Because you could have told whether he was happy or sad from his expression, I wanted to say. But ghosts are unhappy by definition, aren’t they? Especially the ghost of a husband who has been snatched away by the plague. If they come back, it must be because they are looking for something. Or if not something, then somebody.
“What difference?” repeated Mrs Buckle.
“No difference probably, I don’t know,” I said. “Try not to think of it, Mrs Buckle. Tell me about something else.”
And I started on my supper once more. I thought it was best not to humour her belief that she was seeing her dead husband. Perhaps I didn’t want it to be true, either. She had seen her husband several times before, as a ghost, that is.
“Still bad news,” she said. “You know that Lizzie and I are here on sufferance.”
She gestured vaguely at the room, meaning to take in the entire house.
“But you pay rent. Anyway the landlord is your late husband’s cousin, I think you said.”
“He is a cousin to Hugh, yes. And we do not pay much rent. In truth, Nicholas, the money you give us goes quite a long way towards meeting his demands. But now . . . now he is asking for more, much more.”
“But why?”
“He says things have changed since the pestilence last year. Enough time has gone by, and property is starting to get expensive again. He can rent more profitably to others. Of course we could stay if we could afford it.”
She sounded defeated rather than distressed. I wanted to help her. I would have helped her if I’d been able to but what can a player on a shilling and threepence a day do? Nevertheless my heart went out to her and this time I did stretch my hand across the table and rest it on hers. She allowed my hand to stay there for quite a time before slipping hers out from underneath.
“I nearly forgot, you had a visitor earlier today,” said Mrs Buckle.
“I did. Who was it?”
“He didn’t give his name. Just asked whether Nicholas Revill the player lived here.”
I paused with the knife halfway to my mouth.
“He didn’t say why he wanted me?”
“No. He didn’t seem inclined to say much.”
“But he knew I lived here.”
“Is it a secret?”
Now it was my turn to feel a little uneasy although I couldn’t have accounted for the feeling.
“What did he look like?”
“Ordinary.”
“Wearing a red doublet?”
“Why yes, I think he was. A red doublet. So you have seen him after all?”
“No – I – it’s just that I think I know who he might be.”
But I had no idea who he was, of course, except that it must be the figure I’d glimpsed behind me in Thames Street.
O heavy ignorance!
Ben Jonson had organized a rehearsal of his Masque of Peace for the next morning at the house of Sir Philip Blake. Several of the performers would be there (although not the Queen, I assumed). I set off from Mrs Buckle’s lodgings and made my way down Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street. A heat-haze was already forming, turning figures in the distance into insubstantial shapes, mere ghosts. I thought of what my landlady had told me about glimpsing her late husband as he climbed the stairs. It was the third or fourth time she’d told me of such a sighting. The detail of watching the hem of his coat, the back of his head, gave a curious truthfulness to the story. But I didn’t know whether to believe her. She would not lie – but anyone may be deluded. The dead should stay where they belong, in my opinion, and not indulge themselves in truanting about our world.
Maybe it was the bright morning but I also felt a bit of a truant. There were no activities involving the King’s Men scheduled for the next couple of days yet, by participating in Ben’s thing, I was somehow mooching off.
I turned my head from time to time and kept my eyes open for a flash of red doublet in the street, especially after what Mrs Buckle had told me about yesterday’s caller. But this wasn’t very logical. Why should anyone follow me if they already knew where I lived? Anyway, if I had glimpsed a person like the fellow from the previous evening, I would have accosted him. But there was no one who fitted the picture. Instead, I turned my mind to business and this piece of Jonson’s in which I was playing.
The idea of the celebratory masque was a shrewd one on the playwright’s part. The King’s Men were ‘in attendance’ on the Spanish party at Somerset House only in a ceremonial sense. But it had occurred to Ben that more might be done to mark the occasion than merely having us flounce around the palace in our cut-price red cloth. So he had come up with the notion of a private masque to be played before a select audience. And, more than a select audience, Masque of Peace was to be played by a select cast. You can’t get much more select than the Queen of England.
The performance was scheduled for a week’s time. Our masque was to herald the imminent outbreak of peace, which was a foregone conclusion. In truth the Spanish party was not in London to negotiate – since such a large and grand group would never have set sail from Spain if the outcome was in doubt – but to seal a treaty. I did not need Giles Cass to tell me that. The actual swearing of the peace would be staged at the Chapel Royal in Whitehall in the presence of the King. The performance at Somerset House was to be a first course for that event. I didn’t know the behind-the-scenes detail but I guessed that this was Anne of Denmark’s way of marking the event, as well as uniting two of her causes. Her partiality both for Spain and for the drama was well known.
By this stage I’d reached Temple Bar by the Inns of Court. Near here, in Middle Temple during the dying days of Elizabeth’s reign when we were still known as the Chamberlain’s Men, we’d played in WS’s Troilus and Cressida. Beyond Temple Bar stretched the Strand with its fine mansions, including Somerset or Denmark House, now a temporary nest of Spaniards. The Blakes’ mansion stood several hundred yards before Somerset House. It wasn’t quite as grand but it would do to be going on with.
