Sleep of Death

by Philip Gooden

  ‘You should not confuse a play with real life. If there is a plot down here in this world, it is not likely to be discerned by us poor mortals,’ I said, and then realised I was echoing the kind of thing my father would have uttered on Sunday (and the rest of the week).

  ‘Surely you can see,’ said William, ‘that someone has already created that confusion? My father’s death in some of its details, my mother’s remarriage to my uncle and so on – all of this has been revealed on the stage not a few hundred yards from where we are sitting. You say coincidence, but I say coincidence is simply a word for what we don’t yet understand. And if there is a plot behind Master Shakespeare’s work, which there is certainly is, then why should there not be a plot behind what has happened to the Eliot family?’

  I made no answer. There was some flaw in his argument but I was unable to identify it.

  ‘So what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘Accept my offer of lodgings. You would be received into the house as a friend who has done the Eliot family a favour and who is in need of accommodation for the time being. I can speak for my mother and I believe I can speak for my uncle in this respect. You will of course need to cross the river daily for your work at the Globe. But while you are in my mother’s house, watch and listen.’

  ‘Watch, listen? For what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Goodbye, Master Eliot. This is chasing shadows.’

  I made to rise, but half-heartedly.

  ‘Please wait.’

  He held me gently but firmly by the upper arm until I resumed my place beside him on the bench.

  ‘If I were not being honest with you, I would claim to have seen something in those shadows. But I cannot say, I cannot see, if there is anything there or not. And that is tormenting me.’

  He spoke evenly, but the grip of his hand on my arm and the rigid set of his mouth showed that he was in earnest.

  ‘You are casting me as Horatio,’ I said.

  ‘Hamlet’s friend.’ He laughed, but without much mirth. ‘Then you accept?’

  ‘I don’t know. You must say what I am to look for.’

  ‘Everything and nothing. I am an interested spectator, a biased one. I need a neutral pair of eyes to see whether there really is anything out of place.’

  ‘Out of place? How will I recognise what’s out of place in your house, for God’s sake?’

  ‘You will know what you are looking for when you find it.’

  ‘Very cryptic, Master Eliot.’

  ‘William.’

  ‘It is still cryptic, whatever you prefer to be called. But do your clever words actually mean anything?’

  ‘That is the very question I would ask about my father’s death. What does it signify?’

  ‘And why me?’

  ‘Because you showed quickness and dexterity when you accused the steward of theft this afternoon. More important, you were right to act as you did. Because you are a player, and have a sense of the divide between what men say and what they are. And because you know the play.’

  ‘That play?’

  ‘Yes, the play about a father’s death and a mother’s remarriage. Don’t worry that I’m confusing what really happened with what is presented daily on the playhouse boards. But the connection is a . . . pregnant one.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘But suppose there is nothing for me to find or suppose that I am a less percipient spectator than you give me credit for? You must understand that nothing may come of this pregnancy.’

  ‘I hope it won’t,’ he said. I did not believe him. He wished, as all of us do, to discover the worst. He continued, ‘As I said, I respect my uncle and I love my mother. I wish them well in their new life. Though they were married so soon after my father’s death . . .’

  Having made the arrangements for my reception into his mother’s house and after a few more inconsequential exchanges, William Eliot left me sitting in the Goat & Monkey, bemused at this latest shift in my fortune. I couldn’t deny that his offer of lodging was opportune. It would save me the cost of my rent, a not insignificant part of a jobbing player’s insignificant wages. Putting up in one of the grand houses on the north bank would be a dozen times more comfortable than anything I could afford across the water here in Southwark. Most of all, it would be an introduction to people of wealth and influence – and if one is a poor and youngish player making one’s way in the capital then that is something not to be sniffed at.

  And I was curious. The story that William Eliot had recounted was so queerly parallel to events in our author’s latest play that, sceptical as I was, I could not help being affected by what he said. My own argument, supported by dates and times as well as by common sense, was that there could be no link between what had happened in a private garden on the other side of the river Thames and the imagined events in an orchard in Elsinore in the Kingdom of Denmark. If dramatic logic or the parallel were followed, then Sir Thomas Eliot would turn out to be a murderer, the Lady Alice an adulteress possibly complicit in the death of her husband, and – before the action was concluded – her son William would himself have carried out a fair few killings.

  Absurd . . .

  My thoughts were interrupted by a series of repeated screams a few feet from my face.

  ‘Jesus, Nat, you startled me.’

  It was the man who made his living by mimicking animals for a penny in taverns or the street.

  ‘What are you? I don’t recognise that.’

  He was a small grubby man and he now held out an equally small grubby hand. I handed over a penny.

  ‘Laughing hyena.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘Its cries are like laughter, sir. Hear me now.’

  Encouraged by the penny, he gave several more screeches in which, I suppose, there might just have been detected a species of maniacal, mirthless amusement.

  And, looking back, that was a justified commentary on the predicament into which I was about to sink myself.

