Death of Kings (2 page)

His advice wasn’t needed for I found myself being hoist up the steps anyway. Then suddenly the arms which were pinioning me fell away. I tottered but kept my balance. Unthinkingly I made
to remove the blindfold but was anticipated.

“Do keep your hands down, Master Revill.”

Reluctantly, I did as I was told. I was tired of being kept in the dark.

“Before you is a doorway, only wide enough for one man at a time. Step through if you please.”

“No.”

I had decided, you see, that it was foolish – to say nothing of unmanly – to step into what might be a trap. It was time to take a stand. Being led along was one thing, but to cross
a hostile threshhold of my own accord, this stuck in my gullet. Out on the cold, dark streets there was still a tiny measure of safety but once inside private quarters, God alone knew what might
happen. Unfortunately, my ‘No’, intended as a curt vowel of refusal, emerged new-born and quavering into the night air. I must have been more frightened than I knew.

“No?” said the man behind me, gently but wearily as it seemed. “Well, never mind . . . I am only thinking of your dignity, sir.”

Hands gripped my shoulders and half steered, half pushed me forward, as though I were a recalcitrant child. I felt wooden boards beneath my feet, and my face tingled in the comparative warmth
after the night air.

“Now we are here.”

The same smooth low voice at my back.

“In a moment you may remove your blindfold. When you do, you will see a flight of stairs ahead. Which you will please to climb, sir. In the room facing the head of the stairs there is a
man who wishes to talk to you.”

“I suppose I should count up to ten before I start looking for him,” I said, trying to introduce a sneer of my own into the conversation. Perhaps the other individual was stung by
the remark because he said nothing.

“Who
are
you?” I ventured now. “I demand to know before I go any further.”

No answer. I sensed space around me, although if my companions had exited they must have done so as swiftly and silently as ghosts. I waited a moment longer then reached up and lifted the scarf
from a corner of my eye, expecting each moment to be rebuked. But there was nobody there. I was in a bare, dimly illuminated lobby, off which several doors opened. My escort had presumably vanished
behind these. I had a sense of exposure, not the agreeable feeling of being the cynosure of all eyes which one gets as a player on stage but the less pleasant impression of being spied-on through
knot-holes and secret cracks in the dark woodwork. I was still holding the blindfold. In a tiny act of resistance, I dropped it on the floor.

Ahead of me was a flight of stairs, as described, leading up into darkness. I turned round and tried the main door, the one which led into the street, but it was fastened and there was no key in
sight. I might have tested the two or three other exits from the room but suspected that they too would be barred against me. I thought of the quarry in a hunt, channelled to its doom by the
hunters and the hounds, forced down its final path. I climbed the stairs as if in a dream. I remember that they creaked underfoot.

At the top of the stairs was a small open area and a room directly facing. The door was ajar and a faint light slipped out through the gap. I tapped timidly with my fingers’ ends and a
voice said ‘Come in’, and I did so and on the far side of a large room there sat a man at a big table. He was writing. He looked up briefly.

“There is a chair against that wall. Please be seated, Master Revill, and be easy. I shall not be a moment more on this thing.” And he resumed his writing.

I did as instructed – this was a night for doing what I was told. Several candles burned on the desk or table but otherwise the room was unilluminated. I was therefore in the dark and the
gentleman opposite me was in the light, available for my inspection. Perhaps he had intended this, but I do not think so. There are some men who will deliberately keep themselves writing or
fiddling with their documents in order to keep you waiting, as if to say ‘See how busy and important
I
am, see how little
you
matter’, but it was not so with this nameless
individual.

Hunched over his table, he wrote with a wide, scrawling hand, breaking off from time to time to to refresh his pen or to consult other sheets of paper spread about him. Apart from his hand
nothing else of him seemed to stir, except for his feet under the table which did a little circumscribed dance of their own in time with his mobile hand. Otherwise, he did not scratch at his broad
white forehead, or stroke his tapering beard; he did not stop to scrutinise his fingernails or the single golden bands which he wore on each ring-finger. He did not indulge in any of those
scribbler’s little delays and diversions which signify ‘I am thinking’ or ‘I wonder what I look like when I am thinking like this’. Instead he kept on writing as if
his life depended on it.

