Cry Murder! in a Small Voice Read online

  But a voice called out of shadow, shrill complaint that overtopped the player, even at the katastrophê: “Enough. ’Tis stale.”

  Lord Oxford, as it would be. None had marked him for an act at least. Ben shrugged. My lord (for all his long eclipse) could never yet endure the shadows. Must ever be cynosure.

  “What, lights!” Overpitched. De Vere had not the manage of his voice; it swooped and squalled, a hautboy with a parching reed; but lights brought lorded him: his man was all of silk. Ben standing by the stage—between that other world and this—made his anatomy. His suit would be a manor wasted—folds, barns, meadows in its broidering—its buttons downfall even to the rafters, slate-stripped, and their lead by alchemy turned gold; each glove a hamlet; aye, the very perfume on’t a living. Skirted like a spaniel bitch, pated with an oyster shell—if oyster ere had plumes—and ruffed like Winter in a masque. More rings than teeth. So much his swathing. But the man himself a puckfist: nothing, closed in kidskin. But a whiteness and a smoke.

  He rose, his latest boy at elbow. Court alone: none followed in his train.

  A rumour in the audience, the shadow of a hiss.

  And in the tiring-house, a sort of strangled mewling from the poet, who’d been mouthing his own ecstasies, self-handling as it were.

  The players held their mastery. The dead Venetia, red as any rose, choked back his giggling—sufflaminandus erat—though he shook with it. Would spurt. Silenzio thus thwarted in his frenzy, yet leashed in his deep annoy. Setting forth his leg once more—the black became it—he upheld his empty hands. The poet prompted: “O that nothing. . . .”

  So the play went on.

  At Tom Ruddock’s only Doll was in, with six or seven of her gossips and a bowl. A throng, Ben saw: a pity, for the room would scarce hold both of them alone. Besides all, there were three or four of Ruddock’s brats, a hobby-horse, a drum, three stinking demi-spaniels, and the cat in disputation with the pudding bag. Ailurallantomachia. But Doll, sublimely deaf to comedy, reigned over all. Not Burbage could have held a stage beside her, nor Hecuba have queened it so: bereft and avid and ennobled with disaster. “Ah, sweet boy. And would ha’ made a man, a tyrant—” And she wiped a pinguid tear. “God ’a mercy. Here’s one can tell us of his end.” The Moirai simpered. Ben was importuned with burnt offerings and spondaic sack, which he twice refused. Regretted taking: yet he drank.

  “O come, good Master Jonson, come, you saw him fished.”

  “Was he not swoln as—”

  “—a toad?”

  “—a tympany?”

  “As any mooncalf. Blue, he was. His face . . .”

  “They say his—save your reverence—his cockerel . . .”

  A tugging at Ben’s jacket. “Tell the frog, nuncle.”

  “Tell the fox.”

  “Peace, Jug. Tace, Peglet. Master Aesopus is dry. Here’s barley sugar.” And his fist pried open, empty, he let fall a shower from the other hand.

  So his Ben had played.

  There sat the gossips, weeping as a whore would piss. Nay, fluxy in their facile grief: a glut and purge. He felt himself grow cragged and surly. Doggish as Diogenes embarrelled. So: a curt nod round the circle. “Goodwives, I condole. But I have business. Is your other boy within? Rafe Calder?”

  “Will I not call him down?” As banket to their Roman feast.

  “Stay you. Gabble. I will mount.”

  Pursued by loud bewailings and the reek of slops and sack, wet ashes and burnt pease, Ben huffed and hauled himself upstairs: a dogleg, a tottering volute, something near a ladder. And a low door, narrow as a parable.

  He knew this room, he thought; had fled its double.

  Silence to his knock. He opened.

  And he stood amazed.

  From the rafters, bright-leaved as a wood in fall, unfallen, hung a company of players, masque and anti-masque. In little: mere idolatries, no greater than his hand. A puppet show. Some cut from ballad sheets; some drawn by a childish hand; all painted: knights, gods, shepherds, witches; bears and dragons, Mab and Merlin and the rapt Prosperina. Fantastical, this meddled work—aye, Willfully—to graft such hedgerow Englishry on ancient stock, imp out the laurel with the hawtree. Scene: A wood near Athens. Crinkum-crankum. He would have mocked them as a pack of cards; but in the drowning light, they seemed like spirits. Shades of—Bah! a cheat of fantasy. Bad glass, as green as standing water, and an ill-fit frame, no more: a wind in here. But whispering, they stirred.

