The Twelfth Night Murder

by Anne Rutherford

  Though this play was currently onstage with the Duke’s Men on the other side of the river, and The New Globe Players’ patent required they not stage any Shakespeare within two weeks of either of the royal troupes, their experience this past year was that the safest play to rehearse was one that was currently on one of the royal stages. By the time The New Globe Players would be ready to put it on themselves, the other troupe will have finished with it, their audience will have been saturated, and the royal troupe would be unlikely to suddenly decide to perform it again at a whim, thereby cutting short a run by The New Globe Players. Too many times the royal troupes had thwarted them by choosing the very play The New Globe Players were readying for the stage at that moment. Following the two royal troupes was always the safest strategy, and since their Southwark audience was a different set of folk entirely, it never mattered to their coffers that the play in question had already played out the nicer neighborhoods.

  On the surface of it The New Globe Players appeared at a terrible disadvantage to other theatre troupes, but the truth was quite the opposite. By the timing of Suzanne’s request for a patent, and by the fact that her theatre was best suited for an audience disparate from the more fashionable ones who frequented the royal playhouses, with their new-style farces from France and the invention of the thing they called a “proscenium arch,” which framed each scene like a picture and allowed for more complex set pieces, her Players were privileged among the commons troupes about town in that they were permitted to perform Shakespeare at all. Lesser troupes than they were limited only to ancient mummeries and the commedia dell’arte plays that predated even Elizabeth. The Globe, built by Shakespeare decades ago, was now the only London theatre dedicated to Shakespeare’s work in its purest form, without editing or extempore additions of any kind. The stage, of Elizabethan design, was unsuited to those newer plays being written since the king’s return from France.

  That Suzanne’s Players weren’t permitted to stage those plays mattered little to her troupe, for by their location and by their admission prices, the Globe attracted the lower classes who generally preferred the plays staged in the old style. That and the larger capacity than the other houses, due to the galleries having benches rather than chairs, put The New Globe Players in a rather tidy niche all their own. Suzanne had learned long ago that the trick to successful sub-rosa existence was to always be just barely below the notice of those who might cause her trouble. The Globe happened to be on the right side of the river for that.

  Horatio, who had long ago named himself after Hamlet’s friend and had never revealed his real name to anyone, rather enjoyed his role of Protector of the Text and didn’t mind at all the constraints put on the troupe regarding altering it. He worshipped the work of the bard, and would never change a word. He often exhorted the actors under his direction to do their clowning around and rude invention during rehearsal, for it would not be tolerated during performance before an audience, by the audience, the king, or himself. Were he to allow any noticeable change, and were such behavior to be told around at Whitehall, the Players could lose their patent. Because the king was known to drop in on them incognito, discovery was a real possibility.

  Today Horatio watched patiently as Louis, playing Marc Antony, delivered the central speech of his role with the pommel of his stage dagger pressed to his breeches like a large, silly erection. He strolled about the stage, waggling it and his hips eloquently each time he uttered the words, “Brutus says he was ambitious.” His deadpan was perfect, and not a twitch of a smile. He finished to enthusiastic applause, and brought the scene to a stop as he accepted the acclaim of his fellows with deep bows and flourishes.

  Horatio waited for the hilarity to die, then said, “Very well, Louis. Now let’s try it a little less à la commedia. This is, after all, a tragedy.”

  “It surely is a tragedy.”

  A few of the troupe chuckled, but Horatio frowned his lack of amusement. “If the quality of today’s rehearsal isn’t to your liking, Louis, then perhaps you should look to your own performance.” Sober silence fell over the actors on the stage. Horatio let it sink in for a long, disgusted moment, then said, “Once again, Louis. ‘Friends, Romans,’ et cetera, and so on.” He waved a hand to gesture that the work should continue.

  As Louis began again, the large audience entrance door at the front of the theatre opened just enough to allow someone inside. Suzanne looked to find Constable Samuel Pepper shoving the thing closed after him. It was heavy, and so he couldn’t get it entirely shut by himself. After a couple of attempts, putting his shoulder to it, he gave up and left it ajar. Suzanne left the rehearsal and went to see what it was he wanted. A visit from the constable was never pleasant and never good news. She approached him with a great deal of trepidation in her heart. She met him near the door, out of earshot of the rest of the Players.

  “Good morning, Constable.” She greeted him with far more warmth than she felt, and a smile she hoped at least appeared sincere.

  Samuel Pepper was a lazy man, who carried far more weight on his short frame than would have been practical for someone much taller. His walk was a rolling trundle, and even a short stroll for him required enough effort to make him red in the face. He didn’t sweat so much today as he usually did, for the sun hung behind a thick overcast and the temperature had sunk low in this midwinter season. The heavy, dark wool cloak bundled about him had wicked dampness from the street when it brushed the ground, so an inch or two of wet rimmed its hem. The collar was far too wide, even for a man as wide as himself. All in all, the garment was plainly too large for him. His black hat pointed sharply to the sky, which betrayed it as from Cromwell’s time. Even Puritans didn’t wear pointed hats anymore. It therefore bore no feather, but neither did it have a buckle. Not even a small one. It struck her as rather feminine, the sort of hat one might find on an old woman. Today his breathing wheezed with congestion, and Suzanne feared to come too close lest he be catching in the winter cold. Breathing ailments held a particular horror for singers and actors, who, even if they survived the illness, could not work without a voice while recovering.

