Mask of Night (19 page)

The body was brought out and laid in the entrance to the narrow passageway, though not before a couple of the drawers had been despatched for a sheet to place on the ground. There was a strange sense of time suspended. People – players, inn-servants, citizens who’d been slow to disperse at the end of the performance – ebbed and flowed about the corpse. Some came to gawp, some seemed genuinely shocked. Shakespeare held urgent consultations with Burbage and Thomas Pope, the latter still incongruously in his robes as Juliet’s nurse. I considered leaving but there was a kind of comfort in numbers. Also, as one who had discovered the body, I felt an obligation to remain now. Andrew Pearman wandered distractedly round the yard. Like a bereaved dog he would not move far from his master.

The coroner was sent for but the messenger soon returned to say that he was busy about another death and that the body of Hugh Fern was to be put in store for a few hours. But where? Owen Meredith seemed reluctant to give house-room to the dead physician in the Golden Cross. Fortunately, the problem was solved by the arrival of a new actor on the scene.

Not new to me though. Barging through the press came the jowly individual I’d encountered in William Sadler’s lodgings in Christ Church. He was as well-dressed as on that evening. His boots alone would have cost me many months’ wages. He took out an expensive-looking octagonal watch and ostentatiously consulted it, I’m not sure why unless it was simply to impress us with his status and property. Having established the time, he stood over Fern’s body, rubbing his hands together before bending down to examine the man’s wounds. As he was doing so I noticed something odd, perhaps prompted by the newcomer’s excellent boots.

The oddness was to do with Hugh Fern’s feet. At some point before his first appearance as Friar Laurence he’d changed out of his own silver-buckled shoes and put on simpler footwear, more appropriate to the poor mendicant he was playing. I’d no idea where he’d got the plain shoes from, but I’d been half gratified, half embarrassed that he had taken advice from a young player. Yet now that he lay stretched out dead in the Golden Cross yard he appeared to have resumed his original shoes, the ones ornamented with silver and cut from fine leather. For the rest he was still dressed as a Franciscan, the grey robes disfigured with bloodstains. It was only his shoes that had changed. I couldn’t understand it.

Meanwhile the dagger remained where it had been found, towards the left side of Hugh Fern’s chest. Squatting down on his hams and taking out a handkerchief, the newcomer wrapped it around the bloody haft of the dagger. Using both hands and the counterweight of his own body, he pulled the weapon out of the dead man’s chest. The upper half of the corpse quivered under the strain and rose slightly from the ground while Fern’s head fell helplessly backward. The other man had to twist and tug at the dagger to get it clear but eventually he succeeded. He stood up, holding the dagger out before him. The blade, all dark and gouty with blood and other matter, hung down between his hands. I noted that he did not seem concerned about the damage he might do to his fine clothes. He had the appearance of a conspirator in a play, an impression reinforced by the ring of breathless bystanders.

This displaying of the dagger was too much for some of us. A few turned away in discomfort, others groaned involuntarily. Perhaps I did too. But what I noticed was that the well-dressed, jowly man looked more . . . interested in the scene than anything else. It was plain that he had some authority here as well as expertise. For an instant I wondered whether he was the coroner after all – but if he was the coroner he would surely have been greeted as such by the inn-keeper.

He wrapped the dagger up in the handkerchief (a fine silk one) and positioned it on the sheet beside the corpse of Hugh Fern. Then he gazed at the assembled audience, and said, “What happened here?”

This was what had apparently happened.

Doctor Hugh Fern, a respected and prosperous physician of the city of Oxford and a friend from boyhood of William Shakespeare, had been invited to take the part of Friar Laurence in a production of
Romeo and Juliet
. He had been a little nervous at the prospect – as I could testify, having talked with him on this very subject just before the play began. He had overcome his stage-fright, though, and started to enjoy himself. What had he said during the interval? “It’s something I could get a taste for.”

Shortly after he’d attended to my foot, promising to make up a poultice for it later, he had gone into one of the little changing-rooms down the passageway. Once inside, he had locked the door and left the key in the lock.

