An Honourable Murderer

by Philip Gooden

  There was a pause while Sir Philip absorbed this information, at the same time making frequent throat-clearing sounds. Or perhaps he was wondering what I was talking about. I was wondering myself.

  “Very good,” he said finally, moving on.

  The Revills of Norfolk? I made a mental note to ask my friend Jack Wilson, whose family came from Norwich, whether he knew of any Norfolk Revills. Perhaps we were connected. Perhaps they were cousins; perhaps they were rich.

  “Nicholas!”

  “What is it? Oh, sorry.”

  It was Ben Jonson, calling me to order. As well as being the author of the Masque of Peace he was what’s called the ‘guider’ of the production.

  “I wish you to play ignorant now,” he said. “Put on an appropriate face. No, not like that. There’s a difference between ignorance and idiocy, Revill. You’ll be drooling down your front next. Now, my lady, if you would be so good as to take up your position over there. And to cradle the cornucopia in your hands. An imaginary horn of plenty at the moment, I’m afraid. On the night it will be crammed with fruit and flowers.”

  “I hope it won’t be too heavy to carry, Benjamin,” said Lady Blake. She had a pleasant voice, with a scarcely suppressed laughter bubbling in it. “I’m not sure how much plenty I can bear.”

  “The contents will be made of wire and cloth and paper, my lady. Light as air.”

  If deliberate, it was sly of Ben to have cast Lady Jane Blake in the part of Plenty (one of the blessings of Peace) since she certainly didn’t look as though she denied herself very much. I noticed that Ben controlled the members of the Blake household with a looser rein than he did the professional players. With the former it was ‘please . . .’ and ‘perhaps . . .’ He still got his way, though.

  During the morning Ben took us through our lines and postures and movements. It was all quite simple after the complicated world of the stage play. A lot of masque-work involves no more than standing up, or sitting down, or lying flat. Also during the morning I made the acquaintance of Maria More, who was playing a handmaid to Plenty. (And where else should More be, but attending on Plenty?) Though she looked more of the lady than her mistress, I’d been mistaken in my belief that she was aloof. Rather she was combative. Combative, tall and graceful.

  During a break in the rehearsal, while Jonson was consulting his patrons and the rest of us had split up into chattering groups, Mistress More told me that she’d visited the Globe playhouse on two or three occasions. Then she asked a strange question.

  “We’re permitted to take part in these masques but we are not allowed to play on your stage. Why?”

  “We? You mean, ah, well-born people like the ones here?”

  “I mean women.”

  “Oh, women. Women on stage. That wouldn’t be proper.”

  “But some people claim that it’s even less proper for boys to dress up as females.”

  “Such people are general enemies to the playhouse. They object to everything we do. Besides, er . . . I have heard it said that boys make better women than women.”

  “That is your opinion?”

  “Not necessarily my opinion. But I have heard it said.”

  “Are you always so cautious?”

  “I don’t want to offend.”

  “Of course, I forget that it’s also a woman’s part to be easily offended,” she said. “But you still have not answered the question. Why should it be improper for us to play our own sex on stage?”

  “It is a difficult subject,” I said, searching around in my head for reasons and failing to find them. When you came down to it, why shouldn’t women act on the public stage? It would not seem right if they did, that’s all. Maria More looked at me with a gaze that was half amused, half challenging.

  “Difficult indeed,” she said after a pause.

  I was saved from anything else by the appearance of William Inman, the jolly-faced man who was assistant to Sir Philip Blake.

  “Ho hum,” he said. “I think I’ll turn player. I am enjoying this.”

  “What part are you playing?” I said (although I knew perfectly well).

  “I am the Ocean,” said Inman.

  There were to be waves in our piece, as I’d gathered from Snell the engine-man and designer. Masque audiences like to watch waves and voyages, and in the Masque of Peace there was at least some excuse for a bit of sea since the Spaniards have to get over from their part of the world to ours.

