Alms for Oblivion (12 page)

“You were jealous of your friend, Master Agate?”

“Jealous over a whore! That is like being resentful of the wind for brushing your enemy’s face as well as your own. The wind goes where it pleases.”

“Very poetical, Master Revill. Why do you say ‘enemy’? Was your friend your enemy?”

“He was not.”

“I ask again, did you kill him?”

“I say again, I did not.”

“As you say.”

Talbot surprised me by rising from his chair. Apparently the interview was over. But, suspecting a ploy, I did not trust him. I no longer trusted myself. I wasn’t sure what I’d be
betrayed into saying next.

“That will do for the time being but I may recall you later.”

It was over. But I very much feared that if he did recall me it would be before an impanelled jury, and that the stages after that would be arrest and arraignment. My legs felt shaky. The
coroner ushered me from his room and we descended the stairs together. For an instant he seemed to be acting more as a host than a questioner. Half-way down the stairs was a window opening on to a
northern aspect. Not far off could be glimpsed the top of the battlemented gate which stands at the near end of London Bridge.

Alan Talbot grasped me by the elbow. With his other hand he gestured at the view.

“You see that?”

I nodded. What did he want?

“You see the heads.”

Several mast-like poles stuck up into the cold sky. They were topped by dark blobs. I hardly needed to be told that they were the heads of traitors. Every Londoner, and most visitors, knew that.
Some of us passed under those severed heads regularly and – since custom can harden you to almost anything – we didn’t trouble our own heads about them.

“Do you know how they are preserved?” said Talbot. His eyes, as cold as the sky, fixed on me.

“I don’t know,” I said, while thinking that this odd consideration was perhaps a natural one for a coroner. “I am not so curious.”

“They are first parboiled and then dipped in tar. That way they can be kept safe for many years.”

“The Earl of Essex is up there,” I said, almost despite myself. I had once heard that head talk.

“The third from the left-hand end, I believe,” said Talbot. “Next to him is Sir Christopher Blount.”

“You make a study of them?”

“I do not make frivolous play of them as you do. I mean you players. Your pieces are stuffed with severed heads, aren’t they, booted about the stage for the gratification of the
groundlings.”

I thought of Richard Milford’s unperformed play,
The World’s Diseas’d
. The coroner had a point. Still, as Richard would say, it was what the customers wanted.

“This is the view from this window whenever the day is clear, the inevitable view,” said Talbot, as he led the way down the rest of the staircase. “It reminds me of the law and
the law’s penalties.”

If he’d meant to alarm or intimidate me he had succeeded. Once outside in Long Southwark I breathed deep and set off walking briskly in a south-easterly direction, away from my lodgings,
away from the Bridge and the traitors’ heads.

I soon got beyond the packed houses and streets and in among clear fields and hedges and bare trees, with only a straggle of buildings here and there. I walked and, while I was walking, I
thought.

I started with what I knew. It was a single thing only but a thing highly significant to me. I had not killed Peter Agate.

Circumstances were against me though and it looked as if I might have killed him – and this could be enough to cause me to be arrested . . . arraigned . . . convicted . . . executed. I
shivered at this dreadful sequence and its inevitable end-point. The landlord’s testimony, accurate as far as it went, was that, after hearing the sounds of an apparent struggle and my
repeated calling out of my friend’s name, he had emerged from the interior of his house to find me crouched over Peter’s body. Benwell had also deposed, less accurately, that he’d
heard me threaten Peter and that there’d been some dispute about Nell. I wasn’t sure whether the landlord genuinely believed this or whether, from some private or malicious purpose, he
had chosen to misinterpret the conversations which he had eavesdropped on.

If the case against me appeared so strong (though circumstantial) then why hadn’t Alan Talbot the coroner moved to have me arrested? Either because he was waiting to assemble more evidence
against me, I surmised, or because he was not so sure of his ground as he pretended to be. Under this more hopeful interpretation, those sudden questions – “Did you mean to kill
him?”, “What did you do with the weapon?” – had proceeded not from certainty but a desire to startle me into a confession.

