Sleep of Death

Book 1: Nick Revill

by Philip Gooden

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

'Highly entertaining' Sunday Times In the last decade of Elizabeth I's reign, Nick Revill, an aspiring young actor, comes to London seeking fame and fortune. Once there he gains employment with the Chamberlain's Men. Thrown out of his digs over an unfortunate accident, Nick is offered lodgings at a wealthy Thameside mansion by a black-clad youth whose father has just died and whose mother has remarried his uncle. Pondering on the similarities between the young man's story and William Shakespeare's newest tragedy, Hamlet, Nick is charged with the task of finding out whether foul play was involved in the death of the old man and hasty remarriage of his young, lusty wife. As Nick works his way ever closer to the truth, the finger of suspicion begins to point to his enigmatic employer Mr William Shakespeare - actor, author and shareholder in the Chamberlain's Men . . . Praise for Philip Gooden: 'The witty narrative, laced with puns and word play so popular in this period, makes this an enjoyable racy tale' Sunday Telegraph 'The book has much in common with the film Shakespeare in Love - full of colourful characters . . . but the book has an underlying darkness' Crime Time 'Historical mystery fans are in for a treat' Publishers Weekly

Release date: March 5, 2020

Publisher: Constable

Print pages: 359

Sample

Prologue

It was his custom in summer afternoons to sleep outside. He slipped through the back quarters of the house, through its passages and offices, and into the garden. The garden was walled. He could hear occasional cries from Mixen Lane, the distant splashing of the wherries on the river, the boatmen’s shouts. The sun lay evenly across the gravel walks. He made his way towards a door in the far wall and unlocked it. Through the door was an orchard, doubly enclosed from the city beyond the outer wall. Once inside this inner space, he turned and carefully relocked the oak door. He paused and looked around, drawing a deep pleasurable breath. Tongues of leaves wagged at him in the breeze.

He traced a serpentine path through the apple trees and the pears and the plums, thinking of the way that, when autumn arrived, the massed scents and juices of the ripe fruit would be strong enough to overlie the river smells that now vaulted the wall. When he came to the hammock which was slung between two apple trees he paused again and glanced up between the glassy leaves of a nearby pear. From somewhere inside his house there was a shriek – of amusement, of surprise, he couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. No one would disturb him now, when he was secure in his orchard. The servants had the strictest orders. Once he had been in the habit of bringing Alice here. Underneath the trees, lying on mattresses of blossom or on the tussocky grass. The orchard trees were lower then. He could not remember when he and Alice had last visited the garden together. Alice with her oval, decided face, Alice with her hair still untouched by the years. For no reason – but he was deceiving himself, and knew that he was deceiving himself even as he denied there was a reason – the image of Thomas, his brother, slipped itself between him and Alice. A large jovial man, held in the world’s regard, his brother Thomas. Equable, easy-going, popular . . . but a hollow man, without substance behind his fine, external walls. He hated him.

Wearily, he levered himself into the hammock. The apple trees groaned under his weight. Segments of sky swayed as he looked up. A wall of white cloud was advancing from south of the river. He closed his eyes and waited for sleep. Something brushed his cheek. A leaf, no more. There was a rustle overhead. Pictures slipped through his head and then fell away from him like tumbling playing cards. King, queen, knave . . .

A few yards distant, the figure up in the pear tree shifted slightly. It waited to see if the man in the hammock was really asleep, whether he wouldn’t respond to the creaking branches, the swishing leaves. But the man below remained still. The figure swung itself down from the tree. It landed on the tussocky ground, and crouched. There was a sound from the hammock, something between a snore and a sigh. The bulk of the man in the hammock could be seen, his dark humped mass straining at the cords of the netting. The figure slowly straightened up and then loped towards the sleeping man. By the hammock it paused again before withdrawing from a fold of its cloak a tiny flask of opaque glass. The flask was closed with a wax seal. The seal was prised off by inserting a long thumbnail under a protruding flange of wax. The wax came away as easily as a ripe scab.

At that moment the sleeping man shifted. He canted himself sideways so that he was almost facing the figure, which stood, breath stopped, over him. His eyes stayed shut. This was better, this was comfortable! The sleeper’s bearded right cheek was laid nearly as flat as a plate. He might have been on the block, positioning himself for the executioner’s convenience. The figure could see his enemy’s bristles, the way his lips fluttered under each expelled breath, the whorl of his ear. His ear, that was what concerned the figure. There was a fringe of fine hair round the sleeper’s ear, a poor defence, weak little whisker-palisades against what was contained within the opaque flask. The figure thought of the porches and alleys, the winding paths that lead off into the head’s interior from this one hole. Of all the ways into the head this is the least guarded; it is the postern-gate which the treacherous servant leaves ajar for the besieging army.

