Mask of Night Read online

  Other titles by the same author

  Sleep of Death

  Death of Kings

  The Pale Companion

  Alms for Oblivion

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  First published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2004

  Copyright © Philip Gooden 2004

  The right of Philip Gooden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1-84119-693-2

  eISBN 978-1-47210-708-4

  Printed and bound in the EU

  Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face

  Romeo and Juliet, 2, ii

  Wolf’s Bane

  To begin with, you put on the costume.

  You put it on for practice, to see how it fits.

  No, you put it on to see how you fit – how you fit the part which you have chosen for yourself.

  But first you listen at the door. There is no sound from the passageway outside, no scurrying feet, no talk, no subdued laughter. It is that dead point in the middle of the afternoon when the morning’s business is all done and the preparations for evening not yet started. Even so you take the precaution of sliding the bolt home. Then you walk towards the cedar chest in the corner. The lid creaks as you open it. The chest is full. You remove the sheets that are neatly piled on the top and reach for the garment that lies half-way down, in the place where you stowed it last night. You reach under the garment and raise it up like a body. With a touch of ceremony you carry it, cradled in your arms, towards the gate-leg table and deposit it there. Then you return to the chest and retrieve the other items and place those too on the table.

  You listen at the door once more. Nothing, apart from the thudding of your own heart.

  Quickly, before you can think better of it, you strip yourself of your outer clothes and throw them carelessly towards the open chest in the corner. Your senses must be heightened because, despite the sound of your heart, you hear the soft sigh your clothes give as they land on the rim of the chest. You also hear someone laugh, a little low laugh, and for an instant you think that a person has been in the room with you all this time, watching you, spying on you. Your head spins with explanations and excuses before you understand that the laughter came out of your own mouth. Then you are standing in front of the table, looking down at the black coat.

  The black coat goes straight over the undergarments. It’s too thick to wear anything else. Even so, the coat feels heavier than you expected, heavier than when you were carrying it in your arms. The canvas material is waxed so as to repel water – and other liquid matter – and has a stiffness which makes you conscious of your limbs and produces a certain awkwardness in your movements at first. It is already warm inside here. In a few moments you will be hot. Hot but sheltered. As if you were wearing armour. Well, that’s appropriate. After all, this black coat is intended to protect its possessor against a sudden attack, against the fatal stab or blow – although not from any human agency.

  Then you proceed to don the headpiece. A mask, but rather more than a mask. A black hood made of coarse cotton, which encloses the head completely and which is secured with points and buttons at the back. The headpiece has a long bill-like protrusion, similar to a bird’s beak. There are two eye-holes made of thick glass, but no aperture for the nostrils or the mouth. This does not matter since you will not be feeding. You will take shallow breaths. Because of the position of the eye-holes there is a black bar in the middle of your field of vision, but somehow the bar is not part of what you can see, it is closer than that, the bar seems to be inside your head. The glass windows distort the shape of objects out in the world. The legs of the table beside you, for example, seem to curve as they reach the floor. The window light is broken up into shafts and splinters of yellow. The eye-holes give you a sense of detachment from your surroundings.

  You feel calmer than you did before. You have been preoccupied with putting on your costume. The sound of breathing is magnified inside the hood and now the blood whispers in your ears. Is it trying to tell you something, your blood? The air within quickly grows thick, but it is easy enough to breathe because the rough weave of the cloth permits new air to penetrate from outside. Of course the wearer would not wish to receive too many vapours from the outside, you tell yourself. There is a hollow pouch at the end of the “beak” which could be filled with herbs – with bay and dried rosemary, perhaps – or with the dried rind of a lemon or a pomecitron. The cloth itself might be soaked in vinegar or fumigated with frankincense. Opinions differ on what is best.

  Once you are wearing the coat and hood, you pull on the gloves. These are also black but made of a finer cotton than the hood. They allow the fingers to have free play. The gloves are slightly too large for your hands and you tug them down over the fingers, leaving soft little ridges of material at the base of each where finger joins finger.

  There . . . the costuming is almost complete. Only one item remains.

  On the table lies a white cane fashioned from willow. You reach towards it. Your black hand, as it comes into view through the eyepieces, doesn’t look like your hand but someone else’s hand. Yet it is your own fingers which curl around the handle of the cane and lift it from the table-top. The willow cane, which you know to be thin, almost elegant, appears thicker through the distorting eye-cases. For a moment you stand with it poised in front of you like a sword or foil. Then you fall to, and poke and prod at the ground, imagining that there is a sick person down there. Or a dying person. Or a dead one. With a flourish of the cane you point out the signs, the infallible marks of his condition, to an imagined audience.

  The cane is a badge of authority, it is a wand of office. This is why it is white, so that it stands out against the waxy blackness of your costume. But the cane serves a practical purpose too. It allows you to keep a distance between yourself and the dead.

