Sleep of Death

ACT II

So a new man has entered the house. He suspects that something is wrong, without being able to put his finger on it. Or he has been told that something is wrong. But he knows nothing, and certainly nothing about me. What do I know about Master Nicholas Revill? He is tall and hollow-cheeked with coal-black hair. He is young and eager, though he tries to disguise this with a display of worldliness. He is a player. Well, I am a player too. But I give nothing away by saying that. So are all men — and women too; we’re all players — on or off the stage. Professional players, I have observed, are usually rather obtuse. For all their vaunts about understanding human nature, most of them don’t see further than their noses. They are so concerned with the self that the independent existence of others is a strange concept to them. I know too that Master Revill is the son of a parson in the west; I believe that both his parents perished in the plague. He then came to seek his fortune in London, having contracted from somewhere the desire to make an exhibition of himself on the stage. This desire is as virulent — and almost as fatal — a contagion as the plague. A period with the Admiral’s Men and now with the Chamberlain’s Company. But still he plays the small parts. Nothing will come of him.

Every so often, on the nights when I am unable to sleep, I turn round and round the memory of how I swung down from the pear tree in the walled garden, and approached the sleeping form of my enemy. Sometimes I see this as I saw it then, from inside my own case of eyes. Sometimes I see it as if outside myself, as another would have seen it. A crouched, stealthy figure dropping from the tree, fatal fruit. Then, loping across the tussocked grass, an animal closing on its undefended prey. Am I condemned for ever to relive the moment when I stood above his still breathing body, the moment when I unsealed the phial and trickled its contents into his ear? The brief convulsions. The early silence. The wait before my ‘audience’ gathered, the little group come to appreciate, to be horrified, to be struck dumb, by the spectacle that I alone had created. How I wanted to hasten their arrival, by shouting out or screaming, doing something foolish which would have brought them running to the garden.

But I waited. And was rewarded. The discovery of the body in the evening. The uproar and grief.

And what was this all for? For nothing if I am discovered — not likely, I tell myself on those sleepless nights, not likely that the crime will be discovered. Master Revill, he will find nothing. The only danger I face is from myself, from betraying myself. Guilt spills itself in fearing to be spilt, as someone says. I expected to discover that I had lost my clear conscience, but I have discovered instead something more valuable: conscience is a cowardly bitch and will respond to a good whipping. Oh, she will keep her kennel.

The wind brushed across the water, bringing a scatter of yellowing leaves from the trees on the bank. I huddled lower into my cape. The boatman pushed off from the shore and plied steadily into the current and the early morning traffic. Downstream, the silhouette of the buildings on London Bridge made an unbroken line with the houses on either bank, so that we seemed enclosed on a lake and not afloat on a mighty conduit to the sea. Other ferries scudded back and forth, taking citizens to or from their pleasure on the south bank or their business on the north. Eel boats and herring busses slithered among the swarm of smaller vessels, and we rocked and bobbed when we crossed their trails. It was too late in the year, as well as too early in the day, for any pleasure boat. Once, just after I’d arrived in London and near this very spot (and the very day after I had glimpsed our glorious Queen in procession in the street), I’d seen the royal barge, oars agleam, mastering the tide. Mistressing the tide, I should say, mindful of its occupant. This double vision of our Gloriana on successive days — though, to be truthful, I had not actually seen her in the barge — gave me the curious idea that I was destined to glimpse her every day that both of us were in London. Yet I have not seen her since.

Whenever I crossed the river, I thought of that extraordinary feat of the Burbage brothers and the other Chamberlain’s shareholders when they transported the Theatre playhouse from Finsbury, north of the river. It was one of those stories to which we theatre folk are particularly receptive, because it presented us in a fashion that was both heroic and practical. It is not by chance that the figure who holds up the globe on top of our (yes, now I may say our!) playhouse is the mighty Hercules. For this shifting of an entire edifice was a truly Herculean labour. The epic move was the talk of the town for at least a fortnight. The lease on the Finsbury Theatre had run out. There was a disagreement with the landlord. The Chamberlain’s Company had a right to the structure, perhaps, but not to the ground it sat on. The oaken main timbers, the beams and the staves and uprights, were gently prised one from another. Pegs were eased from joints which had hardened over time, numbers were chalked across the dismantled frame, relays of carts organised to take the lumber down Bishopsgate and into Thames Street beside the river. And then in the middle of the winter of ’98, when the Thames had frozen solid, there began the great enterprise of ferrying this load of living wood across to the far side.

I envisaged the carts and the improvised sledges creaking under the weight of the frame of the playhouse — its bare bones, so to speak. I could see the panting breath of the men, the shareholder-players, as they tugged at their precious cargo, searching for a purchase on the ice. I envy these men who are now my colleagues, I envy them their part in the epic undertaking. Above them wheels all the starry heaven of a frosty winter night. I could imagine the urgency of the crossing, and the relief of reaching the far bank. Then Master Peter Street, the carpenter, had worked a near-miracle in putting together what had been taken asunder. And behold! As broken bones are sometimes stronger when they mend, so the Globe which arose, phoenix-like, from the remnants of the Theatre in Finsbury is a greater and stronger edifice than anything that is or that ever was before.

From the stern of the little ferry I saw the white playhouse on the far bank, a sight now grown familiar but still capable of making my heart beat faster. My boatman, blessedly silent apart from the occasional oath which is as necessary to the breed as breathing, thrust his oars into the stream. I hadn’t seen Adam Gibbons again, the man who had collided with me and then nearly throttled the life out of me. There were boatmen by the hundred, by the thousand, plying this stretch of the river, it is true, but London, great as she is, is also in some sense a small place and one may be sure of meeting again those whom one has encountered once.

We were now halfway across the murky river, and my thoughts turned to the household of Sir Thomas Eliot and Lady Alice and William. If I had twisted round in my seat I could have glimpsed it, one of the fine mansions on the north bank. I had lodged there for some days now and been received kindly, if distantly, by the head of the house. William’s story was that I was a player in temporary distress for accommodation. True enough. And, considering the good turn I had done the family in helping to expose the false steward Adrian and vindicate the good servant Jacob, it was the least they could do to provide for my needs while I searched for somewhere more permanent to lodge. So, William said, he had said to his mother and his stepfather-uncle. Of the more obscure reason for my being there — to observe whether there was anything ‘out of place’ — he naturally said nothing. I was his spy or intelligencer, primed to uncover the secrets of others, and this was the secret between us.

While I am halfway across the river, and nothing of interest can happen (unless the ferry be suddenly overwhelmed or the royal barge swan into view) I will recount the first of my discoveries. In the same way I will set down at intervals in the rest of this narrative the other things that I discovered inside — and outside — Lady Alice’s house. I will produce them accurately and keeping to the sequence in which they occurred or in which I found out about them. Though I now know what really happened, I will not anticipate my discovery of the final, strange truth by hinting at or foreshadowing the end.

I took my mission seriously. I even kept a little black-bound book in which I literally noted down what I had uncovered. And, to please myself, I kept it in the crude cipher which I had used once with a friend at school: that is, I simply transposed English characters into their equivalent in the Greek (so that an a became an alpha, a b a beta, and so on). To be truthful, this would not have concealed what I meant from many eyes, but it gave to my investigation an agreeably cabbalistic air. I mention all this to show how innocently I entered upon this business, as greenly as a schoolboy scrawling notes to a classmate. I wanted to please William Eliot. There is value in having a well-connected young patron — but also I had taken to him, and thought our acquaintance might turn to friendship. And I was attracted by what I might call the ‘matter’.

To begin with the body.

I spoke to the servants. I found people were willing to talk to me. I had won some credit in the Eliot household in a twofold fashion: I had assisted the unfortunate Jacob, who tended now to trail about after me when not otherwise engaged on his daily duties. And I had been instrumental in helping to get rid of Adrian the steward. He, I gathered, had been feared and unpopular with the servants because of his high-handed ways and his slyness. The story of what I, Nick Revill, had said and done in the box at the Globe playhouse had filtered through the house.

I spoke to the servants, I say. In particular, the one who had been sent up the wall on a ladder to see what what had happened to old Sir William Eliot. His name was Francis. He was a small, wiry man with a creased brow. He found it hard to keep still, and jigged and mimed, for example, his mounting of the ladder. He needed little prompting to speak about that evening. It might be the most exciting thing that would happen to him in his life, and the story he told must have been repeated a hundred times in the servants’ quarters. I was merely the latest questioner wanting to know about the mysterious and tragic death of Sir William Eliot.

I have here set down the things that I discovered in my investigation into Eliot’s death as if I were interrogating witnesses in a court of law. In doing so, I have formalised my own questions and I have condensed answers — and probably given them a coherence they did not possess — but I have not materially changed what was meant. It may seem surprising that a mere servant such as Francis should speak so frankly about his master or mistress, but I believe it to be true of these large households that they are more like parishes where neighbours gossip to one another and speak openly of the parson or the schoolmaster or the lord of the manor. And among people who live all under one roof, although they will be respectful to their betters, there is often a queer sense of equality too.

Nick Revill: When did you first understand that there was something wrong in Sir William’s house?

Francis the servant: Janet came to me, on Lady Alice’s orders. She told me to bring a ladder into the garden.

N: A ladder? Now you surely thought that was odd, Francis?

F: I thought one of the women had lost something. The wind had caught a hood or a bonnet and blown it into a tree, maybe. But, to be honest, sir, I did not think much. I did what I was told.

N: What did you see when you went out into the garden?

F: My lady and her son William were together near the door into the hidden garden.

N: The hidden garden. This is what you call it?

F: The secret garden or the hidden garden, yes. Or Sir William’s garden. We still use that name sometimes.

N: Because he was the only one who went there?

F: No one else had a key to it. Not even Lady Alice.

N: And now it was she that you saw waiting by the closed door?

F: Master William also. Some of the other servants were standing there too. None of them spoke when I arrived with my ladder across my shoulders, so. [Here Francis mimes the porting of a ladder.] It was dusk on a spring evening. It had been a fine day, a warm day, but now the air was cold. And I felt my skin prickling, like, at the cold. I shivered, I remember that I shivered.

N: What were you told to do?

F: Lady Alice said something like, ‘Francis, I’m rather troubled about Sir William. He will get cold if he’s sleeping in there. I think he should be woken up before it grows any later.’ But I knew that she was not just thinking of his sleep.

N: How did you know?

F: I have seen my lady Alice in many moods. I have seen her angry and soft, and gentle and uppish, and. .

N: Yes?

F: I mean no disrespect to her, sir, but there is a saltiness in her looks sometimes — you understand what I say?

N: Yes.

F [here the good honest servant starts to gulp his words]: I mean even towards me, or so I have thought, sir. I am sure she does not know she is doing it but there is something salt in her, and it is leftover in her expression sometimes like the lees is left in a glass of wine, and her voice falls away all low even if she is giving me a command only, and I have to bend forward to catch her words, and I am uncomfortable, and I hope you can understand me if I have misspoken, sir.

N: Perfectly, thank you. What you are saying is that she is a lady of many — how shall I put it? — moods. But you were mentioning her appearance by the garden door. .?

F: I’ve never seen her look as she looked then. It was getting dark but I could observe her face and features sort of moving around, and she was troubled as she said, pacing about and twisting about.

N: Why do you think she was certain her husband was in there, in the hidden garden?

F: Where else would he be?

N: In the house?

F: I believe they had looked for him, sir. All about the place and around.

N: Outside the house then. In the town? Why should he not be anywhere from Westminster to Shoreditch?

F: But he wasn’t, was he, sir? He was in the garden, and he was dead, and it was I who found him.

N: No one disputes that, Francis, but you miss my point. What I mean is, before you found out for certain that Sir William was in the garden, why was everyone else so sure that he must be there?

F: Janet saw him go across the outer garden and open the door into his orchard, as was his custom. She saw him in the afternoon.

N: I see. But mightn’t he have left the orchard again without anybody noticing it? Didn’t he occasionally go out — on business or pleasure? He hardly had to obtain your permission to leave his own house.

F: Hardly, sir.

N: Well then?

F: This is a large household, Master Revill, there are plenty of people here, and it would be very difficult for Sir William to slip out without being noticed. And Sir William never slipped anywhere. He made proper exits and entrances, just like you players do.

