Sleep of Death

ACT V

Now Master Ralph Ransom he comes to me early in the morning in my lodgings as I am resting and preparing to go about the business of the day. Seeing him I expect him to report success in the matter of Master Revill. But first I am surprised not to see Adrian and say so.

Fat Ralph shuffles uncomfortably.

‘Master Adrian is still there,’ he says.

‘Where?’

‘In the w-w-w-woods.’

‘Why didn’t he come back with you?’

‘He will never come b-b-b-back.’

I struggle to gain control of myself, of my anger — and fear.

‘And Master Revill, he will never come back neither?’

‘He is spoken for.’

I sigh with relief but suspect all sorts of things.

‘Explain.’

Ralph Ransom begins a long and complicated story of how they managed to surprise the player and take him off to the woods and how they met with Nub -

‘Who is Nub?’

‘A creature of Adrian’s. A d-d-d-desperate man. A charcoal burner.’

‘I see.’

But I am angry at the news. There are more and more people involved in this. Safety does not lie in numbers.

They carried Master Nicholas to some hut. He was bound hand and foot. They meant to play with him a little before they killed him.

‘And. .?’

He had a message, Ralph said, a note. In his hand the player held a note.

‘Get to the point.’

‘The p-p-p-p-point is, Master-’

‘No names, not even in private. I have told you before. Simply tell me what happened.’

‘In short, the p-p-p-player managed to run off while we were examining the note and our attention was d-d-distracted.’

‘And you caught him?’

I begin to fear the worst. In fact I have feared the worst ever since Ralph put his fat greasy face round my door.

‘We p-p-p-pursued him. Adrian must have found him. Because there was a struggle.’

Ralph’s breath is coming thicker and quicker.

‘A struggle which Adrian lost,’ I say.

‘. . In short, yes.’

‘But Master Revill, he is spoken for, you said.’

‘Oh, he crawled off into the b-b-b-b-bushes to die.’

‘You saw him? His body?’

‘Well. .’

‘Ocular proof?’

‘No, b-b-b-b-but Adrian gave a good account of himself, and inflicted some mortal strokes.’

‘On the body of a man you haven’t seen and can’t find.’

‘Adrian hates Master Revill. I hate Master Revill.’

‘Hatred by itself is not enough. It has to be accompanied by good sense.’

‘I am sure it w-w-w-was so.’

‘Wishers were ever fools,’ I say.

‘What else c-c-c-c-could have happened?’

‘Anything, you fool.’

And then I change my tone because I have decided what I have to do now.

‘Never mind,’ I say, ‘perhaps you are right and Master Revill lies even now in some ditch with twenty trenched gashes on his head, each one of them a mortal wound.’

Fat Ralph sighs with relief. His blubbery shoulders seem to grow more rounded. He repeats himself.

‘I am sure it w-w-was so.’

‘Let us assume that Master Nicholas is dead,’ I say cheerily. ‘We’ll drink to that.’

I turn my back on Ralph Ransom, telling him to make himself at ease, and go to my table and prepare two glasses of red wine. With a flourish I present one to him. I am reminded of the public display that King Claudius makes when Prince Hamlet is about to fight the duel against Laertes. How the King drops a pearl into the goblet which his nephew should drink from. How Queen Gertrude mistakenly picks up the goblet containing the pearl. How the King tries to prevent the Queen from drinking.

‘Let us drink to. . the end of our enemies.’

‘The end of our enemies,’ repeats Ralph.

‘Now,’ I say, ‘this other man, this charcoal burner. .?’

‘Nub.’

‘Yes, him. Is he secure?’

‘Secure?’

‘He will not talk.’

‘He cannot t-t-t-talk,’ says Ralph jocularly. ‘Or if he did no one would be able to understand him.‘

‘He is a foreigner?’

‘He lives in the forest, it’s the same thing,’

Ralph is now very much at his ease. So much at his ease that he begins, for the first time, to look round my lodgings. From his expression, which he scarcely troubles to keep concealed, I judge that he considers them rather meagre. True enough. I do not live as I would. I require more money, always require more money. This wooing of the ladies, it is a costly business. I am a generous fellow. Occasionally, I may take something from them in return for the expenses I am driven to (as I would have taken my lady Alice’s pearl necklace, using Adrian as my instrument, had not the young player intervened) but I spend more than I get. That is the nub of the matter. And this word brings me back to the question of the charcoal-burner, and his silence.

‘So no one will talk?’

‘No one, oh no,’ says easy Ralph.

‘Good,’ I say. ‘Have some more wine.’

‘Oh yes,’ says the dead man.

‘I have a wine-supplier in Cheapside. Perhaps you have heard of him. He is French — Monsieur Lamord.’

‘Lamord,’ says Master Ralph, rolling the name round his tongue and pretending to a knowledge of vintners that he doesn’t possess, although in this case there is no vintner called Monsieur Lamord.

‘A strange name,’ I say.

‘How so, Master-’ says Ralph, stopping when he remembers that I’ve forbidden him from uttering my name aloud.

‘In French, “l’amour” means “love”.’

‘Love, that’s a fine name for a wine-seller,’ says Ralph, ‘though too much of one is the enemy of the other.’ He sniggers. I notice that when he is relaxed and thinks himself out of danger he speaks smooth and without stuttering.

‘It also means something else if it is construed a little differently,’ I say. ‘La mort. .’

‘Yes?’ all unsuspecting.

‘. . means “death”. So Lamord is love and death, two opposites in the one word.’

‘Very good. Ha ha. Lamord. Love, death. .’

He glances at the wine glass which he has almost drained for the second time. Then he glances at me. Then his face turns grey.

‘I cannot resist a pun,’ I say.

Ralph makes to fling the glass away from him but he is too weak, either through fear or through the quick-acting effects of the venom, and I am on him. He is already a dead man with what he has swallowed, but for the sake of completeness I hold the glass against his chattering lips and teeth, and force him to drink it to the very last drop. Some red wine dribbles down his chin and spills on his clothing where it looks like blood. He chokes and arches his back. Froth forms on the corners of his mouth. His eyes roll upward into his head. His hands clench and unclench on the arms of the chair.

When I am sure that there is nothing more I can do for him I lock the door of the room and leave him to die.

I cannot deny that this business is not going according to plan. By this time perhaps there is no plan. The murder of Sir William Eliot was carefully plotted and executed. It was an act of revenge, of mischief, and of other things besides. But with the other murders that have proceeded from that, I cannot say. Once you have embarked on this bloody course there is no turning back.

It is tedious.

Like in all human affairs, the more often it is done the easier it is done, with less scruple and heart-searching.

But it is also pleasurable. I had no intention of killing Ralph Ransom. The idea occurred to me as I was talking to him. With Francis and the apothecary, I set out to kill them. The player I left to others: obviously a mistake. But with Ralph there was the word, then there was the blow. I am like a fencer who cannot foresee the direction a bout will take, the moves of his opponent, the counter-strokes he himself will employ, but must rely only on his skill and quick wits. One day soon his arm will tire or his wits grow dull and he will lose, but until that time he loves his own craftiness.

These murderous actions, planned or unplanned, create their own consequences and sequels. Now I have to dispose of Ransom’s body. Lug his fatness down the stairs and towards the river when the tide is high in the small hours of the morning. I could enlist someone to help me — Southwark swarms with the lawless and the desperate. But every accomplice is another mouth to feed or to silence. I shall do this alone.