His large, pallid forehead seemed to suck in the light in the room rather than to reflect it. The candles cast shifting, contradictory patterns on the wall behind the man at the table, and there
was something about his quivering shadow that did not accord properly with the solid shape in front of me – although I did not realise until later exactly what it was.

For several minutes this individual did not stop his moving, scrawling hand. Then, without any flourish, without the grin or the sigh which usually signals
finis
to our efforts on paper,
he laid down his pen, clasped his hands together and rested his chin on them. His candid eyes looked at me and, in shadow though I was, I felt myself being thoroughly and rapidly assessed.

“Please, Master Revill, bring your chair forward – into the light – yes, so.”

With someone else I might, I suppose, have protested at the way I’d been snatched off the street and brought to this upper room – now that I was pretty sure that I had not fallen
into the hands of desperadoes, an objection or two seemed called for. But something informed me that protest was futile and that I’d be told what I needed to know when the time was ripe.

Sure enough.

“Master Nicholas Revill, of the Chamberlain’s Men?”

“Yes, sir, now of the Chamberlain’s. I have this very evening been at rehearsal with them.”

“I know,” said the man.

“We are rehearsing to play before the Queen.”

“That I know too.”

Evidently not a man who was easily impressed.

It was only a matter of weeks since my place in the Company of Masters Shakespeare and Burbage had been confirmed. I was still inordinately proud at securing a position with London’s
leading players. Dammit, any young man who has dreamed of a life in the playhouse ever since he was knee-high to a pew-step, to be precise from the moment when as a child I had first heard my
parson-father thundering against plays, players and playhouses from the stage of his own pulpit – any youngster, I say, would have struggled to keep his pride within bounds when invited to
join our capital’s crowning glory, the Globe theatre.

“Have you seen us?” I said. “Have you watched the Chamberlain’s?” It’s strange how, in my eagerness to talk about my craft, I mislaid any sense of the danger
I might be in, to say nothing of the insult of being lifted from the street and carried off who-knew-where. Or perhaps it was not eagerness but a player’s necessary vanity.

“I have little time for the playhouse . . .” he began.

He was a puritan, then, or one of those disapproving city folk who believe that playing is the root of all evil, as well as being bad for business (because it encourages the apprentices to play
truant and the common people to spend their pennies on dreams instead of worldly goods). And yet he did not look or sound like a puritan or a priggish cit.

“But I make an exception for the Chamberlain’s Men.”

“I am pleased to hear it, sir.”

“Your Cowley, your Pope and Gough. Let me see . . . Tawyer, Sincklo and Jack Wilson too. Then there’s Rice and Tyler. Fine players all. And now we must add Master Nicholas Revill to
this catalogue of men.”

Delighted as I was that this stranger showed such a fine awareness of our Company, I couldn’t help wondering
why
he needed to know these things. It did not escape me, either, that
the players he had just listed were by no means the best known or the most distinguished in the Chamberlain’s – no mention of Augustine Phillips or Armin the clown or the Burbages or
Master WS himself. These latter would be the only names familiar to most attenders of our little entertainments.

I grew uneasy again.

“You are asking yourself where all this leads?”

“Why you had me snatched from the street while I was going about my lawful business.”

“Lawful business, indeed,” he echoed in a way that suggested he doubted whether I wasn’t the one at fault, and I grew uneasier still. “I must apologise for the way in
which you were conveyed here. But there is no need for you to know where you are, precisely where you are, in the metropolis. In fact it is very much to my advantage—”

Sensing that I was about to interrupt, he opened, palm downward, one of the hands that still perched beneath his chin.

