“He’s due to appear in minutes,” said WS. “This is my fault.”
“He was eager to play,” I said.
“I didn’t mean that,” said WS, almost snappishly.
I got up from the bench and went to look for myself, careful about putting my full weight on my left foot. There were, to be precise, half a dozen little chambers opening off the right-hand side of the passage. I thought that Hugh Fern had gone into the last of these and, sure enough, the door was locked, although I couldn’t imagine why it should be. The doors to the others were ajar or completely open. Inside were unused costumes and effects, together with the detritus of the inn. There were small grilled openings, more for ventilation than anything else, to each room. These openings were slightly above head height. I stood up on tiptoe and tried to peer into the locked room but it was too dim on the interior for anything to be clearly visible and my position was too uncomfortable to hold for long.
Shakespeare was already inside one of the open rooms, rummaging through the store of clothing there. Handsome, bright-eyed Jane Davenant stood to one side. I didn’t know what she was doing there (but was starting to have my suspicions) and I certainly wouldn’t have asked her straight out. I hadn’t forgotten her attack on the hapless carter or the way she had kicked the stray dog.
“Help me, Nick,” said WS from inside the dim little room. “Your eyes are better than mine, younger anyway.”
“What are you looking for?”
“A friar’s habit. We must have more than one.”
“Perhaps next door,” I said, and went into the neighbouring store-room.
This was the sort of situation where we really missed our tire-man. Bartholomew Ridd, fussy though he was, would have known exactly what was in stock. We carried certain staples, from a king’s robes to a peasant’s smock, and in many cases (although not the king’s) several similar outfits. I sorted through the hanging jerkins, doublets, dresses and chain-mail before arriving at an item whose shape and texture felt right.
“Here is something.”
I brought it out into the half-light of the passage. It was a religious costume, it was even a friar’s garb, but not quite in the right colour, more dirty white than grey.
I said as much to Shakespeare.
“Never mind,” said WS, already shrugging on the habit over his shirt. He was sparsely dressed for a damp afternoon in spring. “Needs must. It’s a good enough fit.”
“You’re taking Hugh’s part?”
I realized he was of course. What I wanted was some explanation.
“Yes,” said WS.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
No more explanation than that.
Jane Davenant performed some smoothing and patting actions on Shakespeare as he adjusted his costume. She even secured the girdle about his waist. She was as good as our tire-man, nearly.
If Hugh Fern passed easily enough as a friar then so did WS, in a different way. With his high brow and his generally benevolent gaze, he looked the part – or would have done if it hadn’t been for a manner that was unusual with him, somehow both abstracted and purposeful.
There was no time to stand about admiring looks and clothes, however. We were in the middle of a play. Now an anxious Dick Burbage appeared and there was a whispered conversation between the shareholders. I noticed that Dick ignored the presence of Jane Davenant. Shakespeare pointed towards the room at the end of the passage, the locked one. Then Dick Burbage gestured in my direction.
Shakespeare turned to me and said, “You were injured in the fight, Nick?”
I shrugged my “it’s nothing” shrug but WS did no more than tell me to sit out the rest of the play and not to appear for the jig at the end, before he and Burbage returned to the area immediately behind the stage.
In the background all during Shakespeare’s search for Hugh Fern and then for a friar’s habit there had been audible the subdued shrieks of women. It was the sound of the Nurse and Juliet, or more precisely of Thomas Pope and the boy player Peter Pearce, as the former tells the latter that her cousin Tybalt has been killed by her lover Romeo. The Nurse has tried to console Juliet. Now the Friar must try to console Romeo.
Standing uncomfortably behind and below the platform stage, I watched Shakespeare go on through the booth and heard the small modification he made to his lines – “Romeo, come forth and speak to Friar Laurence” – to tell the audience who he was. I suppose they were aware of the substitution but there were no gasps of surprise or sounds of protest. It’s strange how quickly audiences will accept what they’re given. Then Dick Burbage entered as Romeo and everything proceeded smoothly once more.
