The Pale Companion

by Philip Gooden

  “I don’t suppose he noticed the boy at all, Laurence.”

  “The man is often mightier than the master,” he replied. “No, he probably didn’t even see me. Then or now. And talking of now, if you’ll forgive me, I have some drinking to do.”

  Laurence blundered off in search of more ale, leaving me to reflect on all I’d heard that evening: Cuthbert Ascre’s resentment of his father because Elcombe apparently stood in the way of his younger son’s pursuit of a player’s life; Laurence Savage’s contempt for the Instede’s owner’s wealth and casual power. When these things were put side by side with Harry Ascre’s seeming reluctance to marry, a course he was compelled to follow by his tyrannical father, it seemed as though no man had a good word to say for our patron. I thought of that cold, hard stare, and told myself that I wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of it.

  I looked around. The moon cast her pale shroud over the scene. By now, the playing area and the banked seating beyond it were almost deserted. Most of my fellows had disappeared. The Elcombes and the Morlands, together with their guests, had long since repaired indoors. No doubt the bride-to-be had already been ushered to her bed with all the ceremony due to her last night on earth as a virgin. I assumed that she was one; but a bigger assumption was that Lord Harry would be willing to deflower her on their first night, or any other one for that matter.

  We of the Chamberlain’s were due to stay on at Instede for another couple of days, to attend the wedding as something between guests and servants, and to provide diversion after the celebrations in the shape of some song and dance as well as a little masque. But our chief business at Instede was complete. This stirred mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, I’d be relieved to be away from a place that – for all its space and lavishness – seemed to contain more than its fair share of human turmoil and unhappiness (mind you, a wedding is a great provoker of those very items). And, of course, I’d be glad enough to return to my adopted city with all its stench and stir. But leaving this country meant leaving behind Kate Fielding. No, not leaving behind . . . that implied some connection between us. Simply leaving. For she had not yet given me the chance to make my feelings clear and – even though I feared that I might not gain an inch with her – I knew that if I departed without making some declaration of my passion I would regret it for the rest of my life.

  So I climbed wearily up the stairs to our upper dormitory. Some of the trestle beds were already occupied and a medley of snores and other unguarded night-sounds filled the moonlit chamber. Unlacing my boots but not bothering to remove anything else, I lay down on my own lumpy bed and tried to sleep. The house would be stirring early for tomorrow’s wedding. But I didn’t consider that. Images of Kate kept filling my eyes. Kate calling to me as I wandered by the lake, Kate debating love poetry, Kate tending to the wound on my face.

  In the pre-sleep time various silly courses of action slipped into my head. Perhaps I should injure myself in her presence to elicit her sympathy and to compel her to attend to me again? No, she’d see through that in an instant.

  Perhaps I should write her a love poem, instead of relying on the words of Richard Milford? No, she’d see through that too.

  Had she admired my performance as the love-sick Lysander? She’d said she liked the play (in truth, it’d be difficult to dislike it) but she had not said a word about my performance. When Cuthbert Ascre turned up she’d complimented him, hadn’t she – but perhaps she was just being polite. After all he was only playing at playing. He needed reassurance. But so did I, something whimpered inside me.

  I must have fallen asleep in this feeble, self-pitying mood for the next thing I knew I was coming awake with a start, dazzled. For an instant I couldn’t remember where I was. The moon was glaring almost directly on my face. Squinting, I observed her shining unashamed at me through the small window opposite. Why had I woken? Around me were little noises, sounds of shifting, but no evidence that anyone else was awake. Without knowing why, I rose and walked towards the window, skirting the bed of one of my fellows. The boards were rough under my stockinged feet. The window was tight shut against the contagion of night. I tried to peer out but could see nothing except the moon’s white eye warped by the thick glass.

