Cry Murder! in a Small Voice

By Greer Gilman

Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.

London, 1603. Ben Jonson, playwright, poet, satirist . . . detective? Someone is murdering choir boys and Jonson, in the way that only Greer Gilman could write him "Fie, poetastery." is compelled to investigate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Release date: Sep 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781618730787

Book preview

Venice, 1604

A coil of scarlet round the sweet boy’s neck: swan-white he lay, his whiter smock outspread as snow, his hand—O piteous!—imploring still. Venetia dead. Above her stood her lord and lover, still as if he held the loop of cord. A silence—

Mummery, thought Ben, remembering. The play was trash. Unworthy of the getting up, the less at court. ’Twas tailor-work: a deal of bombast and a farthing lace. And yet these shadows haunted him, foreshadows of an act unseen: the boy, not feigning now; the sullied smock; the cord. The Slip-Knott drew him in, inwove him in a play of shadows; now had tugged him halfway to Byzantium in its service. Enter Posthumus: a player-poet with a hand in Fate. Though he’d a quarrel to his fellow maker, History: that it wanted art. To lay a scene in Venice, helter-skelter—! Bah. The unities—But soft. On stage, the tyrant speaks.

O! That nothing that hath made her nothing. Aye

Hath wounded in her stifling Air itself.

Wrong’d Venice . . .

Faugh, the stink of her. ’Twould make a maggot puke, this excremental reek, merdurinous, this stew of charnel house, this gallimaufry of dog and rat. The Thames is Pierian to this, unsullied, and the Isle of Dogs Hesperides. A prod of pole lets matter as a surgeon’s probe. The vent of Popery, said a cold voice in his head. A priestly pus. He could write that speech and rail it down, as puppet buffed at puppet in a show. The quarrel made his faith.

A stinking courtesan.

He’d kept his hand to hilt this while. Had kept his wits: the city treacherous. Her body was a-crawl with vermin: thieves, assassins, fireships.

And yet—how beautiful her nighted mask, her play of fires on the deep. Her torches all her stars. All planetary. Qualmish as he was, yet he could gaze with pleasure on the spangling of her watery gown. Fie, poetastery.

Not midnight yet. He eased his Pelion of flesh, but warily: the wharf was rotten by its give and groaning. Naught gained by his tumbling in; though he floated like a tun yet he would rot.

"Fat weed . . . What line was dogging him? That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf . . ." Will’s. Damn him for a country crowder, he could fiddle tragedy extempore, from some old playbook and a backless Ovid, make celestial music of the Carman’s Whistle and a dancing master’s kit. Of Hamlet’s ghost.

A darkened boat slid by, as might be Charon in his gondola. A white face—like the moon her skull—peered out at him. And moonlike, drew him on. Not yet, he’d not embark—

Wrong’d Venice. Ah, the boy had played her rarely, little Whitgift. And would never play a man. They’d forked him from the Thames, stewed livid, like a collop from the devil’s cauldron. Ben had seen him laid on Southwark shore, the eager curs whipped back. Not so the groundlings: they had thronged the player’s boy as if he were a new bear or a Jesuit to hang. The Men had known him by his ring, a lording’s gift.

Not robbed?

The bells were striking now.

So many gone: dead queens and witty pages, all the pretty boys who changed their hose for petticoats, their masquing petticoats for breeches. Brief as rime. Within this year, betwixt the old Queen and the King of Spades (Death trumps), two player’s boys—no, three—were gone: this Peter; quick Salathiel, who spoke his lines; his Ben, his poetry itself.

And Ben remembered how as Prologue to his Cynthia’s Revels, he had made three boys, his puppets, quarrel for the Prologue’s part. While he, who set them on, had scolded their unruly speech; and they, in his words, spoiled (Stop his Mouth) his play. Their voices not their own. He’d made them rivals for possession of a cloak (what, will you ravish me?): the speaker’s all-enfolding garb, black velvet as this night. How fiercely they had snatched at it (I’ld cry a Rape, but that you are Children), as if they quarreled for oblivion.

The last deep stroke on strokes died muffled in a rising fog.

The player’s wish: to be obliterated in a part, unselved; to shine in it, at once the overshadowed and the star. So they’d cast lots for the player’s cloak—O blasphemy unmarked by Revels—as if for Christ his mantle. And Salathiel had won and lost: his cloak would be his shroud.

O, you shall see me do that, rarely; lend me my Cloke.

Another: Soft, Sir, you’ll speak my Prologue in it.

No, would I might never stir then.

So the boy had sworn. And so had forfeited. His death—and Benjamin’s—would Ben endure as Job did, with complaint: God’s will. But something, that walks somewhere had killed Peter Whitgift: cut his thread. Who knew that dreaded Atropos was puppet-master?

Maestro Giansono? An unearthly voice, as of a spirit prisoned in a tree.

Ben swung his lantern round.

A shadow, eyeless, in a cloak of night.

Southwark, All Hallows 1603

The player’s

Reviews for Cry Murder! in a Small Voice

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a delightful little book all full of Elizabethan everything - plays, faeries, corruption. From the point of view of Ben Johnson, and written exactly as you might imagine Ben Johnson thought, made up of quotes and rhymes and allusions. If you haven't spent some time with Elizabethan poets it's probably completely incomprehensible. I loved it.

[schant-1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A slop-pail of Elizabethan babble to no purpose. Couldn't be bothered to finish.