Adam glanced round over his shoulder to check our progress. He turned back and bared his teeth at Master WS in triumph. Suddenly the distance had narrowed sharply. Caught by some miniature whirlpool or species of eddy, Master Mink’s boat was moving in slow circles while we continued to plough through the waves as slow but remorseless as fate. If Mink had noticed us he didn’t give any sign. He was more concerned to regain control over his craft. But his oars hardly connected with the water. Like a pair of giant wooden scissors, they cut the turbulent air.
Master WS stood up in the stern beside me.
‘Careful, sir,’ cried Adam, but Master WS, he paid no attention to the boatman’s caution.
Cupping his hands around his mouth he called out Mink’s name. Once, then again.
Despite the usual gentleness and evenness of his speech he could, as occasion required, throw his voice so that it landed like a dart at the back of the gallery. This he did now. Mink must have heard because he stopped agitating his oars and looked across at us. Distracted, his grip on one of the oars slackened and it slipped itself from the rowlock and floated away out of reach. His small chance of escape vanished with it. All the time the gap between the two boats was closing. It might have been an illusion, but it seemed to me that out here at the midpoint of the river the water was less broken and choppy than it was inshore.
‘Robert,’ called WS again when he had got the other’s attention. ‘We must talk, you and I.’
This was such a ridiculous thing to say, in the middle of a rainstorm, in the middle of rough water, that I almost burst out laughing.
‘Bring us closer, boatman Adam.’
Adam swung and twisted and turned his blades with the dexterity of a swordsman until our boat approached nearer to Mink’s. Master Mink, like the two of us, was still wearing his costume. He was a very bedraggled and woebegone Player King, just as Master WS was a damp Ghost and I, I was a sorry poisoner.
‘Can we attach ourselves to him?’ WS asked Adam. ‘A rope or a hook?’
We too began to circle slowly, caught up in the same fluvial eddy. A strange calm had settled over the scene. I glanced up. The clouds had torn themselves apart in their brief fury and now, in their exhaustion, patches of impossible blue showed among the dirty white. Adam reached beneath his seat and grabbed a coil of rope from some nether compartment.
‘Fasten this to the sternpost, sir, and then let him catch a-holt of it.’
To the mariner’s manner born, Master WS slipped the looped and knotted end of the cable over our sternpost and, alerting Robert Mink with a shout, tossed the coils to the other boat. Mink might have chosen to ignore the shout and the rope spinning through the air but instead he chose to be helped. Seizing the other end of the cable he swiftly secured it to one of the thwarts before passing it round the sternpost in his, or rather Ben’s, boat. Now, joined by a cord, the four of us began a stately rotation, the two ferryboats dancing on water that sparkled and gleamed in the newly emergent sun. The skill and mastery of Adam Gibbons kept both craft in the same position relative to each other. A half dozen yards separated us. The far banks were a slowly shifting backdrop.
Robert Mink’s plump, affable face appeared no longer so well-fed or friendly. Replacing it was no expression of evil, such as would have suited a man who had commited at least three murders; nor any sign of remorse, as would have befitted a penitent; but instead a curiously affronted look. Now occurred the following dialogue, as calmly as if the three of us were sitting in a tavern after a performance. I call it a dialogue because, although I intervened once or twice, the main business was between Robert Mink and William Shakespeare, as will be clearly seen. The role of old Adam, meantime, was to lead us slowly round and round in the freshly washed sunshine and to see that we came to no harm.
‘Well,’ said WS. ‘Dick Burbage will not be pleased to see three of his costumes walking away like this.’
‘Nicholas is wearing no costume, but a dead man’s clothes,’ said Mink.
Master WS looked down at where I sat hunched and shivering on the stern seat, wrapped in Adrian’s mantle, topped by his hat.
‘Why, so am I,’ said Master WS, plucking at the sleeve of his ghostly night-gown and referring to the late King of Denmark. ‘I am dressed in a dead man’s garb.’
‘Ever the jester,’ said Mink. ‘Like your Yorick.’