  There is a line in our play – I mean in Master W.S.’s Dream – where Snug the joiner asks whether the moon is due to shine on the night of their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Bottom and Quince consult an almanac to discover that, yes, the moon does shine. The mechanicals, like good improvisers, think to use this light, gratis. Bottom says, “Why, then you may leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open, and the moon may shine in at the casement.”

  Well, on cue, the moon had indeed risen for the latter part of the Instede Dream. And now the moon was shining in through a line of small casements. Our dormitory floor was at the very top of the house, its mean window-apertures hidden behind a parapet. Between the window and the parapet was a space of a couple of feet or so. The casement opened inwards. I tugged at the catch and, after a little rusty resistance, it gave. The night air was fresh on my face. I glanced round at my sleeping companions. For some reason, I did not wish to be observed as I slithered through the little window and tumbled awkwardly into the standing-space between casement and parapet.

  Once outside, I stood upright and held firmly onto the coping stone. Some of the previous day’s heat still radiated from the wall behind me but the lead-lined guttering was cold underfoot. I guessed that it was about one or two in the morning. By the calendar it was midsummer’s day but there was not yet any sign of lightening in the east. Rather, the moon queened it over the night. A few thin shreds of cloud were scattered across the heavens, scarfing the stars. An owl hooted. I peered over the parapet. I seemed to be standing on the edge of a dizzying cliff, gazing down at a strange landscape in which objects were blanched and transfigured. The space where we’d played out the Dream was almost directly below. At one end were the rows of seating. At a little distance was the garden enclosed by the hornbeam hedge. The plashing of the fountain carried through the soft air. A dog barked in the distance.

  By craning out and round I could look down the flank of the building and see, beyond the little turret on the corner, the moonstruck trees where Robin had lived and died. I thought of the odd way in which Adam Fielding had suddenly decided that the woodman’s death was natural – or as natural as suicide is permitted to be. And shifted my gaze back to the enclosed garden which, from this height, had a queer resemblance to a chess board. For one thing it was neatly quartered and then re-quartered by paths and low hedges, and the light was strong enough to cast flat black shadows among the pale, illuminated segments. For another, the statues and obelisks, the Neptune fountain and the summer-pavilion, had taken on the aspect of chess-pieces disposed for a game. Or rather they appeared like pieces abandoned half-way through a game.

  I blinked in the moonlight. Blinked again. For it looked to me as if one of the figures in the central part of the garden was moving. A white form flickered, was still, flickered again. My skin crawled. Then a piece of shadow appeared to detach itself from a larger area of darkness and to move towards the shifting white shape. To stop, then move forward. To stop, then move forward once more. Everything about it signified stealth, or worse. The figure in white was surely unaware of the creeping but resistless progress of the dark shadow. I wanted to cry out a warning. But I also wanted to stay quiet, to duck down below the parapet. My mouth gaped but, as in a dream, no sound emerged. Then it seemed as though the white and dark shapes met, swirled about, coalesced. Through the night there came a thin shriek.

  At almost the same instant the moon was obscured by a rag of cloud. It was like the snuffing of a candle. By the time she’d re-emerged, the scene had changed again. There was no shifting figure, white or black, in the enclosed garden. Night and silence only. No more.

  I waited, but somehow sensed that whatever had happened was over and done with. Nevertheless I st
ood there clutching the parapet for several minutes more. Then, cold and fearful, I climbed back inside, taking care to close the casement silently, and tiptoed across the splintery boards to the trestle bed. I lay down and closed my eyes. The moon no longer shone direct on my face but shot her beams into a far corner of the long room. Whereas earlier I’d been preoccupied with thoughts of Kate, now it was the image or the series of images I’d just seen which filled my head. The secluded garden, laid out in its squares of moonlight and shade, the blurring, coalescing figures. That thin shriek.

  There was a game going on here all right, but what was it? Who were the players?

