An Honourable Murderer

by Philip Gooden

  The plan was simple. If any of the four responded to the letter it was a fairly sure sign that he or she was guilty. For, if you were innocent, there was a natural reaction to receiving such an anonymous accusation. The natural reaction would be to read the letter with horror, with disbelief, with incomprehension. To dismiss it as the work of a person who was mad or malicious or both. To tear it into small pieces and cast them down the privy and flush them away, perhaps in one of those new devices which Lady Blake and Jonathan Snell had been conspiring over. In short, to try to forget about the letter’s existence. That would be the normal, natural response in the circumstances. It’s how you or I would react, isn’t it?

  The one individual who wouldn’t behave like that would be Sir Philip’s murderer. The murderer might be horrified to be accused, especially anonymously, but he or she would be much less likely to tear up the letter, to forget about it et cetera. Instead the guilty person would – or should, if all went according to plan – follow instructions to turn up at such-and-such a place, at such-and-such a time, in order to silence me either with money . . . or with a more binding method. This second possibility was one reason why I’d wanted Abel’s company, since I was conscious that, if my belief about Blake’s death was right, I was dealing with an individual who was both ruthless and cunning. An individual who was possibly responsible for the deaths of John Ratchett and Giles Cass as well.

  When I was penning those unsigned notes in my lodgings I experienced a schoolboyish thrill. Now, by the chill light of evening, my actions appeared dangerously stupid. I had accused four upright citizens of complicity in a murder. If a single one of them was guilty, this might be justified. But not a single one of them was guilty. I grew increasingly convinced of this, and of my foolishness, as the moon inched up the sky and the air grew colder.

  I had sealed up the letters and handed them to a lad I’d found lounging in Chancery Lane. I didn’t know him and didn’t ask his name. Anonymity all round. Three of the letters were destined for the same place, the Blake mansion in the Strand not far off. I told the boy to hand them personally to the gatekeeper, promising there’d be another penny when he came back and described the gatekeeper to me. He asked no questions but ran off. I hung about on the corner of Chancery Lane, half enjoying the secrecy and the contrivance, and thinking that I might be cut out for a spy after all.

  Then the boy came back to tell me about the large hairy wart on the gatekeeper’s cheek. Since this was the only feature of note which the Blake gatekeeper possessed, I knew that he’d delivered the letters. I imagined the letters being passed from the gatekeeper to a household servant, one of those yellow-liveried fellows who glided about the place like a fish, and then eventually finding their way up to the individual recipients, Lady Blake, Maria More, William Inman. I imagined each person tearing at the seal, unfolding the paper – cheap paper, for this anonymous writer was no better than a cheap extortioner – and reading the slanderous words. It was at this point in my imaginings that doubts started to creep in.

  Too late to go back now. You can’t recall a letter once sent. The boy was still hanging about at my elbow, hoping for more errands, so I gave him the final letter and another penny, telling him to take it to the Snells’ workshop in Three Cranes Lane, making sure it went to the older Snell, the father. I instructed him to bring back some news about the colour of the gate. He scuttled off in the opposite direction. I waited some more, the doubts growing stronger with every passing minute. This errand took longer than the first one, or so it appeared to me as I paced about or leaned against a wall. I remembered that Ben Jonson was supposed to have had a hand in building a wall in Chancery Lane, or was it in Lincoln’s Inn? Eventually the lad returned to inform me that the workshop gate was painted green (it might have been green – I couldn’t remember) and that he had entrusted the letter to a long-haired man who’d promised to pass it to Master Snell. Mission accomplished. I gave the messenger his final penny.

  The die was cast. Four honest citizens had received letters which more or less accused them of murder. It was up to them whether they reacted to this outrageous slander or whether they simply threw the accusations away. A third possibility was that any one of the four might alert a local magistrate and come in search of the anonymous slanderer. Somehow, though, this seemed the least likely course of action. It would be too much . . . trouble. Alerting a magistrate would mean showing the letter to him. It would risk opening up an investigation into Sir Philip’s death which, even if not murder, had some shadowy aspects to it.

