The Opening Night Murder (31 page)

“And did anyone else notice him?” Suzanne wondered why this was the first she’d heard of William in the green room.

“I think, mistress, that I was the only one who recognized him and knew who he was. There’s a crowd of guests for every performance, and those who wish they were guests, who fill the ’tiring room so there is hardly space to breathe. A stranger in the green room is barely noticeable, there be so many of them. I didn’t see that anyone paid him any particular attention. More than likely I myself would never have taken notice had I not fought with him shortly before.”

“Very well. Then tell me what you did when you saw him.”

Arturo continued, “I was like to kill him then, right there in the green room, but my better sense kept me from it. I could kill a man in a fight, but never in cold blood. And later, when he fell to the stage, dead, I had no sorrow for it and might have danced a jig if the celebration wouldn’t have brought the attention of Constable Pepper. The simple fact of having drawn a knife on him shortly before was enough for me to make a strategic retreat with my troupe when he was murdered. I’ve been in the gaol, mistress, only once, and I don’t care to return whether innocent or guilty.”

“I see.” Suzanne did see. Nobody, including herself, wanted
to encounter the constable even when innocent. Coming to the attention of any authority too often resulted in hanging, and that made it advisable to cut and run at the first hint of trouble. Then she asked, “Did you happen to see the crossbow in the green room?”

Arturo nodded. “There were several crossbows there.”

“Did you see the one carried by the boy, Christian?”

Again the tumbler nodded. “He set it down. Left it beside a table.”

“Did you see who took it?”

Arturo shook his head.

“Did you see William leave the room?”

Again Arturo shook his head. “I was needed onstage, and so I went while he was still there. I never miss my cue.”

“Of course not.”

The coincidence of William’s presence in that room and the missing crossbow that was last seen there set up more echoes in Suzanne’s mind. Too much coincidence. She knew by experience that chance was usually anything but. All of this had a fishy smell; she needed to find out the reasons for these things, then she might know what had really happened.

A
LL
the way back to the theatre in the hired coach, Suzanne sat silent, frowning at the floor before her. Horatio kept his thoughts to himself as well, staring out the window with narrowed eyes and thin lips as the carriage jostled over ruts, holes, and finally cobbles. Louis looked out the window on his side, his eyes half-closed in a dreamy stare, and Suzanne knew William’s murder was the last thing on his mind. It had been a struggle to tear him away from Arturo’s daughter. There seemed a real possibility Louis could run away from the Globe
Players to join Arturo’s mummers. They would need to keep an eye on him and hope his terror of foreigners would keep him in London. The way his knee bounced with its nervous tic, he looked as if he were already running away in his daydream.

Suzanne’s mind tumbled, barely aware he was even there. Questions rose and submerged like potatoes in a rolling boil, bobbing up to show themselves, then diving to be replaced by others. Why had William gone into the green room? Where had he gone when he left? Who had taken the crossbow, and why? Had someone recognized William and followed him out with the loaded bow? Where had they gone after leaving the green room? Exactly when had William left the green room? Who had been onstage at that time?

Had Arturo even told the truth about not picking up the crossbow himself? She asked Horatio his opinion, and the big man thought hard and stared skyward as he sorted out the story. Then he said, never taking his eyes from the carriage ceiling, “Well, he said he left to be onstage. To the best of my recollection he was assigned as one of Erpingham’s men in Act IV, Scene III, a nonspeaking role. Though he wasn’t onstage when Wainwright fell from the gallery, he’s told the truth that he had to leave the green room earlier to be onstage. And I should think there was hardly enough time for him to make his exit after the scene and steal the crossbow before Christian could retrieve it and make his own entrance. They must have passed each other at the upstage doors. And it was but a few moments afterward that Wainwright was killed. I believe Arturo’s testimony is honest; he did not kill Wainwright.”

“The scene was the Agincourt battlefield, crowded with men. Who, then, was not onstage who might have shot the crossbow?”

