Death of Kings (17 page)

“Master Busy is in his element. He is good for another hour yet.”

He gestured slightly towards the hall in which the reedy voice still sounded. I was glad I didn’t have to listen to such seditious material for an hour.

“The smoke and the oaths remind me of the playhouse,” I said, “and that is one place where you would not expect to find a Puritan divine. He is not really Master
Busy?”

“That is what I call him,” said the other.

“And what is his element?”

“Dissent is his element. That is what he is drawn to.”

“He is a Thunderer,” I said.

“Is that a sect?”

“Oh no. I mean that he is a Thunderer to my mind. I catalogue preachers as Thunderers, Reasoners or Shepherds.”

“And whiners and pedants,” said the man on the other side of the table. “Or rabble-rousers.” His eyes moved door-wards.

I was puzzled by the detached nature of these remarks, as if the speaker was removing himself from the words and activities on the far side of the closet wall.

“And what is
your
element, Master Revill?”

“I’m just a poor player, sir, entrusted with a message.”

“The defence of ignorance and simplicity, eh? You’ll be telling me next you didn’t understand what Busy was saying, about the crooked councillors and the foreign bastard in
Roman garb.”

“I – don’t – well, not—”

It is strange how reluctant one is to own up to ignorance, even about disreputable matters.

“Come. It is well known, is it not, that there is a plot?”

“A plot? Yes, there is always a plot.” (This seemed the safest thing to say. And true too.)

“A plot involving Cecil and Cobham and Raleigh.”

“Oh their plot, yes.”

“You may pretend not to know, Master Revill, but I tell you that your playing does not convince me.”

In another’s mouth, these words might have been a threat but with this gentleman they conveyed passing amusement. His voice, too, was peculiarly dulcet and lulling. One could have listened
to it without searching for meaning, as one listens to birdsong or the gentle purl of a stream.

I shrugged helplessly, as if he had seen right through me, while all the time I hadn’t the faintest notion what he was talking about.

“They are plotting – Cecil and Cobham and Raleigh . . .”

He paused, as if he expected me to finish the sentence for him. Evidently he still thought I was feigning ignorance. I shrugged again, placatingly. In the gap while neither of us said anything,
I had leisure to reflect on the irony of a player’s being accused of acting when he was merely being his innocent, simple self. When the other man finally realised I wasn’t going to
break my silence, he spoke up.

“They are plotting to make the Spanish Infanta the successor to the English throne. That is what Cecil and Cobham and Raleigh intend. You must surely know that, Master Revill? Everybody
knows that.”

As if to confirm his words, there was another burst of shouting and groaning from the far side of the door.

“I – well, now you say so – I—”

“It is the talk of the town, from tavern to palace.”

“The talk of the town, yes.”

I realised now that in the hot and fevered air of Essex House all sorts of wild notions and strange conceits might grip the minds and fancies of those who filled its precincts. What appeared to
this gentleman to be ‘the talk of the town’ was no more than the discontented delirium of the Essexites. Why, the Spanish Infanta . . . successor to the throne . . . ridiculous! Cecil,
Cobham and Raleigh plotting to this end . . . absurd!

Yet, although this was my instinctive response, a tiny doubt crept into my mind. Perhaps this gentleman was in possession of facts – of secrets – which were hidden from ordinary
mortals like me. He looked as though he might be, for he was obviously well connected. In addition, he spoke with a quiet assurance and, as I have described, his tone had a peculiar,
ears-enchanting quality. As my eyes grew accustomed to the closet’s gloom, and I had more leisure for study, I saw too that he was not merely well dressed but finely dressed. His doublet was
of white silk and his purple trunks and knee breeches were gold-encrusted. The flower-embroidered gauntlets he had been carrying were now laid between us on the table. I wondered whether he decked
himself out every day as though he might be going to sit for his portrait.

“Now, Master Revill, you have a message?”

He gazed direct at me and I saw that his eyes possessed a particular brilliance.

“Not for all ears. For . . . HW only.”