N: But it’s possible that he did ‘slip’ out?

F: Almost anything is possible if you want to put it like that, sir. But none of his city clothes, not his cloaks or his boots, not a thing was taken, and that seemed proof enough to us simple folk that he hadn’t wandered beyond these doors.

N: Very well. As you say, the garden is where he was found anyway. Now tell me what you did next.

F: I placed the ladder carefully against the wall. Then I climbed up it hand over hand, so.

N: What did you see from the top?

F: Nothing. I thought to call for a light from those down below-

N: They had torches?

F: I think not. When they first went into the garden it hadn’t grown dark. And now it was dusk. The secret garden is bounded by high walls and shadowed by trees, and I was unable to see anything but shapes from my post at the top of the outer wall. So I straddled the wall, and Lady Alice, she says ‘Well?’ and I say to her what I’ve just said to you, which is that I can see nothing. And then she says ‘Go on, go and look for him, Francis, please.’

N: Was there anything — did you notice anything — about the way she said that?

F: A strange voice, you mean?

N: Yes.

F: No. I did as she bade me. I turned about so that I might grip the top of the wall with my hands and I hung there for an instant before I fell off into the dark. Then I dropped to the ground on the far side and groped my way about the orchard. I felt that something was wrong. Lady Alice and Master William on the other side of the wall, they felt something was wrong too. One of the master’s bitches had set up a great howling that afternoon, you see, sir.

N: Yes. Proceed.

F: You’re very curious, sir, if you’ll forgive me for saying so.

N: I’m a player, Francis.

F: I know, Master Revill.

N: We players are curious about everything. Human behaviour is, as you might term it, our lifeblood. Humani nihil alienum.

F: If you say so, sir.

N: Not I say so but the Latin author Terence. Go on with your story if you please.

F: Where was I?

N: In the garden, the inner garden.

F: I move slowly about with my hands stretched in front of me, and the branches and leaves, they brush at my face and clothes. [Francis suits his actions to his words.]

N: You should have been a player, Francis.

F: Is it a respectable trade, sir?

N: We are crawling slowly towards respectability. Please continue with your account.

F: Something rustles close to my foot and I stand stock still with my skin prickling and, though it is only a night animal, I wish that Lady Alice had not requested that I climb the ladder and jump down on the other side. The dusk is dangerous, sir. It confuses. In the dark of the night, at least you know where you are — even if you don’t know where you are, if you see what I mean.

N: Ha, very good, yes.

F: I felt too that I was. . not alone in the garden.

N: And in a sense you were not, Francis, for Sir William was there also.

F: I don’t mean that. I felt someone was looking over my shoulder. I jerked my head round sharp, so, and I did it quick to catch them at it before I could grow afraid. But I saw nothing save the heads of the trees. Still my shoulder turned cold. This person. . his eyes were up.

N: Up? Who? Whose eyes? What do you mean?

F: I don’t know, sir. But Sir William, he was not up, not up anywhere. He was lying down.

N: What did you do?

F: At first I am afraid to make a noise but after a while I begin to whisper, ‘Sir William, Sir William’, like this, soft as can be. In a while too I am able to see better, for it is not so dark as I thought. I can make out the apple trees and the pear trees although there are dark pools of shadow lying underneath them. I had been crouching a little as if I was going to meet an enemy and wrestle with him, but now I stand upright. I say ‘Sir William, Sir William’ in a stronger voice. Then after a time I hear Lady Alice’s words come vaulting over the wall. She says something like, ‘Have you found him, Francis?’

N: Were those her very words? ‘Have you found him, Francis?’ Are you certain?

F: Yes, Master Revill.

N: You’re very sure.

F: I was there. I turned my head and shouted back over the wall, ‘No, I ha-’ when suddenly I saw him and broke off speech. So that instant there in the garden is, as it were, branded in my memory.

N: Describe the scene, if you would.

F: My eyes were now much sharper and I could see almost as well as by day. Above me was a moon, new-risen and near full, and the evening star was balanced on a wall top. Between two trees was a hammock, and in the hammock was my master. He was only a shape, but who else could it be?

N: You realised he was dead?

F: Death and sleep are brothers — that’s what they say, isn’t it, sir? But to my mind you cannot confuse those two, however much they be kin. I knew that he was dead the moment I saw him there between the apple trees. He had not answered for all of our calling. And his poor body had heaviness and no heaviness, if you understand me.

N: I think so. What did you do next?

F: I was silent. The hammock swayed and creaked in some of the air that came creeping up and across the wall from the river, and for a moment I thought that Sir William was going to stretch and rise up from his resting place and greet me by name as he did sometimes, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I waited to see. But he did not rise. He had gone from us for good. Lady Alice, she cried out ‘Francis!’ in a way that brought me back to myself. I crept closer, not frightened now but respectful, like. I touched him gently on his forehead with the tips of my fingers, like so [Francis extends surprisingly delicate fingertips], and he was scarcely warm.

N: How was he lying?

F: On his back but with his head to the left side, so, and one arm outflung. I could not see his expression but when they brought him into the house we saw a horrible grin on his face as if he laughed at all of us. The key fell from his person and onto the floor inside. It made a clatter.

N: What key?

F: The key to the door to the garden.

N: Let us go back to when you first found him. What did you think at that moment? About how he’d died for instance?

F: I didn’t think anything, Master Revill. I was frightened, then I was excited, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. It had fallen to me, you see, to make a discovery which would make a difference to everyone in our household. Later I was sorry, because Sir William was a good master. We shall not see his like again.

N: And then?

F: I shouted out something. I cannot recall what it was. I went back to the door. The others were still on the far side. I was very calm and also lively. I could hear them breathing over the wall. I said that I had found Sir William and that torches should be brought, and they knew what I meant, and then they broke down the door and came inside, and everyone went and stood about the body wringing their hands, and Janet ran all over the house beside herself, and my lady Alice and us servants, we were grief-stricken.

N: And Master William?

F: Him most of all.

N: And that was it? You saw nothing further? You did nothing else? You didn’t touch the body, or rearrange anything before the others came into the garden?

F [hesitating]: No, sir.

N: And one more thing, Francis, if you would be so good.

F: Sir?

N: Sir Thomas Eliot, where was he all this while?

F: Sir Thomas?

N: Your old master’s brother and now your new master.

F: He was about his business.

N: Where? Here in the house?

F: Oh no, I do not think so. He was away, in Dover, I think.

N: So when did he find out about the death of his brother?

F: The next day it must have been, sir. When he returned from Dover. My lady went to tell him as he came into the hall, but in truth he must have been able to tell something was wrong. Tom Bullock would have said as he arrived.

N: Tom Bullock?

F: He is the doorman. He says little, but even he could not keep his mouth closed around this.

N: Was Sir Thomas often here?

F: He dwells in Richmond. No longer of course. Now he dwells here with my lady.

N: But, before your old master died, he was often here?

F: I dare say so, Master Revill.

N: Out of love for his brother and sister?

F: It is said-

N: Yes?

F: — that he was near to bankrupt before this marriage.

N: Thank you, Francis. And still one thing more. Can I ask you again about the moment when you saw Sir William?

F: Again, sir?

N [sensing that even this simple man’s patience is about to be exhausted]: For my own private satisfaction. You touched nothing about Sir William’s person in the garden?

F: I — no. .

N: Well, I thank you, Francis.

[Nick Revill makes to turn away, knowing that Francis has more to say on this topic and that a pretended dismissal, and an active conscience, will work best on this good servant.]

F: Wait a moment, sir. You set me thinking now. I went close to the body and, like I said, I knew that he was dead straightaway, even before I put my fingertips out. His head was on one side and. .

N: Yes?

F: It’s a tiny thing, sir. But on the side of his face turned towards me there was a mark that ran aslant his cheek.

N: How did you see this? It must have been dark by this stage.

F: Like I said, my eyes had grown used to the dark, and there was a strong moon nearly at the full. The moonlight caught this. . trail. . as it will pick out the trail of a boat on the river. It was like a snail’s trail, a silver track that stretched from his ear and down across the cheek before it disappeared in his beard. I. . I wiped at the mark with my sleeve, sir, because I did not like to think that something had crawled across the face of my dead master. I had almost forgot it until this instant. Did I do wrong?

N: No, Francis. You showed respect towards your master. The sleeve you used to wipe Sir William’s cheek, would that happen to be the one on the shirt you’re wearing?

F: I keep it in my trunk beneath my bed. I have two shirts, and I have not worn that one since the night of the discovery. And if you were to ask me why, sir, I could not tell you.

We’d landed on the south bank by now. I paid off the boatman, adding a small tip, and was rewarded with a surly nod. Can you ever satisfy a boatman? Will Charon, who is to ferry us all across Lethe one day, be as bad-tempered as a London waterman? Impossible!

As I made my way up the landing steps and into Hopton Street on the way to the playhouse, I considered again what I had discovered. I must confess that the feeling that there was indeed something to find out — the feeling that this wasn’t all a matter of a son’s grieving imagination — had grown strongly upon me. William Eliot was convinced of something odd, even suspicious about his father’s death. Now I was starting to believe the same thing. Even so quickly may one catch the plague! After talking with Francis and summarising our exchange in my little black book, I had noted (in my Greekified style) the following points for further reflection:

firstly: Why were the family, Lady Alice and William, so sure that Sir William was in the garden, that he hadn’t, for example, slipped away from the house? One of the servants, Janet, had witnessed him entering the garden, to be sure, and no one had seen him leave — and his outdoor clothes were in place — but it seemed an absolute certainty with them that he was on the premises. Did this suggest that somebody knew he was there?

secondly: What did Lady Alice mean when she called out to Francis, “Have you found him?” Why had she made that choice of words? Why not “Is he there, Francis?” or “Can you see him?” Lady Alice’s query is what we call out to one who is searching for some thing or object — or for one who is no longer able to answer for himself.

thirdly: What caused the silvery streak which Francis had observed running slantwise across the cheek of the dead man? A snail or some other tiny creature? It was possible. I could understand why he had wiped it off his master’s face. I could understand too why the servant had been reluctant to wear that same shirt again — although this, as well as the way he had described his action at the very end of our meeting, suggested that, rather than merely forgetting the incident as he had claimed, Francis had deliberately thrown earth over it in his mind. Why? Had he, by instinct or unawares, been frightened of something in that sticky track scrawled across the dead man’s face?

fourthly: Had Sir Thomas really been away from the house when his brother died? Had he saddled up and ridden off a day or two earlier, claiming urgent business in Dover, only to return rather before the morning which followed the discovery of the body? Perhaps he had remained all the time in London. What did it mean that he was ‘near bankrout’? If this was true, then presumably he had been saved by an advantageous marriage.

What counted chiefly with me was not, however, the various pointers that I had picked up in conversation with Francis. What convinced me that there was something wrong was a visit to the hidden garden, made in company with the dog-like Jacob.

The door was no longer locked since the old master’s passing. It had secured his private orchard, and now he was dead there seemed no reason to keep it closed. On my second morning in the house I asked Jacob to show me where Sir William had been found. We traversed the larger garden and approached a wall that was pierced in the centre by the half-open oak door. An autumn wind was beginning to strip the trees. The grasses around the garden paths lay lank and untended. The door creaked when I pushed at it, with Jacob at my shoulder. Inside was a thick plantation of fruit trees. A few apples and pears lay mushed underfoot. A vine scaled the inner, south-facing wall behind us. The watermen’s cries, the creak of the nearer boats and the slop of water against the bank floated over the riverside wall.

‘Where did it happen, Jacob? Where was Sir William found?’

Jacob gestured, and lead the way towards the middle of the little orchard, ducking and weaving with suprising agility to avoid the low branches. Beaten-down areas of grass marked old routes among the trees. We came to a small open area where two apple trees faced each other. On the far side were a scattering of plums. Jacob stopped and pointed to the apple trees. They were old and gnarled. Their upper branches ran riot with each other but the lower ones had been pruned or altogether cut away. This was where Sir William’s body had hung suspended in his hammock. Although the hammock had gone, probably taken away with the body, I could see, at about five feet above the ground on each tree, rings around the bark which were discoloured or abraded. I crouched slightly to avoid the dangling leaves and the apples. I ran my fingers round the indentations made by the hammock ropes; as one would expect, they were deeper on the sides facing away from the clearing, where the pull of a man’s weight on the hammock supports would be greatest. As I was leaning forward something tapped me on the shoulder. I thought it was Jacob and looked around, only to see him grinning. Another windfall apple thumped on my outstretched arm. I retrieved it from the wet grass and bit into it. It was, if I am not mistaken, a Peasegood Nonesuch. I straightened up and stood flanked by the pair of trees, slowly chewing the fruit of one tree and pondering the fate of the man who had died suspended between two of them. Jacob, meanwhile, remained gazing at me with the patience and good nature of a dog which halts when his master halts but is ready to spring up the instant that he shows signs of moving.

