But while I stood gazing round, my nose and eyes assailed by the sights and scents, I caught a different noise beneath the plashing of the fountain and the humming of the bees. It sounded like someone talking softly to himself, a continuous low mumble broken by occasional sharper sounds. Recalling my earlier resolution that whatever was happening at Instede House was really no concern of N. Revill, my first instinct was to steal out of the hornbeam garden. So I turned away from the summer-house and walked back towards the Neptune fountain. But as I passed one of the many little bays which had been created out the low box hedges that crossed and re-crossed the garden, I noticed a figure sitting on a stone seat. He was in shadow and must have been very still for me not to have seen him earlier. He was bowed forward, with his hands covering his face. His whole posture bespoke gloom, even despair. Through his clasped hands there poured an indistinct stream of words, expressive of anger or lamentation, I couldn’t be sure which. Every so often his voice rose in a little bark, possibly a curse or a protest. I’d recognized him almost straightaway as Harry Ascre, Lord Elcombe’s son and the subject of our gossiping speculation on the lawn. Seeing him in this state made me feel for a moment ashamed of the light-hearted way we’d played at shuttlecock with his misery. For misery it certainly was.
I crept on. But he must have somehow sensed my presence because Lord Harry chose that instant to look up from between his parted hands. His face was chalk-white and forlorn. He gazed at me incuriously, then buried himself in his hands once more. I did not wait to hear whether he resumed his grumbling lament. Rather I hastened to get out of the garden.
Thinking about it afterwards, what was almost as disturbing – and as inexplicable – as his distress was the fact that he hadn’t challenged me for trespassing in the garden; or, at the least, that he hadn’t attempted to hide what he was feeling. And yet here was a man due to be married within a few days!
*
Two things happened the next day, apart from the continuing round of play preparations (for us) and marriage arrangements (for the rest of the household). It was a Friday and those who regard the day as unlucky will have their fears confirmed when I tell what occurred.
Sometime in the morning we heard that the Paradise Brothers, the holy little trinity which Jack Wilson and I had seen perform in Salisbury, had fetched up at Instede with the intention of playing out their Bible tales to any who would come and watch. The Brothers were not housed in the main building, I’m glad to say; we would have taken that ill. Rather they were accommodated in some outbuildings by the brew-house. Nor were they expected to have anything to do with the wedding celebrations; we would have taken that very ill indeed. But the servants of the house and any of the fieldworkers were permitted, if they had time on their hands in the late afternoon, to slip off and be entertained by the story of Cain and Abel or Noah and his Ark. I couldn’t understand why these people were tolerated on the estate until I heard that they were there by the allowance of Lady Penelope, Elcombe’s wife. She apparently considered it edifying for the household menials to be instructed with pious drama.
Perhaps I was a bit touchy on this topic, although rivalry between acting companies is natural and inevitable. It was true that the Paradise Brothers’ presentations had a force and effectiveness about them, but of a crude sort. Where, in their thumping dialogue and straightforward tales, was to be found anything approaching the supple beauty of Master Shakespeare or even of our lesser writers like Edgar Boscombe and Richard Milford? Why didn’t the Paradise Brothers deal with real people – with kings and dukes and clowns and the like – instead of Abraham and Isaac? Didn’t they realize that they were living in the seventeenth century! Anyway, there was no reason why the paths of our two companies should cross as long as the Brothers stuck to their outbuildings and their rustic audiences and left the palaces and nobles to us.
The other event of that Friday was more serious than the arrival of a pack of pious players. In fact, it was the real beginning of a catalogue of misfortune and worse.
From what Davy, my informant in the household, had said I gathered that Robin the wild wood-man was regarded as a species of walking charm – albeit a somewhat shaggy and smelly one. His continued presence in the woods of Instede was thought to confer good fortune on the house. It was apparent that Robin was treated almost like a sprite or sylvan deity by some of the less educated members of the establishment. They left offerings for him once or twice a day, those little items which he’d referred to, the turnips and sallets and goosegogs, according to the season.
The kitchen drabs took it in turns to convey food to the edge of the wood, carrying it not on a silver salver, as Robin had claimed, but on a simple wooden trencher. Every day they left the food on the stump of a felled tree, at the same time retrieving the empty platter from the previous day. It happened that on this Friday afternoon it was the turn of Audrey, the kitchen girl that Will Fall had his lecherous eye on. She walked down the slope from the house and across the cropped turf towards the dark bank of trees, with her trencher loaded with scraps of fruit and green stuff. She was one of the more intrepid of the drabs and sometimes watched the wood-man take his food. Today, on this Friday, she wondered whether she might go so far as to call out “Robin!” Or better, to whisper it. She didn’t want to alarm him. He was harmless, everybody said so. And if he wasn’t . . . well, she trusted to a pretty pair of heels. But would he respond? Even a dog responds to its given name. That would be something to take back to the servants’ hall. She might even tell the story of her daring to Master Will Fall, that gentleman player from somewhere in the east.