(Pearman was right, by the way. None of the rooms had bolts on the inside. In fact only one had a lock, the one that the Doctor had shut himself up in. There was nothing valuable in that room or any of the others, at least until the Chamberlain’s costumes were put in store. Before that who’d want to steal old rags or discarded bits of seating? Meredith the landlord rather thought that there’d always been a key on the inside but couldn’t remember it ever having been used – hence the rusty manner in which it had turned in my hand.)

Anyway the Doctor had entered the room and locked himself in, presumably to avoid being disturbed in his inexplicable purpose. Almost immediately Fern must have drawn out from under his friar’s habit a dagger, a plain dagger such as a yeoman might carry, a plain and serviceable one. Or, if he hadn’t taken the dagger with him into the room then he had discovered it there by chance. Or, if he hadn’t found it by chance then he must have previously left the dagger in that place with the intention of doing what he did next.

What he did next was to hold the tip of the dagger at a little distance from his heart, perhaps searching with his left hand for the appropriate spot between his ribs. After he had found the spot – he was a doctor, more familiar than most with the right place to strike – he had grasped the haft of the dagger with both hands and driven it with all his might into his heart. Then, with his life-blood welling out of him, he had fallen to the floor.

The Doctor must have died in a very brief space of time because the play had hardly got under way in its second half before Master Shakespeare, trailing Mrs Davenant in attendance, had come rushing into the backstage area, agitated and in search of his friend. Perhaps he suspected something was wrong. At any rate, he was concerned that Fern was literally not in position to make his entry as Friar Laurence. So there was that frantic hunt for a costume that would approximate to a friar’s, there was the hasty dressing, the just-in-time entry of Will Shakespeare and Dick Burbage for the next scene.

Meanwhile the poor Doctor was no more than a few yards away. At least three of us – WS, then Nicholas Revill and finally Andrew Pearman – had examined the outside of the room where he was lying. All of us were uneasy, but none knew that Fern was already dead or dying from his self-inflicted wound.

Convinced by all this?

No, I wasn’t either.

Especially not by the self-inflicted wound.

Not that Fern
couldn’t
have killed himself.

Suicide is a grave sin, but men and women have done it before and are doing it now, some on the spur of the moment, some after long premeditation. All you need is a rope, a knife, poison . . . and a strong despair mixed with courage. Why, Shakespeare’s own Romeo and Juliet show their fortitude in this matter. They say that poison is a woman’s weapon but it is Romeo who buys poison and drinks it over Juliet’s body in the vault, while it is Juliet who, waking from her sleep, snatches his dagger to plunge it into herself – a masculine act surely? Well, if a young girl has the strength of mind and body for such a desperate action, then surely an old doctor possesses it too?

But why should Fern have killed himself? If there was a deep and hidden reason (debt, disease, despair) then why should he choose such a peculiar time and place as the middle of a play performance in an inn yard? Why not put an end to himself in the comfort of his fine house on Headington Hill? And he was a doctor. If he knew just where to strike home with the dagger’s point, then surely – with his knowledge of herbs and poisons – he knew many less painful means of making his exit.

I thought too of the last things he’d said to me. Of how he was getting a taste for playing. Of how he would make up a poultice for my foot. This was hardly the talk of a man who was five minutes away from suicide.

So it wasn’t that he
couldn’t
have killed himself but rather (I believed) that he
hadn’t
.

And yet what alternative was there?

Here was a man seen entering a little room. I knew. I’d witnessed him going in. The friar’s robes, the fringe of hair with the balding spot. I was as certain as I could be that it was Fern. And then there was his corpse lying inside that same locked room. I’d actually found and withdrawn the key myself through the hole that Pearman had bashed in the woodwork, then I had unlocked the door from the outside. There was no other way in or out of the room, apart from a barred opening that might have admitted a cat, nothing larger.

Still I wasn’t convinced.

The question “What happened here?” remained un answered. Rather, those parts that could be answered (such as the means by which the Doctor had met his death) did no more than scrape the surface.

