Sleep of Death (20 page)

Nell and I knew that in about five minutes our innocent rustic, or coney, or rabbit, would be greeted by another affable man. This second friend would, of course, know the name of the stranger, together with his county – why he would even be familiar with the gentleman’s neighbours! ‘Goodman Windfall, have you forgotten me? I am such a man’s kinsman, your neighbour not far off.’ My, the bumpkin would think to himself – reflecting on how he had been warned before he started off for Lon’n town that the citizens were cold and aloof, how they cared nothing for their country cousins, how they were even prepared to trick simple countryfolk – my, this is a regular turnabout. Here am I in this great city, the world’s heart. And here I have been hailed twice in the space of five minutes by men who think they know me!

The sequel to this? The bumpkin’s new-found friend proposes stepping into some nearby tavern, and drinking a toast to their shared county and joint neighbours. Inside the alehouse, a game of cards happens to be in progress. After a jar or two, bumpkin and friend are invited to join in. Bumpkin’s pleasure at so speedily finding companions in Lon’n town is increased by the delightful way in which he seems to be winning more at the hands of cards than he is losing. But he is careful. He knows that luck has a habit of turning. Just as he is on the point of drinking up and leaving and finding somewhere secure to deposit his modest winnings, his friend, by now his fast and eternal friend, says ‘A fresh pint and then away. One more pint and another hand of cards . . . a last hand for friendship’s sake . . .’

The coney will return to his country burrow a sadder man, possibly a wiser one and certainly a poorer.

As Nell and I turned away from the scene we saw and heard another man come up to our country visitor, sure enough addressing him by name – ‘Goodman Martin!’ – and identifying him by county.

However often you have witnessed this operation in Paul’s, or in other parts of the town such as Holborn or Fleet Street, you do not tire of the smoothness, the ingenuity of it. Perhaps it is because Nell and I were originally from the country ourselves that we always took pleasure in seeing our country cousins duped and fooled, although there was a small measure of shame in it, too. All the same, we reflect that we would not be caught out like this because we are worldly-wise. And, I also reflected as we continued through the throng, is not jealousy a somewhat, well, rustic notion? It is hardly worldly to be jealous, especially over a whore. So I assured myself, and I tried to shake myself free from care over Nell’s secrets.

‘What were you saying, Nick?’

‘When?’

‘Before we saw how many friends Goodman Martin has in this fair city of ours.’

‘I was talking about evasions but it doesn’t matter. I do not wish to know about your “arrangement” with an apothecary. And don’t ask me what “evasions” mean, either.’

*      *      *

I returned to the hidden garden in the Eliot house after this excursion to Old Nick’s in Paul’s. Why to the garden, I don’t know. Perhaps, like old Sir William, I saw it as a place of refuge from the taint of the world. I was alone in the house and grounds, for once without Jacob dogging attendance on me. The afternoon performance at the Globe playhouse, a thing set in Milan, full of Machiavellian dukes and cardinals and their mistresses, had gone well. But what remained with me on this fine autumn evening wasn’t the recollected pleasure of how deftly I’d turned my villainous lines as Signor Tortuoso (the murderous creature of the Cardinal-Machiavel), or the compliment that Master Mink had paid me afterwards (‘To the life, Nick, to the life’), but the more recent scene in the desiccated apothecary’s shop. However wary of him I was, I knew he had not been play-acting when he snuffed up the secrets contained in Francis’s shirt. There was much that was wrong here, and I felt resentment, momentary but deep, of young William Eliot for pitching me into a situation where I was expected to uncover dangerous truths.

As I have said before, the door to the inner garden was no longer kept locked. I traced my way among the laden fruit trees – for it seemed to be a consequence of the old master’s death that none had been instructed to disburden the trees, and the area had returned, as will all things unregarded, to a state of nature, unweeded and now growing rank with fallen fruit – until I reached the place where Sir William had met his end. Once again, I surveyed the scene. A heavy, golden air hung about the garden. The rays of the declining sun struck across the wall and into my eyes. Blinded, I felt the grooves left in the trunk of the apple by the dead man’s hammock. What did I expect to discover? Unlike the bowed trees, this revisiting of a dead scene was fruitless. Yet before I knew it, I was at the foot of the guilty pear. I hoisted myself aloft and into the fork in the branches where my man had been. And yes, there in the leaf-shadowed bark were the initials, clear WS, not new but not so old neither.

