Mask of Night (33 page)

I forced myself to inspect the other corpses by the half-light seeping through the window but backed away when I observed that at least two of them bore the authentic marks of the plague, the swellings and buboes which Abel had so artfully faked for me. One of the others I knew. It was Mistress Angelica Root, her poor face bloated and purplish but still recognizable.

Had I really thanked God for preserving me alive? Well, I would not be alive for much longer, surely, having spent the night shut up in such a foul place, wherever it was. The disease which I had played with as an impostor would seize me after all. I would perish as my mother and father had. Strange to say, this realization did not throw me into a state of terror. Perhaps my reserves of terror were all used up.

There was a door to this chamber or cellar but it was firmly sealed. I beat against it and called out but there was no response. I was almost more afraid of someone coming than of no one coming. I went back to the barred window. By raising myself on tiptoe I could stick a hand through the bars and waggle my fingers. I yelled out but failed to convince even myself of my plight. Also there would be nobody about at this early hour, perhaps five in the morning, and I soon gave up.

Then a great calm came over me, almost a lightness of mind. Maybe it was hunger or tiredness, maybe it was the preliminary to the end, in the same way a drowning man is said to fall into a reverie during his last moments. I went back to my position beneath the window opening. I sat down and stretched out my legs in front of me as easily as if I were reclining on a river bank.

In this dream-like state some association between the dead store-house and Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
came to me. When Juliet swallows the sleeping potion prepared by Friar Laurence she dies to the world and is borne off to the vault of the Capulet family. Here she lies among the corpses for two days, waiting to be awakened by her lover’s kiss. When she does wake, though, it is to find Romeo already dead at her feet, a horror surpassing all the other horrors. Despite this Juliet possesses sufficient fortitude to pick up Romeo’s dagger and sheathe it in her body. If a young girl could so steel herself then a grown male player should certainly be able to . . .

This was not a play, I told myself, even if there was something unreal about it all.

Who was going to unlock the door of the cellar and enter this charnel house? Not Romeo for sure.

Yet someone would come. (It was what I was afraid of, that someone would come.) We were here for a reason, Revill and the dead.

I thought about the reason. Plague victims are usually buried as rapidly as possible, after being removed from their dwellings at unobtrusive hours. They are forked unceremoniously into a common pit. Yet there were in this room at least two apparent victims of King Pest – why were they still above ground? And how to explain the presence of Kit Kite and Mistress Root in this dreadful chamber? The one had been poisoned, I was certain, while the other looked to have been beaten to death.

Why would anyone want to accumulate corpses, with all their attendant dangers? They have no value, not even a brass pin’s worth. They cannot be cut up and their remains interrogated, everyone knows that. The doctor is not permitted to do this. If a man dies, a man dies. Unless there are patent marks of violence on him, it is not for us to enquire into the reasons for his passing. It is God’s will. So I’ve heard.

I pulled my doublet more tightly about me. It was streaked with blood from my head wound. I must have looked a sight, bloodied, speckled with plague marks. There was a cold dankness to this room which seemed to be increasing as it grew lighter beyond the barred opening. Something rustled against my chest. I reached in and extracted a sheaf of paper, still warm from where it had been nestling against my heart.

It was a pamphlet.

Kemp’s Nine Days’ Wonder
, I read.

It meant nothing to me. Who was Kemp?

There was a picture on the cover of a dancing man with a drummer in the background.

But, of course, Kemp was the melancholy clown whom Abel Glaze and I had called on during another life. Will Kemp, once of the Chamberlain’s Company and now fading away in Dow-gate. Abel plied him with sack and a pie while I, less graciously, agreed to purchase his account of how he’d jigged and tripped his way from Whitechapel to Norwich. Well, this pamphlet – for which he’d extorted sixpence if I remembered rightly – had been sitting snug in my doublet ever since that day in February when we’d visited the old fool. It seemed like years ago. Perhaps he was dead by now.

