Sleep of Death

ACT III

This was too easy.

I arranged to meet him using Adrian as a go-between. Adrian is serviceable and malicious, and believes that he has a touch of the demonic about him. Hence the black apparel and saturnine gaze. He pulls his hat upon his brows, and looks and looks. He sees himself as a plotter, a cunning politician. Certainly he spent his time in my lady Alice’s household lining his own pockets. It was only William’s blindness to what was going on under his nose that enabled Adrian to remain so long in his position as steward — and it was only a matter of time before he was caught out and exposed. Our player had a hand in that business, and by his piece of legerdemain exposed the steward as a common thief. I am amused that Adrian considers himself to be an innocent in all this and blames the player for dishonesty. I remind him that he really did intend to steal my lady’s necklace. He reminds me that it was I who suborned him to steal it. Nevertheless, Adrian hates our player (so do I) and is waiting for a chance to make him atone. This fact may be useful.

In the meantime, Adrian is down on his luck despite all that pocket-lining, and for a consideration will carry out any small task, provided it be devious. I told him to accost Francis in private, and arrange a meeting between us. I did not want to see Francis face to face myself. He would have wondered. He might have taken fright and refused me an interview. Adrian had to provide some vague talk about a shirt, and the offer of a little money if he would see me alone for a moment. Not too much money, mind, because nothing rouses a man’s suspicions so quickly as an over-large reward for a small business. Without saying who was behind this, Adrian was to tell Francis that someone had important matters to communicate to him — to do with the shirt. With so little a thing may a man be ensnared. I almost wish that the shirt had been something slighter, perhaps a handkerchief. Why, a man’s life might be laid down for a handkerchief.

The little servant came out of the side gate of the main garden. It was late in an autumn evening and a thin, insinuating mist had started to rise from the river. He did not like being out at this hour, no doubt believing, like many simple souls, that he would be blasted by the night air. If it hadn’t been for the promise of money, and more importantly, the mention of his shirt I don’t suppose he would have appeared at all. And oh the shirt! You would have thought from his anxiety that it had been woven of the finest holland rather than the coarse cheap thing it actually was — dowlas, filthy dowlas. I would not have have worn it on my back for ten pounds. Francis saw me standing in the shadows — or rather he saw my shape.

‘Master-’

I could hear the apprehension in his voice. He was shifting around like an animal about to be slaughtered. I was afraid he was going to bolt back through the door, so I put on my calmest, most reassuring manner.

‘No master now but a friend, Francis.’

‘I hope so, sir.’

‘Master Adrian has talked much of you and tells me what a fine servant you are.’

‘I do my best, sir.’

‘You were present when the body of Sir William Eliot was found, I know.’

I had grown used to the dark and so, even with the mist swirling about us, I could almost see the start he gave at this unexpected subject. When Francis spoke there was a tremor of pride in his voice.

‘It was me who found the late master. In his hammock.’

I resisted the temptation of saying, And it was I who put him there. Instead I said, ‘There are worse places to die than in one’s hammock. To pass from a little sleep to a larger one.’

‘Another gentleman spoke to me recently of. . that same thing. He wanted to know how I discovered Sir William and other things.’

‘Such as?’

‘How my lady carried herself. What were her words that came at me when I was feeling the darkness on the other side of the wall. He had a deal of questions.’

‘It is Master Revill that you mean?’

‘Him, sir, the player.’

‘Francis, accompany me, would you? I have something to show you.’

‘Pardon me, sir, but could not this business be conducted indoors?’

‘No house but has hidden eyes, Francis.’

This reply seemed to satisfy him, for after a pause he continued, ‘Master Adrian, he said you had a shirt. It has gone from the trunk under my bed these two days. A man like me may measure his worth in the world by his shirts. I have little else.’

‘You have hit on the very matter that I wished to talk to you about — your shirt.’

‘We are talking now, sir.’

‘Somewhere more removed. Why, this is almost a thoroughfare.’

This was nonsense. Mixen Lane leads nowhere but to the river, and who would be going down there on a cold misty autumn night? The only passengers would be drunks who had lost their way or groping couples too poor to pay for a straw pallet in a flea-ridden leaping-house, and thinking to recline on the soft stinking banks of our Thames.

‘Come Francis, I mean you no harm, and look what I have here — see!’

With a flourish that would have befitted the stage I produced the shirt from under my cloak. It seemed to glimmer as I passed it over, although for all that was to be seen in the misty darkness I might have shown him a piece of bed-sheet. Francis reached out eagerly and clasped the unwashed item. I believe he even put it up to his nostrils and snuffed his own scent. The question that would have sprung to my lips in such circumstances — why had I taken this garment into my hands? — did not occur to the simple servant or, if it did, he chose not to voice it.

‘There are one or two other things I must discuss with you, Francis, and they concern the death of your late master. I have to tell you’ — and here I leaned closer to him and whispered confidentially — ‘that I suspect foul play was involved. I need your help. I need your head in this matter, but we must discuss it elsewhere.’

I took him by the arm and turned in the direction of the river. When you speak soothingly to an animal and caress it, the creature will follow you at heels, even though it is half aware that it goes to its doom; even so I urged Francis to accompany me with mild words and a gentle touch. He permitted himself to be led by the nose. The lane sloped down towards the water and turned into a muddy slide. The tide was out, and the slime and stones that spend half their long lives under the filthy water were revealed to the nose if not the eye. I sensed rather than heard the river’s black rush beyond the bank of the mist.

‘Here, sir?’

He was frightened again.

‘This is away from prying eyes, is it not.’

‘It is night, sir, and quiet and misty. Who is see to us?’

‘Just so.’

He tried again. ‘It is not healthful to be out and about so late.’

‘We shall not be long. Anyway you are close to the house and that should bring you comfort.’

Behind us, though unseen, loomed the garden wall. It was in there, over the wall, last spring that I had. . And now here, almost in the same spot again, I was to. . perhaps there is no end to this process once it has been begun. Murder breeds murder. It is the slippery slope, like the muddy chute which leads down to the banks of our river. It is even as the descent into hell, easy and easier still the further that you slide down. Facilis est descensus Averno.

‘Why should I need comfort?’ said Francis.

‘It is a comfort to be close to the familiar, when one is in extremis.’

Poor man, he did not understand exactly what I meant but he knew what was going to happen. I held him by the upper arm, but tenderly. If he had wanted to, he could have broken away, have slithered and scrabbled across the mud and pebbles up into the safety of Mixen Lane and the side-door of his master’s house. Even in the darkness he should have found his path by the upward slant of the ground. He was a quick, nervous man, and might possibly have outrun me; but I knew he would not attempt to leave my grasp.

‘You knew I was there, Francis?’

‘I do not think so, sir.’

‘No matter. You my not have seen me but I have seen you. You jerked your head round, so, as you crossed the garden which lies over that wall.’

In the darkness I mimed the sudden movement of the head which I remembered him making. His upper arm tensed under my grasp. Perhaps he was able to see me now. The mist on the river gave off a queer dirty yellow light as if it were sickening from within.

But if Francis saw me now, he had not glimpsed me then, on the day that I murdered William. Francis, the good servant sent in quest of his master, had turned his white face straight at me but his eyes were not accustomed to the growing dark and I was obscure among the budding foliage. To me, on that evening in early spring, the scene appeared almost light as day. I had owl-sight. The moon was up, and the evening star hovered atop the wall. Moments later I had heard him gasp as he stumbled across the body of my enemy, which swayed slightly in the airs of evening. Then there were torches and confusion; flickering lights while the body was hoisted from the hammock; a woman wailing, one of the servants and not my lady Alice. But before all that to-do I had witnessed the action which Francis performed: delicately, he extended his arm and brushed at the cheek of his deceased master. It was a gesture that spoke well for him, it was a gentle and gracious movement. It was also the gesture that would now ensure his death.

‘You were up a tree, sir.’

‘Ha, I was like the owl.’

‘ — a less innocent creature I think.’

‘What?’

‘The worm, sir.’

Although I realised that Francis was talking to delay the inevitable, I was minded to humour him, a dead man. I was surprised too at the firmness and composure of his voice.

‘The worm, Francis?’

‘The worm that flies by night.’

‘That is not altogether inappropriate, my friend, for as you know-’ and here I swelled slightly as I spoke the words of Hamlet’s father, the ghost, the late king -

‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,

A serpent stung me.’

I have never been able to resist an audience, even of one. Francis seemed curiously relaxed when he said, ‘And you were that serpent, sir.’

‘Just so-’

He had taken me off-guard as I was reciting those lines, and tore his arm from my slackened grip. Nimbly he darted away into the mist. I was so startled that I merely stood and stared at the blank air. I listened. There were sounds of scraping and splashing as Francis made his frantic way across the mud and shingle. For an instant I was no longer sure of my own orientation, and where the river flowed, where the walls of the garden stood. I cursed myself for having brought this man down to the shore of the river and toyed with him, when I might have made an end of the whole miserable business in the lane by the side-gate and no one any the wiser. Now I was mortally exposed if he should regain the safety of the mansion.

From quite near at hand there came a dull thump and a drawn-out sigh, and I jumped nearly out of my skin because I thought that someone else was on my patch of bank. The noise was almost direct ahead of me. I stopped breathing. Now there was nothing to be heard above or below the sound of the gliding river.

I crouched down and whistled softly, as you might to draw on a frightened dog.

‘Francis,’ I said softly, ‘oh Francis. Come back. I mean you no harm and never did.’

Silence.

I groaned.

‘Francis. I have injured myself. I need your assistance. Help me.’

In front of me coiled the dirty yellow mist. To my left there was a plop and then a splash as small things returned to the water. But no human sound. I waited a few more moments and then, half crouching, I edged my way forward, hands splayed, feet slithering on the slime and stone.

He was closer than I expected, and face down in the mud. He had slipped as he was trying to effect his escape from me. Whether by accident or design he had made off in a direction parallel to the river rather than attempting to regain the little lane that ran up beside the house. In the darkness I was able to make out his shape — for who else could it be? — together with a black pointed object that sat next to his head. This I reached out to touch and then more quickly withdrew my hand. It was hard and slick, and not with river-mud. When Francis fell he struck his head on a rocky outcrop which might have been fashioned to brain a man, it was so sharp-pointed and so angled upwards.

