The Pale Companion (20 page)

“Oh I am sorry to hear it,” I said, “but even in a case like this we still have judgement here. Surely those who caused your brother’s death were brought to account.”

“They were not,” said Laurence. He grinned but it was a very grim grin. “They were too rich and powerful, or rather one of them was.”

“No-one is above the rule of law,” I said piously.

“Wait. Later that day, while the bundle lay wrapped up in his cradle, his last resting-place before the grave, a man came calling. A gentleman judging by his voice and manner. He explained to my mother that he had heard of our misfortune and that he came to offer condolences. More than condolences, as it turned out. Because even as he spoke he drew forth a leather pouch and casually tipped its contents onto the very chest which my brother’s body had so recently occupied. I couldn’t help noticing how my mother’s eyes were drawn towards the little pile of silver or how she responded to the visitor’s manner. She had always been vulnerable to smooth tones, to an easy address. As I said before, I was old enough by now to know how the world works.

“Our visitor gave her to understand that the money he had so carelessly disbursed was hers on condition that she made no fuss about the dead child – or no more fuss than might reasonably be expected from any woman who lived in circumstances like ours. What he meant was that any family inhabiting one of the Fleet Ditch hovels had not much more entitlement to life than the rats which crawled about its banks. Every third day some infant fell from an upper window or was drowned in the stinking channel or was trampled underfoot. There was nothing out of the way in this. In return for not taking the case before the coroner, my mother would receive a further payment in three months – by which time Thomas would be safely underground and forgotten. Our visitor didn’t say this but it’s what he meant.”

“Who was this gentleman?”

“I discovered later that he was Elcombe’s steward, Oswald Eden, the very man who is still in his employ and who greeted us so warmly when we arrived the other day. He was the second horseman in the street who rode down my little brother. The two of them, master and man, were no doubt going somewhere on pressing business. Elcombe has a town house near Whitefriars.”

“But it was an accident,” I said mildly, and looking round half fearfully to see whether this great man or any of his immediate family was in earshot. The grander members of the party, however, had shifted indoors while we poor players and a handful of lesser guests remained scattered about the playing area. I’d have wagered that none was engaged in so earnest a dialogue as Savage and Revill.

“An accident,” I repeated.

“Oh yes, Nicholas, it was an accident. Half the children in the borough succumb to such accidents, falling, dropping, drowning. Or if they don’t go that way then the plague will catch them out. Nothing remarkable, nothing
particular.”

I had it in mind to ask why, then, it was so particular with him. But tact prevented me. Anyway Laurence went on to supply the answer, unprompted.

“My mother hesitated for an instant then she reached out a hand for the silver on the chest, realized that the pile of coin was just too large to be contained within a single clutch and so stretched out both hands and scooped the money into her apron, which, by the by, still carried slight traces of my brother’s mortal remains. That is the picture of her which lodges like a beam in my mind’s eye and cannot be dislodged. My mother tipping money into her spread lap. By comparison, the action of Lord Elcombe and his steward was a mote, a speck of dust – though I hate them both for it and will do until my dying day.”

I had never seen Laurence Savage in such a mood. Usually the blandest of men, he was now red-faced and sweat-streaked. As he uttered those last words, he seemed for once to fit his surname. Then, in a more relenting tone, he said, “After all, what else can you expect of the rich and powerful but that they will ride roughshod over all who are in their way. It is my mother who I cannot forgive. All her pride dwindled to a pile of coin.”

“What happened to you after this?”

“It is easily told, Nick. My brother Thomas was buried and forgotten. After that our fortunes seemed to change. A few months later another visitor, not Oswald but a man with a cast in his eye, came calling with a second packet of blood money. My mother accepted it of course and soon after that she received a proposal of marriage. It was from the very glover who’d bought up my father’s shop. Perhaps he was waiting for her to be a little stretched and strained by circumstances, in order that he might wear her more easily. So we returned to the shop and the business which we’d lost scarcely a year earlier. My stepfather was an unpleasant man, and it is some consolation to know that my mother was not happy with him. He beat me, as was his right, until I grew too large and he was afraid I might hit him in return. One day, encouraged by his fear, I did. Then I ran and ran. Until one day, another day, I fetched up on the shores of the Chamberlain’s Company as an apprentice.”

