Mask of Night

by Philip Gooden

  I noticed some of my fellows looking at us while we whispered in a corner of the hall where, in the next hour, we were to perform our Romeo and Juliet. If she’d wanted to draw attention she could hardly have picked a more public spot, particularly as she put her head close to mine. She had sweet breath. Perhaps people would assume there was some liaison between us. I didn’t mind. She was a handsome woman. But it turned out she had other things on her mind.

  “You remember our conversation in the meadow by Christ Church?”

  “When you talked about your cousin – and poison and clay figures?”

  “Yes.”

  She paused. Whatever she wanted to say next would not come easily.

  “I have been at fault in this.”

  “You mean that you . . .?”

  “I mean that I have decided I was mistaken and you were right. I want to unsay what I said then. Since I cannot do that I would like you to forget it. My cousin is not sick. There is no enemy who is trying to come between her and William.”

  “Although you were so certain there was someone.”

  I struggled to remember a few of her words to quote back at her but she leaned in closer, her voice sounded deep and low in my ears, and I grew confused.

  “There was no one.”

  “What about – what about the figure you saw that morning by the farmhouse. The bird-headed figure?”

  “I was tired. I had not been sleeping well. It was only a farm labourer on his way to work, I expect.”

  “And the figure, the image that was left by your door. That was real enough surely?”

  “A child’s plaything, discarded.”

  Now I was even more confused. But it was none of my business if Susan had decided that she’d been imagining things and didn’t after all require my help. I was relieved, to be honest.

  “You haven’t told anyone, have you, Nicholas?”

  “I told my friend Abel Glaze.”

  “But you have not said anything to William Sadler?”

  “Not a word to him.”

  “Promise me you will not say anything to William. I would not have him disturbed.”

  “Very well. I promise.”

  I looked over to where William Sadler was chatting with his father (or so I assumed, there was enough likeness between them). They were laughing together. Young Sadler looked unlikely to be disturbed by very much. As I watched, he upturned a goblet and drained it. I glanced back at Susan. She too had been gazing at William. Her whole expression, which I can best describe as one of fond impatience, told me what I needed to know and solved the puzzle, or a small piece of it anyway.

  What had Sadler said to me in his college room? He had complacently accepted Sarah Constant’s devotion to him and made some comment about it running in the family. Then he had mentioned not Sarah but Susan, before thinking better of whatever he’d intended to say next.

  I might have prised the secret out of her, I suppose. She owed me that much at least after the tales of poisoning and men in bird-masks. But no force or subtlety was necessary to get at the truth. The secret was written plainly enough on her face. She was the one who was in love with Sadler. Perhaps it had been stronger in the past but there were still traces of affection in her face for that careless student.

  Now she looked back at me. Our heads were still close together. We were sharing a secret, or that’s how it must have appeared. I suddenly thought that she wanted William to catch her – to catch us – like that, heads close together, whispering. With luck he might experience a twinge of jealousy. But Sadler was too busy pouring himself another drink from a convenient flask. He didn’t so much as notice Susan noticing him.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “Think of me as Rosaline.”

  “Rosaline? I don’t understand.”

  “But you do understand, Nicholas Revill. Your look tells me that you do. Think of me as Rosaline in your play, I say, in Romeo and Juliet.”

  At that moment her cousin Sarah came up and claimed her attention by grasping her arm and wanting to talk. I must say that Susan put on a good show of cousinly affection. She smiled gently and listened patiently.

  I moved away. I was already late for changing into my Mercutio costume.

  As I was getting prepared in the side-room which was our dressing area, I puzzled over what she had said. Jack Wilson was next to me, getting into his clothes as Tybalt. Laurence Savage was also there. Since he appears in the very beginning, Laurence was already spruced up as Benvolio, cousin and friend to Romeo.

  “You have your strokes ready, Nick?” said Jack. “This is likely to be the last time we fight in this particular play.”

  “At least there is no stage for me to fall off.”

