An Honourable Murderer

by Philip Gooden

  At this moment I felt something wet and warm slide down my cheek and was surprised because I hadn’t known that the death of any single one of these men meant so much to me. Then a second blob tapped me on the forehead and, in an instant, there came the soft drumming of summer rain across the royal terrace. A soothing sound to wash away the bitter remains of the day. The torches started to sizzle and gave off yet more smoke. Then the rain started to come down in earnest. Whatever traces there’d been of Master Cass on the river-stairs – a little of his blood, a few of his hairs – would soon be washed away and he would be no more.

  I turned to hurry indoors. One of the ground-level windows giving on to the terrace was still open. In the few seconds between leaving the riverside parapet and entering the audience chamber I was overcome by a strange conviction. Strange, because it arrived from nowhere. And a conviction because I was as sure as anyone could be without any evidence or logic to support the idea (that is, very sure indeed) that the deaths of Blake and Ratchett and Cass were all linked. That each man had been murdered, probably by the same individual or individuals. And lastly that it was the responsibility of Nicholas Revill, who had recently distinguished himself by playing the part of Ignorance, to disentangle the truth from out of this peculiar jumble of events. To pull out all the threads. And it was my responsibility because I was the only person to hold all those threads in my hands. No one – apart from the murderer or murderers – knew as much as I did.

  Inside the audience chamber the sounds of enjoyment had given place to the occasional shouts and whistles of labourers as they dismantled the scaffolding and stage. The gallery from which Blake had made his fatal descent was already stripped of its curtains and screens. In one corner of the great room were piled the stage effects: the sun and the clouds, the scalloped waves through which La Paz had made her elegant progress. There was sufficient light for the workmen to see what they were doing but none of the concentrated blaze of a performance. Even the central spot where the King would have been enthroned had he attended the masque looked dim and uncared for. There is almost no place on God’s earth so forlorn as the playhouse which almost everyone – players and audience – has quit. You wonder whether anyone will ever come back, even while the reasoning part of your head says that the very next day there’ll be the usual bustle of lights and laughter, of groans and applause.

  There were perhaps a dozen men in the audience chamber. Judging by their livery, some of them were Somerset House attendants working to clear this space so that it might be ready for the Queen once more after the Spaniards’ departure (which was imminent). I recognized Ned Armitage and Tom Turner from the Three Cranes yard. Up in the gallery, which looked oddly naked without its curtaining, stood the figure of Jonathan Snell near the unprotected edge. His spectacles glinted. I wondered that he wasn’t afraid of walking off the edge, with his poor sight.

  I looked around for father Snell and after a moment glimpsed him in what had been the backstage area but was now an open space. He was bending over the windlass, the one that had taken six men to put into position. He must have heard me coming or seen me out of the corner of his eye since he glanced up when I was still yards away. His sight was keener than his son’s for he said, “Nicholas Revill, isn’t it? What are you doing here? Your fellows have gone home.”

  “I’ve been looking at the river.”

  He did not query this but said, “Now you’re here you can lend a hand.”

  “Willingly.”

  “Then take that chair and put it with the other stuff over in the corner. I’ll get someone to help you.”

  He pointed at the ‘throne’ on which the figure of Truth had descended at the conclusion of the Masque of Peace. It was still sitting in the centre of the stage at the place where Ben Jonson had landed.

  I didn’t move. If I was going to say anything it had to be said now. I put my hand on the older man’s arm. He’d been about to summon one of his workmen.

  “Wait, Master Snell.”

  He looked curiously at me. There must have been something in my voice, a tension, a discomfort.

  “Yes?”

  “I have a question.”

  The question really was, did I think this individual with his expert hands and ingenious mind was a murderer? No, he was probably not a murderer. But in any case this is not a question you can ask straight out. My tongue turned to stone.

  “Master Revill, are you well?” said Snell, his tone somewhere between concern and impatience.