  ACT II

  So a new man has entered the house. He suspects that something is wrong, without being able to put his finger on it. Or he has been told that something is wrong. But he knows nothing, and certainly nothing about me. What do I know about Master Nicholas Revill? He is tall and hollow-cheeked with coal-black hair. He is young and eager, though he tries to disguise this with a display of worldliness. He is a player. Well, I am a player too. But I give nothing away by saying that. So are all men – and women too; we’re all players – on or off the stage. Professional players, I have observed, are usually rather obtuse. For all their vaunts about understanding human nature, most of them don’t see further than their noses. They are so concerned with the self that the independent existence of others is a strange concept to them. I know too that Master Revill is the son of a parson in the west; I believe that both his parents perished in the plague. He then came to seek his fortune in London, having contracted from somewhere the desire to make an exhibition of himself on the stage. This desire is as virulent – and almost as fatal – a contagion as the plague. A period with the Admiral’s Men and now with the Chamberlain’s Company. But still he plays the small parts. Nothing will come of him.

  Every so often, on the nights when I am unable to sleep, I turn round and round the memory of how I swung down from the pear tree in the walled garden, and approached the sleeping form of my enemy. Sometimes I see this as I saw it then, from inside my own case of eyes. Sometimes I see it as if outside myself, as another would have seen it. A crouched, stealthy figure dropping from the tree, fatal fruit. Then, loping across the tussocked grass, an animal closing on its undefended prey. Am I condemned for ever to relive the moment when I stood above his still breathing body, the moment when I unsealed the phial and trickled its contents into his ear? The brief convulsions. The early silence. The wait before my ‘audience’ gathered, the little group come to appreciate, to be horrified, to be struck dumb, by the spectacle that I alone had created. How I wanted to
hasten their arrival, by shouting out or screaming, doing something foolish which would have brought them running to the garden.

  But I waited. And was rewarded. The discovery of the body in the evening. The uproar and grief.

  And what was this all for? For nothing if I am discovered – not likely, I tell myself on those sleepless nights, not likely that the crime will be discovered. Master Revill, he will find nothing. The only danger I face is from myself, from betraying myself. Guilt spills itself in fearing to be spilt, as someone says. I expected to discover that I had lost my clear conscience, but I have discovered instead something more valuable: conscience is a cowardly bitch and will respond to a good whipping. Oh, she will keep her kennel.

  * * *

  The wind brushed across the water, bringing a scatter of yellowing leaves from the trees on the bank. I huddled lower into my cape. The boatman pushed off from the shore and plied steadily into the current and the early morning traffic. Downstream, the silhouette of the buildings on London Bridge made an unbroken line with the houses on either bank, so that we seemed enclosed on a lake and not afloat on a mighty conduit to the sea. Other ferries scudded back and forth, taking citizens to or from their pleasure on the south bank or their business on the north. Eel boats and herring busses slithered among the swarm of smaller vessels, and we rocked and bobbed when we crossed their trails. It was too late in the year, as well as too early in the day, for any pleasure boat. Once, just after I’d arrived in London and near this very spot (and the very day after I had glimpsed our glorious Queen in procession in the street), I’d seen the royal barge, oars agleam, mastering the tide. Mistressing the tide, I should say, mindful of its occupant. This double vision of our Gloriana on successive days – though, to be truthful, I had not actually seen her in the barge – gave me the curious idea that I was destined to glimpse her every day that both of us were in London. Yet I have not seen her since.

  Whenever I crossed the river, I thought of that extraordinary feat of the Burbage brothers and the other Chamberlain’s shareholders when they transported the Theatre playhouse from Finsbury, north of the river. It was one of those stories to which we theatre folk are particularly receptive, because it presented us in a fashion that was both heroic and practical. It is not by chance that the figure who holds up the globe on top of our (yes, now I may say our!) playhouse is the mighty Hercules. For this shifting of an entire edifice was a truly Herculean labour. The epic move was the talk of the town for at least a fortnight. The lease on the Finsbury Theatre had run out. There was a disagreement with the landlord. The Chamberlain’s Company had a right to the structure, perhaps, but not to the ground it sat on. The oaken main timbers, the beams and the staves and uprights, were gently prised one from another. Pegs were eased from joints which had hardened over time, numbers were chalked across the dismantled frame, relays of carts organised to take the lumber down Bishopsgate and into Thames Street beside the river. And then in the middle of the winter of ’98, when the Thames had frozen solid, there began the great enterprise of ferrying this load of living wood across to the far side.

  I envisaged the carts and the improvised sledges creaking under the weight of the frame of the playhouse – its bare bones, so to speak. I could see the panting breath of the men, the shareholder-players, as they tugged at their precious cargo, searching for a purchase on the ice. I envy these men who are now my colleagues, I envy them their part in the epic undertaking. Above them wheels all the starry heaven of a frosty winter night. I could imagine the urgency of the crossing, and the relief of reaching the far bank. Then Master Peter Street, the carpenter, had worked a near-miracle in putting together what had been taken asunder. And behold! As broken bones are sometimes stronger when they mend, so the Globe which arose, phoenix-like, from the remnants of the Theatre in Finsbury is a greater and stronger edifice than anything that is or that ever was before.

