An Honourable Murderer (24 page)

About half of the masque audience was now milling about on the wide terrace of Somerset House. The night view up and down the river felt spacious even if it was mostly invisible. The watermen's fireflies bloomed in the darkness. The crowd was starting to mass down towards one end, where the action apparently was.

Abel pulled me in that direction.

“C'm on.”

We found ourselves on the fringes of a group. The terrace of Somerset House had a grand set of stairs in the centre leading down to the river, while more modest sets (to allow for the arrival of players and other riff-raff) had been constructed at either end. The crowd was drawing towards the eastern steps, that is, those closest to London Bridge. A couple of cresset lights were burning in brackets beside the steps.

I'd been wrong when I thought that what the audience would remember from this evening was not Ben's masque but the couple caught
in flagrante
. Whoever the naughty couple were, they were no longer of much interest. Death trumps sex, just about. What the audience would remember was the body which at this very moment was being borne up the eastern stairs by a group of retainers and then laid carefully on the flagstones at the top. Instinctively, the crowd drew back.

Abel's hand fell away from my sleeve. The cheerful shrieks and giggles faded out. I barged my way near to the front. Water was flowing in streams from the body and, more particularly, from his clothes. They were heavy garments and had soaked up plenty of water. I guessed the body had been spotted just before the weight of his garments dragged him out and down for good. Otherwise he might have sunk to the bottom before he reached the Bridge. If the current had taken him as far as that, then most likely his corpse would have been battered beyond recognition by the mighty piers.

But he was recognizable now. Not his face, which was angled away from me and half in shadow, but his weighty cloak. The cloak was made of some dark fabric, darkened further by the water, and it was covered with painted eyes. Well, I thought, Giles Cass has gossiped his last.

T
he next day, which was the 19th of August in the year of 1604, we were present at a great and historic event. It was the signing of the treaty between Spain and England in the King's palace at Whitehall.

Of course the King's Men were not significant players in all of this but merely there to swell the crowd. As Grooms of the Outer Chamber, we had to dress up in our doublet-and-breeches livery, made out of those four and a half yards of red cloth, and stand tucked away at the side looking suitably impassive while the King and his entourage processed into the Chapel Royal. The Chapel was already crowded with Grooms more senior than us, individuals such as Grooms of the Privy Chamber or Grooms of the Wardrobe. There were also courtiers, diplomats and the rest in attendance.

We waited a long time for the King to appear but no one seemed to mind too much. You can't mind it when a king is late. Certainly I didn't. It gave me the chance to think. Gazing around, I saw our seniors. As you can when you've spent a lot of time in the company of the same group of people, I was able to recognize them all by the backs of their heads, by the corner of their shoulders, by their dress, their postures. There was John Heminge, there were the Burbage brothers, Richard and Cuthbert, and Augustine Phillips. Will Shakespeare was present of course, as well as Thomas Pope, who had lately quit the King's Men because of sickness but who had been determined to attend this ceremony in the Whitehall Chapel. I noticed my friends Laurence Savage and Abel Glaze wearing the same impassive, mask-like expression which was probably fastened to my own face.

While we were waiting I cast my mind back over the events of the previous night at Somerset House. The successful performance of Ben Jonson's
Masque of Peace
, the high spirits which followed it, the rumour about the noble couple who were
at it
on the terrace (I never did discover who they were, or even whether they existed in the first place). Then, as a final act in this drama, the recovery of Giles Cass's body from the river, its slow dripping progress up the steps, the way it had been deposited, almost delicately, on the terrace flagstones, the water that pooled about the body where it lay.

I must have been one of the last people to speak to Giles Cass, or rather to hear him speak. He had made that rude crack about the Spaniards kissing our
anos
instead of our
manos
, and before that he'd intimated that Sir Philip Blake was lucky to have perished when he did. The Spanish joke wasn't to be taken seriously unlike the remark about Blake's lucky death, I assumed. And then only a couple of hours later Cass had turned up dead himself.

