An Honourable Murderer

Book 6: Nick Revill

by Philip Gooden

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

It's the summer of 1604 and the Spanish are in London. Many years after the ill-fated Armada, they are negotiating a peace treaty with the English. Nick Revill's acting company is given a ceremonial role at the celebrations. But not everybody welcomes this outbreak of peace. In the shifting world of the court there are factions. In the Tower of London sits that implacable enemy of the Spanish, Sir Walter Raleigh, and he has friends on the outside who may try to sabotage the negotiations. Nick, meanwhile, is trying to get on with his playing. Invited by Shakespeare's rival, Ben Jonson, to take part in a masque at Somerset House where the Spanish are lodged, Nick is caught up in a conspiracy. During a rehearsal the courtier Sir Philip Blake dies an apparently accidental death when he tumbles from a 'Deus ex machina' chair which is lowering him to the stage. But this is only the first of a series of suspicious deaths, and Nick must look for the murderer among those around him. And Nick has other distractions besides. There is his growing attraction to his landlady, the widowed Ursula Buckle. And then there is that new French girl at the Mitre brothel...

Release date: March 5, 2020

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 259

Sample

The August sun glittered on the water. The boats jostled each other in the swell as though, like the spectators, they were trying to position themselves for a better view. The river smelled as bad as it usually did in the late summer but I don’t suppose any of us were more than occasionally aware of the stench. We were too busy watching out for the enemy.

Both sides of the river were solid with craft, bobbing in expectation. Ferries and wherries overshadowed little sculls and skiffs. There were herring buses and eel boats, temporarily diverted from the fish trade. There were primitive vessels which looked to have been made out of logs and kept afloat by bladders, and which I personally wouldn’t have boarded even to see the arrival of the Queen of Sheba. All of these craft were stuffed with goggling Londoners.

We were moored on the south bank of the river between the Globe playhouse and Molestrand Dock. And we – the King’s Men – were in something of a privileged position because we were standing on the deck of our very own barge. Dick Burbage and the other senior shareholders in the Globe had splashed out a hundred shillings a year on hiring a big boat. This vessel was moored near to the playhouse and was used to ferry us to important places on the other side of the water such as Whitehall Palace and Somerset House, so that we should arrive in style.

Our boat was painted with the image of the Company symbol which stands on top of the thatched roof of the theatre – it’s a figure depicting Hercules the strong man holding up the globe – so that everyone could see who we were and where we came from. Sometimes we advertised our forthcoming productions with banners draped over the sides.

But on this glaring August afternoon no one was looking at us. All eyes were directed towards the middle of the river where a fleet of bedecked barges was making its way upstream to the beating of drums and the tootling of trumpets. The painted oars caught the sun as they cleared the water in unison and threw out a curtain of sparkling spray with each stroke. Church bells rang out from both shores.

“Oh, look at the Dons!” said Mrs Burbage. “Look how many of them there are.”

For this special occasion some of the women had been invited on board the Hercules, as the Globe barge was called. Dick Burbage’s wife tried to sound careless enough but there was an undertone of something else in her voice, a note between fear and admiration perhaps.

“It’s a proper armada,” said her husband, and there was a bit of laughter from the older members of the Company, the ones whose memories stretched back that far.

I’d barely been into my teens when the Spanish had last attempted to make a landing in England. It was during the summer of ’88 in the previous century. Of course the news did not reach our little Somerset village for many days, not until it was all finished with and (had we but known it) we were safe and sound. But by God’s grace – and with a little help from the stormy weather and the fighting prowess of our sailors – that great fleet of foreigners had been scattered in all directions. We’d tweaked the King of Spain’s beard, we’d given him a bloody nose, I remember my father saying. That was immediately before he sank to his knees in thankful prayer.

I was more surprised at my dad’s jubilation and his language than I was at the defeat of the Spanish since I’d been too young or simply too ignorant to understand the danger we were in. Maybe I only began to appreciate the threat properly after the church bells were ringing out and our neighbours were dancing and drinking on the village green by the pond. My father used the Spanish defeat as material for the first of several fiery sermons.

But whatever my youthful ignorance, if it hadn’t been for the grace of God, if it hadn’t been for the weather et cetera, we English might have been very used to this vision by now. That is, the vision of a grand procession of boats floating on our river Thames and containing the flower of the Spanish nobility. Might have been so used to it that we’d scarcely have looked at it twice. Instead, we would all have been trying to wrap our tongues around Spanish vowels at this moment, in submission to an all-conquering power.

