The Pale Companion

by Philip Gooden

  “So somehow you must have climbed the stairs to the dormitory and found your bed in the dark and lain down on it.”

  “Well, Nick, I wasn’t carried up there by Peascod and Mustardseed. I am Bottom only in the play even if I have made something of an ass of myself.”

  “Not at all, not at all,” I said, wanting to avoid even the faintest resurgence of anger in Laurence. “When you were, er, wandering around here, did you notice anything . . . anybody . . . in the region of this garden?”

  I gestured towards the hornbeam enclosure. Through the windows and arches cut in the branches, the flanks and limbs of the statues gleamed whitely in the sun.

  “There were plenty of people about that night, I think. But I was hardly in a fit state to see them clearly . . . or to remember who they were if I did see them.”

  “No, of course.”

  “What did you see?” said Laurence suddenly, sharply. “For sure, all your questions have been directed at something.”

  “I was on the roof,” I said. “I thought I saw figures in that garden over there. But it was all imagination, I expect.”

  Laurence was curious to know what I’d been up to on the roof of Instede, so I briefly sketched in the essentials. Since he’d been so open with me I owed him some explanation. But he could shed no light on the figures in the garden, and even hinted that I’d perhaps consumed more liquor than I remembered. Either that or it was a trick of the moonlight. All imagination.

  The more I thought about it, however, the more convinced I became that I had witnessed something. But what? There was no alternative but to talk to Justice Fielding about it. I was chary of approaching him for a second time about a suspicious death. After the last occasion when, following our interview with Lord and Lady Elcombe, he had abruptly told me that I was being needlessly curious, I wondered how he would receive my latest account.

  I caught him writing, as usual, and felt guilty for disturbing him. However, he encouraged me to speak and didn’t dismiss me as a fantasist. Instead he seemed to take my words most seriously and, two or three times, made me go over what I had seen from the top floor of the house. Now it was my turn to be close-questioned. He quizzed me about the hour, and why I’d concluded that it was the dead middle of the night. He wanted to know what had roused me: was it a cry, a scream . . . a night-noise of what sort precisely? I repeated that if there had been a sound it was locked up in the vault of my brain. The only thing I remembered was waking to the cold light of the moon. Why had I gone to the window then? I didn’t know. Why had I opened it? No reason for that either. (In truth, I was prompted by a line of Master Shakespeare’s, or rather Bottom’s: “Why, then you may leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open.” I did not mention this, however, because no reason at all sounded better than such a silly one.) Why did I step outside? What exactly did I see when I looked down at the formal garden? How long had I stood there? Two figures did I say, or three?

  In the end, I was induced to imitate the guarded posture in which the black shape had advanced towards the white form. In a crouching run I made my way across the floor of the Justice’s chamber, stopping now and then to look round with cocked head before gliding forward again. As a player, I must briefly become that which I play and now I was transformed into the night-shadow stealing towards its prey. Fielding clapped his hands, either in terse commendation or as an indication that he’d seen enough. Then he made me stand and wait in the posture of the figure in white. So I did, shifting and shivering and not daring to turn right round, and all the time with the unpleasant sensation that I was somehow creeping up on myself.

  I protested that I wasn’t certain I’d seen anything, let alone two figures with such clearly defined roles as pursuer and quarry. Yet the remark was for form’s sake only. Even as I crouched down in the part of the hunter or stood, uneasy, in the position of the hunted, I knew that this was an acting-out of the reality in the garden, not a midsummer night’s dream, not a moon-vision. “Knew” not with my head but with that more infallible guide to truth, my guts.

  “Sir?” I said when this was finished. “Adam?”

  Fielding sat slumped in an uncomfortable-looking chair. He looked as solemn as I’d ever seen him. His grey gaze was directed inwards and his beard had a workmanlike squareness, but every so often a kind of shadow crossed his honest features. It was not surprising, I suppose, that the death of Elcombe and the incarceration of Elcombe’s son had hit him so hard, given his long friendship with the family. The despondency and turmoil of the house seemed distilled into this good man.

  “What, Nicholas?” he said distractedly, as though he was still taking in what I’d shown him moments before.

  “I brought this story to you with some trepidation, since the last time we spoke, about the business of Robin, we did not quite, ah, see eye to eye. Yet now when I come to you with something that even to me is cloudy, you quiz me close and appear to accept my words.”

  “These are terrible times for Instede and the family and all who know them,” said Fielding, seeming to avoid my implicit question. “To lose the head of a family is hard enough at any time but to lose him in such violent circumstances is a grievous blow. Then to have the son indicted for the murder of the father . . .”

  He shook his head as if mere words were inadequate.

  “We must also,” he continued, “remember the suffering of Penelope, and of Cuthbert. They have lost a husband and father – and are in danger of losing a son and brother as well.”

  I thought of Lady Elcombe, the black-shrouded figure passing the door. Who knew what was going through her heart? Only the parson Brown perhaps – or Oswald, who was in constant attendance on her. As for Cuthbert, he too had scarcely been seen since his father’s death.