As for Master Nicholas Revill, fat Ralph might be right. Perhaps the steward did inflict some mortal wound on the player and he is even now dying or dead in the woods. Or if he is not, then he might be scared for his life and have run away from London town. So there will be a gap in the play this afternoon.

But I expect to see him again. I will be prepared for that. I don’t know what I will do but it will be something fitting.

‘My God,’ said Richard Burbage. ‘What happened to you?’

He was preparing for his first appearance, all in black in the court of King Claudius and Queen Gertrude. In the background I saw WS looking curiously in my direction. He too was arrayed in his opening costume, the suit of armour worn by the Ghost of Hamlet’s father.

‘I fell into a fight.’

Burbage looked slightly displeased.

‘Did you win?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

‘I shouldn’t like to see your opponent.’

‘I don’t think you will.’

‘You’ve been away, Nick. And away in the wars to judge by the look of you.’

This was Master WS, who appeared at my shoulder as soundlessly as if he really were the Ghost that he played.

‘Away?’

‘I saw you this morning on the back of a farm cart coming up from the country.’

This was true. After quitting Adrian and gathering up his black hat and cloak (which I had brought to the theatre) I started to run for the town. Within a few hundred yards exhaustion overtook me. I stumbled and fell, and might have been lying there till this moment, had not a horse and cart trundled by. At first the carter suspected me for a thief and my ragged, bloody state for a ploy. I was able to convince him that it was I who was the victim of thieves, and he allowed me to slump into his conveyance. So I returned to London as I had left it, in the back of a jolting cart.

The carter was ferrying sackfulls of apples. Their sharp-sweet, heady smell crept over me as I lay huddled in the bottom of the cart, trying to make myself as small as possible. I drifted into an uneasy sleep, in which memories of stealing apples in Bristol orchards were wiped away by frantic chases through dark forests, A rat-like man was coming to cut off a tail which I had grown. My father’s body went sailing through the air to land with a thud in the communal grave of plague victims. The cart went bumping on its way to the markets north of the river and I awoke just before we reached the Bridge. It must have been somewhere around this point that Master WS had seen me and my strange mode of conveyance.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I suppose you could say that I have been away.’

‘Before the climax of a play the hero shall withdraw from the action,’ said Master WS, reminding me of his words on the previous afternoon, in what was another life. Although he was wearing armour he looked not warlike but melancholy, befitting a spirit come from the underworld with no happy news.

‘We must speak after the performance,’ said Dick Burbage to me. ‘I have something to say to you.’

‘Yes, we shall speak,’ said Master WS, Burbage’s fellow-shareholder.

A trumpet sounded the beginning of things. The musicians fluted and sawed from the gallery.

‘I must be on,’ said Master WS. He vanished.

‘And I,’ said Burbage.

I went to change in the tiring-house, although my entrance was many scenes away. Under the eyes of Alfred the tireman, I donned my costume as Lucianus, the poisoner in the play-within-the-play. I planned to add one or two items later, but needed to do it out of his sight.

My head was whirling with madcap schemes and plans. I think that I was half-mad at this time. Like a man in a maze I was struggling to find the centre, but in no very ordered fashion.

My reasoning went as follows: old Sir William Eliot had been murdered, of that there was no doubt. The circumstances of his death provided an uncanny parallel with the circumstances of old Hamlet’s death in the play by Master WS. Both victims were sleeping in an orchard, both were taken by surprise, cut off without time to prepare for death. A poison was poured into the ear of the dormant King and the same method most probably employed on Sir William. There was a brother — Claudius, Sir Thomas — hovering off-stage and waiting to take up the reins of a impatient, lascivious wife, whether Gertrude or Lady Alice. There were sons, although each had reacted differently to the father’s death: Hamlet was deeply unhappy with his mother’s choice of a second husband and bitter because he sees the throne of Denmark slipping out of his grasp; young William Eliot was grieving for his father but claimed to respect (rather than suspect) his uncle and to love his mother. Nevertheless William had been troubled enough by the parallels between art and life to ask me to ‘watch and listen’ in his own house.

I might have been inclined to put William’s sense that all wasn’t well down to fancy or imagination. Since he was afflicted by the need to model himself on Hamlet, what more natural than that he should assume his hero’s distrust of the world, and the feeling that everything in it was rank and rotten, an unweeded garden? But the events of the past few days, from the drowning of Francis to my own scrape with death, had shown me that William’s intuition was right. All was very far from being well.

The question I came back to, the one that I’d entered in Greek lettering in my notebook, was: who?

Who had been responsible for the death of Sir William, the death of Francis, the employment of Adrian and fat Ralph to kidnap and kill me?

There were two or three possibilities, as I saw it.

One was that Lady Alice had plotted to kill her husband — for the usual reasons, a jaded appetite and the wish for change. What I had seen of the couple from my vantage-point in the pear tree showed how she despised her first husband and was at one with her second. Some things would have been beyond a woman’s strength, I judged, and she would have needed help, but when did a beautiful and dangerous woman ever lack a man’s hands? She could have hired assistance, or been in league with Sir Thomas. An objection to this was the appearance of Adrian on the scene. Would he have been taken on, in this vicious capacity, by the woman or the man who had so recently discharged him from their service? Unless this was all a ploy. I went round in circles.

Another, stranger possibility was that son William had killed father William. He had hidden up the tree, he had scampered towards the old man’s supine form, he had poured the deadly preparation in the porches of the paternal ear. There is no reason for thinking this, apart from the whisper in my innermost head that says that sons wish for dead fathers, and all so that they may have their mothers to themselves alone. If I examine the matter honestly, it was sometimes so with me.

A third possibility: the murderer of Sir William Eliot is none other than Master WS himself. I do not see our gentle, vanishing author wielding the knife or passing out the poisoned glass, but these feats of open or concealed violence he has done again and again in his mind’s eye, for his pieces are full of death and villains and destruction. I could not help remembering those initials carved into the trunk of the tree in the Eliots’ garden, or what the gate-keeper had said about the identity of the visitor who called at the house on the day of Sir Thomas’s death. I could not but think of the odd comments made by Master WS, of the looks he has cast in my direction. Perhaps within him some barrier has broken down, and he no longer knows what is art and what is life. He writes a murder, he enacts one. Or he does it first, then he tells us of it. It is no longer enough that he imagine himself a homicide, he must play the part in truth and see where it takes him.

But I have to prove my case.

As Master WS may have taken a leaf out of his own book, as it were, so too will I. In our author’s play, Prince Hamlet tests the King’s guilt by showing him to his teeth and face the image or pattern of his crime. When the travelling players arrive at Elsinore castle they are requested, even commanded, by the Prince to stage a play which, in words and dumb-show, exposes the uncle’s supposed deed. If he changes colour, if he squirms on his throne, if he hangs his head in shame, Hamlet will know him for what he is. He watches his uncle-father watching the play. Not trusting the testimony of his own eyes, he tells his good and faithful friend Horatio to watch the King too. But, in the end, there is no need because the entire audience sees what Hamlet sees.

Claudius runs from the play when it’s hardly got going. As the poisoner (me, Lucianus) appears to work his wicked will on the sleeping king, mouthing threats and making damnable faces, the real King calls out for lights. Daunted by a play he is. Frighted with false fire he is. In front of his court he flees. He is the man.

I planned something similar.

When I got down from the cart on the Southwark side of the Bridge that morning I first made my way to Nell’s. Her reaction was like Master Burbage’s.

‘My God, you look terrible, Nick.’

