Alms for Oblivion

by Philip Gooden

  I’d spent a lot of time at the top of the tower as a boy. There was a flat roof, guarded by little battlements, which had served as my castle on summer afternoons. A very satisfactory castle, almost a kingdom. I doubted any king ever felt prouder or more secure and powerful. The lead of the roof was warm on bare legs, too. Now, many years later, I tugged at the little door to the turret. It wasn’t locked, as I knew it wouldn’t be. It creaked in the way that I remembered, like a snatch from a reedy old tune. The stone stairs spiralled up into the dimness. Quickly I eased through the door, pulling it fast behind me and shutting out the faint sounds of worship. For an instant I stood in almost total darkness, breathing in the familiar smell of dank stone.

  Then I began to climb, sliding my hands over the ashlar walls. Every now and then the outer wall was interrupted by narrow apertures like loop-holes. I passed the entry to the belfry, where hung the great bells which summoned the village to mourn and celebrate and pray. At the top of the stairs was the second door. Recalling that it opened inwards I groped for the handle and tugged at it. No movement. I pulled harder, without success. For a moment I thought I’d have to creep back down the spiral staircase and find myself another hiding-place, and then I pushed at the door instead of pulling and it opened straightaway. Our memories are strange, slippery things. I’d used that entrance on innumerable occasions. How could I have remembered the creak of the door at the base of the tower yet have forgotten which way the one at the top opened?

  I came out on the lead-lined roof of the tower. This morning the lead looked cold and massy. It was slick with dew. The wind – there was always a wind up here even though it might be still as death down in the churchyard – blew a few flecks of rain in my face. There was no shelter on the roof, only the little box-like place in the corner where the stairs emerged and which you had to crouch to come through. I walked across to the parapet and surveyed the scene.

  Everything seemed to come to a pause. What now?

  The neatly disposed headstones down below were like the pieces in a board game. A game whose rules I didn’t understand. As a boy, though, they hadn’t troubled me, those headstones. I was more interested in the long view. From the highpoint of the church tower I had kept watch for my enemies while they were massing on the Somerset hills. The wind rustled through the churchyard trees and it was the breath of approaching armies. As long as I stayed on the top of the tower I was safe. Sometimes Peter Agate and I had hidden up here together.

  Now I saw a man below advancing towards the base of the tower at the same side I’d come in by. He stopped by the west door. He was all small, reduced to his hat and his shoulders. He looked like a beetle. It was Talbot, I recognized him by the feather in his hat. I could have dropped a stone on him, if there’d been a large stone to hand and if he hadn’t looked up while I was doing it (I don’t think I could have dropped a stone on to his bare, upturned face). I would have watched him writhe his way to death. But there was no handy stone and he disappeared into the tower, through the west door. I waited, hoping I’d firmly closed the postern-door at the base of the turret. I’d left the top one half open, so that I might hear any mounting footsteps.

  I visualized Talbot checking the small congregation in the church. No, there was no Revill there in among the good housewives and honest labourers. I imagined Talbot poking his nose into the side-chapels and behind the grander monuments. Shaking his head. Perhaps by now John the sexton had come up to ask what he wanted. A visitor at the early morning service was almost unprecedented. Particularly someone like Talbot, whose dress and bearing carried the stamp of authority. A legal gentleman from London. They would whisper urgently together. The sexton might be surprised to hear that the son of the old parson was a fugitive from justice, even more so to discover that I was a multiple murderer. Then John might recall that I’d been fond of hiding away at the top of the tower when I was a lad.

  At that very instant I heard, from the roof of the tower, the creak of the door at the bottom of the turret. I don’t know why it sounded so clear. Perhaps the circular stairwell magnified any noises. Then I heard the tread of feet mounting the steps, two sets of feet. I wondered if Jack was accompanying him. To me all the footsteps, no matter who they belonged to, were as inexorable as fate. There was no way out. I was trapped on the roof. If I hadn’t been so foolish as to take refuge in a childish sanctuary I might have been halfway to the next village by now. But what would have been the point of that? Coroner Talbot, the nemesis with the feather in his cap, would pursue me to the ends of the earth – and certainly as far as the next village.

