Perhaps I owe my discovery to the Peasegood Nonesuch. It is a large and handsome variety of apple, and demands much eating. I stood there staring at, but not really seeing, the yellow and curling foliage of the orchard. Sir William Eliot had died here. Let us, I said, addressing myself in the plural, assume that he did not die naturally. Someone else had paid his fare to Charon for crossing the river Lethe into the underworld. Everything I’d heard indicated he was alone when he died. Janet had seen him crossing the outer garden and going into his private area. No one else possessed a key to the door. It was his custom of an afternoon to rest in his orchard, to think in this place – to sleep, perhaps to dream. This was his garden, his Eden. Yet Eden had Eve, as well as Adam. Did Lady Alice ever come here? Not on that day, certainly, otherwise she wouldn’t have been so anxious over his whereabouts. And Janet’s report had not mentioned Sir William’s being accompanied by any other member of the household. No, he was alone when he opened the door and relocked it behind him, I was as sure of that as if I had seen him go through the door with my own eyes.
I pursued my thoughts. Eden was home to our first parents. Eden was also the serpent’s lodging place. The snake in the grass. The serpent – or rather the serpent’s malice – was not native to Eden. He crept in from the outside. I wondered, had anyone crept into the garden after Sir William had entered it? Through the door? That was locked, and Sir William had the single key. The key had fallen from his body as it was being carried inside, Francis had told me. Keys may be copied, though. Leave that thought for now. Apply the philosophic principle of Occam’s razor, that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Assume that there was no other key. Then had someone come over the wall? But the walls were high. A ladder had been necessary when Francis had been ordered to get into the inner garden. An inner wall divided the two gardens belonging to the Eliots, while three exterior walls protected Sir William when he was shut up in his private garden. One separated him from his neighbours on the west side, one adjoined Mixen Lane in the east and the final wall opposed the river. Beneath this wall was a slick stretch of shoreline, exposed at low tide.
As I swallowed the last fragments of the Peasegood Nonesuch, I tried to put myself in the position of someone wishing to harm – even to kill – Sir William Eliot. I fashioned another self. I became a murderer; a simple transformation for a player.
Leave aside for the moment the question of how I gained entry into the hidden garden. Leave aside too the question of where I came from, whether from the public lane or the neighbours’ grounds or even from the outer garden of the house. (I discounted the river approach, as too difficult.) The point was, it could be done. Though the walls were high they were not insurmountable. I could have used a ladder, even if an accomplice to place it and then remove it while I was about my dirty business in the garden, would perhaps be necessary. I might have used a simple rope and hook to catch on the wall-top – this would do away with the accomplice. But, whichever method I employed, at what time would I make my entry? Knowing that Sir William habitually repaired to his orchard on fine afternoons in spring and summer, would I wait until I was sure that he was there, and then nip up the wall, drop down the other side and search the orchard until I stumbled across him swinging in his hammock? No. There were too many risks with this clumsy procedure. Sir William might not be safely asleep. He might be wandering among his trees even as I levered myself over his boundary wall. He might see me as I descended or as I threaded my way among his fruit trees.
No, were I the murderer, I would take my place before Sir William had entered his garden. I would be like those spectators who come early to ensure the best positions in the playhouse. I would wait until my mark was fixed and settled in sleep, and only then would I make my move. I would crouch in a corner of the wall like a cur. I would rise from the grass, as the false serpent does.
Or I would fall from above, like rotten fruit.
And now I remembered what little Francis had said to me, about what he felt after he had climbed into the garden but before he had found Sir William dead in his hammock – ‘Someone was looking over my shoulder, sir. Nothing there save the heads of the trees. My shoulder still icy. Their eyes were up. And Sir William he was not up, not up anywhere. He was lying down.’
My skin prickled.
It came to to me then that the safest place to hide in a garden is up a tree. Were I the murderer, plotting this death long beforehand, I would prospect for a secure, leafy arbour a safe height above the ground, and once there I would watch and wait.
