Mask of Night (20 page)

“He should stick to writing. Your man Burbage wasn’t bad, playing Romeo. Very
active
, though.”

“Did you notice your – your betrothed at the play?”

“My – oh, you mean Sarah. Yes, she was there together with Susan. And the battle-axe of a nurse, Mistress Root. They were sitting on the opposite side of the gallery.”

“Did you communicate with each other?”

“Communicate? We waved,” said Sadler.

This didn’t sound exactly like Romeo-and-Juliet-style behaviour, two lovers waving decorously at each other from the opposite sides of an inn yard. Not quite star-struck. Yet I could hardly come out and ask William directly whether he felt passionate about Sarah Constant. Concerning her feelings, though, I had little doubt. I remembered the smile that had lit up her face in Broad Street.

You knew you’d have to kill him when you saw him looking at you.

There was no doubt that he knew. It was only a matter of time, perhaps, before he made . . . certain discoveries. Even so, the occasion caught you unprepared.

It was a perilous moment to act. You would have preferred to be in your disguise, in your armour. But it would have been even more perilous to do nothing, to allow Doctor Fern to expose you . . . and you have to admit to yourself that the danger, the fine timing of the business excited you. It nearly went wrong but a cool head and resolution snatched safety out of the jaws of danger.

The departure of the Doctor is to be regretted but it would have happened sooner or later.

And coming so soon after the death of the carter. In hindsight you should have stayed behind on the banks of the stream, should have ensured that the little man sunk out of sight in the water. Should have weighted the body down with rocks. As it was, Hoby’s corpse must have been carried away and down towards the big river for it had been discovered at daybreak, snagged on a fallen tree where the river runs shallow by Folly Bridge. With luck the marks on Hoby would be attributed to the effect of a fast-moving current and the inevitable buffetings by logs and stones.

Anyway the corpse would not be closely examined by coroner or magistrate. The law does not permit it. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

I
was sufficiently troubled about the death of Hugh Fern to want to speak to Shakespeare about it. Maybe it was presumptuous of me but I chose him because, out of all the seniors, he was the one who had in the past rescued me from a couple of tricky situations, the one whom I most respected, and the one who was most ready to give advice or a listening ear to the junior members of the Company.

Also I believed that WS was more intimately involved with what had happened than anybody else. Doctor Fern was his particular friend and the Chamberlain’s were playing in Oxford largely on account of that connection. In addition, Fern had taken the part which Shakespeare should have been playing. The playwright, together with Mrs Davenant, had been present backstage only a few yards from where Fern lay dead or dying.

WS was lodging in a chamber in the Tavern, next door to the Golden Cross. It was one of the best rooms, fitting a distinguished guest, with a view out over Cornmarket. The walls were of a glowing red, with white roses and Canterbury bells and bunches of grapes painted, as far as I could see, with a craftsman’s assurance, not the journeyman work you usually find in such places. It was late in the evening of the day of Fern’s death, a cold evening in spring. A fire was burning in the grate. WS looked tired and drawn, and I apologized for interrupting him, then apologized again when I saw he wasn’t alone. Dick Burbage, our afternoon Romeo, was sitting in the half-light on the other side of the fire.

I made to go out again.

“No, come in, Nick.”

Shakespeare indicated a stool and told me to pour myself a glass from a flask which stood on a neighbouring table. I refused, saying that I still felt queasy from the events of the afternoon.

“Good God, man, we all feel queasy,” said Burbage. “What’s so special with you? A drink will soon cure that.”

He held up his own glass so that the red liquid glowed from the flames of the fire before gulping it down.

“Drink, unless you want to be like a green girl.”

I wasn’t welcome. Why should I be? I got up to leave.

“Sit down,” said WS. “You injured your foot today, didn’t you?”

“I don’t want to disturb your council.”

“You aren’t disturbing anything. In any case we might value your opinion. Eh, Dick?”

Burbage shrugged. Whatever WS might have valued – and I thought he was just being courteous – Burbage had little time for the views of the ordinary player.

“Opinion on what, William?”

“Whether we should leave.”

“Leave Oxford?”

