An Honourable Murderer

by Philip Gooden

“I don’t know what came over me exactly,” said Abel, “but I saw this lying on the stage and while everyone else was attending to the body, I pocketed it.”

  “Finders keepers,” I said.

  “I don’t want to keep it now. But who should I give it back to? I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’d stolen a dead man’s flask.”

  It struck me that this was precisely what Abel had done, so maybe my reply to him was a bit curt.

  “Don’t return it then.”

  “Well . . .”

  He almost writhed in discomfort. There must be something else troubling him. Abel had made his living through dubious means on the road for many years before he joined the King’s Men. If he hadn’t exactly stolen cash or goods, he had certainly parted the foolish (and the not so foolish) from their money with profitable regularity. Some of the magpie habits of the road had obviously stuck with him and he’d snatched up a dead man’s property almost without thought. Finders keepers. Considering all of this, why was he getting into a tizz over a mere flask, even if it was made of silver?

  Once more Abel glanced around. If he was worried about being watched, he needn’t have been. Dick Burbage, who was playing the Moor, was deep in conversation with Henry Condell who was playing Iago. Shakespeare was standing slightly to one side, as if he was mediating between them. Other members of the company were taking their ease, glad of a pause in the practice. Some were lying down in shady spots. It was muggy during these dog days towards the end of August. Reassured that he was not observed, Abel unscrewed the cap and held the flask out to me.

  “Smell.”

  I smelled something fumy and fiery.

  “It’s aqua vitae, isn’t it? I expect Sir Philip needed a drop or two to, ah, fortify himself with during the rehearsal. It wasn’t altogether comfortable in that flying chair, you know.”

  “No, there’s something else there, something bitter. An underscent. Smell it again.”

  I raised the flask to my nose for a second time and sniffed. Abel might have been right, but I couldn’t really detect anything. Well, maybe just a fugitive wisp of another smell in among the fiery fumes. I returned the flask to Abel.

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Did you see Sir Philip just before he fell? I mean, immediately before.”

  I nodded.

  “What did he look like?” said my friend.

  “What did he look like? What would you look like if you were about to fall more than twenty feet to the ground? He looked terrified. White in the face. His mouth was gaping open.”

  “But no sound came out. He wasn’t shouting, he wasn’t cursing, or exclaiming, or screaming?”

  “I – I don’t know. There was music being played in the background. It might have covered up any sounds he made.”

  “It had stopped by then, the music.”

  “If you say so. Yes, you’re probaby right, the music stopped. When people saw that he was in trouble, everything halted. So Blake didn’t curse or scream. What of it?”

  Abel gulped. He looked even more uncomfortable than when he’d confessed to taking the flask.

  “I’m new to this kind of speculation, Nick.”

  “What kind of speculation?”

  “Your kind of speculation.”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t sure where this conversation was going but I had an inkling, and was half eager, half wary.

  “What if the contents of this flask had been adulterated?”

  “You mean drugged?”

  “Drugged.”

  Abel looked at me, as if glad that this possibility was out in the open. I saw no reason to conceal my own suspicions about Blake now.

  “So you think there was something strange about Sir Philip’s death too,” I said.

  My friend grabbed at my arm. His face lit up.

  “Who else thinks so? Do you think so?”

  “I did, for a time,” I said cautiously. “And Jonathan Snell, the younger one, he had suspicions that the cables supporting the flying chair had been tampered with.”

  “There you are then!”

  “No, wait. Snell retracted his story later after his father had had a word with him. There was absolutely no proof of anything.”

  No proof but plenty of suspicion and unease. I had not yet said anything to Abel of my doubts concerning the deaths of John Ratchett (whom he had never met as far as I was aware) or Giles Cass. I wondered whether now was the moment to come clean with him.

  “Have you tried it?” I said instead, indicating the flask which he was still clutching.

  “Do you think I’m a complete fool, Nick? What if it contains poison?”

  “That doesn’t make sense though. If anyone was going to poison Sir Philip then they wouldn’t need to arrange for an accident to happen to him in the flying chair. Poison is much quieter, less dramatic.”

