The Pale Companion

by Philip Gooden

  Clear enough for the purpose. Which was . . . plain and not plain. I read the papers once. Then, with growing bafflement, read them again. It was a story of sorts. A picture began to emerge in my mind. It was like a landscape glimpsed through mist, mist which thins from time to time to let you see the outline of hills and plains before closing once more and leaving you uncertain and confused about where you are, where you’re going.

  I carefully refolded the sheets and replaced them in the box, tucked it under my arm and, yes, hared off towards the house and my guide in these matters, Justice Adam Fielding.

  “I have a painful tale to tell, my lady.”

  Lady Penelope sat stiffly in her chair in the inner room of her apartment, the quarters which until so recently she’d shared with her husband. She was veiled and garbed in black, as she would be for many months to come, although the black would soon begin to transmute to a fetching dark purple. Unbidden, I found myself thinking about her prospects of remarriage. I rated them as good. Though she’d endured some harrowing days recently and although there were others still in store – the violent demise of her husband, the incarceration and imminent execution of her son – she retained a drawn beauty. There’d be quite a few attracted by her name and her refined looks. Besides, I’ve observed that marriage has in it something of the quality of an old, comfortable habit. If it’s temporarily shrugged off on the death of a spouse, with most people it seems only a moment before they shrug themselves into another suit of clothes, as though they cannot bear to wander all naked and by themselves through this large world. Needless to say, I speak without experience in this business, but one day . . . no doubt . . .

  “Believe me, Penelope,” continued Fielding, “that I would not have requested this assembly if there had not been the most pressing reasons. Reasons which concern all of us.”

  I noted that he’d called Lady Elcombe directly by her given name. Enlightenment only came later.

  Lady Penelope gracefully – almost coquettishly, it seemed – inclined her black-cowled head towards Fielding. Yes, I thought, you will surely remarry and soon, at the same time marvelling at the extraordinary capacity of women to bear up through trials which would flatten men.

  “I wonder that there can be anything more painful,” she said.

  Adam Fielding looked round the room. There were half a dozen of us gathered there. In addition to Lady Elcombe and the Justice and myself there was Kate, of course, and Cuthbert Ascre and Oswald (who gave no indication that he’d lately been wandering in a wood). Night pressed against the windows. In his hand, Fielding held the collection of paper which I’d given him scarcely two hours earlier. What the sheets told him was so startling that he’d at once called this meeting with my Lady and her son and the steward, apologizing for breaking in on her mourning.

  “My young friend here found these sheets this evening in the wood-hole belonging to Robin. Rightly, he brought them to me. They tell a story which only you, my Lady, can confirm. And while it may be painful for you to have to do so, be assured that – if this tale is true – then we can clear your son Harry of his father’s death.”

  I saw Lady Penelope’s hands tighten on the arms of the chair where she sat stiff, upright. She said nothing, though.

  “My Lady, you will remember that shortly before the, ah, day of the wedding, I talked with you and Lord Elcombe about the death of Robin.”

  “I remember.”

  “Your husband said that that unfortunate individual had been born on the estate and then departed with his mother, only to return at some uncertain date, since when he had been dwelling in the Instede wood – for many years perhaps. It seemed that Robin had returned to his birthplace when his mother died, although nobody knew whether this was so or not. That is, nobody knew whether Merry – that was the name she was known by, was it not? – whether Merry was alive or dead.”

  “Why should they?”

  Lady Elcombe’s voice revealed how the strains of the last few days had taken their toll. She spoke barely above a whisper.

  “Indeed, why should they?” Fielding echoed. “She was only a simple woman, with something of a name for herself among the estate-workers.”

  “This was before my time.”

  Again the whisper.

  “Not quite, my Lady. Even if she did leave Instede not long after your arrival.”

  “Are you sure of your ground, Justice Fielding?” said Cuthbert. He had moved in the direction of his mother, perhaps with an impulse of protection. Kate’s face wore a look of troubled sweetness, though whether for her father or Lady Elcombe I could not tell. Oswald looked on as impassively as an obelisk.

  “Not altogether sure of my ground,” said Fielding. “That is why I must tread carefully. Perhaps . . . perhaps it would be less painful if I told a story. After all, what is in these sheets may be just that, a fiction.”

  “Tell your story, sir, and be done with it.”

  “Very well, my Lady. There was once a woman who came to a great estate as a new bride. Within the space of half a year or so she had done her duty by her husband and produced a male heir. The child came early and for a time they thought he wouldn’t survive. But he did, in fact he daily grew stronger and healthier. Hourly. Their rejoicing was short-lived for, although it was evident that the child was likely to thrive, it was also plain that all was not well with him. Not in body but in mind. The mother knew this soon enough, and the father – even if he could not bring himself to see it straightaway – knew it too.

  “Now this couple were tender-hearted, at least in that they did not at once expose the child or abandon it to the elements as our forefathers might have done. But they could not accept the idea that this . . . simpleton, this natural . . . would one day grow up and come to man’s estate. The odds were that he would die. Many children do. The unwanted ones especially. But this one was different. However feeble he was in mind, he showed every sign of health – rather as if all his strength was being diverted from his wits to his sinews. Who can blame them for how they felt? Who can blame them for what they did next? They were helped by the fact that few people were aware of the birth. The child had come early, as I say, and when it became plain that all was not in order, pains were taken to keep him out of the public eye.”

