Alms for Oblivion

by Philip Gooden

  “You wish to share my crop?”

  I smiled awkwardly. Mrs Agate made me feel awkward, and she knew it.

  “So you are returning to London?” she said.

  “No, not London. My fortunes don’t lie there any longer.”

  “A pity. London is a fine place for a young man, full of opportunities.”

  Not if you’re a fugitive from the law, it isn’t, I thought.

  “I dare say you’re right, Mrs Agate.”

  “Where are you going then?”

  I glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the declining sun. Was that where I was going? I didn’t know.

  “I – I don’t know,” I said.

  “A handsome young man like you will make his own fortune. Or take his fortune where he finds it.”

  As she said this she leaned forward. She was wearing mourning, of course, but it was mourning cut to her advantage. That is, low-cut. Between her breasts she clutched the pear.

  “As to my fortune, I’m about to find out,” I said.

  “Perhaps you are going off to preach?”

  “Preach? Oh no, not me.”

  She was looking at the prayer-book which Anne had given me and which I was still holding. I moved to one side and put the prayer-book on the table near her gloves. Sacred and profane.

  “It belonged to Peter.”

  She squinted against the sun.

  “Was my stepson a pious boy? He seemed so to me. You were his friend.”

  “Pious enough,” I said.

  “Some say that religion is a toy,” she said.

  I was taken aback to hear such a – well, a masculine – sentiment in the mouth of a woman.

  “Ralph Verney would be surprised and sorry to hear you say so,” I said.

  “But the parson is not here to hear it. And it is you who are surprised and sorry.”

  I shrugged and she patted the space next to her on the bench as a sign that I should sit. I sat, half reluctantly. The seat was warm from the sun. Accidentally or otherwise (I am sure it was otherwise), her flank snugged against mine after a moment.

  “I only said that, Nicholas Revill, to see its effect on you.”

  “Are you satisfied now?”

  “We shall see. You would like some wine?”

  “I – no, I do not have a strong head.”

  She looked amused. She neatly quartered the pear, licked her fingers and, spitting a segment on the paring-knife, held it up before me. I plucked the fruit from the tip of the knife and put it in my mouth. The taste was a small, sweet shock. Mrs Agate put another quarter between her own lips.

  “You forbid yourself wine but not fruit,” she said. “No forbidden fruit.”

  I smiled, almost despite myself. She was a quick-witted woman, no doubt about it.

  “Will you not stay another day or two?”

  Now she laid a hand on my thigh. I felt the warmth of it through my leggings. I concentrated on savouring the last shreds of the fruit.

  “Is it good?”

  She meant the pear (although of course she also meant the other thing).

  “Ripe,” I said.

  “Ripest is best,” said this middle-aged widow.

  “Provided it is not too long stored.”

  “There is someone I should like you to meet,” she said, ignoring my last remark. She licked pear juice from her lips and caught a little dribble with the other hand as it made its way down her large chin. Then she reached out and slurped the dregs from the wine glass.

  Her resting hand advanced slightly up my thigh. I stayed still. It was not – absolutely unpleasant.

  “Who do you want me to meet?”

  “My son.”

  “Peter? But he is – ”

  “Not him. I have a proper son.”

  I remembered that Peter had mentioned this, that she already had a son.

  “Where is he? Is he here?”

  “He is not come yet but he will be here soon. Won’t you stay?”

  “I cannot stay, Mrs Agate.”

  “Don’t you usually obey a lady’s requests?”

  Now the hand squeezed. In promise, in warning. I said nothing.

  “Why are you leaving, Nicholas? Are you in trouble, Nicholas? You are, aren’t you? Tell me.”

  I was within an inch of spilling out my story. But instead I got abruptly to my feet. I grabbed the prayer-book from the table and in doing so dislodged the pewter plate with the fruit and the gloves. The wine jug swayed precariously but stayed upright. The pewter fell with a clatter, the pears rolled across the stone floor of the pavilion. Confused and red in the face, I scrabbled to pick them up from the ground. Gertrude Agate looked on in amusement. I restored the objects to the table. I brushed at the dark velvet gloves to clean them of dust. The gloves gave off a musky odour. The nap on them was like the nap on a peach. I handed the gloves back to their owner.

