“I have talked with Isabella, see,” said Nell. “And she has told me how matters stand.”
“Matters? Stand?”
“With you and with her and with her husband too. Her husband Jack.”
“Oh God.”
“He knows all.”
“Say you so?”
I felt myself going hot and cold at once, and blushes breaking out all over my face, and the wound on my thigh throbbing fiercely.
“I do say so.”
“He has not said anything to me.”
“Is there a law that says the cuckold must speak to the cuckolder? Should he not rather run him through?”
She removed her hand from my privates and jabbed me in the belly.
“Oh God,” I said. “Jack is a peaceable man. He is my friend.”
I buried my face in the stinky blankets and rugs that were piled on the narrow bed.
“The more shame for you if he is your friend,” she said remorselessly.
“I know,” I said, feeling very sorry for myself.
“But I can tell you why he has kept silent.”
“Because he means to stab me instead?”
I visualised Jack waiting in some dark corner and then leaping out to complete the work which Nunn had begun. No, the scene did not convince.
“I think we can leave you to stab yourself, Nicholas. You do that well.”
“I know the proverb about a knife and a wife,” I said.
“But that isn’t the reason that your friend Jack does nothing.”
“What is it then?”
“Because it suits him that you should occupy his wife.”
“What?”
“Though it does not suit me,” said Nell.
“What?”
“You are a parrot today, Nicholas, with your beak gaping in surprise and the same sound emerging. I say that it suits him because he is more interested in another member of your Company. Mistress Horner says.”
“Who, Jack is?”
At this point my mouth must have been gaping even wider.
“He is on most friendly terms with a boy player – I forget the name—”
“Martin . . . Hancock, it must be,” I said slowly as light began to dawn.
“It is possible that was the name she mentioned.”
“They are often together, it is true. But I thought it was only . . . friendship.”
“So it is too. Friendship and other things besides. And Isabella tells me that her husband has not done her a good turn for, oh, eight months now.”
“A good turn?”
“What you did me some time ago now.”
“What we did together,” I said, though my mind was on other things. Jack and Martin . . . so.
“Therefore Isabella Horner was glad enough to turn to an energetic young player for a good turn . . .”
“Oh.”
“. . . and now she has her eye on another in your Company. Someone senior to you. A poor player was all you were, was what she said.”
“Perhaps she will give him some of her potions,” I said, inwardly relieved to have this confirmation that Mistress Horner was aiming her arrows in a different direction and brushing aside her dismissive description of me. Well, almost brushing it aside.
“Oh, I think she hopes to be fed on his potions,” said Nell. “She is enchanted by his words. They weave a spell about her. And it is someone who you admire, I believe.”
“I wonder who it is,” I said, not wondering at all. “Don’t tell me.”
Then I did a very childish thing and clapped my hands over my ears so as not to hear my friend Nell name the new suitor of Mistress Isabella Horner. Of course, with hands thus occupied, I had left open the rest of myself to attack. And attack me Nell did – but in a loving way, a way which showed (without words) that she had forgiven me for my dalliance with Isabella and showed furthermore what she meant by the expression ‘a good turn’.
A couple of mornings later I was lying at my ease in the spring sunshine and gathering my strength on a turf bank outside the Coven. I’d taken a scroll into the fresh air so as to get acquainted with my next role which, as it happens, was in Master Richard Milford’s second play. His first, A Venetian Whore, in which I’d played the Duke of Argal, had been staged in the brief interim between our last rehearsals for Twelfth Night and that Shrove Tuesday presentation before the Queen.
Whore had been a modest success, though somewhat overshadowed by the Company’s royal affairs and, in my own mind, by the dramatic sequel to that evening. The playhouse audience was pleased by this bawdy comedy, and Messrs Burbage and Shakespeare and the rest were pleased that the audience was pleased, and Master Milford, he was very pleased with life in general. No doubt relieved too that I had not unmasked him as an unscrupulous plagiariser and sneak thief. I was fairly sure that he, like a number of others, had made free with my room at the Coven and searched through my chest for those damning sheets which would link him to The Courtesan of Venice. As a result I’d suspected him of foul play in the matter of May and the cauldron, as well as pursuing me down to hell in the netherworld of the Globe. Now, as I should surely have intuited, Master Milford might have stolen some scraps of paper, but he was no murderer, no hunting hell-hound.
