An Honourable Murderer

by Philip Gooden

  “It’s a device all right,” I said. “Let me tell you how it works. A playgoer is accidentally banged into by a passer-by on the way out of the theatre. A moment later a gentleman shoots off in pursuit of the passer-by, yelling out ‘Stop thief!’ or similar words. Meantime the gent’s companion – usually a lady because it’s more persuasive that way – stays behind to reassure the victim and to prevent them moving off. And a few moments after that the pursuer returns, all puffed out. ‘Oh dear, the thief has managed to get away this time. I do hope nothing’s been taken.’ And nothing has been taken up to that point. Best make sure, though. Best produce your goods, and so provide a display of everything valuable which you’re carrying. That’s when the real thieving starts.”

  I saw that my account carried a bit of weight with the Buckle mother and daughter. That’s exactly what happened, they were thinking. In a distracted manner both of them started to feel about for their valuables once more.

  “This is the reward of virtue, to be slandered by a player. A common player!” said Charity Thoroughgood.

  “I will forswear honesty in future since this is all the thanks we get,” said Anthony Thoroughgood.

  “Honesty and you haven’t been on nodding terms for years, Tony,” I said.

  “That’s God’s truth,” said another voice. “Mister Thorough-good wouldn’t recognize honesty even if he found it in another’s purse. And as for her virtue . . . well, her virtue’s been well handled, believe me.”

  “Not handled by you, Bartholomew Ridd,” said Charity. “Never been handled by you. You wouldn’t know where to put it.”

  I turned to see the aforesaid Bartholomew Ridd. The tireman had been on his way out of the Globe, having finished brushing down his costumes and hanging them up and working out who should pay their forfeits for the little harms done. Although I could have clouted him earlier I was glad enough to see him now. It was the playhouse pair versus the husband-and-wife coney-catchers.

  The Buckles, the mother and daughter coneys or dupes, looked from the Thoroughgoods to Bartholomew Ridd and me and back again, still not knowing whom to believe but with the balance swinging in our favour, especially after Charity’s last outburst. But the lady with the painted cheeks wasn’t quite finished.

  “Come along, my dear,” said Mistress Thoroughgood. “We will never prevail against such impudence.”

  With a shoulder-shrugging show of indignation, the couple made to move away. We were only a few yards from the corner of the alley known as Brend’s Rents. They’d be round it in a second and then they’d take to their middle-aged heels. But I was quicker. I yanked at Charity Thoroughgood’s cloak. It was a long garment, longer and fuller than necessary considering the mild spring weather. Underneath the cloak, tucked into an elaborate belt which was hung with straps and hooks, was an engraved pomander. The object looked familiar. It looked familiar because it was familiar. It had been dangling a few moments earlier from the waist of young Elizabeth Buckle. I grabbed for it as Charity twisted away. Luckily she hadn’t had time to secure it properly and the pomander pulled free in my hand.

  In the confusion the Thoroughgoods managed to make their getaway down Brend’s Rents. In a more respectable area of town the bystanders might have raised a hue-and-cry after the couple, but thieving was commonplace in our district and the pursuer was as likely to be tripped up, or worse, as the pursued. It was quite possible that among the little group of watchers starting to disperse was the very accomplice whom Tony Thoroughgood had been ‘chasing’, come back to observe the successful conclusion to their scheme.

  The Buckle women stood open-mouthed at this latest turn of events. Meantime I kept a firm hold on the engraved pomander. Sold on through one of the Southwark brokers, who never ask any questions, this item alone would have kept the Thoroughgoods in liquor for a week. As far as I’d been able to tell from my glimpse of Charity’s bare belt, the pomander was all she’d been able to lift in this foist. Her fingers were more nimble than her husband’s – his task was simply to pursue the ‘wrongdoer’ and to distract the victim on his empty-handed return, while it was left to his good lady to pick and choose among the articles so recently on display. People are less guarded around a woman, especially when she is all smiles and reassurance. And if you believe you’ve just been robbed, and are then relieved to find that you haven’t been robbed after all, your guard is already down.

