Alms for Oblivion (11 page)

At the end of the rehearsal I was briefly detained by Shakespeare. With his usual consideration he wished to tell me that, since Thomas Pope was returning on the following day from his visit to
Hertfordshire and the Chamberlain’s patron, Lord Hunsdon, there would be no more lines for Peter to read in rehearsal. Pope would resume the role of scurrilous Thersites. Perhaps I could pass
that message on to my friend?

“I’d be pleased to,” I said, not entirely displeased that Peter was no longer required.

“Though Dick Burbage won’t mind if he remains on hand for the time being. He might be useful. He has found some friends in the Company, I think.”

“He has an easy, open nature,” I said.

“He will make a player one day, Nick, if that’s what he wants. Does he?”

“I’m not sure. Part of him does.”

“If that part persists he will make a player. Tell Master Agate that also.”

“Thank you, William. He’ll be – reassured. How is our patron?”

“Either at the point of death or out riding twenty miles every day. Rumour sleeps in the sick-bed. So we are waiting for a first-hand account.”

I would have liked to press for more information – or rather I wanted to know what the Chamberlain’s were going to do if Lord Hunsdon died suddenly and left us without a protector
– but it wasn’t the kind of question I could easily put to WS. So, after a few aimless remarks about Windsor tables and Drake’s hatches (both of which WS already knew about), I
made my way into the foggy evening.

The next few days passed in a blur of rehearsals (for
Troilus and Cressida
) and occasional performances (of other things) at the Globe, although the weather tended to
thin our audiences. It was a relief to get inside the Middle Temple banqueting hall, away from the unhealthy damps and the cold. I looked forward to the performance, knowing that if those young
lawyers, Edmund Jute and Michael Pye, were typical of our audience then we were assured of a warm but not uncritical reception. Perhaps our future, or part of it, lay in these privileged indoor
performances. Thomas Pope, the senior and shareholder, came back from Hertfordshire and reported that Lord Hunsdon probably had a year or two more left in him but that he would no longer be a
vigorous protector or promoter of our interests. This was an unsatisfactory conclusion.

My friend Peter was still quartered in my room, paying his penny-and-a-half a night direct to Master Benwell. I didn’t object to this. He continued to consort with members of our Company,
hanging around at rehearsals, drinking with us, listening to our talk, sometimes adding to it. I couldn’t have said what his plans were. Probably he couldn’t have either. Perhaps his
London half and his country half were fighting out a civil war inside him. There was no opening with the Chamberlain’s at present, even had the seniors been inclined to employ him, but he did
go and enquire one day of the Admiral’s Men, Henslowe’s crowd. If he returned to visit Nell at the brothel known as Holland’s Leaguer, he didn’t tell me of it.

Then one afternoon, about a week after his arrival in London, Peter was killed.

I can be precise enough as to the time of his death. It must have occurred as I was turning down Clink Street, perhaps five minutes away from my front door. I can’t remember what I was
thinking of just beforehand, because everything was wiped from my mind when I reached the entrance to my lodgings. The door was unlocked and slightly open. I don’t even know whether this
struck me as odd. It should have done since Master Benwell believed in that tight-lipped householder’s proverb, ‘fast bind fast find’.

I tried to push open the door to the small lobby but it moved only a little way before jarring against something. Impatiently, I shoved harder. Again it seemed to stick. I peered round the
partly open door to discover what the impediment was. The light was very poor but I could make out a huddled human shape half propped against the inside of the door, with its legs stretched out
across the floor.

I think I knew that it was Peter Agate. For an instant I must have assumed – or hoped – that my friend was drunk. Coming in befuddled from the Devil or the Goat, leaning against the
entrance, sliding down stupefied to end up on the floor. I said his name several times, loudly at first then softer. His doublet was unfastened. I leaned over and grazed my fingertips across his
shirt front, which was sopping wet. I knelt down. The floor was wet too. For sure the fool had spilled drink all down himself or had puked up his guts after a few pints too many. Only there was no
stink of drink, but another smell. The wetness on his front was dark and pooling and slightly sticky and of course I knew. Knew also from the way his head lolled haplessly in my direction, as if to
impart a confidence.

