Mask of Night

by Philip Gooden

  “Doctor Fern.”

  “Why do you say that, Nicholas? You believe Doctor Fern was murdered? How can that be? You were there when he was found.”

  “I – no, I don’t know why I said it. Forget that I spoke.”

  Shakespeare had said nothing all this while though he gazed at me intently. There was a silence which I broke reluctantly after some moments.

  “Is this what you meant by a day of the dead? This carter and Doctor Fern?”

  “There’s more,” said WS.

  “The plague is taking hold in Oxford,” said Burbage. “There were four or five households sealed up this very morning, and there are others under watch.”

  I reached across to the flask and poured out a measure of wine.

  “It will only be a short time before the city authorities prohibit all gatherings,” said WS. “And the first thing to close down will be a company of players from out of town. We may not have much longer.”

  “So where should we go? Tell us,” said Dick Burbage to me as if I was in possession of the answer.

  “Back to London? I have heard that things are no worse there.”

  “Then you are misinformed,” said Burbage. “Matters are worse there than ever. I received a letter from my wife today.”

  I suddenly saw – in one of those belated flashes of understanding which serve more than anything to illuminate our own obtuseness – the reasons for Burbage’s bear-like manner. His wife and children had been abandoned in a plaguey town. (WS, by contrast, had his family tucked safely away in Stratford-on-Avon.) Nor was this all, this consciousness of a family rawly left. Dick Burbage, together with the other shareholders, carried the Chamberlain’s on his shoulders, just as Hercules holds up the image of the globe on the roof of our playhouse. For me the question of the Company’s next destination was an interesting speculation which had a bearing on my livelihood, but it wasn’t my direct responsibility. But for Thomas Pope and Dick and WS and the rest, it was their decision and it affected all of us.

  “Dick’s wife says that the Queen is near her end,” said WS.

  “A matter of days,” said Burbage.

  The gloom in the room deepened. The fire flickered, casting a dying glow on the red and white walls.

  “Are we still to present Romeo and Juliet for the Constant and Sadler families?” I asked. “Surely not?”

  “That is a private presentation, not subject to the city authorities,” said Burbage. “We do not yet know whether we can still stage it at the Ferns’ house. William and I will pay our respects to his widow tomorrow. Depending on what she says we may quit Oxford very soon – or we may stay a few days longer.”

  “Then we could go to – to Gloucester,” I said. Even as I spoke I felt the blood flood into my face. Why was I saying this? Only to fill the silence.

  “Yes, we might go to Gloucester – or Worcester – or Leicester. What does it matter?”

  And with that Dick Burbage carefully placed his glass on the floor, got up and left WS’s room. He was drunk and angry, but in a closed-up fashion. Shakespeare made no attempt to stop him. There was another silence. I wondered how, and how soon, I could make my own exit. But it wasn’t to be so easy.

  WS motioned me to take up the vacant chair by the fire, then said, “Why did you say Gloucester?”

  “I’ve no idea. It was the first place that came into my head.”

  “And why did you claim that Hugh Fern was murdered?

  And don’t say you’ve no idea about that either.”

  Well, since this was why I’d come to see WS in the first place, there was no reason to hold back. Limpingly, I came out with the deductions I’ve already given, although they sounded even less convincing when uttered aloud. I couldn’t see any reason why Doctor Fern should suddenly put an end to himself, I’d been one of the last people he’d talked to and he had given no hint of what he was about to do, and so on.

  “Very well,” said WS. “And what makes you qualified to peer into another man’s heart and pronounce on his intentions, if he has decided to keep them hidden?”

  “I don’t claim that. It’s more a question of common sense.”

  “Common sense tells us that, if a man meets a violent death inside a locked room and there is no sign – or possibility – of the involvement of another, then it must follow that that man did violence on himself, particularly when the implement is so plainly to hand.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I like the idea even less than you do, Nick. To do away with oneself is a dreadful course, it is a mortal sin. Perhaps it was all an accident.”

  This seemed an even less likely notion than murder but I said nothing.

