An Honourable Murderer

by Philip Gooden

  But I knew I’d never get them. Othello is a duel of wits between the Moor and his wicked lieutenant Iago, who tempts and seduces his commander into the belief that Othello’s new wife Desdemona is unfaithful. Only three people – Othello, Iago and Desdemona – are of much importance in this vicious triangle. Dick Burbage was bound to play the part of the Moor, while the voluble villain would be taken by one of our other seniors (as it turned out, Iago was played by Henry Condell), and Desdemona could only be the property of one of our boy-players. The rest of the characters hardly mattered since they were so much clay in the hands of Iago. I wouldn’t have minded playing the dashing Cassio, the honourable ladies’ man. I could have dealt with the dupe Roderigo. In the event I wound up with the white-bearded senator and the drunken soldier.

  Lying sleepless in my chamber in the house of Mrs Buckle, I wondered about purses and the putting of money into them. Wondered whether John Ratchett, who was paying me to give intelligence on Jonson’s Masque of Peace, had seen Othello when we’d first staged the play at the Globe in the spring. Had he picked up Iago’s phrase and, forgetting its origin, used a version of it when he was trying to tempt me? Put money in thy purse.

  Perhaps I should return the three sovereigns and refuse to write any spy-reports, should have nothing more to do with John Ratchett. That would be risking the displeasure of the Privy Council. But what could the Council do to a free and guiltless Englishman? The answer was, they could do a great deal. A great deal to make life uncomfortable, and worse than uncomfortable.

  These were my night thoughts. Now I wished that I’d never listened to Master Ratchett. True, he had saved me halfway through being beaten up on the river bank. I could feel the bruising down my sides, worse at night. The arrival of the man in the red doublet had been opportune. Very opportune. What if –?

  But I got no further in my speculations because the night silence was suddenly disturbed by a noise somewhere between a cry and a groan. It came from outside my room.

  Without striking a light, I got out of bed, crossed the floor and opened the chamber door. My room was on the top storey. Mrs Buckle and her daughter Elizabeth had their bedrooms below. The runny-nosed girl slept somewhere off the kitchen. I saw my landlady where she stood in the open area at the top of the stairs leading to the ground floor. She was in her night-clothes, holding a candle and staring fixedly at the uppermost corner of the stairs. Her eyes were wide open, but I am not sure whether she was really seeing anything.

  In a tavern near the Bristol docks I once witnessed a young woman being put into a trance by a man who came off a ship. The woman had gazed about with the same blank vision as Mrs Buckle’s, until the sailor had restored her to herself by snapping his fingers and whispering some words in her ear. Uncertain what to do next, I had half a mind to leave Mrs Buckle alone. There was no sign of Elizabeth. Then a low moan emerged from the widow’s lips and the hand holding the candle became agitated. The light fluttered and I suddenly grew afraid that the flame would set fire to her nightdress. Almost before I was aware of it, I was down the narrow stairs connecting the first and second floors.

  Mrs Buckle gave no sign that she’d heard or seen me but the candle stopped weaving about. Now she was standing like a statue once more, and her gaze had returned to the vacant corner by the top of the stairs. The candle illuminated a curiously placid expression on her face, still as a mask. We were only a few feet apart.

  Gingerly, I stretched out an open hand. Light spilled on to my palm from her candle, and the shadows shifted around us. At once, Mrs Buckle seemed to come to herself. I can’t think of any other way to describe it than to say that her eyes, which had been empty, became full. It was like pouring wine into a glass.

  “Nicholas, it’s you. What are you doing?”

  “Are you all right, Mrs Buckle?”

  “My husband was telling me . . . telling me . . .”

  “Your husband . . .”

  “He was telling me . . . something.”

  “When?”

  “Just now.”

  “He is dead, Mrs Buckle.”

  “Why, so he is.”

  She looked down, as if conscious for the first time that she was dressed in her night things, and then looked at the space between us. After a time she said, “I shall return to my room now.”

