Alms for Oblivion

Book 4: Nick Revill

by Philip Gooden

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

On a foggy morning in 1602, a boyhood friend of Nick Revill arrives in London. When Peter Agate announces that he wants to try his hand at acting, what can Nick do but offer him a part with his own company, the Chamberlain's Men, who are putting on a private production of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida for the lawyers of Middle Temple. Yet within days Peter Agate is dead, stabbed to death at Nick's lodgings - the beginning of a sequence of violent deaths, each somehow implicating Nick himself. To avoid the hangman's noose Nick must discover the real murderer among a cast of suspects, including an aristocratic brother and sister, a troublemaker from a rival company and an ex-actor who once saw the Devil himself on stage...

Release date: March 5, 2020

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 260

Sample

My boyhood friend Peter Agate arrived in London on a foggy morning in the autumn of 1602. Within a few days he was dead and it was the general belief that I had killed him.

There was a grim aptness to my address at the time: Dead Man’s Place. This Southwark street was closer to the Globe playhouse where I worked than some of my other London lodgings had been. That was in its favour. Against it was the street name and the character of my landlord, Samuel Benwell.

I didn’t care about Dead Man’s Place, or not much anyway, but I struggled to show the same indifference towards my landlord as I did towards the name of his street. There was nothing absolutely wrong with Master Samuel Benwell except his prying interest in the private doings of my Company. He preferred his own sex, I knew, since he had once approached me in a very familiar fashion, with practised hands and averted eyes, and been rebuffed. He didn’t seem to mind, as long as I continued to answer questions about what we players got up to – or what he hoped we got up to. I might have taken offence at Benwell’s assumption that we spent most of our time pleasuring each other, but it would have been churlish. I owed him something for his easy acceptance of my rejection.

Besides, it was true that the Chamberlain’s Men had three or four who were that way inclined, even if we were no different in this respect from other playhouse companies.

Humouring Master Benwell was worth money to me. By some unspoken arrangement, we settled on a lowish rent in exchange for which I tantalized him with theatre gossip. In truth, Master Benwell provided most of the talking. Licking his lips and with a queer, glazed look coming into his eyes, he would ask me a long, complicated question that gave him more pleasure in the unravelling than any answer might provide. A question as to the lodging arrangements of our boy apprentices; or whether in our tire-house and elsewhere in the playhouse there were nooks and cupboards where conversations of an intimate nature might be conducted. Was it true, he asked, that young Martin Hancock, who had not so long ago played Viola in Twelfth Night, was a notorious catamite? Messrs Burbage and Shakespeare now, Dick and Will, were they privy bedfellows? This last item I indignantly denied but I assented to most of the rest, sometimes adding a flourish or two of my own while making it clear that my tastes were more orthodox.

As he listened to my answers, Master Benwell’s mouth hung open and his tongue licked round his thin lips. His tooth-work and his lip-work were not sights to relish. This was tedious but – as I kept reminding myself – it was worth three whole pennies a week to me, the difference between the rent he’d initially proposed (one shilling and threepence) and the shilling we settled for. Benwell had no other tenants. His place was like his mind, pretty filthy. I don’t know what he did. Hanging about seemed to be his principal occupation.

Hanging about was what he was doing on that midmorning when I finally groped my way back to my lodgings. Fog had draped itself over Southwark like a greasy coat and I couldn’t see more than a few yards. I was returning to Dead Man’s Place because, in my hurried departure that morning, I’d forgotten the little bundle of scrolls containing my lines. I’d been about to enter the Globe when I realized this. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been word-perfect, but I wasn’t. Since this was our first rehearsal Richard Burbage would forgive me for not being word-perfect. What he wouldn’t forgive was my coming to the playhouse without my lines, a fact he was bound to discover the moment I started stumbling over them. If he was in a bad mood, I might even be fined. So, in the bustling delay which always seems to attend a rehearsal in its early stages, I reckoned I’d have enough time to slip back to Dead Man’s Place and pick up my lines.

Forgetting my part was something I’d never have done in my early days with the Chamberlain’s. I suppose it was a sign of how much more easy I felt in the Company. Well, there’s such a thing as being too comfortable. Certainly, this was not a comfortable morning to be abroad in. The fog seemed to have grown thicker and danker as well as nastier smelling since I’d quit my warm bed that morning. (Reluctance to get up until the last moment was the reason for my hasty, scroll-forgetting departure.) If I hadn’t been very familiar with the route between playhouse and lodging I might easily have taken the wrong turning.