  “Hugh Fern was an old friend. Tomorrow I must console his wife. Hugh and I shared our boyhoods.”

  “I know,” I said. “You went poaching together.”

  “Who told you that? Did he tell you that?” said WS.

  I was about to say, no, you told me, but instead I shrugged and said, “So I’ve heard.”

  “Don’t believe all you hear. Or even what you see. Don’t leap to conclusions about what you witnessed this afternoon. Don’t leap to – murder – or wrong conclusions about other things.”

  William Shakespeare glanced up at me from his chair on the other side of the slumbering fire and then covered the moment by raising his glass.

  Other things.

  Was this an indirect way of referring to his own breathless appearance in the inn yard with Jane Davenant? I recalled the way she’d helped him into the friar’s costume, tugged on over the shirt which he was already wearing, a frail garment for a dull, wet afternoon. I recalled that earlier during the interval I’d seen Jack Davenant wandering gloomily about the Golden Cross. Perhaps the landlord wasn’t mourning the trade which was being lost to his rival. Perhaps he was mourning a different type of loss. Perhaps he was in search of his wife. Who, at that very instant, was elsewhere, perhaps . . .

  One idea suggested another. My eyes flitted about in the gloom, searching for the bed in Shakespeare’s chamber. It was a capacious enough bed, but then this was probably the best room in the Tavern, one fitting a distinguished guest. Then I grew embarrassed when I caught WS looking at me looking round the room. Having been cold on my entrance into the room, I now felt hot next to the dying fire.

  It never crossed my mind to say anything direct to WS. Or rather it did but I immediately suppressed the idea. I remembered what Hugh Fern had said to me about WS’s capacity to take offence. Tolerant and easy he might be but everyone has limits. I grew hotter still. Fortunately WS switched topics. Maybe he felt uncomfortable too.

  “Do not say too much about Dick’s little outburst, Nick. He is anxious for his family.”

  I nodded a little harder than necessary.

  “I guessed as much.”

  “When you come to get a family you will find that you have made hostages for fortune.”

  “Perhaps that is why I have no plans to get a family.”

  “Plans,” said WS. “You plan what shirt to put on for the week or which tavern you might eat your lunch in, you don’t plan marriage or a family. Not unless you’re a prince or an heir to a great estate – and if you are then someone else does the planning for you.”

  If I was waiting for some little revelation concerning unplanned marriages, then I was to be disappointed for WS now said, “This has not been the best of days. And tomorrow morning Burbage and I must visit the widow.”

  I took the hint and stood up. WS said goodnight in an abstracted way. I left him sipping at his glass and staring at the embers, and went downstairs, intending to return to my own dormitory in the Golden Cross next door.

  In the gloom at the bottom of stairs I almost collided with a figure who was waiting there. I mumbled an apology and expected him to climb the stairs now they were clear. But the man didn’t move. He peered into my face and I recognized Jack Davenant.

  “You have been to see Master Shakespeare?” said the
landlord.

  “Yes.”

  “Is he alone?”

  “He is now,” I said, then realizing this might be misconstrued I added, “Dick Burbage was with him but he left some time ago. I don’t think Shakespeare wants to be disturbed.”

  “Oh, I shan’t disturb him. I love the fellow.”

  This was such an odd thing to say, out of the blue, in the near dark, that I couldn’t judge Davenant’s tone. Was he sneering or did he mean it?

  “You were there this afternoon, weren’t you?” he said. “You were next door in the Golden Cross?”

  “I’m a member of the Chamberlain’s,” I said. “I was playing in Romeo and Juliet.”

  “So was Master Shakespeare.”

  “Yes, he played the friar.”

  “The dead friar?”

  “That was another player. Or not a player exactly but Doctor Fern. When he could not be found during the interval Shakespeare took over his part.”

  “So Master Shakespeare was around at that time?”

  “Why yes,” I said, not knowing where all this was leading, and on my guard for a trap.

  “You confirm that he was there?”

  “Is this a court of law?” I said.

  “Not yet,” said Davenant.

  “You know that Shakespeare is one of our shareholders. He keeps an eye on us, even when he is not playing.”

