Alms for Oblivion (13 page)

There was genuine sorrow among the Chamberlain’s at Peter Agate’s violent death. In a few short days they had got to know and like him. Both Dick Burbage and WS spoke warmly about
him to me, and I was doubly grateful, not only because they too had liked my friend but because they plainly did not believe that I was implicated in his death. (Word had quickly spread of how
I’d found the body and been questioned by the Middlesex coroner.)

I felt – curiously perhaps and unaccountably – that I had brought shame, even dishonour on my Company merely by incurring the suspicion of the authorities. It was not my connection
with death and violence. Ben Jonson, who was sometimes involved with the Globe both as poet and player, had killed a man only three or four years previously, and furthermore that dead man had been
a fellow player. But Jonson disposed of Gabriel Spencer honourably in a duel, even if he was hauled off to court for it and nearly paid with his neck. No one in the theatre world thought any the
less of him for what he’d done. In fact, I’d been told that Spencer was regarded as a troublemaker. There is a world of difference between facing a man front-to-front in the open field
and sneaking up on him in a lobby to stab him through the heart. While none of my fellows considered that I was capable of such a dishonourable and treacherous act, it pained me to know that there
were outsiders who would believe it, and that the Chamberlain’s Company would be tainted by association.

The only person who was interested in a prying way in Peter’s death and the grisly details of it – or the only person who didn’t bother to conceal his naked curiosity with a
show of fellow feeling – was Richard Milford, poet and playwright. We met by chance late one morning in the precincts of Paul’s Yard. He was in the company of his wife and, oddly,
Henslowe’s unofficial agent, Tom Gally, the man who’d been in the tavern with Chesser. Gally said nothing directly to me but continued to gaze down his pointed finger in the direction
of whoever was speaking. Richard Milford asked me so many questions about the murder that I wondered whether he was seeking new material for some violent and sensational drama. I kept my patience
for a time but eventually retaliated. I asked him how things were going with his story of incest and double-dealing,
The World’s Diseas’d
. Had the seniors in our Company
relented? Were they willing to stage the piece?

“Oh, there are plenty of takers,” said Richard airily, but with a sidelong glance at Gally. Aha, I thought, that’s the way it’s going. He’s negotiating with the
Admiral’s Men, and this man is a go-between. The suspicion was almost confirmed by his next comment. “If Burbage and Heminges and the rest don’t want quality, if they’re too
short-sighted to see it, there are many others who will. Who do.”

Tom Gally nodded vigorously at this point but kept his finger under his eye.

“So they’ve turned you down?” I said.

“It is a difficult thing, Nicholas, to be always ahead of public taste, a little way ahead.”

“But you were confident you were providing what the public wanted.”

“The public doesn’t always knows what it wants until it gets it.”

“Then it’s as well you have your patron – patrons, I should say.”

“Whatever your private opinion of Lord Robert, he and his sister have been all grace to me. Haven’t they, Lucy?”

He turned to his wife who was standing quietly next to her husband. She was, if I’m honest, the real reason I’d been willing to stop and subject myself to Richard’s questions.
Not for his company but hers. I’d even been willing to talk about Peter Agate because she was listening. Perhaps I hoped for her sympathy. So far she’d made no comment. She had a way of
glancing up through her long lashes which was as interesting as any speech might have been. Now she simply said, “They are good friends to my husband, Master Revill.”

“Ben Nicholson is printing the play, even as we speak,” said Richard, gesturing across the Paul’s precinct. There was a great concentration of publishers and booksellers in
this part of town. “We have just been to see him. It will be a handsome volume. You know it was he who published my
Garland
.”

I visualized Richard as someone who would be constantly running to the publishers, checking that all was well. I owed money to Master Nicholson. He was a genial, white-haired tradesman who did
business with the Chamberlain’s and was tolerant about players’ bills.

“A precious volume, that
Garland
,” I said. “The more so because it contains verses about you, madam, I believe.”