  I had set the time of assignation for eight o’clock this evening and the place as the roof of the Globe stage. I had hoped to to startle the murderer into an avowal of his, or her guilt, by rising up in the robe of Truth and pointing the finger of blame at whoever emerged on to the roof from the upper gallery like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons. It may sound far-fetched, this dressing-up and finger-pointing, but all I can say is that it worked for Shakespeare. That was in a play, of course, and he was perhaps a little more subtle.

  To arrange a meeting at this dramatic location, and to give directions on climbing to the roof of the playhouse, would inevitably suggest that the anonymous accuser had some connection with the Globe. But many people had connections to the Globe, not just players but costumers and doormen and painters and the like. There was no particular reason for the anonymous letters to be traced back to N. Revill. I had even made an attempt to disguise my handwriting but this had produced such a blotchy, ragged scrawl that it looked like a child’s efforts, so I reverted to my normal hand.

  There was still some light in the sky. Abel had his eyes closed. I settled down with my back against the cabin wall. Thinking I might as well make some use of this blank time before somebody came, before nobody came, I reached into my pocket and fetched out the scroll which contained my part for the next day’s play, that is, Martin Barton’s Melancholy Man. Earlier on the bare stage I’d been unable to remember a single word or action belonging to the murderous character of Lussorio, but when I peered at the lines in the half-light it came back to me.

  Barton had made comments about William Shakespeare being ‘unrealistic’ for using a device like a handkerchief in Othello, as well as for taking seriously subjects such as cuckolding and infidelity when they were only fit for laughter. Well, when it came to a lack of realism his play took the prize. I’d never read or seen or acted in such an absurd hotchpotch as this thing of Barton’s. Blood, satire, laughter, they were all mixed up together until everything was as clear as mud. But the audiences, in their new post-plague mood, liked it, which was the reason why it was being given a revival.

  I won’t weary you with the detailed plot of The Melancholy Man. Suffice it to say that the story concerns a Duke – Italian, naturally – who escapes an assassination attempt arranged by his wife’s lover. As Lussorio, I was one of the murderers who failed to do him in. The Duke comes back in a hermit’s disguise to flit around the outskirts of his court, passing bitter, satirical commentary on the parade of grotesques who populate it. No one guesses that this shag-haired hermit is actually the Duke until he whips off his disguise at the end of Act Five and puts the world to rights. Just as I’d planned to put the world to rights from the rooftop of the Globe.

  Absurd, to think that a Duke could pass himself off as a shaggy hermit in the play. But not as absurd as believing that I was capable of acting as a deus ex machina in reality. In Barton’s case the hermit disguise was a pretext, of course, since dirty old hermits are well known to be moral philosophers. It was a pretext for the playwright to vent his bile about courtly pretensions. Everyone was a parcel of seething rottenness, everyone was food for worms. (Everyone except well-muscled craftsmen and boy-players, no doubt. Not that Barton actually said this.) In my case, I had no excuse for my deus ex machina act. At least Martin Barton was earning an honest living. I was likely to lose mine altogether if anyone discovered what I’d done, what I was doing now.

  It
was getting too dark to read and I put the scroll back in my pocket. Even if anyone did arrive for the ‘meeting’ I probably wouldn’t be able to see them properly. I leaned my head back against the roughcast wall of the cabin and closed my eyes.

  Various shapes crossed my mind’s eye. Or rather they weren’t shapes so much as a queer mixture of pictures and ideas which had taken on some pictorial form.

  One was the signing of the peace treaty between Spain and England which we’d attended a few days previously as Grooms of the Outer Chamber. It wasn’t the ceremony which preoccupied me, the King shambling up the aisle of the Chapel Royal and so on. It was the thought that had come to me afterwards, that It was all a matter of show. The same thing had applied to that glimpse of Cecil and Howard and the rest sitting opposite the Spanish Constable and his señors in the chamber at Whitehall Palace, as if they were waiting to have their portraits done. A matter of show.

