An Honourable Murderer (16 page)

Giles Cass and Ben Jonson had gone by now. The thunderstorm too had retreated. I walked across the stage and peered at the spot where Sir Philip Blake had hit the ground headfirst. It was still covered with a pale linen cloth which had turned plum-coloured in the centre. I did not lift it to look underneath. It seemed apparent now that Blake might have met his death through unlawful means. Two of the ropes supporting the throne of Truth had been half severed, there could be almost no doubt about it. Here was a degree of expertise and calculation which pointed to an ingenious murder. Ingenious, because it could have been taken for an accident if it hadn't been for the sharp eyes of the younger Snell.

I left the audience chamber. Nobody queried my presence in Somerset House. In fact, the place was strangely quiet. Earlier I'd wondered whether the body of Sir Philip was still here or whether he had already been transferred to his own house. Now, passing an adjoining room, I saw that he was not yet home. The room wasn't grand, it was barely an antechamber. There was an unidentified shape lying on a table. Unidentified but also easily identifiable, if you know what I mean. Sir Philip had been covered, unceremoniously, with the costume cloak he was wearing when he perished. His head remained hidden, thankfully. The miniature suns signifying Truth, which were sewn on the cloak and made of foil, caught the light of a handful of candles scattered around the room.

Almost without thinking, I entered the little room to pay my respects.

I had exchanged no more than a couple of dozen words with the man, and they'd been more his words than mine, yet he had seemed agreeable enough. Why, he'd asked me if I was connected to the Revills of Norfolk.

I turned into the room, then froze on the threshold. There were two figures, a man and a woman, standing at one end of the makeshift bier. They were clutching at each other. At first I assumed that they must be overcome by grief. There were mild little whimpers and tiny groans coming from them. They hadn't noticed my presence. I stole out of the room again.

As I threaded my way through the corridors and lobbies towards the open air, I wondered what Lady Blake had been doing with her body glued to Bill Inman's.

I remembered when I was young climbing upstairs in the parsonage to get out of the way of the grown-ups after some church occasion – which must, in retrospect, have been a funeral – to discover the new widow all hot and fresh while she was sharing her grief with her late husband's brother. Perhaps there is something in bereavement which makes us cling to life all the tighter. Just as Lady Jane was clinging to the secretary of her husband, and that husband not four hours dead. Could it have been an honest embrace, two people innocently consoling each other? Possibly. But I didn't forget either that dialogue I'd overheard between Lady Blake and Snell senior about a chair ‘coming down', and the way they had been sniggering together about it like children. The idea that Lady Blake might welcome her husband's death had already entered my head. Now, close behind it, followed the notion that she might have caused it.

If the sight of her and Bill Inman was an unexpected discovery, the next stage in my researches was intentional. I'd suggested to the Snells, you see, that I might carry out a little unofficial investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Sir Philip Blake. This was more or less the task that Ratchett had already imposed on me. It was Jonathan Snell the younger who believed that Blake might have been ‘unlawfully killed' while his father had done his best to call it an accident. As long as each man held so firmly to one belief or the other, it could be that a colder eye, a cooler one, might discover something they'd be blind to.

Naturally, I considered the idea that the father himself might have been involved with the death of Sir Philip. That would explain his guilty sniggering with Lady Blake, his eagerness to say that all this was a terrible misfortune. His son had let slip the fact that the father had been in the gallery helping Sir Philip into the fatal chair while he, the son, had apparently been on the other side. True, Snell senior didn't look like a murderer or even a murderer's accomplice, but if every villain wore his villainy on his face like a badge then life would be much simpler and the gaols would be even fuller – and there would be no more mysteries for us to solve.

Almost as an aside, I had asked the son whether he'd observed anybody else up in the gallery. For answer he tapped his spectacles.

“I am good with close work, Nick, but not so certain over a distance, even a short distance. Anybody might have come and gone especially if they didn't want to be seen.”

