The Pale Companion

by Philip Gooden

  At some point in his examination young Harry had claimed that he’d discovered his father in the garden early in the morning and that, during the process, he must have got blood on himself. After that he would say nothing. This continuing silence seemed to accuse him of more than complicity in his father’s death, quite apart from the evidence of the bloodied shirt and hose. Added to this was a supposition which, having not been much talked of, suddenly became hot in everyone’s mouth: it was that young Ascre hadn’t really sought marriage at all, but was being pushed and bullied into it by a tyrannical father. Finally, matters had reached some kind of a head on the very morning of his marriage. It was said that he’d encountered Lord Elcombe, either by design or by chance, in the hornbeam garden. Perhaps he’d made one last attempt to persuade his father to be allowed to escape from the yoke of matrimony. Perhaps he’d accused his father of being concerned only for his own interest (and fortune) and having no care for his son’s well-being. Perhaps the father sneered at him and told him not to be such a fool as to expect to love or even to like the woman he was about to marry. What were whores for, after all? Perhaps the father cast aspersions on the son’s bed-skills.

  Perhaps . . . perhaps.

  No-one knew anything but almost everybody thought they were in possession of a fragment of the dialogue which had passed between father and son before the latter had struck out at the former or shoved him backwards. By ill chance the father was standing with his back to the sundial and its upright brass gnomon. As the “dagger” found its way between his ribs and pierced his heart, what did the son do? Did he stand there, aghast, spattered with blood, while his father writhed in agony. Did he wait impassively to see what would happen next? Or clamp his hand over his father’s mouth to seal up the cries and screams? Or did he, in blind fury, seize the moment and ram his father’s body further down onto the flat surface of the dial until its point protruded, slick and bloody, from his sire’s chest?

  All these versions of the event were current and probably others besides. The gossip, whispered, sorrowful but somehow heated as well, agreed on only one point: that young Harry Ascre hadn’t deliberately set out to kill his father on that fine midsummer morning. For one thing, if you were planning to commit a murder you would hardly do it in so open a place as the hornbeam garden and with so cumbersome and strange a weapon as the tip of sundial. For another, all agreed that he did not have the “character” of a murderer, whatever that might be. He was, however, a moody, intense young man, and plainly a deeply unhappy one, the more unhappy as his nuptials drew closer. I’d glimpsed something of this for myself when I’d seen him mumbling and cursing away in the garden.

  Whether he’d intended the death of his father or not made little difference. He was headed in one direction only. True, he’d be tried at the Salisbury assizes but would be lucky if he received a hearing that lasted more than half an hour. There were no witnessess against him, but there were none for him either – and even if there had been they wouldn’t necessarily have been listened to. Against Harry Ascre were arrayed his almost complete silence, his proximity to the place of the murder, his bloody garments, his known difference with his father in the matter of the marriage. Taken together, this was, or would be, conclusive. There was only one destination for Ascre. He would be turned off in public like a common felon, dangling on the end of a rope. No traitor, he would be denied the axe and the privacy of the execution yard that is the nobleman’s prerogative. Only the Queen could pardon him. Equally, there was no reason for Queen Elizabeth to reprieve a wicked young man who had snuffed out the life of one of her principal courtiers, even if that young man was the courtier’s son. It would have been better for Harry Ascre (I thought cynically) if he’d possessed some of the address, some of the grace, some of the buoyancy of youth which our sovereign was susceptible to. But he had none of these things. No, he was as good as dead in his Salisbury cell.

  What would happen then? I presumed that Cuthbert Ascre would come into the title and the estate. Well, if he would never be able to tread the boards he would at least be free to act the part of patron to the players to his heart’s content.

