An Honourable Murderer

by Philip Gooden

  “Yes, well . . . you can blame Martin Barton too. I’d been looking at my lines for his Melancholy Man tomorrow. I remembered how that story turns on a Duke whom everyone assumes to be dead after an assassination attempt . . .”

  “Before he comes back in disguise as a hermit to see how they’re all getting on without him,” said Abel who, like me, had a minor part in Barton’s play.

  “Yes.”

  “Far-fetched,” said Abel.

  “Martin Barton would not like to hear you say so. He thinks Shakespeare is lacking in realism because that play about the Moor turns on a handkerchief. Anyway, it occurred to me that there might be – advantages – for Sir Philip Blake in playing dead, since I’d already heard how Cecil was on his tail. And then other things came together, such as the fact that Bartholomew Ridd’s laundrywoman hadn’t been able to clean up the ‘cloak of Truth’ by soaking it in milk or using salt and water on the thing. No wonder she hadn’t been able to get the blood out easily, since it wasn’t blood but red paint. And I’d seen just such an application of red paint in the Three Cranes yard. Old Ned Armitage had got it over his face by mistake. So one idea led to another . . .”

  “Blake is a good actor, he played the artisan well. I’d never have guessed.”

  “Yes. But he didn’t have to speak much, he hid behind that curtain of hair. He probably enjoyed it, just as you or I would enjoy playing the nobleman for a week.”

  “A year would do.”

  “The real strain fell on the others who were in on the deception. Lady Blake fainted when her husband apparently died on stage. I thought that was perhaps to distract us from the trick that was being played, but the faint might have been real.”

  “No feint faint,” said Abel.

  “Tell it to Shakespeare, he appreciates that kind of joke.”

  “You’re taking that tone because you didn’t think of it first. Go on with your explanation.”

  “Where was I?”

  “With Lady Blake.”

  “Afterwards when I saw her she was sometimes merry and cheerful and sometimes tense and strained. That might fit a new widow, but it would fit even better a woman who was glad that her husband had been preserved alive but was also anxious all the time because he might be found out. The same with Maria More, who denied that the dropped handkerchief was anything to do with her even though the handkerchief was completely unimportant. They were living in expectation of discovery. Even Bill Inman was on edge, for all that he seemed so bluff and cheerful. I saw him and Lady Jane embracing just after her husband’s death, but I wonder who was reassuring who.”

  “So that’s it,” said Abel. “I can tell you though that I had a nasty surprise when I heard Sir Philip’s voice. It was a dead man talking. A ghost.”

  “So did I,” I said, “even though I’d guessed by then who he was. I mean, who Tom Turner was.”

  “Seeing as it might have been a ghost, I should have slipped into my best Horatio style,” said Abel. “Did I tell you I might have the part of Horatio in Hamlet?”

  “You have mentioned it now and then.”

  Abel stopped in the middle of the moonlit highway and began to declaim:

  If thou hast any sound or use of voice,

  Speak to me.

  If there be any good thing to be done,

  That may to thee do ease and grace to me,

  Speak to me.

  Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life

  Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,

  For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,

  Speak of it.

  The dropping moon gave him a silver tinge. At this moment, such was my state of elation and exhaustion, that I wouldn’t have been altogether surprised to see a ghost stalking past us, going about his business by the glimpses of the moon. If Abel could have conjured him with the power of his voice and his earnest tone then he would have done.

  But no ghost came. Instead we arrived unscathed at Abel’s lodging in Kentish Street. He offered me his bed to share for the night and, in all innocency, I accepted his offer and, in all innocency, we shared it.

  Journey’s end

  I did not return to my Thames Street lodging until the next evening. Abel and I walked up from his place in Kentish Street early in the morning. There was the first touch of autumn in the air, like a dog nipping round your heels in a not altogether playful manner. The mist still lay on the river when we arrived at the playhouse but it was rapidly burnt off by the sun.

  There was a Globe rehearsal for The Melancholy Man during the morning and the performance of a different piece by another playwright in the afternoon (it was Love’s Triumph by William Hordle, if you’re interested). It was satisfying to be back in our own playhouse, newly renovated – or ‘tarted up to buggery’ as Sam the doorman would say. It was satisfying to be playing according to our own schedule rather than running around at the beck and call of the court and taking on parts that didn’t really belong to us, such as Grooms of the Outer Chamber. Apart from any other consideration, we hadn’t been that well remunerated as a company for our attendance on the Spanish mission to London, receiving a total of twenty-one pounds and twelve shillings to cover a period of more than ten days. It sounds a lot but most of the money went on necessary expenses such as barbering, laundering and provisioning ourselves, since the court high-ups never think that the rest of humanity has to be washed, shorn and fed, especially if we’re to look and feel our best. And the King’s Men didn’t even get any new livery out of the whole affair.

