Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  What puzzles me is how we – they – got away with it.

  Only now do I have an inkling (and you’ll hear about that soon enough too).

  The fortunes of the Chamberlain’s, and whether one or two of its senior members might be cast into gaol, was pretty small beer to anyone outside the playhouse. The eyes of London were firmly fixed on the fate of the Earl of Essex. Within a few days, indictments were laid against him and Southampton and others. The trial of the two Earls followed hard at heels, and it was clear to all that there could be only one sequel to this.

  These things didn’t weigh very greatly on my mind, except for the passing regret about Wriothesley which I’ve already mentioned. Even here, I felt it greatly daring and presumptuous to be concerned at the fortunes of a nobleman. I was slightly surprised not to have been summoned by Nemo to another midnight meeting. It was he, after all, who had instructed me to be a spy in the house of Essex in the first place and who had then conveyed, via the unfortunate Nat, a message commanding me to attend an uprising. Except, of course, Nemo couldn’t have known that that Sunday morning had been chosen as rebellion’s glorious dawn, could he? Any more than he should have been aware that the Chamberlain’s were going to stage the ‘foul play’ of Richard on the Saturday. Why, we hadn’t decided on this ourselves until the company meeting which I’d attended after receiving Nemo’s note (and eating his words, literally).

  I say ‘we hadn’t decided’ but of course the decision had already been made by the shareholders, baffling though it might have been to us common players. Now, Nemo’s note suggested prior knowledge of which way we were going to jump. Which suggested, in turn, collusion – or, at the least, an understanding – between the authorities and the senior Chamberlain’s, the very gentlemen who were now being quizzed by those same authorities. Which suggested . . . I didn’t know what. My poor brain reeled as it had when I’d been blindfolded and led a dance through the dark streets to meet Cecil. All I knew was that I wanted nothing more to do with the world of spies and affairs of state.

  Such thoughts ran in my head as I returned to my lodgings after a morning rehearsal for Richard Milford’s A Venetian Whore. In this comedy I played one of the three suitors for Belladonna’s hand. She is, you will recall, the heroine of the piece, a lady who, to test her would-be lovers’ sincerity and purity, takes to a whore’s life, or to a whore’s garb and manners at any rate. I was a nobleman – the Duke of Argal – come to woo the wealthy Belladonna with the prospect of an extensive champaign, with fertile meads and rich forests. Unfortunately, during my return to the Dukedom of Argal I decide to drop into a brothel and there I take a fancy to a new woman. Who, just before she succumbs to my blandishments (viz. money), reveals herself to be . . . the disguised Belladonna! No fit husband-to-be, I slink back to Argal.

  It was a nice role, somewhere between small and large, and I played the nobleman with one or two touches of grace and ease which I’d picked up in my brief encounters with (whisper it soft) the Earl of Southampton. And A Venetian Whore had the great advantage for us at this moment of being a light, frothy piece, nothing to do with kings, depositions or deaths. However, the play isn’t the thing here. I mention it and my part in it merely to report on the behaviour of Richard Milford during rehearsals.

  I’d already observed the manner of a handful of authors during my short association with the Chamberlain’s, and before that with the Admiral’s. They are strange creatures, not seeming to realise their own strangeness. I except Master Shakespeare here. Though not indifferent to his own words, he showed a kind of casualness about their application. I have occasionally watched him step forward so as to moderate a player’s delivery, to temper his gestures and motions, but I have not otherwise seen him seek to interfere in the player’s craft. This is perhaps because he himself is a player, and understands how each man must be left to find not only his own voice, but his own stance and gait. With other authors it can be different.

  Master Milford was an extreme case of fret and worry. Fitfully watching as we mouthed his lines (not really his, of course), he could hardly keep still. He strode around in the groundlings’ area, casting sidelong glances at the stage. Then he would materialise backstage, ear pressed to the panelling, checking that we were sticking to his precious text – as if he had actually written it! A moment later and there he was hanging about on the edge of the platform, biting his nails to the quick and getting in everyone’s way. He had something of the quality of the ghost in Hamlet, able to be everywhere at once, hic et ubique. At one point, Heminges had to ask Milford to kindly leave the stage, which he did, blushing furiously.