As it was, we were viewing the people whom Mrs Burbage had called the ‘Dons’ as guests, as honoured visitors to London. They came in peace. There was no reason to feel fear. Even so, I shivered slightly. Perhaps it was the breeze which had suddenly sprung up and which broke the light on the water into ten thousand fragments of silver.

“A long time ago I fought those people,” said Abel Glaze.

“And now they are to be welcomed,” said Jack Wilson.

“Welcomed with open arms rather than with unsheathed weapons,” said Laurence Savage.

My friends were standing next to me by the railing and gazing across the water. Even before the Armada and its defeat, Abel Glaze had taken part in the Netherlands campaign against the Spanish. He too had scarcely been into his teens. But during the period when I was ignorant of pretty well everything outside the boundaries of my father’s Somerset parish, Abel was fighting for his life and watching others lose theirs over the sea. Jack Wilson was a bit older and had been a member of the King’s Men for longer. In fact I’d obtained my first foothold in the Company by filling in for him during a temporary absence. Laurence Savage, an amiable fellow with a cowlick of dark hair topping his round face, had run away from his unhappy home and joined the Company years earlier.

“The enemy,” I said, for the sake of saying something.

“Yes,” said Abel. “But the cold was the real enemy in the Low Countries, the cold and the shortages. General Frost and Sergeant Hunger killed many more of us than they ever did.”

We had a fair view of them now. The Hercules was a large boat, suitable for the King’s Men, and it raised us a couple of feet higher than the nearest craft on the river. We were able to see Spanish gentlemen – and some Spanish ladies too – sitting or standing on the grand barges. From this distance they looked little different from an equivalent helping of our royal court. Finely dressed, naturally, and with an arrogant tilt to their postures. You might even have called them insolent.

I wondered whether the Spaniards were as curious to see us as we were to see them. Probably not. If you’re high-up you are used to being gawped at rather than doing the gawping. A few Londoners were waving their hands in a tentative way but there were no answering waves from the foreigners.

“Nine – ten – eleven boats … I can see so far … and there are more of them coming,” said Jack, squinting into the sun-dazzle downstream. “How long will this line stretch out?”

“Till the crack of doom,” said a voice behind us.

It was William Shakespeare. We turned to see our shareholder, playwright and occasional actor standing at our shoulders. There was an intent expression in his face. Even WS – the friend of the high and mighty, a man at home with kings and queens (on and off the stage) – was impressed by this floating procession, it seemed to me.

“We shall look dowdy by comparison, Will,” said Laurence Savage. “Are we getting new livery? Have you asked Secretary Cecil for new livery?”

“He’s probably got more important matters in hand at the moment, but you could ask him yourself,” said WS, jerking his thumb at a barge which was moored fifty yards or so upstream. It was the largest boat on this side of the river and, strangely, it carried no identifying marks. From our position we were unable to see the interior, which was lavishly curtained off.

“Cecil is over there?” said Jack.

“Not only him but the Lord High Admiral, I believe – oh, and the Queen.”

WS enjoyed the little ripple which this information caused among those standing nearest.

“Do you think we’re the only people to feel anything as vulgar as curiosity about our new friends?” he went on. “Or that no one else has wondered whether the Spaniard will arrive with horns on his head and belching hell-fire? The King may have to stay in Whitehall and wait for the grandees to come to him, but that doesn’t mean his wife must do the same. If she wants to watch the Spaniards arrive from the privacy of her own river-boat then she will.”

“Queen Anne goes her own way,” said Jack Wilson, throwing in his own bit of insider knowledge.

This was true as far as I was aware (which wasn’t very far at all). After countless years of being governed by a single woman who had no consort, it was odd to find ourselves being ruled over by a King and a Queen. Odd also that the English were now governed by a couple neither of whom was English by origin. James of Scotland kept his state in Whitehall Palace while Anne of Denmark kept hers a full mile to the east in Somerset House. They were separate in many things – for example, we Globe players were the King’s Men, while the Queen bestowed her theatre patronage on the Earl of Worcester’s Men. But the royal pair had come together on at least three occasions during their marriage and produced two princes and a princess.

“Maybe Anne’s got nowhere to stay except on that boat,” I said.

