An Honourable Murderer

by Philip Gooden

  Of course, one advantage for the nobs was that they didn’t have to bother about the prompt return of the scrolls to the book-man or of their costumes and little props to the tire-man. In fact, some of them seemed distinctly reluctant to change out of their gear. Most people like dressing up, provided they don’t have to do it for a living. We lesser characters, however, must go off to the little antechamber and account to Bartholomew Ridd for the state of our outfits. I was on my way there, in the wake of Abel Glaze and Laurence Savage and the others, when I passed Doña Luisa de Mendoza, La Paz. She was being closely attended by the two Spaniards whom Ratchett had identified, the gentlemen with the great ruffs.

  As I walked by she looked up and smiled at me. What a pang went through my heart! I had not spoken a word to her during our two or three rehearsals, and now I wondered what response I would have got if I had dared to approach her. Perhaps I should produce the spotted handkerchief, which I still possessed, and ask whether it belonged to her. This delicate item, it is yours, my lady? Gracias, señor, muchas gracias.

  But these agreeable dreams were broken by Giles Cass, who moved into step beside me. For some reason he was fastening on me like a leech. He was about to open his mouth, probably to pass on another titbit of gossip, when one of the ruffs – the hawk-eyed lawyer, I think – made a complicated bow in our direction. Cass halted and returned the bow. I did the same, happy enough to stay in the neighbourhood of Doña Luisa.

  “Señores, beso los manos,” said the other grandee, touching his fingertips to his lips to show what he meant.

  This led to an even greater outburst of bowing, as if each side was competing with the other in courtesy. I thought I caught Doña Luisa smiling, as though at men’s foolishness. When we eventually broke away, Giles Cass whispered in my ear, “Very good but I would wish that they had stooped a little lower and kissed our anos rather than our manos.”

  As crude wit went this was satisfactory, but I wondered at a man who was so friendly with the Spaniards in their presence showing them so little respect out of earshot. I changed into my day-gear. I noticed that Cass did not, preferring to continue in his part as Suspicion as long as the party lasted.

  The rest of the evening dissolved into a blur of candlelight and wine and music and dancing and the rest. There were three distinct groups in the audience chamber. At the top were the nobles who’d been among the players and the spectators, both English and Spanish. I noticed that the Queen and Cecil slipped away early. They had a country to run, or at least Cecil did. Then came the professional players. And somewhere to one side were the musicians and the mechanicals, that is, Snell’s men. Both Jonathans were present too, together with their principal craftsmen Armitage and Turner.

  In between the nobles and the mechanicals were figures with a foot in neither camp, such as Giles Cass or Ben Jonson. Or Martin Barton, that scourge of corruption, who was quite happy to load himself down with courtly dainties. I noticed him in conversation with a handsome Spanish youth with finely slashed sleeves to his doublet. Without a language to share between them, they were gesturing a lot. They might not have a common language but they understood each other well enough. And I also noticed how Lady Blake, the recent widow, seemed to be content to drown her sorrows in drinking and dancing. And her husband barely cold in his grave.

  If I sound a bit jaded, then it’s probably because I did not drink as much as everybody else in the room. My head isn’t that hard. Also it was preoccupied with other things. I was bothered by Giles Cass’s words. Keep it that way. Ignorance is best. If he was referring to the death of Sir Philip Blake, then I was happy to fall into line. I would ask no more questions. The same applied to the shadowy demise of John Ratchett. It was almost as if I had dreamed of his presence in the Snell workshop, lying outstretched on the ground. For sure, Ratchett had gone when I returned the next day. But I knew that he had been there at nine o’clock in the evening just as certainly as that he had disappeared by the same hour in the morning.

  Still, what was there to worry about? No one could connect me to this agent of the French ambassador (if that’s what he really was). We had met twice in the Pure Waterman tavern in Southwark, a borough where men do not willingly tell tales, and we had endured one conversation in the Strand. It would be very bad luck if anyone knew both of us and remembered seeing us together. Ratchett was no longer around to make me comply with his demands for ‘information’. Whoever had disposed of him had also done me a favour. That was how I should look at it.