  It wasn’t my idea to visit the old fool. It was Abel Glaze who was eager to meet Will Kemp. The first time the name of Kemp was mentioned in my friend’s hearing his ears pricked up.

  “Is that the Kemp, Nick? The clown? The fool? He of the nine days’ wonder?”

  “Yes, that’s him, nine days Kemp.”

  “I saw him arrive in Norwich.”

  “I saw him depart from Whitechapel.”

  “In Norwich he looked as green and fresh as when he’d set off,” said Abel Glaze. “Jigging and bobbing among the crowd he was, like a cork.”

  “He’s a bobber all right.”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “Hardly know the man,” I said.

  “That’s odd, because you sound as if you share the opinion of the rest of the Company when it comes to Kemp.”

  “Perhaps I do, if you’ll tell me what that opinion is, Abel.”

  “Disapproval. A sort of schoolmaster’s disapproval, frowning and pretending he never was a child.”

  I might be slightly irritated to be told what I thought but I had to admit that Abel Glaze was right. We players of the Chamberlain’s Company did look down on the clown Will Kemp, even though Kemp had been one of the original shareh
olders. He’d quit the players, to be replaced by Robert Armin. Armin was a much more subtle fellow, a melancholy fool, a clown with feeling.

  By contrast Kemp used to go in for the belly laughs. He swaggered and flailed around. When he jigged he stuck out his arse in the direction of the male groundlings or thrust his codpiece at the female ones. Nothing much wrong with that, but it didn’t always fit the mood of the play he was appearing in. And he added bits of business of his own, usually dirty bits – and usually to the irritation of the writers, who don’t like their words being upstaged by a clown’s antics, to say nothing of the other players, who just don’t like being upstaged. I hadn’t seen any of this myself as it was shortly before I joined the Company but I’d heard all about Kemp’s ribaldry. Finally the Chamberlain’s had enough of him. Or he had enough of them. So Kemp sold his shares and jigged his way from London to Norwich in nine days. He picked up big crowds on his journey as well as forty shillings from the mayor of Norwich for his pains.

  After my single glimpse of William Kemp starting off from Whitechapel on his Norwich jig, I’d come across the clown a couple of times in one of our Southwark ale-houses, either the Goat & Monkey or the Knight of the Carpet, I can’t remember which. This was after his return and after the failure of one or two other enterprises. I believe he’d actually set out to jig his way across the Alps. But the inhabitants of those wild regions were not so well disposed towards his antics as the citizens of Ilford or Braintree and he returned a poorer man, as well as a wiser and more bitter one.

  In the tavern the jovial, clowning mask slipped and a jeering manner was revealed, together with an unkind word to anyone who treated him to a pint. When Kemp discovered that I was a member of the Chamberlain’s he enquired after the health of Master Shakerag and the Bumbag brothers. I must have looked slightly taken aback at this disrespect – it was during my early days with the Company and before I grew familiar with the robust style of the players’ speech – because I saw a little smile creep across Kemp’s face at my discomfiture. And then, casting his eyes up and down my form, he said something about new players these days not being old enough to wipe themselves.

  So I wasn’t altogether keen to renew my acquaintance with the clown. But Abel Glaze was very fresh to the Chamberlain’s and still in awe of the legend of Will Kemp. And I’d heard that Kemp, mellowed now and perhaps lonely, was willing enough to receive members of his old Company. He was living on sufferance in the house of a widow somewhere either in Dow-gate or in Elbow Lane. She charged him no rent, perhaps because she was under some kind of obligation to him. Or perhaps she was simply glad to have the celebrated jig-maker under her roof. Though I think that Kemp was beyond jig-making by now, even if it was only three years since his Norwich excursion. Anyway one morning when Abel badgered me for the fiftieth time about calling on the clown, I agreed to take him to the widow’s house there and then. I paused only to establish from Dick Burbage exactly where the widow lived.

  Abel Glaze and I had first encountered each other on a road into Somerset. I was running away from a Southwark gaol, travelling under a false name, while he was going in the opposite direction, towards London. Or, to be more precise, he was going in no particular direction until he met me and decided to become a player. Meantime he was making a good living out of conning charitable persons in the guise of what’s called a counterfeit crank. When he saw a likely mark or victim approaching, he would pretend to be afflicted by the falling-sickness and tumble down in the road, frothing at the mouth and displaying piteous bruises from his previous collisions with the Queen’s highway. The froth was produced by a hastily mouthed sliver of soap while the bruising was mostly paint. All the instruments of Abel’s trade were contained in a few little pots and pouches which he carried round with him. He travelled very light.

  Now, there are plenty of coney-catchers who don’t receive a quarter of the alms which young Glaze pocketed. How to explain his success? He had what is probably the most valuable attribute a con-man can possess – an innocent air, a wide-eyed what-am-I-doing-in-this-world? gaze. And this pose of unworldliness was helped by a high forehead which made him look like a contemplative man rather than a trickster.