  “Be careful you don’t sink the Spaniard,” I said.

  “This isn’t ’88,” said Inman. “They will have a calm crossing, with a favouring breeze. The favouring breeze will be played by Sir Fabian Scaridge. It is the dawn of a new age. The age of Peace.”

  This sounded like the kind of diplomatic remark that might have been uttered by his master. I thought Inman was mocking such language.

  “Are you wearing seaweed, William?” said Maria More. “Shells and starfish and stuff?”

  “I shall insist on a trident. Your man Jonson says the costume man is coming this afternoon to fit us out.”

  “Bartholomew Ridd is his name,” I said. “Ask him for whatever you want. He is very accommodating.”

  Ridd was just the opposite, very fussy and particular. Let them find that out for themselves though. William Inman went on to expand on the joys of a player’s life, as though he was the expert and I was the ignorant one. How delightful it must be to travel round the country, how amusing it must be to wear other men’s clothes, to speak other men’s lines, to play parts that were generally so much above our real station in life. To have so little to do for ourselves.

  “Yes,” I said, “you’re right. We players are hardly required to do anything at all for ourselves. Only to show skill in verse-speaking, and dancing, and fencing, and clowning, and singing. Nothing much.”

  “Only joking,” said Inman. “Don’t take offence.”

  “I’m not easily offended,” I said, glancing at Maria More. “I welcome honest comment.”

  “That’s me in a nutshell,” said Inman. “Bill Inman speaks things as he finds them.”

  I don’t know why, but I never quite believe individuals who refer to themselves in this detached way. There was no opportunity for any further chat, however, since Ben Jonson summoned us to go over our lines and movements once again. There were various gaps in the rehearsal – for one thing, the Queen was not here to run through her lines as Peace, and there was no sign of Sir Fabian Scaridge who was to play the part of the favouring wind – but we emerged from the Blake mansion with a clearer idea of the action.

  And after that nothing much happened for the rest of the day. But the evening made up for this uneventfulness. I went to a brothel and then I got attacked.

  O notable strumpet!

  First, the brothel.

  I just happened to find myself south of the river after hours. Considering that I didn’t have much time for Southwark ale-houses such as the Goat & Monkey or the Knight of the Carpet, it was surprising how often I found myself carousing there with my companions.

  And considering how I thought I’d forsworn the delights of the Southwark stews like Holland’s Leaguer, it was surprising how often I found my feet straying over the threshold of such houses of pleasure.

  Well, not that often, perhaps. I had to balance the state of my purse against my, ah, itch. And some sense of delicacy prevented me from returning to Holland’s Leaguer since it was where my old friend Nell had worked and lived – and died. Instead, I went to a less exalted and expensive establishment called the Mitre, also located in the depths of Southwark. Maybe on account of the ecclesiastical associations of the name, the madam of the place – a prim, tight-lipped woman called Mistress Bates – looked severe enough to be running a religious house. The girls also took pleasure in this incongruous title of Mitre, although it was well known that the name referred less to a churchman’s headgear than it did to a different appendage further south on the bishop’s body.

  I was
explaining this to the dark-haired girl I was in the habit of asking for at the Mitre. This was the evening of the first rehearsal day for the masque. My dark-haired girl, whom I knew only as Blanche, seemed fresh and innocent, although this was no doubt an illusion. In addition, she was French. So it may be that her grasp of dirty double meanings in English was a bit shaky.

  “Oh, Nicholaas . . .” she was saying, “so you mean zat zis ’ouse which we call ze Meeter . . .?”

  “The Mitre, yes.”

  “Ze . . . mitre . . . eet ees anozzer zing too. It is what a – ’ow you say? – a churchman, ’e put on ’is ’ead, yes?”

  “A tall hat with a sort of groove across it which a bishop or a cardinal wears,” I said in my best schoolmasterly style. We were lying in bed at the time, not wearing hats or much of anything else.

  “And eet is ’ow we call ze name of our ’ouse too, yes? Ze Mitre. Oh, Nicholaas!”

