Mask of Night Page 3

  I looked at the slit between sacking and wall. No sign of an eye. But there were surely ears pricked up inside that dark room, listening to their fate. Now Alderman Farnaby directed his fire at the pair of hag-like women who were standing to one side, cowled and expectant.

  “I don’t have to tell you your duties, do I?”

  “We know them,” a voice came quavering from one of the scarfed heads.

  “Are you honest and discreet?”

  “We are, sir,” said the second scarfed head.

  “Vigilant and skilful?”

  “Now, sir,” said the first, “I should say we are that too, though we should be the last to claim it – but if you were to ask these good neighbours standing here – ”

  Alderman Farnaby wasn’t interested in the old woman’s meanderings and cut her off with a wave of his hand. He took one last look at the constable and the old women before sweeping his eyes across the group on the other side of the street. He paused as he glimpsed Abel and me. Perhaps we appeared out of place among the usual inhabitants of Kentish Street. His look seemed to say to all of us, “You’ve had your entertainment.”

  What he actually said was, “The keeper has just called you ‘good neighbours’ . . . well, you will show yourselves good neighbours to these unfortunate Turnbulls and, er, the person called Watkins in the following manner. This house remains undisturbed for the prescribed forty days. These two honest and discreet women will act as nurse-keepers. There is to be no intercourse with the occupants except through them. A warder will be appointed at the charge of the parish to ensure that no one leaves this place. The mark on the door will not be touched. Anyone who tries to wipe the mark off the door, or who enters the house, or who aids the unfortunate occupants to depart before the end of forty days will find himself – or herself – clapped into the stocks or the House of Correction.”

  Then, without waiting to see the effect of his words, he strode off, unhitched the white palfrey and mounted it. He turned the horse’s head towards London and rode off at an even pace.

  “A fig for you too, Farnaby,” said the woman who’d given the number of occupants in the Turnbull household as eight. The words were almost shouted, and accompanied with the appropriate thumb-through-fingers gesture, although not until the alderman was at a safe distance. The small crowd nodded or murmured approval. One or two laughed. Seeing this, the little boy whose hand she was holding glanced up at her and laughed too.

  “Now, now,” said the constable, no doubt feeling the pull of his office, “the gentleman is doing no more than what is prescribed.”

  “The bugger should be prescribed himself,” said the woman. “Him and his prescribes. Laying down the law.”

  “He’s not the only one who likes doing that,” said one of the two crones who’d been appointed nurse-keepers. She crossed the street to stand in front of the woman with the boy. The crone was less ancient that I’d taken her for at first. The quaver had gone from her voice. I wondered whether she’d assumed an older, more feeble manner for the benefit of the alderman.

  “We all know what you’re going to get out of it, Mistress Johnson,” said the woman with the child. “You and your sister. Alderman Farnaby should’ve asked me. I’d’ve told him. You know why you are called keepers? Because whatever you get your griping paws on, you’ll never let go of. I’d rather have rats at my linen or moths in my cupboard than let you inside my house.”

  There was a stir in the crowd. The plight of the unfortunate Turnbulls – as well as the person called Watkins – in the plague-house had been forgotten (not that anyone had shown much concern about them in the first place). The crone’s sister now crossed the street to face their accuser who, sensing that more was expected from her, went on with vigour. The boy glanced at his mother with a confused expression.

  “And nurse, call yourself a nurse? A nurse with a pillow to smother the head or fingers to pinch shut the nostrils, that’s your kind of nursing.”

  It’s one thing to accuse these crones of being light-fingered with the household goods of dying people, but it’s quite another to accuse them of helping the dying on their way. I wondered if the occupants of the house were listening. As if the plague wasn’t enough to contend with, they had these harpies on their doorstep as well!

  I think that a fight might have broken out among the women – and was about to indicate to Abel Glaze that we should quit the scene – when Arnet the beadle returned bearing a pot and brush. Everyone’s attention was distracted by the welcome prospect of watching a man apply red paint to a piece of wood. At the same moment the constable, seeing that the danger of a scrap had diminished, stepped between the two quarrelling women.

  As Abel and I walked away the crowd regrouped in front of the plague-house, doubtless ready to give conflicting advice on where the cross should be postioned on the Turnbulls’ door. I hoped that Arnet had returned with a measure. I wouldn’t like to be in his shoes if Farnaby found that he was a couple of inches out in his dimensions.

  I said as much to Abel.

  “The alderman will discover that the plague is not so easily prescribed as a cross on a door,” said my friend.

  “Or kept in by padlocks.”

  “But they must do something,” he said.

  “There is nothing to be done by them or by anyone else,” I said. “If the plague is set on causing havoc then there is nothing to be done.”

  “Why so hopeless, Nick?”

  It wasn’t just my comment, although what I said was true enough – how could one fight against the plague? It was rather the note of resignation in my voice. I’d never told Abel Glaze the story of how the plague came to my Somerset village of Miching while I was absent, of how it had struck down many of those I knew best, including my father the parson and my mother his wife. Of how I had returned to Miching one fine spring morning to see bodies being forked higgledy-piggledy into a burial pit. Of how I had witnessed all this, as well as the red cross on my parents’ door, and of how I had run from the place where I was born until I was exhausted and could run no further.

