Excerpt of Martyr by Rory Clements

John Shakespeare looked around the gloomy shell of the house. It was remarkably intact, given the ferocity of the fire described by the constable. Something caught his eye on the sodden floor. He picked it up. It was a paper, wet and unreadable. Then he saw that there were more papers lying around amongst the burnt stubble of thatching.

Some of the papers had distinguishable words and all of them were unfolded, which almost certainly meant they were new printed. He signalled to Boltfoot Cooper. ‘Gather them all up.’

There were other things, too: type sorts for printing. But no sign of a press.

‘All of it, Boltfoot, the type sorts, too. I will examine it all later. Perhaps we can find the letter foundry where it was made. Now, Mr Stocker, where is the body?’

Above them the roof was burnt away and the sky hung a brilliant grey where the ceiling should have been. A few flutterings of snow began to drift down.

The staircase was intact, though charred, and they ascended it to the second floor, where in a chamber at the front, they found a woman’s corpse, naked and bloody, stretched obscenely on a large oaken and canopied bed. A kite was pecking at her eyes but flew up through the blackened purlins and rafters as they approached. The bellman gripped his hat in his hands as if he would wring it dry, and averted his gaze. Shakespeare understood why he would wish to do so and why the constable had seemed so shaken

On the first floor of a broad tenement house in Cow Lane near Smith Field, Gilbert Cogg was sweating profusely, which had less to do with the heat from the fire and more to do with his three-hundredweight girth and his exertions with a girl named Starling Day.

She had come to the door of his workshop asking for employment in his bawdy house. He told her he would not employ her without sampling what she had to offer, and said she could have sixpence and a tankard of ale. She asked for a shilling. After a brief bout of bargaining, they had agreed on tenpence. She had earned her money well, half crushed to death beneath his prodigious weight. His enormous bed had threatened to break its boards and joists and collapse through to the ground floor.

But it survived, as did Starling Day. Now they lay together on the dirt-grey sheet. Cogg was panting as if he would soon breathe his last. His belly and chest heaved and sank like a ducking stool. Starling rolled over and slid out of bed. She was thin from lack of nourishment: she had walked from Nottingham to escape a marriage in which she had been beaten one too many times. Though the ribs in her chest looked like a washboard, her bruises had faded and she was still womanly. She would have been pretty, had she had the opportunity to take more care of her hair. She dressed quickly, watching Cogg as his breathing subsided. At last she held out a hand to him.

‘What would that be, then, my pretty bird? Sixpence, I do believe?’

‘Tenpence, Mr Cogg. You did agree tenpence.’

‘Did I now? Did I so?’

‘You did, sir.’

With difficulty he shifted himself upright off the bed. His belly hung low like a sack of turnips. He pushed his stomach forward with evident satisfaction and gave it a hearty slap. ‘You don’t get a belly like that without some hard eating and drinking, my girl.’

‘No, Mr Cogg.’

‘It’s living so near the shambles, little Starling, that’s what does it. The slaughtermen and butchers bring me offal and offcuts and in return I helps them with little things. Money for the rentman, pretty favors from friends like you. You name it, Cogg provides it. I provides fine favors for gentlemen, too, so those as works for me never knows who they might meet. You want fine sotweed? Cogg can get it. You want a prime view of a hanging, drawing and quartering? Cogg provides.’

‘I had heard you were a generous man, Mr Cogg, I was told you might be able to give me work.’

‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we.  You’re new to Romeville, my girl, but you’ve already got some nice Boleynish tricks there. I reckon you could do with some feeding up, though. So I tell you what, I’ll give you a whole shilling this time so you can buy yourself some pies and perhaps you’ll come to me again on the morrow and we’ll see what we can do.’

‘I’d like that, Mr Cogg. Thank you, sir.’

Back to page top >

They were moving on a broad curve northwards, close to the tidal sands of Pig’s Bay near Shoebury Ness. The Elizabeth Bonaventure had been Drake’s flagship sixteen months earlier on his Caribbean raid. She was already a quarter of a century old on that voyage, but John Hawkins had streamlined her and made a new ship of her. Sleek, fast, like a wisp in the wind, she was a Spanish galleon commander’s nightmare.