Francis groaned. A tremor passed down the dark form at my feet. He was still breathing. With my nerves on fire, with a buzzing in my ears, with a red curtain closing in front of my eyes, I straddled his prone body. I half raised him from the ground by his head, using my two hands as if I were lifting a small round boulder. His body seemed to make a motion to go after the head and to rise up between my legs as if to overthrow me, but it was light, it was tiny, it was like a tail to this round head clasped between my hands. Then I flung him back down again, head and all, so that the protruding stone might do its work properly. Something spattered my face. There was the same sound that I had heard earlier, of his head striking against the rock, but this time it was not followed by a sigh.

I sat down on the bank of our Thames, careless of the dirt and other filth. Slowly my breathing calmed. Close by me ran the unseen river, with an innocent purling sound like a stream. I waited. In my hands, on my palms and finger-ends I could feel still the shape of Francis’s head as I had raised it up from where he had lain on the ground. In size and texture it was like a ball of stone, but warm as if left out in the sun. In one place it was not smooth at all but soft and dented. I had the leisure to wonder whether I would ever forget the roundness, the warm smoothness of that other man’s head before I threw it at the pointed rock. I gazed at my invisible hands, which were, I surmised, black with mud, with blood, with the night.

After a time I went towards the river. The ground grew softer and boggier. I thrust my hands into the water and wrung them together and it seemed to me that each hand was the enemy of the other, and I the enemy of both. The water was cold and continually tried to push my hands away from my body, and take them off downstream. Once I grew unsteady on my footing and almost toppled into the river.

Then I sat again and considered the matter. I had not done anything so bad. Francis was a figure of no account. He knew what I was, and for that reason he had to die. It was true that I had somewhat lost sight of my original aim in all this, and that I had been ushered down a path not of my own choosing. But I had made the best of the road I was forced to travel. Anyway, Francis slept. He was secure, secure as sleep. I was safe from him and he was safe from me.

I got up and laid hold of Francis’s feet. I tugged and hauled, while he slipped and stuck in places as he was drawn unwillingly over the rough foreshore. It was several hours until high tide by my reckoning. I might safely leave the body on the water’s edge, and by morning it would be carried away downstream to join the other detritus of our watery thoroughfare. The only impediment were the massive piers of the Bridge, and if Francis’s corpse was smashed against them by the downsweep of the tide it would be even further disfigured.

I left him there, half in, half out of the water. And so an end.

It was only much later, after I was indoors again, that I remembered the shirt that I had given back to Francis.

I went to pay my last respects to Francis and was rewarded for my pains. His body was laid out on a table in an empty ground-floor room. There was no watcher, such as I had been accustomed to when people perished in my father’s parish, but of course that was a country custom, and therefore most likely to be shunned in the great city. Francis had been in the water for several hours and received severe injuries to his head where he had struck a rock. But something of the old Francis remained still. Enough to show that he was as anxious-looking in death as he had been in life. He gave the lie, as plague victims do, to the idea that sleep awaits us on the other side of death, the bourne from which no traveller returns. I shuddered.

As I was exiting the room I collided with a tall, gloomy fellow whom I recognised as one of the Eliot servants. Behind him hovered the bear-like figure of Jacob.

‘Master Revill?’

Jacob nudged him from the back. The two looked as if they were on a deputation.

‘I lodged with our Francis in this house, I was his bedfellow.’

‘Yes, he told me of you. . Alfred?’

‘Peter.’

‘Peter, of course.’

The mute Joseph again banged this skinny fellow in the ribs to prompt him, but it was apparent that he didn’t know how to begin.

‘I am sorry that he is gone,’ I said.

‘Death comes for all,’ said Peter.

‘Indeed,’ I said.

‘To some he comes early,’ said Peter, evidently considering that the way forward was by remarks of riddling obviousness.

‘The river is treacherous,’ I replied.

‘Treacherous enough — but not as dark as a man’s heart,’ said lugubrious Peter.

‘No doubt,’ I said, curious as to why these two wished to speak to me, for they had the air of men with something to impart; but I was also — to be honest — growing rather tired of all these theatrical hints and whispers.

‘Master Revill, Jacob here saw something. .’

Jacob proceeded to sketch shapes in the air. His arms flailed and he hopped from foot to foot. He pointed through the door to where the dead man lay. He shrugged his shoulders. He tugged at his shaggy hair as though trying to draw down his brows. He stood in one place, then in another. It was plain that he was enacting the roles played by two individuals, one of them presumably being Francis. Unfortunately I hadn’t the least idea what he was trying to demonstrate.

I smiled and nodded, and that drove Jacob to ever greater efforts at a dumb-show. I remembered his clumsiness in the box at the Globe when he had shown how utterly incapable he would have been in the business of stealing Lady Alice’s necklace. Suddenly a likeness occurred to me. The shrugging of the shoulders was Jacob’s way of fastening a cloak, while the brow-tugging signified a hat being pulled down.

‘Adrian the steward?’ I said.

At this Jacob nodded furiously, and Peter said, ‘That’s it, sir.’

‘I thought he had been banished by Sir Thomas, on pain of punishment.’

‘He’s a sly one,’ said Peter, ‘as you’d be the first to know, Master Revill.’

It will be seen that the subterfuge which had resulted in Adrian’s dismissal had made me something of a hero, if I may thus express it, to the staff in this household.

‘What Jacob here is, ah, saying is that Francis, God rest his soul, had dealings with Master Adrian?’

‘Just so,’ said Peter, who had taken on the role of interpreter to Jacob. Long association with the dumb giant had given him a facility of understanding. ‘He saw them together.’

‘When?’

Here Jacob went into further contortions. I turned to Peter for enlightenment.

‘In the morning it was, yesterday.’

‘But Francis was a good servant, a loyal one,’ I protested with a vehemence that surprised me. ‘He wouldn’t have gone against Sir Thomas’s command.’

Jacob nodded, not in agreement but in denial of what I’d just said.

‘He was troubled by his shirt, sir,’ said Peter.

‘I know, I know all about the missing shirt.’

‘No longer missing,’ said Peter, producing, with a flourish which might be described as theatrical, a battered, crumpled and dirty garment from under his own not very much cleaner tunic.

I reached out. It was made of coarse cloth and was damp. It smelt of the river. A sudden shiver ran through me.

‘Where did this come from?’

‘Why, off him,’ said Peter, nodding his head in the direction of the body on the makeshift bier. ‘It were wrapped round his middle, like.’

‘Who gave it back to him?’ I said, half to myself. ‘You’re sure it belongs to Francis?’

‘Why, yes,’ said Peter. ‘Look at this mark here on the sleeve. He was wearing it on the night he found old Sir William and when he came back he took off the shirt and folded it and put it away in his trunk and never wore it again.’

On the sleeve was a greasy smear. I raised it to my nostrils but the only scent was the river.

‘Would you keep it, sir?’ said Peter.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

But I hadn’t the least idea what to do with a dead man’s shirt.

It was Nell who suggested an answer.

‘Why don’t you,’ she said, as she saw me peering and sniffing at the discoloured sleeve, ‘take it to old Nick?’

‘Old Nick’s got enough to do, surely, without troubling himself with dead man’s wear. Why, he may have the man entire and all without the encumbrance of clothing.’

Though, even as I said it, I considered that if Francis, the meek and inoffensive Francis, were destined for the undying bonfire, then which of us should escape a whipping for our sins? None, my masters, none.

‘Not him, you fool,’ said Nell fondly. ‘Not that old Nick.’

‘Nor young Nick neither,’ I said.

‘Nor you neither, you fool.’

‘Who then?’

‘Old Nick off Paul’s Walk,’ she said.

‘That one. Oh.’

‘You know him?’

‘Never heard of him. Who is he?’

And here my Nell came over coy and simpering so I guessed that this man was someone she had to do with in the way of business, the business of giving pleasure in her case.

‘He is. . he does. . mixtures. . preparations. . compounds. . in his shop. . under the counter. . They say that he. .’

At this point my Nell whispered in my ear a secret concerning this individual, old Nick, and our glorious (but ageing) Queen. What she said is too dangerous to commit to paper but, if it were true, it might shake the foundations of our state, like all gossip.

‘Can you introduce me?’ I said. ‘To your old Nick, not the Queen.’

Cartographers are accustomed to make Jerusalem the centre of this earthly world. But if they considered more carefully they would put our capital in the place of the holy city, for my money. And of all the places in London the very navel is Paul’s and, to be more precise, Paul’s Walk. Here is all of Britain in little, the gulls and the gallants, the captains and the clowns, the cut-throat, the knight and the apple-squire. Here the lawyer parades in front of the idiot, the money-lender walks with the bankrout, and the scholar accompanies the beggar (often one and the same in our poor fallen world). Here will you see the ruffian, the cheater, the Puritan, and all the rest of the crew. Why, you may even glimpse the odd honest citizen. Paul’s Walk is a babel. One would think men had newly discovered their tongues, and each one of them different from any other. To my country eyes it appeared still a little shocking that such a worldly buzz, such a trade in flesh and metal, filled what was meant to be a sanctified place, the nave of a great church. I said as much to Nell.

‘Religion is good for business, Nick. Devotion makes men randy.’

I remembered the noises of my parents on a Sunday night after my father had given what he considered to be a specially fine performance in the pulpit. Perhaps she was right.

Now, late in the afternoon after the play, we made our way through streaming Paul’s Walk, avoiding the peacocking clusters of the gallants, the reefs of the ne’er-do-wells. The men, I noticed, appraised my Nell, slyly or brazenly. Some of them might even know her. Some of them undoubtedly did know her. I did not like the idea of this.

We made our way across the churchyard and to a shop squeezed into a corner. It was the dingiest apothecary’s I’d ever seen.

‘This is the place?’

Nell didn’t reply but pushed open the door. The light outside was strong and it took some moments for my vision to adjust to the gloom indoors. I hadn’t had much to do with apothecaries since my arrival in London Perhaps I bought with me something of the countryman’s distrust of new-fangled city remedies, as well as a suspicion that coney-catchers were to be found not only on the exterior in Paul’s Walk.

