The easy explanation would be to say that Fisher had gone mad, whatever that may mean, but this would not cover all the facts. In the first place he gave an impeccable performance every night, and if one did speak to him on any subject he would answer as soberly and rationally as ever he did. Only his air of abstraction gave away the fact that a part of him was not attending to you at all.
And so we come to the last fateful night in Castleford. It began for me on a hopeful note. The matinee had been well received by a capacity house and I was beginning to look forward to the last week of our tour at Darlington, where I was determined at all costs not to share digs with Fisher.
After the matinee and before the evening performance I walked out of the theatre to get some fresh air. Fisher had gone out just ahead of me and I saw him walking along the narrow alleyway which led from the stage door to the street, head bowed, muttering something to an invisible presence below him and to his right. He might have been talking to an imaginary dog that trotted by his side. If it was so, the dog was clearly not behaving itself at all well. I waited to see which way he turned into the street, then I took the opposite route.
I returned to the theatre perhaps a little later than I intended, but refreshed, mainly, I think, because I had not seen Fisher. For the first time that week, I felt positively light-hearted. Then, as I walked down the dressing room corridor I became aware of a noise coming from Fisher’s dressing room. It was that mumbling gagged voice again which had accompanied Fisher’s recitation at the digs. It stopped me in my tracks, and all the unspoken horrors of that week threatened to return. I was determined not to let it. I would go and see Fisher and confront him. But with what? That I had not decided.
The dressing room door was ajar, I knocked and, receiving no response, I entered. All was silent and the room was empty, but on the table beside the mirror, its back towards me, was the copper wig on the wig block. I looked around more thoroughly and called Fisher’s name, but there was no one there. A sensation of moist coldness crept over my skin. My eyes were drawn again to the wig. There were tiny beads of water on it that glistened like diamonds in the gaslight and it seemed almost imperceptibly to be trembling, as if shivering like me from the cold. Yet I could detect no other vibration to account for the movement. I watched transfixed as the wig shuddered almost like a living thing. Then it began to turn around towards me, as an object on a vibrating surface will turn, slowly, hesitantly at first, then with increasing deliberation. Suddenly I felt that of all the things in the world I did not want to see, I did not want to see the blank ‘face’ side of the wig block. I turned and ran from the room.
That was only the first of many strange happenings that night. Before curtain up Miss Manville had hysterics in her dressing room, claiming that she had seen Marden’s disembodied head smiling at her in her dressing room mirror. During the performance Fisher seemed distracted. He was constantly adjusting his wig as if it gave him discomfort, and between the second and third acts I saw him drain a large glass of brandy and water in the wings. Not unusual for an actor, you may say, but Fisher was the most abstemious of men and never drank during a show.
We reached the last scene of the third act. There are moments on stage when one feels that a scene is not simply being played, but somehow lived by both actors and audience. This was such a moment. I felt as if I were actually in the officer’s mess of the Loamshires at Bangrapore. I must have risen to the occasion because my line ‘To any man who says that Roger Tremaine is a blackguard I give the lie!’ was more than usually well received. Normally Fisher made his entrance as Tremaine with immaculate timing, just as the applause for my line was fading away, but on this night there was a hiatus before he staggered on in his tattered uniform. The pause before Fisher entered seemed horribly long to us on stage, but was probably barely noticed by the audience. ‘I give the lie myself!’ he cried, receiving the usual ovation. Then, instead of crashing dramatically onto the table, Fisher began reeling about clutching at his head. Something had gone hideously amiss. He seemed in agony and his eyes were starting from their sockets. I realised that he was desperately trying to tear his wig off, but to no avail. Little streams of blood began to pour from his temples just where the wig joined Fisher’s head. He screamed in agony and, as he did so, a great torrent of blood gushed from under the wig join covering his face, hands and several nearby supers in gore. As he finally crashed onto the table and the curtain fell a great roar of applause burst from the audience. It was Fisher’s last and greatest ovation. He never heard it because I am convinced he was dead before he had hit the table.
