Sleep of Death (8 page)

‘It’s obvious enough,’ I said.

‘Well?’

‘It’s what happens before the beginning of the play of
Hamlet.
Hamlet’s father, old Hamlet, dies in his orchard one afternoon. The story’s put around that it was as a result of a snake-bite. But the Ghost tells the Prince that he was poisoned – and that the murderer is now on the throne of Denmark and married to Hamlet’s mother.’

‘I said that Master Shakespeare’s plots were closer to the truth,’ said William. ‘What I’ve just described to you is the manner of my father’s death. Asleep, one afternoon, in his garden, in his house, on the other side of the river, his death apparently a natural one.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘And then to have your mother remarry – and to your uncle. All this really happened, what you’re saying?’

‘It’s easy enough to check it if you don’t believe me. My mother or my uncle or any member of the household will confirm it. There was even a ballad made on the subject of my father’s passing, how death comes for rich and poor alike or some such profundity.’

‘It stretches belief that your family’s history should mimic so exactly the action of a play,’ I said.

‘Yes. It is disturbing to find that nature is so short of material that it is forced to hold up the mirror to art, if I may vary one of the Prince of Denmark’s own observations,’ said William languidly. ‘But consider these things, consider them separately. Then they are less surprising. My father was several years older than my mother. He had not been in the best of health. One might ask, why should he die then and there, one fine spring afternoon in a hammock in his private garden? But, to look at it another way, why shouldn’t he? As good a time as any other. Death is not always the thief who comes in the night.’

‘You sound very, ah, unmoved about this,’ I said.

‘I have thought long and hard about it. I have tried to be dispassionate. Then, I examine the sequel to this. My mother sincerely grieves, I think, at my father’s death. That was no playing, such as Hamlet complains of when he calls his mother Gertrude a hypocrite. My uncle Sir Thomas too showed grief, though in a manly way. He is not a Claudius, surely, full of fine words as he secretly clutches the knife. Each of them, widow and brother, naturally turned to the other for consolation. Consolation soon – very soon – changed to love. Again, what’s exceptional about that? We are told in Leviticus that if brothers dwell together and one of them dies then the widow should not be married outside the family to a stranger.’

‘That is the case when the wife has not produced a son,’ I said. ‘Then the brother should perform the duties of a husband. But in this situation there was at least one son, you.’

William glanced at me in surprise.

‘My father was a parson,’ I said. ‘Whether I wanted to or not, I soaked up Bible learning every day of the week.’

‘There is no great gap between pulpit and stage. That’s why they’re always at each other’s throats.’

I was beginning to warm to this fellow, for all his airs.

‘My father wouldn’t thank you for saying so. Like our City fathers, he held that the playhouse was the root of all abomination.’

‘And so
you
are drawn to it. Does he know how his son earns a living?’

‘My father is dead. My mother also. The plague-beast struck at Bristol a couple of years ago, and one of its tails or legs swept through our little parish.’

‘And now you are a player. Well, whether the words of Leviticus about the marriages of widows and brothers apply or don’t apply, I’m sure that it is not so unusual for two people in such circumstances to find themselves attracted to each other.’

He said this as if he were talking about
my
mother and father.

‘Probably not.’

‘So, you see, these events taken separately – a death and a remarriage – are nothing out of the ordinary.’

‘But you don’t actually think that?’

‘To be more precise, I don’t feel it. Without being able to say why, I don’t feel that all’s right with the world.’

‘There’s a simple way of clearing this up,’ I said. ‘When did your father die?’

‘The first week in May.’

‘And the first performance of
Hamlet
was in June, I think.’

I struggled to remember when I’d seen the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. It was a successful play and so had received more than a couple of performances; and now it had been revived in the autumn. My first appearance with the Chamberlain’s Men had been on the previous day in this very production. But I was fairly sure that my first sight of it as a
spectator
had been in early summer. High white clouds scudding above the open playhouse. A sense of freshness in the air, even among the groundlings. Standing at the back I’d pulled my hat lower to shade my gaze from the afternoon sun as I witnessed the destruction of the royal court at Elsinore (little dreaming that I would myself be appearing within a few months on that very stage as the emissary from England, come to announce the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to unhearing ears!). Yes, this was in June.

