Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  Now it was my turn to nod gracefully. And so we might have continued throughout the live-long day to pay each other compliment and counter-compliment. But I sensed that the interview was drawing to an end.

  “Kindly pass on those lines to Master Shakespeare, Mercury Revill,” he said. “I would not insult your powers of memory by asking you to repeat them to me now.”

  “No need,” I said. “But he will understand them?”

  “He should do. They are his own as well.”

  He rose and went towards the door. Holding it open, he said over his shoulder.

  “I will escort you safely out of the gate, in case our hotheaded Italian friend gets it into his head to attack you again.”

  I was about to make some remark to the effect that I could deal with a mere door-keeper, when our attention was distracted by what was happening outside in the hall of Essex House.

  The Puritan preacher had finished or, perhaps, had been interrupted in mid-spout (for once they have got their feet on a dais or their finger-ends over a pulpit they are most reluctant to let go). But now across the hallway a figure was sweeping from the main door towards the grand staircase. The crowd parted to let him by. He had a group of men at his heels and seemed to be both talking and listening to several of them simultaneously. He moved with a queer gait, with strange long steps. His head was thrust forward, as if in eagerness to meet whatever was coming towards him. His speed and the string of companions behind him made me think of an old picture in one of my father’s books, the image of a comet blazing across the heavens, attended by its train.

  I knew, without being told, that this rushing individual was Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. I knew without being told because I had seen him before in the streets of Islington when he had set out, in all high hopes, for Ireland in the spring of 1599.

  The leader of that ill-omened expedition now swept past me in the hall of Essex House. A cape was flung over his shoulders in such a careless, unstudied fashion that it suggested he dressed – or, rather, was dressed – with the same swiftness with which he moved. I was reminded of his passage through London, for he looked to right and left with an equally vague, abstracted air, all the while seeming both to speak and to listen to the men in his train.

  “That is Cuffe,” said a voice in my ear, and I started for I had momentarily forgotten the presence of the Earl of Southampton at my elbow. “Henry Cuffe, he is his secretary. There is Sir Charles Danvers. And that man struggling to keep up is Sir Gelli Merrick.”

  I recognised the individual who had been with Augustine Phillips and whom I had glimpsed from my hiding place behind the great trunk when they entered the Book-keeper’s room.

  “I am glad to know some of the, ah, dramatis personae,” I said.

  By this time the company had reached the foot of the stairs. The preacher had been forgotten in the great glare and hum which accompanied the return of the Earl of Essex.

  “I would make a good chorus, if you ever have an opening in the Chamberlain’s,” said my Earl. “Would I fit in? Every man should be a master of two trades, in case one turn Turk with him.”

  “Do you want me to pass on so much to Master Shakespeare?”

  For some reason I whispered this, whispered it into his uncovered ear, the other being concealed by a great tress of dark hair.

  “Oh, there is a man who is master of more trades than I can count . . .” said Henry Wriothesley. “No, my Mercury, I do not seriously look for employment with the Chamberlain’s. I have enough to do here. Forgive me if I don’t after all accompany you to the gate. I will be required upstairs.”

  He tilted his head in the direction which the group surrounding Essex had taken. He placed his hand briefly on my upper arm and then entered the crowd which, further excitement being unavailable after the transit of their leader, was now splitting into smaller, chattering groups.

  I made my way out across the courtyard and through the postern gate. The man who had pricked me in the throat was nowhere to be seen. In fact, the door was unattended and I wondered at the laxness of this band of desperate men. Nevertheless, as I navigated the ponds and sloughs of the Strand, what I chiefly thought of was not the little injury which had been done to me at the gate – nor the ranting of the square-toes preacher (even though I wondered how Robert Cecil and the Council could tolerate such sedition being uttered so close to home) – nor the verse message which Master WS had contracted me to deliver to Master HW; no, what stayed with me was the touch of the Earl on my upper arm, his touch and his brilliant gaze.

