Sleep of Death

by Philip Gooden

  NR: Did you admit him to the house?

  TB: No.

  NR: You turned him away?

  TB: No.

  NR: I don’t understand.

  TB: It is simple enough. Listen. I was sat here as I am with you now, and this ‘gentleman’ knocked and announced himself as a player or an author I forget which – as if he expected I would fall down backwards in amazement at his greatness. But before I was able to say anything to him there was a great commotion in the street beyond the gate and so I went to see what was happening.

  NR: The commotion was to do with the gentleman?

  TB: Nothing at all to do with him. It was some apprentices who had uncovered two lurking foreigners and were scoffing and laughing at them. The boys made a ring about them and were mocking the foreigners’ hats or the foreigners’ manners or their foreign words.

  NR: You knew they were foreign?

  TB: I heard their words and I did not understand. I only know plain English, Master Revill.

  NR: What did you do when you saw these apprentices and these tormented foreigners, Master Bullock?

  TB: Do? It was no business of mine. Let them that be a-cold blow the coals.

  NR: Of course. What happened?

  TB: The foreigners received a blow or two and a hatful of curses before they managed to run away. They got off lightly – but I think the boys meant no harm.

  NR: So you stood outside the gate.

  TB: I guarded the house. If they had run in my direction I would have shut the gate against them.

  NR: The apprentice boys?

  TB: The foreigners.

  NR: Then you returned to your post in here?

  TB: Just so.

  NR: And the visitor, the, ah, gentleman?

  TB: Gone.

  NR: Where? Into the house? Back into the street?

  TB: Into the street.

  NR: You’re sure? You saw him?

  TB: No. But he would not have dared to enter the house, so he must have returned to the street.

  NR: While you were watching the apprentice boys and the foreigners.

  TB: While I was doing my duty, guarding this house.

  NR: You’ve never seen him since that day, the afternoon of Sir William’s death?

  TB: Many people visit this house. The Eliot family is a great family and they are accustomed to receiving important visitors. Those are the ones I remember.

  NR: So you know nothing about this caller except that he was a player or an author—

  TB: Oh he gave his name, Master Revill.

  NR: Which you cannot call to mind, no doubt.

  TB: Yes. But not perfect. Like a muddy reflection I cannot get it whole.

  NR: Part will do.

  TB: Let me see. What was it? Shagspark, Shakespurt, Shackspeer, something like that.

  Once again I was playing Jack Southwold in A City Pleasure, the play about the country brother and sister who come to London and who are, it is revealed at the end, not really siblings and so may marry in safety. The play was a hit, a palpable hit, despite my predictions about it to Nell. It was during this piece that I had encountered the Eliot family for the first time and, as Thomas Bullock had reminded me, helped to expose the false steward Adrian. All this only a few days earlier, but it seemed like another life. And that had led to the invitation from young William Eliot to lodge in his mother’s and uncle’s house to see if, by keeping my eyes and ears open, I might detect anything out of the way about the death of his father.

  Well, I had found out things, unwelcome things. Like a foolish mariner that sets out on a bright morning across smooth glittering water, I started full of spirit and expectation. And before I knew it I was sailing beyond the confines of the harbour and out into the open seas and had no charts to help me while, overhead, the skies looked dark. For what I was groping my way towards was that the mysterious man who had called at the house on the afternoon of Sir William’s death, the man who had eluded the distracted doorkeeper, slipped into the main garden and then somehow penetrated the inner garden, the man who had hidden himself up in the pear tree and carved his initials into the bark as he waited to drop on his victim like a thunderbolt, this man was none other than Master William Shakepeare, the principal author, joint shareholder and occasional player in the Chamberlain’s Men. The carved initials had been given flesh, as it were, by Thomas Bullock’s words, which could not but support the idea that Master Shakespeare had indeed haunted this house.

