The Pale Companion

by Philip Gooden

  I looked round. By this time we were close to Moorgate.

  “There, Nicholas,” said Fielding. You have it all, or as much as I can think of to tell you. The rest is yours.”

  “I do not catch your drift,” I said.

  “Come now,” said the Justice. “What did I say earlier? A jury may still decide on the question.”

  “No,” I said, returning his look, candid, unabashed as it was. “You must decide.”

  “I already have,” he said. “I can live with my conscience. Not easily but I can live with it and I have resolved to do so.”

  “When we first met, your worship,” I said, “we talked about what I do for a living.”

  “I remember.”

  “You said that play-acting would save no souls from the eternal bonfire and I said I wasn’t concerned with that.”

  “Well, you are now,” he said with a touch of grim humour.

  I turned in the direction of the city gate, making it clear that I did not expect – or want – Adam Fielding to accompany me any further.

  “I am due for a rehearsal. It is the piece that your daughter and her aunt are coming to see tomorrow. Love’s Disdain.”

  “You will not see me there, I think,” he said.

  “No. Well. Then there is only one thing left,” I said.

  He looked a query.

  “To thank you for preserving me on the plain. From Oswald. I would not be here now, breathing in this slightly rank air round Moor Fields and enjoying the prospect of going off to rehearse with my fellows, if it wasn’t for you.”

  “You have already thanked me, Nicholas, and no more is necessary. Let it not colour your thoughts – or affect your actions, whatever you decide.”

  And he strode off down the road which we’d so lately walked together, talking of murder and lost sons and blame.

  Why wasn’t I surprised the next afternoon – as I scanned the Globe audience in the intervals of playing – to see in one of the private boxes in the upper part of the house a family group which consisted of Susanna Knowles (together with an amiable-looking gent who I presumed to be her husband), Kate Fielding and Cuthbert Ascre? Of Adam Fielding, though, I saw no sign. When we’d finished Love’s Disdain, done our little jig &c., I caught another glimpse of the quartet, or of the significant half of it to be precise. Cousin Kate and cousin Cuthbert were rounding the corner out of Brend’s Rents while I was gazing from one of the small casements in a back passage behind the tiring-house, perhaps in the very expectation of seeing them.

  They were walking as a couple and talking as a couple and laughing as a couple, and I thought of those other occasions when I’d glimpsed them together – without thinking anything of it – as at Harry and Marianne’s pre-wedding feast. So. But I’d already known, hadn’t I? From the way that Kate’s face had lit up when her father announced in the Finsbury garden that her cousin was come to town. From the way she’d been eager to quit our company to join him. And from half a dozen other little episodes or moments, now I came to review the last few weeks.

  Fool, Revill! ever to think . . .

  Well, I wished them well . . . and that seemed to me to be a mark of the fact that I truly loved Kate Fielding . . . that I was able to wish her well. I couldn’t even bear a grudge in my heart against Cuthbert Ascre, or not much of a one anyway. Just as long as he didn’t think he could become an actor as well.

  They married in the following spring. At Instede House. The nuptials must have done something to atone for the abandonment of the other match, the Ascre–Morland one, not least in that this was a couple who were truly matched, properly in love (I can write this with only a small tremor in the hand).

  Two marriages took place within a fortnight of each other, in fact, and together they must have helped to erase the shadow of the past, the shock of a sequence of violent deaths and a tale of sons lost and found. Justice Adam Fielding and Lady Penelope Elcombe were joined in matrimony, so that it seemed as if my lady had, like her namesake, Odysseus’s wife, waited twenty years or more before she was reunited with the man she had once loved. Whether Justice Fielding ever told the full story to his second wife of that midsummer night or whether (like me) he decided to let sleeping bodies lie, I do not know.