Anyway Master Doggett contented himself with condemning the deed for a third time – now calling it unfair, filthy and felonious – and then went off to report the matter to higher authority. So it was that Master Alan Talbot took over the investigation of Peter Agate’s death.
Relations between Master Benwell and myself were constrained. I had not moved out of my lodgings in Dead Man’s Place, nor had he asked me to, but he was no longer eager to hear the titbits of gossip or even to talk to me at all. I couldn’t really believe that he thought he was harbouring a murderer under his roof. Perhaps he was merely paying me back for that earlier rebuff when I had brushed aside his hovering hand, stared down his glazed eye. Benwell himself might have appeared a suitable suspect for this crime. Had he accosted Peter as he had once accosted me, been rejected, and in frustration or fury stabbed my friend? I took care to secure my door at nights but, even so, did not sleep well.
Through my head, when I lay down, ran that scene when I’d come through the door and found my friend’s body. I seemed doomed to repeat it again and again, like imperfect lines in a rehearsal. And there was another memory which recurred and which in retrospect began to seem like an omen or harbinger. It was much more minor than murder but strange and disturbing nonetheless. It had happened as I was leaving Middle Temple one evening, the one when Shakespeare had told me that Thomas Pope was about to return to the Company. I’d stepped out in the dank courts. It was foggy of course. We had been floundering in this fog-sea for days. Sometimes, for brief moments at night, it cleared enough to allow a glimpse of the stars but otherwise we might have been at the bottom of the ocean. The world had grown as small as Master Jute claimed it was when he showed me Drake’s relic – or even smaller since everything had shrunk to the few visible yards around you. A handful of lights were diffused through the gloom. Passers-by, some carrying lanterns, swirled up and then evaporated. The dankness clung to your face and the brassiness of the fog filled your nostrils.
My footsteps had rung hollow as I wound my way through the courts and alleys of Middle Temple. By now I knew the place a little. This legal temple was like a village, a deserted village. But not so deserted after all, because through the murk I detected a shape moving rapidly towards me along a walk. I gasped for, in the darkness, it seemed that the shape had no head. But it was merely that the man had his head right down looking at the ground, while the collar of his cloak was pulled up high.
He didn’t see or hear me, despite my involuntary gasp, and before I could shift to one side we collided heavily. I fell back and sat almost comically down on the dank paving. I couldn’t help it, he was broader and heavier than me, fleshier altogether.
“For God’s sake, man, can’t you look . . . ” The words died on my lips because the shape had already gone several yards beyond me, swallowed up by the night and the fog. Either he hadn’t heard me or had chosen not to hear. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware that he’d struck someone in his rushing passage. He must have been, though. If I was bruised after the encounter so should he have been. Was he a lawyer? His cloak had been lawyer-like, so far as I’d glimpsed it in the gloom. I thought of scrambling up and running after him and holding him to account. But I stayed where I was on the cold ground, overcome by a strange reluctance to move.
And by a slight fear perhaps. There was a scent in the air, quite apart from the smell of the fog. It was a rank, vulpine smell.
Preparations for the Middle Temple production of Troilus and Cressida ran smoothly enough. It was a pleasant distraction to play a Trojan prince who has lost his love to a rival and his friends and brothers in battle, and then goes out to slaughter everyone he can lay his hands on – reality was kept at bay. Although I heard no more from Alan Talbot, I wondered whether this might be the last time I would play with my Company. He could order my arrest at any time.
There was genuine sorrow among the Chamberlain’s at Peter Agate’s violent death. In a few short days they had got to know and like him. Both Dick Burbage and WS spoke warmly about him to me, and I was doubly grateful, not only because they too had liked my friend but because they plainly did not believe that I was implicated in his death. (Word had quickly spread of how I’d found the body and been questioned by the Middlesex coroner.)
