Mask of Night (21 page)

In the gloom at the bottom of stairs I almost collided with a figure who was waiting there. I mumbled an apology and expected him to climb the stairs now they were clear. But the man didn’t move. He peered into my face and I recognized Jack Davenant.

“You have been to see Master Shakespeare?” said the landlord.

“Yes.”

“Is he alone?”

“He is now,” I said, then realizing this might be misconstrued I added, “Dick Burbage was with him but he left some time ago. I don’t think Shakespeare wants to be disturbed.”

“Oh, I shan’t disturb him. I love the fellow.”

This was such an odd thing to say, out of the blue, in the near dark, that I couldn’t judge Davenant’s tone. Was he sneering or did he mean it?

“You were there this afternoon, weren’t you?” he said. “You were next door in the Golden Cross?”

“I’m a member of the Chamberlain’s,” I said. “I was playing in
Romeo and Juliet
.”

“So was Master Shakespeare.”

“Yes, he played the friar.”

“The dead friar?”

“That was another player. Or not a player exactly but Doctor Fern. When he could not be found during the interval Shakespeare took over his part.”

“So Master Shakespeare was around at that time?”

“Why yes,” I said, not knowing where all this was leading, and on my guard for a trap.

“You confirm that he was there?”

“Is this a court of law?” I said.

“Not yet,” said Davenant.

“You know that Shakespeare is one of our shareholders. He keeps an eye on us, even when he is not playing.”

“Playing, hmm,” said the landlord.

“If you’ll excuse me, Master Davenant, I’ll be on my way to my lodging. I’m tired and this hasn’t been the best of days.”

“Of course, Master . . .?”

We’d already been introduced on my first night in the town when WS and I sat drinking at a table not more than a few yards from the foot of these stairs. I didn’t think I’d remind Davenant of this but, since I had no choice, I gave him my name once more. He stood aside to let me pass, then suddenly came up so close that we were almost touching, chest to chest.

“I am an important man in this town, Master Revill. I am a vintner and a broker. My word carries weight.”

“I do not doubt it, sir,” I said and slipped past him, across the main room of the Tavern and so out into the street. It was a cold, gloomy night, shadowed by the events of the day. I went the few yards up Cornmarket, through the yard of the Golden Cross (where the stage stood, looking bereft without the benefit of action), past the passage where Fern’s body had been discovered, and so up the stairs into my crowded quarters.

I took off my shoes and moved restlessly about the room in my stockinged feet, unable to lie down straightaway. There were too many troubling speculations and questions.

Most of my fellows were in bed and asleep, judging by their little noises – a long, difficult day for them too. There was a window at the far end, looking out on the maze of narrow lanes and alleys which clustered at the back of the Golden Cross. The houses on either side overhung the alleys, leaning towards each other so that their upper storeys were almost touching. There was a candle glimmering in one of the chambers set at an angle to ours, and by its light I thought I saw those monkish figures once more. Two cowled heads and snouts shifting in the shadows. The bird-like monks. The monk-like birds. I went cold, and blinked and rubbed my eyes and looked again, but by then everything had disappeared, even the candle’s glimmer.

I crept into bed, convincing myself that I was tired and that my eyes were playing tricks, trying to reason my fear away.

The day had provided plenty of other material for reason and reflection. Once in my shared bed, with Laurence Savage slumbering beside me, I chewed over the last twelve hours like a cow chews her cud, although without the cow’s contentment. It wasn’t only the sudden death of Hugh Fern and any suspicions which attached to that. It was also my recent encounters with WS and then with Jack Davenant.

My intention to pick up bits and pieces about Shakespeare’s life had misfired early on. It had all seemed so easy. I should have remembered that the truth is as slippery as an eel. Already I had heard contradictory stories about poaching, with WS apparently confessing to a boyhood escapade and then Hugh Fern denying that he at least had anything to do with it.

