Mask of Night (10 page)

The old nurse seemed pleased enough and I realized that the wise doctor – to say nothing of the prosperous one – treads a line between his patients’ claims and his own observations.

“You will cast again for me, Doctor Fern? As you did before?” said Mistress Root. “To see if I should proceed in a suit against that bad carter, John Hoby.”

“That I will next week,” said Fern, “when the moon is right.”

A touch of reluctance in his tone suggested to me that he would advise her not to proceed, and my opinion of him rose.

“You would cast for me too, sir?” said Abel Glaze, who had been listening to the tail of this conversation. I was rather surprised that my friend wanted to have his future told, perhaps because it was something I wouldn’t have chosen to have done myself (I was uneasy enough with Lucy Milford’s prophesyings, and they came free after all). Possibly the surprise showed on my face, and was read as doubt or disbelief by the others.

“Doctor Fern cast for me when I lost a cup,” said Susan Constant. She had a crisp, decided voice – almost mannish – which complemented her clear, sculpted features. “It was found where he said it would be.”

The Doctor smiled at this testimony to his skill.

“For myself I haven’t lost anything of value, perhaps because I have nothing of value to lose,” said Abel disingenuously, “but I should like to know what I might gain in the future.”

“The answer is nothing,” I said. “We are poor players. Our future is simply enough told. It is pillar to post.”

I don’t know why I was so averse to what Abel was asking for. It was normal enough. People in every walk of life, from housewives to admirals, visit their doctors not merely for remedies but also for castings, and most doctors are happy to oblige.

Hugh Fern obviously regarded me as a sceptic about horoscopes – which I wasn’t altogether, only wary – because he stroked his round cheeks and looked at his assistant.

“What would you say, Pearman? What is this gentleman’s sign?”

I hadn’t paid much attention to this individual up to now but, as he began casting his eyes up and down my form and moving his raw head from side to side as if to catch me at all angles, I began to examine him too. He was of middle height, with a small ball-like head, a raw and pocked one. He looked to have been rubbed around the noddle with a nutmeg grater. He got more out of me than I got out of him, however.

“Hmm . . . tall enough . . . lean . . . may I see your teeth, sir?”

“Like a horse,” I said and treated him to a bare grin, without much good humour in it. Still, I suppose I should have been grateful. He might have asked to examine my urine like a piss-prophet.

“A player . . . and a traveller therefore,” said Pearman, although he knew this already before checking my teeth. “I should say that the gentleman was born under the sign of the Archer.”

This last part was delivered with a flourish. Despite myself I was impressed, or at least surprised, at what was little more than an ale-house trick. I wondered what comment William Shakespeare would have made about the whole business.

“Sagittarius? I should say so too,” said Fern, clapping his assistant on the shoulder with pleasure and looking to me for confirmation.

“He is correct,” I said.

“And from your grudging way of showing it, Master Revill, I would add that you were born near to the secretive sign of Scorpio.”

“Near enough,” I conceded. “But my father was a parson and did not believe in having nativities cast. He preached against the things.”

“And I?” said Abel Glaze, ignoring my comment. “What am I?”

Why are we so eager to be told who and what we are, to know what lies around the corner for us?

At that moment there was a groan from the settle where Nurse Root was lying. It was a groan of neglect rather than of pain, but it was sufficient to cause the company to pay attention to her welfare once more and to enable Abel and me to escape from the Doctor’s house, his future still untold.

As we made our way down the path that led from the door I was surprised to see the carter and his piebald nag driving slowly towards us, driving with furrowed brow and bobbing wen (the man, that is). It had taken him all this time to set himself in order and resume his business. I wondered why he was going to the Doctor’s house. Perhaps he intended to apologize more fulsomely in front of Mistress Root, throwing himself on her mercy. A bad move, if so. He’d probably do no more than stir up her wrath again. I thought of calling out to him, telling him that it would most probably be all right and that Mistress Root was unlikely to go to law (since Doctor Fern would advise against it). But the poor fellow looked so worried as he trundled past us that I reckoned he was immune to comfort.

