The Pale Companion (24 page)

“Yes, I think so,” I said, suddenly uncertain now that my formulation was exposed to the warm light of day.

“Therefore what you saw in the middle of the night had nothing to do with Elcombe’s death? You talked of an ambush, of one dark shape creeping up on a white one. That’s very different from the scene which you’ve just described.”

“I don’t know how, but I think it was connected,” I said.

“What tells you that?”

“My gut,” I said.

“Well, that is no more unreliable a guide than any other – sometimes.”

“Sir, I have a question for you. That death of Robin the wood-man now, which seemed to me – seems to me – not to have been a case of self-slaughter, that is connected to . . . all this, is it not?”

I gestured round, taking in the spot where Lord Elcombe had been discovered, pinioned, but also the larger area of the garden where I’d witnessed one figure swooping on another.

“Of course it’s all connected,” said Fielding tersely.

“My father has a good opinion of you,” she said.

“He does?”

“Of your acuity and imagination. He says you are most imaginative.”

Was this a compliment? Or was I being subtly rebuked for being a fantasist?

Kate Fielding and I were lounging near the margin of the lake in the Instede grounds. Lounging in complete propriety, I hasten to add. Regret to add. Fully clothed, propped up on our elbows. We had taken a stroll around the water and, finding a shady slope, settled down to admire the view. From here the east face of the house stood up clear, its entrance draped with black baize. Despite this token of mourning, the sun beamed down as it had since we first set foot in the country. The light sparkled off the lake.

“No imagination now, Nicholas? No poetry? That’s what we usually talk about.”

I registered her use of my first name, as I’d registered the care she’d taken to convey her father’s “good opinion” of me. While welcoming Kate’s warmer mood, I couldn’t help wondering if there was an ulterior motive. Something in the air of Instede bred suspicion – which was hardly surprising, perhaps, in a house of murder. The heart-beating pleasure I took in her presence had abated slightly, perhaps because of the general sobriety and gloom of the last few days. Yet my palms felt moist while my mouth was dry.

“I’m afraid I haven’t brought Master Richard Milford abroad with me this morning. He remains tucked under my pillow.”

“Where he sleeps sound no doubt. But you, you could improvise some verse?”

“I am no true poet, Kate, no poet at all really . . . I cannot write or hum to order.”

“Despite that imagination.”

“I have to be inspired,” I said, desperately hoping that she would not insist on a test of my (non-existent) poetic faculty, yet unwilling to abandon this promising line of banter.

“And what inspires you?”

“Oh, you know, the usual things . . . transience and beauty . . . the curve of an eyebrow . . . the breezes of spring . . . the decay of autumn . . . my mistress’s lips.”

“You have a mistress?”

I hesitated for an instant and that must have given her her answer. But what I said aloud was, “You said to me once about my friend Milford and his lines, ‘I don’t suppose there was a woman in the case at all.’ So that is my answer to your question.”

“Haven’t we heard enough of spring flowers and autumn leaves?” she said, shifting the ground of our dialogue and also turning to look out across the water. “If I lived in the city I think
that
is what I should write about . . . if I wrote at all. Its sights and smells. Its greatness, its press of people.”

“But you have an aunt in London, don’t you? So you are familiar with the city.”

“Only as a visitor.”

“I’m a visitor also, of a couple of years’ duration, no more.”

It was odd that I so readily made this admission, smacking of provincialism, to a woman I wanted to impress. Usually I was eager to be taken for a born-and-bred Londoner. Perhaps I sensed that plainness, straightforwardness, was the way to reach her.

“Yes, I remember you come from down here. Your parents are country people.”

“My father was a parson in a Somerset village. My mother was his wife. They are both dead.”

“My mother died when I was quite young but not before I committed her to memory,” said Kate. “My father often talks of her. He tells me that I look a little like her now.”

“She must have been a . . . beautiful woman.”

The little pause was not for effect, I swear.

“He is a partial witness,” she said, smiling.

“All witnesses are partial,” I said meaninglessly, “particularly when they think they are not.”

“I hear that you witnessed something strange the other night.”

