Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  I thought of Mistress Horner’s skill at compounding and combining. I remembered her raisin-fraught cakes; and then, her cat-like fury when I’d announced that I wished to see her no more. I thought that her culinary art might stretch to the ingredients for murder. I thought of her gypsyish, un-English background. Certainly I believed that she had the will to kill. I had left her on the pretext of preferring my own sex to hers, and for that I would pay. They say that there are some who like their revenge piping-hot while others prefer it cold (there is a third class who eschew revenge altogether, but we are not concerned with saints here). Isabella Horner had presented me with the poisonous bottle, knowing that I would one day – sooner or later – out of curiosity or need – go and taste it. Then, from a distance, she would be gratified to hear of the death of that rising young player Nicholas Revill in his obscure Broadwall lodgings, and she would hug to herself the secret of how she was responsible for his demise. Even were the bottle and its contents to be blamed, there would be no evidence as to who had given it to me. That knowledge would have perished with my person.

  She was the real witch in the case, Isabella Horner. April, May, June and July were as nothing to her.

  Still hunched over my chest, I attempted to work out the likely sequence of events. Old Nat had come to see me, with or without the knowledge of the Coven. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to creep up the rickety stairs without their being aware of it. In fact, the periods when they were drunk-asleep far exceeded the times when they were wakeful. In any case, they would have cared little if the raggedy animal man announced that he had business with me. Why did he come calling? To deliver a message, the piece of paper balled up in his other hand. No doubt he was acting on behalf of Nemo, as when he’d intercepted me the previous evening. Perhaps he’d been hanging around as I whiled away the hours most pleasantly in Nell’s crib (so much for the brief moments I’d planned to spend there). Then, knowing I must come back in the end to my hovel-home, he had stationed himself in my room, awaiting my return.

  Growing thirsty – more or less a permanent condition with Nat – he had rummaged through my sparse possessions in search of liquid refreshment. There, at the bottom of my chest, by bad fortune he had chanced on Horner’s bottle. How he’d have seized on it! In the same quick, grasping style as his hand-claw closed around the halfpennies one proferred him for his animal sounds. He’d unstoppered the green bottle, lifted it to his quivering beak, liked the faintly sack-like smell, upturned the thing and sluiced its contents down his ever-open gullet.

  And died.

  I remembered that Nat was never too particular about where or what he drank. His life was largely dedicated to raising the pennies that would enable him to slurp away his waking hours in various ale-houses. I remembered too that green, the colour of Horner’s bottle, was also the colour of jealousy.

  Definitely, Isabella Horner was one who preferred her vengeance cold, so cold that it was almost iced over. I shivered. I suppose I should have been sorry for poor Nat lying huddled there but it was of myself I was chiefly thinking, and how a fellow human being felt murderous towards me.

  My first instinct was to run to the authorities with my information, and I had half risen from my position by the chest to do so. But I quickly checked myself. To whom should this outrage be reported? The local constable? There were none on this side of the river. Besides, most of them were dolts, more likely to congratulate themselves on letting a knave go by than to risk trouble in the attempt to apprehend him. A magistrate? Well, yes, that gentleman might have the wit to grasp the crime which had occurred in my room. Might think as well that the possessor of the poison-bottle was also the individual who’d administered the dose. To be accused of a murder plot originally directed against oneself, and then to hang for it, would be like painting the lily, as Master WS has said in a different context. Everything was complicated by the connection that had existed between me and Mistress Horner. And how could I be really sure that Nat had died by her hand? So sure that I wanted the affairs of the Chamberlain’s Company – or at least of two of its players and a wife – to be aired abroad, which would most certainly be the result if the death were reported to those in authority.

  In this way I argued myself into a less uncomfortable position, one where no action was necessary, or not straightaway. Besides, I reminded myself, I was at present engaged on important affairs of state and could not afford the distraction of magistrates and investigations into what was essentially a question of domestic jealousy. When the Essex storm had blown itself out, when my own slight role in it was concluded, then I might make a move against Mistress Isabella Horner (though what sort of move I hadn’t the faintest idea).

