On the way to Burleigh's house, they passed that of Southampton in Holborn. Liveried attendants swarmed at the door. Hamish got out his sketchpad, a sad affair of playbills stitched together so that he could draw on the blank sides. He was captured by the bustle and colour. He quizzed Jake about whose men these were. They were servants of Essex and of Robert Sidney, Sir Philip's younger brother. That groom waving to Jake worked for Sir Henry Danvers who had been Sidney's page. And lastly, there were Francis Bacon, Anthony Standen and Anthony Rolston, all talking by the mounting block.
"Ha!" said Jake. "You'll not have seen their like among your lochs and glens." The clothes were dazzling, and the men chosen for beauty and strength. Nothing loath, Jake also passed on what he had heard on the streets and in the taverns about these people. The two Anthonies had used Jake to start a public rumour to help Essex pressure an enemy at court. He resented being used like a gull, so he spoke coolly of them. He hoped, incidentally, that the artist's eye was noting the current fashion, and the differences therein from his own garb.
Hamish spent so long taking his pictures of the scenes in Holborn that Jake became parched. He led his friend by way of St Paul's south and over the bridge to Southwark. His favourite tavern was there, full of actors and good conversation.
Robert Armin was in the tavern, singing madrigals for pence for ale to share with John Shancke and William Ecclestone of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. For weeks he had been circling Burbage's company in hopes of a place. "Give it up, Robin," Jake muttered out of the side of his mouth. "They have a Fool, and they're content with his clowning."
Armin concluded a verse before he answered, as quietly, "Kemp? O, he can caper, but there's no music in him. Besides, at any day he might retire to Norwich. I've heard him speak of it."
Armin reeked of insubstantial hopes. Some men would not hear advice. Jake sighed, took his tankards from the maid, and returned to Hamish. The country boy's gaze was flickering about the room, north south east and west. "I had to place the order," Jake said bluntly. "The maid would never have understood your barbarous accent." And why was he snapping at Fleming? It was Armin who had moved him.
An angry flush showed on Fleming's cheekbones. "Better so, than to speak London. Short and sharp as a handful of thrown gravel."
Jake hunched his shoulders, self-conscious. Truth be told, he liked the cadence of Fleming's voice, with its soft lilt and occasional broadened vowels. "We train in elocution - we play at Court, you know, so we must speak clear. I listen to voices much."
That morning, he'd overheard Fleming trying to haggle with the tinker at the door, and it had been piteous when he had been reduced to mime by the cockney's failure to comprehend his dialect. Jake tried, and failed, to suppress a smirk. Fleming saw it, and looked surly.
If things had been other, he would have said, "your voice is like music." But he was not Crodsky, and Hamish was not Lady Bella. "Your voice is well enough," he admitted. "Hah! Are you not a singer?" He knew Ham was musical because of a tedious hour passed coaxing personal secrets from Master Steven Fleming.
The ale had loosened Jake's tongue by the time they left the tavern, not too much, but a little. His fears for Will came on him again. Hamish, his head turning to catch the passing scenes, was not overawed by Jake's hints and mutterings. Darkly, Jake indicated unspoken threats to his fellow apprentice, but even fuddled as he was, could not bring himself to be plain with Hamish.
He did go so far as to whisper to his new friend that Walsingham was mixed up in spywork, and that it was rumoured that he recruited his tricksters and bullyboys from the stage.
Jake glanced upwards. They were now crossing London Bridge from the south side. Hamish's eye vaguely followed Jake's, to the odd, tarred lumps speared on poles above them. First confused, then disbelieving, then appalled, Jake saw him realise what they were; the severed heads of English traitors, here set up to cow the public into respect for authority. A raucous gull alit on one, and Ham looked hastily away, swallowing his fear. He is but a country lad, after all, Jake thought.
Here were men who had been mixed up in power games to their cost.
"Walsingham favours actors for the work of spying." Jake said aloud. "We boast a trained memory, the ability to dissemble our true faces, a way of life which brings us in contact with high and low alike, a certain subtlety - did you cough? Bless you."
Hamish waved his concern aside. "Tis nothing."
Jake offered him his pomander to sniff. It was scented with cloves and feverfew, a sure remedy against disease. The apothecary had sworn it.
"Are you a spy?" Ham asked. He did not sound as if he thought it the case.
He was right. "I? No. Never, never, would I trust my life in the hands of Walsingham or Cecil, for that's what it amounts to. I judge them likely to betray the trust of lesser men whene'er it should suit their ends."
Hamish nodded more seriously. "Yet Will trusts them." His tone, when he spoke of Will to Jake, was strange.