  Everything that I’ve put down here took a couple of days to become evident. And, of course, in the interim a kind of life continued in this miserable house. Preparations were made for the interment of Lord Elcombe in the family vault at Instede. He would lie beside his father, the first holder of the title. Lady Elcombe stayed shut up most of the time, though a couple of times I glimpsed her black-shrouded form passing a door. Sometimes she was reported to be with Brown the parish priest, sometimes with Oswald the steward. Chalk and cheese those two. I knew who I’d rather have to console me. Oswald took on himself an even more central role in the running of the place, seeming to believe not merely that he spoke for his dead lord but that, in the interval while the current holder of the title languished in gaol and before the next one might be confirmed, he actually was master of all he surveyed. His expression reminded me of frosted ground on a winter’s morning. His long arms hung by his sides like withered black bladders.

  I’d assumed that the Chamberlain’s too would quit Instede, there being no reason for us to remain any longer. Everybody had naturally forgotten the Dream; no one had any interest in any further diversion (although, from one aspect, that was exactly what was required). But our seniors Richard Sincklo and Thomas Pope consulted each other at length and spoke to one or two others before announcing that we’d be staying until the obsequies for Elcombe were done. This was because, they said, he’d been a loyal patron to us and therefore we should repay the favour by presenting our last respects to him in death. I’m pretty convinced that Sincklo and Pope believed in their own argument. To do one’s obsequies was the honourable course of action. We were not tradesmen whose dealings with customers were confined to the account-book. Our connections with our friends and patrons ran deeper. Also there must have been the thought that any ties to the Ascre family were not severed with the death of the head of the household. Another would come to take his place. And, of course, in Cuthbert we already possessed a good friend of the drama.

  Despite this, the younger members of the Company were eager enough to escape, except for the two or three like Will Fall who’d formed local attachments – although he complained to me that his kitchen drab Audrey had clammed up under the pretext of grief.

  Laurence Savage took a somewhat cynical view of why we were hanging around. “It’s because the bastards haven’t paid us yet, and aren’t likely to now with Elcombe’s death and all. So old Sincklo and Pope’ve got together and decided that we’ll get a little recompense by eating and drinking at their expense a bit longer, particularly since there’s a funeral in the offing. A funeral’s a great provoker of appetite. Come to think of it, they’ll probably use some of the left-overs from the wedding feast.”

  “The opposite of what happens in Hamlet,” I said. “This time it’ll be the marriage table which is providing the funeral baked meats.”

  “You do know that play, don’t you, Nicholas,” said Laurence.

  As for myself, I wasn’t altogether unhappy that we weren’t leaving straightaway. It wasn’t exactly that I still had hopes of making progress with Kate Fielding . . . but, such is the eternal delusion of the lover, neither had I absolutely abandoned those hopes. And sometimes it is enough merely to gaze and adore from afar. More I could not expect.

  Although Adam Fielding had not been involved in the arraignment of Harry Ascre, he remained at Instede together with his daughter to offer whatever help and consolation he could to the bereaved household. Or so I interpreted his continued presence.

  Of course I had my own story to tell in connection with Elcombe’s death. That moment in the early hours of midsummer morning when I stood clutching the parapet and gazing down into the enclosed chess-board of a garden, where the black piece and the white piece swirled about each other, moved by invisible hands – all this retained its dream-like quality in retr
ospect. The blanched moonscape, the fountain’s soft splash, the curiously stealthy manner in which the shadow had advanced on the white form, the blanking out of this enigmatical scene by the cloud which crossed the moon, the thin shriek which came after. Had I actually witnessed this? Or was it some reverie, perhaps induced by Laurence Savage’s story of dark-suited men coming to offer blood-money for the death of a little child?

  But in my guts, rather than in my head, I understood well enough that it was no dream. Instinct, not reason, told me so. There had been figures in the garden, and some . . . transaction had occurred between them. Was this the actual moment of the killing of Lord Elcombe by his son? I tried to recall the position of the figures in relation to the sundial and the summer-house. But all that appeared to my mind’s eye was an obscure picture where nothing would stay still long enough to be named. It was very troubling to consider that I might have witnessed a killing, and I preferred to find another explanation but couldn’t. Suppose, then, that this had been the case, that murder had been occurring while I looked on, should the black shadow be identified with Harry Ascre and the white form with his father? This seemed the wrong way about. The swift, covert movement of the shadow was much more in keeping with the nature of the father while something about the white form suggested the hapless son. Although I hadn’t seen what happened afterwards, I had the strong feeling that the dark form had, as it were, swallowed up the lighter one. And if there’d been a contest of any kind between father and son, this was surely the direction in which it would have gone.