  “Well done, Nicholas,” said Bartholomew Ridd. “And farewell, ladies.”

  The tire-man moved away down the street. I was inordinately pleased at this casual compliment from a man who’d recently been telling me off. If I had expected gratitude from the women, though, I was mistaken. Mother and daughter both looked wary underneath their great hats. I suppose they thought that this was merely another scene in an elaborate exercise to trick them out of their property. Thought that, soon enough, a third or fourth trickster would crawl out to expose me . . . and another one afterwards to expose him . . . and so on.

  I hurriedly surrendered the pomander to its owner. From the scent left on my hands, it contained cloves. The young woman took hold of the engraved sphere without comment. It was a sensible thing to carry about in the aftermath of the plague and, for some of our more delicate playhouse patrons, it would provide a counter-smell to the odours of the common crowd. She examined it carefully as though, in handing it over, I might have performed some sleight of hand. Then she glanced up at me from under the brim of her hat. I had the impression of a small animal, a timid one perhaps, gazing out of its burrow.

  I did not suggest that they check through their possessions for a second time. I bowed, or rather I inclined my head a fraction, and moved off. Good deed done for the day. So why should I expect any thanks for it?

  My route lay away from the theatre to the south and east of the town. Since the Company’s return from Mortlake I’d been staying with my friend Abel Glaze at his lodging house in Kentish Street. Dusk was closing in.

  I didn’t hear her coming up behind me, just felt a feather-tap on my shoulder. It was the mother, Mrs Buckle.

  “I should thank you, Master . . . Devil, was it?” She laughed – a young laugh – and clapped her hand to her mouth. “No, I must have misheard. It can’t be Devil?”

  Her face was pale in the half-light but her eyes were bright under the rim of her hat. In the distance stood her daughter.

  “It’s Revill. And it was nothing, madam. Only, when you next come to see us at the Globe playhouse, could I suggest that you keep your, ah, wits about you. That Thoroughgood woman was right enough in one thing she said.”

  “What was that?”

  “When she claimed that there were plenty of villains round here – even if she is one of them.”

  “This is the first time we have been to the playhouse, Elizabeth and I.”

  I wasn’t surprised at this but asked instead whether they’d enjoyed Martin Barton’s Melancholy Man.

  “Yes, for all the blood and gore. We did not expect that. My husband would not have approved,” she said.

  “Many people do not approve. He wouldn’t be alone.”

  “Perhaps we are justly rewarded for coming here by . . . by what has just happened.”

  “Your husband wouldn’t think you deserve to be robbed, surely,” I said, though not as certain as I sounded. People are odd.

  “My husband is dead,” she said. Her eyes seemed to glitter more brightly in the gloom.

  “I am sorry to hear it, Mrs Buckle.”

  “In the late outbreak.”

  “I lost my parents to the plague some years ago. But that was in another place, a long way away.”

  There was a pause.

  “We thought we would be going back in the daylight,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for this business we would have been.”

  “Going back?”

  “To the other side of the river.”

  “You live there?”

  “In Thames Street by Skinners’ Hall.”
>
  “Then I shall keep you company on your return.”

  “This is too much trouble, Master . . . Revill. This is a second kindness.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “You’re wrong,” she said.

  “Then it is such a little something that you should not mention it again.”

  “Do you treat all your playhouse customers like this?”

  “Every one. That way we can be sure they will be happy to come back and see us again.”

  Together we walked towards where Elizabeth Buckle was standing. I had no strong motive for doing what I was doing, and certainly not a disreputable one. It was not going to put me to much inconvenience to cross from here to Thames Street. I probably wanted to show these innocents from the north of the river that there was honesty on the south bank too. Besides, Elizabeth Buckle and her mother were quite attractive.