Mistress Davenant had gone by now, though whether to watch the play or elsewhere I didn’t know. I returned to my position on the bench and prepared to sit out the tragic unravelling of Romeo and Juliet. I was baffled by the scene which had just passed. Not so much that William Shakespeare had taken over the role of Friar Laurence half-way through. It was the playwright’s part after all, Doctor Fern was no more than an afternoon substitute, and Shakespeare was only fulfilling the player’s oldest obligation: appearing on cue. No, the baffling question was what had happened to the good Doctor.
The rain had slackened but the air was moist. So much for sun-kissed Verona. When I shivered in my thin, bloody shirt it wasn’t altogether from the chill. It would have been sensible to go and look for my doublet in the store-room but I was in that inert, passive state where one doesn’t want to move, even to avoid discomfort.
Instead I watched and listened.
From my place on the bench I watched the bustling exits and entrances of my fellows and listened to snatches of the stage-action as they brought the lamentable tale of the young lovers to its close. The double deaths in the tomb of the Capulets. The arrival of Prince Escalus and the two rival families to survey the scene. The final sentence of the Prince as he condemns the surviving Montagues and Capulets to live with what they have brought about, indirectly, through their bitter enmity.
So far, so good . . . or so bad.
Then the applause from the crowd in the Golden Cross yard. Heartfelt applause to warm a player’s cockles, an antidote to this dull, wet afternoon.
As the applause was dying down the music struck up from above my head in the gallery and the Chamberlain’s Company – all of them, living or dead at tragedy’s end – came together and joined in a merry jig to dispel the glooms. The boards thudded and the air resonated with whoops and shouts.
My legs almost twitched in time. I longed to be up there with them. I felt alone.
But not quite alone.
Because now there appeared in front of me Doctor Fern’s man, Andrew Pearman.
“Have you seen my master?”
There was a look almost of panic on his face.
“I have been searching for him everywhere.”
“So have my people. He was not here to play his part in the second half.”
“Please . . . Master Revill . . . have you seen him though?”
For the second time in less than an hour I indicated the covered passage which lay to my left. For the second time I gave the same sort of answer.
“Some while back I saw him enter a room along there. I don’t know why he was going there.”
Pearman at once started off. I called after him, not worried about shouting. Nothing could be overheard amid the music and the thumping. “But there’s no one there now. It’s no use. The door is shut fast.”
I watched the servant pushing and tugging at the far door, quite desperately, but it would not give.
The noise of the cornets and drums from overhead, the stamping feet and the hurrah-ing crowd below, all swelled to fill the inn yard. Meantime another drama was being played out backstage. This was different from the anxious enquiries of Shakespeare about Hugh Fern. WS had been apprehensive because the Doctor was due to appear on stage and was nowhere to be found. He feared for the play more tha
n for his friend. But on Andrew Pearman’s face I could read a genuine worry or something worse than worry.
He hoisted himself up to look through the little opening into the room. Did it several times but evidently couldn’t see much. He was slightly shorter than me. He looked towards where I was still sitting on the bench.
“Help me,” he said.
I got up reluctantly. It was as if I sensed what was going to happen next. No, not that exactly. But I knew the news was not good.
“There is someone in there, lying down,” said Pearman. “Look.”
I raised myself up and squinted through the barred space. Knowing what I was looking for, I saw on the floor a shape that might possibly have been a body, but the lack of light made it hard to be certain. It was probably no more than a carelessly heaped mound of clothes. All the same I felt my stomach tighten.
“You may be right,” I said.
“I fear so,” he said.
There was a sheen of sweat across the man’s brow. He rattled urgently at the door, at the same time calling out, “Doctor Fern! Doctor Fern!”
Though the door was flimsy, and there were gaps where the boards had warped, it held fast.
“Perhaps it’s bolted inside?” I said.
“Not when there’s a keyhole,” said Pearman. For all his troubled state he was thinking more clearly than I was. I suppose you might install a key as well as a bolt for extra security, but you wouldn’t put a bolt on the inside of a storeroom where there was no other exit. What would be the point?
