I pulled my doublet more tightly about me. It was streaked with blood from my head wound. I must have looked a sight, bloodied, speckled with plague marks. There was a cold dankness to this room which seemed to be increasing as it grew lighter beyond the barred opening. Something rustled against my chest. I reached in and extracted a sheaf of paper, still warm from where it had been nestling against my heart.
It was a pamphlet.
Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder, I read.
It meant nothing to me. Who was Kemp?
There was a picture on the cover of a dancing man with a drummer in the background.
But, of course, Kemp was the melancholy clown whom Abel Glaze and I had called on during another life. Will Kemp, once of the Chamberlain’s Company and now fading away in Dow-gate. Abel plied him with sack and a pie while I, less graciously, agreed to purchase his account of how he’d jigged and tripped his way from Whitechapel to Norwich. Well, this pamphlet – for which he’d extorted sixpence if I remembered rightly – had been sitting snug in my doublet ever since that day in February when we’d visited the old fool. It seemed like years ago. Perhaps he was dead by now.
I’d never read it, hadn’t even realized that I’d been carrying it about with me these several weeks. Forgetting my immediate predicament, I opened the pamphlet and flicked through its pages, one part of my mind thinking that it might be the last document I’d ever look at. No great poetry, no uplifting words of religious consolation, but the vainglorious account of a superannuated clown’s progress across a little quarter of the realm. Yet another part of my mind told me wearily that, whatever Master Kemp’s faults, they were very small beer compared with the crimes which were being committed all around me now.
I read about Thomas Slye, who played the tabor and kept time for Kemp, and about William Bee, his industrious servant. (Busy Bee, I thought without humour.) I read about the warm welcome Kemp had received at every stop on his tour, and the woman whose legs he’d tied bells to and the other woman whose skirt he’d oh-so-accidentally torn off in his capering. I heard of his triumphal arrival in Norwich and of how his dancing buskins were still displayed in the Guild Hall at Norwich, nailed one next to the other on the wall. Idly I wondered what he’d worn to travel back to London.
Normally, Will Kemp’s rather boastful style would have irritated me but after reading his words I thought warmly of him and hoped that he was well – or as well as could be expected – or, if he was no more, that he had died peacefully. I wished him all the things I would have wished for myself. He was a link to my playing company, to my friends and fellows. I tucked the pamphlet back inside the warmth of my doublet.
I considered Kemp’s shoes nailed to the wall in Norwich Guild Hall. Famous footwear for famous feet.
Footwear . . . famous and not so famous.
That single chopin which had fallen from Mistress Root’s body as she was being hauled from her bedroom in Cats Street.
There was the sound of a key turning in the cellar door. I didn’t look up but continued to think of shoes.
Thought of the strange business of the change in Hugh Fern’s footwear during the Romeo and Juliet performance. Of how he’d changed – or exchanged? – his expensive, buckled shoes for a plainer pair to wear in his character as Friar Laurence. Of how, when his body was discovered, he’d been wearing the buckled shoes once more.
There was the sound of footsteps treading across the flagged floor. I still didn’t look up.
I recalled the excellent boots worn by Doctor Ralph Bodkin when he came to attend to the dead body of his colleague in the yard of the Golden Cross Inn. Fine, supple boots of leather which reached almost to the knee.
Now I looked up from where I was sitting propped against the slimy wall. The same boots, fine, supple and reaching almost to the knee, were standing in front of my gaze.
I got to my feet and looked Ralph Bodkin in the face. He was sweating heavily. The veins on his bullish forehead stood out like cords.
I looked beyond Bodkin to the corpses laid out on the table-tops. One of them, I now saw in the strengthening light, had been slashed across the stomach and something dark and billowing was poking out. The arm of another hung down over the side. The skin had been flayed off. I recalled what Hugh Fern had said to me when he was talking about horoscopes. Doctors may be worse employed, believe me. Much worse employed.
“It is not permitted,” I said.
“What isn’t permitted?”
I waved my arm wildly at the underground room, where the bodies of men and women were indiscriminately mixed.
“This. It is sacrilege to the dead to open them up. It is not allowed.”
“Who is to say so?”
“The laws of God – ”
“Oh.”
“ – and man.”
“The only laws are the laws of nature,” said Bodkin.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Master . . . Revill? Are you well? You have blood on your face. You carry the marks of plague . . . ”
“These are not real. I’m not infected,” I said, brushing impatiently at my face and at the same time reflecting that I most likely was infected by now.
“You ask what I am doing,” said Bodkin. “You came running up recently and asked me another question concerning plays. You remember that?”
The sweat was dripping down from his brow. A strong, meaty smell came off him, as if he was cooking.
“I asked you whether the plague was caused by plays.”
“What did I answer?
“You said it was superstition.”
“Well, so too is the prohibition against cutting up the dead. That is superstition, all superstition. We will only discover the secrets of nature by digging into her and opening her up. It is hard to do that with living subjects – and I would not wish to – but there is no harm in anatomizing the dead.”
“No harm! What of their souls?”
“A fiction. I have not found the soul yet.”
“But people have died in this town so that you can lay them open.”
