Mask of Night

by Philip Gooden

  So it is now as you wait in the shelter of a stand of willows. Water gurgles at your feet, water cold from the winter. Nobody has passed along this path leading from the village of Whittingham to Oxford during the hour you have been waiting. At this instant, though, you hear the creaking of wheels and the heavy breathing of a horse. The driver is eager to get home before dark. But the horse is old and feeble, and has already dragged the cart around the edges of the town today. At least it is empty now. The carter has made his profit. A profit which he must now pay for.

  Naturally, you have dressed for the occasion. You have grown used to your gear by now and are practised at slipping it on and off. At the last moment you tie the hood about your face, securing the points and buttons at the back. There is a comfort in being garbed like this. It is your armour against the world. The costume bestows power on you, of itself. You remember old mother Morrison’s last moments. The look of terror in her eyes, the desperate struggle to raise herself from her narrow bed, the final spasm. You did not even have to touch her (although she had already been weakened by the tainted sweetmeats you had sent). When it came to the point she expired through sheer fright.

  The horse and cart draw nearer. You glimpse them through the branches. The horse whinnies. It is uneasy, scenting your presence. The carter is muttering to himself under his breath. You cannot hear what he is saying, the hood prevents that, but even through the eyepieces you see his lips mouthing words. The growth on his neck seems to quiver with a life of its own. Abruptly, almost before you are aware of what you are doing, you step out from the clump of willows by the water’s edge and stand there, in the way of horse, cart and driver.

  The piebald horse shies away and then shuffles its forefeet. The driver looks – bemused. Then fearful. He begins to speak but can scarcely get the words out.

  “Y-y-y-you. Is it you?”

  He rears back on his wooden perch atop the little cart, and his cap falls off. He half stands up, as if minded to flee. But he cannot run without first getting down from the cart and that would put him on the same level as you. You move forward, waving your white wand from side to side. A slow but inexorable movement. The horse, profoundly unhappy now, attempts to turn round but it is hitched to the cart and the path is narrow. The creature’s hooves slide on the muddy bank and it grows more panic-stricken.

  Meantime the carter has decided to leap from the cart and in his confusion he jumps in your direction. Now he is trapped. The cart is turned aslant the narrow track, with the slithering horse to one side. The carter tries to duck under the overhang at the back of the cart but, as he bends under the tail, you bring the cane down sharp on his back. It must be the shock of the blow, rather than the force behind it, which causes him to fall flat on his face in the mud at your feet.

  He scrabbles around and looks up to see – the black bird of death hovering above him. If he were not so purely terrified he would scream or cry but, as it is, he opens his mouth and no sound emerges. He does not move or he cannot move, and you are reminded of the way in which a mouse will sometimes turn to stone in the presence of a cat.

  You are far removed from this man, far above him. Through your eyepieces you observe your arm as it lifts itself up together with the stick it wields. Then the cane comes down again and again across the carter’s exposed face. You strike at the disgusting growth which depends from his scrawny neck. He raises his arms to try to protect himself and, too late, scrabbles backwards to escape the blows hailing down on him. But he cannot see, cannot think. He flails about and falls into the water. His head, all battered and bloody, dips underneath the cold spring pool. He tries to rise but there is nothing for him to grasp hold of, and anyway you lean out over the water and strike at his waving arms. After a short period he falls back, exhausted, into the water. A trail of bubbles spurts to the surface of the pool and there is a great sighing sound. Then there is nothing.

  You are gripped by a knot of sensations which, until later, you cannot unpick. It is excitement, a great excitement, but with a dash of pity. The pity redeems you but it is the excitement that drives you forward.

  The peculiar request that Susan Constant had made of me was that I should use my eyes and ears to find out whether there was any truth in her belief that her cousin Sarah was being poisoned, slowly and secretly poisoned. An outsider might be helpful, she’d said, might see something she was blind to. It was of little use to claim that I was no expert and that she would be better off talking to a physician or at least unfolding her concerns to another member of her family. For some reason she was adamant that she would not speak to Hugh Fern. And I could only conclude that she was unwilling to involve her adopted family because – terrible as the idea was – she suspected someone within that family circle of being responsible.