In my mind’s eye and ear, I heard Sir William opening the door to his private domain, I saw him make his way gladly through his property, pausing to smell the fragrance of the blossom, to inspect the very beginnings of the crop of fruit that now hung from these trees or strewed the grass around. Then he reaches his hammock. Has he brought something to occupy his mind? A book? The household accounts? A letter requiring a careful reply? No, today he has come with nothing. He comes to rest, to sleep. Wearily, he lowers himself into the hammock. The cords groan slightly at the weight. He hears the shouts from the river, as I do now, and perhaps some noise from his own house. It’s nothing. Just the shriek of a servant.
He settles himself down, gazing up at the bank of clouds advancing across the river from the south-west. He feels sleepy. But something disturbs him. Every time he is on the verge of falling asleep, a stray thought intrudes and jerks him awake. Up in my tree I, the murderer, wait. I have made a little tunnel for myself in the foliage so I have a direct view of the upper part of his body, most especially of his face. All I have to avoid is sudden movement. That might alert him. My perch is not comfortable, not after the hour or more I have passed in it, but a great ambition – and murder is a great ambition – demands small sacrifices. Sooner or later Sir William’s eyes will close. Then I will fall softly to the ground, and creep and creep to reach him. I decide that while I am crossing his grass I will smile.
So . . . the vantage point chosen by the murderer has to be close to the hammock, close enough for him to ensure that his victim is sound asleep. It has to offer a secure hiding-place. These were my conclusions. With Jacob still looking at me, I made a tour of inspection of the trees in the vicinity of the clearing. Two or three of them were large enough to conceal a man, but the configuration of their branches seemed to offer no place where one might stay, let alone sit, with any ease. Then, a little further back, I came across a large old pear tree. Above my head, among the leaves, I saw several potential conjunctions where thick branches sprang from the trunk and where my putative murderer might sit, legs astride. I called Jacob over.
‘Ever since I was a small boy, Jacob, I’ve enjoyed climbing trees. It’s a taste I haven’t grown out of.’
So saying I jumped up and caught hold of the lowest branch. Swaying backwards and forwards, I soon gained enough force to swing myself astride it. Once up there, I manoeuvered myself into a sitting position, with the trunk at my back. I couldn’t easily see the place between the apple trees where the hammock had been attached. In fact I couldn’t see it at all. I shifted to a neighbouring branch. Ah, that was better! From among the leaves and the clusters of ripe pears (Jargonelle, I think, or possibly Winter Nelis) I overlooked the tiny clearing guarded by the two trees.
‘Jacob, would you go and stand where your late master was found? In the place where the hammock was. There, yes.’
I pushed myself flat against the trunk. Of course, had I been a prospective murderer with my long-laid plans, I would have dressed for the part, worn something in goose-turd green, say, to give myself a tree-like hue. As it was, I was wearing a combination of russet and popinjay blue, and must have looked like some great flightless bird up in the pear tree.
‘Now, tell me, can you see me?’
It was hard to remember that Jacob could not ‘tell’ anyone anything. Instead he nodded and made a gurgling sound in response to my question. Yes, he could see me. Well, that wasn’t surprising:
I could see him. And I was wearing the wrong costume. But, unlike the dumb Jacob, Sir William Eliot hadn’t been looking for anyone. When he entered the garden he believed that he was as alone as Adam. Why should he examine the trees to see whether they harboured strange creatures?
I gazed around. I was looking for a sign. Nothing. I gazed some more. What met my eyes was entirely natural, leaves, branches, a wasp burrowing its way into the holed surface of a pear almost before my face. You see how reluctant I was to abandon my idea that Sir William’s murderer had been perched up aloft even before his victim came on the scene. But there was no proof of any of this. For all I knew I was chasing shadows, the very thing of which I had accused young William Eliot in the Goat & Monkey. There was no murder and no murderer. I had constructed a scene of treachery and murder out of smoke. I was, as one might say, barking up the wrong tree. The man had died a natural death, of the sort everyone is entitled to.