“People are dying every day, all around us. I look closely at them when they are brought here in order to discover the secrets of their deaths and their lives. What I do is for our good.”
“Our?”
“The good of humankind.”
“It’s wrong,” I said. My mouth was full of a vile taste.
Bodkin swayed slightly on his feet. He reached into a pocket and retrieved the fine octagonal watch which I’d first glimpsed in the Golden Cross yard as he stood over Fern’s body.
“You see this,” he said, thrusting it towards me. “If I were a watchmaker now and this machine fell ill – that is to say, if it stopped or went slow – I could open it up and poke about among its innards and perhaps restore it to full health. What would you say to that?”
He was a fearsome man but somehow not frightening to me, not now. Maybe I was beyond fear by this point, standing in a plaguey charnel house with a mad physician.
“You are not a watchmaker,” I said. “And we are not watches.”
“Our hearts tick like clocks,” said Bodkin. “We move round in our little circles. We tell time until we run down. We have parts that should work together in harmony – but when something goes wrong we are as helpless as an ape would be confronted by this tiny engine.”
He brandished the watch before replacing it in his pocket.
“Did you kill Hugh Fern?” I said.
Bodkin looked surprised. He blinked and swayed again.
“Kill Fern? No, he killed himself. Killed himself by accident. Hugh Fern was a good enough man – I do not mean that he was a good physician, for he relied too much on horoscopes and such, and had no great ambition – but he was a good enough man. Speaking for myself, I am not interested in the living but the dead. Only the dead can utter their secrets.”
I recalled Bodkin in the inn yard, standing with a bloody knife over the corpse of his fellow doctor
like a conspirator. From somewhere outside this place an early morning church bell began to toll, the universal sound these days.
“You know what would happen to you if the people of the town discovered this?”
“I have faced them down before,” said Ralph Bodkin.
“They would tear you to pieces, as you have done these corpses. Then they would set fire to this place.”
“I do not tear corpses, Master Revill. I dissect in order to penetrate the great mysteries of life and death.”
“You murder to dissect.”
“I have committed no murder. Look, you are still alive.”
“Your agents have. Like that man over there. Christopher Kite, ostler at the Golden Cross.”
Bodkin’s face took on a peculiar sheen. His great, meaty countenance looked like a boiled ham.
“It is immaterial now who has done what. I am sick. I above all men can recognize the signs.”
“You have caught the infection?”
But I already knew the answer. Instinctively I pressed myself into the wall at my back, as if to distance myself from the Doctor. As if that would be of any use.
“I have very little time,” he said.
“What will you do in the interim?”
“I shall make myself secure here, and continue with my work as long as I can.”
He moved away from me and went towards the table on which lay the corpse with the gaping innards.
“It is wicked work.”
“One day it will be seen differently.”
“What should I do?”
“If I were you, Revill, I would leave this place. Look, the door is open. Go now and tell the common townspeople what you wish.”
I glanced across towards the door of the cellar. It was half open.
“What if I am infected as well?”
“You are young. Your vital spirits may be strong enough. But stay if you prefer.”
I was already on my way towards the door. Before I stepped out of this charnel house and abandoned Ralph Bodkin to his wicked work I turned round.
“Tell me one thing, sir. What have you discovered? Have you penetrated the mysteries?”
“Oh no, Master Revill. Others will do that. I am like the ape holding the watch. But I am a cleverer ape than when I started.”
He picked up a long thin knife and bent over the body. I walked from the room, half expecting to be summoned back. A flight of stone steps led upwards. I emerged into a hallway. There was a door ahead of me. It was bolted but not locked. I slid back the bolts and stepped into the street. I closed the door carefully and quietly behind me. The bell continued to toll close by.
There was scarcely anyone about yet. It was a fine spring morning. The sun was shredding a few early clouds and, although it gave off no heat, the blaze of light was welcome. Blinking after the dimness of the cellar, I half walked, half ran across this suburb of the town. The tolling was coming from St Ebbe’s. I passed the western approach to the church and saw the devil faces clustered round the arch of the door. With their pitted beaks and goggling eyes and bat-like ears, they were carved there so as to scare off the real thing. I could have whispered a tale or two in those bat-ears.
I almost ran towards the river. At the water’s edge I slid down the muddy bank and plunged my hands into the fast-flowing stream. I wiped at my face repeatedly with handfuls of freezing water, cleaning off the blood which streaked it and picking at the scab-like counterfeit sores.
Then, feeling as if I had wandered in from another world, I made my way in the direction of the town centre. It was a chill morning but the air was like a purge. A few citizens were going about their business by now. Among them were my friends Abel Glaze and Jack Wilson.
“My God, Nick! What happened? We’ve been looking for you all night,” said Jack.
“I see you’ve recovered from the plague, but that lump is new,” said Abel, indicating my swollen forehead.
“First, what happened to you? You were supposed to prevent me being carried off.”
