Sleep of Death

by Philip Gooden

  Of what use was it to protest that Nell loved me and that I, in my way, loved her, and that whatever might be her relations with other men, with me they were unsoiled by the taint of money either offered or taken? So I might have said before yesterday, anyway. I gave up the attempt. These men had already convicted me. All that remained was the sentence.

  ‘You know so much that you must have been following me,’ I said, lamely. And, indeed, I thought of the plump man who had been on my tail a few days before when I had left my Nell. I became certain that it was this individual who was now standing in front of me in the candlelit cabin.

  ‘We have sniffed you out,’ said Adrian, who had been content to leave Ralph to batter away at me. ‘We have sniffed you out to your stinking lair. You have cheated and abused my friend Ralph through his mother and his sister as surely as you have cheated and abused me.’

  ‘Oh, you are a thief,’ I said, feigning a boldness I did not feel.

  ‘Let losers have their words,’ said Adrian.

  ‘You would have stole my lady’s necklace – and loaded the blame onto poor mute Jacob too.’

  ‘You trapped me with a trick,’ he said. ‘You slipped a hair around my finger and said that it was one of my lady’s when it was no such thing. Say that is not true, player, if you can.’

  How could I, when it was true, perfectly true? Never mind that Adrian really was a thief. I had used a subterfuge to trap him, as William Eliot had discerned. I’d dishonestly caught a dishonest man. There was a germ of truth in all their accusations and it was enough to dishearten me.

  ‘What’s he got against me?’ I asked, gesturing with my head in the direction of the third member of this triumvirate, the long-armed and grimy charcoal-burner. Up to this point he had said nothing.

  ‘He is in my employ,’ said Adrian.

  The grimy creature nodded his head and smiled – that is, he opened a hole of a mouth. He had two remaining teeth at the top that huddled together for comfort.

  ‘He is a man of few words,’ I said. ‘Is he dumb?’

  ‘Nub is serviceable,’ said Adrian. ‘He lives in this forest.’

  At this announcement of his name and dwelling, Nub again performed a smile.

  ‘Like a faun or a satyr,’ I said.

  ‘Simple he may be,’ said Adrian, ‘but at least he is not a city fellow like you, player, full of deceits and trickery.’

  ‘I’m from the country myself.’ I tried to be jaunty but it is hard when your limbs are numb and your heart is dancing with fear. ‘From the West. I am a stranger to London.’

  ‘Why are we wasting time?’ said fat Ralph to Adrian. ‘He keeps us talking to delay us.’

  ‘Waiting adds relish to the meat,’ said Adrian.

  Of the three, Ralph was the most eager to exact revenge. Adrian, I judged, was no less enthusiastic to hurt me, probably to kill me, but he enjoyed his taunting and his hand-rubbing and his gleeful leers too much to get straight down to business as his companion wished. The other man, the ape of a charcoal-burner, was a hanger-on, probably vicious on request.

  While we’d been talking I had been casting surreptitious eyes round the simple room, like a trapped beast. I was reclining awkwardly and painfully on a mound of straw, Nub’s bedding, fit for a brute. My hands and feet I could scarcely feel, so long and securely had they been bound. I was sweating with fear although little gusts of night air entered through the many gaps and holes in the plaited willow of the hut walls. There wasn’t so much a doorway as a place where a section of the wall was more tattered and incomplete than elsewhere. Small bones from the charcoal-burner’s meals were scattered about. It was more like the den of an animal than the dwelling-place of a human being.

  In the centre of the earth floor a pile of ash and burnt twigs lay heaped up together with the charred remains of some small forest creature; directly above this was an uncertain hole in the roof for the smoke to climb through. When I was forced, because of the discomfort of my position, to fall backwards on the prickly bedding from time to time, I glimpsed a single cold star shining far above the hole, hazed over by the smoke from the two candles. I doubted that Nub had ever been prosperous enough to possess a candle in his life. Adrian must have supplied them so that this absurd tribunal was not staged in utter darkness. Even as I looked up the cold star was snuffed out by a black curtain of cloud. That star was my hope, and now it was gone. The air grew even more still.

