The Pale Companion (9 page)

In short, I’d thought we’d probably get along fine. I did wonder, though, whether he was getting paid at our rate of a shilling a day for his performance. Or was he paying us for the privilege?

A morning’s playing gives you an appetite. Today’s dinner, like last night’s supper, was calculated to satisfy it and all of us, except Cuthbert who’d withdrawn to more refined quarters, fell on our pigeon pie and mutton. There was no sign of Oswald, the haughty steward who’d “welcomed” us the previous day. Perhaps he was unwilling to sully himself by further association with rag-tag players. At least his master showed a more accommodating face.

We had more work later, of an ambling kind, when we were due to go out and prospect the ground where the
Dream
would be played – for this was going to be an outdoors performance, with the sward for stage, the woods and fields for hangings, and the stars above for our roof. Richard Sincklo told us to be in attendance on the south side of the house at three in the afternoon. Once on our space, we’d pace out the area and mark off the boundaries enclosing what would become the short-lived kingdom of the players. Thomas Pope would consider how best to incorporate whatever we found there to our advantage, such as paths and hedges and little irregularities in the ground. But between times the post-dinner gap was our own. I remembered that I’d made a half-promise to Robin, the man of the woods, that I’d allow him to show me his “kingdom” among the trees.

Well, no harm in it, I thought.

As a player I ought to be interested in humanity in all its guises, I thought.

Too much thinking, I thought.

Once again I crossed the grassy space between one side of the great house and the wood where Robin lived. The sun shone benevolently on my head and a spacious afternoon peace sprawled across the landscape. It was weather to bless all life. I recalled the drunken farmer who’d clambered up on the makeshift stage in Salisbury. What would he say to this even-tempered climate? No doubt, he’d find fault. Too little of one thing, too much of another. Farmers are like that. Then, as if to confirm that farmers are by no means alone when it comes to perverse fits of feeling, I suddenly missed the smells and sights and sounds of the capital. The sweet stench of the river, which particularly tickles your nose on warm summer days like this; the boiling crowds of apprentices, moving like packs of dogs through the streets; the everlasting peal of the church bells and the coarser peal of the orange-sellers and other street-hawkers. And I was pleased to miss these things because that must mean I was on my way to becoming a true Londoner. Why, I was even missing the sly insinuations of Master Benwell, my landlord. I missed Nell also, and our sessions in Dead Man’s Place and elsewhere. But I could not have put my hand on my heart and answered yes to Elcombe’s question about Cupid’s dart, at least not in relation to her.

By now I had entered the wood once again and a profounder hush folded itself about me. I paused. I felt oddly at ease. As though this wood posed no danger.

“Master Revill.”

“Robin,” I replied.

He appeared seemingly through the trees. But in truth I’d nosed him out before I’d seen him.

“You have come.”

I bowed slightly.

“So that you can show me your kingdom,” I said, “as you promised.”

He put himself into that queer crouching posture which I’d observed on first meeting him and beckoned me on with a curved hand. There was something dog-like about his attitude. By the clearer light of day I saw that he was covered not so much with whole animal pelts as with fragments of fur and hide crudely stitched together. Parts of his body which in the evening gloom had looked clad, like his arms and knees, were in fact bare but all weathered and besmirched. Leaves clung to his beard and a single jay’s feather protruded, by design or accident, from the thatch of his head.

Robin again beckoned me with his hooked hand before turning and moving off into a denser part of the wood. I glanced back at the reassuring bulk of Instede House through the outer fringe of trees. Someone called out in the distance, the shout resonating in the quiet of the early afternoon. I followed Robin. He wove his way among the undergrowth and pursued a route that was apparent to him alone. At one point we came to a boggy patch and then a stream. Robin’s feet were unshod – though a cursory glance downwards might have deceived you into thinking he was wearing shoes, so filthy-black and hardened were his feet to look at. I would normally have trodden carefully, in my townee’s way, but was forced to follow my leader through the squelch and wet. I made some involuntary noise as the water rose over my shoes but Robin was silent. From time to time he glanced back to see that I was still with him.