In the event, Audrey did not have the opportunity to see whether Robin would respond like a dog to the calling of his name. Once she’d placed the trencher of food on the stump and tucked the empty one under her arm, she made to turn towards the thornbush where she’d successfully hidden herself on previous occasions. Then she screamed. Dangling before her face were two objects which she had some difficulty in identifying. She knew only that they were ill to look at. There was a strong, disagreeable smell in the clearing. Then the objects gradually resolved themselves into familiar items: a pair of feet – blackened, curled and scabbed feet. Fearfully she glanced up. The feet belonged to Robin, who was hanging by a rope from the branch of an elm tree. His face was even darker than usual. A swollen tongue extruded itself from his mouth.
* see Death of Kings
Waxing Gibbous
The death of Robin had a lowering effect on the Instede household. I would’ve said that it cast a shadow over the wedding preparations but there hadn’t been any great signs of joy to these beforehand, and they went forward without interruption. No, I mean that it made the servants’ hall a gossiping, troubled place from which all kinds of stories and rumours spread through the estate. As newcomers, we of the Chamberlain’s were largely unaffected by the death. (For some reason I kept my two encounters with the man to myself.) Nevertheless, an episode like this gives a disagreeable tinge to everything for a day or two. And these same days should have had a midsummer bloom to them. Ever since we’d arrived at Instede the mornings had dawned clear, warm and bright. Throughout the day the sky was scarcely blotted with a single cloud and, when evening approached, the golden glow of day seemed to gather itself round the great house in fold upon fold. The death of the wood-man sat oddly with all this warmth and tranquillity.
I spoke to the servant Davy about the stories concerning Robin’s death – or rather he sought me out to tell me of them.
“Some say he hung himself up because he had run mad in the woods.”
Remembering Robin’s half-crazed behaviour and his strange talk, I had to agree that this seemed the most likely explanation. How long would I have lasted in such circumstances without going out of my wits? However, the simple explanation obviously wasn’t good enough.
“Some say he was hung up, sir, because he saw things he oughtnter.”
“Who hung him up, Davy?”
“The fairies and the woodwoses and other creatures of the forest.”
I thought of the fairies in W.S.’s Dream. Airy beings whose very names (Cobweb, Mustardseed) signified their lack of size and strength.
“I do not think so, Davy.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but what do you fine people from Whitehall town know about country matters?”
I told him that I stood corrected and asked what other stories were doing the rounds.
“There is one among our fellows, Kit he is called, says he was the – the devil’s own in human form, was Robin, and that the old gentleman came to collect his dues. We do not pay much heed to him because Kit says that of anybody he does not like, and he does not like anybody. He wishes them all to . . . go and see the aforementioned gentleman. Even so . . .”
“Yes,” I urged Davy, seeing that there was something he was reluctant to utter.
“Even so, sir, Audrey of our kitchen says that she glimpsed Robin’s feet when he was a-hanging from the tree. And one of them was – was cloven. She says.”
Davy looked round apprehensively at this point. His shoulders hunched and a shudder passed through his diminutive frame.
“There, Davy, I can put your mind at rest – and Audrey’s mind too. I saw Robin’s feet and, though somewhat blackened and hard, they were human feet.”
“Are you sure, sir? The . . . person I was referring to . . . is a cunning gentleman.”
“Robin was as human as you or me, almost,” I said, realising that this wasn’t exactly complimentary or reassuring as soon as the words were out of my mouth. “Anyway, you told me before that he was harmless and so on. That he brought good luck on the house as long as he was in the woods.”
“I don’t know what to think, sir. I leave that to those up in Whitehall town.”
“Very well,” I said.
But it was not very well. Something about Robin’s death troubled me, in a different way to that in which it disturbed people like Davy, and it took me a little time to realize what it was. The wild man of Instede woods was speedily buried a matter of hours after he’d been cut down from the hanging tree, not in the consecrated ground belonging to Rung Withers church, the one which stood nearest the estate, but in an unmarked spot on the far side of the woods where he’d spent his strange life. As a suicide he was lucky – if one can ever call the dead lucky – to avoid interment in the public highway at night. Lucky to avoid the stake through the heart which, they whisper, is sometimes the final obsequy of the self-slaughterer.
Some of the workers from the estate farm, under the direction of their bailie, took down the corpse, wrapped it in a winding-sheet, dug a shallow trench and covered the remains with the freshly turned soil. I believe that the Rung Withers parson said some words over the makeshift grave. I do not know what they were – he could not have read the office because Robin had quit this life in such a way as to ensure his eternal damnation – but they would surely have been a comfort to Robin’s soul as well as a testament to the Christian spirit of the parson.
I remember my own father burying a man whose body had been recovered from our river. The villagers of Miching said that he had thrown himself in on purpose to drown but my father would have none of it and insisted that the young man had lost his footing and been swept away by the torrent. Yet it was summer and the banks were dry, the river low and sluggish. Neverthless, said my father, since none of us was there to see him fall and since he had given no notice of his intentions, he deserves Christian burial and will continue to do so as long as I’m parson in this place. It seemed that the gentleman at this church was cut from the same cloth as my father.
Anyway, poor Robin was duly dead and buried – but not forgotten. In fact the sense of his presence seemed to grow larger in his corporeal absence.