I’d never read it, hadn’t even realized that I’d been carrying it about with me these several weeks. Forgetting my immediate predicament, I opened the pamphlet and flicked through its pages, one part of my mind thinking that it might be the last document I’d ever look at. No great poetry, no uplifting words of religious consolation, but the vainglorious account of a superannuated clown’s progress across a little quarter of the realm. Yet another part of my mind told me wearily that, whatever Master Kemp’s faults, they were very small beer compared with the crimes which were being committed all around me now.

I read about Thomas Slye, who played the tabor and kept time for Kemp, and about William Bee, his industrious servant. (Busy Bee, I thought without humour.) I read about the warm welcome Kemp had received at every stop on his tour, and the woman whose legs he’d tied bells to and the other woman whose skirt he’d oh-so-accidentally torn off in his capering. I heard of his triumphal arrival in Norwich and of how his dancing buskins were still displayed in the Guild Hall at Norwich, nailed one next to the other on the wall. Idly I wondered what he’d worn to travel back to London.

Normally, Will Kemp’s rather boastful style would have irritated me but after reading his words I thought warmly of him and hoped that he was well – or as well as could be expected – or, if he was no more, that he had died peacefully. I wished him all the things I would have wished for myself. He was a link to my playing company, to my friends and fellows. I tucked the pamphlet back inside the warmth of my doublet.

I considered Kemp’s shoes nailed to the wall in Norwich Guild Hall. Famous footwear for famous feet.

Footwear . . . famous and not so famous.

That single chopin which had fallen from Mistress Root’s body as she was being hauled from her bedroom in Cats Street.

There was the sound of a key turning in the cellar door. I didn’t look up but continued to think of shoes.

Thought of the strange business of the change in Hugh Fern’s footwear during the
Romeo and Juliet
performance. Of how he’d changed – or exchanged? – his expensive, buckled shoes for a plainer pair to wear in his character as Friar Laurence. Of how, when his body was discovered, he’d been wearing the buckled shoes once more.

There was the sound of footsteps treading across the flagged floor. I still didn’t look up.

I recalled the excellent boots worn by Doctor Ralph Bodkin when he came to attend to the dead body of his colleague in the yard of the Golden Cross Inn. Fine, supple boots of leather which reached almost to the knee.

Now I looked up from where I was sitting propped against the slimy wall. The same boots, fine, supple and reaching almost to the knee, were standing in front of my gaze.

I got to my feet and looked Ralph Bodkin in the face. He was sweating heavily. The veins on his bullish forehead stood out like cords.

I looked beyond Bodkin to the corpses laid out on the table-tops. One of them, I now saw in the strengthening light, had been slashed across the stomach and something dark and billowing was poking out. The arm of another hung down over the side. The skin had been flayed off. I recalled what Hugh Fern had said to me when he was talking about horoscopes.
Doctors may be worse employed, believe me. Much worse employed.

“It is not permitted,” I said.

“What isn’t permitted?”

I waved my arm wildly at the underground room, where the bodies of men and women were indiscriminately mixed.

“This. It is sacrilege to the dead to open them up. It is not allowed.”

“Who is to say so?”

“The laws of God – ”

“Oh.”

“ – and man.”

“The only laws are the laws of nature,” said Bodkin.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Master . . . Revill? Are you well? You have blood on your face. You carry the marks of plague . . . ”

“These are not real. I’m not infected,” I said, brushing impatiently at my face and at the same time reflecting that I most likely was infected by now.

“You ask what I am doing,” said Bodkin. “You came running up recently and asked me another question concerning plays. You remember that?”

The sweat was dripping down from his brow. A strong, meaty smell came off him, as if he was cooking.

“I asked you whether the plague was caused by plays.”

“What did I answer?

“You said it was superstition.”

“Well, so too is the prohibition against cutting up the dead. That is superstition, all superstition. We will only discover the secrets of nature by digging into her and opening her up. It is hard to do that with living subjects – and I would not wish to – but there is no harm in anatomizing the dead.”

“No harm! What of their souls?”

“A fiction. I have not found the soul yet.”

“But people have died in this town so that you can lay them open.”

“People are dying every day, all around us. I look closely at them when they are brought here in order to discover the secrets of their deaths and their lives. What I do is for our good.”

