Alms for Oblivion

by Philip Gooden

  “I have heard of you, Master Revill – but I have heard rather more of your father.”

  “Much more, I hope,” I said.

  “He had a proper care of this parish.”

  Thinking of the way my father had returned to tend to its dying members, and so exposed himself to pestilence and death, I could only bow my head in agreement.

  At this point, there was a loud coughing from Mistress Gertrude.

  “We have not yet finished our discussion, Ralph, over the best way to commemorate the dear departed,” she said.

  I seemed to hear a kind of sneer in her words. I thought it was an unfeeling way to refer to a stepson, even if one who had, no doubt, displeased her by rejecting her advances. I remembered Peter’s description of her, the shudder of horror he’d given. I noted also the familiarity with which Gertrude Agate addressed Verney, her use of his first name – well, parson or no parson, she was old enough to be his mother, I suppose. He was quite handsome too, and so might be at risk. From the very slight frown that crossed Parson Verney’s face, I judged that he’d noted the familiarity too but was sufficiently in control of his features not to let it show much.

  “Excuse me, madam,” I said. “I did not mean to interrupt you.”

  Ralph Verney turned towards Gertrude Agate. Before she could draw him back into the room off the great hall, I said, “I ask your pardon again, Mrs Agate, but I would like to see your husband.”

  To my surprise, Gertrude Agate stopped in her tracks, turned round and almost seemed to smirk.

  “Why?”

  “To pay my respects to him.”

  “You will have a task in hand,” she said.

  “I will not detain him for more than a few minutes.”

  Then I shall be on my way, I thought, there’s nothing more for me in this house.

  “He’ll wait,” said Mrs Agate. She seemed to be enjoying my uncertainty.

  I noticed Anne Agate looking distressed, her face beginning to crumple up once more. As for Ralph Verney, he wore an expression of discomfort which he wasn’t bothering to hide.

  “Anthony Agate is dead,” the parson said finally.

  “My husband has been dead this long month,” said the ungrieving widow.

  “My father is dead,” said Anne Agate.

  Exeunt

  So the story that I’d spun when travelling westwards in the guise of William Topcourt – that I was hurrying back home because of my father’s death – contained a kind of truth, after all. Only it was the father of Peter Agate who had died, rather than Topcourt’s supposed sire. The monument which Anthony’s widow and the parson were discussing was to the father and not – as I’d thought – to the son. For old Anthony Agate had perished not long after my friend quit his home for London. When Peter turned up on my doorstep, and as far as he was concerned, the old man was still alive and still breathing fire and brimstone over his son’s intention to become a stage-player. I wondered that no one had thought to inform Peter of his bereavement and then remembered that no one knew where to find him. The first news that the Agate family received about their son and brother was in my letter, the one telling them of his brutal murder. It was a double blow, the mysterious death of the only son coming hard on the heels of the father’s demise.

  There was no mystery about Anthony’s departure from this world. He had caught a fever in October. At first they’d thought he’d recover. The moment of crisis had come and gone. He had dined on rabbit stew. He was sitting up in bed in his chamber on the last day of the month. The autumn fruit from the orchard had been carried up by the gardeners for his inspection. Trays of quince (after which Quint House was named, I think). Baskets of crab apples and peaches and medlars, that fruit which grosser folk call ‘open-arse’ on account of its appearance. But Anthony Agate had no appetite for any of this produce of his garden and merely picked at a bunch of grapes. The grapes were the last thing he ate. He had an unexpected relapse as the sun went down and expired at the low hour of three in the morning. Ralph Verney had been summoned at the end. The parson was newly arrived in Miching. After my father’s death the requirement had fallen once more on the lord of the manor to bestow the living of Miching. But, since most of the village was dead, it was no very urgent requirement. The pulpit stayed empty like the church. Eventually Anthony Agate had settled on Ralph Verney. Neither man could have known that what was only their second or third meeting would take place at the death-bed of one of them.