Perhaps I owe my discovery to the Peasegood Nonesuch. It is a large and handsome variety of apple, and demands much eating. I stood there staring at, but not really seeing, the yellow and curling foliage of the orchard. Sir William Eliot had died here. Let us, I said, addressing myself in the plural, assume that he did not die naturally. Someone else had paid his fare to Charon for crossing the river Lethe into the underworld. Everything I’d heard indicated he was alone when he died. Janet had seen him crossing the outer garden and going into his private area. No one else possessed a key to the door. It was his custom of an afternoon to rest in his orchard, to think in this place — to sleep, perhaps to dream. This was his garden, his Eden. Yet Eden had Eve, as well as Adam. Did Lady Alice ever come here? Not on that day, certainly, otherwise she wouldn’t have been so anxious over his whereabouts. And Janet’s report had not mentioned Sir William’s being accompanied by any other member of the household. No, he was alone when he opened the door and relocked it behind him, I was as sure of that as if I had seen him go through the door with my own eyes.

I pursued my thoughts. Eden was home to our first parents. Eden was also the serpent’s lodging place. The snake in the grass. The serpent — or rather the serpent’s malice — was not native to Eden. He crept in from the outside. I wondered, had anyone crept into the garden after Sir William had entered it? Through the door? That was locked, and Sir William had the single key. The key had fallen from his body as it was being carried inside, Francis had told me. Keys may be copied, though. Leave that thought for now. Apply the philosophic principle of Occam’s razor, that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Assume that there was no other key. Then had someone come over the wall? But the walls were high. A ladder had been necessary when Francis had been ordered to get into the inner garden. An inner wall divided the two gardens belonging to the Eliots, while three exterior walls protected Sir William when he was shut up in his private garden. One separated him from his neighbours on the west side, one adjoined Mixen Lane in the east and the final wall opposed the river. Beneath this wall was a slick stretch of shoreline, exposed at low tide.

As I swallowed the last fragments of the Peasegood Nonesuch, I tried to put myself in the position of someone wishing to harm — even to kill — Sir William Eliot. I fashioned another self. I became a murderer; a simple transformation for a player.

Leave aside for the moment the question of how I gained entry into the hidden garden. Leave aside too the question of where I came from, whether from the public lane or the neighbours’ grounds or even from the outer garden of the house. (I discounted the river approach, as too difficult.) The point was, it could be done. Though the walls were high they were not insurmountable. I could have used a ladder, even if an accomplice to place it and then remove it while I was about my dirty business in the garden, would perhaps be necessary. I might have used a simple rope and hook to catch on the wall-top — this would do away with the accomplice. But, whichever method I employed, at what time would I make my entry? Knowing that Sir William habitually repaired to his orchard on fine afternoons in spring and summer, would I wait until I was sure that he was there, and then nip up the wall, drop down the other side and search the orchard until I stumbled across him swinging in his hammock? No. There were too many risks with this clumsy procedure. Sir William might not be safely asleep. He might be wandering among his trees even as I levered myself over his boundary wall. He might see me as I descended or as I threaded my way among his fruit trees.

No, were I the murderer, I would take my place before Sir William had entered his garden. I would be like those spectators who come early to ensure the best positions in the playhouse. I would wait until my mark was fixed and settled in sleep, and only then would I make my move. I would crouch in a corner of the wall like a cur. I would rise from the grass, as the false serpent does.

Or I would fall from above, like rotten fruit.

And now I remembered what little Francis had said to me, about what he felt after he had climbed into the garden but before he had found Sir William dead in his hammock — ‘Someone was looking over my shoulder, sir. Nothing there save the heads of the trees. My shoulder still icy. Their eyes were up. And Sir William he was not up, not up anywhere. He was lying down.’

My skin prickled.

It came to to me then that the safest place to hide in a garden is up a tree. Were I the murderer, plotting this death long beforehand, I would prospect for a secure, leafy arbour a safe height above the ground, and once there I would watch and wait.

In my mind’s eye and ear, I heard Sir William opening the door to his private domain, I saw him make his way gladly through his property, pausing to smell the fragrance of the blossom, to inspect the very beginnings of the crop of fruit that now hung from these trees or strewed the grass around. Then he reaches his hammock. Has he brought something to occupy his mind? A book? The household accounts? A letter requiring a careful reply? No, today he has come with nothing. He comes to rest, to sleep. Wearily, he lowers himself into the hammock. The cords groan slightly at the weight. He hears the shouts from the river, as I do now, and perhaps some noise from his own house. It’s nothing. Just the shriek of a servant.

He settles himself down, gazing up at the bank of clouds advancing across the river from the south-west. He feels sleepy. But something disturbs him. Every time he is on the verge of falling asleep, a stray thought intrudes and jerks him awake. Up in my tree I, the murderer, wait. I have made a little tunnel for myself in the foliage so I have a direct view of the upper part of his body, most especially of his face. All I have to avoid is sudden movement. That might alert him. My perch is not comfortable, not after the hour or more I have passed in it, but a great ambition — and murder is a great ambition — demands small sacrifices. Sooner or later Sir William’s eyes will close. Then I will fall softly to the ground, and creep and creep to reach him. I decide that while I am crossing his grass I will smile.

So. . the vantage point chosen by the murderer has to be close to the hammock, close enough for him to ensure that his victim is sound asleep. It has to offer a secure hiding-place. These were my conclusions. With Jacob still looking at me, I made a tour of inspection of the trees in the vicinity of the clearing. Two or three of them were large enough to conceal a man, but the configuration of their branches seemed to offer no place where one might stay, let alone sit, with any ease. Then, a little further back, I came across a large old pear tree. Above my head, among the leaves, I saw several potential conjunctions where thick branches sprang from the trunk and where my putative murderer might sit, legs astride. I called Jacob over.

‘Ever since I was a small boy, Jacob, I’ve enjoyed climbing trees. It’s a taste I haven’t grown out of.’

So saying I jumped up and caught hold of the lowest branch. Swaying backwards and forwards, I soon gained enough force to swing myself astride it. Once up there, I manoeuvered myself into a sitting position, with the trunk at my back. I couldn’t easily see the place between the apple trees where the hammock had been attached. In fact I couldn’t see it at all. I shifted to a neighbouring branch. Ah, that was better! From among the leaves and the clusters of ripe pears (Jargonelle, I think, or possibly Winter Nelis) I overlooked the tiny clearing guarded by the two trees.

‘Jacob, would you go and stand where your late master was found? In the place where the hammock was. There, yes.’

I pushed myself flat against the trunk. Of course, had I been a prospective murderer with my long-laid plans, I would have dressed for the part, worn something in goose-turd green, say, to give myself a tree-like hue. As it was, I was wearing a combination of russet and popinjay blue, and must have looked like some great flightless bird up in the pear tree.

‘Now, tell me, can you see me?’

It was hard to remember that Jacob could not ‘tell’ anyone anything. Instead he nodded and made a gurgling sound in response to my question. Yes, he could see me. Well, that wasn’t surprising: I could see him. And I was wearing the wrong costume. But, unlike the dumb Jacob, Sir William Eliot hadn’t been looking for anyone. When he entered the garden he believed that he was as alone as Adam. Why should he examine the trees to see whether they harboured strange creatures?

I gazed around. I was looking for a sign. Nothing. I gazed some more. What met my eyes was entirely natural, leaves, branches, a wasp burrowing its way into the holed surface of a pear almost before my face. You see how reluctant I was to abandon my idea that Sir William’s murderer had been perched up aloft even before his victim came on the scene. But there was no proof of any of this. For all I knew I was chasing shadows, the very thing of which I had accused young William Eliot in the Goat amp; Monkey. There was no murder and no murderer. I had constructed a scene of treachery and murder out of smoke. I was, as one might say, barking up the wrong tree. The man had died a natural death, of the sort everyone is entitled to.

I swung both legs to one side of the branch and made to drop to the ground. As I did so I noticed a wisp of material caught at the juncture of a twig and my branch. The gods were smiling on me after all. I was about to be justified. I gently tugged at the thread. Was this the clue? No, it was not, for a moment’s examination showed that this ‘evidence’ came from my own jerkin. I raised my eyes upwards in exasperation, and then I saw it. Just at head height and two feet away from where I was sitting someone had carved letters into the trunk. Two intertwined initials. My heart started to thump. I ran my fingers up and down the grooves of the letters. They were about an inch in height and appeared to have been cut into the bark hastily but firmly. Just as one would carve letters if one wanted to leave a message and was conscious that time might be limited. The carving wasn’t fresh; already the letters showed weathering. Although they might have been there longer, these characters had definitely been incised at least a few months ago. Perhaps during the spring and before a man’s death.

I launched myself into space and landed, in a crouch, on the turf below the pear tree.

‘Thank you, Jacob, I’ve seen enough for the time being.’

I left the garden in a brown study, Jacob devotedly on my tail.

The letters up the pear tree were a W and an S.

I wondered whether I was not already deeper into this matter than was good for my peace of mind or health of body.

I wondered whether what I had seen were the initials of our author, William Shakespeare.

And it was Master Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse whose walls I was now walking alongside. His and the other shareholder-players’. This morning was a rehearsal for A Somerset Tragedy by Master Henry Highcliff. I put to one side speculation about those troubling initials, and concentrated instead on my part in the play.

A Somerset Tragedy is a simple tale of domestic lust and violence. It involves a land-holder and his younger wife, as well as a painter, the painter’s sister, the man the painter’s sister wishes to marry, the man the painter has arranged for his sister to marry (two different men, this), three hired assassins, a local lord, sundry servants and clowns, a brace of magistrates, a priest, an executioner. You get the picture. I didn’t know the full plot, since I had received only the scroll bearing my own part, but I could guess what happened from a glance at the dramatis personae. Most likely it began with a rape: most certainly it ended with the rope. I was a yokel, with full-dress accent and boorish manners.

When I had glimpsed a little more of the play in rehearsal I would tell my Nell about it. She enjoyed hearing of my roles, or so I flattered myself. I had discovered that retailing the plot of a play while we were in bed together — as with Master WS’s Hamlet or the infinitely inferior Master Boscombe’s A City Pleasure — was an effective method of delaying my own journey’s end, and thus of ensuring her own satisfactory arrival at that terminus. It was as if a torrent of words could temporarily dam up another sort of effusion. Sometimes Nell had told me of what her paying customers cried out when they were busy about her person, although this was knowledge that I wanted her to share with me only in extremis. I considered that my dramatic summaries showed a more refined temper than their cataloguing of her body parts, and what they were doing or intended to do with them and to them. I wondered whether I should mention to our author my interesting use of his Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. I wondered what our author had been doing up a tree in the garden of Sir William Eliot. Unless it had been some other WS of course.

‘Master Revill!’

It was Robert Mink, the fat player who had given me the note for my Lady Alice. We had coincided at the entrance to the playhouse. Together we made our way to the tiring-house, where some of the other Chamberlain’s men were already gathering. Mink was clutching a much larger scroll than mine. He noticed that I was looking at the size of his part.

‘I play a painter in the county of Somerset,’ he said. ‘I wish to marry my sister off for reasons that are obscure to me. When she does not agree, because there is another man back in the tiring-house, I turn murderous. I paint a picture of my sister which is so beautiful that the onlooker cannot help touching it. The pigment that I use in depicting her flesh, her nearly bare breast, is naturally poisonous to the touch. This picture will then be shown to the man I wish to kill. He will reach out to stroke her exposed, painted flesh, and so he will die. Have you ever heard of anything so unlikely?’

‘Does he die? By touching the pigment?’

‘Of course not. When did you ever hear of a murder plot going right in a tragedy?’