  So, to get back to our proper business of murder, romance, mayhem, comedy, intrigue and deception was a pleasant relief. While I was practising the not very demanding part of the murderer Lussorio in The Melancholy Man, it was curious to reflect that Martin Barton had unwittingly helped me to solve the mystery of the ‘murder’ of Sir Philip Blake by showing how a man might come back to life under another guise. The playwright himself, with that dainty blue hat on his red head, was in attendance during the morning rehearsal even though he wasn’t needed and would have got in the way if Burbage hadn’t slapped him down from time to time. Writers need slapping down from time to time in my opinion. Even so, Barton mouthed along to his own lines and mimed the actions, standing to one side of the stage. I was still waiting for his hat to fall off.

  I’d forgotten that I had left the passage window unlatched from where Abel and I climbed out the previous evening into Brend’s Rents. It suddenly occurred to me in mid-rehearsal that it would still be open. So, in a moment when I wasn’t needed, I hurried off to fasten it. I should have left it alone for, as I was leaning out to grasp the catch, William Shakespeare walked past.

  “Just shutting this, Will.”

  I made a bit of a fuss about doing so, turning the catch with precision, and drew attention to the sort of trivial action which is best performed without thought.

  WS stopped in his tracks.

  “It shouldn’t have been open in the first place,” he said.

  I shrugged casually, but like the window-closing movement this gesture was false, and I felt it as false.

  “I’ll have a word with Sam about it,” said Shakespeare.

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “As a matter of fact I have just been speaking to him.”

  “You have?”

  I was glad that the light in the passage was dim. It was always dim in this passageway.

  “Sam is very worried that the door to his room doesn’t shut fast,” said WS. “He says that you were most concerned about it too, Nicholas, when you talked to him yesterday.”

  It crossed my mind to ‘forget’ the conversation with Sam but then I thought better of it. A partial admission was safer.

  “We weren’t talking about the door to his room as such,” I said.

  “That’s odd because I got the impression that your whole conversation had been about the door that wouldn’t shut. It’s unusual for a player to be so concerned about domestic matters.”


  “He did mention it once or twice, yes. The old bugger – the door I mean, not Sam. That’s how he referred to the door.”

  I had made the mistake of trying to imitate Sam’s style of speech. William Shakespeare did not seem to respond positively to my attempt at lightness. He had more to say.

  “But that wasn’t what he wanted to talk to me about, the door which doesn’t shut and which, in truth, we must see to. What bothered Sam was that someone has been fiddling around with his keys. They were in different places to where they ought to have been. He has a system, you know.”

  “Labels and so on,” I said.

  “Yes,” said WS.

  “Perhaps he put them back in a different place himself yesterday.”

  “He put them back?”

  “Well, he’s in charge . . .”

  “And next, Nicholas, you will be saying that he’s an old man, that his sight’s going and so on.”

  “It’s true that Sam is getting on . . .”

  “Yet we entrust this old man with our money, don’t we? He is our principal gatherer and responsible for all our playhouse takings. So we can trust him to know about his own keys, I suppose.”

  “Yes, we can,” I said.

  I was in my costume as Lussorio since we were still in mid-rehearsal. Underneath my murderer’s gear I was sweating like a pig.

  “I’ve just been having a look round the place to make sure of everything, in case anyone got inside here last night,” continued Shakespeare. “I’ve been examining the Globe from top to bottom. From pole to pole, you might say. I even went up to the cabin on the stage roof. There’s a fine view from the roof now that the mist has lifted.”

  “I must have a look sometime.”

  “The rushes on the walkway round the cabin are all scuffed and trodden on – although we haven’t had cause to use the hut or the lifting-gear so far this season.”

  “Sightseers maybe,” I suggested. “It’s a fine view from up there, as you say.”

  “Sightseers?”

  “Maybe not sightseers.”

  “All seems well, though,” said WS after a long pause.

  “That’s good,” I said.

  “And no damage has been done, Nicholas.”

  There was – perhaps – just the hint of a question in the remark, a slight lift at the end of his words.

  “No damage has been done, William.”

  “Then we shall have to assume that if anyone fiddled around with Sam’s keys it must have been a ghost. If any person – and it was more than one or two from the looks of things – was up on the stage roof, then that must have been a ghost as well.”

  “Ghosts, yes.”

  “Playhouses are full of ghosts, on and off the stage.”

  And with that WS walked away down the passage. I stood there for a minute at least, breathing deep and reflecting that I’d had a lucky escape (although in one sense I had not escaped at all). I recalled how rapid had been Abel’s and my relocking of the doors and replacing of the keys on the previous evening. Hardly surprising I’d put them back on the wrong pegs. Sam must be much more sharp-eyed than I’d thought.

  Then I remembered that I was taking part in a rehearsal and that if I missed my cue I’d receive a rebuke from Dick Burbage which would be considerably less subtle than the one I’d just had from Shakespeare. I hurried back to the stage, sweaty and distracted. I had to play a scene in which I expressed my ‘guilt’ for having allowed the Duke to get away from a murder attempt – even murderers may feel uncomfortable over a job badly done or not done at all. On this occasion I did not have to feign shiftiness and guilt.

  Shakespeare’s reference to the ghosts which haunt playhouses chimed with the moment during the previous night when Abel and I had been walking back to his lodgings. He’d declaimed those lines of Horatio’s which are a challenge to the ghost to declare its purpose in returning to stalk the earth.

  When I got back to Mrs Buckle’s house in Thames Street, it was with an idea in mind.

