Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  “I did not see the marks of violence on them.”

  “You were not meant to. I must say, young man, that I have one piece of advice for you. Not that you’d be able to act on it for you are not going to be let live.”

  “What is it?”

  “Find yourself other lodgings. They are not safe. Why, two people have died there. Besides, you really should’ve been living in a more fashionable quarter. Too late now.”

  “I’m a poor player,” I said.

  “Basta,” he said.

  And another puzzle was solved.

  “It was you who was seeking for me in the book-room,” I said.

  “Bravo.”

  “You must have been in your Italian guise. I heard someone come in and say ‘bastard’ but it wasn’t ‘bastard’ – it was what you’ve just said, whatever that means.”

  “Basta!” he spat the word out. “I suspected you were there. I was relishing a chase but you eluded me, just as you had at Thames-side.”

  “I was in hell,” I said, hoping that he would ask for explanation and so delay exercising the inevitable dagger. But Nunn was pursuing his own train of thought.

  “It is more innocent than it sounds. It means ‘enough’, it means ‘no more’.”

  “Basta,” I said musingly.

  “There is one more thing to do, one more trace to clear away,” said Nunn, “and then I may go to earth again.”

  “Like the fox in the fable.”

  “Like enough,” he said, flicking the dagger up.

  “Yet the fox was not so wise after all.”

  So saying, I threw myself to one side. At the same time I lashed out with my right leg in the hope of striking the hand that held the dagger. I missed – or Nunn was too quick for me. He was as good as his boasting. Within a second he was on top of me, and our cloudy breaths mingled. He jabbed me in the left thigh. I saw his arm jerk out and in, but did not at first connect the movement and the searing pain.

  “You see – the fox did not – did not—”

  “Did not what, Revill?”

  My assailant’s face seemed to fill the entire sky, like a malign tumbling planet. I spoke in short painful bursts, trying to hold his attention, to prevent his arm flashing out and then in again.

  “—the fox swept away – the old traces – but he made new traces – even as – he swept away – the old ones—”

  Nunn pressed heavy on me. If my thigh hadn’t been so painful, I’d probably have been aware of the discomfort of bearing his weight.

  “Different fable, Revill. I know another ending.”

  “—and new traces led back – to his earth—”

  “Not my story, player.”

  He raised his dagger-tipped arm.

  Behind him the door on to the roof creaked open and a weak light spilled over the roof leads. Nunn turned his head aside and his dagger hung irresolute in the frosty night. Through the door tumbled a rush of figures. Someone shouted. I twisted sharply and succeeded in shifting my attacker from his position atop me. Without thought, I half scrabbled, half rolled to the shelter of a nearby chimney stack, trying to put some solid obstacle between Nunn and myself. Once round the corner of the stack I was cut off from a view of what was happening. There were sounds of scuffling and muffled oaths. Then a shadow jumped across the gap that stretched between the tall chimney where I was lying and a steeply inclined section of roof. Two or three other shadows leapt after it and I heard thumps and gasps, and then a long-drawn sigh. Then nothing more.

  Another shape came round the corner and, as it approached me, blotted out the stars. I may have screamed. I huddled into myself. Then yet another shape joined the first, and this one I knew. The hump back made an unmistakable outline.

  “Wait!” Cecil commanded. “This one is a friend.”

  As the other man bent over me I recognised the heavily bearded Yeoman who’d been standing guard outside the Queen’s chamber.

  “He wanted to kill me,” I said. My thigh was throbbing and my leggings felt sticky. A strange lassitude filled me. I could have gone to sleep under the stars.

  “He is hurt, sir, but it is not mortal,” said the guard.

  “Then he will be cared for,” said Cecil.

  “He attacked me . . . he would have killed me . . .”

  “Who?” said Cecil.

  “Nemo . . . nobody . . . Nunn . . .”

  “Nobody attacked you? None was your assailant?”

  “That’s it. Nobody.”

  “Light-headed, sir,” said the Yeoman.