Then there was a human noise behind me, somewhere between a cough and a snort. A smoky light swelled to fill the little hallway. But it did not take the illumination from one of Master
Benwell’s cheap tallow candles to tell me that my childhood friend was dead. On Peter’s forehead I saw the mark, now nearly healed, where he had struck the lintel to my room. I wanted
to touch it and reached out my hand to do so but faltered at the last instant.
Vita brevis
, I thought. He would never be a player now. I wished that he had waited to die until that little
wound on his forehead was all healed.

“D
id you kill him?”

“I did not.”

“Do you know who did?”

“No.”

“So all you know is that you did not kill him.”

“Yes.”

“Did you mean to kill him?”

I started to say something then realized that any response to that question was dangerous. So I merely shook my head

“Did you want to kill him?”

“He was my friend. He was an inoffensive fellow. Without enemies.”

“That is not the answer to what I asked, Master Revill.”

“Even so, it is the only answer I can give, Master Talbot.”

Master Alan Talbot was questioning me about Peter Agate’s death and it was evident that he considered me not so much as a witness but as a potential murderer. Perhaps the Middlesex coroner
saw most of his witnesses in that light. He had cold, ungiving eyes, like the corpse’s which he examined in the way of business. He was a dangerous man too, from my point of view, since he had
the authority to lay an indictment and to order an arrest – the arrest of N. Revill, for example. Talbot had indicated that this was a preliminary examination but had hinted, more by looks
than actual words, that an unsatisfactory answer would land me in trouble. But, in my opinion, the only satisfactory answer as far as he was concerned would have been a straight confession.

I sat awkwardly facing Talbot. I had been summoned to his house in Long Southwark where a silent servant-girl showed me to his first-floor study. The fog had finally lifted and a glittering sun
shone low into my eyes through the window behind the coroner. I shifted my head slightly to escape the light. I wondered if he’d deliberately positioned me here to increase my discomfort.

“Tell me again, Master Revill, why you crossed the bridge. If you were coming from the Middle Temple.”

“I
was
coming from Middle Temple, sir. You may ask my fellows in the Chamberlain’s. I was at a rehearsal there which occupied me until the last moment.”

“I may ask them, though I don’t doubt you were at a rehearsal. My question is why you didn’t cross the river from Temple Stairs rather than going the long way about and walking
over the bridge. Aren’t you familiar with London?”

“I know my London.”

He consulted a sheet of paper in front of him.

“Yet you’re a country lad from the parish of Miching. Where is that?”

“In Somerset.”

“Do you wish you were back there now?”

This was such an odd question that I didn’t know how to respond, but perhaps my hesitation was answer enough.

“To return to the business of the river crossing,” he said. “Didn’t you have the money to pay the ferryman?”

In normal circumstances I would have bridled, slightly, at the imputation. Was he suggesting that players were poorly paid artisans? But these weren’t normal circumstances. I
couldn’t afford to bridle or to get on my high horse. So why hadn’t I taken the ferry across the Thames that late afternoon? Why had I chosen to trace a roundabout route through the
city and then across London Bridge to Dead Man’s Place? I didn’t know. It’s hard to account for unexamined moments, for decisions so small they hardly deserve the name of
decisions.

“I had enough money. But, if I’m honest, I can’t recollect why I walked instead of being ferried. Is it material?”

As soon as these last words were out of my mouth I realized I’d made a mistake. I was calling into question, however mildly, the coroner’s right to ask whatever questions
he
chose to ask. Talbot brought his palms down flat on the desk which was between us.

“Very material, Master Revill, leaving the question of your honesty to one side. It would have taken you, what?, an hour or more to walk through the city and back to your lodgings, a
tedious hour on a damp, foggy afternoon. But it would have taken you less than half that time to hire a ferry at Temple Stairs, be landed on this side of the river and return to those same
lodgings. You would then have had a spare half-hour or more at your disposal . . . ”

“To kill my friend, you mean?”

“Your words, Master Revill.”

