Sleep of Death (12 page)

A Somerset Tragedy
is a simple tale of domestic lust and violence. It involves a land-holder and his younger wife, as well as a painter, the painter’s sister, the man the painter’s sister wishes to marry, the man the painter has arranged for his sister to marry (two different men, this), three hired assassins, a local lord, sundry servants and clowns, a brace of magistrates, a priest, an executioner. You get the picture. I didn’t know the full plot, since I had received only the scroll bearing my own part, but I could guess what happened from a glance at the dramatis personae. Most likely it began with a rape: most certainly it ended with the rope. I was a yokel, with full-dress accent and boorish manners.

When I had glimpsed a little more of the play in rehearsal I would tell my Nell about it. She enjoyed hearing of my roles, or so I flattered myself. I had discovered that retailing the plot of a play while we were in bed together – as with Master WS’s
Hamlet
or the infinitely inferior Master Boscombe’s
A City Pleasure
– was an effective method of delaying my own journey’s end, and thus of ensuring her own satisfactory arrival at that terminus. It was as if a torrent of words could temporarily dam up another sort of effusion. Sometimes Nell had told me of what her paying customers cried out when they were busy about her person, although this was knowledge that I wanted her to share with me only
in extremis.
I considered that my dramatic summaries showed a more refined temper than their cataloguing of her body parts, and what they were doing or intended to do with them and to them. I wondered whether I should mention to our author my interesting use of his Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. I wondered what our author had been doing up a tree in the garden of Sir William Eliot. Unless it had been some other WS of course.

‘Master Revill!’

It was Robert Mink, the fat player who had given me the note for my Lady Alice. We had coincided at the entrance to the playhouse. Together we made our way to the tiring-house, where some of the other Chamberlain’s men were already gathering. Mink was clutching a much larger scroll than mine. He noticed that I was looking at the size of his part.

‘I play a painter in the county of Somerset,’ he said. ‘I wish to marry my sister off for reasons that are obscure to me. When she does not agree, because there is another man back in the tiring-house, I turn murderous. I paint a picture of my sister which is so beautiful that the onlooker cannot help touching it. The pigment that I use in depicting her flesh, her nearly bare breast, is naturally poisonous to the touch. This picture will then be shown to the man I wish to kill. He will reach out to stroke her exposed, painted flesh, and so he will die. Have you ever heard of anything so unlikely?’

‘Does he die? By touching the pigment?’

‘Of course not. When did you ever hear of a murder plot going right in a tragedy?’

‘Death in an orchard,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I was thinking of Hamlet, and the death of his father, and how it does not look like a murder.’

‘Quite different,’ said Master Mink, his triple chins wobbling in disagreement. ‘Anyway that didn’t go right in the long run, did it? The murderer never thrives. Master Shakespeare may stretch belief sometimes but there is a truth beyond mere fact, and he is in ample possession of it. But I fear that Master Highcliff with his Somerset farce masquerading as tragedy is another kettle of fish, a stinking kettle.’

‘Why do the Burbages put on this stuff then?’

‘Because it draws in the crowds, dear boy. The spectators want to see sin in all its varieties, they want to see fighting and fucking and fury, and then they want to see all of this punished – otherwise they will not go home comfortable. But I tell you one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We are right to look down on the authors of this stuff. We are right to pay them so little. Master Shakespeare, of course, excepted. Him and one or two others. But for the most part they are journeymen. Where would the writers be without the players? We are the men of value.’

‘I do not have such a low opinion of authors,’ I said, daring to oppose this large and experienced man of the theatre.

‘Do you not?’ he said. ‘There is no time to discuss this now, we are due to begin our rehearsal, but I would be glad to continue this interview this evening if you find yourself in the vicinity of The Beast with Two Backs. It’s in Moor Street.’

‘Is that a pick-hatch?’

‘Merely a tavern. Its real name is The Tupping Rams or some such. At the south end of Moor Street, if you should find yourself in that neighbourhood tonight.’

