The Player's Boy is Dead

by Leonard Tourney

  "As yet you have said nothing." She spoke sharply, bitterly, erect of back as though posing for the artist's brush.

  "The boy is dead. He is even now buried in the churchyard. I have charged the constable. What more would you have?"

  She detested these measured phrases of her husband's, the cutting edge of his superiority. She responded calmly, "I would have you tell me by whose hand this thing was done."

  "That is Master Stock's business to discover. As magistrate, I have commissioned him. Why can that not suffice you?"

  She sat down in the large Italian chair he had had made for himself in Florence. "So you have," she said cuttingly, attempting at the same time to match his composure. "Oh, you do follow the courses of the law like an obedient hound when it serves your purpose. Master Stock is witless and dull like the rest of the town, and will find nought more than his hat in his hand. Had you been concerned with the boy's murder, you would have pursued the matter yourself. Instead, you chose a man who can do little more than officiate at a bread pudding."

  "He is much respected in the town," her husband replied evenly.

  "Which means," she continued, "that he is prince among bumpkins, for I would not give you a farthing for the lot of them. Oh, I am sick to death of this place."

  She rose and began to pace the floor. She hated him when he was thus, so full of himself.

  "You had interests here yourself, did you not?"

  The question having caught her when her back was turned, she was uncertain of its tone and did not answer until she could look at him squarely. Even then, his heavy features were a mask of ambiguities. "I am, sir," she began dryly, "interested in my husband's health and happiness, in the proper management of his household. I believe, as you well know, it may be truly said that in all things I have been most obedient."

  This last phrase she uttered with peculiar emphasis. He looked up, and for a moment she thought she saw his lips twitch in anger.

  "You had your own pleasures," he said, suppressing a yawn.

  Before replying she examined the familiar face, the broad forehead, the brown and leathery skin of one who seemed to spend all his days in the sun, the heavy lines around eyes almost too small in company with his other features, and most prominent of all, the unusually thick lips. "Yes, I have had my pleasures," she replied calmly, "and yet they have been nothing less than the foundation of your own. Have I done aught that you would have had differently?"

  When he responded, it was to a different question, but she was accustomed to his shifting of the grounds of their disputes. "I have my own interests, my needs, as does any man. Since I have provided well enough for you, I should not think you would have aught to complain of. Your father was poor enough."

  "I am hardly the better now," she said scornfully. "You have probed that wound too often for it to bleed again. Besides, you were well, husband, to look to your own affairs. Were it not your wish to avoid your creditors we might be in London still. That we remain in the provinces now is a wonder to our friends as much as it is a horror to me."

  "We remain here because London is unhealthy," he replied defensively.

  "Unhealthy for you, you mean," she said.

  "And for you as well, my dear. After all, sickness does not spare the virtuous, you know."

  "I wonder then that it has spared you, even here." With that, she walked to the window.

  "If you can no longer tolerate me, you may take the coach to London," he said.

  "The common coach? Are you mad?"

  "Our coach. I will have Edwards drive you. You may proceed to London at your leisure."

  "That gloomy, insolent fellow. I would prefer to drive the horses myself."

  "You may do as you choose."

  "Your gallantry is overwhelming," she said.

  "It is invited by your modesty and goodhousewifery," he replied, his lips twisted ironically.

  "Henry?" she began.

  "Yes?"

  "You shall not put me off about the boy, you know."

  He made a gesture of silence at his lips and walked toward the door. In the gallery beyond he could hear fading footsteps. Husband and wife glared at each other, their expressions fixed in implacable hatred.

  "Do you really trust that man?" she asked.

  "Implicitly," he replied. "Master Varnell wants nothing so much in life as to climb upon my back to another lord's service. I cannot but trust such single-minded ambition in one so devoid of qualities. Besides, I must forgive his curiosity about our affairs if he is to be my factor in my curiosity about others."

  "Do you not mean mine?"

  He smiled coldly. "Perhaps so, yet VarnelPs long nose will prove as useful to me in London as it has here, never fear."

  She sneered and paced again impatiently. "You think yourself clever. Do not prove excessively so. Perhaps the clothier will do your work after all. Since you have so able a tool in Master Varnell, you may find yourself undone in Master Stock. I would not find the irony of such an outcome unpleasing."

  He laughed but without conviction. "I am surprised to hear you say so, having within the half hour so rudely bespoken our friend the constable. But rest assured, I do not employ tools I cannot wield. Master Varnell shall do what I will, as shall Master Stock,"

  She detested his continual self-assurance. She said, "And what have you promised the constable that he fly so willingly to your lure?"

  "The constable? Why he is quite a different bird, his flaw being not in desiring to be more than he is but in being so unremittingly what he is—an honest man. He is more predictable than the sun. A man may set time by him."

  "Was Richard Mull also your tool?"

  "No more than he was yours, lady. But let that rest. The boy is dead, and if you can suffer me these five days we shall proceed to London. Would that please you?"

  "It would please me to go to London, even with you," she said, defeated.

  "Very well, then. Tonight we shall have Master Shipman and his company as we originally purposed. I am minded to some tragic theme, and the suffering of Dido will do well enough."

  They fell into a grim silence; he warmed his hands at the fire in the hearth. She gazed from the window to the garden. Then she turned and looked at him steadily.

  He said nonchalantly, "Pray look that cook prepares enough for the players. They eat heartily."

  "I know my duties," she replied, closing the door firmly behind her.

  The girl unmanned him, the devil take her. He caressed her, but it was as though he were trying to bring a frozen corpse to life. He could do nothing but weep from exhaustion and frustration. The hag of the tavern pounded upon the door. "Pray be less noisy," she had screeched with a voice like a whip across a beggar's back. "I keep an honest house and will have no riot." He had lain on the bed weeping. The girl had unmanned him, the devil take her. Rub salt into her pale cheeks, pale as death, until they glow like hellfire and she awakens to my desire.

  But she had not awakened. She lay staring into the rafters while-he had struggled in the darkness for his garments. Later he had listened at the door for her breathing, her weeping, but there had been nothing, nothing but silence from within and the murmurs of another's passion in the chamber beyond.

  Once in London he had seen an earl's coach run down a child in the street. A crowd had quickly gathered around the broken body. He had remembered vividly the lord's face at the window: a handsome youthful face with but the trace of a beard at the chin and hair at the upper lip soft as down and almost as light as the young earl's face. The young lord had worn a Spanish cape, Peter Varnell remembered. He wished he might have such a one. The coach did not stop; the young lord did not stop. Peter Varnell had not stopped either, would not have stopped, had rode on through the darkening streets lulled by the clatter of hooves on cobblestones and the raw shouts of the driver and the mute curses of the folk as they stared enviously from their doorways and called their brats in from the twisted, narrow streets.

  He would not h
ave stopped then, but at this moment he did to rest at the top of a rise from which he might see the Hall, its outbuildings, and the fields beyond. The rocky surface of the hillock was dry, but he removed his cloak and placed it beneath him and stretched his long legs out before him. For the while it took him to catch his breath, he watched an ant ply the length of his boot before shaking it off into the thin brown grass. On such days as this, his mind full of images of desire, he had walked into the countryside around Cambridge, away from his dreary chamber at the college where he was regularly the butt of jokes about his poverty and Cornish accent. He had aspired to the church, but had fallen from grace the first year at the university, half seduced by the blasphemous Wilfred, half by his own natural inclination for experiences of a more vivid nature than permitted by the cassock. He would have repented had his fall come a year earlier, but by the third year at Cambridge he felt himself quite beyond redemption. Wilfred, an eager reader of the more fashionable Italian authors, had helped to convince him that true felicity lay in getting a secure place in some great lord's affairs, and since attaining his degree he had been busily engaged in that cause.

  For the people of the town he had nothing but contempt, although his own social origins were no grander, but as he viewed it himself, his degree, if nothing else, proved him their better. His enthusiasm for London, the only city of the realm worthy the name, was matched only by that for his lady, Cecilia Saltmarsh, whose high forehead, pencil brows, thin lips, and bodily form the delicious contours of which were merely suggested in the elegant lines of her gowns, represented to him all he knew of sensual delight. What pleasure he should have taken in being more to her than her husband's servant; and the truth was that he lived in hope of seeing himself something more to her than a mere household furnishing. Did she think of him at all? Did she see him at all as daily he executed his employer's affairs in the great house? He studied to deserve more than her praise of him.

  And that had been precisely what had vexed him about the boy: that at a time when his own presence in the house might have become increasingly conspicuous and his worth noted, a pasty-faced actor with but three hairs on his chin should have had more attention from his mistress than he himself had garnered in three months' service. But his mistress was fascinated by plays—and players. He could not himself abide them. But all that was done now, since the boy was dead.

  He rose to his feet, his long legs having gone stiff. Above, the clouds were again heavy with rain. He wrapped his cloak around him and started to walk back to the Hall. He trusted in his luck; it was a good half hour's walk and he was not altogether sure the new storm would allow him that.

  *

  Cecilia Saltmarsh was the only daughter of a Devonshire knight whose wife had died in childbirth and whose estate and morals had both declined under the high cost of London living. She had married Henry Saltmarsh shortly before her father's complete financial collapse. Her husband had generously paid the old knight's debts; but since he had immediately contracted new ones, Henry Saltmarsh's charity was to no avail. This good turn, however, her husband rarely allowed her to forget for more than a week at a time. The first few years of their married life they lived in a spacious house in a fashionable quarter of London and on an income from the Saltmarsh properties. This had allowed her to keep a lavish table and to save two dressmakers from the curse of idleness. She loved the theater, and when in London she had attended, with or without her husband, twice weekly, either at Mr. Henslowe's Rose or at the more intimate and prestigious Blackfriars. She was also fond of players, especially the young boys who took the women's parts, an interest her husband did not discourage. Saltmarsh had curious interests of his own. At first these had horrified and disgusted her; later she learned tolerance, and now both the knight and his lady had settled down to a tempestuous domesticity based on the principle that neither was to inquire too closely into the other's conduct.

