The Pale Companion

by Philip Gooden

  “And now?”

  “If your mind be open too long, Master Revill, anything may fly into it. Beware.”

  Full

  We were invited to a marriage feast. But of course we had to sing for our supper. The feast preceded the Dream, the evening performance of which was the reason we were at Instede. And a great feast it was, even if it was meant to be no more than a prologue to greater post-nuptial ones.

  The early evening sun streamed through the ample windows of the Instede banqueting hall, and the wax candles which had been placed in silver holders at regular intervals down each table remained unlit – no doubt they were there in case of a sudden eclipse. We of the Chamberlain’s occupied a low to middling position in the hall, from which we were permitted to glance up at the high and mighty beings on the dais, who included bride, groom, their parents &c. Below us were the lesser folk from the estate and its environs. As I’ve noticed in the playhouse, however, nobody wastes time inspecting his inferiors. All eyes were fastened upwards. So large was the number of important guests that the high table was, in fact, three tables: the main one many yards in length and with two shorter ones angling out from it at either end. The diners occupied one side only so that they might gaze over the rest of the hall, something which they did from time to time but in an abstracted, distant way.

  This was our first opportunity to study the bride, and – given what we’d heard about Lord Harry Ascre’s unwillingness to grasp his fortune (in any sense) with both hands and the consequent speculation about the reasons for his reluctance – study her we did. Our questions about Marianne’s appearance were soon answered.

  Questions such as: Had she two heads? No.

  Did she squint? Not that one could see.

  Was her complexion as pocked as a nutmeg-grater? From a distance, she looked to have a fetching mixture of red and white in her cheeks, with the latter as predominant as it should be in a young lady of good breeding.

  Her shape then, her proportions – was she spectacularly unpleasing in that regard? Again, no. From where I was sitting with my fellows, Marianne Morland seemed gracefully but not ungenerously built. Jack Wilson and Michael Donegrace and I commented on the cut of her gown, or rather on the way in which it teasingly revealed her cleavage – a style that was appropriate to the unmarried woman which she could still (just) claim to be. In fact, we decided that, if asked, any one of us would have been prepared to consider her as a match for himself, quite aside from the matter of the large portion or dowry which came with her.

  What of Harry Ascre, the reluctant bridegroom? During the last few days leading up to this marriage eve, he’d been looking slightly less gloomy. I’d glimpsed him about the place in the company of his brother Cuthbert or with some of the great guests, and had even noticed the odd smile, the occasional grin softening his haggard features. So I’d begun to discount that memory of him in the hornbeam garden, hunched up, muttering madly, as well as the gossip concerning his willingness or otherwise to be married. Perhaps all grooms-to-be endure such moments of doubt and anxiety. What did I know? (I only knew that if I were to have the prospect of marrying, say, Mistress Fielding, I would endure many throbbing days and sleepless nights beforehand.) But whatever it was that had been making Lord Harry more cheery during recent days had now evaporated. The old, drawn look was returned to his features. Sitting at the top table in the banqueting hall, he seemed sunk inside himself. I hoped for her sake that his bride did not take this as a personal slight, and by her smiling she seemed to say that she did not.

  The bride’s parents, the Morlands of Bristol, were seated beside their hosts, Lord and Lady Elcombe. These Bristolians had the sheen of money. Just as the good huswife protects a piece of furniture by frequent waxing and shining, so this couple – plain only in their names, Master Martin Morland and Mistress Frances Morland – had been buffed with wealth until they shone. You felt that nothing could touch them, or rather that they would have remained unmarked by anything placed on them, as it were. The chief guests, lords and ladies, filled the remaining seats on the dais. The grandest of them had whole counties for names: Devons and Cornwalls, Surreys and Rutlands. The less grand were named for mere cities or towns: your Winchesters, Exeters and Derbys. I was somehow pleased to see Justice of the Peace Fielding sitting up there with his daughter, even though we hadn’t spoken since our argument of a couple of days earlier. Whatever coolness there’d been during the interview with the Elcombes, it evidently hadn’t affected his standing at Instede House. Kate too looked cheerful and at her ease, chatting with Cuthbert.

