I noticed that Master William Shakespeare, the Ghost in a nightgown, was looking at Master Nicholas Revill, the player-poisoner dressed in a dead man’s mantle. He was wondering why I wasn’t wearing my proper costume. He was wondering where he had seen my outfit before. He began to make towards me, but at that moment I heard my cue.
The Player Queen has just wished a good sleep to the Player King,
Sleep rock thy brain,
And never come mischance between us twain
and when she exits I enter. As I did my fear dropped away. I became master of the stage. There was a appreciative intake of breath from five hundred people, the little gasp of satisfaction that comes from seeing a villain about to do his worst. While Hamlet flew around talking to Claudius and Ophelia in state of high old excitement, I stood rubbing my hands and pulling naughty expressions.
On the line ‘leave thy damnable faces’ I stepped forward to the recumbent body of Master Robert Mink. He was on the ground with his back to the double audience, that is the court audience of Elsinore and the real audience in the Globe. Before lying down to sleep in his ‘orchard’ he had carefully laid his crown to one side. As I moved forward, I threw covetous glances at this golden ring. I crouched down and reached out a finger towards it, tentatively, as if it were a hot pan. Then I stood upright, fumbled beneath the cloak for the phial of poison and spoke over the sleeping king. I noticed Master Mink regarding me with his open eyes.
With a trembling excitement I got to the end of the bit written by Master WS.
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecat’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property
On wholesome life usurp immediately.
At this point I should have poured the poison into the sleeper’s ears. Instead I went on:
This cloak I wear’s the colour of my heart;
A dead man’s gown, it serves to hide my art.
This poison too is death to all it touches,
He who mixed it now its power avouches.
It well behoves the murderer to beware,
The schemes he lays may bring him naught but care.
I murder now, but inward know full well
That all such deeds but speed my path to hell.
Then I bent forward to deliver my poison. And several things happened at once, some of them expected, some not. What should happen as the poison is poured is disarray. My lord Hamlet speaks quickly to King Claudius and the rest, explaining how this is only a play they’re watching. But his words have no effect, and the guilty King shouts for light and dashes for the exit.
What actually happened was this: the players who made up the court spectators, including Dick Burbage as the Prince, at once realised that I’d started to improvise. I sensed rather than saw their slightly puzzled looks and altered postures. What does this provincial lad think he’s doing? How dare he tamper with the lines written by Master WS, author, player and chief shareholder! Where is he taking us? And, if they were listening to the words I was uttering, they would wonder what I was talking about. The references to Adrian the steward, to Old Nick, the dead apothecary, the warnings to the murderer that all his acts serve but to enmesh him more helplessly in the nets of hell, all this had a private meaning that was far from the purpose of the speech as written for Lucianus, nephew to the king. What the Globe audience made of it was anyone’s guess. Probably hardly a one of them noticed anything was amiss. You’d have to know the play very well, as William Eliot did, to be aware of this little straying from the path.
In any case Burbage and the others retrieved the situation brilliantly, as you’d expect. Hamlet spoke his lines, Claudius panicked and headed for the exit. The agitated court dispersed. The overlooked players slunk off, puzzled at the extreme expression of kingly disapproval which their drama had provoked.
I’ve left the most important detail till last.
As I delivered my own inferior lines and leaned forward to discharge the poison into the sleeping king’s ear, I saw Robert Mink’s eyes fixed unblinkingly on me from his position on the stage floor. He took in my tall black hat, he took in my sable-coloured mantle. Like the other players he was aware that I had departed from the text in the lines which I uttered. Unlike them he did not seem baffled. Then it shot through me with the speed of an arrow.
He was the murderer!
Master Mink, who had given me the note for my Lady Alice on my second afternoon in the theatre. Who had hidden up a tree in an orchard in the springtime and secured the death of Sir William, her husband and his rival. Who had enticed poor innocent Francis to his death. Who had put an end to Old Nick and hung him up in the air. Who had urged false Adrian and fat Ralph and dumb Nub to do away with me most viciously. And all this for the love or lust of Lady Alice, so that he might possess her or her property, or both. Just as Claudius slays his brother so that he may lay his hands on wife or crown, or both. Had I not seen, during our meeting in the Ram, how he regarded himself as a true (and spurned) lover? For sure, the fervour and the self-pity with which he had delivered the Lover’s Lament had not been counterfeit. Had I not also witnessed his casual malice, the way he held the unfortunate potboy’s hand over the candle? Master Mink, I saw clearly (even though my brain was wild and whirling), was that most dangerous kind of man who is all sweet and easy on one side to conceal what is crabbed and angry on the other.
This takes many minutes to commit to paper but so fast is our understanding sometimes, that all these things I knew for true in less time than it takes to say ‘one’.
I believe too that my state – exhausted, cut and bruised, newly escaped from the threat of emasculation and death, red-handed with the blows inflicted on the false steward Adrian, conscious that my time with the finest, most noble company of players in the world had now run its course and that I would in future live my life as an humble swineherd, away from the terrors and temptations of this busy city – I believe, I say, that my strange state of mind and my fatigued body gave me an especial understanding. Standing not quite at right angles to the world, I saw more clear what was the case. And the case was not good.
