The Pale Companion (30 page)

“The wet-nurse went to live a long way off from the estate. What she did there, how she sustained herself in another town, the story does not say. But the son, I mean her own boy, at some point quit his mother and came back to the one place he’d known from his childhood. Accustomed to a rough, hand-to-mouth existence, the lad – now a young man – took up residence in some woods on the edge of the great estate and there wore out a long succession of summers and winters. He dressed himself in animal skins, he fed off roots and berries and what the charity of the great house provided him with. He took the title of Robin or was called Robin. The outlaw, the woodman.

“Mary did not continue for ever in her casual, slatternly course. In the story she reformed herself or was reformed. She became a God-fearing upright citizen of the town. She looked back on her early wild days with remorse and shame. Eventually she died peacefully in her bed – at least, I hope that she did, since the story that I am telling is hers and was composed by her, and the one thing we cannot recount in our own narratives is the manner of our death.”

Adam Fielding brandished the sheaf of papers. He was pacing slowly about the room as he talked, speaking ruminatively, almost as if he was drawing the narrative from out of himself rather than rehearsing what was on the paper. Lady Elcombe had not stirred where she sat. The rest of us stood, attentive, appalled.

“Before Mary, the wet-nurse, died she wrote a kind of . . . confession. Touching briefly on those early years. But chiefly she wrote about the child. Not the gangly lad who’d returned to live in the woods but the noble baby which had been entrusted to her and which she’d taken away with her. Because, you see, he had not died and been buried hugger-mugger in the woods. No, he had lived . . . even though it was not especially to his advantage or anyone else’s that he should live. Far from putting an end to her charge with neglect, the wet-nurse cared for him tenderly, by her lights. She grew into a mother, of sorts. And all the while he grew up strong, healthy – but no more capable in mind.”

There was an abrupt sound, a kind of barking sob, from the woman in the chair. She seemed to shiver then grew still again. My heart went out to her and I pitied her exposure. But she was beyond caring about that, I think.

“He had a name. Of course he had been baptised by the parents. He had the name they’d given him. It was Henry, his father’s name. He was not a complete natural. He owned some glimmers of understanding, he had a little sense. Sufficient to take in fragments of what his ‘mother’, his nurse, told him. And what stories she told him! He retained something of the little child’s love of stories well into the years when, by computation, he was an adult. She told him tales from the good book. The story of Cain and Abel perhaps. And she must have repeated again and again the tale of where he had come from, the great house, the noble family. I think she must have talked often about this because Robin the woodman used to talk about it as well. Indeed, I have heard from another
player
in this tale how the woodman apparently believed that
he
was heir to some great estate. With Robin it was imagination surely – all those years living out of doors had addled his wits. But with Henry, it was quite true what his nurse told him. Was he not the scion of a fine house, the child of a great man, the first-born of a powerful man, a wealthy one? He was each of these things. Much use they were to him! Maybe she told him that his father had cast him out when he was little. Or did she say that she was his mother – as, in some sense, she had a right to say. Who knows?

“All that is certain is that in the shadowed parts of his mind, Henry conceived the notion of returning to the great house and family which he had heard about so often. When she died, there was nothing to hold him back any longer in that far-off town. Clutching his mother’s dying confession he sped southwards. He was coming home. He travelled by day across open country and forest, finding whatever shelter he could at night, keeping out of men’s way. He was wearing white, because to his simple mind that was the colour of mourning, or because that was the garb which his nurse-mother dressed him in. By the end, of course, after nights of sleeping rough and days of travelling wild, the white garments were speckled and grubby. There was no longer a mother to care for him.”

Again there came that strange sob from the upright chair. I wondered at the fluency and assurance of Fielding’s performance and considered that there was more than a touch of heartlessness in it. Later I realized that it was the only way he could steel himself to get through this very painful interview: to treat it as a narrative, to be shaped, polished and delivered with address. He continued with the tale.