The Queen had voluntarily given up her residence on the banks of the Thames when the Spanish ambassador had chosen it as the only place in town splendid enough to accommodate his country’s envoys while they were staying in London. It really was a voluntary move. In some quarters, Anne was whispered as being of the Spanish party.

“She is back in Whitehall Palace for the time being,” said Shakespeare.

“And back in the King’s bed?” said Abel.

“She’ll have to kick Pembroke out first, it is rumoured,” said Jack.

“A handsome youth, that Pembroke,” said Laurence.

“But I have heard that the King thinks Pembroke’s brother is a handsomer one,” I said.

Listen to us talk! As though we were fully fledged courtiers. We waited for Shakespeare to confirm or deny these latest scurrilous stories about our King. But if he knew anything he wasn’t saying. In fact WS turned away, with a look of slight disapproval on his face as if we were gossiping out of turn. Another strange feature of the new reign was that, whereas under Elizabeth most of the gossip had been to do with state affairs and the succession, the current tattle mostly concerned James’s favourites. It was all about who was in and who was out and who was elbowing his way to the front of the court queue. It felt to me that things weren’t quite as serious as they used to be – or maybe I was just getting older.

I noticed that WS had moved away without answering Abel’s question about whether we would be issued with new livery for the forthcoming peace celebrations. To mark James’s coronation in the summer of the previous year we’d each received precisely four and a half yards of red cloth to make doublet and breeches for the procession. By that stage we were no longer the Chamberlain’s but the King’s Men. (Our ailing patron, Lord Hunsdon, had died though not of the general pestilence but of the pox.)

“Eighteen – nineteen – twenty boats I have seen,” said Jack Wilson, “but these ones now are nothing like so grand as the leaders.”

All of us could see the way this Spanish ‘armada’ was dwindling to its conclusion. I glanced upstream at the large, anonymous barge with its lavish curtains. Behind them apparently sheltered Queen Anne as well as Robert Cecil, the crookback Secretary of State, and Charles Howard, the Lord High Admiral. Everyone knew Howard, even relatively new Londoners like myself. He had commanded the English fleet against the ’88 armada and was no doubt curious to see an old enemy whose less ceremonial arrival he had fought to prevent all those years ago. I had a more particular reason for recognizing his name since, when I’d first come to London, I had been temporarily taken on by the Admiral’s Men, who played under his protection – not that I’d ever seen the great man at any of our performances. He kept away. In this he was like many patrons.

There were only a handful of barges passing now. They were workaday ones rather than brightly decked out, while their oars were coated with plain varnish. Even the spray coming off them seemed not to glitter quite so much. They were full of dark-suited attendants with a scattering of soldiers. The boats in the very rear were low in the water on account of the canvas-covered cases and trunks which they carried.

The attention of the Londoners bobbing on the Thames waters had also dwindled and a buzz of talk was breaking out. The main action was over. The principal actors of the invading party – all those foreign Constables, Counts and Dukes – were on the leading craft which had already travelled upriver and were preparing to dock at Somerset House, or Denmark House as it was officially called. What was travelling in front of our eyes now was like the baggage train of an army, no doubt important for general sustenance but not very interesting.

The Hercules rocked slightly as the senior members and shareholders of the King’s Men began to disembark. Our own little group by the railing – Jack Wilson, Abel Glaze, Laurence Savage and I – also turned our backs on the water. The show on the river was finished. And there would be no show for us in the Globe theatre this afternoon or for several afternoons to come. We were enjoying a break from playing. There was a festive, holiday spirit. The sun was out.

We jostled our way to the gangplank, the others in the lead. I felt my shoulder being grasped by a firm paw. I recognized that grasp. Only one man connected to the King’s Men had that power in his fingers. I turned about to look full into the gaze of Master Benjamin Jonson.

“Well, Nicholas Revill, have you given thought to my suggestion?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I would be honoured to join you and your friends.”

“They’re your friends too. Good man. You will come tonight then?”

“Where to?”

“There is a fish tavern in Bread Street –”

“The Mermaid. I know it.”

“Good man,” repeated Jonson with real approval. “We will be enjoying ourselves from seven onwards. ‘Pine kai eufrainou’ is what Palladas of Alexandria tells us.”

“I expect he does,” I said.

“Drink and be merry, Nicholas. Drink and be merry. We never know whether the next day will be our last.”