  Abel was unwilling to let go of his theory and now said, “Perhaps whoever drugged this flask did not intend to poison him outright but only to subdue him. This could have contained a sleeping draught so it would be easier to put him in the chair and send him on his way. Don’t you see?”

  “Maybe.”

  Had it happened like that? I visualized a couple of figures in the gloom of the gallery hoisting Sir Philip, drugged and pliant, into the throne of Truth and then shoving him into space, with the ropes half severed. In that case the Snells (one of them at least) would have to be involved or, if not them, then Ned Armitage or Tom Turner.

  “You’re convinced of this, Abel?”

  “I was able to see Sir Philip’s expression just before he fell, Nick. White-faced and terrified, as you said. But also strangely . . . I don’t know . . . it was like watching someone having a nightmare which you can’t wake them from. Beyond help. That would be explained by a drugged flask.”

  This seemed a lot to have observed in the instant before the man fell to his death but then Abel was sharp-eyed and shrewd. His theory that Blake had been drugged was plausible. It may be unfair, but drugs and poisons make you think of women. Specifically, they make you think of wives. I recalled that Lady Jane Blake was the daughter of an apothecary. But that wasn’t too significant. Women require little instruction in knowing what herbs to dry and combine to make potions and poisons, all they need is mother wit.

  “What do you think? You’ve solved mysteries before, Nick.”

  “I’ve been wrong more often than I’ve been right.”

  “An injustice has been done here,” he said.

  “I think so too,” I said, surprising myself with the words.

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  “We are going to think on it.”

  “Oh,” said Abel. “Are you so busy with your widow and her daughter that you can’t attend to a crime? I think you must be busy with your landlady’s daughter for I see a little colour rising in your face.”

  “It is hot here,” I said.

  We were standing at the edge of the shade cast by the canopy over the Globe stage. Above us was the freshly painted zodiac and the sun and moon. The real sun had crept round during our talk and was beating down hard. Some words about the widow seemed called for. But all I could come up with was, “Mrs Buckle is well, thank you.”

  “Mrs Buckle . . . how proper, Nicholas. But I’m glad she’s well. And her daughter now?”

  “I never see her. And for your information, Abel Glaze, I shall shortly have to move out of the Thames Street lodging because their landlord seems intent on pricing them out of house and home.”

  At that moment, and fortunately, Dick Burbage clapped his hands for the rehearsal to continue. Abel said quickly, “There is still space in my lodgings in Kentish Street.”

  “Thank you, Abel.”

  I was touched by my friend’s concern. All the little irritations between us faded away. As the rehearsal went forward, and during the periods when I wasn’t required, I considered what Abel had said about Blake being drugged by the contents of the flask. Maybe h
e was right. And naturally, caught in the middle of this plot-ridden play by William Shakespeare, my suspicions started to swing back towards Lady Jane Blake and Jonathan Snell the elder.

  Towards the end of the practice I went round to the front of the stage to the groundlings’ area, to occupy a small part of which our customers pay a penny each to stand for the duration of the play. I wanted to see Dick Burbage’s final tragic turn as Othello, after the Moor has confronted Desdemona over her supposed infidelity and then smothered her on the marital bed. I was already dead, in the person of Roderigo. I’d been killed treacherously in the course of laying an ambush for Cassio. The ambush itself was treacherous, of course, but my death was doubly treacherous, the result of being stabbed by Iago under the cover of night and confusion. (Iago, that shadowy figure in the background, pulling strings, arranging outcomes.)

  Dick Burbage’s turn as Othello was already the talk of the town, and had been since the first performances in the spring. His voice, naturally resonant, sank a notch or two lower to play the Moor. Although this was only a rehearsal he had blacked up his face and hands. Through some trick he contrived to make the whites of his eyes stand out so that he looked like an angry, cornered beast. He was grand yet barbaric, even as he smothered his wife and then grieved over her body. His anger with Iago, when the truth had been revealed, was terrible to see; his anger with himself was even worse.