  However, one thing was clear. I could not sleep with Nat’s corpse in my room. It was not conducive to my health, in any sense. Guided by the candle’s flickering flame, I tugged at his body. It came easily. Underneath his scarecrow rags, Nat was small-boned, as thinly nourished as a bird in winter. My room opened directly onto the stair-head so I paused there to hoist him over my shoulders rather than risk a noisy, bumping progress down the rickety treads. With some difficulty I positioned his arms so that they flopped past my ears, then held him pickaback fashion. He did not seem so light and pitiable now, and the cold mask of his countenance pressed on the nape of my neck. I swallowed hard then listened. From the lower floor came human and animal snores.

  I put one foot tentatively out in search of the first downward step. I usually took great care in going to and from my room. Like Jacob’s ladder, the Coven flight could well have led you straight to heaven (or, more likely, to the other place), so uneven and rotten were the stairs and so high the risk of tumbling from or through them. Now with a body on my back, I proceeded with extra caution, fearful of waking the slumbering sisters or their familiars. The steps creaked and groaned as, swaying, we made our way down. I was glad that Nat had earned only pennies, that most of what he’d earned must have been pissed away in drink, that he was, no heavier than a great shrunk starling – for even as he was, he was a big enough burden for me.

  We reached the floor of the sty in safety. The fire under the cauldron hadn’t quite died away and it cast a dim red glow across the rough floor. As usual, a haze of smoke filled the room. The humped shapes near the entrance were April, June, July and the pig. One of them farted, another sighed, a third muttered some incomprehensible syllable, while a fourth grunted, but I could not have apportioned any sound to any particular origin. I do not think it was the pig which grunted. All at once I was seized with the desire to laugh. With a dead man on my back, and an uncertain future to the front, I shook with suppressed laughter until my eyes watered. Nat’s draped arms shook with me.

  Then, after my little fit, I moved towards the door as softly as if I were walking on eggshells. I threaded my way between the sleeping lumps. By the entrance I fumbled for the key with one hand, keeping Nat hoist in position with the other. The door opened creakily inwards and, while stepping back, I trod on a cat’s tail. At least I think it was a cat. There was a hissing and a scrabbling in the darkness. I almost dropped my burden in fright. More rumblings and grumblings from the sleeping forms but no one rose up to challenge me.

  Through door and into road, turn round with body on back, pull door closed, no need to lock it, am not going far, where am I going?

  Don’t know.

  The night air was like a bucket of cold water thrown in my face after the fug of the Coven. I was sweating from the exertion of carrying Nat and from fear. My breath feathered forth. Now I was out in the open I had to do something, to dispose of Nat’s body somewhere. Even in a dubious area like Broadwall it would not do to hang around with a dead man on your back. The longer I spent over it the more likely it was that I would be seen by someone, even in the middle of the night. I remembered the other evening when I ran back to the Coven, convinced that I was being pursued. Who knew that there were not eyes out there now in the darkness, watching this strange,
double-backed, nocturnal beast?

  I turned southwards, away from the scatter of buildings and towards the more open country. I hunched forward to keep balance. Nat’s head bumped against the back of my head while the rest of his body slipped and slid behind as I attempted to keep him in position by grasping tight hold of his shrunk shanks. I picked up speed on the frosty track. I had the weird sensation that he had come back to life and was breathing down my neck, urging me to make haste. It was like a childish game of pickaback when boys play at being knights in the lists and race around trying to unseat each other. But it was also most unlike, horribly unlike, such a game.

  Above us was the great arc of a starry night. On either side stretched the flat fields of London, fenced by naked hedgerows and skeletal trees, their line interrupted by the occasional dwelling-place. The moon, now higher and smaller in the heavens, looked down indifferently. To my right one of the many streams that debouched into the river ran more or less parallel to the rutted road. I still had no idea what to do with the man clinging to my back. I suppose my intention was to put as many furlongs as possible between where I’d found him and wherever I would leave him. At the same time, I had to balance the danger of discovery with the need to go a distance. And it is hard to think straight if you are bumping down a slippery track on a cold night with a murdered man around your neck.