  I was mulling over these things in an obscure corner on the far side of the audience chamber when I became aware of a great stir running through the room, like the breeze through the summer trees. Groups of talkers and drinkers and dancers were swirling tighter and faster, then breaking apart and coming together again, gaining and losing numbers as they went. Abel Glaze weaved towards me, brandishing a glass which probably cost the equivalent of a month’s wages and slopping most of its contents on the floor.

  “Why so long-faced, Nick? Wassamatter?”

  “Am I? Sorry.”

  “Get pissed like me.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “C’m on, less go see.”

  “Where?”

  He said something which sounded like Terence, and with his free hand almost dragged me across the great chamber. After a time it became evident that we were headed not for Terence but for the terrace, where a great many other people were also heading. After a little more time, and from snippets of excited talk interrupted by shrieks and giggles, I understood that two individuals – a man and a woman – a noble man and a noble woman – had been caught out on the terrace. Caught at it on the terrace. Caught at it. Charles Blount and Lady Penelope Rich, were they? Or the Earl of Rutland and Lady Rochester, were they? No one knew. No one cared. We would soon find out anyway, all of us streaming out through the doors and floor-length windows into the summer’s night.

  The air was soft and moist, with the promise of rain offstage. The flagstones underfoot were dry. Overlaid with cloaks and cushions they would provide a soft bed for urgent lovers. Good luck to them, I thought, although being as eager as everyone else to witness this disgraceful scene, this disgraceful and amusing scene, of a couple of bare-arsed nobles. Though presumably by now they’d have had time to pull up their hose and pull down their skirts. Purses and jewels go missing during performances, to say nothing of handkerchiefs and rings. What is reputation by comparison? I even had the time (or maybe just the sobriety) to feel faintly sorry for Ben Jonson since what everyone would remember from this evening would not be the glories of the Masque of Peace but the antics of the audience. And what would the Spaniards think of us? In a different way, of course, our reputation as English might even be enhanced. Look, we can be hotblooded too.

  About half of the masque audience was now milling about on the wide terrace of Somerset House. The night view up and down the river felt spacious even if it was mostly invisible. The watermen’s fireflies bloomed in the darkness. The crowd was starting to mass down towards one end, where the action apparently was.

  Abel pulled me in that direction.

  “C’m on.”

  We found ourselves on the fringes of a group. The terrace of Somerset House had a grand set of stairs in the centre leading down to the river, while more modest sets (to allow for the arrival of players and other riff-raff) had been constructed at either end. The crowd was drawing towards the eastern steps, that is, those closest to London Bridge. A couple of cresset lights were burning in brackets beside the steps.

  I’d been wrong when I thought that what the audience would remember from this evening was not Ben’s masque but the couple caught in flagrante. Whoever the naughty couple were, they were no longer of much interest. Death trumps sex, just about. What the audience would remember was the body which at this very moment was being borne up the eastern stairs by a group of retainers and then laid carefully on the flagstones at the top. Instinctively, the crowd drew bac
k.

  Abel’s hand fell away from my sleeve. The cheerful shrieks and giggles faded out. I barged my way near to the front. Water was flowing in streams from the body and, more particularly, from his clothes. They were heavy garments and had soaked up plenty of water. I guessed the body had been spotted just before the weight of his garments dragged him out and down for good. Otherwise he might have sunk to the bottom before he reached the Bridge. If the current had taken him as far as that, then most likely his corpse would have been battered beyond recognition by the mighty piers.

  But he was recognizable now. Not his face, which was angled away from me and half in shadow, but his weighty cloak. The cloak was made of some dark fabric, darkened further by the water, and it was covered with painted eyes. Well, I thought, Giles Cass has gossiped his last.