She had a little looking-glass and carried it to me. My face was a mass of bumps, bruises and scratches, from the beating I’d received and from my headlong flight through the forest. There was blood there too, and on my hands and clothing. Adrian’s as well as mine. My limbs ached and my wrists were badly chafed from the effort of freeing them from the ropes. I considered making some reference to our last meeting, in the Goat amp; Monkey with William, and to the way in which I had snubbed her because she was pursuing her trade with young Eliot. But I did not want to reopen old wounds — I had enough fresh ones.

Nell brought some water in a pewter bowl and a cloth and gently wiped away the mess around my face. I winced and drew my breath in sharp. She applied salves and ointments, of which she always kept a plentiful stock. Is there a mother in every woman?

Unlike a mother, though, Nell did not question me, at least not then. Perhaps because she deals so much with men, and with our strange and shameful needs, she is content to let things go unexplained. Instead, she chattered on about the remedies she was applying and how this one was compounded of rue and sanicula, and that one was made of strawberry leaves and fennel and mercury mortified with aqua vitae, you understand. . What I understood was that my Nell was a country girl at heart and knew the remedies of the fields and forests. I also understood that she’d spent plenty of time in Old Nick’s company. She was using expressions that were not natural to her. Her patter and expertise must have come, in part, from him. I wondered whether to tell her of the old apothecary’s fate, trussed up and dead in the place where his alligator had hung. I wasn’t certain of the nature of the relationship between Nell and the old man, whether their ‘arrangement’ was for business or pleasure. With a whore, of course, the one may be the other. On the whole I thought the news of Old Nick’s demise could wait. Sooner rather than later there would be a full accounting, after which she would know all.

I was grateful to be lovingly tended and, as I lay on the bed that we sometimes shared, I felt myself slipping into an exhausted sleep even as she talked away. But I couldn’t allow myself rest — the play had not yet run its course.

‘Nell. . ow-’

‘Don’t talk, Nick. Let me finish.’

‘This is important. It’s — oof — to do with what happened.’

‘I’m not asking any questions, Nick. Keep still.’

‘I will tell you everything later. But there is something — ah — I want you to do.’

‘It’s a bit early in the day-’

‘It’s — ouch-’

‘ — and you’re in no condition for that.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘What then?’

‘I want you to go to the playhouse.’

‘To ply my trade?’

Nell picked up some of her customers at the theatre, although I had asked her to keep away from the Globe, at least for as long as I was working there.

‘No, to watch.’

‘Are you in a play?’

‘Yes. I am Lucianus, nephew to the king — and a poisoner.’

‘Oh, that play.’

‘That play. But I don’t want you to watch that play. The play’s not the thing. I want you to watch someone watching it.’

‘This is deep, Nick. Perhaps you have a touch of fever and are not altogether sure of your words.’

‘I am altogether sane. (Although I am by no means sure that I was at this point.) Listen. I wish you to observe someone and to see how they respond to what is happening on stage.’

‘But you could do this.’

‘I will be watching someone else. Besides, Nell, two pairs of eyes are better than one. I do not trust my senses. I am stumbling in the dark.’

‘You are not well, Nick.’

I was moved by her words and, more, by the way that she uttered them.

‘Scratches and bruises only. My mind is clear. Nell, do you ever think of leaving London?’

‘Whatever for? How would I do for a living?’

‘There are men and towns everywhere, if you are determined to persist in your course of life.’

‘Why, you know London has more men — and more of them rich ones — than any other town. And you know what they say. Fair wenches cannot want favours while the world is so full of amorous fools. Where could I find such a good place again?’

‘Good, Nell? Good for trade perhaps, but is it for your good?’

‘How solemn you sound, Nicholas. What has happened to you that you’ve turned moraliser?’

I thought of the deeds of the night before. I saw the body in the wood, but kept silent.

‘I’ve been thinking that I may not be welcome here much longer. I might return to the country.’

‘Not with me for company, my dear. Or not until I’m too dried up and raddled for the sacking law.’

‘Sacking law?’

‘Whoredom. Were you going to ask me to go with you?’

‘No. . well, not exactly. I just wondered. . Look, to come to the business in hand. That play. There is a performance this afternoon.’

‘Which I should go to but which I shouldn’t watch.’

‘You are often at the playhouse but not for the action on stage, I think.’

‘True,’ she said. ‘But you want me to watch a watcher, not catch him for profit.’

‘Watch a watcher and give me your opinion.’

‘A whore’s opinion. What did you say to me the other day, “My trade is rather more respectable than yours, I think”?’

I saw now that it was not always to my advantage that Nell recalled my words. I felt priggish, particularly as she uttered this in a fluting voice which suggested the puritan. That wasn’t how I’d sounded, surely?

‘I would value your opinion,’ I said, as Robert Mink had said to me in the matter of his verses.

She did not reply.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘I am sorry for my thoughtless words to you as you were going about your business. In the Goat amp; Monkey.’

‘Those I have forgotten. Very well. I will do this for you — but you must promise me one thing, Nick. Not to try and reform me.’

‘I wasn’t trying,’ I said. ‘I merely asked if you ever wanted to leave London.’

‘It comes to the same. Do not become like the Puritans and the moralisers who believe that women like me must have sin beaten out of them by the beadle. Or, with you, it would be the softer kind — the ones who believe we must all be unhappy at our work and will leap at the chance to turn honest. .’

‘I never. .’

‘. . as if we could earn a quarter as much in any other trade. If you men would have us reform you must stop visiting us first — yes, and paying for the pleasure too.’

‘I’m sorry I ever mentioned it,’ I said. And I was too.

‘Now tell me what you want of me this afternoon,’ she said.

So I did.

The next step was easier than I’d expected. From Nell’s I crossed the river to the Eliots’ house. William was curious as to where I’d been the previous night and even more curious about my battered state. I palmed him off with some story about an argument, a fight, typical behaviour among the raffish players, didn’t he know.

‘I will be leaving soon,’ I said. ‘My contract with the Globe is coming to an end because Jack Wilson is returning.’

This, by the by, was more than I knew, although I did know that my days must be numbered. They certainly would be by the end of the afternoon.

‘I will be leaving London too,’ I said.

I was surprised to hear myself saying this.

‘I am sorry for that,’ said William. ‘I have enjoyed your company.’

‘Thank you. And I yours.’

‘You have learned nothing in my uncle’s house?’

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps I can tell you later, after this afternoon’s performance. You will be at the Globe?’

‘I could not miss the Prince of Denmark,’ said William, ‘though I must have seen him live and die a half dozen times.’

‘And my Lady Alice?’

‘My mother doesn’t like the play, as you know. Too many words and too many memories stirred up. Probably the very reasons that I like it.’

‘Could you persuade her to attend? It will most likely be my last performance. And I have other reasons. .’

‘I will try.’

‘Sir Thomas?’

‘My uncle is away on business.’

‘Is he in Dover?’

‘He has business there, yes, I believe.’

So all was arranged.

And now I stood waiting to make my entrance in the dumb-show.

‘How are you, Nicholas?’

I turned round and there was Master Robert Mink, looking as affable as ever.

‘My, I wouldn’t like to have been your opponent,’ he said casting his eyes over my visage.

Despite my best efforts at face-painting it was, I suppose, still obvious from close to that I had disgraced myself in some apprentice-style brawl. In a way this suited the villainous role which I had to play, but I still grinned sheepishly at Master Mink.

