The Pale Companion (35 page)

“Sounds a dangerous place, Nick,” was all she said.

“The country?”

“Yes, a dangerous place.”

“Oh it is, full of bears and wolves and dragons.”

“Is it?”

But her mind was somewhere else, not on my teasing. She swung out of bed as naked and unabashed as Eve before the fall. She rummaged in a bag she’d brought with her and produced some paper and a pencil. Then, returning to bed but sitting up, she rested the paper awkwardly on her crooked knees and proceeded to scrawl something, breaking off now and then for thought. I say “something” advisedly because when she handed me the sheet I had some difficulty in deciphering the words.

“Very good,” I said.

“You can read it?”

“With ease.”

“What have I written then?”

“Er . . . this is your name at the head, is it not?”

“Yes yes, and . . .?”

“What does this say? ‘Hips’? It looks like ‘hips’. I’m not quite sure.”

“Give it me again.”

She snatched the paper, almost tearing it. “I will read it if you cannot. It is some lines of verse.”

She cleared her throat.

“It begins thus:

‘Her lips are as the coral red,

Her eyes are precious stones
. . .’”

“Lips,” I said. “Oh, I see.
Lips
.”

She hit me on the shoulder. The blow wasn’t altogether playful.

“Whose lips and eyes are these?”

Her own lips and eyes gave me the answer which I expected – and suspected.

“And did you write this?” I quizzed.

“You have just seen me do it.”

Her tone ought to have told me to tread carefully but, equally, something in me no longer cared so much.

“I mean, did you pen these lines about yourself?” I asked.

“Someone taught them me.”

“Ah yes, one of the sisterhood.”

“It is better than what
you
write . . . about Puck and Bottom and the others.”

I might have protested that I’d merely been doing what Nell herself had requested of me – that is, to provide details of the
Dream.
Evidently, during my absence, the whore had grown quite refined in her notions.

“So she is teaching you to read and now to write, it seems.”

“Oh I am sorry, Nicholas, very sorry indeed that I cannot write a fair court-hand like yours.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Who is it?”

“Who is who?”

“Your instructress. Your co-worker.”

“Jenny,” she said with suspicious promptness.

“I thought it might have been one of your . . . visitors.”

“What an if it were? Would there be anything wrong with that? You’ve never wanted me to read and write.”

“So we’re back to that again,” I said.

All the delight – or, if I’m to be strictly honest, the delighted and desperate appetite – of our recent encounter had flown out of the window. Nell seemed to feel this too. She swung out of my bed once more, with a flick and a flounce as if to indicate that she wasn’t going to return to it in a hurry. Dressing quickly and claiming she had business to attend to (a very plausible pretext), she exited my room. She did, however, condescend to give me a quick peck on the cheek together with a half-reproachful look before she went, so that I almost got out of bed as the door shut and made to call her back again.

Almost but not quite.

Instead, I lay back and stared at the low, lumpy Benwell ceiling. I couldn’t pretend to be alogether sorry at the way things were turning out. Nell and I had been keeping company for . . . some time now. Perhaps our frantic lovemaking had been a sign of things ending rather than of a fresh beginning.

I stretched out with the contentment of a cat atop a sunny wall. I thought of Kate Fielding. I would not care to be seen by her in a whore’s company. She might have got hold of the wrong idea – although exactly what that wrong idea was I could not specify.

Not that I had any title to the Justice’s daughter, I was quick to remind myself.
No title at all.
Only a kiss’s worth. A kiss largely unreturned. But it helped, didn’t it, to be unencumbered. To be un-Nelled. Just in case. You never know.

I must visit Kate soon. She was due in London about now, to stay at her aunt’s in Finsbury. I could tell her about the forthcoming presentations at the Globe. I could advise her of the size of N. Revill’s parts therein, and indicate which pieces would justify her patronage. She had promised to attend the playhouse.

Idly, I held up the sheet on which Nell had written out those lines of poesy. What was scrawled at the head? “Hell”, was it? No, “Nell” of course to signify that the lines which followed were hers, were about her. She could scarce write her own name clearly. Then below that name:
Her lips are as the coral red
. . .

