Mask of Night Read online

  Honest citizens of Oxford? Possibly . . . although if they were honest citizens why were they whispering and slinking down a dim alley instead of sitting snug inside their dwellings or drinking the evening away in a tavern? Honest? I did not think so.

  What I thought was that I had better make myself scarce. Not wanting to go forward, since I’d no idea what lay ahead, I looked about for a place to conceal myself. Luckily, the wall on one side was buttressed by thick ribs of stone, giving this spot an even more fortified appearance. The darkness was naturally thickest at the base of these buttresses and I made myself small where the nearest of these met the wall.

  Looking back towards the mouth of the walkway, where there was a break in the surrounding darkness and from where the shuffling was emanating, I made out a confused mass of shadows, two or three, breaking apart and merging again into a single mass. The only certain fact was that they were advancing. I could tell this more by sound than sight. There was no moon, only the faintest star-fall. Even though I was able to see so little, there was some aspect to their appearance which was already provoking fear in me. I don’t mean the fear of being found out in the street after dark by some ruffians who’ll lift your purse or, if you’re truly unlucky, deprive you of your life. That fear is, so to speak, a reasonable fear. What I experienced now was something deeper which took me back to the nightmares of childhood. And the nightmare grew worse as the shapes grew larger and more questionable instead of clearer.

  What were they?

  Then from overhead there was a sudden scraping sound. Instinctively I looked up at the noise. A frail light hung swaying in the air. It took me a moment to realize that the sound was a window being opened and that the light was a lantern being thrust out at arm’s length, no doubt by the occupant of the room, curious about the movement and noise in the alley.

  After a few seconds the light was withdrawn and the window closed with another scrape. Perhaps the lantern-holder hadn’t been able to see anything from his position high up above the ground. Perhaps he had seen something, and did not want to see more.

  But I had seen. I wished that I hadn’t. I wished that I too was high up behind a wall, in a secure room.

  For what the flickering, uncertain rays of the lantern revealed was that these shadows creeping towards my hiding place had no heads – or no human heads. Instead they possessed great beast-like snouts which wagged in the night air while, waving in front of each shape, was a thin extension like the horn or feeler of an insect.

  This vision lasted only a moment but it set my heart thudding and made my hair stir. I might have tried to groan or to cry aloud but something swelled in my throat and choked off any sound. I’m not sure what happened next. I think that I closed my eyes, in order to shut out the slightest glimpse of the scene, benighted as it all was. I was more terrified of seeing than of being seen. I could not help hearing though. The padding of feet, of several feet, tentative but continuous, turned into a kind of slithering in my ears and made me to wonder whether I had dropped through the surface of the earth into a pit of monsters.

  What saved me was a curse. Not loud and not mine, but issuing from the snout of one of the creatures now processing past my hiding-place at the foot of the buttress.

  “God’s bones,” came a muffled voice, “but it’s dark enough. And cold enough.”

  No more. But the oath and the workaday comments were enough to tell me that the creatures which were creeping past were human after all. Neither more nor less than human. Three humans to be precise. I stayed where I was, huddled up in the corner between buttress and wall, scarcely breathing, scarcely thinking, only listening until the last shuffle and slither had faded into the night.

  After a time I unwound myself from my corner and stood up, stiff but shivering, in the alley. Now that I’d collected myself slightly, the scene reminded me of something but, in my still frightened state, I couldn’t think of what.

  Then I turned about and – walking more and more quickly before breaking into a run – I chased down winding walks and around corners until I emerged once more into Cornmarket, more by accident than intention. I slunk back to the Golden Cross Inn and up the stairs to the room where some eight or nine of us run-of-the-mill players were bedding down together. Since my fellows were either snoring after the day’s journey or not yet returned from carousing in town there was no one to talk to or be questioned by. This was just as well because I couldn’t have guaranteed the steadiness of my voice. I claimed an unoccupied corner in one of the three beds, recognizing the bulk of Laurence Savage next to me. He was well away, breathing easily. On the far side of him lay Abel Glaze, also well settled. But I stayed awake for a long time, staring at the low ceiling across which floated dark, devil shapes with snouts and insect horns.

