I started shaking and could not stop.
‘And I killed one last evening at supper-time and hung him up in place of an alligator. Master Revill knows who I mean.’
My teeth began to chatter. .
‘And another I killed one night by these very waters. He had a dirty shirt and would not keep it clean.’
. . and chatter.
Around us circled the watchful buildings of London, the palaces and the stews, the theatres and temples.
‘For the first I was up a tree. I entered through the husband’s door and waited up a tree. I watched until he was asleep in his hammock. Then I poured it all down his ear. Guaiacum paste and mercury. Because his wife said she wanted me. She gave me the key to her husband’s door. I had the key from her but she did not open up to me. She preferred the brother. She tricked me.’
‘This is all a play, Robert,’ said Master WS, gently.
‘No play but still your work,’ said Mink. ‘The other one now, Francis, he got it on his sleeve so that was the end of him.’
‘This is my play which you have been playing in. You are sick in your mind.’
‘No play, I tell you,’ said Robert Mink, ‘although there are almost as many dead as at the end of one of your pieces.’ He laughed. ‘My dead will not rise up for applause and a little dance. Clap and see.’
He gazed about as though he expected an invisible audience to respond. Then, as if he was urgently seeking to convince us, he said: ‘You are looking for Master Ransom? You see, I have names. I can give you chapter and verse.’
‘Who is he?’ said WS.
‘Your young player there knows who I mean.’
‘He is a c-c-c-confederate of that gentleman’s,’ I said. ‘He tried to d-d-d-dispose of me last night.’
‘He will bother you no more,’ said Mink. ‘It was he I had for breakfast.’
‘You are sick, Robert,’ said WS. ‘You don’t know your own words.’
‘I am as sane as you are. I am in earnest.’
The boats bobbed about. In the distance I could see the tall houses on the Bridge.
‘If you killed him as you say, where is the body, then?’
‘In heaven. Send thither to see. If your messenger find him not there, seek him in the other place yourself.’
‘Ah,’ said WS, ruefully. ‘You are in earnest.’
‘But if you find him not within this month you shall nose him as you go up the stairs to my lodgings in Swan Street. I, for one, do not intend to return there.’
‘No, you are on the way to Tyburn, Robert,’ said WS. ‘You shall go to heaven in a string if this is true.’
The water had grown calmer and the sun was out but I could not stop my shaking.
‘All of this, it was your handiwork too, playwright,’ said Master Mink.
‘How so?’
‘I mean that I signed your name to it up a tree and so made it yours, and I gave your name when I was asked who I was by the doorman. And, in doing so, I became you. So it was your handiwork.’
I thought of the initials on the pear-tree bark; of what Thomas Bullock the gate-keeper had said.
Master WS looked shaken. A cloud passed over his normally placid features.
‘Why?’
‘Do you remember what you were called by Robert Greene when you were first up in London and writing plays and playing in plays?’ said Mink to WS.
‘Yes.’
‘ “An upstart crow”, was it not?’
‘Oh yes, and Shake-scene and so on,’ said WS, in a way that suggested that he had never quite put such early insults behind him. These matters were still talked of in the theatre fraternity.
‘Did you hate those who laughed at you?’
‘I do not find it easy to hate,’ said WS mournfully. ‘Though I do know that Robert Greene died destitute in a shoe-maker’s house near Dow-gate. His landlord had to pay for his winding-sheet.’
‘That will not be your case, I think,’ said Mink. ‘You will not die in poverty, unregarded.’
‘No,’ said Master WS. ‘I do not think so.’
‘I am a poet too,’ said Mink. ‘Young Master Revill there, shaking in the stern beside you, he has heard some of my verses.’
‘Y-y-y-yes.’ For some reason, my eyes began to water, not for Mink but for myself.
‘I recited to him my Lover’s Lament. That was true verse, it was no feigning.’
Slowly now, slowly, our boats circled each other, like two watchful dogs who know that, sooner or later, they must fight.
‘What did you think, Nick? Tell me what you thought of my verses.’
‘They — they — were — b-b-b-b- ’
‘Bad?’ said Mink. He spoke in simple curiosity.
‘B-b-beautiful,’ I finally forced out the lie between my gnashing teeth.
‘You are lying, Revill. No lies now.’
‘T-t-t-true though.’
‘A pity then,’ said Mink. ‘For I had invited you to my lodgings to hear my Lover’s Triumph. Oh, and to poison you afterwards.’
Tears flowed down my face.
‘There is no escape for you either, William,’ continued Mink. ‘For I wrote a tragedy once. It was called The Tragical History of Sulla, Emperor of all the Romans.’
‘I saw it,’ said WS. ‘At the Curtain.’
‘The Red Bull.’
‘The Red Bull, then. But it was not by you, it was by — let me see — I have it, Robert Otter. Though, come to think of it, I have never heard of that author before or since. Master Otter.’ He paused, then said with a note of weariness, ‘Oh, I see. Otter — Mink.’
‘Never heard of again, that is right. Otter is well buried or drowned.’
‘But I did see your play, your Sulla.’
‘You were fortunate because it received only one performance.’
‘Many good plays go unappreciated and receive a single performance.’
‘Oh, my tragedy was appreciated — but not as a tragedy. It was greeted with howls of derision, as you will surely remember if you were there. There were tears of laughter, screams of glee. People pissed thermselves laughing. It should have been called The Comical History of Sulla, Roman Fool. .’
‘The people are not always good judges. Why, in a future age, they may play your Sulla-’
‘There will never be another performance because the people were right, it was no good. It was no tragedy. Come now, playwright. Give me your honest opinion of my play, if you really attended that performance.’
There was a pause. The sunlight glanced off the water. I waited, with indrawn breath.
‘It was no tragedy,’ said WS. ‘You are right, and the audience at that performance was right to respond as they did. I didn’t piss myself — but I laughed long and loud.’
‘You see,’ said Robert Mink, almost triumphantly. ‘I cannot write verses. I cannot write a tragedy neither. But I can create one. I can do in real life what you only do on paper. So who is the better?’
Then Mink did an extraordinary thing, or a thing even more extraordinary than what he had already done. He bent down and retrieved from the bottom of the boat a crown. It took me a moment to recognise it as the prop which he had been wearing in the part of the Player King. Because he was no true king, but merely a player playing a king in the play-within-the-the-play, the crown did not match Claudius’s for heaviness and splendour. Instead it was a piece of trumpery, lightweight, crudely gold-painted. It was meant to signify to the audience ‘king’, simply and without more ado. He must have tucked it away somewhere in his costume, as he hurried from the theatre and then out into the alleyways down to the river.
‘Who wears the crown?’ he said, grinning. ‘Tell me, who wears the crown?’
‘You do,’ said WS. ‘It is yours.’
‘Sir! Sir!’
All this time Adam Gibbons had been quietly dipping and splashing his oars to keep the two boats on a parallel circular course. I don’t know whether he was listening to the conversation between the two players or — if he was — what he made of it, but now a more pressing consideration had come up. I’d been so engrossed in what I was hearing and in my own shivering, quivering state that I’d been only a quarter aware of our surroundings.