  Her pretty eyes wide open, Blanche clapped her hand across her mouth but continued to laugh and shriek. Her laughter was catching. What had been a stale London joke about a dirty name became fresh to my own ears as well so that I started to laugh out loud and then, when our laughter subsided and she asked me why the brothel and the bishop’s hat should share a name, I just had to explain matters. Better still, I just had to demonstrate the reason why they shared a name with something else. So we turned to other things.

  Blanche was a pleasure. I think that she liked me. But with her, unlike with Nell, pleasure was business, strictly business. Pleasure for cash, cash for pleasure. If I wanted to visit her more often then I needed money in my purse, in order that she might put some of it into hers and some into Mistress Bates’s, the madam’s.

  I did not know much about Blanche, knew nothing about her really apart from the fact that she thought she’d been born in Bordeaux. How and why she’d fetched up on the shores of the Thames, she did not tell me. Sometimes these girls in the stews are genuinely ignorant of their very early lives, sometimes they make a little mystery of it so as to entice customers.

  It was while I was making my way back after this latest session at the Mitre that it happened. It was another bright summer’s evening and my shadow stretched out far ahead of me as I walked along the river bank. I was quite comfortable with the world, not thinking of anything much, lighter in spirits (and a little lighter in my purse).

  To my immediate left was the Hercules, the barge belonging to the Globe shareholders. Only the day before we’d been crowding its decks to inspect the arrival of the Spaniards. Now the river was nearly empty – most of the day’s trade being finished – with only a few watermen plying for hire.

  I looked over my left shoulder in the direction of Somerset House. Queen Anne’s palace stood out, a pearl even amid the other great mansions on the far shore. We would soon be there, first to practise and then to play out Ben’s Masque of Peace.

  There were only a handful of other people on the river bank behind me. If the red-doubleted individual of the previous evening had been among them I would have noticed, I think, even though it was difficult to see much against the glare of the declining sun.

  But there was something about that over-the-shoulder glimpse which caused me to turn my head round once again. Maybe it was a shape moving more quickly than seemed natural on a lazy summer’s evening. Maybe it was some sixth sense of danger. I was just in time to see a cloaked figure bearing down hard. I had no chance to react. There was a draught of air to my right and then a jarring blow to the side of my head. Without even knowing that I’d fallen I found myself sprawling on my back on the ground. The evening sky gaped above me, criss-crossed by flashes of light like meteors. The whizzing meteors continued but suddenly the sky was blocked by the cloaked figure who seemed to have grown to the height of several buildings. He moved halfway out of my dizzy vision. I heard someone grunting and a woman’s voice shrieking “Kick ’im! Kick ’im!”, before experiencing a stabbing pain in my ribs. Then another grunt and another stab, followed by more of both. The bastard was kicking me, as ordered!

  It may sound odd, but what I felt most acutely at this instant – over and above the ringing numbness in my head and the sense that all the breath had been knocked violently out of my body – what I felt most was relief. At least my assailant did not intend to murder me, merely to give me a good kicking. If you’re going to kill someone then you don’t do the deed in a public place, not even in lawless Southwark. Although I couldn’t have articulated these comforting notions at the time, they were running through some part of my battered head even while I curled up against the foot thudding into my side. Instinctively I kept my eyes shut but was aware of shadows moving across the lids.

  Then there was an indistinct blur of shouting and scuffling feet. The kicking stopped. Moments later I felt someone’s hot breath on my face.

  I opened one eye, then the other. A trimly bearded male head hovered above me.

  “How are you, sir?”

  I opened my mouth but nothing more detailed came out of it than a groan.

  I made to sit up and fell back on the ground. I tried again, fell back again. Sitting up would take a bit of doing. My new friend squatted down on his hams. He put his arm behind my shoulders for support. It was odd to see the river bank so peaceful and undisturbed, the water still slipping by. The whole episode had probaby taken less than a minute. A handful of other people had stopped to watch the scene.