Old Nick’s place didn’t hold out much promise. The shop had a squinting slit rather than a window, and little light was allowed in. Wooden boxes and earthenware pots were strewn on lop-sided shelves and the smoky walls were hung with sacs and bladders of animal and vegetable origin. Overhead a stuffed alligator swayed slightly in the draught from the door. I say that it was stuffed, but I believe that at two or three moments during what followed I caught it twitching its tail out of the corner of my eye. On a clear space of the wall behind the counter had been chalked various cabbalistic signs together with pointed stars and overlapping circles and, imperfectly rubbed out, a detailed drawing of a lady sporting a great dildo. There was a smell in the shop, not a completely agreeable one.

‘Hello,’ Nell called, and then after a pause, ‘Nick?’

Silence. The alligator’s eye gleamed in the gloom. I noticed that other impedimenta hung from the ceiling: a couple of large tortoises, a shaft of bone with a saw-like edge, a scaly tail (doubtless a mermaid’s), a kind of tusk (a unicorn’s for certain).

‘This is a waste of time,’ I said. I wasn’t sure what we were doing here anyway. The place made me uneasy.

‘Wait,’ said Nell. ‘He will come when you call him.’

‘Yes,’ said a voice from the corner.

I looked towards the sound. I could have have sworn that the corner was empty when I first surveyed the grimy room. A figure seemed to come together out of the gloom, to assemble itself from patches of light and dark.

‘I always come when my Nell calls.’

The man who shuffled forward was very old. He looked like a plant root or stem that has been hung up in some dusty corner and forgotten. Despite his age his voice had a sweet, almost youthful quality, but it set the hairs on my arms bristling.

‘This is also Nick,’ said Nell to the apothecary. ‘Master Revill, that is.’

‘Call me Old Nick,’ said the old man. ‘That is how I am known.’

I made a very slight bow.

‘He wanted to meet you,’ said Nell.

‘But now he is not so sure.’

I, by the by, had said nothing.

‘Did you recover your ring?’ said the apothecary.

‘It was as you had said,’ said Nell. She turned to me, eager to convince. ‘I lost that ring — you know the one I mean. I came to Old Nick and he was able to tell me where my ring was. He reads his secret book and shuts himself away all in the dark and then he tells me that my ring is in the corner of Jenny’s room, hidden in the dust.’

Probably because he’d put it there himself, I thought.

‘Master Revill is thinking that if I knew where your ring was, then it was because I had placed it there.’

‘No, no,’ I said too quickly. ‘I am lost in admiration at the skill of your friend, Nell.’

‘Master Revill needs convincing,’ said Old Nick.

He spoke slowly and his words spread in soft, sticky pools.

‘And you tried the remedy?’ he said to Nell. He was obviously establishing his credentials with me, through her. ‘Plantain, knot grass, comfrey-’

‘ — and powdered unicorn’s horn, I suppose,’ I said.

‘Nothing so fabulous,’ said the old apothecary. ‘There is no magic here, merely a newt’s liver and sliced snakeskin. But it worked, Nell, it worked?’

‘Oh, I am a new woman, sir,’ said my mistress.

I felt angry and jealous. What was this? I knew nothing of Nell’s dealings with this man — and if anyone was in a position to make a new woman of her. .

‘But Master Revill still needs convincing?’

‘Why should you trouble to do that, sir?’ I said. I’d made a mistake coming here. Why had Nell brought me to this dingy shop? ‘I am only a player, a poor jobbing player, no gentleman, not worth the trouble of convincing.’

‘How is Master Wilson’s mother?’ said Old Nick.

‘Who?’

‘You are standing in Master Wilson’s shoes, I believe, while he is away attending to his mother, who lies sick. For as long as he is absent and in Norfolk you will work with the Chamberlain’s Men.’

This time the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. But then I considered: Nell and this old man were. . acquaintances (I wondered what payment she’d given him for revealing the whereabouts of her ring). What more likely than that she’d told him something about me?

‘You didn’t tell me that, Nick,’ said Nell to me, reproachfully. And this, I now remembered, was true. Nell had the notion that I had been taken on by the Chamberlain’s more or less for good. I had not made clear the true state of affairs, for I wanted to impress. So she couldn’t have told her friend Old Nick what she didn’t know. . therefore the apothecary must, surely, have other sources of information.

‘How long do you wish Master Wilson to remain in Norfolk?’

‘As long as possible,’ I said without thinking.

‘I can bring that about,’ said this withered man. ‘An accident when his horse shies on his return or an attack by some wild rogues on the highway. Or, if you prefer, a sudden illness that will despatch him to keep his mother company.’

I was tempted — for an instant. To reinforce his point the apothecary added in tones of drawling sweetness: ‘All of these things I can procure. Accidental death, bloody gashes, a mortal sickness.’

If you had asked me then for my dearest wish it would have been to remain with the Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe theatre, part of the finest company of players in London and, hence, in the world. As long as Jack Wilson was kept at a distance I was safe. But when he returned to take up his — my! — post I would again be reduced to a workless, wandering player, scrabbling for a foothold in another company. So I was tempted, tempted by the vision of Jack Wilson thrown from his horse or bloodied after a bandit attack, or stretched on a bier. But as these images flashed through my mind there came with them also shame and a thrusting-away of any such underhandedness.

‘No,’ I said firmly. ‘I do not know Master Wilson but he is a fellow player, and I wish him no harm.’

‘Then you are unusual in your profession,’ said Old Nick.

I saw then how clever the apothecary had been. For the first few minutes in his shop I had been a disbeliever. But the instant he dangled before me the vision of my unseen rival, dead or disabled, I took him at his word. Even if only for a moment, I believed that Old Nick could do what he claimed, bring harm over a distance, hurt with magic. I felt also unclean, somehow reduced to his level. More than ever, I wished that I had not agreed to accompany Nell to his workshop.

‘Are you convinced, Master Revill?’

In the half-light on his crinkled face I could see nothing, not even a small smile. His words were drawn out, smoothly spread. . Maasster Reveell. I inclined my head a little, and the alligator swayed in the corner of my eye.

‘We need your help, sir,’ said Nell. I noticed her tone of respect, and that irritated me too.

‘This is no business of Nell’s,’ I said, ‘but mine only. Hearing from her that you are a man of science, I have brought you this for your — examination.’

As Peter had tentatively given me Francis’s shirt so I now passed it across to Old Nick, feeling rather foolish. It was, after all, only a shirt.

The apothecary reached across the green glass alembics and phials on the counter, and grasped the bundle of clothing. He turned it over in his hands, which were misshapen and yet nimble. He stroked the material. He seemed in the gloom to shudder slightly but this could have been my imagination or, more likely, the merest theatrics on his part. Old Nick raised the shirt, all that remained of Francis’s earthly estate, to his nose. He sniffed, then snorted gently.

‘I smell river.’

Well, that took no magic powers of divination. I stayed silent, half hoping that the quack would trip over his own cleverness.

‘I smell death.’

‘Because the man who wore this is dead.’ I was giving nothing away.

Suddenly the man behind the counter stiffened.

‘Francis,’ he hissed.

Nell gasped, and my scalp crawled.

‘Oh, Francis.’ Old Nick’s voice had changed from the drawling honey note. Now there was something robust and commanding in it.

‘Oh, Francis. Come back. I mean you no harm and never did.’

But there was a world of harm in that voice. Couldn’t Francis have heard that, even as I was hearing it now?

‘Oh, Francis. Come back.’

Yes, of course Francis had heard the harm in that voice. But he hadn’t moved, he hadn’t escaped. Why not?

‘Oh, Francis. Come back.’

Old Nick was pawing and sniffing at the shirt like a dog, pausing to turn his head up and utter these repeated phrases in a voice not his. I grew very afraid that Francis the servant might, by the force and command of these very words and urged by his habit of obedience, be brought back to life, might return to us all smeared with river slime, might at this very moment have entered into the dim apothecary’s behind our backs.

‘Stop!’ Nell cried out.

Old Nick looked at her. He shuddered again, then looked at the shirt which he still held. When he spoke it was in his normal, drawling tone.

‘It was night on the river. With me — and with him.’

‘Who?’ I said. ‘Francis?’

‘I have no names,’ said Old Nick. ‘One of them was frightened for his life.’

‘And the other?’

‘I told you that it was night. I could not see clearly.’

I remembered Peter’s words: ‘The river is treacherous enough — but not as dark as a man’s heart.’

‘Nevertheless,’ I said, struggling to recall the original reason why we had brought the dead man’s shirt to the apothecary, ‘nevertheless. .’

‘There is no nevertheless, Master Revill. You described me as a man of science, and what I accomplish I accomplish without magic. I have a power, but it will not be commanded. I cannot tell you anything else at this moment.’

‘Yes, I have it again,’ I said, suddenly remembering that it was not Francis’s decease that we were here to discuss, but the demise of old Sir William in his spring garden. ‘That shirt that you are holding, it was once, not long ago, smeared against a dead man’s face, to wipe something away. . by the sleeve. .’

Old Nick examined each sleeve in turn. Once again he put the garment to his nostrils and snuffed. I was relieved when he took it away from his face without falling into the trance state.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There is something amiss here too.’

Yesss. . amisss.

I waited.

‘But, oh so faint, like the scent of apple blossom,’ said Old Nick. He again sniffed at a cuff of the shirt. ‘And this from a different time, another occasion.’

‘Can you tell what is on the sleeve? Does any of it remain?’

‘Not here, not now, I cannot say. There are mixtures, preparations, methods. I may be able to. . why does this signify?’

‘Two men have died,’ I said. ‘One was the poor possessor of that shirt, as you know. He told me hours before he died that it had been stolen from him.’

‘And the other?’

I found myself curiously reluctant to say. ‘Someone I never met. But I think that his death may be tied with whatever substance remains on the sleeve.’

‘So I should use my science to discover this?’ said Old Nick.

‘Or magic. I care not. But I will pay.’

‘You shall pay, Master Revill. But that is not the point. I am not interested in your money.’

‘Then you are unusual in your profession,’ I said, in a feeble attempt to draw level to him.

The apothecary ignored me. Instead he said to Nell: ‘The same arrangement with you, mistress Nell?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Her deference to him and, more, her provoking ‘arrangement’ with this man angered me. Now, jealousy is foolish in a man that loves a common harlot, one who must open her quiver to any man that has coin. And when was jealousy ever argued away?