"Will trusts... himself. From his days as poor scholar in grammar school, he has been used to excel. He believes that, as a man of parts, he may soar where he wilt."
"The Tudor house have promoted many new men," Hamish said.
Jake sighed. Another talented dreamer. Before refreshing themselves in Southwark, Jake had given the promised view of Burleigh's art collection in the Strand. Hamish had stood and stared long and hard at the rich man's pictures, and had left his own sketchings as a gift in exchange. Sweet country boy, with his scraps of handbills, Jake had thought.
Now that they were out of earshot of Burleigh's steward, Jake warned him that Burleigh was an unlikely patron for artists.
"One time," said Jake, "her majesty promised one hundred good pounds to a poet, for his grand work "The Fairy Queen". And it was Lord Burleigh who spoke out against the endowment. He said, Spencer was a hired state messenger, and thus, already paid, and besides, his poem a mere song. "O," saith her highness, "give him then what is reasonable." And Burleigh's "reasonable" was to pay not a shilling."
"Did Spencer get his money?"
"At length. And not from Burleigh," Jake said darkly. "Which was the merchant you said you intended to visit?"
Messr. Fender was not too proud to sell the vulgar instruments, the hautboy, the sackbut, the hurdygurdy, the pipes and tabor. Ham muttered to him, and he drew them into an inner room, where lutes and guitars lay waiting for their masters. Jake looked round, interested. Ham was telling of how he'd learnt the craft of musicianship from a wandering Irish bard, one of the last of a dying breed.
Master Fender handed Hamish a newly finished celtic harp.
Now, Jake enjoyed a merry tune on the virginals as much as any man, but the harp was so passe, and so (how to put this?) unEnglish. It was a celtic music. Hamish tuned the pegs as Jake watched, and the dreadful truth became clear. The signs had been there, and only a wilfully blind optimist would have missed them; the childhood spent north of nowhere, the rural associations, the way he smiled and smiled affably while above his hairline terrible, terrible, shaggy things happened... Hamish was a folk singer. To how many verses was Jake doomed before the song denouement where the heroine got knocked up or the cow died of murrain? Jake had told Ham (both subtly and Not) that he was a sophisticate. If Ham loved him, he would spare him.
Not love. I'd not think of love. I mean, if he cherished my good opinion.
Hamish neither loved him nor cherished his good opinion. He sang.
The ballad was long and winding, and Jake had ample time to contemplate matters. A dozen or so verses in, his attention dipped into the lyrics, only to find the ballad populated by a whining milkmaid, a wicked landlord, a windmill, and an inadequately comic goat. The tale within the song was taking forever to be resolved, because the quatrains kept being punctuated by, "with a fa la la and a hey nonny no." There would be retribution for this, Jake vowed.
Meantime, he brooded. For instance, how had Hamish paid for the harp? He had seen no coin passing between him and Master Fender, and how, by the by, did a boy fresh to the city know who was, or was not, a reputable supplier of musicians? He thought he had seen a scrap of something pale (papers?) pass from Messr. Fender into Hamish's hand with the harp. That hulking blond apprentice in the outer room - had Jake not seen him earlier, talking rapidly in the Scottish tongue, or Welsh, to Sean and Hamish at the back door? Finn, who Jake saw recognise him (and Finn did Not look happy to see the boy) had called the other two away swiftly before Jake found out who he was. At the time, Jake had been too proud to appear jealous of Ham's friends, but now, he wondered.
He returned his cursory attention to the song. The goat had gotten into the windmill and was eating the corn. It was all very rollicking. Jake sighed.
He hated intelligencing. He was not a natural spy. Yes, he knew most of what was toward in the city, but he kept his ears open. It gave a sense of control over his world. To put his intelligence to use would mean collaboration, and Jake trusted no one.
An Irish harp, Fender said. Sean, Finn, both Irish, both anxious not to be connected. It might mean nothing. And Walsingham in the picture. Jake's unhappiness was not all musical pain. It would be full dangerous to assume it meant nothing, with the Spymaster present and active.
They disturbed a prowling cat on the way back into the inn late that night, and it yowled piercingly. Jake made a warding sign against evil. Who knows who feeds the cursed animal? It could be a familiar. Then, he stumbled over a bowl of milk set outside the door for the neighbours.
"Stop." Hamish moved surely into the kitchen even by starlight. His search of the pantry did not disturb the turnspit dog; clearly he had a longstanding habit of midnight snacking. He brought Jake bread and cheese and weak ale. Jake fell on it like a wolf, and when he looked up, Hamish was staring at him as if he were truly a poor vagabond player. O. My elbows were flying there, and now I'm hunched over the plate as if I feared it would be snatched away. Not so courtly now, Pratt. Jake sat back and ate slower.