The Pale Companion

by Philip Gooden

  Fielding paused again. He sighed.

  “This is all very well.”

  The voice, surprisingly firm, belonged to Cuthbert Ascre. He moved from a position close to his mother’s seat. There was little enough light in the chamber, and what little there was came from a candlebeam hanging in the middle of the ceiling. Into this subdued circle Cuthbert stepped.

  “All very well,” he repeated. “But what proof have you, your worship?”

  I detected a slight sneer in the appellation. Adam Fielding was quiet for a moment. He reverted to stroking his beard.

  “As I said, there is much here that we must piece out with our reason and our imaginings. But there is no doubt of the substance of the story. No doubt, my Lady?”

  He spoke gently, in appeal.

  Lady Elcombe looked for the first time straight at the speaker. She pushed back her veil. When she spoke her voice, like her son’s, was surprisingly composed. It was that, I think, which confirmed to me the notion that there really is such a thing as blood and breeding.

  “No, Justice Fielding, you are right. There was such a child . . . and he was put out to wet-nurse in the circumstances you have described. But I would deny before the throne of God that it was ever – ever – with the intention of securing his death. On – on – my part anyway.”

  Adam Fielding bowed his head in acknowledgment of what she had said.

  “When the woman went away, though, I was of the common opinion that the child had gone, I mean, died. Then other children came, to succeed the one that was . . . no more.”

  “Penelope,” said Fielding, with the same mildness in his tone, “did you know that Henry, the first Henry, had returned?”

  “I had inklings of it.”

  “No more than that?”

  “To see us at such a time as this!” she suddenly exclaimed in a hiss. “To impede us!”

  It took me a moment to see that she was referring to the wedding, and a moment longer to realize that she had been as disturbed as her husband that the lost boy had come back to haunt them. Instead of a mother’s gladness (and turmoil) at the restoration of what had long been forgotten, she too perceived Henry as a threat, an “impediment”, to Instede. After all, there was another Harry already in place and his marriage was imminent! The shocking reappearance of the simpleton threw everything into doubt. In law, he was surely the rightful heir. His arrival threatened to overturn all. No wonder the mother could not be glad. In any case, she had connived at the boy’s removal all those years ago, hadn’t she?

  As well as composure, I observed that there was a steeliness in her nature, in her blood.

  “Well, he will offer no more impediments now,” said Fielding in a tone in which sadness and anger seemed to be struggling for the upper hand. “He lies at the bottom of the lake. Or rather he is laid out, my Lady, in some small downstairs room in your house. Perhaps, given who he is, he should be better accommodated. After all, he will eventually join his father in his resting-place.”

  “Nonsense,” said Cuthbert. “How do we know that this . . . person is who you say he is? I tell you, Justice Fielding, that you are imposing on my mother and myself at this time and that the body from the lake is nothing to do with us, merely some Tom o’Bedlam or vagrant. Even if what my mother has just said is true, it does not mean that – that – thing in the chamber downstairs is my brother.”

  Where Lady Elcombe’s distress registered itself in silence or terse comment, Cuthbert’s showed itself in anger. And I could see why he should feel like this. To hear, of a sudden, that he possessed a surplus brother, and that one a lack-wit, a natural. Then to hear that it was this brother who had procured his father’s death rather than the Harry who lay in Salisbury gaol . . . it would be enough to disturb Old Nick himself.

  “It is your brother,” said Lady Elcombe to her other son – now, shockingly, her third son. The silence that followed was broken only by a quiet gasp from Kate Fielding.

  “How do you know?” said Cuthbert. “You cannot know after all these years.”

  “That ‘thing’, as you term it, I have been to look at. A mother might know her own son by instinct, but there was an infallible mark on him. He had only three fingers on his left hand.” She shuddered now. “He lacked it when he was born, he lacks it now as he lies prone and pale. It is Henry.”

  “You did not say, madam,” said Cuthbert. He did not mean the finger, he meant the whole business, the whole lamentable story.

