An Honourable Murderer

by Philip Gooden

From another, I was storing up favours with powerful people, wasn’t I?

  And then, apart from the duty and the favours earned, there was the money.

  Ah, the money . . . I patted my pocket and felt the unusual bulk of my purse. As a token of his good faith, the gentleman in the Pure Waterman had given me three sovereigns, with the promise of more to follow. Three whole sovereigns. Count ’em – not one, not two, but three weighty circles. This was the equivalent of almost two months’ pay to me.

  Money is serious, it should be listened to.

  This was how my conversation with the gentleman unfolded.

  Nicholas Revill: Tell me why you’ve been following me for the last couple of days. Tell me who you are.

  The Other Man: My name is John Ratchett. I have not been following you exactly, Master Revill, but waiting for the opportunity to speak with you.

  Nick Revill: You called at my lodgings recently?

  John Ratchett: You were out.

  NR: And you pursued me down Thames Street yesterday evening, I think. What is it you want with me?

  JR: A word or two.

  NR: Well, I am indebted to you and so must listen.

  JR: We hope that we may be indebted to you shortly.

  NR: We?

  JR: Nicholas – may I call you that? – I speak on behalf of a certain group which is interested in the King’s Men.

  NR: If you want to hire us for a private performance then you should be speaking to one of the Burbage brothers. I believe our rates are very reasonable.

  JR: More precisely, we are interested in the masque which your man Jonson intends to put on at Denmark House.

  NR: Ben Jonson would be gratified.

  JR: The purpose of the masque is to celebrate the peace between the English and the Spanish?

  NR: That’s no secret.

  JR: You’ve been rehearsing for it in the house of Sir Philip Blake?

  NR: Yes.

  JR: What is your opinion of the Spaniard?

  NR: I do not concern myself with affairs of state. The Spanish were our enemies once, is as much as I know. What is the nature of this group which you speak for, Master Ratchett?

  JR: We are interested in establishing the nature of the ties between England and Spain.

  NR: England and Spain are about to become fast friends, aren’t they? Now I remember, it is to be written down in a treaty so it must be so.

  JR: To get to the quick of the matter, there are others who are interested in breaking those ties.

  NR: Old enemies of Spain, I suppose. This is dangerous territory, Master Ratchett.

  JR: Do not worry, you are well protected.

  NR: ‘Protected.’ Now you do worry me. How? Why? Who do you speak for?

  JR: I . . .

  NR: Do you speak for . . .?

  JR: I cannot say it.

  NR: Then I shall say it . . . it is the Privy Council, is it not?

  JR: Please lower your voice a little, Nicholas.

  NR: All right. But now I do refuse. Whatever you’re suggesting, I refuse. I have worked before for Master Robert Cecil, or rather I have followed his instructions while he was digging into plots. I remember well what danger those instructions led me into. If you’ll excuse me . . .

  JR: Sit down again, Nicholas, and wait until I’ve told you what we require. Sit down. Thank you. What we require is nothing – or as good as nothing.

  NR: Then why are you asking?

  JR: You mentioned plots but there is no plot here. There are rather . . . directions and tendencies. Shades and shadows.

  NR: In plain English, please.

  JR: We are interested in the precise – colouring – of certain individuals with whom you are in touch. For example, Sir Philip Blake and his wife. And there is a person called Giles Cass. We wish to be more precisely informed of their sentiments, their talk.

  NR: And the Queen too? Should I inform on her? You know that she is to participate in the masque?

  JR: Her presence is one of the reasons why it is so important that we are kept informed, thoroughly informed.

  NR: Why me?

  JR: Because you have worked for Secretary Cecil before. You said as much.

  NR: But Secretary Cecil has direct connections with such people. I saw him talking to Sir Philip Blake only yesterday. Why on earth should he want to recruit me?

  JR: The more eyes the better. Listen, Nicholas. We require you only to look out and to listen in. Then to write for us – to write a kind of report – on the preparations for this Masque of Peace, material which would be read only in the highest circles. To describe the people, the little events, that occur in the Blake household or in Denmark House, as you see them. Giles Cass, for example, he would bear watching . . .