“Leave Oxford.”

“Because we’re going to lose our audience, you mean, after the – after what happened today?”

Burbage snorted at this. I judged he’d already downed quite a few glasses. No more was he the youthful Romeo but the middle-aged shareholder.

“Nicholas, you have still got a bit to learn about audiences. We’re likely to
increase
our numbers after what happened today. They’ll come to gawp at the site of a recent death and incidentally they might watch a play. Owen Meredith could probably put an extra halfpenny on his beer.”

Shakespeare raised his hand in Burbage’s direction. Perhaps he considered the remarks improper or tactless, especially given his connection to the dead man. When he spoke, though, it was with weariness rather than irritation.

“Dick is right enough, I’m afraid. Audiences are human, for better and worse. But it’s not just the death of Doctor Fern. Today has been a day of the dead. A man was found drowned in the Isis this morning for one thing.”

“Yes, I know, a waterman. I heard it was a waterman,” I said.

“No, this dead man was a carter,” said WS, “and one known to the Davenants in this place.”

I remembered the scene the other morning. Jane Davenant shouting at the unfortunate carter who had let fall a crate from the back of his cart, her husband helping him to carry it indoors. Was it the same man? Probably.

I felt cold. I was sitting at a little distance from the fire. I wondered whether to pour myself a drink after all.

“And this is not the end of it,” said WS.

“Another murder?” I said.

Both WS and Dick Burbage turned their faces towards where I sat on the stool in the recesses of the room. The remark had slipped out but it was the first thing I’d said which really caught their attention.

“Murder? Who has been murdered?” said Burbage.

“Doctor Fern.”

“Why do you say that, Nicholas? You believe Doctor Fern was murdered? How can that be? You were there when he was found.”

“I – no, I don’t know why I said it. Forget that I spoke.”

Shakespeare had said nothing all this while though he gazed at me intently. There was a silence which I broke reluctantly after some moments.

“Is this what you meant by a day of the dead? This carter and Doctor Fern?”

“There’s more,” said WS.

“The plague is taking hold in Oxford,” said Burbage. “There were four or five households sealed up this very morning, and there are others under watch.”

I reached across to the flask and poured out a measure of wine.

“It will only be a short time before the city authorities prohibit all gatherings,” said WS. “And the first thing to close down will be a company of players from out of town. We may not have much longer.”

“So where should we go? Tell us,” said Dick Burbage to me as if I was in possession of the answer.

“Back to London? I have heard that things are no worse there.”

“Then you are misinformed,” said Burbage. “Matters are worse there than ever. I received a letter from my wife today.”

I suddenly saw – in one of those belated flashes of understanding which serve more than anything to illuminate our own obtuseness – the reasons for Burbage’s bear-like manner. His wife and children had been abandoned in a plaguey town. (WS, by contrast, had his family tucked safely away in Stratford-on-Avon.) Nor was this all, this consciousness of a family rawly left. Dick Burbage, together with the other shareholders, carried the Chamberlain’s on his shoulders, just as Hercules holds up the image of the globe on the roof of our playhouse. For me the question of the Company’s next destination was an interesting speculation which had a bearing on my livelihood, but it wasn’t my direct responsibility. But for Thomas Pope and Dick and WS and the rest, it was their decision and it affected all of us.

“Dick’s wife says that the Queen is near her end,” said WS.

“A matter of days,” said Burbage.

The gloom in the room deepened. The fire flickered, casting a dying glow on the red and white walls.

“Are we still to present
Romeo and Juliet
for the Constant and Sadler families?” I asked. “Surely not?”

“That is a private presentation, not subject to the city authorities,” said Burbage. “We do not yet know whether we can still stage it at the Ferns’ house. William and I will pay our respects to his widow tomorrow. Depending on what she says we may quit Oxford very soon – or we may stay a few days longer.”

“Then we could go to – to Gloucester,” I said. Even as I spoke I felt the blood flood into my face. Why was I saying this? Only to fill the silence.

“Yes, we might go to Gloucester – or Worcester – or Leicester. What does it matter?”