  Fat Ralph was correct, of course. I was talking because I was frightened and because as long as I could get them to talk and keep them at it they were not doing anything worse, like beating me or killing me. Only two of them counted in this respect. The third, the charcoal-burner, showed no interest in my supposed crimes. However, as well as wanting to live a little longer, I was curious.

  ‘Tell me one thing,’ I said, ‘before . . .’

  ‘Before . . . before what, player?’ said Adrian, practically hoisting himself into the air in his villainous dance of glee.

  ‘Before the, ah, epilogue,’ I said.

  ‘Your epilogue and your exit,’ said Adrian.

  ‘Why did you kill Old Nick? Why did you bring him out here?’

  ‘The latter is easily answered,’ said the false steward. ‘Old Nick, as you call him, was brought out here to keep you company. As long as the pit be big enough, what matter how many bodies it contain.’

  So they planned to do away with me. Well, that was hardly news. Yet there was something about hearing it cold that made me break out hot all over again. At the same time, like a bass accompaniment to the villain’s threats, a growling broke out in the distance. Thunder. Once again, my mind reverted to Master WS, and how, often at some moment of crisis in his drama, he would interpolate a human storm with a heavenly one. Well, here was my crisis, and here was the storm, come pat. So Nature copies Art.

  ‘And the first part?’ I persisted. ‘How had the apothecary deserved to die? Had he whored your sister too, Master Ralph? Or bepissed your mother perhaps?’

  Ralph took a step towards me. His leg was already pulling back for a kick but Adrian put out a restraining arm.

  ‘Later,’ he said. ‘I wish the player to know exactly what is due to him. I don’t want him kicked insensible.’ Then, to me, ‘There is no harm in answering your question since your mouth and your eyes and ears will soon be stopped. Do you think you have seen all of us, player? Know that there is another in the shadows. It is with us even as it is with you theatre people. We are the ones on-stage – yet there is another off-stage who keeps his own counsel.’

  This was somehow not surprising. The whole tangled business was beyond Adrian’s grasp alone.

  ‘I knew it,’ I said.

  ‘You know nothing,’ said Adrian. I sensed that the false steward already regretted saying what little he had said.

  ‘He killed the apothecary, this individual in the shadows?’

  Adrian seemed to want to withdraw his wicked and winking hints. For a moment his black cloak subsided into stillness, his tall black hat ceased to wag. He was silent.

  ‘And Sir William Eliot, your old master. He was murdered, wasn’t he?’ I persisted, momentarily at an advantage. ‘But you didn’t kill him. It was the man in the shadows, surely?’

  From outside came renewed rumbling, as if some beast was roaming on the outskirts of the forest.

  ‘I have said enough,’ said Adrian, now distinctly subdued.

  ‘I am right,’ I said.

  ‘Not a word more on that matter.’

  ‘You should beware, Master Adrian, that you never come into question for this. There will be no keeping silent then. The name of this other mysterious man will be forced out of you under torture.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Ralph. ‘We must finish with this p-p-p-player now and send him off to join the apothecary while it is still d-d-d-dark.’

  He drew his hand across his double chins and gurgled, in what I assumed was a mime of throat-slitting. Like Adrian, Ralph Ranso
m was a poor player and would not have earned his keep on the boards. But Nub, that smoky charcoal man, again showed us his dark, almost toothless hole. Throat-slitting was a language that he understood and appreciated.

  Adrian seemed to recover something of his old demonic self. His shadow grew on the wall as his cloak inflated and his sharp little nose quivered. The light from the candles wavered as the gusts of air through the wall-spaces grew stronger. The air was warm, like little draughts from the mouth of hell.

  ‘To be brief, player,’ said Adrian, ‘we have sentenced you to death.’

  ‘A false steward, together with a fat woman’s fat sibling and a mute charcoal-burner – you are no true court,’ I cried.

  ‘We will do.’

  ‘B-b-but f-f-f-first , f-f-f-first—’ stuttered Ralph. He was so angry, or excited at whatever was in prospect, that he was scarcely capable of getting the words out.

  ‘Recover yourself, friend,’ said Adrian, patting him on the shoulder.