  Now, I do not know whether Richard Milford would have been so resdess and troubled if he had been the genuine and only begetter of A Venetian Whore. Was he agitated as an author or as a plagiarist? I alone knew that he was the guardian of another man’s words, even if that other was an anon. And he knew that I knew. This perhaps explained why I often noticed him observing me during his perambulations about the fringes of the stage. Even during the ragged attendance at a rehearsal, a player soon learns not to fix his eye on any single member of the audience; it can be disconcerting for the one so picked out, and besides it seems somehow discourteous to all those others who have paid their pennies. So I did not return Master Milford’s stare but it seemed to combine two contradictory qualities: a kind of brazenness and a species of shame. As if to say, ‘Shog off, Master Revill, I care not what you think’ and ‘Please, Nicholas, do not give me away at this point – just as my play is about to be given to the public’

  Perhaps Master Milford intended to convey no such mixed message to me. Perhaps it was merely that, in his shoes, shoes which had been borrowed (or stolen) off another, I would have felt the same compound of guilt and defiance. Those two are old bedfellows. In the matter of Milford, I thought too of his odd parti-coloured eye and remembered his excited talk about the sword of Damocles. Then I tried to put him out of my mind and enjoy my stroll back to the Coven.

  It was one of those February mornings when Spring haunts the air. The air was soft and balmy. There was still the stench of the city underlying all, but if you walked this stretch of Southwark between the bear-garden and Broadwall with your nostrils closed and your eyes cast upwards you might have imagined yourself, for a moment at least, in the countryside. The trees and bushes and the bare earth had started to lose some of their winteriness as they put forth their first thread-like tendrils. When I first arrived in this greatest of cities and was affected by a longing for my native country, I had sometimes half-closed my eyes and blotted out the squares and straight lines of human habitation. If the trees were in leaf I saw only their green or gold, if the day was clear I saw the blue of the sky with its cloud-armada, and so was back in my own Somerset.

  I am glad to say that these poetic fits passed quickly. If nothing else, the smell of the city will eventually bring you back down to dirty earth. And if that doesn’t, and if you’re unwise enough to walk round Southwark with your gaze fastened up in the air, you’ll most likely tumble over a beggar or a boatman. Or tumble into a bog.

  I was brought down to earth sharp enough now as I neared the Coven. The house where I lodged had lost something of its strangeness for me; familiarity had worked her reverse magic. But as I approached my ‘home’ at the end of this fine morning, the hairs rose on the back of my neck to hear the sounds of wailing and keening which issued from the interior. The noise was scarcely human, and I wondered for an instant whether some new breed of animal had been introduced into the household.

  Nervously, I tiptoed towards the open door. Peering in, I could at first make out nothing except a huddle of shapes stationed around the cauldron to the rear of the ground floor. The room was thinly hazed with smoke. From the midst of this group emanated an unearthly whine interspersed with syllables, rising and falling, half a chant, half an outpouring of sheer misery. The outlines of the figures showed plain enough that the keening was produced by the sisters. />
  Considering that their business was none of mine, I slipped through the door and made to creep up the stairs. But they were not so absorbed in their troubles that they failed to notice my stealthy passage across their premises. With what seemed to be a single movement, three carbuncled and wizened visages turned towards me. Now more than the hair on my nape bristled. My scalp prickled and my guts seemed to coil around themselves. For, between the humped backs and bent shapes of these women and through the smoke haze, I saw a pair of legs protruding from the lip of the brewing cauldron. The syllables uttered by the women started to resolve themselves into short word-trains.

  “Deadandgone.”

  “Beenandone.”

  “Drownedandfound.”

  Then they turned back towards the cauldron and resumed their wailing.