  “Playing, hmm,” said the landlord.

  “If you’ll excuse me, Master Davenant, I’ll be on my way to my lodging. I’m tired and this hasn’t been the best of days.”

  “Of course, Master . . .?”

  We’d already been introduced on my first night in the town when WS and I sat drinking at a table not more than a few yards from the foot of these stairs. I didn’t think I’d remind Davenant of this but, since I had no choice, I gave him my name once more. He stood aside to let me pass, then suddenly came up so close that we were almost touching, chest to chest.

  “I am an important man in this town, Master Revill. I am a vintner and a broker. My word carries weight.”

  “I do not doubt it, sir,” I said and slipped past him, across the main room of the Tavern and so out into the street. It was a cold, gloomy night, shadowed by the events of the day. I went the few yards up Cornmarket, through the yard of the Golden Cross (where the stage stood, looking bereft without the benefit of action), past the passage where Fern’s body had been discovered, and so up the stairs into my crowded quarters.

  I took off my shoes and moved restlessly about the room in my stockinged feet, unable to lie down straightaway. There were too many troubling speculations and questions.

  Most of my fellows were in bed and asleep, judging by their little noises – a long, difficult day for them too. There was a window at the far end, looking out on the maze of narrow lanes and alleys which clustered at the back of the Golden Cross. The houses on either side overhung the alleys, leaning towards each other so that their upper storeys were almost touching. There was a candle glimmering in one of the chambers set at an angle to ours, and by its light I thought I saw those monkish figures once more. Two cowled heads and snouts shifting in the shadows. The bird-like monks. The monk-like birds. I went cold, and blinked and rubbed my eyes and looked again, but by then everything had disappeared, even the candle’s glimmer.

  I crept into bed, convincing myself that I was tired and that my eyes were playing tricks, trying to reason my fear away.

  The day had provided plenty of other material for reason and reflection. Once in my shared bed, with Laurence Savage slumbering beside me, I chewed over the last twelve hours like a cow chews her cud, although without the cow’s contentment. It wasn’t only the sudden death of Hugh Fern and any suspicions which attached to that. It was also my recent encounters with WS and then with Jack Davenant.

  My intention to pick up bits and pieces about Shakespeare’s life had misfired early on. It had all seemed so easy. I should have remembered that the truth is as slippery as an eel. Already I had heard contradictory stories about poaching, with WS apparently confessing to a boyhood escapade and then Hugh Fern denying that he at least had anything to do with it.

  And the same doubt hung around what you might call a different species of poaching, WS’s connection with Jane Davenant. Was it what it appeared? A hurried appearance by the shirt-clad playwright during the interval of the play, accompanied by the landlord’s wife. Had they been engaged in another kind of play, with a cast of two only? Was William Shakespeare playing the afternoon Romeo, rather than Dick Burbage, with Jane Davenant as a Juliet well beyond her first youthful flush? There was also to be considered the apparently loose reputation of Mistress Davenant in Oxford, that gossip about cuckoldry, that ostler-talk about gypsies and playing at fast-and-loose. There was the strange manner of the landlord, questioning whether WS was alone in his room. But hadn’t he also said of Shakespeare, “I love the fellow.”

  Shakespeare himself had warned me against jumping to conclusions. Did he say this because there were conclusions – obvious ones – to be jumped to, and because he wanted to forestall my suspicions? Was this a ploy? Similarly with his talk of not believing everything one heard or saw. Don’t even trust your senses.

  And did that self-distrust apply to the death of Hugh Fern? If you believed the evidence of your eyes it looked like suicide. (But a kind of intuition told me that it was not.)

  Why was Jack Davenant so concerned to establish Shakespeare’s whereabouts in the interval of the play? Was he trying to link his wife and WS together? Or was he insinuating that WS was somehow involved in the death of Hugh Fern? Suppose that you had a rival in . . . love, for want of a better term . . . and that you were a prominent local citizen, say a vintner and a broker, whose word carried weight . . . would you have scruples about linking that rival to a suspicious death, if it meant that he might be investigated and, at the least, put to some inconvenience, possibly worse than inconvenience?

