Sleep of Death

by Philip Gooden

  He was echoing my own thoughts.

  ‘Do you, for example, carry around a stock of head-hair for just such an eventuality? It certainly wasn’t one of your own. Yours is coal-black.’

  ‘It was from your mother’s youthful head.’

  ‘The others may have been fooled,’ said William, ‘but I was sitting closer and the thread of hair you were holding was not hers. I know my mother’s hair well. Quite a different tint.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘The hair wasn’t your mother’s. It belonged . . . to someone else. There were a few threads on my shirt under the costume I was wearing. I noticed them by chance as I was changing into it this afternoon. I suppose I didn’t remove them because the thought of having some threads of this person’s hair about me was pleasing. Nobody could see them. I’m not sure that I thought about it at all. But it was chance, pure good fortune, that the colour was close to your mother’s.’

  ‘Then you pretended to discover it under one of the steward’s rings, took it over to where my mother was sitting – and invited us all to jump to the wrong conclusion?’

  ‘As you said yourself, the steward was guilty,’ I said, a little uneasily. ‘After all he admitted it, as good as admitted it.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I don’t quarrel with my uncle dismissing him. Adrian is more fortunate than he deserves to be. He might be in jail. I was curious how you came to produce a hair that came from somewhere else, from someone else – and now you’ve told me.’

  ‘Now I’ve told you.’

  ‘It was a sleight of hand.’

  ‘Only a trick,’ I said, anxious to move the conversation on, perhaps anxious to rid myself of this superior young man’s company.

  ‘And I am interested too in the justice of tricking the truth out of someone.’

  ‘I imagine that those men in the Tower who have a confession wrung out of them on the rack would rather be “tricked” into the truth, as you put it, if they were given the choice.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said William. ‘I am more concerned with the idea in the abstract.’

  ‘Oh, the abstract.’

  ‘Suppose that there is a fixed quantity of truth, and that every word of ours, every action, great or little, adds to or subtracts from this quantity. This pile of truth. This truth-mountain. Our steward has been dishonest, he has stolen from my mother and then attempted to pass the blame for the crime onto Jacob. This cluster of false words and actions obviously represents a great subtraction from our truth-mountain. A veritable weight. But then you come along, and to establish what has occurred you pass a little falsehood among the rest of us. You pretend that a thread of hair from your sister—’

  ‘Hardly my sister!’ I protested, irritated at the man’s high-handed manner.

  ‘No, of course not. I must have been thinking of that play we saw this afternoon, where the brother and sister turn out not to be be brother and sister after all. What a transparent device to produce a happy ending! I do not think we shall hearing too much more of the author of that. Who was he again?’

  ‘A Master Edgar Boscombe, I believe.’

  ‘I prefer Master Shakespeare myself. His plots are much closer to truth, however ridiculous they seem on the surface. Also he shares my given name. What was I saying? Oh yes. The hair that was secreted about your person. Well, if it didn’t derive from your sister, it was from your wife or your mistress, it doesn’t matter which. I don’t think it was a boy’s hair.’

  He waited an instant for me to respond. I said nothing.

  ‘You do not look like a lover of boys, even though you are a player. My point is this. Your action in pretending that it was Lady Alice’s, my mother’s, also represents a tiny subtraction from the great mountain of truth.’

  ‘And you’re making a mountain out of a molehill,’ I said. ‘What I did was to commit a little falsehood in order to secure a greater truth.’

  ‘Ah, so you are simultaneously taking away and adding to the truth-mountain,’ said William. ‘I wonder, is that possible? I enjoy speculating on these things.’

  ‘Very Jesuitical,’ I sneered, then looked round to make sure no one was within earshot. It was not a good idea to use that word in a public place. But Master William Eliot seemed in no way discomposed. Thoughtfully, he drained off the last of his drink.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘I’m just a player.’

  ‘A simple man and so on.’

  Somehow he managed to turn everything into a jibe or a sly insult. I determined not to rise to it.

  ‘If you like. You said just now that Sir Thomas was your uncle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he’s married to the Lady Alice?’

  ‘My father is dead. After my father died, my uncle married my mother. This happened quite recently, as you may have been able to tell from his attentive manner towards her in the playhouse box.’

  The tapster came across again to take our orders, and one of those natural pauses ensued while the tankards were brought. I took the opportunity of examining William as he sipped at his beer. He was a tall, thin man, about my age or a little older. (Which would put his beautiful mother in at least in her mid-forties, assuming that she had borne him early.) He had an inward-looking, melancholic air about him. His clothes were a fashionable black.

  ‘You are in mourning for your father?’ I asked.

  ‘’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

  Nor customary suits of solemn black . . .’ he began.

  ‘. . . I have that within which passes show –

  These but the trappings and the suits of woe.’ I concluded.

  We laughed in recognition.

  ‘You know the play?’ he said.

  ‘I was in the play yesterday. Small parts, you understand.’

