It was not yet noon. A whiff of the food being prepared for sale to the audience drifted from the tents. Suzanne took a deep breath. Meat pies, she discerned from the scent of grease, onions, and pastry. This early there were no crowds of audience, and the ones who had been in rehearsal on the stage a moment ago were nowhere in evidence. She couldn’t remember any names but Arturo’s. As she descended from the coach, she looked around. Nothing moved except the streamers. They waved in the gentle breeze, slowly like seaweed in the tide.
“Hello?”
No sound or movement came from the tents.
Suzanne walked toward the cluster behind the stage. “Hello?”
Still no sound. The camp was still.
“Tell me, is Arturo about?” She called out, for her voice to carry to all the tents. A brown, shaggy mongrel dog came from behind one of them to stare at her, but he made no sound and only watched her with a slowly wagging tail as she proceeded through the camp.
More silence. This was beginning to irritate Suzanne. She halted, folded her hands in front of her, and called out, “It’s quite all right. I only wish to ask him some questions, then we’ll be on our way.” She looked at Horatio, whose neck was reddening with annoyance, and soon the flush would reach his face.
He also called out, his deep, carrying voice expressing both authority and threat, “My niece would speak to Arturo, and you all know she nearly always gets what she wants.”
Suzanne wished with all her heart that were true. She smiled and added, “Please. I’ll wait here until you decide.”
Suzanne and Horatio waited. And waited. Somewhere in the distance a sheep bleated. Suzanne waited some more, and eventually the sheep bleated again. Amusing itself, she imagined. She wondered whether the mummers would all simply wait in the tents until she gave up and went home, but knew they all knew her well enough to understand it would be an absurdly long wait.
Eventually Arturo appeared at the tent flap and stood quite still in the shadow as he looked out to see if she was still there. His disappointment at seeing her was apparent even at this distance. He withdrew for a moment, disappeared inside the tent, then came out to face her, clearly unhappy at having to do so but struggling to put a good face on it.
“Good morrow, mistress.” His voice was carefully modulated to express pleasant cheer and respect for a superior, neither of which he likely felt at that moment, and he bowed to her as if she were royalty. Or at least as if she were nobility, far above her true station. Suzanne sensed a bit of sarcasm, but ignored it in hopes of learning something helpful.
“Good morrow, Arturo.” She nodded pleasantly to him, then drew back her cloak hood so he could see she meant no harm or subterfuge.
Louis stepped forward, his neck craning to see what he could find among the tents. The girl was nowhere in sight.
The mummer was an extremely small, spare fellow, wiry and thin to the point of emaciation, but tough and strong despite it. He had the ideal body for a tumbler, and he was a master, still able to leap, flip, and bend himself into a knot at an age when most men sought a warm fire and soft chair to ease their aching bones. Of Italian extraction, he bore a long, hooked nose that, with his thinness, gave him the profile of a scythe. He wore only tights and a tight-fitting shirt with no sleeves and no collar. Beneath those leggings he was bound with a cloth, and the sheen of sweat on him was further evidence he’d been in rehearsal that morning.
His black eyes gazed at her with a deep perception that pegged him as one whose life depended on knowing all that went on around him and understanding all it meant to him. Catching Arturo unawares was never likely. He said, eyeing her like a crow waiting to pounce on a fresh carcass, “What can I do for you this afternoon, Mistress Suzanne?”
Louis moved closer to the tents, letting go of any pretense he was there for any reason but to see Arturo’s daughter. Arturo said to him, “She’s in the cook’s tent, Louis. Go to her before you burst apart. She will be happy to see you.”
Louis needed no further permission and bolted for the tent from which the odors of cooking food wafted.
As Suzanne watched him go, she said, “I wonder, Arturo, why you and your family took leave of us so suddenly the other day. Have we offended you somehow?”