‘But this is no jest,’ said WS.
‘No jest,’ said Mink. ‘I have been out and about killing people. Why, I killed one this morning at breakfast.’
I started shaking and could not stop.
‘And I killed one last evening at supper-time and hung him up in place of an alligator. Master Revill knows who I mean.’
My teeth began to chatter . . .
‘And another I killed one night by these very waters. He had a dirty shirt and would not keep it clean.’
. . . and chatter.
Around us circled the watchful buildings of London, the palaces and the stews, the theatres and temples.
‘For the first I was up a tree. I entered through the husband’s door and waited up a tree. I watched until he was asleep in his hammock. Then I poured it all down his ear. Guaiacum paste and mercury. Because his wife said she wanted me. She gave me the key to her husband’s door. I had the key from her but she did not open up to me. She preferred the brother. She tricked me.’
‘This is all a play, Robert,’ said Master WS, gently.
‘No play but still your work,’ said Mink. ‘The other one now, Francis, he got it on his sleeve so that was the end of him.’
‘This is my play which you have been playing in. You are sick in your mind.’
‘No play, I tell you,’ said Robert Mink, ‘although there are almost as many dead as at the end of one of your pieces.’ He laughed. ‘My dead will not rise up for applause and a little dance. Clap and see.’
He gazed about as though he expected an invisible audience to respond. Then, as if he was urgently seeking to convince us, he said: ‘You are looking for Master Ransom? You see, I have names. I can give you chapter and verse.’
‘Who is he?’ said WS.
‘Your young player there knows who I mean.’
‘He is a c-c-c-confederate of that gentleman’s,’ I said. ‘He tried to d-d-d-dispose of me last night.’
‘He will bother you no more,’ said Mink. ‘It was he I had for breakfast.’
‘You are sick, Robert,’ said WS. ‘You don’t know your own words.’
‘I am as sane as you are. I am in earnest.’
The boats bobbed about. In the distance I could see the tall houses on the Bridge.
‘If you killed him as you say, where is the body, then?’
‘In heaven. Send thither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him in the other place yourself.’
‘Ah,’ said WS, ruefully. ‘You are in earnest.’
‘But if you find him not within this month you shall nose him as you go up the stairs to my lodgings in Swan Street. I, for one, do not intend to return there.’
‘No, you are on the way to Tyburn, Robert,’ said WS. ‘You shall go to heaven in a string if this is true.’
The water had grown calmer and the sun was out but I could not stop my shaking.
‘All of this, it was your handiwork too, playwright,’ said Master Mink.
‘How so?’
‘I mean that I signed your name to it up a tree and so made it yours, and I gave your name when I was asked who I was by the doorman. And, in doing so, I became you. So it was your handiwork.’
I thought of the initials on the pear-tree bark; of what Thomas Bullock the gate-keeper had said.
Master WS looked shaken. A cloud passed over his normally placid features.
‘Why?’
‘Do you remember what you were called by Robert Greene when you were first up in London and writing plays and playing in plays?’ said Mink to WS.
‘Yes.’
‘ “An upstart crow
”, was it not?’
‘Oh yes, and Shake-scene and so on,’ said WS, in a way that suggested that he had never quite put such early insults behind him. These matters were still talked of in the theatre fraternity.
‘Did you hate those who laughed at you?’
‘I do not find it easy to hate,’ said WS mournfully. ‘Though I do know that Robert Greene died destitute in a shoe-maker’s house near Dow-gate. His landlord had to pay for his winding-sheet.’
‘That will not be your case, I think,’ said Mink. ‘You will not die in poverty, unregarded.’
‘No,’ said Master WS. ‘I do not think so.’
‘I am a poet too,’ said Mink. ‘Young Master Revill there, shaking in the stern beside you, he has heard some of my verses.’
‘Y-y-y-yes.’ For some reason, my eyes began to water, not for Mink but for myself.
‘I recited to him my Lover’s Lament. That was true verse, it was no feigning.’
Slowly now, slowly, our boats circled each other, like two watchful dogs who know that, sooner or later, they must fight.
