Mask of Night (22 page)

“I didn’t see anyone brandishing a bloody knife.”

“Of course not. This isn’t a play or a story where the murderer struts around, cackling and showing off his weapon.”

“The Chamberlain’s doesn’t indulge in that kind of crude stuff, Abel. You’ve been with us long enough to know that.”

“Never mind that, Nick. Tell me again what you saw and heard. Every detail may be significant. Remember that I once made my living out of paying attention to tiny details, even if they were fake ones.”

I sighed. I half regretted having revealed my misgivings about the death of Hugh Fern to my friend. But I owed him the story for a second and last time. He was enjoying playing the mystery-solver. So I went over everything from my first conversation with Doctor Fern in the yard, his uneasiness about appearing in front of the crowd, his growing confidence as he found his stage-legs (which Abel had witnessed for himself), the way I’d injured myself, how Fern had promised to make up a poultice for my ankle, & cetera.

Then I described how I’d seen Fern going into the far room where he was later found dead. I described WS’s hurried appearance with Mrs Davenant. (Abel didn’t seem particularly interested in this, fortunately.) I recounted how Andrew Pearman had come in next, urgently seeking his master.

“Wait a moment,” said Abel. “This Pearman person now. What about him? He was standing by the door with you.”

I hadn’t realized it until Abel said this but his words chimed with some half-hidden suspicion of my own.

“He was with me at the door, yes, but I was the one who got hold of the key from the inside and opened it. And it doesn’t make sense. If Pearman was . . . involved . . . then he wouldn’t go drawing attention to himself, would he? And why should he want to stab his master anyway? It would leave him without employment.”

“Let’s leave motive to one side for the moment.”

“It strikes me that we’re leaving a great deal to one side. Anyway, if Pearman’d somehow managed to stab his master then he’d want to get as far away from the scene as possible. I would.”

“Could be a bluff,” said Abel. “Diverting suspicion by encouraging it.”

“Why do that, when it’s much simpler to avoid suspicion altogether?”

“Perhaps he is naturally devious.”

“No, I don’t believe so,” I said.

“Oh, I see,” said Abel. “When it’s your theory we have to listen very carefully but when it comes to anything I say . . . ”

“No, it’s not that. There’s another thing besides. Both of us, Abel, can tell when a person is genuinely shocked and distressed. A good player can counterfeit these responses – but a good player can also tell if another person is counterfeiting them. I may be wrong but I would swear to it that Pearman’s distress was real. He didn’t know that he was going to find his master dead any more than I did.”

“All right then . . . ”

Abel seemed disappointed that his idea had come to nothing. But his brain was working in wider and wider circles.

“What if Fern’s murderer came from the outside? I mean, that he – ”

“Or she. Since we’re merely speculating.”

“What if he – or she – was not part of the audience that afternoon in the Golden Cross yard? They might not have come through the yard, not come past where you were sitting at all. There’s that other approach through the alley down there, the one between the two inns. You could reach the locked room that way.”

“No,” I said, “nobody came in that way, at least not after the interval had started.”

“How can you be sure, Nick?”

“I hadn’t even thought about it until just now when you mentioned it. But there was no mud in the passageway outside those store-rooms.”

“So?”

“The whole area had been swept. I remember seeing a couple of pot-boys at work, making it neat for the players, or as neat as an inn yard can ever be. A person who’d walked down the alleyway would have come in with grime all over their boots. Have a look for yourself, that alley’s filthy with rats and dead cats as well as mud.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“And that afternoon it had begun to rain well before the end of the first half of
Romeo and Juliet
– so that would have made the mud even worse.”

“There were no footmarks outside Fern’s room?”

“It wasn’t clean but there were no gouts of mud.”

“So it follows that if Fern was murdered, then his murderer was a member of the audience that afternoon, someone
already
inside the inn yard.”

“Excellent logic, Abel.”

“Thank you, master.”

“That reduces us to two hundred possibilities, give or take a few.”

“Unless it was one of us players.”

“There’s a difference between playing a murderer and being one.”

“Just a joke, Nicholas.”

“So was my comment about two hundred possibilities.”

