Sleep of Death (18 page)

‘You were up a tree, sir.’

‘Ha, I was like the owl.’

‘ – a less innocent creature I think.’

‘What?’

‘The worm, sir.’

Although I realised that Francis was talking to delay the inevitable, I was minded to humour him, a dead man. I was surprised too at the firmness and composure of his voice.

‘The worm, Francis?’

‘The worm that flies by night.’

‘That is not altogether inappropriate, my friend, for as you know—’
and here I swelled slightly as I spoke the words of Hamlet’s father, the ghost, the late king –

‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me.’

I have never been able to resist an audience, even of one. Francis seemed curiously relaxed when he said, ‘And you were that serpent, sir.’

‘Just so—’

He had taken me off-guard as I was reciting those lines, and tore his arm from my slackened grip. Nimbly he darted away into the mist. I was so startled that I merely stood and stared at the blank air. I listened. There were sounds of scraping and splashing as Francis made his frantic way across the mud and shingle. For an instant I was no longer sure of my own orientation, and where the river flowed, where the walls of the garden stood. I cursed myself for having brought this man down to the shore of the river and toyed with him, when I might have made an end of the whole miserable business in the lane by the side-gate and no one any the wiser. Now I was mortally exposed if he should regain the safety of the mansion.

From quite near at hand there came a dull thump and a drawn-out sigh, and I jumped nearly out of my skin because I thought that someone else was on my patch of bank. The noise was almost direct ahead of me. I stopped breathing. Now there was nothing to be heard above or below the sound of the gliding river.

I crouched down and whistled softly, as you might to draw on a frightened dog.

‘Francis,’ I said softly, ‘oh Francis. Come back. I mean you no harm and never did.’

Silence.

I groaned.

‘Francis. I have injured myself. I need your assistance. Help me.’

In front of me coiled the dirty yellow mist. To my left there was a plop and then a splash as small things returned to the water. But no human sound. I waited a few more moments and then, half crouching, I edged my way forward, hands splayed, feet slithering on the slime and stone.

He was closer than I expected, and face down in the mud. He had slipped as he was trying to effect his escape from me. Whether by accident or design he had made off in a direction parallel to the river rather than attempting to regain the little lane that ran up beside the house. In the darkness I was able to make out his shape – for who else could it be? – together with a black pointed object that sat next to his head. This I reached out to touch and then more quickly withdrew my hand. It was hard and slick, and not with river-mud. When Francis fell he struck his head on a rocky outcrop which might have been fashioned to brain a man, it was so sharp-pointed and so angled upwards.

Francis groaned. A tremor passed down the dark form at my feet. He was still breathing. With my nerves on fire, with a buzzing in my ears, with a red curtain closing in front of my eyes, I straddled his prone body. I half raised him from the ground by his head, using my two hands as if I were lifting a small round boulder. His body seemed to make a motion to go after the head and to rise up between my legs as if to overthrow me, but it was light, it was tiny, it was like a tail to this round head clasped between my hands. Then I flung him back down again, head and all, so that the protruding stone might do its work properly. Something spattered my face. There was the same sound that I had heard earlier, of his head striking against the rock, but this time it was not followed by a sigh.

I sat down on the bank of our Thames, careless of the dirt and other filth. Slowly my breathing calmed. Close by me ran the unseen river, with an innocent purling sound like a stream. I waited. In my hands, on my palms and finger-ends I could feel still the shape of Francis’s head as I had raised it up from where he had lain on the ground. In size and texture it was like a ball of stone, but warm as if left out in the sun. In one place it was not smooth at all but soft and dented. I had the leisure to wonder whether I would ever forget the roundness, the warm smoothness of that other man’s head before I threw it at the pointed rock. I gazed at my invisible hands, which were, I surmised, black with mud, with blood, with the night.

After a time I went towards the river. The ground grew softer and boggier. I thrust my hands into the water and wrung them together and it seemed to me that each hand was the enemy of the other, and I the enemy of both. The water was cold and continually tried to push my hands away from my body, and take them off downstream. Once I grew unsteady on my footing and almost toppled into the river.

