Alms for Oblivion

by Philip Gooden

  I sat awkwardly facing Talbot. I had been summoned to his house in Long Southwark where a silent servant-girl showed me to his first-floor study. The fog had finally lifted and a glittering sun shone low into my eyes through the window behind the coroner. I shifted my head slightly to escape the light. I wondered if he’d deliberately positioned me here to increase my discomfort.

  “Tell me again, Master Revill, why you crossed the bridge. If you were coming from the Middle Temple.”

  “I was coming from Middle Temple, sir. You may ask my fellows in the Chamberlain’s. I was at a rehearsal there which occupied me until the last moment.”

  “I may ask them, though I don’t doubt you were at a rehearsal. My question is why you didn’t cross the river from Temple Stairs rather than going the long way about and walking over the bridge. Aren’t you familiar with London?”

  “I know my London.”

  He consulted a sheet of paper in front of him.

  “Yet you’re a country lad from the parish of Miching. Where is that?”

  “In Somerset.”

  “Do you wish you were back there now?”

  This was such an odd question that I didn’t know how to respond, but perhaps my hesitation was answer enough.

  “To return to the business of the river crossing,” he said. “Didn’t you have the money to pay the ferryman?”

  In normal circumstances I would have bridled, slightly, at the imputation. Was he suggesting that players were poorly paid artisans? But these weren’t normal circumstances. I couldn’t afford to bridle or to get on my high horse. So why hadn’t I taken the ferry across the Thames that late afternoon? Why had I chosen to trace a roundabout route through the city and then across London Bridge to Dead Man’s Place? I didn’t know. It’s hard to account for unexamined moments, for decisions so small they hardly deserve the name of decisions.

  “I had enough money. But, if I’m honest, I can’t recollect why I walked instead of being ferried. Is it material?”

  As soon as these last words were out of my mouth I realized I’d made a mistake. I was calling into question, however mildly, the coroner’s right to ask whatever questions he chose to ask. Talbot brought his palms down flat on the desk which was between us.

  “Very material, Master Revill, leaving the question of your honesty to one side. It would have taken you, what?, an hour or more to walk through the city and back to your lodgings, a tedious hour on a damp, foggy afternoon. But it would have taken you less than half that time to hire a ferry at Temple Stairs, be landed on this side of the river and return to those same lodgings. You would then have had a spare half-hour or more at your disposal . . . ”

  “To kill my friend, you mean?”

  “Your words, Master Revill.”

  My skin broke out in goosebumps. My mouth was dry.

  “What reason – I mean – ”

  “That is what we are here to determine, the reason,” said Master Talbot. “According to your landlord’s testimony, he heard bumping sounds from the lobby, as of a struggle, and then heard you calling your friend’s name several times over He came out to find you stooping over Master Agate while his chest was still pumping out his life’s-blood.”

  “You’ve already heard my story. I had just come through the outer door myself. It was stuck and I had to push it – against – against Peter’s body.”

  “You did call out the name of the dead man, repeatedly.”

  “I thought he was drunk and had fallen down and hurt himself.”

  “His blood was on you.”

  “That couldn’t be helped. It went everywhere.”

  “It went everywhere,” echoed Talbot.

  I went colder still at the tone of the coroner’s voice and at the memory of the murder. Peter had been stabbed through the heart. I had caught him within minutes of his dying. The sounds that Benwell heard must have been the sounds of some desperate struggle.

  “Master Agate was freshly killed. And if not by you, Master Revill, then by someone else. Yet you saw no one running from the house? Did you see anyone running from the house?”

  It would have been easy to make up a figure fleeing from the front door and into the murk. Easy to imagine that I had actually seen such a figure. Easy but dangerous. Stick to the truth. Say no more than you have to. Avoid speculation.

  “It was foggy. I don’t think I saw anyone. I was probably walking with my head down.”

  “Ah yes. It was a good afternoon for a stroll, wasn’t it. Tell me, Master Revill, what did you do with the weapon?”

  “I did not kill my friend, sir. I have no weapon. I am not permitted to carry a sword.”

  “No matter. We are not talking swords or rapiers here. A knife or a bodkin is easily hidden, and quickly discarded. You are certain that you saw no one running away into the fog, perhaps throwing down an object? You heard nothing?”

  Now I did suspect a trap. For sure, Master Talbot wanted me to create a shape out of the mist, a shape that ran off and threw away a little dagger so that it clattered on to the icy ground. Not because he believed in such an apparition but because he wanted to see whether I could be persuaded to invent a story to draw blame or attention from myself.

  “I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I was in a mist.”

  “Did you not threaten your friend?” said Talbot suddenly. “Threaten his life?”

  “No, sir. I had no reason to.”

  “That is not what your landlord, Samuel Benwell, says.”

  “Master Benwell was not privy to our conversations.”

  “He says otherwise. Sometimes you talked so loud that he couldn’t help hearing, willy-nilly.”

  Couldn’t help having his ear pinned to my door, you mean, I thought but did not say.

  The coroner picked up another sheet of paper from the desk-top.

  “He deposes this: that you said that if he – that is, Master Agate – went any further you would kill him. Is that so?”