The last act of the play was cancelled that night and the Guv’nor went before the curtain to announce that upon application at the box office customers’ money would be returned. Surprisingly few theatregoers took up this offer, however. As one of them remarked to me in the street the following morning in his blunt Northern way, he had got his shilling’s worth.
No explanation could be discovered for the extraordinary and horrific death of Mr Fisher by either the men of science or of the law. The top of his skull had simply been crushed to a pulp as if it had been a rotten apple. At the inquest a verdict of Death by Misadventure was brought in. The only clue—if it can be called a clue—to the tragedy resided in a crumpled piece of paper found in the jacket Fisher was wearing on the day of his death. It was a bill, the tradesman in question being one, ‘Jabez Wheeler, Superior Wig Maker of 12 Dock Street, Bermondsey’. No figures had been written on the bill side of the document, but on the reverse, the following had been scrawled in pencil:
I find there are some additional costs still outstanding. Yours was an unusual request and mine an unusual talent to execute it. I also have a talent for silence, but silence comes at a price. J.W.
Upon investigation, 12 Dock Street turned out to be a deserted warehouse, and nobody in the district had ever heard of Mr Jabez Wheeler, Superior Wig Maker.
For our last week at Darlington I myself took the role of Roger Tremaine, but my heart was not in it. That third act curtain fell to only muted applause. When it was over I returned to London and was happy to accept the small role of an art student in a revival of Trilby with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
THE DREAMS OF CARDINAL VITTORINI
In the library of Wadham College, Oxford there is a small collection of manuscripts relating to one of its most famous alumni, the poet and rake, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Perhaps the strangest of these papers is a single sheet of foolscap covered in dense, crabbed writing. Along the top in a rather larger hand is written: This rendering of the Responsoriae Foscarinenses made for W of R by his Ldshp’s humble svt Thom Wythorne, Anno 1678. Wythorne was a fellow of Wadham, a secret Catholic and, it was alleged, both a Jesuit priest and a spy. He had known Rochester since they were both Commoners at Wadham. The main body of the text details a kind of ritual, with a homily and responses, religious in form, but far from religious in character. Some of its language and ideas are strikingly similar to Rochester’s poem ‘Upon Nothing’ which it undoubtedly influenced. As for the word ‘Foscarinenses’, I was intrigued because it seemed to throw light on a mysterious sentence to be found in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives: In his last sicknesse My Lord of Rochester was exceedingly paenitent and did confesse to Dr Burnet that before his paines drove him to repentance he had been Foscarine. Some weeks of patient research yielded only a few bare facts about the Foscarines: that they were members of a heretical sect or secret society who first made their appearance at Rome towards the end of the sixteenth century and were all but wiped out there. A compulsive curiosity drove me to investigate further and took me to Rome which was where and how I uncovered the story of Cardinal Vittorini.
**
The Spanish Inquisition is notorious, but the activities of the Inquisition in Rome during the 1560s and 1570s were no less bloody and far more secret. Its history is dominated by the strange and terrible figure of Cardinal Vittorini. There were those who said he was a saint. Moves
were made soon after his death to have him beatified, then canonised, and his cause has recently been revived. His famous mystical work The Means and Might of Spiritual Orison (Benet of Canfield’s translation of the title) is said to be a favourite with His Holiness. I have read it, and it certainly has a curious power: more a poem than a treatise.
He wrote a number of theological works, said to be models of their kind, and he was also a man of wide classical learning. His translation into ottava rima of Silius’s Punica (an epic poem in seventeen books on Hannibal’s invasion of Italy) is said to be better than the original though this could hardly be described as much of an achievement considering Silius’s defects as a poet. Perhaps the Cardinal was attracted to the work because he had been christened Annibale. This may also explain why the present process of his beatification has been slowed down. A twenty-first-century Catholic Church can do without a Saint Hannibal.
