Sleep of Death (21 page)

‘What wealth he missed, what a luxurious crop he neglected to harvest,’ pursued Sir Thomas, evidently pleased with his agricultural metaphors.

‘What wealth
you
have gained,’ said Lady Alice, and from her tone I judged that she did not mean only her bodily self.

‘Oh, we have benefited, my dear. This has been to our advantage,’ said her new husband.

‘As the cat said when the farmer’s wife rescued it from the well,’ she said.

But this proverbial analogy, rather surprising in the mouth of my Lady Alice, was not much to Sir Thomas’s liking, for he now raised himself into a sitting position. The sniggering understanding between the two, the sense that they shared a history of secrets, had been replaced with a brisker mood. The first gusts of evening were blowing over the wall and ruffling the trees. My back was clammily cold with sweat. Sir Thomas got to his feet and then offered his hand to Lady Alice. But she raised herself up without his assistance and then, together but at a little distance from each other, they made their way towards the garden door.

I waited a good five minutes up the pear tree, to ensure that they would be safely across the larger garden beyond and into the great house, before lowering my stiff limbs to the ground.

Excerpts from my notebook:

I have changed my mind. I thought William’s belief that there was something odd about his father’s death was the result of his grief or, perhaps, of attending one too many performances of Master WS’s
Hamlet.
But now the discovery of Francis’s body in the river, the emergence of the shirt that was missing and then found wrapped round his corpse, the disturbing behaviour of Old Nick the apothecary and his vision of somebody talking to Francis, talking in an urgent, commanding whisper, talking him over to his death – all this compels me to acknowledge that old Sir William’s death cannot have been natural.

Another point (under a sub-head, as it were): after Old Nick had taken hold of Francis’s shirt and was speaking in that strange, tranced manner and using words and a tone not his own, it seemed to me that the voice was familiar. There was in it something faint, but recognisable.

So I must conclude that Sir William was murdered.

What follows from that?

Where, when, how, who? And why?

These are the questions which follow, as the night the day.

Let us start with an easy question.
Where?

Response: in his orchard, where it was his custom to sleep on warm afternoons. This was no secret. Anybody wanting to take him at his most vulnerable would choose that moment, particularly as they knew that he regularly went there
alone.
No one else had a key to the secret garden, Francis told me. I have established this from other servants too.

Another question, almost as easy:
When?

Response: at some time between the beginning and the end of the afternoon, a gap of perhaps four hours. Francis says that the body was scarcely warm. Even allowing for the coldness of a spring evening he must have been dead some time. Also: his wife and his son and other members of the household came out to search because they were worried at his absence. This too indicates to me that the murder occurred earlier. If he’d been in the habit of staying in his orchard for hours, until it grew dark in fact, they would not have worried.

A harder question:
How
?

This may be broken down into several smaller questions as, how did our murderer get into the garden, how did he conceal himself, how did he kill Sir William?

Response: I don’t know. Or, rather, I know only what I think I know. When I reconstructed the crime in the garden, attended by the faithful Jacob, I was at first sure that I had found the hiding place of our murderer, up in the old spreading pear tree. Then I doubted. But the discovery of those initials, WS, has in a manner confirmed my suspicion – yes, this was an ‘occupied’ tree – while throwing me further into confusion. Both times I felt in my bones that I was crouching, uncomfortably, up in the branches where our murderer had crouched, that I was in his bloody shoes. My confusion comes from what those initials may stand for. Here I waver, shuttling between doubt and certainty. At one moment I think: The playwright sat up the pear. The next I tell myself: It cannot be that the foremost author in the finest playhouse in the greatest city in the world skulks in trees, waiting to drop down on an unsuspecting knight so as to put him to death.

As to the other part of the ‘how’ question, that is how did Sir William actually shuffle off this mortal coil, what precisely procured his exit? That, too, I don’t know. But I have some hopes of the apothecary.

Question:
Who
?

Who wanted Sir William dead? (If I leave aside Master WS.) Who benefited from his death?

Look to his family.

