Sleep of Death (7 page)

‘Adrian, this is not the first time in which you have been detected in some malpractice. Coming at this particular time of difficulty, when we have looked to you for integrity, what you have attempted to do – to your lady Alice, to poor Jacob – is unforgivable. I am mindful of the good service you have performed for this family over the years, and for that reason I will not set the law on you.’

He paused, and I had time to be surprised at his leniency.

‘But you will leave our company and this box now, and if ever I or any member of my household discovers you within our precincts again, then I will not hesitate to turn you over to justice.’

‘There are things I could say,’ said Adrian. ‘To you, Sir Thomas, and you Lady Alice and even to young William, but this is not the time or the place. To the gentleman player here’ – the way in which he spoke indicated that such a description was for him a contradiction in terms – ‘I wish that he may always have such, ah, easy spectators for his performances, such eyes that are quick to believe, such ears as are quick to trust.
His
presence you are unable to bar me from. I can have him before me at any time by paying a penny and standing with the common people.’

He slid from the box, with his short black cloak and his black hat somehow seeming to swell, an exit performed with as much relish as if he were taking the devil’s part in some old Morality Play.

‘Are you all right, my dear?’ said Sir Thomas, turning attentively towards Lady Alice.

‘Perfectly,’ she replied.

Sir Thomas patted Jacob on the shoulder in an avuncular way. This bear of a man appeared hardly to have recovered from the sacrilege of attempting to slip the pearls from his mistress’s neck.

‘I must thank you, Master Revill, for your part in exposing Adrian. It is of course obvious now that Jacob could never have taken my wife’s necklace, but sometimes we need the obvious pointed out to us. Thank you.’

I inclined my head slightly, grateful at his gratitude. Sir Thomas went to the door of the box, perhaps to check that the steward really had gone. Lady Alice beckoned me to her side. Her voice dropped even lower so that I had to bend forward to hear her. No hardship because I was only inches from the snowy slope of her breasts.

‘I must thank you too,’ she whispered. ‘And I believe you have something to deliver to me.’

I suddenly remembered the note from Master Robert Mink which had brought me up to the gallery in the first place. So this was the lady it was intended for! I fumbled in a pocket of my costume and passed it across. This was half secret and half open business. Her son, who had remained sitting in the opposite corner of the box, most likely saw the transfer. He had made no comment so far on what had transpired.

‘Are you due to appear again?’ he said. ‘I mean in this piece down below? Your part is surely not yet concluded.’

‘Jesus God!’

For the sake of the drama that had been staged in Sir Thomas’s box I had forgotten the real drama in which I was appearing on the Globe stage. Jesus, perhaps I’d missed my cue. I thought of Master’s Burbage’s three-shilling fine. I thought more feelingly of the disgrace – the unprofessionalism – of missing one’s entrance. My very brief career with the Chamberlain’s Men rolled up and vanished before my eyes.

But I made it. I returned to the tiring-room moments before my final entry as the would-be alderman in
A City Pleasure.
Fresh from my private triumph in the box of Sir Thomas and his Lady, I gave my all. I was the foolish townsman John Southwold, who showed, by the absurdity of his language and gestures, that the hapless brother and sister (who weren’t brother and sister) would be better off away from the falsity of the city. Only in a rural setting does virtue flourish. I have observed, by the way, that although many of our poets and satirists are ready to attack the town for its blackness and corruption, and to praise the country for its Arcadian innocence, few indeed of those same poets and satirists are willing to live up to their words and exchange the taint of corruption for the fruit of innocence. In short, they show no great desire to go out to grass.

My part in
A City Pleasure
was not that large but I flatter myself that my performance, with its little twists and flourishes, went down well with the groundlings (who always enjoy laughing at their betters) as well as with the quality (who are pleased enough to watch some upstart guyed upon the stage). Robert Mink looked at me afterwards in a puzzled way. No doubt he was wondering just why I had been absent on his errand for so long. But I merely nodded; I had done what he requested and saw no reason to unravel the confused business that had occurred in the gallery box. If he was friendly with Lady Alice – as the note presumably signified – then he would find out about everything soon enough, if she chose to tell him.