  “You are certain that Harry Ascre killed his father?” I said, visualizing that young man sitting in Salisbury gaol.

  “What is your opinion, Nick?”

  “I have been trying to square what I witnessed in the garden with what actually occurred. If my eyes weren’t deceiving me, I saw a person clad in dark clothes mount some kind of ambush on a figure dressed in lighter material. But I don’t know what the outcome of it was.”

  “Because the moon was covered, the light went out?”

  “Just so.”

  “This is not in absolute contradiction to what happened, then,” said Fielding. “There must have been a struggle between Lord Elcombe and whoever killed him. You might have seen the first stage of it, the prologue.”

  “I am not sure,” I said.

  “Why?”

  I was reluctant to tell Fielding that I’d identified the black shape in my mind with Elcombe and the white form with his son, and that in any such encounter it was almost certainly the father – that ruthless man, one brooking no obstacles – who would gain the upper hand, rather than being left pinned on a sundial’s point. What I said was, “Because this took place in the middle of the night and the body was not found until the early morning. If it was Harry and his father that I saw, then the son must have remained in the garden for the next several hours, shivering and bloody.”

  “Rather than going inside, cleaning himself up, destroying his garments and so on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Those are the actions of a careful man, a man who has the wit and will to protect himself. Suppose that Harry Ascre had lost that wit and will.”

  I nodded. This was very close to my own notion of the older son’s character. After all, the very fact that he’d been discovered wandering, bloody and confused, in his father’s garden, though evidence of his apparent guilt, was also evidence that he wasn’t a calculating killer, wasn’t the kind of person who’d take care to cover his tracks.

  “Nevertheless, he did not kill his father. I am convinced of that,” said Fielding quietly. “I have known the boy since he was small and watched him grow. He is a strange lad, moody and inward-looking, but he is no murderer.”

  “What
can we do about it, Adam? He is bound to hang.”

  Fielding stood up. The inward expression was replaced by a look of determination.

  “We can apply our own wits and wills to ensuring that he is acquitted of this charge.”

  By virtue of his position, Justice Fielding must have a high regard for English law and English courts, but even I, inexperienced in these things, was aware that once someone appeared at an assize then it was pretty well all up with them. Indictments were laid only against the guilty, everyone knew that.

  “How?”

  “By finding who really killed Lord Elcombe.”

  Minutes later Fielding and I were standing in the hornbeam garden by the fatal sundial. All that remained was the stone pedestal, the brass plate with the clock-face and gnomon having been removed or become detached when Elcombe’s body was lifted off it. There were dark streaks and splotches down the side of the pedestal which might have been blood, just as there were blotches on the green grass. Birdsong filled the garden. Butterflies fluttered through the mild mid-morning air. The sun shone with his customary indifference.

  It had been Adam Fielding who required my presence by this now timeless, faceless lump of stone. As we walked towards the garden, he explained that he wanted me to try to “place” the figures which I’d glimpsed from the top storey of Instede, to put the pieces into position on the “board”, for I had mentioned to him the likeness between the garden and a chess-board. It was no good saying I’d already attempted this in my mind and failed. We had to go over the ground together.

  As he did when examining the spot where Robin died in the woods, the Justice spent some time on his hands and knees inspecting the ground around the base of the sundial. The ideal circumstance would presumably have been soil which was soft or damp, receptive to footprints, but there’d been no rain since we arrived in the country. I was puzzled, however, by a couple of deep indentations in the turf on either side and slightly in advance of the sundial pedestal. Fielding enlightened me.

  “Those are the marks of Henry Ascre, of the father I mean. The last marks he left on this earth. Imagine. Pinned down on top of this base here, he cannot get free, for he is without the strength or leverage to push himself up from the place where he has been run through. In his death agony, he drums on the ground with his feet, drums so hard that he leaves these deep prints of his heels. Poor man.”

  I winced at the image.

  “But there is no sign of anything else here. The ground is marked for some yards round about but that is to be explained by the large, agitated party of servants that was required to free the body and then transport it inside. There is nothing overlooked here.”

  “Overlooked?”

  “From my first inspection. I came out on the morning of the murder to see what I could see. A second glance sometimes pays. You never know whether you’ve missed something.”

  I thought of the combination of sharp sight and sharp thinking in this man, the way he had anatomized me when we first met at his house in Salisbury. Some of these qualities had been passed to his daughter, for sure. Perhaps it was Fielding’s presence that stimulated me to try some deductions of my own.

  “I believe that Lord Elcombe knew the person who killed him,” I said. “I mean, even if it was not his son, he knew him.”

  “How so?”

  “Knew and trusted him . . . or her perhaps,” I added as the possibility suddenly occurred to me.

  “Let’s not make things even more complicated, Nicholas. We will assume it was a man. Now speak what’s on your mind.”

  “Bear with me, sir. I am not as quick as you are. There were no marks of violence on the body, were there, apart from the single blow with the tip of the sundial.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Fielding.

  “And Henry Ascre the younger, Harry, he was covered in his father’s blood, but there were no marks on him either, no marks of violence. His face was unbruised, his arms and hands unscathed.”

