Hill of Bones (34 page)

So I tucked the commonplace book inside my doublet, took one last look around the little bedchamber, unlatched the door, listened for sounds from below, heard nothing, trod silently downstairs to the first floor where the dying man’s room was located, together with the other larger bedrooms, heard nothing here either, stole down to ground level and out into the lobby, listened to the clack of pans from the kitchen quarter of the house, plucked the key from the hook by the front door – turned key in lock – opened door – replaced key on hook – stepped out into Vicarage Lane – closed door behind me – all as quiet as could be.

I was still carrying Christopher Hawkins’ notebook. I had no intention of taking it away for good. Rather, I thought it would give me an excuse for returning to the house and seeing Katherine again. The King’s Men had two more days and nights in Bath before we travelled on to Bristol. I should be able to squeeze out a spare hour or two for Katherine.

It was a bright summer morning. I emerged into Cheap Street and was straight away reminded that this city, for all its health-giving waters and handsome new buildings, is a market town. A herd of brindled cows was trotting unwillingly along, urged by a drover to their rear, and churning up the muck in the street still further. I approached the town centre to see pigs at liberty and rootling around the stocks and pillory, which were set between the Guild Hall and the great church. It had never occurred to me before that the rubbish flung at the malefactors in the pillory – rotten apples, dead cats and the like – would make natural picking for pigs.

Hungry in my stomach and tired in my limbs, but with the bounce that comes from a good night well spent, I walked up the slight incline towards the North Gate and Mother Treadwell’s. In the lodging house I found my fellows still half asleep round the breakfast table but suddenly all alert and talkative when they realised I’d come back. I parried their questions and salacious remarks with casual understatement. Naturally, I said nothing at all of the way I’d impersonated a dying man’s son. Yes, I had passed a very pleasant night. No, she is a lady, well bred, not one of the women of the streets you usually consort with. Her name? Is she married? None of your business, Laurence Savage.

There was cold meat, bread and ale for breakfast. Mother Treadwell prided herself on her table. One of the others – I suspected it was Abel Glaze – must have informed on me to the landlady, for she paid me particular attention as she fussed over the breakfast items, winking and tapping the side of her nose and enquiring whether the beds of Bath were soft enough for me and telling me to eat plenty of cold meats so as to regain my vigour.

We had no rehearsal for later that day but were still required to report to the senior player in our company, John Sincklo, to ensure that there were no tasks to be done before the play itself. This was particularly necessary on tour where the stage and other gear were not kept in such an ordered state as at home in the Globe Theatre. Sincklo was staying in comfort at the Bear Inn as a favoured guest of the landlord, Harry Cuff, since we were bringing plenty of business to his establishment. Those of us at Mother Treadwell’s duly reported to John Sincklo only to be told, rather brusquely, that we weren’t needed. He was a somewhat reserved fellow, our senior, not much used to drink, and I suspect he’d enjoyed more than a few glasses with Landlord Cuff after last night’s successful production.

So we were free for the larger part of the day. I thought about returning to the Hawkins’ house in Vicarage Lane although it seemed a little too soon. In any case there was a diversion planned by my companions, which they had obviously been concocting the night before. They wouldn’t tell me what it was but dragged me with them down Cheap Street and then to the west of the great church, which I was surprised to see in the clear light of day was not yet finished. Perhaps the money had run out. The church was not our destination, however.

Beyond the church precincts was a cluster of stone buildings with steam rising from among them. Led by Laurence Savage, who promised us it would be worth it, half a dozen of us paid a penny each to a doorkeeper to be allowed into a viewing area. We climbed a flight of stone steps and found ourselves in a gallery overlooking a very large four-sided pool of water, which was open to the air and from which rose a slightly sulphurous smell as well as steam and a perceptible wave of heat. In the middle of the pool was a structure like a monstrous salt cellar, with pinnacles and jutting eaves.

Even though it was still quite early in the morning, the bath was full of folk. Some clung to the side as though afraid to venture far in, but the majority were standing in the water talking together or half swimming, half wading through it or else simply lying on their backs, buoyed up by the air trapped in their smocks and drawers. A few sat on stone recesses at the base of the great salt cellar.

