Sleep of Death Read online

  Philip Gooden has had his short stories published in a number of anthologies. He is actively involved with the Crime Writers’ Association and contributes to its magazine, Red Herrings. He lives in Bath.

  The Shakespearean Murder Mystery Series

  Sleep of Death

  Death of Kings

  The Pale Companion

  Alms for Oblivion

  Mask of Night

  An Honourable Murder

  SLEEP OF DEATH

  Philip Gooden

  Robinson

  LONDON

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of

  Constable & Robinson Ltd 2000

  This revised and updated edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2009

  Copyright © Philip Gooden 2000, 2009

  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 978-1-84901-070-2

  eISBN 978-1-47210-431-1

  Printed and bound in the EU

  “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause . . .”

  HAMLET, 3, i

  Prologue

  It was his custom in summer afternoons to sleep outside. He slipped through the back quarters of the house, through its passages and offices, and into the garden. The garden was walled. He could hear occasional cries from Mixen Lane, the distant splashing of the wherries on the river, the boatmen’s shouts. The sun lay evenly across the gravel walks. He made his way towards a door in the far wall and unlocked it. Through the door was an orchard, doubly enclosed from the city beyond the outer wall. Once inside this inner space, he turned and carefully relocked the oak door. He paused and looked around, drawing a deep pleasurable breath. Tongues of leaves wagged at him in the breeze.

  He traced a serpentine path through the apple trees and the pears and the plums, thinking of the way that, when autumn arrived, the massed scents and juices of the ripe fruit would be strong enough to overlie the river smells that now vaulted the wall. When he came to the hammock which was slung between two apple trees he paused again and glanced up between the glassy leaves of a nearby pear. From somewhere inside his house there was a shriek – of amusement, of surprise, he couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. No one would disturb him now, when he was secure in his orchard. The servants had the strictest orders. Once he had been in the habit of bringing Alice here. Underneath the trees, lying on mattresses of blossom or on the tussocky grass. The orchard trees were lower then. He could not remember when he and Alice had last visited the garden together. Alice with her oval, decided face, Alice with her hair still untouched by the years. For no reason – but he was deceiving himself, and knew that he was deceiving himself even as he denied there was a reason – the image of Thomas, his brother, slipped itself between him and Alice. A large jovial man, held in the world’s regard, his brother Thomas. Equable, easy-going, popular . . . but a hollow man, without substance behind his fine, external walls. He hated him.

  Wearily, he levered himself into the hammock. The apple trees groaned under his weight. Segments of sky swayed as he looked up. A wall of white cloud was advancing from south of the river. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep. Something brushed his cheek. A leaf, no more. There was a rustle overhead. Pictures slipped through his head and then fell away from him like tumbling playing cards. King, queen, knave . . .

  A few yards distant, the figure up in the pear tree shifted slightly. It waited to see if the man in the hammock was really asleep, whether he wouldn’t respond to the creaking branches, the swishing leaves. But the man below remained still. The figure swung itself down from the tree. It landed on the tussocky ground, and crouched. There was a sound from the hammock, something between a snore and a sigh. The bulk of the man in the hammock could be seen, his dark humped mass straining at the cords of the netting. The figure slowly straightened up and then loped towards the sleeping man. By the hammock it paused again before withdrawing from a fold of its cloak a tiny flask of opaque glass. The flask was closed with a wax seal. The seal was prised off by inserting a long thumbnail under a protruding flange of wax. The wax came away as easily as a ripe scab.

  At that moment the sleeping man shifted. He canted himself sideways so that he was almost facing the figure, which stood, breath stopped, over him. His eyes stayed shut. This was better, this was comfortable! The sleeper’s bearded right cheek was laid nearly as flat as a plate. He might have been on the block, positioning himself for the executioner’s convenience. The figure could see his enemy’s bristles, the way his lips fluttered under each expelled breath, the whorl of his ear. His ear, that was what concerned the figure. There was a fringe of fine hair round the sleeper’s ear, a poor defence, weak little whisker-palisades against what was contained within the opaque flask. The figure thought of the porches and alleys, the winding paths that lead off into the head’s interior from this one hole. Of all the ways into the head this is the least guarded; it is the postern-gate which the treacherous servant leaves ajar for the besieging army.

  The flask drew close to the sleeper’s ear and was tremblingly positioned above the hole. At the lipped mouth of the flask a colourless bead of liquid gathered itself before being transformed into a thin thread flowing directly downwards. The thread insinuated itself into the man’s ear, it burrowed its way down. In a moment the sleeping man stirred. He flapped a hand, as if to brush aside something that had disturbed him, another leaf perhaps or an insect. The figure clamped a hand over the side of the other’s face to hold him in position. The spool unwinding from the flask ran faster, like the last moments of a man’s life slipping out of his grasp. Some of the liquid began now to pool over the edges of the sleeper’s ear-hole. The movements of his head became sharper, jerkier, and so the murderer pressed down harder, harder, with the left hand, while the right jiggled to keep the flask steady and to ensure that the final strings of liquid entered the waking man’s head.