‘Good,’ said apothecary Nick. ‘Come to me in two days and you will have an answer. Not you, my Nell, but you, Master Revill, shall visit me.’

I held my tongue until we were outside in Paul’s again. Even as I spoke I knew that I should feign unconcern. What did it matter to me whether my Nell had an ‘arrangement’ with the Lord Chamberlain, the Lord High Admiral or Old Nick himself (the real Old Nick, that is)?

‘What arrangement, my Nell?’

‘I’m everybody’s Nell today, Nick. Your Nell, his Nell. .’

‘No evasions, Nell.’

‘Evasions? You must speak in plainer English if you want me to understand.’

‘The arrangement, Nell. The “arrangement” which your friend in there mentioned. What do you do for him?’

‘Look over there,’ she said suddenly. ‘See that fine piece of coney-catching.’

A few yards off, stood a young man — obviously fresh up from the country by his dress and his general air of wonderment at our capital city — gazing about him. He was being greeted by a friendly, open-faced fellow, greeted by name. Master Russet or Master Windfall, or some such. The name, needless to say, would be wrong. Then our open-faced friend would make a stab at getting the country-dweller’s county. Worcester, Gloucester? There too he was in error. Then he would essay a couple of the rustic’s fellow-countrymen. ‘Why, sir, do you not have Sir Tarton Barton as your neighbour?’ or ‘Doesn’t Farmer Harmer live yonder over Pillycock hill, three mile from your place?’ These names mean nothing to our fresh bumpkin, which is hardly surprising as the open-faced fellow has probably made them up on the spot. In exchange for these questions the rustic gives the following information: his name, his county and the names of a handful of his neighbours. He would have volunteered more, probably down to the name of his mother’s aunt’s cat, had not the friendly fellow apologised, thanked him and departed into the crush of people in Paul’s.

Nell and I knew that in about five minutes our innocent rustic, or coney, or rabbit, would be greeted by another affable man. This second friend would, of course, know the name of the stranger, together with his county — why he would even be familiar with the gentleman’s neighbours! ‘Goodman Windfall, have you forgotten me? I am such a man’s kinsman, your neighbour not far off.’ My, the bumpkin would think to himself — reflecting on how he had been warned before he started off for Lon’n town that the citizens were cold and aloof, how they cared nothing for their country cousins, how they were even prepared to trick simple countryfolk — my, this is a regular turnabout. Here am I in this great city, the world’s heart. And here I have been hailed twice in the space of five minutes by men who think they know me!

The sequel to this? The bumpkin’s new-found friend proposes stepping into some nearby tavern, and drinking a toast to their shared county and joint neighbours. Inside the alehouse, a game of cards happens to be in progress. After a jar or two, bumpkin and friend are invited to join in. Bumpkin’s pleasure at so speedily finding companions in Lon’n town is increased by the delightful way in which he seems to be winning more at the hands of cards than he is losing. But he is careful. He knows that luck has a habit of turning. Just as he is on the point of drinking up and leaving and finding somewhere secure to deposit his modest winnings, his friend, by now his fast and eternal friend, says ‘A fresh pint and then away. One more pint and another hand of cards. . a last hand for friendship’s sake. .’

The coney will return to his country burrow a sadder man, possibly a wiser one and certainly a poorer.

As Nell and I turned away from the scene we saw and heard another man come up to our country visitor, sure enough addressing him by name — ‘Goodman Martin!’ — and identifying him by county.

However often you have witnessed this operation in Paul’s, or in other parts of the town such as Holborn or Fleet Street, you do not tire of the smoothness, the ingenuity of it. Perhaps it is because Nell and I were originally from the country ourselves that we always took pleasure in seeing our country cousins duped and fooled, although there was a small measure of shame in it, too. All the same, we reflect that we would not be caught out like this because we are worldly-wise. And, I also reflected as we continued through the throng, is not jealousy a somewhat, well, rustic notion? It is hardly worldly to be jealous, especially over a whore. So I assured myself, and I tried to shake myself free from care over Nell’s secrets.

‘What were you saying, Nick?’

‘When?’

‘Before we saw how many friends Goodman Martin has in this fair city of ours.’

‘I was talking about evasions but it doesn’t matter. I do not wish to know about your “arrangement” with an apothecary. And don’t ask me what “evasions” mean, either.’

I returned to the hidden garden in the Eliot house after this excursion to Old Nick’s in Paul’s. Why to the garden, I don’t know. Perhaps, like old Sir William, I saw it as a place of refuge from the taint of the world. I was alone in the house and grounds, for once without Jacob dogging attendance on me. The afternoon performance at the Globe playhouse, a thing set in Milan, full of Machiavellian dukes and cardinals and their mistresses, had gone well. But what remained with me on this fine autumn evening wasn’t the recollected pleasure of how deftly I’d turned my villainous lines as Signor Tortuoso (the murderous creature of the Cardinal-Machiavel), or the compliment that Master Mink had paid me afterwards (‘To the life, Nick, to the life’), but the more recent scene in the desiccated apothecary’s shop. However wary of him I was, I knew he had not been play-acting when he snuffed up the secrets contained in Francis’s shirt. There was much that was wrong here, and I felt resentment, momentary but deep, of young William Eliot for pitching me into a situation where I was expected to uncover dangerous truths.

As I have said before, the door to the inner garden was no longer kept locked. I traced my way among the laden fruit trees — for it seemed to be a consequence of the old master’s death that none had been instructed to disburden the trees, and the area had returned, as will all things unregarded, to a state of nature, unweeded and now growing rank with fallen fruit — until I reached the place where Sir William had met his end. Once again, I surveyed the scene. A heavy, golden air hung about the garden. The rays of the declining sun struck across the wall and into my eyes. Blinded, I felt the grooves left in the trunk of the apple by the dead man’s hammock. What did I expect to discover? Unlike the bowed trees, this revisiting of a dead scene was fruitless. Yet before I knew it, I was at the foot of the guilty pear. I hoisted myself aloft and into the fork in the branches where my man had been. And yes, there in the leaf-shadowed bark were the initials, clear WS, not new but not so old neither.

I think, until that moment, I had been hoping that I was in error. I had surely, as it were, misread my tree. But no, I had not.

WS. The playwright, he had sat up the pear.

I settled myself more comfortably. It was a warm evening. I may have fallen asleep for an instant, tired from being a Machiavel’s creature, wearied by the encounter with Old Nick. Anyway, some very short period must have elapsed because I came to myself again with a start. Unthinkingly, I glanced down. At first I thought I was dreaming. I blinked, and blinked again. Then I permitted my scalp to crawl with horror.

There, in the long grass between the two apple trees, lay a dead man.

Now, I had never seen Sir William in the flesh, although I had studied his likeness in a picture in the Eliot household, but I could not doubt that here he was, in the very space (or, to be precise, just below) where his body had been discovered. Nor had I hitherto seen a ghost. Like most thinking men, I have sometimes questioned whether any of us can ever recross that boundary between the here and there. On the other hand, I have — also like most thinking men — felt differently on this question in the middle of the night. Yet this was the early evening, the light was good, and my sight was unimpeded. There lay Sir William outspread beneath the trees.

Then the ghost did something worse than merely lie there. It coughed and scratched at its beard. And all became clear. For this was, of course, no dead Sir William but a living Sir Thomas, come to lay himself down in the very spot where his brother had been taken off. A strange practice. How could I have confused two men who were not, perhaps, so alike after all? With the image of the dead man in my mind’s eye, I had imprinted it on the living one in the grass.

My first concern was to not reveal myself behind my leafy screen. But I hardly had time to wonder what Sir Thomas was doing there, and to ask myself whether it was brotherly or unbrotherly that he should position himself in the place where Sir William had quit this life, when the riddle of his presence was solved. From somewhere in the depths of the orchard appeared my Lady Alice. She was carrying an apple, a bright red apple. Possibly she had been searching one of the neighbour trees for one that was especially to her taste. Or to his taste. For now she bent low over her outstretched husband, who must have heard her rustling approach because he had already turned his head in her direction, and placed the apple, not into the hand that was proffered, but straight into his mouth. Before doing this, however, she rolled the ripe fruit two times up and down, up and down, the snowy slope of her breasts. She was wearing the same low-cut gown as on the evening when she had made the visit to my little room.

I don’t know why, but I blushed, invisible though I was up in the tree, feeling as red as that apple which had just passed from wife to husband. I was spying on an intimate moment between a loving couple, like Polonius hidden behind the arras in Gertrude’s bedroom and eavesdropping on mother and son. If so, better to blush unseen than to cry out loud and receive Polonius’s penalty. Nor could I, ever the seeker-out of parallels, avoid the analogy between this apple scene and that of our first parents in a garden (I am not a parson’s son for nothing).

Sure enough, the sequel to this apple-offering was reminiscent of what followed for Adam and Eve after they had shared the gift of the forbidden tree. Sir Thomas, pausing only to remove the fruit wedged in his mouth, reached up and pulled down his wife, who was bending low enough for her tits to be near tumbling from her gown, so that she almost fell on top of him. My view was good, only a little obscured by the leaves of the pear tree; indeed there was almost a pure rectangular space made by the branches and through which I peered as if into the heart of a picture. They rolled around on the grass for a time, laughing slightly, snorting a little. My face caught fire anew. These people were old enough to be my parents, for God’s sake! I did not wish to witness several minutes of cut-and-thrust-and-shudder (though, if I am to be absolutely honest with myself and with you, I was not totally averse to witnessing it either).

But something happened to the couple in the grass, or rather didn’t happen, as it does sometimes. After a few moments, without a sign of impatience or anger from either party, Lady Alice and her husband simply disengaged themselves and, while he remained lying in the long grass, she sat up beside him, rearranging her dress. I couldn’t see the expression on her face, since she was turned sideways, but I could hear her voice well enough.

‘Well, Thomas, this can wait.’

‘Hasty journeys breed dangerous sweats,’ said he.

‘At our age, the bed is better,’ said she.

‘My dear, I wonder whether it is because this was the spot. .’

‘I don’t think of him.’

‘But you used to come here together?’

‘You are too nice, Thomas, to remember what I told you once. You are too curious.’