  The tables immediately below the dais were occupied by knights and their dames, together with individuals such as the kindly-looking parson Brown (the one who’d overseen Robin’s interment) and the local schoolmaster. Also stationed here were the noble little children due to play the sprites and fairy attendants in our Dream. Like more than one or two adult players I’ve known, it seemed that they were mostly too excited to eat anything before the performance.

  There may have been holes in Elcombe’s purse – and according to Jack Wilson, this was a main motive behind the Elcombe–Morland marriage – but it was apparent that the host wanted to demonstrate that his resources were almost without limit. Even the tables of we less elevated folk were covered with the finest linen, and we ate and drank with and from silver and glass. Men servants only were used to fetch and carry, since everybody knows that they’re more costly than women on occasions like this. These servants were attractively liveried in a grey, marbled worsted that subtly signalled money as well as the good taste which knows how to spend it. I detected my lady’s hand here.

  As for the food . . . we’d heard that a master cook by the name of Cox had been brought down from London, together with two undercooks, specially for this feast and the ones which would follow the wedding. And as for the food they produced . . . what herds, gaggles and shoals must have breathed their last for our pleasure! The choice on the high tables would have been much more lavish than what was offered to us, but even we were provided with veal and conies and goose and capon – and that was just to start with. I would have been content with cheat-bread and ale to accompany all this – I’ve still retained my country preferences and, anyway, never have much of an appetite before a performance – but we were given manchet to sop up the juices and claret to wash it all down with. As a second course, we were plied with lamb and kid, pheasant and pigeon – oh, and tart and butter and fritters and custard and fruit.

  They say that banquets are meant to inflame the senses, or at any rate the lower urges, and this must be doubly true of those celebrations which frame a wedding. For the first time in several days I caught myself thinking of my whore Nell and wishing that I had her at hand, so to speak. And this despite the fact that I was due to perform, in quite another sense, in a hour’s time. Perhaps these stabs of lust were inspired by the kissing-comfits which suddenly appeared in profusion on the tables and which made one think of their breath-sweetening purpose and then of reasons why one might wish one’s breath to be sugared over. Together with the comfits came suckets, both wet and dry, and some tantalizing little mounds of sweetened cream which worldly old Jack Wilson told me were known as ‘spanish paps’. They were delicious.

  But I was able to get my own back on Jack when we were presented with more sweets in the shape of escutcheons or arms. It was the design on the shield which baffled Jack and which, with my fondness for puzzles, I was able to elucidate. The brightly coloured, candied device featured a large yellow L-shape nestling in a kind of curved hollow. “It’s a rebus,” I explained, “a pictorial pun on the family name. El-combe. Here’s the ‘ell’, and it’s resting in or just above this curved hollow – or ‘combe’ as it’s sometimes called. Hence, Elcombe.”

  I waited for Jack to congratulate me on my cleverness, but unaccountably he just said, “You should have been a schoolmaster, Nick. All I’m interested in is what it tastes like. And when I put this in my mouth, so, I am in
a manner nibbling on our host.”

  “Eating him arms and all,” I said, pleased with my pun (which, by the by, also went unremarked).

  All around us was laughter and chat, the clink of cutlery and glass. From a far corner emanated the soothing sounds of lute and hautboy, as sauce to our eating. Even at our comparatively lowly station in the hall there was a restraint in manners. I saw no one wiping his or her lips with a hand; rather each diner used a glowing white napkin to dab delicately around the mouth. There was no unseemly jostling to plunge one’s knife or spoon into the serving mess containing the meats; instead it was the attitude of after-you-sir-no-you-first-madam which predominated. Of course on the top table they had individual serving dishes, that was how special they were.

