Sleep of Death

by Philip Gooden

  ‘What’s the matter, Jacob?’ said Sir Thomas. ‘Are you trying to deny what Master Adrian is saying? Much better to come clean over this business now.’

  The big man continued to move his head slowly from side to side, and I understood then that he was dumb. Bear-like not only in size and the colouring of hair and beard, but also in his inability to articulate his predicament. The man with the black cloak, who was apparently called Adrian, glanced at me, as if wanting a confirmation of everything which he had described. I knew that I should have to return to the stage within a few minutes. Although I couldn’t have said exactly how I knew it, I knew too that Adrian was lying. Everything he’d said from beginning to end was false. There was something glib in his speech, and in the way he had protested too much. If he had been on stage, one would have perceived immediately that within this figure – with his black clothing, his showy gestures and his overstatement – lurked the villain. Most probably, it was he who had taken the necklace, and the hulking Jacob who’d pursued him through the door, rather than the other way about. The passage was so narrow and the two men so close that such a confusion between pursuer and pursued might have occured. Then, when the large man collided with me, Adrian – seeing it was all up with the robbery and needing a story to channel suspicion from himself – spotted his opportunity. He pretended to find the stolen item in the other’s jerkin, having placed it there during his rummaging.

  All this I saw in an instant, and yet I had not a shred of proof.

  We must have made an odd tableau, standing or seated as if all six of us were blocked for the stage and waiting for someone to tell us what to do next. Although Adrian, whom I supposed to be some kind of steward in this household, had named another and lower servant as a thief, it did not seem to me as though the others were ready to act on his accusation. I noticed that the woman was looking at Jacob more in bafflement than anger. Her hand remained at her neck. The necklace dangled from Adrian’s grasp, as if reluctant to be loosed. For some reason, this confirmed his guilt in my eyes. For certain, it was he who had filched the necklace; if Adrian had recovered it from Jacob’s clothing, as he had mimed doing outside the box, he would by now have handed it back to the lady. There is a taint in stolen goods and no honest man will hold on to them. Sir Thomas turned to the second man who had remained seated. He was younger, a pale-faced individual dressed in black.

  ‘What do you think, William?’

  ‘I think that this gentleman from the players could say more if he wished.’

  He looked steadily at me. Sir Thomas nodded.

  ‘No doubt. You have heard what Adrian has told us, Master . . . forgive me, you said your name was . . .?’

  ‘Nicholas Revill.’

  ‘Master Revill. Is this how it appeared to you?’

  ‘I saw what I saw. These two men exited from your box in some confusion. One stumbled into me, the other recovered that necklace from him. I think.’

  Jacob now turned towards me. His large brown eyes were blank; he expected no favours from me or from anybody. His helpless air would have moved a savage to pity. And it may be, too, that a dumb man will remind a player of the treasury of his tongue, and cause him to thank God for giving him all his faculties complete. Adrian’s razor nose quivered. He continued to hold up the necklace as damning evidence of the other servant’s guilt. Rings glittered on his fingers.

  ‘Well, Jacob,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘I fear I have no alternative but to to have you escorted to the Clink.’

  The Clink is one of half a dozen or so prisons in Southwark. Our lawlesslessness is well provided for.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  There was a pause while everyone swallowed the enormity of my contradicting Sir Thomas.

  ‘No?’ he said.

  ‘I mean,’ I added hastily, ‘that Jacob did not steal this lady’s necklace.’

  Like Caesar, I had crossed the Rubicon. No stepping back. I was about to be exposed as a fool, and a malicious fool at that.

  ‘Explain, if you would,’ said Sir Thomas.

  ‘Master Adrian, give me your hand if you please.’

  I spoke with all the assurance of the budding alderman that I played in A City Pleasure. Thinking of which, I glanced down towards the stage. Well, this too was a kind of act. Hurry.

