a sweete stroke on the lute

Hickey’s eye receives the imprint of whatever it looks upon, like a seal set on soft wax – he remembers every broadsheet and every playbill that has brought him here to this place, and in turn he will remember the jangling columns in Crozier’s ledger, every smudged leaf he has cast an eye over as his master sought a fresh place to set down their accounting.

Ned Cook learned to read at his first master’s elbow, and never forgot the sweetness of that first recognition, black marks on a page coming to stand for speech like summoned imps. Crozier has summoned him here to do his bidding by just such a string of marks delivered covertly in the dead of night. But Ned Cook is a dead man, and Cornelius Hickey’s name is put down in the devil’s book for a record of services rendered.

Two great playhouses, with great and lofty names – the Erebus lit in candles and the Terror a site of massacres, all peopled with players and stocked with malcontents. There can never be enough delicacies for their repertory, enough candles for their jewel-box interiors, enough brass and velvet. Lord Barrow’s Men must work for their keep. Crozier holds the purse-strings of the whole company; he is a more liberal housewife than Master Franklin of the Garden was, but Franklin is dead in the ground some six months and Crozier drinks to Franklin’s soul at the Black Bull every night save Sunday. The Irishman pays more for a plot or a play than his fellows do, but he’s less forgiving regarding those who fail to provide. And he always keeps a record.

Two glasses on the table, an inkwell, and a great black book. The transaction is written up in a prim little column, not in a secretary’s hand but in Crozier’s own – turn another leaf and there will be a list of bills paid for sand and tiles and lumber, or a cure for fever snugged up against a charm against theft of livestock.

Pd. vnto coornelijs hicke the 6th desembe, ten shellinges in earneste of a plot callid Pierce della Vigna, and fyve shellinges more for a freshe prolog to iovines etalleyon tragedie, so in all J saye payd the some of xv shellinges.

Some Dutch-Irish bastard is fifteen shillings richer, but the coins are for the pocket of a red-haired man named Ned, called Neel. He is no writer of plays but a patcher of them, mending their weaknesses like a cobbler mends shoes. So much paid out for a plot that will out-contrive his competitors – he has provided the barest dry bones of a story, and earned his down-payment, with the rest existing nowhere but the flash gilt chest of Hickey’s mind. The prologue will come by counterfeit like all good things do. It’s a far cry from the waterman he once was, practiced in ferrying about sixpenny whores and pocky assassins. Now he ferries them from scene to scene, from Mantua to Venice, from the Irish coast to the French court. He profits off of intrigues that have never taken place.

Crozier murmurs slushy Latin in his ear as he rummages in his flies; Hickey has only small Latin, but enough Greek to know what this business is about. He stops his mouth with a kiss and a pressing hand, though a little knife would do it. Crozier is nothing but his appetites, held together in a skin like a sausage.

“Hold still and I’ll play you something. A song for your prelude.”

He can reach for the carved cittern without leaving Crozier’s lap – is it the Irish who are proverbially given over to enjoyment of music, or is that the Welsh? Whether he’s Irish, Welsh, or a bloody Manxman he’s certainly enjoying the press of Hickey’s hip against his leg, and the weight of him in his lap. Hickey sets to stroking the courses with his fingers as Crozier settles on his waist – it takes a careful mastery and a dextrous hand, not to jangle away like they’re in the anteroom of a brothel.

The composition is a subtle merry tune for a theater stuffed full of idle gentlemen and industrious ladies – he’ll toss that in, gratis. Hickey has learned to please on any instrument that may be practiced upon, from the tightest strings to the stoutest pipes. Crozier is a queer instrument in his own right, barbed and weary, crossed in love and overlooked in preferments, and he is kept in difficult temper – but a careful hand might turn him to a better purpose.

Merry music for a bloodbath on the stage – stoven-in skulls, tableaux of men hewn in two, a witch, poison, old wounds running fresh. Sweeter than honey to Cornelius’ black and hungry tastes, and more lucrative than whoring or rowing. Hickey sings the words to the tune in his cracked and raw voice, but he doesn’t need to be one of St. Paul’s boys to coax and charm a sick-hearted hearer.

Old words to a new tune – the only new thing under this roof is the Rhenish wine. Everywhere books and stringed instruments, the trash of a lover’s wooing, left to go sour and dusty with inattention. It doesn’t take much guile to ferret out that Master Crozier is unlucky in love, and that no woman has been wooed by him with any success for a good three years. It would be hard to detect a woman’s presence whatsoever here, not so much as a hollow-cheeked laundress. In this dry spare house, ganymedes might come and go.

Crozier strokes Hickey’s whiskers with the backs of his knuckles, like a man fondling a ferret or a squirrel. Hickey smiles on him askance, when his song closes.

“Will that suffice for a prelude, do you think? Cittern and bandora, with flute, viol, and drum.”

“If the rest sounds half so sweet as that, you can count yourself well-commended.”

“Will you require anything else of me, before I go?”

Crozier sighs like a man heartbroken. “That pious simpleton Irving has made himself scarce, damn his eyes, and we still need revisions on The Twins. I’ve promised something to our Fitzjames, but he’s taking his precious time with it all. Don’t let him be interfered with.”

“I understand,” Hickey says solemnly. Fitzjames will be performing his own share of interference, no doubt, but sweet-faced John Irving won’t be seen again this side of the river except in a dredger’s basket.

“Holy Jack’s left his papers at his rooms on Vine Street, over the sign of the printer. But he has the only key, and he’s foresworn the theater for a nest of sodomites. Someone else will have to make up the work until he comes around again, and it seems it’s to be Fitzjames.”

“Shame.” Such attacks of conscience will come again no more. Hickey bites his lip. “I’ll see what I can do, sir.”

He’s been handed free license for any manner of nocturnal treachery – forced locks, rifled papers, intrigues, escapes. Fastest writer takes the prize, and Hickey can dash out a line faster than any man. Ned-called-Neel drains his glass and sets aside the cittern with a coppery plink of strings. He gives Crozier an affectionate pat between the legs before hoisting himself to the floor.