  Another reflection must have been prompted by the fact that I’d just looked at Barton’s The Melancholy Man, or rather at my particular lines as Lussorio. I and others had failed to kill the Duke, who then reappeared to indulge himself as a shag-haired hermit dispensing his bitter wit on all sides. The Duke still lived on but not in the person of the Duke . . .

  Then I had an image not from a play but from real life. It was of the craftsman-painter Ned Armitage as I’d first encountered him in the Three Cranes workshop with the marks of red paint on his face. He’d been painting a chest for a stage presentation by Worcester’s Men out at the Curtain playhouse. What – or who – was meant to be hidden in the chest? I’d found a body in the same chest in the workshop on my second visit but that body was a mannequin. There was a real body further in, though, that of John Ratchett sprawled on the floor. By the next morning he’d disappeared as if he’d never existed.

  On the subject of chests: Mrs Buckle had a chest in her room. Was it red? I didn’t know, never having seen her bedroom by daylight, never having been that interested in her furniture. What did Mrs Buckle’s chest have to do with all this? Nothing. Leave her chest behind. But I would have liked to return to Mrs Buckle’s chest, in another sense. My friend Blanche – no, my whore Blanche – she had a mole on her right breast. Perhaps Mrs Buckle had a mole too. That would be amusing, the wife of a parson and a French whore sharing moles. But I wouldn’t know what Mrs Buckle had on her chest. I had not seen her in full daylight, not in that way. Darkness is best.

  Then I thought of Master Bartholomew Ridd and what he’d said about the best way to remove bloodstains. Avoid fighting first of all. But if you do spill blood you should use milk, or salt and water to clean it up. If it’s fresh, then you should spit on the stain. Spit works well. What had the laundrywoman used on the ‘cloak of Truth’ as worn by Sir Philip Blake and Ben Jonson? She’d tried milk, but that hadn’t worked. Nor had salt and water.

  When I was little I had a toy which was made of some shiny wood. It was carved in the shape of an apple and was ingeniously constructed so that it came apart segment by segment. It was a simple matter for my childish fingers to pull the apple apart but much harder for those same fingers to put it back together again. Yet it would go together. I had watched my father reassemble the apple times without number, when I’d gone to him with teary eyes or a cross face. He was a patient man, with me at least. “There,” he’d say, placing it in my open palm, “there’s nothing to it.” And it was true, there was nothing to it when he was the one who was doing it. But as soon as I’d taken the apple apart once more, I could not for the life of me recall how it all slotted together. Then one day I managed to take the apple apart and put it back together, so I squirrelled it away in a chest and never got it out again.

  The items that were floating about in my head were like the pieces of that apple. They should fit together, should fit perfectly, but somehow I could not quite do it.

  I recalled Giles Cass’s words about Sir Philip Blake. That he’d been lucky to die when he did, considering that the beagle, Secretary Cecil, was on his tail for plotting against the Spanish peace, therefore for being on Raleigh’s side. Sir Walter Raleigh . . . who’d narrowly avoided that dreadful fate of hanging, drawing and quartering . . . hanging, and while still alive – though barely – having bloody hands thrust into his entrails . . .

  I thought too of Lady Jane Blake’s hasty remarriage to a country cousin. A lucky man perhaps. To be marrying into all that wealth, a country house far away and a mansion close at hand on the Strand. To be marrying a woman who was an apothecary’s daughter and who’d recently played Plenty in a royal masque. She’d come up in the world, had Lady Blake. All that flesh, a nice prospect for someone. I wondered whether the country cousin would be brought up to town to see London, for the first time perhaps. Or maybe he’d already seen the city . . .

  Some pieces of the mystery – some pieces of the apple – seemed to come together inside my head and for a moment I thought I had it. Then it slipped from my grasp.

  I wasn’t really asleep all this time while I was sitting on top of the Globe for I suddenly heard a noise within the depths of the building. Abel heard it too, a kind of thud. He tensed and sat up. In the fading light we waited for another sound but none came.

  After a moment Abel said, “I have been wondering, Nick.”