  The steward with the black cloak glanced at Sir Thomas, who shrugged, but in such a way as to indicate that Adrian should comply. Adrian held out his left hand, raising his eyes heavenward. He was a good player, perhaps a more subtle villain than I had at first assumed, but I was the better player, and, knowing this, I felt a sudden gust of certainty sweep through me. I gestured at the other hand, the one grasping the necklace. Even now unwilling to lay down the string of pearls, he transferred it to his left. I took his free palm between mine. It was a narrow, dry hand, and that must signify something . . . everything that we have signifies, everything is pregnant with indication. And now I was about to draw conclusions from this hand or, rather, from its accessories.

  He wore several rings. From under one of them I slid something out. I walked over to where the woman sat by the rail of the box, no longer even pretending to watch the play.

  ‘Forgive me, my lady,’ I said. I pulled taut what I held in my hand. It was a thread of hair. I placed it near her ladyship’s golden, unbonneted head, trying to angle the single thread so that it caught the light. The hair was a match, or close enough for my purposes. The four men – Sir Thomas, the younger William, bear-like Jacob, and the sharp-nosed Adrian – held me with their eyes as attentively as if I were an alchemist who had just effected that magical transformation of base material into gold.

  ‘This was under the ring on his middle finger,’ I said. ‘As you can see, it is from my lady’s head.’

  I left the connection for them to make.

  ‘This is absurd, a piece of playing,’ said Adrian. ‘What is he saying? He is saying nothing.’

  He still held the necklace, but I think that he would have been willing enough to get rid of it now.

  William spoke. ‘This gentleman from the players is saying, I believe, that you removed the necklace, and as you did so a hair from my mother’s head was caught between the ring and your finger.’

  William’s words clarified slightly the relationship between the occupants of the box. Even so, the lady hardly looked old enough to have a son in his twenties. From my vantage point, a little to one side and above where she sat, I saw nothing but a head of gold untarnished by the years. Unlike many ladies of rank – unlike, for instance, our beloved Queen (whom I saw three days after I arrived in London, and from a mere eight yards off) – she wore no wig but rested content and justified in what Nature provided. Furthermore, her partly uncovered breasts were full and smooth and white. If she was William’s mother, then presumably Sir Thomas was his father.

  ‘Do you know what happened, Alice?’ said Sir Thomas, appealing to her.

  ‘I am not sure. I felt nothing.’ Her voice was low and resonant. ‘But this should be simple enough to prove. Let Jacob steal the necklace again. If he can take it once then he can surely take it twice. Give it to me, Adrian.’

  The steward, who now appeared to wish himself anywhere but in this box in the playhouse, returned the necklace to Lady Alice. Swiftly she reclasped it around the white pillar of her neck. Now she was the centre of the scene, and we five men mere bystanders.

  ‘I am looking at this play once more, this – what’s it called . . .?’

  ‘A City Pleasure,’ I said.

  ‘I am absorbed in A City Pleasure. I am all ears and eyes on the stage. The back of my neck is bare, save for the necklace, and I am quite undefended. You may do what you please with me.’

  She still spoke softly, but as she described what she was doing she suited the word to the action and, becoming a rapt spectator, bent her head slightly forward to expose the upswept golden hair and the contrasting snowy white skin and the clasp of the necklace.

  ‘Now, Jacob,’ she
said in a tone that was almost kindly. ‘You must remove this necklace from my neck. You must try your best.’

  Sir Thomas pushed gently at the hapless Jacob who, until this point, had been standing in the centre of the box. Slow and worried as he was, he nevertheless understood what he had to do. He shuffled a couple of paces forward to where my lady Alice was leaning over the balustrade. She gave no sign of being aware of anything except the play unfolding below. Jacob stretched out his arms, then seemed to realise that this was more a job for dexterity than force. He looked at his large hands, and tried to flex his fingers but they were quivering so much that he could get no control over them. These great paws, covered on the backs with reddish hair, approached the pale column of his mistress’s neck, and he had the wit to realise that this was a kind of sacrilege, as well as the simplicity not to be able to conceal it. In the middle of her bare nape glowed the intricate clasp that secured the pearl necklace.