  I decided to say nothing of what I’d seen. Anyway, I probably wouldn’t be believed. It would sound like a dream. Perhaps it had after all been some ritual, this dressing up and parading through the back streets of the town, quite normal here. Maybe the scholars got together to celebrate the arrival of spring or the birthday of the patron saint of scholarship (whoever he or she may be), maybe they dressed up as insects and shuffled through the streets at night in small, whispering groups. Who knew how they did things in Oxford?

  In the next couple of days we gained a bit of experience in how they did things in Oxford, or at least in the yard of the Golden Cross Inn. They did them not so differently than they did in the standing-room and the galleries of the Globe playhouse. The Oxford citizens gasped, cheered, whistled and wept just like Londoners and generally at the same points in the action. After a single morning’s rehearsal, the first play we put on was the late Richard Milford’s The World’s Diseas’d, a piece which had drawn good audiences in London during the winter and which went down well in this place too. It was a pleasing choice for me, since I played the revenger Vindice. I’d thought it a pretty absurd tragedy when I first read it at Richard’s insistence, but Shakespeare had humanized some of the action and the characters while retaining the crowd-pleasing bits (usually involving amputation and incest). And when you realize that, whatever it might look like on paper, a piece is actually working on stage – to say nothing of having a good many lines in it yourself – it’s strange how your critical faculties get blunted.

  The next afternoon we staged a newish play by William Hordle, a shy writer with a large and still expanding family. For the Chamberlain’s Company he was working his way through the lexicon of love. His Love’s Disdain we performed in the summer of 1601 while Love’s Diversion had appeared the following year. Now we were presenting Love’s Loss which was the most cheerful of the three, despite its title. Doubtless he was already working on Love Regained. His play production had to outstrip the rate at which his wife produced children and so, while supplying the Chamberlain’s with the light fare of love, he offered meatier matter to the Admiral’s Men, pieces that climaxed in battle-scenes and the suicides of generals. In Love’s Loss I played a simple soul, a contrast to the rampant avenger of The World’s Diseas’d.

  Love’s Loss was also well received by the Oxonians. In fact our reception was so good that we considered that if things went badly in London – if, that is to say, the entire city fell victim to the plague or if the Globe playhouse burnt down – then we would be able to set up in Oxford instead. It was a paper dream, for the place was much smaller than London and could not have sustained a company of the size of the Chamberlain’s, even at our present reduced numbers. And, once established in the capital, which person has ever seriously considered leaving London? Nevertheless, two or three of our number began to make connections and arrangements with some of the townsfolk, or (to be more precise) with some of the townswomen. It crossed my mind to do the same, if the occasion arose, but I remembered Lucy Milford back in London and thought she deserved at least a week or two of fidelity. Oh honourable Revill!

  Playing at the Golden Cross Inn was much more basic than playing at the Globe, but w
e didn’t mind. Give us costumes and a few simple properties (dagger or crown, for instance), give us the lines, above all give us a crowd, and we’ll do it anywhere. All of this activity meant that I forgot my frightening encounter with the hooded group of men. However, I did not wander off in the evenings again but kept to the main thoroughfares.

  As a treat the audiences were promised Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but not now, not yet . . . since we wanted word to spread that the Chamberlain’s were in town. Of course we were also due to offer this tragic romance in more intimate circumstances, and those I’ll come to in a moment.

  No more alarming news of King Pest arrived from London. In fact some of the married men were receiving letters already – we had been easily outstripped by the post-horses in our gradual progress towards Oxford – and their contents were reassuring enough (although this turned out to be misleading). I would have welcomed a letter from Lucy Milford but she did not choose to write, and so whatever I heard was at third-hand. All the news, apart from domestic matters, was to do with the Queen, who was reported to be sinking at a faster rate.

