Sleep of Death (30 page)

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose you could say that I have been away.’

‘Before the climax of a play the hero shall withdraw from the action,’ said Master WS, reminding me of his words on the previous afternoon, in what was another life. Although he was wearing armour he looked not warlike but melancholy, befitting a spirit come from the underworld with no happy news.

‘We must speak after the performance,’ said Dick Burbage to me. ‘I have something to say to you.’

‘Yes, we shall speak,’ said Master WS, Burbage’s fellow-shareholder.

A trumpet sounded the beginning of things. The musicians fluted and sawed from the gallery.

‘I must be on,’ said Master WS. He vanished.

‘And I,’ said Burbage.

I went to change in the tiring-house, although my entrance was many scenes away. Under the eyes of Alfred the tireman, I donned my costume as Lucianus, the poisoner in the play-within-the-play. I planned to add one or two items later, but needed to do it out of his sight.

My head was whirling with madcap schemes and plans. I think that I was half-mad at this time. Like a man in a maze I was struggling to find the centre, but in no very ordered fashion.

My reasoning went as follows: old Sir William Eliot had been murdered, of that there was no doubt. The circumstances of his death provided an uncanny parallel with the circumstances of old Hamlet’s death in the play by Master WS. Both victims were sleeping in an orchard, both were taken by surprise, cut off without time to prepare for death. A poison was poured into the ear of the dormant King and the same method most probably employed on Sir William. There was a brother – Claudius, Sir Thomas – hovering off-stage and waiting to take up the reins of a impatient, lascivious wife, whether Gertrude or Lady Alice. There were sons, although each had reacted differently to the father’s death: Hamlet was deeply unhappy with his mother’s choice of a second husband and bitter because he sees the throne of Denmark slipping out of his grasp; young William Eliot was grieving for his father but claimed to respect (rather than suspect) his uncle and to love his mother. Nevertheless William had been troubled enough by the parallels between art and life to ask me to ‘watch and listen’ in his own house.

I might have been inclined to put William’s sense that all wasn’t well down to fancy or imagination. Since he was afflicted by the need to model himself on Hamlet, what more natural than that he should assume his hero’s distrust of the world, and the feeling that everything in it was rank and rotten, an unweeded garden? But the events of the past few days, from the drowning of Francis to my own scrape with death, had shown me that William’s intuition was right. All was very far from being well.

The question I came back to, the one that I’d entered in Greek lettering in my notebook, was: who?

Who had been responsible for the death of Sir William, the death of Francis, the employment of Adrian and fat Ralph to kidnap and kill me?

There were two or three possibilities, as I saw it.

One was that Lady Alice had plotted to kill her husband – for the usual reasons, a jaded appetite and the wish for change. What I had seen of the couple from my vantage-point in the pear tree showed how she despised her first husband and was at one with her second. Some things would have been beyond a woman’s strength, I judged, and she would have needed help, but when did a beautiful and dangerous woman ever lack a man’s hands? She could have hired assistance, or been in league with Sir Thomas. An objection to this was the appearance of Adrian on the scene. Would he have been taken on, in this vicious capacity, by the woman or the man who had so recently discharged him from their service? Unless this was all a ploy. I went round in circles.

Another, stranger possibility was that son William had killed father William.
He
had hidden up the tree,
he
had scampered towards the old man’s supine form,
he
had poured the deadly preparation in the porches of the paternal ear. There is no reason for thinking this, apart from the whisper in my innermost head that says that sons wish for dead fathers, and all so that they may have their mothers to themselves alone. If I examine the matter honestly, it was sometimes so with me.

A third possibility: the murderer of Sir William Eliot is none other than Master WS himself. I do not see our gentle, vanishing author wielding the knife or passing out the poisoned glass, but these feats of open or concealed violence he has done again and again in his mind’s eye, for his pieces are full of death and villains and destruction. I could not help remembering those initials carved into the trunk of the tree in the Eliots’ garden, or what the gate-keeper had said about the identity of the visitor who called at the house on the day of Sir Thomas’s death. I could not but think of the odd comments made by Master WS, of the looks he has cast in my direction. Perhaps within him some barrier has broken down, and he no longer knows what is art and what is life. He writes a murder, he enacts one. Or he does it first, then he tells us of it. It is no longer enough that he imagine himself a homicide, he must play the part in truth and see where it takes him.