  “Hoist him up, Griffiths,” said Cecil. “Be careful now.”

  And the giant of a guardsman lifted me up as if I was a baby and, cradling me in his arms, ported me across the roof and towards the door. In his wake, I was vaguely aware of other soldiers returning from the outer reaches of the roof. We went slow and Robert Cecil kept pace slightly behind us. His broad brow glimmered.

  As they walked and I was carried down the long corridor Cecil spoke to me, low but urgent.

  “Nicholas, you are hurt. We shall attend to you. But it is necessary that one thing be clarified first. You were hunting down nobody. You were exposing nobody, for which we thank you.”

  I was certainly light-headed. It sounded as though Robert Cecil was complimenting me. I must’ve been light-headed because his tone then changed.

  “But that is over and done with. Nobody will never trouble us again.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “I mean,” said Cecil insistently, his brow aglimmer, “you were attacked by nobody.”

  “Yes, Nunn. He wounded me here in the thigh.”

  I attempted to gesture with my head but wasn’t sure that Cecil understood.

  “No, you are wrong, Nicholas. You were wounded by nobody. Let us be clear on that before you are treated for your injury.”

  I tried to shake my head now, but only succeeded in inducing a wave of dizziness and nausea. There was a flaw in what Cecil was saying but I couldn’t be bothered to identify it. It was only when we’d arrived at some room somewhere – this was a palace, there was no end to the chambers it contained! – and I’d been laid down on a daybed, that the contradiction struck me.

  “If there was – nobody there – how was I wounded? For God’s sake, sir, look. My thigh.”

  Blood had soaked through my hose and was starting to pool on the rough blanket beneath me. I turned in appeal to Griffiths the Yeoman but he was standing impassively by the door. The sleeves and front of his fine costune were smeared with my blood.

  “You must have fallen on your own dagger,” said Cecil. “Either that, or you have given yourself a voluntary wound in the thigh.”

  I lay there gazing up, as the low ceiling seemed to hover and swoop and tremble before my eyes.

  “You must choose how you came in harm’s way, Nicholas. Then we can get physic for you.”

  Cecil was standing awkwardly beside the daybed, looking alternately direct at me and then at my gory thigh, from which all sensation was starting to depart. With his hunchback, he did not show to advantage standing up.

  “After all,” he said with a trace of asperity, “you have already declared that you were attacked by nobody. So it must follow as the night the day that you did this to yourself – either by accident or design. Please choose which, Nicholas, so that your wound may be staunched and a cataplasm applied.”

  “I – I – must have fallen on my own dagger somehow,” I said, and sighed, and hung my head back.

  “Good,” said Cecil. “So let us hear no more nonsensensical references to none and nobody.”

  He said something to Griffiths which I didn’t catch. I didn’t catch very much from that point on, in fact, as I slipped in and out sleep. I preferred being asleep anyway. It took me away from the buzz of voices in the low-ceilinged chamber, it took me away from the pain and discomfort of having my leggings cut away and my (apparently self-inflicted) wound being cleaned up and poulticed. These things I still felt
or saw or heard intermittently but, as I say, I really preferred to sleep through them.

  Epilogue

  Spring 1601

  “So,” said Nell.

  “So,” I said.

  “It’s not that bad here. Though these blankets have a stench.”

  “I must be used to them, I hadn’t noticed.”

  We were lying in a post-coital tryst in my execrable bed in the Coven attic. It was a mild late afternoon. Spring was about to make good on her promise. The holes and gaps in the walls and roof still admitted air but it was almost balmy compared to the bitterness of February. As you can see, I hadn’t quite got round yet to taking the advice of Sir Roger Nunn – or Captain Nemo – or Signor Noti – that I should shift to more fashionable quarters. Not that men who never existed can give you advice, of course. No, I was still living in the lodgings of that witchy trio, April, June and July.