Their side of the story was easily told. My two friends had made themselves comfortable in the back quarters of Edmund Cope’s house, waiting for the signal from me or for some sound which would indicate that the false body-carriers had entered the premises. No sound or signal came. Abel confessed that, waiting in the dark, they might have been less than attentive. (I took this to mean that they’d probably fallen asleep, as I’d done.) The first they knew of anything untoward was a great clatter and a sort of suppressed shriek. That would have been Master Kite dropping the silver bowl when I rose up from the dead on my couch. By the time Abel and Jack had gathered themselves and blundered about in the darkness they found the way out locked or blocked. They shouted and beat on the door but to no avail. And by the time they’d climbed through a window in the rear of the property and made their way back into Grove Street, it was night and the area was quite empty.
They plied me with questions. By now we’d returned to the Golden Cross and I was satisfying my hunger and thirst with some bread and ale. Strange, but despite everything my appetite was good. I sketched out what had happened at Bodkin’s house, hardly believing my own ears, so far-fetched did the story seem. After what they’d gone through themselves, though, Abel and Jack were ready enough to accept it.
However, when I reached that point in my narrative where I described how I’d spent the night with corpses, some of which were quite plaguey, my friends shifted uncomfortably on their seats and made to move a little distance away.
“Aren’t you worried for yourself, Nick?” said Abel.
“Yes,” I said. “But I thought I was facing even more imminent dangers. And I have a little protection.”
I unbuttoned my doublet and shirt to display the leather pouch which I’d purchased for sixpence from the bookseller Nathaniel Thornton, at the same time as I obtained Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Flower’s Herbal. The pouch contained arsenic. If there was something a little odd at first in walking about with an ounce of poison, I soon forgot about it. So far it seemed to have stood me in good stead.
As if this was a cue, my friends also unfastened shirt buttons to reveal their own personal charms or amulets. Jack was sporting a golden chain from which hung a blue stone. This he referred to as an “Eastern Hyacinth”; it provided infallible protection, he assured me. Abel tapped a glass phial which he claimed to have paid a great deal for, since it contained horn of unicorn, ground to powder. I could have told him a tale or two about that but kept silent, reflecting that nobody can be taken in like a confidence-trickster. Anyway as long as we earnestly believe in our charms and amulets, whether true or fraudulent, who is to say that they will not work for us? We were all alive, so far.
After this diversion I continued with my story. When I’d finished, there was a long silence.
“We should report this dreadful doctor to the authorities,” said Abel.
“He is one of those authorities,” I said. “All in good time. This isn’t quite over. Kite is dead. I saw him with my own eyes. But there is another individual in this business. Not Bodkin but someone else.”
“Whoever he is, he is a wicked individual,” said Jack.
“Why do you say he?” I said.
“Is Susan Constant involved?” said Abel suddenly.
“I don’t know. Why?”
Jack Wilson laughed out loud.
“Because our friend here has been talking to her. He has a soft spot for her.”
“Have you, Abel?”
“She is a lady,” he said simply.
“And you are a player. To say nothing of your former trade.”
“Which trade was that, Abel?”
“It doesn’t matter, Jack. I’d swear my life on it that she is innocent . . . ”
“Innocent of what?”
“Of any accusations.”
“Who’s accused her?”
“You have, Nick, in your mind. You are casting round for people to suspect.”
“They are mostly dead or dying,” I said, thinking of Ralph Bodkin cutting up corpses in his cellar.
There was another silence.
“I have made a small discovery though I don’t know whether it amounts to much,” said Abel. “The house which we were spying on in Shoe Lane, the place near the bawdy-house where we saw – ”
“Yes, I remember.”
“It is occupied by Mrs Hoby and her brood. She is the widow, the new widow, of that carter who drowned in the river after he’d knocked over Mistress Root.”
“That makes sense. The woman referred to the place as a house of mourning,” I said.
“Coincidence, eh?” said Jack.
“Not coincidence,” I said. “John Hoby the carter. He was involved in this as well. He may be dead now but it was his horse standing outside Mr Cope’s house in Grove Street. The horse was a clapped-out piebald. And the cart was the same one that rolled up outside Mistress Root’s, I’d swear, from its sound.”
In some dark recess of my head I remembered the creaking wheels which I’d heard, lapsing in and out of awareness, on my involuntary ride last night.
My thoughts turned to the house in Shoe Lane behind the Golden Cross, the house where the widow dwelt with her brood, the house that had evidently been some kind of meeting place for these thieves and false body-carriers. There were three of them: there was John Hoby (deceased), there was Kit Kite (also deceased), and then there was the other.
Shoe Lane.
Where had Hugh Fern obtained those shoes to play the part of Friar Laurence? Why had he changed back into that fine, silver-buckled pair before his death? Or had it happened after his death?
Suddenly I stood up, in my haste knocking over the stool I’d been sitting on.
“What is it, Nick?”
“Jack, your Tybalt sword. The one you had last night. You have it still?”
Jack pulled back his cloak to reveal one of our stage foils. The tip might have been removed so that it was no longer blunt but it remained a pretty paltry weapon.
“Give it me!”
I almost snatched it from his hands and, before my friends could stop me or ask questions, I was out of the door, through the yard and into Cornmarket. I paused to tuck the foil into my belt. I was not permitted to carry such a weapon, the foil being reserved for gentlemen, but these were strange and disordered times. I would not be stopped. No one was going to stop me.
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