‘Death in an orchard,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I was thinking of Hamlet, and the death of his father, and how it does not look like a murder.’

‘Quite different,’ said Master Mink, his triple chins wobbling in disagreement. ‘Anyway that didn’t go right in the long run, did it? The murderer never thrives. Master Shakespeare may stretch belief sometimes but there is a truth beyond mere fact, and he is in ample possession of it. But I fear that Master Highcliff with his Somerset farce masquerading as tragedy is another kettle of fish, a stinking kettle.’

‘Why do the Burbages put on this stuff then?’

‘Because it draws in the crowds, dear boy. The spectators want to see sin in all its varieties, they want to see fighting and fucking and fury, and then they want to see all of this punished — otherwise they will not go home comfortable. But I tell you one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We are right to look down on the authors of this stuff. We are right to pay them so little. Master Shakespeare, of course, excepted. Him and one or two others. But for the most part they are journeymen. Where would the writers be without the players? We are the men of value.’

‘I do not have such a low opinion of authors,’ I said, daring to oppose this large and experienced man of the theatre.

‘Do you not?’ he said. ‘There is no time to discuss this now, we are due to begin our rehearsal, but I would be glad to continue this interview this evening if you find yourself in the vicinity of The Beast with Two Backs. It’s in Moor Street.’

‘Is that a pick-hatch?’

‘Merely a tavern. Its real name is The Tupping Rams or some such. At the south end of Moor Street, if you should find yourself in that neighbourhood tonight.’

After my participation in that morning’s rehearsal, I had to agree with Master Mink. I did not think that we would be performing A Somerset Tragedy more than once, as I told Nell late that afternoon. We were in her room. This was barely more than a closet in Holland’s Leaguer, not far from the bearpit. The women had their own rooms and were generally undisturbed as long as they paid an exorbitant rent to the madam and her one-eyed paramour (familiarly known as Cyclops). But the walls were thin, and cries and groans as well as intermittent thwacks penetrated our ears. The sounds were more reminiscent of Bedlam or one of the quarters of hell than a house of pleasure. I did not particularly enjoy meeting my Nell at her place of work, but for the moment my lodgings were on the far side of the river, and I had nowhere to roost on the south bank when I wished to see her. She had shut up her stall to the public for the day. Only now she had got her wares out again for a private browser.

‘Why are you so sure you’ll only play this play — whats-itcalled? — once?’

‘A Somerset Tragedy. It’s a poor piece,’ I said, with all the assurance of a few days in the Chamberlain’s Company.

‘You haven’t played it yet for the public. Maybe they’ll love it. You might have a great run, three or four performances.’

‘You get a feel for these things.’

‘As you have a feeling for this,’ she said, taking my hand and drawing it down.

‘Ah yes,’ I said.

A while later, she said: ‘Nick, the title of your piece is strange, is it not? The tragedy of Somerset.’

‘Why?’

‘I was remembering your father and your mother.’

‘But you never knew them, little Nell.’

‘But you have told me of them, Master Nicholas.’

Such remarks reminded me how young Nell was. And indeed I have noticed that these women — our doxies, our trulls and rude girls — who spend their days catering to the depraved tastes of fallen man have, as if by compensation, a most child-like tendency in them sometimes. Nell had asked me before about my parents, the parson and the parson’s wife, and encouraged me to talk about them. I attributed this to the fact that Nell had no idea who her parents were — or whether they were alive or dead. The woman she once called ‘mother’ was a mere neighbour, if a good-hearted one. Accordingly, with none of her own, she took an interest in my mother and father. Mine at least you could be certain of, for they were united in death.

I was away from the village when they died. In Bristol. On business about my playing, trying to inveigle my way into one of the touring companies, Dorset’s, Northumberland’s, I have forgotten which. My plans didn’t work out, and I’d spent a fruitless couple of weeks hanging around inn-yards trying to ingratiate myself with the players. My father did not approve. Players were parasites and crocodiles, double dealers and painted sepulchres. They were unnatural, because men are not intended by God to be other than they are, particularly not to play at being girls and women. The shows staged in inn-yards and other public places where players flaunted their filth were not only an incitement to disorder and lasciviousness in otherwise upright citizens, they were also a breeding ground for thieves, whores and knaves.

Needless to say, my father had never attended a play. But he knew what he hated. He also knew, like all good men, that God hated what he hated and was busy with punishment, punishment everyday and everywhere. This punishment most often came in the guise of diurnal accident and disaster. Whenever a calamity overtook the village — a house-fire, a sickness among the sheep, the failure of a crop — he looked for the cause in the sinfulness of the householder, the shepherd, the farmer. For larger catastrophes like the Spanish threat, which had gone before I was grown, or the plague, which never goes, he looked to sinfulness on a grand scale. As a nation, we English were all deeply and doubly dyed with the devil’s pitch. We teetered on the lip of the everlasting pit. The strangest thing with my father was that this sense of universal damnation went hand in hand with a loving-kindness towards his fellow humans, so that the householder or the shepherd or the farmer who had suffered calamity was certain to receive gentle words and a helping hand from him. He would thunder away in the pulpit, but when he descended from it he was the meekest, mildest fellow.

You may wonder that I can speak so lightly of what evidently weighed heavily on my father, this sense of sin — mine, yours, his, ours. But I have observed that an extreme course in a parent is likely to produce an opposite, though milder, response in the offspring. So a Puritan sires the whoremaster, while the rake begets a nun. If Nell were ever to discover her parents they’d no doubt turn out to be fine, upstanding citizens. Another explanation was that I’d heard my father’s message too often. Listening to him roar and thunder Sunday after Sunday, and through the week too, inoculated me. What he saw as sin I see mostly as frailty, while what he considered to be a punitive providence I think of as unlucky chance. Most of all, my father the parson reserved his greatest wrath for what he knew least, players and the playhouse. ‘The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well; and the cause of sin are plays; therefore the cause of plagues are plays.’ So he reasoned. All fell on deaf ears, however, for I don’t reckon that above one in fifty of us had ever seen what he was so energetically condemning.

And when the plague came to our region who should it strike but those who would have no truck with players and playhouses? I mean the good, honest, simple folk of my village. My mother and father were included in that number.

I came over the brow of the hill. It was a fine spring morning. The last traces of frost lingered under hedges and in the ruts on the track, but the air was soft with the promise of better times. I had failed in my attempt to join the touring players and had been walking from Bristol since three that morning. I should have been returning tired and with my tail between my legs but, perversely, I felt fresh and cheerful. In the distance was the glint of the Bristol Channel and, beyond, the hills of wild Wales stood out in the bright air. Down below was my village of Miching. I wondered what my father would say to the prodigal’s return. He would be glad I had not fallen among the sinful players but, humanly, he would wring my hand in sympathy at my disappointment. My mother, she would say nothing. I took one last look around from the heights and then plunged downhill. In the distance at the bottom of the valley was the cluster of cottages and huts separated by thread-like paths, the church and the manor house a little distant from the common people, the scattered farmsteads, everything that, together, went by the name of Miching.

I had made a few dozen downhill strides when, without knowing why, I stopped. There was something wrong. I paused, and shaded my eyes from the sun to see better. The village lay still. I even sniffed the air like an animal scenting danger. Nothing. I went another few steps and halted once more. Then it came to me: what was wrong was that there was nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell. On a morning like this, the beginning of a fine spring day, there should have been people moving in the fields or on the outskirts of the village, the occasional shouted greeting or question, the smell of woodsmoke curling out of the valley, the bleating of sheep. But there was absolute stillness and silence.

My heart beating faster, and with a sick feeling, I leapt down the path. At one point the track ran out of sight as it looped an outcrop of rock, and it was on the far side of this that I found a man sitting with his head in his hands. Roused by my panting and the thud of my feet, he looked up and I recognised him as my father’s sexton, a thin bony man, an appropriate shape for his principal business, I had always felt. I spoke his name. After a moment he came to himself and saw who I was.

‘Nicholas,’ he said in a spiritless voice.

‘What’s happened? Why are you here, John?’

He said nothing for a while but hung his head again, and pressed his hands into sunken cheeks. Then in a mumble he said, ‘Your father sent me here.’

‘Why? What for?’

But I knew already. There is only one cause for such a profound silence and stillness. The plague had struck villages to the east of us in previous years, and even Bristol had known it. It is a tide that creeps inexorably across the land, winter and summer, drowning without distinction young and old, rich and poor, though — unlike the tide — it leaves some spots and areas uncovered. So, in a city, one household will fall victim while its neighbour remains untainted. And yet the plague is a beast too, one that will abandon his orderly progress across country and suddenly overleap many places to land in a distant village or town. Then he will jump sideways or seven miles backwards, and all to confound expectation.

‘I was stationed here to warn people away,’ he said.

How like my father, to think not only of his own flock but of the well-being of the neighbouring parishes.

‘And to stop our own people from leaving,’ he said.

‘My father. . and my mother. . they are helping those in distress?’

‘You cannot go down, Nicholas. I am empowered to stop you and all travellers.’

He spoke by rote. He could scarcely have turned an ant from its path. I was already past him. Then he called out my name, the clearest he had yet spoken, so I paused once more.

‘You will go. But what you will see will be a sermon to you. It is a speaking sight, and the voice it calls us with is a loud one, to call us all to repentance.’

I turned my back on him and went on down the track. As I neared the flatter ground I slowed down. I was desperate to see my parents, and to know that they were all right, but at the same time I was conscious of the risk I ran in entering a plaguey place. It was not self-preservation, or not entirely, but a more cautious mood overtook me as I grew breathless after my downhill dash. Nevertheless I proceeded past the outlying farms and cottages at the ends of fields. This was a well-known route from the earliest days of my childhood, but now it seemed horribly unfamiliar. The first promise of the morning light as I crested the hills above my home had been replaced by terror.

As I came nearer to my village of Miching I saw deserted streets; and as I came within sight of the first houses I found what I knew I would find: many of the doors marked in the centre with red crosses, and sometimes with the words ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ set closely and neatly by the cross. Somehow this was the worst thing I had seen so far, not the crosses and the words themselves but their precision. There was no sign of haste or panic in the sign or the lettering. It was as if each sign had been painted by a craftsman with all the time in the world at his disposal. I paused in the main street. The church was around the corner at the far end. My parents’ house was close by it. I waited to catch my breath. In truth, I didn’t know what to do next. I wanted to cry out but no words came and I was afraid to break the silence.

Then I heard, off to my left, the faintest thump. A delay of perhaps half a minute, then the noise was repeated. I dithered. I did not want to go down the narrow muddy lane that led towards these sounds but, of course, I did go. On the way there were more doors with their neat crosses and pleas for grace. It was important to me to remember the name of this lane as I walked down it with dragging steps and I struggled to think, and yet I could by no means recall it. (Only now, lying in bed next to my whore Nell, do I remember what it was called by the villagers: Salvation Alley, and that not through any connection with the church but because there was a woman named Molly who lived at the bottom and who was reputed to sell herself. I do not know if it had a proper name.)

Beyond this muddy lane was an open patch of ground and when I entered on this area I discovered the source of the thumping noises. There was a cart on the far side of the green. A horse stood lonesome and patient between the shafts. By the back of the cart a great black pit had been dug. Three muffled figures were engaged in tugging and pushing at bodies heaped in the back of the cart. They used staves with a kind of cross-piece at the top. A corpse would topple into the pit, there would be a pause while one of the burial-men fiddled below with his stave — presumably to fork the body into a satisfactory position in the pit — and then another would be toppled down. Some of the bodies were swaddled in linen and some in rags only. Some were so loosely wrapped that they might as well have been naked, for their coverings fell away as they descended from cart to pit. Little did it matter to the corpses whether they fell clothed or unclothed into the common ground; little did it matter to the burial-men. But tears started to my eyes at this indiscriminate heaping together, as one might call it, of my father’s parishioners. Prosperous and poor, reputable and ne’er-do-well, industrious and idle, young and old, man and woman and child (for some of the bundles were not full size), all made their brief passage through the air from cart to ground without distinction.

I must have stood there for some minutes, long enough anyway to count a dozen bodies being offloaded. At one point one of the burial-men looked up and caught sight of me standing at the mouth of Salvation Alley. He did not attempt to warn me away or to alert the others to my presence, he merely returned to his dismal forking of bodies into the pit. I was none of his business. He was none of mine. I turned about.