This ‘understanding’ passed between us, Revill and Mink, without words, and Master Mink, he looked both sad and glad. Sad that his secret had been discovered yet also glad to have been found out.
Then he was up and off, escaping like Claudius from the unearthing of his crime. Yet to any onlooker his departure was simply in character. Like the rest of the players he departs quickly but quietly, to avoid the King’s anger and also to leave the stage free for Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
As I made my own way off stage I heard the scene taking its predestined course, with the prince mocking his one-time friends and exulting in the certainty of his uncle’s guilt.
I too had found a guilty man, but in a quite unexpected quarter. I thought of my stupidity in assuming that Master WS might be a villain, I thought of the way I had told Nell to fasten her gaze on Lady Alice. I wondered what to do next.
Now that I had discovered to my own satisfaction who had first forged this chain of killings I felt a strange responsibility for him. I saw Robert Mink exit not just the stage but the theatre itself and before I knew it I was outside in the street too. He set off, without a backward glance, down Brend’s Rents, the lane which runs past the towering white walls of the playhouse. He was still wearing the costume of the Player King, although without the crown. He ran the risk of a great fine if he was found out for this offence. But his hurry showed how he had already been found out, and in a rather greater matter than the taking of a costume.
The rain that had been hanging over our heads now started to fall in earnest. This was no fierce storm as on the last night, but a weeping in the heavens rather than their anger. Truly, Nature fits herself to us. Mink turned down one alley, then another, moving with steady purpose. Perhaps he was making for his lodgings. The alleys soon became slick with mud a
nd churned-up waste as the rain drove along them. I had not taken off Adrian’s hat and mantle. The first kept my head dry but the second soon hung heavy and wet. Still Master Mink did not cast his eyes over his shoulder. He was heading for the river, I realised. There were several sets of steps nearby which served the theatres and bearpit and other places of pleasure.
He reached the open riverside and I heard him hail a waterman. I could, perhaps, have run and caught him up but instead I moved more slowly. The rain was coming down thickly now and the far bank was a blur. As he was about to embark, he turned for the first time and saw me, but without surprise, as if he had known all the time that he was being followed. He seemed to be waiting. Then his gaze shifted to my right.
I turned and saw Master WS approaching. He was dressed in the night-gown he wore for his third and last appearance as a Ghost.
‘Wait, Robert,’ he shouted. ‘Master Mink, stay!’
But, as if that were the signal he’d been waiting for, Mink leaped into the waiting boat and pushed off from the steps. Almost at the same time he bent down and seized the standing waterman by the legs and jerked him up and out of his own boat. The man fell into the river. Like most of his kind he was probably no swimmer and it was lucky therefore that he landed in a shallow spot and was able to flounder and wade his way to safety.
Master WS seized me by the arm and pulled me in the direction of the river. The wind was coming colder off the water, blowing gusts of rain and spray in our faces. Waves slopped at the piers of the steps. Anybody already out on the river now would be heading for shelter, if they were sensible, and I doubted that any boatman would take a fare in this weather.
Master WS called to a boat that had just pulled in. The fare from the other side of the river scuttled off, pressing payment into the boatman’s palm, and ran up the steps to get out of the wet.
‘No sir, not in this,’ called out the boatman.
‘He’s taken my boat, Adam. The bastard, the cock-sucking arse-wipe, the triple-turned turd.’
This was the ferryman who had been so rudely ejected from his own craft, now back on shore, and standing beside Master Shakespeare and me, as witnesses to the offence against him. He was dripping from his immersion in the river and the rain. He was a powerfully built man. His chest heaved as he bellowed out these choice descriptions of the boat-robber. If Mink hadn’t taken him by surprise, the boatman looked as though he wouldn’t have been bested.
‘Not Adam Gibbons, is it?’ said Master WS to the ferryman who’d just docked, half shouting to make himself heard above the roar of the wind.
‘Depends who’s asking.’
The boatman was bobbing on the choppy water and his head jumped up and down above the top of the steps.
‘Adam Gibbons, the master boatman?’
‘Took my boat, he fucking did,’ bellowed the voice of the mariner beside us.
Adam the boatman was more interested in the compliments flying through the air than he was in the grouses of his fellow-sailor.
‘If you say so, sir.’
‘We have met, boatman. You said that if I ever needed a boatman for something special, I should just bear old Adam in mind.’
Recognition dawned in the streaming, upturned face of old Adam as it emerged into view above the steps. The water ran down his beard like rain off thatched eaves. Recognition dawned in me, too. This was the boatman who’d nearly throttled me when I’d accused him of being a pleonast. That last occasion Master WS had saved my life. Now it looked as if he was trying to endanger it. I might have more than one life, like the cat, but I did not consider that I had more than one in a single day.
‘Beg pardon, sir, didn’t recognise you in that . . . that . . . them night-clothes.’
‘That boat is my lifeblood and my livelihood, Adam. Bleeding bastard cunt’s taken my liveli-fucking-hood,’ said the ferryman whose boat was now bobbing away. Who would not recognise the authentic, oath-ridden tone of the Thames boatman?