  Unwillingly, I drew nearer to them. There was little light in the interior – and the smoke from the fire under the cauldron, now extinguished, made it harder to see – but the voices and the postures were sufficient to identify April, June and July. Where was May? I very much feared that the legs which stuck up straight from the edge of the cauldron were hers. For sure they belonged to no beast, as I had for an instant thought (and hoped). For sure there could be no other reason why these three should be making such a melancholy sound.

  At the edge of the cauldron I peered over, as into a pit. There lay May, the least unwomanly of the quartet, curved like a spoon in the base. Her head was twisted sideways and partly submerged in the dark sloppy brew at the bottom. Her bare legs stuck out the top, the toes pointing heavenward. Like her sisters, she was wearing a dark smock which had, also like her sisters’, probably not been removed for more months than there were in their names. Now this garment had fallen back and bunched about her waist so that her privities were dimly revealed. Turning my head away from this unwitting exposure, I felt dizzy and clung to the iron rim of the cauldron for support. April, June and July resumed their chanting and wailing.

  “Drownedandfound.”

  “Beenandone.”

  “Deadandgone.”

  Tears trickled down from cloudy eyes, the water finding its way among their facial protruberances like a stream coursing in its several strands among boulders. My own eyes begin to prick, perhaps on account of the room’s smokiness.

  I started to tug at the edge of the cauldron, with some notion of overturning it and retrieving the body from the interior. But impatient, scaly hands were laid over mine and I understood that the others wished May to remain where she was while they performed their wailing and chanting, their last rites.

  So, as there seemed nothing further for me to do, I retreated up the stairs to my garret, thinking all the while that this dwelling-place was beginning to acquire an unlucky tincture. The death of Nat had now been followed hard by May’s. My eyes pricked again; yet what was May to me, or I to May? Up in my little room – as the mild airs of the early spring blew through the gaps in the walls and blue sky might be glimpsed through the fitful thatch overhead – I sat on my low bed and wrapped my arms around my peaked knees. I thought.

  Last time I’d stumbled over a body in this place I had leaped to the conclusion that murder was in question, and then made the self-centred assumption that I was the designated victim. Now I was satisfied that Mistress Horner was no poisoner and that Nat had died natural, I told myself to take care not to arrive once more at a false destination. For it appeared that May too had died natural – or, if not natural, then accidental. I will leave it to schoolmen and philosophers to determine the degree of distinction between the two.

  I tried to picture in my mind how it must have occurred. Often enough I’d seen the other women lying strewn about the floor of their sty, overcome by the cauldron’s contents. They spent more time stupefied than awake and, even when walking and talking, seemed like creatures who were closer allied to beasts than men. Then I remembered the tears which I had just witnessed and thought worse of myself for not thinking better of them. How had this happened, then? May was a little different from her sorority. For instance she was often out and about, doing, doing, while her sisters were stay-at-homes; for instance she spoke whole sentences while they garbled and jumbled; but she also shared their life, tending to their fatal cauldron, selling its noxious contents to the unwise traveller.

  What more likely than that, overcome by fumes as she was stirring the pot or disordered in mind from sampling too much of her own preparation, perhaps leaning forward to slip into the mixture some final ingredient (root of hemlock, gall of goat), she’d lost her footing and fallen headfirst into the cauldron? There was not much liquor in the pot – but a man may drown himself in a bucket or a river. Perhaps May had not even struggled to escape her fate but surrendered to the intoxication of her fumy death. Yet, had she died so easy? I recalled the awkward twist of her head, the bunched-up smock, the toes pointing sharp at heaven.

  Well, her brew had finished her. I remembered Master Richard Milford shuddering and warning me against trying it. And a sudden thought struck me. I got up from the low bed and went to my chest. For the second time I was searching for a document.