There was one more thing I had to do before leaving Miching. Following the back lanes, I came out by my father’s church. The tower stood square in the morning sunshine. The doors were open but I did not look inside. Beyond the church, and the graveyard was the house of my parents, the largest in the village. Picking up speed and throwing a sidelong glance at the house as I went by, I saw what I knew I would see: that my father and mother’s door too was crossed in red. And yet I did not falter but kept on. At the boundary of the village I turned aside from the road that would have taken me up the hill again and past the place where John the sexton was sitting. Instead I traced out a grassy path that ran alongside a stream. It was where I had often fished and bathed as a boy. Eventually I started to run, Then I ran, and ran, and ran.

Later, much later, a thought came to me that, had my father still been alive, I might well have told to him. It was the desire, the itch, to become a player which had saved my life. Without my profitless trip into Bristol to join Dorset’s or Northumberland’s Company, I would undoubtedly have been kicking my heels in the village when the plague came to Miching, thus ensuring that we all kicked our heels in unison.

I wondered what my father would have said to this instance of divine providence. But I already knew the answer: God had preserved me in order that I should do something. I had been saved from the plague for a purpose, and, in his eyes, that purpose was not playing.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I said,’ said Nell, ‘do you often think of them, your parents?’

‘I was remembering them now.’

‘I think of mine too,’ she said. ‘Even though I do not know what they looked like.’

I drew her closer as she snuffled. She could be sentimental at times. And this is also a trait I have noticed in her, and girls like her. Their exposure to the sordid world, its cut and its thrust, has in some curious way softened as well as hardened them. They will shed tears over an injured animal, if it be small and young — though they still attend the bearpit, if only because it is a good place for trade. They will sometimes imagine that they would like a baby to fuss and cuddle — but if one comes by accident they are quick enough to farm it out and the more ruthless ones are prepared to abandon or kill it, because a new life puking up in the corner is bad for business.

‘How’s life over the river, in your grand house?’

She was slightly envious, I think. As she spoke there was a loud cry from a room down the passage, followed by a series of low laughs and dull thumps. For the life of me I could not have said whether these signalled delight or despair. Probably both, in which case the delight of the man most likely hinged on the despair of the woman.

‘Better to be over the river than in the stews of Southwark,’ I said, cocking my head in the direction of the sound.

‘Some men like the ladies to cry,’ she said. ‘And they pay better if they do. You should not believe everything that you hear.’

If my Nell was sometimes child-like she was also, at times, very old. And now she was obviously indignant at the aspersions I had cast on her district and place of work, because she went on, ‘You would not think that life was so much better over there from the number of fine and mighty citizens who cross the river almost daily to visit us. These gentlemen seem to prefer it over here to keeping company with their wives, in their grand houses.’

‘That must be because their wives don’t give them what they require.’

‘Some do say that,’ said Nell, ‘and it is true that I’ve seen high-and-mighty women from the other side of the water who look cold enough to piss hail. Hard enough too. But I prefer those men who make no bones about their needs. Whether their wives give them what they want or no, they still require more.’

‘A straightforward fuck, yes.’

‘There’s honesty in appetite.’

‘Who said that, Nell? I’ve heard that said before.’

‘You did.’

‘When?’

‘Does it matter? In the bed-time. When else do we talk? You see how I treasure your words. I’d write them down if I could write.’

‘I could teach you, to read and write. I did offer.’

‘You prefer me ignorant.’

‘Not so.’ But my denial did not ring true even to myself.

‘Anyway, how much more could I charge if I was able to read and write? Would it be much? I think not.’

‘There’s honesty in appetite,’ I repeated (apparently). ‘Very well, I suppose you remember too what I was doing when I uttered these immortal words. . if we were in bed?’

Of course, I said this to draw her on. But it was true that she had a loving memory for my slightest words and actions, and was able to recall scenes with an accuracy that would be the envy of many a player. This hoarding-up of our encounters was deeply flattering.

‘We were in bed in old mother Ransom’s. . and you had just. . let me see. . no, I was about to do. . this. . I think. . or was it that?. . it must have been one or the other.’

‘The other will do splendidly,’ I said.

After a time I said, ‘Nell, these gentlemen who come across the river so often-’

‘What about them?’

‘Have you been visited by any of the Eliots? Sir Thomas, or his brother Sir William — though he is dead now — or his son, also William? Sir Thomas, perhaps? He is a grave sort of man.’

‘And his dead brother is another sort of grave man, I suppose,’ said witty Nell.

‘Oh Nell, you do not need to learn to read and write,’ I said, kissing her left nipple.

‘They are mostly grave men at first. You may be surprised, Nick, when I say that they do not all give their names. Or if they do it is as likely to be Tom as it is to be Dick or Harry. And there are many of them.’

I did not like to think of this.

‘It is the Eliot household you are staying in?’

‘Yes. Sir Thomas has recently married the widow of his brother, Sir William.’

‘So she is some crabbed bitch and he’s likely to be scuttling across the Thames to get his end in over here.’

‘No, she is not crabbed.’

‘She is a young widow full of juice then?’

‘Nor young neither. But she has some charms.’

‘Oh Nick, I see. That means she has many.’

‘Somewhere between my some and your many,’ I said, though an imp of honesty compelled me to add, ‘In truth I hardly know Lady Alice.’

‘But would like to?’

I kissed her other nipple. But Nell was not to be distracted.

‘And her dead husband, Sir Something, he was old and she wore him out?’

For some reason I found the idea, unthinkingly as she had said it, offensive. ‘No, of course not.’

‘Because she’s a lady? That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have done for him — in the bed, I mean.’

‘Nell, this is all imagination. Not everything comes back to the bed.’

‘You said that it did once, in the end.’

‘He died in the spring,’ I pressed on, determined to lay the facts before her. ‘He was found in his orchard. He had gone there to sleep and when he had not returned to the house by the early evening his wife grew anxious and sent a servant to look for him.’

‘These rich women never do anything for themselves.’

‘He had locked himself inside his orchard. It was where he used to go for privacy in the afternoon. Nobody else could get in. The servant had to climb over the wall. He found Sir William’s body.’

‘And then the widow married the brother?’

‘Very soon afterwards.’

‘I’ve heard that before somewhere. The death in the orchard then the marriage to the brother. Something you were saying. .’

“ ‘The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.’ ”

‘Not that. I have it! I always remember what you say. Something about a play.’

‘Yes, I know the play,’ I said, wearying of our encounter.

I made my way back over the river by the Bridge. A walk would clear my head after the afternoon’s performance in the Globe and the subsequent performance in Nell’s crib. It was the early evening. There were few people on the Bridge compared to the middle of the day, and most of them were probably returning, like myself, from their pleasures in the southern quarters of our great town.

I am a player. I am used to being watched, and like most players aware of others’ eyes without seeming to be. I was about halfway across the river when the nape of my neck prickled. This has long been an infallible sign that someone is gazing hard at me from behind. I stopped by the building that was once a chapel (it is now a warehouse) and pretended to fiddle with my points. In truth, I had fastened them negligently as I was leaving Nell and they needed tightening. While I was doing this, and feigning irritation with the errant laces, I cast covert glances down between the houses that lined the bridge. A shopkeeper closing up for the day. A beggar swinging on his crutches. A fat, respectable-looking citizen who had most probably been about unrespectable business on the other side of the water. In addition, a knot of gallants was making its noisy way after me; one of them shouted an obscenity at a matron walking in the opposite direction. She pretended not to hear. I started walking again.

Within a few dozen yards I received the same sensation in the back of my neck. I felt angry. Convinced that I was being followed, my natural instinct was to face about and confront the man. But I could not turn round or even stop again without alerting whoever was behind me, and since the only advantage I possessed was that he didn’t know that I knew he was there, I schooled myself against this. I suspected the beggar. As a class, hardly one of them is what he seems. As for his crutches, even if genuinely required, they were no bar to rapid movement. I have seen those fellows swing through the air when occasion called, their legs and sticks a whirring blur. At the far end of the Bridge I turned left into Thames Street, without changing my speed, and giving the impression of one who has a destination at the end of the working day but is in no especial hurry to arrive there. The south side of Thames Street is pierced by several alleys and crooked passages that run down towards the river. I listened hard for tell-tale footsteps after me, or more precisely for the rhythmic thud of crutches, but the street, though largely empty, still contained passers-by and the occasional grating handcart and I was unable to detect anything. I did not glance round.

After I’d walked the better part of a quarter of a mile — the prickling sensation remaining with me and my neck all this while, though slightly diminished — I turned down the wide slope that leads to Paul’s Wharf. Once round the corner I checked to make sure that nobody was hard on my heels, then ran direct for the river. I covered the distance in a few seconds. The principal pier here is an imposing structure, the biggest landing place on this stretch, with stairs in one corner running down into the water at low tide. To the west side are the remains of an earlier erection that evidently proved inadequate to growing city trade, and has lain unused for many years. The wooden stanchions and cross-pieces of this pier are fractured. The planking where barrels and bales were once piled up is rotten and holed or altogether missing. It was low tide and I jumped from the street end of the main jetty onto the shingle. A couple of individuals were standing at the end of the pier but I do not believe they even turned round as I landed on the slippery pebbles. Crouching slightly, I made my way at a rapid walk to the shelter of the old pier, and slipped among the forest of posts that supported it.

The whole thing, from turning down towards Paul’s Wharf to my concealment under the old pier, had taken less than half a minute. From my point of vantage I was able to see the top of the sloping way to Thames Street and, beyond that, the stone base of Paul’s on which the great steeple had once stood. I waited. I drew back a little into the shadows and surveyed my hiding-place. There was a stench of river, to which, country-born and bred, I am not yet hardened. Pockets of light admitted themselves through the gaps in the planks over my head. Dead fish glinted at the bottom of the slimy piles, human turds had been left marooned by the departing tide, as had cartwheels and baskets, clothing and bed-hangings, fragments of rope and bottles, a portion of all the detritus of our great city. There was even a chest with a shiny clasp. But it was open and empty. Some of this truck would be gathered up as the tide rose but, when it fell again, more and fresh rubbish would be left. So it goes.

I turned back to the scene beyond my hiding-place. There was nobody on the new pier, apart from the men at the far end who were still gazing across the river. No sign of the beggar with his crutches. Perhaps I’d been mistaken when I had thought I was being followed. But then I saw that the two men at the pier’s end were in fact three, and that the third who was now thanking them and walking away was the fat, respectable-looking citizen that I had glimpsed on London Bridge. He had been questioning them, evidently. ‘Did you see a young man come down this way, black-haired, in blue and russet? Bright blue? You couldn’t have missed him?’ ‘No sir, we’ve been watching the river, we’ve seen no one.’

But I am inventing this exchange. I have no idea whether the respectable citizen said this or anything like it to the two loiterers by the water. What I do know is that my cit strolled back on the side of the new pier nearest to where I was crouched under the old one, and that on his smooth face was a mixture of bafflement and irritation. The sort of expression that would fasten itself on your face if you too had been pursuing someone and they had given you the slip. He paused and looked about, seeming to interrogate the air. Was that where I had gone? Into thin air? His eyes swept the underside of the old pier and I could almost see him admit, entertain and then dismiss — in the space of an instant — the idea that I had gone to ground underneath that filthy structure. He walked on, paused once more and looked back, then vanished up the slope into Thames Street.

I waited. I wasn’t sure whether he might not have seen me and be waiting for me to re-emerge so that he could pick up the trail once more. I wasn’t even sure that it was the same individual that I had glimpsed on London Bridge. If not, then he was an innocent man about his business on an autumn evening, and my imagination was away on business of its own. Nevertheless I waited until the two loiterers had themselves abandoned their station at the end of the pier. Now I was alone on the scene. A chill wind ruffled the water. The houses on the other side of the river and on the Bridge downstream were turning into dark shapes, pierced here and there by a tiny glimmer of light.

I shivered. There is no moment so lonely as the first breath of evening, when business is done and pleasure’s distractions not yet started. Under my hand I felt a slimy wooden post. Unless the old jetty was pulled down it would collapse soon of its own accord. On the stone base of St Paul’s not far from me there once stood a great steeple shooting hundreds of feet into the air. Many years before, in the early days of our great Queen’s reign, lightning had destroyed in a moment what men had laboured so long to build. Now the stone stump of the steeple stands as a monument to the temporality of all human things. Monuments, too, have their span. In time, the church would go, perhaps to be replaced by something else. The old pier which was sheltering me must crumble, and that in short time too. Even the great Globe Playhouse, our shining white building on the far bank, will fall one day to unremembered ruin.