I bowed slightly at Lucy Milford and was pleased to see a blush filling her cheeks. She looked up at me – those long lashes! – but said nothing. I’d meant the remark sincerely,
insofar as one means any near meaningless compliment paid to a pretty woman. In truth I liked Richard’s poetic effusions, his slightly self-centred verses about love, transience and
mortality. I thought they were truer to the character of the man than the violent actions and severed limbs of
The World’s Diseas’d
. But I’d also wanted to remind the
poet-playwright of what he’d told me recently, that Venner’s sister was the supposed object of his love-lyrics. Or so he had informed her (while telling his wife something else). The
duplicity of poets! Their shamelessness! But then I’d do the same thing if I was lucky enough to be a poet. I couldn’t be a poet. I knew, I’d tried. Even so, to be able to say
I wrote these verses for you
.

Richard didn’t respond to my compliment to his verses and his wife, other than by a tight smile. She smiled too, slightly, amid the blushes. We exchanged a little more small conversation.
Gally still hadn’t said anything although he had been attentively following our words. Milford announced that the two of them, he and Lucy, would be attending the Middle Temple performance of
Troilus and Cressida
.

“I wouldn’t want Burbage and the rest to think I bear them any hard feelings for their frostiness towards
The World’s Diseas’d
, fools though they may
be.”

The last thing Burbage and the rest were were fools, but I held my tongue, said goodbye to the Milfords and moved off. I hadn’t gone many yards when I became aware that Tom Gally had left
them behind and was keeping pace with me. He kept his head screwed sideways and, from time to time, brought up his hand and sighted at me along his forefinger. Gally had long, soft, unkempt black
hair. It reminded me of a sheep’s fleece. But I sensed the wolf beneath.

I smiled, grimaced rather, and walked quicker. But he wasn’t to be shaken off.

“Master Henslowe sends his commiserations over your recent troubles.”

“I thank him.”

“He knows that you are no murderer.”

I’d worked briefly for the Admiral’s Men soon after my arrival in London. I didn’t care much for Philip Henslowe, their manager. He was a hard-headed businessman who preferred
to keep people in debt to him rather than be paid off, since they would then be out of his power. He was always looking for money-making opportunities outside the theatre, in brothels and
bear-baiting gardens. During my early, priggish days I’d tended to disapprove of this. The Chamberlain’s Company seemed purer and more whole-hearted in their dedication to the drama.
Nevertheless Dick Burbage and some of the other seniors seemed to get on well enough with Henslowe and, as I’ve said, a friendly rivalry existed between the two companies.

Tom Gally, however, with his squinty glance and pointy finger, was an unwelcome companion. To be told by him that my former employer did not consider me a murderer seemed a somewhat feeble form
of praise. Even so, I just about managed to squeeze out more thanks.

“Master Henslowe is sorry too to hear of the sickness of your patron. These are difficult times for us men of the theatre.”

I doubted that Henslowe was that sorry about Lord Hunsdon’s condition but half smiled in acknowledgement, even as I considered how Gally was no real ‘man of the theatre’, but a
hanger-on, a parasite. A self-appointed agent of our rival.

“The Chapel Royal boys,” he added. “They’re a danger, now.”

These were the acting children who’d been doing so well at Blackfriars recently. They were our competitors, true, but few in the Chamberlain’s considered them to be a real threat, or
not that much of a one.

“Those little eyases couldn’t take the bread from the mouths of grown, experienced men,” I said, not as sure as I sounded.

“They are all the fashion. There are many boy-lovers.”

“Fashions come and go. We should welcome rivalry. You know what they say, Master Gally. It’s the storm that proves the roof.”

“Of course. How is he, by the way?”

Gally gazed at me down his finger-gun. By now we had almost completed a circuit of Paul’s Yard.

“How’s who?”

“Why, George Carey. Lord Hunsdon.”

“Strong. Vital. He will live to be as old as Moses.”

“I hear otherwise.”

“Master Gally, if you expect me to report on the health of our patron, you’re talking to the wrong person. I suggest you address yourself to Master Shakespeare or Dick Burbage for an
answer.”

“Forgive me, Master Revill, I was not aware that a great man’s health or sickness might be a subject for secrecy.”

“And you must forgive me, Master Gally, if I’m suddenly overcome with my own sickness.”

“I am distressed to hear it.”