The reply was immediate and practiced, the better to masquerade as truth. “Greener pastures, mistress.” His tone suggested that was the long and the short of it, and enquiring further would be fruitless. Which might very well be the case, but Suzanne wasn’t going to take his word for that.
She gave a glance about the area. This far away from the center of London, traffic was slow. All that could be seen from this spot were orchards and fields where cattle and sheep grazed. “Pastures, indeed, my friend. And green…maybe so. However, I think they can’t be nearly as lucrative as Southwark, where your audience was much larger than it could possibly be here. Unless, of course, the sheep are paying admission.” She paused to let that sink in, and Arturo did not reply. She added, “I wish you would be truthful with me.”
Now that they understood each other, that there could be no pretense of belief the mummers’ departure had been anything but flight from authorities, Arturo shrugged and said, “If not greener, mistress, then safer.”
“To be sure, I can’t find blame in keeping out of arm’s reach of the constabulary.”
“Then you answer your own question and you needn’t bother us on the subject.” He bowed to her again and turned as if to retreat to his tent. “If that is all, mis—”
“If we could speak of just one matter?”
Arturo paused, considered for a moment, then faced her. “Very well, mistress. I’ve no reason to think you’d wish us harm.”
Suzanne nodded. “Indeed not, Arturo. I would always want you to feel our doors are open to you whenever you might deem it safe to return. You and your family are crowd pleasers, and as such are always welcome in my theatre. Furthermore, I expect to do whatever I might to make it safe for you to return.”
A gratifying light of trust came into the tumbler’s eyes, and he seemed to relax some. Tension eased in his shoulders, and he faced her straight on. He said, “What would you ask, mistress?”
“I hear tell of an altercation between yourself and William Wainwright shortly before his untimely death.”
Arturo went stiff and alert once more. He only nodded in reply.
Suzanne continued, “You saw him after the night he came to my quarters.”
“Yes, I did. I helped him to the exit.”
“He threatened me before.”
Arturo’s eyes went wide with genuine surprise, and he quite lost his restraint. “He threatened you? The snake! He threatened you?” His olive complexion reddened and his bushy black eyebrows gathered in a knot. “How did he threaten you?”
“With a knife. I took it away from him.”
A single finger jabbed the air as Arturo spoke, and Suzanne had to remind herself he was angry at William and not her. He fairly shouted, “Had I known it, I would have slit his throat on sight of him!” The finger made a line across his own throat in a slitting gesture. “The man would never have left the theatre that night! I swear I would have murdered him when I had the chance!”
“But you didn’t.”
“I now wish I had. I wish I had cut him with this here knife.” He produced a dagger from his belt, an ordinary knife for eating and everyday utility. The handle was roughly carved by someone with little skill in it, though Arturo was deft enough in handling the thing. He twirled it in his fingers, then slipped it back into his belt. “I didn’t kill him when he returned, nor did I kill him when I saw him in the green room the day he died.”
That struck Suzanne speechless, and she blinked. “The green room?” she finally was able to say. “You saw him in the green room that night?”
“I did indeed. ’Twas during the performance I caught sight of him, and surprised I was in it, for I thought I’d let him know he wasn’t welcome around that theatre.
To see him again so soon after warning him off…well, it angered me, it did. ’Twas in the green room he appeared. All brassy and arrogant, coming in where he wasn’t welcome and didn’t belong. Acting as if he owned the place and didn’t have a care in the world for what I’d told him earlier.”
“And did anyone else notice him?” Suzanne wondered why this was the first she’d heard of William in the green room.
“I think, mistress, that I was the only one who recognized him and knew who he was. There’s a crowd of guests for every performance, and those who wish they were guests, who fill the ’tiring room so there is hardly space to breathe. A stranger in the green room is barely noticeable, there be so many of them. I didn’t see that anyone paid him any particular attention. More than likely I myself would never have taken notice had I not fought with him shortly before.”
“Very well. Then tell me what you did when you saw him.”