  I slept for a couple of hours. When I awoke a grey light was seeping into the dormitory, displacing the moon’s brilliance. Birds were singing. Remembering what I’d seen and heard in the night I was inclined at first to put the whole business down to imagination. Perhaps I’d not even woken and got up but dreamed those actions as well (as one can sometimes dream that one has awoken from a dream). And if I had actually crossed to the casement and exited onto the roof leads, then what had I witnessed? Night shapes, the cry of a hunted animal. No more. So I convinced myself and turned over for another hour’s uneasy slumber.

  But there was a game going on, and a deadly serious one too, for a little later that morning – as Instede House was beginning to stir for the midsummer marriage of the heir to the estate – the body of Henry Ascre, Lord Elcombe himself, second holder of that title, was discovered in the hornbeam garden. He appeared to have been pushed, with great violence, onto the sundial which stood near to the summer-house. The first person to see Elcombe (the first person apart from his murderer, that is) was one of the gardeners. He discovered his master sprawled atop the dial, his arms outflung and his legs splayed forward of the stone pedestal. The gardener didn’t recognize him at first. He probably thought that one of the guests at the wedding, or more likely one of those riff-raff players, was sleeping off a night’s drinking in a peculiar and highly uncomfortable position. Then, as he drew nearer, he saw the bared teeth and fixed heavenward stare of his lord and master.

  He was puzzled by a black triangular object which was resting on his lordship’s chest. It was only when some of the other servants, together with Oswald the steward, came to see and then to shift the corpse that they realized what the object was. The tip and the tapered end of the long brass gnomon, whose innocuous shadow served to remind onlookers of the passage of time, had pierced his heart. Elcombe had been shoved and then probably held down on the dial with sufficient force and fury for the point not merely to enter his back and heart but to burst out, all black and bloody, through his chest. The metal had buckled under the stress but not before it had done its job.

  ‘tempus edax rerum’ read the legend round the sundial. In Elcombe’s case the words had proved all too true: time is indeed the devourer of all things.

  It might, I suppose, have been considered an accident. It could have happened that Elcombe – maybe set on by an excess of wine the previous evening (although it was hard to envisage such a steely man being overcome by anything so mundane) or maybe driven by some strange rage or by self-forgetfulness – had slipped and fallen onto the sundial in his garden, and been run through by the point of the timer. It might even have been that, in his anguished struggle to free himself, he had merely succeeded in pushing the brass dagger deeper into his body.

  But the hand of man seemed a more likely culprit than the point of a dial. And so it proved when young Harry Ascre, he who was due to be married that midsummer’s day, wandered down one of the walkways in the garden while Oswald and the servants were recovering from their first shock and terror. They were mutely contemplating how to detach the body from the sundial’s tip and bear it indoors. Ascre was dressed simply in shirt and breeches. He appeared confused. All over his shirt and hose were gouts of blood, his father’s doubtless. Questions were put to him but he refused to respond – or was unable to. He stood there, mouth slightly open, not looking (as was noted at the time) in the direction of his father’s body. Then he made to wander off again, for all the world as if he was out for an early morning stroll on the morning of his marriage. Oswald gave orders for him to be apprehended and two or three of the burlier servants seized their master’s son and heir and bore him inside, where they secured him in a chamber on the ground floor before returning to help with the corpse.

  I can hardly begin to describe the numbness and then the turmoil which descended upon Instede House as the news of Elcombe’s murder spread. Any death must cast its shadow over a feeling neighbourhood. We’d seen that with the recent demise of Robin. But this, the second violent death in little more than a week, was not to be compared to the woodman’s departure. Where the one man had slipped into a feral condition almost beyond the human world, the other had been at its very heart. To vary the figure, he was like a great wheel from whose spokes depended hundreds of lesser folk, from gardeners to brewers, from cooks to gamekeepers. Whether Lord Elcombe was loved or loathed, or whether he simply left people cold, was beside the point. He – or his position – ensured that many men and women and their children too were kept sheltered, fed and clothed, in exchange for their labours. To have him die, and especially in such difficult, violent circumstances, was to feel the world tremble under one’s feet.

