Mask of Night (2 page)

Abel Glaze and I had first encountered each other on a road into Somerset. I was running away from a Southwark gaol, travelling under a false name, while he was going in the opposite direction, towards London. Or, to be more precise, he was going in no particular direction until he met me and decided to become a player. Meantime he was making a good living out of conning charitable persons in the guise of what’s called a counterfeit crank. When he saw a likely mark or victim approaching, he would pretend to be afflicted by the falling-sickness and tumble down in the road, frothing at the mouth and displaying piteous bruises from his previous collisions with the Queen’s highway. The froth was produced by a hastily mouthed sliver of soap while the bruising was mostly paint. All the instruments of Abel’s trade were contained in a few little pots and pouches which he carried round with him. He travelled very light.

Now, there are plenty of coney-catchers who don’t receive a quarter of the alms which young Glaze pocketed. How to explain his success? He had what is probably the most valuable attribute a con-man can possess – an innocent air, a wide-eyed what-am-I-doing-in-this-world? gaze. And this pose of unworldliness was helped by a high forehead which made him look like a contemplative man rather than a trickster.

Abel Glaze was adept at playing simpletons, bumpkins, clowns or theoreticians. He could even, and this was an odd thing, do a good turn as a murderer. When he arrived in London he was almost immediately taken on by the Chamberlain’s Company. William Shakespeare and Dick Burbage, who did most of the hiring, must have detected something actor-worthy in him. I’d said nothing to them about our earlier meeting or about Glaze’s trickery, and I would continue to say nothing as long as he didn’t reveal that he had encountered me when I was travelling under the name of William Topcourt. Each of us had a little secret that we possessed in relation to the other and this was one of the things that brought us together.

But more than that, we liked each other’s company. He was cheerful and open – for all that he was a confidence-trickster turned actor – and besides he had a fund of good tales of his times on the road, when he was willing to talk about it. So I wasn’t too unwilling that he insisted on my going with him to see Will Kemp. It was a good day for a walk. Although we were only in February, the day was bright and the sky was clear. Spring hovered in the air.

As we walked across to Dow-gate, which was where Burbage thought the widow’s house was located, Abel kept up a stream of cheerful chatter which was welcome as an antidote to my rather dull spirits. Despite the good weather I couldn’t help feeling gloomy. From the players’ point of view there were reasons to be apprehensive in these early months of 1603.

Briefly, the inducements to gloom were, in mounting order of importance:

First
, the approach of the Lent season. This is a thin time for men’s stomachs and a thinner time for players’ purses. Our performances are limited or often banned altogether.

Second
, the imminent death of the Queen. This moment, like the end of a drawn-out play, had been long foreseen and now it was almost upon us. At best it couldn’t be delayed by more than a few weeks. Queen Elizabeth was not our patron but she was a true friend to the theatre and to the Chamberlain’s Company in particular. What effect her departure would have on us no one could say, but it was not likely to be helpful.

Third
, the approach of something much more threatening than any lenten sanctions or than the death of one woman, however great. What was approaching was the pestilence. The plague. The numbers dying were still low, more rumour than certainty, and confined to the remote outskirts of the city, but any increase in the weekly mortality bills would be bad for the theatre business. It might be bad for all our lives as well.

Considering all these worries, Abel Glaze’s good cheer was agreeable enough, although in another man it might have been tedious. Whatever he did he had the knack of making acceptable. Since it was already late in the morning and we were hungry, Abel bought some mince-pies from Mrs Holland’s shop and we ate them on the way before we arrived at Dow-gate, which lies in a tumbledown corner of the river bank although there are grand houses and streets not too far away.

Dow-gate seemed to me an insalubrious sort of place to end up in. Glaze was fond of theatrical tit-bits and old stories so I told him that this was where a man called Robert Greene had died. Greene had once been famous as a writer – which is to say, not very famous at all – but he perished in obscurity shortly after he’d attacked a young playwright called William Shakespeare, calling the outsider from Warwickshire an upstart – an “upstart crow”, in fact. People weren’t much kinder about the memory of Robert Greene. Too much wine all during his life, too many pickled herrings near his end, was what they’d said about Greene. This broken-down area did not seem a propitious place for Will Kemp the clown or his prospects of recovery either, since Kemp too had fallen out with his old friends, the seniors in the Chamberlain’s. He might have crawled into this corner never to emerge again. To think that this man had once been one of the Globe shareholders!

