The Medieval Murderers - The First Murder

‘Read the ending of “Cain and Abel” to me.’

Malinferno turned the stiff pages of his printed book until he came to the relevant passage.

‘It’s Cain’s final speech after the angel hands down God’s curse on him. It ends,

“The devil take both Him and thee!

Foul may you fall!

Here is a crooked company;

Therefore, God’s curse upon you all!”’

Bromhead tapped his original gleefully. ‘I knew there was something different. There are two more lines attributed to the angel at the end here in the manuscript.’

‘What do they say?’

Bromhead intoned the extra lines in his most solemn voice, though it cracked a little and somewhat spoiled the effect.

‘“Beware the sins of envy and vainglory,

Else foul murder ends your story.”’

Malinferno rose from his chair and leaned to look over his friend’s shoulder.

‘Let me see. Oh, yes. And yet they look like an addition done in a different hand. Could they have been added at a much later date?’

Bromhead frowned, peering closely at the intruders on the neat page of handwritten text.

‘I don’t think so. The script is still very old, and I would swear that it has been done by the same hand. The only difference is that the two lines are in a quickly written bastard script, whereas the rest is a more formal book hand. The whole of the rest of the book was carefully inscribed in a way suggesting the author wished his work to last down the ages. These words were stuck at the bottom of the page, below the lines drawn for the proper text. As though they were an afterthought. And a warning.’

Malinferno laughed. ‘A warning? Have you been reading Mary Shelley?’

Bromhead gave him a scandalised look for suggesting he of all people would be reading such modern Gothic rubbish as Malinferno referred to. He shrugged.

‘I suppose it’s nothing really.’

‘Of course it’s not. The writer of the play was a monk, yes? He probably had second thoughts about finishing Cain and Abel on a curse, and made a late addition. A salutary lesson to avoid… what does he say?… “envy and vainglory”.’

Bromhead nodded at Malinferno’s wise words. But a nagging doubt remained in his mind. If he had known what was going on at the first rehearsal of The Play of Adam at the Royal Coburg, he might have been more worried.

‘I’ll kill you, Jed Lawless, you incompetent nincompoop.’

Morton Stanley had been in a bad mood since realising he would have to share the stage with Perceval Tristram. Doll noted that, when he came back from talking to Will Mossop, his temper had been unalloyed. The first run-through of “Adam and Eve”, with Tristram as a rather corpulent serpent, had gone badly. It had terminated when a canvas backcloth, painted with a scene more reminiscent of a prim English woodland than the Garden of Eden, came tumbling down into a crumpled heap close on the heels of Stanley. He had leaped away just as the wooden beam at the top of the backcloth crashed to the ground. With years of dust rising in clouds, and a shocked silence hanging in the air, the tall actor had laid into the chief stagehand. It must have been Lawless’s grip on the cloth that had failed.

Lawless himself, a wizened but wiry old fellow with a club foot, had emerged from the gloom of the wings, ashen-faced, but determined not to be railed at by a mere actor. He cast a glance into the auditorium where Mossop sat giving his instructions.

‘He can’t talk like that to me, Mr Mossop. It was a genuine accident. The rope gave way.’

Will Mossop gave a deep sigh, and waved a hand in his stagehand’s direction.

‘Just tidy up the mess, Jed. Anyway, haven’t we got anything better for the Garden of Eden. I’m sure that backdrop was last used as Birnam Woods in the Scottish play.’

Lawless grinned toothlessly at the theatre manager. ‘It’s true, what you say. We could always use the backdrop of Jack and the Giant .’

He ambled offstage and, as he passed Doll, shot her a comment out of the side of his mouth: ‘He won’t like that. It’s got a ruddy great beanstalk in the middle of it.’

Mossop called the cast to order as the offending backcloth was hauled back up into place. The collapse had creased the painting badly, and Birnam Woods was now mottled with gashes of bare canvas and flaking paint. The effect was most surreal.

Mossop clapped his hands to gain everyone’s attention.

‘Look here, everyone. I want to move on to the Cain and Abel scene, and block it in before we call it a day.’

He pointed at the quiet, middle-aged actor who had already played several minor roles as angels. He had been so self-effacing that Doll had not yet learned his name. Mossop now provided it.

‘Harry, you are the yokel, Brewbarrel, and you come on from stage left.’ He waved his hand disdainfully. ‘Do your usual moping and leering.’

Harry blushed, and nodded as he walked off into the wings. Doll followed him offstage as she was not needed in this scene.

Standing by him in the darkness of the wingspace, she whispered in his ear, ‘What’s blocking?’

He cast a curious glance at her, thinking she perhaps was trying to take a rise out of him. But the genuinely puzzled look on her face showed him that this attractive, voluptuous woman with whom he was sharing this intimate little space was truly ignorant of theatrical jargon. He guessed that she had probably had to provide her services on the couch in Mossop’s office to get the part, rather than by dint of her acting skills. He glanced onstage, and saw that he had time to explain. Mossop was still manoeuvring Stanley and Tristram around the vast open space. He put his mouth to her pretty shell of an ear, and pointed onstage.

‘That is blocking. Giving the actors their moves, and hoping they will remember them at the next rehearsal.’

Doll breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank goodness. I thought it was going to be something quite painful.’

Harry grinned, observing how Morton Stanley was stumbling around the stage, much to Mossop’s exasperation.

‘Oh, for some actors of limited brain it is very painful, I assure you.’

Mossop’s harassed voice coming from the auditorium broke off their conversation.

‘Harry, that’s your entrance.’

The blocking lasted another full day, and then on the third day work began in earnest. Mossop wished the actors to concentrate on the tale of Adam and Eve, and Doll, Morton Stanley, and Perceval Trsitram, who played the part of King George/Satan, went over their lines again and again. Doll had spent the previous night learning her words with Malinferno, who had had to read both Adam and Satan. He had seemed to have taken great relish in the speech after the eating of the apple.

‘“Alas, my wife I blame, for so she to me said-”’ He broke off. ‘This text is quite up-to-date, is it not, Doll?’

Doll cuffed him around the head with her copy of the play. ‘I shouldn’t need to remind you, Joe Malinferno, that I am no wife of yours. Thanks to your reluctance to make an honest woman of me.’

Malinferno’s face went a little pale at the mention of marriage, but he diverted Doll’s sally into the running battle between them concerning making of her an honest woman.

‘What are you going to do about the fact that Adam and Eve are naked, my dear?’

Doll leered at him. ‘I shall be clad in the sheerest of muslin, and Morton will be bare-chested and wearing the tightest pair of breeches you have ever seen.’

That had shut Joe up, and now at the rehearsal, Doll examined the aforesaid actor’s shapely form from the wings, as she awaited her next entrance.

‘No good looking at that, dearie. Didn’t you know that Morton Stanley plays backgammon with the boys?’