Later, sitting in the Goat & Monkey, I pondered on my role not just in the drama on stage but in the business in Sir Thomas’s box. I considered that I had tilted the scales in favour of justice. True, I had my thumb in the pan. A little ‘unfair’ but . . . There was no doubting that Adrian the steward was a nasty piece of work, while Jacob was a good-hearted, loyal and simple fellow. It is not often that right prevails. As for the steward’s threats, I had no fear of those. I felt protected, secure. I had won the approval and thanks of a wealthy man and his wife, Sir Thomas and Lady Alice Eliot. I was, albeit temporarily, a member of the most prestigious company of players in London. My Nell provided for me free, and lovingly, what other men had to pay for, lovelessly. I was energetic, and as near being immortal as a sound head, lungs and limbs can make you at the age of twenty six.

This is the moment when fortune crouches lower as she prepares to pounce.

‘How did you do it?’

It was William Eliot, Lady Alice’s son. He slipped onto the bench beside me.

‘Do what?’

‘The trick with the hair. Dextrous.’

‘Ah,’ I said, and was glad to be given time to think by a tapster’s interruption asking what we wanted.

‘Tell me,’ said William, after he had ordered a tankard for himself and another for me. ‘It doesn’t matter now, and Adrian was obviously guilty. So the right thing has occurred by indirection.’

He was echoing my own thoughts.

‘Do you, for example, carry around a stock of head-hair for just such an eventuality? It certainly wasn’t one of your own. Yours is coal-black.’

‘It was from your mother’s youthful head.’

‘The others may have been fooled,’ said William, ‘but I was sitting closer and the thread of hair you were holding was not hers. I know my mother’s hair well. Quite a different tint.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘The hair wasn’t your mother’s. It belonged . . . to someone else. There were a few threads on my shirt under the costume I was wearing. I noticed them by chance as I was changing into it this afternoon. I suppose I didn’t remove them because the thought of having some threads of this person’s hair about me was pleasing. Nobody could see them. I’m not sure that I thought about it at all. But it was chance, pure good fortune, that the colour was close to your mother’s.’

‘Then you pretended to discover it under one of the steward’s rings, took it over to where my mother was sitting – and invited us all to jump to the wrong conclusion?’

‘As you said yourself, the steward was guilty,’ I said, a little uneasily. ‘After all he admitted it, as good as admitted it.’

‘Yes, yes. I don’t quarrel with my uncle dismissing him. Adrian is more fortunate than he deserves to be. He might be in jail. I was curious how you came to produce a hair that came from somewhere else, from someone else – and now you’ve told me.’

‘Now I’ve told you.’

‘It was a sleight of hand.’

‘Only a trick,’ I said, anxious to move the conversation on, perhaps anxious to rid myself of this superior young man’s company.

‘And I am interested too in the justice of tricking the truth out of someone.’

‘I imagine that those men in the Tower who have a confession wrung out of them on the rack would rather be “tricked” into the truth, as you put it, if they were given the choice.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said William. ‘I am more concerned with the idea in the abstract.’

‘Oh, the abstract.’

‘Suppose that there is a fixed quantity of truth, and that every word of ours, every action, great or little, adds to or subtracts from this quantity. This pile of truth. This truth-mountain. Our steward has been dishonest, he has stolen from my mother and then attempted to pass the blame for the crime onto Jacob. This cluster of false words and actions obviously represents a great subtraction from our truth-mountain. A veritable weight. But then you come along, and to establish what has occurred you pass a little falsehood among the rest of us. You pretend that a thread of hair from your sister—’

‘Hardly my sister!’ I protested, irritated at the man’s high-handed manner.

‘No, of course not. I must have been thinking of that play we saw this afternoon, where the brother and sister turn out not to be be brother and sister after all. What a transparent device to produce a happy ending! I do not think we shall hearing too much more of the author of that. Who was he again?’

‘A Master Edgar Boscombe, I believe.’

‘I prefer Master Shakespeare myself. His plots are much closer to truth, however ridiculous they seem on the surface. Also he shares my given name. What was I saying? Oh yes. The hair that was secreted about your person. Well, if it didn’t derive from your sister, it was from your wife or your mistress, it doesn’t matter which. I don’t think it was a boy’s hair.’