  Yet: when his body had been found, transfixed by the sundial, Elcombe was dressed in his usual dark garb. And when Harry was sighted ambling up a walkway he was wearing a white shirt and pale hose against which his father’s blood showed all too clearly. So, if the father had crept up on the son and there’d been a fatal encounter, the ambush had gone wrong, the white piece had taken the black. But why would father be “creeping up” on son anyway? Hadn’t Elcombe got his way with his first-born? Young Harry was about to marry and so secure the cash which his father needed. Why should Elcombe jeopardize this by a middle-of-the-night rendezvous with the boy?

  And there were questions of time to consider. All of this took place at about one or two in the morning, before the slightest trace of midsummer dawn showed in the east. So the son and heir of Instede had killed his father and then remained for a further four or five hours in the hornbeam garden, wandering up and down its walkways, shivering in the early morning dew while the blood-stained clothes clung to his body. It was possible, I supposed. It was the kind of behaviour which a man who was not in his right mind would succumb to. The kind of behaviour which a man who’d recently killed his father might enact. After all, what was time to him? He’d just killed time, hadn’t he, by ramming his father onto a sundial’s point. The sundial was useless now until it had a new gnomon. I didn’t think that anybody would be in a hurry to replace it.

  Father . . . time . . . father time. Perhaps young Ascre wanted to arrest time, to put off the moment of his wedding – for ever.

  Thoughts like these, if they could be dignified with the name of thoughts, wandered about in my head. Yet this thinking was merely a way of delaying doing anything about what I’d witnessed. My moon-vision couldn’t exonerate Harry Ascre; rather the opposite, it tended to confirm his guilt. On the other hand, I didn’t consider I could stay silent. And the obvious person to approach with my tale must again be Justice Adam Fielding.

  First, however, there was a different, though related, matter to be cleared up. Before and after our Dream performance Laurence Savage had told me the strange tale behind his loathing for Lord Elcombe and for Oswald the steward. True, he hated his mother even more for accepting silver on the death of little Thomas, but his contempt for Elcombe had been apparent ever since the Chamberlain’s arrival at Instede. What had he said of the two men? “I hate them both for it and will do until my dying day.” Well, it was the master who died first. And it was a natural enough notion to cross one’s mind, wasn’t it, that Laurence himself had the clearest motive for murder. The last I’d seen of him, he was blundering off into the night, heated with drink and heated too by memories of his brother’s death and his mother’s treachery.

  Was it not conceivable that Laurence had fallen down somewhere not far from the playing-area, overcome with drink, and then awakened after a few hours to discover Lord Elcombe also wandering restlessly about the grounds? There followed a confrontation betwen the two men. My co-player would have forcibly reminded our patron of that incident many years before by the Fleet Ditch when a brace of hurrying horsemen knocked aside a young lad. Perhaps Elcombe had claimed to have no memory of the accident. Perhaps he brushed it aside carelessly (he had, after all, important matters to attend to: the imminent marriage of his son, his daughter-in-law’s dowry). Perhaps he joked about it. A joke would be in order. What is a poor child to one of the highest men in the land? Something that he said sparked off the fury in Laurence and, in that fury, the player pushed the nobleman so suddenly, so violently, that he fell onto the spike of the dial. Then Laurence shoved down harder – or stood by impassively to see his enemy squirm – or staggered off, unaware of what he had done. Any of the reactions, in short, which had been attributed to Elcombe’s son.

