An Honourable Murderer Read Free Page B

reflection of my fortunes in more than a monetary sense and, if this was so, then even the most favourable observer couldn’t have said that my fortunes amounted to much. Recently, though, there’d been a welcome and overdue change, or at least a hint of it . . .
    Among my earliest accommodation in the capital had been a sty on the third floor of an establishment in Ship Street. It belonged to a stuck-up woman called Ransom, who kept a slovenly house and gave herself airs and graces. The only merit of this room was a view of the river which was obtainable if you risked your neck by craning out of the little window. There were various reasons why I’d had to leave this place, reasons connected to a carelessly emptied chamber pot and a rampant daughter of the establishment.
    Then I’d sunk even lower by putting up with a peculiar quartet of women in Broadwall who charged four pennies a week for a ‘chamber’ that was more holes and gaps than it was floor, walls or ceiling. My landladies called themselves after the sunnier months of the year – April, May, June and July – and had a local reputation as witches. One of them was murdered at the time of the Essex uprising.
    And after
that
I had spent more than two years in a room in a household belonging to Master Samuel Benwell in the street known as Dead Man’s Place. This room of his, which was an improvement on my previous lodging (in the same way that purgatory may be said to be an improvement on hell), had the advantage of being close to the Globe playhouse. Master Benwell and I had our troubles – at one time I found myself lodging in prison rather than under his roof – but he remained faithful to his single tenant. Not so much on account of the shilling a week rental which I paid, as for the playhouse gossip which I fed him from time to time. Some of the gossip was actually true.
    And now Master Benwell was no more. He was dead. No, not murdered, if that’s what you’re thinking, but died naturally. Or as naturally as anyone could who perished in the great plague which had started even while our great Queen was on her deathbed and which continued for many long months into the reign of her successor from Scotland. Indeed, the rising bills of mortality had caused James to delay his coronation procession – the very one in which we’d marched with our four and a half yards of cheap red livery – until the summer.
    By a miracle, none of the Chamberlain’s Men was directly touched by the pestilence. True, we’d spent large parts of the year of 1603 away from the city and out on the road. When Queen Elizabeth died we were playing at the Golden Cross Inn in Oxford, although that brainy town did not escape the plague either. Subsequently we returned to London, but it was plain that there would be no theatre business for many months to come. So we took ourselves off to places like Coventry and Bath, and at each stage we seemed to be stalked by a disease which, like a chess player, made unexpected moves to check and frustrate us. When we got to Bath, for example, we found that the plague had made a knight’s jump into Bristol, killing many in that city.
    Eventually the winter months arrived and we decided to lie low in Mortlake for no better reason than that Augustine Phillips, one of the Globe shareholders, had recently bought a house there by the river. Mortlake seemed as good a place as any. It was a safe distance from town and so the family men summoned their wives and children to join them while the rest of us made do with whatever temporary accommodation we could find.
    Anyway it wasn’t until early in the new year of 1604 that the playhouses were allowed to open once again and the King’s Men could resume their London living in both senses. But the city was a changed place. Weeds flourished in many streets and the doors of infected houses hung aimlessly in their frames. Holes were left