  Abel Glaze was adept at playing simpletons, bumpkins, clowns or theoreticians. He could even, and this was an odd thing, do a good turn as a murderer. When he arrived in London he was almost immediately taken on by the Chamberlain’s Company. William Shakespeare and Dick Burbage, who did most of the hiring, must have detected something actor-worthy in him. I’d said nothing to them about our earlier meeting or about Glaze’s trickery, and I would continue to say nothing as long as he didn’t reveal that he had encountered me when I was travelling under the name of William Topcourt. Each of us had a little secret that we possessed in relation to the other and this was one of the things that brought us together.

  But more than that, we liked each other’s company. He was cheerful and open – for all that he was a confidence-trickster turned actor – and besides he had a fund of good tales of his times on the road, when he was willing to talk about it. So I wasn’t too unwilling that he insisted on my going with him to see Will Kemp. It was a good day for a walk. Although we were only in February, the day was bright and the sky was clear. Spring hovered in the air.

  As we walked across to Dow-gate, which was where Burbage thought the widow’s house was located, Abel kept up a stream of cheerful chatter which was welcome as an antidote to my rather dull spirits. Despite the good weather I couldn’t help feeling gloomy. From the players’ point of view there were reasons to be apprehensive in these early months of 1603.

  Briefly, the inducements to gloom were, in mounting order of importance:

  First, the approach of the Lent season. This is a thin time for men’s stomachs and a thinner time for players’ purses. Our performances are limited or often banned altogether.

  Second, the imminent death of the Queen. This moment, like the end of a drawn-out play, had been long foreseen and now it was almost upon us. At best it couldn’t be delayed by more than a few weeks. Queen Elizabeth was not our patron but she was a true friend to the theatre and to the Chamberlain’s Company in particular. What effect her departure would have on us no one could say, but it was not likely to be helpful.

  Third, the approach of something much more threatening than any lenten sanctions or than the death of one woman, however great. What was approaching was the pestilence. The plague. The numbers dying were still low, more rumour than certainty, and confined to the remote outskirts of the city, but any increase in the weekly mortality bills would be bad for the theatre business. It might be bad for all our lives as well.

  Considering all these worries, Abel Glaze’s good cheer was agreeable enough, although in another man it might have been tedious. Whatever he did he had the knack of making acceptable. Since it was already late in the morning and we were hungry, Abel bought some mince-pies from Mrs Holland’s shop and we ate them on the way before we arrived at Dow-gate, which lies in a tumbledown corner of the river bank although there are grand houses and streets not too far away.

  Dow-gate seemed to me an insalubrious sort of place to end up in. Glaze was fond of theatrical tit-bits and old stories so I told him that this was where a man called Robert Greene had died. Greene had once been famous as a writer – which is to say, not very famous at all – but he perished in obscurity shortly after he’d attacked a young playwright called William Shakespeare, calling the outsider from Warwickshire an upstart – an “upstart crow”, in fact. People weren’t much kinder about the memory of Robert Greene. Too much wine all during his life, too many pickled herrings near his end, was what they’d said about Greene. This broken-down area did not seem a propitious place for Will Kemp the clown or his prospects of recovery either, since Kemp too had fallen out with his old friends, the seniors in the Chamberlain’s. He might have crawled into this corner never to emerge again. To think that this man had once been one of the Globe shareholders!


  We knocked at two or three wrong addresses before arriving at the widow’s. She didn’t seem surprised that we had come to call on Kemp, although I don’t suppose he received many visitors. She jerked her thumb down a passage, at the same time yelling out his name. There was an answering croak. Directed by the sound, Abel and I entered a room that was even smaller than my own lodgings in Dead Man’s Place.

  It was dim in the room and at first I could make out nothing apart from a figure on a plain boarded bed. There was a patched, dirty window. As it turned out, even when my eyes got accustomed to the dimness, there wasn’t much more to see than this: a bed with a man on it. Kemp was a little person, with a mobile face that was gnarled and dull brown like an old walnut. A ragged white beard fringed his chin.

  “Master Kemp?”

  “Who calls?”

  “Nicholas Revill and Abel Glaze – of the Chamberlain’s Company.”

  “The Chamberlain’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you can shog off.”

  “We have come to pay our respects.”

  “You’ll have to pay more than respects,” he said without shifting his position, although he did turn his head to look at us. I didn’t know what was the matter with him – whether it was age or sickness or melancholy or poverty. Perhaps all of these, though any single one might have been enough to account for his dull state.

  “More than respects,” he mumbled again.

  So far this seemed standard for Kemp, or for what he had dwindled into. No sign of the supposed softening in his manner. I would have left it there and then but Abel was standing beside me and it was he, after all, who’d been so eager to see this relic. Now he spoke up.

  “I am sorry to see fortune has played so many tricks on you, sir.”

  From any other man the comment might have been resented but Abel spoke with such feeling that Kemp did no more than grunt.

  “I saw you dancing into Norwich. As if you had feathers at your heels.”