  Even we players felt keenly the loss of a patron. We were in his house by his invitation and, whatever this courtier’s motives for favouring the Chamberlain’s Company, we couldn’t be anything but grateful for his notice.

  Nor was this uncertainty, into which all of Elcombe’s dependants had been thrust, the worse aspect of the situation – or rather it was one among several aspects which vied with each other for worstness.

  There was first of all the private grief of the family, Lady Elcombe and Cuthbert Ascre. Penelope remained closeted for most of the day with parson Brown. Cuthbert vanished from sight somewhere. As well as the normal shock of death, the mother and brother must have been tormented by the fact that the destroyer of Lord Elcombe shared their own flesh and blood. There is a particular horror in the crime of parricide.

  But there was no end to the horrors. For this was no ordinary day at Instede. Some of the grandest people in the land had gathered to celebrate the match of Harry Ascre to Marianne Morland. Now the groom’s father was violently dead, foully dead, and the groom and Instede heir was incarcerated in the great house which was, in name at least, his own. The division and hatred at the heart of this great family had been brutally exposed for the world to see.

  There was no question of the marriage proceeding now, of course.

  Before the day was out most of the guests had slipped away, with stony or tear-stained faces. The Devons and the Cornwalls, the Winchesters and the Derbys: England quit Instede. As if in mockery or defiance of human concerns, the sun shone down unblinkingly on the departing groups. I myself saw the Morlands as they were stepping into their coach. We have a natural appetite to watch how others bear their distresses – at least if we do not know them well – so I observed with quite an appraising eye that mother and father Morland had lost some of the gloss they’d worn at the previous evening’s feast. Their attractive daughter I couldn’t see since she was wearing a veil. But as she climbed into the elaborately carved coach she stumbled and her mother caught her under the arm. Suddenly my heart went out to this girl, someone I’d not even spoken to or been within ten yards of. Who knew whether she’d chosen Harry Ascre for a husband or – a thing much more likely – he’d been chosen for her by her title-hungry parents. Who knew whether she was a willing bride or merely a resigned one?

  From what I’d noticed at last night’s banquet there didn’t seem to be much between the prospective husband and wife, no fond glances, no hungry looks, no quick clasps. Whatever the state of their hearts, her present suffering and situation were painful to contemplate; and assuredly much more painful to endure. To wake on your wedding morning in the fever of expectation and then to discover
that everything had been violently snatched away. To return to the parental home, matchless and mateless, with the future perhaps clouded for ever . . . to grieve for a dead father-in-law and, much more, for the husband who would most likely be accused of his murder . . .

  For this was young Harry Ascre’s fate: arrest, incarceration, arraignment, trial, sentence. And then the almost unavoidable end of those charged with murder. The first two links in this chain had already been forged, and the third was about to be. He didn’t remain long in the locked chamber on the ground-floor of the house. By late afternoon of the following day the coroner had arrived from Salisbury. A jury, composed of men from Rung Withers and two or three other small hamlets beyond the bounds of the estate, had been hastily convened by Sam the bailie in advance of the coroner’s arrival. As soon as that gentleman appeared they got down to the task like good citizens, sitting in the very room where we’d held our rehearsals and, unsurprisingly, found that an indictment for homicide should be made. The coroner had evidently been expecting this – indeed it was hard to see how any other conclusion could have been reached – for he had travelled to Instede House together with two justices. They immediately bound the young man over for trial and returned with him to Salisbury that very evening, riding off with an escort into the dusk to reach their destination. In all of this Justice Adam Fielding took no part because, I presumed, of his friendly connections with the Elcombe family.

  The speed of the process was surprising but it was a reflection of the grave nature of the crime and the rank of the victim. There was also the consideration, no doubt, that it would be better for everybody if Harry was removed from Instede as soon as possible to a more appropriate location than his father’s house. This location was Salisbury gaol where he would be detained until the next assizes, due to be held in a week’s time.