Then I sat again and considered the matter. I had not done anything so bad. Francis was a figure of no account. He knew what I was, and for that reason he had to die. It was true that I had somewhat lost sight of my original aim in all this, and that I had been ushered down a path not of my own choosing. But I had made the best of the road I was forced to travel. Anyway, Francis slept. He was secure, secure as sleep. I was safe from him and he was safe from me.

I got up and laid hold of Francis’s feet. I tugged and hauled, while he slipped and stuck in places as he was drawn unwillingly over the rough foreshore. It was several hours until high tide by my reckoning. I might safely leave the body on the water’s edge, and by morning it would be carried away downstream to join the other detritus of our watery thoroughfare. The only impediment were the massive piers of the Bridge, and if Francis’s corpse was smashed against them by the downsweep of the tide it would be even further disfigured.

I left him there, half in, half out of the water. And so an end.

It was only much later, after I was indoors again, that I remembered the shirt that I had given back to Francis.

*      *      *

I went to pay my last respects to Francis and was rewarded for my pains. His body was laid out on a table in an empty ground-floor room. There was no watcher, such as I had been accustomed to when people perished in my father’s parish, but of course that was a country custom, and therefore most likely to be shunned in the great city. Francis had been in the water for several hours and received severe injuries to his head where he had struck a rock. But something of the old Francis remained still. Enough to show that he was as anxious-looking in death as he had been in life. He gave the lie, as plague victims do, to the idea that sleep awaits us on the other side of death, the bourne from which no traveller returns. I shuddered.

As I was exiting the room I collided with a tall, gloomy fellow whom I recognised as one of the Eliot servants. Behind him hovered the bear-like figure of Jacob.

‘Master Revill?’

Jacob nudged him from the back. The two looked as if they were on a deputation.

‘I lodged with our Francis in this house, I was his bedfellow.’

‘Yes, he told me of you . . . Alfred?’

‘Peter.’

‘Peter, of course.’

The mute Joseph again banged this skinny fellow in the ribs to prompt him, but it was apparent that he didn’t know how to begin.

‘I am sorry that he is gone,’ I said.

‘Death comes for all,’ said Peter.

‘Indeed,’ I said.

‘To some he comes early,’ said Peter, evidently considering that the way forward was by remarks of riddling obviousness.

‘The river is treacherous,’ I replied.

‘Treacherous enough – but not as dark as a man’s heart,’ said lugubrious Peter.

‘No doubt,’ I said, curious as to why these two wished to speak to me, for they had the air of men with something to impart; but I was also – to be honest – growing rather tired of all these theatrical hints and whispers.

‘Master Revill, Jacob here saw something . . .’

Jacob proceeded to sketch shapes in the air. His arms flailed and he hopped from foot to foot. He pointed through the door to where the dead man lay. He shrugged his shoulders. He tugged at his shaggy hair as though trying to draw down his brows. He stood in one place, then in another. It was plain that he was enacting the roles played by two individuals, one of them presumably being Francis. Unfortunately I hadn’t the least idea what he was trying to demonstrate.

I smiled and nodded, and that drove Jacob to ever greater efforts at a dumb-show. I remembered his clumsiness in the box at the Globe when he had shown how utterly incapable he would have been in the business of stealing Lady Alice’s necklace. Suddenly a likeness occurred to me. The shrugging of the shoulders was Jacob’s way of fastening a cloak, while the brow-tugging signified a hat being pulled down.

‘Adrian the steward?’ I said.

At this Jacob nodded furiously, and Peter said, ‘That’s it, sir.’

‘I thought he had been banished by Sir Thomas, on pain of punishment.’

‘He’s a sly one,’ said Peter, ‘as you’d be the first to know, Master Revill.’

It will be seen that the subterfuge which had resulted in Adrian’s dismissal had made me something of a hero, if I may thus express it, to the staff in this household.

‘What Jacob here is, ah, saying is that Francis, God rest his soul, had dealings with Master Adrian?’

‘Just so,’ said Peter, who had taken on the role of interpreter to Jacob. Long association with the dumb giant had given him a facility of understanding. ‘He saw them together.’

‘When?’

Here Jacob went into further contortions. I turned to Peter for enlightenment.

