An Honourable Murderer (30 page)

“Bartholomew –” I said but got no further. The tire-man held up the doublet as if it was contaminated.

“Look at this! Just look at it.”

I looked and saw a dark stain down the front of the doublet.

“Do you know who was wearing this?” said Ridd.

“I wasn't,” I said.

“It wasn't me,” said Abel.

“The question was rhetorical, purely rhetorical,” said Ridd. “This item of Globe clothing was worn by – well, never mind who it was worn by – but I can tell you that the wearer was someone who should have known better.”

“One of the seniors?” said Abel hopefully.

“Someone who should have known better,” repeated Bartholomew, divided between indignation and loyalty.

Abel tried again to mollify the tire-man by saying that the stain on the doublet looked like sheep's blood. Even Ridd couldn't object to the use of sheep's blood (which simulated the human variety) since he knew as well as anyone that without frequent blood-lettings on stage our Globe audiences would dwindle away fast. But Abel's suggestion was scornfully rejected by the costume man.

“
This
is not sheep's blood, Master Glaze,” he said. “Smell it. Go on, smell it.”

He thrust the offending portion of the costume under my friend's long tapering nose. Abel sniffed and shrugged.

“I'm not sure,” he said.

“Well, I am sure,” said Ridd. “It's drink is what it is. This piece of Globe property stinks of the ale-house. Which means that Master – never mind who – means that he has broken the rules and taken his costume to an ale-house. Probably the Goat & Monkey, full of low people. Or the Knight of the Carpet, full of even lower people. How can one expect younger players like yourselves to observe the rules if the seniors and shareholders ignore them?”

We tutted together and then Abel shook his head while I nodded mine. All that Ridd required was that we went through the motions of sharing his outrage. I wondered about the identity of the naughty senior who'd worn a tire-house doublet to go to the tavern. I wondered whether Ridd would berate him about it. Probably he would. Whatever else you might say about Bartholomew, he was no great respecter of persons.

Abel and I had been standing in this little chamber for five minutes or more and still hadn't touched on the reason we'd come, or rather on the pretext. Nevertheless, the stained doublet was a providential way into the conversation.

“Bartholomew ,” I began again, “Abel and I have been in dispute about the best way to remove blood from a garment.”

“The best way is to avoid fights and disputes altogether. That way you will have no blood to remove.”

“This was no fight but a nose-bleed on a fine silk shirt,” said Abel. Like most players he was an accomplished liar. “How do I get rid of it? Nick says buck and lye while I say good old soap and water.”

(I didn't have much idea about ‘buck and lye', by the way. But I'd heard my mother talking about it.)

“You are both wrong,” said Bartholomew with an expert's pleasure. “Buck and lye is too fierce for bloodstains. And soap and water are not precise enough.”

“What would you use?” I said.

“What would I use? I am not a laundrywoman, Nicholas Revill. Although of course I take an interest in these things. The most efficacious way to remove blood is with milk or with salt and water, if the stain is old. If the stain is new, on the other hand . . .”

“Yes, yes?”

We were both almost interested despite ourselves.

“. . . then you can spit on it. Spit works well.”

I was about to work round to the subject of the ‘robe of Truth' from the masque but Bartholomew Ridd spared me the trouble by raising it himself.

“I told the laundrywoman to use milk and then salt and water on the costume worn by the man who died lately – the one who fell from that silly chair – what was his name?”

“Sir Philip Blake.”

“Whoever it was.”

“Did it work, the milk or the salt and water?” I said.

“No, none of it worked, which is why I told her to rub salt directly in the marks. Anyway it is as good as new now. It had to be for when Master Jonson wore it. See for yourself. It's in there.”

He nodded towards the other little chamber and then bent his head once more over the stained doublet, sucking in his breath noisily between his lips. Abel and I went next door and pretended to examine the cloak, which was draped over a table. Ridd was right, it did look as good as new. You'd never have known that a man had died wearing it. There was no trace of blood or gore on it. The miniature suns which decorated it and which indicated the dazzling power of Truth were newly burnished. This had all been easier than I'd expected. We'd located the cloak. But of course we couldn't remove it from the tire-room, at least not yet.

