The Pale Companion

by Philip Gooden

  I had my mouth open to answer – it’s very difficult not to answer that question if it comes at you out of the blue – but stopped myself before any sound emerged.

  “Are you there, Master Revill?”

  It was Oswald. The dry, parchment-y tones sounded incongruous out here on the plain, away from Instede House where they properly belonged.

  “I know you are there.”

  If you know, then why do you need to ask? I thought irritably to myself.

  “Master Revill, you can hear me for sure.”

  It was easier now not to call out, not to respond. I schooled myself in silence. Although Oswald Eden’s words might indicate an innocent game of hide-and-seek, his tone suggested otherwise.

  “I have something to give you.”

  The voice shifted, seeming now close at hand, now more distant. I guessed that he was wandering randomly among the upright stones and the fallen blocks. I squeezed myself further into the angle between the two great slabs. Their scabby roughness, garlanded by strands of bramble, gave the illusion of shelter. The sun was in my favour, throwing its shadows outward from where I was cornered. If it came to it, I could probably hold my own in a tussle with Oswald, but I did not know what weapons he was equipped with. More to the point, I didn’t know what violence he might employ, how desperate he might be. For sure, he intended me harm.

  There was a silence for some moments. Then, without being able to see or hear anything, I knew that the gentleman who sought me was on the far side of one of my slabs of stone. I knew he was close by. Perhaps it was that intuition which is nature’s way of balancing the scales between hunter and hunted. Confirmation came almost at once.

  “Come on, Master Revill, no more games.”

  Then the sound of scrabbling on the far side of the slab, coupled with a little emphatic breathing as Oswald hoisted himself on top of it. Presumably he was doing this for the same reason as I’d climbed one earlier, to get a better viewpoint.

  There! I saw his shadow elongated on the grass. I saw and heard him pacing along the slanting surface of the stone as if he was walking on a stage. When he reached the end he stood and gazed around. I stayed stock-still in my hiding place. Oswald, in his customary suit of solemn black, appeared to nod to himself a couple of times before wheeling about to return the way he’d come. I looked down, perhaps out of the simple belief that if I didn’t see him he couldn’t see me.

  Then he was above me.

  His footsteps ceased; “aah”, he went; then he must have stooped down to pick up something because it made a scraping sound.

  “Master Revill?”

  I kept looking down.

  “I can see you.”

  Don’t move. Could be a trick to get me to move. Like a clever child. But not a child. Dangerous, this man Oswald. Now overhead. Will go away soon. Don’t look up.

  “I can see you, Nicholas. What did you see that night? I fear you saw too much.”

  I looked up from my pit, squinting through the strands of bramble.

  His stick-shape, limned by sunlight, tapered up into the air. From where I cowered he looked . . . dangerous. In his hands he held a large round stone.

  For some reason, I felt myself to be the wrongdoer, caught out, trapped, exposed. I smiled placatingly. At least, my mouth pulled vaguely in that direction.

  “I say again, what did you see?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “That wasn’t the story you told in my Lady’s chamber.”

  “I never named you.”

  “But what did you say in your deposition before the Justice?”

  “Whatever I said, it’s too late now. Justice Fielding has the depositions in his saddle-bag.”

  I regretted the words before they were out of my mouth. I’d just given Oswald the perfect reason to stop and assail Fielding as he rode across the plain . . . if he hadn’t already done so. My stomach lurched to think how long I’d waited for Fielding’s palfrey to amble into view. Perhaps the steward had already disposed of the Justice and was now about to eliminate the last witness against him. For – even if I hadn’t said as much to Adam Fielding in my statement – there was little doubt in my mind of Oswald’s involvement in the dark doings of a midsummer’s night. Indeed, did not his words and behaviour now confirm his complicity?

