The sound of the feet in front changed from striking on stone to the hollower thud of board. A moment later I was treading on a little wooden jetty. A torch burned forlornly at the end. It was low-tide. The head of a ladder led down into darkness. Of my guide there was no sign.
“Oh step down.”
The voice came from below.
I do not like being told where to go. More, I do not like boats. I’ve never glimpsed the wide open sea, and see no reason to – the Bristol Channel was enough for me. I will not willingly exchange the firm-set earth for the slipperiness of water. Nevertheless I turned about and clambered down the ladder. The deck rocked very slightly as if in confirmation of my arrival. Nemo must have had others to assist him because the torch was suddenly withdrawn from the head of the jetty and, at either end of the boat, I felt rather than saw oars or poles thrust against the wooden piles. With a little lurch we were pushed off from the land and launched out onto the dark current.
All around was pitch black. I was afraid to move in case I stumbled over a coil of rope or other maritime lumber and toppled head-first into the river. Beside me stood my companion, his breath coming in soft sighs. Then he grasped me by the arm and ushered me through a gap in some thick fabric which seemed to serve as the entrance to one of the low little huts on deck. It was smoky inside this makeshift room. A slight light came from a couple of candles in the corners and – for heat on this sharp midnight – a tripod of glowing charcoal stood to one side. There were no seats; instead, large cushions were scattered about in apparent invitation to recline. I thought of a Roman general on campaign against some tribe of barbarians. The motion of the boat could be felt underfoot and there was the occasional muffled movement of an oar or the slop of water against the side.
“Lay yourself down, sir, make yourself at ease.”
Nemo’s voice came from close over my right shoulder. I made an abrupt shift around, spinning on my heel, for I wanted to get him full in the face, to take the measure of the man. I was tired of secrecy and subterfuge. I turned rapidly, intending to give my guide a small surprise. He turned his own face quickly away but the precaution was unnecessary. The light in the cabin was very dim and, anyway, he had smeared his countenance with some blacking substance. His eyes alone glittered.
“I prefer to remain obscure. It is better so.”
So saying, keeping his face averted, he touched me lightly on the breast with his fingertips (I shrank slightly from him) and I almost fell back on one of the cushions littering the tiny cabin. Then this strange being, clad in nondescript grey or black, tall enough to have to stoop as he moved across from me, settled himself on the far side of the room. The tripod of hot charcoal caused the dusky air to shimmer and I had the sensation that I was looking into a dream, or a nightmare, in which all identity became an unknown or shifting question.
“Have we stopped moving? We are no longer moving, are we? Where are we?”
I was no longer conscious of any motion from the boat, nor was there any sound from outside.
“We are somewhere off-shore, anchored in mid-stream.”
“Safe from either bank,” I said.
“You speak more wisely than you know, sir. The walls of this cabin are well-quilted, as you may see. Sounds are deadened. We are away from prying eyes and ears.”
For all the contact I felt with reality, we might as well have been floating through the empty air in our little sealed, tentlike chamber.
“Is the world so curious to know what you do?” I said.
“The world is a curious place and a perilous one,” he said. “There is much to guard against.”
“I do not understand . . .” I began. “I do not understand what you do, what the part you play is.”
“I am like the night watchman. I work while others sleep,” said Nemo. “Indeed, I work so that others may sleep. I walk the streets and, seeing a flame creeping from the corner of your house, I shout ‘Fire!’” – he delivered the exclamation without raising his soft voice – “and so save lives and goods. Or I grab hold of that rogue who is now, even now, making his stealthy way towards the casement which your foolish housewife has left ajar. There are outbreaks of fire in the great ship of state. There are always windows left carelessly ajar.”
“We live in troubled times,” I said, trying to match my interlocutor’s portentousness.
“These are indeed troubled times,” Nemo echoed. “There are mad plots that you would scarcely credit. For instance, there is a certain gentleman who is planning to dry up the river that we are floating on at this present moment.”
“Dry it up – how?”
“With a species of burning-glass. And then there is another individual who lives in Finsbury and who is in the pay of Spain.”
“I suppose he intends to extinguish the sun.”
“No. He is training up an ape in the art of assassination. Him we have not moved against yet, but the moment the ape shows signs of being able to wield a knife proficiently we will arrest the both of them.”
“The ape too?”
“Would you leave a murderous ape at large, sir?”
I said nothing. The little chamber that we sat in might have been the product of an addled brain.
“And there are deeper, more perilous currents. Men who are to be taken more seriously. I believe you know who I am referring to. There is a man has a house on the Strand.”
“The Earl of—”
“Shh. No names. Though I must tell you that there is more than one earl in question. And then there is another man. A commoner. William Shakespeare.”
“Shakespeare,” I said. “I seem to recognise the name.”
I struggled in the gloom of the cabin to make out the ash-coloured face of my interlocutor as he nestled in a mound of cushions on the other side of the cabin. But his countenance, his whole form, wavered in the close, stuffy air. His voice remained soft, even when describing absurd conspiracies, even when uttering threats.
“Tell me your dealings with Shakespeare.”
“He is my employer. He and Master Burbage and the other shareholders in the Chamberlain’s.”