Pearman moved a couple of paces to the opposite side of the passage. I thought he was going to throw himself full-tilt at the door but he gestured towards me, as if he expected that I should do it.
“We ought to get Owen Meredith, the landlord,” I said. “This is his property. He will surely have the key.”
“I am afraid for Doctor Fern,” said Pearman, looking suspiciously at me as though I somehow bore responsibility for this state of affairs. Then in an odd echo of WS’s words earlier he said, “Needs must,” and did a little run and put his shoulder to the door. The boards shivered but still stuck fast.
Even now I was for going off to find Meredith but Andrew Pearman was already fiddling with the boards in the area of the keyhole. He squeezed his fingers into a gap, then got his whole hand in, curled it round and seized a piece of the planking from the far side so that his fingertips protruded. He wrenched it backwards and forwards. His face flushed and the veins in his forearm stood out. With a cracking sound a square chunk of wood splintered away. He drew it out and handed it to me. I placed it carefully on the flagstones of the passage. As I did so, something nagged at the corner of my mind. Perhaps I was troubled about the petty damage to the landlord’s property. Well, if the Doctor’s assistant was doing it in a proper cause, then no doubt the Doctor or someone would make it good.
I watched Pearman as he scrabbled blindly on the interior of the door, his forearm awkwardly angled though the hole.
“I can’t feel anything.”
His face fell, then brightened slightly. “Sir, your arm may be longer. Will you try?”
He stood to one side. By now I was thoroughly infected with his belief that something was wrong. I reached my own arm through the ragged gap in the door and groped about. I too could feel nothing at first, then suddenly my fingertips grazed something metallic. As my fingers closed around the slippery metal, I involuntarily cried out, “Got it!”
I might have tried to twist the key round from the inside and open the door in that way but it was hard to get a sufficient purchase on the head and shaft of the key. Instead I took a firm hold of it and inched it out of the lock, holding my breath for fear that it might slip from my grasp. I slowly withdrew my arm and clenched hand from the hole in the door. For the few moments which this process took I was completely oblivious of my surroundings. The dim passageway, the intent gaze of the Doctor’s assistant, the remote sounds of drum, cornet and stamping feet from the region of the stage. I only registered these things again as I held up the key, in triumph. The real purpose in retrieving the key was, for a tiny instant, forgotten. I stood there wondering what to do next.
“Open it, Master Revill.”
I turned the key in the lock of the battered door. It grated rustily in the wards, suggesting that it wasn’t often used, but the door itself swung inwards at a little shove from my hand. My heart beating faster and louder, I saw that the huddle of grey on the dirty floor of the store-room was human. The body lay on its side with its front turned away from us but from what I could glimpse of the back of the head, I feared that this was indeed Hugh Fern. I sensed Pearman crowding behind me, felt his hot breath on my neck.
“Oh sweet Jesus.”
He darted into the room and knelt down by the body. He stretched out his hand respectfully and touched the man’s shoulder. Then shook it. There was no answering movement, no sudden awakening. This was no sleeper. Still crouched down, Pearman leaned over the body then turned towards me. His face was rigid with terror. He forced out the words.
“Oh, it is my master.”
“Is he dead?”
Pearman peered at the figure again, then moaned, a long despairing noise.
“Yes.”
“I’ll get help,” I said.
I hastened out of the passageway. As I went I heard Pearman groaning and calling out the Doctor’s name.
I wanted to get away from this place. Or, at least, before I went back there I wanted witnesses, more witnesses than a single distracted servant could provide.
Above all I didn’t want to be found in the proximity of a body.
(Not only was there a natural human resistance to this, I was also, abruptly, conscious of the fact that I’d been one of the last people to see Doctor Hugh Fern alive, that I was wearing a shirt streaked with stage-blood, that anyone finding Nicholas Revill together with a corpse might leap to the wrong conclusion. It’s happened to me before and if that sounds calculating, well, I can’t help it.)