  “Good morning, Mistress Thornton,” Pepper greeted with a smile that struck her as even more forced than usual. He was certainly not happy to be there and more than likely wished to be back at his office, imbibing the French brandy he kept there for his morning company. Probably he would have liked the brandy to dull the illness she now saw in his eyes and heard in his voice. Whatever had brought him there that morning surely must be important, for him to have given up his brandy on such a day.

  “What can I do for you, Constable? I hope you’re feeling well enough to be out and about in this cold.”

  He coughed to demonstrate just how sick he really was, and said, “I come to ask a favor.”

  A favor? And he was admitting it? His errand must be even more serious than she’d thought. But a weight lifted from her heart, for she realized he must not be there to arrest anyone. He was the one who needed something from her this time, and that put her at an advantage. “What might I do for you?” She cared very little about helping Pepper, but it was always good to be on the right side of the law in a neighborhood where on any given day most folks were guilty of one minor thing or another. More than once she’d had to talk him out of taking away someone she cared about, and had not always succeeded.

  “I . . .” He paused for a long, painful coughing fit. Suzanne stepped back as he bent and hawked phlegm onto the stones at her feet. Then he straightened, dabbed his wet lips with a handkerchief, and continued, “Mistress Thornton, I am here about your boy.”

  “Piers?” Panic rose in her chest and she placed a palm over her heart as if to hold it in place. “What has happened to my son?” Piers lived in some rooms in the neighborhood, but she hadn’t seen him since yesterday and so couldn’t be certain he was all right.

  Pepper’s eyes narrowed in puzzlement for a moment, the
n it cleared as he remembered Piers. “No, my dear woman. Nothing like that. Not your son, but your other boy. This lad is one of your Players.”

  “Christian?” Other boys came and went in the troupe, as they were needed for small and female roles, but since most theatre troupes were beginning to cast real women to play the roles of women, the demand for adolescent boys was declining. The Players had only Christian living on the premises who could be termed a “boy.” He was ten last October. She turned toward the stage to look, and there he was, looking at her to see what she wanted. She asked Pepper, “What do you want with Christian?”

  Pepper squinted at the boy on the stage, puzzled once more. “That is your boy actor?”

  “It is.”

  “He’s the only one in your group?”

  “Currently, yes.” She gestured to Christian that he should never mind, and should return to the rehearsal. The boy complied, and once again attended to Horatio.

  Pepper thought for a moment, then said, “It appears I’ve made a mistake. It also appears I do need your help even more than I’d thought.” He seemed deeply disconcerted by this unexpected development, whatever it was.

  “Perhaps if you told me the story from the beginning.”

  He nodded, and frowned as he thought for another moment. Then he began, “There was found this morning a body floating in the river.”

  Suzanne’s interest piqued, and so did her sense of alarm. “In the river, you say?”

  The constable nodded. “Indeed. Not far from here.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I couldn’t say. Though I thought I knew.” He glanced over at Christian again. “I find I was mistaken.” Pepper returned his attention fully to Suzanne and continued, “He was found caught among some flotsam near one of the waterwheels in an arch at the south end of the bridge.” He gestured in the general direction of the bridge, which was the only route across the Thames in the city except by ferry.

  “Did he fall from the mill above?” This certainly wasn’t the first body ever to be pulled from the river near that bridge. People jumped, were pushed, or fell accidentally with appalling regularity. The hundreds of shops and households ranged along the sides of the road crossing the bridge all had windows looking out over the river, and the bridge was one of the most crowded streets in London. The waterwheel that turned the mill at the south end of the bridge had claimed many victims over the years.

  Pepper shrugged. “Hard to tell, I vow. Not from the street, I think, the way the structures are situated on that side of it. A fall from a window, perhaps, but by the way he was stuck in the current against the pier I should have thought he’d come from farther upstream.”

  “Bank Side, then?”

  A doubtful nod, and a shrug in reply. Pepper appeared at a loss, but Suzanne had a sense she wasn’t being told everything. She asked, “What brings you to me today?”

  “As I said, I thought he was one of your actors.”

  “What made you think that?”

  “He looks a mite like your boy, Christian.” He nodded in the direction of the stage. “I remember interviewing him last summer.”

  “But even though your dead body is not our Christian, and you plainly don’t know its identity, you still think I can help you with this investigation. What makes me so likely?”

  “He must be an actor.”

  “You don’t know his name, or anything else about him. You now know he’s not our boy; how can you still think he’s an actor?”

  “It’s true. Apparently I’ve never seen him before, and there is no telling what his name is, nor from whence he came. But his attire told me he must be an actor in a play somewhere, and your theatre is the closest playhouse to where the body was found.”