A coincidence, it seemed. An accident, probably. For it appeared that Cass had slipped and struck his head when he was standing near the bottom of the same set of stairs up which his body had been carried. There was blood on the edge of a stair just above the high-water mark. Two or three individuals thought they'd observed him going down the steps about half an hour earlier. This I heard from Ben Jonson, who was among the crowd on the terrace watching the body being retrieved.

There was nothing odd about these last sightings of Cass except for the fact that he was apparently alone on an evening when company was the rule. But then I'd been alone myself, brooding in an obscure corner of the performance room. So Cass must have descended the stairs – to wait for someone down there? to look at the night-view across the river? to hail a ferry? – until he arrived at the position where he lost his footing. It was easy enough to do. The lower stairs, which are regularly covered by the tide, are coated in weed and slime. There is a wooden railing for the benefit of foot-passengers but the steps are wide and anyone standing in the middle of them would have no handhold. Supposing Cass had suddenly turned, his attention caught by a movement on the river. Or that he'd twisted round, hearing a sound behind him. He'd been drinking, like almost everybody else. Distracted, unsteady with drink, his foot slithers on the slime and weed. He falls backward or he falls sideways, he strikes his head on the stone step.

And then – or so I imagined it – Cass had lain there, bleeding and perhaps senseless until the tide rose sufficiently to ease him off his perch and into its watery clasp. Or, in another version, Cass had lost his balance and hit the stone step hard enough to leave traces of his fall but not enough to knock himself out. Then, groggy, unsure of his whereabouts, he had staggered upright and lurched forward into the water. But, however it had happened, the outcome was the same. Giles Cass drowned after striking himself on the head.

I couldn't feel much sorrow at Cass's death but it was still a troubling event which had brought the Somerset House celebrations to a sombre conclusion. As his body had been lifted up from the terrace so that it might be decently stowed indoors, his head fell backwards and his mouth gaped open. River water dribbled from his mouth. I thought of that frequent gesture of his, the way he dabbed at his lips as if some grease were smeared on them. I thought of my last sight of Sir Philip Blake with his gaping mouth, of John Ratchett with his still warm hand. The place on the terrace where Cass had been lying was dark with water but there were yet darker stains in the region of his head.

An accident perhaps – nobody seemed to think any differently – but I went to look for myself. Once the body, still cloaked in its garb of Suspicion, had been carried inside and the crowd had dispersed, I lifted one of the cresset torches from its bracket. I walked down the steps, clutching at the wooden railing and taking particular care when the going became slippery underfoot. In front of me stretched the river. It felt as wide as the ocean. Water slurped at the stairs.

I swept the torch around in the region of my feet. It gave off more smoke than light. Any traces below the waterline would have been washed away, but I was lucky – if finding evidence of a death counts as lucky – for almost immediately I discovered some bloody marks. Standing in the dark, which was made deeper by the torch's moody flare, I envisaged the ways in which Master Cass might have met his end. Diverted by a light out on the river, distracted by a noise over his shoulder. I looked around. I was a little below the topmost step. In other words, out of sight of any people on the terrace unless they came to the very edge of the flight of steps and looked down. No one to see him fall, no one to hear the dull thunk of a head hitting stone, especially not over the sounds of celebration from inside the audience chamber. True, the gossip had it that there'd been those noble individuals out on the terrace – Charles Blount and Lady Rich, or Rutland and Lady Rochester – but, if they were ever there, they'd had their hands full at the time and would not have been aware of a dying man.

There was a different noise coming from the Somerset House audience chamber now. The music had stopped. The party was over. A dead man had brought it to a close. Less harmonious bangs and thuds were audible and for an instant I wondered what was causing them. Then remembered that the Snells and their workmen would most likely be working late into the night to take down the scaffolding and stage.