As I emerged into the more open area at the back of the stage, I encountered my fellows milling around there in a happy back-slapping mood. The action was over. Romeo and Juliet were dead. The warring families were united in sorrow. The dances were finally done. The music had stopped. The audience was free to go home or to get on with their afternoon drinking and other pleasures.
I blurted out the name of Hugh Fern but didn’t have to say anything else. My face must have registered something of the real tragedy which had been unfolding in the passageway of the Golden Cross. I pointed towards the covered passage.
I was swept up in a gaggle of Chamberlain’s. A number of us had bloodstained costumes, Paris, Juliet, Tybalt, we had all been in the wars. We crowded back into the passage and round the door of the far chamber. I was at the rear but glimpsed, through the heads of my fellows, the essentials of the scene.
Andrew Pearman was as I had left him. He was on his knees by his master’s body, which was by now rolled over on its back. Pearman was holding his hands to his face as if he could bear to look no longer. Hugh Fern, still clad in his Franciscan robes, lay gazing up at the ceiling of his last room. His face was distorted in an expression of horror, his teeth bared, his eyes bulging. There could be no doubt of the fact of his death. Nor of the means by which that death had been procured. Near the centre of his chest, surrounded by the folds of the blood-soaked friar’s habit, stood the handle of a dagger.
The body was brought out and laid in the entrance to the narrow passageway, though not before a couple of the drawers had been despatched for a sheet to place on the ground. There was a strange sense of time suspended. People – players, inn-servants, citizens who’d been slow to disperse at the end of the performance – ebbed and flowed about the corpse. Some came to gawp, some seemed genuinely shocked. Shakespeare held urgent consultations with Burbage and Thomas Pope, the latter still incongruously in his robes as Juliet’s nurse. I considered leaving but there was a kind of comfort in n
umbers. Also, as one who had discovered the body, I felt an obligation to remain now. Andrew Pearman wandered distractedly round the yard. Like a bereaved dog he would not move far from his master.
The coroner was sent for but the messenger soon returned to say that he was busy about another death and that the body of Hugh Fern was to be put in store for a few hours. But where? Owen Meredith seemed reluctant to give house-room to the dead physician in the Golden Cross. Fortunately, the problem was solved by the arrival of a new actor on the scene.
Not new to me though. Barging through the press came the jowly individual I’d encountered in William Sadler’s lodgings in Christ Church. He was as well-dressed as on that evening. His boots alone would have cost me many months’ wages. He took out an expensive-looking octagonal watch and ostentatiously consulted it, I’m not sure why unless it was simply to impress us with his status and property. Having established the time, he stood over Fern’s body, rubbing his hands together before bending down to examine the man’s wounds. As he was doing so I noticed something odd, perhaps prompted by the newcomer’s excellent boots.
The oddness was to do with Hugh Fern’s feet. At some point before his first appearance as Friar Laurence he’d changed out of his own silver-buckled shoes and put on simpler footwear, more appropriate to the poor mendicant he was playing. I’d no idea where he’d got the plain shoes from, but I’d been half gratified, half embarrassed that he had taken advice from a young player. Yet now that he lay stretched out dead in the Golden Cross yard he appeared to have resumed his original shoes, the ones ornamented with silver and cut from fine leather. For the rest he was still dressed as a Franciscan, the grey robes disfigured with bloodstains. It was only his shoes that had changed. I couldn’t understand it.
Meanwhile the dagger remained where it had been found, towards the left side of Hugh Fern’s chest. Squatting down on his hams and taking out a handkerchief, the newcomer wrapped it around the bloody haft of the dagger. Using both hands and the counterweight of his own body, he pulled the weapon out of the dead man’s chest. The upper half of the corpse quivered under the strain and rose slightly from the ground while Fern’s head fell helplessly backward. The other man had to twist and tug at the dagger to get it clear but eventually he succeeded. He stood up, holding the dagger out before him. The blade, all dark and gouty with blood and other matter, hung down between his hands. I noted that he did not seem concerned about the damage he might do to his fine clothes. He had the appearance of a conspirator in a play, an impression reinforced by the ring of breathless bystanders.
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