Arturo continued, “I was like to kill him then, right there in the green room, but my better sense kept me from it. I could kill a man in a fight, but never in cold blood. And later, when he fell to the stage, dead, I had no sorrow for it and might have danced a jig if the celebration wouldn’t have brought the attention of Constable Pepper. The simple fact of having drawn a knife on him shortly before was enough for me to make a strategic retreat with my troupe when he was murdered. I’ve been in the gaol, mistress, only once, and I don’t care to return whether innocent or guilty.”
“I see.” Suzanne did see. Nobody, including herself, wanted to encounter the constable even when innocent. Coming to the attention of any authority too often resulted in hanging, and that made it advisable to cut and run at the first hint of trouble. Then she asked, “Did you happen to see the crossbow in the green room?”
Arturo nodded. “There were several crossbows there.”
“Did you see the one carried by the boy, Christian?”
Again the tumbler nodded. “He set it down. Left it beside a table.”
“Did you see who took it?”
Arturo shook his head.
“Did you see William leave the room?”
Again Arturo shook his head. “I was needed onstage, and so I went while he was still there. I never miss my cue.”
“Of course not.”
The coincidence of William’s presence in that room and the missing crossbow that was last seen there set up more echoes in Suzanne’s mind. Too much coincidence. She knew by experience that chance was usually anything but. All of this had a fishy smell; she needed to find out the reasons for these things, then she might know what had really happened.
ALL the way back to the theatre in the hired coach, Suzanne sat silent, frowning at the floor before her. Horatio kept his thoughts to himself as well, staring out the window with narrowed eyes and thin lips as the carriage jostled over ruts, holes, and finally cobbles. Louis looked out the window on his side, his eyes half-closed in a dreamy stare, and Suzanne knew William’s murder was the last thing on his mind. It had been a struggle to tear him away from Arturo’s daughter. There seemed a real possibility Louis could run away from the Globe Players to join Arturo’s mummers. They would need to keep an eye on him and hope his terror of foreigners would keep him in London. The way his knee bounced with its nervous tic, he looked as if he were already running away in his daydream.
Suzanne’s mind tumbled, barely aware he was even there. Questions rose and submerged like potatoes in a rolling boil, bobbing up to show themselves, then diving to be replaced by others. Why had William gone into the green room? Where had he gone when he left? Who had taken the crossbow, and why? Had someone recognized William and followed him out with the loaded bow? Where had they gone after leaving the green room? Exactly when had William left the green room? Who had been onstage at that time?
Had Arturo even told the truth about not picking up the crossbow himself? She asked Horatio his opinion, and the big man thought hard and stared skyward as he sorted out the story. Then he said, never taking his eyes from the carriage ceiling, “Well, he said he left to be onstage. To the best of my recollection he was assigned as one of Erpingham’s men in Act IV, Scene III, a nonspeaking role. Though he wasn’t onstage when Wainwright fell from the gallery, he’s told the truth that he had to leave the green room earlier to be onstage. And I should think there was hardly enough time for him to make his exit after the scene and steal the crossbow before Christian could retrieve it and make his own entrance. They must have passed each other at the upstage doors. And it was but a few moments afterward that Wainwright was killed. I believe Arturo’s testimony is honest; he did not kill Wainwright.”
“The scene was the Agincourt battlefield, crowded with men. Who, then, was not onstage who might have shot the crossbow?”
Horatio looked once more out the window at the passing streets of London, and sternness hardened his voice. “Do not ask that, my niece, for your son was one of the very few who were not busy at that moment.”
Suzanne went silent and focused her attention on the middle distance. She struggled to keep herself from screaming or weeping.
The performance that evening was the opening of The Winter’s Tale. Suzanne sat through it, barely attending, her thoughts sorting through the things she’d learned these past couple of days. William in the green room. It made no sense. The king and William on the premises at the same time. That made even less sense, given Wainwright’s terror of the crown. Plainly he hadn’t known Charles was there. Which raised the question of why Wainwright was there. What had brought him to the theatre and sent him upstairs to the stage right gallery? And who’d had cause to follow him there?