  The sensible course of action would have been for me to refuse to have anything to do with the business. But she had flattered me with mystery-solving powers, and just because a particular task is beyond our ability doesn’t mean that we’re immune to being cajoled into it. Also she had given a good impression of having no one else to turn to, she had appealed to my chivalrous nature. (Yes, I know, foolish Revill.)

  Susan had informed me that I would have a good opportunity to observe both families together, the Constants and the Sadlers, at the performance of Romeo and Juliet at Fern’s house on Headington Hill, which was scheduled for a few days after the first public performance. In the meantime, however, she contrived an encounter with Sarah for me. At least I assumed it was a contrived meeting, for I bumped into Susan and another young woman wandering one morning in a wide street which I’d heard called both Horsemonger Lane and the Broad. I had the feeling that she’d been keeping her eye open for me.

  “Master Revill, you escaped from the riots?”

  “William Sadler gave me refuge in his college. But I was concerned for you, madam.”

  “I was with Mistress Root. She lives nearby in Cats Street and so we were not far from shelter. In any case she is worth a dozen bulldogs.”

  I laughed, remembering the way Nurse Root had beaten Sadler over the head with the stockfish.

  Susan Constant seemed to have fallen into the habit of introducing me to others, and she did so now. I’d been right in my assumption that this was her cousin Sarah.

  Sarah Constant was a pretty, slight thing. Delicate, as Susan had described her. She was wrapped up against a cold March wind which swept down this exposed street just beyond the old city walls. There was a sharpness in her features. She was pale, perhaps unhealthily so, and she was half leaning on her cousin as if for support. But not knowing what she looked like normally, as it were, I couldn’t have said whether there was anything really wrong with her.

  “This is a terrible spot,”said Susan.

  “Why is that?” I said, looking about. We were opposite the dour-looking tower gateway of the college called Balliol. Beyond the college were open fields, criss-crossed with overflowing streams. Oxford is very flat.

  Sarah Constant said, “I can never pass here without seeing the flames and hearing the screams.”

  I wasn’t sure what she was talking about but tried to be facetious by assuming that she was referring to more of the bad behaviour between town and gown.

  “Obviously they make a profession of riot in this town.”

  “This is the place where the blessed martyrs met their end in Mary’s time,” explained Susan, with a stern look at me. “Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burnt to death in this very street.”

  Taken aback, I looked about as if there might still be signs of the sacrifice. There were indeed a couple of charred stumps not many yards away which I did not want to examine too closely. A chaplet of flowers, now withered, had been draped over one of them.

  “My grandfather told me that gunpowder was hung about their necks,” said Sarah. “He witnessed it. It was Ridley’s brother-in-law who obtained permission to speed their end with gunpowder.”

  This was cheerless talk
on a cheerless March day.

  “Oh Mistress Sarah,” I said. “All that was long ago. We should each of us pray that those dark days of persecution never return. But we are young, aren’t we. Shouldn’t we be looking forward? You have a wedding to celebrate, I believe.”

  For the first time a smile visited her face, and she was transformed. Susan Constant, I noticed, did not look so pleased. But then she wasn’t the one who was getting married. I hoped that William Sadler would prove a worthy husband to this fragile woman.

  We exchanged a few pleasantries after this, keeping off the gloom and martyrdom, and ending with an assurance from Susan that both cousins would come to the Golden Cross performance of Romeo and Juliet that very afternoon.

  I protested that that might spoil the story for them, when we came to perform it in the Doctor’s house on Headington Hill.

  “Oh, everybody knows the story. It ends unhappily,” said Susan Constant.

  “That’s no secret,” I said. “The Prologue tells us so within a few seconds of the opening.”

  “Then we are really coming so that we can see your mettle,” she said.