  This was my first association, fleeting as it might have been, with the world of the high and mighty. It was not my last.

  It was a strange season, those few months of winter in London, taking them all in all. The figure of Rumour, painted with a thousand tongues and each one of them wagging a different tale, passed through our streets and chambers, sometimes whispering, sometimes roaring. Naturally, whatever Rumour said never served to inform, only to excite and confuse. One day you might hear that our beloved Queen was dead; the next that, in her sixty-plus year, she had miraculously been delivered of a baby boy who was the very image in little of his maternal grandfather.

  I was told on good authority that a whale had beached itself at Gravesend and that this signified the wreck of the great enterprise of England. Someone else, telling me of what was (presumably) the same whale, was most certain that this entailed the destruction of all those foreign enemies who would tread on our shores. A little while afterwards, a third person informed me in strictest confidence that there never was a whale, but rather that a great eagle had been sighted over Whitehall which had, suddenly and unaccountably, tumbled from the sky and smashed into the ground. Yet the onlookers, rushing to examine the spot, had been unable to find any trace of the mighty bird. What did this portend?

  A little before the mighty Julius Caesar fell, they say, strange sights and sounds were witnessed in Rome. The graves stood tenantless; the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the streets. In London, the graves retained their guests, as far as I know, but one strange thing I can confirm from my own experience. Shortly before the Christmas of 1600, we were shaken by an earth-tremor. Awoken by some dreadful combination of noise and motion, I was in my own indifferent quarters, and not with Nell (or Mistress Horner). It was early in the morning, barely light. Almost as soon as it had started, the grinding noise and the motion – a kind of slight shrugging which brought down a few tiles and chimneys, nothing more – ceased. People rushed from their lodgings, some still in night-attire and all equipped with white, terror-struck faces. Even the Coven seemed alarmed. No doubt I looked as frightened as my fellow citizens. Certainly, I could not leave off shaking for an hour after, and all day felt cold and hungry. The rumbling or grinding, which can have lasted only moments, seemed to resound in my ears. I was reminded of the area beneath our playhouse stage which is entered by a trap-door and which, during the action, serves as a grave or as a portal to Hell or Purgatory. This is the dark cellarage from where the ghost of Prince Hamlet’s father begins his stalk. It surely follows that underneath our firm-set earth there must be some great, fearful machinery to produce such sound and motion.

  This tremor was, naturally, taken for a prodigy – or as my street informant would have said, a progeny-prodigal. Like the sudden black cloud which had flown up into the Earl of Essex’s way as he had departed for Ireland over a year earlier, it plainly had significance – and not of a hopeful sort. I too couldn’t help wondering what all this meant.

  But we none of us had long to wait before we discovered what it did mean: whales and earth-tremors, falling eagles, black clouds et al. We Londoners were shortly to see overweening pride and towering ambition brought low. So perhaps the story of the eagle was true in the end.

  “How is my Nell?”

  “Why, Nick, it’s a long time since I’ve heard you say that.”

  “You have been in my thoughts.”

  “But not in my be
d.”

  “It’s not grown cold on that account, I’m sure.”

  “Come and warm it now.”

  “You’re surely not going to claim that you have pressing business elsewhere at this time of night?”

  “No. But an early start, you know . . .”

  “That never used to trouble you. Nor did your brow used to furrow like that. Come here and let Nell smooth it for you.

  “Very well, but for a moment only.”

  “I know I should be grateful for a morsel of your time. You must be much in demand.”

  “Ah . . . that’s better.”

  “You have not forgotten what strange power I have in my hands and fingers.”

  “It’s good to be reminded.”

  “Power to soothe and smooth – and to swell.”

  “Yes, that is better.”

  “Only you must submit to me entirely to feel its full effects. Lie back now—”

  “For a moment only.”

  “Of course. And as I work you shall tell me a little of your day. You have been rehearsing to see the Queen again.”

