The public – that is to say, people like us – was allowed to watch the animal fights in the palace courtyard. It was the King’s bears against greyhounds, followed by mastiffs baiting a tethered bull. But I’ve never had that much of an appetite for the bear-pit so I slipped off. I tried to tell myself that I’d been present at a piece of history-making (something to tell the grandchildren, although before you can have grandchildren you have to have children) but it didn’t convince. Treaty or no treaty, England and Spain might be at war again in a year or two. It was all a matter of show.
I had a privileged glimpse behind the scenes on my way out of Whitehall Palace. Getting lost in the building, I was passing, for at least the second time, a great pair of double doors. They’d previously been shut but were now open. Glancing in, I saw the English and the Spanish on opposite sides of a brocade-covered table. Among them I recognized the white-whiskered visage of Charles Howard, the Lord High Admiral, as well as Charles Blount, the chubby-faced Earl whom Cass had pointed out to me in Somerset House. At the near end of the table sat Secretary Cecil, with a pen, ink-well and single sheet of paper in front of him. On the other side of the long table, like so many knights ranged for combat, sat an equivalent number of Spanish grandees. I recognized the Count and the hawk-eyed lawyer whom Ratchett had identified, together with the Constable who had lately sworn the oath in the Chapel Royal. In fact I recognized so many of these men that I felt we’d already been introduced.
I was still staring into the room when Cecil’s great domed head swung towards me, like a lumbering but dangerous beast. Then most of the table turned their heads in my direction. Yet they weren’t really looking at me, a poor player, a nobody. Rather it was as if they were sitting for a collective portrait so that this instant could be commemorated down the ages. History sat heavy on their shoulders. Then the double doors were slammed shut by unseen retainers and once more I resumed the business of getting lost in Whitehall Palace.
A couple of days later, after more feasting and toasting and pledging, the Spaniards left town. Somerset House was restored to its rightful owner. It was said that Queen Anne lost no time in decamping from Whitehall and returning home. Home for her was evidently any place where her husband was not.
It was a somewhat longer journey home for the Spanish. They withdrew downriver with little of the pomp and ceremony which had attended their arrival. Londoners, always quickly jaded, showed no curiosity about the departure of the old enemy, the insolent foe. Before the Spanish arrived in London, there’d been relief that they were not bringing their own fleet upriver as far as the city. (This was the reason they had initially disembarked at Dover since the Privy Council could not permit them to accomplish in peace what they’d never achieved in war.) But now I don’t suppose anyone would have cared if they’d come and gone with a whole fleet of ships. They might have been a touch cocky in their demeanour, they might have spoken a strange language, but they didn’t wear horns and some of their women were beautiful.
I wondered what Sir Walter Raleigh thought to see them go. I wondered too about the legal niceties of the case against him. Since he’d been accused of conspiring with Spain – and ignoring the fact that this was an absurd charge in the first place – could he any longer be considered guilty of treason? For our old enemy was our new friend. We were all conspirators with Spain now, or at least the King and Secretary Cecil and the rest of the pack were. So where did that leave Sir Walter? An interesting problem for our legal friends in Middle Temple and Lincoln’s Inn there. Whatever was to happen to him, at least Raleigh had been spared the traitor’s ultimate and dreadful fate: to have the hangman cut him open and thrust bloody hands into his warm entrails even as he hung alive on the scaffold, and to witness this man draw the guts before his face, and then to have his private parts cut away and cast into the fire before his eyes . . . it was too horrible to think about, yet it was somehow impossible not to think about it if your mind drifted in that direction. My mind had been drifting in that direction quite a lot recently. I suppose these horrid pictures were prompted by Giles Cass’s remarks to me about Sir Philip Blake. About how he was lucky to have died when he did since Secretary Cecil, James’s beagle, was on his trail. Certainly he had perished quickly compared to what his time on the scaffold would have been. If Cass was telling the truth, of course . . .