  I glanced at the others. Sir Thomas was watching his ungainly servant advance on Lady Alice. Her son, the black-suited William, who had still not risen from his seat in the other corner of the box, was dividing his attention between the tremulous thief and Adrian. The latter had positioned himself near to the door. The steward caught my eye and shot me a look as sharp as his nose. It was apparent that he held me responsible for this little scene, even though this part had been his mistress’s suggestion. His own version of events would have seen Jacob safely on his way to the Clink by now.

  Jacob’s hands arrived at Lady Alice’s neck. They were shaking uncontrollably. For all her self-control, the woman tensed as she felt his fingers scraping and scrabbling at the clasp. After a few moments Jacob turned to look at his master, Sir Thomas. I do not think that I have ever seen such a combination of helplessness and entreaty. He made some strangulated sound in his throat. But speech here was quite unnecessary. All of our actions speak, and his dumbness was pitifully eloquent. Sir Thomas nodded, and Jacob let his huge hands drop to his sides.

  Nobody spoke. It was quite evident to every person in that little room that Jacob could never have taken Lady Alice’s necklace. For one thing, he was far too clumsy, barely capable of undoing the catch even had it been around his own neck and his hands absolutely steady. Certainly, he could not have performed the trick without her noticing. But a stronger reason was that his every movement, his every gesture, showed that he lived with a respect that amounted almost to reverence for this man and woman, his master and mistress. We had all witnessed how his hands shook as they drew close to her neck, how reluctantly his feet had dragged across the oak flooring of the box. He was attempting to be a thief only at the command of Sir Thomas and the Lady Alice. If they’d told him to leap out of the box into the area where the groundlings stood below, he most likely would have obeyed. Nor was this a matter of acting. He was too stupid to act, but he was also – and this I saw suddenly – too good to act anything. Jacob was simply what he was, a single man and nothing more. For the rest of us in that box I cannot speak; we might all have been players, and even the poorest of players is a double man.

  The silence was broken by Adrian. (I mean the silence in our little box, for all the time during this interlude the buzz and hum of stage business floated up to our unlistening ears.) But before he spoke, he smiled. A little lop-sided grin. Like Jacob he had a kind of wit, in his case the wit to realise that he was cornered.

  ‘Player is clever,’ he said. ‘Player knows his business, as I hope I know mine.’

  I felt chilled, even though the afternoon was warm and I was sweating in my heavy town costume. But there was guilt in his words and in his crooked smiling face. Now Sir Thomas spoke, but with a peculiar reluctance which I attributed to the difficult task which confronted him.

  ‘Adrian, this is not the first time in which you have been detected in some malpractice. Coming at this particular time of difficulty, when we have looked to you for integrity, what you have attempted to do – to your lady Alice, to poor Jacob – is unforgivable. I am mindful of the good service you have performed for this family over the years, and for that reason I will not set the law on you.’

  He paused, and I had time to be surprised at his leniency.

  ‘But you will leave our company and this box now, and if ever I or any member of my household discovers you within our precincts again, then I will not hesitate to turn you over to justice.’

  ‘There are things I could say,’ said Adrian. ‘To you, Sir Thomas, and you Lady Alice and even to young William, but this is not the time or the place. To the gentleman player here’ – the way in which he spoke indicated that such a description was for him a contradiction in terms – ‘I wish that he may always have such, ah, easy spectators for his performances, such eyes that are quick to believe, such ears as are quick to trust. His presence you are unable to bar me from. I can have him before me at any time by paying a penny and standing with the common people.’

  He slid from the box, with his short black cloak and his black hat somehow seeming to swell, an exit performed with as much relish as if he were taking the devil’s part in some old Morality Play.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ said Sir Thomas, turning attentively towards Lady Alice.

  ‘Perfectly,’ she replied.

  Sir Thomas patted Jacob on the shoulder in an avuncular way. This bear of a man appeared hardly to have recovered from the sacrilege of attempting to slip the pearls from his mistress’s neck.

