The Pale Companion (37 page)

“His memory?” I ventured. “It harmed his memory. Did he have no name to preserve?”

“A lack-wit’s name,” said Fielding.

“A person,” I persisted.

“I suppose a father may be allowed a greater latitude than others in this matter.”

There was a pause while I misunderstood him. Then it grew clear, and I felt myself go a little weak in the legs. All the time the walls of the city drew nearer. We were now traversing the marshy area of Moor Fields, with its greenmantled ditches and sweet smell of rot. Clouds covered more than half the sky. The afternoon would not be fine after all.

“You know?” I said, and the question struck me as strange even as I put it, because he should have been saying it to me. “You know it for certain? He was your son.”

“Oh yes, there is no doubt about it.”

Adam Fielding stopped on the path for the first time since we’d set off from his sister-in-law’s house. He looked direct at me.

“I went to look at him after you and your fellows dragged him out of the water. When he was laid out in that little room. If a mother may know her child by instinct but infallibly, I suppose that a father may as well. It was our son. I told you once that I had a moment of rebellion when I was young. I wished to marry Penelope before – before she became Lady Elcombe. We would have married too, if my father had not stepped in and directed that I should marry her sister Elizabeth instead. And the aftermath of that . . . was a happy marriage. Brief but blissful perhaps, as I said to you. Besides, Kate came out of our union and she would redeem anything. My father knew better than I did. Or more likely it was luck or fate, I don’t know. Whatever the sequel, I went to my wedding-day an unhappy man, like Harry Ascre.

“But before that day, some time before, Penelope and I had done what youngsters will generally do if they’re left to themselves. She found herself big with child. By then she was married as well – to Elcombe. She too had a father to direct her in her choice of spouse. The child came a little early, if not as early as she pretended to her new husband. He never knew. He thought it was his, she believed it wasn’t but of course said nothing. And the rest you know. Their discovery that the baby was not . . . normal. I think that Penelope saw it as a punishment for our sin and for her deception of her husband. And then there was Elcombe’s decision to farm Henry out to a wet-nurse who would be negligent, even murderous. What he hadn’t reckoned on was the child actually being well cared-for and growing up strong and healthy enough to return one day to the family home. When he did and Elcombe realized the full extent of the danger – well, my lord took what he would see as a justified action to protect his interests.”

I looked round. By this time we were close to Moorgate.

“There, Nicholas,” said Fielding. You have it all, or as much as I can think of to tell you. The rest is yours.”

“I do not catch your drift,” I said.

“Come now,” said the Justice. “What did I say earlier? A jury may still decide on the question.”

“No,” I said, returning his look, candid, unabashed as it was. “
You
must decide.”

“I already have,” he said. “I can live with my conscience. Not easily but I can live with it and I have resolved to do so.”

“When we first met, your worship,” I said, “we talked about what I do for a living.”

“I remember.”

“You said that play-acting would save no souls from the eternal bonfire and I said I wasn’t concerned with that.”

“Well, you are now,” he said with a touch of grim humour.

I turned in the direction of the city gate, making it clear that I did not expect – or want – Adam Fielding to accompany me any further.

“I am due for a rehearsal. It is the piece that your daughter and her aunt are coming to see tomorrow.
Love’s Disdain.”

“You will not see me there, I think,” he said.

“No. Well. Then there is only one thing left,” I said.

He looked a query.

“To thank you for preserving me on the plain. From Oswald. I would not be here now, breathing in this slightly rank air round Moor Fields and enjoying the prospect of going off to rehearse with my fellows, if it wasn’t for you.”

“You have already thanked me, Nicholas, and no more is necessary. Let it not colour your thoughts – or affect your actions, whatever you decide.”

And he strode off down the road which we’d so lately walked together, talking of murder and lost sons and blame.

Why wasn’t I surprised the next afternoon – as I scanned the Globe audience in the intervals of playing – to see in one of the private boxes in the upper part of the house a family group which consisted of Susanna Knowles (together with an amiable-looking gent who I presumed to be her husband), Kate Fielding and Cuthbert Ascre? Of Adam Fielding, though, I saw no sign. When we’d finished
Love’s Disdain,
done our little jig &c., I caught another glimpse of the quartet, or of the significant half of it to be precise. Cousin Kate and cousin Cuthbert were rounding the corner out of Brend’s Rents while I was gazing from one of the small casements in a back passage behind the tiring-house, perhaps in the very expectation of seeing them.

They were walking as a couple and talking as a couple and laughing as a couple, and I thought of those other occasions when I’d glimpsed them together – without thinking anything of it – as at Harry and Marianne’s pre-wedding feast. So. But I’d already known, hadn’t I? From the way that Kate’s face had lit up when her father announced in the Finsbury garden that her cousin was come to town. From the way she’d been eager to quit our company to join him. And from half a dozen other little episodes or moments, now I came to review the last few weeks.

Fool, Revill! ever to think . . .

Well, I wished them well . . . and that seemed to me to be a mark of the fact that I truly loved Kate Fielding . . . that I was able to wish her well. I couldn’t even bear a grudge in my heart against Cuthbert Ascre, or not much of a one anyway. Just as long as he didn’t think he could become an actor as well.

They married in the following spring. At Instede House. The nuptials must have done something to atone for the abandonment of the other match, the Ascre–Morland one, not least in that this was a couple who were truly matched, properly in love (I can write this with only a small tremor in the hand).

Two marriages took place within a fortnight of each other, in fact, and together they must have helped to erase the shadow of the past, the shock of a sequence of violent deaths and a tale of sons lost and found. Justice Adam Fielding and Lady Penelope Elcombe were joined in matrimony, so that it seemed as if my lady had, like her namesake, Odysseus’s wife, waited twenty years or more before she was reunited with the man she had once loved. Whether Justice Fielding ever told the full story to his second wife of that midsummer night or whether (like me) he decided to let sleeping bodies lie, I do not know.