  “No – I don’t think . . . but it’s possible that I might have made some such comment in jest.”

  And indeed I had a half-memory of telling Peter, soon after his arrival in my room, that if he didn’t stop apologizing I would kill him. It was only a joke, a joke that was simultaneously callous and feeble. And an unfortunate remark, doubly unfortunate now.

  “You had a dispute . . . about a whore,” said Master Talbot.

  I realized that Samuel Benwell must have spent all his time listening outside my door, probably in the hope of picking up players’ tittle-tattle.

  “Not a dispute, no.”

  “Let us call it instead, a fight. Didn’t you fight with your friend and strike him on the head?”

  “He hit himself on the doorway to my room when he came back drunk one night. I had nothing to do with it.”

  I would have said, ask Benwell, but the landlord was probably the source of this story. Talbot was silent.

  “It is true that Peter visited a – a friend of mine – in Holland’s Leaguer,” I said at last.

  “A friend? You mean a whore?”

  “What do you suppose, a Puritan?”

  Talbot said nothing.

  “Of course it was a whore.”

  “Do you players often visit whores?”

  “It is not a habit confined to players, I believe.”

  “Say vice rather than habit.”

  I shrugged. It was evident that Alan Talbot didn’t much care for players. He’d already made that clear in one or two preliminary remarks in my examination. Like many in authority he probably blamed us for encouraging immorality and undermining law and order. I don’t suppose he cared for whores either.

  “You were jealous of your friend, Master Agate?”

  “Jealous over a whore! That is like being resentful of the wind for brushing your enemy’s face as well as your own. The wind goes where it pleases.”

  “Very poetical, Master Revill. Why do you say ‘enemy’? Was your friend your enemy?”

 
“He was not.”

  “I ask again, did you kill him?”

  “I say again, I did not.”

  “As you say.”

  Talbot surprised me by rising from his chair. Apparently the interview was over. But, suspecting a ploy, I did not trust him. I no longer trusted myself. I wasn’t sure what I’d be betrayed into saying next.

  “That will do for the time being but I may recall you later.”

  It was over. But I very much feared that if he did recall me it would be before an impanelled jury, and that the stages after that would be arrest and arraignment. My legs felt shaky. The coroner ushered me from his room and we descended the stairs together. For an instant he seemed to be acting more as a host than a questioner. Half-way down the stairs was a window opening on to a northern aspect. Not far off could be glimpsed the top of the battlemented gate which stands at the near end of London Bridge.

  Alan Talbot grasped me by the elbow. With his other hand he gestured at the view.

  “You see that?”

  I nodded. What did he want?

  “You see the heads.”

  Several mast-like poles stuck up into the cold sky. They were topped by dark blobs. I hardly needed to be told that they were the heads of traitors. Every Londoner, and most visitors, knew that. Some of us passed under those severed heads regularly and – since custom can harden you to almost anything – we didn’t trouble our own heads about them.

  “Do you know how they are preserved?” said Talbot. His eyes, as cold as the sky, fixed on me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, while thinking that this odd consideration was perhaps a natural one for a coroner. “I am not so curious.”

  “They are first parboiled and then dipped in tar. That way they can be kept safe for many years.”

  “The Earl of Essex is up there,” I said, almost despite myself. I had once heard that head talk.

  “The third from the left-hand end, I believe,” said Talbot. “Next to him is Sir Christopher Blount.”

  “You make a study of them?”

  “I do not make frivolous play of them as you do. I mean you players. Your pieces are stuffed with severed heads, aren’t they, booted about the stage for the gratification of the groundlings.”

  I thought of Richard Milford’s unperformed play, The World’s Diseas’d. The coroner had a point. Still, as Richard would say, it was what the customers wanted.

  “This is the view from this window whenever the day is clear, the inevitable view,” said Talbot, as he led the way down the rest of the staircase. “It reminds me of the law and the law’s penalties.”

  If he’d meant to alarm or intimidate me he had succeeded. Once outside in Long Southwark I breathed deep and set off walking briskly in a south-easterly direction, away from my lodgings, away from the Bridge and the traitors’ heads.

  I soon got beyond the packed houses and streets and in among clear fields and hedges and bare trees, with only a straggle of buildings here and there. I walked and, while I was walking, I thought.

  I started with what I knew. It was a single thing only but a thing highly significant to me. I had not killed Peter Agate.

  Circumstances were against me though and it looked as if I might have killed him – and this could be enough to cause me to be arrested . . . arraigned . . . convicted . . . executed. I shivered at this dreadful sequence and its inevitable end-point. The landlord’s testimony, accurate as far as it went, was that, after hearing the sounds of an apparent struggle and my repeated calling out of my friend’s name, he had emerged from the interior of his house to find me crouched over Peter’s body. Benwell had also deposed, less accurately, that he’d heard me threaten Peter and that there’d been some dispute about Nell. I wasn’t sure whether the landlord genuinely believed this or whether, from some private or malicious purpose, he had chosen to misinterpret the conversations which he had eavesdropped on.