But back to our Spanish guests. They disembarked somewhere beyond Greenwich and travelled overland to Dover where they boarded their own vessels and sailed away, to drop off the edge of the world for all I knew.
I enjoyed Mrs Buckle’s company for one further night. Or rather I would have done had her late husband not come between us.
Relations were a little awkward, maybe more awkward than they would have been if we’d never shared a bed. I was not certain whether she wanted to resume our connection, to put it coyly. But three or four days after the performance of the Masque of Peace, we again found ourselves sitting up late, sharing some wine and chatting. I had been telling her of the Spaniards, since I had seen them at close quarters, and of the Queen’s skill in dancing. I found myself gazing at the pronounced groove above her upper lip. I knew it now, a little, but I would not object to knowing it again, it and other things. To round off our chat, like the final item in a feast, I mentioned the drowned man who’d been fished from the river outside Somerset House.
“Who was he?”
“The drowned man? Someone called Cass, Giles Cass.”
“A great man?”
“No. Or, if so, only in his own estimation.”
“Did he have a wife?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“It would to her.”
But the question of whether Cass had a wife was of little interest to me. Of no interest at all in fact. Although unlike Martin Barton in other respects, he too had seemed not the marrying kind. Cass’s loss was not much regretted. Even Ben Jonson, when I referred to the subject a day or two later, had shrugged his shoulders and said something in Latin about death being common to all men. As for the way Cass had perished, nothing could have been more ordinary. Men, women and children fall into the river every day. It is London’s great receptacle.
Back to the living . . .
Mrs Buckle and I retired to her chamber. I only knew she wanted this by her instruction to me to follow her in five minutes. She must have been fearful of our footsteps being heard in unison, and alerting Lizzie the daughter or Grace the servant-girl. I crept along, by instinct, although I knew that if I were innocently going up to my own chamber I would have walked carelessly enough.
We lay down on her marital bed in an oddly decorous fashion. The single illumination came through the casement window from a nearly full moon. I thought of those husband-and-wife figures who stretch out beside each other for their eternal rest on the top of a church tomb. These weren’t very warm or encouraging thoughts. I put my arm across so that it rested on Mrs Buckle’s breasts. Except in one part, I felt as stiff as one of those pieces of tomb statuary. Mrs Buckle was still wearing her day clothes, her widow’s weeds. They showed up inkily in this light. Suddenly she too stiffened, in apprehension.
“See where he comes!”
She grasped my hand tightly where it clutched her left breast. By this time I was lying half across her. I turned my head. There was nothing to see, just the moonlight picking out the few bits of furniture in the bedchamber: a padded stool, a large chest, a small cupboard.
Mrs Buckle sat up abruptly. I sensed rather than saw her staring in the direction of the window. I thought she’d forgotten my presence but when she next spoke it was to me, not to whatever she’d glimpsed across the room.
“You see him? Oh, you must see him.”
“There is nothing –”
But I never finished the sentence for a weird alteration in the moonlight occurred. It was if a sheet of thick glass, full of flaws, was moving between the window and the bed where we were lying. The moon’s whiteness was splintered
into fragments as it poured into the room. I felt the place go cold. It had been a warm summer’s night, now it turned as chill as spring. Goosebumps broke out on my arms.
“In his habit as he lived,” said Mrs Buckle in a whisper. “He is leaving now.”
The disturbance in the moonlight passed and the room was filled once more with the planet’s steady, unhuman glow.
I’d never seen a ghost before and wasn’t sure that I’d seen one now. Perhaps it was no more than a trick of the light, a tattered cloud moving in front of the moon or a momentary blurring in my vision. But the hair on my head told a different tale. And whatever I’d glimpsed, imperfectly, Mrs Buckle had seen in full. Her late husband, the Reverend Hugh Buckle, would not leave her in peace.