The sun was low in the sky when the performance finished and the audience began to file out, abuzz with commentary on the show. Suzanne remained in her seat in the stage left gallery, thinking, even after the crowds had left and the actors were all in the dressing room. She gazed across at the stage right gallery, thinking hard but getting nowhere.
Nearly entranced, barely knowing where she was headed, so deep in thought was she, she rose from her seat and walked around back and to the other gallery. A murder had occurred here, but she looked around at the now empty space and couldn’t see how it had happened. She knew it had, but couldn’t visualize any of it. She looked down at the stage below, at the blackened bloodstain on it, and still couldn’t imagine how William had been shot. Something was quite wrong, and she struggled to put her finger on it.
Then she tried visualizing the event as she had seen it rather than as it was said to have happened. In her mind’s eye she saw the body lying on the stage, in the position indicated by the bloodstain that had spread across the boards when the crossbow bolt had been removed from William’s throat.
His throat. Suzanne frowned. The bolt had been lodged in his throat, pointing downward into his chest. Nearly straight downward, the angle being very strange. She remembered seeing the fletching in front of his face, and the direction the boy had pulled when he removed the bolt had been past William’s head rather than straight out from the throat. The gush of blood, as shown by the shape of the stain below, had been toward stage left rather than straight downstage. Only after the blood had surged that direction did it then begin to run down the boards toward the pit. Suzanne realized the bolt could only have been shot by someone standing above William. Almost directly above. She looked upward, to the heavens so painstakingly painted with clouds and cherubs.
The roof of the ’tiring house, on which the heavens had been painted, overhung the gallery by ten or fifteen feet. For someone to have shot William from up there they would have had to dangle from the eaves, an awkward thing that would most likely have resulted in two bodies falling rather than just the one. And still it would not have resulted in a wound like the one that had killed William.
Nevertheless, Suzanne was moved to have a look at the roof.
The ’tiring house stairs ended at the third floor and went no higher, but at the back of the stage right gallery was a
ladder that led to a trapdoor above. It was composed of rough wood, of slats nailed to two wall supports. Suzanne rolled up the sleeves of the man’s shirt she wore and climbed up. The slats were widely spaced and she was not tall, so she had to haul herself up by her arms with each step. She tried to imagine someone climbing this with one hand while holding a loaded crossbow and stalking a victim in the same, otherwise empty room. It just didn’t seem plausible.
The trapdoor overhead was not easy to open. The thing was heavy and seldom used, and it resisted her attempts to shove it upward. Again, it would have been even more difficult carrying a crossbow, but she allowed it might have been possible for a man.
She considered going back downstairs for help, but disliked the idea of telling anyone where her thinking had taken her. So she persisted, put her shoulder into the effort, and shoved hard. The door creaked and complained, but finally it budged and she was able to shove it high enough for it to fall back onto the floor of the room above with a dull thud and a cloud of dust. Once more she thought of the victim supposedly in the gallery below and supposedly oblivious to being stalked by a man with a crossbow. She found it highly unlikely, but pressed on because the angle at which the crossbow had pierced William’s throat would have been impossible unless the murderer had shot from the roof.
She climbed through the hole and into a storage room above. As scant as were the property stores of The New Globe Players, this room was nearly empty and held nothing more than some ends of cloth bolts left over from the recent costuming. They were stacked in a corner and covered with an oiled cloth to protect them from temperature and dampness.
Windows in the room overlooked the roofs of two gables over the rear of the ’tiring house. The roofs formed a valley between their peaks, immediately outside the windows. They were not terribly large and were much taller than they were wide, shuttered with frames stretched with animal skins shaved thin enough to let in light. Suzanne pulled them open. The flimsy frames wobbled on their leather hinges as she climbed through and onto the roofs outside.
The Opening Night Murder Page 23