  This chest, the one which had harboured Mistress Horner’s unfatal love-potion, was home to few possessions, as I’ve explained earlier. But I had placed there for safe-keeping not only the green bottle as well as the (incendiary, now incinerated) Phillips-Merrick dialogue, but also the few sheets of The Courtesan of Venice, the play which Milford appropriated and which was destined for imminent performance as A Venetian Whore. I checked most carefully through the sparse contents of the chest. The manuscript scraps, the only proof of Milford’s plagiarising, had gone.

  I returned to my bed, wrapped arms round knees once more and thought.

  Nobody could have abstracted those sheets but Milford. Or rather, no one but he would have a reason to do so. It was apparent that the prior existence of a text concerning a lady-whore and the fair city of Venice was known only to him and to me. Why, the very fact that the Chamberlain’s were staging Whore was proof that the original had fallen into time’s abyss. Milford had gambled on resurrecting the piece and claiming authorship, and the gamble would’ve come off had I not, by chance, been requested by Master Allison to catalogue the contents of the book-room trunk. And from the trunk I’d unearthed, again by chance, the first pages of Courtesan.

  It was also in the book-room, on the same day, that I’d eavesdropped by chance on the dialogue between Augustine Phillips and Gelli Merrick (currently residing in the Tower).

  Something snagged in my mind about that dialogue, about the way I’d just phrased it to myself. Eavesdropped by chance. How extraordinarily tidy and coincidental and convenient it all was: that on one star-lit night I should have been charged with a task by Secretary of State Cecil, warned of an approach to our Company by Merrick the Essexite, and then within a couple of days that I should hear first-hand evidence of exactly such an approach. It was almost as if I had been required to overhear that dialogue. It could not have been plotted neater in a tale. Master Allison had asked me to go to the book-room. But someone had suggested me for that job in the first place. Who was it? Ah yes . . . Master WS.

  But I put these nagging thoughts, these interesting speculations, to one side. I was still considering Richard Milford.

  There could surely be no doubt that the plagiarising playwright had visited the Coven and crept up to my room – after all, he knew it well, he had lodged here himself – intending to recover the sheets of paper which would brand him a forger. Without the accusing manuscript there was no proof of his theft of another man’s word-hoard. Only my own word against his. But it was the writing which was dangerous. I recalled the moment when I’d confronted him in the Goat & Monkey, how he attempted to snatch the papers from my grasp. I thought too of the sword of Damocles conversation, and of the anxious glances he’d thrown at me that morning during rehearsal.

  He was a troubled man. Perhaps a desperate one.

  Troubled enough
to enter another man’s room, rifle through his belongings and thieve a few sheets of paper.

  Desperate enough to . . . ?

  How had May really died? Natural like Nat?

  I’d last seen her slipping back to the Coven at night. Both of us slipping back in the starfall. I was somewhat preoccupied, having recently deposited a dead man under a layer of leaves in a ditch. What had she been up to? More to the point, what had she seen? I recalled her words to me, her last words to me as it transpired: “I have something to tell you.”

  I should have listened.

  It is strange how during that Essex season, everything happened or shaped itself by twos. Or so it seemed, looking back on it all afterwards.

  In Shakespeare’s drama of Richard II there are really two kings: the divinely appointed Richard and the usurping Bolingbroke. For certain, the supporters of the Earl of Essex planned to duplicate in real life what they saw played out at the Globe, hoped to unmake a queen by making a king. Or rather, they hoped that history would repeat itself.

  The Earl himself had twice paraded through London. Once in premature triumph on his way to Ireland, when I witnessed his vainglory in Islington and the ominous black cloud which rose to the north-east. And once with treasonous intent, when he led his rag-tag army from Essex House to St Paul’s, and when the insignificant figure of Nick Revill had again been present, something between a witness and a participant. And I had twice visited Essex House and twice encountered there Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, to say nothing of the disagreeable gatekeeper Signor Noti.

  And the other events with which I was involved also played themselves out in doubles.

  There was, for example, the business of Master Milford, playwright and plagiariser, and of those two plays or, more correctly, of the one play with the two titles, Courtesan and Whore.