  I had earlier conceived of Master WS as a murderer and a cheat and a rogue – just as I had seen him as a bishop, a prince and a king. He was all these things and more besides, because these were the things which he had made in the quick forge of his imagination. But now I began to wonder whether he might not be in reality what he had so successfully presented on stage in the persons of King Claudius or Richard III, a secret and a sly murderer.

  The part of the crookbacked king brought to my mind a tale, a piece of gossip, which was given to me by Robert Mink. As well as his own lyrics, he evidently loves a naughty story. He wheezed with laughter as he told me backstage how, one day when Richard III was to be performed, Master WS noticed a young woman delivering a message to Dick Burbage so cautiously that he knew something must be up. ‘Or soon would be up,’ snorted Mink. The message from the girl was that her master was gone out of town that morning, and her mistress would be glad of Burbage’s company after the play; and the tail of the message was to know what signal he would give so that he might be admitted. Burbage replied, ‘Three taps at the door I will give, and and then I will say, “It is I, Richard the Third”.’ Richard was one of Burbage’s biggest parts, according to Mink. ‘Women were drawn to his crookedness.’

  The servant girl immediately left, and Master WS followed after her till he saw her to go into a particular house in the city. He enquired about it in the neighbourhood and he was informed that a young lady lived there, the favourite of some rich old merchant. Near the appointed time of meeting, Master WS thought it proper to arrive rather before Dick Burbage. He knocked three times on the door, as agreed, and delivered Burbage’s line about Richard the Third. The lady was very much surprised at Master WS’s taking Burbage’s part; but our author is after all the creator of Romeo and Juliet. The language of love and persuasion flows in his veins. You may well believe that the young lady was soon pacified, not to say satisfied, and both she and Master WS were happy in each other’s company. And now here comes Dick Burbage to the same door of the same house, and repeats the same signal. Knock, knock, knock. And he delivers his line about the crookback king, little knowing that another has stolen a march on him. But Master WS, he pops his head out of the window and tells his fellow player and shareholder to be gone. ‘And do you know what he said to him?’ said Master Mink, hardly able to get the words out for laughter, “‘This is not your place, for William the Conqueror reigned before Richard III”.’

  As I sat with Messrs Tawyer and Sincklo in the tiring-house waiting for my entry in the last act of A City Pleasure I was musing over this story and wondering whether it was true. Didn’t it contradict what Nell had said about the Chamberlain’s Men? Wasn’t Burbage a good, uxorious man? Was anyone what they seemed to be? If it was true, and not a piece of inventive, malicious gossip, what did it show about Master WS – nothing much, perhaps, except that he was mischievous and quick-witted (as I had seen for myself when he rescued me from the attentions of Adam the boatman) and that he might look out for another man’s woman. Nothing much.

  ‘Well, Nick, and how do you find our Company?’

  It was Master WS, wearing a bland expression and his ordinary day-clothes. His voice has a country sweetness to it (how many in this realm are drawn to the great city as if by a magnet!). I was reminded of Old Nick’s honey tones and how they made my hairs bristle, whereas with Master WS you at once trusted and liked the man. And this reminded me in turn that I was due to go back and see the apothecary after this afternoon’s performance. But here and no
w I was face to face with this man whom, at that instant, I had been convicting in my mind of a stealthy murder.

  ‘I am privileged to work here, sir.’

  ‘We are glad enough that you are with us. I have seen you play, let me see, three times now. And I have heard good reports from Master Burbage.’

  I glowed. A warm feeling filled me. How ridiculous that I could think that this civil gentleman, with his kindly brown eyes and slight country burr, was branded with the mark of Cain!

  ‘And in this thing of Master Boscombe’s you are . . .?’ he said, referring to A City Pleasure. I suspected that he knew and was asking for the sake of conversation.

  ‘John Southwold, a citizen of London, a figure of fun though not to himself.’

  ‘It is a good piece,’ said Master WS.

  ‘Oh it seems to me not so good,’ I said, meaning of course not so good as one of your own, but not having the courage to say so outright.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘It is clumsy,’ I said quickly. ‘For – for example, you can see straight away that the brother and sister are not brother and sister and that they will be married by the end of the piece.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ said Master WS. ‘A comedy must end with a marriage. It’s a rule.’

