The Pale Companion (21 page)

I waited, but somehow sensed that whatever had happened was over and done with. Nevertheless I stood there clutching the parapet for several minutes more. Then, cold and fearful, I climbed back inside, taking care to close the casement silently, and tiptoed across the splintery boards to the trestle bed. I lay down and closed my eyes. The moon no longer shone direct on my face but shot her beams into a far corner of the long room. Whereas earlier I’d been preoccupied with thoughts of Kate, now it was the image or the series of images I’d just seen which filled my head. The secluded garden, laid out in its squares of moonlight and shade, the blurring, coalescing figures. That thin shriek.

There was a game going on here all right, but what was it? Who were the players?

I slept for a couple of hours. When I awoke a grey light was seeping into the dormitory, displacing the moon’s brilliance. Birds were singing. Remembering what I’d seen and heard in the night I was inclined at first to put the whole business down to imagination. Perhaps I’d not even woken and got up but dreamed those actions as well (as one can sometimes dream that one has awoken from a dream). And if I
had
actually crossed to the casement and exited onto the roof leads, then what had I witnessed? Night shapes, the cry of a hunted animal. No more. So I convinced myself and turned over for another hour’s uneasy slumber.

But there was a game going on, and a deadly serious one too, for a little later that morning – as Instede House was beginning to stir for the midsummer marriage of the heir to the estate – the body of Henry Ascre, Lord Elcombe himself, second holder of that title, was discovered in the hornbeam garden. He appeared to have been pushed, with great violence, onto the sundial which stood near to the summer-house. The first person to see Elcombe (the first person apart from his murderer, that is) was one of the gardeners. He discovered his master sprawled atop the dial, his arms outflung and his legs splayed forward of the stone pedestal. The gardener didn’t recognize him at first. He probably thought that one of the guests at the wedding, or more likely one of those riff-raff players, was sleeping off a night’s drinking in a peculiar and highly uncomfortable position. Then, as he drew nearer, he saw the bared teeth and fixed heavenward stare of his lord and master.

He was puzzled by a black triangular object which was resting on his lordship’s chest. It was only when some of the other servants, together with Oswald the steward, came to see and then to shift the corpse that they realized what the object was. The tip and the tapered end of the long brass gnomon, whose innocuous shadow served to remind onlookers of the passage of time, had pierced his heart. Elcombe had been shoved and then probably held down on the dial with sufficient force and fury for the point not merely to enter his back and heart but to burst out, all black and bloody, through his chest. The metal had buckled under the stress but not before it had done its job.

‘
tempus edax rerum
’ read the legend round the sundial. In Elcombe’s case the words had proved all too true: time is indeed the devourer of all things.

It might, I suppose, have been considered an accident. It could have happened that Elcombe – maybe set on by an excess of wine the previous evening (although it was hard to envisage such a steely man being overcome by anything so mundane) or maybe driven by some strange rage or by self-forgetfulness – had slipped and fallen onto the sundial in his garden, and been run through by the point of the timer. It might even have been that, in his anguished struggle to free himself, he had merely succeeded in pushing the brass dagger deeper into his body.

But the hand of man seemed a more likely culprit than the point of a dial. And so it proved when young Harry Ascre, he who was due to be married that midsummer’s day, wandered down one of the walkways in the garden while Oswald and the servants were recovering from their first shock and terror. They were mutely contemplating how to detach the body from the sundial’s tip and bear it indoors. Ascre was dressed simply in shirt and breeches. He appeared confused. All over his shirt and hose were gouts of blood, his father’s doubtless. Questions were put to him but he refused to respond – or was unable to. He stood there, mouth slightly open, not looking (as was noted at the time) in the direction of his father’s body. Then he made to wander off again, for all the world as if he was out for an early morning stroll on the morning of his marriage. Oswald gave orders for him to be apprehended and two or three of the burlier servants seized their master’s son and heir and bore him inside, where they secured him in a chamber on the ground floor before returning to help with the corpse.