  When Othello had finished and stabbed himself and the order had been given for Iago to be escorted away and tortured – he vows never to say another word under torture, and I believed him, he never would – there was an outbreak of spontaneous applause from the dozen or so of us scattered in the groundlings’ area. To think that you could have this, standing here, for just a penny! It was like purchasing a whole world, a pearl beyond price. It was only a practice, however, and being a practice, there was no final song or jig from us players. I turned to go back to the tire-room since I was still in my Roderigo outfit.

  I almost stumbled over Martin Barton who was sitting at the bottom of the steps which led to one of the tiers of seating (twopence or threepence – still cheap at the price). Barton too had evidently been watching the closing moments of Othello.

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” he said.

  “What is?”

  He waved a languid arm towards the stage where Burbage, Condell and the rest were trooping off.

  “The whole thing.”

  I said nothing and made to move on. But it wasn’t so easy to get away from Barton.

  “That business with the handkerchief, for example. Just picking it up like that! How convenient. How absurd.”

  In the middle of the play Iago finds a handkerchief dropped by Desdemona and uses it to further ensnare the Moor, telling him that she has given it to her supposed lover Cassio. Barton’s words called to mind the handkerchief dropped in the Somerset House gallery, the one which apparently did not belong either to Lady Blake or to Maria More.

  “I don’t see why it’s absurd, Master Barton,” I said. I didn’t much care for the satirist and knew that he was merely being provoking. Even so, I rose to his bait.

  “So much hinges on a silly bit of linen,” he said. Barton stretched out his legs and yawned. I saw down his gullet. A dainty blue hat sat askew on his red hair. I willed it to fall off. “Couldn’t our friend Shakespeare have come up with something more substantial than a silly bit of linen?”

  “Probably he wanted to show how great outcomes sometimes depend on small accidents,” I said, quite pleased with the insight.

  “Oh, how profound,” said Barton.

  “Besides, Martin, I seem to remember you made great play over a little codpiece in your Melancholy Man. Great outcomes, little things, you know.”

  “That was in fun. A small codpiece does not make a tragedy. On second thoughts though it may do . . . Anyway, getting back to Master Shakespeare, all this fuss over cuckolding, it’s hardly realistic.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. What would you do if your wife was unfaithful, Martin?”

  “That is a mischievous question.”

  “As if yours aren’t,” I said, falling into his mode. “Answer me anyway.”

  “I am not married and not likely to be married, as you are well aware, Nicholas. But, if you mean, would I run my wife through if she’d been run through by another man in a different sense? Would I cover her face with a pillow – as we’ve just seen Master Dick smother that nice boy-player Peter Pearce – because she had been covered by another man in a different sense? If you mean any of that, then no, I don’t think so. What about you, Nicholas? Would you do anything so savage, so animal?”

  “Like you, I am not married –”

  “You are not like me, but never mind.”

  I ignored him and said, “I don’t think I would kill out of jealousy but who can say what he would do if driven to extremity.”

  (The previous night in Mrs Buckle’s chamber flashed before my inward eye. The shimmerings and distortions in the moonlight. Her husband’s ghost, had it been? Jealous, was he?)

  “If I speak as a playwright now, and a not unsuccessful one,” said Martin Barton, undeterred, “it is to tell you that cuckolding and horning and infidelity are fit for one thing only. And you know what that thing is? It is laughter. I used them for laughter in my Melancholy Man. Remember?”

  “I had a part in that, Martin. I played Lussorio the murderer.”

  “They are about to revive my Melancholy Man. It will be interesting to have it put on straight after this piece of Master Shakespeare’s. We shall see which the audience really approves of.”

  “Yes, we shall,” I said.

  For some moments Martin Barton’s eyes had been tracking someone over my shoulder. Now he said, “Ah, here he is.”

  I looked round. Peter Pearce was parading past us. Peter had taken the part of Desdemona in Othello. He had wiped the white paint from his cheeks and the red paint from his lips and was dressed in his everyday clothes. He was chatting to Andrew Larch, another boy-player, who had played Emilia, the wife to Iago and confidante to Desdemona. They were talking as closely together as they had talked in character on stage.