  The closet she examined at the moment was large but full, although she had brought but a sample from the house in London and of those only the gowns suitable for the season. She stood, her long slender arms akimbo, trying to make up her mind. Since she was especially proud of her fair skin, she chose a color to set it off to best advantage, handing the garment to Gwen, a pretty Welsh girl of fourteen who had been her maid for two years.

  The girl took the gown and submissively laid it out on the purple coverlet of the bed.

  "No," Cecilia Saltmarsh said imperiously, "not there. Into the antechamber. I will rest now. See that no one disturbs me for this hour."

  The girl nodded and hurried from the room, careful that the gown not drag.

  Cecilia Saltmarsh lay down on the bed, staring moodily -up at the underside of a canopy painted ornately with moon and stars. The memory of her conversation with her husband vexed her still. Henry always vexed her, and she was certain he was lying about the boy. She always knew when he lied, but her knowledge never made his motives less enigmatic. Now she was determined to know the truth, not for truth's sake but because she took the boy's murder as a personal affront.

  She was unable to sleep and soon gave up the attempt. She called for the Welsh girl, told her to find Varnell, and began to dress hurriedly. She did not like her husband's secretary. The man was ill-favored and mean, a scrambling man who would make any door an opportunity for his ambition. His attentiveness to her—yes, she had noted that and had sometimes averted her face to hide her laugher-had grown stale, had become insulting in its presumption of social equality. She had tolerated it only for amusement's sake and out of a simple curiosity to see how far he might go. Her father would have never endured such a scarecrow scholar in his service. She knew, however, her husband used the man for more than his secretary. That was Henry's way. She had no doubt Varnell was involved in her husband's present business with the players.

  When he entered a few minutes later, Varnell bowed stiffly from the waist, his face pale with what she surmised was suppressed passion. She directed him to sit, asked if he were well in body and how he bore the recent cooler weather, and came to her point.

  "I have a favor,'' she said.

  "Lady?"

  " 'Tis no great thing."

  Varnell protested. He would do anything. She had only to speak it.

  "My husband has told me of Richard Mull's murder. I am most sorry for it."

  The secretary mumbled sympathetically beneath his breath, staring on boldly, not looking away as she had almost expected. She wondered if his brave face were innocence or merely his fascination with her, and decided it was the latter. "I am told the constable has been set on the murderer, whoever he may be."

  "He has, and reports to Sir Henry this very day."

  "When he does," she said. "I would know his report."

  Varnell dropped his gaze at that and stood stiffly before her.

  "Would that trouble you—conveying my husband's business to me?'Tis more than a woman's curiosity. You know what favors we showed the boy," she said, wondering the while if the man really did and if so, in what coin her husband might have purchased his complicity. She repeated: "Were you to covey to me in confidence what you have either from my husband or from Master Stock you would do me a service I would not soon forget." She put the request sweetly now, so that it would hardly seem to admit a negative response.

  Varnell looked confused. "I would be loath to tell of what passes within your husband's chambers. He is my employer and—"

  "Come, come, Master Varnell. We are husband and wife. My husband's business is mine, and mine his. 'Tis as simple as that. Take heart. Such qualms as these are mere foolishness, like a maiden's blush. Sir Henry keeps from me only to spare my feelings, which I think at times he holds at too great account. I would know his mind."

  She leaned forward so that he might appreciate the generosity of her rounded shoulders. Varnell sighed heavily, his face brightening with resolve. "You will find me your good servant," he said finally.

  She smiled in triumph and rose. T
he chamber was drafty and she pulled a shawl close about her shoulders as she conducted the secretary to the door and watched him make his way down the long hall. A curious little man, she thought.

  She leans toward him, her loose gown opening to the waist so that he can see her bosom, and smiles radiantly. He sits manly and erect and says, "I hope, lady, that I may have your complete confidence. It is no little thing you ask of me. Sir Henry is my master and I his servant, at least in the capacity of secretary, although my university training ,has prepared me for—"

  A knock at his door shattered the scene, but Varnell made a note to himself to continue recalling it at his leisure. First discomfited by his interview with Cecilia Saltmarsh, he now found it most satisfying to remember. His prospects in the house, he decided, had never been brighter. He opened the door. It was the Welsh girl to tell him that Sir Henry wished to see him at once. Varnell sent the girl off pausing to inspect himself in the glass. He smoothed the blond hairs upon his upper lip and framed a politic countenance. The effect was right; the secretary was ready.

  The two men sat facing each other over a glass of wine. Saltmarsh looked grim. "When Master Stock comes with his tale I want you here too. Observe the man's manner and expression. Watch the eyes, especially the eyes. He may tell us less than he knows. 'Tis likely he'll be direct and unsuspecting but there's always the ill luck he may have discovered something. Some trifle overlooked in the enterprise.''

  Saltmarsh paused and leaned forward in his chair. The spectre of ill luck hovered above Varnell's head threateningly. He realized his hands were trembling. "I was most careful in all," he protested.

  "The hostler will keep silent?"

  "As death. I paid him well. The man's a scoundrel but he knows what's good for him. He'll say nothing."

  "Not even to save his own neck?"