Much Ado About Murder

171 Pages·2016·0.82 MB·English

by  Hawke Simon

MUCH ADO ABOUT MURDER
Also by Simon Hawke
A Mystery of Errors
The Slaying of the Shrew
MUCH ADO ABOUT MURDER
Simon Hawke

A Tom Doherty Associates Book
NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are
used fictitiously.
MUCH ADO ABOUT MURDER
Copyright © 2002 by Simon Hawke and William Fawcett & Associates All rights reserved, including the
right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN: 0-765-30241-1
First Edition: December 2002
Printed in the United States of America 0987654321
To
my wife, Deborah
Who puts up with a lot
MUCH ADO
ABOUT MURDER
1
I
T WAS A QUIET NIGHT in the taproom of the Toad and Badger as Tuck
Smythe sat down to a simple supper of dark oat bread, ale, and pottage. A quiet
night at the Toad and Badger tavern, however, did not necessarily mean the
night was quiet in any generally accepted meaning of the phrase. It simply meant
that no crockery was being hurled, no furniture was being overturned, and no
skulls were being broken. (Admittedly, broken skulls did not occur as frequently
as broken furniture and crockery, largely because players, as a rule, had less of a
tendency toward violence than histrionics.) Smythe knew that the occasional
broken bone or two was not altogether out of the question, but then such
incidents did not often involve actors, who usually knew well enough to make a
timely exit to the wings whenever the action center stage became a bit unruly.
Despite the general tumult over which the ursine Courtney Stackpole
presided as the innkeeper, Smythe took comfort in the fact that the Toad and
Badger was not really the sort of tavern where blood could flow as freely as
small beer. Those sorts of places could more readily be found in Southwark or
Whitechapel, where seamen from the trading ships and mercenaries from the
foreign wars often brawled with the weatherbeaten rivermen and tough drovers
from the Midlands. In such places, on any given night, blades could be drawn as
readily as ale. The Toad and Badger, fortunately, was not that sort of tavern. It
was rowdy and boisetrous, to be sure, but for all that, it was more loud than
lethal and its charm lay primarily in the eccentricities of its patrons, most of
whom were simple tradesmen and entertainers.
On this particular occasion, the atmosphere within the tavern was unusually
subdued, in large part because the fortunes of the Queen’s Men were lately in
decline. The previous summer, they had gone out on tour throughout the English
countryside, but their performances had not brought in nearly as much as they
had hoped. The harvests had been poor for two years running, and while people
in the countryside were generally starved for entertainment, many of them were
also quite literally starving and could scarcely afford even the very reasonable
price of admission to a play.
In many villages where they had stopped, rather than set up in the courtyard
of a local inn, as was their custom, the Queen’s Men had erected their stage out
in a village square, then played for free to gain an audience. Afterwards, they
would simply pass the hat. All too often, unfortunately, they had found that the
number of people in their audience had well outnumbered the few coins that they
had left behind.
To add insult to their injury, there were numerous bands of cozeners,
vagabonds, and sharpers traveling the countryside of late, posing as legitimate
companies of players. They would herald their arrival in a town with a fanfare of
cornets and sackbuts, then with dramatic gestures, posturings, and declamations,
the imposters would announce themselves as “the famed and legendary Queen’s
Men,” or “the illustrious and acclaimed Lord Admiral’s Men,” or “the Earl of
Leicester’s Own Grand Company of Players,” when, in fact, they had no
legitimate noble patron whatsoever and thus possessed no right under the law to
perform anywhere as players. Nevertheless, that did not stop scores of
enterprising scoundrels from banding together in companies, stealing some
wagons and some horses, then dressing up in motley and passing themselves off
as legitimate players out on tour from London.
These rogues would come into a country town and stage some sorry travesty
of a production they had cobbled together from bits and pieces filched from
various plays that they had seen in London or, worse still, put on a play that they
had stolen in its entirety by attending several performances en masse and
committing different parts to memory. Much of the time, a play that was stolen
in this manner resulted in a production that was a hopeless mish-mosh of
misremembered lines and markedly inferior performances, which would have
been bad enough, thought Smythe, if fraud were the only crime being
perpetrated. Unfortunately, no sooner would these imposters leave a town that
they had visited than numerous thefts and other crimes would be discovered,
leaving little doubt as to the culprits.
Needless to say, the victims of these roving, thieving bands were not very
well disposed toward legitimate companies of players who came to visit
afterward. The Queen’s Men had been driven from three villages they came to
on their tour and Smythe still had some bruises left from being pelted with sticks
and stones hurled by the angry townspeople at their last stop.
At least London’s critics did not hurl anything more hazardous than a few
well-turned epithets.
When the company had finally come home to London, they quickly
discovered that things there were not much better. The playhouses were all
closed down, in part because of plague, and in part because of rioting
apprentices who had taken to roaming the streets of the city in large gangs and