Looking at the affair in this way I grew slightly more cheerful – or slightly less gloomy, rather like a man who’s been told he will be executed in a month instead of a week. After
all, I argued with myself, no weapon had been found on me nor had I had the time or opportunity to dispose of one. Or not much time, not much opportunity. More important, I had no motive to wish my
friend dead, let alone actually to kill him. He was no rival of mine in the Company, he was not about to supplant me. And, although Peter had occupied my place next to Nell in her crib, so had
hundreds of other men besides. Was I supposed to go around slaughtering half of London’s males? If there had to be a rival then the authentic one in this matter of Nell’s bed (and
heart) was the young gentleman from the Inns of Court across the water. And if that man was Michael Pye, he could rest easy. Magnanimous Revill had no intention of running him through. What was Nell
to me? Once she was much to me, then she became less, and now she had dwindled into something . . . something not worth killing or dying for, at any rate.

Anyway, I was no killer, it was not in my nature.

The question was, who was? Who had killed Peter Agate?

Under the bare autumnal sky, I turned to look back over London. On this side, the Southwark side, the city lumped and swelled like a living thing under a thin veil of smoke and smut which the
sun only served to bring out. The grander buildings with their spires and towers and battlements were mostly on the far bank. Out in the open I tried to shake off the taint of suspicion and guilt
but it clung like the London air. I felt guilty. In one corner of my mind, I wondered what I’d feel like if I really was guilty. More guilty still, presumably. But perhaps genuine murderers
are unfeeling, have no consciences, suffer no guilt. So that if I really was guilty, I would actually feel less bad than I did at this moment . . .

It was a useless speculation. My mind would be more profitably occupied in trying to establish who had murdered Peter.

Not me.

Good. That only left the rest of the world.

Start with the obvious . . . it must have been an enemy.

Good, an enemy. And then what?

The problem in starting with the obvious is that it doesn’t really get you anywhere. Another problem was that, as far as I knew, Peter had no enemies. He’d been in London little more
than a week. You’d have to be a dedicated trouble-seeker to make a mortal enemy inside seven days. A man he’d insulted in a tavern or elsewhere, if his ‘London side’ was to
the fore? I remembered the chalky-faced, superannuated old player who had objected to our trade. But hadn’t he and Peter met later and enjoyed a courteous talk?

Had his murderer been someone from our native village of Miching, then? Most of the villagers were dead. His father Anthony might have opposed his wish to go on stage but that would hardly
extend to having his only son cut down in cold blood. Anyway did they even know (or care) where he was? Peter had a stepmother – Mistress Gertrude, like the mother of Hamlet – and she
had reportedly pursued him not with a bare bodkin but with flapping dugs and lascivious intent. He had little sisters, not so little now perhaps. They were deprived of a brother. Anthony Agate had
lost his son. I could not think of anyone else who would break the news to Peter’s family. I resolved to write to them that night. They would get the news in three or four days.

The part played by Samuel Benwell in all of this did not escape me. It was convenient for Talbot the coroner that my landlord had been on the premises with his sharp ears. He’d been able
to report on the comings and goings of his two lodgers, been able to repeat their ‘arguments’. Then he had appeared on the scene at the right moment, just as I was huddled over
Peter’s corpse, covered with my friend’s blood. The wrong moment for me, of course. How had he responded to this shocking picture? Calmly, quite calmly, certainly by contrast to my own
surprise and terror. Still clutching his smoky candle, Benwell had passed within feet of where I was huddled and gone outside into the foggy street. There I heard him calling for help. Shouting, I
think, “Help! Murder! Murder! Help!”

Within a few moments he returned with a clutch of neighbours, avid for catastrophe. We stood around awkwardly, half in, half out of the doorway. A couple of people stretched out Peter’s
body to its full length in the lobby. The blood no longer flowed, as if he was all emptied. No one attempted to detain me, although they might have done so if I had made to leave the house. After a
time the headborough was summoned or perhaps he simply appeared, drawn by all the commotion. This headborough was a stupid man called Doggett. He had once fined me over non-attendance at church.
Now Doggett studied the scene and pronounced it unwholesome, foul and villainous. Then he made to detain one of the neighbours until Benwell whispered in his ear and gestured at me.

