The Pale Companion (6 page)

“Gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to Instede. I know that Lord Elcombe is a good friend to us players and to the Globe playhouse, and would wish me to say so on his behalf.”

“That’s more than he knows,” said Laurence Savage to me in a fairly audible aside.

“We must remember,” continued Sincklo, “that although we are accustomed to be the centre of attention, the cynosure of all eyes, for as long as we’re here at Instede we are a sideshow to the principal attraction. We are in this place to assist at the celebration of a wedding and cannot expect to be centre-stage.”

I wondered whether he was saying this to excuse the off-hand treatment which we’d already received and which was probably a foretaste of more off-handedness to come. Richard was a rather formal, cautious man, apt to think before he spoke and to speak only when necessary. I suddenly saw that staying and playing in a great man’s house might not be the simple proposition I’d imagined. Leading a band of players into what was a kind of foreign territory might require the skills of an ambassador. Perhaps this was why the Burbage brothers had selected Sincklo to be our senior on tour.

“Nevertheless,” he continued, “I know that I can depend on the Chamberlain’s to give a good account of themselves whatever the circumstances. We are here to practise our craft and to earn our living. We are here to spread our good name even further abroad and to justify the sharers’ trust in us.”

At this, he nodded in the direction of the other senior, Thomas Pope, who was himself one of the sharers – that is, an individual who had put up some of the cash to buy the Globe when our Company moved south of the river. Thomas smiled and slightly inclined his head at Richard’s words. I felt my heart swell to be a member of this fine Company in which men could give and receive compliments with such grace.

At the same time there was a little niggling in my mind as I continued to wonder what Laurence Savage had meant by his cryptic remarks concerning the part of Demetrius in the play. However, this was not an appropriate moment to ask Richard Sincklo, who continued: “We have a chamber on the ground floor of this great house which has been put at our disposal for practice and rehearsal and, though we are all tired and dusty at the end of a long day’s journey, our craft will be tireder and dustier still if we do not attend to it. After all, it’s several days since we last rehearsed. So I say to you that we shall begin our business in half an hour.”

Such was the discipline and good-will of our band that there was not even a murmur of protest at what Sincklo had said, although inwardly no doubt quite a few (like me) were regretting being called to arms quite so soon. As often happens in rehearsal the tiredness dropped off me like a snake’s skin. Jack Horner took the part of Demetrius. I knew, though, by the manner of his playing and by his frequent recourse to the scroll containing Demetrius’s lines that this was not
his
part. He was standing in for someone else. I could have asked Jack but our friendship had somewhat cooled of late, and I didn’t want to give him the impression that I didn’t know what was what. Equally, I could have spoken to Richard Sincklo but he was preoccupied and furrowed-looking. I decided to leave the question since it would be apparent enough who was playing Demetrius when we got down to the real rehearsals. It was a little mystery I would have to live with for the time being.

Anyway, by the end of our practice I could have run through ten more plays and a dozen jigs to round them off with. And this despite the fact that I have a not inconsiderable part in the play. I shall say more of both play and part (really quite a big one) later on in the story. What I want to relate now concerns what happened later that evening.

As Master Sincklo described, we’d been provided with a chamber on the ground floor of Instede House. Once our play practice was done we were fed and watered, or rather aled, in a neighbouring room. In the glow of a rehearsal which has gone off properly – and with that pleasant tiredness which is well earned and soon to be relieved by a good night’s rest – and in the consideration that the Chamberlain’s Company’s stay on Lord Elcombe’s great estate might, after all, be a satisfactory affair – I felt like taking the air late on this summer’s evening before climbing the stairs toward heaven and my trestle bed.

I asked one or two of my fellows to join me but, since I really wanted my own company, was glad enough when they refused. Jack Wilson anyway preferred to leave me to my own devices after the previous evening in Salisbury. “God knows what you’ll stir up this time, Nick,” he said. “Well, I won’t look to you for help,” I said.