I felt – curiously perhaps and unaccountably – that I had brought shame, even dishonour on my Company merely by incurring the suspicion of the authorities. It was not my connection with death and violence. Ben Jonson, who was sometimes involved with the Globe both as poet and player, had killed a man only three or four years previously, and furthermore that dead man had been a fellow player. But Jonson disposed of Gabriel Spencer honourably in a duel, even if he was hauled off to court for it and nearly paid with his neck. No one in the theatre world thought any the less of him for what he’d done. In fact, I’d been told that Spencer was regarded as a troublemaker. There is a world of difference between facing a man front-to-front in the open field and sneaking up on him in a lobby to stab him through the heart. While none of my fellows considered that I was capable of such a dishonourable and treacherous act, it pained me to know that there were outsiders who would believe it, and that the Chamberlain’s Company would be tainted by association.
The only person who was interested in a prying way in Peter’s death and the grisly details of it – or the only person who didn’t bother to conceal his naked curiosity with a show of fellow feeling – was Richard Milford, poet and playwright. We met by chance late one morning in the precincts of Paul’s Yard. He was in the company of his wife and, oddly, Henslowe’s unofficial agent, Tom Gally, the man who’d been in the tavern with Chesser. Gally said nothing directly to me but continued to gaze down his pointed finger in the direction of whoever was speaking. Richard Milford asked me so many questions about the murder that I wondered whether he was seeking new material for some violent and sensational drama. I kept my patience for a time but eventually retaliated. I asked him how things were going with his story of incest and double-dealing, The World’s Diseas’d. Had the seniors in our Company relented? Were they willing to stage the piece?
“Oh, there are plenty of takers,” said Richard airily, but with a sidelong glance at Gally. Aha, I thought, that’s the way it’s going. He’s negotiating with the Admiral’s Men, and this man is a go-between. The suspicion was almost confirmed by his next comment. “If Burbage and Heminges and the rest don’t want quality, if they’re too short-sighted to see it, there are many others who will. Who do.”
Tom Gally nodded vigorously at this point but kept his finger under his eye.
“So they’ve turned you down?” I said.
“It is a difficult thing, Nicholas, to be always ahead of public taste, a little way ahead.”
“But you were confident you were providing what the public wanted.”
“The public doesn’t always knows what it wants until it gets it.”
“Then it’s as well you have your patron – patrons, I should say.”
“Whatever your private opinion of Lord Robert, he and his sister have been all grace to me. Haven’t they, Lucy?”
He turned to his wife who was standing quietly next to her husband. She was, if I’m honest, the real reason I’d been willing to stop and subject myself to Richard’s questions. Not for his company but hers. I’d even been willing to talk about Peter Agate because she was listening. Perhaps I hoped for her sympathy. So far she’d made no comment. She had a way of glancing up through her long lashes which was as interesting as any speech might have been. Now she simply said, “They are good friends to my husband, Master Revill.”
“Ben Nicholson is printing the play, even as we speak,” said Richard, gesturing across the Paul’s precinct. There was a great concentration of publishers and booksellers in this part of town. “We have just been to see him. It will be a handsome volume. You know it was he who published my Garland.”
I visualized Richard as someone who would be constantly running to the publishers, checking
that all was well. I owed money to Master Nicholson. He was a genial, white-haired tradesman who did business with the Chamberlain’s and was tolerant about players’ bills.
“A precious volume, that Garland,” I said. “The more so because it contains verses about you, madam, I believe.”
I bowed slightly at Lucy Milford and was pleased to see a blush filling her cheeks. She looked up at me – those long lashes! – but said nothing. I’d meant the remark sincerely, insofar as one means any near meaningless compliment paid to a pretty woman. In truth I liked Richard’s poetic effusions, his slightly self-centred verses about love, transience and mortality. I thought they were truer to the character of the man than the violent actions and severed limbs of The World’s Diseas’d. But I’d also wanted to remind the poet-playwright of what he’d told me recently, that Venner’s sister was the supposed object of his love-lyrics. Or so he had informed her (while telling his wife something else). The duplicity of poets! Their shamelessness! But then I’d do the same thing if I was lucky enough to be a poet. I couldn’t be a poet. I knew, I’d tried. Even so, to be able to say I wrote these verses for you.
