Alms for Oblivion

by Philip Gooden

  But there was one thing I had to discover, if I could. It was what Richard Milford had said to Edmund Jute after the Troilus and Cressida performance. I recalled how that murderous man, with some of his fellow students, had been ogling Vinnie Venner’s tits in a mocking rather than a lascivious way, and how Milford had shooed them off with a few choice words. If that comment had been sufficient to prompt Jute to stab the playwright then they must have been harsh words indeed.

  I asked Lucy Milford whether she’d overheard her husband’s rebuke to the students, but she hadn’t.

  “Except,” she said, “he made some reference to nasty little boys when we were returning home. Or it was silly little students. He said he’d told them that they were all nasty boys.”

  This hardly seemed enough to provoke one man to stab another. But then, I reflected, the slightest insult may cause a man to pick up his knife, especially when that man’s senses are inflamed by drink. Kit Marlowe had been stabbed through the eye during a quarrel in a tavern, and died straightaway. What one man can laugh off, another takes to heart. There was besides, in Jute’s case, his newly acquired ‘taste’ for killing. He’d discovered how easy it was to perform with Peter Agate, and how easy to shift the blame as well. Now he moved on to rid himself of an irritating playwright who’d called him a nasty little boy. And after that he turned his attention to a troublesome whore who had deluded herself into the belief that he might rescue her from Holland’s Leaguer.

  “How did you know that it wasn’t me?” I said to Lucy. “When you got me out of gaol, you said that, whoever it was that had killed Richard, you knew it wasn’t me.”

  “I do not know how I knew,” said the widow. “It was a certainty, but I don’t know where that certainty came from. No more than I know where that vision of a bleeding man came from. It was Richard, but it was not him too.”

  I recalled the shudder she’d given in the Middle Temple hall, the wide-eyed stare over my shoulder.

  “You have the gift too,” she said.

  “Gift?”

  “Of seeing things.”

  I thought of all my speculations in these Southwark murders, of how I’d blamed in my mind first one person then another, from harmless old Chesser to the less harmless Tom Gally, from the rustic Venners to Coroner Talbot. Just about everybody, in short, except the person who’d actually committed the crimes. I thought too of how I had woven plots involving these individuals, and had also turned accidents – runaway carts, blazing shops – into malicious acts. Far from seeing into the future, as Lucy Milford perhaps could in some sense, I wasn’t even able to understand what was happening around me in the present.

  “No, I don’t see things,” I said. “In this whole business I have seen almost nothing right. I have not got the gift.”

  But if I didn’t have the gift of second sight – more of a curse than a blessing, in my view – I had other things.

  I had my freedom.

  I had my place in the Chamberlain’s Company once again.

  And I had some comforts too.

  For, as the end of this dire year of 1602 approached, I found myself consoling and being consoled by a soft-voiced woman.

  You see, I cheered a dead man’s widow. All in the interest of a happy ending, you understand.

  Endnotes

  1. see Death of Kings

  2. see Sleep of Death

  3. see Death of Kings

  4. see The Pale Companion