‘No questions,’ he said. ‘You young men! Sudden and quick in quarrel, as our friend says.’ He nodded in the general direction of the stage, meaning Master WS.

He was costumed as the Player King, a part that was well fitted both to his bodily size and his good-natured authority. In the dumb-show, and then in the play-within-the-play, he must suggest a weary wisdom. When his Queen announces that she will never marry after his death, he knows that she protests too much. She will do what she says she will not. A royal widow does not sit long with an empty throne for company. Thinking of which, I cast my eyes in the direction of the box occupied by Lady Alice Eliot and William. I could not see them and had to hope that they were visible from the vantage point on the other side where I had secured a seat for Nell.

‘Well,’ said Master Mink, ‘and you are enjoying your time with the Chamberlain’s Men?’

‘I fear that my time is almost over.’

‘Jack Wilson is coming back?’

‘He is sure to be, soon. His mother must either be dead or have decided to live a little longer.’

‘I am glad that he is to return. He is a good player, although I am not sure that you don’t have — ah — darker looks than Jack and so are more apt for darker parts.’

‘Master Shakespeare was kind enough to say something of the same sort when we first met,’ I said.

‘Did he now? Well, he is the best judge of these things, I suppose. Anyway we shall be sorry to lose you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, reflecting that this was a fine day for compliments.

‘Before you leave you must visit my lodgings. You have not yet heard my Lover’s Triumph.’

‘No, I have not.’

‘My lodgings would be better than the Beast with Two Backs. We would not have to depend on the stumbling service of Gilbert the potboy. I have a fine red wine that I’d like your opinion of.’

‘I would be honoured.’

‘And now I must take a few moments to myself. I always do this before I go on stage.’

He removed himself into a corner. Meantime I fumbled in the sleeve of my costume for a speech I’d penned earlier. This is the very same device which Hamlet uses, a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines planted in the play to expose Claudius. Well, I did not pretend to be Master WS and would not dare to hold up my poor candle to his blazing sun, but I congratulated myself that I’d managed to add a few lines in the style of what Lucianus delivers when he is about to pour poison into the ear of the Player-King (Master Robert Mink). These lines would hint at the real-life mystery and murder of Sir Thomas Eliot.

My plan, as should be evident, was to confront those whom I considered might be responsible for this foul deed.

To wit: Lady Alice Eliot, spied on by Nell in the audience.

To wit: Master WS, spied on by myself from the stage.

(It was a pity that Sir Thomas was absent in ‘Dover’ but I believed that, if he were guilty, he shared that guilt with his wife, and that therefore, if she were exposed, so too would he be.)

All this might seem to strain belief. Why should a man or woman spill their secrets because they see them played out on a stage? But I had authority for what I was doing, the authority of the Prince of Denmark himself, for:

Adding lines to plays is common enough. The broader clowns in the other companies did it all the time, even if the professionalism of the Chamberlain’s Men kept Robert Armin, our company clown, within bounds. Nevertheless, what might be tolerated in an older player would not be allowed in a snipper-snapper like myself. Even if nothing untoward occurred as a result of my own little lines-within-a-play-within-a-play, I would be cast out of the Chamberlain’s for impudence, for incompetence. I would never work with such a company again. Most likely, I would never act again.

I would go back to the West Country and, like the prodigal son, turn into a keeper of swine.

I would go back to my own land and follow my father into the church. Without his certainty and his charity, I would become a sexton and dig graves.

But the play had not yet run its course. I had to expose a murderer.

I wasn’t relying on my feeble words alone. I slipped on the cloak and hat that belonged to Adrian, the false steward. They were his badge or emblem, the mark by which he was most surely recognised. Like the cuts and bruises on my face, they sorted with the part I played. That I was wearing a costume not issued by the tireman would also be held against me, I thought, as I rapidly adjusted Adrian’s mantle. There was dried blood around the collar.

And now I must be on. I slept-walked through the dumb-show. I went through the wordless motions of pouring poison into kingly ears, and pouring another kind of poison into the ears of the widowed but receptive queen. All this time I was in a frenzy of impatience to reach the main action so that I might speak the lines I had composed. It would most probably be the last thing I said on a public stage. I was conscious of banks of faces in the boxes and galleries, of shifting bodies in the pit. The day, which had promised so fair early in the morning, had grown dull. Sullen clouds hung over us and I felt the odd drop of rain.

As I came off after the dumb-show I saw Master WS looking at me most strangely. He had no part in the play-within-the-play or in the court scene in which it unfolds, but he was due on very shortly afterwards, a visitor in Gertrude’s bedchamber where the Ghost appears — though only to Hamlet’s eyes — for the last time. Master WS had removed the armour worn in the opening scenes on the castle battlements and was garbed in a night-gown. Now he is to become a wistfully reproachful Ghost, dressed as he might have been in life had he visited his wife’s chamber. He stretches his arms across the divide between the living and the dead but the Queen does not see him.

I noticed that Master William Shakespeare, the Ghost in a nightgown, was looking at Master Nicholas Revill, the player-poisoner dressed in a dead man’s mantle. He was wondering why I wasn’t wearing my proper costume. He was wondering where he had seen my outfit before. He began to make towards me, but at that moment I heard my cue.

The Player Queen has just wished a good sleep to the Player King,

Sleep rock thy brain,

And never come mischance between us twain

and when she exits I enter. As I did my fear dropped away. I became master of the stage. There was a appreciative intake of breath from five hundred people, the little gasp of satisfaction that comes from seeing a villain about to do his worst. While Hamlet flew around talking to Claudius and Ophelia in state of high old excitement, I stood rubbing my hands and pulling naughty expressions.

On the line ‘leave thy damnable faces’ I stepped forward to the recumbent body of Master Robert Mink. He was on the ground with his back to the double audience, that is the court audience of Elsinore and the real audience in the Globe. Before lying down to sleep in his ‘orchard’ he had carefully laid his crown to one side. As I moved forward, I threw covetous glances at this golden ring. I crouched down and reached out a finger towards it, tentatively, as if it were a hot pan. Then I stood upright, fumbled beneath the cloak for the phial of poison and spoke over the sleeping king. I noticed Master Mink regarding me with his open eyes.

With a trembling excitement I got to the end of the bit written by Master WS.

At this point I should have poured the poison into the sleeper’s ears. Instead I went on:

Then I bent forward to deliver my poison. And several things happened at once, some of them expected, some not. What should happen as the poison is poured is disarray. My lord Hamlet speaks quickly to King Claudius and the rest, explaining how this is only a play they’re watching. But his words have no effect, and the guilty King shouts for light and dashes for the exit.

What actually happened was this: the players who made up the court spectators, including Dick Burbage as the Prince, at once realised that I’d started to improvise. I sensed rather than saw their slightly puzzled looks and altered postures. What does this provincial lad think he’s doing? How dare he tamper with the lines written by Master WS, author, player and chief shareholder! Where is he taking us? And, if they were listening to the words I was uttering, they would wonder what I was talking about. The references to Adrian the steward, to Old Nick, the dead apothecary, the warnings to the murderer that all his acts serve but to enmesh him more helplessly in the nets of hell, all this had a private meaning that was far from the purpose of the speech as written for Lucianus, nephew to the king. What the Globe audience made of it was anyone’s guess. Probably hardly a one of them noticed anything was amiss. You’d have to know the play very well, as William Eliot did, to be aware of this little straying from the path.

