‘I do my best, sir.’
‘You were present when the body of Sir William Eliot was found, I know.’
I had grown used to the dark and so, even with the mist swirling about us, I could almost see the start he gave at this unexpected subject. When Francis spoke there was a tremor of pride in his voice.
‘It was me who found the late master. In his hammock.’
I resisted the temptation of saying, And it was I who put him there. Instead I said, ‘There are worse places to die than in one’s hammock. To pass from a little sleep to a larger one.’
‘Another gentleman spoke to me recently of . . . that same thing. He wanted to know how I discovered Sir William and other things.’
‘Such as?’
‘How my lady carried herself. What were her words that came at me when I was feeling the darkness on the other side of the wall. He had a deal of questions.’
‘It is Master Revill that you mean?’
‘Him, sir, the player.’
‘Francis, accompany me, would you? I have something to show you.’
‘Pardon me, sir, but could not this business be conducted indoors?’
‘No house but has hidden eyes, Francis.’
This reply seemed to satisfy him, for after a pause he continued, ‘Master Adrian, he said you had a shirt. It has gone from the trunk under my bed these two days. A man like me may measure his worth in the world by his shirts. I have little else.’
‘You have hit on the very matter that I wished to talk to you about – your shirt.’
‘We are talking now, sir.’
‘Somewhere more removed. Why, this is almost a thoroughfare.’
This was nonsense. Mixen Lane leads nowhere but to the river, and who would be going down there on a cold misty autumn night? The only passengers would be drunks who had lost their way or groping couples too poor to pay for a straw pallet in a flea-ridden leaping-house, and thinking to recline on the soft stinking banks of our Thames.
‘Come Francis, I mean you no harm, and look what I have here – see!’
With a flourish that would have befitted the stage I produced the shirt from under my cloak. It seemed to glimmer as I passed it over, although for all that was to be seen in the misty darkness I might have shown him a piece of bed-sheet. Francis reached out eagerly and clasped the unwashed item. I believe he even put it up to his nostrils and snuffed his own scent. The question that would have sprung to my lips in such circumstances – why had I taken this garment into my hands? – did not occur to the simple servant or, if it did, he chose not to voice it.
‘There are one or two other things I must discuss with you, Francis, and they concern the death of your late master. I have to tell you’ – and here I leaned closer to him and whispered confidentially – ‘that I suspect foul play was involved. I need your help. I need your head in this matter, but we must discuss it elsewhere.’
I took him by the arm and turned in the direction of the river. When you speak soothingly to an animal and caress it, the creature will follow you at heels, even though it is half aware that it goes to its doom; even so I urged Francis to accompany me with mild words and a gentle touch. He permitted himself to be led by the nose. The lane sloped down towards the water and turned into a muddy slide. The tide was out, and the slime and stones that spend half their long lives under the filthy water were revealed to the nose if not the eye. I sensed rather than heard the river’s black rush beyond the bank of the mist.
‘Here, sir?’
He was frightened again.
‘This is away from prying eyes, is it not.’
‘It is night, sir, and quiet and misty. Who is see to us?’
‘Just so.’
He tried again. ‘It is not healthful to be out and about so late.’
‘We shall not be long. Anyway you are close to the house and that should bring you comfort.’
Behind us, though unseen, loomed the garden wall. It was in there, over the wall, last spring that I had . . . And now here, almost in the same spot again, I was to . . . perhaps there is no end to this process once it has been begun. Murder breeds murder. It is the slippery slope, like the muddy chute which leads down to the banks of our river. It is even as the descent into hell, easy and easier still the further that you slide down. Facilis est descensus Averno.
‘Why should I need comfort?’ said Francis.
‘It is a comfort to be close to the familiar, when one is in extremis.’
Poor man, he did not understand exactly what I meant but he knew what was going to happen. I held him by the upper arm, but tenderly. If he had wanted to, he could have broken away, have slithered and scrabbled across the mud and pebbles up into the safety of Mixen Lane and the side-door of his master’s house. Even in the darkness he should have found his path by the upward slant of the ground. He was a quick, nervous man, and might possibly have outrun me; but I knew he would not attempt to leave my grasp.
‘You knew I was there, Francis?’
‘I do not think so, sir.’
‘No matter. You my not have seen me but I have seen you. You jerked your head round, so, as you crossed the garden which lies over that wall.’
In the darkness I mimed the sudden movement of the head which I remembered him making. His upper arm tensed under my grasp. Perhaps he was able to see me now. The mist on the river gave off a queer dirty yellow light as if it were sickening from within.
But if Francis saw me now, he had not glimpsed me then, on the day that I murdered William. Francis, the good servant sent in quest of his master, had turned his white face straight at me but his eyes were not accustomed to the growing dark and I was obscure among the budding foliage. To me, on that evening in early spring, the scene appeared almost light as day. I had owl-sight. The moon was up, and the evening star hovered atop the wall. Moments later I had heard him gasp as he stumbled across the body of my enemy, which swayed slightly in the airs of evening. Then there were torches and confusion; flickering lights while the body was hoisted from the hammock; a woman wailing, one of the servants and not my lady Alice. But before all that to-do I had witnessed the action which Francis performed: delicately, he extended his arm and brushed at the cheek of his deceased master. It was a gesture that spoke well for him, it was a gentle and gracious movement. It was also the gesture that would now ensure his death.