The grasp on my shoulder tightened even further before Jonson allowed his hand to fall away. He had a pock-marked face and a manner of getting up close when he spoke to you, even if he was only talking about the day’s weather. Mind you, with Jonson, any comment about the day’s weather was usually accompanied by a classical garnish – just a sliver of Latin or a sprig of Greek, as above. He prided himself on his learning and lost no opportunity of showing it off. He thought William Shakespeare was quite an ignorant, unrefined man.

Like WS, Benjamin Jonson was a player and writer, though a much more touchy one. He was always on the lookout for snubs. You’d never have thought that he was the son of a bricklayer and had served an apprenticeship in the trade or that, like Abel Glaze, he had fought in the Netherlands or that he’d killed a man in a duel and only just escaped the noose – at least you wouldn’t have thought any of these things until you experienced the strength in his hands.

At this moment, from our vantage point at the head of the gangplank which linked the Hercules to dry land, we could see over the heads of the people milling about on the river bank. There was a stir of activity in the region of the anonymous barge moored further upriver. There was nothing really anonymous about it, of course. How could there be when the Queen of England and Scotland was involved? A knot of uniformed yeomen blocked our view but between their shoulders I could glimpse a figure being ushered into a closed carriage. The figure’s face was concealed by an elaborate mask. From a practical point of view this was silly. (If you want to draw attention to yourself, wear a mask. If you’re looking not to be recognized, go about bare-faced and with some tiny difference from the usual.) But it was said that Queen Anne liked dressing up and taking part in dances and masques.

Ben Jonson was still at my elbow as we paused on the gangplank, caught up in the line of our departing fellows. Beneath us was a ten-foot drop into the greasy water between the barge and the bank. I was almost fearful that a careless movement might pitch me into the river. Jonson gestured towards one of the individuals who had disembarked from the royal barge and was pacing in the Queen’s wake. This was a quite elderly man with a fine, fair moustache and a forked beard.

“Look at Howard, look at the Lord High Admiral,” he said. “Observe the spring in his step. That’s what a young wife will do for you. Young wives are a great preservative.”

Like Shakespeare, Ben Jonson was fond of showing his familiarity with the court high-ups. He did it more nakedly than WS, however. But it was true that Charles Howard – or the Earl of Nottingham – or the Lord High Admiral – walked with a bounce that denied his age as well as the weight of titles which he carried. He’d recently married a much younger woman.

“Get a move on, Ben,” said someone to our rear. “You’re holding everyone up.”

“I’ll move when I’m ready, thank you,” said Ben, deliberately not budging even though there was now space in front. I would have moved forward but he had me firmly by the elbow.

“And Cecil. You know Cecil, Nick? There he is.”

It was easy enough to spot Sir Robert Cecil, Secretary to the Privy Council. Cecil was a short man with a large head topped by a great brow. But his main emblem was the crooked back that accompanied him everywhere. Today he was on his feet although usually he would not walk any distance in public and must be transported in a chair. Seeing Cecil I felt a queasiness in my guts.

“I have met Secretary Cecil, yes.”

“You have met him. When?”

I recalled being taken blindfold through the midnight streets of London for my meeting with Robert Cecil in the closing days of Queen Elizabeth’s reign when the Earl of Essex was plotting his treason. I recalled the task with which Cecil had entrusted me. The secrecy of it.*

“It’s of no account,” I said. “I’ve no wish to meet him again. He is dedicated to his plots.”

I pulled out of Jonson’s grasp and started to move down the gangplank before the people behind grew impatient enough to shove us into the Thames.

“Dedicated to plots? You must tell me about it some time,” said Jonson. “I can smell a story.”

“Who’s that man and the woman too?” I said to distract him.

A slight individual with prominent ears was leaning down so that Cecil might whisper something to him. He looked grave, as you would do if the second most powerful (some would say the most powerful) man in the kingdom was addressing you. Nearby stood a largish woman.

“That is Sir Philip Blake. I know him, know him well. The lady next to him is his wife, Lady Jane. They are both involved in this business with us. You might call them patrons.”

By this time we were on the shore. There was a certain interest from the passers-by in the presence of such important visitors to the south bank but, being sophisticated Londoners, none of us wanted to show it very much. A glimpse of Queen Anne was hardly comparable to a sight of Queen Elizabeth in the old days. And it may be that everyone’s appetite for spectacle had been sated by the river-borne Spaniards. I looked about for Abel and the others but they’d made themselves scarce.

