Mask of Night (25 page)

“There was once a coldness between the Sadlers and the Constants, that’s true,” said WS, seeing that I needed an explanation. “But it was years ago. I think my friend Hugh Fern saw himself as a peace-maker, where a truce had already been declared. Or it may be that . . . ”

I waited.

“ . . . he wanted to encourage the young lovers.”

“By having them watch a tragedy where the young lovers perish?”

“By displaying true passion to them, perhaps,” said WS. “I do not know. If you’ve talked to Will Sadler at all you must have noticed that he’s a somewhat – lukewarm young man. Maybe Hugh wanted to encourage him in love.”

“Someone told me recently that only a fool would try to bring two people together,” I said.

“I wonder who that was,” said Shakespeare. “Well, all we know is that none of us is consistent. Nothing is certain. Had you not better finish your dressing? We are beginning soon.”

I half smiled and resumed doing up the points of my costume. Seeing that I was pacified, WS moved away, saying that he had guests to welcome.

Our chamber production of
Romeo and Juliet
, played out in the hall of the Fern house, was a notable success, small though the audience was. Quality made up for quantity. They laughed, groaned and wept in the right places, but all in a refined fashion.
Romeo and Juliet
can hardly have been unfamiliar to them, since several of the audience had been in the Golden Cross on the afternoon of Hugh Fern’s death and others had doubtless seen the play before. However, the story comes fresh even when we know the ending.

In fact our audience too was familiar, apart from those members of the two families whom I hadn’t glimpsed before. There was Mistress Root, gaudily dressed and laughing at the bawdiness of Thomas Pope playing the Nurse to Juliet. There was William Sadler sitting close to Sarah Constant. I could not see the expression on his face but hoped that the play was working its magic and causing him to fall into a grand passion for her. There was Susan Constant, who had already told me that she was to be identified with Romeo’s discarded lover, Rosaline.

Other familiar faces in the audience were Doctor Ralph Bodkin and, more surprisingly, John and Jane Davenant from the Tavern. What was going on inside their heads I haven’t the slightest idea, but I presumed they were here as friends to the Company or to the Ferns. It was a private performance but also our farewell appearance in Oxford, and who knew when a troupe of players would pass this way again?

The tragedy finished with our jig. I was able to join in this time, my ankle being almost healed. Nothing untoward occurred. Nobody was found dead in a cupboard afterwards. There was more food and drink at the close. The Sadler and Constant families mingled cheerfully with the other guests. From fragments of conversation, I gathered that a wedding would soon be celebrated (unless the plague took a real hold of the town and brought everything to a stop). Sarah Constant’s face was lit up by her smile, sun on a snowfield. Will Sadler had his face buried in a glass. There was no sign of Susan.

We packed up our gear and prepared to make the journey back into town for the night. Like any travelling after dark, this was best done together or at least in groups large enough to deter thieves and worse. We walked down the hill under the moon, but guided as well by several lanterns. We entered the city through the east gate and went down the High Street. The town was quiet.

A few of our number detached themselves from the party at various stages along our route, including Laurence Savage and Jack Wilson. They had private business to attend to, no doubt. I’d heard that Jack had picked up with the wife of a wool merchant who was conveniently absent in Peterborough. Her name was Maria and she had much admired his skill with the foil when he was playing Tybalt. I knew no more than that. Even bland, mild-mannered Laurence had apparently secured himself a friend of that kind, or so he’d hinted to me. For the first time in several days I thought of Lucy Milford and wondered how she was managing in London. Managing without me, that is. (But of course, she’d be perfectly all right without me. Sad but true.)

For reasons I couldn’t fathom I kept expecting something to happen, but it didn’t. We got back to the Golden Cross Inn, those of us who hadn’t anything more urgent or interesting to do than go to bed. I thought that it was all over. We were to leave the city within a day or two.