In any case Burbage and the others retrieved the situation brilliantly, as you’d expect. Hamlet spoke his lines, Claudius panicked and headed for the exit. The agitated court dispersed. The overlooked players slunk off, puzzled at the extreme expression of kingly disapproval which their drama had provoked.

I’ve left the most important detail till last.

As I delivered my own inferior lines and leaned forward to discharge the poison into the sleeping king’s ear, I saw Robert Mink’s eyes fixed unblinkingly on me from his position on the stage floor. He took in my tall black hat, he took in my sable-coloured mantle. Like the other players he was aware that I had departed from the text in the lines which I uttered. Unlike them he did not seem baffled. Then it shot through me with the speed of an arrow.

He was the murderer!

Master Mink, who had given me the note for my Lady Alice on my second afternoon in the theatre. Who had hidden up a tree in an orchard in the springtime and secured the death of Sir William, her husband and his rival. Who had enticed poor innocent Francis to his death. Who had put an end to Old Nick and hung him up in the air. Who had urged false Adrian and fat Ralph and dumb Nub to do away with me most viciously. And all this for the love or lust of Lady Alice, so that he might possess her or her property, or both. Just as Claudius slays his brother so that he may lay his hands on wife or crown, or both. Had I not seen, during our meeting in the Ram, how he regarded himself as a true (and spurned) lover? For sure, the fervour and the self-pity with which he had delivered the Lover’s Lament had not been counterfeit. Had I not also witnessed his casual malice, the way he held the unfortunate potboy’s hand over the candle? Master Mink, I saw clearly (even though my brain was wild and whirling), was that most dangerous kind of man who is all sweet and easy on one side to conceal what is crabbed and angry on the other.

This takes many minutes to commit to paper but so fast is our understanding sometimes, that all these things I knew for true in less time than it takes to say ‘one’.

I believe too that my state — exhausted, cut and bruised, newly escaped from the threat of emasculation and death, red-handed with the blows inflicted on the false steward Adrian, conscious that my time with the finest, most noble company of players in the world had now run its course and that I would in future live my life as an humble swineherd, away from the terrors and temptations of this busy city — I believe, I say, that my strange state of mind and my fatigued body gave me an especial understanding. Standing not quite at right angles to the world, I saw more clear what was the case. And the case was not good.

This ‘understanding’ passed between us, Revill and Mink, without words, and Master Mink, he looked both sad and glad. Sad that his secret had been discovered yet also glad to have been found out.

Then he was up and off, escaping like Claudius from the unearthing of his crime. Yet to any onlooker his departure was simply in character. Like the rest of the players he departs quickly but quietly, to avoid the King’s anger and also to leave the stage free for Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

As I made my own way off stage I heard the scene taking its predestined course, with the prince mocking his one-time friends and exulting in the certainty of his uncle’s guilt.

I too had found a guilty man, but in a quite unexpected quarter. I thought of my stupidity in assuming that Master WS might be a villain, I thought of the way I had told Nell to fasten her gaze on Lady Alice. I wondered what to do next.

Now that I had discovered to my own satisfaction who had first forged this chain of killings I felt a strange responsibility for him. I saw Robert Mink exit not just the stage but the theatre itself and before I knew it I was outside in the street too. He set off, without a backward glance, down Brend’s Rents, the lane which runs past the towering white walls of the playhouse. He was still wearing the costume of the Player King, although without the crown. He ran the risk of a great fine if he was found out for this offence. But his hurry showed how he had already been found out, and in a rather greater matter than the taking of a costume.

The rain that had been hanging over our heads now started to fall in earnest. This was no fierce storm as on the last night, but a weeping in the heavens rather than their anger. Truly, Nature fits herself to us. Mink turned down one alley, then another, moving with steady purpose. Perhaps he was making for his lodgings. The alleys soon became slick with mud and churned-up waste as the rain drove along them. I had not taken off Adrian’s hat and mantle. The first kept my head dry but the second soon hung heavy and wet. Still Master Mink did not cast his eyes over his shoulder. He was heading for the river, I realised. There were several sets of steps nearby which served the theatres and bearpit and other places of pleasure.

He reached the open riverside and I heard him hail a waterman. I could, perhaps, have run and caught him up but instead I moved more slowly. The rain was coming down thickly now and the far bank was a blur. As he was about to embark, he turned for the first time and saw me, but without surprise, as if he had known all the time that he was being followed. He seemed to be waiting. Then his gaze shifted to my right.

I turned and saw Master WS approaching. He was dressed in the night-gown he wore for his third and last appearance as a Ghost.

‘Wait, Robert,’ he shouted. ‘Master Mink, stay!’

But, as if that were the signal he’d been waiting for, Mink leaped into the waiting boat and pushed off from the steps. Almost at the same time he bent down and seized the standing waterman by the legs and jerked him up and out of his own boat. The man fell into the river. Like most of his kind he was probably no swimmer and it was lucky therefore that he landed in a shallow spot and was able to flounder and wade his way to safety.

Master WS seized me by the arm and pulled me in the direction of the river. The wind was coming colder off the water, blowing gusts of rain and spray in our faces. Waves slopped at the piers of the steps. Anybody already out on the river now would be heading for shelter, if they were sensible, and I doubted that any boatman would take a fare in this weather.

Master WS called to a boat that had just pulled in. The fare from the other side of the river scuttled off, pressing payment into the boatman’s palm, and ran up the steps to get out of the wet.

‘No sir, not in this,’ called out the boatman.

‘He’s taken my boat, Adam. The bastard, the cock-sucking arse-wipe, the triple-turned turd.’

This was the ferryman who had been so rudely ejected from his own craft, now back on shore, and standing beside Master Shakespeare and me, as witnesses to the offence against him. He was dripping from his immersion in the river and the rain. He was a powerfully built man. His chest heaved as he bellowed out these choice descriptions of the boat-robber. If Mink hadn’t taken him by surprise, the boatman looked as though he wouldn’t have been bested.

‘Not Adam Gibbons, is it?’ said Master WS to the ferryman who’d just docked, half shouting to make himself heard above the roar of the wind.

‘Depends who’s asking.’

The boatman was bobbing on the choppy water and his head jumped up and down above the top of the steps.

‘Adam Gibbons, the master boatman?’

‘Took my boat, he fucking did,’ bellowed the voice of the mariner beside us.

Adam the boatman was more interested in the compliments flying through the air than he was in the grouses of his fellow-sailor.

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘We have met, boatman. You said that if I ever needed a boatman for something special, I should just bear old Adam in mind.’

Recognition dawned in the streaming, upturned face of old Adam as it emerged into view above the steps. The water ran down his beard like rain off thatched eaves. Recognition dawned in me, too. This was the boatman who’d nearly throttled me when I’d accused him of being a pleonast. That last occasion Master WS had saved my life. Now it looked as if he was trying to endanger it. I might have more than one life, like the cat, but I did not consider that I had more than one in a single day.

‘Beg pardon, sir, didn’t recognise you in that. . that. . them night-clothes.’

‘That boat is my lifeblood and my livelihood, Adam. Bleeding bastard cunt’s taken my liveli-fucking-hood,’ said the ferryman whose boat was now bobbing away. Who would not recognise the authentic, oath-ridden tone of the Thames boatman?

‘Well, now is the time for something special, Adam,’ said Master WS, ignoring the desperate bellows to one side of us. In the midst of the downpour and the noise of the wind, there was in WS’s voice a note of good humour, even amusement.