Horatio looked once more out the window at the passing streets of London, and sternness hardened his voice. “Do not ask that, my niece, for your son was one of the very few who were not busy at that moment.”

Suzanne went silent and focused her attention on the middle distance. She struggled to keep herself from screaming or weeping.

The performance that evening was the opening of
The Winter’s Tale
. Suzanne sat through it, barely attending, her thoughts sorting through the things she’d learned these past couple of days. William in the green room. It made no sense. The king and William on the premises at the same time. That made even less sense, given Wainwright’s terror of the crown. Plainly he hadn’t known Charles was there. Which raised the question of why Wainwright was there. What had brought him to the theatre and sent him upstairs to the stage right gallery? And who’d had cause to follow him there?

The sun was low in the sky when the performance finished and the audience began to file out, abuzz with commentary on the show. Suzanne remained in her seat in the stage left gallery, thinking, even after the crowds had left and the actors were all in the dressing room. She gazed across at the stage right gallery, thinking hard but getting nowhere.

Nearly entranced, barely knowing where she was headed, so deep in thought was she, she rose from her seat and walked around back and to the other gallery. A murder had occurred here, but she looked around at the now empty space and couldn’t see how it had happened. She knew it had, but couldn’t visualize any of it. She looked down at the stage below, at the blackened bloodstain on it, and still couldn’t imagine how William had been shot. Something was quite wrong, and she struggled to put her finger on it.

Then she tried visualizing the event as she had seen it rather than as it was said to have happened. In her mind’s eye she saw the body lying on the stage, in the position indicated by the bloodstain that had spread across the boards when the crossbow bolt had been removed from William’s throat.

His throat.
Suzanne frowned. The bolt had been lodged in his throat, pointing downward into his chest. Nearly straight downward, the angle being very strange. She remembered seeing the fletching in front of his face, and the direction the boy had pulled when he removed the bolt had been past William’s head rather than straight out from the throat. The gush of blood, as shown by the shape of the stain below, had been toward stage left rather than straight downstage. Only after the blood had surged that direction did it then begin to run down the boards toward the pit. Suzanne realized the bolt could only have been shot by someone standing above William. Almost directly above. She looked upward, to the heavens so painstakingly painted with clouds and cherubs.

The roof of the ’tiring house, on which the heavens had been painted, overhung the gallery by ten or fifteen feet. For someone to have shot William from up there they would have had to dangle from the eaves, an awkward thing that would most likely have resulted in two bodies falling rather than just the one. And still it would not have resulted in a wound like the one that had killed William.

Nevertheless, Suzanne was moved to have a look at the roof.

The ’tiring house stairs ended at the third floor and went no higher, but at the back of the stage right gallery was a ladder that led to a trapdoor above. It was composed of rough wood, of slats nailed to two wall supports. Suzanne rolled up the sleeves of the man’s shirt she wore and climbed up. The slats were widely spaced and she was not tall, so she had to
haul herself up by her arms with each step. She tried to imagine someone climbing this with one hand while holding a loaded crossbow and stalking a victim in the same, otherwise empty room. It just didn’t seem plausible.

The trapdoor overhead was not easy to open. The thing was heavy and seldom used, and it resisted her attempts to shove it upward. Again, it would have been even more difficult carrying a crossbow, but she allowed it might have been possible for a man.

She considered going back downstairs for help, but disliked the idea of telling anyone where her thinking had taken her. So she persisted, put her shoulder into the effort, and shoved hard. The door creaked and complained, but finally it budged and she was able to shove it high enough for it to fall back onto the floor of the room above with a dull thud and a cloud of dust. Once more she thought of the victim supposedly in the gallery below and supposedly oblivious to being stalked by a man with a crossbow. She found it highly unlikely, but pressed on because the angle at which the crossbow had pierced William’s throat would have been impossible unless the murderer had shot from the roof.

She climbed through the hole and into a storage room above. As scant as were the property stores of The New Globe Players, this room was nearly empty and held nothing more than some ends of cloth bolts left over from the recent costuming. They were stacked in a corner and covered with an oiled cloth to protect them from temperature and dampness.