  She let the gloves dangle from her juice-sticky fingers and made as if to give them back to me.

  “You should really consider staying.”

  “No, I am decided. I shall leave at first light tomorrow.”

  “Then take your prayer-book if you like, Nicholas, but won’t you also take one of these gloves? They are perfumed. Smell it and think of me. You could keep it under your pillow.”

  “Thank you – I – no – ”

  And I backed away from the pavilion and almost ran down the path that curved round the late Anthony Agate’s orchard.

  It took me some time to recover from my meeting with the late Anthony Agate’s widow. Like Hamlet’s mother, this Gertrude was still fresh in mourning and fresh in other ways too. I wasn’t sure whether she had been trying to seduce me or tease me, or both. Was this how she had approached Peter? Probably. He’d said it was one of the reasons why he’d hastily departed from Quint House. Not only disgust but also fear that he might succumb to his stepmother.

  I wondered why she wanted me to meet her son.

  I wondered lots of things.

  For the widow’s gesture, in attempting to get me to take one of her musky velvet gloves as a keepsake, sparked off a train of ideas, although not ones directly connected with that loose lady. I thought back to the Chamberlain’s performance of Troilus and Cressida in Middle Temple, and of how I had exchanged a doublet sleeve for a glove. Of how I’d frozen at that moment so that young Peter Pearce had been left exposed in the full glare of candlelight with hundreds of spectators waiting for our next moves, my next move. I thought of how the doublet sleeve had vanished from Bartholomew Ridd’s stock, or had never been returned to it, in order that it might be wickedly used to stifle the life out of Nell. And I remembered the glove, Cressida’s glove.

  After that I moved on to consider that second and final interview with Coroner Talbot, the time when I’d been escorted by Gog and Magog from the Counter prison to the coroner’s house in Long Southwark and questioned over Nell’s death. He’d asked me about the sleeve – and the glove. We’d gone through the scene when the lovers parted, almost as if he were Burbage instructing the players. What had Talbot said exactly? I struggled to fasten down his words. Something like – no, very like – “You give the sleeve to Peter Pearce, who gives you a glove in return.” And then adding casually, “What did you do with that glove by the way?”

  I’d known that there was something odd about the question at the time but hadn’t quite been able to put my finger on it. Now I could. It wasn’t that Talbot was curious about the stage transaction. That was just part of his investigation into the murder of Nell, the effort to trace the ‘progress’ of the Troilus sleeve. No, it was a different question which occurred to me now: how had Talbot known about the glove in the first place? How had he known that I (or Troilus) had taken a glove in exchange for Cressida’s taking a sleeve?

  Either I had told him – or he had been watching the play.

  Once more I struggled to recall the detail of that fraught interview. Had I told him? I didn’t think so. I’ve a good me
mory – always useful in cases like this. And, anyway, why should I inform him of some piece of stage business? He’d been the one who was interested, not me. While he was questioning me, I’d been sunk in despondency, dejected and indifferent about detail.

  And so it followed, almost certainly, that he had seen the play, had been present at the one and only performance of Troilus and Cressida. Well, why not? There was a bunch of legal high-ups sitting at the back of the Middle Temple banqueting-hall, comfortably installed underneath the great bank of portraits. The crown of the legal profession was there. Justices, benchers, serjeants-at-law – and coroners. Hadn’t I been aware of that at the time? Perhaps, at some level, I’d even noticed that Talbot himself was there.

  Steady, steady, I told myself. Think clearly.

  So what if the coroner had been present at the performance? Why not? There was nothing odd or sinister in his presence in Middle Temple. I hoped that he’d enjoyed the performance. The only strange aspect to the matter was why he hadn’t told me he’d been there. Why, when he was questioning me in Long Southwark, he hadn’t saved time and trouble by simply saying, “I was there. I saw you exchange sleeve and glove with the boy-player.” Perhaps he wanted to hear my version of the story. After all, justice was important to him. He’d said so often enough. And justice depends on facts.