  I gulped down my last draught of Somerset air. It was mild and gentle, or seemed so to me, for all that we were on the lip of winter and there was rain in the air. I turned about and stood with my back to the door that opened on to the roof, hands grasping the rough stone of the battlements, and gazed for the final time over the scenes of my boyhood. I heard two men moving faster as they reached the top of the stairs, heard them pause as they registered the presence of a figure leaning over the parapet, heard one of them step out on to the lead-lined tower roof. It cost me an effort not to look round.

  Then came that familiar, cold voice.

  The coroner’s voice.

  “This is the man I seek.”

  My mind in a whirl, I followed Alan Talbot up the sloping track which led to Quint House. There’d hardly been the time for him to explain things or, more accurately perhaps, hardly time for me to grasp them, or the great changes which had taken place over the last half-hour. Changes in my perception, that is.

  It had indeed been John the sexton who’d suggested to Talbot that I might have taken refuge up in the church tower. Talbot had told him that it was most urgent that I should be found before I harmed myself. The coroner must have seen the panic on my face as I opened the door of the parsonage. I no longer felt panic-stricken. Just deeply confused.

  But there was no opportunity for explanations at this stage. We had already reached the gate to Quint House and were striding up the flagged path to the front door. Talbot rapped loudly, with the force if not the majesty of the law. The door was opened by Anne Agate. I guessed, from what Talbot had told me, that she knew who he was. Scarcely troubling to greet her, he shouldered his way into the house. As he passed Anne I saw her gaze fasten on mine, and her eyes flick sideways.

  Taking the hint, I didn’t follow Talbot inside but took off around the flank of the house, retracing my steps of yesterday afternoon when I’d surprised Gertrude Agate in her little pavilion. Then it had been warm, the sun hanging like a coppery apple in the sky. Now it was overcast. Too late I remembered that, because of the way the orchard path curved round, anyone sitting in the pavilion could see a visitor advancing from a distance.

  As I drew closer to the pavilion I heard voices. A man and a woman’s. A cautious instinct made me slow down, almost walk on tiptoe. They sounded preoccupied, too busy to notice anyone approaching. Within seconds I was standing by the withered red creeper which covered the pavilion. The conversation inside continued uninterrupted.

  Something about the way I was standing – or rather stooping (because when you eavesdrop you crouch slightly) – reminded me of my part of Troilus in WS’s play. The lovesick Troilus who, in the last act, goes on a delegation to the Greek camp, and there discovers the faithlessness of his lover Cressida. He eavesdrops on her when the Greek Diomedes whispers soft words of love in the night air. He sees her when Diomedes wheedles from her the gift – the sleeve of the doublet – which is not Cressida’s to give, because Troilus has entrusted it to her together with his heart. Well, what I was overhearing now, standing outside the pavilion, was apparently a scene of love and devotion. It merely happened to be between a mother and her son, as I soon discovered. And it involved a sleeve – the Troilus sleeve – as I also soon discovered.

  “Where did you get it?” said Gertrude Agate. And then before the other person could answer she said, “Is it . . . the one?”


  There was no response except a little laugh or snort.

  “Let me see it,” said Gertrude. “Let me feel it. It is good cloth.”

  “Players have expensive clothes,” said the other.

  “Look at this gold work. How did you do it now?”

  “One twist and a squeeze,” said a voice I recognized but couldn’t immediately put a face to. “Or a little more.”

  “A little more for a little whore,” said Mrs Agate.

  “A quicumque vult.”

  It took me a moment to realize that they were talking about Nell. And then I knew the identity of the man. I fitted the voice to a face. A round, red-headed face. I remembered that occasion in Middle Temple hall, when I’d first encountered the gaggle of law students, and when they’d exchanged humorous Latinisms describing whores.

  “Is that one of your legal terms, dear?”

