. But what? A Jesuit priest? A Spaniard? Too obvious. He had racked his brains for something original, and then suddenly he had remembered the strange fellow who had threatened him at the bear-pit two years before: Black Barnikel, the pirate.
A blackamoor. The pirate moor. What could be stranger, more threatening? The audience wouldn’t be able to take their eyes off him.
He made the Moor loathsome, hideous. As terrible as Tamburlaine, cunning as Mephistopheles. His speeches and monologues were magnificent as awful images of evil came spilling out. There was not one redeeming feature in him. At last however, caught in his own toils, he was brought to justice and, after showing himself to be a coward as well, was led away, contemptibly, to execution. When he finally put down his pen, Meredith felt certain: now he would make a figure in the world.
He decided that afternoon to go out. And then he decided to do something he had not done for a long time. He put on his galligaskins, and a white lace ruff, and his hat with the billowing feathers.
Dusk had fallen before Edmund and the lady crossed the bridge. She was being carried by two servants in a covered chair: he was walking beside it, gallantly carrying a lamp to light the way. They had met at a play given by the Admiral’s men and then retired to sup with a party of other fashionable folk at a nearby tavern. Until that day, Edmund had only known his companion slightly, as a friend of Lady Redlynch; but it seemed that he was known to her since, noticing him in the playhouse gallery, she had turned and archly remarked: “I see, Master Meredith, you have dressed as a gentleman again.” And whatever she might have heard of him from Lady Redlynch, it was enough, evidently, for her to make it clear to him that evening that his place was at her side.
They had just paused for a moment about a hundred yards north of the bridge when John Dogget and Jane, returning from the boathouse, came in sight of them.
Had they not paused, had Edmund not leaned forward into the covered chair, Jane might not have realized who it was. But in doing so, he held the lamp up to his face. There was no mistaking it. Even from the distance, in the little pool of lamplight, she could see them both: Edmund, his handsome, aristocratic face, half shadowed;