‘What did you think, Nick? Tell me what you thought of my verses.’
‘They – they – were – b-b-b-b- ’
‘Bad?’ said Mink. He spoke in simple curiosity.
‘B-b-beautiful,’ I finally forced out the lie between my gnashing teeth.
‘You are lying, Revill. No lies now.’
‘T-t-t-true though.’
‘A pity then,’ said Mink. ‘For I had invited you to my lodgings to hear my Lover’s Triumph. Oh, and to poison you afterwards.’
Tears flowed down my face.
‘There is no escape for you either, William,’ continued Mink. ‘For I wrote a tragedy once. It was called The Tragical History of Sulla, Emperor of all the Romans.’
‘I saw it,’ said WS. ‘At the Curtain.’
‘The Red Bull.’
‘The Red Bull, then. But it was not by you, it was by – let me see – I have it, Robert Otter. Though, come to think of it, I have never heard of that author before or since. Master Otter.’ He paused, then said with a note of weariness, ‘Oh, I see. Otter – Mink.’
‘Never heard of again, that is right. Otter is well buried or drowned.’
‘But I did see your play, your Sulla.’
‘You were fortunate because it received only one performance.’
‘Many good plays go unappreciated and receive a single performance.’
‘Oh, my tragedy was appreciated – but not as a tragedy. It was greeted with howls of derision, as you will surely remember if you were there. There were tears of laughter, screams of glee. People pissed thermselves laughing. It should have been called The Comical History of Sulla, Roman Fool . . .’
‘The people are not always good judges. Why, in a future age, they may play your Sulla—’
‘There will never be another performance because the people were right, it was no good. It was no tragedy. Come now, playwright. Give me your honest opinion of my play, if you really attended that performance.’
There was a pause. The sunlight glanced off the water. I waited, with indrawn breath.
‘It was no tragedy,’ said WS. ‘You are right, and the audience at that performance was right to respond as they did. I didn’t piss myself – but I laughed long and loud.’
‘You see,’ said Robert Mink, almost triumphantly. ‘I cannot write verses. I cannot write a tragedy neither. But I can create one. I can do in real life what you only do on paper. So who is the better?’
Then Mink did an extraordinary thing, or a thing even more extraordinary than what he had already done. He bent down and retrieved from the bottom of the boat a crown. It took me a moment to recognise it as the prop which he had been wearing in the part of the Player King. Because he was no true king, but merely a player playing a king in the play-within-the-the-play, the crown did not match Claudius’s for heaviness and splendour. Instead it was a piece of trumpery, lightweight, crudely gold-painted. It was meant to signify to the audience ‘king’, simply and without more ado. He must have tucked it away somewhere in his costume, as he hurried from the theatre and then out into the alleyways down to the river.
‘Who wears the crown?’ he said, grinning. ‘Tell me, who wears the crown?’
‘You do,’ said WS. ‘It is yours.’
‘Sir! Sir!’
All this time Adam Gibbons had been quietly dipping and splashing his oars to keep the two boats on a parallel circular course. I don’t know whether he was listening to the conversation between the two players or – if he was – what he made of it, but now a more pressing consideration had come up. I’d been so engrossed in what I was hearing and in my own shivering, quivering state that I’d been only a quarter aware of our surroundings.
‘The Bridge, sir!’
We were caught up in a gently revolving eddy but, as well as making slow circles, we were also travelling downstream with the current. The tide, which must have been at its height when we boarded Adam’s boat, was ebbing and our two roped vessels were going downriver with it. When, minutes before, I’d glimpsed the buildings of London Bridge, I’d not grasped how close we were running to it. The great starlings or bases that supported the piers, nearly two dozen of them, loomed close. The spaces between the piers gaped like so many hungry river mouths. The merchants’ houses above looked more like cliffs of wood than human habitations. The roaring, which we must have been hearing for the last few minutes without properly attending to its cause, and which was produced by the constriction and the forcing of the waters through the piers, seemed to grow deafening.