“Or nobody,” said the father, butting in.

“When was the chair last used?” I said. “I mean, when it was working properly.”

“I rode in it this very morning,” said Snell senior.

“And I saw my father lowered in it. There was nothing wrong with the apparatus then.”

“There was some give in the ropes, I told you at the time,” said the father, still keen to uncover an accident.

I also found out from the son that two or three craftsmen from their workshop had been up on the floating platform in the time immediately before and during the practice for the
Masque of Peace
. Perhaps they would have a clearer idea if there had been any visitors to the gallery. Jonathan consulted with his father who told me, reluctantly it seemed, that at least two of them – whom he referred to only as Ned and Thomas – were usually to be found at some point in the evening at the Line and Compass, an ale-house in Fleet Street favoured by the better sort of artisan.

It was lucky that everything was so close by. I hastened to the Line and Compass, hoping to encounter Ned and Thomas. They weren't there (as I soon discovered) but instead I ran across Martin Barton, the red-haired playwright and satirist. I wondered what he was doing there, out of all the taverns in London, and then recalled that he lived somewhere in the neighbourhood.

He hadn't noticed me. But seeing him in the midst of a little group of working men, I also recalled the odd comment he'd made about there being more honour and honesty in a craftsman's thumb than in whole bodies of the wealthy. Unthinkingly, I'd assumed that his court satire was carried through – like most satires – for form's sake. That is, the satirist is secretly hungering for the very things he condemns. Maybe in Barton's case he really believed what he said, and was therefore consorting with craftsmen as an antidote to knights and queens.

I was on the point of sneaking out of the ale-house when he caught my eye. Too late. He waved me over with a flail of his arm and pulled me down so that I was sitting next to him on the bench. Barton had sunk a few pints by this stage. He was describing the events of the afternoon, the fatal fall of Sir Philip Blake. This was not being done in that respectful tone of voice which most people assume when talking about the death even of someone only slightly known to them. Rather he seemed to enjoy recounting the way in which the ropes had snapped and Blake been tipped forward so as to land on his skull. In fact, Barton more or less implied it was no better than that noble gentleman deserved for the crime of being, well, noble. By the nods and grins from the circle of men – mostly young, I observed, and well-muscled – Martin Barton was finding a receptive audience.

I must have made some involuntary movement on the bench where I was perched. Barton interpreted this as being some objection to his words.

“Well, Nicholas Revill,” he said, “you would like it, I suppose? All that wealth and rottenness together. The palace and the high chair.”

“If my means matched my wit, I could purchase the world,” I said, palming him off with the stale saying. In truth, Martin Barton, drunk, wasn't a person to argue with.

“Well, they don't match, my friend,” said Barton. “If you're not born to it and you can't afford to buy it, then the next best thing you can do is go creeping and crawling towards the palace and the high chair. Like Ben Jonson.”

“That is unfair,” I said, forgetting that I meant to avoid an argument. “Jonson is no one's man.”

“I tell you Ben Jonson should have followed his father in being a bricklayer, like young Verney here.”

Barton raised his tankard at a brawny fellow opposite who, incongruously, winked back at the playwright.

“No offence to bricklayers,” I said, “but if Jonson had joined their ranks, the world would be the loser.”

“No, the world would be the gainer because at least we'd have something else to lean against. You can lean against a wall but you can't lean against a pile of paper,” said Barton. “There's a wall round these parts somewhere – in Lincoln's Inn, isn't it? – where is it, Verney?”

“At the backside toward Holborn, Martin,” said the young bricklayer.

“That's the one, at the backside. Jonson laid that wall, they say,” said Barton. “I tell you I'd rather have another wall from Master Ben than a whole folio of new plays.”

There were grunts of approval from the drinking circle, and someone made a predictable comment about paper being useful for one thing only, and that wasn't reading or writing. I wondered how Martin Barton got away with keeping this company. In outlook, in education and in just about everything else, he was far closer to Jonson than he was to any of these men, with their limber bodies and broad hands.