‘You told me a great deal then, and not only in words.’

Saying this, he raised himself slightly from the ground and gave her an affectionate kiss, which she returned, equally lovingly.

‘Now we can speak plain. Then we had to do much in dumb-show,’ said Lady Alice.

‘Like the prologue to a play,’ said Sir Thomas, rather grimly. ‘Tell me, why has your son invited this player to lodge with us?’

Up in the pear tree, I felt the sweat break out across my forehead.

‘There is no harm in Master Revill, even if he does seem to be rather full of himself.’

Had I been free to do so, I would have bridled at this comment of hers.

‘What does your son want with him?’

‘Our son.’

‘Our son.’

‘You know how he is drawn to the playhouse. If he were not a gentleman I believe that he might have turned player himself.’

‘I sometimes think William — I mean, William my brother — had the right idea about players and playhouses. To keep them all at arm’s length.’

‘Hang him!’ said Lady Alice, with a sudden, almost shocking burst of energetic spite. ‘He had no pleasures. He could not go, for certain he could not go.’

‘And you could raise the dead, my dear.’

‘Don’t.’

And she seemed, to my eyes, to shiver slightly as she glanced around. For a moment her gaze came to rest on where I sat aloft. Fortunately, I was not wearing anything gaudy, but in any case her mind was elsewhere.

‘Oh, he had no pleasures,’ she repeated, in an abstracted tone.

‘ — except his habit of coming alone into this garden,’ Sir Thomas cut in. They sniggered together, like naughty boy and bad girl. A fresh wave of sweat poured off my brow.

‘How useful that was,’ said Lady Alice, more calmly.

Was this not an admission of their guilt?

‘To have him out of the way at the same time every day,’ said Sir Thomas, tickling with his fingers at the exposed bosom of his wife.

‘Only if the sun shone,’ said Lady Alice, shifting a little in the anxiety of her pleasure.

‘When it shone for him, it shone for us.’

More low laughter. More sweating from the watcher up the tree.

An admission of guilt, yes. But guilt of what? Their words suggested that they had engaged in covert cut-and-thrust, perhaps in my lady’s chamber, perhaps elsewhere in the capacious mansion, when the husband had been slumbering here in the garden in his hammock. This was not yet an admission of murder.

I waited for more, and more came.

‘Of course, there were always your trips to Dover,’ she said.

‘Oh, Dover is a good port, a good place of entry,’ he said.

They laughed together, still like bad children.

‘Dover in Fish Street, that is,’ he said.

‘I miss my visits to Dover,’ she said.

‘There is no need to travel when you are well provisioned at home.’

‘But you still keep your lease on Dover?’

‘A foxhole merely.’

She did not reply, and by her shifting slightly away from her husband I could see that his last remark had not pleased her. Anyway, they spoke so low and were so consumed with amusement at their own doings, that I could scarcely hear them. But I had heard enough. I remembered what dead Francis replied to my question about Sir Thomas’s whereabouts when his brother’s body had been discovered. ‘He was away, in Dover, I think.’ Although the knight and his lady were speaking in a kind of cipher, it was one that was plain enough to read. Sir Thomas, in addition to his debt-ridden estate in Richmond, maintained some little lodgings in Fish Street (close to Paul’s) to which he and his lady might repair for their diversion. When he went there he spoke of ‘going to Dover’, a town sufficiently distant to account for lengthy absence. The phrase had evidently become a joke between the two. I wondered whether Lady Alice’s displeasure at his retaining the rooms was because she suspected that he might now be doing with another what he had been acustomed to do there with her.

‘My brother was a fool,’ said Sir Thomas, apparently thinking that the way back into her favour was to cry down the late Sir William. ‘To cultivate the ground here and to neglect the ground here.’ So saying, he dug his hand in between her breasts, as if he were some species of gardener. She yelped, and not entirely with pleasure, I thought.

‘What wealth he missed, what a luxurious crop he neglected to harvest,’ pursued Sir Thomas, evidently pleased with his agricultural metaphors.

‘What wealth you have gained,’ said Lady Alice, and from her tone I judged that she did not mean only her bodily self.

‘Oh, we have benefited, my dear. This has been to our advantage,’ said her new husband.

‘As the cat said when the farmer’s wife rescued it from the well,’ she said.

But this proverbial analogy, rather surprising in the mouth of my Lady Alice, was not much to Sir Thomas’s liking, for he now raised himself into a sitting position. The sniggering understanding between the two, the sense that they shared a history of secrets, had been replaced with a brisker mood. The first gusts of evening were blowing over the wall and ruffling the trees. My back was clammily cold with sweat. Sir Thomas got to his feet and then offered his hand to Lady Alice. But she raised herself up without his assistance and then, together but at a little distance from each other, they made their way towards the garden door.

I waited a good five minutes up the pear tree, to ensure that they would be safely across the larger garden beyond and into the great house, before lowering my stiff limbs to the ground.

Excerpts from my notebook:

I have changed my mind. I thought William’s belief that there was something odd about his father’s death was the result of his grief or, perhaps, of attending one too many performances of Master WS’s Hamlet. But now the discovery of Francis’s body in the river, the emergence of the shirt that was missing and then found wrapped round his corpse, the disturbing behaviour of Old Nick the apothecary and his vision of somebody talking to Francis, talking in an urgent, commanding whisper, talking him over to his death — all this compels me to acknowledge that old Sir William’s death cannot have been natural.

Another point (under a sub-head, as it were): after Old Nick had taken hold of Francis’s shirt and was speaking in that strange, tranced manner and using words and a tone not his own, it seemed to me that the voice was familiar. There was in it something faint, but recognisable.

So I must conclude that Sir William was murdered.

What follows from that?

Where, when, how, who? And why?

These are the questions which follow, as the night the day.

Let us start with an easy question. Where?

Response: in his orchard, where it was his custom to sleep on warm afternoons. This was no secret. Anybody wanting to take him at his most vulnerable would choose that moment, particularly as they knew that he regularly went there alone. No one else had a key to the secret garden, Francis told me. I have established this from other servants too.

Another question, almost as easy: When?

Response: at some time between the beginning and the end of the afternoon, a gap of perhaps four hours. Francis says that the body was scarcely warm. Even allowing for the coldness of a spring evening he must have been dead some time. Also: his wife and his son and other members of the household came out to search because they were worried at his absence. This too indicates to me that the murder occurred earlier. If he’d been in the habit of staying in his orchard for hours, until it grew dark in fact, they would not have worried.

A harder question: How?

This may be broken down into several smaller questions as, how did our murderer get into the garden, how did he conceal himself, how did he kill Sir William?

Response: I don’t know. Or, rather, I know only what I think I know. When I reconstructed the crime in the garden, attended by the faithful Jacob, I was at first sure that I had found the hiding place of our murderer, up in the old spreading pear tree. Then I doubted. But the discovery of those initials, WS, has in a manner confirmed my suspicion — yes, this was an ‘occupied’ tree — while throwing me further into confusion. Both times I felt in my bones that I was crouching, uncomfortably, up in the branches where our murderer had crouched, that I was in his bloody shoes. My confusion comes from what those initials may stand for. Here I waver, shuttling between doubt and certainty. At one moment I think: The playwright sat up the pear. The next I tell myself: It cannot be that the foremost author in the finest playhouse in the greatest city in the world skulks in trees, waiting to drop down on an unsuspecting knight so as to put him to death.

As to the other part of the ‘how’ question, that is how did Sir William actually shuffle off this mortal coil, what precisely procured his exit? That, too, I don’t know. But I have some hopes of the apothecary.

Question: Who?

Who wanted Sir William dead? (If I leave aside Master WS.) Who benefited from his death?

Look to his family.

Lady Alice I know from my own experience to be a woman with, as Francis expressed it, a saltiness in her looks — and not just in her looks. Witness the behaviour of the couple which I had spied from the tree in the evening. That they were bed-partners before the death of Sir William was hardly to be doubted. Suppose, however, that the occasional stolen afternoon, when the sun shone, or when she might go and see him in his lodgings in ‘Dover’, was not sufficient for her, or for him. Suppose that she wanted Sir Thomas for a husband, now and for next week; suppose that Sir Thomas wanted her for his wife, also now and for next week; and therefore they would not wait for mortality to strike the first husband down but must needs give him a thrust. Suppose that Sir Thomas wanted control over more than his brother’s human relict; that he wanted the fine mansion on the edge of the Thames? I have heard it whispered, and not just by the unfortunate Francis, that Sir Thomas was near bankrout; he was heavily in debt, he was about to lose his estate in Richmond. What had she said in the garden? ‘What wealth you have gained.’ Isn’t this enough to make them plot together — lust and avarice conjoined — to get rid of the first husband? (As Gertrude and Claudius may have plotted together in Master WS’s Hamlet.)

Or perhaps the plot was all Sir Thomas’s, and Lady Alice merely accepted the result without enquiring into it too closely, as women are always inclined to take what fortune drops into their laps.

On the other hand, young William Eliot has informed me that both his mother and his uncle were, in their own ways, genuinely distressed by the death of a husband-brother. What I’d witnessed of them from the tree didn’t suggest that their grief had lasted long. Just so do Gertrude and Claudius appear to be genuinely distressed. They are good players at grief. So too is Hamlet, good at grief. Who is to say what is real and what is play? I go round in circles. Each argument meets a counter-argument. In this real-life drama it is William Eliot who is playing the part of Hamlet, the son of a mother recently married to an uncle, and of a father dead in strange circumstances. What reason might William have for wishing his father dead? A voice whispers to me, and I am almost afraid to commit this thought to paper: haven’t all sons, in some hidden part of themselves, a wish to see their fathers dead?

Who is guilty then? All? None?

A final question for myself: Why compare everything to a play? Why should I hold every incident up and see whether it matches something in Master Shakespeare’s imagination?

Response: Because it seems to me that the play is the answer — the play’s the thing. This starts with Hamlet and it will end with Hamlet.