We must have been moving for five minutes or so. I’d spent most of the time looking down, trying to avoid the damp places and the tiny pits and falls which Nature scatters everywhere for the unwary. When I glanced up again, Robin’s brown-grey shape had vanished.

I sighed inwardly. I was getting used to being lost in the woods.

“Hist!”

The sound came from by my feet. I looked down and eventually discerned a darker shape on the forest floor. The feather still stuck straight up from his head. Then the head was withdrawn to be replaced by that beckoning, curved hand. Wherever he was going he evidently expected me to follow.

I crouched down. There was a large ragged hole torn out of a bank of earth and fallen leaves. Patches of sunlight fringed its edges but within it was earthy-dark. Just as the vixen has her earth, and the conies their warrens, so does Robin the wood-man have his home in the ground. Well, what had I expected? A fine mansion perched among the treetops with a perspective in every direction? Some cosy cottage with Mistress Robin, a dimpled dame, in attendance? Only in a story.

What I faced instead was a hole. And a decision. Do I follow this strange man into his lair? What if he is in the habit of luring young players and other passengers into his den, there to club them to death and roast their mortal remains over a fire for his supper? What if he imbalms them, and keeps them for his winter provender?

Only in a story, I told myself. A story fit to frighten children on a winter’s night.

I remembered what Davy the servant had told me too. Robin was harmless enough. Some said he brought good luck on the house.

I eased myself into the hole, sometimes crouching, sometimes on hands and knees, feeling my way forward down a tight tunnel. Damp penetrated my leggings. There was a slight gleam of light a few yards ahead. The passage stank, though whether this was its natural smell or the smell of its occupant I wasn’t sure.

“Hist, Master Revill,” came from up ahead.

I scrabbled along the passage, suddenly frightened that the mud-ceiling was going to come down and bury me. I emerged into a tiny hollowed-out area which – as I realized when my eyes gradually grew accustomed to the light (or lack of it) – had been formed under and to one side of the clustered roots of several great trees. The earth must have washed away naturally or been scooped out by Robin so as to form this hide. The spaces between the twisting, diving roots had been filled with branches plaited together and then covered with a kind of mat of leaves. But a small quantity of light was still admitted, enough for me to see my host squatting in the opposite corner.

“You are welcome to my home,” he said.

I would have bowed but I was already hunched over.

“Most gracious.”

“I can offer you water,” he said, without moving from his squatting position with his arms hooped over his knees.

“I do not drink it, thank you,” I said.

I didn’t drink it neither, or not much, and certainly not from the green-mantled pool he most likely obtained it from.

“Flesh I cannot offer you,” he said solemnly. “Flesh I do not eat.”

So much for my childish fantasies about being killed and roasted! I settled myself down on the leaf-mould which passed for flooring.

“To kill even the meanest creature,” he continued, “is to injure one of our fellows.”

I must have looked automatically at the strips of squirrel and rabbit and God-knew-what-other fur and hide which patched his begrimed body for, seeing my glance (he had very acute sight), he said, “I have not harmed a living creature. I take only from those who no longer have need of covering in this cold world. It is no sin to borrow from the dead.”

It might have been the dank air of the den but I started to feel shivery. Something tickled at the back of my neck and I reached up to brush it off.

“No, no, flesh I do not eat. They know that.”

“They?”

“My dependencies.”

He waved a bedraggled arm to the left and for a moment I wondered what he meant, then realized he must be referring to Instede.

“So they bring me only turnips and green sallets, and goosegogs and raspberries . . .”

What had Davy said about this man, that he should be looked after. Perhaps this was what he meant.

“. . . on silver trenchers.”

Looked after because he was mad, no question of it.

“That is no more than you deserve,” I said.

“A king does not go foraging,” said this muddy man.

By now my eyes had grown used to the near-dark and I could study my host. My intention was to bring this dialogue to a speedy close, however. Poor Robin was plainly out of his wits, and though one may learn something from the mad it is limited. He had once been a handsome man, with a strong, long face. Hunger and exposure had sharpened his features, so that his nose was like a pen. Deep scars and embossed scabs were visible through the grime on his face and arms and legs. This was unaccommodated man himself, a poor forked being.