I had no idea that Laurence’s history was so, well, dramatic. I looked on him with new eyes.

“So now you know why I hate Elcombe and all that he stands for. Wealth and power.”

“Why did you agree to come and play the
Dream
at Instede then?”

“I am a player, Nick. No doubt you recognize the breed. I thought you were one yourself. We’d play in front of Old Nick himself, wouldn’t we, if we were paid for it and the shareholders told us to get on with it. Anyway, I didn’t realize that I would feel so . . . bitter towards this great nobleman until we actually came within sight of his fine pile. And I was amazed to see Oswald himself still in his master’s employ, still the same arrogant, high-handed bastard. Little did he think that the boy in the Fleet Ditch house who watched him spill his silver on a chest would one day turn up at his master’s country seat.”

“I don’t suppose he noticed the boy at all, Laurence.”

“The man is often mightier than the master,” he replied. “No, he probably didn’t even see me. Then or now. And talking of now, if you’ll forgive me, I have some drinking to do.”

Laurence blundered off in search of more ale, leaving me to reflect on all I’d heard that evening: Cuthbert Ascre’s resentment of his father because Elcombe apparently stood in the way of his younger son’s pursuit of a player’s life; Laurence Savage’s contempt for the Instede’s owner’s wealth and casual power. When these things were put side by side with Harry Ascre’s seeming reluctance to marry, a course he was compelled to follow by his tyrannical father, it seemed as though no man had a good word to say for our patron. I thought of that cold, hard stare, and told myself that I wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of it.

I looked around. The moon cast her pale shroud over the scene. By now, the playing area and the banked seating beyond it were almost deserted. Most of my fellows had disappeared. The Elcombes and the Morlands, together with their guests, had long since repaired indoors. No doubt the bride-to-be had already been ushered to her bed with all the ceremony due to her last night on earth as a virgin. I assumed that she was one; but a bigger assumption was that Lord Harry would be willing to deflower her on their first night, or any other one for that matter.

We of the Chamberlain’s were due to stay on at Instede for another couple of days, to attend the wedding as something between guests and servants, and to provide diversion after the celebrations in the shape of some song and dance as well as a little masque. But our chief business at Instede was complete. This stirred mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, I’d be relieved to be away from a place that – for all its space and lavishness – seemed to contain more than its fair share of human turmoil and unhappiness (mind you, a wedding is a great provoker of those very items). And, of course, I’d be glad enough to return to my adopted city with all its stench and stir. But leaving this country meant leaving behind Kate Fielding. No, not leaving behind . . . that implied some connection between us. Simply leaving. For she had not yet given me the chance to make my feelings clear and – even though I feared that I might not gain an inch with her – I knew that if I departed without making some declaration of my passion I would regret it for the rest of my life.

So I climbed wearily up the stairs to our upper dormitory. Some of the trestle beds were already occupied and a medley of snores and other unguarded night-sounds filled the moonlit chamber. Unlacing my boots but not bothering to remove anything else, I lay down on my own lumpy bed and tried to sleep. The house would be stirring early for tomorrow’s wedding. But I didn’t consider that. Images of Kate kept filling my eyes. Kate calling to me as I wandered by the lake, Kate debating love poetry, Kate tending to the wound on my face.

In the pre-sleep time various silly courses of action slipped into my head. Perhaps I should injure myself in her presence to elicit her sympathy and to compel her to attend to me again? No, she’d see through that in an instant.

Perhaps I should write her a love poem, instead of relying on the words of Richard Milford? No, she’d see through
that
too.