  Now I had to speak. So, for want of anything better, I poured out an account of how I’d heard – no, overheard – the conversation between him and Lady Jane during the rehearsal at the Blake mansion. That conversation about Then this will come down, and Oh, it’ll come down all right.

  Snell looked baffled. I felt my face turning red.

  “You overheard this conversation, Master Revill?”

  “Yes. I didn’t mean to. I was on the way back from . . . I had been relieving myself.”

  “Relieving yourself.”

  I grew redder yet and could think of nothing further to say. Would I had said nothing at all.

  “You eavesdropped on us.”

  “I was behind an arras.”

  “And why do you think my talk with Lady Jane about things coming down and so on, why was this significant?”

  When your cheeks are as hot as a forge, can they get any hotter? Yes, they can.

  “Forgive me, Master Snell, I have been stupid and presumptuous.”

  “I would not disagree with you there.”

  “It’s just that there have been three deaths connected to Ben’s Masque of Peace –”

  “Three deaths?”

  “Two, I mean. Sir Philip Blake and now Giles Cass.”

  “So you suspect some mischief, exactly as my son did?”

  Strangely enough I was pleased that Snell mentioned this, since it made me feel less isolated, less absurd in my viewpoint. Even so I noted that he’d used the past tense in talking about his son’s belief.

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  “Possible that I might have been conspiring with Lady Blake to do away with her husband? Yes?”

  “Forgive me, Master Snell.”

  A wave of expressions had crossed his face while we were talking. When I’d mentioned the ‘three deaths’ (by mistake including that of John Ratchett), Snell had looked uneasy, it seemed to me. This was followed by indignation, even anger. Now, however, a glint of humour came into his eyes.

  “All right, Nicholas Revill, for the relief of your curiosity I shall tell you what Lady Blake and I were talking about while you were cowering behind an arras.”

  “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “Of course you mean to pry.”

  “All right, I do.”

  I waited, half embarrassed, half curious. Whatever he was about to say was not going to be a confession of murder.

  “Tell me, you know what I am referring to by a ‘seat house’?”

  “It’s a kind of jakes, isn’t it?”

  “A jakes, a privy, a necessary room, call it what you will,” said Snell, warming to his theme. “There is a man called Harington, Sir John Harington. He was a favourite of our late Queen Elizabeth on account of his good looks and for having translated some poem from the Italian.”

  I nodded away as if I’d heard of this Harington fellow but really without the slightest idea of who or what Snell was on about. It didn’t matter. The engine-man was caught up in his own words. There was the same kind of animation in his face as when he’d talked about the windlass and its intricacies.

  “In my eyes, Sir John is truly distinguished for one thing, whatever else he has done. He has given much thought to our bodily needs. He has – I won’t say perfected – but he has brought to a high pitch a device for ensuring that human waste is swept from eyes and nose by a combination of cisterns and valves.”

  I must have looked disbelieving or perhaps merely baffled for Jon
athan Snell swept on in prophetic vein, “The day may come, Nicholas, when chamber pots and jordans and nightsoil men will no longer be needed, at least in grand houses like this one. When you require to attend to your bodily necessities you will shut yourself away in a private room, a closet with a standing supply of water. And, at the end of a process, you will simply pull a lever or a cord to release a cascade of water and so flush away the unsightly traces of our animal nature. This is the jakes of the future.”

  “Where will it go to, the waste?” I said, slightly repelled (that someone should have wasted – ha! – so much time and thought on such matters) but also interested despite myself.

  Jonathan Snell waved his long-thumbed hand in the direction of the Somerset House windows and said, “The river is wide. The river is deep. Plenty of room out there. Now, is your curiosity relieved? I use the term advisedly. This is what I was discussing with Lady Jane Blake, the installation of one of these devices in her house on the Strand. There is your plot, there is your conspiracy. Lady Jane is in the forefront of progress and improvement. She is an apothecary’s daughter, you know, not one of your nose-in-the-air noblewomen. I am proud to call her my patron.”