We knocked at two or three wrong addresses before arriving at the widow’s. She didn’t seem surprised that we had come to call on Kemp, although I don’t suppose he received many visitors. She jerked her thumb down a passage, at the same time yelling out his name. There was an answering croak. Directed by the sound, Abel and I entered a room that was even smaller than my own lodgings in Dead Man’s Place.

It was dim in the room and at first I could make out nothing apart from a figure on a plain boarded bed. There was a patched, dirty window. As it turned out, even when my eyes got accustomed to the dimness, there wasn’t much more to see than this: a bed with a man on it. Kemp was a little person, with a mobile face that was gnarled and dull brown like an old walnut. A ragged white beard fringed his chin.

“Master Kemp?”

“Who calls?”

“Nicholas Revill and Abel Glaze – of the Chamberlain’s Company.”

“The Chamberlain’s?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can shog off.”

“We have come to pay our respects.”

“You’ll have to pay more than respects,” he said without shifting his position, although he did turn his head to look at us. I didn’t know what was the matter with him – whether it was age or sickness or melancholy or poverty. Perhaps all of these, though any single one might have been enough to account for his dull state.

“More than respects,” he mumbled again.

So far this seemed standard for Kemp, or for what he had dwindled into. No sign of the supposed softening in his manner. I would have left it there and then but Abel was standing beside me and it was he, after all, who’d been so eager to see this relic. Now he spoke up.

“I am sorry to see fortune has played so many tricks on you, sir.”

From any other man the comment might have been resented but Abel spoke with such feeling that Kemp did no more than grunt.

“I saw you dancing into Norwich. As if you had feathers at your heels.”

“Better than having them in your head,” said Kemp.

“And I saw you leave London,” I said, throwing in my penny’s-worth.

“I danced myself out of the world,” said Kemp, raising himself slightly from the horizontal.

“I have brought you a pie.”

Abel burrowed into his doublet and presented one of Mrs Holland’s confections to the old clown with a little touch of ceremony, adding, “Seeing as it’s dinner time.”

Will Kemp sat up on his boarded bed and took the mince-pie without a word of thanks to Abel or a glance at the pie. He bit into it. I wondered when he’d last had anything to eat.

“That is to say,” said Kemp, after he’d swallowed most of the pie, “you must understand that when I say I danced myself out of the world I mean I danced myself out of the Globe theatre.”

“And I brought you this as well,” said Abel Glaze. He produced from another part of his doublet a small corked bottle. I realized that he had come prepared with these little offerings. He was a walking pantry. He handed the bottle to Kemp, who was by now perched on the edge of his low bed. Kemp flipped the cork off with his thumb, threw back his head and glugged down about half the liquid. His Adam’s apple jigged in his scrawny neck.

When he’d satisfied his immediate thirst he looked up at Glaze.

“Sack from Master Richardson,” said Abel.

“Taylor’s is better,” said Kemp. “Go to Taylor’s in Bright Street. Richardson puts lime in his sack.”

Some phrase about beggars not being choosers entered my head but I said nothing. Let Will Kemp cling to his scraps of dignity since it didn’t look as though he had much else left. Besides, it was plain that Abel Glaze had gone the right way to gain the old clown’s attention and approval. Whatever the shortcomings of the white wine, the effects of it were almost immediately apparent. Kemp stayed sitting on the edge of his bed but he grew more upright while his face – always the most mobile aspect of a body that had once been constantly shifting – took on a new interest in his surroundings and his visitors.

“This is only temporary,” he said, looking round at his mean quarters. “I have an opening with Worcester’s Men.”

I doubted this. I didn’t think he would ever dance a jig or make a joke in public again. But Abel was more understanding.

“It would be a pity, sir, if the stage was deprived of your genius for too much longer.”

“I am much of your mind, Master . . . what did you say your name was?”