‘It was June,’ I said. ‘I remember.’

‘Well?’

‘Your father’s death took place before the play of
Hamlet
ever appeared on the Globe stage. You’re not suggesting that our author got the idea for his play from what happened to your father?’

‘Of course not,’ said William Eliot. ‘I’d never accuse any playwright of making up ideas or borrowing from reality. They’d be justifiably insulted. Anyway, every educated person knows that there’s an older version of your author’s
Hamlet,
some crude stuff that’s been around for years. And that rough version probably had an even rougher version preceding it. And one before that, and so on.’

‘So it’s not a case of nature holding up the mirror to art, as you wittily put it,’ I persisted. ‘Your father’s death occurred before the play was first performed. But it’s not the other way round either. The play was not composed so far in advance of your father’s death as to indicate that the author might have “borrowed” from reality, even assuming that he’d be prepared to do anything so indelicate. The two things, the play writing and the death, must have been occurring more or less simultaneously. Why, he must have been at work on
Hamlet
in April or even during May itself if it was first staged in June.’

‘He writes fast.’

‘No more than average,’ I said, pretending to a knowledge of our author’s compositional habits. But what I said applied to any playwright worth his salt. We had no patience with any author who laboured for weeks and then produced a few paltry scenes.

‘So there’s no connection between the events of the play and my father’s death, you think,’ said William.

‘Just coincidence,’ I said with a confidence that I didn’t feel.

‘You’re probably right,’ he said. Then after a pause, ‘You remember that I had a proposition to put to you?’

‘Yes.’

He broke off to order another drink for each of us, and, when our hands were full and our mouths refreshed once more, said, ‘You’ve nowhere to lodge presently?’

‘You know already of the difference of opinion with my landlady, apparently.’

‘I can offer you quarters in my house, that is in my mother’s and stepfather’s house. It’s on the other side of river, not so convenient for the Globe perhaps, but in a rather better neighbourhood.’

‘I like it here,’ I said. ‘This is the players’ district.’

And it was true. Southwark was near to being lawless territory, outside the writ of the City authorities. Our one respectable building was the Bishop of Winchester’s Palace. Otherwise we were all stews, playhouses and thieves’ kitchens, together with an array of prisons from the Clink to the Marshalsea – the ultimate destination for many of our folk. Southwark residents tended towards the unrespectable: coney-catchers and bully boys, whores and veterans . . . and yet somehow I, the country parson’s son, felt in my element down here in a way that I hadn’t when I lodged north of the river.

‘I didn’t mean permanent quarters,’ said William. ‘I can see that there are advantages to living near your workplace. Though you’re only temporarily with the Chamberlain’s Men, I understand. There’s a man who is off visiting his dying mother, is there not?’

Who had he been talking to?

‘I’m not interested in your offer,’ I said. ‘I prefer to find my own accommodation.’

‘No offence, Master Revill. I have an ulterior motive in asking you to take a room in my house. I’m not in the business of looking after players who have been thrown out of their lodgings for covering their landladies with piss.’

A smile took the offence out of his words. But I was busy wondering if he knew Nell.

‘Master Eliot, get to the point.’

‘I would like you to help me find the murderer of my father.’

I began to think that my new acquaintance shared more than clothing and a fashionable melancholy with that figure who had swept the London stage, the lord Hamlet. Master William Eliot, like the Prince, had a trace of madness in him.

‘I thought there was nothing suspicious in his death.’

‘Outwardly, no.’

‘When you break it down into a series of events there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. Isn’t that what you said – or something like it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then?’

‘Master Revill, when you see a play you watch as one scene succeeds another, and you will perhaps not at first understand how the scenes are linked, or that the play with all its disparate parts is nevertheless a whole – sometimes a ragged, clumsy whole – but still something complete unto itself. Whether the play is well-made or ill-made there is connection, there is a plan, a plot.’

