Mask of Night (24 page)

You pass out of the house, pulling the door to behind you. It is late in the day. You might compare yourself to the angel of death, passing over these remote dwellings. Wherever you go, whatever you touch, is marked for destruction or for use.

T
he final commission which I’d mentioned to Doctor Ralph Bodkin was, as you’ve probably guessed, our private performance of
Romeo and Juliet
at the house of Doctor and Mrs Fern. Soon after this we were due to quit Oxford, the local authorities having been as good as Doctor Bodkin’s word and prohibited further playing in the Golden Cross yard or anywhere else in a public place. By doing this they had anticipated the seniors’ decision to leave. Where we were going next I had no idea. Perhaps the shareholders didn’t either. Our departure from Oxford – or our dismissal – was expected since the plague deaths showed no signs of abating. Most of us were relieved, given the likely hostility of the townspeople if the Carfax demonstration was anything to go by. And yet these were some of the very citizens who’d been so loud and appreciative in their welcome only a fortnight earlier!

Surprisingly, the performance at the Ferns’ wasn’t a subdued affair. Mrs Fern, the Doctor’s widow, might not have been merry in her black weeds but nor was she obviously grieving. There was a proper air of decorum but no exaggerated solemnity about the house. The funeral and the feast which followed had taken place a few days previously. Some of the pictures were draped with black but there was no other mark of mourning apart from the bands worn by the servants, including Andrew Pearman. The last I’d seen of him he had been pacing distractedly round the inn yard. He still looked sombre, understandably given that his position as the Doctor’s assistant no longer existed. I wondered what would happen to all the gear contained in Fern’s consulting room, all the bowls and flasks, the surgical probes and gauges.

We were to play
Romeo and Juliet
on the flat, that is, at floor level, while the (smallish) audience would sit on three or four tiers of raised seating. It was an evening performance and the massed candles glowed in the wall-sconces, their light reflected in the linen-fold panelling. There was a fire in the great fireplace. I foresaw that we’d all get very heated in our costumes.

The two families for whose benefit this play was being staged were milling around together, drinking and talking with some additional guests. They maintained a kind of reserve with each other, but not much. The parents on each side could have been cast in one of our plays, so neatly did they seem to fit their moulds. The fathers were grave and grey-bearded, the mothers matronly. There were a handful of brothers and sisters, younger Sadlers, smaller Constants, and I recalled now that Sarah had a sister called Emilia among others.

I found it hard to credit that there really was a feud between the Constants and the Sadlers, however muted. What was it supposed to have been about originally? I struggled to remember. A patch of useless land somewhere out in Cowley Marsh? Surely these two households were much too civilized and comfortable now to fall out over a bog? I also recalled that William Sadler had said that Hugh Fern could not resist seeing drama where there was none.

Those love-birds Sarah Constant and William Sadler seemed quite restrained with each other but perhaps that was natural. The couple were on public display, as it were. I didn’t consider there was any great passion between them, at least on his side, although Sarah cast frequent fond glances in his direction. She was still pale but less tense-looking.

I’d been thinking about the poisoning story and whether Susan Constant still expected me to use those skills of detection which she had misguidedly attributed to me. Was I meant to try to uncover some hidden poisoner even at this late stage?

Fortunately, I was not. It was Susan herself who relieved me of that task before the play began.

“Nicholas, can I speak with you?”

I noticed some of my fellows looking at us while we whispered in a corner of the hall where, in the next hour, we were to perform our
Romeo and Juliet
. If she’d wanted to draw attention she could hardly have picked a more public spot, particularly as she put her head close to mine. She had sweet breath. Perhaps people would assume there was some liaison between us. I didn’t mind. She was a handsome woman. But it turned out she had other things on her mind.

“You remember our conversation in the meadow by Christ Church?”

“When you talked about your cousin – and poison and clay figures?”

“Yes.”

She paused. Whatever she wanted to say next would not come easily.

“I have been at fault in this.”

“You mean that you . . .?”