I reached Master Benwell’s front door by instinct and quickly opened and closed it, as if the fog could be excluded. A few wisps and tatters sneaked in all the same.

‘Master Nicholas.’

I was used by now to my landlord’s silent presence. That is, you might think you were alone and turn round to see, oh yes, Master Benwell leaning against the wall or tucked into a corner. So I didn’t start in surprise when he uttered my name but was already shaping in my mind a brisk excuse that I didn’t have time to stop and talk – must get back to the playhouse – only returned for my part. No, not ‘part’ … Benwell would be quick to seize on the word and examine it for hidden filth … you had to watch your mouth around Benwell.

‘You have a friend, Nicholas.’

‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘More than one on a good day.’

‘I mean a visitor and a friend,’ said Benwell, standing in the dimness of the little hallway. ‘At least he claimed he was your friend.’

‘What was his name, Master Benwell?’

‘He didn’t want to give it.’

‘Did he seem honest?’

‘Do you have friends who aren’t?’ countered my landlord.

‘Legions of them. Rogues and scoundrels all.’

‘You naughty players,’ he said.

‘You know us,’ I said, moving towards the stairs.

‘I showed him up,’ said Benwell.

I stopped in my tracks.

‘Why, was he at fault?’

Oh, the sword-like flash of wit on a damp, foggy morning. At the same time, I puzzled over the real meaning of Benwell’s words or rather over the identity of the person waiting for me in my first-floor room.

‘What?’ said Benwell. ‘Oh, I have you now … was he at fault? Ha. No, he said he was a friend. He seemed honest. I wouldn’t have ‘showed him up’ otherwise. Oh, you stage people.’

While my landlord was rattling on in the gloom, I went rapidly through some possibilities. No man likes to be surprised in the room where he makes his bed. So my visitor wouldn’t give his name. Why not?

A creditor?

Well, yes, I had a couple of creditors. There was Martin Bly for example. But the few shillings which I owed to the landlord of the Goat & Monkey tavern for sack and ale – very little of it consumed by my abstemious self (I priggishly add) – would not justify a personal visit to my room. And then there was the more than few shillings for which I was in debt to Master Benjamin Nicholson, a bookseller in St Paul’s Yard. A few pounds in fact. But he wouldn’t bother to come calling for money owing to him.

It’s a little sad if the only unexpected visitor you can expect is a creditor, so I speedily summoned up a more worthy alternative. A rival in love? But this didn’t seem to fit the case either.

Who was my unknown visitor then?

And suddenly I had it.

It must be someone from another company of players, someone who’d come to offer me more money and bigger parts than the Chamberlain’s provided. Hence the anonymity, the touch of mystery. A delicate mission, you understand.

Such is the odd way the human mind works – or the way mine works at any rate – that I’d no sooner got hold of this idea than I became convinced of its truth. Upstairs in my room was waiting an emissary from, say, Henslowe of the Admiral’s Men, a rival group of players. I’d once worked briefly for Henslowe, which added a bit of backbone to this belief. Also there was the fact that an apparent agent of Henslowe’s, a rather dislikeable man called Gally, had been hanging around the Chamberlain’s haunts recently, maybe in the hope of en ticing some of us away. These were competitive times in the London playhouses. Now I thought that Henslowe must have heard of my new eminence with Chamberlain’s. Of course, I’d turn down any offer, however extravagant, however coaxing … but it is agreeable to be asked.

All of this went through my head in about a twentieth of the time it takes to tell it and a smile must have been sneaking about my lips.

‘Pleasant thoughts of your gentleman friend upstairs?’ said Benwell, whose eyes glimmered in the grey light of the lobby.

‘I must go and see who it is,’ I said, but inwardly convinced of the situation I’ve just described. I bounded up the narrow flight of stairs two steps at a time, wishing to give to Master Henslowe’s man an impression of energy and purpose even on a miserable morning like this one. I’d altogether forgotten about my playscript, the original purpose in returning to my lodgings.

I flung open the door of my room. The light was very poor – the window was pinched and dirty, and the fog seemed to have permeated my chamber too – but, after a moment’s hesitation, I recognized the stooping figure standing uneasily near my bed. There wasn’t much space to stand anywhere else and the lowness of the ceiling meant that anybody who was taller than average had to hunch up a bit. All the same this person was hunched up more than necessary. I knew that stance, that stoop.

It wasn’t anybody from Philip Henslowe’s company.

I wasn’t about to be offered a new job.

There was nothing for me to turn down.

‘Hello, Peter,’ I said.