  ‘This is for my father in a sense,’ said William, indicating his black clothing, ‘because he did die recently. But I don’t believe I bear my uncle any grudge for marrying my mother, and I don’t despise my mother for choosing another husband, though one can never quite plumb the depths of one’s own mind in matters like these. My uncle is a good and shrewd man, I think. He is certainly a shrewd one. And a lenient one too, as you saw this afternoon when he allowed Adrian the steward to go scot-free. My mother is a woman who knows her own mind. She is also a handsome woman. If she wishes to marry soon after the death of a first husband, what more natural than that she should turn to that man’s brother? They are not unalike, my father and my uncle. No, I don’t brood on my mother’s remarriage. I am not Prince Hamlet.’

  But the little flood of words, the most this young man had yet spoken, showed that he had brooded, was still brooding over this very matter. Anyone who eagerly denies something, with a mass of accompanying reasons, concedes the case against him, all unawares. And also William Eliot’s air, his dress, his professed pleasure in speculation, everything about him might have lead one to think that he was modelling himself on that famous character, the Prince of Denmark.

  ‘And yet . . .’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Master Revill, I understand that you have nowhere to lodge at the moment, is that right?’

  I was disconcerted. William Eliot had obviously been talking to someone. One of the Chamberlain’s Company?

  ‘I had a disagreement with my landlady over . . . something. She has given me notice.’

  ‘I’m going to make you a proposition,’ said William. ‘But first I must tell you something that happened a few months ago, if you are willing to listen to a story.’

  I nodded but said nothing.

  ‘A man went into his walled garden one afternoon. He was in the habit of going there to sleep on warm days. He alone possessed the key to the door that opened into this walled garden. It was his retreat, his sanctuary, a place where he could think or rest undisturbed. There was nothing unusual in these afternoon absences. When he did not reappear in the house by nightfall of this same day, however, his
wife and their son and the servants began to grow worried. They called from the outer part of the garden, they rattled at the locked door. No response. Eventually one of the servants was sent over the wall on a ladder. What the servant found in the twilight caused the wife to order the door broken down. When the household – by now most of them were assembled – poured though the narrow entrance to the walled garden they found the head of the household dead in his hammock. The body was almost cold. He had apparently lain there since the early afternoon. There were no marks of violence, no signs of foul play. He had died naturally. What does this remind you of?’

  ‘It’s obvious enough,’ I said.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s what happens before the beginning of the play of Hamlet. Hamlet’s father, old Hamlet, dies in his orchard one afternoon. The story’s put around that it was as a result of a snake-bite. But the Ghost tells the Prince that he was poisoned – and that the murderer is now on the throne of Denmark and married to Hamlet’s mother.’

  ‘I said that Master Shakespeare’s plots were closer to the truth,’ said William. ‘What I’ve just described to you is the manner of my father’s death. Asleep, one afternoon, in his garden, in his house, on the other side of the river, his death apparently a natural one.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘And then to have your mother remarry – and to your uncle. All this really happened, what you’re saying?’

  ‘It’s easy enough to check it if you don’t believe me. My mother or my uncle or any member of the household will confirm it. There was even a ballad made on the subject of my father’s passing, how death comes for rich and poor alike or some such profundity.’

  ‘It stretches belief that your family’s history should mimic so exactly the action of a play,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It is disturbing to find that nature is so short of material that it is forced to hold up the mirror to art, if I may vary one of the Prince of Denmark’s own observations,’ said William languidly. ‘But consider these things, consider them separately. Then they are less surprising. My father was several years older than my mother. He had not been in the best of health. One might ask, why should he die then and there, one fine spring afternoon in a hammock in his private garden? But, to look at it another way, why shouldn’t he? As good a time as any other. Death is not always the thief who comes in the night.’

  ‘You sound very, ah, unmoved about this,’ I said.

  ‘I have thought long and hard about it. I have tried to be dispassionate. Then, I examine the sequel to this. My mother sincerely grieves, I think, at my father’s death. That was no playing, such as Hamlet complains of when he calls his mother Gertrude a hypocrite. My uncle Sir Thomas too showed grief, though in a manly way. He is not a Claudius, surely, full of fine words as he secretly clutches the knife. Each of them, widow and brother, naturally turned to the other for consolation. Consolation soon – very soon – changed to love. Again, what’s exceptional about that? We are told in Leviticus that if brothers dwell together and one of them dies then the widow should not be married outside the family to a stranger.’

  ‘That is the case when the wife has not produced a son,’ I said. ‘Then the brother should perform the duties of a husband. But in this situation there was at least one son, you.’

  William glanced at me in surprise.

  ‘My father was a parson,’ I said. ‘Whether I wanted to or not, I soaked up Bible learning every day of the week.’

  ‘There is no great gap between pulpit and stage. That’s why they’re always at each other’s throats.’

  I was beginning to warm to this fellow, for all his airs.

  ‘My father wouldn’t thank you for saying so. Like our City fathers, he held that the playhouse was the root of all abomination.’

  ‘And so you are drawn to it. Does he know how his son earns a living?’

  ‘My father is dead. My mother also. The plague-beast struck at Bristol a couple of years ago, and one of its tails or legs swept through our little parish.’

