Crimson Rose Read Online Free

of his claret.
    ‘No, this girl, Kit …’
    ‘Now, Ned,’ the playwright wagged a playful finger at him, ‘your heart belongs to Zenocrate, remember.’
    Alleyn’s face dropped and he hauled off his helmet, shaking his hair free. ‘Which would be sheer delight,’ he said, ‘until you remember that Zenocrate is actually a cloth-footed fifteen-year-old baker’s roundsman with shoulders like cypress chests and pustules like the Pestilence.’
    ‘Ah.’ Marlowe nodded. ‘An actor’s lot, Ned, an actor’s lot.’
    ‘I hope you aren’t casting aspersions on the honourable art of boy players, Master Alleyn.’ Thomas came through the door, panting a little from the stairs, with his arms full of timbers to carve them into Babylon, or at least his approximation of it. ‘I was one myself once.’ He looked around him, distracted. ‘Has anyone seen my chisel?’ he asked the two men.
    Marlowe shrugged. ‘Sorry, Thomas. I am happy to say I wouldn’t know a chisel if it bit me on the leg, but I think I have the general gist and there are no tools up here that I can see. Why have you hauled all that timber up here anyway?’
    ‘Master Henslowe is arguing about money down on the stage and I didn’t think he would want me to overhear.’
    ‘You are too sensitive for this job, Tom,’ Marlowe said. ‘We’ll come down in a minute and drown him out with a rehearsal or two. How would that be?’
    ‘Thank you, Kit.’ Thomas Sledd shouldered his timber again and began his slow and careful descent back on to the stage.
    Marlowe drained his cup and made to follow him, but Alleyn stopped him, pulling at his sleeve.
    ‘I knew Thomas when he was with Ned Sledd’s company, but I never saw him perform, only rehearse. Was he any good?’
    ‘His performance in Cambridge when I saw him a year or so ago was as good as you would expect. Sledd’s company was going up in the world when I saw it next, but Tom’s voice had gone before I had a chance to see him.’
    Alleyn preened. ‘Well, I like to think that I could have raised the tone of the company, given time,’ he said. ‘Sadly, business called me away before …’
    ‘Yes,’ Marlowe said drily. ‘Your business was stealing my
Dido
and trying to pass it off as your own, as I recall.’
    Alleyn laughed, an actor’s laugh, head thrown back and hands on hips. He said, as he did whenever he had to make it clear to the furthermost groundling that he was amused. ‘Ha. Ha. Ha.’ Then he straightened up with no preamble. ‘Good days, Kit. Good days. But seriously, I never realized that Thomas was Ned Sledd’s son.’
    Marlowe turned his back on the stair’s head and lowered his voice. ‘He isn’t,’ he said. ‘But he used to say that old Ned was the only father he knew. His mother was, I believe, a Winchester goose and his father –’ he looked at Alleyn without a glimmer of a smile this time – ‘some feckless actor, I expect, born to the wild road and the taverns. Ned brought up young Thomas when his mother dumped him on the company, made him the man he is today. Only natural he should take his name.’ He turned to go down to the stage. ‘Come on, Master Alleyn. We must help Master Sledd out of his predicament.’
    Alleyn frowned, staring hard at the poet. ‘How old are you, Marlowe?’ he asked.
    ‘Twenty-three,’ he told him.
    ‘Hmm. Twenty-three going on sixty,’ Alleyn grunted. ‘Well, then, Methuselah, give me your words of wisdom on
my
predicament.’
    ‘If it’s Cupid’s measles, I understand Bucklersbury is the street you need. There are more apothecaries there than …’
    ‘It’s not the pox, Christopher.’ Alleyn pouted. ‘Thank you for caring. No, this woman is untouchable – a goddess.’
    ‘Married?’
    ‘No,’ Alleyn enthused now, pacing the floor as Marlowe waited patiently by the door. ‘No, that’s the very Devil of it.’ He unbuckled his epaulettes and gratefully slipped out of the breast and backplates of his armour.