‘You were up a tree, sir.’
‘Ha, I was like the owl.’
‘ – a less innocent creature I think.’
‘What?’
‘The worm, sir.’
Although I realised that Francis was talking to delay the inevitable, I was minded to humour him, a dead man. I was surprised too at the firmness and composure of his voice.
‘The worm, Francis?’
‘The worm that flies by night.’
‘That is not altogether inappropriate, my friend, for as you know—’ and here I swelled slightly as I spoke the words of Hamlet’s father, the ghost, the late king –
‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me.’
I have never been able to resist an audience, even of one. Francis seemed curiously relaxed when he said, ‘And you were that serpent, sir.’
‘Just so—’
He had taken me off-guard as I was reciting those lines, and tore his arm from my slackened grip. Nimbly he darted away into the mist. I was so startled that I merely stood and stared at the blank air. I listened. There were sounds of scraping and splashing as Francis made his frantic way across the mud and shingle. For an instant I was no longer sure of my own orientation, and where the river flowed, where the walls of the garden stood. I cursed myself for having brought this man down to the shore of the river and toyed with him, when I might have made an end of the whole miserable business in the lane by the side-gate and no one any the wiser. Now I was mortally exposed if he should regain the safety of the mansion.
From quite near at hand there came a dull
thump and a drawn-out sigh, and I jumped nearly out of my skin because I thought that someone else was on my patch of bank. The noise was almost direct ahead of me. I stopped breathing. Now there was nothing to be heard above or below the sound of the gliding river.
I crouched down and whistled softly, as you might to draw on a frightened dog.
‘Francis,’ I said softly, ‘oh Francis. Come back. I mean you no harm and never did.’
Silence.
I groaned.
‘Francis. I have injured myself. I need your assistance. Help me.’
In front of me coiled the dirty yellow mist. To my left there was a plop and then a splash as small things returned to the water. But no human sound. I waited a few more moments and then, half crouching, I edged my way forward, hands splayed, feet slithering on the slime and stone.
He was closer than I expected, and face down in the mud. He had slipped as he was trying to effect his escape from me. Whether by accident or design he had made off in a direction parallel to the river rather than attempting to regain the little lane that ran up beside the house. In the darkness I was able to make out his shape – for who else could it be? – together with a black pointed object that sat next to his head. This I reached out to touch and then more quickly withdrew my hand. It was hard and slick, and not with river-mud. When Francis fell he struck his head on a rocky outcrop which might have been fashioned to brain a man, it was so sharp-pointed and so angled upwards.
Francis groaned. A tremor passed down the dark form at my feet. He was still breathing. With my nerves on fire, with a buzzing in my ears, with a red curtain closing in front of my eyes, I straddled his prone body. I half raised him from the ground by his head, using my two hands as if I were lifting a small round boulder. His body seemed to make a motion to go after the head and to rise up between my legs as if to overthrow me, but it was light, it was tiny, it was like a tail to this round head clasped between my hands. Then I flung him back down again, head and all, so that the protruding stone might do its work properly. Something spattered my face. There was the same sound that I had heard earlier, of his head striking against the rock, but this time it was not followed by a sigh.
I sat down on the bank of our Thames, careless of the dirt and other filth. Slowly my breathing calmed. Close by me ran the unseen river, with an innocent purling sound like a stream. I waited. In my hands, on my palms and finger-ends I could feel still the shape of Francis’s head as I had raised it up from where he had lain on the ground. In size and texture it was like a ball of stone, but warm as if left out in the sun. In one place it was not smooth at all but soft and dented. I had the leisure to wonder whether I would ever forget the roundness, the warm smoothness of that other man’s head before I threw it at the pointed rock. I gazed at my invisible hands, which were, I surmised, black with mud, with blood, with the night.
After a time I went towards the river. The ground grew softer and boggier. I thrust my hands into the water and wrung them together and it seemed to me that each hand was the enemy of the other, and I the enemy of both. The water was cold and continually tried to push my hands away from my body, and take them off downstream. Once I grew unsteady on my footing and almost toppled into the river.
Then I sat again and considered the matter. I had not done anything so bad. Francis was a figure of no account. He knew what I was, and for that reason he had to die. It was true that I had somewhat lost sight of my original aim in all this, and that I had been ushered down a path not of my own choosing. But I had made the best of the road I was forced to travel. Anyway, Francis slept. He was secure, secure as sleep. I was safe from him and he was safe from me.
I got up and laid hold of Francis’s feet. I tugged and hauled, while he slipped and stuck in places as he was drawn unwillingly over the rough foreshore. It was several hours until high tide by my reckoning. I might safely leave the body on the water’s edge, and by morning it would be carried away downstream to join the other detritus of our watery thoroughfare. The only impediment were the massive piers of the Bridge, and if Francis’s corpse was smashed against them by the downsweep of the tide it would be even further disfigured.
I left him there, half in, half out of the water. And so an end.