  ‘And now you are a player. Well, whether the words of Leviticus about the marriages of widows and brothers apply or don’t apply, I’m sure that it is not so unusual for two people in such circumstances to find themselves attracted to each other.’

  He said this as if he were talking about my mother and father.

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘So, you see, these events taken separately – a death and a remarriage – are nothing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘But you don’t actually think that?’

  ‘To be more precise, I don’t feel it. Without being able to say why, I don’t feel that all’s right with the world.’

  ‘There’s a simple way of clearing this up,’ I said. ‘When did your father die?’

  ‘The first week in May.’

  ‘And the first performance of Hamlet was in June, I think.’

  I struggled to remember when I’d seen the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark. It was a successful play and so had received more than a couple of performances; and now it had been revived in the autumn. My first appearance with the Chamberlain’s Men had been on the previous day in this very production. But I was fairly sure that my first sight of it as a spectator had been in early summer. High white clouds scudding above the open playhouse. A sense of freshness in the air, even among the groundlings. Standing at the back I’d pulled my hat lower to shade my gaze from the afternoon sun as I witnessed the destruction of the royal court at Elsinore (little dreaming that I would myself be appearing within a few months on that very stage as the emissary from England, come to announce the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to unhearing ears!). Yes, this was in June.

  ‘It was June,’ I said. ‘I remember.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Your father’s death took place before the play of Hamlet ever appeared on the Globe stage. You’re not suggesting that our author got the idea for his play from what happened to your father?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said William Eliot. ‘I’d never accuse any playwright of making up ideas or borrowing from reality. They’d be justifiably insulted. Anyway, every educated person knows that there’s an older version of your author’s Hamlet, some crude stuff that’s been around for years. And that rough version probably had an even rougher version preceding it. And one before that, and so on.’

  ‘So it’s not a case of nature holding up the mirror to art, as you wittily put it,’ I persisted. ‘Your father’s death occurred before the play was first performed. But it’s not the other way round either. The play was not composed so far in advance of your father’s death as to indicate that the author might have “borrowed” from reality, even assuming that he’d be prepared to do anything so indelicate. The two things, the play writing and the death, must have been occurring more or less simultaneously. Why, he must have been at work on Hamlet in April or even during May itself if it was first staged in June.’

  ‘He writes fast.’

  ‘No more than average,’ I said, pretending to a knowledge of our author’s compositional habits. But what I said applied to any playwright worth his salt. We had no patience with any author who laboured for weeks and then produced a few paltry scenes.

  ‘So there’s no connection between the events of the play and my father’s death, you think,’ said William.

  ‘Just coincidence,’ I said with a confidence that I didn’t feel.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ he said. Then after a pause, ‘You remember that I had a proposition to put to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He broke off to order another drink for each of us, and, when our hands were full and our mouths refreshed once more, said, ‘You’ve nowhere to lodge presently?’

  ‘You know already of the difference of opinion with my landlady, apparently.’

  ‘I can offer you quarters in my house, that is in my mother’s and stepfather’s house. It’s on the other side of river, not so convenient for the Globe perhaps, but in a rather better
neighbourhood.’

  ‘I like it here,’ I said. ‘This is the players’ district.’

  And it was true. Southwark was near to being lawless territory, outside the writ of the City authorities. Our one respectable building was the Bishop of Winchester’s Palace. Otherwise we were all stews, playhouses and thieves’ kitchens, together with an array of prisons from the Clink to the Marshalsea – the ultimate destination for many of our folk. Southwark residents tended towards the unrespectable: coney-catchers and bully boys, whores and veterans . . . and yet somehow I, the country parson’s son, felt in my element down here in a way that I hadn’t when I lodged north of the river.

  ‘I didn’t mean permanent quarters,’ said William. ‘I can see that there are advantages to living near your workplace. Though you’re only temporarily with the Chamberlain’s Men, I understand. There’s a man who is off visiting his dying mother, is there not?’

  Who had he been talking to?

  ‘I’m not interested in your offer,’ I said. ‘I prefer to find my own accommodation.’

  ‘No offence, Master Revill. I have an ulterior motive in asking you to take a room in my house. I’m not in the business of looking after players who have been thrown out of their lodgings for covering their landladies with piss.’

  A smile took the offence out of his words. But I was busy wondering if he knew Nell.

  ‘Master Eliot, get to the point.’

  ‘I would like you to help me find the murderer of my father.’

  I began to think that my new acquaintance shared more than clothing and a fashionable melancholy with that figure who had swept the London stage, the lord Hamlet. Master William Eliot, like the Prince, had a trace of madness in him.

  ‘I thought there was nothing suspicious in his death.’

  ‘Outwardly, no.’

  ‘When you break it down into a series of events there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. Isn’t that what you said – or something like it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘Master Revill, when you see a play you watch as one scene succeeds another, and you will perhaps not at first understand how the scenes are linked, or that the play with all its disparate parts is nevertheless a whole – sometimes a ragged, clumsy whole – but still something complete unto itself. Whether the play is well-made or ill-made there is connection, there is a plan, a plot.’