Mask of Night

by Philip Gooden

  Had they thought to trap me in the house, to take me by surprise and then to deal with me?

  Only one of the hooded figures had spoken. As well as the comment about seeing nothing, he had made that riddling reference to “naughty man’s cherries”.

  There was something half familiar about the voice, muffled though it had been by the hood.

  My thinking being more or less done for the time being, I left the meadows by the river and made my way back towards Carfax and the Golden Cross. It crossed my mind that I should report my discovery of Angelica Root to the authorities, but now there was no body to be produced, and the only evidence of any wrongdoing, a crumpled note which might or might not be in the dead woman’s handwriting, was lost. Anyway, if poor old Root really had perished of the plague then the last thing the coroner or magistrate would wish for was an investigation into her death. What would be the point? What was one death among so many?

  I encountered that familiar ostler Kit Kite in the deserted yard of the Golden Cross. He was idling his time. I stopped to idle it with him.

  “Good day, Nicholas,” he said.

  “Master Kite.”

  “Out and about early?”

  “I have been exploring the town.”

  “I hear you are leaving soon.”

  “Only me?”

  “Ha, I mean your Company is leaving, Nicholas.”

  “Then I’m sure you are better informed than any of my Company – apart from the seniors. There are no secrets in an inn.”

  “I keep my ear to the ground.”

  The little ostler tapped himself on his sandy head, and giggled.

  “An odd expression, that,” I said. “I mean, no one really keeps his ear to the ground.”

  “I dare say they don’t, but it is a figure, you know,” said this learned handler of horses.

  “A figure of speech, just so,” I said.

  “Such things don’t deserve to be looked into so closely.”

  But I observed that Kit Kite was looking at me closely. His eyelashes were sandy too.

  “I heard another expression recently in this town,” I said. “I had not heard it before, and I wondered whether it was particular to this place.”

  “What might that be?”

  “Something about . . . let me see . . . about dead man’s cherries, I think.”

  “Where did you hear it?”

  I bypassed the question, saying instead, “It would be more accurate to say that I overheard it.”

  Kit Kite screwed up his eyes and scratched his head in a quite convincing display of ignorance.

  “It means nothing to me either. Perhaps you misheard, Nicholas.”

  “Perhaps so.”

  I made to walk on, leaving the ostler to his feigned uncertainty. After a couple of paces, I snapped my fingers and turned about.

  “I have it! It was not a dead man but a naughty man. Naughty man’s cherries, that was it.”

  “For sure you misheard, Master Revill,” said Kit Kite.

  “I don’t believe so. Like you, I keep my ear to the ground.”

  Then I entered the inn before he could say anything else by way of denial or incomprehension. But I did not go upstairs to my quarters. I stayed just inside the entrance and watched the reaction of Master Kite in the gap between the door and the jamb.

  The ostler remained standing in the middle of the yard. There was no look of bafflement on Kite’s face now. I could see his expression clearly since he was gazing in the direction I’d gone in. His face registered something more decided, something tougher.

  I jumped as a hand grasped my shoulder.

  “Spying?”

  “Ah, er, Master Davenant.”

  The landlord came up close to me. His face was as long as a beagle’s. I wondered what he was doing in the Golden Cross, in Owen Meredith’s establishment.

  “Revill the player, isn’t it?”

  He smelled as though he’d been sampling some of his own produce or some of the rival landlord’s. Wafts of warm, liquorish air occupied the space between us.

  “Do you know anything about that man out there?” I said. “The ostler.”

  “Ostler? What ostler?”

  “Kit Kite.”

  “Hardly know the man.”

  Nevertheless Jack Davenant poked his head round the door-frame.

  “What are you talking about, Revill? There’s no one there.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You are leaving,” said Davenant, echoing the words of the ostler he hadn’t seen. His tone hung somewhere between command and question. I assumed he was referring to the whole Company rather than to one middling member of it.

  “Leaving, yes. There is no more for us to do here,” I said.