  But we of the Chamberlain’s were not permitted to sit long over the feast, picking every last morsel from between our teeth and draining the final dregs from the cup of pleasure. We had to attend to the pleasure of others, namely the Elcombe and Morland families and their guests. At a discreet signal from Thomas Pope, we got up from our seats. I was half impressed to see Cuthbert Ascre also rise from his privileged place on the top table, when he realized that we were leaving. He is a proper player, I thought, and wondered whether he had not been absolutely sincere when he rued that he was not “free” to act. Did he really want to escape from his gilded cage of rank and wealth? Of course the scion of a noble house could act, as long as he remained unpaid. But once coin entered the question, well, then the well-born had to bow out. Playing isn’t that respectable – yet.

  Outside, the declining sun shot his beams over our playing area and the banks of seats which had been erected to accommodate the bottoms of top persons. Above was the limitless blue arch of a fine summer evening. Off to one side was the pleasure-garden enclosed by the hornbeam hedge. We were to begin our Dream at eight o’clock or thereabouts. The action would finish as darkness began to fall. The glimmers of a midsummer’s night would attend Oberon and Puck’s closing words, their visages flickeringly revealed by the flare of torches, as they called down blessing on the newly married couples and required indulgence from the audience. Then the noble little children would parade and troop, holding tapers and singing their own epithalamium.

  A shiver ran through me, a shiver of expectation and, just a little, of apprehension. I’d played outside on only a couple of occasions and never before with the Chamberlain’s. Of course, it was what some companies did all the time, those companies which were perhaps less fortunate or gifted than ours and were without a house to call their own. I thought of the Paradise Brothers (would they be in attendance tonight, to see how it should be done? I wondered), they who carried their properties from town to town and enacted their tales of the Bible on makeshift stages in market squares.

  Playing outside feels more . . . dangerous than playing inside. Not because of the obvious things like wind and rain, mere inconveniences which might keep an audience away or carry off our words into oblivion. Rather, I can only describe it as enhanced sense of exposure. There’s no barrier between the player and the great wide world, even the overhanging firmament itself. Man in all his heroic littleness standing against the sky and the stars.

  And if this sounds like arrogance or simple absurdity – well, maybe it is.

  Enough cut-price philosophy. You can get that free in any tavern.

  Canvas screens had been slung between some of the trees on the edge of the playing area, and it was in the shelter of these that we changed and did our face-painting. We had brought no tire-man with us to straighten out our costumes or to tell us of our infinite insignificance in comparison with what we were wearing but Jack Horner, who had relatively small parts in the play, had elected to smooth each man’s lappets and tighten his points – or at least to indicate to us what was needed in the way of smoothing and tightening. Perhaps Sincklo had requested that he do this. Jack was doubling as Egeus, the tyrannical father of my Hermia, and Philostrate, the master of the revels at Theseus’s Court. As such he appeared at the beginning and the end of the action but not in between. He cast a cursory glance over me and pronounced that I’d do.

  “Thank you, Jack,” I said.

  “Delighted, Nicholas,” he replied before moving on.

  Cuthbert Ascre presented himself for Jack’s approval, and I observed that Horner was rather more courteous with our patron’s son. I saw Laurence Savage observing it too. I was still smarting from his recent attack, when he’d not minced his words in telling me to have nothing to do with Cuthbert. We hadn’t spoken since.

  “Tell me, Laurence, is it only the father that you hate? Or his sons as well?”

  I don’t know why I said this. I suppose that I wanted to demonstrate, in a roundabout way, that I wasn’t the only one to show civility – or, as Laurence would put it, arse-licking – to an Ascre.

  Laurence was in his rough garb as Bottom. And roughly he replied, “Am I required to like this family?”

  “No,” I conceded. “Of course not. But ever since we arrived here, in fact as we were walking together up the road to Instede, you’ve made it absolutely clear that you loathe Elcombe and all his works.”

  “And you wonder why?”

  “That would be my question, if we were still friends.”

  I was glad to see a kind of softening come over Laurence’s featureless features and hoped we might re-establish our usual cordial relations.

  “Very well, Nicholas. We have a few moments before these high and mighty folk come and plant their posteriors on the seats.”