I walked out into the warm air. The formal gardens and working parts of the estate were obviously on the other quarters of Instede House because, from where I was standing outside the courtyard at which we’d first entered, the land dropped away towards a wooded area. I was facing west and the sun filled the sky with his evening benediction, drawing a few golden strands of cloud after him like a king going into exile. (That was a rather fine poetic figure, I thought; perhaps I should drop it casually in the hearing of someone like Master W.S.) Shading my eyes with my hand, I could see beyond the wood a low line of hills. Somewhere over there, and not so very many miles distant, was the village of Miching, where my father had preached from his pulpit, where I had played as a child, where my mother had summoned me indoors to bed at about this very time on a summer’s evening. And now, stolen from me by the plague, they were there no more and I would never again be welcomed home by them this side of paradise.

Unexpectedly, I felt water come into my eyes. I dabbed at them and walked off down the gradual slope which led away from Instede and towards the woods. It is odd how even at moments of ease and content, perhaps especially at such moments, darker thoughts will come to shadow us. To dispel these I deliberately turned my mind elsewhere.

Item: the excellence of my Company and how they were like a family to me, supplying what the plague had taken.

Item: she whom I had left behind in London. So I asked myself what my Nell was doing at this instant. This very instant. A bad idea. Because she was most likely plying her trade in Holland’s Leaguer, just as I’d been plying mine in the rehearsal room. A mixture of jealousy (at the thought of the customer who was occupying her now) and regretful lust (that I was not in his place in her bed) overtook me.

Well, business is business, as she would say . . . only business.

Instead of Nell, I summoned up images from the previous evening. The kindly keen-eyed Justice of the Peace, Adam Fielding. His beautiful dark-haired daughter Kate, she of the soothing hands and ointments. Instinctively I raised my hand to touch the bruised, scraped places on my face. And that made me remember the stir in the square and the performance of the Cain and Abel story by the Paradise Brothers. An appropriate appellation for a travelling band which dealt in old Bible tales. I wondered whether they’d been drawn towards such subjects by their name alone.

All this time I was making progress across a sheep-cropped area of grass and towards the woods which lay on one side of the mansion house. I paused, turned around and gazed up at the great palace on its knoll. From this angle it looked even grander and more imposing. The sinking sun struck the windows and they gave back a dazzling return. One or two diminished figures were moving around the side of the building. My attenuated shadow stretched out impossibly far in front of me.

I turned back in the direction of the wood and entered the trees’ own long-drawn shadows. Either my eyes were still affected by the sun’s glare or there was actually something there, because I saw – or thought I saw – and for the second time that day – an object moving in the darkness among the trunks. Not white, but a gloomier flickering shade. I stopped, blinked and looked again. I almost made to return to the shelter of the great house with the excuse that we had a long day of rehearsal on the morrow, that there was no requirement to walk any further, &c. It also occurred to me that I’d had enough of this nonsense. If an energetic and straight-thinking young man was going to be frightened by some silly shifting shapes among the trees, then it was a pretty poor look-out for all concerned.

I walked on, tasting again my panic of the afternoon and determined to face down my fears.

A rough path led from the field into the wood and it was apparent from the beaten-down grass that feet often wandered this way. Perhaps it was a trysting-place for the lads and lasses cramped up in the servants’ quarters of Instede. I threaded my way through outcrops of bush and briar. Once inside the wood, I hesitated, to let my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. It was old, this pocket of woodland, much older than the house. The lower branches of the oaks and elms writhed overhead. Mossy, misshapen trunks clustered on every side. After the heat of the day it was cool in here. The airs of evening were stirring, bringing with them the pungent odour of wild garlic. A hidden stream murmured in my ear. There were animal rustlings and whirrings. These were familiar sounds. They posed no threat. By now I was able to see quite clear. I wiped my sweaty palms on my shirtfront and breathed deep. The best way – the only way – to overcome fear is to walk up to that old rascal and face him down.

“Hist!”

“Jesus save us!’

I would have jumped clean out of my shoes if I could. As it was, I stumbled backwards over a fallen branch. Winded, I lay on the ground looking up at the splinters of light among the topmost branches. A strange face thrust itself between me and the view.

A disordered face, with straggly grey hair and a beard all grimed and leaf-strewn, and exhaling reeky breath from a toothy hole of a mouth.