  I’d never told Abel any of this but I told him now as we were walking towards his lodgings further down Kentish Street.

  He said nothing for a moment after I’d finished, then, “You ran away all those years ago. But you would not run now?”

  He waved his arm around. He meant, run from this part of Southwark, perhaps from London itself.

  “What would be the point?” I said.

  “To save one’s life. To get away from King Pest.”

  “Would you run?”

  “This is my first glimpse of the thing,” he said, not answering my question, as I hadn’t really answered his. “Although of course I am familiar with the signs and symptoms of the plague. I studied diseases when I was on the road since being sick was a good living for me.”

  “When I came to this city,” I said, “I grew to realize that the thing is always with us, grumbling away in the background, sometimes declining but never dying out altogether. People here seem hardened to it somehow. They believe that if you’re going to catch it, well then, you’re going to catch it. It’s all in the stars. You saw that group outside the house of those unfortunates. You saw how they were . . . I don’t know . . . ”

  “Stirred up? Excited?”

  “Yes, for all that they were so quiet at first . . . yes, excited . . . and if I examine my own reactions I was a little excited too.”

  “I felt the same in the wars, Nick. There was death all around us and the risk of it for me was the same as for everyone else but I too was stirred up.”

  Abel Glaze had served as a young boy in the Netherlands campaign against the Spaniards in the ’80s. He’d taken part in the battle of Zutphen in which Sir Philip Sidney had died so gallantly. Abel was lucky to have come off unscathed but, when he grew tired of pretending to have the falling-sickness, he could still show off a convincing limp and some good wounds (created with unslaked lime and a smear of iron
rust). He regarded his “wounds” as a tax on those who’d stayed comfortably in their beds while English soldiers and sailors were fighting abroad, just as his “sickness” was a test of people’s charity, an opportunity for them to show benevolence. He’d put such sophistry behind him though. Those days were over for he was an honest actor now.

  It’s an odd fact that, for all the horror of the discovery of the tainted house, there was also this excitement. And this despite the fact that I had the most personal reasons to detest the plague, quite apart from any threat it represented to the skin, blood and bones of Nicholas Revill. Still, it was so. I merely report what I felt and what Abel, by his own account, felt also.

  When, Abel and I having parted, I retraced my steps towards central Southwark and my own lodgings in Dead Man’s Place, I observed that the Turnbulls’ door was marked by a neatly painted red cross. Arnet the beadle had done his job. A diminutive warder was standing on duty, clutching at a bill or halberd which was almost twice his height. When he saw me drawing near he struggled to put on a fierce expression which vanished when he realized I wasn’t going to stop and gawp at the door, unlike the three or four idlers who were still hanging about.

  There was no sign of the hag-like women. Presumably they were inside the sick-house tending to their charges. That is, seeing what pickings were to be had – pretty thin round these parts, I imagined – or plotting how to hasten the passage of the victims from sick-bed to grave. (Unless, of course, Mistress Johnson and her sister were genuinely honest women, ones who would look after the dying with care and compassion.) It’s another odd fact, by the way, that these old nurse-keepers rarely contract the disease themselves. Which only goes to show that if you’re going to catch it, then you’re going to catch it. And if not, not. It’s in the stars.

  These last few hours had driven from my mind the visit to Will Kemp and I did not remember the melancholy clown until, that night, I retrieved from my doublet his Nine Days’ Wonder. It was the account of his jig from London to Norwich. I tucked it back into my doublet to read on some later occasion, perhaps between rehearsals.

  During the next couple of weeks the numbers of reported plague victims and infected dwellings increased, although only slowly. This was no longer mere gossip and rumour, however, but fact. The authorities had stepped in, as Abel and I had seen in the case of the officious Alderman Farnaby. And when the authorities put in an appearance, then bills, orders and constraints cannot be far behind.

  All of this had its effect on the Chamberlain’s Company and the Globe playhouse sooner than I expected. Our shareholders, being prudent men and sensing the way things were going, decided to make a virtue of necessity. We would leave London straightaway, without waiting for the inevitable notice from the Privy Council. The Council would order the restraint of stage plays either on account of Lent or on account of the plague or both. However, while you can get round some of the lenten laws, there’s no way you can evade the plague. For one thing, your audiences tend to drop away rather quickly. I hadn’t experienced this for myself but there were still enough veterans of the last bad outbreaks in ’92 and ’93 for the memory to be kept fresh among the players.

  It was our good fortune that we had playing business to perform away from London. No, that’s wrong, it wasn’t our “good fortune” but the result of the prudence and foresight of our shareholders. The shareholders, that same band of middle-aged men whom Kemp the jig-maker had been so rude about. Will Shakeshaft and Dick Bumbag, Thomas Pap and Richard Sink-low and the others. These were the ones who – in addition to acting, dancing, singing, directing, writing, book-keeping and head-counting – kept the Globe spinning round on its axis.