  I noticed Martin Barton’s gaze show real animation for the first time. He almost bothered to sit up from his lounging position at the bottom of the steps. It was evident that, of the two boys, he was interested in Desdemona. He had already referred to that nice boy-player Peter Pearce (and, besides, Andrew Larch was comparatively plain).

  “Look at that elegant foot,” said the satirist when Peter was still within earshot. “And that wandering eye. And then, Nicholas, think of a region somewhere between the two.”

  I had a bit of a soft spot for Peter Pearce, in an innocent sense. He had played Cressida to my Troilus in Middle Temple almost two years ago. He’d enjoyed an exceptionally long career as a boy-player and at any moment his voice must start to go, irretrievably. There were already signs of it. Desdemona might be his swan-song and he could hardly go out on a more plangent note. Then he’d graduate to youngman roles. I was pleased to see how he and Andrew Larch paraded past Barton and me without paying either of us any attention. Peter’s ‘parading’ wasn’t provocative either, I think, but merely the result of his having played female roles for so long.

  “I’m sorry,” said Martin Barton. “Have I offended you? Shocked you, Nicholas?”

  “What in?”

  “My comments about young Pearce.”

  “It’s the satirist’s business to offend, isn’t it? But no, Martin, you haven’t offended me. Plenty of people would no doubt agree with you about Peter Pearce.”

  Barton appeared almost disappointed. Whether it was because I wasn’t ‘shocked’ or whether he didn’t like the idea of other men fancying Pearce, he now said, “Then let me tell you something really offensive.”

  “A joke?”

  “It might as well be. A joke on marriage. I have heard that Lady Jane Blake – she who played Plenty in Ben’s absurd mas
que – is to get married again.”

  “What! But her husband has not been dead for more than a few days!”

  “I know,” said Barton gleefully. “Could you invent a better joke on the notion of fidelity and marital bliss?”

  “Who’s she marrying? Not Bill Inman?”

  “Inman?”

  “He played Ocean in the Masque of Peace.”

  “Oh, that one. Covered in shells. No, she’s not marrying him but some obscure country cousin. So they say.”

  “Who says? You know this for a fact?”

  “I have it on good authority, on the best authority in fact. That snooty woman who accompanies Lady Jane told me so.”

  “Maria More.”

  “Yes, her. Anyway, does it matter who her mistress is marrying? She’ll observe the formalities, naturally. She’ll let a decent period of mourning go by – let’s say, half an hour or half a day if pushed – and then she’ll be leaping into bed with her new man. Obviously she is a lady of large appetites as well as large everything else. All that flesh! Ugh. Fancy being swallowed whole by her.”

  He shuddered with a horror which probably wasn’t altogether pretended.

  Despite myself I was – if not shocked – then surprised. This was a pointless response for whatever Lady Jane Blake did or didn’t do was no particular concern of mine. Martin Barton got up on his spindly legs and stretched. He was pleased to have squeezed some reaction out of me at last.

  “This is why I say our great Shakespeare is unrealistic, Nicholas. Why he is almost unworldly. In the real world, a man dies and his widow remarries within days. So much for marriage vows and eternal memory. But in the stage-play world, men are prepared to kill on mere suspicion.”

  Barton wasn’t making a serious point but having a dig at WS. Nevertheless, his revelation about Lady Jane made me think. If it was true – and presumably it must be true if Barton had heard it directly from Maria More – then it tended to darken the cloud of suspicion which had already started to hang once more over the widow.

  Like everyone, I’ve heard stories about hasty remarriages. The stories of grieving spouses getting yoked again in doublequick time as if they cannot bear to be alone and free. There was that woman from Bermondsey who wed the tailor who’d come to measure her up for her mourning gear. She buried her first husband on the Tuesday and married her second on the Wednesday. I wondered whether he’d charged her for the mourning suit. And I remembered that moment from my childhood when I’d discovered a new widow sharing her grief exclusively with her late husband’s brother, in an upstairs chamber. Even Shakespeare, whatever silly claims Barton had made about his being ‘unworldly’, had provided an example of a rapid rematch in the shape of Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude.