Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

Adrian asks why we are doing this and I say it is my humour. I am reminded of Hamlet’s stowing the body of Polonius in the lobby so that he can joke about it.

I tell Adrian that the corpse is expecting a visit from a friend of his, meaning Adrian’s, and the thieving steward asks who and I say, ‘Master Nick Revill, the player’ and even in the half-darkness of the dead man’s shop I see the other’s mouth twist in anger.

‘Perhaps,’ I say, ‘you would wait here until he arrives.’

I leave Adrian after giving him further instructions. As I walk briskly across Paul’s I notice the innocent figure of Master Revill making his way in the opposite direction. I am careful not to be seen. Underneath my doublet is stuffed the shirt that belonged to Francis. I smile and smile like a man in love with this fallen world. I take pains to keep my hands clenched because there is blood on my palms.

Darkness.

A jolting darkness.

At first I thought that my eyes were tight closed and so made to unfasten them. Either they would not open or they were open already — I could not tell, it was so dark. I attempted to reach up with my hand from where it lay awkwardly under my body, but my hand would not move. My hands were joined together. Next I tried to shift my legs but they too were fastened to each other.

I considered whether I was dead. Close by me were squeaks and squeals and, more distant, thuds and murmurs. This must be the afterlife. Was I in hell or purgatory with gibbering spirits keeping me company, either in torment or in mockery? Well, father, I thought, you were right. Here it is, and here am I in it. I shall describe purgatory. Complete darkness. Your body unable to move but shaken and jolted painfully every moment. No other feeling but aches and pains in every limb. Something close and stifling lying across your face. And tiredness, so that you want to sleep forever but cannot for the aches and pains and the jolting.

Nevertheless I must have slept — or somehow retreated from any knowledge of myself because, moments or hours later, I don’t know which, I went through the whole process again of coming to, and being unsure of whether my eyes were open or shut, and attempting once more to move my hands and feet.

Around this time the thought came to me clearly that I was not dead but alive, in pain and bound up by the hands and feet. I couldn’t see anything because there wasn’t anything to see. The stifling cover over my face and body was a stinking hairy blanket. The jolting motion and the squealing noise were caused by whatever I was being carried in, a cart or wagon most probably, as it jerked across the ground. The regular thuds turned themselves into the sound of a horse’s hooves. The murmurs were the low, occasional voices of the men travelling with me, my captors perched on the driving seat of the cart. The aches and pains in my body were proof not of the torments of hell but that I still had life.

I tugged at my hands but they were securely tied, I could feel the cord biting into my wrists and the backs of my hands. In my mind’s eye I traced back the path which had led to where I found myself now. The visit to Old Nick’s shop. The wait when I was convinced of being watched. The sight of the apothecary’s body swaying from the ceiling. The voice in the darkness saying ‘And so an end’. The blacker shapes growing up around me, blows raining down on my head. The descent into night.

As the conveyance bumped and swayed on its way I tried to order my thoughts. Whoever the man — or men — who had done this to me, he or they had presumably murdered Old Nick as well. Although ignorant of the means by which the old apothecary had been forced through death’s door, I couldn’t doubt that he had been murdered and then grotesquely raised up into the place where his alligator normally hung. I was less certain about why he’d been killed, but the drowning of Francis, that poor servant’s river-stained shirt, the strange death of Sir William Eliot, together with the play of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, all these things bobbed in my mind like the confused flotsam of some sea-battle.

Why was I still alive? Where was I being taken, joltingly and painfully, in the back of a wagon under a stinking blanket? Since the individual who had disposed of Old Nick had taken me by surprise, why hadn’t he made an end of me there and then, and left me displayed at the apothecary’s? He might as well be hanged for two sheep as for one. Surely, since I was still living and breathing, it must be for a purpose. This gave me a little flare of hope. I was not required to die — or at least not yet. But then, I reflected, the hope that relies on the unknown purposes of a murderer must be slender indeed.

I twisted my head to one side, and winced as the after-pain of a blow forked down my side. I tried to peer under the blanket but there was not even the tiniest gap or cranny through which to see. Or if there was, it was night outside and nothing visible. I listened. No sound except the squeaking wagon and the plodding, panting horse, and the occasional murmured comment which I could not make out clearly. If I had been certain that there were people other than my captors at hand I would have called out. I would have cried, ‘Help! Ho! Murder!’ so loudly as to be heard from Spitalfield to Southwark. But I feared there was nobody to listen. There were no street sounds, no echoes of our passage coming back from walls or houses. We must be outside the city. If I could have thrown off the filthy blanket I would have been able to tell from the quality of the air whether we were within or outside the city walls. The smell of London was the first thing that struck me when I came up from the country.

There are four main routes out of London and we might be moving on any one of them. North, into the flat lands beyond Finsbury Fields. Westward, down the river in the direction of Greenwich. Or perhaps eastwards — although on that route the cart would have passed through Holborn and Westminster, and a prudent driver might prefer to steer away from crowded places. These directions all involved traversing relatively law-abiding areas of the city.

On the other hand, if we had crossed the river either by the bridge or ferry, we would have moved south through my own patch of Southwark. This was no particular source of comfort. Were I planning to take someone prisoner and carry him off to a secret destination, this is the direction I would take. Everyone knows that the law and authority of the city do not stretch far on our bank of the Thames. Men and women who have stumbled into trouble recognise that they have a bolt-hole here. Even those on the right side of the law but afraid of its frown — boatmen, for example, or the owners of bearpits — feel instinctively that they are at home south of the water. Respectable figures like the players of the Chamberlain’s Men are resident in Southwark. Master WS, he lived in the Liberty of the Clink, did he not? Though not Master Richard Burbage, no, he lived with seven little Burbages somewhere oh-so-proper north of the river. .

So my muddy thoughts pursued their meandering course. I probably fell into sleep or unconsciousness again, from time to time. Master WS’s bland, brown-eyed face came floating at me through the stifling darkness under the blanket. Something he had said when we were talking backstage at the Globe in what seemed to be another life. Something about an apothecary. . and tricks of the trade. Why had he mentioned the word ‘apothecary’? I would ask Master WS the next time I saw him. But if this slow-coach didn’t soon get to where it was going I would not be able to return to the Globe for the next performance of. .

I couldn’t remember what it was I was due to perform in. .

Suddenly I was jolted awake by a violent lurch. The cart tipped to one side and shuddered to a stop. There was swearing up in front and the thwack of a whip being applied. Then shifting sounds as the men jumped to the ground and, shoving and cursing, struggled to get the wagon upright and on the move once more. After a time they succeeded. The wagon groaned as they resumed their places and we continued on as lumberingly as before.