The Conscience of the King hg-2 Page 2

  Something was wrong.

  The Actor could sense it, even on the sidelines. The actors on stage had picked up a signal, the tremor that goes round live performers when things start to go wrong. Horatio's eyes were flickering backwards and forwards, Hamlet ill at ease and muffing some of his lines. The King, Claudius, had risen to his feet in uncontrollable anger. The whole assembly — courtiers, actors — should have splintered from the stage in apparent chaos. Old Ben's body was still on the stage.

  'Bloody hell!' said Condell. 'Sodding bloody buggering fucking hell! Why doesn't he get up and go?'

  You never left a body on the stage. It was the golden rule. It spoilt it if the audience saw a character they had just been told was dead suddenly get up and walk off before the next scene. It wasn't as if they could draw a curtain over the stage. Yet this was different. The audience knew that the body in the play-within-the-play was an actor's, had not really died. He was expected to run off with his tail between his legs, realising the actors had caused offence. Yet Ben lay there, stiff, unmoving.

  They were seconds away from the audience realising something had gone tragically wrong. Ben lay flat out on the bed, eyes agape and mouth open, a thin line of dribble from his lips over his chin. *I do believe,' said Condell, in a tone of hushed disbelief, 'that the stupid old bastard has gone and died on us.'

  The Actor turned to Condell. He had only half-heard. 'It's all over,' he said sadly.

  The great Burbage, playing Hamlet, had gone glassy-eyed and had lost the plot completely. The line should have been: 'O good Horatio, I'll take the Ghost's word for a thousand pound!' Instead, Burbage started to gabble complete nonsense, 'For thou dost know, O Damon dear…'

  'Damon? Damon! Who the fuck's Damon when he's at home?' Condell was incandescent.

  This realm dismantled was

  Of Jove himself; and now reigns here

  A very, very…

  There was an appalling pause… 'Paiock!'

  'Oh sweet Jesus!' moaned Condell, wringing his hair. 'What's he doing?'

  'He's regressed,' said the Actor. 'Don't you remember? He's mangling lines from that monstrous load of old garbage we did years ago — Gorboduck, wasn't it? — and it was bad enough then.'

  On stage, Horatio turned to Hamlet, a look of total scorn on his face. 'You might have rhymed…' he said tersely.

  Horatio saved the day, with no help at all from Hamlet. He motioned firmly to one of the actors off stage and together they draped Old Ben over their shoulders. Never explain. Never apologise. If you make it look as if you meant it, the audience will believe you. It was a basic rule.

  They dumped the body by the Actor's feet. He gazed into the staring eyes of Old Ben and a pain like an icicle in his chest clutched his heart. Vaguely he was aware of Hamlet's voice: 'O good Horatio, I’ll take the Ghost's word for a thousand pound…'

  Burbage had got it together again. They were back on track. It hardly seemed to matter to the Actor. Old Ben was dead, clearly. Condell bent down to feel in his neck for a pulse, for form's sake. There was nothing.

  The Actor smelted something. His hand shot out, stopping Condell just as his bony fingers were to touch the corpse's flesh.

  'Hold it! Don't touch him!'

  The smell, that metallic, vinegary stench with an acidic burn to it. He had researched poisons, knew their reality. This was not water that had been poured into Old Ben's ear. Someone had substituted the green bottle with its harmless contents for a sophisticated and expensive poison, the ingredients known to only two or three men in London at most. Someone, carefully and methodically, had sought to murder the actor taking the part of the Player King. Only at the last minute had a different man taken on the role for that one performance. Ben's death was no accident.

  Which meant that someone had tried to murder the Actor. Or to be more precise, actor, poet and playwright. Shakespeare. William Shakespeare, the author of this very play, Hamlet. William Shakespeare, the actor who had always taken the role of the Player King, the actor who should have been playing it this afternoon except for a last-minute change because he felt sick.