  I hadn’t enquired what had happened to the corpse of the unfortunate May, last seen stuffed in her own cauldron. Tact or guilt prevented my asking. I assumed they had disposed of her with appropriate rites and ceremony. I hoped that she had been given, if not a Christian burial, then one that God in His infinite mercy might find acceptable. I liked May, and held myself not a little responsible for her death. And for Nat’s death too, another hapless victim buried hugger-mugger, not dignified with Christian obsequies. Obviously, Nunn – if he ever existed, which of course he didn’t – had decided that all those involved in his treacherous double dealing with the Essex enterprise should be wiped from the slate. He had picked out the small detail, Nat and May, and all that remained was to erase the final figure, one N.Revill.

  And when I asked myself who Nunn was doing this for, I had no clear answer. He was working for Cecil and working for Essex and, ultimately, working for gold and the game, as he had expressed it. He was a foul traitor, deserving of that foulest of punishments, hanging and drawing and quartering.

  Yet much of the affair could be laid at Cecil’s door. In order to forestall a dangerous threat to an ailing Queen, he had actually set out to encourage the very rising which the country feared. This had a double advantage. Essex’s actions, if provoked by Cecil and his agents, remained to an extent under their control. It was the Secretary’s schedule which the Earl followed or, to vary the figure, it was the Secretary who was piping the tune to which the Queen’s favourite jigged and pranced.

  There was a further benefit, too – by provoking a head before it was truly ripe and ready, Cecil and the authorities had to deal with a threat that was essentially unformed. Not yet the full-grown serpent, it was merely the snake in its shell. But the wary statesman does not show mercy to the snake on that account; only the fool gives him the time to grow fangs. I remembered the confusion and uncertainty that attended the Sunday morning march of Essex and Southampton and the rest, the dithering over which direction to turn, the shut-up city houses, the fear in the faces of the onlookers. Oh, how ingenious Cecil and Nemo and the unseen others had been! How hot-headed and short-sighted were Essex and Southampton and their acolytes!

  “What?” I said.

  “I said,” said Nell, “does that hurt?”

  She was pressing, gently but quite insistently, on my dressed thigh.

  “Not much,” I said, undecided whether to solicit her sympathy for my pain or her admiration for my stoicism. “Not too much, that is.”

  “Things must be better if you were able to do what you’ve just done.”

  “ We’ve just done.”

  “I told you that my preparations and simples would help,” she said, ignoring my comment.

  The moment she’d seen my wound, Nell had at once decided that the remedies applied by Cecil’s physician were inadequate. Telling me that that ignorant gentleman’d gone wrong straightaway by not placing two periwinkle leaves between my teeth so as to staunch the flow of blood, she then washed out the raw gash all over again with juice of Saracen’s root (“you’ll know it better as comfrey” she explained comfortingly) before applying some poultice of her own devising. What I knew all too well was that she had obtained her herbal lore from Old Nick the St Paul’s apothecary2, herbal lore and much else beside, I used to fear.

  It may be that the wound wasn’t as bad as it first felt or appeared. Nunn had given me a fleshy stab prior to the fatal stroke he was about to inflict when interrupted. I owed my life to the arrival of Cecil and the guard. So, although I was most angry that the Secretary had used me to unmask Nemo and his madness and then compelled me to turn my ordeal into a dream or a delusion (“You were attacked by nobody. You were wounded by nobody.”), I couldn’t but acknowledge that he had saved me. Saved me to lie once again flank-to-flank with Nell, to enjoy the company of my compeers in the Chamberlain’s, to breathe the spring air through the rents in my rented wall.

  Within a few days I was able to get about without too much discomfort, though I pleaded incapacity to get Nell to visit me at the Coven rather than have to find my way over to Holland’s Leaguer, her place of work. Fortunately, we of the Chamberlain’s had just entered on the lenten period when companies had to obtain official dispensation if they wanted to play anything, so there wasn’t much doing at the Globe now. In any case, after our unfortunate involvement with the Earl of Essex – although it had almost certainly been foreseen, even planned, by the Council and the Company together – it might have seemed politic to lie low. Not that we were out of favour, as far as I could see. Hadn’t we just presented that melancholy but diverting comedy Twelfth Night to the Queen, and hadn’t she told me with her own lips that she’d enjoyed the play?

