Mask of Night (37 page)

Yet at the same time I did not
really
believe I was contaminated, perhaps because any alternative to that belief would have been so troubling. Instead I trusted to my ratsbane, rather as Jack trusted to his hyacinth-stone and Abel his powdered unicorn-horn. So far we had been preserved. And there’s another thing. The more you are surrounded by such forceful reminders of mortality, the more you come to accept that profound philosophy which applies to the pestilence and many other undesirable things besides. Which is: if you’re going to catch it, then you’re going to catch it. And if not, not. It’s in the stars.

Well, we arrived back in London some five days after we’d set out from Oxford. My landlord Samuel Benwell was surprised to see me back so soon. I was surprised to be back so soon. My room, which I had retained in my absence at the rate of sixpence a week, was still empty. That it hadn’t been let out to anyone else wasn’t honesty or scruple on Benwell’s part, I think, but rather that London was in the grip of plague-panic and its citizens leaving in large numbers. There was no great call for accommodation.

Yet this was not the worst or the greatest news in town.

The worst and greatest news was that Queen Elizabeth was dead.

She was seventy years old at her death, and had reigned for more than half her life. She had reigned for all of my life and of Abel’s life and Jack’s life, and indeed of the lives of the greater part of the population of this island. Some of the seniors in the Chamberlain’s had dim recollections of the days of Bloody Mary when they’d been little children. Sam, the old gatherer or money-taker at the Globe playhouse, even claimed to have memories of Mary and Elizabeth’s father, the great Henry. All this is to say that, when the Queen died, it was comparable to the removal from the landscape of some natural object, such as a great mountain or a mighty river, which we had long taken for granted and had thought (if we thought about it at all) would never change. A mountain or a river can protect those who lie on the right side of it. Elizabeth was the Queen of England, yet she was also the mother to the nation, nurturing us and watching over us to see that we came to no great harm. And we had not come to any great harm while she reigned over us. In truth, she had left us better than she found us, and of how many rulers can you say that?

I met her once. She questioned me on my knowledge of Latin, for she was a great linguist, and imparted to me the secret of her reign, or one of those secrets at least. She had even thanked me for some small service which I’d performed for the state. Yet she was a very formidable woman, and I was tongue-tied most of the time in her presence and then deeply relieved to be dismissed from it.

She had a comfortable end, they say, after a long period of refusing to lie down but rather sitting or even standing up for days on end. She went mildly like a lamb, they say, she parted this life as easily as the ripe apple comes loose from the tree. They say this – and I hope for her sake it was so.

Her death shook the town, more than the plague was capable of doing. There was talk of insurrection, although by whom or against whom was never entirely clear. Men looked to their property more closely. Landlord Benwell went around proclaiming his favourite proverb, “fast bind fast find”, with a smug air. There was an abrupt falling-away of business south of the river in Southwark. I don’t mean in the playhouses, which were closed anyway on account of the plague and of the lenten season, but in the brothels and the dives where gambling flourished. The river boatmen modified their swearing for a day at least. The coney-catchers and confidence-tricksters suspended their operations (not that there were many victims about) for a brief time. The drinking in the taverns was moderate, conversation was modest. Such a lurch into respectability could only have been provoked by a very great and shocking event. Thank God it would not last for ever.

The effect on us Chamberlain’s could not be assessed yet. Who knew the views of Elizabeth’s successor towards the drama? Who, apart from the playing companies, would have cared very much about those views in any case? And who, indeed, knew more about this successor, this royal gentleman, than that his name was James, that he was the sixth king of that name in Scotland, and that he was probably saddling up in Edinburgh at this very moment?

While the fact of the Queen’s death sank in, so too did the plague continue in its scuttling progress across the city. You have had enough of this, I dare say, and I will not weary you with yet more descriptions of the inroads made by King Pest. Enough to say that later during that year of 1603 I witnessed scenes like those foreseen by Lucy Milford when she was in her Cassandra mood and had glimpsed an empty street with grass growing in it and a riderless horse, its nostrils stuffed with rue. Witnessed similar things and many more terrible ones over the next several months. Just as Abel and I had been present during the early stages of the infection outside that mean house in Kentish Street – where Alderman Farnaby had issued such precise instructions for the painting of a cross (
It is to be the prescribed fourteen inches in length. You will do it in oil so that it may not be easily rubbed off.
) and condemned the occupants to their forty days in isolation – so it seemed that Abel and I were destined to be in on the end of this
thing
.

Or this thing would be in on the end of us.