  ‘And,’ I ploughed on, ‘it does not seem to my eyes a very deep satire. The audience enjoys the jokes. They laugh at the corruption and foolishness that the author shows them.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t they?’

  ‘But they do not understand that the author is showing them themselves. Holding the mirror up to nature.’

  Master WS half smiled in acknowledgement, I supposed, of my reference to one of his own lines.

  ‘They think that the author is showing them their neighbours,’ he said, ‘and that is what makes them laugh.’

  ‘Then they do not understand properly.’

  ‘Everyone thinks that the satirist’s darts are aimed at the man in the next room,’ said Master WS. ‘It is not in human nature for any of us to consider the same darts as lighting on ourselves. That is why we can all bear satire so light.’

  Again I noticed that deplorable tendency to punning. Accordingly, I tried to raise the tone of our dialogue with a classical reference.

  ‘Then it is like Pegasus and the Gorgon.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘For Pegasus held up a mirror and deflected the glance of the Gorgon that would have turned him to stone. Just so each of us turns away the killing glare of the satirist.’

  ‘Very good, Master Revill, though I think that you mean Perseus. Perseus was a hero, Pegasus was a horse with wings.’

  This correction was delivered so gently that I did not feel more than faintly humiliated. I was eager to keep talking, or rather listening, to this quiet man. From his clothes and relaxed manner, he had no part in the afternoon’s comedy and was apparently casting his eye backstage in the same way that a landlord might survey his estate.

  ‘You mentioned rules a moment ago. The rule that comedy ends with marriage. What about tragedy?’

  ‘A tragedy may begin with a marriage.’ And Master WS looked for a moment wistful.

  ‘Discord in marriage, that is comedy, is it not?’ I said. ‘The unfaithful wife, the cuckolded husband who may be dubbed the knight of the forked order – the man with horns is always a laughing stock.’ (I was thinking, on stage, yes; but I was also thinking of Sir William Eliot.)

  ‘But what if he that was hit with the horn was pinched at the heart, truly pinched, and so ran mad?’ said Master WS. ‘That might make a tragedy. Or if the wife accused of infidelity was innocent. That might make a tragedy.’

  ‘It sounds as if there are no rules then,’ I said, to draw him on. ‘These things are usually funny.’

  ‘Oh, there are one or two rules, if you want to call them that, though I prefer to say tricks of the trade. The kind of tricks that an alchemist might use – or an apothecary – in order to draw in an audience which is anyway willing to be seduced.’

  Was it my imagination or did Master WS’s gentle gaze suddenly harden as he said ‘apothecary’? I fancied that he was looking very intently at me and I grew uncomfortable.

  ‘As?’ I said. ‘What rules of play-writing do you mean?’

  ‘That nothing very important shall happen in the first few moments, while the audience is settling down to watch and listen. They must finish talking to their neighbours or swallowing their drink or lighting their pipes. Only when they have attended to their own comforts can they give their full attention to the play. And so the business played out on stage at the beginning should be small beer.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, obscurely disappointed. I had been hoping for a revelation from Master WS, not observations on the eating and drinking habits of the spectators. He continued:

  ‘Or – to give you an example from the other end of the action – before the climax of a play the hero shall withdraw from the action. The audience will not see him for the space of an act or so. That way, when he returns they are the more pleased at his return and the more sorrowful at his demise. Prince Hamlet is kidnapped on his way to England by pirates and we do not see him for a time. At the same time, the author must not make the fourth act overlong, in case the audience grows impatient for the hero’s restoration.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, wondering whether there was not real wisdom to be found after all in such small things.

  ‘Now, Nick, I must not distract you because your cue arrives in a moment.’