  Now the mother was confiding to me in a low voice that, for herself, she could happily have threaded her way through the alleys between the Globe and the river but it was her daughter for whom she was concerned. Elizabeth smiled to see her mother, who quickly explained that I had offered to escort them home. The usual half-protestations followed but I sensed that both women were relieved. The encounter with the Thoroughgoods had shaken them up more than they realized. Perhaps they believed that our borough crawled with glib tricksters (and they wouldn’t have been altogether wrong in this belief). I wondered whether Mrs Buckle had deliberately set out to pluck at my chivalrous string with her talk of the late hour and the return across the river.

  By the time we reached the stairs by St Mary Overy it was almost dark. The watermen had lit their lamps and their craft were so many fireflies. On the right-hand side, lights flickered in the grey-blue bulk of London Bridge. Filling our ears was the roar of the water, forced between the great piers. I hailed a ferryman, and one of the fireflies changed course and started to hover towards us through the air. We were picked up by a brawny waterman (the fellows who regularly work this part of the river need to be stronger than usual because of the pull of the water through the bridge piers) and snugged ourselves down in the stern. I sat between the two women. It was a little time since I had sat between two women, so tightly. We rapidly became familiar.

  It happened like this.

  Within a few yards of quitting the shore, with the ferryman gruntingly pulling on his oars as he struggled against the tug of the tide, I was told that the late master of the Buckle household had been a minister of religion. That he had selflessly served his parish of St Thomas’s during the plague, unlike many clergy who either walked away from their posts or refused to step outside their houses at all. The Reverend Buckle had fallen sick as he was giving the sacrament in church. He had gone home and died without fuss the next day (which was a Thursday). The older woman, whose name was Ursula, poured her story into my ears, with the younger one making very occasional comments. It was as if a dam had been unblocked.

  By the time we were nearing the northern shore, with the lights of the Bridge glimmering above us, I’d told the women of how their situation echoed my own. My father too had been a parson, down in the wilds of Somerset. He had been absent from our village when the plague struck but had come back, at certain risk to his life, to tend his flock. He and my mother perished together with many of his parishioners.

  From the way that Ursula Buckle grasped my knee and from the heartfelt sighs of Elizabeth, I knew that I had found ready listeners. But while my wounds were old and nearly healed over, theirs were still raw. They knew that they were lucky to have survived. I think they felt some odd sense of guilt because they were still living while so many around them had perished. They said nothing of this, naturally, but I had been through the same mixture of self-blame and relief.

  By the time we disembarked at Old Swan Stairs we were fast friends. It took a short time to walk to their house and then not much longer before I was sitting at their table, being refreshed with wine and gingerbread, and only a little while longer than that before it was settled that I should move into their house as a lodger.

  Maybe I had been angling for this. Maybe, in turn, they had been angling for a male presence in their household. It was a comparatively large dwelling – most probably a onetime merchant’s property, like so many of the houses near the Bridge – which was rented to Mrs Buckle by a distant cousin of her husband, the Reverend Hugh. In a way mother and daughter were lucky still to have a roof over their heads. Had they been living in the parsonage belonging to St Thomas’s, they might have been dispossessed by now in favour of the new incumbent. Anyway, Ursula and Elizabeth rattled around in their rented place in Thames Street like a couple of loose peas in a pod. They’d brought their own furniture with them but these few objects were not up to the task of filling the place. They’d also employed a housemaid, a young girl with a very runny nose. The other servants, including a male cook, had died during the plague outbreak or quit the area for somewhere safer.

  When I told Abel Glaze that I was moving out of his lodging in Kentish Street, which had never been meant as anything more than a stop-gap, my friend said, “A mother and daughter, eh, Nick, and all alone in the world.”

  “These are respectable people.”

  “I thought you liked it down here among the less respectable people.”

  Abel was a little hurt that I was abandoning him. Besides, he said, hadn’t I always claimed to prefer the air of Southwark to the more refined stuff that blew about in the confines of the city?

  “Others live on the north side,” I said, referring to a small handful of the King’s Men, mostly the seniors.