  Whether John Davenant, the gloomy landlord of the Tavern further down Cornmarket, was right in his fear that we would cause him to lose trade, or whether WS was right when he claimed that for every play-lover there’s somebody who can’t stand the things and will take shelter in the nearest tavern to escape them, I never discovered.

  What I did discover was Davenant’s wife, Mistress Jane.

  Two or three days after our arrival in Oxford, I was standing in the Cornmarket in the early morning when I noticed a striking woman on the far side of the street. The sun was fast burning away the early mist, and it seemed as though this woman came striding out of the clouds. She was tall, with a fine head of dark tangled hair. She walked in a way which simultaneously suggested that she knew everyone’s eyes were on her – and although there were only a few people about, I am sure they were – and that she couldn’t care less. Handsome rather than beautiful, and not so young either, she was accustomed to being looked at without betraying the fact (as an actor is). Someone nudged me, and I turned to recognize one of the ostlers from the Golden Cross stables, a perky sandy-haired fellow. He had taken charge of Flem, the Company horse, after we arrived.

  “I can see where you’re looking,” he said.

  “Looking is free.”

  “That one’s a gypsy. Plays at fast and loose.”

  “At fairs?” I said, thinking he meant it literally and was referring to that con-game involving knots and string.

  “With her husband – and others maybe,” said the ostler.

  “Who is she then, since you obviously know her?”

  “Everybody in Oxford knows Mistress Jane Davenant.”

  The name struck a chord, and just as I made the connection between Jack Davenant, landlord of the Tavern, and the wife whom Shakespeare had enigmatically mentioned, this tall and striking woman crossed the street and turned into the yard of the Tavern next door to us.

  So that was Jane Davenant. What had WS said of her – that she was a woman you wouldn’t get used to, not in a lifetime?

  “So what else do you know about her?” I said.

  “She is witty and of good conversation, they say,” said the ostler.

  “And what else?”

  The little ostler giggled and tapped himself on his head in an odd gesture that conveyed, I suppose, that whatever knowledge he possessed was going to stay locked up inside his sandy skull. A penny or two would probably have unlocked it but I wasn’t going to pay for gossip. The ostler seemed disappointed.

  “Well, if you want to know more, you know where to come,” he said. “Christopher Kite at your service.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “But you may call me Kit. Kit Kite.”

  I thanked him again, reflecting that it was a funny old world where ostlers gave you permission to call them by their diminutives.

  It wasn’t Kit Kite I was really thinking of anyway but the handsome woman. If Mrs Davenant was as famous or notorious as all that then I’d probably find somebody willing to tell me all about her for free. Perhaps I’d ask WS next time we had a drink together.

  In any case I had other business apart from listening to an ostler’s chat that morning. We all had other business since we were due to go to the outskirts of the city and inspect the house where Romeo and Juliet was to be privately staged. (There was no early rehearsal as we were merely reprising The World’s Diseas’d that afternoon.)

  When we Chamberlain’s played away from home it was a requirement for all the players, as well as any hangers-on, to inspect in advance what you might call the field of battle, the arena of action. Each arena, whether it’s a playhouse or an inn yard or a private dwelling or simply an open stretch of ground under the stars, has its own quality and smell. We need to grow familiar with the dimensions of the place, its entrances and exits, and most important of all, its peculiarities, such as the creaking floorboards on the left or the fact that there’s a dead spot downstage where your voice never projects properly. And the only way to know your patch of ground is by walking it over, talking and declaiming to yourself while you’re doing so.