The Cardinal was a great prince of the church. He had been born into the powerful Vittorini family which had sired, and, it was said, been sired by, many eminent churchmen. He became a bishop at the age of eighteen and a cardinal at twenty-eight. His palazzo in Rome was the centre of an enlightened and brilliant cultural circle of artists, poets and musicians. The finest painters decorated his reception chambers with frescoes, though his own private apartments were plain and Spartan. The finest food and wine was served at his banquets, but he himself touched little of it. Even on feast days he ate and drank modestly. He slept on bare boards for four hours a night and he was known to wear a hair shirt. His piety and asceticism were a byword.
In appearance he was spare and tall, with a stoop even in his thirties. The famous Titian portrait shows him seated, slightly hunched, head craning forward. He has a gaunt, melancholy face, not unlike some pictures you see of Dante, with a hooked nose and deep-set eyes. He seems to be looking intently at something in the far distance. But what is most arresting about the portrait is the hands. The eighty-year old Titian must have been fascinated by them because they are very carefully and brilliantly represented. One clutches the arm of his chair; the other rests pretentiously on a pile of books, presumably his own works. They are large, yet delicate with abnormally long fingers. The bones and sinews show vividly through the dry, almost transparent skin. These hands seem to be enjoying a separate and independent life, as if they were a grotesque pair of pet spiders that had just emerged from the Cardinal’s sleeves.
Contemporary accounts of Cardinal Vittorini describe his voice as being low and his manner unfailingly courteous and gentle, if it is possible to be gentle without warmth. This was the only complaint that was regularly recorded of him. There was always a distance and detachment in his manner, and he had no intimate friendships.
In 1568 he was appointed by Pope Pius V to oversee the operation of the Holy Inquisition in Rome. Though the Cardinal was only thirty-three, this was generally regarded as an excellent appointment. His devotion to the True Faith was unquestioned, as were his piety and integrity. There were some who thought that he might be over-zealous, but they were few. Besides, in those days, when heresy was spreading through the Holy See of Rome itself, it was thought best to err on the side of rigour. It was the time of the Counter-Reformation when the church was beginning to wake from its corrupt, complacent slumbers. A new spirit was abroad and Cardinal Vittorini was its incarnate symbol.
The Cardinal soon found that the task which he had been set was not a congenial one; but being an ascetic, he found this very lack of congeniality to be an additional spur to his zeal. He had to oversee the interrogation of countless people, most of them as incapable of heresy as they were of orthodoxy. A life of privilege and culture had prepared him for almost everything except an encounter with the uneducated mind. He found such meetings profoundly disturbing: he was fully equipped to fight heresy, but not ignorance. Ignorance was the foe without a face; and it was everywhere.
But then His Eminence the Cardinal began to be beset by another and far more troubling threat to his spiritual life. There are a number of documents in the Vatican archives relating to this crisis which can be found among the papers collected for his original beatification process. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I persuaded the Director of the Vatican Archive, the very charming and courteous Monsignor Dossi, to let me see these papers. I am fully aware that my releasing some of them to the general public will be seen in some quarters as a breach of trust, but I believe that my action is justified for reasons which I hope will become clear.
The most important of the papers was written by Brother Benedetto, a Capuchin Friar who was the Cardinal’s chaplain and secretary. He was one of the few men who could possibly have been described as being close to the Cardinal, and for this reason alone his story carries conviction. There is another reason, though. It is clear from other documents in the Vittorini file that Fra Benedetto wrote what he did under duress, in compliance with his vow of obedience. Orders had come from the Pope himself that a narrative of the Cardinal’s last days should be given and that no detail should be spared. Fra Benedetto, therefore, felt bound to tell the truth in spite of the fact that he was devoted to the Cardinal and anxious to put the best possible construction on his words and actions. What follows is his story, and it will be interspersed with other documents where relevant.