  The sickness came upon him again, wave after wave, and did not go away. Cecil, he thought to himself, I must tell Cecil. It had gone too far, gone on far too long.

  One moment he was there. The next moment he had gone. In his tension and sickness he failed to take note of the small, cloaked and hooded figure, following him with burning eyes and a strange, high-prancing step.

  2

  May, 1612 The Merchant's House, Trumpington, near Cambridge

  'There was given me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me.'

  The King James Bible

  Henry Gresham sat in the great high-backed chair, looking out through the tall mullioned window over the East Anglian meadows. For a few moments he was at peace, the sardonic smile gone from his face, features relaxed, the book lying almost unnoticed in his lap. The smells of early summer wafted across the Great Hall, grass and turned earth mingling with the faint smell of smoke from garden fires.

  He felt extraordinarily calm. He had risen early that morning, noting the still-warm other half of the bed. For years Jane, now his wife, had always managed by some alchemy to rise before he did, and grant him the space to re-enter the world in private.

  In private, that is, except for the figure of Mannion. If the one certainty in Gresham's life was that Jane's slim, warm body would be gone from his bed when he awoke, the other was that Mannion, that immense hulk of a man, would drift in silently to the room almost as soon as Gresham's feet touched the floor, towel in hand, ready to guide his master to the adjoining room where the bath had already been filled. This morning he had rejected the ritual, putting on instead a rough country jerkin and trews over his clean linen, stuffing a simple cap on his head and walking out past the startled servants wiping the sleep from their eyes as they came to terms with their own world. He had strode out of the house, lungs taking in great gasps of the still, chill morning air. Mannion, with a wistful eye back at the house and breakfast, had followed him in silence. He knew where Gresham would be going. It had to be Excalibur's pool.

  Gresham had called it that when he bought the house. If ever there was a pool from which an enchanted hand might bring Excalibur, this was it; a bend in the river channelled out by the years into almost the size of a small lake, the water deep in history, cool and pure.

  Mannion sniffed as Gresham stripped off and prepared to dive into the pool. Gresham heard it, as he was meant to. He turned to his body-servant, grinning, stark naked in the still-cold morning air.

  'This is a magical place! An enchanted place! Can't you feel it, old man?'

  'Funny how you can miss these things,' Mannion replied in a tone that did not imply any great respect for magic or enchantment. 'I thought it was just cold and damp.'

  'Have you no imagination?' Gresham half shouted as he prepared to dive in to the darkness of the pool, thin strands of early morning mist still clinging to its luminous surface. *No,' said Mannion, at least able to close that one up without further discussion. 'And if I did have, you can be sure neither of us'd be standing here catching our deaths this morning!'

  Gresham pulled back, aborting his dive, interested.

  'And how do you reckon that?'

  'Because it's your so-called imagination that's got you into most of the scrapes that my lack of it has helped pull you out of. Now are you going to dive in, or are we both going to die of your imagination?'

  Not for the first time, Gresham reflected that it was usually a bad thing to engage the servants in conversation before breakfast. He gasped as the cold river water bit benignly into his flesh. Mannion was waiting with the towel as he climbed out, dripping, on to the grassy bank. Mannion noted with approval, as he always did, the firmness of Gresham's body, the muscle under just the right layer of flesh. In the cold, patches of Gresham's skin, all down his right side, had turned just the slightest shade paler than the rest of
his flesh. If Mannion remembered holding Gresham in his arms for weeks on end, or Gresham his screaming for release from his agony when the powder had burned all that side of his body, then neither said anything. They did not need words in order to communicate.