I can hardly begin to describe the numbness and then the turmoil which descended upon Instede House as the news of Elcombe’s murder spread. Any death must cast its shadow over a feeling neighbourhood. We’d seen that with the recent demise of Robin. But this, the second violent death in little more than a week, was not to be compared to the woodman’s departure. Where the one man had slipped into a feral condition almost beyond the human world, the other had been at its very heart. To vary the figure, he was like a great wheel from whose spokes depended hundreds of lesser folk, from gardeners to brewers, from cooks to gamekeepers. Whether Lord Elcombe was loved or loathed, or whether he simply left people cold, was beside the point. He – or his position – ensured that many men and women and their children too were kept sheltered, fed and clothed, in exchange for their labours. To have him die, and especially in such difficult, violent circumstances, was to feel the world tremble under one’s feet.

Even we players felt keenly the loss of a patron. We were in his house by his invitation and, whatever this courtier’s motives for favouring the Chamberlain’s Company, we couldn’t be anything but grateful for his notice.

Nor was this uncertainty, into which all of Elcombe’s dependants had been thrust, the worse aspect of the situation – or rather it was one among several aspects which vied with each other for worstness.

There was first of all the private grief of the family, Lady Elcombe and Cuthbert Ascre. Penelope remained closeted for most of the day with parson Brown. Cuthbert vanished from sight somewhere. As well as the normal shock of death, the mother and brother must have been tormented by the fact that the destroyer of Lord Elcombe shared their own flesh and blood. There is a particular horror in the crime of parricide.

But there was no end to the horrors. For this was no ordinary day at Instede. Some of the grandest people in the land had gathered to celebrate the match of Harry Ascre to Marianne Morland. Now the groom’s father was violently dead, foully dead, and the groom and Instede heir was incarcerated in the great house which was, in name at least, his own. The division and hatred at the heart of this great family had been brutally exposed for the world to see.

There was no question of the marriage proceeding now, of course.

Before the day was out most of the guests had slipped away, with stony or tear-stained faces. The Devons and the Cornwalls, the Winchesters and the Derbys: England quit Instede. As if in mockery or defiance of human concerns, the sun shone down unblinkingly on the departing groups. I myself saw the Morlands as they were stepping into their coach. We have a natural appetite to watch how others bear their distresses – at least if we do not know them well – so I observed with quite an appraising eye that mother and father Morland had lost some of the gloss they’d worn at the previous evening’s feast. Their attractive daughter I couldn’t see since she was wearing a veil. But as she climbed into the elaborately carved coach she stumbled and her mother caught her under the arm. Suddenly my heart went out to this girl, someone I’d not even spoken to or been within ten yards of. Who knew whether she’d chosen Harry Ascre for a husband or – a thing much more likely – he’d been chosen for her by her title-hungry parents. Who knew whether she was a willing bride or merely a resigned one?

From what I’d noticed at last night’s banquet there didn’t seem to be much between the prospective husband and wife, no fond glances, no hungry looks, no quick clasps. Whatever the state of their hearts, her present suffering and situation were painful to contemplate; and assuredly much more painful to endure. To wake on your wedding morning in the fever of expectation and then to discover that everything had been violently snatched away. To return to the parental home, matchless and mateless, with the future perhaps clouded for ever . . . to grieve for a dead father-in-law and, much more, for the husband who would most likely be accused of his murder . . .

For this was young Harry Ascre’s fate: arrest, incarceration, arraignment, trial, sentence. And then the almost unavoidable end of those charged with murder. The first two links in this chain had already been forged, and the third was about to be. He didn’t remain long in the locked chamber on the ground-floor of the house. By late afternoon of the following day the coroner had arrived from Salisbury. A jury, composed of men from Rung Withers and two or three other small hamlets beyond the bounds of the estate, had been hastily convened by Sam the bailie in advance of the coroner’s arrival. As soon as that gentleman appeared they got down to the task like good citizens, sitting in the very room where we’d held our rehearsals and, unsurprisingly, found that an indictment for homicide should be made. The coroner had evidently been expecting this – indeed it was hard to see how any other conclusion could have been reached – for he had travelled to Instede House together with two justices. They immediately bound the young man over for trial and returned with him to Salisbury that very evening, riding off with an escort into the dusk to reach their destination. In all of this Justice Adam Fielding took no part because, I presumed, of his friendly connections with the Elcombe family.

