Free An Honourable Murderer by Philip Gooden Page A

it was well known that the name referred less to a churchman’s headgear than it did to a different appendage further south on the bishop’s body.
    I was explaining this to the dark-haired girl I was in the habit of asking for at the Mitre. This was the evening of the first rehearsal day for the masque. My dark-haired girl, whom I knew only as Blanche, seemed fresh and innocent, although this was no doubt an illusion. In addition, she was French. So it may be that her grasp of dirty double meanings in English was a bit shaky.
    â€œOh, Nicholaas . . .” she was saying, “so you mean zat zis ’ouse which we call ze Meeter . . .?”
    â€œThe Mitre, yes.”
    â€œZe . . . mitre . . . eet ees anozzer zing too. It is what a – ’ow you say? – a churchman, ’e put on ’is ’ead, yes?”
    â€œA tall hat with a sort of groove across it which a bishop or a cardinal wears,” I said in my best schoolmasterly style. We were lying in bed at the time, not wearing hats or much of anything else.
    â€œAnd eet is ’ow we call ze name of our ’ouse too, yes? Ze Mitre. Oh, Nicholaas!”
    Her pretty eyes wide open, Blanche clapped her hand across her mouth but continued to laugh and shriek. Her laughter was catching. What had been a stale London joke about a dirty name became fresh to my own ears as well so that I started to laugh out loud and then, when our laughter subsided and she asked me
why
the brothel and the bishop’s hat should share a name, I just had to explain matters. Better still, I just had to demonstrate the reason why they shared a name with something else. So we turned to other things.
    Blanche was a pleasure. I think that she liked me. But with her, unlike with Nell, pleasure was business, strictly business. Pleasure for cash, cash for pleasure. If I wanted to visit her more often then I needed money in my purse, in order that she might put some of it into hers and some into Mistress Bates’s, the madam’s.
    I did not know much about Blanche, knew nothing about her really apart from the fact that she thought she’d been born in Bordeaux. How and why she’d fetched up on the shores of the Thames, she did not tell me. Sometimes these girls in the stews are genuinely ignorant of their very early lives, sometimes they make a little mystery of it so as to entice customers.
    It was while I was making my way back after this latest session at the Mitre that it happened. It was another bright summer’s evening and my shadow stretched out far ahead of me as I walked along the river bank. I was quite comfortable with the world, not thinking of anything much, lighter in spirits (and a little lighter in my purse).
    To my immediate left was the
Hercules
, the barge belonging to the Globe shareholders. Only the day before we’d been crowding its decks to inspect the arrival of the Spaniards. Now the river was nearly empty – most of the day’s trade being finished – with only a few watermen plying for hire.
    I looked over my left shoulder in the direction of Somerset House. Queen Anne’s palace stood out, a pearl even amid the other great mansions on the far shore. We would soon be there, first to practise and then to play out Ben’s
Masque of Peace
.
    There were only a handful of other people on the river bank behind me. If the red-doubleted individual of the previous evening had been among them I would have noticed, I think, even though it was difficult to see much against the glare of the declining sun.
    But there was something about that over-the-shoulder glimpse which caused me to turn my head round once again. Maybe it was a shape moving more quickly than seemed natural on a lazy summer’s evening. Maybe it was some sixth sense of danger. I was just in time to see a cloaked figure bearing down hard. I had no chance to react. There was a draught of air to my right and then a jarring blow to the side of my head.