My skin broke out in goosebumps. My mouth was dry.

“What reason – I mean – ”

“That is what we are here to determine, the reason,” said Master Talbot. “According to your landlord’s testimony, he heard bumping sounds from the lobby, as of a
struggle, and then heard you calling your friend’s name several times over He came out to find you stooping over Master Agate while his chest was still pumping out his
life’s-blood.”

“You’ve already heard my story. I had just come through the outer door myself. It was stuck and I had to push it – against – against Peter’s body.”

“You did call out the name of the dead man, repeatedly.”

“I thought he was drunk and had fallen down and hurt himself.”

“His blood was on you.”

“That couldn’t be helped. It went everywhere.”

“It went everywhere,” echoed Talbot.

I went colder still at the tone of the coroner’s voice and at the memory of the murder. Peter had been stabbed through the heart. I had caught him within minutes of his dying. The sounds
that Benwell heard must have been the sounds of some desperate struggle.

“Master Agate was freshly killed. And if not by you, Master Revill, then by someone else. Yet you saw no one running from the house? Did you see anyone running from the house?”

It would have been easy to make up a figure fleeing from the front door and into the murk. Easy to imagine that I had actually seen such a figure. Easy but dangerous. Stick to the truth. Say no
more than you have to. Avoid speculation.

“It was foggy. I don’t think I saw anyone. I was probably walking with my head down.”

“Ah yes. It was a good afternoon for a stroll, wasn’t it. Tell me, Master Revill, what did you do with the weapon?”

“I did not kill my friend, sir. I have no weapon. I am not permitted to carry a sword.”

“No matter. We are not talking swords or rapiers here. A knife or a bodkin is easily hidden, and quickly discarded. You are certain that you saw no one running away into the fog, perhaps
throwing down an object? You heard nothing?”

Now I did suspect a trap. For sure, Master Talbot wanted me to create a shape out of the mist, a shape that ran off and threw away a little dagger so that it clattered on to the icy ground. Not
because he believed in such an apparition but because he wanted to see whether I could be persuaded to invent a story to draw blame or attention from myself.

“I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I was in a mist.”

“Did you not threaten your friend?” said Talbot suddenly. “Threaten his life?”

“No, sir. I had no reason to.”

“That is not what your landlord, Samuel Benwell, says.”

“Master Benwell was not privy to our conversations.”

“He says otherwise. Sometimes you talked so loud that he couldn’t help hearing, willy-nilly.”

Couldn’t help having his ear pinned to my door, you mean, I thought but did not say.

The coroner picked up another sheet of paper from the desk-top.

“He deposes this: that you said that if he – that is, Master Agate – went any further you would kill him. Is that so?”

“No – I don’t think . . . but it’s possible that I might have made some such comment in jest.”

And indeed I had a half-memory of telling Peter, soon after his arrival in my room, that if he didn’t stop apologizing I would kill him. It was only a joke, a joke that was simultaneously
callous and feeble. And an unfortunate remark, doubly unfortunate now.

“You had a dispute . . . about a whore,” said Master Talbot.

I realized that Samuel Benwell must have spent all his time listening outside my door, probably in the hope of picking up players’ tittle-tattle.

“Not a dispute, no.”

“Let us call it instead, a fight. Didn’t you fight with your friend and strike him on the head?”

“He hit himself on the doorway to my room when he came back drunk one night. I had nothing to do with it.”

I would have said, ask Benwell, but the landlord was probably the source of this story. Talbot was silent.

“It is true that Peter visited a – a friend of mine – in Holland’s Leaguer,” I said at last.

“A friend? You mean a whore?”

“What do you suppose, a Puritan?”

Talbot said nothing.

“Of course it was a whore.”

“Do you players often visit whores?”

“It is not a habit confined to players, I believe.”

“Say vice rather than habit.”

I shrugged. It was evident that Alan Talbot didn’t much care for players. He’d already made that clear in one or two preliminary remarks in my examination. Like many in authority he
probably blamed us for encouraging immorality and undermining law and order. I don’t suppose he cared for whores either.