  In the end, after I’d gone perhaps half a mile and the sweat was pouring into my eyes and my breath coming in great wheezes, the problem of how far to travel was solved. I skidded on an icy patch and fell sideways, losing touch with Nat. I rolled onto my back, surprised, the breath knocked out of me, for an instant forgetting where I was, what I’d been doing. Then I recalled my fellow-traveller. Unwilling to get up, I merely turned my head to one side. How wide the road seemed when you were lying right down among its frost-bound ruts! Wide and empty too. Nat had disappeared. After a time it occurred to me that I should look to my other side. There, seemingly at a great distance, across a veritable landscape of ridges and furrows, lay a huddled shape that was probably the animal man. He must have rolled there after we fell together.

  Well, he could rest in that spot for a while. He was in no hurry to move. He wouldn’t get cold, he wouldn’t get hungry, wouldn’t get thirsty (always the real consideration with Nat), wouldn’t get anything ever again. He was beyond harm. The stars over my head started to blur and shimmer in my eyes as I thought of these matters. Then I sat up like a man invigorated. It was myself I was really sorry for, or sorry for as much as I was for him. The difference was that I was alive and Nat was not. He might have been beyond harm but Nick Revill most certainly wasn’t. It behoves every man to protect himself from danger.

  I stood up and walked the few paces to the body. He had landed on the opposite side of the road to where the stream ran. This half, the left hand, was bounded by a ditch beyond which was a bank overtopped with a row of trees.

  I had to leave the body somewhere and I might as well leave it here. Not out on the open road but in the decent obscurity of the ditch. This was hardly Christian burial but I could do no other, and I consoled myself with the thought that God will surely judge us according to the circumstances and conditions which He has laid on us.

  Once again I took hold of Nat, this time tugging him by the shoulders towards his final destination. I slid down into the ditch and he followed me close and willing. The sides and bottom were full of fallen leaves, the ungathered waste of many autumns. They rustled and crackled under our weight. Although it was less sharp down here than out on the open road, the frost had already begun to crisp the leaves. If I’d had a digging implement of any kind I could have attempted to burrow right into the flank of the ditch and given Nat at least a thin crust of earth for cover. But I had nothing more than my bare hands, so I scraped and scooped at a mixture of leaf and sticky soil until I’d made a sort of elongated nest.

  I pushed Nat into the area I’d hollowed out near the base of the ditch. I covered him as best I could, piling up the leaves again and laying some fallen branches and stems athwart the corpse. I didn’t delude myself that it would lie there for long undisturbed. The beasts and scavengers of the London fields would scent Nat soon enough and have him out of his covert. I suppose there was a certain appositeness in this: that he, who had scraped a living through imitating their wild cries, would now find himself supplementing their meagre winter pantries. Better such a fate, unchristian though it might seem, than that he should be uncovered by human scavengers, who’d simply strip his body of its rags and leave him Adam-naked. Much better than that he should be found by someone with the authority to question and investigate his death. (Not that this was likely, I told myself, for he’d most probably be taken for one of the many vagabonds who died outdoors in the winter months through cold and hunger and exhaustion.)

  As I put the final branches on his resting-place I promised Nat – I promised myself – that I would avenge his death. That I would extract a confession from Mistress Isabella of how she had planned to kill me and how, her schemes going awry, she had destroyed an innocent and harmless man whose cries and barks and whinnies had given an equally innocent pleasure to tavern-drinkers the length and breadth of the town. A cold fury rose up in me but I mastered it with effort, and said a short prayer over Nat’s ill-concealed remains, such as I had often heard my father intone over the dead in our village of Miching.

  I clambered out of the ditch and set my face northwards back to the Coven. As I neared my lodgings I saw a figure approaching from the opposite direction. We met at the entrance.

  “Master Nicholas, is it not?”

  “May?”

  “The very same.”

  On another occasion I might have made some light-hearted remark on seeing her, like “Where have you been? Out and about killing swine?”, since we were on quite easy terms, but I was not in the mood now.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  “And I have nothing to tell you,” I said, taking slight fright at her tone and wondering if she’d seen anything. “I am tired now and on my way to my hole.”