  A voice, neither man’s nor woman’s, spoke from the air. “. . . tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore . . .”

  Low thunder. “Veni!”

  A boy hunched in the rafterage dropped down, unfolding neatly in a bow. No courtship in it, only training. The quarrelled light cast diamonds on him: a motley of air.

  “Your servant.” But he could not mask the face he lifted, restless desolate. A wind in sand.

  The boy who made the offering. By his carriage; by his tawny doublet. By his grief. Venetia’s waiting woman. Aye, Ben minded her. How gazing on her mistress’s body, she had touched a lock of hair. Had tift it. Well enough for heaven. It had struck. Amid a clutter of obsequies—trash. Give him woodrights and an axe, and he would lop it to the timber.

  He could use such a boy.

  Fourteen, perhaps. Impubis. A year or two in him to boy it, to be signed a journeyman or cast away. A good voice, but a Marcher accent, with an uplift in it. Not so pretty as his fellow had been. He needs must paint: a pale, sharp, white-brown face—not perfect blackthorn but embrowned—and crowblack hair, upstarting. His eyes, were they not red with weeping, good: a winter sea. A fury in them.

  Ben must stoop to enter, brushed by demi-puppets. “Thy pardon. I intrude upon thy mourning.”

  That sea cast back his pity.

  “They lie. By Christ’s nails, he is innocent. Is slandered. He would not—”

  Bluntly. “Murder himself? I am not Providence and cannot weigh his soul; yet I doubt the law in this.”

  “You believe me?”

  Ben spoke lower. “When the spades had gone, I spoke the service for him.”

  “Are you priest?”

  “An actor. But my prayers as true as any man’s.”

  “I know your work, magister. I have seen your Poetaster. And Sejanus—”

  Aposiopesis. (The rest is silence.) Whether out of awe or policy, he could not tell. “And they lacked of giants?”

  “No, sir. For you serve the Giant Seneca, and have stolen his boots. Then axe to the beanstalk, and down falls harp and all.”

  “Thou insolent chit.” But he was pleased and the boy knew it; yet cared not.

  “I am of your party, sir. By lying, we speak true.”

  A clever imp. Could see him starving by his wits. “Might I look about?”

  Mute assent. A shrug. What could he?

  Aye, this room he knew. A stark bare place beneath its canopy of dreams. Black-thatched, ill-plastered. All the timbers wried, as if in flinching as from a blow. Gapped floorboards. You could lose a shoe between. And all their little furnishings worth not a groat. A straw bed, linenless. A box or two for ease. A candlestick. A pot. A half-a-dozen nails. Their store? No borrowed playing-clothes: he noted that. Lath swords. A pipe and tabor. Scrawlings on the daub in charcoal, on the door in chalk. So. And on a shelf, a little workshop: stumps of pencil, scraps of paper, pinches of bright minerals, deep earths, a brush or two, a row of eggshells stained within. He turned these in his great blunt fingers, set them down. A pretty alchemy. And here their library: five or six play-quartos—Shakespeare again—unbound; parts for study, not the one he sought; snipped ballad sheets; a song or two pricked out. Ah. A foxed and blotted Virgil, missing a signature. An Ovid, water-warped.

  “Pulled from a grammar school, wert thou? At Shrewsbury?”

  “Ludlow, sir. Born in Clun. My father was a joiner.”

  And his mother Welsh, I’d lay. One of Glendower’s hatchlings. A dragon in egg. “And Whitgift’s?”
/>   “A weaver, he thought. But othertimes would say, the King of Fairy. He was one the masters of children stole, and set to playing ere he’d left off petticoats. He was Titania’s boy the old Queen praised, they say; they called him Changeling.”

  “Aye. I mind,” said Ben. “The little chimneysweeper.” That start of down-white hair, that look of shining terror. Pretty as a candle, and as easy snuffed.

  “I worried much how he might live, sir, when he grew a man; for all his art was in his innocence. His part was ever to die. I thought—” And the boy looked at the shelf of books.

  “To starve with him?” No answer. “So he had no kin to come wailing and prying?”

  “A friend.”

  Who loved Venetia, knowing all his frailties.

  Ben touched the rustling company of shades. “His? Thine?”

  “Both. The art of hand was his, but I made them stories. Plays.” The boy looked upward and away, as if at clouds. “A game of Arcady. ‘The Queen’s Men.’”