  “And don’t you get ensnared by the mother and daughter,” he said.

  “What could be better than being ensnared by the pair?” I said. “I intend to be ensnared.”

  As usual in such disputes, there was a measure of truth in the insults we threw at each other. Perhaps I did have a hankering towards a touch more respectability – I was approaching thirty, for God’s sake, and I owned none of the items that many men of my age possessed (as wife, children, property). As for Abel: in my view, he would have liked nothing better than to be ‘ensnared’ by a mother and daughter. He didn’t have much luck in love, did my friend.

  Anyway I soon moved into the Buckle house in Thames Street. It was highly convenient being so close to the Bridge and therefore within easy reach of the playhouse on the other side.

  It was highly convenient too being cared for by women again. I was something between a friend, a lodger and a cousin. They charged me a low rent but more than repaid me with meals. With a bit of encouragement, Mrs Buckle visited the Globe playhouse and admired some of the performances, provided I promised to escort her home afterwards. We discussed poetry and the drama together. The Reverend Buckle had been a good man but, like many other good men and including my father, he had not approved of plays, players or playhouses. He’d never ranted against them in the pulpit, or not much, but he had shown his disdain clearly enough by forbidding his wife and daughters to attend the place. I didn’t realize until later how much Ursula and Elizabeth Buckle had had to steel themselves to venture into Southwark to see The Melancholy Man at the Globe. Ursula told me they’d gone to see it only because the title promised something gentle and reflective. They did not bargain on the feast of revenge, blood and rough humour which Martin Barton the playwright served up.

  My few months in the Thames Street house had been pleasant ones. For the first time in London I was quite content to stay where I was. As I said, I’d gone up in the world.

  But it wasn’t just to do with a change of place. Of course I had fallen in love, slightly in love. Not with young Elizabeth Buckle, of whom I saw little, but with Ursula. She was considerably older than me, although not old enough to be my mother. My love was unrequited, needless to say. And unrecognized, I hoped. My small secret.

  I would have said that Mrs Buckle was settling into widowhood, perhaps before she started looking
round for a fresh husband. But she had a small secret too, which she confided to me one evening. She had started to glimpse the ghost of her late husband, the Reverend Hugh Buckle, in various places round the house.

  Give me your hand

  The Mermaid tavern, where Ben Jonson had fixed to meet me on the evening after we’d watched the advance of the Spanish party upriver, is situated in Bread Street. This thoroughfare runs up at right angles to Thames Street in the area to the east of St Paul’s and not too far from where I was lodging with the Buckles. The Mermaid tavern is a well-run house, and so offers a different world from the usual players’ dens like the Goat & Monkey. Its fish and wine are recommended by those who know their food and drink.

  When I got there on this fine summer’s evening Ben Jonson was already installed at the end of a table, his invariable position.

  “Ah, Nicholas, sit yourself there – and help yourself to this and afterwards to these.”

  Jonson was a casually commanding person and a generous one too, with himself as much as with others. William Shakespeare rarely put himself at the helm in this manner. But then perhaps WS didn’t need to.

  Jonson gestured once more. In front of him was ‘this’ and ‘these’: a large flask of wine and a heap of opened oysters. I wondered whether the playwright needed to fortify himself after an energetic afternoon in the stews of Southwark. But the truth is that he was a man of large appetites, on any occasion. Now he reached for one of the oysters and tilted his head. I watched his Adam’s apple bobbing about as the oyster slithered down his gullet.

  Already sitting to one side of the table was a red-headed man called Martin Barton, whom I knew glancingly. He was a poet and playwright, an up-and-coming satirical writer. He had recently written that play called The Melancholy Man, after a performance of which I’d first met Ursula and Elizabeth. And then there were Jack Wilson and Laurence Savage. I expected them to be present. I hadn’t expected to see Abel Glaze on the opposite side of the table. I was surprised that my friend had said nothing to me earlier about coming to this tavern meeting, but then we were no longer living in each other’s pockets.