“Let’s restrict it to those we
know
were in the audience. Those people we can identify and who must have known Doctor Fern.”

We had to interrupt ourselves at this point because we were both required to attend the finale of
The World’s Diseas’d
. After the play was over – I was dead, like all good avengers, but Abel had survived as a minor courtier – we resumed the discussion, so caught up in our speculations that we didn’t bother to change out of our costumes straightaway.

Abel asked me to search my memory for those people I’d seen in the yard around the time Hugh Fern died.

“Susan Constant was there together with her cousin Sarah. They were talking with Doctor Fern. So was Mistress Root, come to that.”

“The woman we picked up from the road after she’d been run down by that carter? The one who called us chivalrous gentlemen of the road?”

“Yes, her. But I can tell you that the carter is dead. Hoby was his name. His body was found in the Isis.”

“In the river? Drowned?”

“It’s a fair assumption if you find a body in a river.”

“You don’t suppose Mistress Root drowned the man? After all, she did swear a thousand plagues on him.”

“Seriously, Abel?”

“Everything must be considered. All stones must be upturned and the ground examined underneath.”

“Then it’s much more likely the carter drove straight into the river, seeing how much control he had over his horse.”

(But had the horse and cart been found near where the carter drowned? I didn’t know. This was a diversion from our main topic, however.)

“Mistress Root is a strong woman,” said Abel. “Good with her fists. She floored her husband, one of her husbands anyway.”

“She can hold her own in a scrap, no doubt about it.”

“She hates marriage. She said she’d have no more of it.”

“For herself, I think she meant. No more marriages for herself.”

“Who’d have her in marriage or any other way, the great brawny old thing? But seriously, Nick, if we have to be serious now . . . Nurse Root is against marriage, against the marriage of Sarah Constant perhaps.”

“What are you hinting at?”

“That she is the opposite of our Shakespeare’s Nurse in
Romeo and Juliet
.”

“Instead of secretly helping the young lovers, she’s trying to trip them up, you mean?”

“Worse than trip them up . . . ”

“It is a ridiculous notion. A nurse as a poisoner and murderer.”

“Who better placed to be a poisoner? And who knows what goes on in the mind of a woman like that? Perhaps she wishes to preserve her Sarah in a state of perfection, the eternal virgin.”

I looked hard at Abel.

“Just an idea,” he said. “Well, go on. Who else did you see backstage?”

“Jack Davenant and Mrs Davenant.”

“Together?”

“Not together.”

“Ah,” said Abel, tapping his nose. “She was with William Shakespeare, you said.”

“Yes, but I don’t think he was involved.”

“You never know.”

“William Sadler was also in the audience,” I said quickly. “The student who is to marry Sarah Constant. He was sitting in the gallery with a man called Ralph Bodkin.”

“Ah!”

“What?”

“Ralph Bodkin. A suggestive name.”

“Ralph?”

“No, Bodkin. A bodkin is a little dagger, you know.”

“I didn’t think we were going to convict people on their names,” I said, “but I suppose it’s appropriate in a different way since Bodkin is a doctor, like Fern. It was he who came to examine Fern’s corpse.”

“If he’s a doctor then he’d have enough to do with bodkins and lancets in his trade,” said Abel. “That’s suggestive too.”

“Bodkins are used for bleeding and for lancing boils, not killing people.”

“A knife knows no purpose,” said Abel.

“True, it’s a Jack-of-all-trades,” I said.

That’s more or less where our talk ended. And not before time, you may think, since we were getting ourselves stranded on the far shores of absurdity. Maybe it was the effect of whispering in the lee of the platform stage, discussing theories of murder at the same time as participating in the playing of murder. In my character of Vindice I was very bloody, and perhaps inclined to discover plots everywhere. For his part, Abel seemed eager enough to take my cue and come out with his own notions, however outrageous.

But the more we talked, the less plausible my ideas and suspicions appeared – even to me, especially to me perhaps. In the end, I concluded that I would do nothing since I could think of nothing useful to do.