  If the case against me appeared so strong (though circumstantial) then why hadn’t Alan Talbot the coroner moved to have me arrested? Either because he was waiting to assemble more evidence against me, I surmised, or because he was not so sure of his ground as he pretended to be. Under this more hopeful interpretation, those sudden questions – “Did you mean to kill him?”, “What did you do with the weapon?” – had proceeded not from certainty but a desire to startle me into a confession.

  Looking at the affair in this way I grew slightly more cheerful – or slightly less gloomy, rather like a man who’s been told he will be executed in a month instead of a week. After all, I argued with myself, no weapon had been found on me nor had I had the time or opportunity to dispose of one. Or not much time, not much opportunity. More important, I had no motive to wish my friend dead, let alone actually to kill him. He was no rival of mine in the Company, he was not about to supplant me. And, although Peter had occupied my place next to Nell in her crib, so had hundreds of other men besides. Was I supposed to go around slaughtering half of London’s males? If there had to be a rival then the authentic one in this matter of Nell’s bed (and heart) was the young gentleman from the Inns of Court across the water. And if that man was Michael Pye, he could rest easy. Magnanimous Revill had no intention of running him through. What was Nell to me? Once she was much to me, then she became less, and now she had dwindled into something . . . something not worth killing or dying for, at any rate.

  Anyway, I was no killer, it was not in my nature.

  The question was, who was? Who had killed Peter Agate?

  Under the bare autumnal sky, I turned to look back over London. On this side, the Southwark side, the city lumped and swelled like a living thing under a thin veil of smoke and smut which the sun only served to bring out. The grander buildings with their spires and towers and battlements were mostly on the far bank. Out in the open I tried to shake off the taint of suspicion and guilt but it clung like the London air. I felt guilty. In one corner of my mind, I wondered what I’d feel like if I really was guilty. More guilty still, presumably. But perhaps genuine murderers are unfeeling, have no consciences, suffer no guilt. So that if I really was guilty, I would actually feel less bad than I did at this moment . . .

  It was a useless speculation. My mind would be more profitably occupied in trying to establish who had murdered Peter.

  Not me.

  Good. That only left the rest of the world.

  Start with the obvious . . . it must have been an enemy.

  Good, an enemy. And then what?

  The problem in starting with the obvious is that it doesn’t really get you anywhere. Another problem was that, as far as I knew, Peter had no enemies. He’d been in London little more than a week. You’d have to be a dedicated trouble-seeker to make a mortal enemy inside seven days. A man he’d insulted in a tavern or elsewhere, if his ‘London side’ was to the fore? I remembered the chalky-faced, superannuated old player who had objected to our trade. But hadn’t he and Peter met later and enjoyed a courteous talk?

  Had his murderer been someone from our native village of Miching, then? Most of the villagers were dead. His father Anthony might have opposed his wish to go on stage but that would hardly extend to having his only son cut down in cold blood. Anyway did they even know (or care) where he was? Peter had a stepmother – Mistress Gertrude, like the mother of Hamlet – and she had reportedly pursued him not with a bare bodkin but with flapping dugs and lascivious intent. He had little sisters, not so little now perhaps. They were deprived of a brother. Anthony Agate had lost his son. I could not think of anyone else who would break the news to Peter’s family. I resolved to write to them that night. They would get the news in three or four days.

  The part played by Samuel Benwell in all of this did not escape me. It was convenient for Talbot the coroner that my landlord had been on the premises with his sharp ears. He’d been able to report on the comings and goings of his two lodgers, been able to repeat their ‘arguments’. Then he had appeared on the scene at the right moment, just as I was huddled
over Peter’s corpse, covered with my friend’s blood. The wrong moment for me, of course. How had he responded to this shocking picture? Calmly, quite calmly, certainly by contrast to my own surprise and terror. Still clutching his smoky candle, Benwell had passed within feet of where I was huddled and gone outside into the foggy street. There I heard him calling for help. Shouting, I think, “Help! Murder! Murder! Help!”

  Within a few moments he returned with a clutch of neighbours, avid for catastrophe. We stood around awkwardly, half in, half out of the doorway. A couple of people stretched out Peter’s body to its full length in the lobby. The blood no longer flowed, as if he was all emptied. No one attempted to detain me, although they might have done so if I had made to leave the house. After a time the headborough was summoned or perhaps he simply appeared, drawn by all the commotion. This headborough was a stupid man called Doggett. He had once fined me over non-attendance at church. Now Doggett studied the scene and pronounced it unwholesome, foul and villainous. Then he made to detain one of the neighbours until Benwell whispered in his ear and gestured at me.

  I don’t know why the headborough didn’t take me in. I protested my innocence, of course, explained how I too had stumbled on this bloody scene. I think that murder was probably out of Master Doggett’s realm. It is out of most of our realms, fortunately. Doggett said again that the deed was unwholesome, foul and villainous, and appeared to think he’d done his duty. These headboroughs are elected by their fellow householders and it’s sometimes seemed to me that, particularly in a slippery suburb like Southwark, it might suit the locals to have a man who will not be too officious – or not too effective anyway – in enquiring into wrongdoing. Not that they’re expected to wink at murder . . .