  “I thought to keep it concealed now as I did then, but God would not suffer it so.”

  In the gloom I thought I detected a single tear making a snail’s progress down her face. If it was there, she made no move to brush it away.

  Once again Cuthbert intervened, either to save his mother from further exposure or to give vent to his own anger and confusion.

  “Very well.” He swallowed audibly. “Very well. But we do not know that he – he – met my father.”

  “I can answer you there.”

  Now Oswald the steward stepped forward into the circle of light. His long, dry face was of a piece with his voice – dry as old parchment.

  “I did not witness my master meeting his son, but I believe that Justice Fielding’s story is correct. An encounter had been, ah, fixed between Lord Elcombe and this person. My master was gracious enough to admit me to his confidence, to an extent. The outcome of that encounter must have been as the Justice tells it.”

  I waited for Fielding to press this man. Who had fixed the “encounter”? How could one have a rendezvous with a simpleton who presumably took no account of hours or days? And to what end? It didn’t make sense, or not completely.

  Fielding surprised me by not pursuing these questions. Instead, he said, “Thank you, Oswald. You will swear an affidavit to that effect, that you knew your master’s intentions in this matter and so on?”

  Oswald said nothing, merely nodded.

  “My Lady, will you also sign a statement giving an account of how things stand with your family? To the existence, that is, of an older son who is now deceased.”

  Lady Elcombe neither spoke nor nodded.

  “To save another son from the gallows,” Fielding urged.

  “I see that we must be exposed before the world,” she said with resignation.

  “And Nicholas?”

  “Uh, what?”

  My mind was elsewhere, trying to work out what was going on.

  “You too will depose under oath to what you saw in the garden?”

  “Of course, your worship. But it is little enough.”

  “This is a tale made up of little pieces. Together, these pieces will be enough to secure the release of Harry Ascre from Salisbury gaol. It is as good as certain that the dead Henry is guilty of his father’s death. A dead man cannot go to the gallows but he may step in the way of a living one.”

  “But how did – did – Henry finish up in the lake?” I said (since no one else seemed to be asking such questions).

  “After his father’s demise, I imagine that he wandered away in confusion from the scene,” Fielding explained in an almost cursory manner. “He must have had some blood on him. Perhaps he was attempting to wash it off in the lake. Or perhaps he threw himself into the water in despair. Does it matter? It is almost over now.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  But it wasn’t over, of course.

  I could see that.

  You can see that too.

  Waning Gibbous

  The next day Adam Fielding and I rode away together from Instede House. I was never so glad in my life to turn my back on anywhere. The Chamberlain’s Company had arrived to celebrate a marriage and to contribute our mite towards the festivities by staging WS’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But, instead of the harmony of Hymen, we had attended a triple feast of death. The demise of Robin the woodman was the harbinger for the killing of Lord Elcombe and the subsequent death, whether by accident or suicide, of his sad simpleton of a son.

&nbs
p; But the fates were not to be satisfied with this catalogue of misery. A poor drowned soul lay in a downstairs room of the great house, lifeless testimony to the ruthlessness of his father all those years before and an agonizing reproach to the living mother now. The older son of the family, now revealed to be the middle child, was still imprisoned for that same father’s murder even if Justice Fielding seemed convinced that the clutch of affidavits he carried in his saddle-pouch would secure the young man’s release. There was yet more: a marriage had been disarranged, and two families violently disappointed in their hopes and ambitions. One of those familes had been as good as broken.

  I wondered whether, even if Harry were released from gaol, the union with Marianne Morland would proceed. It seemed doubtful. The Morland parents had looked, from my glimpses of them at the wedding feast, to be more interested in the gloss of rank than anything else. They already had the money, you see. (With the Elcombes it was apparently the other way about: they possessed the rank but not the pecuniary means to support it. All these things are relative, I suppose. Instede House and its occupants certainly looked pretty prosperous to me – unhappy but prosperous.) It seemed unlikely that the merchant family from Bristol would consider allying itself with a noble house in which shame and the prospect of the scaffold figured so prominently. In any case there’d been little enough enthusiasm on Harry’s part for the match. Now, without Elcombe’s insistence, there seemed no reason for the alliance to be concluded.

