Free Much Ado About Murder by Simon Hawke

he had followed her and Molly from the Toad and Badger. She had said as much, though he did not know how she could have noticed him. He had never once seen her look around. But she must have known somehow that he was there, just the same, for she had to have sent word to those men, through some sort of signal… but to whom? And how? Once again, he felt out of his depth, a country bumpkin from the Midlands wandering through London like a perfect gull, ignorant and clueless.
    He had never considered himself gullible or foolish, but then, he reminded himself, gullible and foolish people never do, do they? That is one of the things that makes them so. London truly is a different world, he thought. More than one, in fact. The worlds of London society were like layers. Begin to unearth and discover one, and soon another became revealed underneath it… an "underworld," so to speak.
    He needed to obtain more of those pamphlets of Robert Greene's. He felt as if what he had learned from them had merely scratched the surface of London's underworld of thieves. How was it, he wondered, that Greene came by all his knowledge of the world of London's criminals? He was a poet, a university man who, one would think, would be much more accustomed to the ways and customs of the Inns of Court rather than the "stews" or brothels and "boozing kens" or alehouses of Cheapside and Southwark. He wondered if it would be possible to meet Greene somehow and ask him questions.
    "Were I in your place, I should not bother," Shakespeare said, when Smythe returned home and put the question to him.
    "Why not?"
    Still at his writing desk when Smythe returned, Shakespeare had managed to get a number of pages written and felt pleased enough with his progress to retire for the night. They both prepared for bed, stripping down to their white linen shirts.
    As Smythe sat down on the mattress and brushed off stray bits of rushes that had adhered to his bare feet, Shakespeare hiked up his shirt and urinated in the chamber pot they kept on the floor in the corner of their room. To help keep down foul odors, they avoided using the chamber pot for anything else, and instead shat in the jakes, a tiny room where Stackpole kept a close stool, which was nothing more than a small, crude, wooden box seat with a hole in the top and a lid, inside of which was kept a large chamber pot partially filled with water. In the interests of keeping his establishment as clean as possible, Stackpole dutifully saw to it that the jakes was emptied out into the street several times a day, and fresh rushes were strewn on the floors in all the rooms each morning, mixed with chips of wormwood to help keep down the fleas. It was, truly, among the cleanest inns that Smythe had seen in the working-class neighborhoods of London, despite its somewhat tumbledown appearance, and any tenant who violated Stackpole's scrupulous edicts on decorum by voiding, spitting, or vomiting upon the floor without cleaning it up was soundly boxed about the ears and then thrown out into the street. Consequently, most of Stackpole's tenants tended to follow his rules out of both self-interest and self-preservation.
    "From what I hear, Greene has descended into dissipation," Shakespeare said, as he opened the window and flung the contents of the chamber pot out into the street.
    "
Oy
!" someone yelled out from below.
    Shakespeare glanced out briefly. "Sorry, Constable," he called down.
    "Seems to me as if you have made that particular descent a time or two yourself," Smythe replied.
    "S'trewth, I have enjoyed, upon more than one occasion, the happy state of drunkenness," Shakespeare replied, as he got into bed, "but I have never sought to wallow in the desolate depravity of dissipation. Greene, poor soul, has fallen to that saddest of all states wherein his talent, such as 'twas, has sailed away upon a sea of spirits. 'Tis not a pretty story, I fear. He is but six years my senior, and yet Dick Burbage tells me that he