  I got these details and others besides from Anne Agate. Whatever the discomfort, even the fear which she and her sisters might have felt in the presence of their father, everything was swallowed up in genuine grief for him. Within the space of a couple of years, the three sisters – Anne and Margaret and little Katie – had lost their mother, their father and their brother. The plague has often commissioned his twin, that rascal death, to cut wide swathes through a single family. Indeed the pair take a delight in cutting down every human stalk in a bunch except one, so that the survivor’s ragged solitude looks like mockery. But there seemed an especial cruelty to the fact that the Agates had been spared the fate of the rest of Miching village only for some of them to fall under the rascal’s scythe shortly afterwards.

  What must have made life more difficult for the surviving sisters was their new mother. Their parents had both been whisked away by death, and so had their brother. In their place was this . . . this harpy. I’d seen something of Mistress Agate at our first encounter in Quint House and saw a little bit more of her a little later in the story. She had a round red face, gappy teeth (yes, I know what that signifies), a wandering eye and a moist palm (and what that signifies too). Instinctively, instantly, I believed what Peter had said about her. She was hot-livered, loose in the hilts. Yet it couldn’t be denied that – for all her harpiness – there was a certain attraction to the idea of Mistress Agate getting her claws into you. You might enjoy being gripped by her, having her hot breath panting on your face, her reddened cheek rubbing against yours. And she left you in no doubt that she would grip, pant and rub. And you would enjoy it, probably, and be shame-faced about it afterwards, probably.

  Anyway, that was the bed-trick she’d played with Anthony Agate, and had tried to play with Peter.

  But now her husband and her stepson were dead. If Gertrude Agate had ever been prepared to shed tears for her husband’s death they were all dried up now. I doubted she did shed any except for form’s sake on the way to the churchyard. Erecting a monument was a different matter. That was a reflection of her importance in Miching. As for her attitude towards her stepdaughters, that could be described as – what had Peter’s word been again? – attentive, but without any real warmth to it. The warmth that Mistress Agate gave off was a different kettle of fish. Well, why should she care for three young women? They weren’t hers. But the odd thing was that she did seem to mind about them. Or at least to want to keep them close and in sight, particularly. Anne Perhaps she saw the oldest daughter as a rival. I remembered the way she had demanded, sharply, who I was while we were standing in the great hall. But again, why shouldn’t she? She was the mistress of the house now.

  Although I had considered moving on from Miching almost as soon as I’d arrived at Quint House, I was induced to stay by the kindness of Ralph Verney. He invited me to spend some time in the parsonage. It was my old home. It’s difficult to convey how strange and unsettling I found it to enter those old, dark rooms once more. Rooms where my father had read and studied and written his sermons, where he’d held court, settled disputes, dispensed advice and delivered admonitions, while in the kingdom of the kitchen my mother kept just as tight a rein over the household accounts and the single slattern called Susan who worked under her. Despite being larger than any of the other dwellings in the village, the parsonage was not a grand house, certainly not in comparison to the Agate residence. Yet when I dwelt there with my father and mother, it had seemed the centre of the world. Or rather one of the poles of that world, th
e other being Quint House.

  As I’ve said, Ralph Verney was new to the parish. Indeed, the parish of Miching was in some sense new to itself, since the village had almost tumbled wholesale into the pit and had only lately started to drag itself out again. Even so, I was surprised by how normal daily life seemed to be. Towards the end of November things were bound to be quiet and a touch dreary, and there was that sense of shutting up shop for winter. But there was also hay in the barn, just as there were sheep in the pen and cheese in the loft and ale in the tub and bacon hanging from the rafters. The surviving villagers had clothes on their backs and thatches over their heads.

  There were many gaps in the neighbourhood but some of them had been filled – with incomers who were related to those families which had perished, and with other incomers who had no prior connection at all with Miching but who knew how cheap land and property could be in the aftermath of the plague. And there seemed to be a lot of little children and babies about the place. The parson told me he’d baptized three in the previous month alone.