  Ralph took several deep breaths. I almost felt for him as he struggled to calm himself.

  ‘Think on this, p-p-p-player. We are not going to put an end to you without first p-p-p-purging you of your naughty p-p-p-part.’

  ‘You make no sense.’

  ‘Your vicious t-t-t-tool.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  But I was afraid that I did.

  ‘You have shamed and beslubbered my sister with the seed of your instrument, with your silly weapon. Not c-c-c-content with that, you have monstrously abused my mother with the waste and outpouring from that same p-p-p-part.’

  ‘I never laid a finger on your mother, I say again. What happened was an accident. She chanced to be standing underneath the window when – when – it wasn’t even me . . . And I never touched your sister with a will, either. Talk to her. She launched herself at me. She tricked me into entering her chamber—’

  ‘You tricked her and you entered more than her chamber, p-p-p-p-player. And for that you will pa-pa-pa-pay.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  I was slick with sweat. The warm breath of the breeze penetrating the hut through its many crevices grew into a steady, somehow airless stream. Outside I heard the trees shaking their heads at the coming storm. Sweat ran from my forehead down my face, it gushed from under my arms. I began to shake. There was a flash outside the hut, followed seconds later by the thunder-crack. By the lightning, I glimpsed momentarily my three opponents, huddled about me. They looked human and not-human, like the wax effigies of the dead that you may see in Westminster Abbey.

  ‘As you untrussed and took down your hose for your pleasure with this good man’s good sister,’ said Adrian, ‘so we will now untruss you for ours.’ His voice was unsteady. He was excited, as Master Topclyffe in the Tower was said to grow excited when he had a priest on the rack.

  ‘Christ, no, wait.’

  ‘And after you have become our eunuch, after you have become a gelded player, the fingers will be removed from your right hand,’ said Adrian. ‘Then you will die.’

  I groaned because I was incapable of speech. My head pounded. The murderous, mutilating trio before me appeared to grow smaller as if I was viewing them down a dark tunnel. For an instant I thought that I heard light, pattering footsteps outside the hut, and my mind leapt at the hope of rescue, but another instant was enough to identify the sound as the rain, falling slowly, falling in single fat blobs.

  ‘You trapped me with a trick,’ Adrian continued. ‘By sleight of hand you slipped a thread of somebody’s hair under my finger and claimed it was my Lady Alice’s. Because of you I was discharged from the Eliot household. Sir Thomas would never have discharged me but for you. Your hands are dangerous things and, like your cock, do harm to good and innocent people. Therefore, though the rest of your life be very short, your enjoyment of your organ of generation and of your fingers will be shorter still.’

  The speech came off trippingly, as though he had learned it by heart, had stored it up in that dark chamber ready for the occasion of its delivery. But there was still that tremor in his voice. The thrill of seeing another hurt, tormented. Or was it? A further flash of lightning and thunder-clap, and I could have sworn that Adrian flinched. Like many, perhaps he was frightened of a storm. But I could not see how to turn it to my advantage.

  He motioned to the sooty charcoal man, as if to say ‘Now your time is come.’

  Through the haze that seemed to have filled the tiny cabin – a haze that may have proceeded from my own terror or from the smoky candles, or both – I saw Nub draw from somewhere among the dirty rags that hung off his person a long, rusty, curved knife. He loped towards me across the dirty floor and crouched at my feet. Obligingly, the lightning flashed once again and the thunder boomed out closer to. So, I thought, would this scene be staged: with noise and knife and quaking terror. Adrian and Ralph stood back. Evidently, like those citizens that crowd close to the scaffold to witness the agony of the dying, they were content to leave the dirty work to another but at the same time eager not to miss a moment’s pleasure. The charcoal-burner cut the cord that bound my feet together and with his blackened claws threw my legs apart as casually as if he was dealing with a beast in the shambles. My limbs were numb, I could not move them.

