Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

Or perhaps the plot was all Sir Thomas’s, and Lady Alice merely accepted the result without enquiring into it too closely, as women are always inclined to take what fortune drops into their laps.

On the other hand, young William Eliot has informed me that both his mother and his uncle were, in their own ways, genuinely distressed by the death of a husband-brother. What I’d witnessed of them from the tree didn’t suggest that their grief had lasted long. Just so do Gertrude and Claudius appear to be genuinely distressed. They are good players at grief. So too is Hamlet, good at grief. Who is to say what is real and what is play? I go round in circles. Each argument meets a counter-argument. In this real-life drama it is William Eliot who is playing the part of Hamlet, the son of a mother recently married to an uncle, and of a father dead in strange circumstances. What reason might William have for wishing his father dead? A voice whispers to me, and I am almost afraid to commit this thought to paper: haven’t all sons, in some hidden part of themselves, a wish to see their fathers dead?

Who is guilty then? All? None?

A final question for myself: Why compare everything to a play? Why should I hold every incident up and see whether it matches something in Master Shakespeare’s imagination?

Response: Because it seems to me that the play is the answer — the play’s the thing. This starts with Hamlet and it will end with Hamlet.

As it happens, the next afternoon we did Hamlet again. It was a sure crowd-puller and — pleaser, so the Burbage brothers had put another performance on the schedule in two days’ time. The tragedy of the Prince of Denmark was to be leavened by the little satire of Boscombe’s A City Pleasure , performed on the middle afternoon. After the Sunday break, we were to revert to our diet of crazed Milanese dukes and cardinals, and murderous painters and rustics in the county of Somerset. Such is the player’s round. So dizzying is it that one scarcely knows on any one day whether one’s first line should be ‘Buon giorno’, or ‘Good den, zur’, or ‘Greetings, my fair dame’. And while these plays, together with WS’s Hamlet, were going forward, we were preparing for the next batch which included Love’s Sacrifice (the minimal part of Maximus) and Julius Caesar (the disposable part of the poet Cinna).

But that afternoon it was, as I say, Hamlet.

After I had delivered my lines as the English ambassador, after Fortinbras of Norway (which, being not a very big part, was taken by Samuel Gilbourne, who had been with the Chamberlain’s only as many weeks as I had days) had spoken nobly over the remains of the Prince, and after we had all done our little jig and the audience gone home happy, I retired to the tiring-room, surrendered my costume and, exchanging a few words with my co-players, exited into Brend’s Rents.

I was not surprised to see William Eliot outside. We fell easily into step together and, skirting the Bear Garden, made to enter the Goat amp; Monkey, the tavern where we’d first encountered each other.

‘Sir, sir!’

‘Not now, Nat.’

The dirty man was lounging at the inn-door, hoping to be invited to do his animal-noises in exchange for pennies which he’d promptly convert — oh alchemy! — into ale’s muddy gold.

‘I will do you a bear fight, death and all, sir.’

‘No, Nat.’

‘Four dogs dead and the bear mortally wounded — all for one penny.’

‘Piss off now.’

‘Can you do a unicorn?’ said clever William.

‘No sir, for though it is not widely known, the unicorn is mute,’ said clever Nat.

‘There’s a penny for your pains,’ said William, and Nat scuttled ahead of us into the Goat amp; Monkey to spend the coin quickly. While William and I were talking, he would glance at us from his corner from time to time, raising his tankard to his new patron.

‘I thought you would most probably be at the playhouse,’ I said.

‘Yes. It is like an itch, that play. I must keep scratching at it.’

‘We do it again the day after tomorrow.’

‘You have nothing to report?’

‘From your mother’s house? No, apart from the initials up the tree which I told you of. And the strangeness of Francis’s death.’

‘Which we have also talked of.’

Although it had been William who first inveigled me into the Eliot mansion with the promise or threat of something ‘out of place’, he now seemed inclined to dismiss my findings as insignificant. Initials up a pear tree? Nothing; children, and lovers like Master WS’s characters, carved their names into trees, not murderers. The death by drowning of the servant who had discovered his father’s body? People died in the river every day by the bucketful. Not quite true, but he had a point. I had not yet told him about my visit to the apothecary’s for fear that he would laugh at my credulity. Nor had I told him about the two occasions when I had seen his mother in a less than respectable light, once in my room and once in the garden. What was I to tell him? That his mother and uncle had been bed-mates before his father went down underground? That in every argument with myself I went round in circles?

‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘that we are so little advanced in this matter.’

‘My fault, Nick. I should never have asked you to do this. I thought that a fresh pair of eyes, ones not half-blinded by family affection or dislike, might see something which I had overlooked. No matter. I have enjoyed having a player for a lodger.’

‘Your parents too?’ I said, remembering the exchange between Lady Alice and Sir Thomas.

‘There is much coming and going in our house. They are civil to their guests, as befits a knight and his lady. And my mother has a real taste for the playhouse. She always did. My father, he-’

‘ — despised players,’ I cut in.

‘I don’t know that it was as strong as that. But he was suspicious, certainly. He felt that no man should pretend to be what he was not, even in play.’

‘My father also.’

‘So we have that in common.’

I saw William’s gaze slide to one side of my face, even as I felt outspread fingers slipping under the hair at my nape.

‘Nicholas,’ a soft voice whispered in my ear. I knew the warmth and sweetness of her breath. ‘Shift up.’

Nell pushed onto the bench between William and me.

‘I thought I’d find you here, in your favourite hole,’ she said.

Finished with business for the day, she must have been. That is to say, by now she had earned enough to pay the Madam, with a little left over to provide for daily necessaries. The life of the whore is even more precarious and provisional than that of the jobbing player. As ever, I wondered who — and how many — she had been with that day. And as ever, I tried to strangle the thought at birth, just as I stifled the notion that she was looking for new trade in the Goat amp; Monkey. Nevertheless, I was glad to see her.

William smiled at my mistress. He did not ask who, or rather what, she was. He would know that no lady should walk alone into a Southwark tavern. And her dress of flame-coloured taffeta most likely told him a story too.

‘Who’s this, Nick?’

‘William Eliot, a gentleman who dwells across the river.’

‘Eliot. Is that. .?’

‘One of the most distinguished families in the city, yes,’ I said quickly, considering that William would not have been overjoyed to know that the secret matters of his family were the property of a trull.

‘A drink, mistress?’ said William, all courteous and courtly.

‘Nell,’ said Nell, simpering slightly. I wished now that she had been sat not between us but on my side only, since she wriggled and snuggled herself in his direction. ‘Thank you, sir.’