Richard didn’t respond to my compliment to his verses and his wife, other than by a tight smile. She smiled too, slightly, amid the blushes. We exchanged a little more small conversation. Gally still hadn’t said anything although he had been attentively following our words. Milford announced that the two of them, he and Lucy, would be attending the Middle Temple performance of Troilus and Cressida.
“I wouldn’t want Burbage and the rest to think I bear them any hard feelings for their frostiness towards The World’s Diseas’d, fools though they may be.”
The last thing Burbage and the rest were were fools, but I held my tongue, said goodbye to the Milfords and moved off. I hadn’t gone many yards when I became aware that Tom Gally had left them behind and was keeping pace with me. He kept his head screwed sideways and, from time to time, brought up his hand and sighted at me along his forefinger. Gally had long, soft, unkempt black hair. It reminded me of a sheep’s fleece. But I sensed the wolf beneath.
I smiled, grimaced rather, and walked quicker. But he wasn’t to be shaken off.
“Master Henslowe sends his commiserations over your recent troubles.”
“I thank him.”
“He knows that you are no murderer.”
I’d worked briefly for the Admiral’s Men soon after my arrival in London. I didn’t care much for Philip Henslowe, their manager. He was a hard-headed businessman who preferred to keep people in debt to him rather than be paid off, since they would then be out of his power. He was always looking for money-making opportunities outside the theatre, in brothels and bear-baiting gardens. During my early, priggish days I’d tended to disapprove of this. The Chamberlain’s Company seemed purer and more whole-hearted in their dedication to the drama. Nevertheless Dick Burbage and some of the other seniors seemed to get on well enough with Henslowe and, as I’ve said, a friendly rivalry existed between the two companies.
Tom Gally, however, with his squinty glance and pointy finger, was an unwelcome companion. To be told by him that my former employer did not consider me a murderer seemed a somewhat feeble form of praise. Even so, I just about managed to squeeze out more thanks.
“Master Henslowe is sorry too to hear of the sickness of your patron. These are difficult times for us men of the theatre.”
I doubted that Henslowe was that sorry about Lord Hunsdon’s condition but half smiled in acknowledgement, even as I considered how Gally was no real ‘man of the theatre’, but a hanger-on, a parasite. A self-appointed agent of our rival.
“The Chapel Royal boys,” he added. “They’re a danger, now.”
These were the acting children who’d been doing so well at Blackfriars recently. They were our competitors, true, but few in the Chamberlain’s considered them to be a real threat, or not that much of a one.
“Those little eyases couldn’t take the bread from the mouths of grown, experienced men,” I said, not as sure as I sounded.
“They are all the fashion. There are many boy-lovers.”
“Fashions come and go. We should welcome rivalry. You know what they say, Master Gally. It’s the storm that proves the roof.”
“Of course. How is he, by the way?”
Gally gazed at me down his finger-gun. By now we had almost completed a circuit of Paul’s Yard.
“How’s who?”
“Why, George Carey. Lord Hunsdon.”
“Strong. Vital. He will live to be as old as Moses.”
“I hear otherwise.”
“Master Gally, if you expect me to report on the health of our patron, you’re talking to the wrong person. I suggest you address yourself to Master Shakespeare or Dick Burbage for an answer.”
“Forgive me, Master Revill, I was not aware that a great man’s health or sickness might be a subject for secrecy.”
“And you must forgive me, Master Gally, if I’m suddenly overcome with my own sickness.”
“I am distressed to hear it.”
“Its chief sympton is a violent aversion to continuing in your company. Goodbye.”
And I veered off from him, angry inside myself that he should have gone this roundabout route to try to discover how close to dying our patron was.