  “Alla stocatta.”

  He lunged at me but I was busy doing up my points and in no particular mood for levity.

  “Jack, you know this piece of ours better than I do. There is no female called Rosaline in it, is there?”

  It may seem odd that I had to ask about the identity of a character in Romeo and Juliet, although it’s true we can’t see a play from the outside as long as we are in it, and we almost never read or study the thing in its entirety but only our own parts and scenes. Still, it was even odder that I’d somehow overlooked a significant character. But Jack too seemed baffled.

  “Rosaline? There is one Juliet, one Lady Montague, one Lady Capulet . . . the Nurse of course . . .”

  “There is a Rosaline,” said Laurence, “but she never appears on the stage.”

  Jack clapped his hand to his head.

  “Of course there is,” he said.

  Seeing I wasn’t going to get it, Laurence Savage looked a bit smug while he kept me waiting for an explanation.

  Then he recited some lines.

  “At this same ancient feast of Capulet’s

  Sups the fair Rosaline, whom thou so lov’st,

  With all the admired beauties of Verona.”

  When he saw that I still wasn’t following him, he sighed.

  “Rosaline is Romeo’s first love. I should know because Dick Burbage will pour out his heart to me in about, oh, half an hour. Remember Romeo doesn’t take part in the fight at the beginning of the play because he is wandering love-sick among the sycamores on the edge of the city. He is pining for his Rosaline under the sycamores.”

  “But when he claps eyes on Juliet he forgets all about Rosaline,” I said.

  “Despite Rosaline’s ‘bright eyes and quivering thigh’,” said Jack. “I should have remembered Rosaline. That is my line about the bright eye. Personally I would have been pleased enough with a quivering thigh.”

  “Why do you want to know, Nick?” said Laurence. “Are you thinking of ways you could improve on William Shakespeare? Have Romeo not kill himself after all, but go back to Rosaline at the end?”

  I had a sudden vision of a different tragedy – one that wouldn’t be a tragedy at all. Romeo survives and goes off to marry Rosaline.

  “I don’t think the audience would accept that,” said Jack. “A happy ending to Romeo and Juliet? Come on.”

  “Only curious,” I said.

  But now I understood Susan Constant’s reference and kicked myself for my slowness. She had seen the play in the yard of the Golden Cross Inn. The lines about Romeo and Rosaline must have struck home – and struck hard. Susan saw herself in the mirror of a character who is talked about but who never actually steps on to the stage.

  Rosaline is displaced in Romeo’s affections by Juliet. Perhaps in the same way Susan had been displaced in William Sadler’s affections – if he was capable of anything so selfless as affection – by her cousin Sarah. If that’s what had happened. What evidence did I have? A glancing reference by Sadler and (much more significant) the look which Susan had given him just now across the hall, a look combining impatience and fondness.

  When she is thrown over by Romeo what does Rosaline do in the play? Nothing. Or if she does do anything we never hear of it for Romeo and
Juliet is not her story.

  What does Susan Constant do in real life?

  Does she invent a story about her cousin being poisoned, about the “present” of an image being left by the door with a pin sticking into it?

  If it was all invention . . .

  She seemed pretty certain that it was now. Had told me to forget all about it. The figure she’d glimpsed in the field was a labourer on his way to work. The clay image was an abandoned plaything.

  In some part of her mind did Susan dislike – even hate? – her cousin sufficiently to wish harm on her? Did she claim that Sarah was being poisoned because it was what she herself wanted to do? And, unable to contemplate such a horrendous course directly, had she transferred the wish to some imagined enemy? I had no idea whether this speculation was right. It was too deep for me, this attempt to see into the recesses of another’s heart and mind.

  And, whatever Susan Constant was saying now, at the time she had believed in her story. I could not forget that I too had had more than one glimpse of those hooded figures.