“You are speaking to him. I am HW, Henry Wriothesley.”

This was as I had half suspected. Even so, I was jolted by the realisation that I was talking to the Earl of Southampton.

“I – I guessed as much.”

“Then let me guess a little in return.” The same mild smile played around his lips. I wondered what this easy-going man was doing in a nest of rebels and malcontents, indulging in
fantasies or nightmares about Cecil and Raleigh and the Spanish Infanta. Outside in the hall, the preacher’s reedy tones rose and fell, with crowd’s noises as a ground-bass.

The Earl pursed his lips and pretended to be puzzled. “Let me guess. As to the identity of the person who has entrusted you with a message, now. Would his first initial be a W and his last
one be an S, so that the two being put together make WS?”

“Yes,” I said tersely, feeling that he was mocking me for my coyness in not naming him outright.

“William Shakespeare?”

“Yes. Our author.”

“Our?”

For some reason he seemed put out by my description. I was quite pleased to see this.

“I mean our author at the Chamberlain’s. He is a shareholder – and sometimes a player too.”

“I know this,” said Wriothesley. “Now tell me something I don’t know. What is the message that you have brought?’

“It doesn’t make much sense to me,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to. After all, you yourself said you were only a poor player. Out with it now, man.”

I hesitated. There is a difference between calling oneself ‘a poor player’ and being so described by another. But the larger reason for my hesitating was the nature of the message I
had to pass on. It really did not make much sense, and I suddenly became self-conscious about speaking the words in front of this great nobleman.

“Very well. I was asked to say this to you (clearing my throat and taking a deep breath like some journeyman actor):

‘For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any

Who for thy self art so improvident.’ ”

After I’d recited these two lines there was a pause. I feared that there was some covert insult in them.

“And that was all,” I said.

A change had come over the face of the man lounging opposite me. The playful, half-mocking look had gone to be replaced by an expression that was almost wistful. The brilliant eyes seemed
dimmed.

“No more is necessary,” he said. “Tell me, how is Master Shakespeare – and Burbage and the others?”

I was about to say something to the effect that he should know, since one of his party (to wit, Sir Gelli Merrick) had visited the Globe playhouse only the day before, when I realised that the
visit had been
sub rosa –
certainly intended to be concealed from a poor player like Nick Revill and possibly not even known to a great player like the Earl of Southampton.

“The winter is a lean period for all playhouses,” I said.

“Yet you have the Queen’s favour, and that must take some of the edge off the chills and rain of winter.”

Was it my imagination or was there a sharpness to his comment? For it was universally known that the individual in whose mansion we were sitting, the Earl of Essex, had until recently been the
Queen’s favourite, indeed her chiefest favourite. But now, like Icarus, he had tumbled down as low as he had once flown high. The sun of the Queen’s favour had turned to ice. As with
other great men at court, Southampton’s fortunes too could rise and fall. Since he had hitched his wagon to Essex’s train, those fortunes must of necessity have been on the wane. Still,
it must be galling in the extreme to have basked in the Queen’s favour once and then to watch others warming themselves in the same place now – even if it was only a company of
players.

“We are to perform soon in her presence,” I said, hoping that a simple statement of fact would not offend or provoke him.

“God willing, you will perform – and she will watch it,” he said mysteriously, then fell silent. Outside, the preacher continued to pipe his tune. Henry Wriothesley seemed to
gather himself to say more. “Though I am glad enough that your company prospers, I meant to ask after particular individuals in it rather than the collective.”

“Master Shakespeare?”

I thought of Nemo’s words – ‘he and . . . this gentleman you have mentioned . . . were once friends’.

“Yes, it is him I mean,” said Southampton. “He is well?”

“I have no reason to think otherwise,” I said – rather formally perhaps.

“As well as the indifferent children of the earth?”

“What? Oh, yes,” I said, picking up the allusion to WS’s own
Hamlet.

“Happy in that he is not over-happy, you mean.”

“On Fortune’s cap he is not the very button.”