The speed of the process was surprising but it was a reflection of the grave nature of the crime and the rank of the victim. There was also the consideration, no doubt, that it would be better for everybody if Harry was removed from Instede as soon as possible to a more appropriate location than his father’s house. This location was Salisbury gaol where he would be detained until the next assizes, due to be held in a week’s time.

At some point in his examination young Harry had claimed that he’d discovered his father in the garden early in the morning and that, during the process, he must have got blood on himself. After that he would say nothing. This continuing silence seemed to accuse him of more than complicity in his father’s death, quite apart from the evidence of the bloodied shirt and hose. Added to this was a supposition which, having not been much talked of, suddenly became hot in everyone’s mouth: it was that young Ascre hadn’t really sought marriage at all, but was being pushed and bullied into it by a tyrannical father. Finally, matters had reached some kind of a head on the very morning of his marriage. It was said that he’d encountered Lord Elcombe, either by design or by chance, in the hornbeam garden. Perhaps he’d made one last attempt to persuade his father to be allowed to escape from the yoke of matrimony. Perhaps he’d accused his father of being concerned only for his own interest (and fortune) and having no care for his son’s well-being. Perhaps the father sneered at him and told him not to be such a fool as to expect to love or even to like the woman he was about to marry. What were whores for, after all? Perhaps the father cast aspersions on the son’s bed-skills.

Perhaps . . . perhaps.

No-one knew anything but almost everybody thought they were in possession of a fragment of the dialogue which had passed between father and son before the latter had struck out at the former or shoved him backwards. By ill chance the father was standing with his back to the sundial and its upright brass gnomon. As the “dagger” found its way between his ribs and pierced his heart, what did the son do? Did he stand there, aghast, spattered with blood, while his father writhed in agony. Did he wait impassively to see what would happen next? Or clamp his hand over his father’s mouth to seal up the cries and screams? Or did he, in blind fury, seize the moment and ram his father’s body further down onto the flat surface of the dial until its point protruded, slick and bloody, from his sire’s chest?

All these versions of the event were current and probably others besides. The gossip, whispered, sorrowful but somehow heated as well, agreed on only one point: that young Harry Ascre hadn’t deliberately set out to kill his father on that fine midsummer morning. For one thing, if you were planning to commit a murder you would hardly do it in so open a place as the hornbeam garden and with so cumbersome and strange a weapon as the tip of sundial. For another, all agreed that he did not have the “character” of a murderer, whatever that might be. He was, however, a moody, intense young man, and plainly a deeply unhappy one, the more unhappy as his nuptials drew closer. I’d glimpsed something of this for myself when I’d seen him mumbling and cursing away in the garden.

Whether he’d intended the death of his father or not made little difference. He was headed in one direction only. True, he’d be tried at the Salisbury assizes but would be lucky if he received a hearing that lasted more than half an hour. There were no witnessess against him, but there were none for him either – and even if there had been they wouldn’t necessarily have been listened to. Against Harry Ascre were arrayed his almost complete silence, his proximity to the place of the murder, his bloody garments, his known difference with his father in the matter of the marriage. Taken together, this was, or would be, conclusive. There was only one destination for Ascre. He would be turned off in public like a common felon, dangling on the end of a rope. No traitor, he would be denied the axe and the privacy of the execution yard that is the nobleman’s prerogative. Only the Queen could pardon him. Equally, there was no reason for Queen Elizabeth to reprieve a wicked young man who had snuffed out the life of one of her principal courtiers, even if that young man was the courtier’s son. It would have been better for Harry Ascre (I thought cynically) if he’d possessed some of the address, some of the grace, some of the buoyancy of youth which our sovereign was susceptible to. But he had none of these things. No, he was as good as dead in his Salisbury cell.