  “We do not rehearse to see her but to play before her. She sees us.”

  “But you will still be in Her presence.”

  “I have been in the presence of other great ones today instead.”

  “There is none so great as our sovereign lady.”

  “There are some would be.”

  “Are you sure that these are things which you are supposed to talk of, Nicholas? Are you sure that this news is for your peace of mind? Last time we met you played the mute. Lie still and attend to what I am doing.”

  “One day I shall tell you all.”

  “No, you will tell me nearly all. But look now, I have put you into a state where you need say nothing further. See. Feel.”

  “Ah yes.”

  “Nothing except a few words of love, if you wish.”

  I left Nell’s crib a little less heavy in body and mind. Once again, it was a frosty night. The trees stood gaunt by the roadside. The moon, growing towards fullness, was suspended low above the ground, looking pale and sickly. Maybe I was on the alert for signs but I saw several meteors tracing out their mischievous paths among the stars and recalled the heavenly omens which were reported in Rome before Julius’s fall. Who was our Caesar? The rushing man in Essex House or our solitary sovereign in Whitehall Palace? For certain, London could not contain them both for much longer, no more than England had been able to bear the weight of Henry Bolingbroke and Richard together on her soil.

  Arrived at the Coven, I almost stumbled over April and June and July bundled up together near the entrance, like cubs in a litter. They appeared to have fallen asleep where they fell. I could have got drunk on the fumes that ascended from their huddled shapes. I assumed it was those three, and that May was absent, because the others acted as a kind of monstrous conjoined body, never, as far as I could see, parting more than a few feet from each other’s company. I wondered where the more limber May was. Out about her business, no doubt, spreading alarm and despondency like the meteors. I felt my way up the perilous stairs and so into my room. There were so many chinks, rents and unadorned holes in the fabric of the walls that I might almost have seen to read by starfall.

  My room was spare. It contained a bed. And to enhance the homeliness of my quarters, I had imported a small chest in which I kept my valuables – or would have done had I possessed any. Nevertheless, it guarded two or three things of significance to me, like the agreement I’d signed when invited to become a member of the Chamberlain’s (never have I appended my signature so eagerly to anything), my father’s signet ring, a cambric handkerchief which Nell presented to me when first we met, as well as a few other items.

  In short, there were only two objects of furniture in the room. Now, by the faint light that filtered through the gaps, I could see that I was the owner of a third. A carpet had been delivered and left rolled up in the middle of the uneven floor. My first thought was that the Coven had suddenly grown mindful of the comfort of their lodger and, as a gesture of their interest in his welfare, had spontaneously decided that his room required an additional domestic touch. My second thought was that, since the sisters were content to live like pigs in shit, there was no reason for them to be remotely concerned with the well-being of a mere lodger.

  My third thought was straightforward enough.

  It was: Jesus!

  For, when I bent over to examine it, the rolled-up bundle on the floor turned into a huddled human body. I coughed to clear the phlegm which had suddenly gathered in my throat. There was a roaring in my ears. The loudest sound – the only sound – in the room was the banging of my heart. I tried to say something, to say anything, but only a squeak emerged. Then I put my hand out and felt the other’s stiff arm. I darted my fingertips into the area of the face, paler than the rest of the mound, and encountered a rough, razorable cheek, all of it quite cold. My scalp prickled and I broke out into goose-flesh.

  I’d been squatting on my haunches and now sat down heavily on the floor. For a moment I hoped – hoped! – that the body in my room was May’s, the fourth member of the Coven. If the other three were in a stupor downstairs, then perhaps it did not stretch belief that she might be dead drunk on my upper floor. Perhaps she’d swallowed too much of her own concoction. However, a second’s reflection showed it couldn’t be May. The rough and razorable cheek I’d felt would not have been a disqualification with April and the others, because they were patchily whiskered, but the more feminine May approached a sort of smoothness. It wasn’t her. And I’d already glimpsed the other three downstairs, far gone but not over the other side of death’s borne.