As for the man who had asked that question, the well-dressed individual who had so confidently extracted the dagger from the corpse: he, it transpired, was another local physician and worthy. Doctor Ralph Bodkin by name, he lived and practised at the western end of town, near the Castle. Judging by his dress and manner, he was obviously a prosperous member of the fraternity like Hugh Fern.

Doctor Bodkin had actually been a member of our audience on the fatal afternoon, together with William Sadler. They’d been sitting up in the gallery. I remembered that I’d mentioned in the hearing of both men that the Chamberlain’s were staging
Romeo and Juliet
on this particular day. Maybe this had sparked the idea that they should come and see the play together.

Now, it may be that the suspicious mind scents a conspiracy here – or at any rate an unnatural coincidence. What was Sadler doing at the Golden Cross Inn? And why should a well-to-do physician mingle with the common townsfolk, albeit from his position in a more expensive gallery seat? But there was nothing out of the way about their presence. William Sadler had decided to attend the play out of curiosity and perhaps a touch of vanity, for this was the narrative in which he had been cast as Romeo, if not by himself then by Hugh Fern. Ralph Bodkin accompanied him because the Doctor had once been a tutor to William, as I’d surmized, and now stood in some less specified position of guide or mentor. And to suppose that a man like Doctor Bodkin was somehow too superior to attend a public play was to contradict all our experience at the Globe playhouse, where we enjoyed a fine mixture of the rich, the respectable, the feckless and the downright dishonest.

And, if the really suspicious mind scents something . . . something too convenient, too opportune about Bodkin’s arrival after the discovery of the body then this is simply explained as well.

Along with most of the audience, William Sadler and Ralph Bodkin had quit the Golden Cross Inn at the end of the performance, walking away together, quite unaware of the drama which was taking place off-stage. They’d been well on their way towards the church of St Ebbe’s when they were intercepted by the messenger who had been sent in search of the coroner and was returning empty-handed. This breathless individual, a pot-boy called Percy, recognized in Doctor Bodkin an alternative authority and, perhaps confused, panted out his message – that the coroner was already busy – with another dead man – could not attend the Golden Cross for a few hours yet – meantime the body should be kept safe. What dead man? asked Bodkin. Which one, the first or the second dead man? said Percy. The one in the Golden Cross, said Bodkin. Oh that one, said Percy. Yes that one, said Bodkin, who is he?
I
don’t know, said Percy, before dashing off towards St Martin’s and Cornmarket.

(I heard later that the dead man – the first one – who was already occupying the attention of the coroner was some individual who’d been fished out of the River Isis earlier in the day. Apparently a waterman. I thought nothing of it at the time, so preoccupied were we all with the death of Hugh Fern.)

So Doctor Bodkin turned round and walked back to the inn yard, reaching it shortly after the pot-boy. William Sadler, assuming that whatever had occurred was nothing to do with him, wasn’t sufficiently interested in the notion of a corpse at an inn, and decided to continue with his afternoon business. He only found out later that the body in question was that of Hugh Fern, the old family friend of both the Sadlers and the Constants.

I had this part of the story from Sadler himself. I’ll explain in due course how I came to be asking him questions about the sequence of events surrounding Fern’s death.

“So although you didn’t know about Doctor Fern’s death,” I said, “didn’t you notice that he was no longer playing the part of the friar?”

“I noticed that his voice had changed,” said Sadler. “And then I looked harder at the figure inside the habit and realized that he’d changed. I suppose I wondered why Fern wasn’t playing the part any longer. I recognized
him
in his habit all right. He spent a lot of time looking out at the audience.”

I refrained from saying that inexperienced players often do that, they are so thrilled to find themselves the centre of all eyes.

“Then I noticed how his part had been taken by someone else. But I thought that this was maybe how you professional players did things. Change horses in mid-stream.”

“Not usually,” I said.

“I tell you one thing though, Nicholas,” said Sadler. “The fellow playing Friar Laurence – in the second half, I mean – he wasn’t much good. Ha!”

“You’re talking about William Shakespeare.”

“He still wasn’t much good.”

“He didn’t expect to have to play that part, or not play that part just then,” I said, wondering why I was bothering to defend WS and conscious that my excuse on his behalf was feeble anyway.