  The set phrase of peace

  The next day, which was the 19th of August in the year of 1604, we were present at a great and historic event. It was the signing of the treaty between Spain and England in the King’s palace at Whitehall.

  Of course the King’s Men were not significant players in all of this but merely there to swell the crowd. As Grooms of the Outer Chamber, we had to dress up in our doublet-and-breeches livery, made out of those four and a half yards of red cloth, and stand tucked away at the side looking suitably impassive while the King and his entourage processed into the Chapel Royal. The Chapel was already crowded with Grooms more senior than us, individuals such as Grooms of the Privy Chamber or Grooms of the Wardrobe. There were also courtiers, diplomats and the rest in attendance.

  We waited a long time for the King to appear but no one seemed to mind too much. You can’t mind it when a king is late. Certainly I didn’t. It gave me the chance to think. Gazing around, I saw our seniors. As you can when you’ve spent a lot of time in the company of the same group of people, I was able to recognize them all by the backs of their heads, by the corner of their shoulders, by their dress, their postures. There was John Heminge, there were the Burbage brothers, Richard and Cuthbert, and Augustine Phillips. Will Shakespeare was present of course, as well as Thomas Pope, who had lately quit the King’s Men because of sickness but who had been determined to attend this ceremony in the Whitehall Chapel. I noticed my friends Laurence Savage and Abel Glaze wearing the same impassive, mask-like expression which was probably fastened to my own face.

  While we were waiting I cast my mind back over the events of the previous night at Somerset House. The successful performance of Ben Jonson’s Masque of Peace, the high spirits which followed it, the rumour about the noble couple who were at it on the terrace (I never did discover who they were, or even whether they existed in the first place). Then, as a final act in this drama, the recovery of Giles Cass’s body from the river, its slow dripping progress up the steps, the way it had been deposited, almost delicately, on the terrace flagstones, the water that pooled about the body where it lay.

  I must have been one of the last people to speak to Giles Cass, or rather to hear him speak. He had made that rude crack about the Spaniards kissing our anos instead of our manos, and before that he’d intimated that Sir Philip Blake was lucky to have perished when he did. The Spanish joke wasn’t to be taken seriously unlike the remark about Blake’s lucky death, I assumed. And then only a couple of hours later Cass had turned up dead himself.

  A coincidence, it seemed. An accident, probably. For it appeared that Cass had slipped and struck his head when he was standing near the bottom of the same set of stairs up which his body had been carried. There was blood on the edge of a stair just above the high-water mark. Two or three individuals thought they’d observed him going down the steps about half an hour earlier. This I heard from Ben Jonson, who was among the crowd on the terrace watching the body being retrieved.

  There was nothing odd about these last sightings of Cass except for the fact that he was apparently alone on an evening when company was the rule. But then I’d been alone myself, brooding in an obscure corner of the performance room. So Cass must have descended the stairs – to wait for someone down there? to look at the night-view across the river? to hail a ferry? – until he arrived at the position where he lost his footing. It was easy enough to do. The lower stairs, which are regularly covered by the tide, are coated in weed and slime. There is a wooden railing for the benefit of foot-passengers but the steps are wide and anyone standing in the middle of them would have no handhold. Supposing Cass had suddenly turned, his attention caught by a movement on the river. Or that he’d twisted round, hearing a sound behind him. He’d been drinking, like almost everybody else. Distracted, unsteady with drink, his foot slithers on the slime and weed. He falls backward or he falls sideways, he strikes his head on the stone step.

  And then – or so I imagined it – Cass had lain there, bleeding and perhaps senseless until the tide rose sufficiently to ease him off his perch and into its watery clasp. Or, in another version, Cass had lost his balance and hit the stone step hard enough to leave traces of his fall but not enough to knock himself out. Then, groggy, unsure of his whereabouts, he had staggered upright and lurched forward into the water. But, however it had happened, the outcome was the same. Giles Cass drowned after striking himself on the head.