  “No more playing,” said Davenant. “No more mischief.”

  He wandered off into the yard. I saw him give a kick to one of the supports of the platform where we’d so recently performed Romeo and Juliet and the other pieces. I wondered what he’d been up to in the Golden Cross.

  But it wasn’t the landlord of the Tavern whose behaviour was puzzling me at the moment. It was the reaction of Master Kite, the knowing ostler. For sure, the expression “dead man’s cherries”, deliberately misquoted at first, had put him on his guard. Most people, if asked to explain a word or phrase, will repeat it with a frown. Kite, though, had simply enquired where I’d heard it.

  I knew exactly where I’d heard it. Lying under the bed in Angelica Root’s chamber.

  And I was pretty certain whose mouth I’d heard it from: Kite’s mouth.

  Despite the muffling effect of the hood, it was his voice, and his giggle following after it.

  The chamber which I shared with Laurence Savage and Abel Glaze and others was bustling. Jack Wilson looked particularly perky. I recalled the wool merchant’s wife who had admired his way with a foil. Jack looked as though he hadn’t slept a wink and had enjoyed every second of it. Which was more than you could say for my last couple of hours.

  I soon learned that we were to leave Oxford the next day.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Where you will,” said Jack. “We are released. Personally I shall stay here in town for a little. I have been offered lodging for the time being.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “It’s very simple,” said Jack. “There’s this woman in Grove Street, you see. She is a wool merchant’s wife, and I must strike while the iron is hot. I fear that her husband will soon summon her to Peterborough when he finds out what’s happening here. When he finds out about the plague, I mean, rather than that she is consorting with a member of the Chamberlain’s.”

  “Not that,” I said, faintly impatient with Jack’s complacent elaboration. “What I don’t understand is why all of us are being released.”

  “That’s because you missed a meeting which the shareholders convened this morning. You weren’t there, Nick.”

  “I was – busy.”

  “Well, Dick Burbage announced that we are to assemble in London again at the end of Lent.”

  “And then we shall take stock,” said Abel Glaze.

  I must have looked a bit baffled still because Abel added, “Burbage tells us that the Queen has only days left . . . they say that she cannot be persuaded to go to bed but sits up without speaking. To think that she should die!”

  “And the plague rages on in London too,” said Jack. Try as he might, he was unable to keep a touch of cheerfulness out of his voice.

  Of course, I realized that Burbage and many more of the married men would want to get back to London, now it was clear that things weren’t going to improve up there. Some would probably want to arrange for their wives and children to quit the city altogether.

  But there was more to our return than a natural concern for families. If Queen Elizabeth was really on the point of death, then it might well seem to the Chamberlain’s shareholders that the appropriate place for them was in her capi
tal city. There was common sense here as well, for who knew what turn affairs would take after her death? Safer to be prepared for the future at our base in Southwark rather than elsewhere, several days’ journey away.

  “What are you going to do, Nick?”

  “Unfortunately I haven’t found your kind of accommodation yet, Jack,” I said.

  “Oh, and what kind is that?”

  “The close-clinging-female kind. In Grove Street.”

  “You may say so,” said Jack, liking to talk on this topic. “She does cling close, this merchant’s wife. Maria. Ma-ri-a. A lovely name. She is younger than her husband.”

  I moved away but Jack kept babbling.

  “What?”

  Jack had said something but I wasn’t listening.

  “I tell you gentlemen, this plaguey period is a great increaser of fear and desire – for both sexes.”

  “Well, even without your diversions I may stay a day or two longer as well,” I said. “I don’t suppose Owen Meredith’s rooms are going to be in great demand.”

  I was looking out of the window at the end of our dormitory room. As I’ve already described, there was a jumble of old houses and alleyways to the rear of the Golden Cross. What had distracted me was the sight of Kit Kite entering one of the houses down there. There was no mistaking that little sandy-haired figure. Naturally I linked his appearance with the night-time glimpse of the cowled figures at a nearby window.

