Suffer the Little Children (The Chronicles of Christoval Alvarez Book 5) Read online

  Suffer

  the

  Little Children

  Ann Swinfen

  Shakenoak Press

  Copyright © Ann Swinfen 2015

  Shakenoak Press

  Ann Swinfen has asserted her moral right under the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified

  as the author of this work.

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than

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  being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Cover images

  Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I

  Contemporary drawing of whipping a beggar

  Cover design by JD Smith www.jdsmith-design.co.uk

  For

  Michael & Sally

  Chapter One

  Autumn, 1589

  They were here again today. A hasty passer-by might mistake them for a bundle of rags thrust into the angle between the outside wall of the playhouse and the bottom of the staircase which led up to the more expensive tiers of seats. I knew better. I had been coming every afternoon this week to practise a duet with Guy Bingham, comic actor and musician in James Burbage’s company of players. Or more properly, Lord Strange’s Men. And every day they were here. When my duties at St Thomas’s Hospital were finished in the late afternoon, I walked across the Bridge, up through the City and out again at the north through Bishopsgate. The Theatre lay beyond Petty France, almost into Moorfields, though even here a few new houses were being thrust up along the edges of the open ground, in defiance of all the regulations intended to restrict the size of London.

  The rags stirred and a dirty hand was thrust out.

  ‘Shilling for bread, Master? Spare a shilling for bread?’

  It was the usual beggar’s whine, somehow both obsequious and threatening. The amount demanded was outrageous. You could buy twelve standard loaves for a shilling.

  ‘You shall have a groat,’ I said, reaching into the purse at my belt. I was not so well paid as an assistant physician that I could give a shilling to every beggar in London, though a groat would not go far amongst the five of them.

  As I dropped the coin into the dirty palm, the fingers closed round it, quick as a man-trap, and the hand disappeared under the rags. It was the oldest boy, of course, who was some kind of a leader. He looked about nine, but was so gaunt and ill-nourished that he might be twelve or thirteen. The youngest, who was perhaps three or four, and who never spoke, could have been either a boy or a girl. There was a fierce girl, a little younger than the leader, who glared at me, as usual, through a matted tangle of hair so dark she might have been a gypsy. Or perhaps she was a cast-off bastard of one of the Lascar sailors who sometimes swarmed about the ships down by the Custom House. The other two – one boy, one girl, brown haired and freckled – were probably about seven and sufficiently alike that they must have been twins. Something of a miracle, then, to have come into the world of the London streets as a twin and yet survived. The girl kept a constant watch over her brother, who was nearly bald, his scalp covered with the unmistakable sores caused by ringworm. The first time I had seen them, I had offered the boy a salve, but they had shrunk away from me as though I had suggested skinning him. Both he and his sister kept a wary eye on me now.

  ‘A’nt you got no more’n a groat?’ the eldest boy whined.

  I gritted my teeth. I had heard him speak like any other child when he did not know I was listening, but the whine was a carefully cultivated part of his profession.

  ‘Nay,’ I said firmly. ‘No more coin than a groat.’

  For all I knew, every penny they earned might pass straight into the hands of some adult beggar who was controlling them. I had never seen them with an adult, but their position was carefully chosen. Some thought had gone into it. Round by the playhouse entrance for the penny groundlings they would have little chance of earning anything, but here the more prosperous members of the audience would pass on their way in and out, and the pickings would be better. I knew that the company had played a comedy this afternoon – soon after midday, because of the cold weather and early dusk – and people were more likely to be generous when cheered by a comedy.

  ‘However,’ I said, unbuckling my satchel, ‘I’ve brought you these.’

  I handed out five spiced buns, still warm from the bakeshop, a paper cone of roast chestnuts, and a rather greasy pie, which had stained its paper wrapping, so that I hoped it had not leaked into my medical supplies. Out of the deep pocket in my physician’s robe I drew a cheap pottery flagon of small ale, stoppered with a rag and a wooden bung.

  ‘You’ll get a farthing, if you return the flagon to the Saracen’s Head in Camomile Street,’ I said, jerking my head back in the direction of Bishopsgate.

  I was about to tell them to share out the pie fairly when I saw that the elder girl had pulled a knife from a sheath at her belt and was cutting it into five slices. They were as even as she could make them.

  ‘Thank you, Master.’ The boy spoke gruffly, as though the words came with difficulty, but at least he had abandoned the whine.

  All the children fell upon the food as if they had not eaten for a week, which perhaps they had not. I watched them with sympathy. I knew what it was to starve.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked the boy, when every scrap of food had gone and they were passing the ale from hand to hand. It was so weak it would not even harm the little one.

  He flashed me a suspicious look, but then seemed to decide I deserved something in return for the food.

  ‘I’m Matthew and that’s Katerina.’ He pointed to the elder girl. ‘Them two’s Jonno and Maggie. We don’t know the baby’s name. Found him in the churchyard of St James Garlickhythe, so we call him Jamey.’ He clamped his jaws shut. Clearly he thought he had said too much.