“And now the story becomes a little obscure,” said Adam Fielding, “but we must strive to get the picture whole and clear, if necessary by piecing it out with our reason and our imaginings. A man’s life is at stake. When Henry reached the outskirts of the place where he’d been born he recognized it – not from memory of course but from his nurse-mother’s stories. The great house set on a rise, the lake and all the other appurtenances. Home. Yet now he was home who was there to acknowledge his existence? He was wary, mortally wary like an animal, as well as simple. He had no words to announce himself, and for authority only a dying woman’s confession, words which he could not read but which he somehow knew were vitally important.

“He took shelter in the woods. And now you can see that there is only one direction for the story to go. In the woods he naturally encountered that strange creature Robin. They shared a mother, a mother of sorts. They were, in a manner, brothers. Henry lacked the wit to read but he could still announce who he was, that is, the heir to a large estate and a fine demesne, and he found among the trees a counter-claimant, another strange being who’d for years believed himself entitled to some great inheritance.”

Cuthbert Ascre let loose at this point a violent . . . laugh. Like the rest of us, he was stretched to breaking-point and this was, I suppose, his way of manifesting it. I noticed that Kate’s gaze flickered constantly between her father and Lady Elcombe.

“Two claimants, whether they are men in a wood or rival emperors, will eventually come to blows. No realm can endure two kings. They will fight until the business is settled and the victor is sole possessor. So it was in this case. Henry may have been simple but he was strong, stronger apparently than he who I have called his ‘brother’ – an individual who was some years his senior and whose strength had been sapped by all those years of living unhoused, unroofed. It is not comfortable to imagine what happened after that. Within a few days of Henry’s arrival in the woods, the hatred between him and Robin had grown so great that the men were mortal enemies. If Robin had a superior knowledge of his surroundings, then to Henry we may attribute the greater strength . . . and ferocity.

“We know the sequel to this. One summer’s night or early in the morning Henry surprised Robin and put an end to him. He hung him from a tree. Remembering those stories of his nurse-mother from the good book, the hatred of Cain for Abel, or how David’s son Absalom hung from an oak-tree, or how Iscariot swayed from the elder, he hanged Robin from a tree.”

Adam Fielding paused. He stopped his pacing. His voice had grown old and hoarse. He hardly troubled with the pretence that he was telling a “story” now. Rather he spoke direct to the matter. I looked down and was surprised to see my hands balled into fists. Outside, the dark pressed on the wide windows of Instede and I wondered when the dawn would come again.

“But even this is not the end of a painful tale. Again, I cannot be sure of what happened afterwards, no one can. But I believe that there was an . . . encounter between the lord of the great house and the woe-begone son who had returned to claim his place in it. Master Nicholas Revill here was a distant witness to the business and he can tell us what he saw on a moonlit night.”

I started to hear my name and to realize that Fielding was calling on me to describe the dream-like vision of the chessboard garden and the black and white figures. With none of Fielding’s fluency or assurance, I haltingly recounted what I’d seen or thought I’d seen, all the while regretting I’d ever been drawn from my bed to the window that night.

As I stumblingly came to the end of my brief witness, Fielding took up the reins again. He spoke softly, with difficulty now, almost forcing the words out between his teeth. Of all the terrible speculations of this night, what followed was surely the worst.

“So, my Lady, it seems as though there must have been a meeting between these two, father and disowned son. There can hardly have been an argument since Henry – I mean Henry the son – was incapable of sustaining conversation of that kind. Whether words of any kind were exchanged, no one will ever know. In the middle of the night the white spectre of a long-lost son rose up before his father and the father, horror-struck, faced the child he had farmed out all those years ago. Did Henry somehow identify himself? Did his father know him, by instinct or otherwise? I do not convict the son of malice, poor lack-wit. He did not know what he was doing, what effect he was having. Somehow the father backed into . . . he stumbled . . . he fell onto the great sundial in the middle of the garden. The gnomon pierced his heart and he perished after a short struggle.”

Fielding paused again. He sighed.

“This is all very well.”