  From the shelter of the canvas screen we could see the great company come trickling from the house. The Devons and the Cornwalls. The Winchesters and the Derbys. All of England came rolling towards us, in little. Some of them drifted in the direction of the enclosed garden to take a stroll before the play. There was laughter and shouting in the golden air. I wondered how many of our audience, bellies already full and heads rapidly filling with winy fumes, would be able to resist the lure of sleep.

  “Let me enlighten you,” he began. “I have a story to tell. There was once a woman who lived near Cheapside. She had two sons, one of them scarcely beginning to walk and the other . . . well, the other old enough to be beginning to know how the world works. There’d been three other children in between these two, to fill up the spaces, but they’d all died. And her husband too had died not long since, just after the birth of the youngest son. He’d been a glover and in the way of things she was allowed to take over his business when he went. But the business was debt-ridden and anyway she lacked the skill or the will to carry on the trade. It quickly declined and was bought for a pittance by a man in the next street who had long been a rival of her husband’s. The widow didn’t mind too much. She was handsome enough, particularly when dressed in black, and could expect to marry after the appropriate period of mourning had passed. In the meantime, though, with two children to provide for, she had to turn her hand to small jobs which she considered to be beneath her. Laundering and the like. After the mourning period was over the offers of marriage didn’t come in, not in the quantity or the quality she’d hoped for. Perhaps the prospective husbands were put off by the gossip about debt, or perhaps it was her pride that did it, she was a proud woman. I believe there was one man who’d been turned away early on who she’d’ve been glad enough to accept later when times got hard, when things got desperate.”

  All this time while Laurence Savage was talking in a low, confiding tone, I nodded away and looked understanding though I couldn’t see what any of this had to do with Lord Elcombe.

  “Things grew desperate, as I say. This little trio had to shift to some tumbledown tenement near the Fleet Ditch, and there the widow struggled to keep the black clothes on her back and the white shirts on her children’s. Well, one fine morning these two surviving sons, the small one who was walking quite sturdily by now and . . . the other one, were outside in the street. Perhaps the older son was amusing his little brother by drawing shap
es in the dirt with a stick, perhaps he was teaching him to count the number of rats that crawled about the bank, and showed no fear of man or beast. Those rats, by the by, looked much more thriving than the poor benighted humans who lived on the banks of that stinking current.”

  “Yes, I know the place and do not like it,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Ah, Nick,” said Laurence, “we shall have to wait for the conclusion of the story. Look.”

  He gestured at the bank of seats erected in front of the playing area. They were all full now except for a central section which was to be occupied by the bride and groom-to-be and their families. I’d been so absorbed in Laurence’s tale that I’d almost forgotten the audience – but not quite. No actor quite forgets his audience.

  “We are both on in a moment,” said Laurence Savage, sliding away. I was momentarily annoyed, almost suspecting him of deliberately pausing at this point in his narrative to make me more eager to hear the rest of it. I still couldn’t see any connection between Lord Elcombe and two little Savages – for it was certain that the older boy was Laurence himself, wasn’t it? – playing by a filthy London stream. But now these speculations were put to one side as Master Thomas Pope came round in his Puckish guise to give us, each and every one, some last word of encouragement. I noticed that he was especially solicitous to the company of noble children who were to open the action with a fairy procession and a dance before the appearance of the adult humans. By this time, with a little fanfare, the Elcombes and Morlands had taken up their places and so we had our cue to begin.

  Before I entered, and while Theseus and Hippolyta were talking of the snail-paced approach of their wedding, I cast my eyes swiftly across the audience, trying to place Kate Fielding. Yes, there she was, next to her father. Both of them were sitting above and to one side of the Elcombe clan. I felt a little shiver run through me which, I swear, was less to do with apprehension over the coming performance than it was connected to Kate’s presence. She had never seen me act before, although as soon as this notion occurred to me came the counter-idea: why should she care whether she’d seen me before or not? And then I was able to give no more time to my heart for I had to step out onto the golden green and play the part of the anguished lover, Lysander.