  And she turned about and entered her chamber, her candle lighting the way to bed. She shut the door. I clambered up the ladder-like stairs to the second floor and shut my own chamber door. I lay down on my bed.

  I don’t know whether Mrs Buckle found it easy to get back to sleep but I was thoroughly awake by now. Dawn was a good few hours off.

  I struck a light and examined the notes which I’d made on that day’s practice for the Masque of Peace in the great room in the Blakes’ mansion overlooking the river.

  The notes were scrappy – and not very revealing. I wasn’t sure how I could work them up into a ‘manuscript’ which would be worth three pounds to Master Ratchett and the Privy Council. All I had were a handful of gobbets picked up in overheard conversations or jibes thrown about the room during gaps in the rehearsal. There were other individuals in the practice room, like the Scaridges and the Fortunes. (It’s odd how easily one gets used to throwing off these noble names, as if one was mingling with them every day.) But I will concentrate here on those who are relevant to this story.

  For example, I had picked up an anti-Spanish comment from William Inman, secretary to Sir Philip Blake. Yes, an anti-Spanish comment, such as you may hear a dozen times over standing on any street corner in London for half an hour. In his bluff, hearty manner, Bill Inman had said something about preferring a Spanish piece to peace with Spain, although both were likely to prove poxy and rotten. He accompanied the remark with a rude gesture. Then he’d caught Mistress Maria More looking reprovingly at him. This was important information, and certainly worth reporting in a despatch to Robert Cecil.

  Martin Barton, the red-headed satirical playwright, was talking about art. He had been boasting to Abel Glaze and Maria about the gratifying reception given to his recent tragedy The Melancholy Man. But I think he was doing this to needle Ben Jonson, who was in earshot and whose own late attempt at a court-tragedy had flopped so lamentably in a play called Sejanus. Barton was not a player – there was something about his combination of red hair and spindly little legs which would have made him suitable only for clown’s parts – but Jonson had given him a part as Poesy and Drama in the masque. Maybe mischievously, Jonson had written almost no words to go with this role. Barton seemed content, however, drinking up his surroundings. I reckoned he was storing up material for his next satire and thinking how much better he could have managed the whole business. He was one of those people who are happiest feeling superior.

  Giles Cass, the dapper go-between, was also talking about art. He was praising Queen Anne, assuring us that we professional players would find in her a woman of taste who – had destiny not called her to the supreme role in public life as a king’s consort – might have excelled in any of the arts. He dabbed at his mouth while he mentioned the Queen, as if he could only do so with clean lips.

  I enjoyed a chat with Sir Philip Blake which, after he’d cleared his throat, went in its entirety as follows:

  Sir Philip Blake: Oh, er, Ignorance!

  Nicholas Revill: Ah, Sir Philip.

  Sir Philip Blake: Very good.

  In fact I saw and heard nothing of any significance during our time with the Blakes. Nothing except for a couple of exchanges. One was harmless, I think, or at least predictable. And I hardly knew what to make of the other.

  Martin Barton accosted me at one point. He waved his hand about the room and said, “What do you think of all this?”

  “Think of it?”

  “Is there honesty here?”

  “As much as anywhere,” I said.

  “I tell you there is more honour and honesty in the thumb of a single craftsman than there is in all these finely swath
ed corpses.”

  “If you say so.”

  But Barton wasn’t interested in agreement or disagreement. He’d approached me only in order to unburden himself. Perhaps he’d had enough of being struck virtually dumb as Poesy. I was treated to a rant about the corruption of the court and the age which might have come from one of his plays. Everything was foul and decayed. It might look fine on the surface but poke your finger through, and it was all seething rottenness underneath, food for worms. I nodded politely, not wanting to spoil the satirist’s enjoyment, but eventually I just had to excuse myself. A call of nature, you know.

  I was out of the room for a few moments answering nature’s call. In less grand surroundings I might have pissed in a randomly chosen fireplace, as one would in an inn, but somehow I didn’t think they’d approve of that sort of behaviour in this sort of place. So I dropped in on the servants’ privy in the back quarters of the establishment. Even here the buckets seemed to have an extra sheen, no doubt on account of the reflected nobility of the retainers’ gilded waste. In the main bedrooms upstairs the chamber pots were most likely silver.