In fact, by comparison with the other things which people had been perpetrating around me in the last few weeks – murders, both attempted and accomplished; treason and insurrection; gross lies of state and a politic duplicity – a spot of plagiarism and the theft of a few pages appeared positively innocent.
So, following the success of his first piece, Richard Milford’s second play was already in hand, to be staged by the Chamberlain’s after the lenten season had finished. It was titled The Murder in the Garden, and appeared to be a domestic mystery or tragedy. I had his own word that it was all his own work, and perhaps it was this time. Of course, I didn’t have the full story, only the scroll of my role. I was pleased to note that my scrolls were slowly growing bigger as I too grew up into my place with the Globe players.
I’d taken my part to the turfy bank outside with the best intentions of committing to memory a hundred lines or so of The Murder in the Garden, but the soothing warmth of a watery sun and an inclination to fall asleep at odd times (I was still a little weak from the thigh wound) tugged at my eyelids. I was enjoying the red play of light on the underside of those same lids when a sudden shadow fell across them. I blinked, to see an individual blocking the sun. I assumed that it was a passer-by, come to purchase some of the sisters’ brew. As far as I could tell, May’s death had made no difference to their business, and they were still using the fatal cauldron to mix their noxious messes. I hoped they’d scoured it after they’d removed her corpse, while knowing perfectly well that they wouldn’t have done.
I gestured with my thumb in the direction of the Coven.
“They’re in there,” I said.
“Who?”
“April and the rest of the sisters in the Coven.”
“How do you call it?”
The Coven.
I sat up fast then because I recognised the voice of Master WS. Sure enough, it was the playwright and no common wayfarer who was standing in my light.
“I – I’m sorry, sir – I thought you’d come to buy their brew—”
“Later perhaps. I have come to see my wounded fellow. How are you, Nicholas?”
“Well enough, sir – William.”
“And your wound?” He gestured at my dressed leg.
“I am mending fast.”
“I am pleased to hear it. So it is not a case, Nicholas, of ‘Thigh no more, ladies, thigh no more’?”
I did not dignify this ‘joke’ with a response (there are limits), and after a time Master Shakespeare cast his eyes about in search of fresh material.
“So this interesting-looking place is where you lodge.”
“For the moment.”
I resolved to move as soon as I could properly walk again.
&
nbsp; “Learning your part, I see.”
He sat down beside me on the bank of turf and took the scroll.
“Richard Milford’s new thing?”
“Yes. Murder in the Garden.”
“I enjoyed his Whore. More to the point, our congregation did too. A nice, light piece for the middle of winter, to distract our minds before the royal performance.”
“I thought it – it was – a little like . . .”
“Yes? Like what?”
WS turned his large, curious gaze on me.
“Like . . . your own Merchant of Venice, William.”
“Of course it was. All plays are made out of the scraps and fragments of other plays.”
“Of course,” I said.
“But I have come not to talk about Master Milford, Nicholas, but to commiserate with you.”
“Thank you.”
I felt myself growing warmer under the wintery sun.
“And to congratulate you. I hear that the Queen herself summoned you at the end of the performance.”
I had not made a great noise about this in the Company, perhaps fearing that (as with Nell) I would not be believed.
“I will not ask what you talked of,” said WS.
“She liked the play,” I said.
WS seemed gratified by this, but only slightly.
“And then afterwards you had that regrettable accident. Fell on your own dagger, or some such thing.”
“Oh yes,” I said, looking away and now feeling that the sun had grown altogether too warm. “I was careless.”
“You were not the only individual around the Palace to come to grief that night.”
“No?” I said, supposing that he was referring to Essex.
“No. There was a gentleman discovered on the ground near the Court Gate. It appeared that he had fallen from an upper window – or the roof.”
“Did he—” – I swallowed – “—do they – who was it?”