And the same doubt hung around what you might call a different species of poaching, WS’s connection with Jane Davenant. Was it what it appeared? A hurried appearance by the shirt-clad playwright during the interval of the play, accompanied by the landlord’s wife. Had they been engaged in another kind of play, with a cast of two only? Was William Shakespeare playing the afternoon Romeo, rather than Dick Burbage, with Jane Davenant as a Juliet well beyond her first youthful flush? There was also to be considered the apparently loose reputation of Mistress Davenant in Oxford, that gossip about cuckoldry, that ostler-talk about gypsies and playing at fast-and-loose. There was the strange manner of the landlord, questioning whether WS was alone in his room. But hadn’t he also said of Shakespeare, “I love the fellow.”

Shakespeare himself had warned me against jumping to conclusions. Did he say this because there
were
conclusions – obvious ones – to be jumped to, and because he wanted to forestall my suspicions? Was this a ploy? Similarly with his talk of not believing everything one heard or saw. Don’t even trust your senses.

And did that self-distrust apply to the death of Hugh Fern? If you believed the evidence of your eyes it looked like suicide. (But a kind of intuition told me that it was not.)

Why was Jack Davenant so concerned to establish Shakespeare’s whereabouts in the interval of the play? Was he trying to link his wife and WS together? Or was he insinuating that WS was somehow involved in the death of Hugh Fern? Suppose that you had a rival in . . . love, for want of a better term . . . and that you were a prominent local citizen, say a vintner and a broker, whose word carried weight . . . would you have scruples about linking that rival to a suspicious death, if it meant that he might be investigated and, at the least, put to some inconvenience, possibly worse than inconvenience?

As I was falling asleep, I recalled how WS had helped me in the past when I was in difficulties. I wondered whether he was still sitting up next door in his chamber in the Tavern, alone and pondering on the death of a friend, gazing into the relics of the fire and sipping at the dregs in his glass.

At once I resolved to come to WS’s aid. I would look into Doctor Fern’s demise and arrive at the truth. Then, having got this settled in my mind, I must have dropped off to sleep.

Like most late-night resolutions, this one looked distinctly threadbare, even stupid, by the light of morning. How could I have had the presumption to believe I could “help” William Shakespeare? How, in any case, was I supposed to come by the truth about Fern’s death? Where to start?

Happening to fall into company with Will Sadler – Oxford is a small place, stand in Carfax and the world will pass you by sooner or later – I heard the student’s account of how he and Doctor Bodkin had been intercepted on their way out of the Golden Cross, and how the physician had returned to examine Fern’s body. But there was nothing out of place in his story. I grew inclined to think that there was nothing to discover.

We continued to perform in the Golden Cross yard. Another day, another play. As Dick Burbage had predicted, our audiences actually went up after Hugh Fern’s death. But, as WS had also predicted, the players’ stay here was almost certainly drawing to a close. The number of plague deaths increased quite sharply, and the fatalities were dotted about the city in a way that suggested that King Pest was operating to his usual pattern – that is, at random.

WS and Dick Burbage paid their visit to Mrs Fern. I don’t know what passed between the widow and the shareholders but the upshot as far as the Chamberlain’s were concerned was that our private performance of
Romeo and Juliet
was scheduled to go ahead in the Headington house on its due date. The Sadler and Constant families were to attend, as much in tribute to the dead Doctor as anything else.

I hadn’t completely forgotten the story which Susan Constant had told me, of her belief that her cousin was being poisoned and that there was some malevolent presence haunting her house, leaving clay figures by the door, and so on. But I was inclined to put it down to an over-active imagination. (Yes, I can see the irony here, considering my own excited speculations about Hugh Fern.) If Sarah Constant was genuinely ill, then couldn’t that be attributed to her apprehensions about marriage and to her high-strung nature? I remembered her shivering account of hearing the martyrs’ cries, of seeing the flames which consumed them in Broad Street, even though this had occurred many years before she was born.

Besides, all of this business of poisoning and mysterious figures was overshadowed by the shock of Fern’s death. What Susan had told me was only a story, but Fern’s death was real, tragically so.

It was Abel Glaze who made a connection between the two strands.

