Death of Kings (20 page)

As I put the final branches on his resting-place I promised Nat – I promised myself – that I would avenge his death. That I would extract a confession from Mistress Isabella of how
she had planned to kill me and how, her schemes going awry, she had destroyed an innocent and harmless man whose cries and barks and whinnies had given an equally innocent pleasure to
tavern-drinkers the length and breadth of the town. A cold fury rose up in me but I mastered it with effort, and said a short prayer over Nat’s ill-concealed remains, such as I had often
heard my father intone over the dead in our village of Miching.

I clambered out of the ditch and set my face northwards back to the Coven. As I neared my lodgings I saw a figure approaching from the opposite direction. We met at the entrance.

“Master Nicholas, is it not?”

“May?”

“The very same.”

On another occasion I might have made some light-hearted remark on seeing her, like “Where have you been? Out and about killing swine?”, since we were on quite easy terms, but I was
not in the mood now.

“I have something to tell you,” she said.

“And I have nothing to tell you,” I said, taking slight fright at her tone and wondering if she’d seen anything. “I am tired now and on my way to my hole.”

So I did not question her on her night’s activities and she did not have the chance to question me on mine. This was perhaps a mistake, though I did not see it at the time. Once inside,
she went off to join her sleeping sisters on the floor and I climbed my weary way up the rickety flight of stairs.

The room was as I had left it. No more bodies, thank God! I was surprised at how little of the candle – which I had carelessly left lit – was burned out. The night might have seemed
endless but, in reality, not so much time had elapsed. I carefully replaced the empty green bottle in my trunk, thinking to confront Mistress Isabella at some point with her killing machine.
Casting about my quarters I caught sight of the ball of paper which Nat had been clutching. I unfolded it.

As I’d half expected it was a message, a message written in plain English and from Nemo, if I was to believe the four letters appended at the end.

It said:

Nemo

I read this several times over but was none the wiser. In fact, I was significantly more confused. The note raised a host of questions and answered none. Why should I go
back to Essex House? And why on the Sunday morning? What was supposed to happen then, happen there? How did he – Nemo – know what was likely to transpire in the enemy camp when he was
in Cecil’s employ? What did the reference to my Company and their ‘foul play’ mean? Was it a joke? If so, it wasn’t one that I was privy to. And how could I, a humble
player, protect the Chamberlain’s? Was this scrap of paper, found in a dead man’s hand, really from Nemo? This was about the only point that I was able to answer with a degree of
assurance. Probably it was his; the tone, half jocular, half threatening (that reference to ‘trunk-work’), seemed typical of the man. And I already had experience of how he employed Nat
as a messenger.

It was evident that matters were coming to a head. Of course, Cecil and the Council were desperate to be kept informed, but why should
I
act as their agent? Because I had a foot in both
camps, a little voice whispered inside my head. I was a player – and there was obviously a faction among the players which was not ill-disposed towards the Essex cause – but I was also
a true Englishman, loyal to my sovereign and mindful of the commonwealth. That was the lever which they were using to get me to act as a spy, that and my fatal intimacy with Mistress Horner.

Anyway, all this was pretty much beside the point. They’d got me in a corner, had tied me to a stake like Stubbes the bear. If I had a foot in both camps I was also caught between them. If
I didn’t do as Nemo’s note instructed, then it looked as though the Chamberlain’s Company might suffer. Perhaps it was arrogance to think so, but if I was able to safeguard the
Company by making a return visit to Essex House, this was surely a small task to undertake. I toyed for a moment with the notion of running and telling all I knew to Dick Burbage or Master WS,
there and then. I trusted them much more than I trusted the ash-complexioned, soft-mouthed Nemo. Him I trusted not at all.

But I could easily be painted as a government spy in the Globe, someone who had voluntarily agreed to work for the authorities. Had I not already betrayed the Company in some small sense by
cuckolding one of my fellows? The taste of that double-dealing was not pleasant in the mouth, although it had been overtaken by the terrible discovery that Mistress Horner wanted to do away with
me. And how could I explain
that
to anyone? Go up to Jack Horner and say, “Oh by the way your wife nearly succeeded in poisoning me the other night. Matter of fact, she did manage to
do someone in, you might remember him, old Nat the Animal Man. Pity. Shame. Oh, why did she want to see me dead? Well, you see, I was fucking her – sorry about that but she did start it in a
way and I don’t think I’m the only one, if that’s any consolation . . . it’s not, oh well – and then I told her I’d rather be fucking a man, men rather, because
that’s my true taste you see, my real bent, well not my true taste, I just said it to get out of . . . oh never mind. Anyway, she was so pissed off with me when I said this thing about men,
that she gave me a green bottle full of poison and told me to drink it when I wanted to go back to the straight and narrow of womankind. No, no, of course she didn’t tell me that she’d
put poison in the bottle . . .”

I mean, would
you
believe a word of it? I wouldn’t.

I went round in circles, with my allegiances and obligations tangled together so tight that it would have taken a smarter head than mine to unravel them. The only thing that was clear was that I
was expected to call at Essex House on the next Sunday morning. Perhaps it would be a quiet day in the old hotbed, just the odd Puritan spouting and the occasional malcontent ranting but no one
actually
doing
anything. But what was to be my pretext? Nemo hadn’t told me that. I’d have to trust to luck and quick wits if I was once again stopped at the postern by Signor
Noti.

I blew out the candle and lay down on my lumpy bed. It was freezing. I shivered and pulled over my head the mixture of blankets and stinking animal skins (no doubt the remains of their
sacrificial rites) which the Coven had thoughtfully provided for my nocturnal comfort. After a while I realised that I was still clutching Nemo’s note. It was a perilous piece of paper, too
perilous to be seen by the eye of morning. If the candle had been alight I would have burned it to ashes. As it wasn’t, I had to obey Nemo’s final injunction and eat his words. They
tasted as bitter as ashes and for some time after I’d swallowed his secrets I seemed to feel them, a mushy bolus, lodged in my windpipe.