‘You should not confuse a play with real life. If there is a plot down here in this world, it is not likely to be discerned by us poor mortals,’ I said, and then realised I was echoing the kind of thing my father would have uttered on Sunday (and the rest of the week).

‘Surely you can see,’ said William, ‘that someone has already created that confusion? My father’s death in some of its details, my mother’s remarriage to my uncle and so on – all of this has been revealed on the stage not a few hundred yards from where we are sitting. You say coincidence, but I say coincidence is simply a word for what we don’t yet understand. And if there is a plot behind Master Shakespeare’s work, which there is certainly is, then why should there not be a plot behind what has happened to the Eliot family?’

I made no answer. There was some flaw in his argument but I was unable to identify it.

‘So what am I supposed to do?’

‘Accept my offer of lodgings. You would be received into the house as a friend who has done the Eliot family a favour and who is in need of accommodation for the time being. I can speak for my mother and I believe I can speak for my uncle in this respect. You will of course need to cross the river daily for your work at the Globe. But while you are in my mother’s house, watch and listen.’

‘Watch, listen? For what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Goodbye, Master Eliot. This is chasing shadows.’

I made to rise, but half-heartedly.

‘Please wait.’

He held me gently but firmly by the upper arm until I resumed my place beside him on the bench.

‘If I were not being honest with you, I would claim to have seen something in those shadows. But I cannot say, I cannot see, if there is anything there or not. And that is tormenting me.’

He spoke evenly, but the grip of his hand on my arm and the rigid set of his mouth showed that he was in earnest.

‘You are casting me as Horatio,’ I said.

‘Hamlet’s friend.’ He laughed, but without much mirth. ‘Then you accept?’

‘I don’t know. You must say what I am to look for.’

‘Everything and nothing. I am an interested spectator, a biased one. I need a neutral pair of eyes to see whether there really is anything out of place.’

‘Out of place? How will
I
recognise what’s out of place in your house, for God’s sake?’

‘You will know what you are looking for when you find it.’

‘Very cryptic, Master Eliot.’

‘William.’

‘It is still cryptic, whatever you prefer to be called. But do your clever words actually mean anything?’

‘That is the very question I would ask about my father’s death. What does it signify?’

‘And why me?’

‘Because you showed quickness and dexterity when you accused the steward of theft this afternoon. More important, you were right to act as you did. Because you are a player, and have a sense of the divide between what men say and what they are. And because you know the play.’

‘That play?’

‘Yes, the play about a father’s death and a mother’s remarriage. Don’t worry that I’m confusing what really happened with what is presented daily on the playhouse boards. But the connection is a . . . pregnant one.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘But suppose there is nothing for me to find or suppose that I am a less percipient spectator than you give me credit for? You must understand that nothing may come of this pregnancy.’

‘I hope it won’t,’ he said. I did not believe him. He wished, as all of us do, to discover the worst. He continued, ‘As I said, I respect my uncle and I love my mother. I wish them well in their new life. Though they were married so soon after my father’s death . . .’

Having made the arrangements for my reception into his mother’s house and after a few more inconsequential exchanges, William Eliot left me sitting in the Goat & Monkey, bemused at this latest shift in my fortune. I couldn’t deny that his offer of lodging was opportune. It would save me the cost of my rent, a not insignificant part of a jobbing player’s insignificant wages. Putting up in one of the grand houses on the north bank would be a dozen times more comfortable than anything I could afford across the water here in Southwark. Most of all, it would be an introduction to people of wealth and influence – and if one is a poor and youngish player making one’s way in the capital then that is something not to be sniffed at.

And I was curious. The story that William Eliot had recounted was so queerly parallel to events in our author’s latest play that, sceptical as I was, I could not help being affected by what he said. My own argument, supported by dates and times as well as by common sense, was that there could be no link between what had happened in a private garden on the other side of the river Thames and the imagined events in an orchard in Elsinore in the Kingdom of Denmark. If dramatic logic or the parallel were followed, then Sir Thomas Eliot would turn out to be a murderer, the Lady Alice an adulteress possibly complicit in the death of her husband, and – before the action was concluded – her son William would himself have carried out a fair few killings.