But I have to prove my case.

As Master WS may have taken a leaf out of his own book, as it were, so too will I. In our author’s play, Prince Hamlet tests the King’s guilt by showing him to his teeth and face the image or pattern of his crime. When the travelling players arrive at Elsinore castle they are requested, even commanded, by the Prince to stage a play which, in words and dumb-show, exposes the uncle’s supposed deed. If he changes colour, if he squirms on his throne, if he hangs his head in shame, Hamlet will know him for what he is. He watches his uncle-father watching the play. Not trusting the testimony of his own eyes, he tells his good and faithful friend Horatio to watch the King too. But, in the end, there is no need because the entire audience sees what Hamlet sees.

Claudius runs from the play when it’s hardly got going. As the poisoner (me, Lucianus) appears to work his wicked will on the sleeping king, mouthing threats and making damnable faces, the real King calls out for lights. Daunted by a play he is. Frighted with false fire he is. In front of his court he flees. He is the man.

I planned something similar.

When I got down from the cart on the Southwark side of the Bridge that morning I first made my way to Nell’s. Her reaction was like Master Burbage’s.

‘My God, you look terrible, Nick.’

She had a little looking-glass and carried it to me. My face was a mass of bumps, bruises and scratches, from the beating I’d received and from my headlong flight through the forest. There was blood there too, and on my hands and clothing. Adrian’s as well as mine. My limbs ached and my wrists were badly chafed from the effort of freeing them from the ropes. I considered making some reference to our last meeting, in the Goat & Monkey with William, and to the way in which I had snubbed her because she was pursuing her trade with young Eliot. But I did not want to reopen old wounds – I had enough fresh ones.

Nell brought some water in a pewter bowl and a cloth and gently wiped away the mess around my face. I winced and drew my breath in sharp. She applied salves and ointments, of which she always kept a plentiful stock. Is there a mother in every woman?

Unlike a mother, though, Nell did not question me, at least not then. Perhaps because she deals so much with men, and with our strange and shameful needs, she is content to let things go unexplained. Instead, she chattered on about the remedies she was applying and how this one was compounded of rue and sanicula, and that one was made of strawberry leaves and fennel and mercury mortified with
aqua vitae,
you understand . . . What I understood was that my Nell was a country girl at heart and knew the remedies of the fields and forests. I also understood that she’d spent plenty of time in Old Nick’s company. She was using expressions that were not natural to her. Her patter and expertise must have come, in part, from him. I wondered whether to tell her of the old apothecary’s fate, trussed up and dead in the place where his alligator had hung. I wasn’t certain of the nature of the relationship between Nell and the old man, whether their ‘arrangement’ was for business or pleasure. With a whore, of course, the one may be the other. On the whole I thought the news of Old Nick’s demise could wait. Sooner rather than later there would be a full accounting, after which she would know all.

I was grateful to be lovingly tended and, as I lay on the bed that we sometimes shared, I felt myself slipping into an exhausted sleep even as she talked away. But I couldn’t allow myself rest – the play had not yet run its course.

‘Nell . . . ow—’

‘Don’t talk, Nick. Let me finish.’

‘This is important. It’s – oof – to do with what happened.’

‘I’m not asking any questions, Nick. Keep still.’

‘I will tell you everything later. But there is something – ah – I want you to do.’

‘It’s a bit early in the day—’

‘It’s – ouch—’

‘ – and you’re in no condition for that.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘What then?’

‘I want you to go to the playhouse.’

‘To ply my trade?’

Nell picked up some of her customers at the theatre, although I had asked her to keep away from the Globe, at least for as long as I was working there.

‘No, to watch.’

‘Are you in a play?’

