So. . the vantage point chosen by the murderer has to be close to the hammock, close enough for him to ensure that his victim is sound asleep. It has to offer a secure hiding-place. These were my conclusions. With Jacob still looking at me, I made a tour of inspection of the trees in the vicinity of the clearing. Two or three of them were large enough to conceal a man, but the configuration of their branches seemed to offer no place where one might stay, let alone sit, with any ease. Then, a little further back, I came across a large old pear tree. Above my head, among the leaves, I saw several potential conjunctions where thick branches sprang from the trunk and where my putative murderer might sit, legs astride. I called Jacob over.
‘Ever since I was a small boy, Jacob, I’ve enjoyed climbing trees. It’s a taste I haven’t grown out of.’
So saying I jumped up and caught hold of the lowest branch. Swaying backwards and forwards, I soon gained enough force to swing myself astride it. Once up there, I manoeuvered myself into a sitting position, with the trunk at my back. I couldn’t easily see the place between the apple trees where the hammock had been attached. In fact I couldn’t see it at all. I shifted to a neighbouring branch. Ah, that was better! From among the leaves and the clusters of ripe pears (Jargonelle, I think, or possibly Winter Nelis) I overlooked the tiny clearing guarded by the two trees.
‘Jacob, would you go and stand where your late master was found? In the place where the hammock was. There, yes.’
I pushed myself flat against the trunk. Of course, had I been a prospective murderer with my long-laid plans, I would have dressed for the part, worn something in goose-turd green, say, to give myself a tree-like hue. As it was, I was wearing a combination of russet and popinjay blue, and must have looked like some great flightless bird up in the pear tree.
‘Now, tell me, can you see me?’
It was hard to remember that Jacob could not ‘tell’ anyone anything. Instead he nodded and made a gurgling sound in response to my question. Yes, he could see me. Well, that wasn’t surprising: I could see him. And I was wearing the wrong costume. But, unlike the dumb Jacob, Sir William Eliot hadn’t been looking for anyone. When he entered the garden he believed that he was as alone as Adam. Why should he examine the trees to see whether they harboured strange creatures?
I gazed around. I was looking for a sign. Nothing. I gazed some more. What met my eyes was entirely natural, leaves, branches, a wasp burrowing its way into the holed surface of a pear almost before my face. You see how reluctant I was to abandon my idea that Sir William’s murderer had been perched up aloft even before his victim came on the scene. But there was no proof of any of this. For all I knew I was chasing shadows, the very thing of which I had accused young William Eliot in the Goat amp; Monkey. There was no murder and no murderer. I had constructed a scene of treachery and murder out of smoke. I was, as one might say, barking up the wrong tree. The man had died a natural death, of the sort everyone is entitled to.
I swung both legs to one side of the branch and made to drop to the ground. As I did so I noticed a wisp of material caught at the juncture of a twig and my branch. The gods were smiling on me after all. I was about to be justified. I gently tugged at the thread. Was this the clue? No, it was not, for a moment’s examination showed that this ‘evidence’ came from my own jerkin. I raised my eyes upwards in exasperation, and then I saw it. Just at head height and two feet away from where I was sitting someone had carved letters into the trunk. Two intertwined initials. My heart started to thump. I ran my fingers up and down the grooves of the letters. They were about an inch in height and appeared to have been cut into the bark hastily but firmly. Just as one would carve letters if one wanted to leave a message and was conscious that time might be limited. The carving wasn’t fresh; already the letters showed weathering. Although they might have been there longer, these characters had definitely been incised at least a few months ago. Perhaps during the spring and before a man’s death.
I launched myself into space and landed, in a crouch, on the turf below the pear tree.
‘Thank you, Jacob, I’ve seen enough for the time being.’
I left the garden in a brown study, Jacob devotedly on my tail.
The letters up the pear tree were a W and an S.
I wondered whether I was not already deeper into this matter than was good for my peace of mind or health of body.
I wondered whether what I had seen were the initials of our author, William Shakespeare.
And it was Master Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse whose walls I was now walking alongside. His and the other shareholder-players’. This morning was a rehearsal for A Somerset Tragedy by Master Henry Highcliff. I put to one side speculation about those troubling initials, and concentrated instead on my part in the play.
A Somerset Tragedy is a simple tale of domestic lust and violence. It involves a land-holder and his younger wife, as well as a painter, the painter’s sister, the man the painter’s sister wishes to marry, the man the painter has arranged for his sister to marry (two different men, this), three hired assassins, a local lord, sundry servants and clowns, a brace of magistrates, a priest, an executioner. You get the picture. I didn’t know the full plot, since I had received only the scroll bearing my own part, but I could guess what happened from a glance at the dramatis personae. Most likely it began with a rape: most certainly it ended with the rope. I was a yokel, with full-dress accent and boorish manners.
When I had glimpsed a little more of the play in rehearsal I would tell my Nell about it. She enjoyed hearing of my roles, or so I flattered myself. I had discovered that retailing the plot of a play while we were in bed together — as with Master WS’s Hamlet or the infinitely inferior Master Boscombe’s A City Pleasure — was an effective method of delaying my own journey’s end, and thus of ensuring her own satisfactory arrival at that terminus. It was as if a torrent of words could temporarily dam up another sort of effusion. Sometimes Nell had told me of what her paying customers cried out when they were busy about her person, although this was knowledge that I wanted her to share with me only in extremis. I considered that my dramatic summaries showed a more refined temper than their cataloguing of her body parts, and what they were doing or intended to do with them and to them. I wondered whether I should mention to our author my interesting use of his Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. I wondered what our author had been doing up a tree in the garden of Sir William Eliot. Unless it had been some other WS of course.
‘Master Revill!’
It was Robert Mink, the fat player who had given me the note for my Lady Alice. We had coincided at the entrance to the playhouse. Together we made our way to the tiring-house, where some of the other Chamberlain’s men were already gathering. Mink was clutching a much larger scroll than mine. He noticed that I was looking at the size of his part.
‘I play a painter in the county of Somerset,’ he said. ‘I wish to marry my sister off for reasons that are obscure to me. When she does not agree, because there is another man back in the tiring-house, I turn murderous. I paint a picture of my sister which is so beautiful that the onlooker cannot help touching it. The pigment that I use in depicting her flesh, her nearly bare breast, is naturally poisonous to the touch. This picture will then be shown to the man I wish to kill. He will reach out to stroke her exposed, painted flesh, and so he will die. Have you ever heard of anything so unlikely?’