I found the note as I was unpacking the scroll which contained my lines as Mercutio. You probably know that these scrolls are among the most precious items carried by a player. Anyone who mislays his lines must not only pay for a new copy but also face the wrath of Master Allison, the book-keeper. So we treat our parts with care. I was about to stow it in the scrip or wallet which I kept under my bolster when a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. I picked it up and held it near the candle.

The writing was unfamiliar – not the clear hand of the play copyist – and I had to angle the page so that it caught the light. It was a simple messsage, simple in one sense. It said:

You are right to suspect foul play in the death of Hugh Fern. We must talk in private. Say nothing beforehand but come to my house on the corner of Cats Street tomorrow morning.
Angelica Root
.

I carefully folded the note inside my scrip and thought.

This was a baffling communication for several reasons. For one thing I’d mentioned my suspicions about Doctor Fern’s death only to Dick Burbage and WS, and Abel of course. How had Mistress Root got to hear of them? For another, I’d assumed that the problem of Hugh Fern was dead and buried, so to speak. Whatever the questions which surrounded his death, the coroner had pronounced it to be an accident, misadventure.

Then, if Mistress Root wanted to talk to me, why hadn’t she taken the opportunity this evening when we were all together at the Ferns’ house? (This at least was more easily answered. Presumably she did not want the two of us to be seen talking together in public.)

And how had she contrived to put the note inside the Mercutio scroll? A moment’s reflection, however, suggested that this would have been relatively simple, since the scrolls had been left in the “dressing-room” while we were mingling with the audience at the end of the performance. Anyone might have slipped in and secreted a note inside my scroll.

“Getting love-letters again?”

It was Abel Glaze, who, sleeping in the same bed as me, noticed my scrutiny of the note from Mistress Root and the thoughtful way I’d folded it up.

“Something of the sort,” I said.

Luckily the light in our large room was so feeble – candle economy – that he wasn’t able to see much.
Say nothing beforehand.

“Is it from Mistress Constant?”

“She is engaged to be married.”

“I mean, from
Susan
Constant.”

“No, it is not. Not from anyone like that.”

“Oh well,” said Abel with a sigh, “and I thought we were the only two in the Chamberlain’s not to have found ourselves a mistress in this place and be busy tonight.”

This was not completely accurate – at least half the bed spaces in our dormitory were occupied at this very moment, and solely by their rightful owners – but I detected a rueful note in my friend’s voice. Perhaps his love-lorn pose was not altogether a pose.

I blew out the candle and lay down. One advantage of Laurence Savage’s absence was that I had more space in the bed, as did Abel.

“Where is Laurence, do you know?” he said.

“No.”

“I hope he has found himself a more comfortable nook than this place.”

I refused to rise to Abel’s speculation. The question was not interesting (or not
that
interesting). The real question that was preoccupying me, of course, was whether I should respond to Mistress Root’s summons to her house in Cats Street. I had more or less put the business of Hugh Fern’s death out of my mind. The coroner had sat, everyone seemed satisfied. Yet here was the promise of further secrets.

We must talk in private.

I could ignore the request. We’d be departing from Oxford in forty-eight hours or less.

Caution counselled, well, caution. What did this have to do with me?

But curiosity said something different. To leave the town without having got to the bottom of this mystery would be like quitting a play before the fifth act. You stick it out even though you know it’s going to end unhappily.

So early next morning, after breakfasting on a little ale and brown bread, I slipped out of the Golden Cross and made my way to Cats Street. It wasn’t far, just a few hundred yards down the High Street and to the east of St Mary’s, the church with the great spire. The mist from the river was lifting but shreds of it still hung in the air. The highways were almost deserted.

I had the note in my pocket. The house on the corner. This must be it. A quite handsome dwelling on two floors, half facing on to the High and half on to Cats Street, which was more of a lane. It was a large place for one woman, though Angelica Root may have had dependants or lodgers for all I knew. Certainly large for a nurse, but then I recalled that she’d been married at least three times. Perhaps the late Mr Root had left her well provided for.