  I was making my way back to the principal room where we were rehearsing. A man and a woman were standing just outside the door, deep in conversation. It looked to be one of those discussions at which a third party would not be welcome. I was about to cough to alert them to my presence, then paused. The woman was Lady Jane Blake. The man had his back to me but there was something familiar about him.

  The light was dim in the passageway outside the practice room and there was a great tapestry hanging from the wall next to me. I’ve always had a hankering to eavesdrop from behind a tapestry or arras. (It’s what Polonius does with fatal results to himself in WS’s Hamlet.) I stepped into the shadow of the arras but without concealing myself properly behind it. I wasn’t so much an eavesdropper as a passer-by. Then I listened. There was the rustle of paper.

  “And the seat,” said the voice of Lady Blake. There was that suppressed laughter in her tone. “You are sure about the seat?”

  “Absolutely, my lady,” said the other.

  I recognized his voice. Had listened to him lately. Who was he?

  “But will it hold up under the weight?”

  “It will hold up. We wouldn’t want anyone falling off the device accidentally, would we?” said the man.

  The man and woman almost giggled in a manner that seemed to me, loitering in the folds of the arras, somehow improper. As if they were children sniggering over adult matters. I risked a peep around the edge of the hanging. Heads together, the couple were examining a sheet of paper. I recognized the man now.

  “Then this will come down,” said Lady Jane, stabbing a plump forefinger at the sheet.

  “Oh, it’ll come down all right,” said Jonathan Snell. “It will all come down.”

  Jonathan Snell, the engine-man who was designing machines and effects for Jonson’s Masque of Peace. The gentleman who’d been invited to guess my weight in the courtyard. Now he was demonstrating something to Jane Blake, with the same confident style in which he’d shown off the diagram of the deus ex machina chair. He was surely talking about a device of his own making, but what was it?

  My impression that there was an underhand aspect to this meeting was strengthened by the way in which the two of them – the noble lady and the engineer with the long thumb – responded when one of the household footmen glided by. Luckily this yellow-liveried gent came from a different direction to the place at which I was standing. The Blake footmen were very silent and this, combined with their glassy stares and golden costumes, gave them the indifferent quality of fish in a big pond. This particular fish was almost on Lady Blake and Master Snell before they spotted him. When they did, the couple seemed to spring apart and Snell hastily folded up the sheet of paper. The footman glided on, far too well-bred to observe the behaviour of his betters. If he noticed me while I was loitering he gave no sign of it. After a moment Lady Blake returned to the practice room, and shortly afterwards Snell followed her inside. I had the distinct impression that they didn’t want to be seen entering together.

  Putting on my best just-wandering-around air, I stepped out from the shelter of the arras and went back to the masque rehearsal. There wasn’t much for me to do since I had my lines as Ignorance off pat – no great feat considering there were so few of them – and Ben Jonson’s energies were largely directed at polishing the performances of the nonprofessional players. Lady Jane Blake disposed herself as Plenty, clutching a jug instead of a cornucopia to her ample chest. Sir Philip hummed and cleared his throat and just about got through his few verses as Truth, although he could not resist slipping in a ‘very good’ from time to time. Maria More was a graceful handmaid to Plenty, while Bill Inman billowed about as the Ocean. Giles Cass was playing Suspicion – he had asked Jonson for the part, I gathered.

  Jonathan Snell sat at a desk to one side of the room, sketching and scribbling on sheets of paper and from time to time coming across to consult Jonson. I guessed he was working out the final details of the masque machinery. He nodded towards me, acknowledging our meeting from a day or two before. He seemed a straightforward fellow but I was puzzled about why he and Lady Jane had been conversing so secretively outside the door and why they didn’t appear to want to have anything to do with each other inside the room.