  I saw him raise both his long arms and stand with straddled legs, the stone held above his head. It must have been heavy; his arms were braced against the weight. The top of the slab where he stood was about seven feet above me. He couldn’t miss. Oswald mightn’t kill me outright when he let it fall but he’d certainly injure me badly enough to be able to finish me off at leisure. Nor could I get out of the tight corner where I was wedged, or not quickly enough before he launched the stone at my head. I have seen boys stone a wounded waterfowl – have done it myself, I’m ashamed to say. It is not difficult to achieve a strike.

  I flinched in expectation of the blow. There flashed through my mind the idea of curling up into a ball so as to protect my head and delicate parts. But that would be to surrender to my assailant, to present him with a hapless, hopeless target, and something in me instinctively rejected this. Seconds seemed to lengthen to hours, to eternities. Still Oswald stood poised overhead, as though he had been turned to stone too.

  “Wait!”

  He had flexed his arms, preparatory to a throw. When I shouted, he paused. I suppose that throwing down a large chunk of rock on a poor defenceless individual is not that straightforward. You may be checked, for a moment, by notions of humanity and other fripperies. Even the hardest heart can house a scruple. So it was with Oswald. Or perhaps it was simply my arresting shout. Whatever the reason, he paused.

  And this allowed Justice Fielding to get close enough to the steward to take him by surprise – or almost so. I’d spotted Fielding edging along the top of the slab and shouted out to distract: Oswald’s attention (and with the minor aim of preventing his braining me). Oswald spun round, sensing a presence behind him. In simple self-defence Fielding pushed at the steward. Or it may be that the latter simply lost his footing, overbalanced by the awkwardness of his posture as well as by the stone which he still held above his head.

  Whether he fell or was pushed, the upshot was the same. Oswald toppled backwards and fell into the narrow angle where I lay. As he descended his head struck the facing slab. Somehow he appeared to slither down the stone wall, ending up on the grass. He lay there in a curiously restful position as though he was taking a nap, arms and legs fully extended and head propped up against the base of the slab. His head lolled in a way that I have never seen a head loll before. In the centre of his chest sat the round ball of stone with which he had intended to dash out my brains.

  “How do you feel now?”

  Oh it was worth nearly having one’s brains dashed out! To have Kate Fielding ministering again, as she had tended to me after my first escapade in Salisbury. True, my injuries weren’t exactly severe. Cuts and scratches, and a dramatic many-hued bruise on my side where a protruding stone jabbed me when I landed on the ground. Nothing to complain of. After all, others in this adventure were not bruised but dead – dead by rope, by drowning, by falling from a height, dead even by sundial.

  “Hmm,” said Kate, looking at the discoloured area below my ribs, “that looks nasty.”

  We were sitting in the parlour where I’d talked with her father less than two weeks before. It was a bright morning in Salisbury, and fresh country sun and country air streamed through the open casements, only a little admixed with the smells and noises of the town. Kate had insisted on giving me a thorough inspection, within the bounds of propriety of course. I was pleased enough to have her play the part of nurse, believe me.

  “It’s not so bad,” I said, manfully.

  “It’s a pity you didn’t get it seen to earlier. Then we could have applied the traditional remedy for this kind of bruising.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Fried horse dung.” />
  “Oh, a pity.”

  “Of course it has to be put on almost straightaway otherwise it’s not much use. So we’ll just have to fall back on plantain again.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll live.”

  Later on, when she was palping and prodding my lower limbs, she encountered the scar of the stab-wound I’d received the previous winter on the roof of Whitehall.* After I’d stopped wincing, I could see that she was impressed. At least, that’s how I interpreted her expression.

  “Another adventure,” I said casually. “Someone tried to kill me.”

  “It seems to be a habit with you.”

  “London, you know,” I shrugged.

  “Oh, that is the wicked city you warned me about. With the wild apprentice boys and the desperate veterans.”

  “I didn’t know you knew it, at the time.”

  “I shall be there again quite soon.”

  “You will?” I couldn’t keep the smile out of my voice or off my face. “With your aunt, the one in Finsbury Fields?”

  “You’ve got a good memory, Nicholas.”

  I wanted to say, how could I forget anything material to you, Kate? But instead I contented myself with some remark about actors and memory, as I had with her father on that fateful ride back from Instede.

