Mask of Night (31 page)

“It is for all of us.”

“What’s that?”

There was the scraping sound of a key turning in the front door. My bowels turned to water. Abel froze, still holding the make-up pot. Then we breathed again to hear Jack Wilson’s voice.

Swiftly he entered his mistress’s house and came through the lobby into the ground-floor chamber where Abel had been giving me the plague. Jack said, “My God,” when he saw me, and I was pleased because he was taken in. Then in a breathless whisper he told us how he’d primed Kit Kite, as planned. He’d mentioned to the Golden Cross ostler the rumour of a plague-struck house in Grove Street. The rest of the occupants had run away, he’d heard, after one of them fell sick. (That they should run away was plausible enough since anyone discovered in a plaguey dwelling could find himself interned there for forty days.) The implication was that the house stood undefended.

“You did it casual, Jack? He didn’t suspect?”

“I did it as well as you would have done, Nick, and all with acting. I asked him whether the story was true, as if I was the ignorant one. I think he took the bait.”

“We’ll see. How long till dark?”

“A couple of hours or less. It is a dull March day outside.”

“If Kite and his accomplice are going to rob this house they will get here as soon as they safely can, for fear that some of the other bearers will beat them to it.”

“But none of the other body-carriers in Oxford know about this house,” said Abel.

“Kite doesn’t know that they don’t know,” said Jack. “That is, he doesn’t if he believed my rumour.”

“So the pair of them may get here straight after nightfall – or even earlier. The two of you should hide yourself in the back quarters of this fine place.”

“How shall we know when they’ve come?” said Abel.

“Don’t worry, I’ll cry out for help – or you’ll probably hear them anyway. They’ve not got much cause to be quiet since they are on official body-fetching business, or pretending to be.”

“Will you be safe? Are you armed?” said Abel.

“I have a knife,” I said, touched by his concern. (But my knife, tucked in my doublet, was a little object better suited to nail-paring than anything more desperate.)

“So have I,” said Abel. “Though I do not believe in violence for I have been a soldier.”

“While I have the foil which I employed as Tybalt,” said Jack. “I have taken off the tip which blunted it. See.”

“Ah, this is the foil which attracted Mistress Maria,” said Abel.

“Not the foil alone but my prowess with it,” said Jack, enacting his favourite
Romeo and Juliet
lunge. “
Alla stocatta!
”

With that and a few more pleasantries, mostly uttered to steady our nerves, Abel and Jack made themselves scarce in the back passages of the house, leaving me to play dead on the couch. But before he went Abel took a candle and set fire to some small tablet which he’d deposited in the fireplace. All at once a sharp, foul reek filled the chamber.

“Jesus, what are you doing?”

“You’re dying of plague, Nick. You will not smell pleasant. Your last hours will stink out the room.”

“Our friends can’t smell much. They wear those hoods.”

“They’ll get a taste of it, even so.”

“What is it?”

“Another trade secret.”

“Well, if I don’t die of your face-painting then I most likely will from that stench.”

But I grew accustomed to the smell after a time. The room was dark enough – the dead don’t require candles. I almost fell asleep. I sensed rather than saw the light dying by slow inches beyond the curtained window.

Sleep and death are like brothers, they say. It was odd to feel sleepy in this hour of danger but I did.

Perhaps there was something soporific in the stinky air which filled the room. Perhaps I was genuinely succumbing to the . . . fever.

Random thoughts floated through my brain. I tried to recall the names of the poison plants from Flower’s
Herbal
. How did they go? Belladonna, beautiful lady, devil’s herb and dwale (which sounded like a cross between dole and bale and so was highly appropriate) – these were the guises of the deadly nightshade. While monkshood was wolf’s bane and friar’s cap, as well as Cupid’s car.

I reached up to feel the bumps on my face. The dabs of ointment had grown hard as calluses. I reflected that I was imitating the manner of death which my poor parents had endured in reality. Well, that was fitting enough. I was only an imitator. A poor player. I let my hand drop down, fingers clenched in the death agony. I positioned my other hand over my chest, clutching my doublet. I practised my final grin, teeth bared for ever.