  Done! Now the murderer didn’t care if the sleeper woke. It would be better if he woke, to see the cause of his death. The murderer stepped back, like a craftsman admiring his handiwork. The man in the hammock clapped a hand to his ear. His eyes, they flew open. They searched among the surrounding trees before coming to rest on a shape which, to be sure, had smutted its face and was wearing a short cloak of goose-turd green that made it hard to distinguish among the thick foliage. Would have made it hard even for a man newly awoken and without any suspicion of harm in this fallen world. But the man in the hammock was dying and had only seconds to grasp the sight of the shape in his orchard before a hot knife of pain skewered his head and was withdrawn, and then thrust in again and again.

  ACT 1

  ‘You know the play?’

  This was said with surprise. Players aren’t supposed to know plays, players are only supposed to know their parts.

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘Last month. You were magnificent. No flattery. I have said that to many others since then, before I am saying it to you now.’

  Nerves
were twisting my speech. What was intended as genuine compliment came out as clumsy buttering-up. And pompous, as well as patronising, considering I was talking to a man old enough to be my father.

  Master Burbage shrugged but was graceful enough to smile.

  ‘I’ve played with the Admiral’s Men,’ I said, to change the subject. ‘Nottingham’s, I should say.’

  ‘The Admiral’s will do. That’s what they were on this side of the river. How do they do in the north of the town?’

  ‘Well enough,’ I said.

  ‘Tactful, Master Revill,’ said Burbage. ‘The audiences are different over there, more respectable – and more respectful – than our Southwark spectators. But the Admiral’s Men ran away when we appeared south of the river, essentially they ran away, although Henslowe would claim that it was purely commercial.’

  ‘Everything is commercial with Master Henslowe,’ I said.

  ‘All bearpits and brothel business, his enemies say,’ said Burbage.

  ‘Henslowe sees plays and playhouses as a good investment, nothing more. At least, that was my impression,’ I said, eager to make a good impression myself, and to cancel out something of the clumsiness of my earlier remarks. I didn’t really know how Henslowe saw things, but there was nothing wrong with running him down to curry favour with a business rival.

  ‘What is the most important part of the playhouse?’ said Burbage.

  I hesitated before replying. This was undoubtedly what they call a ‘trick’ question, designed to catch out the young and naive. What is the most important part of the playhouse? The author? No; everyone knows that the author doesn’t matter. The flattering thing would be to refer to the company; no company, no play. The obvious answer would be to say the stage – no stage, no play either. A clever response might be to mention the seats, for though many spectators are happy to hand over their pennies and stand by the stage and smoke, the better classes pay more for their seats and the even better classes pay yet more for private boxes. With seating comes a discriminating audience, and a more sedate one. Instead, I plumped not for the flattering or the obvious or the clever answer, but the shrewd one. As I thought.

  ‘The tiring-house,’ I said, gesturing vaguely. We were sitting in a room adjoining the tiring-house.

  For where would the players be without their place to change in, and to shelter between appearances? The tiring-house is where reality and illusion meet in perpetual conflict, or so I would go on to claim if Master Burbage was good enough to ask my reasons. The tiring-house is a magical cave of unending transformations, where a player becomes a king in the flick of a costume, and a king may become a beggar when he turns his cloak inside out and smirches his face. I waited for Burbage’s approval, to begin my rhetorical flight.

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Master Revill,’ said Burbage, ‘that is a very stupid answer.’

  ‘The stage, I should have said.’

  ‘The part that matters,’ said Burbage, ‘is wherever the money is taken. That is the centre of the playhouse. That is why I would never join those who sneer at Master Henslowe for the way he makes his money, or how much money he makes or for his attitude to the making of money. In the playhouse, before you can make anything else, you must make money.’

  Burbage’s reputation was unspotted. It was hard to think of him trading in whores and chained bears. He was happily married, wasn’t he, with a large number of children?

  ‘People cross the river in droves every day,’ said Burbage. ‘They come to see us, of course they come to see us. But they come also to see the bears and the bulls in the pits. They come to visit the stews and taste a different meat from what they get at home. In short, they want to see animals being tormented, men and women both, and the men, they want to exercise their pricks across the water. And sometimes they visit plays before or afterwards. The same people. So that is why I have never taken exception to the way in which Henslowe and Alleyn choose to make their money.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ I began, ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘Players are so contemptible,’ said Burbage, in a narrow fluting voice that had an echo of the pulpit in it, ‘that we might as well be whores. We show off what we have and people pay to watch us. What do they call us, “caterpillars of the commonwealth”, “painted sepulchres”?’

  ‘Puritans say that,’ I said.

