Hill of Bones (33 page)

‘As to the voice, I come from this part of the world,’ I said.

‘I knew it! I could almost believe this was fated.’

‘It is an imposture, madam, a lie.’

‘A white one. No guilt or blame attaches or, if it does, it is mine alone. It will only take an instant.’

‘What if he recognises me?’ I said. ‘I mean, what if he recognises that I am
not
his son, William. That would be worse than doing nothing.’

‘Uncle Christopher can hardly see, he can hardly hear,’ she said. ‘It is enough if he knows you are in the same room. I promise that if my uncle is not in a fit state to receive you, if he is wandering too much in his mind, I will not ask you again. It is now or never.’

‘Let it be now then,’ I said.

II

Had I stopped to think the matter through, I would have refused her request. A great deal of trouble would have been avoided. Some danger too. But I was persuaded to do this merciful deed by her manner, by her pleading – by her attractions too, of course. If I hoped anything at all it was that the old uncle might be so deep asleep or far gone that no pretence on my part would be necessary. As I followed Katherine Hawkins down the narrow road, which I later learned was called Vicarage Lane, I reflected that this errand was very different from what I’d been imagining when I was handed the ‘privy message’.

We halted outside a doorway over which hung a lantern. As far as I was able to see, the houses in the lane were newer than some others in the city, rising to three or four storeys rather than two, and constructed of stone instead of timber. I remembered that Katherine said her uncle was a cloth merchant, a well-to-do one. She produced a key and unlocked the door. Inside the lobby, which was illuminated by a couple of wax candles, a woman of uncertain age started up from a chair. She’d been dozing.

‘Why, Mistress Katherine, where have you been?’

‘It’s all right, Hannah. It’s a close night. I needed a little air.’

The woman, who was wearing a grey overdress, looked curiously at me. I would have done the same in her position. I waited for whatever explanation Katherine Hawkins would give. I wasn’t going to help her out. She hung the door key on a hook by the entrance and then removed her hat, doing each action slowly as if to give herself time to think. I saw that, although strained, she had an enticing face, a wide mobile mouth, a delicate chin, large eyes.

‘Oh, here is an extraordinary coincidence, Hannah. This is Mr Revill. He is a member of the King’s Men who have been playing in the yard of the Bear. He and the others have come all the way from London. Mr Revill knew William.’

‘William?’ said the woman, who I supposed was some long-time retainer. She struggled to catch up with Katherine Hawkins, who now said with deliberate slowness: ‘Yes, our cousin William. Mr Revill knew him in London.’

The older woman’s face lit up even as I felt myself growing more and more uncomfortable with the deception.

‘You are friends with William, sir! How is he? Where is he?’

I shrugged, to hide my unease, and said, ‘I’ve no idea where your William is. I met him only once – or perhaps it was twice – many years ago. I . . . I was told he had gone to the Americas.’

‘I thought it might be a comfort for Uncle Christopher to see Mr Revill,’ said Katherine smoothly. She was very adept at spinning a tale. I wondered what else she had said that was half true or outright false.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Hannah.

‘I will take him up to my uncle. Go to bed now, Hannah.’

Hastily, to avoid further comment or question, she snatched up one of the wax candles and we left the lobby. I followed her up the stairs.

Half-way up, when we were out of earshot of the woman, I stopped and whispered urgently to her, ‘Already you have involved me in a complete falsehood and I have not even seen your uncle. Whatever you may say to the woman in the lobby, I’ve never met your cousin.’

‘You
could
have encountered him in London,’ she whispered back. ‘I told you Cousin William wanted to be a player. And I had to explain your presence to Hannah somehow.’

She was very close to me and standing on the stair above so we were at the same height. She bent forward a degree and kissed me on the lips, holding the candle delicately poised to one side. I felt her breasts against me. She stayed for just long enough before pulling back and saying, ‘I beg you to do this one thing that we have already discussed, Mr Revill. I shall ask no more of you, while you . . . you may ask of me what you please.’