After my participation in that morning’s rehearsal, I had to agree with Master Mink. I did not think that we would be performing
A Somerset Tragedy
more than once, as I told Nell late that afternoon. We were in her room. This was barely more than a closet in Holland’s Leaguer, not far from the bearpit. The women had their own rooms and were generally undisturbed as long as they paid an exorbitant rent to the madam and her one-eyed paramour (familiarly known as Cyclops). But the walls were thin, and cries and groans as well as intermittent thwacks penetrated our ears. The sounds were more reminiscent of Bedlam or one of the quarters of hell than a house of pleasure. I did not particularly enjoy meeting my Nell at her place of work, but for the moment my lodgings were on the far side of the river, and I had nowhere to roost on the south bank when I wished to see her. She had shut up her stall to the public for the day. Only now she had got her wares out again for a private browser.

‘Why are you so sure you’ll only play this play – whats-itcalled? – once?’

‘A Somerset Tragedy.
It’s a poor piece,’ I said, with all the assurance of a few days in the Chamberlain’s Company.

‘You haven’t played it yet for the public. Maybe they’ll love it. You might have a great run, three or four performances.’

‘You get a feel for these things.’

‘As you have a feeling for this,’ she said, taking my hand and drawing it down.

‘Ah yes,’ I said.

A while later, she said: ‘Nick, the title of your piece is strange, is it not? The tragedy of Somerset.’

‘Why?’

‘I was remembering your father and your mother.’

‘But you never knew them, little Nell.’

‘But you have told me of them, Master Nicholas.’

Such remarks reminded me how young Nell was. And indeed I have noticed that these women – our doxies, our trulls and rude girls – who spend their days catering to the depraved tastes of fallen man have, as if by compensation, a most child-like tendency in them sometimes. Nell had asked me before about my parents, the parson and the parson’s wife, and encouraged me to talk about them. I attributed this to the fact that Nell had no idea who her parents were – or whether they were alive or dead. The woman she once called ‘mother’ was a mere neighbour, if a good-hearted one. Accordingly, with none of her own, she took an interest in my mother and father. Mine at least you could be certain of, for they were united in death.

I was away from the village when they died. In Bristol. On business about my playing, trying to inveigle my way into one of the touring companies, Dorset’s, Northumberland’s, I have forgotten which. My plans didn’t work out, and I’d spent a fruitless couple of weeks hanging around inn-yards trying to ingratiate myself with the players. My father did not approve. Players were parasites and crocodiles, double dealers and painted sepulchres. They were unnatural, because men are not intended by God to be other than they are, particularly not to play at being girls and women. The shows staged in inn-yards and other public places where players flaunted their filth were not only an incitement to disorder and lasciviousness in otherwise upright citizens, they were also a breeding ground for thieves, whores and knaves.

Needless to say, my father had never attended a play. But he knew what he hated. He also knew, like all good men, that God hated what he hated and was busy with punishment, punishment everyday and everywhere. This punishment most often came in the guise of diurnal accident and disaster. Whenever a calamity overtook the village – a house-fire, a sickness among the sheep, the failure of a crop – he looked for the cause in the sinfulness of the householder, the shepherd, the farmer. For larger catastrophes like the Spanish threat, which had gone before I was grown, or the plague, which never goes, he looked to sinfulness on a grand scale. As a nation, we English were all deeply and doubly dyed with the devil’s pitch. We teetered on the lip of the everlasting pit. The strangest thing with my father was that this sense of universal damnation went hand in hand with a loving-kindness towards his fellow humans, so that the householder or the shepherd or the farmer who had suffered calamity was certain to receive gentle words and a helping hand from him. He would thunder away in the pulpit, but when he descended from it he was the meekest, mildest fellow.