  Ralph Verney himself was unmarried. The slattern – whom (I regret to say) my mother had somewhat tyrannized over in the kitchen – had shared in the general fate. To attend to his domestic needs, Verney kept an ageing widow woman who originated from a village over the next hill or two. Mrs Hobbs presented no danger to him, marital or otherwise, in my opinion. She was a decent woman, clucking and motherly. She spoke a broad Mummerset that wouldn’t have been believed on stage, and was inclined to make oracular but meaningless pronouncements like, “An chud ha’ bin zwaggered out of my life, ’twould not ha’ bin zo long as ’tis by a vortnight.” Most of the time I could follow her – this was my own country after all. The rest of the time I nodded in agreement at whatever she said. I think Mrs Hobbs rather enjoyed having two young men to fuss over in the parsonage.

  Among the survivors was John, my father’s sexton. A tall, bony man, he’d always looked to my child’s eyes like a walking skeleton. He was a kind man, no death’s-head. But his daily proximity to death – among his other duties as sexton, he dug the graves in the churchyard and tolled the mourning bell in the belfry – seemed to have inoculated him against the old rascal. He’d survived the plague. He was as taken aback to see me as I was to see him. My last glimpse of him had been as he was sitting above the village, instructed by my father to stop any traveller going down into that plague-stricken place. I’d ignored his strenuous warnings of course, but it was typical of John that he should have been so determined to carry out my father’s final commands. And now John was as devoted to Ralph Verney as he had been to my father.

  I’d also taken to Parson Verney from the moment I’d clapped eyes on him at Quint House. He had a dry manner which concealed a certain shyness. He didn’t ride around on a high horse – literally or metaphorically – but on a modest cob. He talked easily to the villagers, without condescending and without showing a pride or consciousness that he wasn’t condescending to them. And he was more considerate towards Mrs Hobbs than my mother would ever have been. I wondered how long he’d stay in Miching and whether he’d seek out another living, particularly after the unexpected death of his patron. My father had passed his whole life in the one village, but he was an old-style parson and Ralph was young and probably ambitious. Maybe I saw a little of myself in him. My one-time self, that is.

  It was generous of him to invite me to stay in the parsonage, when I might have been about as welcome as the cuckoo in the nest. For one thing, this enabled me to put off a decision on what to do – or rather where to go – next. I’d come back to Miching because it seemed as though the solution might lie here. The idea had jumped into my head as I stood talking to Lucy Milford in the Southwark street. But what solution? Or the solution to what? In reality I was simply running away from my troubles. Returning to the only place I knew, like a wounded dog crawling back to its kennel. Now it seemed as though I had no choice but to run on.

  My old life, my old self, was well and truly dead. In fact, when they found out who I was, the handful of villagers who’d survived from my father’s time, including John the sexton, were as surprised to see me as if I’d returned from the dead like Lazarus. But my state was not so healthy or hopeful as Lazarus’s. I was a fugitive from justice, an escaper from the Counter prison, a man with the suspicion of three murders hanging over his head. Running away in the first place was an admission of guilt.

  Several times I woke in the night, woke several times every night, and waited for the bleakness, the hopelessness of my situation to rush over me like a black wave. Then I would tell myself that at least I was still alive and free, not dangling from Tyburn tree to be pecked at by the kites. I would tell myself that I was back in my home village, for the time being among friendly people. And that would make me think of the true friends I had lost, like Peter Agate, like Nell . . . and so the black wave would sweep over me once more.

  Several times I almost confessed everything to Ralph Verney, told him of my predicament, threw myself on his mercy. If he wanted to send for the nearest magistrate once he’d heard my story, well, perhaps that would be for the best. But I held my tongue. Oddly, I thought that he might not believe me, and would consider me mad rather than judging me guilty or innocent. And if Verney was wondering about my absence from London, he didn’t show it. Maybe he knew better than to wonder. Anyone who is at all familiar with the life of a player knows that it is about as secure as quicksand. No, less secure than quicksand. Prolonged absences from work, enforced resting between engagements – for the player this is business as usual.