It was only much later, after I was indoors again, that I remembered the shirt that I had given back to Francis.
* * *
I went to pay my last respects to Francis and was rewarded for my pains. His body was laid out on a table in an empty ground-floor room. There was no watcher, such as I had been accustomed to when people perished in my father’s parish, but of course that was a country custom, and therefore most likely to be shunned in the great city. Francis had been in the water for several hours and received severe injuries to his head where he had struck a rock. But something of the old Francis remained still. Enough to show that he was as anxious-looking in death as he had been in life. He gave the lie, as plague victims do, to the idea that sleep awaits us on the other side of death, the bourne from which no traveller returns. I shuddered.
As I was exiting the room I collided with a tall, gloomy fellow whom I recognised as one of the Eliot servants. Behind him hovered the bear-like figure of Jacob.
‘Master Revill?’
Jacob nudged him from the back. The two looked as if they were on a deputation.
‘I lodged with our Francis in this house, I was his bedfellow.’
‘Yes, he told me of you . . . Alfred?’
‘Peter.’
‘Peter, of course.’
The mute Joseph again banged this skinny fellow in the ribs to prompt him, but it was apparent that he didn’t know how to begin.
‘I am sorry that he is gone,’ I said.
‘Death comes for all,’ said Peter.
‘Indeed,’ I said.
‘To some he comes early,’ said Peter, evidently considering that the way forward was by remarks of riddling obviousness.
‘The river is treacherous,’ I replied.
‘Treacherous enough – but not as dark as a man’s heart,’ said lugubrious Peter.
‘No doubt,’ I said, curious as to why these two wished to speak to me, for they had the air of men with something to impart; but I was also – to be honest – growing rather tired of all these theatrical hints and whispers.
‘Master Revill, Jacob here saw something . . .’
Jacob proceeded to sketch shapes in the air. His arms flailed and he hopped from foot to foot. He pointed through the door to where the dead man lay. He shrugged his shoulders. He tugged at his shaggy hair as though trying to draw down his brows. He stood in one place, then in another. It was plain that he was enacting the roles played by two individuals, one of them presumably being Francis. Unfortunately I hadn’t the least idea what he was trying to demonstrate.
I smiled and nodded, and that drove Jacob to ever greater efforts at a dumb-show. I remembered his clumsiness in the box at the Globe when he had shown how utterly incapable he would have been in the business of stealing Lady Alice’s necklace. Suddenly a likeness occurred to me. The shrugging of the shoulders was Jacob’s way of fastening a cloak, while the brow-tugging signified a hat being pulled down.
‘Adrian the steward?’ I said.
At this Jacob nodded furiously, and Peter said, ‘That’s it, sir.’
‘I thought he had been banished by Sir Thomas, on pain of punishment.’
‘He’s a sly one,’ said Peter, ‘as you’d be the first to know, Master Revill.’
It will be seen that the subterfuge which had resulted in Adrian’s dismissal had made me something of a hero, if I may thus express it, to the staff in this household.
‘What Jacob here is, ah, saying is that Francis, God rest his soul, had dealings with Master Adrian?’
‘Just so,’ said Peter, who had taken on the role of interpreter to Jacob. Long association with the dumb giant had given him a facility of understanding. ‘He saw them together.’
‘When?’
&
nbsp; Here Jacob went into further contortions. I turned to Peter for enlightenment.
‘In the morning it was, yesterday.’
‘But Francis was a good servant, a loyal one,’ I protested with a vehemence that surprised me. ‘He wouldn’t have gone against Sir Thomas’s command.’
Jacob nodded, not in agreement but in denial of what I’d just said.
‘He was troubled by his shirt, sir,’ said Peter.
‘I know, I know all about the missing shirt.’
‘No longer missing,’ said Peter, producing, with a flourish which might be described as theatrical, a battered, crumpled and dirty garment from under his own not very much cleaner tunic.
I reached out. It was made of coarse cloth and was damp. It smelt of the river. A sudden shiver ran through me.
‘Where did this come from?’
‘Why, off him,’ said Peter, nodding his head in the direction of the body on the makeshift bier. ‘It were wrapped round his middle, like.’
‘Who gave it back to him?’ I said, half to myself. ‘You’re sure it belongs to Francis?’
‘Why, yes,’ said Peter. ‘Look at this mark here on the sleeve. He was wearing it on the night he found old Sir William and when he came back he took off the shirt and folded it and put it away in his trunk and never wore it again.’
On the sleeve was a greasy smear. I raised it to my nostrils but the only scent was the river.
‘Would you keep it, sir?’ said Peter.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
But I hadn’t the least idea what to do with a dead man’s shirt.
It was Nell who suggested an answer.
‘Why don’t you,’ she said, as she saw me peering and sniffing at the discoloured sleeve, ‘take it to old Nick?’
‘Old Nick’s got enough to do, surely, without troubling himself with dead man’s wear. Why, he may have the man entire and all without the encumbrance of clothing.’
Though, even as I said it, I considered that if Francis, the meek and inoffensive Francis, were destined for the undying bonfire, then which of us should escape a whipping for our sins? None, my masters, none.
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