Then I must have fallen into a doze or a daze. The couch was surprisingly comfortable, just what I might have chosen for my own death-bed.

In this strange, half-dazed state, a parade of figures passed in front of my mind’s eye, figures going two by two, as flat as images in a painting. They were all somehow connected with this peculiar business in Oxford even if I could not see the links at present.

Two by two.

There was the late Doctor Hugh Fern walking abroad, quite unconscious of the fact that he was a ghost, and chatting with his man Pearman, putting a friendly hand on the servant’s shoulder.

Then there were the cousins Sarah and Susan Constant, the one pretty and delicate and nervous like a bird, the other reserved and serious but handsome nonetheless. She was trying to persuade her cousin to drink from a leather flask which she carried, but Sarah waved it away using the back of her hand.

Then Jack and Jane Davenant strolled by. To my surprise the landlord and landlady appeared relatively friendly towards each other. In my mind’s eye, they vanished behind a clump of willows like those which fringed the river in Christ Church meadows. After a while Mrs Davenant emerged from the trees without her husband but accompanied by William Shakespeare. As usual, it was difficult to read the expression on the playwright’s face. She was gesticulating in her gypsy-ish way but I couldn’t tell whether it was with excitement or anger or some other emotion altogether.

The couple vanished, to be replaced by Will Sadler. He was talking animatedly to a man whom at first I couldn’t identify because he was standing on the far side of the student in what seemed to be a dimly lit room. Then Will moved slightly and I recognized the bullish outline of Doctor Ralph Bodkin. Well, there was nothing out-of-the-way about this, since Bodkin had once been tutor to Sadler and the two of them continued to keep company together.

Next came an odd couple. I’d glimpsed them only once in conjunction together, and it wasn’t a happy occasion. Now I saw Angelica Root together again with the carter called . . . what was it? . . . Hobby . . . no, Hoby. John Hoby. The one who’d had the temerity to run her down on Headington Hill and whom she had cursed with a thousand plagues. But for the present they were both dead, surely? I had discovered Mistress Root myself as she was lying on her bed in Cats Street, eyes like currants popping out of a cake. While as for Hoby, he had been drowned in the Isis. If they were both dead, then I could guarantee that their enmity was persisting into the afterlife, for here was Nurse Root still berating the unfortunate carter. At any moment I expected her to retrieve a stockfish from under her voluminous skirts and start bashing him about the bonce. Meantime he stood with shrunken posture and drooping head, the whole effect rendered grotesque by the great wen which hung from his neck.

Then this scene too dissolved before my eyes to be replaced by a more sinister tableau.

I was once again in the passage between high college walls. Two bird-monk figures seemed to float past me like witches, their capes flapping around their ankles. One of them had his hood off, and I understood that I was correct in my suspicions. It was Kit Kite. He saw me looking at him, paused, giggled and tapped himself on the head as if to say, “Yes, it’s me.” But the other figure remained hidden under the face mask. I had previously thought of this unknown individual as Kite’s confederate but it was the other way about. The masked person was the leader and Kite merely an accomplice, I realized. Then the two shapes floated out of my mind’s eye.

All at once, I woke up. Or rather, my real eyes suddenly took in my real surroundings. A ground-floor chamber in a fine house in Grove Street in the city of Oxford. Surely I was still in a dream though, for by the light of a hovering lantern I could make out the same two figures, no longer floating through the air but walking on the solid floor. Both were garbed in their protective gear, with their beaked hoods, cloaks and pale wands. One of them was holding up the lantern whose rays through my half-closed eyelids appeared like golden threads.

“Here it is.”

It was Kite’s voice, muffled up but still recognizable.

The figures advanced towards the couch where I was lying. My head was half angled in their direction, my teeth were bared and my eyes unwaveringly fixed on an imagined point in the gloom surrounding the light. The two halted, as if there were an invisible wall surrounding me.

“He has the tokens,” said the other.

“See his hand,” said Kite.

“Wait . . . do not go too near.”

