An Honourable Murderer (26 page)

Then King James got to his feet and swore an oath in Latin to honour the treaty, with God's good help. There was a Scots twang to his Latin that was quite pleasant to listen to, whether you understood the words or not. After that a Spanish gentleman whom I assumed to be the Constable of Castile, since he was the leader of their party, also undertook in Latin to honour the treaty. Then the King and the Constable fastened their signatures and seals to a little pile of documents – not that we could witness much of the procedure from our obscure position – and all this while we stood quiet and patient. Then the King walked jerkily out of the Chapel, with the audience or congregation bowing low once more. The effect to an observer would have been of a summer breeze wafting over a field of corn, especially since (though everyone's hats were off) there were many feathers in evidence. We straightened up in time to see the Constable of Castile stalk by, his haughty demeanour a contrast to our monarch's uncertain gait, followed by Cecil being carried in his chair, and then the rest of the two parties in descending order of precedence.

And that was that, more or less. There was to be a feast at the Banqueting Hall, to which we weren't invited. I heard later that the two sides tried to drink each other under the table, and that the King was particularly eager for toast after toast to be drunk since the Constable of Castile presented him with a fine gold and crystal cup when the first health was pledged.

The public – that is to say, people like us – was allowed to watch the animal fights in the palace courtyard. It was the King's bears against greyhounds, followed by mastiffs baiting a tethered bull. But I've never had that much of an appetite for the bear-pit so I slipped off. I tried to tell myself that I'd been present at a piece of history-making (something to tell the grandchildren, although before you can have grandchildren you have to have children) but it didn't convince. Treaty or no treaty, England and Spain might be at war again in a year or two. It was all a matter of show.

I had a privileged glimpse behind the scenes on my way out of Whitehall Palace. Getting lost in the building, I was passing, for at least the second time, a great pair of double doors. They'd previously been shut but were now open. Glancing in, I saw the English and the Spanish on opposite sides of a brocade-covered table. Among them I recognized the white-whiskered visage of Charles Howard, the Lord High Admiral, as well as Charles Blount, the chubby-faced Earl whom Cass had pointed out to me in Somerset House. At the near end of the table sat Secretary Cecil, with a pen, ink-well and single sheet of paper in front of him. On the other side of the long table, like so many knights ranged for combat, sat an equivalent number of Spanish grandees. I recognized the Count and the hawk-eyed lawyer whom Ratchett had identified, together with the Constable who had lately sworn the oath in the Chapel Royal. In fact I recognized so many of these men that I felt we'd already been introduced.

I was still staring into the room when Cecil's great domed head swung towards me, like a lumbering but dangerous beast. Then most of the table turned their heads in my direction. Yet they weren't really looking at me, a poor player, a nobody. Rather it was as if they were sitting for a collective portrait so that this instant could be commemorated down the ages. History sat heavy on their shoulders. Then the double doors were slammed shut by unseen retainers and once more I resumed the business of getting lost in Whitehall Palace.

A couple of days later, after more feasting and toasting and pledging, the Spaniards left town. Somerset House was restored to its rightful owner. It was said that Queen Anne lost no time in decamping from Whitehall and returning home. Home for her was evidently any place where her husband was not.

It was a somewhat longer journey home for the Spanish. They withdrew downriver with little of the pomp and ceremony which had attended their arrival. Londoners, always quickly jaded, showed no curiosity about the departure of the old enemy, the insolent foe. Before the Spanish arrived in London, there'd been relief that they were not bringing their own fleet upriver as far as the city. (This was the reason they had initially disembarked at Dover since the Privy Council could not permit them to accomplish in peace what they'd never achieved in war.) But now I don't suppose anyone would have cared if they'd come and gone with a whole fleet of ships. They might have been a touch cocky in their demeanour, they might have spoken a strange language, but they didn't wear horns and some of their women were beautiful.