  A grunt. “Out of fashion.”

  “Out of time. Not great Eliza but old Mab.”

  “My son . . .” He knew not why he spoke. “My son had a tawdry puppet, which he begged me at Bartholomew. Named him Caesar Augustus, and did laurel him with cresses. In ’s histories, he slew giants, and did rule the moon.”

  “You might have learned his art.” The boy was smiling. Yet for all his skilled impudence—a page in a comedy—there was a mist now on those eyes.

  Ben’s own were dry. A myriad of children—innocents—were dead this year of plague. Why rail at this one death, this scatterling’s? Aye, that comes pat: because the murderer usurps death’s crown and ministry, mocks providence. Scapes justice. So? And art thou law?

  Above him, turning on a string, a knight of shadows rode, lance levelled at the air. I summoned am to tourney. ’Twas a child’s dream out of balladry, a Bedlam quest. Not his. Cry Murder? Tilt at wickedness? What cause have I? His cold voice catechized: For that thou canst not bring thy war on heaven. Ben could—with anguish—set his own Ben’s death, his soundless grief, in measure: here doth lye / Ben. Jonson his best piece of poetry. Could square his agony with heaven’s metric: call it just. Could rhyme. Not so with this boy player’s death. No elegy in this, but act.

  Now, now his opening. He tapped the knight. “Those colors must have cost. Here’s lapis.” Not a word. “How came he by that?”

  Stumbled back. No parry.

  “Did he act the Ganymede? Ceverene solebat?”

  A hit, by his turning cheek. Wave-white then red, a deep carnation welling up, as if a man were stabbed in water. Boarded. Yet no quick-denying oath, but answer.

  “With no man that I know, sir. He hath been—he was—my bedfellow, this year and more.” A silence. “Only . . . he was fond of praise. Of . . . cosseting. I cannot fault him. All our study is to please.”

  “And before this year? Some masters cosset.”

  Calder bit his lip on smiling. “Master Ruddock? He hath wenches. We have heard old coil below.”

  An eyebrow.

  “Past midnight, creeping in, he clashes with the pot our mistress set for him, athwart the stair. Nails! he cries, and stands aswim in it. Now Trip and Trey rouse up and bark in antiphon, and worry at his calves; pot-shod, he thumps and morrises and yelps; the mistress drubs him with her broom, and rails. Down, bitches, is it? Was it not, Up, cock and On, whore!”

  Ben fell against the timbers in a great Y—they shook as if the house would fall—braced and laughing. Samson-Silenus. “Strayed Odysseus is worried by the she-cur Hecuba. I will make an epigram. O most excellent boy. Thou hast given me my ale tonight.” He wiped his glowing face, and sat on one of the boxes, gingerly. It creaked and swayed. Now, while he is smiling. “And of late, did any man attempt him? Coy his cheek? Or whisper, tongue in ear? Give trifles, sweetmeats?”

  “None, sir. That I know.” That hopeless honesty. “’Twas all old women, honeying and fondling.”

  “And the ring?”

  “From my lady Howard for his singing in her masque of Eros.”

  “Yet by covenant is not that gold his master’s?”

  And again, the blush. “Gold, yes: which our master bade him wear, as brag of patronage. But other toys we kept.”

  “He worked privily?”

  “We all do, we boys. We may not; but there is stolen pleasure in’t. And sweetmeats oftener than coin.”

  “Oranges,” said Ben. He tapped the chalking on the door. “Back. Oranges.”

  “That was another night.”

  “So there were many?”

  “I have thought—” said Calder, staring at the wall. “I know not, but I think he went because it frighted him. He feared the dark, and murderers, and ghosts. He flinched from ruffians. I think he did it for the coming home. The candle.”

  “And that night it burned to snuff.”

  “I waked for him,” said wretched Calder. “He was coming back.”

  “From whence?”

  “If I knew—” The fury at himself. “Yet he did seem in great spirits. And I—was vexed with him. I did not stay him.”

  “What figures did he paint the last?”

  Calder thought. “This, Ariadne. And the Minotaur.”

  “We will spell this out from Sibyl’s leaves.”

  Lumbering to his feet, Ben tapped the dangling toys. They trembled. “Good paper this. No market stall.” He twitched them down and turned them. Verses, of a sort. Indited in a fair large hand, Italianate: no playhouse scrivener’s crabbed and thorny scrawl. Broad margins like a monument.