She turned down a passage at the top of the first flight of stairs, without looking back to see whether I was behind her. She came to a door, tapped on it once, softly, and almost straight away twisted the handle and entered the chamber. I halted in the entrance, peering through the gloom, wondering what I had been foolish enough to let myself in for and wishing with (almost) all my heart that I was back with my fellows at Mother Treadwell’s.

What followed was painful but not entirely painful. I’ll tell it in brief. The room belonging to the dying uncle Christopher – at least that part was true, he really was very near death – was stiflingly hot, not only on account of the general airlessness of the night but because a fire smouldered in the chimneypiece while a half-dozen candles consumed themselves in different corners. There were grand tapestries on the wall, depicting knights in the lists or knights out hunting or knights conversing with ladies in pointed hats.

Katherine went forward to a large four-poster bed, its curtains drawn back. A sharp-nosed man was lying there. His head was almost sunk into a pile of pillows, his body buried under thick blankets, his reed-thin arms stretched out flat on the covers. Resting under his right hand was a small black-bound book. Perhaps nothing confirmed how close he was to dying as the presence of the Bible.

When Katherine beckoned me forward to stand beside her, I could scarcely make out anything but the nose, the glimmer of white in the almost closed eyes, the threads of hair sticking out from under his nightcap.

She shook her uncle gently by the shoulder to ensure that he was awake or at least not completely asleep. She said several times, ‘William is here. Your Will is here, Uncle.’ And to vary it, ‘He has returned, your son has returned.’

Eventually his right hand fluttered and a kind of twitch affected the dying man’s lips. His head moved towards me a fraction and I sat on the edge of the bed, took his dry, cold hand in mine and said, ‘Yes, I am here.’ I could not bring myself to say the name of William. I said, ‘I am here,’ again, but more loudly, and his fingers tightened slightly on my wrist while his mouth seemed to widen into a smile or a grimace.

He struggled to say something even as his feeble grip slackened and his fingers scrabbled at the cover of the Bible. He was making a vain attempt to pick it up. I had to lean very close to hear him but, striving with every word, he was saying, ‘Take – it – take – it – William.’

At first I was not sure what he meant, then understood he must be referring to the black-bound testament. I looked towards Katherine, standing beside and above me. She gestured, yes, yes, take it, so I took up the Bible from the dying man’s hand and, without thinking, slipped it into a pocket in my doublet. While all this was going on, the old uncle appeared almost animated. Then the expression vanished altogether and his head subsided even further into the white pillows. I had the image of a man drowning in foam. And I do not know whether that man was Uncle Christopher or me, for I had never felt more uneasy or uncertain in my life.

The less painful part came afterwards. Indeed, there was some pleasure in it. After a few more minutes by the bedside of Uncle Christopher – who might now have been truly dead apart from the odd tremor in his chest and a sound from his gaping mouth like fallen leaves being blown along – Katherine took me by the hand and ushered me from the room. There was another staircase leading to the next floor where two or three rooms were clustered together under the roof. Guided by the single candle she held in her other hand, up we crept and she opened the door to a low-ceilinged chamber, equipped with a simple bedstead and a chest.

Without saying anything, Katherine gestured towards the window. I went to look. The window was still half open. I leaned out. Down below was the yard of the Bear Inn and the stage where the King’s Men had presented our production of
A House Divided
. To one side was a portion of the garden that must belong to the house, separated from the inn yard by a stone wall. In the moonlight I could see the whole scene quite clearly. There was no one left in the yard now, no murmuring idlers, no pipe embers.

Katherine came to stand beside me. She closed and latched the window.

‘I was in a hurry when I left,’ she said, turning aside and putting the candle on top of the chest. ‘I saw you on stage and straightaway I thought you looked and sounded very like Cousin William. My . . . scheme . . . was brewing in my head all the while I watched but I did not pluck up the courage to write you a note until the performance was over and you were all doing your little dance. There was so little time then, if I was to catch you before you left.’

‘So you wrote the note but had nothing to say,’ I said. My mood was an odd mixture of anger and sadness, and a return of the itch that had driven me through the yard of the Bear.

‘All I could think of was that way of addressing you on the cover of the letter, putting three words.’

‘“A privy message”,’ I said. ‘It certainly got my attention.’

