Read Prince - John Shakespeare 03 - for Free Online Page B

torches were now standing guard outside the neighbouring house. The building was older than the Shakespeares’ home and almost as large. It was a stone-built city home for merchants and dated back a hundred years or so. Most recently, it had come into the possession of a wool merchant from Antwerp. They seemed good people who doffed their hats in the street and said good day in strongly accented English, and yet he did not know their names nor anything about them, save that they seemed wealthy and respectable.
    There was shouting from within the house. Shakespeare marched up to the front door and saw that it had been stove in by a battering log, for it was lying flat in the hallway.
    ‘What is this? What has happened here?’ he demanded of the guards as he tried to peer inside.
    ‘Hunting for rats,’ one of the men said, dourly. He held a drawn sword. ‘What’s it to you?’
    Shakespeare noted the Queen’s escutcheon emblazoned on the man’s jerkin. ‘I am an officer to Sir Robert Cecil and these people are my neighbours, that is what it is to me. Now let me pass.’ He stepped forward. As he did so, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a figure a little way down the street, sheltering in the shadow cast by the wall of the house.
    The two men moved across Shakespeare’s path to bar his way. He elbowed them aside and pushed on through the front door. They laughed, but did not try too hard to stop him. Inside, the hall was ablaze with the flickering light of pitch torches and candles. Richard Topcliffe was sitting in the centre of the room on a coffer of polished elm, one leg swinging, his pipe stuck in his mouth, belching out smoke.
    To one side of the room, Shakespeare saw the family who lived here. Father, mother and six children aged from about five to fifteen. They were all in their nightclothes and stood rigidly to attention, frightened witless.
    ‘Well, well, Mr Shakespeare. What a pleasure to see you here,’ Topcliffe growled like an undomesticated cat. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘Come to help me flush out vermin, have you?’
    On the other side of the room stood a line of serving men and women, half a dozen in all. Two were in livery, the others in nightclothes like their master’s family.
    ‘What are you talking about, Topcliffe?’
    ‘This is Mr Sluyterman, according to the Return of Strangers here.’ Topcliffe ran his finger down a list of names. ‘Mr Jan Sluyterman. Says he has a wife, Gertrude, which I take to be that ugly oyster-wench at his side, and six children – Cornelius, another Jan, Pieter, Willem, Marthe and Jacob. Says, too, that he has six servants, three of them English and three Dutch.’ Topcliffe turned to the master of the house. ‘Is that all correct, Mr Sluyterman?’
    Topcliffe had two heavily armed pursuivants at his side. These agents of the state, with powers of search and arrest, brandished swords and wheel-lock pistols. From other rooms came the sound of stamping boots and smashing panels. Obviously, there was a cohort of other men spread around the house, searching for someone – or something.
    ‘ Ja – yes, sir. It is correct. But—’
    ‘Shut your filthy Dutch mouth, Mr Sluyterman. I will tell you when I wish you to speak.’
    ‘But I thought you asked—’
    ‘I don’t like your Dutch voice, I don’t like your Dutch whore of a wife and I don’t like you, Sluyterman, so stow you before I force my blackthorn down your miserable gullet. Are you Calvinists? Her Majesty the Queen does not like Calvinists and nor do I.’
    Shakespeare could tell from Sluyterman’s eyes that he was concealing something. The Dutchman looked at Topcliffe with a steady, nervous gaze as if afraid that averting his eyes would confirm his guilt. He was a well-fed man in his forties. He looked as though he had never done anything more physical than lift a quill, write in a ledger and count coin. His wife was attractive in a homely, plump way, with a white lawn coif