I knocked at the door, expecting to be expected. Waited. No one came. Knocked again. I pushed at the door but it was shut fast. I turned to go away, half relieved.

Then I saw that one of the casement windows on the side of the house which faced Cats Street was ajar, more than slightly ajar. I peered into the room, which was unoccupied apart from a dining-table, a few chairs and some decorative odds-and-ends. If you’re a town-dweller it is not wise to leave a window unlatched during the night for obvious reasons, and if you live in the country then you probably believe that the night air is bad for your health. So I concluded that there was someone in the house, or that there had been someone here earlier this morning.

I returned to the front door and rapped on it once more.

When no answer came, I walked back down the lane and stood in front of the open window.

Before I was properly conscious of what I was doing, I had swung the window right open and hoisted myself over the sill and into the dining-room. Getting in was not difficult. The sill of the window was only three feet or so from the ground.

Once inside the house I paused. I wondered whether anyone had seen me climbing in. So impulsive had the action been that I hadn’t even bothered to check. I closed the window.

I called out Mistress Root’s name. The boards creaked as I made my way across a dark lobby and towards a room on the far side. The curtains were drawn but some light squeezed through a gap. In one corner was an ample bed, the marital bed I assumed. Mistress Root was lying on the bed under the shadow of the tester overhead. She was fully clothed, in the same rather gaudy robes she’d been wearing at the Ferns’ last night.

I called out her name, more softly this time. But I knew that she was dead. Even by the meagre light I could see her staring eyes, like currants popping out of a cake. She was still red in the face, but blotchily so. On the bed beside her lay two figures, simple clay things that a child might play with, miniature humans. I picked them up, for want of anything else to do. They had featureless heads and gestures for limbs. They seemed familiar, and I remembered Susan Constant’s description (now retracted) of a figure left outside a back door. One of these images had a pin stuck into its belly while the other had a pin jammed into its head.

I felt hot, then cold. I don’t know how long I stood there in the house of a dead woman, before I was brought back to myself by the squeaking of cart wheels from the lane outside. The mind is odd, because I remember thinking to myself that the carter needed to grease his axle. The squeaking stopped. There was the sound of a key scraping in the front door, then the creak of the door opening and a gust of cold air. There was a little hanging moment, when time seemed to stop altogether. Then a whispering and the soft click of the door being closed again. Too soft a sound, too surreptitious.

In such moments instinct takes over. Thank God it takes over. And thank God too that Mistress Root was a woman who’d come up in the world or married well or been left comfortably off. Whatever the reason, she was the (dead) occupant of a fine bed, elaborately carved with recesses for candles in the headboard and with solid plinths supporting the pillars which held up the tester. But what mattered to me at that moment wasn’t the carving or the embroidery but the space underneath the bed.

Before I was really aware of what I’d done I found myself beneath the bed, burrowing like a frightened rabbit pursued by dogs. It was dark and dusty down here. I waited. The top of my head grazed against the leather webbing which supported the feather mattress and the wool blankets (no fustian for Mrs Root) and their late owner. However terrible the circumstances, there was something almost comforting in all this weight above me, particularly when I heard the floorboards creaking right outside the room.

“There’s nothing to see,” said a muffled voice.

The light was poor but, for myself, I could see quite enough. There were two of them. I’d been saved by the fact that before they reached the bedroom they had gone into at least one of the other rooms on this floor. I’d also heard feet mounting the stairs and, after a few moments, coming down again. If they’d headed straight for this room I would not have had time to get lodged out of sight beneath the bed.

But now the four feet advanced towards my hiding-place and I breathed slow. Not just feet. Also in my line of sight were the bottom of their dark cloaks and a pair of pale sticks, too thin and whip-like to be aids to walking. The feet stopped. Then came the same muffled voice.

“Naughty man’s cherries,” it said.

Naughty man’s cherries
?

At least that’s what it sounded like. And there was something familiar about the voice which had uttered these words, although I couldn’t place it. This peculiar remark was followed by a giggle.

The other person made an impatient, shushing sound.