  “I see. Thank you for explaining so much, Master Snell. I’m truly sorry for having – for having misunderstood you both.”

  “Have you spoken to her?” he said, quickly.

  “Of course not. Now I’m covered in confusion. I should not have been listening to your talk with Lady Blake. I should not have jumped to conclusions.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Nicholas.”

  He had not called me by my first name before, and it was pleasing to be forgiven – or at least to be excused – even at the cost of appearing a bit of a fool. Snell beckoned to one of his craftsmen. It was Tom Turner, the lank-haired fellow.

  “Now, if you two will put your hands to it, that chair is to be shifted from there – to there.”

  Together Turner and I manhandled the throne of Truth from the stage to the side of the audience chamber, where all the other portable effects were stacked. The ornamentation had been stripped from the chair and it was quite plain and compact although too large for one man to carry. I had entrusted my weight to this device, as had Sir Philip Blake and Ben Jonson.

  We placed the chair next to a full moon which, without the benefit of candlelight, looked tired and wan. I said to Turner, “You’ll use this again?”

  “What’s that?”

  “This chair. You’ll use it again?”

  The question, which had been casual, seemed to be unusually difficult for Turner to answer. He scraped his hand across his stubbly chin. “S’pose so,” he said eventually from behind his curtain of hair. Unlike his mate Ned Armitage, Turner was a man of few words. But why shouldn’t he be? He was a craftsman, expressing himself through his hands.

  I helped to shift a few more objects. After that the Snell workmen turned their attention to the laborious task of dismantling the wooden scaffolding, something which would surely occupy them for several hours of the night. I slipped out of the audience chamber, though not before encountering father Snell once more. He gave me a broad grin to which I replied with a sheepish smirk. I made my way through the passages and antechambers of Somerset House, a familiar route by now. I passed knots of Spaniards, still jangling in that strange tongue which sounds both sweet and sharp. They kept later hours than we English did. The same mixture of cooking odours which I’d noticed on my first visit, oily and blossomy odours, hung about the dining areas. After the departure of the old enemy, his smell would linger on for a little.

  I had a fantasy of meeting Doña Luisa de Mendoza once more in the corridors but I did not. Perhaps she had already slipped between the rose-scented, silken sheets of her bed. The thought of her slipping between the sheets was as sweet and sharp as the incomprehensible Spanish language – and I hadn’t even met Doña Luisa! I hastened through the great court and past the gatehouse and so out into the damp night.

  By the time I returned to the house in Thames Street, Mrs Buckle was in bed. Not surprising since it was gone midnight. If I’d known my landlady better, I might have disturbed her. As it was, the only person I disturbed was her daughter Lizzie who was downstairs but skittered away when she saw me, muttering some words about not being able to sleep.

  That made two of us for when I at last got my head down on my top-floor bolster, I found it hard to drift off. The events of the day swirled around in my head. A lot had happened. The successful performance of the Masque of Peace; the presence of Queen Anne (that angular lady from Denmark but one unexpectedly skilful in dancing); the death of Giles Cass; and the embarrassing closet-dialogue with father Snell.

  I believed what he’d said about the new cisterns and valves and the rest of it. It was too far-fetched a tale not to be true. I’d thought that he and Lady Jane Blake were plotting the death of a husband when all the time they were conspiring to build a better jakes. No wonder they’d been a bit secretive. No wonder they’d been acting a little like giggly schoolchildren conversing on adult matters. My respect for Jonathan Snell increased. He was not merely a creator of descending chairs and scalloped waves but a potential master of the privy. My respect for him increased – but I’d look at him with different eyes in future.