Men and women mixed together without distinction. When one of the bathers made to get out, their garments clung close as an onion skin and showed most or all of what lay beneath. We gawped, of course, but it was, in truth, not much of a spectacle. Or at least it was not a stirring spectacle. The majority of the bathers were far from young and it was generally apparent why they had come to try the healing waters of Bath. Some were as rotund as the inflated bladders carried by jesters, others were so thin they looked as though they were being consumed from within. And I have never seen so many misshapen limbs, so large a quantity of bent backs, as I saw gathered together in this steamy pool. Why, if you half closed your eyes, and added a little bit of screaming and groaning to the picture, you might have imagined you were present at one of the infernal pits. The smell of the brimstone and the white, ghost-like garments of the bathers added to this impression.

Just occasionally, however, our watch was made worthwhile when a woman younger and more comely than the mass climbed from the water or sank herself slowly into it and so revealed much more under her clinging garments than would normally be considered decent. The odd thing was that these women seemed to know the effect they were having and to be prolonging their actions by a few instants. This, no doubt, was why we’d paid our pennies to the doorkeeper.

A wizened-looking individual emerged from a corner of the gallery and took it upon himself to act as our guide. He told us this was the King’s Bath, which we knew, and that the area round the pinnacled construction in the middle was called the Kitchen on account of its being situated directly over the source of the hot spring. Then he said that there were other interesting sights to be seen elsewhere at the Queen’s Bath and the Lepers’ Bath. Sights of a fleshly nature, he said, both more enticing and more grotesque than anything likely to be seen here at the King’s. If we good gentlemen would like to accompany him . . .

The others were ready enough but I was not in a the mood. Partly it was because I was thinking of Katherine Hawkins – one of the few younger women in the pool below had hair of a similar colour to hers, although this bather was handsome rather than pretty. I considered that now might be time to return the commonplace book belonging to her uncle. Then I might invite Katherine to attend a performance in the yard of the Bear that evening, and afterwards we could . . .

Lost in my warm imagination, I hardly realised that I’d been left alone in the gallery, so eager were my fellows to see the sights of the Lepers’ and the Queen’s Baths. I took one final look at the pool with its ghostly bathers and started towards the entrance.

At the top of the stairs my way was blocked by a burly individual.

‘Are you Nicholas?’ he said.

‘What business is it of yours?’

‘Nicholas of the . . .’ he fumbled in his mind to get the right words in the right order, ‘. . . of the King’s Men presently playing in this town?’

I nodded. He stuck out his doubleted chest and pushed forward into the gallery. Instinctively I stepped back towards the stone parapet, which prevented spectators from tumbling into the steam bath. I thought, I’m growing weary of being sought out by strangers with an interest in plays and players. This one did not have the advantage of being young, attractive and female.

‘You have got something that doesn’t belong to you,’ he said presently.

‘I have?’

‘A book,’ said this gentleman. He uttered the word ‘book’ as though it didn’t pass his lips very often.

I understood straight away that he must be referring to Uncle Christopher’s commonplace book. I only just prevented myself from feeling for the pocket where it was stowed.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Give it me now.’

He lumbered forward and I stepped back in equal measure with him until I felt the parapet against my buttocks. He was a big man with beetling brows and a seamed forehead. With one push he could have shoved me over into the steamy pool.

‘I haven’t got the book with me,’ I said.

‘So you do have it,’ he said. He wasn’t as slow and stupid as he looked.

He came to within a couple of inches, face to face, close enough that I smelled his meaty breath. He gripped me by the upper arms. I’m not sure what would have happened next, whether he would have manhandled me or shoved me out and over into the bath. Fortunately, we were interrupted by a shout from the entrance to the gallery. Over my new friend’s shoulder I saw an individual who was dressed in some sort of blue livery and carrying a mace.

‘We’ll have none of that filthy behaviour here,’ said this person. ‘Bringing disrepute on the royal baths. Be off with you.’