“No player – or author – can be that, I think. There
are no great fortunes to be made in the playhouse, in any sense.”

“You are better off so. Fortune gives only to take away.”

“What she takes she can restore,” I said, with matching sententiousness.

“Perhaps, but she is truly a strumpet and no man should depend on her favours.”

The image of Nell flashed across my mind.

“He was very particular that I should speak to you in person.”

“Who?”

“Master Shakespeare.”

“Return my greetings to him. You do not mind being a messenger, Master Revill? A Mercury?”

“Not in the least.”

And at that moment I did not. Listening to this graceful, slightly melancholy man, I had already fallen under the spell of his voice and his manner. I could understand how WS might have picked
him out for a friend, or the other way about. Although he was perhaps only a year or two older than I was, he seemed far ahead of me in experience.

“Thank him for his words. They are like him. They are his own words too, of course.”

“I – I assumed so.”

“I should reply in kind. Let me see.”

This time the pause and puzzlement on Henry Wriothesley’s face was genuine. He was evidently searching his memory.

“Ah, yes. I have it. Tell him this.”

The Earl of Southampton straightened himself slightly in his seat. Without the preamble of throat clearing, he said:

“
‘Lo in the orient when the gracious light

Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

Doth homage to his new-appearing sight
,

Serving with looks his sacred majesty
. . .’ ”

“You should have been a player, my lord,” I said, when it was evident he was going to say no more. “Your voice would have brought in a thousand.”

The compliment, untainted by flattery, slipped out. In fact it was the kind of remark which might easily be taken amiss. There are many men – and not all of them well-born either –
who would be happy to take offence at having the low trade of the stage suggested to them. Yet Henry Wriothesley appeared the true gentleman when he inclined his head in acknowledgement of my
words, used though he must have been to hearing his praises sung. Furthermore, he returned my compliment winged.

“
Experto crede
, Master Revill. When the expert speaks we must believe him.”

Now it was my turn to nod gracefully. And so we might have continued throughout the live-long day to pay each other compliment and counter-compliment. But I sensed that the interview was drawing
to an end.

“Kindly pass on those lines to Master Shakespeare, Mercury Revill,” he said. “I would not insult your powers of memory by asking you to repeat them to me now.”

“No need,” I said. “But he will understand them?”

“He should do. They are his own as well.”

He rose and went towards the door. Holding it open, he said over his shoulder.

“I will escort you safely out of the gate, in case our hotheaded Italian friend gets it into his head to attack you again.”

I was about to make some remark to the effect that I could deal with a mere door-keeper, when our attention was distracted by what was happening outside in the hall of Essex House.

The Puritan preacher had finished or, perhaps, had been interrupted in mid-spout (for once they have got their feet on a dais or their finger-ends over a pulpit they are most reluctant to let
go). But now across the hallway a figure was sweeping from the main door towards the grand staircase. The crowd parted to let him by. He had a group of men at his heels and seemed to be both
talking and listening to several of them simultaneously. He moved with a queer gait, with strange long steps. His head was thrust forward, as if in eagerness to meet whatever was coming towards
him. His speed and the string of companions behind him made me think of an old picture in one of my father’s books, the image of a comet blazing across the heavens, attended by its train.

I knew, without being told, that this rushing individual was Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex. I knew without being told because I had seen him before in the streets of Islington when he had
set out, in all high hopes, for Ireland in the spring of 1599.

The leader of that ill-omened expedition now swept past me in the hall of Essex House. A cape was flung over his shoulders in such a careless, unstudied fashion that it suggested he dressed
– or, rather, was dressed – with the same swiftness with which he moved. I was reminded of his passage through London, for he looked to right and left with an equally vague, abstracted
air, all the while seeming both to speak and to listen to the men in his train.

“That is Cuffe,” said a voice in my ear, and I started for I had momentarily forgotten the presence of the Earl of Southampton at my elbow. “Henry Cuffe, he is his secretary.
There is Sir Charles Danvers. And that man struggling to keep up is Sir Gelli Merrick.”