An Honourable Murderer (28 page)

Dick Burbage's turn as Othello was already the talk of the town, and had been since the first performances in the spring. His voice, naturally resonant, sank a notch or two lower to play the Moor. Although this was only a rehearsal he had blacked up his face and hands. Through some trick he contrived to make the whites of his eyes stand out so that he looked like an angry, cornered beast. He was grand yet barbaric, even as he smothered his wife and then grieved over her body. His anger with Iago, when the truth had been revealed, was terrible to see; his anger with himself was even worse.

When Othello had finished and stabbed himself and the order had been given for Iago to be escorted away and tortured – he vows never to say another word under torture, and I believed him, he never would – there was an outbreak of spontaneous applause from the dozen or so of us scattered in the groundlings' area. To think that you could have this, standing here, for just a penny! It was like purchasing a whole world, a pearl beyond price. It was only a practice, however, and being a practice, there was no final song or jig from us players. I turned to go back to the tire-room since I was still in my Roderigo outfit.

I almost stumbled over Martin Barton who was sitting at the bottom of the steps which led to one of the tiers of seating (twopence or threepence – still cheap at the price). Barton too had evidently been watching the closing moments of
Othello
.

“Ridiculous, isn't it?” he said.

“What is?”

He waved a languid arm towards the stage where Burbage, Condell and the rest were trooping off.

“The whole thing.”

I said nothing and made to move on. But it wasn't so easy to get away from Barton.

“That business with the handkerchief, for example. Just picking it up like that! How convenient. How absurd.”

In the middle of the play Iago finds a handkerchief dropped by Desdemona and uses it to further ensnare the Moor, telling him that she has given it to her supposed lover Cassio. Barton's words called to mind the handkerchief dropped in the Somerset House gallery, the one which apparently did not belong either to Lady Blake or to Maria More.

“I don't see why it's absurd, Master Barton,” I said. I didn't much care for the satirist and knew that he was merely being provoking. Even so, I rose to his bait.

“So much hinges on a silly bit of linen,” he said. Barton stretched out his legs and yawned. I saw down his gullet. A dainty blue hat sat askew on his red hair. I willed it to fall off. “Couldn't our friend Shakespeare have come up with something more substantial than a silly bit of linen?”

“Probably he wanted to show how great outcomes sometimes depend on small accidents,” I said, quite pleased with the insight.

“Oh, how profound,” said Barton.

“Besides, Martin, I seem to remember you made great play over a little codpiece in your
Melancholy Man
. Great outcomes, little things, you know.”

“That was in fun. A small codpiece does not make a tragedy. On second thoughts though it may do . . . Anyway, getting back to Master Shakespeare, all this fuss over cuckolding, it's hardly realistic.”

“Oh, I don't know. What would you do if your wife was unfaithful, Martin?”

“That is a mischievous question.”

“As if yours aren't,” I said, falling into his mode. “Answer me anyway.”

“I am not married and not likely to be married, as you are well aware, Nicholas. But, if you mean, would I run my wife through if she'd been run through by another man in a different sense? Would I cover her face with a pillow – as we've just seen Master Dick smother that nice boy-player Peter Pearce – because she had been covered by another man in a different sense? If you mean any of that, then no, I don't think so. What about you, Nicholas? Would you do anything so
savage
, so
animal
?”

“Like you, I am not married –”

“You are not like me, but never mind.”

I ignored him and said, “I don't think I would kill out of jealousy but who can say what he would do if driven to extremity.”

(The previous night in Mrs Buckle's chamber flashed before my inward eye. The shimmerings and distortions in the moonlight. Her husband's ghost, had it been? Jealous, was he?)

“If I speak as a playwright now, and a not unsuccessful one,” said Martin Barton, undeterred, “it is to tell you that cuckolding and horning and infidelity are fit for one thing only. And you know what that thing is? It is laughter. I used them for laughter in my
Melancholy Man
. Remember?”

“I had a part in that, Martin. I played Lussorio the murderer.”

