The Pale Companion

P
HILIP
G
OODEN
is the author of
Sleep of Death
and
Death of Kings,
the first two novels in the Nick Revill series. A contributor to various short story anthologies, he also works as an editor, most recently on a new edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World.
He lives in Bath, where he is currently working on his fourth Nick Revill mystery.

Praise for the Nick Revill series

‘The witty narrative, laced with puns and word play so popular in this period, makes this an enjoyable racy tale.’

Susanna Yager,
Sunday Telegraph

‘The book has much in common with the film Shakespeare in Love – full of colourful characters . . . [but with] an underlying darkness.’

Crime Time

Other titles by the same author

Sleep of Death

Death of Kings

Alms for Oblivion

Philip Gooden

Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2002

This edition published by C&R Crime,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2012

Copyright © Philip Gooden, 2002

The right of Philip Gooden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-47210-430-4 (ebook)

Turn melancholy forth to funerals;
The pale companion is not for our pomp.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
I, i

T
he murderer straddled the prone body. He watched his victim closely, alert for the slightest sign of life. There was a twitch from an outflung arm, a spasm in a sprawled leg. The man who was still standing raised his club in the air, ready to bring it down once more on his victim’s head. But there was no need. The other was safely dead, and all those little shifts and shivers were no more than the dregs of life departing from him. A dark thick red pooled from where his skull had been stove-in.

The murderer, who had been wholly absorbed in his task up to this point, now began to take in his surroundings. Dusk was falling. Shadows were gathering in corners. He glanced uneasily to the right, then the left. There! What was that crouching in the underwood? Whose were those gleaming eyes? Did they belong to a beast of the field – or a human witness? He moved uncertainly in that direction before some sound spun him round to face danger from the opposite quarter. He lifted his club, then lowered it once more.

He waited. Flicked a glance down towards the corpse. Started to realize the need for concealment. Awkwardly, still clutching the club tightly enough to throttle it, he bent down and nudged and tugged the body towards a nearby bush. No time to dispose of it properly. He would leave it to be buried in the maws of kites and crows, of bears and wolves. They would do his filthy work for him.

The murderer left the body part-hidden under the foliage. He turned round and, stooping slightly, began to exit from the scene of his crime. He walked on tiptoe, as if frightened the ground was going to swallow him up. Suddenly he halted.

Slowly . . . slowly . . . he directed his gaze upward as the realization struck home. Above was the arch of the sky, a deep darkening blue. The murderer had been looking in the wrong direction all this time. His yellow beard jutted out from his chin. If I have an enemy, his posture seemed to say, then that enemy is looking down on me from above. At this moment. While I have been thinking myself invisible, he has been watching me. My every move. Worse, he has read my every thought and inspected the chambers of my heart. He has seen my hollowness, my arrogance and anger. Everything was conveyed in the murderer’s huddled shoulders, in the limp helplessness of the club swinging between his knees. He seemed to be at once looking upward and downward, to be apprehensive and abject.

Now fear and dread overcame him. He turned back to regard the evidence of his crime, improperly concealed. Tremors ran through the murderer’s frame. He made to fling the club away but the haft of it seemed to stick to his hands, to refuse to be released. Then he made to fling himself away. He turned in circles which grew wider and wilder by the instant. He spun round until he collapsed on the ground. Only then did the club fell from his nerveless fingers. He clutched his face with his hands.

What have I done? God hide me from the knowledge of what I have done, from the knowledge of myself.

Oh hide me from God.

But it was no use. At that moment God entered from the right.

At first the murderer, hands covering his face, could not see his Maker. Then, becoming aware he was not alone, he peeped between parted fingers.

God spoke.

He said: “Where is your brother?”

The murderer scrambled to his feet, looked at God in amazement. What brother? his look seemed to say.

But God, undeceived, repeated the question.

“Where is your brother?”

“I know not,” said the murderer. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

“What have you done?” said God.

And the murderer followed God’s eyes as he looked towards the bush where the body was barely concealed.