He waited an instant for me to respond. I said nothing.

‘You do not look like a lover of boys, even though you are a player. My point is this. Your action in pretending that it was Lady Alice’s, my mother’s, also represents a tiny subtraction from the great mountain of truth.’

‘And you’re making a mountain out of a molehill,’ I said. ‘What I did was to commit a little falsehood in order to secure a greater truth.’

‘Ah, so you are simultaneously taking away and adding to the truth-mountain,’ said William. ‘I wonder, is that possible? I enjoy speculating on these things.’

‘Very Jesuitical,’ I sneered, then looked round to make sure no one was within earshot. It was not a good idea to use that word in a public place. But Master William Eliot seemed in no way discomposed. Thoughtfully, he drained off the last of his drink.

‘Anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘I’m just a player.’

‘A simple man and so on.’

Somehow he managed to turn everything into a jibe or a sly insult. I determined not to rise to it.

‘If you like. You said just now that Sir Thomas was your uncle?’

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s married to the Lady Alice?’

‘My father is dead. After my father died, my uncle married my mother. This happened quite recently, as you may have been able to tell from his attentive manner towards her in the playhouse box.’

The tapster came across again to take our orders, and one of those natural pauses ensued while the tankards were brought. I took the opportunity of examining William as he sipped at his beer. He was a tall, thin man, about my age or a little older. (Which would put his beautiful mother in at least in her mid-forties, assuming that she had borne him early.) He had an inward-looking, melancholic air about him. His clothes were a fashionable black.

‘You are in mourning for your father?’ I asked.

‘’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black . . .’ he began.

‘. . . I have that within which passes show –
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.’ I concluded.

We laughed in recognition.

‘You know the play?’ he said.

‘I was in the play yesterday. Small parts, you understand.’

‘This is for my father in a sense,’ said William, indicating his black clothing, ‘because he did die recently. But I don’t believe I bear my uncle any grudge for marrying my mother, and I don’t despise my mother for choosing another husband, though one can never quite plumb the depths of one’s own mind in matters like these. My uncle is a good and shrewd man, I think. He is certainly a shrewd one. And a lenient one too, as you saw this afternoon when he allowed Adrian the steward to go scot-free. My mother is a woman who knows her own mind. She is also a handsome woman. If she wishes to marry soon after the death of a first husband, what more natural than that she should turn to that man’s brother? They are not unalike, my father and my uncle. No, I don’t brood on my mother’s remarriage. I am not Prince Hamlet.’

But the little flood of words, the most this young man had yet spoken, showed that he had brooded, was still brooding over this very matter. Anyone who eagerly denies something, with a mass of accompanying reasons, concedes the case against him, all unawares. And also William Eliot’s air, his dress, his professed pleasure in speculation, everything about him might have lead one to think that he was modelling himself on that famous character, the Prince of Denmark.

‘And yet . . .’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Master Revill, I understand that you have nowhere to lodge at the moment, is that right?’

I was disconcerted. William Eliot had obviously been talking to someone. One of the Chamberlain’s Company?

‘I had a disagreement with my landlady over . . . something. She has given me notice.’

‘I’m going to make you a proposition,’ said William. ‘But first I must tell you something that happened a few months ago, if you are willing to listen to a story.’

I nodded but said nothing.

‘A man went into his walled garden one afternoon. He was in the habit of going there to sleep on warm days. He alone possessed the key to the door that opened into this walled garden. It was his retreat, his sanctuary, a place where he could think or rest undisturbed. There was nothing unusual in these afternoon absences. When he did not reappear in the house by nightfall of this same day, however, his wife and their son and the servants began to grow worried. They called from the outer part of the garden, they rattled at the locked door. No response. Eventually one of the servants was sent over the wall on a ladder. What the servant found in the twilight caused the wife to order the door broken down. When the household – by now most of them were assembled – poured though the narrow entrance to the walled garden they found the head of the household dead in his hammock. The body was almost cold. He had apparently lain there since the early afternoon. There were no marks of violence, no signs of foul play. He had died naturally. What does this remind you of?’