The widow did not have to ask me to leave her. To be honest, after this latest visitation (if that’s what it was), I wasn’t in the mood for it. Nor was she. We made our half apologies – “I think I’d better . . .” and “Perhaps it would be best if . . .” – and I slunk upstairs to my own room, although not before ensuring that Mrs Buckle was content to be by herself for the rest of the night. She might have shifted rooms, although that would hardly deter a ghost. Perhaps her enforced move from Thames Street was a good thing after all.
I was shaken by the apparition. Baffled, too. What did the late Reverend Buckle require? To frighten his wife into propriety? To scare off an interloper in his bed? If so, he’d succeeded. But are ghosts so petty-minded? Oh yes, I thought, they must be. Why should they be any different from the rest of us? And then I wondered whether the ghost was walking for another reason altogether, and not out of jealousy. If so, it was a mystery. And, as it turned out, a solution to this mystery was to be found, like so much else, in the works of Master William Shakespeare.
He that was Othello
The first play we were scheduled to put on at the restored Globe was WS’s tragedy of the Moor called Othello. The theatre looked much better for its new coats of paint and general sprucing-up. It was over four years now since the Globe had been erected on this spot, and for a quarter of that time the place had been left empty during the plague. Indeed, the fabric of the building was considerably older than those four years since the timbers had been the ones originally used for the theatre in Shoreditch, dismantled and transported across the frozen Thames during the course of a bitter winter.
A good, meaty tragedy was required to open proceedings and there was a double advantage in staging Othello at this point in late August. Its popularity had already been proved by a short run in the spring of the year, and Dick Burbage had added to his fame by his interpretation of the title part. The seniors knew that word of mouth would bring in new audiences as well as those who’d be happy to see it for a second time. The other reason was that, as WS had indicated to me, we were due to perform Othello in front of the court at Whitehall in the near future. So the opportunity to refine the play – not in its verses, of course, but in the details of its action – was welcome. You might have thought that King James would prefer fresh plays, never exhibited before the public. In fact, insofar as he had any taste for plays at all, it was for old favourites. The very first play we’d performed for our powerful patron, As You Like It, dated from Elizabeth’s reign.
I’d resigned myself to a couple of minor parts (the soldier, the senator) in the revived Othello but I was lucky in the misfortune of one of my friends. Laurence Savage had taken the part of the dupe Roderigo in the spring production and had been assigned the same role this time. Laurence made a good dupe, he could assume an air that was at once doltish and calculating. He had that cowlick over his forehead which seemed to speak volumes. But by bad luck on the day before the rehearsal he ate too many oysters in the Mermaid tavern, keeping company with Ben Jonson, and the same night he was puking his guts up and the next day he was feeling exceedingly sorry for himself. Laurence dutifully turned up for the Othello rehearsal but the only part he would have been suitable for was playing a revenant from the grave. Dick Burbage sent him back to be sick in his lodgings and drafted me in his place.
“I’m sorry, Laurence,” I said, clapping my friend lightly on the back as he passed me at a rush, heading for one of the waste buckets stationed about the Globe playhouse for the convenience of our patrons.
I wasn’t really that sorry, but at least I tried to keep my pleasure at being given a larger part within bounds. Even if Laurence returned fit and well for the actual performance, I would be allowed to keep the role of Roderigo provided I made a decent go of it during rehearsal. I collected my lines from Geoffrey Allison, the book-keeper. The scroll was a comforting size. Allison told me to take care of it. He tells everyone to look after their parts, even the seniors. Losing the scroll containing your lines is a hanging offence with him, just as damaging your costume is with Bartholomew Ridd. I retreated to a quiet corner of the playhouse and started to study my lines.
Formerly I’d been of the opinion that nobody mattered very much in Othello except the Moor himself, his wife Desdemona and his scheming soldier-companion Iago. It’s funny, though, how being given a slightly larger character than you expect causes you to revise your notions of that character. Roderigo is an interesting figure after all, I discovered, more interesting than the somewhat bone-headed Cassio. I much preferred being Roderigo to, Cassio. There was a greater scope in the part. Roderigo is Iago’s dupe, his tool. He believes himself to be in love with Desdemona, and this is the first lever that Iago uses to topple him and everybody else from their perches. I would even get to wear a disguise since Iago instructs Roderigo to put on a beard when, in his lovelorn fashion, he follows Desdemona and Othello to Cyprus. Eventually Roderigo will die on that island, stabbed in the dark by his ‘friend’ Iago. There was a bit of meat to this role and I settled down to a more careful study of the scroll with the relish of a dog who’s just been thrown an especially tasty bone by his master.