  But oh, that paper. Irresistible as ivory, stiff as breastplate: fitting for a lord’s impresa. Was the boy told, Burn this? Could he not bear to give it up?

  The text was snipped about of course; but here, in the bull’s shoulder (where the sisters weep) was verse enough to judge. “What think you? As a part in tragedy?”

  Calder read. “No cues.” He mouthed the lines. “Unspeakable. Not one of our trade?”

  “No. No poet. Yet would mount his tragedy.” A turn. “The ancientest of theatre is a sacrifice. Thus: for his tragoedia—his goat-song—he did want a kid.”

  “Sir?”

  “The crowner hath no love for players. Here’s a naked child laid out, at which a guildsman Herod’s very dog must weep; and Master Barebones Fear-the-Lord must rant above him for a quarter-hour on sodomy and profanation. There was in some sort . . . protestation.” Hand on hilt, a grim look. “But as thou know’st, I am felon”—and he crooked his Vulcan’s thumb—“and I may not speak. I broke the bailiff’s pate that did turn me out.” A flare at bellows; then a sinking down, a glowering. “’Twas ruled the boy had slain himself by hanging, for the shame of whoredom—”

  A cry.

  “—and then—for the concealment of his crime—by drowning.”

  “He would not—”

  “Conspiracy, twice murder and—’twas argued—self-sodomy.”

  “He did not.”

  “I know,” said Ben. “Someone had bound him, hand and foot. I saw the marks.”

  Calder dropped the Minotaur as if it were a coal. “This . . . monster?”

  “I cannot prove it.”

  “Tell me his name. I will kill him.”

  He would: Ben saw that in his face. Could not. “No. His servants would kill thee, as they would a rat. Small vengeance, to be buried in a dunghill, to a psalmody of flies.” He took the boy by the shoulders, held them. How he shook. “I am for surety, then justice. An I prove this death, thou wilt have vengeance. Not with steel: this war is of the theatre. He will eat his words.”

  Cheapside, Advent 1603

  In a corner of the Mermaid, Ben drank with his crony, Robin Armin, late of the Goldsmith’s Company. The King’s Men’s Snuff. A gill to Ben’s quartpot: his slight quick tumbler’s body in a mole-gray scholar’s gown, mischief as justice. He’d an ill-matched face—a fortune in a fool—two faces in one coin, like moon and dark of moon. Himself
his guising. He’d a trick of turning, overturning what you saw in him. Now mirth, now melancholy: child; confessor; lunatic. His hands, unlooked-at, toyed incessantly, with salt, knives, oranges. And now with gold, a quarter angel: tumbling it down and down a Jacob’s ladder of his fingers, juggling, spinning, rolling it, occulting and disclosing it: now Michael, now the Ship.

  With his pensive side to Ben, he listened to the thundrous bombard of opinion, his descanting upon sack, policy, stage-traffic, wits, lackwits, roaring girls, the Scots king’s minions, Martial’s epigrams, Will’s damned facility, Bess Broughton’s smock; all rival poets and their flaws; masques, stratagems, boys’ companies, the Queen’s paps jigging as Hippolyta—so much for Art—the Unities in Aeschylus (Snuffed, by an eyebrow), the goose pie before them (tried and executed), broken music, and by such labyrinthine turns, at last the court.

  “—and whining Oxford? What rumor of him?”

  “Light, by a scruple.” A flick and the angel vanished. “How, my lord Leapfrog? Signor Fanfaranado? Not forgot: for he keeps his trumpeter.”

  Ben snorted. Armin sipped. He’d drunk a half stoup of wine, unsugared, in the evening; had nibbled at a seedcake and a sucket of quince.

  “I knew him ere the Ark had sailed, and when our old Queen (Jesu bless her) had her teeth. The Moon was not yet round.” A pinch at salt, let fall. “’A had of my master Lonyson a gold ring of an ounce (troyan): who had naught of him. Being prentice then, I made a ballad ont: ‘O for O.’ ’Twas sung to the tune of ‘Halfe Hannikin.’”

  “A ring? For a Ganymede?”

  An eyebrow. “’Twas not for his Countess. She might sit i’ th’ ashes and cry, O for a hobbyhorse. They say his daughters among them had one petticoat, as the Sisters one eye.” The dark face turned; the light. “A pretty ring, quaint-fashioned, with two stones. His mistress, they say, is in’s mirror. Self-wed.”