  NR: Cass? I thought that he worked for Cecil.

  JR: There are outer circles and inner circles.

  NR: Circles, shadows, tendencies. Haven’t you anything more solid, Master Ratchett?

  JR: Can I put money in your purse, Nicholas? Will this be solid enough? These coins are a kind of circle after all.

  Well, all I had to do was to pen a couple of reports or three on the goings-on surrounding the production of the Masque of Peace. Nothing much. As I said earlier, it seemed pretty straightforward. John Ratchett also insinuated that I would be doing the state – or the Privy Council at least – some service. I’d be working under their ‘protection’. I should have known better.

  The stuff about the state sounded quite plausible at the time. Although I’d claimed ignorance when he was speaking to me, I knew a bit more than I let on. For example, when Ratchett claimed that there were people who’d like to break the ties between England and Spain, he was only speaking the half of it. There were many more people who were fearful of the Spanish than ready to befriend them. Indeed, under the old Queen, it had been the duty of all right-thinking Englishmen to regard them as the enemy. If we weren’t engaged in open warfare, then there was a hidden struggle proceeding all the time. Why, only a few years ago, there had been a mad plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth by smearing the pommel of her horse’s saddle with poison. And now we were all meant to whoop and throw our caps into the air when we witnessed the Spaniards sailing up the Thames.

  Yet who was I – playing the part of Ignorance in Ben’s masque – to question the wisdom of our councillors and statesmen? Peace was a blessing, wasn’t it? If I could play some tiny part in furthering an accord, then wasn’t it my duty to play that part? This was the sort of inflated notion that swelled up and filled my head.

  And then there was the money. “Can I put money in your purse, Nicholas?” he’d asked, as if I was the one doing him a favour by accepting it. John Ratchett was prepared to pay me three pounds for each account I provided. I never knew that writing might be so lucrative, but then I supposed that the Privy Council had a deep purse.

  The prospect of cash didn’t altogether blind me but, mixing metaphors, it added the cheese to the mousetrap. And when it came to money, I wasn’t only thinking of myself. For instance, Ursula Buckle needed money to stay in her Thames Street house. Gaining a little extra cash, which I might hand over to her with a careless flourish, could buy her a bit of time with the unfeeling cousin who wanted to kick her and her daughter Lizzie out on to the streets. It might even be the way to her heart. (But probably not, she wasn’t that sort.) While as for me, if I wanted to go on visiting my French friend Blanche in the Mitre, that certainly required a nice fat purse.

  And besides all this there was that little implication – the fatal, flattering little implication – that Sir Robert Cecil himself would be reading what I wrote. In spite of what I’d claimed to Ben Jonson on the quayside, about having no wish to meet the Secretary again, the truth was that I was no more immune to a request from on high than most men would be.

  So I said yes to Ratchett. Yes, I will report on the masque preparations.

  Fool.

  Did you not hear a cry?

  I discovered it wasn’t
just the red-doubleted Master Ratchett who was interested in the Masque of Peace. I was soon approached by William Shakespeare.

  “Ah, Nick, good morning,” he said, his tone telling me that something else would follow on from the greeting.

  I was standing on the open stage of the Globe playhouse. WS had just emerged from the stage-left entrance. If he’d been making an entrance in a real drama, the style of his approach would have been somewhere between casual and purposeful. The stage floor, not covered with rushes as it usually was for performance, resonated to the playwright’s tread.

  The Company wasn’t playing at the moment. These dog days of August can be dry and dusty for business. Also the energies of the King’s Men were officially directed towards playing the Grooms of the Outer Chamber for the duration of the Spanish visit. We had become ‘grooms of the chamber’, you see, at about the same time that we received the royal patent. From this court position we earned almost no money, only prestige. But it’s customers, not prestige, that pay the rent. And customers need to be drawn to the playhouse, especially since the excitement of our return to town after the plague had worn off. Customers – or the better class, at any rate – enjoy bright, fresh surroundings. So the shareholders were taking the opportunity of the August dog days to smarten up the playhouse.