I don’t know why the headborough didn’t take me in. I protested my innocence, of course, explained how I too had stumbled on this bloody scene. I think that murder was probably out of
Master Doggett’s realm. It is out of most of our realms, fortunately. Doggett said again that the deed was unwholesome, foul and villainous, and appeared to think he’d done his duty.
These headboroughs are elected by their fellow householders and it’s sometimes seemed to me that, particularly in a slippery suburb like Southwark, it might suit the locals to have a man who
will not be too officious – or not too effective anyway – in enquiring into wrongdoing. Not that they’re expected to wink at murder . . .

Anyway Master Doggett contented himself with condemning the deed for a third time – now calling it unfair, filthy and felonious – and then went off to report the matter to higher
authority. So it was that Master Alan Talbot took over the investigation of Peter Agate’s death.

Relations between Master Benwell and myself were constrained. I had not moved out of my lodgings in Dead Man’s Place, nor had he asked me to, but he was no longer eager to hear the titbits
of gossip or even to talk to me at all. I couldn’t really believe that he thought he was harbouring a murderer under his roof. Perhaps he was merely paying me back for that earlier rebuff
when I had brushed aside his hovering hand, stared down his glazed eye. Benwell himself might have appeared a suitable suspect for this crime. Had he accosted Peter as he had once accosted me, been
rejected, and in frustration or fury stabbed my friend? I took care to secure my door at nights but, even so, did not sleep well.

Through my head, when I lay down, ran that scene when I’d come through the door and found my friend’s body. I seemed doomed to repeat it again and again, like imperfect lines in a
rehearsal. And there was another memory which recurred and which in retrospect began to seem like an omen or harbinger. It was much more minor than murder but strange and disturbing nonetheless. It
had happened as I was leaving Middle Temple one evening, the one when Shakespeare had told me that Thomas Pope was about to return to the Company. I’d stepped out in the dank courts. It was
foggy of course. We had been floundering in this fog-sea for days. Sometimes, for brief moments at night, it cleared enough to allow a glimpse of the stars but otherwise we might have been at the
bottom of the ocean. The world had grown as small as Master Jute claimed it was when he showed me Drake’s relic – or even smaller since everything had shrunk to the few visible yards
around you. A handful of lights were diffused through the gloom. Passers-by, some carrying lanterns, swirled up and then evaporated. The dankness clung to your face and the brassiness of the fog
filled your nostrils.

My footsteps had rung hollow as I wound my way through the courts and alleys of Middle Temple. By now I knew the place a little. This legal temple was like a village, a deserted village. But not
so deserted after all, because through the murk I detected a shape moving rapidly towards me along a walk. I gasped for, in the darkness, it seemed that the shape had no head. But it was merely
that the man had his head right down looking at the ground, while the collar of his cloak was pulled up high.

He didn’t see or hear me, despite my involuntary gasp, and before I could shift to one side we collided heavily. I fell back and sat almost comically down on the dank paving. I
couldn’t help it, he was broader and heavier than me, fleshier altogether.

“For God’s sake, man, can’t you look . . . ” The words died on my lips because the shape had already gone several yards beyond me, swallowed up by the night and the fog.
Either he hadn’t heard me or had chosen not to hear. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware that he’d struck someone in his rushing passage. He must have been, though. If I was bruised
after the encounter so should he have been. Was he a lawyer? His cloak had been lawyer-like, so far as I’d glimpsed it in the gloom. I thought of scrambling up and running after him and
holding him to account. But I stayed where I was on the cold ground, overcome by a strange reluctance to move.

And by a slight fear perhaps. There was a scent in the air, quite apart from the smell of the fog. It was a rank, vulpine smell.

Preparations for the Middle Temple production of
Troilus and Cressida
ran smoothly enough. It was a pleasant distraction to play a Trojan prince who has lost his love to
a rival and his friends and brothers in battle, and then goes out to slaughter everyone he can lay his hands on – reality was kept at bay. Although I heard no more from Alan Talbot, I wondered
whether this might be the last time I would play with my Company. He could order my arrest at any time.