  “And since you are to visit there, Kate, I insist that you come and see the Chamberlain’s in performance.”

  “I have already watched you do the Dream.”

  “But you have not seen us play in our home.”

  “Home?”

  “The Globe playhouse, I should say.”

  “Your friend Will Fall was urging me to do the same.”

  Again, the little twinge of jealousy.

  “Ah yes. How did you enjoy your ride to Salisbury?”

  “Well enough. He is a lad, isn’t he, Will.”

  I couldn’t quite interpret this. Approval? Or disdain? Or amusement? So I went on to urge her attendance at the proper playhouse, explaining that the Instede experience wasn’t to compare with it.

  “And besides when we were playing at Instede, everything was overshadowed by what happened afterwards,” I said, echoing the words of Parson Brown in Rung Withers. “It was no occasion of joy, but the prelude to melancholy. No, you must see us as we should be seen.”

  “I think you mean I should see you, Nicholas.”

  I could not meet her eye, and found myself growing red like a schoolboy. This was the moment surely. Seize it, Nicholas. Kate meantime bent forward to apply some ointment to a particularly vicious flesh-tear on my forearm.

  “Of course I do,” I said.

  “Well, I will come and see you play. That is, unless you endure any more adventures in the interim. You might not survive another adventure.”

  She looked up at me with those clear, candid eyes.

  “No adventures, I promise, until you are come to London.”

  Greatly daring, I leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. The touch, the taste stayed with me for several hours afterwards. Or rather, I tried to ensure it did by allowing no drop of liquid to pass my own lips – just like a green, lovesick schoolboy.

  Around the dinner hour, Adam Fielding returned from the gaol, where he had been in conference with the two justices who had originally ridden over to Instede for the inquest on Lord Elcombe and who had committed young Harry Ascre for trial. Armed with the depositions which he’d gathered from Lady Elcombe and (the now defunct) Oswald, as well as myself, he had succeeded in persuading his fellow magistrates that the charges against Ascre should be abandoned.

  Adam Fielding had saved my life. For I had no doubt that, if he hadn’t had crept up behind Oswald Eden and caused him to topple to his death, the steward would have launched his stone missile at the unprotected head of one N. Revill, whose pate is no harder than the average mortal’s. It was not likely that Oswald would have missed at such close range, and – even if he hadn’t disposed of me at the first strike – he could have finished me off straight after. Then I would have remained lying outdoors in the midst of the stone rings on Salisbury plain, for crows and other carrion to peck at.

  Approaching the mighty stone rings, Fielding had sighted Napper the nag cantering in circles. Worried that I’d fallen off and injured myself, he had put on speed. (When he told me this, I was touched by his concern and forgave him for his mockery of my poor horsemanship – like sitting in a chair, indeed!) Next Fielding spotted Oswald’s horse, tethered on the outskirts. Whether he recognized it or not I don’t know, but the sight made him uneasy. Dismounting, he walked in the direction of the voice which carried over the grass. Curiously, it echoed the question on his own lips: “Are you there, Master Revill?” Then, seeing the black stick-figure stalking among the stones, he had grasped my danger and set to stalking Oswald himself. For all his years, Adam Fielding was a fit, limber man. To clamber atop a six-foot high slab was no great challenge, to creep up behind a man preoccupied with his own quarry was a reversion to child’s play.

  I owed him my life.

  Afterwards, we’d walked and ridden back to Salisbury from the stone rings, with Fielding and I taking it in turns astride his dignified palfrey. The late Oswald was draped over the crupper of his own mount, the pale one he’d arrived on. There was no sign of my Napper. I guessed he was half way back to Instede. If I owed Fielding my life I owed the nag a debt too, for he’d enabled me to slip away more or less undetected as Oswald rode up. Now the steward’s head lolled on one flank of his mount and his feet waggled on the other. My legs were still shaky and it seemed to take a particular effort to put one in front of the other during my spells of walking. Fielding was uncharacteristically quiet, so it was a silent little trio, two living and one dead, that paced city-wards across the plain while the thumb-print of a waning moon rose into the sky. We reached Salisbury in the middle of that summer evening.