‘Nick. I knew it was you. I heard your voice downstairs.’

Peter Agate gestured awkwardly at my meagre furnishings as if it was his room and he was apologizing for the inadequacy of our surroundings. Like the stooping posture, this tentative gesture was typical of him.

‘You were the last person I expected,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you – if you were expecting someone else.’

‘Not at all. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I wouldn’t usually be here at this time of day.’

The absurdity of my earlier speculation – that my visitor was from another acting company, come to tempt me to greater things – rushed back on me. I was glad of the dimness of the room, since Peter couldn’t witness the warmth that now spread across my face. It might have been embarrassment that caused me to repeat, ‘Not at all.’

And I moved towards Peter Agate and wrapped him in my arms and he responded by wrapping his around me, with a sigh of relief, I think, at discovering that his old country friend Nick Revill was still his friend in the very different circumstances of the city.

After we’d released each other we stood back. Like true Englishmen, we were a little uncomfortable at renewed friendship.

‘Your landlord was good enough to allow me to wait up here. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘My dear fellow,’ I said in a magnanimous fashion and then, thinking better of this, modified it to, ‘Dear Peter … you’ve given him stuff to think on for weeks. He couldn’t wait to tell me that I had a visitor.’

‘He asked if I was a – a player,’ said Peter. I thought I detected an odd catch in his voice and wondered whether he was insulted by my landlord’s speculation.

‘Oh, Master Benwell loves plays and players. He loves the backstage aspect of things. He will talk to you for hours about it. But you didn’t give anything away? Not even your name?’

‘Just being cautious, Nick.’

I regarded the tall, shambling figure in front of me. He looked no different to my eyes, no different in outline anyway. I wondered whether I seemed different to him.

‘What were you going to do? Wait for me until I came back?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I might have been hours.’

‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.’

‘Don’t say sorry,’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ he said again.

‘The same old Peter,’ I said. ‘Another apology and I shall kill you.’

This rough speech was a way of trying to reassure him that everything between us was as it had always been – although we hadn’t seen each other for, oh, more than three years.

He laughed, mildly.

‘You’re probably wondering why I’m here?’

‘Not yet. Any question like that is swallowed up in the pleasure of seeing you once more.’

True, I hadn’t yet started to wonder at his presence in London, in Southwark, in Dead Man’s Place, in my room – I was genuinely pleased to see my old Somerset friend again, no lie – but of course as soon as he mentioned it, I did start to wonder why he was here. There was a pause.

‘You have a London gloss, Nick. You have acquired manners. Address.’

‘You’ll find me the same country lad underneath,’ I said.

Another pause.

I sensed that Peter had something to say, probably a story to tell. At the same time I recalled the reason why I’d returned to my lodgings.

‘I normally wouldn’t be here, only I forgot my scroll – my part in the play we’re practising.’

I reached across to the rickety little table where my few possessions were piled and took the rolled-up papers.

‘There’s a rehearsal I must attend immediately,’ I said. ‘Otherwise Burbage will use my guts to tie his points.’

‘That would be Cuthbert?’

‘No, it would be his brother Dick. But you’re well informed.’

‘For a country lad.’

‘Town or country. Most Londoners know of Dick Burbage, but not so many could name Cuthbert. He’s more behind the scenes. Which is where I ought to be now, if you’ll forgive me. We shall talk later.’

I made to go through the door then stopped and considered.

‘If I were you, Peter, I wouldn’t want to spend two or three hours shivering in an ill-lit room. There’s an ale-house nearby.
The Goat & Monkey. A players’ place, if you don’t object to that. Martin Bly’s the landlord.’

I said this, I must confess, not only because I was thinking of my friend’s comfort but also because I wanted to show off my familiarity with the neighbourhood. I almost added, in reference to his drinking at the good old Goat, ‘Put it on my slate,’ before reflecting that patronage can go too far. (Also I was reflecting on that little debt of mine.)

‘Thank you, Nick,’ said Peter. ‘I have no objection to a players’ place, none at all. I’ll try it.’

I gave him a couple of directions, making them pretty precise on account of the weather, and said I’d join him in the tavern as soon as I could. As I paced speedily through the fog in the direction of the Globe, hoping that I wouldn’t have been missed yet, part of my mind was occupied with the question of exactly why Peter Agate had quit his home in Somerset and suddenly appeared in London.