I think, until that moment, I had been hoping that I was in error. I had surely, as it were, misread my tree. But no, I had not.

WS. The playwright, he had sat up the pear.

I settled myself more comfortably. It was a warm evening. I may have fallen asleep for an instant, tired from being a Machiavel’s creature, wearied by the encounter with Old Nick. Anyway, some very short period must have elapsed because I came to myself again with a start. Unthinkingly, I glanced down. At first I thought I was dreaming. I blinked, and blinked again. Then I permitted my scalp to crawl with horror.

There, in the long grass between the two apple trees, lay a dead man.

Now, I had never seen Sir William in the flesh, although I had studied his likeness in a picture in the Eliot household, but I could not doubt that here he was, in the very space (or, to be precise, just below) where his body had been discovered. Nor had I hitherto seen a ghost. Like most thinking men, I have sometimes questioned whether any of us can ever recross that boundary between the here and there. On the other hand, I have – also like most thinking men – felt differently on this question in the middle of the night. Yet this was the early evening, the light was good, and my sight was unimpeded. There lay Sir William outspread beneath the trees.

Then the ghost did something worse than merely lie there. It coughed and scratched at its beard. And all became clear. For this was, of course, no dead Sir William but a living Sir Thomas, come to lay himself down in the very spot where his brother had been taken off. A strange practice. How could I have confused two men who were not, perhaps, so alike after all? With the image of the dead man in my mind’s eye, I had imprinted it on the living one in the grass.

My first concern was to not reveal myself behind my leafy screen. But I hardly had time to wonder what Sir Thomas was doing there, and to ask myself whether it was brotherly or unbrotherly that he should position himself in the place where Sir William had quit this life, when the riddle of his presence was solved. From somewhere in the depths of the orchard appeared my Lady Alice. She was carrying an apple, a bright red apple. Possibly she had been searching one of the neighbour trees for one that was especially to her taste. Or to his taste. For now she bent low over her outstretched husband, who must have heard her rustling approach because he had already turned his head in her direction, and placed the apple, not into the hand that was proffered, but straight into his mouth. Before doing this, however, she rolled the ripe fruit two times up and down, up and down, the snowy slope of her breasts. She was wearing the same low-cut gown as on the evening when she had made the visit to my little room.

I don’t know why, but I blushed, invisible though I was up in the tree, feeling as red as that apple which had just passed from wife to husband. I was spying on an intimate moment between a loving couple, like Polonius hidden behind the arras in Gertrude’s bedroom and eavesdropping on mother and son. If so, better to blush unseen than to cry out loud and receive Polonius’s penalty. Nor could I, ever the seeker-out of parallels, avoid the analogy between this apple scene and that of our first parents in a garden (I am not a parson’s son for nothing).

Sure enough, the sequel to this apple-offering was reminiscent of what followed for Adam and Eve after they had shared the gift of the forbidden tree. Sir Thomas, pausing only to remove the fruit wedged in his mouth, reached up and pulled down his wife, who was bending low enough for her tits to be near tumbling from her gown, so that she almost fell on top of him. My view was good, only a little obscured by the leaves of the pear tree; indeed there was almost a pure rectangular space made by the branches and through which I peered as if into the heart of a picture. They rolled around on the grass for a time, laughing slightly, snorting a little. My face caught fire anew. These people were old enough to be my parents, for God’s sake! I did not wish to witness several minutes of cut-and-thrust-and-shudder (though, if I am to be absolutely honest with myself and with you, I was not totally averse to witnessing it either).

But something happened to the couple in the grass, or rather didn’t happen, as it does sometimes. After a few moments, without a sign of impatience or anger from either party, Lady Alice and her husband simply disengaged themselves and, while he remained lying in the long grass, she sat up beside him, rearranging her dress. I couldn’t see the expression on her face, since she was turned sideways, but I could hear her voice well enough.

‘Well, Thomas, this can wait.’