**
My memorial must begin in the Autumn of the year 1572. One night in, I think, late September, His Eminence was sitting at dinner with a select company. I myself was present. The hour was late and much excellent wine had been drunk, though not, I must add, by my master, who kept to his rule of extreme moderation. Among the company was the eminent poet Alessandro Andrei whose immortal Somnum Iamblichi is, I suppose, admired by all men of taste and learning. Signor Andrei was discussing the works of Porphyry, a favourite subject of his, when he happened to mention that there was a group of men and women in Rome—he called them a sect—who were devoted to the teachings of Porphyry and Plotinus. They called themselves Ignotists, and taking as their premise the idea of Plotinus that God was unknowable, they worshipped Ignorance as a god and indulged in all kinds of curious practices. At this His Eminence stiffened. It was normal at these banquets for the Cardinal to be at his most carefree, and to allow conversation to wander where it would without consideration for the strictest propriety; but Signor Andrei had entered a sphere in which His Eminence’s most sacred obligations were engaged. Andrei himself immediately became aware of this and fell silent. Soon afterwards His Eminence retired for the night and the party was dismissed.
The following morning Signor Andrei was summoned to the Palazzo Vittorini and was there questioned by the Cardinal in private, I being the only other person present. His Eminence first satisfied himself that Andrei was in no way a party to the doings of these Ignotists. This was a relief to the Cardinal, for he was a great admirer of the poet’s incomparable verses. He then asked Andrei to tell him everything he knew about the Ignotists and Andrei was very willing to oblige.
Several times during the interview Signor Andrei was seen to tremble violently. On one of these occasions my master the Cardinal stopped his interrogation and asked gently if he was suffering from the ague. Signor Andrei replied no, that it was merely anxiety. I find it hard to believe that it was fear of the Cardinal that made him tremble because His Eminence never once raised his voice to him or showed the slightest sign of anger. He was, as usual, earnest and persistent, but he was always softly spoken.
The facts about this sect which Signor Andrei revealed to us were as follows. The Ignotists were led by a man named Ascanio Foscari, a Venetian by birth, who sometimes styled himself ‘Count Foscari’. He was a notorious libertine and lived in a most extravagant style without any known source of money. Around him he had gathered a number of bravos, all equally dissolute, but distinguished, so it was said, by some wit. Women too, from all classes, were among his associates. Foscari himself was reckoned to be a man of learning and had spent several years in a seminary befo
re being expelled for licentious behaviour. The practices of the Ignotists were both vile and curious. They would assemble in a cellar or ruined church where they would offer worship to the god they called Agnoia, which means unknowing or ignorance; but sometimes they changed the name of their god and called it Outis, No-one, or even Ouden, Nothing. According to them God created the world out of Nothing and that therefore nothing, or Chaos, preceded God and deserved to be worshipped before him. Many of their ceremonies were plainly blasphemous and in mockery of those of Holy Mother Church. Sometimes they bowed low to a casket which on being opened was seen to contain nothing, or ‘Divine Darkness’, as they called it. Clearly this ritual mocked the reverence due to the ciborium which holds the blessed sacrament. On one occasion, Andrei told us, they dressed an ape as the Virgin Mary and carried it about in procession; on another they crucified a small black dog. They did this, they said, to show that all forms and ceremonies were vain and meaningless, and that they had no regard for the common forms of decency. They also have no belief in the immortality of the soul and as a hymn sing those verses from the chorus of Seneca’s Troades which begin:
After death nothing is, and death itself is nothing...
They also had secret signs and passwords by which they recognised each other. One, I must repeat because it became a strange source of torment to my master, the Cardinal. When one Ignotist met another he would often greet him with the words:
‘Of what cannot be spoken . . .’
To which the other would reply:
‘Of that let no man speak.’
Signor Andrei’s descriptions were so clear that I thought he must have been more closely connected with the sect than he made out, but I held my tongue. His Eminence had undertaken to trust his word that he had not taken part in any of their rites, and there was an end of it. When Andrei had finished his account, the Cardinal dismissed him and, immediately summoning his officers, told them to find out these Ignotists with all speed, and especially their leader, Foscari.
The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories Page 29
