Mask of Night (11 page)

Jack was trying to instruct me in the niceties of the various strokes. This was necessary since Mercutio, good swordsman or not, is certain to be familiar with all the terms and poses which will enable him to cut a good figure in the piazza. He is an Italian after all.

“No, Nick, no,” said Jack, standing next to me and grasping my right hand. “
This
is the
stocatta
. You go under your opponent’s weapon, and up. So.”

“I thought that was the
imbrocatta
.”

“That is
over
your opponent’s weapon. The
stocatta
is usually directed to the belly. So . . . ”

And he lunged forward, taking my arm and the foil along with him.

“The
stocatta
,” I said. ”
Stocatta.
”

“Forget the terms,” said Jack. “Unless you think you will one day be a gentleman and fight duels and get left for dead on the field or clapped up in gaol for your pains.”

“How did you learn them then?”

“My father. He had ambitions for me as a gentleman, not a player. He would have preferred me to hunt and ride, not strut about on stage in front of the common people.”

It’s surprising what you learn about people you thought you knew. I would have heard more but Jack, perhaps suspecting me of time-wasting, returned to the practice.

“Concentrate instead on the moves, the thrusts. Not the names. So – like this! And this! Now let me see you do it unaided, Master Revill.”

Jack stood watching me like a fencing-master until I had grasped the strokes to his satisfaction – or at least to my satisfaction, which was considerably easier to obtain.

“Now we ought to move on to the
volte
and the
punta riversa
,” he said.

“Unless we are required inside,” I said hopefully.

But Jack was enjoying his role as instructor too much and brushed aside my comment as easily as he brushed aside my blade. We thrust and parried, twisted and turned on the Doctor’s lawn like a pair of dancers. It was one of those early spring mornings that seem to prefigure summer itself. The sweat was running down my face. Eventually, to my relief, Laurence Savage summoned Jack for a reprise of one of his scenes indoors and I was left to myself. I sank down, placing my gleaming blade in the long grass beside me.

“
Stocatta
,
imbrocatta
,” I hissed through my teeth in true Italian style, and then, “
Volte
,
punta riversa
. . .
puuunta riverrrrsa
.”

Then I stood up once more, retrieved my foil from the ground and lunged and parried, all the time repeating the terms which Jack had used. I felt like a real Mercutio. All at once I stopped. I was being watched.

There was a little burst of clapping from above.

“
Bene
,” said a voice.

I looked up and saw Susan Constant watching me from a bank above the lawn, a twitch of what might have been amusement on her clear features. Like anyone caught unawares, and doing something slightly foolish, I laughed it off.

I knew who she was but did not want to acknowledge it (since she might think I’d been asking questions about her, which I had) so I simply bowed slightly and introduced myself.

“Oh, I think I know you, Master Revill. I saw you bring in Mistress Root the other day. And I was watching you inside just now when you were killed in the duel.”

“That’s why I need to practise, mistress,” I said. “So that I don’t get killed again.”

“But it is written, is it not?” she said. “That you must die.”

“Only in this piece. As a player, I will rise to live and fight another day. I’ve died and risen again many times.”

“Then perhaps you are the person to help?”

“Help who?”

“Help us. Help me.”

“Help you, lady? But I am not even certain whom I have the honour of addressing.”

“Aren’t you?” she said. “Well, I am Susan Constant.”

All this time she had been standing above me on the bank and now she ran down the slope until our heads were on the same level. I waited for her to speak first, because I really hadn’t any idea what she wanted.

“Your Company is here to perform
Romeo and Juliet
, to smooth any obstacles on the road to my cousin’s marriage?”

“Your cousin is Sarah Constant? While it is her marriage to William Sadler you mean,” I said. “Yes, that’s why we’re here although we’re also playing at the Golden Cross Inn for the public. But you should talk to one of the seniors or to Doctor Fern. They know more than me. I’m just a simple player.”

“Your friend Abel Glaze told me about you,” she said.