“I should not let Jonson hear you say so, Master Barton.”

“I am afraid of no man.”

“You know he killed a man in a duel once.”

“Killing a man is nothing. It's getting away with it that counts.”

I thought of the severed ropes in the Somerset House masque. Who knew of them? Only the Snells and myself – and whoever had taken a knife to them in the first place.

“I came here looking for two of the men who were working on the platform from where Sir Philip fell. Ned and Thomas are their names. I was told they often come to the Line and Compass.”

“Why?”

“Because they like it, I suppose.”

“Why do you want to see them?”

“Because, Master Barton, I mislaid a ring which belonged to my father on the floating platform and I wondered whether one of them had picked it up by chance.”

This answer seemed to satisfy Barton.

“Ned Armitage I know,” said one of the other young men. “He'll be over at the Snells' workplace.”

“Where's that?”

“Halfway down Three Cranes Lane on the left.”

“I'll go and look for him now.”

“Stay and drink with us, Nicholas Revill,” said Barton.

“I'm not thirsty.”

“Then give my love to Master Ben when you see him,” called Barton to my retreating back. There was a little laughter from his followers.

I was glad to get outside. The late afternoon storm had disappeared and in its place was a clear evening, rinsed of the summer dust. The streets were already drying off. Three Cranes Lane was on the route back to Mrs Buckle's. I would look in and see if either of those fellows was there and willing to talk to me about what, if anything, he'd observed in the gallery above the stage. I would have to go about it carefully. The story of the dropped ring belonging to my father had worked well enough so far.

While I was walking I thought of what Martin Barton had said about Jonson, about how it would have been better if he'd stuck to bricklaying. Barton came from a more prosperous background than Jonson – he'd even gone to Middle Temple for a time – so it was easy to attribute the remarks to snobbery. But there was jealousy involved too between him and Jonson. Although Barton had scored a hit with his
Melancholy Man
, there was no doubt about who was the more substantial playwright in every sense. Envy and jealousy are the pond in which playwrights – and other writers too, for all I know – swim about, splashing unhappily. For if Martin Barton was jealous of Ben Jonson, then Ben Jonson envied William Shakespeare.

Like the rest of us, Jonson had been present at a genuine tragedy at Somerset House just now but he couldn't write a stage tragedy to save his life. A recent piece called
Sejanus
, which the King's Men had staged, turned out to be worthy of the name of tragedy only on account of the way it was received. ‘Disaster' would have been a better word. Convinced of his own correctness, Jonson thought the audience were idiots for not appreciating it properly. Yet, in the middle of his troubles, he had only to look around to see old Bill Shakespeare scribbling comedies and tragedies with equal ease, drawing in public audiences for almost every product of his pen and earning the applause of the royal court as well. It must have been very galling for a man of Jonson's considerable pride and touchiness.

His attitude to his very name showed how touchy he was. Some uncharitable individuals claimed that he was no more than common
Johnson
spelled with an ‘h', and that Ben – turning up his nose at being the son of any old John – had decided to drop his aitches in order to stand out from the crowd. Whether this story was true or not, I remembered an occasion when our book-keeper Geoffrey Allison received a very public ticking-off for daring to write
B. Johnson
on the outside of a scroll containing one of Ben's parts – mind you, I think that Allison had done it deliberately.

By this time I'd reached Three Cranes Lane. It runs down towards the river and a set of stairs of the same name adjoining a wharf. There are three stout cranes on the wharf to hoist up the wine barrels for storage in a stone house known as the Vintry. (But I think the wine trade is not what it was in these parts, perhaps as a result of the plague.) There's also a tavern at the top of the lane called the Three Cranes but, in an innkeeper's witty variation on the name, the sign depicts three long-necked birds. The tavern was quiet. Most of its trade would be with wharf-men during the day.