Alms for Oblivion

by Philip Gooden

  Jute might not have been on my conscience but he was still lodged in my head and it was many months before the dream faded. Alan Talbot, however, was determined to exonerate me of any blame in the death of Edmund Jute. I couldn’t help reflecting on the irony of this, that after all the coroner’s work in trying to pin on me the guilt for murders which I hadn’t committed, he was now attempting to leave me free and clear.

  By the time Talbot arrived on the scene in the pavilion the main action was finished. Gertrude Agate (or Jute, as she was by the first of her three husbands) was dead, poisoned by her own son. That same son was stretched out beside her on the ground, holed and stabbed. At a little distance lay Nicholas Revill, covered with blood. A shambles. At first sight, Talbot told me, he thought we were all dead. Then I groaned and stirred, and he was glad to see that something might be recovered from this ruin.

  The coroner’s attitude towards me had undergone a sea-change, even when he was still in London. He had ridden down to Miching not in pursuit of an escaped felon but in pursuit of the truth. When Jute – who had learned of my whereabouts in a letter from his mother – went to the coroner to inform against me and proposed that the two of them should travel to Somerset together, Talbot had seized the opportunity of keeping an eye on the man he had begun to suspect of the Southwark murders.

  “How did you know?” I asked. “Why did you suspect Jute?”

  We were travelling back to London, after matters had been sorted out in Miching – or sorted out so far as they could be after such a shocking tragedy (of which more in a moment). We travelled fast by horse, Talbot and I. The roads were stickier than when I’d walked this way about a fortnight earlier but they were still passable. I wasn’t comfortable in the saddle but wanted to get back to London as quickly as possible.

  Talbot already had his rented horse from the outward journey and I hired a sturdy hack from a stable in Wells, at the rate of a shilling for the first day and eightpence per day thereafter. Talbot loaned me the money, telling me that I could repay him when I resumed my position with the Chamberlain’s Company. I didn’t say that I wasn’t certain I still had a position with the Chamberlain’s. He also paid for my share of our lodgings. One of the places we stopped at was the Night Owl near Buckingham, the very inn which I had been too fearful to stay at during the early stages of my trudge out of London.

  We kept company, Talbot and I, but it was an uneasy journey for me. I couldn’t rid myself of my old image of the man as a cold-eyed questioner, with the power to cast me into gaol and worse. For his part, Talbot seemed easy enough, almost genial and expansive. As we travelled or stopped and ate, it was my turn to ask questions. (I’ve condensed the conversations we had for the sake of easy reading here.) I was naturally curious about the chain of circumstance, the thread of suspicion, which had led him from Southwark to Miching.

  “How did you know?” I repeated. “What made you suspect Edmund Jute?”

  “He was too hot for justice.”

  “He was a lawyer.”

  “That was what made me suspicious.”

  “I thought that justice was the supreme good,” I said, remembering how Talbot had always insisted on it.

  “So it is. But Jute was eager, over-eager, to have you hunted down for the sake of justice. And that made me to turn the matter upside down, and to ask myself whether he wasn’t really more interested in hunting you down than in the justice.”

  “To make sure that I was finally silenced for his crimes.”

  “When Jute came to see me,” said Talbot, “bearing a letter from his mother which said that Nicholas Revill had turned up unexpectedly in Miching, I asked myself why he was so concerned with an escaped felon.”

  “I was a murderer. Perhaps he was worried about his mother’s safety.”

  “If he was he didn’t mention it. In any case Gertrude Agate said that you were just passing through. And so Jute was insistent that we should boot and saddle up immediately before you could get away. But I delayed, and set myself a question or two to answer.”

  “Do you often ask yourself questions, Master Talbot?”

  “If I do, I’m at least sure of an honest answer. Or at least, honest uncertainty. Sometimes the right question will take you a long way. For instance, when your friend Peter Agate died I asked myself what should always be the first question in such cases.”

  I said nothing. Talbot was enjoying this, in his legalistic fashion. Let him have his hour or two in the sun.

  “It was, who benefited from his death? Now, it was plain that you didn’t benefit from it. In fact, it was plain that your friend was so newly arrived in London that his death was more likely to be connected with where he’d come from rather than where he’d arrived at. You said yourself, Nicholas, that he was an inoffensive fellow, one without enemies. So who would want to kill him?”

  “You thought that I would, for one.”

  “It looked as though you had, or might have done. But then you protested your innocence.”

  “You believed me?”

  If I sounded surprised it was because I was surprised.

  “I didn’t disbelieve you,” said Talbot.

  “I wondered why you made no move against me. I was expecting to be arrested at any moment.”

  “You didn’t seem guilty. One gets a nose for guilt after a time, although it’s not an infallible nose. The problem was that murder seemed to be dogging your heels, Nicholas. There was the death of Richard Milford, and just before that your interest in his wife and all that talk of a dead man – ”

  “I’m not interested in Lucy Milford.”

  Talbot looked at me.

  “Oh yes, all right, I am.”