Like me, Peter came from the village of Miching. Or rather he came from outside that spot, a place once lovely, now blighted. He was lucky in being a little removed from the village – as I had been lucky. The memory of that early spring morning returned, its terrible flavours and colours hardly diminished. That bright morning when I had run down towards my birthplace, fear taking tighter and tighter hold of my guts.

I saw myself, as if from the outside, leaping over stones, skidding on the downhill path, rounding blind corners, the dead silence of the village masked by my panting breath and the blood thudding in my ears. I’d been absent, trying to get a position with a troupe of players, a hopeless excursion, nothing came of it (except that my absence saved my life). While I was away the plague struck. My father and mother, the parson of the village and his wife, died. So did most of the rest of the village. I don’t know how many exactly. I didn’t stop to find out. After I witnessed my neighbours’ bodies being forked into a common pit, after I saw the red cross splashed on my parents’ door, I ran and ran. I spent that night shivering and weeping on some open high ground above the Bristol Channel. I almost caught my death of cold.

But I wasn’t the only survivor from our hamlet. The Agates were the wealthiest family in Miching, living in a residence that maintained a proper distance from the village folk. Their manor – called Quint House – was set apart, on a place where the ground rose. The parson and the squire and the schoolmaster stand out even in a modest village, by reason of their education or their rank and riches. It could be said that they cling together, having no true equals among the other inhabitants. In particular the parson may well cling to the lord of the manor when the parish is in the gift of the latter. Peter’s grandfather, also called Peter, had been the patron of Miching parish. Many years before, he had bestowed the living on my father. In turn my father often bestowed compliments on old Peter Agate. In my hearing he many times called him a good man, a pious man. My father meant what he said. For one thing, old Agate was dead by then and there was no advantage in flattering him. And for another, my father despised the idea of flattering. So, if he said grandfather Agate was pious, it was the simple truth. I never knew old Agate but I formed a mind-picture from my father’s description, of someone with a stern, unyielding face and a manner to match. A bit like my father, I suppose.

And, just as in most villages the parson, the squire and the schoolmaster consort with each other, so their offspring are expected to play together. In Miching we had no schoolmaster – though my father occasionally took that part – so squire and parson made an elevated society of two (although everybody knew who occupied the higher rung on the ladder). Peter and I were thrown together from early on. He was the sole boy in a family of girls while I had no living brothers or sisters. We even looked a little alike, I suppose. We stayed friends as we grew up, although never so close as in those boyhood years. On countless summer evenings I had made the journey down the slope from Quint House, never thinking that the world needed to be any bigger than the few dozens of acres which separated church and manor.

The Agates’ distance from the village was life-preserving, as it turned out. The plague’s a funny thing. Its dragon’s-breath will strike down everybody in one dwelling and leave a neighbouring one unscathed. So it was with the Agate place and its occupants.

It wasn’t until a month or so after I’d fled from Miching that I discovered that the family of my friend had survived. It was perhaps remiss on my part, even cowardly, not to have enquired after them but I’d assumed they were dead. The end of my own parents seemed like the closing of the book of my past life, one which I had no wish to open again.

I was in Bristol but ready to depart for London, there to make my fortune. And like every young man off to make his fortune in a capital city, I was sure I’d soon be rich and famous and, the next moment, just as certain I’d soon be dying – of hunger and poverty, or after a violent attack by robbers – in a ditch in the city suburbs. It was in one of these gloomy moods that I encountered Peter Agate in a tavern by Bristol docks. We met like ghosts, each thinking the other dead.

After we’d recovered from the shock of seeing one another we exchanged stories, speaking in quiet and hesitant tones as if imparting secrets. Unlike me, Peter had been at home when the plague came calling. He had no idea how he and his family had escaped the common fate of the common folk a small way down the hill. True, a handful of the villagers hadn’t been affected either but the Agate household was preserved whole and entire, down to the humblest servant. They’d lost some of the field-workers, though, and this was the reason why Peter was in Bristol, hiring hands on his father’s behalf. He told me something which I didn’t know and which shook me a little. It was that my father had, like me, been absent from the parish when the plague struck. Unlike me, though, he had not been abroad on a frivolous errand but staying at a remote farm, tending to a dying man. While he was away the pestilence took possession of Miching. Hearing this, he could have chosen not to return. But he did return. My mother was still there, of course. So were all his parishioners. When they died, so did he.

After Peter finished his story, I sat in silence for a time. Then I ran swiftly through my own narrative. Perhaps I was a little ashamed at my flight from Miching, compared with the way Peter had continued to stay on there, compared with my father’s courage in returning.