The tavern named Ram, the plain and simple Ram — not The Tupping Rams, nor The Beast with Two Backs neither — was, as Master Mink had told me, at the south end of Moor Street in Clerkenwell. A light, miserable rain was falling. I made my way warily over the slimy cobbles. Not only for fear of slipping, but because this area of London, for all that it is the home of the Red Bull playhouse as well as the Revels Office, is on the northern fringe of the city. Like all border-lands, it has attracted more than its fair share of lawless resolutes, ready to deprive a man of anything about him that is detachable. But the only lurkers in tonight’s shadows were a few stray dogs and cats; the human variety would no doubt be found, entertaining each other, inside the pick-hatch nearby in Goswell Road. Houses of sale, like playhouses, thrive on city fringes.

I wondered why Master Robert Mink had suggested a meeting here, away from the Southwark haunts. Within, The Ram was not crammed. Smoke and whispering and little barks of laughter emerged from a group knotted in one corner. Despite the paucity of lamps overhead, I easily spotted my co-player at a table on the opposite side of the room.

‘Sit down, Nick.’

He shouted to a young, feeble-looking drawer for another pint-pot for himself and an additional one for me, and, when the lad was slow to move, shouted again, ‘Quickly, before my friend dies of thirst. I have already passed on, and believe I must be in Purgatory now.’

There was a single, sickly candle on the elmwood table at which we sat. By its smoky flicker, I watched the quiver of Master Mink’s chins.

‘You’re doubtless asking yourself why I come to this hole when there are so many other holes south of the river, and close to our great Globe too, where I could be equally badly served.’

I said that something of the kind had occurred to me while I slithered over the cobbles outside.

‘I like sometimes to put a distance between the place where I earn my bread and the place where I eat it — or drink it. I also have an affection for this part of town. I once had a connection with the Red Bull. Boy, where is that drink!’

Out of the shadows, as if on cue, hobbled the puny drawer, no more than a boy, I saw now. One foot dragged slightly behind him, as if struggling to keep up. His mouth wrestled with some simple phrase — probably that cry of drawers everywhere, ‘Anon, anon sir’ — but it was plain that he had even less command over his words than he did over his movements. His outstretched hands shook so that the two tankards which he was carrying slopped over onto the filthy flooring. He tried to place them in front of us but kept missing the expanse of the table-top. At each attempt, another ale-spurt leaped up and over the rims. Master Mink seemed split between deep irritation and high amusement at the boy’s efforts, but finally he half rose, seized the tankards and put them on the table himself.

The boy stared.

‘Avaunt thee, Gilbert,’ said Master Mink. ‘Avaunt, I say. In plain English, go. Shog off.’

When the boy had turned and shambled away, a process that took some time, Master Mink said, ‘There goes a by-blow of the landlady’s. Mistress Goodride is her name and that is her nature too. Well, the fruit of her loins shows all too clearly the mark of her sin. She bore him, and now Gilbert Goodride bears his mother’s sin, I say.’

‘You sound like my father,’ I said.

‘Was he a player?’

‘A parson.’

Though many men might not have been, Robert Mink seemed pleased by this comparison to a pulpit-pounder.

‘Is her name really Mistress Goodride, Master Mink?’ I said, thinking that, like The Beast with Two Backs, this tavern-keeper’s name might be another witty invention by my colleague.

‘Robert you may call me. After all, we share a profession and a workplace, and have a licence to be familiar. As for the name of Goodride, it will do as well as any other.’

I wondered how much to believe. I decided to revert to what we had been talking of before the arrival of the unfortunate Gilbert.

‘You played the Red Bull?’

‘A long time ago.’

‘That is the only playhouse I have not visited.’

‘I have played every one of them.’

‘But the Globe is the finest?’

‘Yes, how can it be otherwise, with the Brothers Cabbage and Master Shakeshift and all, telling us that it is so.’

I was a little shocked at the irreverence, and my face must have given me away.

‘You have not been long at this game, have you, Nicholas?’

‘Two years almost,’ I said.

‘And you are from the west?’

I remembered how tartly I had answered Master Burbage over the matter of my origins, so this time I rested content with a nod.

‘And now you are here, drawn by this siren?’

For an instant I thought that he was referring to Nell or some other trull or doxy.

‘I mean London,’ said Master Mink. ‘I mean, to speak more precisely, the itch of playing. That is your siren.’

‘And so, if playing is my siren, I will not be pleased until I have dashed myself on the rocks?’ I said, wanting (as I had with Master WS), to impress this strange man with my learning.

‘None of us is pleased until he has dashed himself on the rocks,’ said Master Mink gloomily. ‘Do you think Odysseus could ever sleep happy again once he had heard the song of the sirens?’

‘Do you remember Robert Greene?’ I said, partly because I wanted to shift his mood and partly because I was genuinely interested in those giants, the playwrights and versifiers of the eighties and early nineties. ‘Though I know that your opinion of authors is not great.’

‘Oh yes, Greene I remember. . and George Peele. . Kit Marlowe. . and Tom Nashe, Tom Lodge. Thomas Watson, too. Thomas is a good name for an author, is it not? That’s what they were all called. Thomas. Thomas Kyd, him as well.’

‘Kyd of the Spanish Tragedy?’

‘The very same.’

Now this was like hearing that my interlocutor had walked with Elijah or spoken with John the Baptist. Men such as Kyd, with their blood-and-thunder tales of revenge, were the harbingers to our latter-day, refined masters like Master WS.

‘Oh, Thomas is a good journeyman name, a good no-nonsense name,’ Robert Mink continued. ‘Boy, boy Gilbert, another drink for my friend and me!’

Mink’s reminiscent, almost womanish, mood was replaced with a stentorian bellow as he called for more refreshment. So loud and abrupt was his shout that it not only caused me to jump, spilling some of what remained in my pot (Master Robert was drinking more rapidly than I could manage), but it provoked a stir in the quietly buzzing, gently smoking huddle in the opposite corner. One or two pale faces were even turned in our direction through the gloom.

‘Where are they now?’

I said nothing; I can recognise a rhetorical question when I hear one.

‘Dead and gone, in disgrace or in obscurity,’ said Master Mink. ‘Kit Marlowe stabbed in Deptford, Greene dying with nothing, so that his wife could not even afford a winding-sheet. Kyd tortured in the Tower and now gone too. You hear what I say about dashing oneself on the rocks? Do you think it was the sirens’ song that Odysseus really wanted — or the rocks? Then there was that Thomas Nashe looking for sanctuary in, let me see, in. . where was it?’

Out of the smoky darkness I could see Gilbert Goodride, the hapless drawer, commencing his progress towards us, clutching two more tankards which, brimming in the beginning, would lose much of their freight before the end of their journey.

‘I have it!’ said Master Mink.

‘What?’ I said, my mind and eyes on the hobbling little figure.

‘Yarmouth! Nashe sought sanctuary in Yarmouth after he ran into trouble with the Council over The Isle of Dogs.’

‘What trouble?’ I said, trying to distract Master Mink from Gilbert’s advance. I had a nasty feeling that this was not going to turn out well.

‘Lewd matters. Veiled attacks on someone in authority. Something that got up the Council’s nose. Or most probably Mr Secretary Burghley’s. WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING, YOU HALTING HALF-WIT!’

A combination of shaking hands and uneven gait notwithstanding, the boy had reached us with the slopping tankards. At the last moment, though, a spasm jerked the remaining contents of one of the pots over Master Mink. Now, my companion was, I had already observed, particular in the manner of his dress (unlike some players, who, appearing as kings, queens and princes during their afternoons in the playhouse, are content to pass for mechanics and handicrafts-men in their private hours). Even by the fitful, smoky light of the tavern corner, anyone might see that Robert Mink was well turned out; his doublet alone, Dutch-fashion and long-pointed, would have cost me two weeks’ wages. Now his ample frontage was soaked in ale. Some of the liquid spattered his smooth cheeks and folded chins.

Gilbert Goodride, poor potboy, stood before us, shaking slightly, though whether from his natural condition or from fear of what he expected might happen, I do not know. This time, it was I who leant forward and relieved Gilbert of the tankards, placing them softly on the table.

‘Now, now,’ said Master Mink, standing up and wiping his face with a fine cambric handkerchief. This ‘Now, now’ may be delivered in several ways between the peremptory and the consoling. I was glad to hear from the other’s tone that he seemed to condole with the unfortunate Gilbert. ‘No harm done, after all,’ he continued. ‘No offence.’

So saying, he held out his hand, fleshy palm ajar, to the boy, as one offers one’s fingers to be sniffed at by a harmless dog. The ‘now, now’ had changed to a whispered ‘there, there’. Master Mink might have been a good mother dealing with a child troubled with dreams. Gilbert was trying to mouth apologies but nothing coherent emerged. He seemed slightly reassured by Mink’s soothing manner. So was I. But I was deceived. The plump, open gesture and the mild phrases lulled Gilbert Goodride as well. Suddenly, Mink’s splayed fingers closed around the awkward right hand of the potboy. Why do we suppose that fat men are necessarily slow and clumsy? I should have remembered how nimbly my co-player could caper on the stage. Using only his fingers, he squeezed the boy’s hand, tightening his grip like a vice, until the faces of both man and boy were contorted, Mink with the effort, Gilbert with the pain. Then, still holding on with the one hand, he forced open the boy’s fingers with the other. He spread them, palm-side-down, over the guttering candle which sat, fatly, in the middle of the table. The boy gave a small scream, more from surprise than hurt, I think, although he must have felt that too.

Mink held the boy’s hand above the dying candle for a instant before bringing it down hard onto the mess of wick and flame and smut and grease. When he released his grip, Gilbert sprang back from the table, shaking his hand in the air and making noises which were further from sense than ever. Then, still waving the offended limb, he shambled off towards the outer darkness, whining softly. From the table on the other side of the room came a bark of laughter. Somebody at least had appreciated the scene. More pitiful than the treatment of the boy was the way he seemed to accept it as his due, as if life could be no better and no different. I was reminded of a beaten cur slinking, without remonstrance, tail between legs, into a corner.

‘Good,’ said Mink. ‘Sit yourself down once more, Nicholas. When I have recovered my breath’ — though, by the by, he seemed not the least winded by his actions, while I (as I realised after a moment) had been holding my breath throughout — ‘I will try again for refreshment. This time maybe, we will be favoured with the mistress’s attention rather than her idiot’s.’

‘Perhaps she will be less than happy with you for treating her son like that,’ I said.

‘That is as nothing to what she does to him herself. I have seen her beat him senseless when he was younger.’

‘But he cannot help himself,’ I said.

‘That is why she used to beat him,’ said Master Mink. ‘That, and because he reminded her every day, in his misshapen way, of the heat of her reins. The quondam heat. She is no longer what she was, is our Mistress Goodride.’

The terrible thought crossed my mind, not only that Robert Mink might have known Mistress Goodride carnally (this was more than likely, judging by his off-hand and faintly contemptuous manner of referring to her appetite), but that this poor drawer Gilbert might have sprung from his own seed.

‘I must leave,’ I said. ‘I have business to attend to.’

Then Master Mink became all sweetness to me. Putting a confiding hand on my arm, he spoke low, ‘Please stay a little longer, Nicholas. Be comfortable. I will not keep you long from your business. We have not yet come to the reason why I wished to meet this evening. I would value your opinion on a matter.’

I had all this while been standing, but now I sat once more. His words were flattering. I was a still unfledged member of the Chamberlain’s Men and — although I tried my best to forget the fact — only a temporary one. Naturally, I harboured the hope that, by my skill and willingness, I might so impress those he had called Master Cabbage and Master Shakeshift and the others that they would create for me a permanent space on their boards. Master Robert Mink was one of the most senior players of the Company; it was in my interest to pay him the tribute of listening, and of providing him with an opinion if he so desired.

Such arguments with oneself are always the easiest to win.