As it happens, the next afternoon we did Hamlet again. It was a sure crowd-puller and — pleaser, so the Burbage brothers had put another performance on the schedule in two days’ time. The tragedy of the Prince of Denmark was to be leavened by the little satire of Boscombe’s A City Pleasure, performed on the middle afternoon. After the Sunday break, we were to revert to our diet of crazed Milanese dukes and cardinals, and murderous painters and rustics in the county of Somerset. Such is the player’s round. So dizzying is it that one scarcely knows on any one day whether one’s first line should be ‘Buon giorno’, or ‘Good den, zur’, or ‘Greetings, my fair dame’. And while these plays, together with WS’s Hamlet, were going forward, we were preparing for the next batch which included Love’s Sacrifice (the minimal part of Maximus) and Julius Caesar (the disposable part of the poet Cinna).

But that afternoon it was, as I say, Hamlet.

After I had delivered my lines as the English ambassador, after Fortinbras of Norway (which, being not a very big part, was taken by Samuel Gilbourne, who had been with the Chamberlain’s only as many weeks as I had days) had spoken nobly over the remains of the Prince, and after we had all done our little jig and the audience gone home happy, I retired to the tiring-room, surrendered my costume and, exchanging a few words with my co-players, exited into Brend’s Rents.

I was not surprised to see William Eliot outside. We fell easily into step together and, skirting the Bear Garden, made to enter the Goat amp; Monkey, the tavern where we’d first encountered each other.

‘Sir, sir!’

‘Not now, Nat.’

The dirty man was lounging at the inn-door, hoping to be invited to do his animal-noises in exchange for pennies which he’d promptly convert — oh alchemy! — into ale’s muddy gold.

‘I will do you a bear fight, death and all, sir.’

‘No, Nat.’

‘Four dogs dead and the bear mortally wounded — all for one penny.’

‘Piss off now.’

‘Can you do a unicorn?’ said clever William.

‘No sir, for though it is not widely known, the unicorn is mute,’ said clever Nat.

‘There’s a penny for your pains,’ said William, and Nat scuttled ahead of us into the Goat amp; Monkey to spend the coin quickly. While William and I were talking, he would glance at us from his corner from time to time, raising his tankard to his new patron.

‘I thought you would most probably be at the playhouse,’ I said.

‘Yes. It is like an itch, that play. I must keep scratching at it.’

‘We do it again the day after tomorrow.’

‘You have nothing to report?’

‘From your mother’s house? No, apart from the initials up the tree which I told you of. And the strangeness of Francis’s death.’

‘Which we have also talked of.’

Although it had been William who first inveigled me into the Eliot mansion with the promise or threat of something ‘out of place’, he now seemed inclined to dismiss my findings as insignificant. Initials up a pear tree? Nothing; children, and lovers like Master WS’s characters, carved their names into trees, not murderers. The death by drowning of the servant who had discovered his father’s body? People died in the river every day by the bucketful. Not quite true, but he had a point. I had not yet told him about my visit to the apothecary’s for fear that he would laugh at my credulity. Nor had I told him about the two occasions when I had seen his mother in a less than respectable light, once in my room and once in the garden. What was I to tell him? That his mother and uncle had been bed-mates before his father went down underground? That in every argument with myself I went round in circles?

‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘that we are so little advanced in this matter.’

‘My fault, Nick. I should never have asked you to do this. I thought that a fresh pair of eyes, ones not half-blinded by family affection or dislike, might see something which I had overlooked. No matter. I have enjoyed having a player for a lodger.’

‘Your parents too?’ I said, remembering the exchange between Lady Alice and Sir Thomas.

‘There is much coming and going in our house. They are civil to their guests, as befits a knight and his lady. And my mother has a real taste for the playhouse. She always did. My father, he-’

‘ — despised players,’ I cut in.

‘I don’t know that it was as strong as that. But he was suspicious, certainly. He felt that no man should pretend to be what he was not, even in play.’

‘My father also.’

‘So we have that in common.’

I saw William’s gaze slide to one side of my face, even as I felt outspread fingers slipping under the hair at my nape.

‘Nicholas,’ a soft voice whispered in my ear. I knew the warmth and sweetness of her breath. ‘Shift up.’

Nell pushed onto the bench between William and me.

‘I thought I’d find you here, in your favourite hole,’ she said.

Finished with business for the day, she must have been. That is to say, by now she had earned enough to pay the Madam, with a little left over to provide for daily necessaries. The life of the whore is even more precarious and provisional than that of the jobbing player. As ever, I wondered who — and how many — she had been with that day. And as ever, I tried to strangle the thought at birth, just as I stifled the notion that she was looking for new trade in the Goat amp; Monkey. Nevertheless, I was glad to see her.

William smiled at my mistress. He did not ask who, or rather what, she was. He would know that no lady should walk alone into a Southwark tavern. And her dress of flame-coloured taffeta most likely told him a story too.

‘Who’s this, Nick?’

‘William Eliot, a gentleman who dwells across the river.’

‘Eliot. Is that. .?’

‘One of the most distinguished families in the city, yes,’ I said quickly, considering that William would not have been overjoyed to know that the secret matters of his family were the property of a trull.

‘A drink, mistress?’ said William, all courteous and courtly.

‘Nell,’ said Nell, simpering slightly. I wished now that she had been sat not between us but on my side only, since she wriggled and snuggled herself in his direction. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Call me Will. Sack or sherry, Nell?’

‘Plain ale, sir — Will.’

My heart sank, not only at this display of familiarity but because my Nell could not drink without becoming light at the heels. She drank, not ladylike in little sips, but in great gulps. In that state she was liable to offer for nothing what she customarily exchanged for cash. I knew this because it had been how our acquaintanceship started. I poked her with my elbow but she ignored me. William called out to the potboy and gave his orders. Did he know what she was? Probably. Did he care? Probably not.

‘You are not from our city, are you, Nell? I can hear it in your voice.’

‘From our country, Will.’

‘Have you shut up shop for the day? Are your customers all gone?’ I said, in a none-too-subtle effort to inform William that he was dealing with a common whore and in case he had not been alerted to this fact by her dress or manner.

‘You keep a shop, Nell?’

She was all eyes for him, and he for her, and I was away on the edge of their vision and out of their minds. She was throwing back the tankard of ale and, in between gulps, no doubt casting up her eyes at him from under their lids.

‘In a manner of speaking, Will.’

‘And what do you trade in?’

‘Dainties. . and sweetmeats. . and suchlike.’

‘I expect you are well patronised.’

‘I always have room for another customer.’

‘No, you are never full, are you Nell?’ I said. ‘No matter how many crowd your parlour.’

‘Even so, I dare say that your stock goes fast,’ said William, ignoring my interjection.

‘So fast that it must soon be exhausted,’ I tried again.

‘It is always fresh, every day it is fresh,’ said Nell, also ignoring me and draining her pot to the last drop.

‘Another?’ said William Eliot. ‘And Nick, you as well?’

‘Thank you, I have not finished,’ I said, with what I hope was a bad grace. It seemed my fate to be accompanied by quick drinkers. I remembered the other evening in the Ram with Master Robert Mink and his love-lorn lyrics.

‘And whereabouts is your shop situated, mistress Nell? Where does a country girl set out her stall? I ask in case I should wish to inspect your wares.’

‘You should ask directions at the place which was my Lord Hunsdon’s mansion.’ (This was, by the by, a piece of coy indirection on the part of Nell, for the house she referred to was the place now known as Holland’s Leaguer.) ‘They will be able to tell you where I am to be found.’

‘I thought so,’ said William. ‘I have seen other vendors in that street, but none, I think, that may match you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

By this time, Nell had almost finished her second pot, and I felt myself growing sick at heart.

‘Excuse me,’ said William. He went out into the yard, no doubt for a piss.

Nell turned to me. I was staring into the bottom of my tankard to avoid meeting her gaze.

‘Come, come, Nick,’ she said softly, laying her hand upon my knee. ‘It is all business.’

‘No pleasure, all trade,’ I said angrily.

‘Which would you prefer it to be? My trade is their pleasure. But it is my business, as yours is to tread the boards. We are all beholden to men from over the river.’

‘My trade is rather more respectable than yours, I think.’

‘You have not said so before.’

‘I have often thought it,’

‘I shall make it up to you,’ she said. ‘I shall restore you to good humour. Who can restore you as I can?’ she said softly but urgently, with ale-freighted breath, as she saw William Eliot returning.

I said nothing, but was a little mollified at her whispered words. It was true, who could restore me as she could? And considering all this afterwards, I had to concede that my Nell had some right on her side and that I had little excuse to interfere in her business. It was more that I did not care for it to be conducted under my nose. Nor could I be angry with William. He was only acting as I would have acted. There is also, I have observed, a little core of sweetness at the heart of jealousy. For, I think too, that I was for the first time fearful of losing her, I who had always taken the girl’s heart for granted whatever she might do with her body.

William joined us again but did not resume his position on the bench. He announced his intention to cross the river to return to his mother’s house and suggested that we share a ferry. I was relieved, for it meant that he did not intend a rendezvous with Nell at that moment, even were she willing. It meant too that, had I chosen, I could have returned with her to the place that she had described as Lord Hunsdon’s mansion. There she could make it up to me. By her little movements against my flank, that was what she seemed to have in mind. Meantime, William stood somewhat impatiently over us waiting for my answer.

‘Thank you, William,’ I said. ‘I am tired after a day’s play and I have parts to scan. I will go with you.’

I could sense my Nell’s disappointment, and was glad, and then wondered if I shouldn’t after all have accompanied her so that she might do her worst with me.

I have just now talked with the doorkeeper of the Eliot house, and I must this instant write down what he said. It is the only way to order my mind and to set things in their proper sequence. This fellow’s name is Tom Bullock and he fits it, being thick across the forehead, the shoulders, the chest, etc. Unlike in my interview with the unfortunate Francis I do not have to straighten out and tidy up his words. What Bullock had to say he said, and no more besides. And, when I had heard him, I almost wished the questions had remained unasked. I was seeking to discover whether anybody unknown or unexpected had visited the house on the afternoon of Sir William’s death. The doorkeeper has a small cubby-hole by the main entrance and anybody wishing to enter the house — or leave it, for that matter — must pass him. Perhaps Bullock sees himself as a man of a somewhat philosophical turn of mind and thinks that the greatest wisdom shows itself best in the fewest words.

Nick Revill: You remember the day of Sir William’s death?

Tom Bullock: Of course.

NR: You were on duty here?