  This chimed with my suspicion that he was one of the pair who had removed Mistress Root’s body. What I must decide now was what to do next. Or rather, whether to do something – or nothing. While the rest of my fellows continued their preparations for departure I pursued my thoughts.

  I’d no doubt that I had stumbled on some ingenious and murderous business, even if it was one whose purposes and methods were still obscure to me. Just about everything which I’d seen and heard since arriving in this town – Susan Constant’s story (later withdrawn) of the poisoning of her cousin, the mysterious deaths of Hugh Fern and of Angelica Root, the band of hooded figures, the convenient appearance of the plague cross on the house in Cats Street – seemed to be connected. But what were the threads that tied it all together?

  There was no real story to take to the authorities. I had no proof – the vanished note would have been useful here – nothing except the testimony of my own eyes. I couldn’t even call on Susan Constant, for she had denied her earlier suspicions and sworn me to silence. (And that was a minor mystery too.) It crossed my mind to approach Ralph Bodkin. He was a physician and a local alderman, a man of influence. I had seen for myself his bullish courage while he disposed of the ranting individual who was stirring up the crowd in Carfax. But there was a no-nonsense, almost intimidating aspect to the man. I recalled the way in which he’d dismissed as superstition the connection between plays and the plague. If Bodkin asked me for evidence, or even for a clear account of what was going on, I couldn’t have obliged him.

  No, if anything was to be done then it rested on the shoulders of one N. Revill.

  Straightaway, before caution or second thoughts could intervene, I set out from the Golden Cross. After several false turns and blind alleys I found the area of the town which lay behind the inn. The houses here were old, mean and narrow. Only a little light penetrated between the overhang of the upper storeys. The roadways, more like ditches, were littered with household waste and the stench was stronger than it would have been in open places. I looked back and upwards to see the rear windows of our inn.

  I identified the door which Kit Kite had gone through and knocked on it, aware that this was the second time in a single morning that I’d arrived at an unknown dwelling. Please God, there would be no bodies in here –

  “What you want?”

  A small, hard-faced woman clung about with children. Two – no, three – were holding on to her legs like miniature gaolers taking her into custody while a baby’s wailing filled the background.

  “I’m looking for lodging.”

  “There’s none here. This is a house of mourning.”

  The comment was more like a threat than an appeal for commiseration.

  “I’m a player.”

  “I don’t care if you’re the angel Gabriel.”

  She made to close the door.

  “Wait!”

  The door was half closed.

  “I was recommended this place by Christopher Kite. Maybe you – ”

  Then she shut the door full in my face, although not before giving me a curious look or so I thought.

  Not much revealed by her. But useful in one way. In the gloomy little lobby, behind the woman and her brood, I’d noticed a thin white cane propped against the wall.

  “There’s no proof of any of these things, Nick.”

  “You believe me though?”

  I had got as far as telling Abel Glaze of my discovery of the old nurse and of the departure of the hooded figures with her corpse. I reported some of the conclusions I’d arrived at down by the river.

  “Of course I believe what you say, though many might not,” said Abel. “Even so, to withhold it from your friend until now.”

  “I’m sorry, Abel.”

  I was sorry but what I needed more was to pacify him since I required his assistance. I had changed my mind about shouldering the burden of this mystery by myself. As when we’d discussed the death of Hugh Fern, I wanted to lighten the load. But Abel, while not exactly sceptical, seemed to be making a show of his willingness to believe me, and wanting credit for it. Perhaps he was right to do so.

  “It is a pity that you lost the letter from Mistress Root,” he said now.

  “I’ve told you what she said. If it was from her.”

  “But last night you claimed it was a love-letter.”

  “I think you were the one who said that first, imagining it was from one of the Constant cousins or something. You’re always ready to believe in a love-letter.”

  “But you didn’t deny it altogether.”

  “Because that’s what the note instructed me to do: say nothing beforehand.”

  “Even so . . . and what do you mean, I’m always ready to believe in a love-letter?”