We rarely held meetings in the Chamberlain’s. We were, in a sense, meeting all the time, we ordinary players. The day-to-day business of the Company was in the hands of
the Burbage brothers and the major shareholders such as Shakespeare and Phillips and Heminges. They commissioned or bought new work and decided what plays would be put on and when, they handled
negotiations with the Office of the Revels and dealt with licences and, most important, with the finances. Individuals such as the Tire-man or the Book-keeper had their little kingdoms, with that
inclination towards tyrannous rule which seems to characterise small rulers, but the management of the Globe in all its fullness and roundness was firmly in the hands of a few.

It was something of a surprise therefore when word came through from Dick Burbage that he wanted to speak to the entire company at the ungodly hour of nine on a February Friday morning. This was
a couple of days after my excursion to Essex House and the dire events of that night. In my imagination, I repeated and re-repeated my walk in the dark down Broadwall. And when I thought about it,
which was much of the time, I could feel still the weight and form of a dead man hanging on my back. So, in a way, I welcomed any distraction, including an early morning meeting.

It was too cold to assemble in the open on the stage and since the only room large enough to hold all the members of the company was the tire-house, it was there that we were summoned. There was
a queer expectation in the air, half excitement, half apprehension. I was standing with the two Jacks – Horner and Wilson – and our boy-player Martin Hancock. Needless to say, I had
said nothing to Jack about his wife’s behaviour. In fact, I would have gone to great lengths to protect my friend from the knowledge of Isabella’s vicious duplicity. I was dreading
another visit by her to the Globe, although they had been infrequent of late. How does one converse with someone who has attempted by violent stealth to cut one’s mortal thread? The ordinary
small change of discourse seems somehow inadequate. Therefore I hoped not to see her again, or at least not see her until our current crisis had passed and I could turn my mind to how best to deal
with Mistress Horner. Glancing round the tire-house now, I saw the faces that had become familiar over the last few months, the senior men like Cowley and Pope and the more junior ones such as Cook
and Rice.

That this was a significant occasion was indicated by the presence on a make-shift platform at the end of the room of the Burbage brothers, Richard and Cuthbert, together with the senior players
William Shakepeare and Augustine Phillips. Seeing Master WS reminded me that I hadn’t passed on to him the message from Henry Wriothesley. I hadn’t really had the opportunity but
neither had I sought for one. This playing at Mercury was becoming wearisome – and probably dangerous, if recent nights were anything to go by.

I had never before attended a meeting at which the Chamberlain’s Company had been so formally called together. After a moment, and without a signal from anyone, the buzz of conversation
died down. Dick Burbage, who had been deep in dialogue with WS, turned towards us and began to speak. They always said that Dick was a Proteus, able to take on any role – able to
become
any role – someone who submerged himself in his part before the play began and surfaced for air only when disrobing after the action was finished. I would not have dared to
approach him while he was off-stage during a performance, and I’d noticed that even the more important members of the Company had only the briefest exchanges with him at such times. To every
part that he played he brought a physical attack, hard or insinuating, as if he would make it his by seizure or seduction. Now he played at being the responsible manager and shareholder, always
conscious that the well-being of his beloved Company rested in his hands. Or perhaps he really
was
the responsible manager, etc. It’s easy enough when an actor’s on stage because
you
know
he must be playing but when he’s off, how can you tell what he’s feeling?

“Friends and fellow players,” Burbage began, perhaps in deliberate echo of Mark Antony’s opening words in WS’s
Julius Caesar
as he speaks to the crowd over the
corpse of his precious Caesar, “friends . . . I have summoned you here this early in the morning for no idle purpose. I say I but I mean, of course, Cuthbert and William and Augustine and the
rest of the shareholders.
We
have called this unusual meeting. Now, we may be mere players, but we are players near the heart of things. In the last few years we have played at the royal
court more than twice as often as another company which I will not name [
he meant Henslowe’s Admiral’s men].
Our sovereign has been pleased not merely to grace our performances
but to compliment us on them in the warmest terms. We are
her
men in all but name.”

So far, so unexceptionable. Around me I sensed the beginnings of bewilderment: why have they called us together? Surely not just to say that we’re the Queen’s favourites? We know
that.
Stale news. As if sensing the mood of the Company, Dick Burbage continued:

“This you know well. Long may we continue to be the favourites of Queen Elizabeth. Long may she continue to reign over us! [
A few murmurs of assent at this point, but for form’s
sake only.
] However, if it behoves every man to think of the future, how much more does it behove every group of men allied together for mutual benefit – as we are allied – to arm
itself against ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ [
here he nodded slightly at Master WS in acknowledgement of his words].
In short, we have to look out for ourselves.
To be on the watch for new patrons and friends. I do not have to tell you, my friends, how precarious is the life of the player.

“We have only recently attained respectability. And always our enemies, Puritans and the like, are seeking to thrust us back onto the high-roads and inn-yards, if not into the ditch where
they think we belong. We have other enemies too that I scarcely need to enumerate. A cold spell keeps people indoors, the bear-baiting draws away their pennies, while an outbreak of the plague
closes us down altogether. And even when we do succeed in gathering a congregation [
this was Dick Burbage’s preferred term for the playhouse audience
], gathering them in sufficient
numbers, we must keep them diverted. If we fail to amuse them, my friends, then we too will shortly fail – fail to eat, fail to pay our rent, fail to feed our families. Ah, how precarious is
the life of the player!”