  I couldn’t feel much sorrow at Cass’s death but it was still a troubling event which had brought the Somerset House celebrations to a sombre conclusion. As his body had been lifted up from the terrace so that it might be decently stowed indoors, his head fell backwards and his mouth gaped open. River water dribbled from his mouth. I thought of that frequent gesture of his, the way he dabbed at his lips as if some grease were smeared on them. I thought of my last sight of Sir Philip Blake with his gaping mouth, of John Ratchett with his still warm hand. The place on the terrace where Cass had been lying was dark with water but there were yet darker stains in the region of his head.

  An accident perhaps – nobody seemed to think any differently – but I went to look for myself. Once the body, still cloaked in its garb of Suspicion, had been carried inside and the crowd had dispersed, I lifted one of the cresset torches from its bracket. I walked down the steps, clutching at the wooden railing and taking particular care when the going became slippery underfoot. In front of me stretched the river. It felt as wide as the ocean. Water slurped at the stairs.

  I swept the torch around in the region of my feet. It gave off more smoke than light. Any traces below the waterline would have been washed away, but I was lucky – if finding evidence of a death counts as lucky – for almost immediately I discovered some bloody marks. Standing in the dark, which was made deeper by the torch’s moody flare, I envisaged the ways in which Master Cass might have met his end. Diverted by a light out on the river, distracted by a noise over his shoulder. I looked around. I was a little below the topmost step. In other words, out of sight of any people on the terrace unless they came to the very edge of the flight of steps and looked down. No one to see him fall, no one to hear the dull thunk of a head hitting stone, especially not over the sounds of celebration from inside the audience chamber. True, the gossip had it that there’d been those noble individuals out on the terrace – Charles Blount and Lady Rich, or Rutland and Lady Rochester – but, if they were ever there, they’d had their hands full at the time and would not have been aware of a dying man.

  There was a different noise coming from the Somerset House audience chamber now. The music had stopped. The party was over. A dead man had brought it to a close. Less harmonious bangs and thuds were audible and for an instant I wondered what was causing them. Then remembered that the Snells and their workmen would most likely be working late into the night to take down the scaffolding and stage.

  I lowered the torch once more and inspected the stains at the edge of the step. If there’d been any doubt about what they were, it was dispelled by what I found as I peered closer. Human hair, two or three little hanks of it, was embedded in the dried clots of blood. Cass’s hair was dark, about the same shade as mine, but straight
and short. Here were hairs that showed up straight and dark in the torch’s flare – plain evidence of how and where he’d met his end. There was something forlorn about these little traces of the dead man.

  I stood up and returned to the top of the steps, almost losing my footing as I went. I replaced the torch in its iron bracket and went to lean against the stone parapet, facing the river. The stone was warm from the day’s sun. As far as I was aware, I was the only person on the river-front terrace.

  Three men dead.

  Firstly, Sir Philip Blake, courtier. Cause of death: falling from a height during a masque rehearsal. An apparent accident, although a possible murder. Anyway, he was dead and gone, his body carted off to the family’s country house in Loamshire or somewhere just as remote and rustic.

  Secondly, John Ratchett, agent to the French ambassador, Monsewer La Boderie. Cause of death: also falling from a height, as the result of standing on a trapdoor and having it open under his feet. Not an accident surely, although it might have been a suicide. (This thought had not occurred to me before. Could a person standing on the trapdoor in the workshop reach the lever? Not a plausible way to go, surely. Not an obvious method of self-slaughter.) Anyway, Ratchett was dead and gone like Sir Philip. Certainly gone, for his body had disappeared. I was the only person to have seen it apart from the individual who had engineered his death in the first place and the one – the same one? – who had taken him away from the Snells’ workshop.

  Thirdly, Giles Cass, go-between, diplomatic smoother. Cause of death: drowning after a blow to the head. An apparent accident.