  There was a profound quiet in this dark room, illuminated only by a clutch of candles. I wondered at Master Fieldings’s cruelty and had to trust that he had some higher purpose in mind. Lady Elcombe had half turned in her chair but, like the rest of us, she was hanging on the Justice’s every word.

  “There was also living on the estate a working woman who’d got a name for herself as loose and careless. She possessed a son too, a long lolloping thing who ran wild. She’d had others no doubt, ones who’d run wild to their graves. In particular she’d very recently borne a child which cried its way through half a dozen days before giving up the ghost. It was to this woman that the mother and father turned . . . or perhaps it was the father only. Many children are put out to the wet-nurse. Now, the wet-nurse may be poor but she should be a woman of good character since everybody knows that children imbibe the character of their nurse together with their milk. This woman was poor, certainly, but not virtuous. She was a slattern. Careless, neglectful, loose in the hilts. Which was the very reason why the mother and father . . . or perhaps it was the father only . . . surrendered their baby to her. They knew she would not be over-concerned for her charge and that, even if she didn’t actively seek to end it, she would take no great pains to keep it alive. So the baby was put in the care of Mary, this was her name, and the mother and father washed their hands of their first-born.”

  “No,” said Lady Elcombe. She spoke in the same low tone, looking away from us. “No, please do not think that the mother forgot her child. She believed that she was cursed for her action. She thought God would strike her down – or at the least make her barren.”

  “But he did not,” said Fielding in a gentler tone. “Within the allotted space o
f time she gave birth to two more sons who were well enough in mind and body. The father was pleased. The succession to the estate was assured. As a sign of this, the parents gave to the older son the same name as had been given to the first boy. The wife had performed her duty. The wet-nurse Mary did her duty too in a way, or she did what was expected of her. Not so long after she accepted the charge of the baby, she vanished altogether. Went away with that great lolloping son of hers and perhaps with the young child. Nobody knew whether the child was still alive or whether he hadn’t died and been buried, hugger-mugger, in the woods. Whatever was the case, her disappearance must have been a great relief to the mother and father. Perhaps they’d even paid her to disappear . . . or perhaps it was the father only . . . At any event, it seemed to solve the problem.

  “The wet-nurse went to live a long way off from the estate. What she did there, how she sustained herself in another town, the story does not say. But the son, I mean her own boy, at some point quit his mother and came back to the one place he’d known from his childhood. Accustomed to a rough, hand-to-mouth existence, the lad – now a young man – took up residence in some woods on the edge of the great estate and there wore out a long succession of summers and winters. He dressed himself in animal skins, he fed off roots and berries and what the charity of the great house provided him with. He took the title of Robin or was called Robin. The outlaw, the woodman.

  “Mary did not continue for ever in her casual, slatternly course. In the story she reformed herself or was reformed. She became a God-fearing upright citizen of the town. She looked back on her early wild days with remorse and shame. Eventually she died peacefully in her bed – at least, I hope that she did, since the story that I am telling is hers and was composed by her, and the one thing we cannot recount in our own narratives is the manner of our death.”

  Adam Fielding brandished the sheaf of papers. He was pacing slowly about the room as he talked, speaking ruminatively, almost as if he was drawing the narrative from out of himself rather than rehearsing what was on the paper. Lady Elcombe had not stirred where she sat. The rest of us stood, attentive, appalled.

  “Before Mary, the wet-nurse, died she wrote a kind of . . . confession. Touching briefly on those early years. But chiefly she wrote about the child. Not the gangly lad who’d returned to live in the woods but the noble baby which had been entrusted to her and which she’d taken away with her. Because, you see, he had not died and been buried hugger-mugger in the woods. No, he had lived . . . even though it was not especially to his advantage or anyone else’s that he should live. Far from putting an end to her charge with neglect, the wet-nurse cared for him tenderly, by her lights. She grew into a mother, of sorts. And all the while he grew up strong, healthy – but no more capable in mind.”

  There was an abrupt sound, a kind of barking sob, from the woman in the chair. She seemed to shiver then grew still again. My heart went out to her and I pitied her exposure. But she was beyond caring about that, I think.

  “He had a name. Of course he had been baptised by the parents. He had the name they’d given him. It was Henry, his father’s name. He was not a complete natural. He owned some glimmers of understanding, he had a little sense. Sufficient to take in fragments of what his ‘mother’, his nurse, told him. And what stories she told him! He retained something of the little child’s love of stories well into the years when, by computation, he was an adult. She told him tales from the good book. The story of Cain and Abel perhaps. And she must have repeated again and again the tale of where he had come from, the great house, the noble family. I think she must have talked often about this because Robin the woodman used to talk about it as well. Indeed, I have heard from another player in this tale how the woodman apparently believed that he was heir to some great estate. With Robin it was imagination surely – all those years living out of doors had addled his wits. But with Henry, it was quite true what his nurse told him. Was he not the scion of a fine house, the child of a great man, the first-born of a powerful man, a wealthy one? He was each of these things. Much use they were to him! Maybe she told him that his father had cast him out when he was little. Or did she say that she was his mother – as, in some sense, she had a right to say. Who knows?