“—and even more than it is to my advantage, I should say it is very much for your safety’s sake that you are, and remain, in ignorance of your whereabouts.”

“So that when I leave I shall again be blindfolded, and so on?”

“I fear so. But if your question, Master Revill, is intended to establish that you shall leave in due course, then be assured that you will.”

I made some deprecatory gesture, as if such a fear had never crossed my mind. His large, candid gaze rested on me.

“Not a hair on your head shall be touched. You are much too valuable to us.”

“A poor player?” I said, thinking of the other man’s comment in the street.

“Would you help yourself – and me – to some wine? There is a flask on that cupboard by the wall.”

I did as he directed, noting that he had turned aside the ‘poor player’ remark. Even in the few moments occupied by my pouring the wine, he had returned to his paper-work so that I
stood uncertainly above him while he scrawled a few words in the margin of a sheet close-written in another’s hand. There was something strange about him, hunched over his work, but I could
not quite put my finger on it. Then he gazed up and motioned for me to put down the glass which I held for him, all the time smiling with a candour that had me, helplessly, smiling in return.

When I’d resumed my chair, he said, “Master Revill, you are a loyal Englishman?”

“I hope I have it in me to love my country.”

“And our sovereign lady, the Queen?”

“You hardly need to make
that
a question.”

“But I do. Oblige me with an answer.”

“She deserves respect and reverence, sir. I would not dare to talk about love . . .”

“She is lovable too, provided one be wary about it.”

In another man I might have suspected that this had been said to establish a personal connection with the sovereign, yet I did not think the man opposite me was seeking to elevate himself
through great associations. His comment, rather, had the air of a thrown-off observation, made half to himself. No wonder he hadn’t been impressed by my saying that the Chamberlain’s
had just been rehearsing for a royal performance.

“Like most of our countrymen I have known no other monarch,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “you’d have to be in your fifth decade to have even a child’s memory of her father.”

I wondered whether
he
remembered Henry VIII. The man at the other side of the table seemed ageless – or rather he was like what I had once read of the Roman emperor Justinian, that
no man could recall his ever having been young.

“While she herself is now in her seventh decade,” he pursued.

Talking of the Queen’s age was, somehow, disrespectful and I wished he would come to the business in hand, whatever it was.

“I find it hard to conceive that another could reign over us as she does,” I said, meaning a diplomatic compliment.

“Then you are like the rest of our countrymen in that too.”

“How so?”

“Unhappy.”

“Unhappy?”

“In having to think of another occupying her place on the throne of England.”

“I – I suppose so.”

“Yet it is something that we must think of. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t consider what will happen next, who will come afterwards.”

“No,” I said.

These were dark waters and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to set sail on them.

“Come, Master Revill, let us speak more plain,” he said, sipping at his glass. “The Queen must die.”

“Sir, I must respectfully ask you to let me go. I did not come here of my own free will. I never asked to be brought to this place. I have no desire to listen to treason.”

“So it is treason to claim that an old woman will die?”

“No, but . . .”

“You think that I am trying to inveigle you into some trap.”

“No, though . . .”

I did, and I did not. I didn’t know what I thought.

“Nicholas, Nicholas, princes are as mortal as the rest of us,” said the man on the far side of the table. In everything, he used a tone of sweet reason. “We know better than to
believe with the Romans or the Egyptians that our rulers are gods. Our own sovereign would be the first to cry blasphemy if we did. She is nearly as pious as my own mother.”

“Well then . . .” I said, for the sake of saying something.

“If I could extend our Queen’s life by a year – or even a month – by giving her a year of mine in exchange, I truly believe that I would.”

“Why am I here?” I said, tiring suddenly of this dangerous fiddle-faddle.

“When a king nears to the end of his reign there is fear among the populace. This is so even in the best run realms, the most orderly states. How much more do men have cause to fear when
the king – or the queen – has no issue. We can’t see our way clear to the future if we do not know who is to rule over us. You follow me?”