  The light in the passageway had not been good but, from what I’d glimpsed, the sheet of paper was covered with lines and circles. It looked very similar to the one which Snell had shown to Jonson and me in the courtyard. The fact that the two had been talking of ‘seats’ and ‘weights’ tended to confirm that the engine-man was explaining to Lady Jane the device intended to lower her husband to the ground during the Masque of Peace. These chairs, on which gods and other elevated figures are brought down to earth, are standard features of modern stages. We’ve got the mechanism for one at the Globe. It is housed in a little hut or cabin on top of the ‘heavens’.

  Perhaps, as a loving wife, Lady Jane was concerned for her husband’s welfare as he sank to earth. Then this will come down, she’d said, and Oh, it’ll come down all right, Snell replied. But the sniggering, conspiratorial tone of the dialogue somehow made a less . . . innocent . . . interpretation more plausible. And hadn’t Shakespeare said that the relations between the Blakes were cold?

  But what was I meant to put in my report to John Ratchett? That I’d heard two people talking secretively about a deus ex machina device? That William Inman had cracked an anti-Spanish joke? That Giles Cass played the part of Suspicion rather well?

  I was not exactly happy in the role of intelligencer. More to the point, I was not exactly successful, having little to report. I decided that I would wait until the next practice, which was to take place at Somerset House, and hope that something more significant would occur to earn me my three pounds from the Council.

  O, a chair, a chair!

  “Ah, Nicholaas, come ’ere. You look so fatigay, mon chéri,” said Blanche, the girl in the Mitre brothel. “So tired.”

  “It’s been a hard day,” I said.

  “Come ’ere and be soozed by your Blanche,” she said, grasping me firmly by the arm.

  I don’t know how she could tell that I was tired, since she kept the light in her little chamber so dim, but I was more than ready to be soothed. Later, when my tiredness had disappeared after a vigorous soothing, I lay stroking her dark hair where it fanned out over the pillow and thinking of nothing.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “I ’ave found out sumzing about you, Nicholaas,” said Blanche.

  “’ave you?”

  “Now you make fun of ze way I speak. Zat is not fair.”

  “And why is zat, Blanche?”

  “Because it is you who teach me.”

  “Me?”

  “I learn from ze gen’lemen of England.”

  This was a nice way of referring to her customers, so I said, “But I like the way you speak. Honest
ly, Blanche. Tell me what you have found out.”

  “Non.”

  The pout and the shrug which accompanied this were more expressive than her refusal.

  “All right, don’t tell me,” I said.

  “Now I will tell you. You live wiz a – ’ow you say? – une veuve . . .”

  “If that means widow, yes, I lodge with a widow.”

  “I knew it!”

  “How did you know?”

  Pleased with herself, Blanche tapped the side of her nose.

  “I ’ave a little bird, ’e tells me zings.”

  “Well, your bird’s got it right this time.”

  “A young – widow – elle est belle?”

  “I’m sure your bird could tell you that as well.”

  “Perhaps she likes you, la veuve?”

  “Jealous, Blanche? ’ow you say that in French? Jaloux, is it?”

  For answer she looked across to the sand-glass which measured time in this place. Now my time was up. So I rose from the bed and settled up with Blanche, using part of the money given me by John Ratchett. There was a small pleasure in using Privy Council cash in a Southwark stew, but I don’t imagine I was the first. Blanche’s hand closed round the coins. She didn’t bother to conceal the business aspect to our transactions or make any play about being surprised to get cash.

  To be frank, I was happier keeping things on this business level with the Frenchwoman. Nevertheless I wondered how Blanche had found out where I lodged. Not too difficult, perhaps. Some other players frequented the Mitre. I knew that Laurence Savage did, for one. He must have been blabbing. Perhaps he too saw Blanche. The thought was unwelcome and I put it away.

  Blanche had said that I looked so fatigay when I arrived. If I did, the reason was the dramatic day which I’d just spent at Somerset or Denmark House, where we had assembled for an on-the-spot rehearsal of the Masque of Peace.