“I mean that I have decided I was mistaken and you were right. I want to unsay what I said then. Since I cannot do that I would like you to forget it. My cousin is not sick. There is no enemy who is trying to come between her and William.”

“Although you were so certain there was someone.”

I struggled to remember a few of her words to quote back at her but she leaned in closer, her voice sounded deep and low in my ears, and I grew confused.

“There was no one.”

“What about – what about the figure you saw that morning by the farmhouse. The bird-headed figure?”

“I was tired. I had not been sleeping well. It was only a farm labourer on his way to work, I expect.”

“And the figure, the image that was left by your door. That was real enough surely?”

“A child’s plaything, discarded.”

Now I was even more confused. But it was none of my business if Susan had decided that she’d been imagining things and didn’t after all require my help. I was relieved, to be honest.

“You haven’t told anyone, have you, Nicholas?”

“I told my friend Abel Glaze.”

“But you have not said anything to William Sadler?”

“Not a word to him.”

“Promise me you will not say anything to William. I would not have him disturbed.”

“Very well. I promise.”

I looked over to where William Sadler was chatting with his father (or so I assumed, there was enough likeness between them). They were laughing together. Young Sadler looked unlikely to be disturbed by very much. As I watched, he upturned a goblet and drained it. I glanced back at Susan. She too had been gazing at William. Her whole expression, which I can best describe as one of fond impatience, told me what I needed to know and solved the puzzle, or a small piece of it anyway.

What had Sadler said to me in his college room? He had complacently accepted Sarah Constant’s devotion to him and made some comment about it running in the family. Then he had mentioned not Sarah but
Susan
, before thinking better of whatever he’d intended to say next.

I might have prised the secret out of her, I suppose. She owed me that much at least after the tales of poisoning and men in bird-masks. But no force or subtlety was necessary to get at the truth. The secret was written plainly enough on her face. She was the one who was in love with Sadler. Perhaps it had been stronger in the past but there were still traces of affection in her face for that careless student.

Now she looked back at me. Our heads were still close together. We were sharing a secret, or that’s how it must have appeared. I suddenly thought that she wanted William to catch her – to catch us – like that, heads close together, whispering. With luck he might experience a twinge of jealousy. But Sadler was too busy pouring himself another drink from a convenient flask. He didn’t so much as notice Susan noticing him.

“Yes,” she said finally. “Think of me as Rosaline.”

“Rosaline? I don’t understand.”

“But you do understand, Nicholas Revill. Your look tells me that you do. Think of me as Rosaline in your play, I say, in
Romeo and Juliet
.”

At that moment her cousin Sarah came up and claimed her attention by grasping her arm and wanting to talk. I must say that Susan put on a good show of cousinly affection. She smiled gently and listened patiently.

I moved away. I was already late for changing into my Mercutio costume.

As I was getting prepared in the side-room which was our dressing area, I puzzled over what she had said. Jack Wilson was next to me, getting into his clothes as Tybalt. Laurence Savage was also there. Since he appears in the very beginning, Laurence was already spruced up as Benvolio, cousin and friend to Romeo.

“You have your strokes ready, Nick?” said Jack. “This is likely to be the last time we fight in this particular play.”

“At least there is no stage for me to fall off.”

“
Alla stocatta.
”

He lunged at me but I was busy doing up my points and in no particular mood for levity.

“Jack, you know this piece of ours better than I do. There is no female called Rosaline in it, is there?”

It may seem odd that I had to ask about the identity of a character in
Romeo and Juliet
, although it’s true we can’t see a play from the outside as long as we are in it, and we almost never read or study the thing in its entirety but only our own parts and scenes. Still, it was even odder that I’d somehow overlooked a significant character. But Jack too seemed baffled.

“Rosaline? There is one Juliet, one Lady Montague, one Lady Capulet . . . the Nurse of course . . .”

“There
is
a Rosaline,” said Laurence, “but she never appears on the stage.”

Jack clapped his hand to his head.

“Of course there is,” he said.

Seeing I wasn’t going to get it, Laurence Savage looked a bit smug while he kept me waiting for an explanation.