“They are about to revive my
Melancholy Man
. It will be interesting to have it put on straight after this piece of Master Shakespeare's. We shall see which the audience really approves of.”

“Yes, we shall,” I said.

For some moments Martin Barton's eyes had been tracking someone over my shoulder. Now he said, “Ah, here he is.”

I looked round. Peter Pearce was parading past us. Peter had taken the part of Desdemona in
Othello
. He had wiped the white paint from his cheeks and the red paint from his lips and was dressed in his everyday clothes. He was chatting to Andrew Larch, another boy-player, who had played Emilia, the wife to Iago and confidante to Desdemona. They were talking as closely together as they had talked in character on stage.

I noticed Martin Barton's gaze show real animation for the first time. He almost bothered to sit up from his lounging position at the bottom of the steps. It was evident that, of the two boys, he was interested in Desdemona. He had already referred to
that nice boy-player Peter Pearce
(and, besides, Andrew Larch was comparatively plain).

“Look at that elegant foot,” said the satirist when Peter was still within earshot. “And that wandering eye. And then, Nicholas, think of a region somewhere between the two.”

I had a bit of a soft spot for Peter Pearce, in an innocent sense. He had played Cressida to my Troilus in Middle Temple almost two years ago. He'd enjoyed an exceptionally long career as a boy-player and at any moment his voice must start to go, irretrievably. There were already signs of it. Desdemona might be his swan-song and he could hardly go out on a more plangent note. Then he'd graduate to youngman roles. I was pleased to see how he and Andrew Larch paraded past Barton and me without paying either of us any attention. Peter's ‘parading' wasn't provocative either, I think, but merely the result of his having played female roles for so long.

“I'm sorry,” said Martin Barton. “Have I offended you? Shocked you, Nicholas?”

“What in?”

“My comments about young Pearce.”

“It's the satirist's business to offend, isn't it? But no, Martin, you haven't offended me. Plenty of people would no doubt agree with you about Peter Pearce.”

Barton appeared almost disappointed. Whether it was because I wasn't ‘shocked' or whether he didn't like the idea of other men fancying Pearce, he now said, “Then let me tell you something really offensive.”

“A joke?”

“It might as well be. A joke on marriage. I have heard that Lady Jane Blake – she who played Plenty in Ben's absurd masque – is to get married again.”

“What! But her husband has not been dead for more than a few days!”

“I know,” said Barton gleefully. “Could you invent a better joke on the notion of fidelity and marital bliss?”

“Who's she marrying? Not Bill Inman?”

“Inman?”

“He played Ocean in the
Masque of Peace
.”

“Oh, that one. Covered in shells. No, she's not marrying him but some obscure country cousin. So they say.”

“Who says? You know this for a fact?”

“I have it on good authority, on the best authority in fact. That snooty woman who accompanies Lady Jane told me so.”

“Maria More.”

“Yes, her. Anyway, does it matter who her mistress is marrying? She'll observe the formalities, naturally. She'll let a decent period of mourning go by – let's say, half an hour or half a day if pushed – and then she'll be leaping into bed with her new man. Obviously she is a lady of large appetites as well as large everything else. All that flesh! Ugh. Fancy being swallowed whole by her.”

He shuddered with a horror which probably wasn't altogether pretended.

Despite myself I was – if not shocked – then surprised. This was a pointless response for whatever Lady Jane Blake did or didn't do was no particular concern of mine. Martin Barton got up on his spindly legs and stretched. He was pleased to have squeezed some reaction out of me at last.

“This is why I say our great Shakespeare is unrealistic, Nicholas. Why he is almost unworldly. In the real world, a man dies and his widow remarries within days. So much for marriage vows and eternal memory. But in the stage-play world, men are prepared to kill on mere suspicion.”

Barton wasn't making a serious point but having a dig at WS. Nevertheless, his revelation about Lady Jane made me think. If it was true – and presumably it must be true if Barton had heard it directly from Maria More – then it tended to darken the cloud of suspicion which had already started to hang once more over the widow.