The flask drew close to the sleeper’s ear and was tremblingly positioned above the hole. At the lipped mouth of the flask a colourless bead of liquid gathered itself before being transformed into a thin thread flowing directly downwards. The thread insinuated itself into the man’s ear, it burrowed its way down. In a moment the sleeping man stirred. He flapped a hand, as if to brush aside something that had disturbed him, another leaf perhaps or an insect. The figure clamped a hand over the side of the other’s face to hold him in position. The spool unwinding from the flask ran faster, like the last moments of a man’s life slipping out of his grasp. Some of the liquid began now to pool over the edges of the sleeper’s ear-hole. The movements of his head became sharper, jerkier, and so the murderer pressed down harder, harder, with the left hand, while the right jiggled to keep the flask steady and to ensure that the final strings of liquid entered the waking man’s head.

Done! Now the murderer didn’t care if the sleeper woke. It would be better if he woke, to see the cause of his death. The murderer stepped back, like a craftsman admiring his handiwork. The man in the hammock clapped a hand to his ear. His eyes, they flew open. They searched among the surrounding trees before coming to rest on a shape which, to be sure, had smutted its face and was wearing a short cloak of goose-turd green that made it hard to distinguish among the thick foliage. Would have made it hard even for a man newly awoken and without any suspicion of harm in this fallen world. But the man in the hammock was dying and had only seconds to grasp the sight of the shape in his orchard before a hot knife of pain skewered his head and was withdrawn, and then thrust in again and again.

ACT I

‘You know the play?’

This was said with surprise. Players aren’t supposed to know plays, players are only supposed to know their parts.

‘I’ve seen it,’ I said. ‘Last month. You were magnificent. No flattery. I have said that to many others since then, before I am saying it to you now.’

Nerves were twisting my speech. What was intended as genuine compliment came out as clumsy buttering-up. And pompous, as well as patronising, considering I was talking to a man old enough to be my father.

Master Burbage shrugged but was graceful enough to smile.

‘I’ve played with the Admiral’s Men,’ I said, to change the subject. ‘Nottingham’s, I should say.’

‘The Admiral’s will do. That’s what they were on this side of the river. How do they do in the north of the town?’

‘Well enough,’ I said.

‘Tactful, Master Revill,’ said Burbage. ‘The audiences are different over there, more respectable – and more respectful – than our Southwark spectators. But the Admiral’s Men ran away when we appeared south of the river, essentially they ran away, although Henslowe would claim that it was purely commercial.’

‘Everything is commercial with Master Henslowe,’ I said.

‘All bearpits and brothel business, his enemies say,’ said Burbage.

‘Henslowe sees plays and playhouses as a good investment, nothing more. At least, that was my impression,’ I said, eager to make a good impression myself, and to cancel out something of the clumsiness of my earlier remarks. I didn’t really know how Henslowe saw things, but there was nothing wrong with running him down to curry favour with a business rival.

‘What is the most important part of the playhouse?’ said Burbage.

I hesitated before replying. This was undoubtedly what they call a ‘trick’ question, designed to catch out the young and naive. What is the most important part of the playhouse? The author? No; everyone knows that the author doesn’t matter. The flattering thing would be to refer to the company; no company, no play. The obvious answer would be to say the stage – no stage, no play either. A clever response might be to mention the seats, for though many spectators are happy to hand over their pennies and stand by the stage and smoke, the better classes pay more for their seats and the even better classes pay yet more for private boxes. With seating comes a discriminating audience, and a more sedate one. Instead, I plumped not for the flattering or the obvious or the clever answer, but the shrewd one. As I thought.

‘The tiring-house,’ I said, gesturing vaguely. We were sitting in a room adjoining the tiring-house.

For where would the players be without their place to change in, and to shelter between appearances? The tiring-house is where reality and illusion meet in perpetual conflict, or so I would go on to claim if Master Burbage was good enough to ask my reasons. The tiring-house is a magical cave of unending transformations, where a player becomes a king in the flick of a costume, and a king may become a beggar when he turns his cloak inside out and smirches his face. I waited for Burbage’s approval, to begin my rhetorical flight.

‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Master Revill,’ said Burbage, ‘that is a very stupid answer.’

‘The stage, I should have said.’

‘The part that matters,’ said Burbage, ‘is wherever the money is taken. That is the centre of the playhouse. That is why I would never join those who sneer at Master Henslowe for the way he makes his money, or how much money he makes or for his attitude to the making of money. In the playhouse, before you can make anything else, you must make money.’

Burbage’s reputation was unspotted. It was hard to think of him trading in whores and chained bears. He was happily married, wasn’t he, with a large number of children?

‘People cross the river in droves every day,’ said Burbage. ‘They come to see us, of course they come to see us. But they come also to see the bears and the bulls in the pits. They come to visit the stews and taste a different meat from what they get at home. In short, they want to see animals being tormented, men and women both, and the men, they want to exercise their pricks across the water. And sometimes they visit plays before or afterwards. The same people. So that is why I have never taken exception to the way in which Henslowe and Alleyn choose to make their money.’

‘I wasn’t,’ I began, ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

‘Players are so contemptible,’ said Burbage, in a narrow fluting voice that had an echo of the pulpit in it, ‘that we might as well be whores. We show off what we have and people pay to watch us. What do they call us, “caterpillars of the commonwealth”, “painted sepulchres”?’

‘Puritans say that,’ I said.

‘Not only them. It is a commonly held view. Even so, we are crawling very slowly towards respectability, very slowly indeed. Why are you on stage then, in this despised popular business?’

‘I like showing off,’ I said without thinking. ‘I like being watched, I suppose,’ I said, more slowly.

‘Good, Master Revill,’ said Burbage. ‘I like that. Remind me of what you appeared in with the Admiral’s.’

‘I was in Robert, Earl of Huntingdon and a thing called Look About You. Small parts . . .’

‘We must all start somewhere,’ said Burbage.

I said nothing; I had already said too much. A man slipped across the background of the room, and glanced curiously in my direction for a moment. He looked like Master Burbage, the same tapering beard, a similar brown gaze. I wondered if it was Cuthbert, brother to Richard Burbage and the one who managed the business. Burbage craned round in his chair and nodded, and then the man was gone. I must have looked a query.

‘Our author,’ he said. ‘He is the Ghost.’

Indeed there was something ghost-like about the other man’s manner of slipping into and then out of the room, something almost insinuating. Not Cuthbert Burbage therefore.

‘He is the Ghost in the play in question, the one we were talking about.’

‘I remember the ghost appearing, on the battlements,’ I said. “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” I said.

‘Yes, it is a good beginning,’ said Burbage. ‘I cannot think when our, ah, congregation has fallen so quiet so soon at the start of things.’

‘And the ghost appears in the bedchamber too,’ I said, eager to show off my knowledge.

‘Indeed he does,’ said Burbage.

‘But only to Prince Hamlet, the Queen can’t see him. I wondered why that was.’

‘You’ll have to ask our author, even though I fear you’ll soon find yourself – like the rest of us – too busy for that sort of speculation,’ said Burbage. ‘To business. We may need you for two weeks. That is the time Jack Wilson is likely to be away. His mother is dying in Norwich and not quickly, he has been informed. He left early this morning.’

‘I will take on all his parts?’

‘Let me see. You’ll do the townsman in A City Pleasure and Cinna in Julius Caesar—’

‘Cinna the conspirator?’ I interrupted. Here was a part with a little weight.

‘Not Cinna the conspirator but Cinna the poet,’ said Burbage. ‘You appear and are promptly killed by mistake, to show the indiscriminate bloodlust of the mob. You will do the cobbler at the beginning of the same play and Clitus or Strato at the end, I forget which. The Roman play is two weeks away, when you will also have the part of Maximus in Love’s Sacrifice. Despite the name the part is rather small, I’m afraid. Now this week, you are to be a clownish countryman in A Somerset Tragedy – you can do the voice?’

‘Why, zur, ’tis where I was born. Zummerzet is the place of my naivety, you might say.’

‘Good,’ said Burbage. ‘Then at some point you must be a French count and an Italian Machiavel – but not in the same play.’

He raised a hand slightly as if to prevent my showing my mastery of a French or Italian accent.

‘And of course you will appear in the play about the Prince of Denmark this afternoon.’

‘As . . .?’