“The voice of your brother Abel calls to me. The voice of your brother’s blood calls to me from the ground.”

The murderer said nothing but tumbled to his knees. As God’s sentence fell from his lips, Cain’s head slumped forward until his forehead was resting on the ground with his body arched awkwardly above.

“Now you are cursed by the very earth which has opened her mouth to receive the blood of your brother Abel. You are cursed among men, Cain, and the earth shall no longer sustain you. You will be a stranger to it.”

Cain’s entire body now pressed down on the ground. Our first murderer seemed to be clasping his mother, the earth. But God was unyielding.

“You will be a fugitive and a vagabond on this earth. No place shall be a home to you.”

“All men will turn against me,” moaned the man on the ground. “All shall curse me, and one will slay me.”

He raised his head to look imploringly at his Maker. His beard, bright yellow, the sign of Cain and Judas Iscariot, seemed to gather the last flecks of the disappearing light.

“Not so,” said God. “You are doomed to wander out your days and no man may end them before I have determined. Whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall multiply seven times over on that man’s head.”

And in the gathering dusk God moved forward to put on Cain the mark of sin whereby all men would know the first murderer for what he was and that his punishment was God’s alone, not to be usurped by humankind.

God extended his thumb to brand Cain on his forehead.

Then somebody laughed.

It wasn’t a pleasant laugh but a wild, mocking cackle. It came from somewhere to my left and nearer the front. God stopped in his progress towards Cain and seemed put out. Darkness was closing in fast and the crowd was a mass of blocky shapes and shadows. The stage in front of us was unilluminated. Obviously, the Paradise Brothers had expected to arrive at the end of their Cain and Abel drama before night closed her curtains round all of us. I doubt that they had so much as a single torch or brand between them. They were bare, unsophisticated fellows, these three players – but for all that, they had a kind of authority. The Paradise brother enacting Cain, for example, had presented a nice mixture of rage and bad conscience. God too had been well personated, although the player’s appearance helped. He had a great white beard and a stern brow. Now he gazed into the gloom that filled the market square as the laughter rang out once more, laughter that was raucous and disturbing.

At first I’d thought the cackle was a sign of impatience with the drama unfolding on the makeshift scaffold which was erected in a corner of the square. Someone who’d grown tired of the familiar Bible tale of brother-bashing, and was eager for a jig or a spot of bawdy instead. Certainly, in London the audience wouldn’t have permitted so many minutes to pass without a dance or a dirty joke. But then that’s the city for you, and we were in the country.

Now there was a disturbance in the crowd as someone pushed his way right to the edge of the scaffold and hoisted himself onto the platform before turning outwards to face the audience. God stood where he was, his right arm held out ready to give Cain his mark. The fratricide still knelt, his forehead tilted up to meet his brand of punishment.

And, even as I waited to see what was going to happen next, I wondered at the inexperience – the
greenness
– of this little company of players. That they could be put off their action by the mere fact of someone getting up on their makeshift stage. That they did not roundly tell this individual where and how he might dispose of himself. We of the Chamberlain’s Company occasionally encounter persons – drunks and show-offs mostly – who believe that our Globe customers prefer to see
them
rather than the players. These people, who want to usurp our places on stage, are soon seen off by an outstretched arm, an outstuck foot or a ribald remark.

But here in the market square these country players were transfixed. Like the crowd, they were waiting to see what the intruder would do next. Even the actor playing dead Abel had twisted round from his position at the edge of the platform to see what was happening. Jack Wilson, standing next to me, nudged me in the ribs in a this-is-going-to-be-good gesture. The individual who was now standing centre-stage staggered slightly and produced a bottle from the folds of his upper garments.

I felt disappointed. A man playing drunk can be amusing enough on the boards but a real drunk is a different kettle of fish, the more tedious in proportion as he believes that what he has to say is of any importance.

Sure enough.

“Snoffair. Snorright. Snoffair.”

He stopped, perhaps to allow us to ponder the wisdom of his words.

Jack Wilson whispered in my ear, “He thinks it’s not fair, Nick.”