I could have left town for a space since there was no immediate prospect of playing, given the uncertainties of the time. But I had nowhere to go and besides I had the feeling that, even if I’d found a bolt-hole, the pestilence would creep in after me. You recognize my philosophy: if you’re going to catch it . . .

So far, so sound, however.

Perhaps it’s the ratsbane.

Naturally I lost little time in going round to Lucy Milford’s house in Thames Street, hoping to renew our amour, hoping for a little love and comfort. I was even prepared to talk a bit about the Oxford mysteries. But Lucy Milford, like so many of our fellow citizens, had departed. A neighbour informed me that she’d gone to an uncle in Bromsgrove – or was it a cousin in Middlesex? I’d thought it was the other way about as far as those uncles and cousins and places were concerned, but my memory may have been at fault. I was glad that Lucy was out of harm’s way, though. Quite glad, even if I would have been pleased to see her still in town.

I heard that Will Kemp the clown was clinging to life in Dow-gate even while so many of the younger and fitter were dying around him. Perhaps I should visit and tell him that I’d eventually read his
Nine Days’ Wonder
under somewhat strange circumstances and that I’d gained from it a valuable hint concerning shoes. But of course I haven’t gone to see him, and the next news I expect to hear will be of his death.

So that was that.

Except for a little chat I had with William Shakespeare by way of rounding things off.

I might have wanted to tell him that his friend Hugh Fern had not killed himself or even, in the coroner’s charitable version, fallen accidentally on his knife. Rather Doctor Fern had been cunningly murdered by his wicked servant-apprentice, Andrew Pearman. I might have wanted to tell WS about the events in Oxford and the way in which I and my friends went about unmasking a horrid conspiracy involving the dissection of corpses and the robbing of the dead.

But I could say nothing. Jack and Abel and I had come to an agreement, almost without using words, to keep quiet about what had occurred in the little house in Shoe Lane. And if we kept quiet about that, then we had to keep quiet about everything else. What would be the point of bringing the story into the open anyway? Justice – justice of the roughest, readiest kind – had been done, or mostly done.

So I said nothing of all this but instead asked the playwright if he had heard recently how matters stood in the city of Oxford.

“They stand well enough, Nick, all things considered. Unlike this place, the plague seems to be levelling off in Oxford, as I hear in a letter from my friend Davenant.”

“From Mistress Jane Davenant?”

“Why no, from her husband John. He subscribes greetings and good wishes to the members of the Company.”

“I thought he had no great love for plays.”

“Why should you think so?”

“Oh, only the things he said. The looks he gave.”

“Don’t believe all you see and hear.”

(So we were back to that again. Sensing that WS didn’t wish to say more about the Davenants, I switched subjects.)

“Do you believe you can truly know another person?” I said.

“Certainly, in their outward manifestations.”

“But inwardly?”

“We hardly know ourselves, Nick. How can we know another? Why do you ask?”

“A little time ago I thought to take note of some – features – of someone else’s life. With a view to writing about this person.”

Shakespeare didn’t ask to whom I was referring (perhaps he guessed) but said, “You have made progress?”

“No progress at all,” I said. “I have abandoned the project. I can get no agreement about even a couple of simple stories.”

“Then make it up,” said WS promptly.

“What about accuracy? What about posterity?”

“Oh, a posterior for posterity,” said the playwright. “Let them sort it out after we are all dead.”

“And what will happen to us before we die, Will? Under the new dispensation, the new King.”

The King. How strange it was to be uttering those two simple words!

“The King has not yet reached London. Until he arrives, who can tell? Be content, Nick. I expect we shall be all right. Players are like corks. Lightweight perhaps but almost unsinkable.”

“And sometimes bottling up good stuff.”

“Why yes,” said WS, smiling with mild indulgence at my comment. Then more seriously, “We can’t tell the future, we cannot predict the ending.”

“Except when it comes to writing plays. There we already know the finish,” I said, thinking of that alternative conclusion to
Romeo and Juliet
, the unwritten one where the hero survives to go off and marry the fair Rosaline.

“But even in plays it’s not so straightforward, let me tell you.”

“Yes?” I said, all ears.

“Endings now,” said William Shakespeare, “endings can be the very devil.”

I’m very grateful to Bruna Gushurst-Moore, friend and herbal practitioner, for help and advice on herbs, preparations and poisons, as they might have been applied in the Shakespearean period of
Mask of Night
. It’s a wide topic. Poison was a relatively more common method of murder than it is now. The details are mostly accurate (including the poison titles or folk-names given to each section) . . . but the uses to which the poisons are put are entirely my own.

PCG