This voice was more distorted by the headgear than Kite’s but even so there was a touch of something familiar in it.

One of them – Kite, I think – put down the lantern and extended the pale wand which he was carrying and poked me in the side with it. It was a tentative poke, almost a respectful one. Thank God, I have some experience of playing dead. Once – having been run through at the beginning of a battle scene – I had to lie at the exposed edge of the Globe stage for what felt like hours while the rain was pissing down, and all without showing any greater facial discomfort than the average endured by a man who’s died violently in the field. The trick is to go limp, breath shallow and take your mind off to somewhere else more pleasant. Which I attempted to do now as I lay on the couch and received a couple of more forceful pokes in the side and flank. Then the second voice said simply, “Enough.”

Thank God also that they didn’t get too close. Circumstances favoured Abel’s cosmetic ingenuity and made them trust my corpse. The thin wand allowed the person wielding it to keep his distance from the infection so that Kite must have been standing almost a whole body’s length away. In addition, the light was coming up from floor level and the false body-bearers were wearing the hoods which limited their vision. The thick eyepieces glittered. Later I thought that this was how the dying lamb must feel on the upland as it lies surrounded by monstrous carrion birds, by great black crows and ravens.

Playing dead is not so hard when it’s a matter just of play. Playing dead is more difficult when it’s literally a matter of life and death. It was like being in the middle of a nightmare, powerless to move, powerless to make a sound. Except in a nightmare, in the end, you wake up. I was already awake; awake but turned to stone. Perhaps it was this petrified state which saved me. For if they had discovered that I was pretending now . . .

They didn’t discover it, apparently. As I’d predicted to Abel they were more interested in the plentiful contents of this room, in making a hurried survey of what they could seize and carrying it off. Probably they were fearful that a bunch of rival body-bearers would turn up on the doorstep at any moment and steal their thunder. The lantern was retrieved from the floor and the two figures shifted their attention to the more profitable areas of the chamber. I was merely the pretext for their presence, a dead body worth less than a brass pin. I breathed again slow and shallow, only now conscious that I’d been holding my breath all this time.

This was the moment when I should have called out for Jack and Abel but something prevented me. While it had been easy enough to talk about crying for help, it was very hard to actually do it. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was because, by calling out, I would throw off the pretence of death which had preserved me up to now.

Instead here I was waiting for my friends to burst through the door and rescue me. Surely they must have heard the intruders when they broke into the house. But I hadn’t heard them, had I? The first time I’d been aware of their presence was when the pair were already standing inside this very chamber. Maybe they hadn’t even broken into the house but had obtained a key by some roundabout method, like Jack Wilson. Or perhaps Jack had failed to secure the front door properly. What did it matter? They were inside, and where were my friends?

The couple were being quiet as they moved through the shadowy chamber. I prayed for one of them to drop a silver candlestick with a great clatter or to stumble over in the shadows. They didn’t. Rather they shifted about the room in a practised way, whispering sometimes when the lantern light was brought to bear on particular objects. These, as far as I could judge from the corner of my eye, were then being deposited in one place.

After a few minutes of this – although it seemed like hours – I realized that I was going to have to do something. Abel and Jack were not going to burst into the room and effect a rescue. I was on my own. My best hope was to act at once. To leap up in a shocking recovery, to shout and scream, to catch them off their guard. The main door to the house was probably unfastened, for I supposed that this pair of thieves planned to make a quick escape once they’d loaded up the cart. I did not wish to be part of their load. If I took them by surprise, I could probably break out into the street and yell for assistance.

I moved my head very slightly. The light was stationary on the far side of the room on top of a sideboard. Beside it were several objects which glinted. I felt a spasm of indignation on behalf of Edmund Cope, miles away in Peterborough. This was all his property! Even while I was watching, a hooded figure brought across a great bowl or ewer cradled in his arms to add to the hoard. It was Kit Kite. I was beginning to be able to distinguish between the two of them. I wondered that they hadn’t removed their headpieces then recalled that, as far as these thieves were concerned, they were working in an infectious place. I wondered where the other one was. I could not find out without sitting up and looking about.