  From the stern of the little ferry I saw the white playhouse on the far bank, a sight now grown familiar but still capable of making my heart beat faster. My boatman, blessedly silent apart from the occasional oath which is as necessary to the breed as breathing, thrust his oars into the stream. I hadn’t seen Adam Gibbons again, the man who had collided with me and then nearly throttled the life out of me. There were boatmen by the hundred, by the thousand, plying this stretch of the river, it is true, but London, great as she is, is also in some sense a small place and one may be sure of meeting again those whom one has encountered once.

  We were now halfway across the murky river, and my thoughts turned to the household of Sir Thomas Eliot and Lady Alice and William. If I had twisted round in my seat I could have glimpsed it, one of the fine mansions on the north bank. I had lodged there for some days now and been received kindly, if distantly, by the head of the house. William’s story was that I was a player in temporary distress for accommodation. True enough. And, considering the good turn I had done the family in helping to expose the false steward Adrian and vindicate the good servant Jacob, it was the least they could do to provide for my needs while I searched for somewhere more permanent to lodge. So, William said, he had said to his mother and his stepfather-uncle. Of the more obscure reason for my being there – to observe whether there was anything ‘out of place’ – he naturally said nothing. I was his spy or intelligencer, primed to uncover the secrets of others, and this was the secret between us.

  While I am halfway across the river, and nothing of interest can happen (unless the ferry be suddenly overwhelmed or the royal barge swan into view) I will recount the first of my discoveries. In the same way I will set down at intervals in the rest of this narrative the other things that I discovered inside – and outside – Lady Alice’s house. I will produce them accurately and keeping to the sequence in which they occurred or in which I found out about them. Though I now know what really happened, I will not anticipate my discovery of the final, strange truth by hinting at or foreshadowing the end.

  I took my mission seriously. I even kept a little black-bound book in which I literally noted down what I had uncovered. And, to please myself, I kept it in the crude cipher which I had used once with a friend at school: that is, I simply transposed English characters into their equivalent in the Greek (so that an a became an alpha, a b a beta, and so on). To be truthful, this would not have concealed what I meant from many eyes, but it gave to my investigation an agreeably cabbalistic air. I mention all this to show how innocently I entered upon this business, as greenly as a schoolboy scrawling notes to a classmate. I wanted to please William Eliot. There is value in having a well-connected young patron – but also I had taken to him, and thought our acquaintance might turn to friendship. And I was attracted by what I might call the ‘matter’.

  To begin with the body.

  I spoke to the servants. I found people were willing to talk to me. I had won some credit in the Eliot household in a twofold fashion: I had assisted the unfortunate Jacob, who tended now to trail about after me when not otherwise engaged on his daily duties. And I had been instrumental in helping to get rid of Adrian the steward. He, I gathered, had been feared and unpopular with the servants because of his high-handed ways and his slyness. The story of what I, Nick Revill, had said and done in the box at the Globe playhouse had filtered through the house.

  I spoke to the servants, I say. In particular, the one who had been sent up the wall on a ladder to see what what had happened to old Sir William Eliot. His name was Francis. He was a small, wiry man with a creased brow. He found it hard to keep still, and jigged and mimed, for example, his mounting of the ladder. He needed little prompting to speak about that evening. It might be the most exciting thing that would happen to him in his life, and the story he told must have been repeated a hundred times in the servants’ quarters. I was merely the latest questioner wanting to know about the mysterious and tragic death of Sir William Eliot.

  I have here set down the things that I discovered in my investigation into Eliot’s death as if I were in
terrogating witnesses in a court of law. In doing so, I have formalised my own questions and I have condensed answers – and probably given them a coherence they did not possess – but I have not materially changed what was meant. It may seem surprising that a mere servant such as Francis should speak so frankly about his master or mistress, but I believe it to be true of these large households that they are more like parishes where neighbours gossip to one another and speak openly of the parson or the schoolmaster or the lord of the manor. And among people who live all under one roof, although they will be respectful to their betters, there is often a queer sense of equality too.

  Nick Revill: When did you first understand that there was something wrong in Sir William’s house?

  Francis the servant: Janet came to me, on Lady Alice’s orders. She told me to bring a ladder into the garden.

  N: A ladder? Now you surely thought that was odd, Francis?

  F: I thought one of the women had lost something. The wind had caught a hood or a bonnet and blown it into a tree, maybe. But, to be honest, sir, I did not think much. I did what I was told.

  N: What did you see when you went out into the garden?

  F: My lady and her son William were together near the door into the hidden garden.

  N: The hidden garden. This is what you call it?

  F: The secret garden or the hidden garden, yes. Or Sir William’s garden. We still use that name sometimes.

  N: Because he was the only one who went there?

  F: No one else had a key to it. Not even Lady Alice.

  N: And now it was she that you saw waiting by the closed door?

  F: Master William also. Some of the other servants were standing there too. None of them spoke when I arrived with my ladder across my shoulders, so. [Here Francis mimes the porting of a ladder.] It was dusk on a spring evening. It had been a fine day, a warm day, but now the air was cold. And I felt my skin prickling, like, at the cold. I shivered, I remember that I shivered.