  ‘I must thank you, Master Revill, for your part in exposing Adrian. It is of course obvious now that Jacob could never have taken my wife’s necklace, but sometimes we need the obvious pointed out to us. Thank you.’

  I inclined my head slightly, grateful at his gratitude. Sir Thomas went to the door of the box, perhaps to check that the steward really had gone. Lady Alice beckoned me to her side. Her voice dropped even lower so that I had to bend forward to hear her. No hardship because I was only inches from the snowy slope of her breasts.

  ‘I must thank you too,’ she whispered. ‘And I believe you have something to deliver to me.’

  I suddenly remembered the note from Master Robert Mink which had brought me up to the gallery in the first place. So this was the lady it was intended for! I fumbled in a pocket of my costume and passed it across. This was half secret and half open business. Her son, who had remained sitting in the opposite corner of the box, most likely saw the transfer. He had made no comment so far on what had transpired.

  ‘Are you due to appear again?’ he said. ‘I mean in this piece down below? Your part is surely not yet concluded.’

  ‘Jesus God!’

  For the sake of the drama that had been staged in Sir Thomas’s box I had forgotten the real drama in which I was appearing on the Globe stage. Jesus, perhaps I’d missed my cue. I thought of Master’s Burbage’s three-shilling fine. I thought more feelingly of the disgrace – the unprofessionalism – of missing one’s entrance. My very brief career with the Chamberlain’s Men rolled up and vanished before my eyes.

  But I made it. I returned to the tiring-room moments before my final entry as the would-be alderman in A City Pleasure. Fresh from my private triumph in the box of Sir Thomas and his Lady, I gave my all. I was the foolish townsman John Southwold, who showed, by the absurdity of his language and gestures, that the hapless brother and sister (who weren’t brother and sister) would be better off away from the falsity of the city. Only in a rural setting does virtue flourish. I have observed, by the way, that although many of our poets and satirists are ready to attack the town for its blackness and corruption, and to praise the country for its Arcadian innocence, few indeed of those same poets and satirists are willing to live up to their words and exchange the taint of corruption for the fruit of innocence. In short, they show no great desire to go out to grass.

  My part in A City Pleasure was not that large but I flatter myself that my performance, with its little twists and flourishes, went down well with the groundlings (who always enjoy lau
ghing at their betters) as well as with the quality (who are pleased enough to watch some upstart guyed upon the stage). Robert Mink looked at me afterwards in a puzzled way. No doubt he was wondering just why I had been absent on his errand for so long. But I merely nodded; I had done what he requested and saw no reason to unravel the confused business that had occurred in the gallery box. If he was friendly with Lady Alice – as the note presumably signified – then he would find out about everything soon enough, if she chose to tell him.

  Later, sitting in the Goat & Monkey, I pondered on my role not just in the drama on stage but in the business in Sir Thomas’s box. I considered that I had tilted the scales in favour of justice. True, I had my thumb in the pan. A little ‘unfair’ but . . . There was no doubting that Adrian the steward was a nasty piece of work, while Jacob was a good-hearted, loyal and simple fellow. It is not often that right prevails. As for the steward’s threats, I had no fear of those. I felt protected, secure. I had won the approval and thanks of a wealthy man and his wife, Sir Thomas and Lady Alice Eliot. I was, albeit temporarily, a member of the most prestigious company of players in London. My Nell provided for me free, and lovingly, what other men had to pay for, lovelessly. I was energetic, and as near being immortal as a sound head, lungs and limbs can make you at the age of twenty six.

  This is the moment when fortune crouches lower as she prepares to pounce.

  ‘How did you do it?’

  It was William Eliot, Lady Alice’s son. He slipped onto the bench beside me.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘The trick with the hair. Dextrous.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, and was glad to be given time to think by a tapster’s interruption asking what we wanted.

  ‘Tell me,’ said William, after he had ordered a tankard for himself and another for me. ‘It doesn’t matter now, and Adrian was obviously guilty. So the right thing has occurred by indirection.’