However, as I scanned the lines, other thoughts intruded. I kept hearing echoes of the recent events at Somerset House and elsewhere. When Iago repeatedly instructs Roderigo to ‘put money in his purse’, I couldn’t help hearing those very same words used by John Ratchett when he’d persuaded me – in effect, tricked and bribed me – into writing reports for the ‘Council’. Surely Ratchett must have seen the spring performance of our play and, whether he was aware of it or not, was putting himself in the shoes of the machiavellian villain. And when Roderigo talks of rushing off to drown himself in the canals of Venice, I remembered the death of Giles Cass in the Thames. (The coroner had sat on the case and pronounced Cass’s death an accident, so that was that.) Above all, I saw in the character of Roderigo and the way he’d been duped by Iago a slightly uncomfortable reflection of the way I’d been drawn by Ratchett into the whole affair surrounding the Masque of Peace and the Blakes.
I’d been made a fool of, no doubt. But there was a nagging feeling in me that we’d all been made fools of in a larger sense, just as Iago makes fools of everyone from the senators of Venice to the garrison on Cyprus. Maybe this was the effect, or the fault, of Shakespeare’s Othello. Of reading his lines and then seeing the skeleton of the play once again clothed in flesh and blood during our practice. The tragedy of the Moor is controlled by a master-manipulator, a shadowy figure who stands behind or above all the mayhem and murder which he delights in producing. And all the time he is the bluffest, plainest, most downright person you could imagine, is Iago!
Behind the real-life tragedy of the death of Sir Philip Blake, and the less lamented departure of Giles Cass, and the almost unknown demise of John Ratchett (but still known to me and to at least one other), I wondered whether there was a similar machiavellian figure in the shadows, an Iago, manipulating events for his – or her – benefit. It must have been the heated atmosphere of this play, seething with plot and counter-plot, which provoked these suspicions in me once more. At the end of Othello, the truth comes out, although it’s too late for everyone by that stage. I did not know whether the trut
h concerning the death of Blake, the man who’d played Truth, would ever emerge.
Since I was uncertain what could – or should – be done, I settled for doing nothing. But no sooner had I decided this than a couple of conversations started to put matters in a different light.
The first conversation was with Abel Glaze. During a pause in the practice he congratulated me on securing the part of Roderigo.
“From Ignorance to a dupe isn’t such a big step,” I said, referring to my role in Ben’s Masque of Peace.
“Oh, come on, Nick, you know you have to be smart to play stupid. Speaking for myself, I’d rather play the zany than the hero.”
They say that inside every clown there’s a serious man, a tragedian, struggling to get out but I’m not sure that this was the case with Abel.
“Can I ask you to play the judge now, Nick?” he said.
“Play the judge?”
“It’s not the right word. But I’m in a bit of a difficulty. You see this?”
Glancing round as if to ensure that no one was watching, Abel produced a metal flask from his pocket. He shook it. There was liquid inside. The flask, made of finely chased silver, looked vaguely familiar.
“This belonged to Sir Philip Blake.”
I recognized it now. I’d seen Blake take a swig from it on the day of the fatal practice at Somerset House, before he climbed up the ladder to the gallery. Dutch courage, I’d thought at the time.
“Where did you get it, Abel?”
“I picked it up from the stage floor after he fell. Remember?”
All I remembered was Abel heading towards the body. And before that, the crack of Sir Philip’s head striking the ground like a nut being split open. And after that, the blood pooling out from beneath his cloak.
“I wasn’t looking too closely.”
An Honourable Murderer Page 20