‘I ran down and round, and handed it to some lad in the inn. I gave him a coin to pass it to “To him who plays the Duke”. Then I waited until you emerged, as I knew you would.’

‘Well, madam, I think my business here is done.’

But I did not move. I did not even wonder why she had led me upstairs rather than back to the ground floor. I knew why.

‘You have brought comfort to a dying man, Nicholas,’ she said. ‘Your deed will surely be noted in heaven.’

Maybe it was her words that made me think of the dying man’s Bible in my doublet pocket. I made to retrieve it but was distracted by Katherine’s next move. She licked her fingers and with a decisive motion snuffed the candle she’d placed on the chest. Then she started forward and kissed me full on the lips and pressed herself against me. We descended, almost tumbled, onto the narrow bedstead, and she fumbled with my hose even as I struggled to undo my doublet with one hand and raise her skirts with the other. The smell of the snuffed candle lingered in the room.

In the beginning of what followed, with one tiny corner of my mind, I wondered whether this deed that we were about to perform was also one to be noted in heaven. Yet she was eager and grateful, and now I was more than glad to be here, in the house of a dying man, with his niece. Then all my discomfort and scruples disappeared. Everything vanished in the moonlit delights of the summer night.

When I woke, the sky was turning pale. I didn’t know where I was. Soon the details of last night began to return, slow at first and then all at once. My part as the wicked Duke Peccato in
A House Divided
, the note with its teasing superscription, the nocturnal meeting with Katherine, the mission of mercy to the dying man, the pretence that I was his returned son, William. Then Katherine Hawkins and I afterwards, up here in this little chamber with the gable window, and the bed, which now seemed small and hard. Katherine had gone. I was a little disappointed but couldn’t blame her. Whether it was remorse or second thoughts or the straightforward desire for her own bed, she’d left me.

I must have fallen asleep once more for I came to with a start, woken by some noise outside. Almost dashing my head against a ceiling beam, I went to the window. Down below in the inn yard were a couple of travellers taking charge of their horses from the ostler. These early leavers mounted up and clattered out of the yard where we’d played the previous evening. It seemed like a signal that I should leave too. There was no noise from the rest of the house. I wanted to sneak out even if no one was up yet.
Especially
if no one was up yet. I recalled that the key to the door was hanging on a hook beside it. I wouldn’t have minded seeing Katherine again – indeed, had it been later in the day, and had my stomach been full and my senses sharper, I would definitely have wanted to see her again – but I was reluctant to encounter the old retainer Hannah or, God forbid, to come anywhere near the dying Uncle Christopher once more. I laced and fastened my garments and put on my doublet. An unfamiliar weight to one side made me remember old Christopher’s Bible, the volume which I’d stuffed in a pocket. ‘Take – it – William’, he’d gasped to me, and I had obeyed his words.

I took it out of my pocket and straight away saw what hadn’t been apparent to me in the heat and confusion of the previous evening: namely, that it wasn’t a Bible at all. Rather, it was a notebook or a commonplace book, handsomely bound in black leather, and full of scribblings and comments, together with some longer stretches of writing and even the odd sketch, each labelled with letters and arrows. I puzzled over the mechanisms depicted in the sketches before realising, from their general shape and the rollers and pedals, that they were weavers’ looms. Perhaps Christopher Hawkins was designing a more efficient machinery for his trade. Elsewhere in the book were remarks and quotations that he liked sufficiently to note down. ‘Age and wedlock tames man and beast’ and ‘Neither a borrower, nor a lender be’ – that sort of thing, cautious sayings as befitted a merchant.

There were several pages of verse, which I guessed had been written by Hawkins himself rather than copied from another’s work, since the lines were blotted with crossings-out and at first glance appeared somewhat feeble.

et cetera.

I was about to put the book down on the chest, where it might be found later by a servant, or perhaps by Katherine herself, when it came to me that this was a careless, disrespectful way to treat a dying man’s property. After all, he had urged me to take the thing even if he was under the misapprehension that I was his son. It must be important to him since he was clutching it with his cold, dry hand. I should not abandon it in this upstairs chamber. But nor did I want to look for a member of the household to whom I could hand back the book since I planned to slip away unseen.