“I could tell you a thing or two about him.”

“Are you playing at the Golden Cross today?”

“This afternoon at two o’clock.
Love’s Loss
.” Seeing her puzzled look I added, “It’s the title of a piece by William Hordle.”

“Who is William Hordle?”

“A playwright. His name is growing in London.”

“It’s a tragedy?”

“Veering nearer to comedy despite the title. You will leave happy.”

“You are in it?”

“Madam, we are not such a large company, and so almost all of us are in almost everything the whole time,” I said, wondering where this catechism was leading.

“Then I shall be at the Golden Cross this afternoon. Master Revill, I would welcome the opportunity to speak with you afterwards.”

“I would be honoured to speak with you afterwards or at any time, Mistress Constant,” I said, “but can you not give me some – indication – some hint of the help which you say you require?”

For the first time Susan Constant looked uneasy. She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the Ferns’ house.

“No,” she said, “not now, not here. This afternoon after your
Love’s Loss
.”

She turned and ran back up the sloping ground.

I stood there, wondering if I should simply have refused to meet her after the play. How many men can turn down a woman’s appeal for help, though? The answer is, plenty of us can. But what if the woman is young and – if not exactly pretty and definitely not beautiful – yet handsome in her own style, like Susan Constant? To say nothing of well-born, also like Susan Constant? Ah, then it isn’t so easy to turn her down, is it? Mistress Constant displayed a briskness in firing off questions and indicating her requirements which suited her clear-cut features and her trim shape, and which I found . . . not unengaging.

Curiosity played its part too. What was it she wanted to tell me? What “help” did she require? And just what had Abel Glaze been saying about me?

I looked down to discover that I was still holding the foil in whose use Jack Wilson had been instructing me. I tickled the long grass with the tip of the foil. The grass did not fight back. Perhaps Susan Constant had glimpsed in Nicholas Revill a chivalrous figure, a rescuer of damsels, a knight-at-arms who would leap on to his horse and come galloping to her rescue. In a way I hoped not, since my horsemanship was about on a par with my swordsmanship.

I tried one or two experimental slashes with the foil. Again I became aware that someone was watching me. I looked up to see Doctor Hugh Fern, standing atop the bank where Susan had been standing. I smiled up at the good Doctor and he gave me his cherubic grin in return.

Well, we played out William Hordle’s
Love’s Loss
that afternoon in the yard of the Golden Cross Inn and our audience was generous in its laughter and applause. Afterwards I half expected to find Mistress Susan Constant waiting for me outside one of our makeshift tiring-rooms. These were a row of tiny chambers in a corner of the yard where our clothes were hung up amid the unwanted items and detritus of the inn. But the female who hangs about outside the place where the players get dressed and undressed is usually confined to a certain sort of woman (and sometimes a certain sort of man). Mistress Constant was probably not that sort of hanging-about woman.

After quickly changing into my street clothes, I left the Golden Cross and turned out into Cornmarket without encountering her. I hadn’t spotted her at the performance either. At first I’d been gratified by Susan’s request for an interview, then I was irritated by it and slightly troubled. But now that it appeared as though she’d changed her mind about talking to me, I grew disappointed. I’d already spoken to Abel Glaze to discover what secrets of mine he’d let slip but he insisted he’d said no more about me to the woman than terms of general praise.

“Master Revill.”

A hand touched me on the shoulder. I’d looked round a moment before and hadn’t seen her in the street.

“Nicholas,” she said.

“Mistress Constant. I thought you weren’t coming after all.”

“Let’s walk down this way,” she said. “It’s emptier.”

“Don’t you want to be seen with a player?”

She did not answer but briskly led the way through Cornmarket and across the place called Carfax where it intersected with the High Street. I followed, curious now.

“Did you see the play?” I asked.

“Yes. It was witty enough.”

This was very mild praise. I suspected that Mistress Constant probably had little time for plays. Some people don’t. I did not bother fishing for compliments on my performance, not being so desperate to hear them as I had been in my earlier acting days. Besides, I only played a simple soul in
Love’s Loss
, a small part.