‘Hasty journeys breed dangerous sweats,’ said he.

‘At our age, the bed is better,’ said she.

‘My dear, I wonder whether it is because this was the spot . . .’

‘I don’t think of him.’

‘But you used to come here together?’

‘You are too nice, Thomas, to remember what I told you once. You are too curious.’

‘You told me a great deal then, and not only in words.’

Saying this, he raised himself slightly from the ground and gave her an affectionate kiss, which she returned, equally lovingly.

‘Now we can speak plain. Then we had to do much in dumb-show,’ said Lady Alice.

‘Like the prologue to a play,’ said Sir Thomas, rather grimly. ‘Tell me, why has your son invited this player to lodge with us?’

Up in the pear tree, I felt the sweat break out across my forehead.

‘There is no harm in Master Revill, even if he does seem to be rather full of himself.’

Had I been free to do so, I would have bridled at this comment of hers.

‘What does your son want with him?’

‘Our
son.’

‘Our son.’

‘You know how he is drawn to the playhouse. If he were not a gentleman I believe that he might have turned player himself.’

‘I sometimes think William – I mean, William my brother – had the right idea about players and playhouses. To keep them all at arm’s length.’

‘Hang him!’ said Lady Alice, with a sudden, almost shocking burst of energetic spite. ‘He had no pleasures. He could not go, for certain he could not go.’

‘And you could raise the dead, my dear.’

‘Don’t.’

And she seemed, to my eyes, to shiver slightly as she glanced around. For a moment her gaze came to rest on where I sat aloft. Fortunately, I was not wearing anything gaudy, but in any case her mind was elsewhere.

‘Oh, he had no pleasures,’ she repeated, in an abstracted tone.

‘ – except his habit of coming alone into this garden,’ Sir Thomas cut in. They sniggered together, like naughty boy and bad girl. A fresh wave of sweat poured off my brow.

‘How useful that was,’ said Lady Alice, more calmly.

Was this not an admission of their guilt?

‘To have him out of the way at the same time every day,’ said Sir Thomas, tickling with his fingers at the exposed bosom of his wife.

‘Only if the sun shone,’ said Lady Alice, shifting a little in the anxiety of her pleasure.

‘When it shone for him, it shone for us.’

More low laughter. More sweating from the watcher up the tree.

An admission of guilt, yes. But guilt of what? Their words suggested that they had engaged in covert cut-and-thrust, perhaps in my lady’s chamber, perhaps elsewhere in the capacious mansion, when the husband had been slumbering here in the garden in his hammock. This was not yet an admission of murder.

I waited for more, and more came.

‘Of course, there were always your trips to Dover,’ she said.

‘Oh, Dover is a good port, a good place of entry,’ he said.

They laughed together, still like bad children.

‘Dover in Fish Street, that is,’ he said.

‘I miss my visits to Dover,’ she said.

‘There is no need to travel when you are well provisioned at home.’

‘But you still keep your lease on Dover?’

‘A foxhole merely.’

She did not reply, and by her shifting slightly away from her husband I could see that his last remark had not pleased her. Anyway, they spoke so low and were so consumed with amusement at their own doings, that I could scarcely hear them. But I had heard enough. I remembered what dead Francis replied to my question about Sir Thomas’s whereabouts when his brother’s body had been discovered. ‘He was away, in Dover, I think.’ Although the knight and his lady were speaking in a kind of cipher, it was one that was plain enough to read. Sir Thomas, in addition to his debt-ridden estate in Richmond, maintained some little lodgings in Fish Street (close to Paul’s) to which he and his lady might repair for their diversion. When he went there he spoke of ‘going to Dover’, a town sufficiently distant to account for lengthy absence. The phrase had evidently become a joke between the two. I wondered whether Lady Alice’s displeasure at his retaining the rooms was because she suspected that he might now be doing with another what he had been acustomed to do there with her.

‘My brother was a fool,’ said Sir Thomas, apparently thinking that the way back into her favour was to cry down the late Sir William. ‘To cultivate the ground here and to neglect the ground
here.
’ So saying, he dug his hand in between her breasts, as if he were some species of gardener. She yelped, and not entirely with pleasure, I thought.