I groaned at the cheap verse and imagined some love-struck brothel-creeper laboriously sticking together shards and fragments from his table-book and, while he recited them in Nell’s ear, grasping hold of her fingers as she made her big r’s and long p’s . . .
Her eyes are precious stones
. . . all the time employing his other hand to play with her . . .

Perhaps I’d been a bit hasty in welcoming Nell’s departure.

If I’d been a little more circumspect in my choice of words I too could now be playing with her . . .

To cool down, I envisaged her new poet-friend. And succeeded in heating myself in a different way as he sprang into instant existence in my head.

Obviously what
he
wrote was preferable to my scribblings. Revill couldn’t pen poetry, he only made rude quips. Though she’d found the jokes about Bottom and Puck funny enough when I was last in London. Perhaps I’d been relegated to the role of Bottom, the asinine lover, the one to laugh at, the substitute, the scapegoat . . .

Something snagged in my mind, like a thread catching on a nail.

Scapegoat.

And something else: “Nell” – not “Hell”.

Well, well.

Sighing, I turned on my side and fell into an uneasy sleep even though it was only mid-evening. In my dream, black and white figures chased each other across a chess board while the moon played peekaboo behind the clouds.

Although we were in the middle of the summer season, a period when companies often took to the road, the Globe was still expected to provide enough fare to satisfy its home audience. So when the touring group of the Chamberlain’s returned to London we were plunged straight into rehearsals for three or four pieces. One in particular I liked, for the naked reason that I had a bigger part in it than in the others.

The play was
Love’s Disdain,
and the author William Hordle. It was a nice piece about love requited and unrequited, unions celebrated and thwarted, vengeance threatened and averted. A tragi-comedy, in short. I had a good, solid role as an unrequited lover, one of a duo, a male and female duo. Now, in the way of dramatic things, an unrequited twosome would normally make up a cooing pair by the end of Act Five, but William Hordle was made of sterner stuff. He granted happiness to two out of the three couples – not a bad average for the real world perhaps but a little below par for the playhouse. The unhappiness which I was scheduled to play was in contrast to my Lysander in the
Dream
whose desires were finally fulfilled. This time, in
Love’s Disdain,
they would not be. Most players enjoy misery more than they enjoy happiness. It is easier to play sad, to pull faces and speak dolefully. It comes more natural, except to our clowns, and offers us more of a chance for showing off. I thought it would be a good occasion for Kate Fielding to make her promised trip to the theatre and to see Revill’s mettle.

Accordingly, I took advantage of a free morning to hasten northwards towards Finsbury in quest of the Justice’s daughter. I even carried with me a play-bill. The aunt’s house lay beyond the city walls in Finsbury Fields. I walked through fenny Moor Fields, where the pastures were criss-crossed with what in my part of the country we called rhines. These channels, with their stiff scummy surfaces, were fringed with feathery water-plants. On a warm day like today they gave off a not unpleasant smell of rot which took me back to Somerset. This was a familiar enough landscape to most players anyway because two playhouses, the Theatre and the Curtain, lay in the area of Finsbury Ditch. It goes without saying that they had little of the grandeur or the address of the Globe, even if they were well enough in their way.

Even though I was outside the stone girdle with which London encircles herself – and inside which a modicum of safety and protection is offered to her citizens – most of the scattered houses in this northern quarter were a world away from the lawless confusion of Southwark to the south of the river. Set behind substantial walls and guarded by lodges, these mansions had more of the rustic than the urban. London was within reach all right, for you could glimpse her smoky stacks and hear the bells from her spires, but round about were grasses and trees and unencumbered clouds.

I recognized the house from the griffins on the gateposts, which Kate had described to me, and glimpsed a satisfying red-brick frontage through the greenery. Kate’s aunt, Susanna Knowles, was married to a well-to-do merchant, very well-to-do judging by the style and size of their residence. She had two or three offspring from an earlier marriage, as did her husband, Kate said, but now the couple had reached that dry land which lies beyond the child-bearing years. Once inside the property, I negotiated for a little time with the gatekeeper in the lodge before I saw a familiar figure strolling with another woman in the shade of a great oak.