‘We require you to pursue the boat that belongs to your fellow. We need the man who stole it and your fellow, he needs his boat back. Will you help us?’

Up and down bobbed Adam’s head.

‘I don’t know, sir. . this weather. .’

The wind took his words and hurled them round about. Whitecaps were forming in the middle of the river. Spray spattered the platform where were stood. Inwardly, I withdrew my notion that Nature or Providence matched their weathers to our moods or needs. This looked like an unwise moment to launch onto the Thames. I could see Master Mink pushing, pushing, pushing his way up and down and through the waves towards the far bank — though he had not yet succeeded in rowing far.

‘I’ll make it worth your while, Adam.’

‘Well, sir. . that depends what my while’s worth, don’t it.’

The boatman’s head bobbed.

‘It will be a measure of your great skill.’

‘No flattery, sir.’ The head bobbed again.

‘I am sure you would like to help your poor robbed fellow here. .’

‘No charity neither.’ The head bobbed once more.

‘Or are you like one of these fresh-water mariners, whose ships were drowned in the plain of Salisbury?’

I was still trying to work out this jibe and wondering how Master WS got away with it whereas I was handed a throttling for trying to be clever, when old Adam’s face bobbed up for the last time.

‘Hop aboard.’

‘And me,’ said the other boatman. ‘Let me get my hands on the fucking cunt.’

‘No room, Ben,’ said Adam. ‘Only these two gentlemen here.’

He obviously hadn’t recognised me. I would willingly have surrendered my place on the rocking, pitching boat to Ben — or to the archangel Gabriel for that matter — but Master WS seemed determined that I should accompany him. He stepped in first and I followed in an awkward movement that was something between a step, a scrabble and a jump. To move from the relative solidity and safety of the stairs to this narrow, swaying craft, to know that only a thin skin of wood separated me from the green slopping waters of the Thames, was to experience, and for the second time in little more than twelve hours, a powerful fear for my life. As I got down almost on a level with the tide, the river seemed to expand and fill the horizon, and I entered a watery universe.

I am no fish, I cannot swim.

On the bank, Ben the boatman was shouting obscenities into the teeth of the wind and waving his fist at his own distant boat, or rather at its occupant. Adam pulled out into the bouncing waters. Master WS and I huddled on the seats in the stern. I pulled my — Adrian’s — hat lower on my brows. WS was bare-headed and the rain beat at his large balding brows, but he did not seem to care.

‘Good, Adam, good, master boatman,’ he muttered by way of encouragement to the grizzled greybeard wielding the oars. WS’s face still showed traces of a ghostly painted whiteness and his sodden night-gown clung to his undergarments. I realised that he must have sped out of the theatre after us as soon as he had completed his final appearance as the Ghost. The play would continue whatever the weather. The players were partly protected by the stage-roof, while the better class of spectators sat snug in their boxes and galleries. The groundlings in the pit endured the rain as stoically as an army on campaign, appearing to enjoy the vicissitudes of the elements.

As far as I was able to see through the rain and spray the river was almost empty of smaller boats. This made it easier to keep sight of Master Mink in his stolen craft. I had crossed the river often enough by ferryboat but always when the water was, by comparison, like a millpond. Now I recognised for the first time the force and fury of which this great broad slippery fellow was capable. The jumping and bucking of the little ferryboat was like being on a mischievous horse, and reminded me of my fear the first time my father had put me astride one.

‘We are gaining,’ said Master WS. ‘This is excellently done, master boatman.’

It was true that Mink’s boat seemed a little nearer. The figure of the rower was furiously plying the blades. Sometimes one of the oars flailed helplessly in the air, at others it was buried deep in the frothing current and Mink had to twist his body to retain hold of it. Like us, he was bobbing violently up and down, and either his motion or his diminished size against the river and sky — or perhaps the frantic futility of the to-and-fro action — made me think of a small child on a hobby-horse. It was plain that he didn’t know what he was doing and that matters were slipping out of his control as we approached the middle of the river where the current was strongest. At this difficult pass Adam’s skill showed through. He was strong in the chest and arms — as I knew to my cost — from years of pulling people from shore to shore. More important, he knew the river and its moods inside out, backwards and forwards, top to bottom, and although he mightn’t have ventured out in this weather from choice, now he was here he knew how to ride the waves. He knew when and where to thrust his blade deep into the swirling flow, when and where to withdraw it so that it just skimmed the spume.

I found that my own alarm had blown away, as if in the wind. It was partly the horrid fascination of watching an individual in much greater difficulty than ourselves on the water and partly the sense that we, Master WS and Master NR, were in the hands of a man who knew his trade and acquitted himself skilfully. I began to think that WS’s compliments to the boatman had not been so extravagant after all, and that, were we to survive this enterprise, I would treat this class of men more respectfully in future.

Adam glanced round over his shoulder to check our progress. He turned back and bared his teeth at Master WS in triumph. Suddenly the distance had narrowed sharply. Caught by some miniature whirlpool or species of eddy, Master Mink’s boat was moving in slow circles while we continued to plough through the waves as slow but remorseless as fate. If Mink had noticed us he didn’t give any sign. He was more concerned to regain control over his craft. But his oars hardly connected with the water. Like a pair of giant wooden scissors, they cut the turbulent air.

Master WS stood up in the stern beside me.

‘Careful, sir,’ cried Adam, but Master WS, he paid no attention to the boatman’s caution.

Cupping his hands around his mouth he called out Mink’s name. Once, then again.

Despite the usual gentleness and evenness of his speech he could, as occasion required, throw his voice so that it landed like a dart at the back of the gallery. This he did now. Mink must have heard because he stopped agitating his oars and looked across at us. Distracted, his grip on one of the oars slackened and it slipped itself from the rowlock and floated away out of reach. His small chance of escape vanished with it. All the time the gap between the two boats was closing. It might have been an illusion, but it seemed to me that out here at the midpoint of the river the water was less broken and choppy than it was inshore.

‘Robert,’ called WS again when he had got the other’s attention. ‘We must talk, you and I.’

This was such a ridiculous thing to say, in the middle of a rainstorm, in the middle of rough water, that I almost burst out laughing.

‘Bring us closer, boatman Adam.’

Adam swung and twisted and turned his blades with the dexterity of a swordsman until our boat approached nearer to Mink’s. Master Mink, like the two of us, was still wearing his costume. He was a very bedraggled and woebegone Player King, just as Master WS was a damp Ghost and I, I was a sorry poisoner.

‘Can we attach ourselves to him?’ WS asked Adam. ‘A rope or a hook?’

We too began to circle slowly, caught up in the same fluvial eddy. A strange calm had settled over the scene. I glanced up. The clouds had torn themselves apart in their brief fury and now, in their exhaustion, patches of impossible blue showed among the dirty white. Adam reached beneath his seat and grabbed a coil of rope from some nether compartment.

‘Fasten this to the sternpost, sir, and then let him catch a-holt of it.’

To the mariner’s manner born, Master WS slipped the looped and knotted end of the cable over our sternpost and, alerting Robert Mink with a shout, tossed the coils to the other boat. Mink might have chosen to ignore the shout and the rope spinning through the air but instead he chose to be helped. Seizing the other end of the cable he swiftly secured it to one of the thwarts before passing it round the sternpost in his, or rather Ben’s, boat. Now, joined by a cord, the four of us began a stately rotation, the two ferryboats dancing on water that sparkled and gleamed in the newly emergent sun. The skill and mastery of Adam Gibbons kept both craft in the same position relative to each other. A half dozen yards separated us. The far banks were a slowly shifting backdrop.