  There were ladders and scaffolding about the stage. Perched twenty feet or so above us were a couple of craftsmen touching up the gilded ribs and the stars of the stage ceiling. One was sitting astride a plank while the other was lying on his back. Only one of his legs was visible, carelessly dangling over the side of a platform as if he had no further to fall than from a truckle-bed.

  I turned towards Shakespeare and gestured overhead.

  “Look you: a brave overhanging firmament – or it will be again soon,” I said, quoting him, at least in the first few words.

  “Fretted with golden fire,” said WS, quoting himself.

  “I wouldn’t choose that job,” I said.

  “No head for heights?”

  “I’d be afraid all the time of losing my head.”

  “Once you’d been up there for a day you would forget your fear,” said WS.

  “I hope Sir Philip Blake has a head for heights,” I said quickly. “He is playing the figure of Truth in Ben’s masque, and has to be lowered from the ceiling in a chair.”

  WS smiled slightly. I had brought up the subject of Jonson’s Masque of Peace because, in truth, I was a little uneasy about my participation in it. I suppose I wanted WS to endorse me. Even though the seniors must have given their approval for the Somerset House presentation, if only tacitly, I couldn’t escape the notion that Ben Jonson was setting up a little company of his own within the larger Company. It was gratifying to have been asked by Jonson to take part, but I would not have sacrificed the good opinion (as I believed) of the Globe shareholders.

  Perhaps WS read something of my anxiety in my face for he put his hand to my shoulder. It was a firm grip but quite different from Jonson’s bear-like grasp.

  “You have hit on the subject I wanted to talk about, Nick. How do the masquers do?”

  “We’ve only had one rehearsal.”

  “Even so . . .?”

  “I think that a noble audience will have to learn to be less, er, fastidious than the groundlings.”

  “They are less fastidious already. You’ve played often enough at court to realize that. They have not paid good money for one thing. The spectators are not really watching us most of the time, anyway. They’re watching the King or the Queen.”

  “Or they’re pissed or asleep,” I said, entering into the spirit of the conversation.

  “We are to present Othello at Whitehall in a few weeks,” said WS. “I hope they’ll have woken up in time for that – or sobered up.”

  I thought of Othello, the play about the Moor of Venice. If anything could wake them up, that should. The King’s Men had presented this piece of WS’s soon after our spring return to the Globe. We’d drawn good audiences for it. My own parts hadn’t exactly been large – a Venetian senator (white beard), a drunken soldier on the isle of Cyprus (black beard). I wondered whether I’d get something a bit bigger next time around.

  I sensed that we still hadn’t reached the end of our dialogue, WS and I. Overhead the scaffolding and planking creaked and groaned as the painters shifted position. One of them was directly above us. Instead of a leg, all I could see now was an arm waggling across those ‘heavens’ which, with their moon, stars and zodiac, provide the roof of our stage-play world.

  “Nick,” said WS, “if I were to ask you to report on anything – untoward – which occurs while you are preparing for Ben’s masque, you must not suppose that I am asking you to turn into a spy.”

  “Untoward?”

  I probably looked confused. This was the second time such a request had been made of me within twelve hours. What was this one about? I made a stab in the dark.

  “Is the good name of the King’s Men at stake here?”

  “Not yet but it might be. Ben is one of our number – at least some of the time he is. And you and several others are taking part in his masque.”

  “Abel and Laurence Savage and Jack Wilson,” I said, as if I was trying to show that this wasn’t my enterprise alone. Or perhaps I was hinting to WS that he could have asked any one of them to be his non-spy.

  “An unfortunate outcome would not reflect well on the Company,” said Shakespeare.

  ‘An unfortunate outcome’. The phrase sounded roundabout, almost diplomatic. So I asked WS whether he had any reason to expect trouble.