“Kate!” I called.

She waved, smiled and came towards me. We exchanged a chaste kiss, but she held my hand for a moment or two longer than necessary. She turned her head and said to the woman now emerging from the shadow of the oak. “Master Revill is here. He I told you of, the player.”

My first thought was, why should Kate need to identify me to Lady Elcombe? – for it was she who was now approaching the spot where we stood on the lawn. I must have stood there, mouth ajar, like a mammering idiot for I couldn’t work out why Elcombe’s widow should be here in Finsbury Fields, and not dressed in mourning either but in something light and cheerful for a summer’s day. When she drew close, however, I saw that it was not Penelope Elcombe but a woman very similar to her in appearance. This one shared with her country mirror the same imperious manner, offset by the same generous mouth. But she was older than the Instede lady, her hair streaked with grey and her face a little more lined. For all that, though, she wore an expression of content which I didn’t remember to have seen on Lady Elcombe’s face during any of our brief acquaintance.

Kate Fielding introduced this lady as her aunt, Susanna Knowles, and we passed a few pleasant minutes in conversation, during which I was gratified by her interest in and knowledge of the London players and playhouses. Kate had noticed my little discomfiture. She must have guessed its cause, surely. But I’d have to wait for enlightenment – even if one or two glimmers were already breaking through into my darkened mind, like the first streaks of dawn.

I produced my playbill advertising
Love’s Disdain.
Mrs Knowles said, “Master Revill, you are in this thing?”

“Indeed, madam. I play a lovesick individual.”

“One who finds happiness in the end, I expect, though?”

“I don’t want to give away the play – but I think I may say that if you come to see it, you and Kate, you could be in for a surprise.”

“I promised, aunt,” said Kate. “I said I would go and see Nicholas next time I was in London.”

I felt a little glow in my stomach which was only slightly diminished when she added, “And the rest of the Chamberlain’s Company of course.”

“Well, we shall all go together,” said Mrs Knowles.

I was a bit baffled by the “all together” but assumed she was referring to her husband or something. Then aunt Knowles went to attend to some indoor business, and I was left alone with Kate. It seemed to be our fate to wander round lawns and gardens, without approaching what I would have liked to make our own indoor business. Nevertheless, I was pleased enough to have this woman’s company on any terms. And, besides, I had something quite specific to ask her about now.

“I had no idea, Kate, that Lady Elcombe was your aunt.”

“It’s no secret, Nicholas.”

“But you never said so, you never called her aunt.”

“Unlike with aunt Knowles, you mean. I saw the way you were looking at her. I suppose they are quite alike, Penelope and Susanna. When you have grown up with people you do not see these things, or rather you forget them early on.”

“There is not so much likeness when you are close to.”

“Oh Nicholas, that sounds ungallant.” By this time we were sitting in a nook or roosting-place in a corner of the garden.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I explained hurriedly. “I mean that your aunt, your London aunt, looks happier with life than your country aunt.”

“Her husband Knowles is most devoted to her.”

She left unsaid – didn’t need to say – that Lord Elcombe had, by contrast perhaps been not so devoted to
his
wife.

“But you never said, about Lady Elcombe,” I said reverting to the subject and probably trying Kate’s patience.

“The reason I don’t refer to her as my aunt is not deliberate. Just that I don’t see her in that light. She is a great lady, with houses and lands at her disposal, and she has . . . well, to be round with you, she has always had a distant air with me ever since I was a child. Perhaps it was because my father had once been a favourite with her.”

I must have started slightly because Kate added, “Long ago, before he married my mother.”

“You know this?” I said, surprised that a daughter should be so familiar with her father’s amours or preferences.

“My mother occasionally mentioned it,” said Kate. “It was a joke between them, my parents. I mean, a pleasant joke. To show that, we were often enough at Instede and I would play with my boy cousins. I received few nods or smiles from Lady Elcombe though. So it’s no wonder that I prefer my aunt Knowles.”