  It may seem odd but the fact that a man had died by drowning during the course of this Somerset House evening impinged on me less than the conversation with Snell. I wasn’t sure that Cass’s death was going to impinge much on anyone. Ben Jonson, who’d spoken to me on the terrace as we gazed at the body lying on its back, had not sounded like a man who was either shocked by what had happened or touched by grief. Presumably Sir Robert Cecil might regret it from a practical point of view, but Cecil had many men in his employment, both directly and indirectly.

  After Master Snell’s account of the ‘privy’ conversation I was no longer so sure that the deaths of Cass and Ratchett and Blake were linked. Wasn’t so sure that they’d been murdered. This was the second time I’d changed my mind in the course of an evening. Perhaps there was an ‘innocent’ explanation for everything after all. The first and third deaths were accidental while the middle one was a suicide. Perhaps Ratchett had stood on the trapdoor and pulled the lever himself.

  And then again, perhaps not.

  A fanfare of trumpets from an overhead gallery broke into my thoughts. We were back in the Chapel Royal at Whitehall Palace, the day after the masque performance at Somerset House. A historic day, this 19th of August, the day of the signing of the peace treaty between England and Spain. We were still awaiting the arrival of King James, although the fanfare was to signal his imminent appearance. There’s a form to these royal displays but I had the sense that James had kept everyone hanging about for a little longer than was considered proper, especially considering the presence of our Spanish guests. The King was known to have a distaste for large groups of people, even the ordered crowds at court. He preferred being out in the open, hunting in the field. Not to like presenting yourself in front of your own countrymen is a strange failing in a monarch, and one that is hard for a player to understand.

  None of the King’s Men had a clear sight of our patron as he processed into the Chapel in full ceremonial fig. We were bowing too low, of course. But I’m afraid that there wouldn’t have been that much curiosity among us about James in any case. We’d already played before him on two or three occasions, and so we were familiar with his features. Unlike our last monarch, King James did not provoke much curiosity, let alone excitement. He was said to be intelligent and, aside from his passion for hunting and for the company of young men, to love nothing more than a learned dispute. He had penned poetry in his youth and, more recently, written some book or other on the business of kingship. Yet who would not have substituted all of that for half an hour in the presence of Queen Elizabeth? James was not physically striking either. His eyes were deep-set, as though they were hiding in their sockets, and he displayed a queer, shambling gait
as he made his way up the aisle.

  When he reached the east end James seated himself on a kind of throne, which was less grand than a throne in an audience chamber because this was, after all, the House of God. The rest of us remained standing, bareheaded and silent. Only one other person was seated and that was Sir Robert Cecil, who was presumably allowed to keep his chair on account of his rank (and his hunchback condition). I was able to see almost nothing of the Secretary but recognized his voice as he read a preamble to the treaty. Cecil announced the formal outbreak of peace between England and Spain but it was a document so larded with fine, circumlocutory phrases that it seemed to cover things up rather than to make them plain.

  Then King James got to his feet and swore an oath in Latin to honour the treaty, with God’s good help. There was a Scots twang to his Latin that was quite pleasant to listen to, whether you understood the words or not. After that a Spanish gentleman whom I assumed to be the Constable of Castile, since he was the leader of their party, also undertook in Latin to honour the treaty. Then the King and the Constable fastened their signatures and seals to a little pile of documents – not that we could witness much of the procedure from our obscure position – and all this while we stood quiet and patient. Then the King walked jerkily out of the Chapel, with the audience or congregation bowing low once more. The effect to an observer would have been of a summer breeze wafting over a field of corn, especially since (though everyone’s hats were off) there were many feathers in evidence. We straightened up in time to see the Constable of Castile stalk by, his haughty demeanour a contrast to our monarch’s uncertain gait, followed by Cecil being carried in his chair, and then the rest of the two parties in descending order of precedence.

  And that was that, more or less. There was to be a feast at the Banqueting Hall, to which we weren’t invited. I heard later that the two sides tried to drink each other under the table, and that the King was particularly eager for toast after toast to be drunk since the Constable of Castile presented him with a fine gold and crystal cup when the first health was pledged.