Stories continued to fly about the place, the kind of thing which Davy had repeated to me, that Robin had been set swinging by the wood-sprites, that Old Nick had come to claim his own, &c. The question which snagged on my mind, however, had to do with a more practical consideration. It wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t found out by chance that the halter which he’d been wearing when they cut him down had been preserved. The bailie of the farm, an oily individual by the name of Sam, had loosened the rope from off Robin’s neck, coiled it up and kept it as a prize.
I’d heard that the rope from London’s Tyburn tree was often chopped up into little lengths and then sold by the hangman for several shillings apiece, it being supposed that the sweat and grease of the man on the gibbet had peculiar life-giving properties. I’d even heard that those who despaired of a cure at the hands of a physician would sometimes pay – and pay highly – to be allowed to hold their infected parts against the raw and reddened neck of a man newly cut down. I’d heard of these things, I say, but this was the first time I’d ever encountered the practice.
It turned out that Sam the bailie wasn’t yet as advanced as his London counterparts. He was keeping the rope with which poor Robin had turned himself off, true, but not with the aim of profiting by another’s misery – or at least not profiting unduly. Rather he was charging the simple folk on his own farm, as well as others on the estate, a mere halfpenny to gaze on this fatal cord and a full penny to touch it. What claims he made about it, I don’t know. Perhaps that its touch would cause the blind to see and the halt to walk without limping. Or perhaps he was merely building on that secret delight which we all have in seeing (and sometimes touching) those items which are linked to death. I dare say he extracted a kiss or a grope from some of the women. He was an oily man was Sam. This knowledge I had from Audrey of the kitchen via Will Fall, her beau.
When I heard that the bailie had saved the cord with which Robin had suspended himself, I paid him a call. He lived in a tiny two-storey house near the farm, from which he kept a close watch on all the doings of his workers. He stayed a little aloof from them, to enhance his mystery, and his house was set behind low hedges. He expressed surprise that a gentleman player from London should be interested in examining a suicide’s rope. Maybe he thought we were surrounded by the hangman’s impedimenta all the time up there, stumbling over scaffolds, running into ropes, and would think nothing of a country hanging. Anyway, Sam the bailie didn’t hesitate when I showed him my penny and, after securing the outside door to his downstairs room and slipping the coin into a practised pocket, he went straight to a coffer in a corner. This he unlocked, blocking my view with his back. From the coffer he produced, with a touch of ceremony, an item wrapped up in some kersey cloth. He bent forward to lay it out on the floor in a patch of sunlight, and wheezingly peeled away the coverings to reveal a grimy, tangled length of rope. After this he stood back, as proud as if he’d just given birth to this mortal coil.
“You may touch, Master – ?”
“Nicholas.”
“You’ve paid your penny, you may touch.”
I wasn’t that eager to finger the rope but I did get down on hands and knees to peer closely at it. I felt my skin crawl slightly and my neck began to itch in expectation of the cord. Without straightening out the rope, I estimated its length to be about five or six feet. One end had been cut through, but not cleanly. A few strands of fibre frayed out. There was a crude but effective knot securing the noose at the other end. It didn’t look as though it would have given even under the weight of two men. I thought of Robin’s thin raggedy frame, swaying in the summer airs. Standing up again, I made a business of extracting a whole sixpence and holding it aloft so it caught the light which streamed through the small grubby window. The room was close-pent, airless. Sam was on the alert to meet my requirements.
“I have a question or two.”
Even as I said this, I wondered why I was saying it, why I was going to this expense to establish how Robin had met his end. Sixpence was no great matter but it was still half a day’s pay. I placed the coin in Sam’s greasy palm. We stood with the coil of rope between us.
“You cut him down?”
“Not I personally, Master Nicholas. But the men under my direction.”
“Can you describe how you did it? How they did it.”
“They cut him down, is all.”
“But how? Sixpennyworth of how.”
Sam paused. His oily brow furrowed. I believe he considered that I was deriving some queer pleasure from his description.
“Oliver climbed up the tree and then out along the branch from where the body was hanging. He had to come down again to get a knife.”
“Why?”
“The rope was tied about the branch with a knot. The knot was too fast to be untied. Oliver fumbled with his hands but he could not unpick it when all the time he was trying to keep balance on the branch. I saw the rope must be cut and I told Oliver so.”
“He used a knife.”
Sam nodded, as though he was humouring a slow child.
“Whose?”
“Why, his own,” said Sam, looking at me in puzzlement (and indeed I could not have said why I was asking some of these questions). “He had taken it off his belt when he first climbed the tree. A man can fall on his own knife.”
“He found it easy to climb the tree?”
“Not so much, but he is young and limber. He likes these feats.”
“And then?”
“Then Oliver cut the cord, though it took some time because his knife needed sharpening.”
Sam gestured at the rope lying in the sunlight. That explained the frayed end.
“Who else was present?”
“There were two others who held – held – Robin’s legs.”
“Why?”
“We did not want him to fall in a heap on the ground.”
“Of course,” I said. “That was thoughtful of you.”
“Not me. We had Brown with us. Brown told us.”
“Ah,” I said, wondering just how much of a crowd had attended this deposition. “Brown?”
The Pale Companion Page 9