The voice, surprisingly firm, belonged to Cuthbert Ascre. He moved from a position close to his mother’s seat. There was little enough light in the chamber, and what little there was came from a candlebeam hanging in the middle of the ceiling. Into this subdued circle Cuthbert stepped.

“All very well,” he repeated. “But what proof have you, your worship?”

I detected a slight sneer in the appellation. Adam Fielding was quiet for a moment. He reverted to stroking his beard.

“As I said, there is much here that we must piece out with our reason and our imaginings. But there is no doubt of the substance of the story. No doubt, my Lady?”

He spoke gently, in appeal.

Lady Elcombe looked for the first time straight at the speaker. She pushed back her veil. When she spoke her voice, like her son’s, was surprisingly composed. It was that, I think, which confirmed to me the notion that there really is such a thing as blood and breeding.

“No, Justice Fielding, you are right. There was such a child . . . and he was put out to wet-nurse in the circumstances you have described. But I would deny before the throne of God that it was ever – ever – with the intention of securing his death. On – on – my part anyway.”

Adam Fielding bowed his head in acknowledgment of what she had said.

“When the woman went away, though, I was of the common opinion that the child had gone, I mean, died. Then other children came, to succeed the one that was . . . no more.”

“Penelope,” said Fielding, with the same mildness in his tone, “did you know that Henry, the first Henry, had returned?”

“I had inklings of it.”

“No more than that?”

“To see us at such a time as this!” she suddenly exclaimed in a hiss. “To impede us!”

It took me a moment to see that she was referring to the wedding, and a moment longer to realize that she had been as disturbed as her husband that the lost boy had come back to haunt them. Instead of a mother’s gladness (and turmoil) at the restoration of what had long been forgotten, she too perceived Henry as a threat, an “impediment”, to Instede. After all, there was another Harry already in place and his marriage was imminent! The shocking reappearance of the simpleton threw everything into doubt. In law, he was surely the rightful heir. His arrival threatened to overturn all. No wonder the mother could not be glad. In any case, she had connived at the boy’s removal all those years ago, hadn’t she?

As well as composure, I observed that there was a steeliness in her nature, in her blood.

“Well, he will offer no more impediments now,” said Fielding in a tone in which sadness and anger seemed to be struggling for the upper hand. “He lies at the bottom of the lake. Or rather he is laid out, my Lady, in some small downstairs room in your house. Perhaps, given who he is, he should be better accommodated. After all, he will eventually join his father in his resting-place.”

“Nonsense,” said Cuthbert. “How do we know that this . . . person is who you say he is? I tell you, Justice Fielding, that you are imposing on my mother and myself at this time and that the body from the lake is nothing to do with us, merely some Tom o’Bedlam or vagrant. Even if what my mother has just said is true, it does not mean that – that – thing in the chamber downstairs is my brother.”

Where Lady Elcombe’s distress registered itself in silence or terse comment, Cuthbert’s showed itself in anger. And I could see why he should feel like this. To hear, of a sudden, that he possessed a surplus brother, and that one a lack-wit, a natural. Then to hear that it was
this
brother who had procured his father’s death rather than the Harry who lay in Salisbury gaol . . . it would be enough to disturb Old Nick himself.

“It is your brother,” said Lady Elcombe to her other son – now, shockingly, her third son. The silence that followed was broken only by a quiet gasp from Kate Fielding.

“How do you know?” said Cuthbert. “You cannot know after all these years.”

“That ‘thing’, as you term it, I have been to look at. A mother might know her own son by instinct, but there was an infallible mark on him. He had only three fingers on his left hand.” She shuddered now. “He lacked it when he was born, he lacks it now as he lies prone and pale. It is Henry.”

“You did not say, madam,” said Cuthbert. He did not mean the finger, he meant the whole business, the whole lamentable story.

“I thought to keep it concealed now as I did then, but God would not suffer it so.”

In the gloom I thought I detected a single tear making a snail’s progress down her face. If it was there, she made no move to brush it away.

Once again Cuthbert intervened, either to save his mother from further exposure or to give vent to his own anger and confusion.