I felt suddenly confused – and not a little irritated – to realize that Adam Fielding kept no secrets from his daughter.

“Yes, I told your father of something I saw, or thought I saw. But I would not like the story to get abroad.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was in the nature of a dream or a nightmare . . . a shifting, uncertain image. You wouldn’t like your dreams spread among strangers.”

“Am I a stranger?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Shall we talk about something else?”

“I’m sorry if I’ve angered you, Nicholas.”

She reached across and half-grasped my hand. It was worth being irritated to have her touch me. She looked away.

“What’s that in the water – over there?”

I followed her gaze. All I could see was the glint of the sun on the surface. Kate rose to her feet and moved a few paces nearer the rushy margin of the lake. She shaded her eyes with her hand and peered intently at a stretch of water. I got up and joined her.

“Where?”

For answer, she pointed. I saw nothing except the gentle ripples and the swaying, feathery plants on the bank. Then at once something seemed to stir in the deeper, darker water beyond the place I’d been looking at. A rash of bubbles erupted on the surface, together with a queer hissing sound. At first I took it for a fish coming closer to the surface – a surprisingly large fish – a monstrously large fish. In Kate’s presence I steeled myself against stepping back from the lake edge. Whatever was down there, it could hardly clamber out onto dry land. It was no submarine beast, however, but something more like a long colourless bundle, cylindrical in shape, which appeared to be dragging itself up from the bottom of the lake, twisting slowly round and round and trailing ragged streamers behind it. The reflected sun and the muddiness of the water combined to make the object indistinct.

Kate clutched at my arm. I heard her draw breath sharply. Just as the bundle seemed about to break the surface and disclose itself, it abruptly dropped down out of sight, as though a water-sprite or something worse had tugged it back to the lake-bed. There was a momentary flurry above the spot where the bale-like shape had disappeared, then all was flat and calm again.

We stood there for some time, Kate still holding hard onto my upper arm. In other circumstances I would’ve been glad of this, glad of the chance to reassure and comfort her. But the truth is that I was shaken myself.

“What was it, Nicholas?”

“I don’t know.” I shivered. “But there is something rotten here at Instede.”

“You must come and see this, Nick,” said Will Fall.

“So you’ve said already.”

“We look to the Paradise Brothers to provide something special.”

“
We?
Will, you speak like a member of the laity, if I may say so,” I said, hardly troubling to keep the annoyance out of my tone. “Anyone’d think that you had never seen a band of players before, let alone been part of their mystery as a member of the Chamberlain’s.”

The three of us – Will and I, together with his kitchen drab Audrey – were ambling towards the great barn where the Paradise Brothers were due to put on a new “play” for the edification of the estate workers. I was a little surprised that, in this delicate period before Lord Elcombe’s interment, they should have thought themselves licensed to act. Still, they were evidently driven by some species of spiritual fervour, rather than baser commercial considerations like the rest of us.

“I mean no aspersions on my own company,” said Will, “but the Paradises remind me of an earlier period of playing.”

“You’re not old enough.”

“An era that was more direct,” he went on, ignoring my comment. “An era without so many refinements.”

“You mean crude and clumsy.”

“I mean rough-hewn and honest.”

“Then we agree,” I said.

“Anyway, Nick, I look forward to seeing what miracles they can work with bits of cable and harness. We enjoyed Judas a-hanging himself last time, didn’t we, Aud? Nearly as good as the real thing.”

The short red-faced girl stumbling along beside Will seemed surprised to be addressed and muttered something incomprehensible in reply.

“I wonder who they’ll kill today?” he said.

I considered the remark out of place, given what had recently occurred at the great house, but it was no use rebuking Will: there was an honest, rough-hewn quality to him too. He said what he thought, without thought.

When we got to the barn there was the same crowd of besmocked and breeched workers who’d gathered a few days earlier to watch the drama of Judas. Among them, I noticed Sam the grasping bailie and keeper-of-the-rope, as well as Davy, my informant in the household. It was interesting to see that, for all the makeshift circumstances of this presentation, an air of expectation, even of excitement, gripped the little audience. I wondered what Peter, Paul and Philip Paradise were going to divert us with this time. For sure, it would involve murder or self-slaughter – just like real life.