  Justice Fielding and I were riding across the open plain which lies to the north and west of Salisbury. The larks still sang beneath the blue bowl of the sky, summer’s good humour restored. It was afternoon. A deal of time had been spent at Instede taking depositions from Lady Elcombe and Oswald, each being heard in private. I don’t think they would have agreed to it without Fielding’s assurances that their witness was necessary to quash the indictment against Harry Ascre. He had also taken a statement from me about what I’d seen from the players’ dormitory on midsummer’s night. Although I several times repeated that my vision was confused and wavering, Fielding insisted it would contribute towards the task of freeing young Ascre. “Part of the picture,” he said. “An item in the pattern.”

  All this business of witness-taking meant that my departure from Instede was bound to be delayed so, by prearrangement, Adam Fielding and I journeyed back together. My fellows set off early that morning as planned, the funeral obsequies for Lord Elcombe being complete and our respects paid to a valued patron. (Of course, nobody apart from me knew anything of the inner history of this sad family.) The Chamberlain’s were on foot but, since it was late afternoon by the time the Justice and I started, we didn’t expect to overtake them. In fact, they’d most likely reached Salisbury and the Angel Inn already.

  Kate Fielding had also set off early for Salisbury to prepare things for her father’s return. She assured me that the invitation to spend the night in their house still stood. For companionship and safety, Kate travelled back with the Chamberlain’s. She was given pride of place beside Will Fall on the cart, Messrs Sincklo and Pope graciously conceding their shared position to a lady for the duration of the trip. As I saw her being handed up to her place, I thought that whatever the lack of refinement in our mode of transport, there was an ample courtesy in the Chamberlain’s men attending on her.

  Will Fall, for sure, would keep her well amused on the drive. A pang of jealousy pinched my heart, but then I reflected that Kate was hardly mine – hardly anybody’s, I hoped – to be jealous about. In any case, Fall’s tastes ran more to wenches and drabs like Audrey of the kitchens. Audrey exchanged many broken sentences with her paramour before permitting him to climb up alongside the lady from Salisbury. Perhaps she was jealous too. Even drabs have feelings. I wondered what reassurances Will had given to his country girl: undying love; eternal remembrances; the promise of an infinity of kisses; until the next town and the next girl. He wouldn’t be returning to Instede. Safely installed beside Kate and with a knowing grin at her, Will whipped up old Flem. The draughthorse looked to have been well cared for in the Instede stables, and with nary a cough or a wheeze the jade jerked into motion.

  No, Will wouldn’t be returning. Not one of us would be returning to Instede, I profoundly hoped. A few of the household had gathered to see the Company off and now stood gazing at the disappearing column. Surprisingly, Cuthbert Ascre was there to shake the hands of our seniors and to be told once again that he would have made a player . . . yes, a good player. He seemed to have shrugged off the anger and turmoil of the previous evening and to be his usual pleasant self. Oswald was nowhere in sight. Nor was Lady Elcombe. Not that I would have expected to see either of them. But some lesser beings, like Sam the bailie and my servant friend Davy, appeared and seemed genuinely regretful at the departure of the players. Partly, no doubt, this was to be explained by the pall of gloom which must once more descend over Instede. But it was also a tribute to the flash and fanfare which we players bring with us wherever we travel – we just can’t help it. Life must seem so dull after we’ve gone.