The black carriage containing the Queen stood a few dozen yards off, sealed up like a sepulchre, the horses waiting patiently in the shafts. Sir Robert Cecil was evidently going to depart with Anne but was allowing himself to finish his conversation with Sir Philip Blake first. It was a mark of Cecil’s standing – some people might have said, his arrogance – that he could afford to keep the Queen waiting like this.

The Lord High Admiral strode away from the royal party. He was by himself, a fine old gentleman in an elegant ruff. Closer to, his beard was more white than fair.

“What do you bet that he’s going to take a little walk on this side of the river,” said Ben Jonson. Hs eyes tracked the admiral’s back. “See, I told you.”

Charles Howard had turned off in the direction of Paris Garden.

“He has no fear of wandering by himself in these lawless realms. Every waterman, wrinkled or otherwise, in South-wark is familiar with the victor of the Armada, and would be honoured to see him board his boat. And if we were to follow him now, Nicholas, we would no doubt see him entering the hallowed precincts of Holland’s Leaguer – or some other knocking-shop.”

“Where every woman, wrinkled or otherwise, would be honoured to have him board her,” I said.

“Good, good, Nicholas.”

“You’re very curious about the Lord High Admiral, Ben,” I said.

For myself, I was surprised rather than curious. Not so much that a man of Howard’s rank might be visiting one of the local brothels – assuming that’s what he was doing – but that he should be so careless about it. As Ben said, the Lord High Admiral would be easily recognized by most of the older watermen, many of whom were ex-sailors.

“There is encouragement here for all of us who are merely in our middle years, Nicholas Revill,” said Ben Jonson, almost gleefully. “Look at Nottingham. He marries when he’s touching seventy, he gets his young wife with child almost straightaway, and while she is in that state which the French term hors de combat he takes himself off to the Southwark stews because he must have it. He must have it.”

“I’m not in my middle years,” was my feeble reply. But Jonson wasn’t even listening.

“I will follow my admirable admiral, I think. He has given me my cue for this hot afternoon,” he said, moving off in the direction taken by Nottingham and pausing only to shout out a reminder that I should present myself at the Mermaid tavern that evening, if I chose. And so Jonson left, presumably for one of the stews which are studded across Southwark like so many buttons on a whore’s outfit.

I might have done the same, I suppose. I used to frequent Holland’s Leaguer sometimes when my friend Nell worked there (although I enjoyed free what others paid for). But I have lost my taste for that particular place ever since her sad departure. And because the heat which was stirring up Ben Jonson had left me feeling spiritless I made my way back to my lodgings.

* see Death of Kings

The story of my lodgings is part of the story of my time in London. Sometimes I thought my changing accommodation was a reflection of my fortunes in more than a monetary sense and, if this was so, then even the most favourable observer couldn’t have said that my fortunes amounted to much. Recently, though, there’d been a welcome and overdue change, or at least a hint of it …

Among my earliest accommodation in the capital had been a sty on the third floor of an establishment in Ship Street. It belonged to a stuck-up woman called Ransom, who kept a slovenly house and gave herself airs and graces. The only merit of this room was a view of the river which was obtainable if you risked your neck by craning out of the little window. There were various reasons why I’d had to leave this place, reasons connected to a carelessly emptied chamber pot and a rampant daughter of the establishment.

Then I’d sunk even lower by putting up with a peculiar quartet of women in Broadwall who charged four pennies a week for a ‘chamber’ that was more holes and gaps than it was floor, walls or ceiling. My landladies called themselves after the sunnier months of the year – April, May, June and July – and had a local reputation as witches. One of them was murdered at the time of the Essex uprising.

And after that I had spent more than two years in a room in a household belonging to Master Samuel Benwell in the street known as Dead Man’s Place. This room of his, which was an improvement on my previous lodging (in the same way that purgatory may be said to be an improvement on hell), had the advantage of being close to the Globe playhouse. Master Benwell and I had our troubles – at one time I found myself lodging in prison rather than under his roof – but he remained faithful to his single tenant. Not so much on account of the shilling a week rental which I paid, as for the playhouse gossip which I fed him from time to time. Some of the gossip was actually true.

And now Master Benwell was no more. He was dead. No, not murdered, if that’s what you’re thinking, but died naturally. Or as naturally as anyone could who perished in the great plague which had started even while our great Queen was on her deathbed and which continued for many long months into the reign of her successor from Scotland. Indeed, the rising bills of mortality had caused James to delay his coronation procession – the very one in which we’d marched with our four and . . .