Windows in the room overlooked the roofs of two gables over the rear of the ’tiring house. The roofs formed a valley between their peaks, immediately outside the windows. They were not terribly large and were much taller than they were wide, shuttered with frames stretched with animal skins
shaved thin enough to let in light. Suzanne pulled them open. The flimsy frames wobbled on their leather hinges as she climbed through and onto the roofs outside.

All the shingles out here were new, for the old roofing had been so rotten that none of it had been salvageable. Each piece was attached solidly, with new iron nails, and she trusted the support beneath. Nothing shifted as she went to the front of the gables where they joined the heavens, which overhung the stage. There she paused.

The view of London from up here took her breath away. Just at sunset, the light threw shadows sideways and shone redly against the bridge, St. Paul’s, and other of the taller structures. The river a few streets over shone blue and silver, and many boats bobbed on it. Barges floated slowly past, stately in their importance. For a moment Suzanne forgot her mission and marveled at the city that had been her home for more than three decades.

But then she returned to her purpose and moved across the roof of the heavens to her right, and thence to the inner eave of the theatre roof. She headed toward the spot that overhung the gallery from which William had fallen. When standing on the stage it was hard to see that the gallery roofs and ’tiring house heavens weren’t just one continuous overhang, for all three sections were painted with blue sky and fluffy clouds.

Suzanne made her way carefully toward the edge of the stage gallery roof, and her boots slipped dangerously on the shingles. She put out a hand to steady herself, but here the pitch wasn’t steep enough for her to put her hand all the way down. A dizziness of vertigo gave her a fear of toppling over the edge if she came too close, and for a moment she had to stop and get her bearings. The slant of the roof made it hard to tell which way was truly up. If she trusted her
visual orientation, she was sure to tip sideways and hurtle to the stage. Trusting the horizon was no help, because it wasn’t visible here. She paused, collected herself, then crept most carefully toward the edge to look down. There was a rain gutter there, but she didn’t trust it to hold her up, so she kept to the shingles.

With utmost care to keep her balance, she peeked far enough over to see the bloodstain. It was directly below her, and she stood right at the spot where the heavens’ roof met the stage gallery eave. The disparate angles of the two roofs were dizzying all by themselves. Anyone venturing up here might have fallen and died just for that.

Then she saw something that seemed to have nothing to do with William’s death, but at the same time must have had, for Suzanne didn’t believe in coincidence. Everything that was had a reason to be, and so this must have meaning for anything to make sense. She noticed that the spot where she was standing overlooked the third floor gallery over the main entrance doors. The very spot where the king had been sitting the night of the murder.

She sat down on the shingles at the edge of the eave and stared in that direction. Those particular seats were the only ones visible from this vantage point. The lower galleries were too low to see from here, and the rest of the third floor gallery was hidden by the roofs that rose to either side. The seats where Daniel, Charles, and the man who loved cows had sat were framed by the roofs surrounding the stage. Suzanne stared, unsettled by this, though she didn’t know why.

Then she saw a sag in the gutter directly below her. It had somehow become broken and hung awkwardly from its moorings. A quick look at the rest of the gutters told her they’d all been replaced during the renovation, like the rest of the roof.
All were new, and so they shouldn’t be broken anywhere. But this one had been damaged recently. There’d been someone up here after the work had been finished, and Suzanne was beginning to think she might know why.

She looked from the king’s seat to the broken gutter. Then to the king’s seat again. She turned to look up at the valley between the gables, where it met the roof over the heavens. Then at the king’s seat again. She stood, took a step forward, then turned to have a good look at the gutters all along the eaves and heavens. In this area, near the broken section, they were covered with a spray of blackened spots. Blood? Could be. They were as black as the stain on the stage boards. They had the appearance of the spray Daniel had said was missing from the gallery below, which he’d said was inevitable with the sort of wound that had killed William.