Still, all that village life was behind me now. I was going forward not back, forward to a new life in London. To be a player, I told him. Going to fortune or to ruin. (Strange that I never considered a middle course, involving neither.)

We stood for an instant that spring evening outside the waterside tavern, saying farewell. The air was cold but there were still some gleams in the sky. My earlier gloom had lifted. I’d felt my spirits rise as I described to Peter my planned pilgrimage to London and its playhouses. I had already fallen in with a gaggle of Bristolian carters who were setting off eastwards at first light. I might accompany them as far as Trowbridge. After that I was ready to take whatever travelling companionship fortune threw in my way. As for Peter, since he had concluded his father’s hiring business he might have returned to Miching straightaway but I think he meant to try what Bristol had to offer by way of diversion for a day or two. He seemed fired up by drink to try his chances in a big town. Me, I had my ambitions set on an even greater town. We clasped arms about one another, briefly, awkwardly, as if we were going to tussle like boys. I don’t think we ever expected to see each other again.

And now here was my childhood friend come to London. Come, it seemed, to see Revill. Naturally I couldn’t help wondering why.

These speculations occupied my mind as I threaded the foggy thoroughfares to my work-place. Few people were abroad on this unhealthy morning. The fog was so dense that the white flank of the Globe loomed up in front of me quite unexpectedly. But I brightened up to see it, like a sailor sighting the cliffs of home. I made my way quickly inside to the tire-house, which
was the costume-room and the only indoor area large enough to hold the whole company of players, if in rather crushed conditions. We were there not for a full-scale rehearsal (that would have taken place outside on the stage) but for what Dick Burbage called a chamber practice, an early run-through of unfamiliar material. In any event, we were not performing this piece in the Globe playhouse at all but in a different venue, perhaps a more select one, as I shall shortly explain.

As soon as I walked into the smoky, damp-smelling room my good cheer evaporated. There was a hush.

‘Oh, Master Nicholas,’ said Dick Burbage. He was standing like a schoolmaster on a little dais to one side of the room. This was his customary position when he supervised a rehearsal.

‘Dick?’

‘In your own good time.’

‘I am ready,’ I said, brandishing the scroll which contained my part.

‘You may be ready, but are you sorry?’

‘Sorry …? Oh yes, sorry for being late.’

‘Did you get lost in the fog?’

There was some laughter at this from a few of my fellows, a combination of pleasure at my discomfiture and relief that they weren’t dancing on the end of Burbage’s tongue.

‘In the fog? Why, was I missed?’ I said, laying a little stress on the last word. Oh, the sword-like flash of wit on a damp, foggy morning (and for the second time too). There were a few belated groans and jeers as the joke penetrated. Personally I considered that it was worthy of taking its place beside one of Master Shakespeare’s lesser puns, almost worthy.

Burbage looked slightly put out and I could see him debating inwardly whether to tear me off a strip or whether to pay me back in kind. Fortunately he chose the latter.

‘Beware, Nicholas, otherwise it will be a fine morning for you despite the fog – or the mist.’

By his half-smiling he seemed to say that, on this occasion at least, he wouldn’t be levying the shilling which was often imposed for lateness at rehearsal. This fine, this tax on tardiness, was not fine; it was a whole day’s pay, whose loss one could resent. Nevertheless you had to respect Dick Burbage’s public display of good humour. He and the other shareholders in the Chamberlain’s, and the rest of us, had reason to feel apprehensive at the moment.

‘Now,’ said Burbage briskly. ‘To work. Your cue from the Prologue, Nicholas, is:

… do as your pleasures are:

Now good or bad, ’tis but the chance of war.’

So I began, assuming the appearance and pose of love-sickness:

‘Call here my varlet; I’ll unarm again:

Why should I war without the walls of Troy

That find such cruel battle here within?’

Et cetera.

Afterwards Burbage told me I looked liverish rather than lovesick. But I think that it was his way of having the final word.

*   *   *

When we’d finished our chamber practice Dick Burbage gave the time for our afternoon rehearsal, which was to be on the other side over the water. He coupled this with a warning about lateness (directed at N. Revill, I felt). Then he left us to our own devices for a couple of hours. So I hastened to meet my old friend, sure that he would inform me of his reasons for coming to London. Peter Agate had done as I’d suggested and searched out the Goat & Monkey ale-house to drink away the remaining hours of that fog-bound morning. In between nervous gulps of ale, he told me why he had left home and come to London. He intended to find his fortune on the stage. Why this disturbed me I don’t know, but it did.

‘You want to be a player!’

‘Is there anythi. . .