The bulky man had taken a pace back from me. I slipped out of his shadow and walked briskly to the stairs, nodding to the individual with the mace on the way. I did not stop to ask what he thought we were up to. I could guess. (Later I learned that he was the sergeant-at-arms for the King’s Bath, employed to ensure decorous conduct among the bathers and the watchers.) I clattered down the stone stairs and out into fresh air and the precincts of the great church.

I walked fast up Cheap Street towards Vicarage Lane, looking behind me occasionally to see if the lumbering man was on my tail. I was going to return the commonplace book to Katherine Hawkins and I was going to do it now. My thoughts of inviting her to a play performance, and then to something rather more personal after the play, had faded. Instead I felt aggrieved, angry. No one else in Bath knew that I was Nicholas of the King’s Men. No one else was aware I possessed the wretched notebook apart from Katherine, since she had seen me take it from her sick uncle. She had encouraged me to take it! Therefore it must have been she who had set that blockish individual on me. Why hadn’t she simply asked me to return the notebook? I was meaning to do that anyway. Why were threats necessary? Yes, I felt angry and aggrieved.

The one question I did not ask myself was why a book containing second-hand quotations and bits of bad verse should be so important.

I strode up Vicarage Lane, reached the merchant’s house and knocked loudly on the door. It was Katherine herself who opened it. Her eyes were red, her hair was disordered, her dress careless. I was glad to see she was in a state of distress. So distressed, it seemed, that she didn’t even recognise me at first. When she did realise who it was, she said only three words.

‘He is dead.’

No need to ask the identity of the dead man.

‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ I said, almost without thought.

‘You had better come in, Nicholas.’

‘No, you had better come outside first.’

I took her by the shoulders and gently but firmly drew her through the front door. Before she could object, I explained that I had just been accosted by a man in the baths who’d roughly demanded the return of the black-bound book that Uncle Christopher had given me the previous evening, and that it could only have been she – Katherine – who put him on my tail.

I had scarcely got to the end of my speech when I registered growing confusion on her face.

‘My uncle’s black notebook?’ she said. ‘Oh, what does that matter? I don’t know of any man in the baths, Nicholas.’

The figure of Hannah passed through the lobby. Katherine glanced over her shoulder through the still open door of the house while the old retainer peered curiously in our direction. I realised two things at once: that Katherine Hawkins had nothing to do with the stranger in the King’s Bath and that it must be Hannah who had described me to him. The servant was the only other person to know my name and the acting company I belonged to, as well as the fact that I’d visited this house last night. How she deduced that I had the book, I don’t know.

Now it was my turn to feel confused. And guilty for having spoken bluntly to Katherine while her grief for her uncle was so raw. I took her more tenderly by the shoulders and ushered her back into the lobby of her own home. Hannah had vanished. If she appeared again, and if I had the chance, I’d have a word with her.

‘I am very sorry to hear of your uncle’s death,’ I said, this time with feeling.

‘It was early this morning,’ she said. ‘So long expected yet so surprising when it happens. Thank God the parson got here in time.’

Uncle Christopher’s demise must have occurred after I crept out of the house, otherwise I would have been alerted by the fuss and alarm of a death, the summoning of the parson and so on. Selfishly, I was glad to have made my exit in time.

We’d been slowly pacing towards the back of the house and by now we were standing outside the door to what was the dining room. A window gave a view of some apple trees, sun-lit. Inside the panelled chamber it was stuffy and gloomy. A long table stood in the centre of the room, with chairs at each end and benches set on either side. Huddled towards one end were three men, two sitting next to each other, the other on the bench opposite. Wooden boxes and sheafs of paper and documents were arrayed on the table between them, together with a clutch of lighted candles. The men were so absorbed in leafing through the papers that our presence went unnoticed.

Eventually one of them looked up. He was a very plump individual with a large face. He seemed to start and coughed to draw the attention of the one beside him. This second man was wearing spectacles. He must have been long-sighted for he now removed them in order to scrutinise us – more precisely, to scrutinise me – as we stood in the doorway. This gentleman did not start in surprise but his brow furrowed as if was I presenting him with a puzzle, and not a very welcome one either. By now the third man, who’d been sitting with his back to us, was aware of us too. He twisted his head round. His eyes narrowed.