“It appears that he was a courtier, though his name slips my mind,” said WS. “A fine gentleman but they say that, like many of his kind, he lived beyond his means. He was heavily in debt.”
“Death cancels all accounts,” I said mechanically (while remembering Nunn’s words about gold speaking in all tongues).
“Yet few are indebted to it on that account,” said WS.
I winced at the word-play. WS must have noticed for, clapping me on the shoulder, he made to rise. “Well, Nicholas, I will leave you to learn your lines or to enjoy your sleep in the sun.”
He stood up, again casting his shadow across me.
“Sir?” I said tentatively.
“Yes.”
“I recently ran an errand for you to a certain gentleman, who was lodging temporarily in Essex House.”
Shakespeare said nothing, and I could not tell from his sun-limned outline whether he was willing to listen to me or not. However, I ploughed on.
“And I wondered . . . whether all was well with that gentleman?”
I knew that Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, had, for the time being, avoided the fate of his friend and cousin, Essex. I knew that he was incarcerated in the Tower. But I knew no more.
“He has lost his liberty and will not regain it for the moment. How can it be otherwise? But, do you mean, will he lose any more? will his life be forfeit?”
“I – I – think that was my meaning, yes.”
“The answer is no. I believe that the gentleman is safe from the extreme penalty.”
“It may be presumptuous in me to say it. . . William . . . but I am glad.”
My heart hammered. I thought of Wriothesley’s touch, his brilliant gaze, his designation of me as Mercury.
WS lingered for a moment.
“Not presumptuous in you. After all, I sent you to him with some small reminder,” he said. “That he should be mindful of himself.”
(I thought of WS’s lines, the ones which I’d carried to Wriothesley at Essex House – ‘For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any Who for thy self art so unprovident.’)
“He chose to ignore it,” he continued.
“But you still saved him,” I said, recklessly perhaps but wanting to establish once for all what was the case. “By keeping a foot in both camps, by listening to the overtures of the Essexites and staging Richard and by letting the Council know everything that was happening in advance, you saved your friend. It was an arrangement. The Council knows everything, and in return Southampton is allowed to live.”
“There is nobody to say so.”
“Didn’t you tell me that you had contemplated the story of Damon and Pythias? The friends who would lay down their lives for each other.”
“A play is not life,” said WS.
“There was a bargain struck,” I said excitedly.
“Nicholas, I think you’ve been lying overlong in the sun,”
said WS. “Either that or you’re still weak from that wound which you inflicted on yourself.”
“Of course,” I said.
At that moment there was a great clatter and a shouting and wailing from inside the Coven. Shakily, I stood up. Out of the house rushed the pig and the dog and the chickens and the cats, followed by the three sisters, my joint-landladies, April, June and July. Much flailing of limbs as they pushed through the entrance. There’d apparently been some upset in the witchy interior. Once outside, and ignoring altogether the presence of a distinguished stranger on their turfy bank, they shouted and screamed at each other. By now, I had grown slightly skilled in their strange tongue, and from the accusations and counter-accusations that were flying to and fro, I understood that the cauldron had been upset and a quantity of valuable ingredients (powdered unicorn’s horn, essence of dead toad, ground dogs’ tongues and so on) lost to the world.
As the screeching and the screaming continued, I grew more and more embarrassed, I was used enough to the antics of April, June and July, but was very unhappy that they should expose themselves in all their witchy wretchedness and squalor to the sharp eyes of Master Shakespeare.
What would he think of these howling hags? More important, what would he think of Nick Revill for lodging with such she-devils? I was about to say something about my intention to shift lodgings soon, very soon, when I observed that he was observing this scene of the squabbling women, the fleeing animals, the smoke-filled entrance – observing all this with a pondering eye.
He tapped his forefinger to his lips.
“What did you call this place, Nicholas?”
“The Coven, William.”
“And these three women, they have names?”
So I told him, expecting him to laugh or express disbelief.
But Shakespeare did neither of these things. Instead he simply stood there, gazing at the three quarrelling witches, tapping his lips.
“Hm,” said WS finally. “Hmm.”
Endnotes
1. see Sleep of Death
2. see Sleep of Death
Death of Kings Page 29