‘Well, now is the time for something special, Adam,’ said Master WS, ignoring the desperate bellows to one side of us. In the midst of the downpour and the noise of the wind, there was in WS’s voice a note of good humour, even amusement.
‘We require you to pursue the boat that belongs to your fellow. We need the man who stole it and your fellow, he needs his boat back. Will you help us?’
Up and down bobbed Adam’s head.
‘I don’t know, sir . . . this weather . . .’
The wind took his words and hurled them round about. Whitecaps were forming in the middle of the river. Spray spattered the platform where were stood. Inwardly, I withdrew my notion that Nature or Providence matched their weathers to our moods or needs. This looked like an unwise moment to launch onto the Thames. I could see Master Mink pushing, pushing, pushing his way up and down and through the waves towards the far bank – though he had not yet succeeded in rowing far.
‘I’ll make it worth your while, Adam.’
‘Well, sir . . . that depends what my while’s worth, don’t it.’
The boatman’s head bobbed.
‘It will be a measure of your great skill.’
‘No flattery, sir.’ The head bobbed again.
‘I am sure you would like to help your poor robbed fellow here . . .’
‘No charity neither.’ The head bobbed once more.
‘Or are you like one of these fresh-water mariners, whose ships were drowned in the plain of Salisbury?’
I was still trying to work out this jibe and wondering how Master WS got away with it whereas I was handed a throttling for trying to be clever, when old Adam’s face bobbed up for the last time.
‘Hop aboard.’
‘And me,’ said the other boatman. ‘Let me get my hands on the fucking cunt.’
‘No room, Ben,’ said Adam. ‘Only these two gentlemen here.’
He obviously hadn’t recognised me. I would willingly have surrendered my place on the rocking, pitching boat to Ben – or to the archangel Gabriel for that matter – but Master WS seemed determined that I should accompany him. He stepped in first and I followed in an awkward movement that was something between a step, a scrabble and a jump. To move from the relative solidity and safety of the stairs to this narrow, swaying craft, to know that only a thin skin of wood separated me from the green slopping waters of the Thames, was to experience, and for the second time in little more than twelve hours, a powerful fear for my life. As I got down almost on a level with the tide, the river seemed to expand and fill the horizon, and I entered a watery universe.
I am no fish, I cannot swim.
On the bank, Ben the boatman was shouting obscenities into the teeth of the wind and waving his fist at his own distant boat, or rather at its occupant. Adam pulled out into the bouncing waters. Master WS and I huddled on the seats in the stern. I pulled my – Adrian’s – hat lower on my brows. WS was bare-headed and the rain beat at his large balding brows, but he did not seem to care.
‘Good, Adam, good, master boatman,’ he muttered by way of encouragement to the grizzled greybeard wielding the oars. WS’s face still showed traces of a ghostly painted whiteness and his sodden night-gown clung to his undergarments. I realised that he must have sped out of the theatre after us as soon as he had completed his final appearance as the Ghost. The play would continue whatever the weather. The players were partly protected by the stage-roof, while the better class of spectators sat snug in their boxes and galleries. The groundlings in the pit endured the rain as stoically as an army on campaign, appearing to enjoy the vicissitudes of the elements.
As far as I was able to see through the rain and spray the river was almost empty of smaller boats. This made it easier to keep sight of Master Mink in his stolen craft. I had crossed the river often enough by ferryboat but always when the water was, by comparison, like a millpond. Now I recognised for the first time the force and fury of which this great broad slippery fellow was capable. The jumping and bucking of the little ferry
boat was like being on a mischievous horse, and reminded me of my fear the first time my father had put me astride one.
‘We are gaining,’ said Master WS. ‘This is excellently done, master boatman.’
It was true that Mink’s boat seemed a little nearer. The figure of the rower was furiously plying the blades. Sometimes one of the oars flailed helplessly in the air, at others it was buried deep in the frothing current and Mink had to twist his body to retain hold of it. Like us, he was bobbing violently up and down, and either his motion or his diminished size against the river and sky – or perhaps the frantic futility of the to-and-fro action – made me think of a small child on a hobby-horse. It was plain that he didn’t know what he was doing and that matters were slipping out of his control as we approached the middle of the river where the current was strongest. At this difficult pass Adam’s skill showed through. He was strong in the chest and arms – as I knew to my cost – from years of pulling people from shore to shore. More important, he knew the river and its moods inside out, backwards and forwards, top to bottom, and although he mightn’t have ventured out in this weather from choice, now he was here he knew how to ride the waves. He knew when and where to thrust his blade deep into the swirling flow, when and where to withdraw it so that it just skimmed the spume.
I found that my own alarm had blown away, as if in the wind. It was partly the horrid fascination of watching an individual in much greater difficulty than ourselves on the water and partly the sense that we, Master WS and Master NR, were in the hands of a man who knew his trade and acquitted himself skilfully. I began to think that WS’s compliments to the boatman had not been so extravagant after all, and that, were we to survive this enterprise, I would treat this class of men more respectfully in future.
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