Robert Mink’s plump, affable face appeared no longer so well-fed or friendly. Replacing it was no expression of evil, such as would have suited a man who had commited at least three murders; nor any sign of remorse, as would have befitted a penitent; but instead a curiously affronted look. Now occurred the following dialogue, as calmly as if the three of us were sitting in a tavern after a performance. I call it a dialogue because, although I intervened once or twice, the main business was between Robert Mink and William Shakespeare, as will be clearly seen. The role of old Adam, meantime, was to lead us slowly round and round in the freshly washed sunshine and to see that we came to no harm.

‘Well,’ said WS. ‘Dick Burbage will not be pleased to see three of his costumes walking away like this.’

‘Nicholas is wearing no costume, but a dead man’s clothes,’ said Mink.

Master WS looked down at where I sat hunched and shivering on the stern seat, wrapped in Adrian’s mantle, topped by his hat.

‘Why, so am I,’ said Master WS, plucking at the sleeve of his ghostly night-gown and referring to the late King of Denmark. ‘I am dressed in a dead man’s garb.’

‘Ever the jester,’ said Mink. ‘Like your Yorick.’

‘But this is no jest,’ said WS.

‘No jest,’ said Mink. ‘I have been out and about killing people. Why, I killed one this morning at breakfast.’

I started shaking and could not stop.

‘And I killed one last evening at supper-time and hung him up in place of an alligator. Master Revill knows who I mean.’

My teeth began to chatter. .

‘And another I killed one night by these very waters. He had a dirty shirt and would not keep it clean.’

. . and chatter.

Around us circled the watchful buildings of London, the palaces and the stews, the theatres and temples.

‘For the first I was up a tree. I entered through the husband’s door and waited up a tree. I watched until he was asleep in his hammock. Then I poured it all down his ear. Guaiacum paste and mercury. Because his wife said she wanted me. She gave me the key to her husband’s door. I had the key from her but she did not open up to me. She preferred the brother. She tricked me.’

‘This is all a play, Robert,’ said Master WS, gently.

‘No play but still your work,’ said Mink. ‘The other one now, Francis, he got it on his sleeve so that was the end of him.’

‘This is my play which you have been playing in. You are sick in your mind.’

‘No play, I tell you,’ said Robert Mink, ‘although there are almost as many dead as at the end of one of your pieces.’ He laughed. ‘My dead will not rise up for applause and a little dance. Clap and see.’

He gazed about as though he expected an invisible audience to respond. Then, as if he was urgently seeking to convince us, he said: ‘You are looking for Master Ransom? You see, I have names. I can give you chapter and verse.’

‘Who is he?’ said WS.

‘Your young player there knows who I mean.’

‘He is a c-c-c-confederate of that gentleman’s,’ I said. ‘He tried to d-d-d-dispose of me last night.’

‘He will bother you no more,’ said Mink. ‘It was he I had for breakfast.’

‘You are sick, Robert,’ said WS. ‘You don’t know your own words.’

‘I am as sane as you are. I am in earnest.’

The boats bobbed about. In the distance I could see the tall houses on the Bridge.

‘If you killed him as you say, where is the body, then?’

‘In heaven. Send thither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him in the other place yourself.’

‘Ah,’ said WS, ruefully. ‘You are in earnest.’

‘But if you find him not within this month you shall nose him as you go up the stairs to my lodgings in Swan Street. I, for one, do not intend to return there.’

‘No, you are on the way to Tyburn, Robert,’ said WS. ‘You shall go to heaven in a string if this is true.’

The water had grown calmer and the sun was out but I could not stop my shaking.

‘All of this, it was your handiwork too, playwright,’ said Master Mink.

‘How so?’

‘I mean that I signed your name to it up a tree and so made it yours, and I gave your name when I was asked who I was by the doorman. And, in doing so, I became you. So it was your handiwork.’

I thought of the initials on the pear-tree bark; of what Thomas Bullock the gate-keeper had said.

Master WS looked shaken. A cloud passed over his normally placid features.

‘Why?’

‘Do you remember what you were called by Robert Greene when you were first up in London and writing plays and playing in plays?’ said Mink to WS.

‘Yes.’

‘ “An upstart crow”, was it not?’

‘Oh yes, and Shake-scene and so on,’ said WS, in a way that suggested that he had never quite put such early insults behind him. These matters were still talked of in the theatre fraternity.

‘Did you hate those who laughed at you?’

‘I do not find it easy to hate,’ said WS mournfully. ‘Though I do know that Robert Greene died destitute in a shoe-maker’s house near Dow-gate. His landlord had to pay for his winding-sheet.’

‘That will not be your case, I think,’ said Mink. ‘You will not die in poverty, unregarded.’

‘No,’ said Master WS. ‘I do not think so.’

‘I am a poet too,’ said Mink. ‘Young Master Revill there, shaking in the stern beside you, he has heard some of my verses.’

‘Y-y-y-yes.’ For some reason, my eyes began to water, not for Mink but for myself.

‘I recited to him my Lover’s Lament. That was true verse, it was no feigning.’

Slowly now, slowly, our boats circled each other, like two watchful dogs who know that, sooner or later, they must fight.

‘What did you think, Nick? Tell me what you thought of my verses.’

‘They — they — were — b-b-b-b- ’

‘Bad?’ said Mink. He spoke in simple curiosity.

‘B-b-beautiful,’ I finally forced out the lie between my gnashing teeth.

‘You are lying, Revill. No lies now.’

‘T-t-t-true though.’

‘A pity then,’ said Mink. ‘For I had invited you to my lodgings to hear my Lover’s Triumph. Oh, and to poison you afterwards.’

Tears flowed down my face.

‘There is no escape for you either, William,’ continued Mink. ‘For I wrote a tragedy once. It was called The Tragical History of Sulla, Emperor of all the Romans.’

‘I saw it,’ said WS. ‘At the Curtain.’

‘The Red Bull.’

‘The Red Bull, then. But it was not by you, it was by — let me see — I have it, Robert Otter. Though, come to think of it, I have never heard of that author before or since. Master Otter.’ He paused, then said with a note of weariness, ‘Oh, I see. Otter — Mink.’

‘Never heard of again, that is right. Otter is well buried or drowned.’

‘But I did see your play, your Sulla.’

‘You were fortunate because it received only one performance.’

‘Many good plays go unappreciated and receive a single performance.’

‘Oh, my tragedy was appreciated — but not as a tragedy. It was greeted with howls of derision, as you will surely remember if you were there. There were tears of laughter, screams of glee. People pissed thermselves laughing. It should have been called The Comical History of Sulla, Roman Fool. .’

‘The people are not always good judges. Why, in a future age, they may play your Sulla-’

‘There will never be another performance because the people were right, it was no good. It was no tragedy. Come now, playwright. Give me your honest opinion of my play, if you really attended that performance.’

There was a pause. The sunlight glanced off the water. I waited, with indrawn breath.

‘It was no tragedy,’ said WS. ‘You are right, and the audience at that performance was right to respond as they did. I didn’t piss myself — but I laughed long and loud.’

‘You see,’ said Robert Mink, almost triumphantly. ‘I cannot write verses. I cannot write a tragedy neither. But I can create one. I can do in real life what you only do on paper. So who is the better?’