  I braced myself for a bitter comment or at least a critical one. How I was all wrong, how this was a waste of effort.

  “Do you think they’ll ever build another spire on Paul’s?”

  Abel gestured across the river. The great church was almost opposite us, a little to our left. Its outline bulked larger and grander than any other building on the far side. Once, years ago at the start of Elizabeth’s reign, St Paul’s possessed the tallest spire of all the London churches. But it was struck by lightning and burned down. It had never been replaced although there was talk of it from time to time.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It would be a fine thing,” said Abel.

  “A fine thing,” I repeated.

  And that seemed to bring this futile evening to a close. There was no point in lingering up here on the roof of the Globe any longer. The air was turning chilly with more than a hint of autumn in it. No one was going to come now. My scheme wasn’t so much madcap as just plain foolish. Time to get out of the playhouse, and return here in the proper form for tomorrow morning’s rehearsal of Barton’s Melancholy Man. To return not as trespassers but players. Not as arrogant finders-out of truth but as humble honest craftsmen.

  Abel stood up and stretched. I moved away from the cabin and along the walkway towards the door into the upper gallery. Then we heard it.

  ‘A strange truth’

  There was no doubt about it this time. There were footsteps coming up the gallery stairs. More than one set of footsteps. My first thought was that they must belong to a couple of the seniors. They’d found out about my plans and were coming to deal with me. It was no more than I deserved. I’d trespassed on my own workplace, I’d stolen keys (and would have stolen a tire-room costume if I could have laid my hands on it), I’d written slanderous letters, I’d inveigled an innocent player into participating in a foolish scheme. I had brought the King’s Men into disrepute. I would be asked to leave the Company straightaway. No more than I deserved.

  All this passed through my mind in a flash. The footsteps drew nearer. In a moment the door which led from the topmost gallery on to the roof would be opened. Abel grabbed my arm and pulled me back. Without saying a word, we slipped around to the far side of the hut, the side that faced towards the river, and crouched against the wall. We’d be out of sight of anyone making a cursory inspection from the doorway. Maybe we could get away with it.

  We heard the gallery door opening and the tread of feet as people – only two of them by the sound of it – emerged into the open. It was more than half-dark by now. There was the glimmer of lamplight from round the corner of our hiding place. This suggested that whoever was up here on the roof felt l
ittle need to conceal themselves. Unlike us, they were entitled to be here. The tables were turned. We’d been intending to trap a murderer. Now it was Abel and I who were trapped and trying to hide, most likely from our seniors. I waited for a shout, a summons. But nobody spoke, nobody said a thing, not even in a whisper.

  This was strange, that nobody was speaking at all. After an age had gone by, I motioned to Abel to stay where he was and crept forward very slowly on all fours until I reached the corner of the roughcast wall of the hut. Like a wary tortoise I peered round the edge. There were two men standing at the other end of the walkway. They had a lantern with them but it was placed on the rush-strewn ground so that I glimpsed only their feet. They had their backs to me and were looking towards the door which gave on to the gallery passage. The door was still open.

  I retreated behind the shelter of the wall and signed to Abel that there were a couple of them. He cupped his hand and whispered in my ear, “Burbage? Shakespeare?” I shook my head. Like me, he’d assumed that anyone on the roof must be here legitimately, and at this time of night that was most likely to be the shareholders. But the outlines I’d seen had not been those of Dick Burbage or WS or of anyone else that I recognized from the King’s Men. Even so, I had an idea who the two were.

  Then we heard more steps coming up the gallery stairs. Not one or two sets of steps but several. These were no shareholders come to rebuke us, and to throw me out of the Company. This was much more serious than the mere loss of my job. My heart was beating hard and a sweat broke out on me, despite the growing chill of the evening. I suddenly understood that my madcap scheme, far from failing, was about to become a great success. I understood some other things too. The pieces of the apple, which I’d been struggling to fit together, slotted into place without effort while I was paying attention to something quite different. There’s nothing to it. I saw how the trick had been done, more or less.