*
see
The Pale Companion

The root is the most effective part. White and fleshy when disinterred from the ground, it shrivels as it dries out. You wear gloves at all times when you handle it, knowing that the venom can creep through any raw or open place on your flesh. Dried, it looks like a miniature, malignant tree. Then you slice it with a little knife and grind it down with pestle and mortar until it is almost as fine as grain. A faint, disagreeable odour rises up. The naked taste of this preparation would not be agreeable so you must mask it behind something stronger and more palatable, using mulled wine or sack for cover. If you had the time you would go about this as carefully as a royal cook, preparing a meal for the monarch. In the proper way, the powder should be left to steep in solution somewhere warm and open – on a window sill, say – for a month or more. But you have not got the luxury of time. Events are peering over your shoulder. So you decoct the powder in wine over a gentle heat, until it has all dissolved. Then you decant the result into half a dozen stoppered phials, made of opaque glass. Here is your arsenal.

Belladonna. Bella donna. Beautiful lady.

The Italians now, they are the past masters of poisoning. With them it is an art. For example, they have perfected the poisoned knife from which, when the slightest pressure is applied to the blade, three little envenomed spikes spring out to nip the unsuspecting knife-holder in the palm. What you are doing is simple enough stuff, however, only the beginning. For you have ambitions in the field of poisons. There are so many compounds, so many methods of delivery apart from the poison knife. You might take a quill and blow a powder into the ear of a sleeping man, or pierce another one’s windpipe with a poisoned needle, or soak this gentleman’s doublet in cantharides, or give that fine lady a pomander which is impregnated with arsenic. (Although there are different views on arsenic, you have learned, some saying it is a preservative.)

To administer poison is to deal death from on high. Although you must be ready to confront your victims directly, as with old mother Morrison, you have the comfort of knowing that, if all runs smoothly, you can put a distance between the two of you. You are able to keep your hands clean. As for your conscience, that can go whistle. What are two or three or five deaths when so many more are in prospect during this time of plague?

T
his easy interlude in Oxford was too pleasant to last long. We continued to play in front of appreciative audiences at the Golden Cross Inn and had the first practice for
Romeo and Juliet
at Hugh Fern’s house on Headington Hill. The rehearsal went well enough – although there was an odd consequence to it – and I considered that I acquitted myself respectably as Mercutio.

But the mood of the Company was darkened by some news which had reached us that very morning. It was all the talk of the ostlers, the drawers, and the other servants before we were ever up, and it was to do with the plague. King Pest.

Well, there was a lesson here, for if we’d believed we could trick fate and outrun the infection we were deluded. An outbreak of the pestilence had been reported from the south side of the town. News of such an event spreads even more quickly than the disease itself and, like the disease, usually has no obvious source. It simply became “known” that an entire household had been struck down near Folly Bridge.

The response of the players was perhaps a little offhand. We had come, after all, from a populous city where the disease never quite died out. You got used to it, as I’d said to Abel. Certainly you didn’t show fear. A more immediate concern for us might have been the suspicion directed at outsiders. Since the Chamberlain’s Company had crossed Folly Bridge only a few days before – and since we might therefore have been blamed for importing the infection with us – it was just as well that the road across the bridge was the principal route into and out of town and constantly busy. In other words, if the disease had come from the outside, it might have been brought in by any of the hundreds of travellers who arrive at the Athens of England at all times of the day.

We didn’t know whether the city authorities differed from those in London in the way they would handle the outbreak, apart from the inevitable step of isolating the household. The general opinion was that we, that is the players, would be permitted to ply our trade in the inn yard for as long as the death toll stayed low. But, if it started to rise (and bearing in mind that Oxford is a much smaller place than London, not partitioned into many suburbs and wards), then we could find ourselves on the move once more. I’d said to Abel Glaze, half in jest, that the player’s future was never other or better than a matter of pillar to post. This staggering insight was likely to be proved true once again.