TB: Where else would I be?

NR: When were you aware that something had happened?

TB: Something?

NR: I will be more precise. When did you first become aware that the master of the house was dead?

TB: Let me ask you a question, Master Revill.

NR: I am at your service, Master Bullock.

TB: Why are you asking me these questions?

NR: You have probably heard that I am a player.

TB: I have heard.

NR: From your tone I can see you have no very high opinion of our profession.

TB: Everyone must have a living.

NR: I am with the Lord Chamberlain’s Company. We play at the Globe on the other side of the river. Indeed, I was privileged to meet the master and mistress of this house at one of our performances.

TB: It was there also that you met Adrian the steward, I am told.

NR: Yes.

TB: And discovered him for a thief.

NR [thinking that I had glimpsed the reason for the doorkeeper’s hostility]: It is true that I had a hand in that business. I did not dismiss him, that was your master. I merely helped to expose him.

TB: I am no friend to Adrian. He got what he deserved. He is a dishonest and high-handed man.

NR: Well, we are in agreement.

TB: If you think so. But you have left my question by the wayside.

NR: Your question?

TB: Why do you wish to know about the old master’s death?

NR [forced to pluck some explanation out of the air]: I have it in mind to compose a tragedy, a deep respectful tragedy of the domestic sort, like. . like Arden of Faversham.

TB: Is he an author?

NR: It is the name of a play, a famous play, about — about a death in a household.

TB: I do not attend the playhouse.

NR: I thought not. But I am interested in the tragic events which happened in this house because-

TB: — because you wish to put them on stage?

NR [seeing that I am venturing into deeper and deeper water]: No, no. I am interested because — because ‘Humani nihil alienum’.

TB: I don’t understand your words, Master Revill. Plain English is good enough for me. Nevertheless, if you must ask some questions for private reasons of your own, do it and be done with it.

NR: Thank you. When did you first become aware that Sir William had died?

TB: I heard the cries and wailing from the other side of the house after they had brought his body in from the garden. One of the servants, Janet I think, went running around the house in tears and, all those that did not know, she told willy-nilly.

NR: In the afternoon of that day you were at your post here?

TB: I have already said so.

NR: Were there any visitors that afternoon?

TB: Most likely.

NR: Can you call any of them to mind?

TB: One was of your kind.

NR: My kind?

TB: A player.

NR: A player?

TB: Or a — whatd’youcallit? — author, I forget which.

NR: How do you know?

TB: He told me. Just as you told me a minute ago that you were with such-and-such a company at such-and-such a playhouse, he told me that he was an author or a player. Perhaps there is something about the gentlemen in your profession, you cannot hold your tongues but must be telling all the world your business.

NR: Did you admit him to the house?

TB: No.

NR: You turned him away?

TB: No.

NR: I don’t understand.

TB: It is simple enough. Listen. I was sat here as I am with you now, and this ‘gentleman’ knocked and announced himself as a player or an author I forget which — as if he expected I would fall down backwards in amazement at his greatness. But before I was able to say anything to him there was a great commotion in the street beyond the gate and so I went to see what was happening.

NR: The commotion was to do with the gentleman?

TB: Nothing at all to do with him. It was some apprentices who had uncovered two lurking foreigners and were scoffing and laughing at them. The boys made a ring about them and were mocking the foreigners’ hats or the foreigners’ manners or their foreign words.

NR: You knew they were foreign?

TB: I heard their words and I did not understand. I only know plain English, Master Revill.

NR: What did you do when you saw these apprentices and these tormented foreigners, Master Bullock?

TB: Do? It was no business of mine. Let them that be a-cold blow the coals.

NR: Of course. What happened?

TB: The foreigners received a blow or two and a hatful of curses before they managed to run away. They got off lightly — but I think the boys meant no harm.

NR: So you stood outside the gate.

TB: I guarded the house. If they had run in my direction I would have shut the gate against them.

NR: The apprentice boys?

TB: The foreigners.

NR: Then you returned to your post in here?

TB: Just so.

NR: And the visitor, the, ah, gentleman?

TB: Gone.

NR: Where? Into the house? Back into the street?

TB: Into the street.

NR: You’re sure? You saw him?

TB: No. But he would not have dared to enter the house, so he must have returned to the street.

NR: While you were watching the apprentice boys and the foreigners.

TB: While I was doing my duty, guarding this house.

NR: You’ve never seen him since that day, the afternoon of Sir William’s death?

TB: Many people visit this house. The Eliot family is a great family and they are accustomed to receiving important visitors. Those are the ones I remember.

NR: So you know nothing about this caller except that he was a player or an author-

TB: Oh he gave his name, Master Revill.

NR: Which you cannot call to mind, no doubt.

TB: Yes. But not perfect. Like a muddy reflection I cannot get it whole.

NR: Part will do.

TB: Let me see. What was it? Shagspark, Shakespurt, Shackspeer, something like that.

Once again I was playing Jack Southwold in A City Pleasure, the play about the country brother and sister who come to London and who are, it is revealed at the end, not really siblings and so may marry in safety. The play was a hit, a palpable hit, despite my predictions about it to Nell. It was during this piece that I had encountered the Eliot family for the first time and, as Thomas Bullock had reminded me, helped to expose the false steward Adrian. All this only a few days earlier, but it seemed like another life. And that had led to the invitation from young William Eliot to lodge in his mother’s and uncle’s house to see if, by keeping my eyes and ears open, I might detect anything out of the way about the death of his father.

Well, I had found out things, unwelcome things. Like a foolish mariner that sets out on a bright morning across smooth glittering water, I started full of spirit and expectation. And before I knew it I was sailing beyond the confines of the harbour and out into the open seas and had no charts to help me while, overhead, the skies looked dark. For what I was groping my way towards was that the mysterious man who had called at the house on the afternoon of Sir William’s death, the man who had eluded the distracted doorkeeper, slipped into the main garden and then somehow penetrated the inner garden, the man who had hidden himself up in the pear tree and carved his initials into the bark as he waited to drop on his victim like a thunderbolt, this man was none other than Master William Shakepeare, the principal author, joint shareholder and occasional player in the Chamberlain’s Men. The carved initials had been given flesh, as it were, by Thomas Bullock’s words, which could not but support the idea that Master Shakespeare had indeed haunted this house.

I had earlier conceived of Master WS as a murderer and a cheat and a rogue — just as I had seen him as a bishop, a prince and a king. He was all these things and more besides, because these were the things which he had made in the quick forge of his imagination. But now I began to wonder whether he might not be in reality what he had so successfully presented on stage in the persons of King Claudius or Richard III, a secret and a sly murderer.

The part of the crookbacked king brought to my mind a tale, a piece of gossip, which was given to me by Robert Mink. As well as his own lyrics, he evidently loves a naughty story. He wheezed with laughter as he told me backstage how, one day when Richard III was to be performed, Master WS noticed a young woman delivering a message to Dick Burbage so cautiously that he knew something must be up. ‘Or soon would be up,’ snorted Mink. The message from the girl was that her master was gone out of town that morning, and her mistress would be glad of Burbage’s company after the play; and the tail of the message was to know what signal he would give so that he might be admitted. Burbage replied, ‘Three taps at the door I will give, and and then I will say, “It is I, Richard the Third”.’ Richard was one of Burbage’s biggest parts, according to Mink. ‘Women were drawn to his crookedness.’

The servant girl immediately left, and Master WS followed after her till he saw her to go into a particular house in the city. He enquired about it in the neighbourhood and he was informed that a young lady lived there, the favourite of some rich old merchant. Near the appointed time of meeting, Master WS thought it proper to arrive rather before Dick Burbage. He knocked three times on the door, as agreed, and delivered Burbage’s line about Richard the Third. The lady was very much surprised at Master WS’s taking Burbage’s part; but our author is after all the creator of Romeo and Juliet. The language of love and persuasion flows in his veins. You may well believe that the young lady was soon pacified, not to say satisfied, and both she and Master WS were happy in each other’s company. And now here comes Dick Burbage to the same door of the same house, and repeats the same signal. Knock, knock, knock. And he delivers his line about the crookback king, little knowing that another has stolen a march on him. But Master WS, he pops his head out of the window and tells his fellow player and shareholder to be gone. ‘And do you know what he said to him?’ said Master Mink, hardly able to get the words out for laughter, “‘This is not your place, for William the Conqueror reigned before Richard III”.’

As I sat with Messrs Tawyer and Sincklo in the tiring-house waiting for my entry in the last act of A City Pleasure I was musing over this story and wondering whether it was true. Didn’t it contradict what Nell had said about the Chamberlain’s Men? Wasn’t Burbage a good, uxorious man? Was anyone what they seemed to be? If it was true, and not a piece of inventive, malicious gossip, what did it show about Master WS — nothing much, perhaps, except that he was mischievous and quick-witted (as I had seen for myself when he rescued me from the attentions of Adam the boatman) and that he might look out for another man’s woman. Nothing much.

‘Well, Nick, and how do you find our Company?’

It was Master WS, wearing a bland expression and his ordinary day-clothes. His voice has a country sweetness to it (how many in this realm are drawn to the great city as if by a magnet!). I was reminded of Old Nick’s honey tones and how they made my hairs bristle, whereas with Master WS you at once trusted and liked the man. And this reminded me in turn that I was due to go back and see the apothecary after this afternoon’s performance. But here and now I was face to face with this man whom, at that instant, I had been convicting in my mind of a stealthy murder.

‘I am privileged to work here, sir.’

‘We are glad enough that you are with us. I have seen you play, let me see, three times now. And I have heard good reports from Master Burbage.’

I glowed. A warm feeling filled me. How ridiculous that I could think that this civil gentleman, with his kindly brown eyes and slight country burr, was branded with the mark of Cain!

‘And in this thing of Master Boscombe’s you are. .?’ he said, referring to A City Pleasure. I suspected that he knew and was asking for the sake of conversation.

‘John Southwold, a citizen of London, a figure of fun though not to himself.’

‘It is a good piece,’ said Master WS.

‘Oh it seems to me not so good,’ I said, meaning of course not so good as one of your own, but not having the courage to say so outright.

‘How so?’

‘It is clumsy,’ I said quickly. ‘For — for example, you can see straight away that the brother and sister are not brother and sister and that they will be married by the end of the piece.’