  Of course it wasn’t such a simple matter to quit London. Most of my fellow players had wives and children. The families might be used enough to their men being absent on tour. It happens once or twice a year. But there’s a difference between leaving your loved ones when the worst they’ve got to face is the stink of a London summer and leaving them when the plague is rampaging round the city’s outskirts. Then it looks a bit like running away. Two or three of the husbands elected to stay behind, and one or two of the bachelors remained in London for reasons of their own. We would be a slightly reduced group, but still travelling in larger numbers than on the usual summer tour.

  Speaking for myself, I didn’t mind the appearance of running away. I had no wife and children, no one (more or less) to leave behind, no one whose good opinion I had to be concerned about. And, although the first glimpse of what Abel Glaze had termed King Pest in the house in Kentish Street had been exciting in its way, that sensation was quickly succeeded by a dull, distant fear as the death toll started to climb in different parts of London. So, when it was announced that we were going on tour, I was glad enough.

  We didn’t know exactly what pieces we were due to to play, although various titles were thrown about. The final decisions were left in the hands of the seniors, to be sorted out on arrival. Anyway, requirements might be changed by the circumstances at our destination. So we would travel with some all-purpose costumes (from king to peasant), a few effects and an assortment of play scripts, jolted together in the property wagon and all pulled along by our trusty old horse, known as Flem and an older member of the Company than many of us players.

  Nor did we know when we would return to London. All being well – that is, if the numbers dying of the plague didn’t grow unmanageably – we ought to be back in town after the end of Lent. But there was no certainty to this. Instead there was an odd feeling among the members of the Company that we were destined for a long campaign, like an army marching into alien territory.

  I made arrangements with my landlord Samuel Benwell to keep my room in Dead Man’s Place available, agreeing unwillingly to reimburse him at the half-rate of sixpence a week, the first four instalments to be paid in advance. If I hadn’t come back by the beginning of June he was at liberty to lease my room. I was aware however that, if the pestilence really took hold of the city, Benwell would have difficulty in letting my mouldy room to anyone, and so I should most likely be able to bargain him down and recoup some of my losses.

  Small beer perhaps, all these calculations, but there was a kind of comfort during such difficult times in looking three months ahead and making arrangements for one’s life as if everything was going to continue as usual. Strange how, as we walk towards the mouth of hell, we can divert ourselves with thoughts of the next meal or of saving a few pennies.

  Apart from my landlord there was only one other person to whom I had to say farewell.

  The previous autumn I’d met Richard Milford’s young widow, Lucy. She was not a widow when we first met but a married woman. Shortly afterwards, however, her husband was murdered and for a period I was suspected of being the murderer and clapped up in gaol. Richard Milford was a playwright, an ambitious one who’d written for our Company several times. He was always in quest of success but before he’d had a proper chance to show himself, he’d been cut down on his own doorstep. I had suffered a loss of my own at about the same time when my precious Nell was brutally murdered by the same hand that disposed of Richard Milford. I suffered nightmares from that death, and from the other events which followed, suffered them for months afterwards. Inevitably, the two of us, widow and player, ran parallel in our grief. Then, not so inevitably, we turned towards each other for consolation.

  So Lucy Milford and I had enjoyed a warm winter. She continued to wear her widow’s weeds of course, and there were still many occasions when the memory of Nell would make me pause during the day, and more painful times when the image of my friend would slip unbidden into my head at night. But what they say about life going on is right enough in its way . . . although you must be careful about how you acknowledge this truth, in case people should think you indifferent or hard-hearted.

  But everyone is entitled to consolation, and I don’t think I was anything more than this to Lucy, consolation and comfort. I offered her the
se things together with a warm body on cold nights. She was shy, inward and secretive, although less so than at our first meetings. She did not see a future husband in me, nor did I discover a wife in her. I don’t think I was looking for one, while she most likely had her sights set on someone a bit more elevated than a common player.

  The day before the Chamberlain’s departure, I went to say good-bye to her in her lodgings in Thames Street, an address which was average for north London but several cuts above most places south of the river. We talked for a time of the Chamberlain’s Company and of where we were travelling to and what plays we were likely to stage there. We talked a little about her husband, and his last play, The World’s Diseas’d, posthumously performed. Ironically it had been his greatest success, partly because of the quality of the piece (William Shakespeare had made some small changes to the text, unknown to most) but more because the audiences had been drawn to the play out of curiosity. It was a drama of revenge from a man whose bloody death might have been created by his own pen.

  As I went to kiss her farewell – neither of us was in the mood for anything more celebratory – Lucy began to weep and I was touched until she told me that she was weeping not for herself or even for the both of us, but weeping on account of London.

  “What is it, Lucy?”

  I had a pretty good idea of what was troubling her. We had not mentioned the outbreak of the disease nor had I described the scene which Abel and I witnessed in Kentish Street. But the subject of plague could not be far from the mind of every Londoner.

  Lucy’s were not ordinary fears, however. Richard Milford’s widow possessed the gift of second sight (even if this is more of a curse than a blessing in my view). In her case, the visions were fitful and fragmentary. She had had intimations of her husband’s death, for example. Afterwards she had been certain that I was not guilty of his murder although she could not say who had committed the crime.