I identified myself as a player at the gatehouse and the doorkeeper waved me through. He had a large, hairy wart on his cheek and if you’d asked me afterwards what he looked like or even whether he had two heads, I wouldn’t have been able to describe him. Just the large, hairy wart. An ample courtyard extended in front of a fine house-front. Although I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, I was a little overawed by the scale of the place and so was pleased to see Ben Jonson standing in a shady spot in the yard. He was deep in conversation with another man. Together they were examining a sheet of paper.
Not wanting to disturb them by calling out, I coughed and Jonson looked up. He squinted into the sunlight as I approached.
“Ah, it is you, Nicholas. Wait there an instant.”
Obediently I stopped. The other man was a short fellow with a lined face. Jonson nudged his companion and said, “How about him, Jonathan Snell?”
The short man looked me up and down.
“Nine and a half, I’d say,” he said.
There was a pause.
“Well, Revill,” said Ben Jonson. “Is he right? Yes or no.”
“I’d have a better idea of yes or no if I knew what you were talking about, Ben.”
“We’re talking about your weight, man. What do you think nine and a half is? Your age?”
“Is this gentleman a hangman? Why does he need to guess how heavy I am?”
“Do I look like a hangman?” said the man called Jonathan Snell. He sounded amused rather than indignant.
“I can’t tell,” I said. “The only hangman I ever saw looked like a parson. His real trade was as a butcher, though.”
“Never mind all that, Nicholas. Is he correct? Do you weigh nine and a half stone?”
“I can’t tell that either, Ben. I expect so.”
“Master Snell claims to be able to tell a man’s weight just by glancing at him.”
“That must be a useful skill.”
“It is, sir, it is. See.”
Snell held out the s
heet of paper which, close to, showed as a mass of lines and circles.
“Oh, you are the engine-man,” I said.
Snell beamed. He transferred the sheet of paper to his other hand and held out his right to shake. He had a long thumb which, disconcertingly, seemed to wrap itself round the back of my own hand.
“Jonathan is constructing the chair which will bring Sir Philip Blake down from the heavens like a deus ex machina. Sir Philip will be the god who comes down to earth to solve human problems. This is Master Snell’s plan of the device.”
“I remember now, Sir Philip is playing the part of Truth in our masque,” I said.
“Truth must come down in state, though,” said the little man. “It wouldn’t do if he plunged to earth, wouldn’t do at all. You must take account of the sitter’s weight in these calculations and I have already assessed Sir Philip’s at a glance.”
“As long as he has the time to deliver a least a couple of verses while he’s descending,” said Jonson. “It’ll be the best he can do. He’s no actor.”
“I’ll be at the controls myself, Master Jonson,” said Snell. “I’ll lower him good and steady.”
He mimed turning a wheel.
Masques, even relatively straightforward ones like Peace, can’t be staged in a day and I realized, after hearing Jonson and Snell talk about their device, that this one had been in preparation for some time.
“How is the building going?” said the playwright, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of Somerset House. I noticed that, consciously or not, he used his right, unbranded hand for the gesture.
“It’s going well. We’ll be ready inside two days. All ready.”
“Good, good. Nothing too elaborate is necessary.”
“Nothing that’ll overshadow your valuable words, you mean, Master Ben,” said Snell.
I glanced at Jonathan Snell with new respect. I didn’t know how long he’d been acquainted with Ben Jonson but he had got the measure of the man and his sensitivity, and showed that he wasn’t daunted by it. Jonson didn’t take offence at the slight irony in the words either (as he might have done with me, for example).
“I must go and check on the waves,” said Snell. “One of the cranks has a tendency to stick. Goodbye, Masters Benjamin and Nicholas. What part are you playing by the way?”
“I am Ignorance,” I said.
Snell might have made a cheap crack at that point but he simply nodded a further farewell to Jonson and me and walked off towards the gatehouse. He crossed paths with Abel Glaze, Laurence Savage and Jack Wilson who were just entering the courtyard. After we had exchanged greetings, all five of us headed for the house, with Ben Jonson in the lead.
This was a large establishment and, once inside, we were ushered through various chambers by various footmen, all in yellow livery. There was something fish-like about the way they glided from room to room with glassy expressions, being actively uninterested in us. Eventually we ended up in a great chamber overlooking the river. We spent some time examining the view, examining the furniture, examining the tapestries. It was very quiet. The only sounds which penetrated from outside were the cries of gulls or watermen, and they were muted as if out of respect. Our voices dropped almost to a whisper, although not Jonson’s. At long last, four people came into the room. I recognized Sir Philip Blake and Lady Blake from the previous day on the south bank of the river. The other two, a man and a woman, I didn’t know.
Since all four are going to play quite a part in this story I’ll pause here to introduce them, bringing forward what I found out later.
Sir Philip Blake was a courtier, top to toe. He’d been entrusted with a minor part in the current ‘negotiations’ with Spain, although he had formerly been an opponent of such a treaty, like many Englishmen. Blake was a relatively slight man with quite prominent ears. There was a sharpness to his pointed beard and a touch of severity in his features which was appropriate for the role of Truth in the Masque of Peace.