‘In the morning it was, yesterday.’

‘But Francis was a good servant, a loyal one,’ I protested with a vehemence that surprised me. ‘He wouldn’t have gone against Sir Thomas’s command.’

Jacob nodded, not in agreement but in denial of what I’d just said.

‘He was troubled by his shirt, sir,’ said Peter.

‘I know, I know all about the missing shirt.’

‘No longer missing,’ said Peter, producing, with a flourish which might be described as theatrical, a battered, crumpled and dirty garment from under his own not very much cleaner tunic.

I reached out. It was made of coarse cloth and was damp. It smelt of the river. A sudden shiver ran through me.

‘Where did this come from?’

‘Why, off him,’ said Peter, nodding his head in the direction of the body on the makeshift bier. ‘It were wrapped round his middle, like.’

‘Who gave it back to him?’ I said, half to myself. ‘You’re sure it belongs to Francis?’

‘Why, yes,’ said Peter. ‘Look at this mark here on the sleeve. He was wearing it on the night he found old Sir William and when he came back he took off the shirt and folded it and put it away in his trunk and never wore it again.’

On the sleeve was a greasy smear. I raised it to my nostrils but the only scent was the river.

‘Would you keep it, sir?’ said Peter.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

But I hadn’t the least idea what to do with a dead man’s shirt.

It was Nell who suggested an answer.

‘Why don’t you,’ she said, as she saw me peering and sniffing at the discoloured sleeve, ‘take it to old Nick?’

‘Old Nick’s got enough to do, surely, without troubling himself with dead man’s wear. Why, he may have the man entire and all without the encumbrance of clothing.’

Though, even as I said it, I considered that if Francis, the meek and inoffensive Francis, were destined for the undying bonfire, then which of us should escape a whipping for our sins? None, my masters, none.

‘Not him, you fool,’ said Nell fondly. ‘Not that old Nick.’

‘Nor young Nick neither,’ I said.

‘Nor you neither, you fool.’

‘Who then?’

‘Old Nick off Paul’s Walk,’ she said.

‘That one. Oh.’

‘You know him?’

‘Never heard of him. Who is he?’

And here my Nell came over coy and simpering so I guessed that this man was someone she had to do with in the way of business, the business of giving pleasure in her case.

‘He is . . . he does . . . mixtures . . . preparations . . . compounds . . . in his shop . . . under the counter . . . They say that he . . .’

At this point my Nell whispered in my ear a secret concerning this individual, old Nick, and our glorious (but ageing) Queen. What she said is too dangerous to commit to paper but, if it were true, it might shake the foundations of our state, like all gossip.

‘Can you introduce me?’ I said. ‘To your old Nick, not the Queen.’

Cartographers are accustomed to make Jerusalem the centre of this earthly world. But if they considered more carefully they would put our capital in the place of the holy city, for my money. And of all the places in London the very navel is Paul’s and, to be more precise, Paul’s Walk. Here is all of Britain in little, the gulls and the gallants, the captains and the clowns, the cut-throat, the knight and the apple-squire. Here the lawyer parades in front of the idiot, the money-lender walks with the bankrout, and the scholar accompanies the beggar (often one and the same in our poor fallen world). Here will you see the ruffian, the cheater, the Puritan, and all the rest of the crew. Why, you may even glimpse the odd honest citizen. Paul’s Walk is a babel. One would think men had newly discovered their tongues, and each one of them different from any other. To my country eyes it appeared still a little shocking that such a worldly buzz, such a trade in flesh and metal, filled what was meant to be a sanctified place, the nave of a great church. I said as much to Nell.

‘Religion is good for business, Nick. Devotion makes men randy.’

I remembered the noises of my parents on a Sunday night after my father had given what he considered to be a specially fine performance in the pulpit. Perhaps she was right.

Now, late in the afternoon after the play, we made our way through streaming Paul’s Walk, avoiding the peacocking clusters of the gallants, the reefs of the ne’er-do-wells. The men, I noticed, appraised my Nell, slyly or brazenly. Some of them might even know her. Some of them undoubtedly did know her. I did not like the idea of this.