  ‘Not only them. It is a commonly held view. Even so, we are crawling very slowly towards respectability, very slowly indeed. Why are you on stage then, in this despised popular business?’

  ‘I like showing off,’ I said without thinking. ‘I like being watched, I suppose,’ I said, more slowly.

  ‘Good, Master Revill,’ said Burbage. ‘I like that. Remind me of what you appeared in with the Admiral’s.’

  ‘I was in Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and a thing called Look About You. Small parts . . .’

  ‘We must all start somewhere,’ said Burbage.

  I said nothing; I had already said too much. A man slipped across the background of the room, and glanced curiously in my direction for a moment. He looked like Master Burbage, the same tapering beard, a similar brown gaze. I wondered if it was Cuthbert, brother to Richard Burbage and the one who managed the business. Burbage craned round in his chair and nodded, and then the man was gone. I must have looked a query.

  ‘Our author,’ he said. ‘He is the Ghost.’

  Indeed there was something ghost-like about the other man’s manner of slipping into and then out of the room, something almost insinuating. Not Cuthbert Burbage therefore.

  ‘He is the Ghost in the play in question, the one we were talking about.’

  ‘I remember the ghost appearing, on the battlements,’ I said. “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” I said.

  ‘Yes, it is a good beginning,’ said Burbage. ‘I cannot think when our, ah, congregation has fallen so quiet so soon at the start of things.’

  ‘And the ghost appears in the bedchamber too,’ I said, eager to show off my knowledge.

  ‘Indeed he does,’ said Burbage.

  ‘But only to Prince Hamlet, the Queen can’t see him. I wondered why that was.’

  ‘You’ll have to ask our author, even though I fear you’ll soon find yourself – like the rest of us – too busy for that sort of speculation,’ said Burbage. ‘To business. We may need you for two weeks. That is the time Jack Wilson is likely to be away. His mother is dying in Norwich and not quickly, he has been informed. He left early this morning.’

  ‘I will take on all his parts?’

  ‘Let me see. You’ll do the townsman in A City Pleasure and Cinna in Julius Caesar—’

  ‘Cinna the conspirator?’ I interrupted. Here was a part with a little weight.

  ‘Not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet,’ said Burbage. ‘You appear and are promptly killed by mistake, to show the indiscriminate bloodlust of the mob. You will do the cobbler at the beginning of the same play and Clitus or Strato at the end, I forget which. The Roman play is two weeks away, when you will also have the part of Maximus in Love’s Sacrifice. Despite the name the part is rather small, I’m afraid. Now this week, you are to be a clownish countryman in A Somerset Tragedy – you can do the voice?’

  ‘Why, zur, ’tis where I was born. Zummerzet is the place of my naivety, you might say.’

  ‘Good,’ said Burbage. ‘Then at some point you must be a French count and an Italian Machiavel – but not in the same play.’

  He raised a hand slightly as if to prevent my showing my mastery of a French or Italian accent.

  ‘And of course you will appear in the play about the Prince of Denmark this afternoon.’

  ‘As . . .?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Master Revill, your parts are very small, you may grasp them in twenty minutes. You will appear in the dumb-show as the poisoner, and then again as the nephew to the King—’

  I felt a tightness in my chest. My eyes swam.

  ‘But that is your . . . I mean
. . . you are . . .’

  The nephew to the King! Everyone knows that is the principal part in the play! Master Burbage’s part. He wasn’t seriously expecting me to take his role, and anyway how could I? The scroll containing the lines would run across the floor of the room we were sitting in and then all the way up the wall to the ceiling! Hardly to be learned in twenty minutes even if I prided myself on the speed with which I could seize on a part. I was about to say something of all this when Burbage caught my panicked expression.

  ‘Ah I see,’ said Burbage. ‘No no, I don’t mean that nephew to the King, I mean the nephew to the King in the play inside the play. As such you are only required to come out, look dark, and rub your hands in glee. Essentially, you are repeating the process you enacted in the dumb-show a few moments earlier.’

  ‘I have lines?’

  ‘You unburden yourself of a handful of couplets and of the poison which you are carrying. You can play this badly because the murderer is intended to be gloating and obvious. In fact, the worse you play this part of nephew to the player King, the better. It takes skill to play badly. Deliberately badly.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, obscurely disappointed, but also relieved.

  ‘Then you are interrupted by the King, the real King. He is naturally disturbed by what he sees on stage, on the stage which we are to imagine on the real stage, that is.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, and I did, now that memories of the earlier performance I’d seen were returning crisper and clearer.

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether you understand or not,’ said Burbage. ‘You’re only a player. You take part but that doesn’t mean you have to know what’s going on.’

  ‘And what else do I have?’

  ‘An ambassador from England comes on at the end, you will recall. Ties up a few loose ends, tells us that a couple of people have been put to death, expresses general amazement at the scene of carnage which he’s stumbled into. I suggest you put on the kind of look you wore just now when you thought you were taking my part.’