Perhaps in deference to the tragic events at Instede, however, the Brothers had chosen a story without violence: the parable of Dives and Lazarus. You know the one. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. Then, later on, the rich man is shoved down into hell while the poor man is raised up into heaven, where he rests smug and snug in Father Abraham’s bosom. This is consoling for all of us poor (or not so rich) folk since it tells us that we shall ultimately be rewarded for our privations on this earth. And, more important,
it tells us that the wealthy will suffer for their prior comforts.
Most men, having to choose between pampering themselves or punishing their enemies, would surely choose the latter. So it is, I say, a satisfactory parable.

I wondered at first whether the little rustic audience was going to be disappointed at the absence of murder and suicide – as if there hadn’t been enough of these things a few hundred yards away from where we were standing. But the Paradise trio were skilful. They knew how to draw an audience in, with simple or crude colours and effects: the arrogance of Dives and the humility of Lazarus; the descent into hell of the former, the ascent into heaven of the latter. This last trick was nimbly achieved by means of the same harness and pulleys which had been used to hoist aloft Judas Iscariot. As Paul “Lazarus” Paradise rose slowly into the air towards the heavenly cross-beams of the barn, where the sun shot his rays through some ragged places in the roof, so did Philip “Dives” Paradise sink down towards the hellish straw-strewn ground, where he writhed gratifyingly. This double movement, of a man rising and a man sinking in unison, brought little gasps of appreciation from the crowd. Even I was forced to concede that the Paradises, with their mastery of rope and pulley, knew a trick or two.

Then Peter Paradise, playing the part of Father Abraham with protruding beard and furrowed brow, told us all of the gulf which divides Heaven and Hell and how none could cross it. Still “brothering and sistering” as if his life depended on it, he instructed us to turn our backs on wealth and pleasure and to preserve our immortal parts safe and uncorrupted. Among this raggle-taggle crowd this struck me as odd. What would they ever know of wealth? What would I ever know of it, come to that? As on the two previous occasions when I’d been present at a Paradise performance, it was the parson’s share of the show. The trio of players, or Peter Paradise at least, were thwarted preachers. I remembered my father’s little tricks and turns in the pulpit. Well, no great distance separates the two trades.

But Peter Paradise, with his white robes and his rabble-rousing delivery, went rather further than was wise. At some point – when exactly I couldn’t quite pin down – he shifted from those sermon-generalities which don’t really offend anyone to a direct attack on the late Lord Elcombe.
There,
he thundered, was a Dives,
there
was wealth in all its power and arrogance. And now where was this great, proud man? Where was he? Peter’s brows furrowed more furiously, his beard protruded more proudly. He looked about as if he expected Lord Elcombe to emerge from the crowd. Then he pointed at Dives still writhing around among the straw. Elcombe was where he deserved to be, that’s where. In Hell he surely was, languishing in anguish.

I grew a little uncomfortable at this.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum,
they say, don’t they (if they’ve had the benefit of a Latin education)? Concerning the dead, we should speak nothing but good, if only for fear of what others will say about us after we’ve gone. Whatever Lord Elcombe had been or done in his lifetime, he was not yet below ground and here was his memory being traduced by these forthright players. I wasn’t the only one to feel uncomfortable. The crowd of workers who’d watched the parable with approval – and even enjoyed being told to eschew the wealth they didn’t possess – now started to shift and stir where they stood. There were murmurs and whispered asides. As Peter Paradise ranted on, there was even the odd voiced comment.

“’t’aint right.”

“’e weren’t so bad, the master.”

“Wealth’s a curse to them as have it, without a doubt.”

A responsive player would have tailored his delivery to these signs of unease and protest, would have been better advised to shut up altogether, but Peter had too much of the fiery parson about him to be deterred by mere disapproval. Remembering the brawl in Salisbury, I feared trouble. These Paradise people seemed to cause a stir wherever they went, as if their name promised not harmony but turmoil. Just as they weren’t really brothers, according to Cuthbert Ascre, so their message was anything but fraternal.