This was the beginning of their rivalry, even if it was a rivalry mostly apparent on Dole’s side. Now he was determined to revenge himself on the individual who’d wronged him, using the playwright’s own medium of words. It was his last chance for revenge since Christopher Dole did not think he would be alive for much longer.
So he cobbled together, during forty-eight hours of frantic scribbling, a piece guaranteed to cause WS a few problems. And it was all his – Christopher Dole’s – own work. Or very nearly all. Lying on the desk-top was an ancient vellum manuscript, some of which Christopher had put to use in The English Brothers. This was an old drama known as The Play of Adam. To bulk out his own play, Christopher had copied a couple of pages from this piece, ones telling of the rivalry between Cain and Abel and the first murder, and presented them as a play-within-a-play. The manuscript was worn and, in places, the writing so faded that Christopher was forced to peer closely in order to copy it out. The play-within-a-play was a fashionable device. Shakespeare himself had done the very same thing in Hamlet.
A few months earlier Christopher had discovered the vellum manuscript in a chest in a neglected corner of the shop belonging to his brother, Alan, a bookseller. Alan had just turned down Christopher’s request for a loan and disappeared upstairs, above the shop. Christopher, feeling aggrieved at his brother’s refusal, had poked around among Alan’s stock of books. He’d unfastened the chest in the corner and, straight away, his curiosity was sparked by a wax seal securing one of several rolls bundled inside. The elaborate seal suggested the contents might be valuable.
Unthinkingly, Christopher broke the disc of wax. Casting his eyes over the text inside, he soon saw that it was from the earliest days of drama, a period when plays were scarcely to be distinguished from religious celebrations and festivals. He secreted the scroll inside his doublet, believing it might come in useful. And so it proved when he had transcribed a few dozen lines from the old text into his own hastily composed piece. Since Christopher Dole did not get on with his brother, he liked the fact that the section he’d copied out was to do with Cain and Abel. It had given him the idea of titling his work The English Brothers.
The material for the play itself he had discovered in a collection of antique tales. It was a narrative about the rivalry between a pair of English siblings who should have been fighting the Norse invaders but were instead more interested in fighting each other over the same noble lady. Christopher versified this story and dashed it down any old how, hardly caring how it came out.
The English Brothers was never going to be performed.
It would be printed, however. Printed without the approval of the authorities and without a licence. And it would bear Shakespeare’s name on the title page or, if not his name in full, then a hint of it. Let the man from Stratford explain himself to the Privy Council. They would definitely be interested in some of the coded comments in The English Brothers.
It was a late afternoon in autumn and growing dark. Christopher Dole might have slept now his work was complete but he was seized with the desire for action. He took the old vellum manuscript and hid it away inside his own chest, which contained nothing more than his shirts and other faded garments. Then he folded up the foul papers and tucked them inside his doublet. He snuffed out the dying candle and made his way out of the little top-floor room and down the rickety stairs of his lodgings.
In the small dark lobby he almost collided with a figure who was leaning against the jamb of the front door and blocking the exit.
‘Ah,’ said the figure, ‘it’s Christopher, isn’t it?’
‘You are in my way.’
‘I knew it was you. I can identify every member of this household by their tread, even when they’re hurrying, as you are.’
‘I am going out.’
The figure pushed itself away from the door-jamb and moved slightly to one side so that Dole was forced to brush past him. He smelled meat and liquor on the other’s breath. It reminded him that he had not eaten properly for at least forty-eight hours.
The lounger in the lobby was Stephen. He was the landlady’s son. Stephen did not seem to do anything in his mother’s house other than pad softly around, like a cat, and push his nose into other people’s business, like a dog.
‘You are surely on your way somewhere important, Christopher,’ he said in his usual familiar style. ‘Judging by the way you came downstairs almost running – for a man of your age, that is.’
‘Shog off, Stephen,’ said Christopher, opening the door and stepping into the street. He heard the other say, ‘My pleasure’, as the door closed behind him.
It was damp and cold in the streets outside but no damper or colder than it was in Dole’s garret room. The playwright walked briskly so as to keep out the weather and because he was eager to reach his destination, a tavern called The Ram. The tavern was in Moor Street in Clerkenwell. Dole knew that he would find the man he wanted there. Old George preferred The Ram to his home. It was quieter in The Ram. It was too distant for any member of his household to come hunting for him. Ensconced in the tavern, he would not be bothered by wife and children.
Sure enough, George Bruton was sitting in front of a pint pot in a corner. The interior of the tavern was smoky and no better lit than Dole’s own quarters. But George always sat on the same bench in the same corner, and a blind man might have found him. There was a knot of men in another corner of the room. Christopher could see nothing of them except the flash of an arm, the turn of a jaw.
George Bruton observed Christopher coming in his direction. Before the playwright could reach him he pinged his fingers against the side of his pot, and Dole took the hint to order two more pints from the passing drawer. Then he sat down next to Bruton. He waited until the drinks arrived and his companion had taken several gulps, almost draining the pot. Bruton was a large man who occupied more than his share of the bench. Dole remembered the days when he’d been slender. Their association was through Christopher’s brother, Alan, the bookseller and publisher. George Bruton was a printer who sometimes worked for Alan.
‘A damp evening, George,’ said Christopher.
George humphed. He was not a great one for talk. Neither was Christopher Dole, for all that his business was to do with words. So Dole decided to get straight to the point.
‘You recall that commission, a private one, that I mentioned to you a few days ago?’
‘My memory is not so good these days,’ said the printer. ‘It will take another one of these to stir it into life.’
Christopher had hardly drunk anything from his own pint but he snapped his fingers for the drawer, a pimply lad, and placed a fresh order. There was a bark of laughter from the shadowed group in the opposite corner. The very sound of the laughter, and a disjointed sentence or two, was enough to tell Christopher that these were gentlemen. The Ram was rather a down-at-heel place but perhaps the group liked it for that reason. He turned his attention back to George Bruton.
‘I require something to be printed – printed privately.’
For the first time George swivelled his block-like head to stare at Christopher.