Like everyone, I've heard stories about hasty remarriages. The stories of grieving spouses getting yoked again in doublequick time as if they cannot bear to be alone and free. There was that woman from Bermondsey who wed the tailor who'd come to measure her up for her mourning gear. She buried her first husband on the Tuesday and married her second on the Wednesday. I wondered whether he'd charged her for the mourning suit. And I remembered that moment from my childhood when I'd discovered a new widow sharing her grief exclusively with her late husband's brother, in an upstairs chamber. Even Shakespeare, whatever silly claims Barton had made about his being ‘unworldly', had provided an example of a rapid rematch in the shape of Hamlet's mother, Gertrude.

Gertrude was a murderess, of course.

Or, if she did not actually have a hand in her first husband's murder, she connived at it.

Or, if she did not connive at it, she was happy to accept the result: a fresh man in her bed.

I wondered about the obscure country cousin Lady Jane was marrying. Had she too connived at Sir Philip's death to secure a fresh man in her bed?

T
here is a whore in
Othello
who goes by the name of Bianca. She is in love with that bone-headed lieutenant, Cassio. The wicked Iago says somewhere in the play that it is the strumpet's curse to beguile many while being beguiled by one. And he was right too, if my experience with my friend Nell was anything to go by. For Nell had loved me, and me alone, as I believed . . .

But enough of that.

Iago's claim about strumpets did not apply, however, in the case of my newish whore Blanche, the girl from Bordeaux. She was not beguiled by me, despite the similarity of her name to WS's Bianca.

Blanche . . . Bianca . . . both names are to do with whiteness, with purity, and so are highly inappropriate for a whore. For an instant, a little bit more than an instant, I wondered whether Shakespeare had also been a patron of the Mitre brothel in Southwark and had there encountered a French girl whom he had transformed into an Italian one.

Pleasure with Blanche was a pleasure but it was still business. A candle on a table near her bed illuminated a sand-glass which regulated her time – and her customers' time – more strictly than a preacher's. In this everyday object I saw a disconcerting reminder of my father the parson, who would often position a sand-glass on the edge of the pulpit when he started to sermonize. His was a simple object created from two bulbs of glass joined with tallow. After the first half-hour was up he would turn it with a flourish. Blanche's device of measuring time was smarter than my father's but she kept as strict a watch on her sand-glass as my father's parishioners kept on
his
.

On my next visit to the Mitre I found myself following the events in
Othello
. It was as if Shakespeare was writing my behaviour. Just as the play was guiding my suspicions about a hidden manipulator of events, an off-stage Iago, so too it was guiding me in more minor decisions. In the same way that Cassio makes a gift of a handkerchief to Bianca, so I made a gift of a handkerchief to Blanche. Cassio's handkerchief comes, indirectly, from Desdemona. Mine came from – who knew where it came from? It was the one that I'd obtained from Ned Armitage at the Three Cranes yard, under the pretence that I knew its owner.

It was a gift made on impulse. I fished it out of my pocket while I was dressing at the end of a visit to the Mitre.

“I have a present for you, Blanche.”

“
Pour moi
? But wot izzit? Show me.”

“You must close your eyes.”

She did, though it was so dim in her little room that there wasn't much difference between keeping one's eyes open or keeping them shut. It had been the same in Nell's crib at Holland's Leaguer. Whether it is to preserve the strumpet's blushes (unlikely) or to enhance her charms (more probable) or to save the client from a knowledge of his shame (but this depends on the client), Blanche was one of those who liked to keep things dark.

Blanche took the handkerchief which I placed in her hand. She brought it close to the single candle and examined the fine cutwork and the embroidery of dainty red spots. The feel of the material alone would have indicated quality. Blanche sniffed at the handkerchief.

“Zis – it belong to a lady?”

“It does now.”

She giggled, as if she understood this somewhat oily compliment. Probably she did. I felt that she understood more than she let on.

“Do men give you many things, Blanche?”