“Satisfied?” said Ridd, as we were leaving. “Have you picked up some tips on shirt-cleaning?”

“Thank you, Master Ridd,” said Abel.

“What works for ale-house stains?” I said, indicating the guilty doublet.

“Oh, soap and water,” said Ridd with resignation. “They will wash out with time. Time is another great cleanser, along with milk and salt and the rest. With this dirty doublet, though, it is not the offence so much as the principle of the thing.”

“Tell Dick Burbage about it,” said Abel.

“Who do you think was wearing this?” sighed Bartholomew Ridd.

Later, Abel and I discussed who should be involved in the little scene we were planning to play out.

“Each one of them,” I said. “There are not very many. There is Lady Jane herself and her maid-companion Maria More. There is William Inman . . .”

“Who you saw in a clinch with the widow.”

“Yes, he must be invited. And Jonathan Snell, the father.”

“I thought that you heard them discussing the most innocent subject, Nick. Pipes and cisterns and privies. Innocent but unseemly.”

I'd told Abel just about everything in the attempt to persuade him to go along with what he'd termed a madcap scheme. This included the eavesdropped discussion in the Blake mansion, which Snell had already explained to me as what you might call a
privy
talk. I believed him about that particular conversation but still thought there might have been some understanding between the wife and the engine-man to dispose of the husband. The way he'd tried to minimize the son's discovery of the severed ropes, for example. The fact that I had discovered the body of John Ratchett on the floor of his workshop. This tended to point the finger of suspicion at the father – but not at the son, who had first drawn my attention to the ropes and whose later denial that anything was wrong might be attributed to the influence of Jonathan senior.

“Yes, we should definitely add Master Snell to the list,” I said. “And I have been wondering about Martin Barton.”

“But he's a poet, he's a playwright,” said Abel Glaze, who still retained a perhaps exaggerated respect for these professions despite a couple of years spent in the playhouse.

“So is Ben Jonson. Yet he has killed a man, even if it was in a duel.”

“Why would Barton want to see Sir Philip dead?”

“He envies Ben Jonson, he would be glad of anything that disrupted one of Ben's productions.”

“Death is an extreme form of disruption,” said Abel. “And killing one man because you don't like another man's work seems a – a roundabout way of doing things.”

“Well, since you put it like that . . .” I conceded. “But I did hear Barton talking in the Line and Compass tavern about Sir Philip's death, almost as if the poor man deserved to die. And we all know how Barton despises court life . . .”

“It's a pose,” said Abel. “Barton is better born than any of us. His disdain of Jonson is because Jonson was once a bricklayer.”

Abel had accounted for Barton's attitude so exactly that I could not think of any objection, although I still recalled Barton's words in the ale-house,
Killing a man is nothing. It's getting away with it that counts.

“Very well,” I said. “Leaving aside Barton, there are just four of them. That is: Lady Blake and Maria More, Bill Inman and Jonathan Snell. Each of them might have had a reason for wanting Sir Philip dead, or at least for helping another of the group who did. Lady Jane because she's after another husband or because the last one found her out in some infidelity. Maria More because she is devoted to her mistress. Bill Inman because he too seems to be devoted to Lady Jane.”

“Or because he wants her for himself.”

“She seems much desired,” I said.

“And Jonathan Snell? What's his motive?”

“I don't know. Money? The challenge of killing a man and making it look like an accident?”

Abel looked dubious.

“I still think this is a madcap scheme, Nick.”

“Why are you going along with it then?”

“Friendship. And because I believe nothing is going to happen.”

“If nothing happens I'll drop the whole business,” I said. “Lady Blake can marry her country cousin in peace.”

“That's good of you,” said Abel.