  I think that the comment was intended to be a little flirtatious. But she couldn’t really manage flirtation – she was too clear-cut and serious. Sarah Constant managed another smile which, in her white face, was like the sun on a snowfield but welcome for all that.

  I must be very precise about the afternoon of the play performance. About all of it. “Every detail may be significant,” someone said to me later. Judge for yourself.

  The first surprise – but a very minor one in view of what happened later in the day – was the information that Doctor Fern was to take part in our Golden Cross Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare had hinted to me that his old friend had once had acting ambitions, and now our author proposed that, for a single performance, Fern should don his mantle (or his Franciscan cassock) as Laurence, the Friar who gives comfort to Romeo and provides the sleeping draught for Juliet.

  “But he’s not even a proper member of our Company,” said Abel Glaze, with the outrage of the newcomer. Abel was playing the apothecary of Mantua who sells Romeo the poison with which he kills himself. My friend had a couple of other little roles as well but he felt aggrieved that a big part was going to a “play-dabbler” like Fern.

  “Why has Shakespeare surrendered his own lines? I don’t understand,” he persisted.

  “Because they’re his lines so he can dispose of them as he wants,” I said.

  “And how does this doctor person, this play-dabbler, know these lines, anyway? Has he been in rehearsals? No, he hasn’t.”

  “He knows the lines the same way we do. By rote. I hear he’s been studying night and day since we arrived, and also that Burbage and Shakespeare have run through his moves with him.”

  Abel snorted.

  “It’s no use objecting, Abel. Master Shakespeare is a shareholder and may do as he pleases, provided the other seniors agree. And Doctor Fern is our sponsor too, we’re here in this town mostly because of him. If he wants to tread the boards then he will be indulged . . . ”

  “Go on, Nick. You’re very good at digging up reasons – or should that be excuses?”

  “Also, he’s a physician and that will give authority to Laurence’s talk of herbs and remedies. And look at his hair and the way he’s going bald. There’s even something friarly about that.”

  “It’s not professional,” was the best that Abel could come up with in answer.

  Since there won’t be another opportunity, I may as well record here and now that – as far as he went – Doctor Hugh Fern provided a good performance as Friar Laurence. No one in the paying audience ought to have felt short-changed that this meaty part was being enacted by a man whom Abel Glaze had disparagingly referred to as a “play-dabbler”. It was only a pity that the good Doctor was not permitted to deliver his lines to the very end.

  For one thing, as I’d indicated to Abel, Fern looked right. With his round face and cheerful smile, he had the reassuring appearance of someone you would instinctively trust and turn to. Although he and Mercutio don’t share any scenes together on stage, I was able to hear a few of his lines from off-stage, and there was some comment among the Chamberlain’s afterwards that the day he decided to take up medicine was a decided loss to the English stage. (Mind you, people do tend to talk in that rather grand style about someone who’s just died.) But they were right, he was a loss. To medicine, if not to the theatre.

  If you think that I sound worked up about a man whose hand I’d shaken once and who’d only uttered a few words in my direction, then I should explain that I was one of the last people to see Hugh Fern alive. More than that, we had enjoyed a conversation together.

  There was cause to remember that meeting later and I went over what we had said, or rather what he had said, several times in my mind to try to extract some clue out of his words. I even made some notes about our dialogue a few hours after his shocking death.

  Although the Golden Cross Inn was a good place for playing as far as the audience was concerned – there was plenty of room for those who wanted to stand and, for those prepared to pay a bit more and hire stools or chairs, there was a wide gallery running round the entire yard – it was a little deficient from the players’ point of view. The stage itself was a simple raised platform with booths for exits and entrances on opposite sides at the back, and a larger curtained area in the middle to simulate “indoor” scenes such as the Friar’s cell or the tomb of the Capulets. The rear of the stage was concealed by canvas sheeting, painted with bright swirls of red and blue and green that were without meaning, and so adaptable to whatever action might be played out in front of it.