  They walked back in companionable silence to The Merchant's House. Medieval in its origins, it had once been little more than a Great Hall with a kitchen attached. Extended and added to over two hundred years, Gresham could feel the heat of the house extend towards him like outstretched arms. He found it difficult to explain its magic, but he knew it was centred in the Great Hall. Once, in a different age, whole families and their retainers had lived, squabbled and loved in this Hall, with only the kitchens, store houses and rooms for the master and mistress separated off. Now, with its tapestries and fantastic gilded and beamed roof, the Great Hall was simply the largest room at the centre of a complex of corridors, levels and parlours, a positive industry of a house, the noises of which Gresham could perpetually hear faintly in the background. Summer was truly in the air, and there was a sense of reawakening in all the subdued sounds around him, a stirring of limbs aching from the winter. Yet the Great Hall seemed almost impervious to this tumult. In its time it had seen and hosted all that human life could offer. It was called The Merchant's House, but Gresham guessed some rich merchant had bought it from the nobility who had first built it and then fallen on hard times, or perhaps even fallen on the executioner's block. No merchant would have built that Hall. Its confidence was the confidence of a blood-line, not of earned money.

  His children had come in through the door at the other end of the Hall, talking quietly to each other. The room gleamed, rich with the shine and smell of polish. Gresham felt an irritation, and half rose to banish them from the formal room of the great house, the room that was his to be alone in whenever and howsoever he required it. This was an adult room, not a nursery. Then he fell back, unseen, as he caught the words of their conversation.

  'Sssh!' It was Walter, six this year and the older of the two, who happened to be making the most noise. 'If they hear us they'll make us leave!'

  'Why will they make us leave?' That was the small, piping voice of Anna, rising five. Learning to speak extraordinarily early, she had always done so with perfect clarity.

  'Because adults do that sort of thing.'

  'Then are adults not very clever?'

  'I… I… I don't know!' safd an exasperated Walter. 'Let's get on with the game.'

  Gresham relaxed back into his chair, grinning, still hidden from his two children. Now there was the subject of his next academic work, he thought. Man, the dominant species, brought to a grinding halt by the seventh rib asking a sensible question. And what was Man's answer? 'I don't know! Let's get on with the game!' How many men had Gresham known who treated the deadly serious business of life as simply a game? The only difference between Gresham and other men was that he had learned long ago that there was no answer, that life was indeed a game and survival its only victory.

  The game in this instance, or so it appeared, consisted of skipping the length of the vast table centred in the Hall and placing something a few feet past its end, itself only a few feet from the back of Gresham's chair. Feeling increasingly like a naughty child himself, Gresham looked round to catch sight of what his daughter had laid on the floor.

  Good God. It was a bum roll. Or two bum rolls, to be precise. These were the padded half-hoops that a woman wore resting on her bottom to exaggerate the size of her hips and the narrowness of her waist, and to put a barrier between the flesh and the steel wires that extended her skirt out to the ludicrous lengths required by Court fashion. There would be hell to pay when their loss was discovered.

  The game quickly became clear. Walter and Anna each had a packed leather ball. Underneath the table was a narrow tunnel formed by the extravagantly backed oak chairs tucked under it. Bowling the ball under the entire length of the table so that it emerged to rest in the centre of one of the bum rolls acquired top points. Bowling the ball so that it hit the end of the bum roll meant no points. A few points were scored for clearing the table but not reaching the embrace of the bum roll.

  The temptation was too much.

  'Can I play?' asked Gresham, standing up.

  Children were meant to doff their caps to their father after his breakfast, ask him to pray for them and invite his formal blessing. Formal. Restrained. Fathers did not romp with their children on the floor.

  But it was a good game, and he did want to play.

  His two children, ludicrously small now that he was upright, jumped back as he spoke but calmed immediately as they recognised their father.

  'Do you… do you… do you mind us being here, Father?'

  It was Walter, the brave little soldier standing in front of his officer, always unsure of what erratic authority would decree yet wanting so much to get it right.

  'Of course I do!' said Gresham firmly. 'You've disturbed my peace and quiet and you've no right to be here.'

  Interesting, he thought, most children's faces would have fallen at that. His children were too young to control all their muscles. Both flickered, and blinked, but their control at what must have seemed disaster in their tiny lives was remarkable. Both stood straight before him. Unwilling to demand more of their courage, he spoke again.