I
crouched in the gathering dark on the roof of the Globe playhouse thinking; Abel was right. This is a madcap scheme. Abel himself was sitting only a couple of yards away from me. We were in the shadows of the hut on top of the playhouse canopy. My friend said nothing out loud but inwardly he was probably cursing himself for agreeing to help. His only consolation could be that, when nothing happened and we both of us went home, he wouldn't be the one who looked a complete fool. I stood upright and started to pace up and down the rush-strewn wooden walkway.

The scheme, the madcap scheme, had not started altogether well. It had been a simple enough matter to get into the playhouse after hours since I'd deliberately left a window unlatched in a passageway overlooking the alley known as Brend's Rents. I'd gone in first (this was my idea after all, and this would be my fault when it all went wrong) while Abel gave me a leg-up and kept watch outside. There was still more than an hour of daylight left. Once I was inside, I latched the window and waited in the behind-stage passage, listening for sounds. There were none. The place seemed empty. It should be empty by the middle of the evening, all the life and activity of the Globe being concentrated within the periods of practice and playing. There was always the chance, however, that someone – one of the seniors, say, or Bartholomew Ridd or Geoffrey Allison the book-keeper – might be working late.

Standing in the gloomy passage which I'd walked up and down countless times in the last four years, I felt like a trespasser. This was a foolish feeling, I told myself. You cannot trespass in your own workplace. But it was my actions, not my instincts, which were truly foolish. And it was trespassing since I had no business being here, no business at all. If found and challenged, I planned to say that I'd returned to pick up my part for next day's play (which was not WS's
Othello
but Barton's
Melancholy Man
). This at least was ‘true' since I had hidden my scroll in an obscure corner of the tire-room. I almost hoped to be found and challenged. That way I could pick up my ‘lost' lines and return to my lodgings, no damage done.

But there was no one to find me and put me back on the right path. I walked along the passageway, my footsteps echoing unnaturally loud inside my head if nowhere else, and made an entrance on to the bare stage. I'd be out here tomorrow afternoon, once again playing Lussorio in
The Melancholy Man
. Lussorio was a murderer but I doubt if he felt much guiltier than I did at this moment. I opened my mouth to say a few lines from my part in the play but no sounds emerged. I couldn't recall a single thing which Lussorio said or did. My mind was blank. It happens to players sometimes. You can only hope that it does not happen when you're actually standing on the stage in front of a paying audience. Maybe I did need to retrieve that lost part from the tire-room after all.

I cleared my throat and tried again. Some words came out but they weren't from
The Melancholy Man
. Instead they were Roderigo's from
Othello
:

I have no great devotion to the deed
,
And yet he has given me satisfying reasons:
'
Tis but a man gone: forth my sword: he dies.

My voice resonated around the vacant galleries. The sun dropped below the roof and the exposed interior of the playhouse turned as deep and shadowy as a valley on a summer's evening, although the sky overhead was still a pale blue. I had the eerie sensation that I was being watched from the empty tiers of seating. Oddly, this feeling was much stronger than when one actually was being watched by a houseful of spectators. And why had I chosen those particular lines from
Othello
or rather why had they slipped, unbidden, into my head? It must be that Roderigo is waiting in ambush as he utters them, waiting to kill Cassio. Just as Abel and I were waiting in ambush, not to kill but to find a killer . . .

I'd almost forgotten about Abel Glaze and hastened to the little office where Sam, the principal doorkeeper and money-gatherer, kept his keys. Sam was a little limping man who went round securing the exits, both public and players', after everyone had left the theatre. His last act was to lock himself out and take himself home (he lived somewhere by the Southwark Bear Garden, I think) with his bunch of keys. The one door he was unable to secure, ironically, was that to his own office since the wood had swollen and it would not shut properly. “I've told Master Burbage about it,” he'd said to me that very morning when I was checking to make sure that the door hadn't yet been repaired. “It's not safe. Some bugger'll take advantage and get in here one of these days.” I had nodded, reflecting all the while that that bugger would be me, and feeling dishonest in every atom of my body. “They spend all that money on tarting up the place out front, tarting it up to buggery,” Sam continued, “all that money on the stage and the rest of it and then they don't bother to see to a simple job like this door. It's all show. I've told Master Burbage.”