Where her husband was thin and ascetic-looking, Lady Jane Black was plump and amiable. She looked like a tavernkeeper’s wife, pleased to see old friends and newcomers equally. (I later discovered that she came from lowly circumstances, being an apothecary’s daughter.) In fact, if I hadn’t known who she was I would have taken her for the attendant or personal servant to the much more elegant lady who was standing by her side. In reality it was this one who was the servant while the plump lady was the mistress. The tall and graceful woman was called Maria More. As she came into the room she arched her eyebrows and gazed around with a kind of disdain, as if to say ‘Oh, so these are the players, are they?’
The final member of this foursome stood a little behind Sir Philip. His name was William Inman. He had something of Ben Jonson about him, a similar air of bustling good humour though with a much redder face. I suspected instinctively that, as with Jonson, the good humour would disappear if he was crossed. Just as I’d seen Cecil whisper in Blake’s ear yesterday while both stood near the Queen’s carriage, so I now saw Blake turn and whisper into the ear of Inman.
Inman smiled slightly and nodded vigorously at whatever his master had said. This red-faced man stood in the same relation to Blake as the elegant lady did to his wife, somewhere between an assistant and a secretary. And, after a first glance at the four of them, you would’ve said that the noble lady and gent were closer to their personal attendants than they were to each other. More civil, more responsive.
Ben Jonson strode forward to greet Blake and to incline his head towards the ladies. He trod a nice line between deference and familiarity. This son of a bricklayer always said that he never esteemed anyone just because they had a noble name, and I think it was true. Then, with a sweep of his hand about the chamber, Ben made some remark about great wealth and taste being contracted into a single room. He said this in English before adding some appropriate Latin quotation. The first comment certainly pleased his patrons and broke the ice.
At this point Giles Cass, the go-between, and Martin Barton, the satirical playwright, were ushered into the chamber. Our practice party was complete for the time being, although not all the players were present. Cass was known to the Blakes, of course, and Barton swiftly got familiar with them. For someone who affected to despise the court and all its works, Barton was surprisingly good at getting familiar.
Then it was the moment to begin.
Rehearsing a masque is quite different from rehearsing a play. The action is much shorter, there aren’t many lines to learn and no one expects great feats of performance anyway. Despite the engine-man’s comment about Jonson’s ‘valuable words’, it is the music, costumes and effects which are more important than the drama. The music and the rest are produced by professionals, which is just as well. Since many of the principal roles are taken by important people like the Queen of England, and since such important people always have much less time at their disposal than we ordinary persons, any rehearsal time is necessarily limited.
Ben Jonson produced a sheaf of papers and distributed them among the company. Each of us in the room had a part in the Masque of Peace. I was accustomed to the fat scrolls of the playhouse, especially since I’d started taking bigger parts, and so the couple of sheets which I now held felt like short commons. None of us had many words to say. I wondered about this until Abel pointed out that we’d be playing in front of an audience of whom half would be Spanish. What would be the point, he said, of Ben’s penning reams of lines if they were destined to pass over the heads of many of his listeners?
“It hasn’t stopped him before,” I said.
But Abel was surely correct. Why write a great deal if you’re not going to be understood?
Ben had assigned the parts quite artfully – or cynically, if you prefer. On the whole the more attractive roles, such as Peace and Plenty, were given to the part-time actors who just happened to be full-time nobles while the less enticing ones like Ignorance and Rumour were doled out to the proper players.
> I didn’t have much to do in the part of Ignorance except to look useless (yes, all right, spare the comments). I’d never played a simple, unqualified Noun before, and was quite looking forward to doing it as a change from playing human beings. Looking forward also to wearing my costume, which had been conceived by the Globe tire-man Bartholomew Ridd and which, like all masque outfits, was a kind of walking riddle.
Altogether, this masque should be a holiday from ordinary work. Not much application or effort required.
(Little did I know. I was truly ignorant. Ignorance personified.)
For a flavour of my lines, which cannot have detained Ben Jonson very long in the composition, try the opening:
I know not where I am,
I know not whence I came,
Darkness is my dwelling-place,
Ignorance is my name.
The function of Ignorance was to tremble at the prospect of the arrival of the Spaniards. Along the same pattern, Suspicion was meant to bristle and the figure of Fright was supposed to adopt a threatening posture, while Rumour went running from one ear to another. These ‘bad’ qualities were intended to be absurd, laughable. But the joke was that this was actually how most of the English felt about the Spanish, and were content to feel. It was probably how the Spanish felt about us too: ignorant, prejudiced, suspicious, hostile.
While we were examining our roles, Sir Philip Blake made a tour of the room, enquiring who we were playing. I told him that I was Ignorance and therefore a kind of opposite to his Truth.
“Truth will prevail,” he said, clearing his throat.
“It must prevail. It is written,” I said, since I can be just as sententious as anybody else.
“Who are you really, though, behind the mask of Ignorance?”
“Nicholas Revill, sir, a player.”
“Revill? Not one of the Revills of Norfolk?”
“No, from Somerset.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard of them. Are you connected?”
“If we are, then it’s like the connection of one twig to another on the opposite side of the tree.”
An Honourable Murderer Page 5