“Its chief sympton is a violent aversion to continuing in your company. Goodbye.”

And I veered off from him, angry inside myself that he should have gone this roundabout route to try to discover how close to dying our patron was.

It took me several minutes to recover my calm. I was glad to see, though, that I had shaken Gally off, or at least that I could no longer see him in the throng of the Yard. He was a troublemaker
who would do his best to do down his – or Henslowe’s – rivals. Someone to be watched. A dishonest fellow.

As if to prove my own honesty to myself I thought of walking over to discuss my small debts with Benjamin Nicholson, who was printer, publisher and bookseller all in one. I had bought several
volumes of verse over the last few months, partly out of a wish to read the latest thing but also to see if I could learn the craft of verse-writing. Poetry is surely a skill like any other, it can
be learned – or grasped – in its outward manifestations. But there is also something inside it that you can’t get at, like the kernel in a nut. Can’t get at without smashing
the shell. And the kernel is not only in the poetry, it is also in the poet. If you do not already possess the kernel inside you then there is little chance you will pen anything but the most
mediocre verse. So I’d concluded.

And as I walked across the Yard I paused in the vicinity of the great Cross that stands in its centre and concluded something else: that I would not settle my bill with Master Nicholson, not
just yet. You see, I didn’t know whether I might not at any time be arrested by Master Alan Talbot. He had it in his power to cast me into prison, to bring me before magistrates for trial,
& cetera. Why settle my debts now if my future was so clouded? A man who is about to be hanged smiles at petty obligations. Besides I hadn’t got the money.

In this way I toyed with my prospects. Did I think I was about to be accused of my friend’s murder, convicted and hauled to the scaffold? I didn’t know. Maybe I thought I could avert
that possibility by imagining in detail how it might happen and so, by fearing the worst, placate the Fates (who delight in taking us by surprise).

And talking of surprises . . .

“Master Revill!”

A hand clutched at my arm. I looked into a lined, chalky countenance. It was the alliterating man from the Goat & Monkey, he who had warned Peter against stepping out on to the stage. The
ex-player. His ears stuck out from under his cap. The last time I’d seen him had been as he was hauled out of the ale-house by a crew of boatmen.

I shook my arm free but he too kept pace beside me. Yet another eager, talkative companion. I’d had enough.

“You are a friend to Peter Agate?”

“Was a friend,” I said.

“Alas,” said this gentleman. “There is woe in the world.”

I stopped, turned towards him and said, “Sir, have you anything to say to me? If so, say it and be done. I have had sufficient conversation for this morning.”

“I was a player once,” he said.

“I know, with Lord Strange.”

If he was surprised that I was aware of this he didn’t show it.

“Until I saw the playhouse for what it was.”

“We’ve been here before,” I said wearily. “You will say that it is a place of perdition, and I will respond that it is a bower of bliss. Can we leave it at that, Master
Chesser?”

I was only giving him this much of a hearing because he had been, once, a member of my trade in a way that Tom Gally could never claim to have been. I had recalled Chesser’s name from
Peter’s account of their second meeting. We stood in the centre of Paul’s Yard near the big Cross and the world, woeful and otherwise, flowed round us.

“It is the devil’s hole,” said Chesser. “But it is not too late to climb out.”

“Of course.”

“I saw him once. In Derby.”

“Saw him? Saw who?”

“The devil.”

I might have moved on but this superannuated player gripped my arm again with a hold that was almost painful. His eyes glared, yet he no longer looked so absurd. Despite myself, I was
attentive.

“You are familiar with the tragical history of Dr Faustus, the hellish Conjurer?” he said.

“Kit Marlowe’s play?”

“A sacrilegious man. He denied the divinity.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to Christopher Marlowe, dead and murdered these many years in a tavern brawl in Deptford, or to his creation Dr Faustus who sold his soul to the
devil in exchange for all earthly knowledge and delights. Either Marlowe or Faustus would have fitted the description of godlessness.

“We were in Derby,” said Chesser, “about that cursed play. A certain number of devils were keeping their circles on our stage, and Faustus was busy in his magical invocations,
when on a sudden we players were confounded for we were all persuaded there was one devil too many amongst us.”