Mink fumbled in his fine-quality, ale-soaked doublet and retrieved a sheaf of papers. ‘One reason I grew angry with that foolish boy was that I feared for these.’

He extracted a sheet, seemingly at random, and brought it up close to his eyes in the attempt to read. Now that the candle had been so summarily snuffed out by his own action, there was only a dim, swaying lamp suspended from the low ceiling. It was as ineffectual as a glow-worm.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I know them by heart.’

‘What do you know?’

‘The Lover’s Lament, I will begin with.’

He cleared his throat. His slumped shape seemed to straighten on the bench.

Et cetera.

I cannot go on. I had to sit through this stuff but that is no reason why you should have to. I will be merciful and draw the veil over Master Mink’s effusions.

Robert Mink did go on, however. Declaiming, sighing, whispering, urging, as if on stage, he begged his mistress to have pity on him. He threw himself into Tartary. He exalted her unto the skies. He waded through a Dead Sea awash with naiads, and a forest-full of dryads. He called in aid the whole classical pantheon. But, like all true lovers in verse, he ended no better than he had begun, still lost and lorn, alas!

‘Well?’ he said when he had not so much finished as, for a time, dried up, like the kennel down a street in hot weather.

Naturally, I knew full well whose verses they were, while, inwardly, I marvelled that a player with all his experience of others’ words should be so blinded to his own.

‘Is it Master Thomas Nashe?’ I said, all innocence and guile wrapped up together. ‘Is it he?’

‘Oh no, not Nashe,’ said Mink, not yet ready to reveal his hand.

‘Well’ — I pretended to flail about for a suitable name — ‘it is Master Shirley then.’

‘Nor him neither.’

‘Marlowe? It had just a trace to my ears of “Come live with me and be my love” — as the passionate shepherd says to his inamorata.’

It had no such thing, of course, but Master Mink was inordinately pleased to have his versifying likened to one of the most famous poems of our time. I could see, even in the tavern darkness that swathed us, his bulk swell up with the pleasure of it all. Deciding, perhaps, that he was unlikely to top Kit Marlowe for comparisons, he decided to own up.

‘I am no Kit Marlowe,’ he said, though it was plain from his slight smirk — which I could not so much see in his face, as hear in his words — that he considered himself not so inferior. ‘Though it may be that I am as much of a passionate shepherd.’

I could not square the man of soft feelings and elevated opinion with the impatient figure who had crushed and burnt poor Gilbert’s hand; nevertheless, I continued to play my part.

‘They are your lines?’

Nicely done, Nicholas, I thought, in its admixture of surprise and no-surprise.

‘A poor thing but mine own.’

‘Oh not poor, Robert, but rich.’

But something about my quick and facile rejoinder, coupled perhaps with my ready use of Master Mink’s given name, roused his suspicions. No one is so quick to take offence as he who is easily flattered. He returned the sheaf of papers to his ample doublet.

‘You do not mean it.’

‘I do, believe me.’

‘You do not mean it and I do not believe you. No matter, Master Revill.’

He spoke mildly, yet I already had witnessed enough of Mink’s mildness and what it might be a prelude to. Fortunately, he now gave me my dismissal for the time being.

‘You have business to attend to, you said. Another evening, and you may hear The Lover’s Triumph.’

‘I am at your service,’ I said, already rising from the table.

Outside, the cobbles of Moor Street were slimy with the rain that still fell, as steady and remorseless as Master Mink’s verses.

Scene: The next day. The house of Sir Thomas and Lady Alice Eliot. During supper the conversation turns to plays and players, in particular the value of the company clown.

William Eliot: You have Robert Armin with you now, don’t you? In the Chamberlain’s Company?

Nick Revill: As successor to Will Kempe, yes. Armin is our clown and so the heir to Kempe’s bauble, his thing.

Lady Alice: It was not such a little thing, Kempe’s, unless I have been misinformed.

Sir Thomas: Kempe the jig-maker. Your only jig-maker.

Lady Alice: He jigged his way across more country than lies between here and Norwich, and more than country, I’ll be bound.

William Eliot: ‘Successor’ and ‘heir’ are grand words for the company clown, though from the way that he spoke them I don’t think Nick approves of the trade.

Nick: I wouldn’t say this beyond these walls, but I don’t believe clowns and suchlike are an ornament to the profession.

Sir Thomas: Profession, ha!

Nick: With respect, sir, that is exactly the reason why companies need to be careful in selecting their clown.

Sir Thomas: Explain.

Nick: We are no longer a bunch of tatterdemallions setting ourselves up on a wooden cart in some draughty inn-yard, there to play peekaboo with the Devil and God and Everyman, in a creaking Morality of vice and virtue. We are the voice of our age. We are the mirror of the times. We inhabit one of the finest buildings in the greatest city the world has ever seen, and in our little Globe is the greater globe contained, in all her passion and splendour and, yes, sometimes in her squalor too.

William: Well done, Nick! Some more wine?

Sir Thomas: Clowns surely have their place too in all this splendour and squalor?

Nick: But it is in the nature of the clowns to break bounds, to flow over their banks, to obscure the face of the play with their meaningless torrent of words and gestures. I believe that is one reason for Armin joining the Chamberlain’s and Kempe leaving us. Armin is less. . broad.

Sir Thomas: Oh, if you want broadness then I remember Tarlton back in the eighties. He was the one, a small hunched fellow with a squashed nose. He’d jig and he’d rhyme and do his faces, and then turn about and shake his arse at the crowd as if he was going to fart at them.

Lady Alice: Oh yes! And you have heard the story told of a lady that once offered to cuff him. . because he was so impudent to her face.

Sir Thomas: What’s that, my dear? Tell us.

William: He struck at her first?

Lady Alice: He was sharper than that. Words before blows. He agreed to the cuff — but only on condition she reversed the spelling.

Sir Thomas: Tarlton was the one, there is no doubt about it. There has never been a clown to match him. Tell me, Nick, you’re the insider. It’s not just my age but our clowns have grown more sedate. They roar less than they used, do they not? And, from what you’ve been saying, you must approve of this change.

Nick: What Master Richard Burbage calls the congregation loves them still, unfortunately, but they are no friends to our authors. The playwrights are of my mind, I think. They would muzzle them. Clowns hold the words of others very cheap indeed, and think nothing of mangling whatever the authors provide.

William: ‘Let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them’.

Nick: As the Prince says.

Lady Alice: Prince who?

William: The Prince of Denmark, mother.

Lady Alice: Oh, him.

William: Hamlet is giving advice to the players before they perform in front of the King and Queen at Elsinore, if you remember. He has a message that he wishes conveyed to his mother and step-father and he doesn’t want the royal court distracted by zanies.

Nick: Though Hamlet speaks also out of a feeling for the players and their art, surely?

Sir Thomas: Art, ho!

Lady Alice: I don’t like that play about Denmark. They all talk so much.

Sir Thomas: It was a painful experience for us to watch, as you may imagine, Nick.

Nick: I — yes, I — it must have been.

Sir Thomas: Here was a man done to death by his brother — and dying in an orchard too — with the brother marrying the grieving widow. My own brother goes to his eternal rest. Lady Alice and I go to the Globe for some recreation, a little diversion, the latest piece by Master Shakespeare, and what do we find? That some of the outward circumstances of our lives have been shadowed forth on the stage.

William: But what of that, uncle? Our withers are unwrung.

Lady Alice: Unwrung withers, William?

Sir Thomas: A line from the play, my dear.

Lady Alice: Dear William knows that play so well.

William: It bears study, mother.

Sir Thomas: If I was of a suspicious cast of mind I would consider that Shakespeare had borrowed our clothes to flaunt himself in front of the public. That he was profiting from Lady Alice’s widow’s weeds.

William: Pure coincidence. The sad loss of my father and of your husband, madam, and your brother, sir, must have occurred even as the author was writing. The idea is not his, in any case. There is an older play of Hamlet, by somebody or other. No author worth his salt is going to use real life when there are so many books and plays to borrow from.

Lady Alice: What is he like, Master Revill? Master Shakespeare, who is he? Is he greedy and unscrupulous, ready to exploit a private tragedy? I have heard that he would be a gentleman but that he combines that wish with a hard head for business.

Nick: Then you know him better than I do, my lady. I find him hard to. . describe. He plays the Ghost, you know, in this tragedy of the Prince of Denmark, and that seems a part which is especially fitted to him.

Sir Thomas: How so?

Nick: A ghost is everywhere and nowhere on this earth. He materialises and then vanishes, without a by-your-leave. You might see him but you cannot seize him. And when he speaks, we pay attention because he carries intelligence from some place the rest of us have never been.

Lady Alice: You mean to make your Shakespeare mysterious.

Nick: I hardly know him, as I say. I’m only a humble player. He is the author. But he did me a good turn recently when he rescued me from the attentions of a boatman who had his arm across my windpipe.

Sir Thomas: Then your company author must be a strong man, I wouldn’t choose to wrestle one of the Thames boatmen. I have some respect for him now.

Nick: He overcame him with words.

Lady Alice: Oh, words.

Nick: There was a certain balance in the case, my lady, because the boatman had taken exception to one of my words, and was trying to throttle me because of it.

Lady Alice: A rude word?

Nick: Worse, my lady. A would-be witty word. I was stupider than I knew and our author rescued me from it. Tell me, Lady Alice, he has never visited this house, has he?

Lady Alice: Who?

Nick: Master Shakespeare.

Lady Alice: Would I have asked you about him if he had?

Nick: I thought perhaps. . maybe. . when your first husband. . it might have slipped your. .

Lady Alice: I know there is a fashion now for taking up with theatre people, and in the highest circles of the land too, but Sir William, my first husband, didn’t really hold with them. He was rather set in his ways. I think he still thought of your kind as a — what did you call it? — a bunch of tatterdemallions in an inn-yard. So it’s most unlikely that anybody from your world could ever have crossed our threshold. Not even Master Shakespeare. Why do you ask?

Nick: Oh, no reason, my lady.

Sir Thomas: That means that Master Revill here does have a reason — but doesn’t want to reveal it.

Of course I had a reason. I wanted to know why the initials WS were carved into the tree where, I was pretty certain, a murderer had been crouching. I didn’t want to think that a principal shareholder and occasional player in the Chamberlain’s Men (let alone the leading author of our times) had somehow crept over a garden wall and secreted himself up a pear tree. Even less did I wish to contemplate the idea of this reserved, likeable man dropping down from his leafy perch, creeping across the grass and, in some manner as yet undetermined, putting an end to the sleeping life of Sir William Eliot.

True, Master WS was a proficient in the art of murder — just as he was in those other dark arts of lying, cheating and forswearing, of slander, theft, mutilation and mayhem. To say nothing of treasons, plots, conspiracies and stratagems, as well as the more homely gamut of envy, lust, sloth and avarice. Master WS was quite familiar with all these things because it was his job to sound humanity to its nethermost depths. He is a playwright and daily presents us with our vices and virtues, leaving us to choose whether or not to acknowledge them. Everything human is known to him; nothing, perhaps, repels him.

But knowing is one thing and doing is another. Master WS might show what passed through the mind of cut-throat or cut-purse as he lay waiting for his prey, but that didn’t mean that he was either one of those creatures. All are at liberty to think murder, and some of us may speak it, but few, thank God, do the deed.

There must be other explanations. And now I cudgelled my brains to come up with them. As: suppose that the ‘WS’ I had seen inscribed in the bark stood for Walter Self or Will Savage or Wynne Sourdough. And then I thought that these initials most probably signified Wrong Scent, for I was becoming less and less convinced by my train of reasoning. Perhaps I had imagined those initials in the bark, I had been so eager to discover the mark of a lodger in the tree.

In my notebook and using my Greek lettering I had little to transcribe that night. I’d found out almost nothing from my supper with Sir Thomas and Lady Eliot and William, except that her first husband had disapproved of plays and players. Like many who lived to the north of the river Sir William considered them, considered us, a threat to good order. The theatre enticed apprentices away from their masters’ service. The theatre encouraged lewdness and other low thoughts and bad acts. My lady Alice, however, differed from her late husband. She had a taste for the saltier comments of clowns — I recalled Tarlton’s reversed ‘cuff’ remark. I recalled too the low-cut gown that my lady was wearing. And then I shut my little book wearily, and considered going to William on the next day and telling him that my stay in his mother’s house was fruitless, for there was nothing to uncover. In truth, I felt that I should move back to my side of the river, and return to my kind, the players and whores and ruffians, the superannuated soldiers and sailors of Southwark. It was generous of William Eliot to have offered me hospitality, whatever his ulterior motive, but I could not repay him except with titbits of gossip about the Chamberlain’s Men — and even here, there wasn’t that much to tell. It was as my Nell had claimed: they were, with odd exceptions like Robert Mink, the most regular group of men.