You may wonder that I can speak so lightly of what evidently weighed heavily on my father, this sense of sin – mine, yours, his, ours. But I have observed that an extreme course in a parent is likely to produce an opposite, though milder, response in the offspring. So a Puritan sires the whoremaster, while the rake begets a nun. If Nell were ever to discover her parents they’d no doubt turn out to be fine, upstanding citizens. Another explanation was that I’d heard my father’s message too often. Listening to him roar and thunder Sunday after Sunday, and through the week too, inoculated me. What he saw as sin I see mostly as frailty, while what he considered to be a punitive providence I think of as unlucky chance. Most of all, my father the parson reserved his greatest wrath for what he knew least, players and the playhouse. ‘The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well; and the cause of sin are plays; therefore the cause of plagues are plays.’ So he reasoned. All fell on deaf ears, however, for I don’t reckon that above one in fifty of us had ever seen what he was so energetically condemning.

And when the plague came to our region who should it strike but those who would have no truck with players and playhouses? I mean the good, honest, simple folk of my village. My mother and father were included in that number.

I came over the brow of the hill. It was a fine spring morning. The last traces of frost lingered under hedges and in the ruts on the track, but the air was soft with the promise of better times. I had failed in my attempt to join the touring players and had been walking from Bristol since three that morning. I should have been returning tired and with my tail between my legs but, perversely, I felt fresh and cheerful. In the distance was the glint of the Bristol Channel and, beyond, the hills of wild Wales stood out in the bright air. Down below was my village of Miching. I wondered what my father would say to the prodigal’s return. He would be glad I had not fallen among the sinful players but, humanly, he would wring my hand in sympathy at my disappointment. My mother, she would say nothing. I took one last look around from the heights and then plunged downhill. In the distance at the bottom of the valley was the cluster of cottages and huts separated by thread-like paths, the church and the manor house a little distant from the common people, the scattered farmsteads, everything that, together, went by the name of Miching.

I had made a few dozen downhill strides when, without knowing why, I stopped. There was something wrong. I paused, and shaded my eyes from the sun to see better. The village lay still. I even sniffed the air like an animal scenting danger. Nothing. I went another few steps and halted once more. Then it came to me: what was wrong was that there was nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell. On a morning like this, the beginning of a fine spring day, there should have been people moving in the fields or on the outskirts of the village, the occasional shouted greeting or question, the smell of woodsmoke curling out of the valley, the bleating of sheep. But there was absolute stillness and silence.

My heart beating faster, and with a sick feeling, I leapt down the path. At one point the track ran out of sight as it looped an outcrop of rock, and it was on the far side of this that I found a man sitting with his head in his hands. Roused by my panting and the thud of my feet, he looked up and I recognised him as my father’s sexton, a thin bony man, an appropriate shape for his principal business, I had always felt. I spoke his name. After a moment he came to himself and saw who I was.

‘Nicholas,’ he said in a spiritless voice.

‘What’s happened? Why are you here, John?’

He said nothing for a while but hung his head again, and pressed his hands into sunken cheeks. Then in a mumble he said, ‘Your father sent me here.’

‘Why? What for?’

But I knew already. There is only one cause for such a profound silence and stillness. The plague had struck villages to the east of us in previous years, and even Bristol had known it. It is a tide that creeps inexorably across the land, winter and summer, drowning without distinction young and old, rich and poor, though – unlike the tide – it leaves some spots and areas uncovered. So, in a city, one household will fall victim while its neighbour remains untainted. And yet the plague is a beast too, one that will abandon his orderly progress across country and suddenly overleap many places to land in a distant village or town. Then he will jump sideways or seven miles backwards, and all to confound expectation.

‘I was stationed here to warn people away,’ he said.

How like my father, to think not only of his own flock but of the well-being of the neighbouring parishes.

‘And to stop our own people from leaving,’ he said.

‘My father . . . and my mother . . . they are helping those in distress?’

‘You cannot go down, Nicholas. I am empowered to stop you and all travellers.’

He spoke by rote. He could scarcely have turned an ant from its path. I was already past him. Then he called out my name, the clearest he had yet spoken, so I paused once more.

‘You will go. But what you will see will be a sermon to you. It is a speaking sight, and the voice it calls us with is a loud one, to call us all to repentance.’