It took me several minutes to recover my calm. I was glad to see, though, that I had shaken Gally off, or at least that I could no longer see him in the throng of the Yard. He was a troublemaker who would do his best to do down his – or Henslowe’s – rivals. Someone to be watched. A dishonest fellow.
As if to prove my own honesty to myself I thought of walking over to discuss my small debts with Benjamin Nicholson, who was printer, publisher and bookseller all in one. I had bought several volumes of verse over the last few months, partly out of a wish to read the latest thing but also to see if I could learn the craft of verse-writing. Poetry is surely a skill like any other, it can be learned – or grasped – in its outward manifestations. But there is also something inside it that you can’t get at, like the kernel in a nut. Can’t get at without smashing the shell. And the kernel is not only in the poetry, it is also in the poet. If you do not already possess the kernel inside you then there is little chance you will pen anything but the most mediocre verse. So I’d concluded.
And as I walked across the Yard I paused in the vicinity of the great Cross that stands in its centre and concluded something else: that I would not settle my bill with Master Nicholson, not just yet. You see, I didn’t know whether I might not at any time be arrested by Master Alan Talbot. He had it in his power to cast me into prison, to bring me before magistrates for trial, & cetera. Why settle my debts now if my future was so clouded? A man who is about to be hanged smiles at petty obligations. Besides I hadn’t got the money.
In this way I toyed with my prospects. Did I think I was about to be accused of my friend’s murder, convicted and hauled to the scaffold? I didn’t know. Maybe I thought I could avert that possibility by imagining in detail how it might happen and so, by fearing the worst, placate the Fates (who delight in taking us by surprise).
And talking of surprises . . .
“Master Revill!”
A hand clutched at my arm. I looked into a lined, chalky countenance. It was the alliterating man from the Goat & Monkey, he who had warned Peter against stepping out on to the stage. The ex-player. His ears stuck out from under his cap. The last time I’d seen him had been as he was hauled out of the ale-house by a crew of boatmen.
I shook my arm free but he too kept pace beside me. Yet another eager, talkative companion. I’d had enough.
“You are a friend to Peter Agate?”
“Was a friend,” I said.
“Alas,” said this gentleman. “There is woe in the world.”
I stopped, turned towards him and said, “Sir, have you anything to say to me? If so, say it and be done. I have had sufficient conversation for this morning.”
“I was a player once,” he said.
“I know, with Lord Strange.”
If he was surprised that I was aware of this he didn’t show it.
“Until I saw the playhouse for what it was.”
“We’ve been here before,” I said wearily. “You will say that it is a place of perdition, and I will respond that it is a bower of bliss. Can we leave it at that, Master Chesser?”
I was only giving him this much of a hearing because he had been, once, a member of my trade in a way that Tom Gally could never claim to have been. I had recalled Chesser’s name from Peter’s account of their second meeting. We stood in the centre of Paul’s Yard near the big Cross and the world, woeful and otherwise, flowed round us.
“It is the devil’s hole,” said Chesser. “But it is not too late to climb out.”
“Of course.”
“I saw him once. In Derby.”
“Saw him? Saw who?”
“The devil.”
I might have moved on but this superannuated player gripped my arm again with a hold that was almost painful. His eyes glared, yet he no longer looked so absurd. Despite myself, I was attentive.
“You are familiar with the tragical history of Dr Faustus, the hellish Conjurer?” he said.
“Kit Marlowe’s play?”
“A sacrilegious man. He denied the divinity.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to Christopher Marlowe, dead and murdered these many years in a tavern brawl in Deptford, or to his creation Dr Faustus who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for all earthly knowledge and delights. Either Marlowe or Faustus would have fitted the description of godlessness.
“We were in Derby,” said Chesser, “about that cursed play. A certain number of devils were keeping their circles on our stage, and Faustus was busy in his magical invocations, when on a sudden we players were confounded for we were all persuaded there was one devil too many amongst us.”
Alms for Oblivion Page 10