  “I see where you are headed, Nicholas. You mean that there was no struggle between father and son or between them and anybody else.”

  “Yes,” I said, not feeling as sure as I sounded.

  “And yet a man died.”

  “Without expecting to, without being prepared for it. Elcombe was unarmed, wasn’t he? Unattended too. If he came out here to meet someone – or met them by chance in the early morning – he did not foresee any danger to himself. He allowed that someone to come close to him. Which argues familiarity or friendship.”

  “I am with you so far. Then . . .?”

  “Some words must have been exchanged, some insults traded, but the two were still standing close to each other. Close enough for the other to have lunged or lashed out suddenly so that Elcombe was caught off guard . . . and pushed back here on top of this pedestal. Or perhaps he wasn’t even pushed. He stepped back, slipped and fell. In that case no violence would have been required to cause Elcombe’s death, merely the shadow of violence.”

  “A raised arm would have done the job,” said Fielding. “It would have been enough for the other to look threatening.”

  “Which is why I said him or her, just now.”

  Although even before the words were out of my mouth I conjured up and almost dismissed the image of Lord Elcombe being outfaced by anyone, let alone a woman.

  Adam Fielding stroked his spade beard while he considered what he had heard. “So, if we are searching for an alternative culprit to the young man, you are telling me that we must look within the circle of individuals whom Elcombe trusted or at least those he would allow to come near him. Because in your, ah, reading of the situation, he died or was killed, unsuspecting, at close quarters – and only a person known to him would have been permitted that liberty.”

  “Yes, I think so,” I said, suddenly uncertain now that my formulation was exposed to the warm light of day.

  “Therefore what you saw in the middle of the night had nothing to do with Elcombe’s death? You talked of an ambush, of one dark shape creeping up on a white one. That’s very different from the scene which you’ve just described.”

  “I don’t know how, but I think it was connected,” I said.

  “What tells you that?”

  “My gut,” I said.

  “Well, that is no more unreliable a guide than any other – sometimes.”

  “Sir, I have a question for you. That death of Robin the wood-man now, which seemed to me – seems to me – not to have been a case of self-slaughter, that is connected to . . . all this, is it not?”

  I gestured round, taking in the spot where Lord Elcombe had been discovered, pinioned, but also the larger area of the garden where I’d witnessed one figure swooping on another.

  “Of course it’s all connected,” said Fielding tersely.

  “My father has a good opinion of you,” she said.

  “He does?”

  “Of your acuity and imagination. He says you are most imaginative.”

  Was this a compliment? Or was I being subtly rebuked for being a fantasist?

  Kate Fielding and I were lounging near the margin of the lake in the Instede grounds. Lounging in complete propriety, I hasten to add. Regret to add. Fully clothed, propped up on our elbows. We had taken a stroll around the water and, finding a shady slope, settled down to admire the view. From here the east face of the house stood up clear, its entrance draped with black baize. Despite this token of mourning, the sun beamed down as it had since we first set foot in the country. The light sparkled off the lake.

  “No imagination now, Nicholas? No poetry? That’s what we usually talk about.”

  I registered her use of my first name, as I’d registered the care she’d taken to convey her father’s “good opinion” of me. While welcoming Kate’s warmer mood, I couldn’t help wondering if there was an ulterior motive. Something in the air of Instede bred suspicion – which was hardly surprising, perhaps, in a house of murder. The heart-beating pleasure I took in her prese
nce had abated slightly, perhaps because of the general sobriety and gloom of the last few days. Yet my palms felt moist while my mouth was dry.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t brought Master Richard Milford abroad with me this morning. He remains tucked under my pillow.”

  “Where he sleeps sound no doubt. But you, you could improvise some verse?”

  “I am no true poet, Kate, no poet at all really . . . I cannot write or hum to order.”

  “Despite that imagination.”

  “I have to be inspired,” I said, desperately hoping that she would not insist on a test of my (non-existent) poetic faculty, yet unwilling to abandon this promising line of banter.

  “And what inspires you?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual things . . . transience and beauty . . . the curve of an eyebrow . . . the breezes of spring . . . the decay of autumn . . . my mistress’s lips.”

  “You have a mistress?”

  I hesitated for an instant and that must have given her her answer. But what I said aloud was, “You said to me once about my friend Milford and his lines, ‘I don’t suppose there was a woman in the case at all.’ So that is my answer to your question.”

  “Haven’t we heard enough of spring flowers and autumn leaves?” she said, shifting the ground of our dialogue and also turning to look out across the water. “If I lived in the city I think that is what I should write about . . . if I wrote at all. Its sights and smells. Its greatness, its press of people.”

  “But you have an aunt in London, don’t you? So you are familiar with the city.”

  “Only as a visitor.”

  “I’m a visitor also, of a couple of years’ duration, no more.”

  It was odd that I so readily made this admission, smacking of provincialism, to a woman I wanted to impress. Usually I was eager to be taken for a born-and-bred Londoner. Perhaps I sensed that plainness, straightforwardness, was the way to reach her.