  There was a slurping sound. Mrs Agate was drinking. I fervently hoped she would choke.

  “Only a London term for a whore,” said Edmund Jute. “She would never have done . . . ”

  “Done what, my dear?”

  “Done for a gentleman. She was beginning to have ideas that she would do, but she wouldn’t.”

  “Did you have her before . . . you know?”

  “During,” said Jute.

  Mrs Agate sniggered. My fists clenched and I felt sick. A kind of red mist descended over my eyes for an instant.

  “You didn’t bring it away with you?”

  What was ‘it’?

  Ah, of course, the sleeve.

  The Troilus sleeve, which Jute had taken after the performance in Middle Temple hall and which he had used to strangle Nell.

  “Coroner Talbot gave it to me,” said Jute. “It was evidence in the case against the player but, since he is plainly guilty, it is no longer required.”

  “The coroner gave it you?” said Gertrude.

  “Not ‘gave’ exactly. It would be better to say that I borrowed it from his cap-case at one of the inns.”

  “Naughty boy,” she said, but full of admiration. “What if he had found out . . .?”

  “Then it would easily be blamed on an ostler. They are dishonest, paltry fellows.”

  “You take risks, my darling.”

  “No risk when the coroner has it so firmly fixed in his head that Revill is a murderer. A murderer several times over.”

  “He looks like a murderer,” said Mrs Agate. “Haggard and shifty. But handsome in his way.”

  “Master Talbot talked of nothing else all the journey down,” said Jute. “Revill’s guilt, that is, not his handsomeness. He is consumed with fury at the way the player slipped through his fingers in London and determined that justice shall be done.”

  If a smirk was ever audible I reckoned that Gertrude Agate’s was then.

  “It is fortunate that I wrote to my boy to tell him of the wicked player’s arrival,” she said.

  “Talbot already had an idea that Master Nicholas would return to his home village. But he was grateful when I informed him. And even more grateful when I offered to accompany him.”

  “To visit your mother?”

  “And see my estate.”

  “Not yet.”

  “One day.”

  “May it be long in coming,” she said.

  “You should not wish yourself long life, mother.”

  “Why not?”

  “You are tempting fate.”

  No reply, except a slurp from the wine glass.

  “It is bad luck to wish yourself long life, I say,” said Jute again.

  I wondered at his insistence.

  And then there was a long silence in this loving dialogue. When Gertrude Agate next spoke her tone was quite different. It was like the chill which descends after the sun goes behind a cloud. A glass shattered on the ground.

  “What have you done?”

  “It is rather what you have done. You taught me the way when you poisoned the old man. That was the beginning.”

  “It was for your sake, Edmund.”

  “So is this, for my sake.”

  “You could have waited.”

  The voice was growing weaker, wheezier.

  “Oh wicked son,” she wailed. It was like a line from a play.

  “I could have waited,” said Edmund Jute. His voice was remarkably even and untroubled. “But I have acquired a taste for it now. I have not yet told you about the playwright . . . ”

  No need to enquire what this particular ‘it’ was, the activity for which he had acquired a taste. And no reply from Gertrude Agate either – she was beyond enquiry – except a strangled cry and a strange noise as if she was tapping her feet.

  “Spiced wine will hide a multitude of sins, mother.”

  There was a thump and a series of terrible retchings and groans, as if the damned had been permitted to speak. I stood round the corner, among the withered creeper, until the sounds became unbearable. Then I moved out into the open.

  How can I describe the scene before me? How can I convey its horror? I did not sleep easy for many nights afterwards.

  Edmund Jute – the red-haired law student, with the round innocent face – stood over the body of his mother as she writhed and flailed her last. She was on her back, purple and mottled in the face. Her eyes were wide and stary. She looked but did not see. Her clothing was disordered and vomit-stained, and one of her breasts was exposed. Her state was horrible enough. But more horrible, much more horrible, was the behaviour of her son. Having done his worst, he was now doing nothing. He was watching her, standing quite unmoved a little to one side. It flashed through my mind that he had probably watched the dying agonies of Peter Agate – and Richard Milford – and Nell – in the same detached spirit.