I wondered what Sir Walter Raleigh thought to see them go. I wondered too about the legal niceties of the case against him. Since he'd been accused of conspiring with Spain – and ignoring the fact that this was an absurd charge in the first place – could he any longer be considered guilty of treason? For our old enemy was our new friend. We were all conspirators with Spain now, or at least the King and Secretary Cecil and the rest of the pack were. So where did that leave Sir Walter? An interesting problem for our legal friends in Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn there. Whatever was to happen to him, at least Raleigh had been spared the traitor's ultimate and dreadful fate: to have the hangman cut him open and thrust bloody hands into his warm entrails even as he hung alive on the scaffold, and to witness this man draw the guts before his face, and then to have his private parts cut away and cast into the fire before his eyes . . . it was too horrible to think about, yet it was somehow impossible not to think about it if your mind drifted in that direction. My mind had been drifting in that direction quite a lot recently. I suppose these horrid pictures were prompted by Giles Cass's remarks to me about Sir Philip Blake. About how he was lucky to have died when he did since Secretary Cecil, James's beagle, was on his trail. Certainly he had perished quickly compared to what his time on the scaffold would have been. If Cass was telling the truth, of course . . .

But back to our Spanish guests. They disembarked somewhere beyond Greenwich and travelled overland to Dover where they boarded their own vessels and sailed away, to drop off the edge of the world for all I knew.

I enjoyed Mrs Buckle's company for one further night. Or rather I would have done had her late husband not come between us.

Relations were a little awkward, maybe more awkward than they would have been if we'd never shared a bed. I was not certain whether she wanted to resume our connection, to put it coyly. But three or four days after the performance of the
Masque of Peace
, we again found ourselves sitting up late, sharing some wine and chatting. I had been telling her of the Spaniards, since I had seen them at close quarters, and of the Queen's skill in dancing. I found myself gazing at the pronounced groove above her upper lip. I knew it now, a little, but I would not object to knowing it again, it and other things. To round off our chat, like the final item in a feast, I mentioned the drowned man who'd been fished from the river outside Somerset House.

“Who was he?”

“The drowned man? Someone called Cass, Giles Cass.”

“A great man?”

“No. Or, if so, only in his own estimation.”

“Did he have a wife?”

“I don't know. Does it matter?”

“It would to her.”

But the question of whether Cass had a wife was of little interest to me. Of no interest at all in fact. Although unlike Martin Barton in other respects, he too had seemed not the marrying kind. Cass's loss was not much regretted. Even Ben Jonson, when I referred to the subject a day or two later, had shrugged his shoulders and said something in Latin about death being common to all men. As for the way Cass had perished, nothing could have been more ordinary. Men, women and children fall into the river every day. It is London's great receptacle.

Back to the living . . .

Mrs Buckle and I retired to her chamber. I only knew she wanted this by her instruction to me to follow her in five minutes. She must have been fearful of our footsteps being heard in unison, and alerting Lizzie the daughter or Grace the servant-girl. I crept along, by instinct, although I knew that if I were innocently going up to my own chamber I would have walked carelessly enough.

We lay down on her marital bed in an oddly decorous fashion. The single illumination came through the casement window from a nearly full moon. I thought of those husband-and-wife figures who stretch out beside each other for their eternal rest on the top of a church tomb. These weren't very warm or encouraging thoughts. I put my arm across so that it rested on Mrs Buckle's breasts. Except in one part, I felt as stiff as one of those pieces of tomb statuary. Mrs Buckle was still wearing her day clothes, her widow's weeds. They showed up inkily in this light. Suddenly she too stiffened, in apprehension.

“See where he comes!”

She grasped my hand tightly where it clutched her left breast. By this time I was lying half across her. I turned my head. There was nothing to see, just the moonlight picking out the few bits of furniture in the bedchamber: a padded stool, a large chest, a small cupboard.

Mrs Buckle sat up abruptly. I sensed rather than saw her staring in the direction of the window. I thought she'd forgotten my presence but when she next spoke it was to me, not to whatever she'd glimpsed across the room.

“You see him? Oh, you must see him.”