Lady Alice I know from my own experience to be a woman with, as Francis expressed it, a saltiness in her looks – and not just in her looks. Witness the behaviour of the couple which I had spied from the tree in the evening. That they were bed-partners before the death of Sir William was hardly to be doubted. Suppose, however, that the occasional stolen afternoon, when the sun shone, or when she might go and see him in his lodgings in ‘Dover’, was not sufficient for her, or for him. Suppose that she wanted Sir Thomas for a husband, now and for next week; suppose that Sir Thomas wanted her for his wife, also now and for next week; and therefore they would not wait for mortality to strike the first husband down but must needs give him a thrust. Suppose that Sir Thomas wanted control over more than his brother’s human relict; that he wanted the fine mansion on the edge of the Thames? I have heard it whispered, and not just by the unfortunate Francis, that Sir Thomas was near bankrout; he was heavily in debt, he was about to lose his estate in Richmond. What had she said in the garden? ‘What wealth
you
have gained.’ Isn’t this enough to make them plot together – lust and avarice conjoined – to get rid of the first husband? (As Gertrude and Claudius
may
have plotted together in Master WS’s
Hamlet.
)

Or perhaps the plot was all Sir Thomas’s, and Lady Alice merely accepted the result without enquiring into it too closely, as women are always inclined to take what fortune drops into their laps.

On the other hand, young William Eliot has informed me that both his mother and his uncle were, in their own ways, genuinely distressed by the death of a husband-brother. What I’d witnessed of them from the tree didn’t suggest that their grief had lasted long. Just so do Gertrude and Claudius appear to be genuinely distressed. They are good players at grief. So too is Hamlet, good at grief. Who is to say what is real and what is play? I go round in circles. Each argument meets a counter-argument. In this real-life drama it is William Eliot who is playing the part of Hamlet, the son of a mother recently married to an uncle, and of a father dead in strange circumstances. What reason might William have for wishing his father dead? A voice whispers to me, and I am almost afraid to commit this thought to paper: haven’t all sons, in some hidden part of themselves, a wish to see their fathers dead?

Who is guilty then? All? None?

A final question for myself: Why compare everything to a play? Why should I hold every incident up and see whether it matches something in Master Shakespeare’s imagination?

Response: Because it seems to me that the play is the answer – the play’s the thing. This starts with
Hamlet
and it will end with
Hamlet.

As it happens, the next afternoon we did
Hamlet
again. It was a sure crowd-puller and -pleaser, so the Burbage brothers had put another performance on the schedule in two days’ time. The tragedy of the Prince of Denmark was to be leavened by the little satire of Boscombe’s
A City Pleasure
, performed on the middle afternoon. After the Sunday break, we were to revert to our diet of crazed Milanese dukes and cardinals, and murderous painters and rustics in the county of Somerset. Such is the player’s round. So dizzying is it that one scarcely knows on any one day whether one’s first line should be ‘Buon giorno’, or ‘Good den, zur’, or ‘Greetings, my fair dame’. And while these plays, together with WS’s
Hamlet,
were going forward, we were preparing for the next batch which included
Love’s Sacrifice
(the minimal part of Maximus) and
Julius Caesar
(the disposable part of the poet Cinna).

But that afternoon it was, as I say,
Hamlet.

After I had delivered my lines as the English ambassador, after Fortinbras of Norway (which, being not a very big part, was taken by Samuel Gilbourne, who had been with the Chamberlain’s only as many weeks as I had days) had spoken nobly over the remains of the Prince, and after we had all done our little jig and the audience gone home happy, I retired to the tiring-room, surrendered my costume and, exchanging a few words with my co-players, exited into Brend’s Rents.

I was not surprised to see William Eliot outside. We fell easily into step together and, skirting the Bear Garden, made to enter the Goat & Monkey, the tavern where we’d first encountered each other.

‘Sir, sir!’

‘Not now, Nat.’

The dirty man was lounging at the inn-door, hoping to be invited to do his animal-noises in exchange for pennies which he’d promptly convert – oh alchemy! – into ale’s muddy gold.

‘I will do you a bear fight, death and all, sir.’

‘No, Nat.’

‘Four dogs dead and the bear mortally wounded – all for one penny.’