‘Don’t worry, Master Revill, your parts are very small, you may grasp them in twenty minutes. You will appear in the dumb-show as the poisoner, and then again as the nephew to the King—’

I felt a tightness in my chest. My eyes swam.

‘But that is your . . . I mean . . . you are . . .’

The nephew to the King! Everyone knows that is the principal part in the play! Master Burbage’s part. He wasn’t seriously expecting me to take his role, and anyway how could I? The scroll containing the lines would run across the floor of the room we were sitting in and then all the way up the wall to the ceiling! Hardly to be learned in twenty minutes even if I prided myself on the speed with which I could seize on a part. I was about to say something of all this when Burbage caught my panicked expression.

‘Ah I see,’ said Burbage. ‘No no, I don’t mean that nephew to the King, I mean the nephew to the King in the play inside the play. As such you are only required to come out, look dark, and rub your hands in glee. Essentially, you are repeating the process you enacted in the dumb-show a few moments earlier.’

‘I have lines?’

‘You unburden yourself of a handful of couplets and of the poison which you are carrying. You can play this badly because the murderer is intended to be gloating and obvious. In fact, the worse you play this part of nephew to the player King, the better. It takes skill to play badly. Deliberately badly.’

‘Oh,’ I said, obscurely disappointed, but also relieved.

‘Then you are interrupted by the King, the real King. He is naturally disturbed by what he sees on stage, on the stage which we are to imagine on the real stage, that is.’

‘I understand,’ I said, and I did, now that memories of the earlier performance I’d seen were returning crisper and clearer.

‘It doesn’t matter whether you understand or not,’ said Burbage. ‘You’re only a player. You take part but that doesn’t mean you have to know what’s going on.’

‘And what else do I have?’

‘An ambassador from England comes on at the end, you will recall. Ties up a few loose ends, tells us that a couple of people have been put to death, expresses general amazement at the scene of carnage which he’s stumbled into. I suggest you put on the kind of look you wore just now when you thought you were taking my part.’

‘At the end I don’t have the last word, do I? I don’t remember the ending of the play clearly.’

‘That is probably because you were rapt by the beauty or the wit of my own dying words as Hamlet. The last word of all goes to Fortinbras. He’s going to be the next King of Denmark.’

‘Ah yes,’ I said.

‘Fortinbras writes finis to our tragedy,’ said Burbage.

‘I would like to have the last word one day.’

‘Master Revill, when did you arrive from your Zummerzet?’

‘About two years ago, Master Burbage.’

‘I didn’t hear it in your voice until you did your, ah, imitation. I can detect it now.’

‘We’re not all bumpkins even if we do come from the provinces.’

‘No, though some of us ride in on our high horses. I was born here, but our author is from Warwickshire. He rarely goes back. And the companies you’ve played with, again?’

‘The Admiral’s . . . and . . . Derby’s once.’

‘At the Boar’s Head?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve filled in during sickness, unavoidable absence, that kind of thing – but no doubt you’re looking for a company which you can permanently attach yourself to?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing is permanent in this business, Master Revill. We could be closed down like that.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Plague, the Council, commercial failure, anything could drive us out onto the road and into your bumpkin provinces.’

‘I want only to act,’ I said.

‘Well, Master Revill, let me say that the Chamberlain’s Men are pleased to have you for the next week or three, or until Wilson returns from attending on his poor dying mother. Now to terms. One shilling a day is your pay. Which also happens to be the fine if you are late for rehearsal, while it is two shillings for non-attendance at rehearsal, and three entire shillings if you are late and out of costume when you should be ready for the actual performance. Larger fines, very much larger fines, if you remove a costume from this playhouse. Remember that costumes are worth more than players and plays put together. Some of our congregation come only to see the costumes. And if you lose your part by dropping it in the street or leaving it in the tavern or by some whore’s bed you will not only be drawn and quartered but your goods forfeit. You will doubtless know this from your short time with the Admiral’s, but I always like to be clear where I stand with new players.’

‘I understand, Master Burbage.’

‘Good. Now go to the tire-man for your costumes, and then to Master Allison our bookman for your parts. Just tell him you’re doing Jack Wilson’s. He’ll understand. And before you leave this morning check the plot in there.’ He nodded towards the tiring-house. ‘You won’t appear as nephew to the player-King till half past three or thereabouts this afternoon, and we start at two, so you have plenty of time before you come on, not just for your lines today but for the townsman in A City Pleasure. And you might as well take a look at what you’re doing in Somerset Tragedy while you’re about it. Leave the French count and the Machiavel for today. We’re rehearsing Pleasure on Tuesday, and you can try out your Zummerzet voice on Thursday when we’re running through the Tragedy of that county. All clear? If it’s not, get the details from Allison.’

