As I made my own way off stage I heard the scene taking its predestined course, with the prince mocking his one-time friends and exulting in the certainty of his uncle’s guilt.
I too had found a guilty man, but in a quite unexpected quarter. I thought of my stupidity in assuming that Master WS might be a villain, I thought of the way I had told Nell to fasten her gaze on Lady Alice. I wondered what to do next.
Now that I had discovered to my own satisfaction who had first forged this chain of killings I felt a strange responsibility for him. I saw Robert Mink exit not just the stage but the theatre itself and before I knew it I was outside in the street too. He set off, without a backward glance, down Brend’s Rents, the lane which runs past the towering white walls of the playhouse. He was still wearing the costume of the Player King, although without the crown. He ran the risk of a great fine if he was found out for this offence. But his hurry showed how he had already been found out, and in a rather greater matter than the taking of a costume.
The rain that had been hanging over our heads now started to fall in earnest. This was no fierce storm as on the last night, but a weeping in the heavens rather than their anger. Truly, Nature fits herself to us. Mink turned down one alley, then another, moving with steady purpose. Perhaps he was making for his lodgings. The alleys soon became slick with mud and churned-up waste as the rain drove along them. I had not taken off Adrian’s hat and mantle. The first kept my head dry but the second soon hung heavy and wet. Still Master Mink did not cast his eyes over his shoulder. He was heading for the river, I realised. There were several sets of steps nearby which served the theatres and bearpit and other places of pleasure.
He reached the open riverside and I heard him hail a waterman. I could, perhaps, have run and caught him up but instead I moved more slowly. The rain was coming down thickly now and the far bank was a blur. As he was about to embark, he turned for the first time and saw me, but without surprise, as if he had known all the time that he was being followed. He seemed to be waiting. Then his gaze shifted to my right.
I turned and saw Master WS approaching. He was dressed in the night-gown he wore for his third and last appearance as a Ghost.
‘Wait, Robert,’ he shouted. ‘Master Mink, stay!’
But, as if that were the signal he’d been waiting for, Mink leaped into the waiting boat and pushed off from the steps. Almost at the same time he bent down and seized the standing waterman by the legs and jerked him up and out of his own boat. The man fell into the river. Like most of his kind he was probably no swimmer and it was lucky therefore that he landed in a shallow spot and was able to flounder and wade his way to safety.
Master WS seized me by the arm and pulled me in the direction of the river. The wind was coming colder off the water, blowing gusts of rain and spray in our faces. Waves slopped at the piers of the steps. Anybody already out on the river now would be heading for shelter, if they were sensible, and I doubted that any boatman would take a fare in this weather.
Master WS called to a boat that had just pulled in. The fare from the other side of the river scuttled off, pressing payment into the boatman’s palm, and ran up the steps to get out of the wet.
‘No sir, not in this,’ called out the boatman.
‘He’s taken my boat, Adam. The bastard, the cock-sucking arse-wipe, the triple-turned turd.’
This was the ferryman who had been so rudely ejected from his own craft, now back on shore, and standing beside Master Shakespeare and me, as witnesses to the offence against him. He was dripping from his immersion in the river and the rain. He was a powerfully built man. His chest heaved as he bellowed out these choice descriptions of the boat-robber. If Mink hadn’t taken him by surprise, the boatman looked as though he wouldn’t have been bested.
‘Not Adam Gibbons, is it?’ said Master WS to the ferryman who’d just docked, half shouting to make himself heard above the roar of the wind.
‘Depends who’s asking.’
The boatman was bobbing on the choppy water and his head jumped up and down above the top of the steps.
‘Adam Gibbons, the master boatman?’
‘Took my boat, he fucking did,’ bellowed the voice of the mariner beside us.
Adam the boatman was more interested in the compliments flying through the air than he was in the grouses of his fellow-sailor.
‘If you say so, sir.’
‘We have met, boatman. You said that if I ever needed a boatman for something special, I should just bear old Adam in mind.’
Recognition dawned in the streaming, upturned face of old Adam as it emerged into view above the steps. The water ran down his beard like rain off thatched eaves. Recognition dawned in me, too. This was the boatman who’d nearly throttled me when I’d accused him of being a pleonast. That last occasion Master WS had saved my life. Now it looked as if he was trying to endanger it. I might have more than one life, like the cat, but I did not consider that I had more than one in a single day.
‘Beg pardon, sir, didn’t recognise you in that. . that. . them night-clothes.’
‘That boat is my lifeblood and my livelihood, Adam. Bleeding bastard cunt’s taken my liveli-fucking-hood,’ said the ferryman whose boat was now bobbing away. Who would not recognise the authentic, oath-ridden tone of the Thames boatman?
‘Well, now is the time for something special, Adam,’ said Master WS, ignoring the desperate bellows to one side of us. In the midst of the downpour and the noise of the wind, there was in WS’s voice a note of good humour, even amusement.
‘We require you to pursue the boat that belongs to your fellow. We need the man who stole it and your fellow, he needs his boat back. Will you help us?’
Up and down bobbed Adam’s head.
‘I don’t know, sir. . this weather. .’
The wind took his words and hurled them round about. Whitecaps were forming in the middle of the river. Spray spattered the platform where were stood. Inwardly, I withdrew my notion that Nature or Providence matched their weathers to our moods or needs. This looked like an unwise moment to launch onto the Thames. I could see Master Mink pushing, pushing, pushing his way up and down and through the waves towards the far bank — though he had not yet succeeded in rowing far.
‘I’ll make it worth your while, Adam.’
‘Well, sir. . that depends what my while’s worth, don’t it.’
The boatman’s head bobbed.
‘It will be a measure of your great skill.’
‘No flattery, sir.’ The head bobbed again.
‘I am sure you would like to help your poor robbed fellow here. .’
‘No charity neither.’ The head bobbed once more.
‘Or are you like one of these fresh-water mariners, whose ships were drowned in the plain of Salisbury?’
I was still trying to work out this jibe and wondering how Master WS got away with it whereas I was handed a throttling for trying to be clever, when old Adam’s face bobbed up for the last time.
‘Hop aboard.’
‘And me,’ said the other boatman. ‘Let me get my hands on the fucking cunt.’
‘No room, Ben,’ said Adam. ‘Only these two gentlemen here.’
He obviously hadn’t recognised me. I would willingly have surrendered my place on the rocking, pitching boat to Ben — or to the archangel Gabriel for that matter — but Master WS seemed determined that I should accompany him. He stepped in first and I followed in an awkward movement that was something between a step, a scrabble and a jump. To move from the relative solidity and safety of the stairs to this narrow, swaying craft, to know that only a thin skin of wood separated me from the green slopping waters of the Thames, was to experience, and for the second time in little more than twelve hours, a powerful fear for my life. As I got down almost on a level with the tide, the river seemed to expand and fill the horizon, and I entered a watery universe.