And with that Dick Burbage carefully placed his glass on the floor, got up and left WS’s room. He was drunk and angry, but in a closed-up fashion. Shakespeare made no attempt to stop him. There was another silence. I wondered how, and how soon, I could make my own exit. But it wasn’t to be so easy.

WS motioned me to take up the vacant chair by the fire, then said, “Why did you say
Gloucester
?”

“I’ve no idea. It was the first place that came into my head.”

“And why did you claim that Hugh Fern was murdered?

And don’t say you’ve no idea about that either.”

Well, since this was why I’d come to see WS in the first place, there was no reason to hold back. Limpingly, I came out with the deductions I’ve already given, although they sounded even less convincing when uttered aloud. I couldn’t see any reason why Doctor Fern should suddenly put an end to himself, I’d been one of the last people he’d talked to and he had given no hint of what he was about to do, and so on.

“Very well,” said WS. “And what makes you qualified to peer into another man’s heart and pronounce on his intentions, if he has decided to keep them hidden?”

“I don’t claim that. It’s more a question of common sense.”

“Common sense tells us that, if a man meets a violent death inside a locked room and there is no sign – or possibility – of the involvement of another, then it must follow that that man did violence on himself, particularly when the implement is so plainly to hand.”

“I suppose so.”

“I like the idea even less than you do, Nick. To do away with oneself is a dreadful course, it is a mortal sin. Perhaps it was all an accident.”

This seemed an even less likely notion than murder but I said nothing.

“Hugh Fern was an old friend. Tomorrow I must console his wife. Hugh and I shared our boyhoods.”

“I know,” I said. “You went poaching together.”

“Who told you that? Did he tell you that?” said WS.

I was about to say, no, you told me, but instead I shrugged and said, “So I’ve heard.”

“Don’t believe all you hear. Or even what you see. Don’t leap to conclusions about what you witnessed this afternoon. Don’t leap to – murder – or wrong conclusions about other things.”

William Shakespeare glanced up at me from his chair on the other side of the slumbering fire and then covered the moment by raising his glass.

Other things.

Was this an indirect way of referring to his own breathless appearance in the inn yard with Jane Davenant? I recalled the way she’d helped him into the friar’s costume, tugged on over the shirt which he was already wearing, a frail garment for a dull, wet afternoon. I recalled that earlier during the interval I’d seen Jack Davenant wandering gloomily about the Golden Cross. Perhaps the landlord wasn’t mourning the trade which was being lost to his rival. Perhaps he was mourning a different type of loss. Perhaps he was in search of his wife. Who, at that very instant, was elsewhere,
perhaps
. . .

One idea suggested another. My eyes flitted about in the gloom, searching for the bed in Shakespeare’s chamber. It was a capacious enough bed, but then this was probably the best room in the Tavern, one fitting a distinguished guest. Then I grew embarrassed when I caught WS looking at me looking round the room. Having been cold on my entrance into the room, I now felt hot next to the dying fire.

It never crossed my mind to say anything direct to WS. Or rather it did but I immediately suppressed the idea. I remembered what Hugh Fern had said to me about WS’s capacity to take offence. Tolerant and easy he might be but everyone has limits. I grew hotter still. Fortunately WS switched topics. Maybe he felt uncomfortable too.

“Do not say too much about Dick’s little outburst, Nick. He is anxious for his family.”

I nodded a little harder than necessary.

“I guessed as much.”

“When you come to get a family you will find that you have made hostages for fortune.”

“Perhaps that is why I have no plans to get a family.”

“
Plans
,” said WS. “You plan what shirt to put on for the week or which tavern you might eat your lunch in, you don’t plan marriage or a family. Not unless you’re a prince or an heir to a great estate – and if you are then someone else does the planning for you.”

If I was waiting for some little revelation concerning unplanned marriages, then I was to be disappointed for WS now said, “This has not been the best of days. And tomorrow morning Burbage and I must visit the widow.”

I took the hint and stood up. WS said goodnight in an abstracted way. I left him sipping at his glass and staring at the embers, and went downstairs, intending to return to my own dormitory in the Golden Cross next door.