I told him everything, you see. Well, not quite everything. I did not mention my own night encounter with the hooded trio or that recent glimpse from the dormitory window. But I described Susan Constant’s fears for her cousin’s welfare. She had not bound me to secrecy, although perhaps she should have done. I also went through my reasoning over the death of Fern. It was an alternative to doing nothing at all. The burden of unravelling mysteries lay heavy on me. I wanted to lighten the load.

I knew that Abel looked on me in the light of a mentor – at least I flattered myself that he did – if only because my own service in the Chamberlain’s was rather longer than his. In a manner of speaking I had brought him into the Company. Compared to him I was an expert on plays and playing, just as he was an adept in the tricks of the road. I might have turned to Jack Wilson or Laurence Savage but I feared that they’d laugh at my speculations.

Abel and I talked while we were waiting off-stage during a performance. We were doing
The World’s Diseas’d
, Richard Milford’s violent drama of sudden death and cold revenge. It was odd to be talking about a real-life death so close to where it had actually occurred and to be playing about with stage-death at the same time. Particularly so since I was taking the part of Vindice, and occasionally had to break away from our dialogue and make an entrance to do a spot of brooding or avenging. Luckily, I didn’t have to throw myself about the platform since my ankle was still delicate. You forget these petty infirmities, however, when you’re in front of the crowd. Abel’s parts in the drama were smaller but he too had to keep an ear open for his cues. This gave our conversation a rather piecemeal, fractured quality.

Anyway, when I’d come out with all this about the Constants and Doctor Fern in a muddled narrative, Abel Glaze was quiet for a time then he said, “Doctor Fern was Sarah Constant’s godfather, her sponsor?”

“I believe so. Yes, he was.”

“Do you think that she might have said something to him about her health?”

“Maybe. But according to her cousin Susan she refuses to believe that anything is really wrong with her.”

“But suppose that the Doctor came to the same conclusion as Susan, whether she – whether Sarah, I mean – said anything to him or not. He was a doctor after all. Maybe he too detected symptoms of poisoning in her.”

“Yes . . . ”

“And suppose you’re right in your belief that there’s something strange about Doctor Fern’s death. Strange to the point of murder.”

“Yes.”

“Then
suppose
. . . ”

“Wait a moment, Abel.”

I stopped him at this point since I had to make an entrance as Vindice and deliver a speech about the pleasures of revenge and then stab a cardinal. When I’d done my duty I returned and we carried on our secret, whispered conversation at the back of the stage platform.

“You were in the middle of supposing, Abel. Tell me.”

So he did. And what Abel Glaze supposed was twisted enough.

It was that Doctor Fern had uncovered a plot of some kind against Sarah Constant and that the discovery put him into danger, mortal danger. That whoever was plotting against Sarah was about to be confronted by Fern and had therefore been forced to take drastic action. Even to the point of killing him in the middle of a play.

Oddly enough, the more Abel said, the more sceptical I became.

“What about the locked room?” I said. I pointed towards the fatal chamber. We were leaning against the wall only a few yards from it.

“Oh, the locked room is a detail.”

“An insuperable detail.”

“Let’s leave it in the wings.”

“Wherever you leave it, it will still have to be accounted for sooner or later.”

“I have it! It could be that Fern himself turned the key in the door.”

“A notable feat for a dead man.”

“
Before
he died, Nick. He is badly wounded, dying but does not know it, or rather he is not aware of what he is doing at all in his final moments. Only instinct is left. He manages to bar the door against his adversary.”

“If he’d any last bit of sense left in him, wouldn’t he have gone looking for help?”

“Not if the person who stabbed him was still there, waiting outside the door.”

“You’re forgetting, Abel, that all this was taking place during the
Romeo and Juliet
interval. There were plenty of people around.”

“You know what it’s like during intervals. Nobody really pays attention to anybody else. They’re too busy about their own affairs.”

“But this wasn’t backstage at the Globe, all private and shut away. There were members of the public wandering about as well.”

“That just adds to the confusion. Nobody staying in one spot for more than a few moments.”

“
I
was there the whole time though, sitting on that bench by the passageway. I’d injured my foot. I had nothing to be busy about. ”

“So you ought to be in the best position to see what happened.”