  'But then again, this looks a good game, and the least you can do if you've disturbed me is let me play it too.'

  They smiled then, shy little smiles. Trust and fear, thought Gresham, and some affection. Three of the ingredients that make a fine commander. Am I treating my children like soldiers under my command?

  If he was, one soldier kept a lawyer in the barracks.

  'Your arms are bigger than ours,' said Gresham's daughter. 'You must have a forfeit!'

  Where had she learned to speak like that at her tender age? Those huge, dark eyes; the thin, wiry little body; the intensity and the control in the voice. In a moment Gresham was rushed back to his first meeting with her mother, Jane. A bastard girl in a godforsaken village, beaten to perdition by a vicious stepfather, demanding that the gentleman pay a forfeit because he had blinked before she did.

  He blinked now, and saw his daughter before him again. Yet as it had always been with her mother, he felt a strange, defenceless feeling overwhelm him. She was very like Jane.

  He became businesslike. Fathers should be formal, precise and definite with their children. In a very short space of time it was agreed that he should have a five-point handicap on a match of six throws. He had argued for three points, his children for ten, and they had compromised, at five. His children forgot who he was as he totally threw away the first ball, hitting the leg of the third chair along.

  'Damn!' he said, engrossed, then looked round with a guilty start. Walter and Anna pretended they had not heard him. Walter landed his neatly within the circumference of the bum roll and Anna lodged her ball just outside of it.

  When Lady Jane Gresham entered the Hall, with Mannion beside her, it was to find her husband, Sir Henry Gresham, kneeling on the floor in peasant's jerkin and trews, beating it with his fists and yelling in mock horror that he had lost to devilry and witchcraft. Walter and Anna were dancing round him, alternately shrieking, 'We won! We won!' and trying to hug him to say thank you for the fact that he could be so silly.

  Jane had seen Gresham kill a man by cleaving his head in half with a boat axe, an exultant grin on his face as his teeth drew back over his lips. He had consigned men to torture, had himself been strapped to the rack. She knew he could be without pity or remorse for those who threatened him, or her. And here he was, treating his children as if they were the most fragile alabaster.

  The children saw their mother and rushed towards her, all decorum forgotten. In a trice they were wrapped round her.

  'Mummy, Mummy, Father came and we thought he was angry but he played with us and we won…'

  Jane was dressed plainly, to manage the house and her children rather than to
impress at Court. Nonetheless, every lady painting and corseting at Court would have given their souls to look as she did. The body was straight as an arrow, the complexion clear, the legs as long as heaven and the breasts the reward for having made the journey. Her head was chiselled and her face extraordinary. Its classical beauty was simplicity itself, yet it flickered and changed and flashed a different reality every second. The eyes. It was always the eyes with her, almost black but with a strange sparkle to them and the same primeval depth as the pool that Henry Gresham had dived into this morning.

  'Good morning, my lord,' said Jane, managing to manifest total control, exasperation and a mild, irritated affection all at the same time. 'I thought I had only two children in my care. Now it seems I have three.'

  Gresham stood up. 'Madam,' he announced, standing to his full height, 'I must make formal complaint regarding your motherhood.'

  The two children disengaged from their mother and stood back, alarmed.

  "Sir Henry!' replied Jane, sweeping to her full dignity, 'I am appalled. How may I have failed in my sacred duty to your heirs?'

  'You have failed, my lady,' replied Gresham in the most sonorous tones he could muster, 'in that you have had the temerity to bring into this world two young striplings,' he glowered at his children with such severity that they fell back, 'who have managed to beat me fair and square at bowling!'

  With that, he flung out his arms and his children ran in glee to their embrace.

  'Take these young hounds outside,' Gresham said to Mannion after a moment, gazing swiftly at Jane who nodded imperceptibly, 'and give them some exercise, so they learn to leave their father undisturbed and, of course, to let him win.'