“There is nothing –”

But I never finished the sentence for a weird alteration in the moonlight occurred. It was if a sheet of thick glass, full of flaws, was moving between the window and the bed where we were lying. The moon's whiteness was splintered into fragments as it poured into the room. I felt the place go cold. It had been a warm summer's night, now it turned as chill as spring. Goosebumps broke out on my arms.

“In his habit as he lived,” said Mrs Buckle in a whisper. “He is leaving now.”

The disturbance in the moonlight passed and the room was filled once more with the planet's steady, unhuman glow.

I'd never seen a ghost before and wasn't sure that I'd seen one now. Perhaps it was no more than a trick of the light, a tattered cloud moving in front of the moon or a momentary blurring in my vision. But the hair on my head told a different tale. And whatever I'd glimpsed, imperfectly, Mrs Buckle had seen in full. Her late husband, the Reverend Hugh Buckle, would not leave her in peace.

The widow did not have to ask me to leave her. To be honest, after this latest visitation (if that's what it was), I wasn't in the mood for it. Nor was she. We made our half apologies – “I think I'd better . . .” and “Perhaps it would be best if . . .” – and I slunk upstairs to my own room, although not before ensuring that Mrs Buckle was content to be by herself for the rest of the night. She might have shifted rooms, although that would hardly deter a ghost. Perhaps her enforced move from Thames Street was a good thing after all.

I was shaken by the apparition. Baffled, too. What did the late Reverend Buckle require? To frighten his wife into propriety? To scare off an interloper in his bed? If so, he'd succeeded. But are ghosts so petty-minded? Oh yes, I thought, they must be. Why should they be any different from the rest of us? And then I wondered whether the ghost was walking for another reason altogether, and not out of jealousy. If so, it was a mystery. And, as it turned out, a solution to this mystery was to be found, like so much else, in the works of Master William Shakespeare.

T
he first play we were scheduled to put on at the restored Globe was WS's tragedy of the Moor called Othello. The theatre looked much better for its new coats of paint and general sprucing-up. It was over four years now since the Globe had been erected on this spot, and for a quarter of that time the place had been left empty during the plague. Indeed, the fabric of the building was considerably older than those four years since the timbers had been the ones originally used for the theatre in Shoreditch, dismantled and transported across the frozen Thames during the course of a bitter winter.

A good, meaty tragedy was required to open proceedings and there was a double advantage in staging
Othello
at this point in late August. Its popularity had already been proved by a short run in the spring of the year, and Dick Burbage had added to his fame by his interpretation of the title part. The seniors knew that word of mouth would bring in new audiences as well as those who'd be happy to see it for a second time. The other reason was that, as WS had indicated to me, we were due to perform
Othello
in front of the court at Whitehall in the near future. So the opportunity to refine the play – not in its verses, of course, but in the details of its action – was welcome. You might have thought that King James would prefer fresh plays, never exhibited before the public. In fact, insofar as he had any taste for plays at all, it was for old favourites. The very first play we'd performed for our powerful patron,
As You Like It
, dated from Elizabeth's reign.

I'd resigned myself to a couple of minor parts (the soldier, the senator) in the revived
Othello
but I was lucky in the misfortune of one of my friends. Laurence Savage had taken the part of the dupe Roderigo in the spring production and had been assigned the same role this time. Laurence made a good dupe, he could assume an air that was at once doltish and calculating. He had that cowlick over his forehead which seemed to speak volumes. But by bad luck on the day before the rehearsal he ate too many oysters in the Mermaid tavern, keeping company with Ben Jonson, and the same night he was puking his guts up and the next day he was feeling exceedingly sorry for himself. Laurence dutifully turned up for the
Othello
rehearsal but the only part he would have been suitable for was playing a revenant from the grave. Dick Burbage sent him back to be sick in his lodgings and drafted me in his place.

“I'm sorry, Laurence,” I said, clapping my friend lightly on the back as he passed me at a rush, heading for one of the waste buckets stationed about the Globe playhouse for the convenience of our patrons.