  That settled the question of the youngest child’s sex. Hearing his name, he beamed at me. He had a full set of teeth and was hardly a baby, but since he never seemed to speak, perhaps he was simple-minded.

  ‘And where will you sleep tonight, Matthew?’ I said. ‘It’s growing very cold. I think there may be a frost.’

  This, it seemed, was a question too many. He frowned. ‘We got a warm place. We’ll stay here till the players leave. The big man sometimes gives us sixpence.’

  ‘That would be James Burbage,’ I said. ‘He owns the playhouse.’ It would be like Burbage to give the children sixpence. He was a big man in every way and would probably give them sixpence even if the takings had been poor today, but he might not stop to think whether they would be allowed to keep it.

  ‘Well, I hope you can sleep warm tonight,’ I said, and nodded a farewell to them. They seemed a little less hostile now, yet I was not deceived. These street urchins were feral, regarded by the City officials as little more than animals. Christ’s Hospital provided refuge for orphans and abandoned children, but waifs like these would no more cross its threshold than that of Newgate Prison, its near neighbour. I turned away and followed the wall of the playhouse round to the common entrance, the shortest route to the stage and tiring rooms.

  ‘Still out there, are they, Kit?’ Guy handed me his second-best lute. My own lute had been taken by my father’s creditors while I was in Portugal, so I was always grateful for the chance to play with Guy.

&nbs
p; I nodded.

  ‘The same five. I gave them a groat and some food. Even discovered their names.’

  ‘Aye, that’s best. Food in their stomachs is better than any chinks.’

  Guy himself had known times of great poverty. Like all the players he could see through the rags to the scraps of humanity beneath, however unattractive.

  ‘What are they called, then?’

  ‘The two older ones are Matthew and Katerina, the twins are Maggie and Jonno. The smallest is Jamey.’

  ‘So it is a boy.’

  ‘Aye. Difficult to judge, through all that dirt.’

  ‘I’m surprised they told you. The food must have loosened their tongues.’

  ‘They wouldn’t tell me where they sleep.’

  He shrugged. ‘Plenty of places around here. Stableyards of the inns. Tenters’ sheds out on Moorfields. Some of them just sleep in shop doorways, and are kicked out by the apprentices in the morning.’

  All of this was true. Matthew had said they had somewhere warm to sleep. That sounded better than a doorway. We were drawing near to the time of year when some of the apprentices kicking out the recumbent beggars in the morning found they had a stone cold corpse on their hands. Despite Christ’s Hospital for children and Bridewell for adult vagrants, the London authorities could not cope with its great underbelly of the poor as successfully as the old monasteries had once done.

  ‘I’ve written out the next section,’ Guy said, handing me a sheet of closely handwritten music. ‘Would you take the upper part?’

  I hooked a stool toward me and settled down to tune the lute. It was a fine instrument, but I still sadly missed my own.

  ‘Katerina, did you say?’ Guy looked up from his own tuning. ‘Sounds foreign.’

  ‘She looks foreign too.’ I grinned. ‘Like me.’

  ‘Nay. You just look Spanish or Portuguese. She’s something other.’

  ‘Lascar, perhaps. But she swears as fluently in English as any other London beggar.’

  He laughed. ‘Right. I’ll give you the beat.’

  We had played through the new section once and Guy had made some minor changes, when Simon Hetherington came out from the tiring house and sat down cross-legged on the stage between us.

  ‘You should watch yourself with this fellow, Kit. He’ll have you on stage with him in our new play before you know what has happened.’

  I grinned down at him. At one time Burbage had tried to recruit me as a boy player, at the time when Simon himself was still playing women’s parts, but I had firmly refused. Working as assistant to my physician father at St Bartholomew’s had been enough for me, quite apart from my less well known work for Sir Francis Walsingham. The players knew something of my code-breaking now. Apart from Simon, they knew nothing of my other work. Simon himself had recently been raised to second romantic lead, after Christopher Haigh, though sometimes he must be content to hold a pike beside a king’s throne or play the fool opposite Guy. In a company of players you must be prepared to take on any role.

  ‘You know I could never appear on a stage, faced with all those eyes and gaping mouths,’ I said, sweeping out my hand to indicate the tiered seats and the flat ground below us, where the groundlings would stand.

  The lute gave out a soft note of sympathy as my elbow knocked it.

  ‘That was what you said when you were a lad of sixteen.’ Simon gave me a teasing smile. ‘Surely you no longer fear them.’

  I shook my head and laughed. ‘I haven’t changed.’

  ‘Oh, but I think you have,’ he said quietly, with a look that made my stomach clench. I looked away and shuffled the music, which I had propped up on a chair painted to look like a throne.

  ‘Come, you are keeping us from our practice,’ I said briskly. ‘Are you not off home?’

  ‘I’ll wait for you,’ he said, stretching out to lie on the stage with his hands behind his head.

  Half an hour later, Guy carried the lutes back to store in the tiring house and Simon and I left the playhouse. We both had lodgings in the same building over the Bridge in Southwark, convenient for me, now that I was working at St Thomas’s Hospital, south of the river, but not so convenient for Simon. He had moved there while he was on loan to Philip Henslowe’s company at the Rose and kept the room on because it was far better than anything he could have rented for the same money near the Theatre.

