‘I hope it won’t,’ he said. I did not believe him. He wished, as all of us do, to discover the worst. He continued, ‘As I said, I respect my uncle and I love my mother. I wish them well in their new life. Though they were married so soon after my father’s death. .’
Having made the arrangements for my reception into his mother’s house and after a few more inconsequential exchanges, William Eliot left me sitting in the Goat amp; Monkey, bemused at this latest shift in my fortune. I couldn’t deny that his offer of lodging was opportune. It would save me the cost of my rent, a not insignificant part of a jobbing player’s insignificant wages. Putting up in one of the grand houses on the north bank would be a dozen times more comfortable than anything I could afford across the water here in Southwark. Most of all, it would be an introduction to people of wealth and influence — and if one is a poor and youngish player making one’s way in the capital then that is something not to be sniffed at.
And I was curious. The story that William Eliot had recounted was so queerly parallel to events in our author’s latest play that, sceptical as I was, I could not help being affected by what he said. My own argument, supported by dates and times as well as by common sense, was that there could be no link between what had happened in a private garden on the other side of the river Thames and the imagined events in an orchard in Elsinore in the Kingdom of Denmark. If dramatic logic or the parallel were followed, then Sir Thomas Eliot would turn out to be a murderer, the Lady Alice an adulteress possibly complicit in the death of her husband, and — before the action was concluded — her son William would himself have carried out a fair few killings.
Absurd. .
My thoughts were interrupted by a series of repeated screams a few feet from my face.
‘Jesus, Nat, you startled me.’
It was the man who made his living by mimicking animals for a penny in taverns or the street.
‘What are you? I don’t recognise that.’
He was a small grubby man and he now held out an equally small grubby hand. I handed over a penny.
‘Laughing hyena.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘Its cries are like laughter, sir. Hear me now.’
Encouraged by the penny, he gave several more screeches in which, I suppose, there might just have been detected a species of maniacal, mirthless amusement.
And, looking back, that was a justified commentary on the predicament into which I was about to sink myself.
ACT II
So a new man has entered the house. He suspects that something is wrong, without being able to put his finger on it. Or he has been told that something is wrong. But he knows nothing, and certainly nothing about me. What do I know about Master Nicholas Revill? He is tall and hollow-cheeked with coal-black hair. He is young and eager, though he tries to disguise this with a display of worldliness. He is a player. Well, I am a player too. But I give nothing away by saying that. So are all men — and women too; we’re all players — on or off the stage. Professional players, I have observed, are usually rather obtuse. For all their vaunts about understanding human nature, most of them don’t see further than their noses. They are so concerned with the self that the independent existence of others is a strange concept to them. I know too that Master Revill is the son of a parson in the west; I believe that both his parents perished in the plague. He then came to seek his fortune in London, having contracted from somewhere the desire to make an exhibition of himself on the stage. This desire is as virulent — and almost as fatal — a contagion as the plague. A period with the Admiral’s Men and now with the Chamberlain’s Company. But still he plays the small parts. Nothing will come of him.
Every so often, on the nights when I am unable to sleep, I turn round and round the memory of how I swung down from the pear tree in the walled garden, and approached the sleeping form of my enemy. Sometimes I see this as I saw it then, from inside my own case of eyes. Sometimes I see it as if outside myself, as another would have seen it. A crouched, stealthy figure dropping from the tree, fatal fruit. Then, loping across the tussocked grass, an animal closing on its undefended prey. Am I condemned for ever to relive the moment when I stood above his still breathing body, the moment when I unsealed the phial and trickled its contents into his ear? The brief convulsions. The early silence. The wait before my ‘audience’ gathered, the little group come to appreciate, to be horrified, to be struck dumb, by the spectacle that I alone had created. How I wanted to hasten their arrival, by shouting out or screaming, doing something foolish which would have brought them running to the garden.
But I waited. And was rewarded. The discovery of the body in the evening. The uproar and grief.
And what was this all for? For nothing if I am discovered — not likely, I tell myself on those sleepless nights, not likely that the crime will be discovered. Master Revill, he will find nothing. The only danger I face is from myself, from betraying myself. Guilt spills itself in fearing to be spilt, as someone says. I expected to discover that I had lost my clear conscience, but I have discovered instead something more valuable: conscience is a cowardly bitch and will respond to a good whipping. Oh, she will keep her kennel.
The wind brushed across the water, bringing a scatter of yellowing leaves from the trees on the bank. I huddled lower into my cape. The boatman pushed off from the shore and plied steadily into the current and the early morning traffic. Downstream, the silhouette of the buildings on London Bridge made an unbroken line with the houses on either bank, so that we seemed enclosed on a lake and not afloat on a mighty conduit to the sea. Other ferries scudded back and forth, taking citizens to or from their pleasure on the south bank or their business on the north. Eel boats and herring busses slithered among the swarm of smaller vessels, and we rocked and bobbed when we crossed their trails. It was too late in the year, as well as too early in the day, for any pleasure boat. Once, just after I’d arrived in London and near this very spot (and the very day after I had glimpsed our glorious Queen in procession in the street), I’d seen the royal barge, oars agleam, mastering the tide. Mistressing the tide, I should say, mindful of its occupant. This double vision of our Gloriana on successive days — though, to be truthful, I had not actually seen her in the barge — gave me the curious idea that I was destined to glimpse her every day that both of us were in London. Yet I have not seen her since.
Whenever I crossed the river, I thought of that extraordinary feat of the Burbage brothers and the other Chamberlain’s shareholders when they transported the Theatre playhouse from Finsbury, north of the river. It was one of those stories to which we theatre folk are particularly receptive, because it presented us in a fashion that was both heroic and practical. It is not by chance that the figure who holds up the globe on top of our (yes, now I may say our!) playhouse is the mighty Hercules. For this shifting of an entire edifice was a truly Herculean labour. The epic move was the talk of the town for at least a fortnight. The lease on the Finsbury Theatre had run out. There was a disagreement with the landlord. The Chamberlain’s Company had a right to the structure, perhaps, but not to the ground it sat on. The oaken main timbers, the beams and the staves and uprights, were gently prised one from another. Pegs were eased from joints which had hardened over time, numbers were chalked across the dismantled frame, relays of carts organised to take the lumber down Bishopsgate and into Thames Street beside the river. And then in the middle of the winter of ’98, when the Thames had frozen solid, there began the great enterprise of ferrying this load of living wood across to the far side.