  As I say, I was one of those left behind, to assist Fielding in gathering the evidence which would acquit Harry Ascre. Now we were ambling across the plain on a fine late afternoon, following the track which we’d traversed on foot not so many days before. It was almost possible to leave behind, with the house, all thoughts of sudden death, suicide and murder. Almost, but not quite. Mind you, I was helped in my desire to keep my head out of the gloom by having to keep my mind on my horse. This mean beast had been lent me by one of the Instede grooms at Adam Fielding’s request. The Justice himself rode his own palfrey, in keeping with his rank. Nicholas Revill, meantime, was required to master and direct a short creature with white legs and a body of indeterminate colour, which took an inordinate interest in Fielding’s dignified mount, either out of friendliness or mischief. “Sweathland” was the breed, I was told, or some such name – why do those in the know always delight on inflicting their jargon on the ignorant and the indifferent? Though country-bred, I have never grown familiar or easy around horses. And they know it. My attempts to control this particular nag – which was supposed to answer to the name of Napper but in fact answered to nothing at all, not even cries of “bastard!” or “Jesus!” – caused Fielding some amusement and, I dare say, kept my mind partly away from the last few days.

  Even so there were matters that I wanted to discuss with the magistrate. For all the explanations given in my Lady’s chamber the previous evening and for all the statements which he’d gathered and which he hoped would unlock Harry Ascre’s cell door, I was not absolutely convinced by Fielding’s reading of events, by his “story”. There were too many loose ends and things sheerly unexplained. Or matters never understood in the first place. For example, to start with something relatively minor, I couldn’t see why Harry Ascre had been so opposed to marriage with Marianne Morland. Now that that union seemed unlikely to proceed, I ventured to ask Fielding for his thoughts on the young man’s obstinate reluctance. Given his old acquaintance with the Elcombe family, he might have something fresh to offer.

  He took some moments in consideration, stroking his beard with one hand while keeping loose hold of his reins with the other. Meantime I held on fearfully to Napper’s strings.

  “Not all young men are eager to rush into matrimony,” he said finally. “And before you go on to say it, the reason is not that they want to continue with their life of lechery and whoredom. Nor that they prefer their own gender. This is not the situation with young Harry, so far as I know. Perhaps he is simply not ready for marriage.”

  “Oh.”

  Fielding, perhaps seeing that this was a disappointingly simple explanation, said, “It is sometimes the case. Are you ready for marriage, Nicholas?”

  “Doesn’t there have to be a woman in situ?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Fielding. “Those who are disposed to many will find others of like mind.”

  “I – don
’t know, Adam. I suppose that, if I hesitate to answer, then my answer must be no, I am not ready.”

  I did not say that there was one woman I would have married – and married tomorrow.

  “But you have a woman in London?”

  “Of sorts,” I said. Oh the treachery of those who talk about their friends out of earshot! Believe me, I did not feel that indifferent towards Nell. “Anyway, when we first met you described my position precisely. You said that any young man on his first excursion out of town will be, what was it?, ‘ready for other adventures’.”

  “You have a good memory.”

  “I am trained to recall lines.”

  “There is another factor in Harry’s case, I believe,” pursued Fielding. “That is, the more his father insisted on matrimony, the more reluctant he became to embrace it. The higher the family, the less freedom its members have to carve for themselves. Of course, the freedom of daughters is circumscribed – some would say rightly so – but the son too may find himself in a cage not of his making.”

  It was odd how Fielding, with his talk of cages, was echoing the words of Cuthbert Ascre.

  “But sons are not docile creatures like daughters, not tractable. They may rebel against confinement.”

  “And that’s what Harry was doing? Rebelling?”

  “Yes, in sullenness and silence, not in killing his father. It is simple enough. We do not always want those our parents choose for us. Remember your play.”

  “Play?”

  “Master Shakespeare’s Dream. There is an arranged match in that piece – and some resistance to it.”

  Adam Fielding was right. But the Chamberlain’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream seemed to have taken place in another time, another place, to have nothing to do with two men riding across Salisbury plain and talking of marriage and murder.

  “I was a rebel once – of sorts, as you would say,” said Fielding. “I did not want she who my father had chosen.”

  “What happened?” I asked, pleased at the Justice’s little revelation. And surprised too, as one always is when a man older and wiser than oneself admits to some youthful indiscretion or defiance.