“Our?”

“The good of humankind.”

“It’s wrong,” I said. My mouth was full of a vile taste.

Bodkin swayed slightly on his feet. He reached into a pocket and retrieved the fine octagonal watch which I’d first glimpsed in the Golden Cross yard as he stood over Fern’s body.

“You see this,” he said, thrusting it towards me. “If I were a watchmaker now and this machine fell ill – that is to say, if it stopped or went slow – I could open it up and poke about among its innards and perhaps restore it to full health. What would you say to that?”

He was a fearsome man but somehow not frightening to me, not now. Maybe I was beyond fear by this point, standing in a plaguey charnel house with a mad physician.

“You are not a watchmaker,” I said. “And we are not watches.”

“Our hearts tick like clocks,” said Bodkin. “We move round in our little circles. We tell time until we run down. We have parts that should work together in harmony – but when something goes wrong we are as helpless as an ape would be confronted by this tiny engine.”

He brandished the watch before replacing it in his pocket.

“Did you kill Hugh Fern?” I said.

Bodkin looked surprised. He blinked and swayed again.

“Kill Fern? No, he killed himself. Killed himself by accident. Hugh Fern was a good enough man – I do not mean that he was a good physician, for he relied too much on horoscopes and such, and had no great ambition – but he was a good enough man. Speaking for myself, I am not interested in the living but the dead. Only the dead can utter their secrets.”

I recalled Bodkin in the inn yard, standing with a bloody knife over the corpse of his fellow doctor like a conspirator. From somewhere outside this place an early morning church bell began to toll, the universal sound these days.

“You know what would happen to you if the people of the town discovered this?”

“I have faced them down before,” said Ralph Bodkin.

“They would tear you to pieces, as you have done these corpses. Then they would set fire to this place.”

“I do not tear corpses, Master Revill. I dissect in order to penetrate the great mysteries of life and death.”

“You murder to dissect.”

“I have committed no murder. Look, you are still alive.”

“Your agents have. Like that man over there. Christopher Kite, ostler at the Golden Cross.”

Bodkin’s face took on a peculiar sheen. His great, meaty countenance looked like a boiled ham.

“It is immaterial now who has done what. I am sick. I above all men can recognize the signs.”

“You have caught the infection?”

But I already knew the answer. Instinctively I pressed myself into the wall at my back, as if to distance myself from the Doctor. As if that would be of any use.

“I have very little time,” he said.

“What will you do in the interim?”

“I shall make myself secure here, and continue with my work as long as I can.”

He moved away from me and went towards the table on which lay the corpse with the gaping innards.

“It is wicked work.”

“One day it will be seen differently.”

“What should I do?”

“If I were you, Revill, I would leave this place. Look, the door is open. Go now and tell the common townspeople what you wish.”

I glanced across towards the door of the cellar. It was half open.

“What if I am infected as well?”

“You are young. Your vital spirits may be strong enough. But stay if you prefer.”

I was already on my way towards the door. Before I stepped out of this charnel house and abandoned Ralph Bodkin to his wicked work I turned round.

“Tell me one thing, sir. What have you discovered? Have you penetrated the mysteries?”

“Oh no, Master Revill. Others will do that. I am like the ape holding the watch. But I am a cleverer ape than when I started.”

He picked up a long thin knife and bent over the body. I walked from the room, half expecting to be summoned back. A flight of stone steps led upwards. I emerged into a hallway. There was a door ahead of me. It was bolted but not locked. I slid back the bolts and stepped into the street. I closed the door carefully and quietly behind me. The bell continued to toll close by.

There was scarcely anyone about yet. It was a fine spring morning. The sun was shredding a few early clouds and, although it gave off no heat, the blaze of light was welcome. Blinking after the dimness of the cellar, I half walked, half ran across this suburb of the town. The tolling was coming from St Ebbe’s. I passed the western approach to the church and saw the devil faces clustered round the arch of the door. With their pitted beaks and goggling eyes and bat-like ears, they were carved there so as to scare off the real thing. I could have whispered a tale or two in those bat-ears.