‘Thank you, Master Burbage. I would like to say how grateful I am to be given the chance to work with the finest—’

‘Yes yes, Master Revill. We’re only players, remember, caterpillars of the commonwealth – though I suppose some caterpillars are finer than others.’

‘You are the Queen’s caterpillars,’ I said, referring to the well-known favour enjoyed by the Chamberlain’s Men at court.

‘And we shall see if you are Master of the Revels, Master Revill,’ said Burbage, referring to the well-known civil servant who made a packet out of licensing plays.

Richard Burbage hoisted himself from his chair. Son of a carpenter, wasn’t he? Well, there were good enough precedents for that. There was certainly something solid, something oak-like about him.

 

I visited the tire-man and was kitted out with Wilson’s gear, one thing that was villainous and another thing with a showy but leftover feel to it. From the bookkeeper I received half a dozen puny scrolls giving me my lines for that afternoon and for the rest of the week. From the plot hanging up in the tiring-house for the day’s business I ascertained that I joined in a dumb-show as a poisoner, and then appeared a few moments afterwards as one ‘Lucianus, nephew to the King’, for which I was required to carry a flask (containing poison) and, presumably, a face with black looks. All as Master Burbage had said, and all as my returning memory of the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark told me. Later, much later when almost all were dead and gone, I was cued to enter the court of Elsinore with news from England of even more death. So I was a porter of death and a messenger of death, I thought neatly, trying to make a pattern out of my little roles, and then I considered that I enjoyed this good fortune only because Master Wilson was attending to a dying mother in Norfolk. But in Julius Caesar I was myself destined to die, playing the part of the unfortunate Cinna, the poet torn in pieces by the mob for his bad verses. The other plays I didn’t know, though Love’s Sacrifice and A Somerset Tragedy by their very titles carried the promise of death dealt with an open hand.

I left the Globe, almost skipping on this fine, late summer morning. I was only sorry that Dick Burbage had not wanted to hear out my stammering gratitude. For grateful I was. Outside the playhouse in Brend’s Rents, the alley behind, I glanced up at its sides, sheer white like the chalk cliff of a gorge. Like a palace, like a cathedral or a castle – this playhouse was all these to me, a place of authority and splendour. I remembered my first glimpse of it on arriving in London, fresh and green from Zummerzet. The Globe shimmered in a heat haze on the south side of the river, unmatched for height or amplitude by any building in the neighbourhood. The flag was flying and the trumpet reached my eager ears even across the great stretch of London’s water, and I knew that playing was about to begin, and I wished myself, at any cost, to be one among that company. When you are near this great edifice you can see a polygon, but so multi-sided is it that, from a distance, it appears to be a fine shining ring. It is, in truth, a magic ring, in which any apparition may be conjured for the delight and the edification of what Master Burbage called the congregation. The Globe playhouse was, to me, as fabulous as Troy.

Later after my arrival, when I had been in London a few weeks and was mixing with my playing kind, I learned the extraordinary story of the construction of the Globe, how Burbage and his brother, together with the other shareholders, had—

‘I’ll fucking have you!’

I broke from my recollections. Someone was shouting at me. An instant more and the same someone had smashed into me. A great sweaty face was pushed into mine, foul breath shoving over the sill of his lower lip. I fell down on my back, and the great oaf tumbled on top me and panted there as if he really was fucking having me. After a time he levered himself off. From his costume I recognised a waterman. I would have known him for one anyway, partly because every third man in this borough of Southwark makes his living on the river, partly because he had that look, half sea-dog, half hang-dog, which most of them’ve got and which they claim comes from having served with Drake or Frobisher or the Lord High Duck or some other sea-worthy sea worthy – but mostly I would’ve known him for a waterman because of the flood of cursing that gushed out of his filthy lips the moment he had righted himself.

‘Fucking arse-wipe – bloody fucking shite – Jesus Christ – where the fuck’s the fucking fucker gone . . .’

All of this was accompanied with gusts of sour air, heaves of his great chest and rollings of eyes that did not quite swivel together, so I had the unpleasant sensation that he was looking simultaneously at, before and behind me.

‘Where’d he fuc. . .