I swung both legs to one side of the branch and made to drop to the ground. As I did so I noticed a wisp of material caught at the juncture of a twig and my branch. The gods were smiling on me after all. I was about to be justified. I gently tugged at the thread. Was this the clue? No, it was not, for a moment’s examination showed that this ‘evidence’ came from my own jerkin. I raised my eyes upwards in exasperation, and then I saw it. Just at head height and two feet away from where I was sitting someone had carved letters into the trunk. Two intertwined initials. My heart started to thump. I ran my fingers up and down the grooves of the letters. They were about an inch in height and appeared to have been cut into the bark hastily but firmly. Just as one would carve letters if one wanted to leave a message and was conscious that time might be limited. The carving wasn’t fresh; already the letters showed weathering. Although they might have been there longer, these characters had definitely been incised at least a few months ago. Perhaps during the spring and before a man’s death.
I launched myself into space and landed, in a crouch, on the turf below the pear tree.
‘Thank you, Jacob, I’ve seen enough for the time being.’
I left the garden in a brown study, Jacob devotedly on my tail.
The letters up the pear tree were a W and an S.
I wondered whether I was not already deeper into this matter than was good for my peace of mind or health of body.
I wondered whether what I had seen were the initials of our author, William Shakespeare.
* * *
And it was Master Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse whose walls I was now walking alongside. His and the other shareholder-players’. This morning was a rehearsal for A Somerset Tragedy by Master Henry Highcliff. I put to one side speculation about those troubling initials, and concentrated instead on my part in the play.
A Somerset Tragedy is a simple tale of domestic lust and violence. It involves a land-holder and his younger wife, as well as a painter, the painter’s sister, the man the painter’s sister wishes to marry, the man the painter has arranged for his sister to marry (two different men, this), three hired assassins, a local lord, sundry servants and clowns, a brace of magistrates, a priest, an executioner. You get the picture. I didn’t know the full plot, since I had received only the scroll bearing my own part, but I could guess what happened from a glance at the dramatis personae. Most likely it began with a rape: most certainly it ended with the rope. I was a yokel, with full-dress accent and boorish manners.
When I had glimpsed a little more of the play in rehearsal I would tell my Nell about it. She enjoyed hearing of my roles, or so I flattered myself. I had discovered that retailing the plot of a play while we were in bed together – as with Master WS’s Hamlet or the infinitely inferior Master Boscombe’s A City Pleasure – was an effective method of delaying my own journey’s end, and thus of ensuring her own satisfactory arrival at that terminus. It was as if a torrent of words could temporarily dam up another sort of effusion. Sometimes Nell had told me of what her paying customers cried out when they were busy about her person, although this was knowledge that I wanted her to share with me only in extremis. I considered that my dramatic summaries showed a more refined temper than their cataloguing of her body parts, and what they were doing or intended to do with them and to them. I wondered whether I should mention to our author my interesting use of his Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. I wondered what our author had been doing up a tree in the garden of Sir William Eliot. Unless it had been some other WS of course.
‘Master Revill!’
It was Robert Mink, the fat player who had given me the note for my Lady Alice. We had coincided at the entrance to the playhouse. Together we made our way to the tiring-house, where some of the other Chamberlain’s men were already gathering. Mink was clutching a much larger scroll than mine. He noticed that I was looking at the size of his part.
‘I play a painter in the county of Somerset,’ he said. ‘I wish to marry my sister off for reasons that are obscure to me. When she does not agree, because there is another man back in the tiring-house, I turn murderous. I paint a picture of my sister which is so beautiful that the onlooker cannot help touching it. The pigment that I use in depicting her flesh, her nearly bare breast, is naturally poisonous to the touch. This picture will then be shown to the man I wish to kill. He will reach out to stroke her exposed, painted flesh, and so he will die. Have you ever heard of anything so unlikely?’