Again I felt shivery. A spider, one of Davy’s attercops, suddenly lowered itself in front of my eyes.

If part of Robin – the kingly part – was mad, another part seemed aware of his predicament because he now said, in a tone of sadness, “I was not ever thus.”

I waited, for revelation.

“No lord of a shrunken kingdom was I, but of many acres. Of dale and forest and mead. I could have ridden across them from dawn to sunset without dismounting.”

“Where was . . . where is . . . this kingdom?” I said gently, noting the poetic way he’d described it.

He tapped his skull with crooked fingers.

“Safe and sound in here.”

He laughed a quite pleasant laugh, not the mad cackle you might have been expecting.

“Where none can seize it,” he said.

Or see it, I thought.

“You don’t believe me, Master Revill.”

Again, that acuteness! I squirmed uncomfortably on the dank and dirty ground.

“You have your treasures in mind,” I said, noticing how the jay’s feather stood upright from his hair.

“Oh I have them here too,” said Robin.

All this time he had been squatting, hugging his knees with his arms, an awkward position which I couldn’t have sustained for more than a few minutes. Now he reached behind him in the dimness of his lair and brought forward a small leather-covered box. He fiddled with some kind of hasp. He struggled for some time, his nails scraping on the surface. Eventually he half-opened the lid. I couldn’t see what it contained. Alternately glancing up at me and then down at the box, he started to rummage awkwardly inside it. I imagined he might bring out a bit of dried bat’s wing or a withered chaplet of flowers but instead there was the rustle of paper. His eyes flicked up and down, the whites unnaturally bright in the gloom.

Finally, he extracted from the box four or five discoloured sheets of paper. Pushing them close to his face, he seemed to scan them in search of a particular item. Then, selecting one, he held it out to me but without letting go of his side of it. There seemed to be some writing on the sheet but, so dim was the interior of the hole under the trees, that I couldn’t make anything of it or even see which way up the sheet was meant to be.

“Yes,” I said, nodding slowly (and all the time thinking furiously about how I could extricate myself from this ridiculous business), “yes, I see what you mean.”

What had I done to earn the privilege of a peek inside this crack-brain’s head? Had I offended Genesius, the patron saint of players? Was he now giving me a little lesson in the cost of showing too much curiosity about my fellow man?

“There’s more, Master Revill,” said Robin, carefully returning the unreadable sheet to the leathern box.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“You’re not the only one to have seen my treasures.”

“I expect not.”

“He’s seen them too.”

“Who?” I said mechanically.

“Oh you know,” he said. “You are familiar with him.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“He is clever,” Robin said. “He does not wear the badge of his tribe.”

I stayed silent for the simple reason that I could think of nothing to say – and also because I was unwilling to provoke him to further nonsense.

He too said nothing for a moment, and then began to sing in a tuneless up-and-down way.

When the devil came up
And walked the lea,
Who was he looking for?
Me or thee?

I couldn’t stand up in this damp, dirty-smelling hole but I made to back out, on hands and knees, down the earth passage by which I’d entered. I’d had my fill of the smell, the talk, the papers, and now the sing-song. But I wasn’t quick enough. Robin’s scrawny arm shot forward and he grabbed at mine. I felt the bone of his fingers scrabble at the flesh of my arm but he didn’t have sufficient control of his hand to take a firm grasp. He leaned forward and his breath buffeted against my face.

“That’s who,” he said. “You know him. You’ve seen him.”

He meant no harm, I am sure of that, no harm. He did not have it in him to do harm. With his feeble frame, he was no threat. Even so, I rebelled at the hand which was scraping at my arm, and pulled away. After that I might have pushed at him or kicked him, I’m not sure which, I was so eager to get out of this stinking, mouldy house. Desperation gave me strength and I heard him gasp as my shove winded and overtoppled him. I took off backwards down the little tunnel and out into the air.