  I fervently hope that Twelfth Night distracted her for a couple of hours on that Shrove Tuesday night. On the next morning, Ash Wednesday morning, Essex was beheaded in the Tower yard. They say he made a good end.

  As for Southampton . . . that gentleman I will come to in a moment.

  Oddly enough, I hadn’t been able to impress Nell with my personal account of meeting our Queen. Prompted by her at one of our earlier encounters, I’d run through the performance, described the appreciative laughter that issued from the canopied chair of state, catalogued the interior of the great Hall (“How many candles, Nick? I don’t believe you.”), even mentioned how, as I thought, one of my own lines had elicited a sigh from the depths of the chamber. But when it came to Sir Roger Nunn’s summoning of me to her majesty’s presence, Nell flatly refused to believe a word of it.

  “I’m telling you the truth, Nell,” I protested. “She asked to see me specially. The Queen asked for me.”

  “I suppose She admired your black hair – or your playing.”

  “Neither.” (Though the suggestions were flattering and not entirely beyond the bounds of possibility.)

  “Why did She want to see you then?”

  “I cannot speak of it.”

  “Oh, we’re back to that again.”

  “But I did see her nonetheless, and speak to her and she to me.

  “Very well. What is She like then?”

  “She is . . . she is an old lady now.”

  “There, Nicholas. And you wonder that I don’t believe you. How can She grow old like other mortals?”

  “Because she is like other mortals,” I said. “Because she is not a goddess.”

  But Nell was clasping her hands to her ears, unwilling to listen to another sacrilegious word from me. I didn’t mind her adopting that position, at least when she was naked, since it caused her breasts to swell as the billows do in the Bristol Channel. However, I soon saw that if I wanted to avail myself of what was on offer, I would have to drop any pretence of meeting the Queen, let alone trying to present a truthful portrait of that great lady.

  Similarly it wasn’t worth even beginning to describe to her the story of Nunn-Nemo-Noti, even had I not been bound by some notion of silence. Why, Secretary Cecil himself refused to accept what had happened – and he’d been there! Accordingly, when Nell inquired how I’d received the wound in my thigh I had to
adopt the lie which Cecil had forced on me, that I had been careless and stabbed myself with my own dagger (the tiny one which I kept buried in my clothing and which was more suitable for nail-paring than flesh-gouging). This was also the story which I retailed to my fellows in the Company, and although they laughed at my clumsiness and although one or two of them looked askance as if they thought I was hiding a deeper tale, it was soon accepted that Nick Revill was not a man to be trusted with his own knife – or another man’s wife, as the saying goes.

  Which brings me on to a final detail from my dialogues with Nell. On the spring evening mentioned earlier, I eventually got round to the subject of Isabella Horner. I hadn’t forgotten that I’d left her and Nell discussing – things – in the Goat & Monkey. I was eager, though fearful might be a better word, to discover what had passed between these two women. Judging that Nell was preoccupied with the smell of the blankets or with the efficacy of her remedies for my wounds, I saw an opportunity to mention casually what was on my mind. I contrived to drop Isabella’s name in the conversation, and was surprised to see Nell smirk.

  “You are a fool, Nicholas,” she said, though not unkindly.

  “How so?”

  “That you think I do not know.”

  “Know what?”

  “And still to keep up the pretence like this.”

  “What pretence?” I said with a faltering heart.

  “I know that you and Mistress Horner have shared a bed together.”

  I – we – once—

  “Once?”

  “A handful only.”

  “A small handful no doubt – like this handful,” she said, grasping my member, which had suddenly developed a desire to run for cover. She shifted her hand and squeezed my cullions hard enough (but I was aware that she might have done it much harder).