Then he recited some lines.

“At this same ancient feast of Capulet’s
Sups the fair Rosaline, whom thou so lov’st,
With all the admired beauties of Verona.”

When he saw that I still wasn’t following him, he sighed.

“Rosaline is Romeo’s first love. I should know because Dick Burbage will pour out his heart to me in about, oh, half an hour. Remember Romeo doesn’t take part in the fight at the beginning of the play because he is wandering love-sick among the sycamores on the edge of the city. He is pining for his
Rosaline
under the sycamores.”

“But when he claps eyes on Juliet he forgets all about Rosaline,” I said.

“Despite Rosaline’s ‘bright eyes and quivering thigh’,” said Jack. “I should have remembered Rosaline. That is
my
line about the bright eye. Personally I would have been pleased enough with a quivering thigh.”

“Why do you want to know, Nick?” said Laurence. “Are you thinking of ways you could improve on William Shakespeare? Have Romeo not kill himself after all, but go back to Rosaline at the end?”

I had a sudden vision of a different tragedy – one that wouldn’t be a tragedy at all. Romeo survives and goes off to marry Rosaline.

“I don’t think the audience would accept that,” said Jack. “A
happy
ending to
Romeo and Juliet
? Come on.”

“Only curious,” I said.

But now I understood Susan Constant’s reference and kicked myself for my slowness. She had seen the play in the yard of the Golden Cross Inn. The lines about Romeo and Rosaline must have struck home – and struck hard. Susan saw herself in the mirror of a character who is talked about but who never actually steps on to the stage.

Rosaline is displaced in Romeo’s affections by Juliet. Perhaps in the same way Susan had been displaced in William Sadler’s affections – if he was capable of anything so selfless as affection – by her cousin Sarah. If that’s what had happened. What evidence did I have? A glancing reference by Sadler and (much more significant) the look which Susan had given him just now across the hall, a look combining impatience and fondness.

When she is thrown over by Romeo what does Rosaline do in the play? Nothing. Or if she does do anything we never hear of it for
Romeo and Juliet
is not her story.

What does Susan Constant do in real life?

Does she invent a story about her cousin being poisoned, about the “present” of an image being left by the door with a pin sticking into it?

If it was all invention . . .

She seemed pretty certain that it was now. Had told me to forget all about it. The figure she’d glimpsed in the field was a labourer on his way to work. The clay image was an abandoned plaything.

In some part of her mind did Susan dislike – even hate? – her cousin sufficiently to wish harm on her? Did she claim that Sarah was being poisoned because it was what she herself wanted to do? And, unable to contemplate such a horrendous course directly, had she transferred the wish to some imagined enemy? I had no idea whether this speculation was right. It was too deep for me, this attempt to see into the recesses of another’s heart and mind.

And, whatever Susan Constant was saying now, at the time she had believed in her story. I could not forget that I too had had more than one glimpse of those hooded figures.

Jack Wilson and Laurence Savage and the others had left by this stage. Not yet fully costumed as Mercutio, I must have been standing there in a brown study (perhaps remembering those hooded figures) because I wasn’t aware that Shakespeare had entered the changing-room. He was dressed in the garb of Friar Laurence, and for an instant I didn’t recognize him. The gloom that had shrouded him when we’d last talked in his chamber in the Tavern was dissipated. He was generally a sunny individual.

“You look as though you’ve seen a ghost, Nick.”

“It’s nothing,” I said.

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him what was really on my mind but instead I said, “This is a strange business.”

“How so?”

“We are supposed to be bringing two families together by playing, but I do not see any great signs of hostility, even of dislike between them. Did Hugh Fern imagine this thing? William Sadler suggested that to me.”

“Does it matter why we are playing?”

“Oh, it’s only money, I suppose. What does anything matter as long as the coin is good?”

There was an unexpected sharpness to my tone and WS looked taken aback. I don’t know why I felt like this. Perhaps it was the result of having been taken in by Susan Constant with her stories. No, not taken in . . . but . . .