  So I did not question her on her night’s activities and she did not have the chance to question me on mine. This was perhaps a mistake, though I did not see it at the time. Once inside, she went off to join her sleeping sisters on the floor and I climbed my weary way up the rickety flight of stairs.

  The room was as I had left it. No more bodies, thank God! I was surprised at how little of the candle – which I had carelessly left lit – was burned out. The night might have seemed endless but, in reality, not so much time had elapsed. I carefully replaced the empty green bottle in my trunk, thinking to confront Mistress Isabella at some point with her killing machine. Casting about my quarters I caught sight of the ball of paper which Nat had been clutching. I unfolded it.

  As I’d half expected it was a message, a message written in plain English and from Nemo, if I was to believe the four letters appended at the end.

  It said:

  For the eyes of Nicholas Revill alone. You are to go to Essex House on Sunday morning by nine of the clock. You will be my eyes and ears there and report to me what you see and hear. You are in a position to do the state some service. Your compliance is required; do so, and then your loyalty will be rewarded and your Company protected from the misfortune that might otherwise overtake it for foul play. Do not doubt that I am the author of this that you are reading. Remember that I know of the trunk-work between you and a certain married lady.

  Read and digest. Destroy this note. Eat my words now.

  Nemo

  I read this several times over but was none the wiser. In fact, I was significantly more confused. The note raised a host of questions and answered none. Why should I go back to Essex House? And why on the Sunday morning? What was supposed to happen then, happen there? How did he – Nemo – know what was likely to transpire in the enemy camp when he was in Cecil’s employ? What did the reference to my Company and their
‘foul play’ mean? Was it a joke? If so, it wasn’t one that I was privy to. And how could I, a humble player, protect the Chamberlain’s? Was this scrap of paper, found in a dead man’s hand, really from Nemo? This was about the only point that I was able to answer with a degree of assurance. Probably it was his; the tone, half jocular, half threatening (that reference to ‘trunk-work’), seemed typical of the man. And I already had experience of how he employed Nat as a messenger.

  It was evident that matters were coming to a head. Of course, Cecil and the Council were desperate to be kept informed, but why should I act as their agent? Because I had a foot in both camps, a little voice whispered inside my head. I was a player – and there was obviously a faction among the players which was not ill-disposed towards the Essex cause – but I was also a true Englishman, loyal to my sovereign and mindful of the commonwealth. That was the lever which they were using to get me to act as a spy, that and my fatal intimacy with Mistress Horner.

  Anyway, all this was pretty much beside the point. They’d got me in a corner, had tied me to a stake like Stubbes the bear. If I had a foot in both camps I was also caught between them. If I didn’t do as Nemo’s note instructed, then it looked as though the Chamberlain’s Company might suffer. Perhaps it was arrogance to think so, but if I was able to safeguard the Company by making a return visit to Essex House, this was surely a small task to undertake. I toyed for a moment with the notion of running and telling all I knew to Dick Burbage or Master WS, there and then. I trusted them much more than I trusted the ash-complexioned, soft-mouthed Nemo. Him I trusted not at all.

  But I could easily be painted as a government spy in the Globe, someone who had voluntarily agreed to work for the authorities. Had I not already betrayed the Company in some small sense by cuckolding one of my fellows? The taste of that double-dealing was not pleasant in the mouth, although it had been overtaken by the terrible discovery that Mistress Horner wanted to do away with me. And how could I explain that to anyone? Go up to Jack Horner and say, “Oh by the way your wife nearly succeeded in poisoning me the other night. Matter of fact, she did manage to do someone in, you might remember him, old Nat the Animal Man. Pity. Shame. Oh, why did she want to see me dead? Well, you see, I was fucking her – sorry about that but she did start it in a way and I don’t think I’m the only one, if that’s any consolation . . . it’s not, oh well – and then I told her I’d rather be fucking a man, men rather, because that’s my true taste you see, my real bent, well not my true taste, I just said it to get out of . . . oh never mind. Anyway, she was so pissed off with me when I said this thing about men, that she gave me a green bottle full of poison and told me to drink it when I wanted to go back to the straight and narrow of womankind. No, no, of course she didn’t tell me that she’d put poison in the bottle . . .”