Now, it is possible to pass through the arches – but the prudent traveller disembarks well before reaching the Bridge and continues his journey on foot. And you can be sure that any boatman making the passage would expect extra for his pains and the risk he takes. With our two boats the risk was considerable. We were still joined by rope. Robert Mink, disappointed tragedian and multiple murderer, was no oarsman. In fact, he had only one oar remaining.
Master WS spoke. He mixed firmness and persuasion. ‘Now, Adam, there is still time but we run the risk of being carried away on the tide or, worse, of being battered against one of the piles. Only your strength and skill can save us now.’
He neglected to mention, by the by, that it was his own skill – with a silver tongue – that had persuaded Adam to take his boat out in the first place and so put himself, and the ferryman, and me, all at risk. But Adam did not appear to harbour any resentment against this man who might be leaving a boatman’s widow and children unprovided for in this harsh world, or depriving the English stage of its finest adornment, or snuffing out the life of an obscure West Country parson’s son turned player.
‘Pull, man, pull. Robert Mink, you have an oar. Use it!’
Half crouching in the stern, Master WS issued orders and encouragements. Adam Gibbons dug into the task with a will. His back bent and straightened, bent and straightened, his breath came thick and short, sweat poured down his face and dripped off his beard, still matted with the rain. If Master WS was fearful he didn’t show it. I wondered that he didn’t seize a oar for himself and begin to paddle – the thought occurred to me to do it – and then I realised his thinking was clearer than mine. Adam was the expert here, his was the skill and strength. If we were to be saved at all it would be by the boatman.
Despite his best efforts, however, we were drifting closer to the Bridge. The roaring of the waters was growing louder, the cliffs of houses rising higher, the gaps between the piers gaping wider. White, knife-like crests formed as the water pushed against the outworks of the great piers. Cords of sinew stood out on the oarsman’s neck and temples and arms. The rope between the boats was taut. In the background Master Mink was making motions with his remaining oar. I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, our position seemed unchanged.
And then I understood that our boatman was winning the struggle. If we had not put a distance between ourselves
and the Bridge we were, at least, no closer to it. The size of the piers and the buildings surmounting them remained constant. I silently willed him on, with clenched hands and gritted teeth. All the time Master WS spoke encouragement and praise. Slowly, slowly, we pulled away from the Bridge, against the current; slowly, slowly, we struck out on a diagonal for the southern shore.
But then we seemed to, as it were, leap forward. The reason was not far to seek. Robert Mink, understanding that Adam was succeeding in the task of drawing us back towards dry land and safety, had unhitched the rope that fastened his craft to ours. As the gap between the boats widened he shouted out again, ‘Who is the better, playwright? Who is the better?’
He stood unsteadily in the little ferryboat as it was borne back and away by the current towards the Bridge. By twisting round in the stern, WS and I had a good view of what happened next. Adam kept tugging on his blades, ferrying us to terra firma, unable to see much of what was taking place over our turned shoulders. Probably he wouldn’t have been interested anyway. Just another accident on the river. An unskilled sailor. A dry-land mariner.
Mink’s craft, bearing him alone for captain and crew, dwindled in our sight. He continued to look in our direction, rather than at the course on which the current was taking him. He was washed nearer and nearer to the Bridge and I thought that he would slip between one of the central arches like a morsel of butter down a gullet. Once beyond them, if he did not capsize, he might well be able to make for the shore and the wilds of Essex or Surrey. But at the last moment, rather than capsizing, his little boat swerved and smashed hard into one of the great piers. We were too distant to hear anything apart from a far-off scraping and cracking sound above the low thunder of the descending water. The bow of the boat tilted and upended as if it the waves really intended to swallow it in one gulp and I thought I saw a small figure topple into the fast-flowing stream. The dot of a head was visible against the blue sky between a pair of arches. Then the head vanished as swift as if it had been wiped away.
I wondered what had happened to his poor trumpery crown. Then I surprised myself by discovering fresh tears coursing down my face.
Sleep of Death Page 26