“Abel Glaze.”

“It is good to know that there are still one or two members of the Chamberlain’s Company with their heads on straight and their organs of appreciation in working order.”

“Dick Burbage sends his greetings,” I said.

“Bumbag? How is the old bastard?” said Kemp, taking another swig from the bottle of sack.

As a matter of fact, this “bastard” comment was closer to Burbage’s actual words before Abel and I set off for Dow-gate, only he had been referring to Kemp.

“And Master Shakeshaft? And Thomas Pap and Master Sink-low and all the other turdy-faced rogues and fat old shareholders?”

“The Company is in working order, like their organs of appreciation,” I said.

Picking up on the slight stiffness in my reply, Kemp turned his attention back to Abel. One admirer is enough in a little room. Kemp drained the last drop from the bottle and then held it upside down with a forlorn but somehow actor-ly expression. As if this was a cue, which perhaps it was, Abel produced yet another bottle from his doublet and handed it to Kemp, who swallowed some of the new gift, this time without commenting on the provenance of the sack.

“Sit down,” said the clown then, “sit down.”

There was nothing to sit down on but Abel promptly lowered himself to the filthy rush-covered floor and, after a moment, I followed suit.

“I can still cut a caper,” said Kemp, waiting for us to be settled like an audience and then standing upright.

As we watched in that dingy room in Dow-gate, he raised his arms and kicked up his heels, thrust out his groin and waggled his hips. But he was a dancing shadow.

Pausing, he said, “There was a rhyme to go with all this . . . but I have forgot the words to it.” Then he sat down once more on the bed and swigged at the second bottle.

“My buskins . . . you know where they are?” he said.

At first I thought Kemp had lost his shoes – or perhaps had sold them for food or drink – since he’d been dancing before us in his stockinged feet, but Abel was quicker than I to grasp his meaning.

“Your famous dancing shoes, sir?”

“They are in the Guild Hall at Norwich, that’s where my buskins are, the ones I wore to dance from London in. There they stand displayed side by side, nailed to the wall.”

“You are the master of morris-dancers,” said Abel. “The king of capers.”

The clown, accepting the compliment as no more than his due, looked at us as we sat leaning against the roughcast wall, only a few feet from him. His eyes glittered in the gloom.

“There were the women. The nut-brown lass with the large legs . . . I put bells on those legs so that she could join me in a jig. I fitted them myself, low down and
high up
.”

His hands shaped themselves round thick imagined hams.

“ . . . and then there was the other girl whose petticoats I tore off – accidentally, you understand, quite accidentally as I fetched a leap and landed on her skirts and broke her points and ties – so there she was stood only in her underthings and turning scarlet in front of the people . . . who were not displeased . . . and then . . . ”

Will Kemp paused to see how we were taking in all this suggestive talk. Speaking for myself, I was interested enough and could have done with more of it, though not too much more. But, good showman that he still was, Kemp understood that he’d caught his audience’s attention. He stopped reminiscing at this point and, reaching under his low bed, produced a small clutch of pamphlets.

“Here’s the full story,” he said. “
Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder
, it is called. Perhaps you have heard of it. My little tale is contained in here where you may read it at your leisure.”

He held up a copy. On the front was the title as he’d announced it and a picture of our friend jigging away, with his drum player in the background. Abel reached forward to take hold of a pamphlet but Kemp held it out of his grasp.

“Only a shilling,” he said. “Or seeing as you are members of my old Company, nine pence. You may purchase my account of this epic journey from London to Norwich for a mere nine pence. Or – further – seeing as you are young
ish
members of the Chamberlain’s and therefore without the resources of those fat old shareholders, a mere six pence. Sixpence. My final offer.”

I waited for Abel to reach for his purse but he mimed regret with upturned palms, a downturned mouth and raised shoulders. So, somewhat grudgingly, I took out sixpence of my own, half a day’s pay. I handed it over to Kemp, who passed across his
Nine Days’ Wonder
in exchange. As he leaned forward he exhaled fumes of sack in my direction. I carefully folded the booklet and put it inside my doublet. My sixpence vanished into Kemp’s thin, veiny hand.