The only step I took was a half-hearted attempt to fix the position of the room where I thought I’d glimpsed the hooded figures – the “monks” – by the glimmer of a candle. It lay somewhere to the back of the Golden Cross Inn and, gazing out of our players’ dormitory during daylight, I saw several crooked windows at our level or a little above or below it. This was one of the oldest parts of the city, with cramped, winding passages threaded between houses whose overhanging tops almost obscured the sky. I couldn’t have placed the “monk” window with any certainty, and I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to. Probably it had been no more than a trick of tired eyes.

And there things rested for a day or two. If Jack Davenant had wanted to point an accusing finger at WS over Hugh Fern’s death, he did not succeed. The Doctor was found by the coroner to have died as the result of falling on his knife in some inexplicable “accident”. The unblinkered opinion might have been that Hugh Fern had committed suicide, even if the traditional motives (debt, disease, despair) seemed to be missing. But Doctor Fern was a prosperous and popular citizen of Oxford, and a well-connected one. He must have been on good terms, probably friendly ones, with the coroner as well as the local magistrates and other worthies such as Ralph Bodkin.

Suicide is a dreadful thing, as WS had said to me. An offence against God and man. We show our horror of it by burying the suicide at night in the public highway. While this may be good enough for the wandering veteran or the ruined shopkeeper, it will not do for an honourable man like Hugh Fern. If the influence of his friends could get the verdict shifted from intention to “accident”, and so remove the shadow from the family as well as ensure that Fern received a fitting funeral, then nobody could say that this was really an improper course.

The other possibility – that of murder – was even more remote than suicide. I don’t believe that it was even considered by anyone except two players with time on their hands and over-active minds.

Hugh Fern did receive his fitting funeral three days after his body had been discovered. Shakespeare, Burbage and some of the other seniors attended a service for him in St Mary’s. Shakespeare himself composed the address, I was told.

That seemed to be that. Besides, the coroner and the magistrates had other, more pressing business than the half-baffling death of a local doctor.

Now the plague itself was firmly established within the city. No longer was it possible to pretend that it would be confined to a handful of cases on the outskirts. As I’ve said, we Londoners accepted it in a resigned, even relaxed way – or pretended to. But the city was on edge. The riot which Susan Constant and I had witnessed showed that town and gown liked beating each other over the head, but it also showed how touchy and moody the people were. They were tinder, ready for the spark.

I watched one of these sparks as it fell among the tinder.

Carfax is the closest Oxford comes to the area round Paul’s Walk in London, a place where everyone gathers to gossip and to carry on trade, licit or illicit. Crowds form naturally, drawn by anything or nothing.

It was evening. The days were drawing out now. The sun was going down behind the tower of St Martin’s, setting the sky on fire. At the foot of the church tower a man was having a similar effect on a crowd. He was standing on the back of a horseless cart and waving his arms about. A stocky figure, his voice was disproportionately loud. I could hear his booming tones from a distance although I couldn’t make out any of the words. I drew nearer and heard what he was declaiming. Ah yes. It wasn’t altogether a surprise. I’d been expecting something like this.

The plague brings prophets as surely as a dog carries fleas. They are mostly self-styled preachers who tell us that we are all doomed. I know the breed, because my father was one of them – although he was a proper preacher, not self-appointed – and so I’ve perhaps been inoculated against the worst effects of their ranting.

This man did not appear to be very different. He ranted and roared. He pointed to the cluster of bills which had suddenly been stuck over the doors of St Martin’s. He didn’t have to explain what they were. Everyone feared the appearance of the plague orders and the mortality bills, breaking out in public places like white pustules on healthy skin.

Then the speaker got down to business. The plague was God’s instrument for the punishment of sin, he declaimed. It was God’s angel – or his arrow flying through the air – or his hand stretched out to smite the wickedness of men – or all of these together and more. What was being punished was vice and sin. The very air which we breathed in was infected by human corruption, and so gave back to us our own taint.

The crowd, mostly made up of townspeople but containing a few students, was growing by the instant. Some of them looked up at this last remark and snuffed the air, which was hazy from chimney-smoke. They seemed to be enjoying the prospect of peril and punishment. They weren’t really, of course, but there is a kind of initial thrill which runs through us in such a situation, as I’d observed when Abel and I had come across the plague-house in Southwark’s Kentish Street.