After a short time we found ourselves in a street lined with town houses and then turned down an alley on the right-hand side of it and so on to a selection of meadows framed with walks and fringed with trees which were beginning to turn green. My companion told me that we were in the meadows of the Cardinal’s College or Christ Church. A few people were strolling about the walks, some of them threadbare scholars but others more plushly dressed.

It was late afternoon. The sky was overcast but there was still warmth in the air. I was not averse to walking out with a handsome woman.

But what did she want from me?

“What do you want from me?” I said.

“To find a murderer,” she said.

This was said so matter-of-factly that I thought I’d misheard. I looked sideways at her, but she did not look at me. For the first time I noticed her jaw-line, clear-cut and composed.

“Who has . . . died?”

“No one has died.”

For certain, she was mad – even though she might not have looked or sounded it.

“It is more a question of who will die.”

Either mad or, like my friend Lucy Milford back in London, she had the “gift”, was able to peer into the future. God forbid, not another seer, I said to myself.

“I am sorry to say this, Mistress Constant, but are you sure you’re speaking to the right person?”

“Perhaps you think I need a divine or a physician instead,” said Mistress Constant.

This was what I did think, but it’s not altogether polite to recommend someone to a priest or a doctor unless they are in extremity.

“I am serious and I am in my right mind,” she said. “Listen while I explain.”

So I listened as we paced the walks of Christ Church meadows. Having agreed to meet her, I owed her that much.

She explained that her own family were cousins to the main branch of the Constant family which had lived in this city for generations. She was born in Ipswich but her parents died within a few months of each other when she was young, very young, and she had been taken in by the Oxford Constants – that is by James and Sarah Constant, the parents – and brought up as one of the family.

“Oh, but I thought your mother was still alive,” I said.

“No, she is not. Why should you think so?”

“Because I remember the day when we brought the injured Mistress Root to Doctor Fern’s house. She said that she’d been sent there by your mother.”

“That is easily explained,” said Susan. “I have no memory of my real parents, none at all, so it is natural for me to think of the older Sarah and of James as my mother and father, and they have been gracious enough to allow me to call them that. And I have been like a sister to their daughters, Sarah and Emilia and the others, like an older sister. Emilia wasn’t even born when I arrived in this place. We had the same nurse in Mistress Root. We shared the same memories, played the same games as children, we wept and laughed over the same childish happenings.”

By now we’d reached the river which was flowing fast and high at this time of year. So special is this university town that the river is dignified here with the name of the Isis, although we ordinary Londoners know it as the ordinary Thames. Obviously the water has come down in the world by the time it’s floated as far as the capital. I was still in the dark as to why Mistress Constant wanted to talk to me. So far, the story she’d told was usual enough. You might say that she was lucky to have been taken in by loving cousins. I said as much to her, in fact, while we paced along the bank.

Yes, she knew that she was lucky. She had obligations towards those who’d taken her in all those years ago, she said, speaking in her low tones and in an oddly formal way. And those obligations were the reason she had to do something now since she believed that her cousin Sarah, young Sarah, was being poisoned.

“Poisoned?”

“I believe so.”

“Sarah is the woman who wishes to marry William Sadler,” I said, thinking it was odd to be talking in an almost familiar fashion about two people I hadn’t even seen, let alone met. “There is some opposition to the match?”

“Yes, but not so much,” said Susan. “I think that the two families are almost ready to lay down their, ah, arms. The union of the young would bring about the final reconciliation of the old.”

“What do the two young people think?”

“William is . . . careless,” she said. “He will accept what is put on his plate. While Sarah, she is glad enough.”

This was an odd way of talking about a prospective match. Still I pressed on.

“So – so – why do you think Mistress Sarah Constant, your cousin, is being poisoned?”

“Because she has an enemy who is determined she shall not marry William Sadler. I believe in this – this enemy also.”