There was a tap at my door, accompanied by a whispered ‘Master Revill? Nick?’

I recognised Lady Alice’s low tones. I picked up my candle and moved to the door, scarcely a stride away. I was a guest but not an important one — a player, for God’s sake — so my accommodation was at the top of the house in a tiny monk-like room. Lady Alice stood outside, dressed as she had been at supper and during the household prayers which followed.

‘May I come in?’

She leaned forward as she spoke so that I caught a whiff of her breath, still scented with the meats of supper, and glimpsed her small teeth, not too discoloured and with only a few gaps, considering her age.

For answer I drew to one side. You cannot refuse the lady of the house. My room was small, as I have said, but even so she brushed past me closer than required as she entered and I felt the soft graze of her breasts. ‘William isn’t here, I’m afraid,’ I said too quickly. Once or twice her son and I had sat up of an evening, discussing the philosophy of playing as well as exchanging gossip.

‘I know. It was you I wanted to see.’

She shivered slightly. There was no fire in the room and the casement was open. I made to shut it. From the window, positioned high up at the back of the house, I could see the river’s black sheen.

‘I thought that all country people disliked the night air.’

I had been brought up to believe that the night air was indeed unwholesome but I felt that the remark was intended somehow to ‘place’ me. I was no true Londoner, but a rustic.

There was a truckle-bed and a trunk in the room. I gestured nervously at the trunk which was covered with a thick cloth and served me as table. She sat down daintily. I perched uneasily on the bed, lower than her, and waited. She picked up my little notebook and glanced at its contents by the flickering candlelight.

‘Why, this is not English,’ she said.

‘It is Greek,’ I said, praying that she could not understand those symbols and not wanting to explain the feeble code I employed whereby each term was simply transposed into the letters of the Greek alphabet.

‘An educated man.’

‘Within my limits, my lady. My father insisted that I learn Latin and Greek from an early age. He undertook my tuition himself.’

‘Did he intend you for a schoolmaster?’

‘Possibly. That or the church.’

‘So you became a player.’

‘I did not set out to contradict his wishes.’

‘Then you must have been a very unusual son.’

‘My father — and my mother — are dead, but I like to think that he would not wholly condemn the place that I now find myself in, I mean with the Chamberlain’s Men.’

‘Ah yes. We heard at supper just how highly you esteem the stage and your company.’

I was slightly embarrassed by this reminder of my effusions at table, brought on in part by drink. I simply nodded in reply. I was aware too that, although I defined myself as a Chamberlain’s man, I was only one for as long as Jack Wilson was away at his dying mother’s. I resolved to be a little more sparing in future in giving the world my opinions on plays and players.

Lady Alice put down my little black book and leaned back on my trunk as if she were quite at ease.

‘I was interested to hear what you had to say about Master Shakespeare. I have been curious about him ever since I read his “Venus and Adonis”. You know that story?’

Is there anyone the length and breadth of this land who can read, and does not know Master WS’s “Venus and Adonis”? That tale of male reluctance and a ripe woman’s urging, whose theme is the chase — the hunting of the beautiful boy whose real wish is to hunt the boar. The book has been out in the world for a good few years now and kept our book-makers and our booksellers busy, for it has yet to slip into those Lethean waters which await all printed matter. How many young men have panted to its verses, as I have, and wished themselves smothered by the attentions of an older woman? How many unrequited lovers, boy and girl, have pored and sighed over its pages, seeing in the indifference of the chase-mad young man to Venus’s overtures an image of their own rejection?

As she repeated these words from Venus’s attempted seduction of Adonis, Lady Alice leaned towards where I sat opposite and a little below her. Either of us could have touched the other one without quite straightening our arms.

‘If I remember it correctly,’ she said.

Again I caught the layered sweetness of her breath, but with a hint of something gross and yet stirring below. In the uncertain light of the candle her white front swelled out like a soft siege-machine, designed to tear away at the firmest bulwark. My eyes swam and I felt as if the earth had grown suddenly unsteady beneath the bed I sat on.

‘ “I know not love,” quoth he, “nor will not know it,

Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it. .” ’

Quoth I — but my voice was not altogether steady as I drew the lines up from the well of memory. But she was able to give as good as she got.

‘At this Adonis smiles as in disdain,

That in each cheek appears a pretty dimple.’

I only just prevented myself from reaching up to feel for the dimples (which I do not have). The smile, disdainful or not, was already fastened on my face. It occurred to me that this was the second time in twenty-four hours that I had listened to someone reciting verses of unrequited passion. The difference between Master Mink and Lady Alice, however, was as great as the difference between the latter’s poetry and Master WS’s. Rather than continuing with the exchange of lines from Master WS’s V amp; A, I said, ‘You should have been a player.’

‘Boys make better women than we do. It is easier to believe they are what they pretend to be. A woman on stage would be a distraction.’

I was surprised at the earnest reply. It was as if she had actually given thought to the preposterous idea that a woman could play a woman’s part.

‘One day perhaps. .’ She allowed her voice to trail away. ‘Now tell me, Master Revill, or Adonis, for you have something fresh-faced about you, something countrified, and besides a woman who is old enough to be your mother can be so familiar — tell me what is the boar that you’re hunting here?’

‘I’m not sure I understand, my lady.’

‘You do, but I will say it more plainly. Your presence in this house. Were you sent for? Is it of your own free will?’

‘Lady Alice. . your son heard that I was embarrassed for lodgings and kindly offered to put me up here. . for a short while. In fact I was considering just now that I ought to return.’

‘Return?’

‘To Southwark. When I have to leave the Chamberlain’s Men I am more likely to find further employment south of the river than on this side of it. There are more playhouses there.’

‘Why do you have to leave the Chamberlain’s?’

I felt myself reddening. Fortunately, the room was dim. Her face, with its firm, decided features, was suffused with colour too.

‘Because I am standing in the shoes of a player who is absent for a week or two only.’

‘I see. I thought from the way you were talking at supper that you were one of the pillars of the company.’

I blushed more furiously. To cover myself, I gabbled, ‘Jack Wilson’s mother is sick. She is dying, I believe. In Norfolk. In Norwich.’

‘Perhaps he will not come back.’

This was, of course, the hope that had passed through my mind, and more than once.

‘No, no,’ I said.

‘Yes, yes, you mean.’

‘Am I so transparent, my lady?’

‘Not transparent enough, Master Revill, I think.’

‘I do not understand you.’

‘Have you found what you’re looking for?’

‘I don’t know what I am looking for,’ I said, truthfully.

‘That is as good as admitting that you are looking for something. Remember what happened to Adonis in the chase after the boar,’ she said. She reached across — we were still less than an arm’s-length from one another — and cupped her hand above my crotch.

‘And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine

Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin.’

I was too surprised to respond for myself, although my member began to show a mind of its own under her near-touch. Lady Alice seemed pleased and also amused.

‘What Adonis would not do for the woman who wanted him was, alas, done to him. Thus was Adonis slain.’

She removed her hand, and so I was half relieved, half regretful.

‘Not a word, Master Revill.’

I wasn’t certain whether this was an injunction or a question. Before I might have asked Lady Alice what she meant she had slipped away from my room.

This wasn’t my last visitor of the evening, however. Moments later there came another tap, and my heart stirred for I thought it might be my lady returning to continue our discourse of “Venus and Adonis”. Yet the tap was less confident. I went to the door, candle in hand, and saw the creased features of Francis, the wiry little servant who had been the first to discover the body of Sir William Eliot in the garden. He looked troubled and began to gesture before he started to speak.

‘Oh excuse me, sir.’

‘That’s all right, Francis.’

‘You remember that you was asking me questions about Sir William and how I found him?’

‘You were very informative.’

‘Thank you, sir. And now it’s gone.’

‘I don’t absolutely follow you, Francis.’

‘My shirt.’

Here he drew out in the air a T-shape which I took to be the garment in question.

‘Your shirt has gone? Ah, your shirt. The one you were wearing when you found your late master.’

‘Sir William, yes. It has gone from the trunk which lies under my bed.’

‘Perhaps one of the other servants in your room has taken it.’

‘I have asked Alfred and Will and Peter and they have said no and besides they are bigger men than me so why should they take my clothes when they would not fit?’

His brow creased like rumpled washing.

It seemed as though the unfortunate Francis expected me to do something about his missing shirt, even that he held me partly responsible for its disappearance, perhaps because we had previously discussed the item of clothing. It was curious, I thought, that the garment he was wearing when he found Sir William — and the sleeve of which he had employed to wipe away a silvery mark from the dead man’s cheek — should apparently have vanished. Or it was not curious at all, and I was imagining all sorts of oddness where all was straight and even.

‘I’m sorry to hear this, Francis, but I, er, expect your shirt will turn up again,’ I said, sounding to my own ears like some harried mother reassuring a small child. ‘It is a small thing, after all.’

‘A man like me may measure his worth in the world by his shirts, and one or two further items,’ said Francis with dignity. Having got this off his chest, he withdrew.

It must not be thought that, even while I was busy in the house of Sir Thomas and Lady Alice trying to discover something about the death of her first husband and growing more and more certain that there was nothing to discover, I was undutiful in my playing. Quite apart from Master Burbage’s warning of the sanctions that waited on those who missed rehearsals, I had something stronger to urge me across the river every morning. My love of the profession, my hopes for advancement in it, both ensured that I was prompt in attendance. However small my parts, whether I was playing a respectable citizen or a boorish rustic, a Roman poet or a courtly poisoner, I was careful to have my lines off pat and not to trespass beyond the bounds of what I was set there to say and do. A licensed clown can carry out much of his own business, as I had indicated to Sir Thomas and Lady Alice, while the leaders of our company such as Master Burbage and Master Phillips have their own style which the crowd loves. But the newcomer does best when he holds quiet to his place while looking all about him. Besides all this, there was an air of intentness and responsibility which shaped everything that the Chamberlain’s did, in contrast to my time with the Admiral’s Men. It was as if we knew that we were engaged in a serious enterprise — why, we were holding the mirror up to nature.

True, the reason why many of our audience came to see us in pieces such as A Somerset Tragedy was because the plays were full of what Master Mink called fighting and fucking and fury. Burbage amp; co could not have afforded to turn their back on this gaudy stuff even if they’d wanted to. Nor do I believe that they would have wished it. To be a player, however elevated and respectable, is always to have the smell of the crowd in your nostrils, and that is a stench which you grow to love. Sometimes from the boards I would look out across the press, the sea of bobbing heads, bare and bonneted, the clouds of smoke wreathing upwards from dozens of pipes, the gallants who took their seats on the sides of the stage, the shadowy ranks of the galleries where well-to-do folk like the Eliots paid for their privacy and (perhaps) pleasures unconnected with the play. Underneath the lines being declaimed, I heard that continuous susurration which accompanies a crowd and which falls away altogether only when a prince dies or a courtesan gets her come-uppance. Out there in the press, bargains soft and hard were being negotiated, favours exacted, gossip exchanged, pockets plundered, ale gulped, pippins picked at by dainty teeth. Yet for all that, the press or congregation was with us and we with them. The Globe was like some mighty ship, and its glowing white walls were her sails, spread to take us into uncharted territory, while the utterance of speakers on stage and off, sacred and profane, was the breath that filled those sails.

And, no, even in the midst of these elevated thoughts, I did not forget my lines.

Two days after Francis had come to see me, anxious for his missing shirt, he was found face down on the muddy foreshore which lay between the wall of the Eliots’ garden and the river. He had evidently slipped and struck his head on a large stone embedded in the ooze. The tide might have lifted him up overnight and carted the body off altogether so that he was never seen again, but he had fetched up against a rotten pile that protruded from water like a diseased finger. As the tide receded he had dropped into the mud again. He was discovered by a boatman who recognised his crinkled features and wiry frame as those of one of the Eliots’ servants.