  The widow was waiting for me. I might have expected to be questioned about my whereabouts on the previous night. I might have thought she was going to describe how she’d seen, once again, her husband’s spectre. But she had a smile on her face and, quite unbidden, she put her arms about me.

  “Oh, Nicholas,” she said.

  “Oh, Mrs Buckle,” I said after a time.

  “A most extraordinary thing has occurred,” she said. “You could never guess –”

  “Have you found something?”

  “Why, yes. How did you know?”

  I kissed her again for answer. I did not want to spoil her enjoyment in her story, although I had a pretty good idea of what she’d found.

  Soon she came out with the story. Preparing to move house, since there was no possibility of deferring this any longer, she had started to sort out the few articles of furniture and other items which she and Lizzie had brought from the St Thomas’s parsonage. She’d not been in the mood to do this when they shifted houses shortly after her husband’s death. Only now could she decide what should be kept and what might be sold, since she and her daughter had to look to the future and consider all conceivable means of raising money. She’d even contemplated getting rid of the pieces which had been in her husband’s family for generations. In particular, the chest which stood in her bedroom.

  Opening the chest and examining its contents properly for the first time since the Reverend Buckle’s death, she rummaged through some potentially saleable items such as a lace cloth, a silver salter wrapped up in a piece of rag (and which must have been secreted there for safekeeping), and a brooch which she rather thought had belonged to her mother-in-law.

  “Then, Nicholas, I felt the strangest sensation. It was as if – as if Hugh was standing behind me and guiding me, telling me to look further, not to be satisfied with what I’d discovered so far but to look further. I got out all the contents of the chest and had them spread across the floor. Still I felt my husband urging me to look further and not to give up. I came to the bottom of the chest and it was bare and empty. I sat back and could not think what to do next. Then, Nicholas, I observed that there was a fair distance between the bottom of the chest inside and where it stood on its base on the floor. I rapped on the wood inside and it sounded hollow. I did not know what to do next but Hugh told me to go to the kitchen and get a roasting-jack. In short I used it to prise up the boards at the bottom of the chest and there I found – what do you think I found? – a hoard of money! Gold coins and more gold coins, and more still. I could not finish counting them but was overcome with amazement.”

  I thought of those words of Horatio about the reasons why ghosts walk. They come back for vengeance, they come back because they are restless, but they also come back for the most mundane of reasons. They’ve left money behind. This was a generous ghost though. The Reverend Buckle wanted the money not for himself – what can a clergyman be wanting with cash in heaven (or in the other place, or in the one that stands between)? – wanted it not for himself but so that his wife should have it.

  “Why, Nicholas, you do not seem surprised,” said Mrs Buckle.

  “I am not altogether surprised but I am delighted for you – and for Lizzie,” I said.

  “What should we do with it, the money?”

  “Why, it is yours, Mrs Buckle. Yours and your daughter’s. It must have belonged to your husband or to his family maybe. I am sure that his spirit was directing you to find it. Perhaps that is the reason you have, ah, seen him so often. That money is yours now by law and by any other right.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “There is no supposing about it. Besides, finders keepers, you know.”

  “We can afford to move now.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “Where should we go?”

  “To the country?”

  “Lizzie says she likes the town, even south of the river. But I think that would be a little rough for her.”

/>   “Rough for both of you, Mrs Buckle.”

  “Nicholas, you may move with us, if you like. Grace is coming with us. I could not leave her behind.”

  “You have a kind heart, Mrs Buckle. But I do not think I can move with you.”

  “You do not need to feel . . .”

  She was going to say something like “coy”, I think, but was too coy to express herself.

  “It’s not that,” I said. “I do not think I can house with you – or Lizzie – in the future wherever you’re living, in town or country.”

  “Oh.”

  “It is nothing to do with you, Mrs Buckle. I shall always have the fondest memories.”

  She brightened at this and said, “And I. But, do you know, Nicholas, so many coins. I couldn’t count them all.”

  “I don’t think you should mention this to anyone else, the gold coins.”

  “You are the first person I’ve told.”

  “Not Lizzie?”

  “She is out today,” she said.

  “Oh yes, out again. Well, please say nothing. Keep the money well hidden. There may be more honesty on this side of the Thames than in Southwark but there are villains and deceivers everywhere. People are not what they seem.”

  I decided to visit the Mitre brothel for a final time. Before that I dropped in on the Goat & Monkey – for a touch of Dutch courage maybe, considering what I intended to do next – and in that disreputable tavern I had the bad fortune to encounter that disreputable couple Tony and Charity Thoroughgood again. I did not wait to be nudged over, and pointed to and whispered about. Instead I walked straight up to them and told them flat out that I knew they’d been responsible for attacking me on the Thames bank not so long ago, by the Pure Waterman tavern. I’d recognized Charity’s voice, I said, and furthermore I had a respectable witness who was willing to give evidence (I did not mention that the respectable witness, John Ratchett, was dead). They could count themselves lucky I’d not brought an action of battery against them. But I would do it if they made trouble for me in future. In fact, I would do it if I ever saw them hanging about the Globe playhouse again.