At last a boy at the top of the mainmast called, ‘Hulk ahoy’. And soon they saw it, a weathered old vessel stuck fast in the sand with nothing left but its hull and a broken skeleton of spars and masts, dating back to the turn of the century or before.

‘We will take six turns, master gunner. First turn long range, five hundred yards,’ Drake announced. The master gunner, a short, broad-shouldered man of thirty, bowed to his vice-admiral and went straightway to the gun-deck where he began issuing orders.

As they came around for the first turn and as the great cannons boomed and recoiled on their four-wheeled carriages, the smoke of gunpowder choked out the sun, like a crackling bonfire of greenwood in autumn. Boltfoot Cooper kept his eyes on Drake and remembered the long days of the cirumnavigation in the great oceans with a curious nostalgia he had thought never to feel again.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the vastness of the open sea, when you knew there was a God in Heaven and that He was very close. On a clear day, the ocean was a glory to behold. The rolling waves, higher than the bowsprit of the Golden Hind, reaching as far as a man could see, north, south, east and west; immense in their splendour. As the Hind had descended from one wave into a long, dipping trough, the next wave came up like a tall, grey cathedral before them and the ship rose to meet it, before falling once more down a wall of water into an enormous, foam-wracked trough. Such days had terrified many mariners, but Boltfoot had loved them; he had forgotten how much.

‘Regrets, Cooper?’ Drake bellowed, just after the second boom of the Elizabeth Bonaventure’s guns, as if he reading Boltfoot’s mind.

Yes, that you cheated me out of my plunder, Boltfoot thought, but said nothing.

Herrick, in his room above the chandlery on the Strand at Deptford, had been awake and watchful since first light. He had seen the Elizabeth Bonaventure from some way off. She was every inch a royal ship, proudly bearing flags with the cross of St George and silken pennants of gold and silver, flying thirty yards or more from the masts. And then, as she came closer, he could see the rose shield of the Tudors adorning the low race-built forecastle – the same diminutive structure that made the ship so vulnerable to boarding yet, at the same time, as nimble and quick as a wild cat.

For a moment, Herrick found himself admiring her lines. She was majestic and it occurred to him that if the English had many more such ships, they could trouble, if not match, any armada that Philip could muster and put to sea. He resolved that when this Holy mission was done with, he would go to Mendoza in Paris with information on what he had seen here. His Spanish masters should know the truth about this English fleet.

From the bag he took the two pieces of gun; the mechanism and the barrel in one piece, the stock separate. They clipped together easily. He primed the weapon with the fine willow powder and rammed home one of the balls into the muzzle. It fitted perfectly. Herrick removed his sighting stand from below the bed. It was short, no more than two feet. He had crafted it himself from wood he had found discarded outside the dockyard timber merchant’s lot nearby. At its top was a notch, on which he could rest the muzzle.

He opened the little window and looked out. Beneath him the early-morning throng was going about its business. No one looked up. Herrick took his pillow cushion from the bed and put it on the floor close by the window, where he placed it beneath one knee, crouching low so that his head would not be visible from the street below. He had a clear, unimpeded view of the landing steps where Drake would soon land.

He could see the cockboat now, rowed hard and in time by four oarsmen. The coxswain stood, directing their strokes. In the back, the captain sat in splendour, talking to a dark-skinned man to his left. On the other side of him sat a thickset man who looked for all the world like a broadsheet version of a pirate.

The cockboat was about two hundred yards away. Herrick rested the barrel of his snaphaunce musket on the makeshift stand, its muzzle protruding not more than an inch over the sill of the window.

He knew it to be a remarkable weapon. He could easily hit a man’s head from a hundred yards, probably one-fifty, and possibly even two hundred. Herrick lined up the sights and squinted down the barrel at Drake. He could take him now.