  Facts, Nicholas, facts.

  Well. What did I know for a fact about Alan Talbot? That he was hostile enough towards us players. He’d made some disparaging comments about our frivolous treatment of some subjects. When he’d shown me the daily view from his staircase window, the severed heads of traitors displayed at the end of London Bridge, he seemed to be drawing a contrast between the authentic penalties of the law and the sensational, make-believe retribution which often takes place on a stage. And through my mind had flashed the ludicrous antics which occurred in Richard Milford’s The World’s Diseas’d. But you would not claim there was anything unusual in Coroner Talbot’s attitude, not for someone in his position of authority. Nothing unusual either in his coldness towards the other habits of Londoners. “Do you players often visit whores?” he’d asked me, well knowing the answer. He’d called it a vice. If it was a vice it was a general one. Many people practised it, both as buyers and providers. But that’s no defence of whoring, he’d no doubt say. Sin shared is not sin halved.

  What if it was his vice as well, his sin? The righteous man, or the one who makes a show of his righteousness, often has something to hide. It may be so in life. It certainly is on stage. The upright judge, the wealthy merchant, the proud king, all of them have secrets to hide in the playhouse – if they didn’t have secrets there would be no future for them, no disaster in the wings, no disgrace crouching underfoot.

  At this point I naturally thought of Nell and of her hidden admirer, her secret paramour. This unnamed being was a lawyer. She’d as good as told me that he was a lawyer. I’d been assuming that he must be one of the students from the Inns of Court, someone young and energetic like cocky Michael Pye. In fact, I’d pretty well settled on Pye as my rival. But a coroner may also be called a lawyer. Nell could well have put herself under the protection of an older man. The more I thought about it the more convinced I became that that was what she would do, would have done. Why go with youth? They have energy but they lack almost everything else that matters, like money. And I knew that Nell was growing dissatisfied with her situation at Holland’s Leaguer. A mere player was no longer good enough for her. What better than a man like Talbot, powerful, established, well-to-do.

  Coroner Alan Talbot lived close enough to Holland’s Leaguer. That was no proof of anything. Most of Southwark was close to one stew or another. And anyway you’d be unlikely to uncover him as a regular customer, even if he was one. The establishment was discreet, under the direction of Bess Barton. And, besides, Talbot had said himself that its occupants made unreliable witnesses. Just as he’d said that a brothel must have many irregular exits. Well, I suppose that you didn’t have to know the inside of a brothel to know that. Still, it was all . . . highly suggestive.

  Talbot’s house in Long Southwark was convenient not merely for the brothel, where Nell had been surprised and strangled. It was also close to my own lodgings in Dead Man’s Place, where Peter Agate had been surprised and stabbed. And close to the Bridge which offered the quickest route to the other side of the river. To Thames Street, for example, where Richard Milford had been surprised and stabbed.

  So – beginning with a glove and ending with three murders – I built up my own indictment against Coroner Talbot, just as he had tried to indict me for those same murders. And his persecution of me made sense too, because if I could be held to account for them then Talbot would not only have diverted suspicion from himself, he would also have disposed of a troublesome player. One less of the frivolous tribe to corrupt and distract the world.

  There remained the little matter of motive.

  And a little more thinking provided one.

  Evidently justice had gone to Talbot’s head and infected his brain. He was embarked on a crusade to clean up London by ridding it of players and playwrights and whores. One of each: Agate, Milford, and Nell. I remembered the fervour in his eyes. A hard, impatient man. Justice took too long. It demanded the wearisome fact of a crime before the offender could be hanged. Why not skip the tedious process and go straight to the gallows? It was like jumping over the first four acts of a play, so that you get straight to the good bits, the fights and the punishment and retribution.