‘Piss off now.’

‘Can you do a unicorn?’ said clever William.

‘No sir, for though it is not widely known, the unicorn is mute,’ said clever Nat.

‘There’s a penny for your pains,’ said William, and Nat scuttled ahead of us into the Goat & Monkey to spend the coin quickly. While William and I were talking, he would glance at us from his corner from time to time, raising his tankard to his new patron.

‘I thought you would most probably be at the playhouse,’ I said.

‘Yes. It is like an itch, that play. I must keep scratching at it.’

‘We do it again the day after tomorrow.’

‘You have nothing to report?’

‘From your mother’s house? No, apart from the initials up the tree which I told you of. And the strangeness of Francis’s death.’

‘Which we have also talked of.’

Although it had been William who first inveigled me into the Eliot mansion with the promise or threat of something ‘out of place’, he now seemed inclined to dismiss my findings as insignificant. Initials up a pear tree? Nothing; children, and lovers like Master WS’s characters, carved their names into trees, not murderers. The death by drowning of the servant who had discovered his father’s body? People died in the river every day by the bucketful. Not quite true, but he had a point. I had not yet told him about my visit to the apothecary’s for fear that he would laugh at my credulity. Nor had I told him about the two occasions when I had seen his mother in a less than respectable light, once in my room and once in the garden. What was I to tell him? That his mother and uncle had been bed-mates before his father went down underground? That in every argument with myself I went round in circles?

‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘that we are so little advanced in this matter.’

‘My fault, Nick. I should never have asked you to do this. I thought that a fresh pair of eyes, ones not half-blinded by family affection or dislike, might see something which I had overlooked. No matter. I have enjoyed having a player for a lodger.’

‘Your parents too?’ I said, remembering the exchange between Lady Alice and Sir Thomas.

‘There is much coming and going in our house. They are civil to their guests, as befits a knight and his lady. And my mother has a real taste for the playhouse. She always did. My father, he—’

‘ – despised players,’ I cut in.

‘I don’t know that it was as strong as that. But he was suspicious, certainly. He felt that no man should pretend to be what he was not, even in play.’

‘My father also.’

‘So we have that in common.’

I saw William’s gaze slide to one side of my face, even as I felt outspread fingers slipping under the hair at my nape.

‘Nicholas,’ a soft voice whispered in my ear. I knew the warmth and sweetness of her breath. ‘Shift up.’

Nell pushed onto the bench between William and me.

‘I thought I’d find you here, in your favourite hole,’ she said.

Finished with business for the day, she must have been. That is to say, by now she had earned enough to pay the Madam, with a little left over to provide for daily necessaries. The life of the whore is even more precarious and provisional than that of the jobbing player. As ever, I wondered who – and how many – she had been with that day. And as ever, I tried to strangle the thought at birth, just as I stifled the notion that she was looking for new trade in the Goat & Monkey. Nevertheless, I was glad to see her.

William smiled at my mistress. He did not ask who, or rather what, she was. He would know that no lady should walk alone into a Southwark tavern. And her dress of flame-coloured taffeta most likely told him a story too.

‘Who’s this, Nick?’

‘William Eliot, a gentleman who dwells across the river.’

‘Eliot. Is that . . .?’

‘One of the most distinguished families in the city, yes,’ I said quickly, considering that William would not have been overjoyed to know that the secret matters of his family were the property of a trull.

‘A drink, mistress?’ said William, all courteous and courtly.

‘Nell,’ said Nell, simpering slightly. I wished now that she had been sat not between us but on my side only, since she wriggled and snuggled herself in his direction. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Call me Will. Sack or sherry, Nell?’

‘Plain ale, sir – Will.’

My heart sank, not only at this display of familiarity but because my Nell could not drink without becoming light at the heels. She drank, not ladylike in little sips, but in great gulps. In that state she was liable to offer for nothing what she customarily exchanged for cash. I knew this because it had been how our acquaintanceship started. I poked her with my elbow but she ignored me. William called out to the potboy and gave his orders. Did he know what she was? Probably. Did he care? Probably not.