  As I was falling asleep, I recalled how WS had helped me in the past when I was in difficulties. I wondered whether he was still sitting up next door in his chamber in the Tavern, alone and pondering on the death of a friend, gazing into the relics of the fire and sipping at the dregs in his glass.

  At once I resolved to come to WS’s aid. I would look into Doctor Fern’s demise and arrive at the truth. Then, having got this settled in my mind, I must have dropped off to sleep.

  Like most late-night resolutions, this one looked distinctly threadbare, even stupid, by the light of morning. How could I have had the presumption to believe I could “help” William Shakespeare? How, in any case, was I supposed to come by the truth about Fern’s death? Where to start?

  Happening to fall into company with Will Sadler – Oxford is a small place, stand in Carfax and the world will pass you by sooner or later – I heard the student’s account of how he and Doctor Bodkin had been intercepted on their way out of the Golden Cross, and how the physician had returned to examine Fern’s body. But there was nothing out of place in his story. I grew inclined to think that there was nothing to discover.

  We continued to perform in the Golden Cross yard. Another day, another play. As Dick Burbage had predicted, our audiences actually went up after Hugh Fern’s death. But, as WS had also predicted, the players’ stay here was almost certainly drawing to a close. The number of plague deaths increased quite sharply, and the fatalities were dotted about the city in a way that suggested that King Pest was operating to his usual pattern – that is, at random.

  WS and Dick Burbage paid their visit to Mrs Fern. I don’t know what passed between the widow and the shareholders but the upshot as far as the Chamberlain’s were concerned was that our private performance of Romeo and Juliet was scheduled to go ahead in the Headington house on its due date. The Sadler and Constant families were to attend, as much in tribute to the dead Doctor as anything else.

  I hadn’t completely forgotten the story which Susan Constant had told me, of her belief that her cou
sin was being poisoned and that there was some malevolent presence haunting her house, leaving clay figures by the door, and so on. But I was inclined to put it down to an over-active imagination. (Yes, I can see the irony here, considering my own excited speculations about Hugh Fern.) If Sarah Constant was genuinely ill, then couldn’t that be attributed to her apprehensions about marriage and to her high-strung nature? I remembered her shivering account of hearing the martyrs’ cries, of seeing the flames which consumed them in Broad Street, even though this had occurred many years before she was born.

  Besides, all of this business of poisoning and mysterious figures was overshadowed by the shock of Fern’s death. What Susan had told me was only a story, but Fern’s death was real, tragically so.

  It was Abel Glaze who made a connection between the two strands.

  I told him everything, you see. Well, not quite everything. I did not mention my own night encounter with the hooded trio or that recent glimpse from the dormitory window. But I described Susan Constant’s fears for her cousin’s welfare. She had not bound me to secrecy, although perhaps she should have done. I also went through my reasoning over the death of Fern. It was an alternative to doing nothing at all. The burden of unravelling mysteries lay heavy on me. I wanted to lighten the load.

  I knew that Abel looked on me in the light of a mentor – at least I flattered myself that he did – if only because my own service in the Chamberlain’s was rather longer than his. In a manner of speaking I had brought him into the Company. Compared to him I was an expert on plays and playing, just as he was an adept in the tricks of the road. I might have turned to Jack Wilson or Laurence Savage but I feared that they’d laugh at my speculations.

  Abel and I talked while we were waiting off-stage during a performance. We were doing The World’s Diseas’d, Richard Milford’s violent drama of sudden death and cold revenge. It was odd to be talking about a real-life death so close to where it had actually occurred and to be playing about with stage-death at the same time. Particularly so since I was taking the part of Vindice, and occasionally had to break away from our dialogue and make an entrance to do a spot of brooding or avenging. Luckily, I didn’t have to throw myself about the platform since my ankle was still delicate. You forget these petty infirmities, however, when you’re in front of the crowd. Abel’s parts in the drama were smaller but he too had to keep an ear open for his cues. This gave our conversation a rather piecemeal, fractured quality.