  The other person who seemed to welcome my arrival in Miching was Anne Agate. I saw now what I hadn’t noticed at that first encounter on the doorstep of Quint House, her resemblance to Peter. Not so much in looks – although she had his handsomeness in a female form – but in her good-hearted seriousness. Yet she wasn’t altogether earnest. Sometimes she’d smile and laugh, and then she’d remember that she had lately lost a father and a brother and look sad again. I saw a little of her and liked her a lot. But no more than that . . . if that’s the direction your thoughts are tending in.

  From Mistress Gertrude Agate, formerly Potts, the grieving widow, I had a different kind of reception after the comparative frostiness of our first meeting. I’d encountered her a couple of times since and come to those personal conclusions about her which you’ve already been treated to. I felt her moist palm close over my hand more than once. Sensed her roving eye linger awhile on my fine form. Picked up more than a compliment or two directed at me through those gappy teeth. She was forward in compliment. I couldn’t quite work out the reason for the change in her from suspicion to warmth. Perhaps she was merely struck by the appearance of a handsome young player – her words, not mine. But my pulse didn’t race faster, or not much faster anyway, although she did make me feel uneasy. But even though she retained certain qualities, she was old enough to be my mother, old enough to be everybody’s mother. (And I remembered that she had been Peter’s mother or stepmother, briefly, and had attempted to seduce him.) It would have been a mistake, however, to dismiss her as a ramping widow, all hot and lonesome in her bed even while her husband was scarcely cold below ground. There was more to her than that.

  One afternoon a little more than ten days or so after my arrival in Miching I was up at Quint House for the last time. I had decided to leave the village the next morning. There was nothing more for me here. To leave and go on the road and let it lead me where it would. To become a counterfeit crank like Abel Glaze and earn fourteen and threepence halfpenny during a single day in Reading . . . to lose myself in the wilds of Wales . . . to take ship from Bristol or Plymouth . . . There were many shapes to the future, none of them very enticing.

  The afternoon was fine and calm, a moment such as you sometimes enjoy just before winter’s onset. Anne Agate had given me a prayer-book which belonged to her brother, in memory of him. It was small and portable. I would carry it on my travels. We kis
sed chastely and I left her, having already said goodbye to her younger sisters. I was making my way along a border which was interrupted by stone urns and sombre yews. Round the corner was a raised, gently curving walk which overlooked the orchard. Here grew peaches, apples, medlars, and other fruit besides, as well as the quinces which gave to the Agate house its name. Now the branches were all bare and the ground muddy and unkempt. But the sky was blue while the air was unexpectedly soft. At the end of the walk I paused to admire the scene.

  “Master Revill.”

  I recognized Gertrude Agate’s voice. She must have seen me coming when I was at the far end of the curved walk. Partly hidden from sight, she was sitting inside a stone pavilion which gave a view across the orchard and then further over the fields and hills to the west. A deep red creeper clambered its withered way over the stonework of the pavilion. All I could see of the lady of the house were her silk-stockinged legs stretched out in the autumn sun and her hands languidly cradling a pear. I moved round and stood in her light. She was sitting on a cushion on a stone bench. There was a table beside her and a pewter plate loaded with pears, together with a little paring-knife which glinted in the sun Also on the table was a hat with a veil attached and a pair of embroidered gloves of dark velvet. A jug of wine and a nearly drained glass stood nearby.

  “Mrs Agate. I have come to say farewell.”

  I hadn’t intended to say farewell to her. Hadn’t thought to see her again, in fact. But the courtesy cost nothing. An unfathomable look passed over her face.

  “You catch me enjoying my fruit,” she said, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t decipher. Since her hat and veil were on the table, her hair was free and exposed. It was still a coppery colour, and in its day must have been a fiery sight.

  “A fine crop,” I said, glancing at the loaded platter.