  It was a simple set-up. There’s nothing wrong with simplicity. In fact, there’s an invigorating aspect to playing in an inn yard since it harks back to our origins as players (though not mine personally). But you get used to little comforts and amenities, only noticing them when they’re gone. At our home in the Globe playhouse we had plenty of room to put our costumes on and off, just as we had secure nooks for the manuscripts containing our lines, and storage places for everything from pikes and pistols to coins and candle-holders, as well as offices for the tire-man, the book-man and the shareholder-players.

  Naturally the Golden Cross possessed none of these amenities. It wasn’t a haven for players but an inn where people stayed the night or chatted and drank away their waking hours. However, Owen Meredith, the landlord, had let us have a row of adjoining “rooms” convenient for the stage, in which we might change our costumes, store our few effects, & cetera. These spaces were little more than cupboards for the lumber of the inn, full of old barrel staves, discarded bottles, splintered bits of benching and piles of rag. A beery and vinous smell hung about them, not unpleasant. We tidied up the interiors and took them over for our costumes and effects but, even so, if the garments had had to remain there for more than a few days they would have picked up the mildew while our blunted foils would have gathered the rust.

  These “rooms” were in the far right-hand corner of the yard as you approached it coming from the street. They occupied one side of a covered passage which led out into an unroofed alley which, in turn, would conduct you between the Golden Cross Inn and the Tavern next door until you emerged into the wider area of Cornmarket Street. Since there seemed to be a certain coolness between the two hostelries you might have thought of this short, narrow alley as the neutral territory between two rival camps. Certainly it looked scruffy and neglected, with the half-eaten corpses of a couple of cats at one end and live rats which were nearly as big as the dead cats and which scarcely bothered to move if you poked your head round the corner.

  You could have gained access to either inn by means of this alley if you were coming from the street. There was an entrance directly into the Tavern about half-way along the alley wall as well as the opening to the covered passage at the far end which connected to the Golden Cross yard. You could ha
ve gained access to either inn by this means, I say, but it was unclear why anyone would want to do so, since the alley was dirtier, muddier and much less salubrious than the normal approaches via the yard of each hostelry.

  There was a makeshift bench in the yard of the Golden Cross near the inner entrance to the covered passage and in the double shadow of the overhead gallery and the backstage cloth. It was nothing more than a couple of planks supported on two barrels, and put there, I suppose, for the convenience of those who might want to sit down after the labour of shifting stuff into or out of the store-rooms.

  On this fateful afternoon I’d dressed myself in my costume as Mercutio. Because we were on tour we had no tire-man to help us into and out of our costumes. Or, more accurately, we had no fastidious Bartholomew Ridd to fuss and fret over torn lace and missing gloves. He’d chosen to stay in London. We had to see to everything ourselves. This included the laundering of our clothes – a significant requirement if you’re playing in a tragedy and you are wounded or killed, and have to get the blood cleaned off.

  There was about a quarter of an hour to go. An expectant, buzzing sound came floating out from the depths of the inn yard, as welcome to the player as the sound of bees to the bee-keeper. One way or another, that sound is honey to us all. Behind the platform or stage a couple of the pot-boys were busy sweeping the ground, making all neat and tidy for the players’ comings and goings. Feet scuffled on the boards of the overhanging gallery. Some of my fellows were already mixing with the arriving audience. This is not something I like doing before a play. Afterwards is all right, when the action is done and you are about to resume your real self, but doing it before somehow seems to diminish the mystery.

  This was the first time I’d played the role of Mercutio in public and I felt a fluttering in my stomach which was more intense – as if the little hive of bees was inside me rather than out in the yard – than the apprehension I usually experienced before going on stage. I’d grown accustomed to these feelings and the gradations in them over the last few years with the Chamberlain’s. A familiar part in a play still provoked nervousness, but somehow it was a homely kind of nerves. A new part, on the other hand, produced a heightened state which sometimes had in it a touch of pure terror. In the early days I’d expected this sensation to get better over time, but the more experienced players denied that this ever happened. Indeed, some of them claimed that a player was nothing without his nerves, that they were required to keep him on his mettle.