  So, who was this person in my room?

  I would have preferred not to look, would rather have leapt into bed and pulled the stinking covers about me, would just as soon have fled the house altogether. But there was a body in my room, and fear and curiosity and anger combined to make me want to discover its identity (for some reason I assumed that I would know him).

  With shaking hands I lit my carefully conserved candle. The flame flickered and swooped as I held it over the dead man’s countenance. It was poor Nat the Animal Man, as I think I already half suspected it would be. His face tilted to one side and his mouth stretched to expose raggedy teeth. His scarecrow rags were pulled about him, as if to cover up what had proved mortal enough. He’d paid his debt, but everything about him – his expression, his huddled posture, even his very presence in my chamber – signified that it had been a forced settlement.

  Carefully, very carefully, I placed the candle on the floor, for I was afraid that otherwise it might drop from my trembling hand. I closed my eyes for a moment and, as I sometimes did before walking out on stage, tried to steady my breathing and calm my heart. I wasn’t certain what I felt: anger, fear, grief. Or rather, I experienced all these emotions but in varying quantities at different instants, so that at one moment I was frightened for my own life and at the next furious that someone had taken away the life of a fellow human. And in my little room! Then I would think how old Nat was really a harmless individual, and not so old either, trying to scrape a penny-living with his gallery of unhuman noises, and a tear would start to my eye. Yet all of this occurred in little more than the blink of that same eye.

  I strove to control my feelings, with some success. It was important to draw what conclusions I could from this event. To discover, for example, how Nat had met his death; to think of reasons why his death should be necessary. I started to study the body. He was lying upon his side, his thin legs pulled up. Both of his hands were clenched and drawn tight against his chest. Both of them were clutching at something. I opened the cage of his fingers, not yet gone stiff, and recovered what was inside them.

  One of the items was a balled-up scrap of paper. I unfolded it, saw some writing and put the fragment to one side, intending to examine it later. The other item was a small bottle made of dark glass. The bottle felt empty
. I tilted it and a single tear of clear liquid fell to the floor, catching the light from my candle. I sniffed at the bottle’s lip. A sweetish smell, quite pleasant, not unlike the aroma of sack. I leaned forward and sniffed briefly at Nat’s gaping mouth. My gorge rose but even as I struggled to control my nausea I thought that I detected that same smell on his cold lips. So, I tried to reason coolly, it was possible that he had drunk from this little bottle and then died. But had he died because of the bottle or, rather, because of its contents? And, supposing that it had contained poison, why should Nat have been carrying with him a vial of envenomed liquor?

  Still kneeling, I brought the bottle closer to the candle flame. It was made of green glass, a worthless little container so shoddy that there was a bulge on one side near the base. Then all my fears, which had been slightly allayed by the attempt to apply reason to the corpse’s presence, returned in full force. As I’ve mentioned, my bare room contained only two movables: bed and chest. I shuffled on my knees towards the latter. Besides that I possessed nothing of true value to keep from the world’s prying eyes, the lock on the chest had long since been broken. I retrieved the candle, opened the lid and took an inventory of my goods. Yes, there tucked in one corner was my Chamberlain’s contract. In another was my spare shirt and, beneath that, Nell’s cambric handkerchief with my father’s ring safely folded inside it. There were a couple of books too and other things besides.

  But what was missing from the chest in which I’d put it for safe-keeping was the bottled concoction which Mistress Isabella Horner had presented to me not long ago, the concoction which, she’d claimed, would restore me to the straight and narrow highway of women when I tired of the by-ways of men and boys. The bottle was absent from the chest because it was presently clasped by the defunct Nat. Isabella Horner had hoped to work a cure on me. But her cure was to be a permanent one. It was evident enough, was it not, that if I’d sipped at Mistress Horner’s preparation then it would have been Nick lying down, lying clenched and curled in the place where Nat was now.