Had she admired my performance as the love-sick Lysander? She’d said she liked the play (in truth, it’d be difficult to dislike it) but she had not said a word about
my
performance. When Cuthbert Ascre turned up she’d complimented him, hadn’t she – but perhaps she was just being polite. After all he was only playing at playing. He needed reassurance. But so did I, something whimpered inside me.

I must have fallen asleep in this feeble, self-pitying mood for the next thing I knew I was coming awake with a start, dazzled. For an instant I couldn’t remember where I was. The moon was glaring almost directly on my face. Squinting, I observed her shining unashamed at me through the small window opposite. Why had I woken? Around me were little noises, sounds of shifting, but no evidence that anyone else was awake. Without knowing why, I rose and walked towards the window, skirting the bed of one of my fellows. The boards were rough under my stockinged feet. The window was tight shut against the contagion of night. I tried to peer out but could see nothing except the moon’s white eye warped by the thick glass.

There is a line in our play – I mean in Master W.S.’s
Dream
– where Snug the joiner asks whether the moon is due to shine on the night of their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Bottom and Quince consult an almanac to discover that, yes, the moon does shine. The mechanicals, like good improvisers, think to use this light, gratis. Bottom says, “Why, then you may leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open, and the moon may shine in at the casement.”

Well, on cue, the moon had indeed risen for the latter part of the Instede
Dream.
And now the moon was shining in through a line of small casements. Our dormitory floor was at the very top of the house, its mean window-apertures hidden behind a parapet. Between the window and the parapet was a space of a couple of feet or so. The casement opened inwards. I tugged at the catch and, after a little rusty resistance, it gave. The night air was fresh on my face. I glanced round at my sleeping companions. For some reason, I did not wish to be observed as I slithered through the little window and tumbled awkwardly into the standing-space between casement and parapet.

Once outside, I stood upright and held firmly onto the coping stone. Some of the previous day’s heat still radiated from the wall behind me but the lead-lined guttering was cold underfoot. I guessed that it was about one or two in the morning. By the calendar it was midsummer’s day but there was not yet any sign of lightening in the east. Rather, the moon queened it over the night. A few thin shreds of cloud were scattered across the heavens, scarfing the stars. An owl hooted. I peered over the parapet. I seemed to be standing on the edge of a dizzying cliff, gazing down at a strange landscape in which objects were blanched and transfigured. The space where we’d played out the
Dream
was almost directly below. At one end were the rows of seating. At a little distance was the garden enclosed by the hornbeam hedge. The plashing of the fountain carried through the soft air. A dog barked in the distance.

By craning out and round I could look down the flank of the building and see, beyond the little turret on the corner, the moonstruck trees where Robin had lived and died. I thought of the odd way in which Adam Fielding had suddenly decided that the woodman’s death was natural – or as natural as suicide is permitted to be. And shifted my gaze back to the enclosed garden which, from this height, had a queer resemblance to a chess board. For one thing it was neatly quartered and then re-quartered by paths and low hedges, and the light was strong enough to cast flat black shadows among the pale, illuminated segments. For another, the statues and obelisks, the Neptune fountain and the summer-pavilion, had taken on the aspect of chess-pieces disposed for a game. Or rather they appeared like pieces abandoned half-way through a game.

I blinked in the moonlight. Blinked again. For it looked to me as if one of the figures in the central part of the garden was moving. A white form flickered, was still, flickered again. My skin crawled. Then a piece of shadow appeared to detach itself from a larger area of darkness and to move towards the shifting white shape. To stop, then move forward. To stop, then move forward once more. Everything about it signified stealth, or worse. The figure in white was surely unaware of the creeping but resistless progress of the dark shadow. I wanted to cry out a warning. But I also wanted to stay quiet, to duck down below the parapet. My mouth gaped but, as in a dream, no sound emerged. Then it seemed as though the white and dark shapes met, swirled about, coalesced. Through the night there came a thin shriek.

At almost the same instant the moon was obscured by a rag of cloud. It was like the snuffing of a candle. By the time she’d re-emerged, the scene had changed again. There was no shifting figure, white or black, in the enclosed garden. Night and silence only. No more.