“I do not mean in the way of ordinary business.”
“I am not sure what business you mean, then.”
“Let us leave that for the moment,” said Nemo. “First tell me about the dialogue between Master Phillips and Sir Gelli Merrick.”
The reference did not take me by surprise.
“If you know of it already, why do you need to ask?”
“This is not a test of them, sir. It is a test of you.”
“I wish to speak to Master Secretary.”
“You were fortunate to be granted one interview with him. Even he cannot be everywhere at once or available to all. Come, tell me what passed between Phillips and Merrick. If everything is above board, you are doing no disservice to your company of players.”
“We are asked to perform a play, no more,” I said.
“That I know. And to be paid forty shillings and so on.”
“What more is there to say?”
“Most of the tale is in the telling. I want to know what you made of the scene. I want to know how you construed it.”
So I told this strange, dirty-faced man what I had overheard in the Book-keeper’s office, although first I had to explain the circumstances under which I came to be there. Then I described how Master Augustine Phillips had seemed suspicious or sceptical of the request made by Sir Gelli. How he had fingered it first, before giving assent.
“How did he give assent?” said Nemo. “Willingly? With understanding?”
“As far as I could tell, it seemed to be be no more than a matter of business,” I said.
“Like your dealings with Master Shakespeare and the others?”
“Not at all,” I said. “That is a business tempered with shared aims, shared pleasures and hopes. But this thing with Merrick, if that is his name—”
“That is his name.”
“It was a transaction only.”
“Simply business?”
“We all have to earn a living. Those of us who are unlucky enough not to be born earls.”
“I think it may be lucky you mean – before this is concluded.”
“Should I really call you Nemo?” I said, trying to wrest some advantage from him.
“That is how I am known here.”
“So on this boat you are Captain Nemo, and when you seize innocent men from the street you are . . . what are you then?”
The figure facing me seemed to dissolve into the smoky air, so ill-lit, so hazy was the tiny cabin.
“I am nobody. Be content not to know, sir.”
“I have no choice,” I said.
“What you have said is half a story. Now tell me what transpired with Master Shakespeare. You were seen talking with him alone in a corner of the Revels Office for a good quarter of an hour.”
I did not register surprise that he knew about my recent dialogue with WS at the Twelfth Night rehearsal. To be honest, I would not have been surprised if he’d informed me of the exact colour of my stool that morning.
“Yes, we did speak,” I said.
It occurred to me, in a little burst of scruple, that what had passed between Master WS and me was privileged conversation, unlike that between Phillips and Merrick at which I had been an unacknowledged and unwilling third. This distinction stood out very clear in my mind and I tried to explain it to the dark figure on the other side of the cabin, hoping, I suppose, that he might release me of the necessity of informing on Master WS. For I could well see that what I had been asked to do cast the great playwright in no very favourable light. Foolishly, I muttered something about loyalty.
But it was futile.
“This is no light matter, sir,” said Nemo. “I can see well that you are actuated by loyalty to your Company, and to the individuals who compose it. No bad thing. But there are other, greater loyalties.”
He paused.
“Besides . . . if you want to turn to loyalties now . . .”
“Yes?” I said, half knowing what was coming.
“There is the question of your friendship with Mistress Isabella Horner.”
Something curled and puckered inside me.
“Yes – I – what has that . . . ?”
“Loyalty is not divisible, I think,” said Nemo. “What would your friend Jack Horner say if he knew how his wife was occupied? And who was occupying her.”
“It is finished,” I said then added, “but although he is a peaceful man he would not be pleased, I think.”
“Beware those mild men,” said Nemo mildly. “Worse still, what would the senior men of your Company say, Shakespeare and the Burbages and the rest?”
“They are men of the world . . . anyway Master Shakespeare himself. . .”
“Yes?”
“Never mind.”
“Of course they are men of the world, as you say. This is not a moral question. But you are a newcomer to the Chamberlain’s, are you not, with your three months’ experience?”
“Rather more than four,” I said, aware that to quibble about such a detail was already to admit defeat. Nemo didn’t even bother to acknowledge my correction. For a moment I wished that I was being confronted with Master Secretary Cecil. Perhaps naively, I imagined that he would have been more understanding.
“They would not applaud the cuckolding of one member of the Company by another?”
“Perhaps not,” I replied, aware – as Nemo must have been aware – that companies of players, like other small groups of men with a common purpose, are held together by multitudinous, almost invisible threads of duty, mutual need and obligation. Confused by lust, I had carelessly slashed at some of those threads. My earlier conversation with Jack Horner had hinted at my discomfort, even my shame.
“But my lips are tight shut on this matter,” said Nemo.
“Provided I am open about what Master Shakespeare requested of me?”
“Just so.”
I was exasperated, less with Nemo and the secret machinery that lay behind him, than with myself. I had been trapped with all my high-minded talk of loyalty.
So I told Master Secretary’s grey-faced agent what had been requested of me by England’s leading playwright. Even if I didn’t properly grasp what Master WS meant by the words I was expected to convey, it was evident that they had meaning for others. He made me repeat Shakespeare’s words several times over, I mean the words that I had to pass on.