  “Oh, other men’s cherries,” I said. “Which reminds me . . . ”

  So I told Abel of the queer remark which I’d heard from my hiding-place under Mistress Root’s bed, and of the little test to which I’d subjected Kit Kite. For sure, the ostler was familiar with the phrase. So was Abel Glaze, as it happened. All at once he grew excited.

  “Naughty man’s cherries, Nick. I know what they are.”

  His irritation that I had not revealed the full story earlier was swept away by his eagerness to tell me something.

  “It is a name for a poison. For the deadly nightshade. And there are other names for it as well.”

  “Nightshade will do to be going on with,” I said.

  Nightshade. It was as if someone had opened a window in my head.

  Nightshade. Of course. It was a common plant, you hardly had to go far looking for it. So they called it “naughty man’s cherries”. I thought of the purple berries, carrying destruction in their dark hearts but like enough to cherries for the term to be used mockingly by those possessed of no good intentions. The dark heart of nature.

  A clump or two of it grew not far from the Somerset parsonage where I was brought up. I knew about it before I could speak, almost. How is it that we learn to avoid these fatal fruits when we are small? Instinct? Had my mother warned me about it? When we are children we are guarded by agents, they say, seen and unseen. But who is there to preserve us when we are grown men and women, and someone chooses to slip a mortal dose into our meat or drink? I thought of Mistress Root stretched out on the marital bed, her eyes like popping currants, her shoes still on her dead feet. Truly it is man, not nature, that has a dark heart.

  “What?” I said.

  “I said,” said Abel, “so you think that the old woman was poisoned?”


  “Yes, and then that it was made to look like the plague.”

  “But why?”

  “That is what we have to find out.”

  “We?”

  Yes, we.

  Us.

  Nicholas Revill and Abel Glaze, middle-ranking players of the Chamberlain’s Company, set down by chance in the middle of Oxford and thrown into the heart of a mystery which involved plague and poison. After a little resistance Abel had agreed to help, or at least to keep me company.

  It was the middle of the evening. Abel and I were standing in an alley almost opposite the “house of mourning” where the hard-faced woman had answered the door to me earlier that day. We’d been loitering here for about half an hour, our eyes by now accustomed to the dark. Fortunately there was a good deal of coming and going at another house further up the street and this activity did something to mask our presence. It hadn’t taken long to realize that this busy dwelling was a brothel or stew, but one of a particularly dilapidated sort.

  The street was called Shoe Lane, I’d discovered, but any kind of respectable activity such as cobbling had long since quit the place, and now another kind of hammering and fitting was going on. The brothel had a little, low door so that those entering had to stoop as if they were making obeisance. By contrast with the stews of London – establishments such as the Cardinal’s Hat or the Windmill, and above all Holland’s Leaguer (where my friend Nell once plied her trade) – this place looked to be a sad, provincial affair. Its occupants were probably squinty-eyed country girls and dispossessed serving-women, or so I imagined. I’d no intention of finding out.

  The customers, however, appeared more respectable from the occasional glimpse we had as they hurried, singly or in little groups, by the mouth of the alley. Some of them glanced in our direction then hurried on again without paying much attention. If they noticed us at all, two figures in the shadows, they presumably thought we were plucking up courage to visit the house ourselves. The more fearful might have imagined we were vagrants lying in wait to rob them (though if we were going to do that, we’d only do it while they were on the way in, not when they were leaving with lighter purses).

  Again, it was fortunate for Abel and me that there’d been no sign of any beadle or watchman while we were hanging about. They’d doubtless been bribed to keep away from this quarter of the town, maybe with the offer of free samples. That’s how it works in the borough of Southwark anyway. Abel was slightly surprised that the tightening grip of the plague in the town hadn’t interrupted the flow of business at the brothel – he could be a bit green sometimes – but I whispered to him that the threat of King Pest was most likely to bring about an increase of trade not a diminution. Seize the day, make hay while the sun shines, & cetera, even if it’s a pretty mouldy kind of hay.