  He clapped me on the shoulder in a friendly way and then went across to have a word with Messrs Tawyer and Sincklo. So absorbed had I been by Master WS’s words and – to be truthful – so concerned had I been by the impression I was making on him that I had almost forgotten the play unwinding on stage. He hadn’t though. I realised that, all the time we’d been talking in low tones, he had been listening to the lines that reached us from the far side of the tiring-house wall and assessing the time remaining before my next entry. Master WS must have an excellent working knowledge of A City Pleasure if he knew when a minor player such as myself was due to appear. And all this for a work not his own, and one that in my eyes had appeared to be a journeyman piece. I resolved to pay more attention, to try to work out for myself some of those things that he had termed the tricks of the trade.

  After the performance I made my way across the Bridge and up towards Paul’s. The streets were beginning to empty and I remembered the recent occasion when I had been convinced that I was being followed. This time I experienced no warning prickle, no sense of being observed. I felt inclined to laugh at my suspicions and the caution of hiding away under the slimy pillars of a pier on the river. Most likely the plump, respectable-seeming citizen I’d glimpsed was exactly what he seemed. Similarly with Master WS. This courteous and thoughtful man, with his fatherly concern for the younger members of the Company, how could he be other than what he appeared? Yet, as I walked up Paul’s Chain, I thought too of how fond Master WS was of disguise and doubleness in his plays. He has told us himself how one may smile and smile and be a villain.

  In Paul’s the business of the day was concluding. Sellers and buyers were withdrawing to do battle again on the following morning. I thought of the young man that Nell and I had seen, fresh from the country and surrounded by coney-catchers like a solitary sheep among a pack of wolves. How much would he have lost in the card-game or whatever it was he had been lured away to, lost not just in money but in his good opinion of himself? Also forfeit would be his innocence about London. Unless he was unusually forgiving, he would never think of the town again except with anger and resentment. For a moment I felt ashamed of our bustling city and sorry for all the sheep that flock here to be shorn.

  In the corner of the churchyard was the apothecary, Old Nick’s. It crossed my mind whether I should have asked Nell to accompany me since it was she who had an ‘arrangement’ with the old man. But Old Nick had been precise when he said that he wished to see me alone.


  I pushed open the door of the shop. Inside, it was was even darker than on my first visit. The end of the day was overcast and little light penetrated through the squinting slit that passed for a window. After a time I could make out the recumbent shape of the alligator, together with the mermaid’s tail and the unicorn’s horn, all swaying gently overhead in the draught from the ill-fitting door. At the back of the shop on the wall hung the animal and vegetable materials, shrivelled or sagging, of Old Nick’s trade. A glass item on the counter reflected a gleam of light.

  I waited.

  I cleared my throat.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, my voice sounding oddly muffled. ‘Nick, Old Nick?’

  He would make the same sinister entry as on my and Nell’s previous visit, materialising gradually from the dust and darkness at the rear of the shop. Probably he was watching me at this very moment, his own wrinkled vision accustomed to the dark places where he did his dirty business. Probably he was waiting until my unease and discomfort had reached a level that would satisfy him.

  I spoke the apothecary’s name again, more loudly.

  Silence. Silence in the shop apart from the odd drip of water and the occasional creak from the objects hanging from the ceiling. From outside, from the street, came the welcome shouts and shuffling sounds of ordinary life. I shivered. I would have left the dark shop if I hadn’t had the feeling that to do so would be to show myself as a coward – and not just in my own eyes. I had a strong sensation now, when there was no one around, of being watched. Also, I reminded myself, I’d come to this place because Old Nick had summoned me and for a reason: to find out from the apothecary whether he’d discovered anything on the sleeve of old Francis’s shirt.

  Maybe, if the old man himself was absent, he had left a note, some indication of where he’d gone or what he’d found out. But even as I made up this idea I knew that it was not so. If Old Nick had anything to reveal to me, he would do it in person. Nevertheless, to break the stillness, I began half-heartedly to cast around in the gloom, feeling rather with my hands than finding with my eyes, groping on the counter top, across the warped wooden floor.