  I was relieved that arrangements were in the hands of an important citizen of the town. I was relieved I did not have to face such things as the bestowal of the body, the sending off next morning of a messenger to Instede with the news of Oswald’s demise, or the inevitable explanations required from various quarters. My fellows were lodging at the Angel Inn in Greencross Street and were due to set out on their return to London later that day. I spoke to Richard Sincklo and outlined some of what had happened without going into much detail. I asked that I might remain behind a day or two longer since my witness might be required. My friends like Jack Wilson and Laurence Savage were eager in their questions and I promised them that I would unfold the whole story when we were together again at the Globe.

  But what was the whole story?

  Fielding explained that, like me, he considered Oswald to have been somehow implicated in the series of Instede deaths. The steward had claimed no more than that he’d been aware of his master’s meeting on midsummer’s night with his cracked older son. But there was a closeness between them – Fielding held up his hand with the index and middle fingers wrapped about each other – a closeness which suggested Oswald knew much more than that simple fact about Elcombe’s plans and intentions. Whether he, that is Elcombe, had gone out to silence Henry the simpleton, and so keep the way clear for the second son’s marriage to proceed . . . or whether he had attempted to bribe or trick the natural into leaving the estate . . . but had himself perished in the course of the business . . . whatever had occurred, Fielding was sure that Oswald had been up to the hilts in it.

  “Oswald couldn’t be certain what you’d seen that night,” said Fielding. “After he’d given his testimony, he was suddenly seized with the belief that he’d given himself away. Or that you might have said more to me than you’d let on. Accordingly he decided to waylay you on the way back.”

  “And then you?”

  “I dare say. Travellers are robbed on the plain from time to time. Wild rogues and rakehells. It would have been easy enough for Oswald to cover his tracks.”

  “He must have been very dev
oted to the memory of his master.”

  “He was. But devoted mostly to the memory of himself. Also, I believe that he had ambitions . . .”

  “In the direction of the Lady Penelope?”

  “Yes, Nicholas. You too noticed that.”

  I hadn’t before that instant, but sometimes you don’t realize what is the case until you say it aloud.

  “He was at her side after her husband’s death, often at her side. Everyone saw that. He kept her husband close company too. But a steward!”

  “There is precedent,” said Fielding. “The Duchess of Suffolk married her Master of the Horse.”

  “And Master Shakespeare created an ambitious steward in one of his plays. But he was a figure of fun.”

  “That was not Oswald. Well, Nicholas, I am in high hopes that young Harry Ascre will be freed tomorrow and returned to his family. At least something will have been salvaged out of this wreck.”

  Something was salvaged. Adam Fielding’s hopes were realized.

  Young Ascre was released to go back to a house in mourning. Lady Elcombe might be relieved that she had two out of three sons left, even if the eldest had been momentarily restored only to be snatched away. But then how deep could her grief be for a simpleton she hadn’t seen since he was a baby? Given what was known of that unfortunate’s life (and the hand he’d played in procuring his father’s death), it couldn’t altogether be regretted that he now lay in the family vault.

  No doubt the family would knit together, eventually. Lady Elcombe might expect to remarry in time, when her widow’s weeds turned to purple. Harry Ascre wouldn’t be compelled to marry Marianne Morland, wouldn’t perhaps be compelled to marry anyone at all. Cuthbert might be able to indulge his passion for the stage . . . though I judged this unlikely. With noblemen, such passions are essentially pastimes.

  Nicholas Revill’s hopes, on the other hand, weren’t realized.

  I must confess that my heart had swelled at the invitation from Kate Fielding to spend the night at the Justice’s house in Salisbury. I’d thought – such was my green-sickness – that she desired to have me on her home territory, there to take advantage of a young player. Yes, all right, I know, the wish was father to the thought . . . but you must admit it was not completely out of the question.