  ‘Before we go,’ I said, ‘I want to see if those beggar children are still here.’

  ‘I heard you talking to Guy about them. You seem very interested in the little rascals.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘I think it a sad state of affairs that children so young should live and starve and probably die on the streets of London, when there is food enough and money enough in the city to keep them fed and clothed and safe.’

  We walked round to the place where the children begged, but there was no sign of them, apart from the screwed up greasy paper which had contained the pie.

  ‘Ah, well,’ I said, ‘I hope they do have a safe place to sleep tonight. It will be very cold, I think.’

  We had both pulled our cloaks tight around our shoulders, and I was glad of my physician’s gown over my doublet and breeches.

  ‘I’ve been thinking a good deal about the street children,’ I said as we reached the north end of the Bridge. ‘Especially since I’ve been working at St Thomas’s.’

  ‘You have charge of the children’s ward there, have you not?’

  ‘Aye, and the lying-in ward endowed by Sir Richard Whittington for unmarried mothers. Many of them cannot keep their babes, so we take them to Christ’s Hospital. I’m coming to know it very well.’

  We stepped on to the Bridge. The crowds were thinning after the hurly-burly of the day, but many were hurrying in both directions, to cross the river before the gates were closed. Most were travelling south, in our direction, those who worked in the City but lived cheaper in Southwark. As we often did, we paused at the break in the houses about halfway across and leaned on the parapet, looking down river towards the bustle of ships at the Legal Quays, preparing to set sail on the turn of the tide. Beyond them the grim bulk of the Tower rose, and further still I could see the long ferry making its way down to Greenwich. The grey waters of the Thames, unsavoury by day, lay at this moment of slack water in soft ripples like a silk scarf, catching glints from the setting sun as if it were laced with thread of gold.

  I turned and braced my back against the parapet, screwing up my eyes against the low glare of the sun, sinking behind Westminster.

  ‘I must have walked past Christ’s Hospital a thousand times when my father and I lived in Duck Lane,’ I said, ‘every time I went through Newgate. I never gave it a second glance. I knew Greyfriars had been turned into a home for abandoned children, but I had no idea that it was – well – so vast. There is the church, of course, which you can see from the street, but there are quadrangles like the inns of court, and dormitories, a refectory, all the usual kitchen offices – brewhouse, bakehouse, dairy. They have a school, and teach the children their letters. The little ones are called ‘petties’ and have their own teacher. For the older ones there is a grammar school, a music teacher . . . They even teach the girls to read and write.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Simon said. ‘But what of the babies you take there? They are too small even to be petties!’

  ‘Oh, the babies are sent out to wet-nurses in the country. From the start, the governors thought it would be better for their health. When they are weaned and old enough, they come back to the Hospital. I am surprised the governors cared enough to make such wise provision.’

  ‘I’d heard tell that it was a great gift to London from the boy king Edward, but it hasn’t put a stop to the child beggars, like ours,’ he said. ‘Though was it not a few City benefactors who set it up? Not the king himself.’

  ‘Aye, and put those collecting boxes in all the churches. It seems the numbers are supposed to be limited to five hundred, but they already
have seven hundred living there.’

  I hitched myself away from the parapet and began to walk on toward the Great Stone Gate. We would need to hurry or we wouldn’t reach our lodgings.

  ‘So there wouldn’t be room for those children, would there? Even if you could persuade them to go.’

  I gave a rueful grin. ‘Nay, I think to Matthew and his friends it would seem no better than a prison. Hurry! They have already closed one side of the gate.’

  Seeing the guards approaching the other gate, we broke into a run.

  The house where we lodged stood on Bankside, facing the river, and not far from the whorehouses where the Winchester geese plied their trade. The first of their customers would have come over the Bridge with us, others would take a wherry across the river after the gates were closed. Further along there was a bear pit and the Rose playhouse. Southwark was an odd place, very different from the City itself, but if you could endure the stench of the tanneries and dye-works, it was a lively place. Londoners flocked here for entertainment of every kind.

  ‘Burbage has been talking lately about moving us south of the river,’ Simon said. ‘He has had a few fallings-out with the owner of the land on which the Theatre is built. And he thinks more people are coming over here now, instead of going out to Bishopsgate.’

  ‘That would mean less walking for you,’ I said, pushing open the heavy front door.

  He grinned. ‘Aye. I’d save on shoe leather.’

  It was dark inside the house, but our landlady, Goodwife Atkins, must have heard us, for she came bustling through from the kitchen at the back of the house carrying a candle lantern. I fished a candle stump out of my satchel and lit it from hers. Simon never remembered these small domestic details, but depended on me to light him up the dark stairs to his room, which was on the floor below mine.

  ‘A man came asking for you, Master Hetherington,’ the landlady said. ‘Early afternoon. He left a message.’ She fetched a folded paper out of her apron pocket and handed it to him. It was crumpled and grubby, but might have suffered from contact with Goodwife Atkins’s cooking, which was of the greasy variety.