  Jack Wilson and Laurence Savage and the others had left by this stage. Not yet fully costumed as Mercutio, I must have been standing there in a brown study (perhaps remembering those hooded figures) because I wasn’t aware that Shakespeare had entered the changing-room. He was dressed in the garb of Friar Laurence, and for an instant I didn’t recognize him. The gloom that had shrouded him when we’d last talked in his chamber in the Tavern was dissipated. He was generally a sunny individual.

  “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost, Nick.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him what was really on my mind but instead I said, “This is a strange business.”

  “How so?”

  “We are supposed to be bringing two families together by playing, but I do not see any great signs of hostility, even of dislike between them. Did Hugh Fern imagine this thing? William Sadler suggested that to me.”

  “Does it matter why we are playing?”

  “Oh, it’s only money, I suppose. What does anything matter as long as the coin is good?”

  There was an unexpected sharpness to my tone and WS looked taken aback. I don’t know why I felt like this. Perhaps it was the result of having been taken in by Susan Constant with her stories. No, not taken in . . . but . . .

  “There was once a coldness between the Sadlers and the Constants, that’s true,” said WS, seeing that I needed an explanation. “But it was years ago. I think my friend Hugh Fern saw himself as a peace-maker, where a truce had already been declared. Or it may be that . . . ”

  I waited.

  “ . . . he wanted to encourage the young lovers.”

  “By having them watch a tragedy where the young lovers perish?”

  “By displaying true passion to them, perhaps,” said WS. “I do not know. If you’ve talked to Will Sadler at all you must have noticed that he’s a somewhat – lukewarm young man. Maybe Hugh wanted to encourage him in love.”

  “Someone told me recently that only a fool would try to bring two people together,” I said.

  “I wonder who that was,” said Shakespeare. “Well, all we know is that none of us is consistent. Nothing is certain. Had you not better finish your dressing? We are beginning soon.”

  I half smiled and resumed doing up the points of my costume. Seeing that I was pacified, WS moved away, saying that he had guests to welcome.

  Our chamber production of Romeo and Juliet, played out in the hall of the Fern house, was a notable success, small though the audience was. Quality made up for quantity. They laughed, groaned and wept in the right places, but all in a refined fashion. Romeo and Juliet can hardly have been unfamiliar to them, since several of the audience had been in the Golden Cross on the afternoon of Hugh Fern’s death and others had doubtless seen the play before. However, the story comes fresh even when we know the ending.

  In fact our audience too was familiar, apart from those members of the two families whom I hadn’t glimpsed before. There was Mistress Root, gaudily dressed and laughing at the bawdiness of Thomas Pope playing the Nurse to Juliet. There was William Sadler sitting close to Sarah Constant. I could not see the expression on his face but hoped that the play was working its magic and causing him to fall into a grand passion for her. There was Susan Constant, who had already told me that she was to be identified with Romeo’s discarded lover, Rosaline.

  Other familiar faces in the audience were Doctor Ralph Bodkin and, more surprisingly, John and Jane Davenant from the Tavern. What was going on inside their heads I haven’t the slightest idea, but I presumed they were here as friends to the Company or to the Ferns. It was a private performance but also our farewell appearance in Oxford, and who knew when a troupe of players would pass this way again?

  The tragedy finished with our jig. I was able to join in this time, my ankle being almost healed. Nothing untoward occurred. Nobody was found dead in a cupboard afterwards. There was more food and drink at the close. The Sadler and Constant families mingled cheerfully with the other guests. From fragments of conversation, I gathered that a wedding would soon be celebrated (unless the plague took a real hold of the town and brought everything to a stop). Sarah Constant’s face was lit up by her smile, sun on a snowfield. Will Sadler had his face buried in a glass. There was no sign of Susan.

  We packed up our gear and prepared to make the journey back into town for the night. Like any travelling after dark, this was best done together or at least in groups large enough to deter thieves and worse. We walked down the hill under the moon, but guided as well by several lanterns. We entered the city through the east gate and went down the High Street. The town was quiet.