A figure dressed in animal pelts and skins tied about his person.

A wild man of the woods!

I must have screamed or shouted in terror, even as I frantically scrambled to my feet, for this weird individual backed away in alarm and lifted his hands protectively in front of his face. His evident fear helped me to get the better of mine.

For an instant I wondered whether he was a man at all, but his apprehensive posture and (to be candid) his smell even at a distance persuaded me that I was not dealing with a wood-spirit or demon.

I have heard of these feral beings – unfortunates abandoned at birth, suckled by wolves and raised among the beasts, and who scarcely know themselves to be human. Men who, when they perish in the winter’s cold, have no gravestone to mark the place where they fall and only a veil of dead leaves to cover them.

He lowered his hands from his face. They were oddly crooked, like animal paws – or, with their long nails, more like claws. Then, still keeping a distance between us, he said, “Well, sirrah. What are you doing in my territory? Have you come to spy?”

In the dimness of the wood I stared at this wild figure, from whose bewhiskered mouth emerged sensible, if slightly threatening, sentences.

Out of my own mouth emerged nothing. I was too surprised to speak.

“Well then?”

He crept a couple of paces towards me while I retreated. He had a strange, swaying movement. I was frightened of tumbling over backward again and having him on top of me. Him and his reeky breath.

“I – I – am . . .”

“Out with it!”

Something in his peremptory tone, incongruous in this dishevelled, rank-smelling figure, struck me as absurd. I nearly laughed out loud and then thought better of it.

“Nicholas Revill is who I am,” I managed to get out finally.

“And who might Nicholas Revill be? Is he a spy?”

“No spy but a player in the Chamberlain’s Company. We are newly arrived from London to – to this place here. We are the guests of Lord Elcombe.”

I jerked with my thumb in the general direction of Instede House.

“What do you play, sirrah?”

“We play the words that are set down for us.”

He nodded at this deliberately unilluminating reply, seeming to think about it. I took the opening to ask him a question, “Now that I have given you my name and trade, as the phrase goes, you must give me yours.”

“Who am I?” he said curiously, as if he’d never heard the question before. “I? Some call me Robin.”

Well, that name fitted one who flitted and bobbed about in the greenery, although the breast of this one was dun-coloured rather than red. It also brought to mind the thief called Robin Hood. And that character called Robin Good-fellow in Master W.S.’s
Dream,
he who is jester and attendant to King Oberon in the same piece.

“But I have no trade,” he added.

“Oh I would say you have not,” I said, humouring this odd fellow and casting my eyes up and down his ragged outline.

“Does a lord need a living?”

“As you say.”

“I am the lord of all this little land,” said Robin the wood-man.“Look around you. I am master of what you see.”

At this moment I wasn’t able to see very much but I nodded and said soothing things and wondered how quickly I might escape from this individual’s company.

“Master . . . Revill, is it?”

“Aye, Nick Revill.”

“I can see by your looks that you do not altogether believe my words.
[This remark – which was right enough
–
took me aback a little because my own eyes couldn’t have read a face. The fellow’s must be adapted to the darkness under the trees.]
And it is late for you to be out, Master Revill. But if you return tomorrow I will show you my kingdom.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Come to me when the sun is directly overhead,” said Robin. “I have things to show you.”

“Very well.”

“You may leave my kingdom now, Master Revill,” said this scarecrow in the dusk.

“Thank you, your majesty – Robin.”

I almost bowed my way of his “court” in the woods, half in jest but half struck too by the earnestness of the man. Maybe I would go back next day, for my own amusement – and instruction. It’s a player’s duty, almost, to study those among whom he finds himself.

By the time I exited the woods only a few fragments of day remained to the sky. The great bulk of Instede House blocked half the horizon in front of me, with little flickers and gleams of light signifying some of the windows. A young moon lolled low on the earth, as if unwilling to make the effort to hoist herself higher in the heavens. I hastened across the short turf which separated the wood from the bank on which the house perched. At one point, I thought I heard someone breathing quite close by, a kind of sighing, and I looked round and went a little faster. I had had enough of woodland shapes, sounds and spectres for one day.