‘Does he die? By touching the pigment?’
‘Of course not. When did you ever hear of a murder plot going right in a tragedy?’
‘Death in an orchard,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I was thinking of Hamlet, and the death of his father, and how it does not look like a murder.’
‘Quite different,’ said Master Mink, his triple chins wobbling in disagreement. ‘Anyway that didn’t go right in the long run, did it? The murderer never thrives. Master Shakespeare may stretch belief sometimes but there is a truth beyond mere fact, and he is in ample possession of it. But I fear that Master Highcliff with his Somerset farce masquerading as tragedy is another kettle of fish, a stinking kettle.’
‘Why do the Burbages put on this stuff then?’
‘Because it draws in the crowds, dear boy. The spectators want to see sin in all its varieties, they want to see fighting and fucking and fury, and then they want to see all of this punished – otherwise they will not go home comfortable. But I tell you one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We are right to look down on the authors of this stuff. We are right to pay them so little. Master Shakespeare, of course, excepted. Him and one or two others. But for the most part they are journeymen. Where would the writers be without the players? We are the men of value.’
‘I do not have such a low opinion of authors,’ I said, daring to oppose this large and experienced man of the theatre.
‘Do you not?’ he said. ‘There is no time to discuss this now, we are due to begin our rehearsal, but I would be glad to continue this interview this evening if you find yourself in the vicinity of The Beast with Two Backs. It’s in Moor Street.’
‘Is that a pick-hatch?’
‘Merely a tavern. Its real name is The Tupping Rams or some such. At the south end of Moor Street, if you should find yourself in that neighbourhood tonight.’
After my participation in that morning’s rehearsal, I had to agree with Master Mink. I did not think that we would be performing A Somerset Tragedy more than once, as I told Nell late that afternoon. We were in her room. This was barely more than a closet in Holland’s Leaguer, not far from the bearpit. The women had their own rooms and were generally undisturbed as long as they paid an exorbitant rent to the madam and her one-eyed paramour (familiarly known as Cyclops). But the walls were thin, and cries and groans as well as intermittent thwacks penetrated our ears. The sounds were more reminiscent of Bedlam or one of the quarters of hell than a house of pleasure. I did not particularly enjoy meeting my Nell at her place of work, but for the mom
ent my lodgings were on the far side of the river, and I had nowhere to roost on the south bank when I wished to see her. She had shut up her stall to the public for the day. Only now she had got her wares out again for a private browser.
‘Why are you so sure you’ll only play this play – whats-itcalled? – once?’
‘A Somerset Tragedy. It’s a poor piece,’ I said, with all the assurance of a few days in the Chamberlain’s Company.
‘You haven’t played it yet for the public. Maybe they’ll love it. You might have a great run, three or four performances.’
‘You get a feel for these things.’
‘As you have a feeling for this,’ she said, taking my hand and drawing it down.
‘Ah yes,’ I said.
A while later, she said: ‘Nick, the title of your piece is strange, is it not? The tragedy of Somerset.’
‘Why?’
‘I was remembering your father and your mother.’
‘But you never knew them, little Nell.’
‘But you have told me of them, Master Nicholas.’
Such remarks reminded me how young Nell was. And indeed I have noticed that these women – our doxies, our trulls and rude girls – who spend their days catering to the depraved tastes of fallen man have, as if by compensation, a most child-like tendency in them sometimes. Nell had asked me before about my parents, the parson and the parson’s wife, and encouraged me to talk about them. I attributed this to the fact that Nell had no idea who her parents were – or whether they were alive or dead. The woman she once called ‘mother’ was a mere neighbour, if a good-hearted one. Accordingly, with none of her own, she took an interest in my mother and father. Mine at least you could be certain of, for they were united in death.
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