  So absorbed was he in this dreadful scene of his own making that he did not become aware of my presence for an instant. Perhaps I cried out. Then Edmund Jute turned round and saw who it was, and saw that I knew his cold wickedness. We looked each other in the face and – this is most strange – I was ashamed for him, since he belonged to some distant branch of humanity and could not be ashamed for himself. And I was angry. And I don’t know what else besides. Then Jute reached for the little paring-knife which still lay beside the platter of fruit on the table and swept through the air towards me.

  Without thought, I raised my arm up to deflect him, and caught him a swinging blow on the side of the head. He must have already been off balance because the blow, not strong in itself, was sufficient to knock him to the ground. As he lay there, close to his dying mother, a red mist descended again in front of my eyes. It was blood, my own blood. His knife must have caught me after all, somewhere on the forehead. I wiped at the blood to clear it from my sight and fell on him and we tussled on the ground. I smelled on him that feral smell which I had smelled in the wake of the headless figure which had swept past me in Middle Temple and which I’d afterwards glimpsed in the corridors of Holland’s Leaguer. It was a rank, vulpine scent. Ever afterwards when I smelled it – smelled it naturally, that is, in the open air – it made me think not of a fox, but of Jute and the scent he exuded when death and murder were in question.

  We were down there on the flagged stonework of the pavilion for hours. It seemed hours. Yet in reality, it can only have been seconds. Jute kept trying to reach around with the little knife and gouge me in the back. Once again Master Topcourt’s coat helped to protect me, and Jute was unable to gain a real purchase on me. And I kept batting his hand away and trying to catch hold of his stabbing wrist. His breath was hot in my face and his rank scent high in my nostrils. Then his mother, Gertrude, intervened. In her dying throes she made a rattling noise in her throat and her own arm swept out and knocked the knife from his grasp. There was more strength in that final blow than there was in both our hands. The paring-knife fell on the stone and in an instant I had it in my grip and in another instant was burrowing away at the chest of the man who lay beneath me, like a dreadful lover.

  It wa
s a sharp-pointed, sharp-edged knife, for all that it was little.

  Even so, it wasn’t easy. I was shocked by the resistance which met the blade. Jute battered at me with his arms, and I was compelled to withdraw the blade and strike at him many times over. The knife seemed to tangle in his garments, and sometimes the blade skidded on some inner obstacle. But I suddenly knew that I would win. By main force and determination and cold anger, I knew that I would win. I grunted. I thought of Nell – no, I didn’t think of her but felt her presence. I shouted. I remembered Peter Agate, my friend from Miching. I spoke. Doubtless I spoke. Spoke incomprehensible things. Edmund Jute made noises too as he breathed his last, with his mother beside him.

  But he did breathe his last at last, and I rolled off him, exhausted.

  Finis

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure, Nicholas?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “But he might have fallen on his knife, his own knife?”

  “I – it is possible, I suppose.”

  Only it hadn’t happened like that.

  I had no more than a blurred memory of those last few moments of my mortal engagement with Edmund Jute. But I was sure of one thing. That he had died at my hands, not his own. I would not have had it any other way. This wicked young lawyer had slaughtered my friends because they were in his way. And if anyone was justified in despatching him with a perfect conscience it was I. My conscience may have been clear – I tried to argue with myself that it was clear, I had killed Edmund Jute in self-defence – but that didn’t prevent a single dream from pursuing me for a long time afterwards. In my dream I was struggling with Jute in a lead-lined cistern that was slowly filling with blood. I had to dispose of him before the blood rose over our heads, and put an end to both of us. I had a knife but so did he, and his knife was bigger than mine. In addition there was a cord dangling from his waist with which he could strangle me. We were both slick with blood and panting hard, and I was terrified of losing my footing and slipping beneath the rising tide of red. On every occasion I woke up, sweating and breathless, before this fight was concluded.