  A few of our number detached themselves from the party at various stages along our route, including Laurence Savage and Jack Wilson. They had private business to attend to, no doubt. I’d heard that Jack had picked up with the wife of a wool merchant who was conveniently absent in Peterborough. Her name was Maria and she had much admired his skill with the foil when he was playing Tybalt. I knew no more than that. Even bland, mild-mannered Laurence had apparently secured himself a friend of that kind, or so he’d hinted to me. For the first time in several days I thought of Lucy Milford and wondered how she was managing in London. Managing without me, that is. (But of course, she’d be perfectly all right without me. Sad but true.)

  For reasons I couldn’t fathom I kept expecting something to happen, but it didn’t. We got back to the Golden Cross Inn, those of us who hadn’t anything more urgent or interesting to do than go to bed. I thought that it was all over. We were to leave the city within a day or two.

  I found the note as I was unpacking the scroll which contained my lines as Mercutio. You probably know that these scrolls are among the most precious items carried by a player. Anyone who mislays his lines must not only pay for a new copy but also face the wrath of Master Allison, the book-keeper. So we treat our parts with care. I was about to stow it in the scrip or wallet which I kept under my bolster when a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and held it near the candle.

  The writing was unfamiliar – not the clear hand of the play copyist – and I had to angle the page so that it caught the light. It was a simple messsage, simple in one sense. It said:

  You are right to suspect foul play in the death of Hugh Fern. We must talk in private. Say nothing beforehand but come to my house on the corner of Cats Street tomorrow morning.

  Angelica Root.

  I carefully folded the note inside my scrip and thought.

  This was a baffling communication for several reasons. For one thing I’d mentioned my suspicions about Doctor Fern’s death only to Dick Burbage and WS, and Abel of course. How had Mistress Root got to hear of them? For another, I’d assumed that the problem of Hugh Fern was dead and buried, so to speak. Whatever the questions which surrounded his death, the coroner had pronounced it to be an accident, misadventure.

&nbs
p; Then, if Mistress Root wanted to talk to me, why hadn’t she taken the opportunity this evening when we were all together at the Ferns’ house? (This at least was more easily answered. Presumably she did not want the two of us to be seen talking together in public.)

  And how had she contrived to put the note inside the Mercutio scroll? A moment’s reflection, however, suggested that this would have been relatively simple, since the scrolls had been left in the “dressing-room” while we were mingling with the audience at the end of the performance. Anyone might have slipped in and secreted a note inside my scroll.

  “Getting love-letters again?”

  It was Abel Glaze, who, sleeping in the same bed as me, noticed my scrutiny of the note from Mistress Root and the thoughtful way I’d folded it up.

  “Something of the sort,” I said.

  Luckily the light in our large room was so feeble – candle economy – that he wasn’t able to see much. Say nothing beforehand.

  “Is it from Mistress Constant?”

  “She is engaged to be married.”

  “I mean, from Susan Constant.”

  “No, it is not. Not from anyone like that.”

  “Oh well,” said Abel with a sigh, “and I thought we were the only two in the Chamberlain’s not to have found ourselves a mistress in this place and be busy tonight.”

  This was not completely accurate – at least half the bed spaces in our dormitory were occupied at this very moment, and solely by their rightful owners – but I detected a rueful note in my friend’s voice. Perhaps his love-lorn pose was not altogether a pose.

  I blew out the candle and lay down. One advantage of Laurence Savage’s absence was that I had more space in the bed, as did Abel.

  “Where is Laurence, do you know?” he said.

  “No.”

  “I hope he has found himself a more comfortable nook than this place.”

  I refused to rise to Abel’s speculation. The question was not interesting (or not that interesting). The real question that was preoccupying me, of course, was whether I should respond to Mistress Root’s summons to her house in Cats Street. I had more or less put the business of Hugh Fern’s death out of my mind. The coroner had sat, everyone seemed satisfied. Yet here was the promise of further secrets.