‘Of course you can,’ said Master WS. ‘A comedy must end with a marriage. It’s a rule.’

‘And,’ I ploughed on, ‘it does not seem to my eyes a very deep satire. The audience enjoys the jokes. They laugh at the corruption and foolishness that the author shows them.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

‘But they do not understand that the author is showing them themselves. Holding the mirror up to nature.’

Master WS half smiled in acknowledgement, I supposed, of my reference to one of his own lines.

‘They think that the author is showing them their neighbours,’ he said, ‘and that is what makes them laugh.’

‘Then they do not understand properly.’

‘Everyone thinks that the satirist’s darts are aimed at the man in the next room,’ said Master WS. ‘It is not in human nature for any of us to consider the same darts as lighting on ourselves. That is why we can all bear satire so light.’

Again I noticed that deplorable tendency to punning. Accordingly, I tried to raise the tone of our dialogue with a classical reference.

‘Then it is like Pegasus and the Gorgon.’

‘It is?’

‘For Pegasus held up a mirror and deflected the glance of the Gorgon that would have turned him to stone. Just so each of us turns away the killing glare of the satirist.’

‘Very good, Master Revill, though I think that you mean Perseus. Perseus was a hero, Pegasus was a horse with wings.’

This correction was delivered so gently that I did not feel more than faintly humiliated. I was eager to keep talking, or rather listening, to this quiet man. From his clothes and relaxed manner, he had no part in the afternoon’s comedy and was apparently casting his eye backstage in the same way that a landlord might survey his estate.

‘You mentioned rules a moment ago. The rule that comedy ends with marriage. What about tragedy?’

‘A tragedy may begin with a marriage.’ And Master WS looked for a moment wistful.

‘Discord in marriage, that is comedy, is it not?’ I said. ‘The unfaithful wife, the cuckolded husband who may be dubbed the knight of the forked order — the man with horns is always a laughing stock.’ (I was thinking, on stage, yes; but I was also thinking of Sir William Eliot.)

‘But what if he that was hit with the horn was pinched at the heart, truly pinched, and so ran mad?’ said Master WS. ‘That might make a tragedy. Or if the wife accused of infidelity was innocent. That might make a tragedy.’

‘It sounds as if there are no rules then,’ I said, to draw him on. ‘These things are usually funny.’

‘Oh, there are one or two rules, if you want to call them that, though I prefer to say tricks of the trade. The kind of tricks that an alchemist might use — or an apothecary — in order to draw in an audience which is anyway willing to be seduced.’

Was it my imagination or did Master WS’s gentle gaze suddenly harden as he said ‘apothecary’? I fancied that he was looking very intently at me and I grew uncomfortable.

‘As?’ I said. ‘What rules of play-writing do you mean?’

‘That nothing very important shall happen in the first few moments, while the audience is settling down to watch and listen. They must finish talking to their neighbours or swallowing their drink or lighting their pipes. Only when they have attended to their own comforts can they give their full attention to the play. And so the business played out on stage at the beginning should be small beer.’

‘Oh,’ I said, obscurely disappointed. I had been hoping for a revelation from Master WS, not observations on the eating and drinking habits of the spectators. He continued:

‘Or — to give you an example from the other end of the action — before the climax of a play the hero shall withdraw from the action. The audience will not see him for the space of an act or so. That way, when he returns they are the more pleased at his return and the more sorrowful at his demise. Prince Hamlet is kidnapped on his way to England by pirates and we do not see him for a time. At the same time, the author must not make the fourth act overlong, in case the audience grows impatient for the hero’s restoration.’

‘Ah,’ I said, wondering whether there was not real wisdom to be found after all in such small things.

‘Now, Nick, I must not distract you because your cue arrives in a moment.’

He clapped me on the shoulder in a friendly way and then went across to have a word with Messrs Tawyer and Sincklo. So absorbed had I been by Master WS’s words and — to be truthful — so concerned had I been by the impression I was making on him that I had almost forgotten the play unwinding on stage. He hadn’t though. I realised that, all the time we’d been talking in low tones, he had been listening to the lines that reached us from the far side of the tiring-house wall and assessing the time remaining before my next entry. Master WS must have an excellent working knowledge of A City Pleasure if he knew when a minor player such as myself was due to appear. And all this for a work not his own, and one that in my eyes had appeared to be a journeyman piece. I resolved to pay more attention, to try to work out for myself some of those things that he had termed the tricks of the trade.

After the performance I made my way across the Bridge and up towards Paul’s. The streets were beginning to empty and I remembered the recent occasion when I had been convinced that I was being followed. This time I experienced no warning prickle, no sense of being observed. I felt inclined to laugh at my suspicions and the caution of hiding away under the slimy pillars of a pier on the river. Most likely the plump, respectable-seeming citizen I’d glimpsed was exactly what he seemed. Similarly with Master WS. This courteous and thoughtful man, with his fatherly concern for the younger members of the Company, how could he be other than what he appeared? Yet, as I walked up Paul’s Chain, I thought too of how fond Master WS was of disguise and doubleness in his plays. He has told us himself how one may smile and smile and be a villain.

In Paul’s the business of the day was concluding. Sellers and buyers were withdrawing to do battle again on the following morning. I thought of the young man that Nell and I had seen, fresh from the country and surrounded by coney-catchers like a solitary sheep among a pack of wolves. How much would he have lost in the card-game or whatever it was he had been lured away to, lost not just in money but in his good opinion of himself? Also forfeit would be his innocence about London. Unless he was unusually forgiving, he would never think of the town again except with anger and resentment. For a moment I felt ashamed of our bustling city and sorry for all the sheep that flock here to be shorn.

In the corner of the churchyard was the apothecary, Old Nick’s. It crossed my mind whether I should have asked Nell to accompany me since it was she who had an ‘arrangement’ with the old man. But Old Nick had been precise when he said that he wished to see me alone.

I pushed open the door of the shop. Inside, it was was even darker than on my first visit. The end of the day was overcast and little light penetrated through the squinting slit that passed for a window. After a time I could make out the recumbent shape of the alligator, together with the mermaid’s tail and the unicorn’s horn, all swaying gently overhead in the draught from the ill-fitting door. At the back of the shop on the wall hung the animal and vegetable materials, shrivelled or sagging, of Old Nick’s trade. A glass item on the counter reflected a gleam of light.

I waited.

I cleared my throat.

‘Hello,’ I said, my voice sounding oddly muffled. ‘Nick, Old Nick?’

He would make the same sinister entry as on my and Nell’s previous visit, materialising gradually from the dust and darkness at the rear of the shop. Probably he was watching me at this very moment, his own wrinkled vision accustomed to the dark places where he did his dirty business. Probably he was waiting until my unease and discomfort had reached a level that would satisfy him.

I spoke the apothecary’s name again, more loudly.

Silence. Silence in the shop apart from the odd drip of water and the occasional creak from the objects hanging from the ceiling. From outside, from the street, came the welcome shouts and shuffling sounds of ordinary life. I shivered. I would have left the dark shop if I hadn’t had the feeling that to do so would be to show myself as a coward — and not just in my own eyes. I had a strong sensation now, when there was no one around, of being watched. Also, I reminded myself, I’d come to this place because Old Nick had summoned me and for a reason: to find out from the apothecary whether he’d discovered anything on the sleeve of old Francis’s shirt.

Maybe, if the old man himself was absent, he had left a note, some indication of where he’d gone or what he’d found out. But even as I made up this idea I knew that it was not so. If Old Nick had anything to reveal to me, he would do it in person. Nevertheless, to break the stillness, I began half-heartedly to cast around in the gloom, feeling rather with my hands than finding with my eyes, groping on the counter top, across the warped wooden floor.

To my surprise my search was soon rewarded. Tucked in the angle between the base of the counter and a floor-board was a small square of paper. I unfolded it and could see the marks of writing, but the light was too poor to make out what it said, or even whether it contained words or symbols. The chances were that it was some recipe, made of ants’ tongues and maidens’ tears, to cure the pox or love-sickness. As I was crouching over this little scrap of paper somebody tapped me on the back of my neck! I must have shrieked or shouted. Certainly I jumped several feet back towards the door. My heart was thudding furiously and there was a roaring sound in my ears. I had my hand on the door, ready to pull it open and dive out into the street, when a quieter voice inside, the voice of second thoughts, told me to wait.

The tap wasn’t the tap of a person. Whatever had struck me on the neck was now sliding slowly down my backbone. My first idea was that it was the water which I had heard intermittently dripping in the darkened shop and which I had assumed, without thinking, to be the result of some half-completed experiment or spilled container. But now, even as the idea came clearly in words, I rejected it. Experiments aren’t carried out on the ceiling, and this was where the drip had come from. And water is cold, particularly when it slides down the back of your neck. This little stream was slow-moving and neither warm nor cold. It shared my body heat.

I put my hand up to feel. Then I rubbed my thumb and fingers together. They came away sticky and I knew why. Blood was dropping from the ceiling of the apothecary’s shop. I looked up. My eyes were more used to the darkness now, but it was still hard to make out the objects that swung there. They were simply shapeless, and monstrous. The unicorn’s horn, the mermaid’s tail and the tortoise shells appeared to be implements of torture from hell. The alligator seemed to wink at me with his unmoving eye and I realised with cold horror that the shape suspended from the shop ceiling was no river-beast but a man’s body. As quickly as I had decided that the shape was human came the certainty that, bundled together and trussed up over my head, was all that remained on earth of the wrinkled apothecary. He hung there, the blood in his veins gradually seeping on to the warped wooden floor.

‘And so an end.’

I startled myself with the sound of my own voice. I had time to consider that this was a strange thing to say — even time to reflect that perhaps it was a line from some play. It sounded like a play. It is strange what things will float to the surface of the mind when it scarcely knows itself. Then I had time also to consider that my voice was changed. And then I had further time to wonder whether this was, after all, my own voice or whether it did not belong to one of the shapes that seemed to grow out of the darkness around me. Even as I felt a blow to the back of my neck and others on my head, I was glad to solve this tiny mystery of whose voice it was. It belonged to one of the black shapes that was beating me. It was not my own.

And then everything descended, joltingly, into darkness.