  These thoughts and suppositions occupied me during my final night in Miching. I’d told Ralph Verney that I was leaving and he had generously pressed me to stay, although in a different style to Gertrude Agate. But no, I said, I must get back. And as soon as I’d said this, I realized that I was not going to travel westwards in the direction of the setting sun, not going to take ship at Bristol or Plymouth, or lose myself in the Welsh marches. No, I was returning to London, returning to face Coroner Alan Talbot, returning to obtain justice once and for all.

  I’d no idea how I was going to accomplish any of this. But during that last night I lay sleepless in my bed in the parsonage, imagining myself confronting Coroner Talbot with the evidence of his wrongdoing. Or – since the evidence was rather thin – I would confront him with my conviction that he was the villain of the piece. Then he would start, like a guilty thing surprised. He was bound to start. Murder will out, they say. Truth will out. Those were his own words.

  I rose early, before first light, and hastily made preparations for my departure. Not much preparation was required since all the baggage I carried was, essentially, myself. My purse still had a little money in it. Probably not enough to get me back to London. Well, I’d have to trust to providence for that. And I still had William Topcourt’s woollen topcoat. I made a vow to restore it to him, travel-stained as it was. I hoped the poor fellow was safe in the Counter prison, safe from his wives, safe from being strung up under the name of Revill.

  Mrs Hobbs, Verney’s housekeeper, provided me with porridge and concerned words – most of which I could follow – and generally clucked about in her motherly way. Ralph himself was at the church. The seven o’clock service would be almost over by now. I took one final glance around the place where I had lived for so many years then opened the front door

  And slammed it shut again.

  It wasn’t yet fully light but I had seen, clearly enough, a man in a hat, a feathered hat, a man coming up the path towards the door of the parsonage. It was the very man who had been occupying so many of my thoughts: Coroner Alan Talbot!

  I didn’t stop to consider what he was doing here in a Somerset village, many miles distant from Southwark. (Although if I had, the answer would have been obvious enough. He was looking for me.) I didn’t stop to confront the man whom I’d been convicting, in my head, of a string of murders and from whom I had dreamed of extracting a confession.

  Instead, instinct took over. I ran.

  I ra
n past a startled Mrs Hobbs and exited the house by a door which opened off the kitchen. Even as I scrambled to get out of the back door I heard a thunderous knocking at the front.

  There was a muddy track which led directly from the rear of the parsonage to the church, and which was out of sight of the front of the house. I hared along the track, wrenched open the rusted gate which gave on to the graveyard and took shelter behind the nearest headstone. Mindlessly I took note of the name on the stone – it was Thomas Wilkins, from one of the village families – while I tried to regain some control over myself.

  I had thought myself safe from pursuit. But not so. Here was Coroner Talbot, like an avenging angel in a feathered hat, striding up the front path of my old home in order to seize hold of the fugitive from justice. How had he discovered my hiding place? For a moment I credited him with some supernatural powers. From over the churchyard wall I heard voices. I recognized Talbot’s voice and the local tones of Mrs Hobbs. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and it may be that he was having some difficulty grasping her Mummerset. But there could only be one topic of conversation. The coroner would be enquiring after the whereabouts of N. Revill while the housekeeper, once she’d understood who he was looking for, would surely explain that I’d just rushed through the back door. “Chid niver zeen anythin’ like ’ee, zur.” Or she could simply point to the direction I’d gone in. I couldn’t rely on their mutual incomprehension lasting long.

  From inside the church came the thin sound of singing. Not many people there, judging by the muted noise. The day was dawning in full colour but dull and bleary for all that. Some ancient idea of sanctuary came to me. I rose from my crouching position behind T. Wilkins’s headstone and made for the west end of the church which was graced with a tower, the highest structure in Miching. The west door was ajar as was the inner door leading off from the porch. Now the whisper of the litany had replaced the ragged singing at the far end. I recognized Ralph Verney’s voice. Immediately inside the porch was a small postern-like door which, I knew, opened on to a spiral staircase. The staircase ran up inside a turret that clung to the tower like a thumb. There were two exit-points from the staircase. One gave on to the belfry and then, on the upper level, the second exit emerged on to the roof of the tower.