However, we dismissed the plague and its threat to our livelihoods, not to mention lives, as soon as we reached Doctor Fern’s and began practising for
Romeo and Juliet
.

This is a queerly affecting play, a sugared tragedy. The story is surely known to you. If the theatre survives and the Puritans or the plague do not triumph over all of us then this tragedy will be played out down the centuries, and keep WS’s name fresh to succeeding generations. But – wherever you live, whenever you live – you are doubtless already familiar with the two rival families in the city of Verona, those Montagues and Capulets, and the young couple who reach across the divide which separates them. You recognize the couple’s fear that their parents would hardly allow them to meet, let alone marry. You remember the intervention of Friar Laurence, Romeo’s friend and father-confessor, who encourages Romeo and Juliet to wed in secret, partly for the sake of propriety but also in the hope that the union of such young lovers might bring about a reconciliation of the feuding families (which it does, but in the last way that anyone would have desired).

The youngsters enjoy one night of wedded bliss. Their whole marriage is contracted into the hours between a single dusk and dawn, hardly more than an eye-blink. Then Romeo must fly from Verona for the killing of Tybalt, and Juliet must feign death with the help of Friar Laurence’s potions, and Romeo must believe her really dead, and return to kill himself over her drugged body in the Capulet family vault, and then she must awaken – too late, just too late! – to see her husband truly dead and gone, before taking up his dagger and sheathing it in her own body. So perish the young lovers and so are their old families brought together in grief and self-reproach.

Love and death, it is a most infallible mixture.

It is not just the deaths of the young lovers, either. There’s also the odd fight on the way, with the occasional casualty. On the road to that love-tryst in the Capulet tomb others will perish. Mercutio is mortally wounded by Tybalt’s rapier before Tybalt himself dies at the hands of Romeo. The real hatred is between these two, since Tybalt has just killed Romeo’s friend. By contrast, the bout between Tybalt and Mercutio starts in a relatively light-hearted vein before digging deeper and opening real veins, so to speak.

Now, I was playing Mercutio and so was required to fight and die in the public eye. When it comes to fighting, the public eye is sharp and wants value for money. Londoners are used to pageants and jousts, and any stage company worth its salt must make a good fist of fighting. Not every player is an accomplished swordsman, even though it’s one of those skills – like dancing and singing – which you tend to pick up as the years go by, however useless you are to begin with. In my opinion Mercutio is not that good a swordsman, in fact he’s more of a
wordsman
. Or perhaps it was rather that I knew myself to be clumsy with a sword and was projecting this on to my character. Unlike Richard Burbage, for example, who still gave Romeo a professional edge when he flashed his blade. And unlike Jack Wilson who was taking the part of Tybalt, and against whom I was scheduled to fight.

True, I had played a fighter during a performance the previous winter as Prince Troilus. But, though there’s plenty of talk about Troilus’s prowess as a fighter we don’t actually
see
much sign of it on stage, and I’d been able to hide behind Shakespeare’s lines. Now, however, I would have to give a good account of myself, not only with words but with the sword. I also knew that if I ever wanted to progress to the larger parts – Hamlet the Dane, say, that noble duellist – then I would have to prove my dexterity with the foil.

So, after the half-way point in
Romeo and Juliet
when we weren’t needed at practice, I suggested to my friend Jack Wilson that we might run through a few passes and thrusts outside. The reason we weren’t needed was that we, as Tybalt and Mercutio, were both dead. And the reason I suggested a practice was because I’d noticed Dick Burbage frowning a little at some of my strokes and slashes. You need to learn how to handle a foil, his frown said, confirming what I already knew.

The others remained indoors while Jack and I found a secluded spot on one of the Doctor’s untilled lawns. Hugh Fern had given the Chamberlain’s the run of the public rooms of his house and of its gardens. His generosity towards us was marked. I suppose that it was connected to his one-time wish to become a player, which Shakespeare had mentioned. The morning was fine and clear, with that pleasant view over Oxford’s towers and spires. We soon worked up a sweat, or at any rate I did.