Then Mink did an extraordinary thing, or a thing even more extraordinary than what he had already done. He bent down and retrieved from the bottom of the boat a crown. It took me a moment to recognise it as the prop which he had been wearing in the part of the Player King. Because he was no true king, but merely a player playing a king in the play-within-the-the-play, the crown did not match Claudius’s for heaviness and splendour. Instead it was a piece of trumpery, lightweight, crudely gold-painted. It was meant to signify to the audience ‘king’, simply and without more ado. He must have tucked it away somewhere in his costume, as he hurried from the theatre and then out into the alleyways down to the river.

‘Who wears the crown?’ he said, grinning. ‘Tell me, who wears the crown?’

‘You do,’ said WS. ‘It is yours.’

‘Sir! Sir!’

All this time Adam Gibbons had been quietly dipping and splashing his oars to keep the two boats on a parallel circular course. I don’t know whether he was listening to the conversation between the two players or — if he was — what he made of it, but now a more pressing consideration had come up. I’d been so engrossed in what I was hearing and in my own shivering, quivering state that I’d been only a quarter aware of our surroundings.

‘The Bridge, sir!’

We were caught up in a gently revolving eddy but, as well as making slow circles, we were also travelling downstream with the current. The tide, which must have been at its height when we boarded Adam’s boat, was ebbing and our two roped vessels were going downriver with it. When, minutes before, I’d glimpsed the buildings of London Bridge, I’d not grasped how close we were running to it. The great starlings or bases that supported the piers, nearly two dozen of them, loomed close. The spaces between the piers gaped like so many hungry river mouths. The merchants’ houses above looked more like cliffs of wood than human habitations. The roaring, which we must have been hearing for the last few minutes without properly attending to its cause, and which was produced by the constriction and the forcing of the waters through the piers, seemed to grow deafening.

Now, it is possible to pass through the arches — but the prudent traveller disembarks well before reaching the Bridge and continues his journey on foot. And you can be sure that any boatman making the passage would expect extra for his pains and the risk he takes. With our two boats the risk was considerable. We were still joined by rope. Robert Mink, disappointed tragedian and multiple murderer, was no oarsman. In fact, he had only one oar remaining.

Master WS spoke. He mixed firmness and persuasion. ‘Now, Adam, there is still time but we run the risk of being carried away on the tide or, worse, of being battered against one of the piles. Only your strength and skill can save us now.’

He neglected to mention, by the by, that it was his own skill — with a silver tongue — that had persuaded Adam to take his boat out in the first place and so put himself, and the ferryman, and me, all at risk. But Adam did not appear to harbour any resentment against this man who might be leaving a boatman’s widow and children unprovided for in this harsh world, or depriving the English stage of its finest adornment, or snuffing out the life of an obscure West Country parson’s son turned player.

‘Pull, man, pull. Robert Mink, you have an oar. Use it!’

Half crouching in the stern, Master WS issued orders and encouragements. Adam Gibbons dug into the task with a will. His back bent and straightened, bent and straightened, his breath came thick and short, sweat poured down his face and dripped off his beard, still matted with the rain. If Master WS was fearful he didn’t show it. I wondered that he didn’t seize a oar for himself and begin to paddle — the thought occurred to me to do it — and then I realised his thinking was clearer than mine. Adam was the expert here, his was the skill and strength. If we were to be saved at all it would be by the boatman.

Despite his best efforts, however, we were drifting closer to the Bridge. The roaring of the waters was growing louder, the cliffs of houses rising higher, the gaps between the piers gaping wider. White, knife-like crests formed as the water pushed against the outworks of the great piers. Cords of sinew stood out on the oarsman’s neck and temples and arms. The rope between the boats was taut. In the background Master Mink was making motions with his remaining oar. I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, our position seemed unchanged.

And then I understood that our boatman was winning the struggle. If we had not put a distance between ourselves and the Bridge we were, at least, no closer to it. The size of the piers and the buildings surmounting them remained constant. I silently willed him on, with clenched hands and gritted teeth. All the time Master WS spoke encouragement and praise. Slowly, slowly, we pulled away from the Bridge, against the current; slowly, slowly, we struck out on a diagonal for the southern shore.

But then we seemed to, as it were, leap forward. The reason was not far to seek. Robert Mink, understanding that Adam was succeeding in the task of drawing us back towards dry land and safety, had unhitched the rope that fastened his craft to ours. As the gap between the boats widened he shouted out again, ‘Who is the better, playwright? Who is the better?’

He stood unsteadily in the little ferryboat as it was borne back and away by the current towards the Bridge. By twisting round in the stern, WS and I had a good view of what happened next. Adam kept tugging on his blades, ferrying us to terra firma, unable to see much of what was taking place over our turned shoulders. Probably he wouldn’t have been interested anyway. Just another accident on the river. An unskilled sailor. A dry-land mariner.

Mink’s craft, bearing him alone for captain and crew, dwindled in our sight. He continued to look in our direction, rather than at the course on which the current was taking him. He was washed nearer and nearer to the Bridge and I thought that he would slip between one of the central arches like a morsel of butter down a gullet. Once beyond them, if he did not capsize, he might well be able to make for the shore and the wilds of Essex or Surrey. But at the last moment, rather than capsizing, his little boat swerved and smashed hard into one of the great piers. We were too distant to hear anything apart from a far-off scraping and cracking sound above the low thunder of the descending water. The bow of the boat tilted and upended as if it the waves really intended to swallow it in one gulp and I thought I saw a small figure topple into the fast-flowing stream. The dot of a head was visible against the blue sky between a pair of arches. Then the head vanished as swift as if it had been wiped away.

I wondered what had happened to his poor trumpery crown. Then I surprised myself by discovering fresh tears coursing down my face.

‘Come, Nick,’ said Master WS, as we reached dry land. ‘There is still a little business to conclude for this day.’

And business there was.

The sun was shining as we raced through the streets, WS in the lead. Steam rose from the gutters and rooftops.

I was alternately sweating and shivering when we reached the Globe, and everything seemed to be occurring in a dream from which I would surely soon awaken. Somewhere on the way I lost my — Adrian’s — tall, villainous hat. His cloak still clung to my back.

By the time we arrived in the tiring-house the bloodbath was done. Hamlet had finished his duel with Laertes and both had been mortally wounded. The Prince had witnessed his mother take a fatal sip from the poisoned chalice prepared for him. King Claudius had seen all his schemes unravel in front of his face, as his Queen died and his nephew compelled him to drain the remains of his own poison draught.

Now Hamlet is left alive for a few moments, long enough to request loyal Horatio to report to a wonderstruck court the truth behind these strange and terrifying events. Now the poison from the venom-tipped sword has the upper hand of Prince Hamlet; now that fell sergeant Death strides in to make his last arrest.

All is done.

Almost.

There is the little matter of the late arrival of the ambassador from England with the news of yet more deaths. Minor characters, ones whom Hamlet has brushed from his conscience.

I tottered on stage, a weary English ambassador, exhausted no doubt from my urgent passage across the North Sea, my breakneck gallop across the Danish plains, my rapid entry through the portals of Elsinore. Perhaps my appearance, battered, rainswept, sweat-sodden, surprised beyond surprise, made up for a somewhat wooden delivery.

Then I remained, grinning inappropriately like an ape, as Horatio talked of casual slaughters and Prince Fortinbras of Norway talked of his rights of memory in the Kingdom of Denmark. Then the soldiers were bidden go shoot their pieces in honour of the late Prince.

Then we faced the applause, and we had our music from the gallery and our little jig, and after that I knew no more.