  “This situation is like a cauldron into which all sorts of odds and ends are being thrown,” said WS. “Ben’s patrons now, Sir Philip and Lady Blake. There is coldness between them. And Jonson has connections with the man Giles Cass, who is a weathervane. He once veered towards Raleigh. Now he veers towards Cecil.”

  “I know. I don’t trust him.”

  “Then there are the Spaniards at Somerset House. I would be interested to have your account of them.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open – though I hardly know what it is I’m looking for,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said WS, making to move off. I sensed that he was a little uncomfortable with the request he’d just made. Then he suddenly stopped and looked down, as if deep in thought.

  “Have you cut yourself?”

  “What? No, I don’t think so.”

  Shakespeare was gazing at the bare boards. A spatter of blood-red drops had appeared on the floor between us. Instinctively we stepped back. Even as I watched, another drop fell to leave its mark on the stage. I looked up. So did the playwright.

  “Hey. You there!” WS called. “Take care with your brush.”

  After a moment a gargoyle of a face thrust itself over the side of the aerial platform and leered in our direction.

  “Whassat, mate?”

  “Be careful, man. You’re covering us with red paint.”

  “Red paint?”

  The big-nosed visage vanished from view. When it reappeared it was accompanied by a hand clutching a brush.

  “No red paint ’ere.”

  Even from our position on the ground, we were able to see that his brush was tipped with a dark blue colour. Not surprising really if you’re painting the sky.

  “Only blue up ’ere, see.”

  As if to confirm this, a couple of blue drops now flew down to join the scatter of red ones on the floor.

  “You’re right,” said WS. “Sorry to have interrupted you.”

  “’sallright, mate.”

  The head vanished again.

  “And it cannot be that other fellow now,” I said, pointing to the second painter who was still sitting astride his plank at some yards’ distance and who was carefully running his brush along one of the ribs or frets which divided the ceiling into segments. “He is using gold paint.”

  “It’s a mystery. You like mysteries, Nick,” said Shakespeare, gaz
ing down once more at the cluster of red drops. Already the wooden flooring seemed to have drunk them up, and they had lost some of their brightness. WS spoke lightly and turned away. A man used to dealing with the higher mysteries, perhaps he was not over-concerned with little ones.

  Nor was I, much.

  But the blood-red drops on the playhouse stage, if they were no great mystery, were certainly an omen.

  That night I woke up with a start in the widow Buckle’s house. I sat up in bed. What had woken me? Some sound? No. The house was quiet apart from the tiny creaks and groans which you never notice during the daytime. A bad dream? Maybe. I couldn’t recall what, if anything, had been going through my head beforehand.

  Nor could I get back to sleep. Instead I lay down and returned to the conversation with John Ratchett in the Pure Waterman. I’d attended another practice for the Masque of Peace and, in a somewhat half-hearted fashion, had begun to write down my observations on the event. I felt uncomfortable, spying. I was doing this for money, wasn’t I? But I was also doing the state some service, wasn’t I? Duty and profit. Where was the harm?

  And then Master Ratchett’s expression came back to me. Can I put money in your purse, Nicholas? (Why yes, you can, John Ratchett. Feel free to load it with as many sovereigns as it will hold. I will be able to carry them, however many.)

  Put money in thy purse.

  These are the words of the villainous Iago in WS’s Othello, the play which Shakespeare had mentioned to me on the Globe stage. Although I’d had only a couple of small parts in the previous performance, I was familiar with the story of Othello.

  Ordinary players don’t normally get an overview of the works they’re acting in unless they have meaty parts like the ones that go to Dick Burbage. But back in the spring of this year Geoffrey Allison, the Globe book-keeper, had asked me to pick up the fair copies of Shakespeare’s latest from our scrivener, a gent in Paul’s Yard who spends his life bent over other men’s scrawlings and who looks up at you with the wide-eyed surprise of an owl. WS must be comparatively easy to copy out, however, since I’m told he doesn’t blotch or cross through his lines. Anyway, before I returned to the Globe with my precious cargo of fair copies, I ducked into a quiet corner of St Paul’s and had a quick read-through of the play. Naturally, I imagined myself in one or two of the principal roles.