“You are sure that was what he said?” said Nemo. “That that is what he wants you to say?”
“His very words,” I said.
“No more?”
“No more.”
“You were seen to talk together for several minutes. And all for these few words?”
“Men may talk together.”
“Men should not talk quiet and private in the public gaze. It invites speculation.”
“We talked of friendship.”
“His and yours?”
“I would be proud to count him as a friend, but we talked in, ah, more general terms. Of the friendships of antiquity. Of Damon and Pythias. Of Aeneas and Achates.”
“You know that he and . . . this gentleman you have mentioned . . . the Earl of Southampton . . . were once friends.”
“I do not know it.”
“And are so still perhaps?”
“I do not know that either.”
“That is what we have to determine, whether they are still friends.”
“You could do so without my help.”
“No, sir. You are very essential in this matter. You are our man in this matter.”
“I am nobody’s man,” I said indignantly.
“Not even Mistress Horner’s?” he said.
“Not hers neither, no more.”
“Well, well, we shall see,” he said. “In the meantime we ask you to do no more than Master Shakespeare requests of you. That is, to deliver this message to his old friend.”
“And . . . ?”
“To observe how it is received and, if occasion demands, to report it to me.”
“I am no tell-tale.”
“It is a tell-truth that we require. You think that you are betraying your fellows but I say that you are not. You are defending the realm and you are defending them too. It is for their well-being and their protection that as much as possible be known. In knowledge lies safety.”
With these words and other similar ones this man shuffled me off. At some stage in our conversation the boat must have been directed back to the shore for when grey-face uncoiled himself to signify that we had finished and then ushered me out of his close, quilted cabin, I found that we were again in the shadow of a pier. The tide had risen while we were talking and I had fewer rungs of the ladder to climb. When I regained the wooden jetty I turned about. But already the boat was being pushed off by unseen hands and of Nemo there was no sign.
I was getting too old for these late nights, serving the state. I made my way back to the Coven. Now, I am not usually troubled about crossing my home patch, by day or night. It is true that Southwark is commonly regarded by those superior folk who live on the other bank as a lawless waste (though I’ve observed that that doesn’t stop them coming across in boatloads to take their pleasure). But if you’re native to an area, even if you’re a recent native like me, you discount their well-bred fears and fables, at the same time as taking a bit of pride in them. A finely jewelled lady, a gentleman decked out in valuables, yes, such people would be fools if they strolled our streets after dark. But indigence is its own protection. Why attack a poor player? He’s left the most valuable item he’s ever worn – his costume – behind him at the playhouse. The most precious thing about his person is likely to be the scroll from the Book-man containing his part for the next day’s performance, and unless I’m much mistaken the renegades of Southwark do not assail a man for a pennyworth of verse or a cupful of prose.
S
o I considered myself safe.
Tonight, however, walking away from Nemo’s strange river-craft and stranger words, I felt myself the object of a thousand eyes and half as many dagger- or club-wielding hands. Lurking behind every bush or tree or wall, tucked into every hole and corner, creviced in the night, were shadows who were waiting for me. And there were many, many shadows on that star-riddled night. There was something in the air. I remembered Nemo’s talk about plots. Well, the razor-sharp air was certainly infected tonight. With suspicion and unease and plain mischief.
There! What was the shape shifting stealthily out from behind the bole of that tree? Something rubbed its hands in the bottom of the ditch I’d just leapt over. A cough scraped the night. A portion of wall detached itself from its surroundings, dusted itself down and set off into the dark. My breath plumed out in front of me. I started to run. The cold air had already seized on the muddy ruts and puddles in the path so that they were slippery and brittle underfoot. Over the sound of my own panting I heard behind me a wheezing that could have been exhaled breath. In fact, I was near certain I could hear a twin pumping of breath – so there were at least two of them! I glanced over my shoulder – a double mistake, because I could see nothing anyway and because I skidded and almost fell. My home the Coven – ha! home – was a couple of hundred yards away. Despite the cold, beads of sweat were running down my forehead and into my eyes. The straggle of buildings on either side jumped and blurred to my sight.
As my feet thudded and slithered over the ground, my mind ran too. Ran not rationally, but frantically, as I considered the possible identity and purpose of my pursuers. Was it Captain Nemo and his invisible minions, come to catch me and haul me back to the boat? Perhaps it was my own fellows from the Chamberlain’s who thought that I was betraying them to Sir Robert Cecil, and who were running after me to tell me that they no longer wished me in their Company?
There was something dream-like, or rather nighmarish, in this jumble of thoughts – and nightmarish too in my panicky, skidding progress along the hard, muddy road that lead to the Coven. Finally I reached my ramshackle house, fell against the door, fumbled for the key, scrabbled for the hole, pushed the key home and twisted it violently. The door fell open under my weight and I tumbled through and slammed it shut with myself safe on the other side. After a moment, I peeped through one of the many cracks in the door. The road outside lay quiet. The frost and fresh ice glittered under the half-moon and the starlight. I waited. And waited. But no shape or shadow passed along the way. After a time my breathing calmed and my heart stopped banging.
Death of Kings Page 11