  William Shakespeare had already mentioned to me his friend Hugh Fern, the doctor who was on good terms with the Constant and Sadler families. Not only had he proposed a presentation of Romeo and Juliet and offered to pay for it, he had also offered a venue: the spacious hall of his own house. This was a sort of neutral ground where each family might come and go freely. It was a generous act of patronage and friendship by the Doctor. Private performances aren’t so rare but they are usually requested by members of the nobility, and intended as a demonstration of the wealth or taste of the patron. But our Romeo and Juliet seemed meant rather as an upside-down warning, a way of averting a new outbreak of feuding between the neighbouring Oxford families.

  When we’d all assembled outside the Golden Cross Inn, Dick Burbage led us off in the direction of the hill leading towards Headington, a suburb which lies to the east of the city. The mist which had swathed the streets was all burned off by now. Church bells clanged. There was a particularly fine spire on a church to our left. The morning sun dazzled our faces as we walked down the wide, gently curving road which runs through the centre of Oxford and is called the High. A holiday mood still clung to us. We swung along with a bit of swagger, aware that some locals were pointing us out as the players from London and commenting, “They’re good, they’re worth seeing,” or “Don’t miss ’em.” At least I hoped that’s what they were saying. On either side was a queer assemblage of shops and plenty of taverns with great hanging signs, mixed up with grander edifices, the halls and colleges.

  After a short time the road passed through the city wall.

  Beyond it were more high walls guarding groves of trees, together with a fine tower – the tallest I’d yet seen outside London. As we were walking and talking under the shadow of this great tower, someone told me that it belonged to Magdalen College. I wondered what it would be like to spend one’s life in study and contemplation, debating under the shelter of those old trees or gazing out at the world from the top of the tower. Wondered for a few moments only. I would sooner be in the public eye than buried among mouldy books, sooner be with my fellows on the road or on the stage than consorting with dry-as-dust scholars. Then we crossed a bridge over some willow-strewn watercourses before the road began to make a gentle ascent.

  There were several large dwellings on either side of the road – close enough to the city for the necessaries of life (and, I suppose, the protection of those walls) but far enough away from any unpleasant town fumes – and it was towards one of these that we now turned. It was a handsome house, Doctor Fern’s, no doubt fitting his standing in the town. It was surrounded by a garden, gently terraced on account of the slope of the hill. Perhaps this was what happened to you when you became middle-aged and respectable, and did well. You purchased a big house with
a comfortable garden, you lived in it, you looked out at your views, and you sighed with satisfaction. I remembered hearing somewhere that William Shakespeare had bought one of the largest houses in Stratford-on-Avon a few years previously. And yet these two, playwright and physician, had apparently been on poaching expeditions together when they were growing up in Warwickshire!

  By the time all of us – and there were more than twenty players and extras – had been admitted, a little welcoming party had assembled in the hall of the house. I easily picked out Doctor Fern. A smiling fellow with rounded cheeks and a cheerful glance, he was quite close to the Cupid that WS had described, apart from a fringe of prematurely white hair which gave him a tonsured monkish look. A stolid lady next to him was presumably Mrs Fern, while a younger, not unattractive woman remained in the background together with a pocky-faced young man. Shakespeare himself was already part of the group and I guessed he had arrived at the house some time before us. It was obvious from the way that Dick Burbage and one or two of the other seniors greeted the Ferns that they were well known to each another.

  It seemed a happy household. You know how you can detect that straightaway sometimes. The Ferns had no children, I discovered later, but a clutch of dogs had the run of the place and were made much of by their mistress.

  We were made very welcome, the Doctor shaking each of us by the hand and complimenting us on our reputation, with his wife adding further kind words. I couldn’t help contrasting this with the frosty reception we’ve had at one or two great houses. Then, since it was shortly after breakfast time, ale was brought in for our refreshment. We started to examine the hall where we stood, for it was here that our private Romeo and Juliet would be presented. Although the house was quite new, the hall was rather in the old style, with linen-fold panelling and a fireplace large enough to accommodate half the household. There was a gallery at one end, and this was highly convenient since we could use it for those parts of the action where a balcony or a different level was required.