  Eventually I clambered to my feet, clinging to my rescuer. He was plump but solid as a little pillar. I noticed that he was wearing a red doublet which he filled comfortably.

  “Did – did you –”

  I struggled to regain my breath. My sides were starting to hurt. There was a cloudiness over my right eye, near where I’d been struck at the beginning of the attack.

  “They ran off,” said the other, answering one of the questions which I hadn’t been able to ask. “They ran off when I came near.”

  “Did – did –”

  “No more now, sir. Let us get you to some comfort. Here is the Pure Waterman close at hand.”

  Still holding tight to the stranger, I limped across towards the tavern. The few bystanders strolled on. We entered the tavern. The Pure Waterman, which stands four-square on Bankside, was named either in irony (since watermen are almost always impure, at least in their speech) or in propitiation of its customers, most of whom are ferrymen and don’t care for outsiders. Nevertheless it was welcome as a place to get my breath and wits back. Tactfully, the Samaritan in a red doublet, steered me towards an obscure, smoky corner. I stared about, still slightly dazed. The tavern was crowded. Instead of waiting for a drawer to notice us, my rescuer went off in search of refreshment.

  Quite soon the plump man returned. He placed a little pewter mug in front of me and I gulped from it straightaway, then wished I hadn’t. I coughed and gasped for air. He looked concerned.

  “Be careful, take it slowly. I have the landlord’s word for it. That’s his best aqua vitae.”

  The fiery liquid prickled in my throat before it began to glow lower down in my guts.

  “I asked him for something restorative,” said the other man, sitting down and taking a more modest swallow from his own mug.

  “I feel – ah – better – already.”

  I did too. Normal vision was returning to my right eye. My sides would ache for a good few days, and I could visualize the bruises taking shape like little thunderclouds even while I was sitting here, but some experimental shifts and turns told me that nothing was broken, most likely.

  “That was a vicious attack,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the river.

  I made to shrug manfully and felt a sharp pain in my side.

  “Do you know who it was?” said my rescuer.

  “Who?”

  “Your attacker. There was a woman there but it was a man doing all the work.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “Did you see his face?” he persisted.


  “No. Did you see it?”

  “They ran off, like I said. He was wearing a cloak which he kept about his face, thus.”

  Suiting the action to the word, my rescuer lifted up his arm so that it obscured the bottom half of his face. He gazed at me over his crooked elbow. He had brown eyes and a steady gaze, and he seemed to be assessing me somehow.

  “An enemy?” he said.

  For an instant I thought he was referring to himself but then realized he was talking about the person who’d set on me. I took a more cautious sip from my mug of aqua vitae and said, “It looks like it. Sir, I have been guilty of discourtesy. You must put it down to the, ah, surprise I have just received. But I do not know the name of my rescuer.”

  “While I do not know the name of the person I have rescued.”

  “I think you do,” I said.

  He did not reply.

  “For form’s sake then, I am Nicholas Revill. A player, a member of the King’s Men in fact.”

  This gentleman showed no sign of recognition but nor did he ask why I supposed him to already know my name. Rather, he continued to gaze at me with those shrewd, assessing eyes. There was a silence. Eventually it was my nerve which went.

  “Well, sir, if you won’t tell me to whom I owe my gratitude, there is at least one piece of information which you could give me.”

  “What is that, Master Revill?”

  “Tell me why you’ve been following me for the last couple of days. Tell me who you are.”

  Put money in thy purse

  So we talked, my rescuer and I, and eventually I found myself listening to a proposal. Then I found myself agreeing to the same proposal, uneasily.

  By the next morning I’d more or less forgotten the attack, despite the bruises and the pang in my side if I turned sharply. Instead I was preoccupied with the conversation we’d had in the Pure Waterman. I could not rid myself of the idea that this might be a dangerous undertaking, although it looked straightforward enough on the surface.

  From one aspect I was doing my duty by my country.