‘Yes. I am Lucianus, nephew to the king – and a poisoner.’

‘Oh, that play.’

‘That play. But I don’t want you to watch that play. The play’s not the thing. I want you to watch someone watching it.’

‘This is deep, Nick. Perhaps you have a touch of fever and are not altogether sure of your words.’

‘I am altogether sane. (Although I am by no means sure that I was at this point.) Listen. I wish you to observe someone and to see how they respond to what is happening on stage.’

‘But
you
could do this.’

‘I will be watching someone else. Besides, Nell, two pairs of eyes are better than one. I do not trust my senses. I am stumbling in the dark.’

‘You are not well, Nick.’

I was moved by her words and, more, by the way that she uttered them.

‘Scratches and bruises only. My mind is clear. Nell, do you ever think of leaving London?’

‘Whatever for? How would I do for a living?’

‘There are men and towns everywhere, if you are determined to persist in your course of life.’

‘Why, you know London has more men – and more of them rich ones – than any other town. And you know what they say. Fair wenches cannot want favours while the world is so full of amorous fools. Where could I find such a good place again?’

‘
Good,
Nell? Good for trade perhaps, but is it for
your
good?’

‘How solemn you sound, Nicholas. What has happened to you that you’ve turned moraliser?’

I thought of the deeds of the night before. I saw the body in the wood, but kept silent.

‘I’ve been thinking that I may not be welcome here much longer. I might return to the country.’

‘Not with me for company, my dear. Or not until I’m too dried up and raddled for the sacking law.’

‘Sacking law?’

‘Whoredom. Were you going to ask me to go with you?’

‘No . . . well, not exactly. I just wondered . . . Look, to come to the business in hand. That play. There is a performance this afternoon.’

‘Which I should go to but which I shouldn’t watch.’

‘You are often at the playhouse but not for the action on stage, I think.’

‘True,’ she said. ‘But you want me to watch a watcher, not catch him for profit.’

‘Watch a watcher and give me your opinion.’

‘A whore’s opinion. What did you say to me the other day, “My trade is rather more respectable than yours, I think”?’

I saw now that it was not always to my advantage that Nell recalled my words. I felt priggish, particularly as she uttered this in a fluting voice which suggested the puritan. That wasn’t how I’d sounded, surely?

‘I would value your opinion,’ I said, as Robert Mink had said to me in the matter of his verses.

She did not reply.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I am sorry for my thoughtless words to you as you were going about your business. In the Goat & Monkey.’

‘Those I have forgotten. Very well. I will do this for you – but you must promise me one thing, Nick. Not to try and reform me.’

‘I wasn’t trying,’ I said. ‘I merely asked if you ever wanted to leave London.’

‘It comes to the same. Do not become like the Puritans and the moralisers who believe that women like me must have sin beaten out of them by the beadle. Or, with you, it would be the softer kind – the ones who believe we must all be unhappy at our work and will leap at the chance to turn honest . . .’

‘I never . . .’

‘. . . as if we could earn a quarter as much in any other trade. If you men would have us reform you must stop visiting us first – yes, and paying for the pleasure too.’

‘I’m sorry I ever mentioned it,’ I said. And I was too.

‘Now tell me what you want of me this afternoon,’ she said.

So I did.

The next step was easier than I’d expected. From Nell’s I crossed the river to the Eliots’ house. William was curious as to where I’d been the previous night and even more curious about my battered state. I palmed him off with some story about an argument, a fight, typical behaviour among the raffish players, didn’t he know.

‘I will be leaving soon,’ I said. ‘My contract with the Globe is coming to an end because Jack Wilson is returning.’

This, by the by, was more than I knew, although I did know that my days must be numbered. They certainly would be by the end of the afternoon.

‘I will be leaving London too,’ I said.

I was surprised to hear myself saying this.

‘I am sorry for that,’ said William. ‘I have enjoyed your company.’

‘Thank you. And I yours.’

‘You have learned nothing in my uncle’s house?’

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps I can tell you later, after this afternoon’s performance. You will be at the Globe?’