  Impatience rose, and Suzanne wished the constable would simply spit it all out for her. “What attire? Why must you be so circumspect?”

  The constable blinked some, and for the first time since she’d known him he seemed unsure of his words. “Well, Mistress Thornton, my sensibilities were quite shaken when I saw what I never expected to see in my lifetime. I cannot compass the meaning of it, and can only hope he belongs to another troupe of actors. For either he’s an actor, or else he’s a . . . well . . .”

  She sighed. “A sodomite? Is he wearing a woman’s frock, then?”

  Pepper nodded.

  Suzanne gazed at him for a moment, wondering how a man executing his office could be so tender about that subject. Unseemly as it was, it couldn’t possibly be something he’d never encountered before. Pepper was lazy and avoided work, but Suzanne had always assumed he was capable of accomplishing that work. Now she doubted it. Finally she said, “Well, Constable, I assure you there are hundreds of men in London who enjoy wearing dresses, and a surprising few of them are actors. Particularly our Christian, who would not be found dead in one, literally or otherwise, except onstage where it is understood he is playing a role that does not necessarily reflect his own personality. So I assure you your corpse is not one of ours. We are missing nobody today. Is that information all you came for?”

  Pepper drew a deep, thoughtful breath as he struggled with the decision of what to say next. He said, “I wonder, Mistress Thornton, whether you would care to come look at this corpse?”

  “Look at it? What for?”

  “You see, the poor fellow did not drown, nor was he killed by the waterwheel. He was stabbed in the throat.”

  “Murdered?”

  Pepper nodded. “I’ll need far more information than I have available to me in order to find his killer.”

  Suzanne weighed her next words more carefully than usual, for the first ones that came to mind were quite sharp and therefore ill-advised. She said, “Not to put too fine a point on it, Constable, but you must admit that a desire to learn the truth has never caused you so very much trouble in the past.”

  “True, Mistress Thornton. Ordinarily this corpse would have been buried without much to-do and forgotten, but I’m afraid your late successes in discovering the perpetrators of such murders have created an expectation in the crown that is more than I can live up to.”

  A smile tickled the corners of Suzanne’s mouth, for she knew well the cases he meant. “Indeed? The murders I’ve solved for you have got the king thinking you can solve them yourself?”

  He nodded. “I’m afraid I’ve been told that I’m to find this boy’s murderer, since I appear to be the only man in all of London so very talented at this sort of deduction.”

  Suzanne’s smile grew to a full-fledged grin. “Well, Constable, I imagine that puts you at a singular disadvantage regarding your office.”

  “The magistrate has full confidence in me. It is a two-edged sword.”

  “Misplaced as that confidence is.”

  That stung Pepper, and he blinked. “I do my best.”

  He didn’t, but Suzanne wasn’t going to argue that point. “The question is, will you succeed?”

  “I have full confidence in you.”

  “I haven’t agreed to help. What do you offer in the way of compensation?”

  “The knowledge that justice is done?” His tone was hopeful, and betrayed his understanding that she knew justice was a fantasy and she would want more for her trouble.

  “There is no such thing as justice this side of heaven.”

  Pepper nodded the truth of that, and his voice took on the strident tone of one playing a trump card. “Then perhaps you would consider that I have the power to keep the assorted thieves and cutthroats attached to your troupe safe from arrest?”

  Alarm skittered up her back. This was skating into a risky subject. She was ever forced to not look very closely at the character of the actors in her troupe, and tended to look the other way on most things so long as nobody stole or fought while on the premises. “You would commit malfeasance?” They both knew he did so every
day, but this argument was all she had at her disposal.

  He shrugged. “To a point. There may be some instances where circumstances could be interpreted in your favor.” Suzanne waited for the rest of his explanation, and then the other shoe dropped. “But remember, by the same token they might otherwise be taken as not in your favor.”

  “That sounds very much like a threat.” Trepidation weakened her voice, and she coughed to clear her throat.

  “Not at all. ’Tis nothing more than an arrangement of mutual respect and support. One hand washes the other, you understand. I would be predisposed to be lenient with those associated with someone I respect.”

  “And need.”

  “Also that.” There was no shame in him. This was a simple agreement and nothing more.

  She considered his words, and understood that were she to refuse the alliance there would certainly follow a flurry of retaliatory arrests and other sorts of harassment to demonstrate his power. Pepper could bring her enterprise to a complete halt if he wished, and as self-centered as he was, he would surely make certain she would have to close her doors just to show her he could. Further, he could accomplish it in short enough time that Daniel would be powerless to thwart him. She said, “Very well. I promise nothing, but show me the corpse. Where is it?”

  Pepper’s relief was palpable, and a wide, small-toothed smile spread across his face. “Excellent! Come with me!” He waved her along to accompany him, and turned toward the front entrance, which still stood ajar.

  “This way, Constable.” Suzanne gestured toward the rear of the theatre. “You might be aware there’s a back entrance to this building. You don’t need to shove that enormous entrance door back and forth by yourself.”