  I knew Laurence Savage, not well, but as a fellow toiler in the playhouse. His bland looks were useful when an unobvious villain was required, although comedy was really his line. In general, his nature seemed to stand in ironic relation to his name: he was mild, easy-going. That was the reason I’d been surprised, even slightly shocked by the tale he’d told of his little brother’s death and what he’d hinted at of his family history after that. It did not seem appropriate that he should have grown out of such sad soil. But then I thought, unfairly perhaps, of the part he had played in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom is transformed to an ass, although he doesn’t know it, and grows high-handed. This is a love-change. But hate can work equal transformations, and to a shape uglier and less comic than an ass’s. Had mild Laurence become murderous Savage, impelled by his loathing and fear of Elcombe?

  To be honest with you, I didn’t think so. I still trusted to my instinctive knowledge of the man. But I couldn’t be sure. There was only one way I could have been confident that Laurence was nowhere near the hornbeam garden in the middle of the night: to have seen him at the time in the top-floor room where we’d all been sleeping. Or most of us had been sleeping, at any rate. I couldn’t quite place the whereabouts of Laurence’s bed. On the opposite, the window, side of the chamber, four or five down from mine? I rather thought so. But as to whether his crib was occupied on the night of the murder, I had no idea. Two or three of my fellows, especially after the excitements of the play and with an eye to the openings which a touring performance provides for diversion, were definitely absent from their cots. To ask where they’d been or whether they’d noticed Laurence Savage while they went about their business would be asking for a justified punch in the nose. We may be responsible for each other in the play but, except in extreme cases, each man’s recreation is his own concern.

  So there was only one way to get to the bottom of this. I’d have to ask Laurence straight out. I tried various unsatisfactory formulations in my mind: “Well, Laurence, I expect you’re glad enough that his lordship is dead . . .” or “I saw something rather strange when I was standing on the roof the other night, Laurence . . .” But in the event Savage saved me the trouble by coming straight to the point. It was apparent that the question had been troubling him too.

  “A word, Nicholas.”

  “I have been wanting to talk, Laurence.”

  We were walking on the south side of the house, a stone’s throw from the garden where the murder had occurred.

  “I can guess your theme. It is to do with . . . with the other night and the tale I told you, is it not? Concerning my mother and my brother and Lord Elcombe and his steward.”

  For an instant I th
ought that Laurence was going to admit that he’d made it up. That it was all a story.

  “I would not want to be held accountable for my words,” he said.

  For sure, he had invented the story.

  “I do not mean to deny what happened by the Fleet Ditch. I was there. Nor do I mean to deny that I . . . hate . . . hated Lord Elcombe. What I have said I have said. But when I spoke of the accident, I was carried away by drink and by a . . . contempt for the man which has been building and building inside me ever since we set eyes on this pile. It was a relief to have your ear, Nick. You’re a good listener.”

  “Thank you,” I said, not knowing how else to respond.

  “True, I wished him dead and his steward as well, and it has occurred to me since that one should be careful what one utters, even in drink and anger, especially perhaps in those two states.”

  “You may put your mind at rest, Laurence. Elcombe was killed by human hands and by a sundial’s point, not by any harsh words.”

  “Oh thank you.” He grasped me by the shoulder and I saw relief in his face. He had evidently been suffering in mind, forging a link between his words and his enemy’s fate. It takes a player or a poet to have such a deep faith in – and fear of – the power of words.

  “In his time Lord Elcombe must have garnered up a whole heap of harsh words, given his nature,” I said.

  “Oh yes,” said Laurence eagerly. He looked even more relieved. He’d have to be a good actor to be simulating this condition. (But then he was a good actor.)

  “What happened to you on midsummer’s night, Laurence?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “For my own private curiosity, no more.”

  “I can’t remember clearly. I’d had a deal to drink and then after we’d spoken together, a deal more. I suppose I wandered unhappily about the grounds for some time. I must have chosen to lie down at some point for I recall waking up and finding myself on the grass. Then the next I knew I was lying fully clothed on my bed in our chamber and it was already beginning to grow light.”