I lowered the torch once more and inspected the stains at the edge of the step. If there'd been any doubt about what they were, it was dispelled by what I found as I peered closer. Human hair, two or three little hanks of it, was embedded in the dried clots of blood. Cass's hair was dark, about the same shade as mine, but straight and short. Here were hairs that showed up straight and dark in the torch's flare – plain evidence of how and where he'd met his end. There was something forlorn about these little traces of the dead man.

I stood up and returned to the top of the steps, almost losing my footing as I went. I replaced the torch in its iron bracket and went to lean against the stone parapet, facing the river. The stone was warm from the day's sun. As far as I was aware, I was the only person on the river-front terrace.

Three men dead.

Firstly, Sir Philip Blake, courtier. Cause of death: falling from a height during a masque rehearsal. An apparent accident, although a possible murder. Anyway, he was dead and gone, his body carted off to the family's country house in Loamshire or somewhere just as remote and rustic.

Secondly, John Ratchett, agent to the French ambassador, Monsewer La Boderie. Cause of death: also falling from a height, as the result of standing on a trapdoor and having it open under his feet. Not an accident surely, although it might have been a suicide. (This thought had not occurred to me before. Could a person standing on the trapdoor in the workshop reach the lever? Not a plausible way to go, surely. Not an obvious method of self-slaughter.) Anyway, Ratchett was dead and gone like Sir Philip. Certainly gone, for his body had disappeared. I was the only person to have seen it apart from the individual who had engineered his death in the first place and the one – the same one? – who had taken him away from the Snells' workshop.

Thirdly, Giles Cass, go-between, diplomatic smoother. Cause of death: drowning after a blow to the head. An apparent accident.

At this moment I felt something wet and warm slide down my cheek and was surprised because I hadn't known that the death of any single one of these men meant so much to me. Then a second blob tapped me on the forehead and, in an instant, there came the soft drumming of summer rain across the royal terrace. A soothing sound to wash away the bitter remains of the day. The torches started to sizzle and gave off yet more smoke. Then the rain started to come down in earnest. Whatever traces there'd been of Master Cass on the river-stairs – a little of his blood, a few of his hairs – would soon be washed away and he would be no more.

I turned to hurry indoors. One of the ground-level windows giving on to the terrace was still open. In the few seconds between leaving the riverside parapet and entering the audience chamber I was overcome by a strange conviction. Strange, because it arrived from nowhere. And a conviction because I was as sure as anyone could be without any evidence or logic to support the idea (that is, very sure indeed) that the deaths of Blake and Ratchett and Cass were all linked. That each man had been murdered, probably by the same individual or individuals. And lastly that it was the responsibility of Nicholas Revill, who had recently distinguished himself by playing the part of Ignorance, to disentangle the truth from out of this peculiar jumble of events. To pull out all the threads. And it was my responsibility because I was the only person to hold all those threads in my hands. No one – apart from the murderer or murderers – knew as much as I did.

Inside the audience chamber the sounds of enjoyment had given place to the occasional shouts and whistles of labourers as they dismantled the scaffolding and stage. The gallery from which Blake had made his fatal descent was already stripped of its curtains and screens. In one corner of the great room were piled the stage effects: the sun and the clouds, the scalloped waves through which
La Paz
had made her elegant progress. There was sufficient light for the workmen to see what they were doing but none of the concentrated blaze of a performance. Even the central spot where the King would have been enthroned had he attended the masque looked dim and uncared for. There is almost no place on God's earth so forlorn as the playhouse which almost everyone – players and audience – has quit. You wonder whether anyone will ever come back, even while the reasoning part of your head says that the very next day there'll be the usual bustle of lights and laughter, of groans and applause.

There were perhaps a dozen men in the audience chamber. Judging by their livery, some of them were Somerset House attendants working to clear this space so that it might be ready for the Queen once more after the Spaniards' departure (which was imminent). I recognized Ned Armitage and Tom Turner from the Three Cranes yard. Up in the gallery, which looked oddly naked without its curtaining, stood the figure of Jonathan Snell near the unprotected edge. His spectacles glinted. I wondered that he wasn't afraid of walking off the edge, with his poor sight.