  This dirty man looked at me, and the red-streaked whites of his eyes stood out clear in his face. He smiled his toothless smile. If he had earlier reminded me of an ape, he now appeared to me with his two protruding teeth in the likeness of a rat. And like a great rat he started to crawl up my body, gripping the knife with one hand and fumbling between my legs with the other, deliberately protracting his pleasure and my pain. He had no liking for the subtleties of untrussing and pulling down my hose, not Nub. He intended to slice through cloth and skin and sinew and all, without discrimination. I writhed, I twisted, I dwindled, as it were, into myself but to no avail. He was wiry and strong. I was lying on my back with my hands bound beneath me. His weight was on the lower part of my body from which feeling had, in any case, almost departed.

  But extreme fear may give a sharpness to the mind, even to the senses. The haze over my vision cleared and I saw things clear, more clear than ever in my life. I saw the four of us as if from the outside, a frozen tableau, and here again a flash of lightning fixed us all in unmoving postures. In an instant I considered – and rejected – attempting to delay the charcoal-burner by pointing out that, if he did his worst there, where I lay on the pile of straw, the blood and mess would stain his sleeping-place. But that wouldn’t bother a torturer and executioner.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. My voice came out thick, as though my tongue had turned into a bolster.

  ‘No more words, player,’ said Adrian from where he stood on the far side of the hut. Was he putting a distance between himself and the blood that was about to be spilt? ‘We have heard enough of you.’

  ‘This concerns your friend – the one who is off-stage – the one in the shadows.’

  I spoke as calmly and clearly as I could manage. Outside, the rain pattered steadily. My life depended on being understood. The charcoal man was still groping at my centre, questing after my fear-shrunken parts.

  ‘He does not exist,’ said Adrian, almost calling across the space of the tiny hut.

  ‘I have a message from him,’ I said.

  I remembered the scrap of paper which I had retrieved from the apothecary’s shop just before the ambush in the dark. The paper with the writing which it had been too gloomy to decipher. It was still in my grasp, actually in my hand. Like a dying man clutching at a straw I had clenched my hand over it as I was assaulted in the shop, and it had remained in my closed fist ever since. At least I hoped it had. The careless cruelty with which my hands had been wound round with cord might actually have helped to keep a grip on the fragment of paper. There was no sensation in my limbs now, but I recalled how earlier, in the jolting back of the wagon, I had been half aware of holding something. In my clear-sighted desperation I suddenly real
ised what it might be.

  ‘A message?’ said Adrian.

  ‘He is t-t-t-time-wasting,’ stuttered Ralph. ‘Get on with it.’ This was directed at Nub, who seemed to be distracted by the conversation passing backwards and forwards over his black head. The curved, rusty knife stood erect in one hand while the other hand hovered above my groin. Possibly he waiting for the final word of command from Adrian. But Adrian was himself distracted by the noise from the black sky over the forest. He could not fully savour his revenge because he was somewhat fearful for himself. From the top of my great terror I looked down on his little fright. The other two had less imagination.

  ‘In my hand I have a message. See for yourself.’

  I tried to speak with a confidence and sureness that I did not feel. But I am a player.

  ‘Behind my back. In my hand I feel it still. I have a message from your friend in the shadows. I found it in the shop of the dead apothecary. It is important. He will not thank you if you don’t recover it.’

  There was a pause while my life – to say nothing of my fingers and my private parts – hung in the balance.

  ‘Turn him over.’

  Through the ragged door I saw lightning stab at the trees. I was roughly manhandled onto my front. I lay, face down, on the stinking, prickly pile of straw. Adrian’s next words were covered by the thunder so that he had to repeat himself.

  ‘Look at his hands. See what he is holding.’

  As if through a thick blanket, I felt a fumbling at my own bound and benumbed hands. There was a grunt from Nub which might have signified ‘here’ or ‘see’. I sensed rather than saw Adrian move closer to see what he had discovered.

  ‘Bring it here.’

  Another grunt. The charcoal burner’s black claws tugged and twisted at something that was in my own grasp. Thank Christ the scrap of paper was still there.

  ‘Don’t tear it, you fool,’ said Adrian.

  There was more fumbling at my back. I hoped that, in the struggle to retrieve the note, my hands might be completely unfastened. No such luck. But in order to extricate the scrap of paper from where it was wedged between my hands and the cords that secured them, Nub had to pull at the ropes and the constriction on my lower arms became a little less.