  “All that is certain is that in the shadowed parts of his mind, Henry conceived the notion of returning to the great house and family which he had heard about so often. When she died, there was nothing to hold him back any longer in that far-off town. Clutching his mother’s dying confession he sped southwards. He was coming home. He travelled by day across open country and forest, finding whatever shelter he could at night, keeping out of men’s way. He was wearing white, because to his simple mind that was the colour of mourning, or because that was the garb which his nurse-mother dressed him in. By the end, of course, after nights of sleeping rough and days of travelling wild, the white garments were speckled and grubby. There was no longer a mother to care for him.”

  Again there came that strange sob from the upright chair. I wondered at the fluency and assurance of Fielding’s performance and considered that there was more than a touch of heartlessness in it. Later I realized that it was the only way he could steel himself to get through this very painful interview: to treat it as a narrative, to be shaped, polished and delivered with address. He continued with the tale.

  “And now the story becomes a little obscure,” said Adam Fielding, “but we must strive to get the picture whole and clear, if necessary by piecing it out with our reason and our imaginings. A man’s life is at stake. When Henry reached the outskirts of the place where he’d been born he recognized it – not from memory of course but from his nurse-mother’s stories. The great house set on a rise, the lake and all the other appurtenances. Home. Yet now he was home who was there to acknowledge his existence? He was wary, mortally wary like an animal, as well as simple. He had no words to announce himself, and for authority only a dying woman’s confession, words which he could not read but which he somehow knew were vitally important.

  “He took shelter in the woods. And now you can see that there is only one direction for the story to go. In the woods he naturally encountered that strange creature Robin. They shared a mother, a mother of sorts. They were, in a manner, brothers. Henry lacked the wit to read but he could still announce who he was, that is, the heir to a large estate and a fine demesne, and he found among the trees a counter-claimant, another strange being who’d for years believed himself entitled to some great inheritance.”

  Cuthbert Ascre let loose at this point a violent . . . laugh. Like the rest of us, he was stretched to breaking-point and this was, I suppose, his way of manifesting it. I noticed that Kate’s gaze flickered constantly between her father and Lady Elcombe.

  “Two claimants, whether they are men in a wood or rival emperors, will eventually come to blows. No realm can endure two kings. They will fight until the business is settled and the victor is sole possessor. So it was in this case. Henry may have been simple but he was strong, stronger apparently than he who I have called his ‘brother’ – an individual who was some years his senior and whose strength had been sapped by all those years of living unhoused, unroofed. It is not comfortable to imagine what happened after that. Within a few days of Henry’s arrival in the woods, the hatred between him and Robin had grown so great that the men were mortal enemies. If Robin had a superior knowledge of his surroundings, then to Henry we may attribute the greater strength . . . and ferocity.

  “We know the sequel to this. One summer’s night or early in the morning Henry surprised Robin and put an end to him. He hung him from a tree. Remembering those stories of his nurse-mother from the good book, the hatred of Cain for Abel, or how David’s son Absalom hung from an oak-tree, or how Iscariot swayed from the elder, he hanged Robin from a tree.”

  Adam Fielding paused. He stopped his pacing. His voice had grown old and hoarse. He hardly troubled with the pretence that he was telling a “story” now. Rather he spoke direct to the ma
tter. I looked down and was surprised to see my hands balled into fists. Outside, the dark pressed on the wide windows of Instede and I wondered when the dawn would come again.

  “But even this is not the end of a painful tale. Again, I cannot be sure of what happened afterwards, no one can. But I believe that there was an . . . encounter between the lord of the great house and the woe-begone son who had returned to claim his place in it. Master Nicholas Revill here was a distant witness to the business and he can tell us what he saw on a moonlit night.”

  I started to hear my name and to realize that Fielding was calling on me to describe the dream-like vision of the chessboard garden and the black and white figures. With none of Fielding’s fluency or assurance, I haltingly recounted what I’d seen or thought I’d seen, all the while regretting I’d ever been drawn from my bed to the window that night.

  As I stumblingly came to the end of my brief witness, Fielding took up the reins again. He spoke softly, with difficulty now, almost forcing the words out between his teeth. Of all the terrible speculations of this night, what followed was surely the worst.

  “So, my Lady, it seems as though there must have been a meeting between these two, father and disowned son. There can hardly have been an argument since Henry – I mean Henry the son – was incapable of sustaining conversation of that kind. Whether words of any kind were exchanged, no one will ever know. In the middle of the night the white spectre of a long-lost son rose up before his father and the father, horror-struck, faced the child he had farmed out all those years ago. Did Henry somehow identify himself? Did his father know him, by instinct or otherwise? I do not convict the son of malice, poor lack-wit. He did not know what he was doing, what effect he was having. Somehow the father backed into . . . he stumbled . . . he fell onto the great sundial in the middle of the garden. The gnomon pierced his heart and he perished after a short struggle.”