  “Be careful, Nicholas, I may know more than you think. I saw you talking together after the play.”

  “So you were at the performance of Troilus and Cressida In Middle Temple?”

  “Yes. I enjoyed the play, to an extent.”

  “You didn’t mention that you were there when you were questioning me about it.”

  “It wasn’t material, to use your expression.”

  “I thought you didn’t approve of plays – or players.”

  “I don’t as a rule,” said Talbot. “But this was a little different. A dry piece. It wouldn’t appeal to the public. Too intelligent for them.”

  “Don’t underestimate the public,” I said, thinking that William Shakespeare would have been proud of me for such a liberal sentiment. “Even so, with this Trojan play, I rather think the shareholders are of your opinion.”

  “I defer to you in the question of plays and public taste, Nicholas. Just as you must defer to me when it comes to crime and punishment.”

  “I do,” I said, feeling rebuked. I could not be comfortable in this man’s company, for all that he had helped to save me.

  “Then, after Richard Milford’s death,” Talbot continued, “there was the murder of the woman in the brothel. That was when things began to look really bleak for you. You were intimately linked to Nell of Holland’s Leaguer, you were in the stew moments after she died. You were almost begging to be arrested, tried and hanged.”

  “I thought . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing.”

  I stopped myself from saying that at one stage recently I’d thought that he, Alan Talbot, was the murderer of Nell. Instead I reverted to something he’d mentioned earlier.

  “Hers wasn’t a – a death which benefited me though, was it? To go back to your question. Who benefits?”

  “Ah,” said Talbot in his legalistic, hair-splitting way, “I didn’t say that that was the only question, merely that it was the first question. True, you wouldn’t have benefited from your friend Nell’s death, you wouldn’t have gained advantage from it – but it might have satisfied your jealousy – or someone else’s jealousy – or their anger – or their pride – ”

  “ – or their need for advancement,” I added, thinking of the fragment of dialogue I’d overheard b
etween Edmund Jute and his mother, about the murder of Nell. That she had had to be discarded because of her ambitions and Jute’s sense of his place. ‘She was beginning to have ideas that she would do,’ Jute had said, and my gut tightened at the memory.

  “You see,” said Talbot, “there are plenty of motives for murder. But it never hurts to begin with the most obvious one. Who benefits? So after the first murder, after Peter Agate’s death, I set myself to find out a little about him. I discovered that he came from a distinguished old family, which probably wouldn’t have been happy with the idea of his going on stage – ”

  “They weren’t.”

  “That he was the only male child in a family of girls. That he came from a large estate just outside your own village.”

  “You didn’t know that his father had died, though?”

  “Not at the time. And ‘been murdered’ would be more accurate.”

  “Gertrude killed her husband?”

  “Yes, even though it will never be known for certain. But a letter was discovered in Jute’s lodgings which – hinted at that possibility. She was too cautious to commit herself outright to paper.”

  “You searched his lodgings?”

  “I had them searched, after he had come to see me with his mother’s letter, and while I was delaying and asking myself questions. He roused my suspicions, as I’ve said. There were other letters from her besides the one reporting your arrival in Miching. They corresponded frequently. Among them was one describing the manner of old Anthony Agate’s death. She had underlined the words ‘rabbit stew’. Twice.”

  “Perhaps she was sending him a recipe.”

  “Only if the rabbit had been fed belladonna first.”

  I must have looked baffled because Talbot explained.

  “The nightshade isn’t only deadly on its own account. If you eat a bird or a rabbit which has eaten one of the berries, then you may be just as easily poisoned. I understand that Anthony Agate was making a slow recovery from a fever. His daughter Anne tells me that the last things he ate were rabbit stew and a few grapes. After that he suffered a relapse.”

  “She poisoned him for his estate.”

  “Or if it wasn’t done that way with the rabbit stew, then it was done another way. I doubt that the fever was genuine. Anne Agate said that her father was always as strong as a horse. Yes, she poisoned him for the sake of the estate, or for the sake of her son.”

  “Much good it did her. But there was another son who would have inherited. I mean, Peter Agate.”

  “And who’d disappeared,” said Talbot. “To make his fortune as a player, although no one knew that.”

  “What if he had returned to Miching? To claim his inheritance.”

  “No doubt she would have dealt with him in the same way that she dealt with Anthony Agate. But she didn’t have to. Because Edmund took over now.”

  “When Peter arrived in London and got to know my Company and so got introduced to the law students at Middle Temple . . . ”

  “Yes. By pure chance. And Edmund Jute saw his opportunity. Here was the heir to Quint House and all its lands, fallen into his lap. All he had to do was to ensure that young Agate never returned home.”

  “I rather think I might have prompted Jute to make his move,” I said. “I told him that Peter was thinking of going back to Miching. My friend was not altogether, ah, happy in London. He thought of it as a place which brought out his worser self. I am sorry for it.”

  “Sorry for London?”

  “Sorry that I should have given Jute his cue to act.”

  “Do not reproach yourself, Nicholas. Jute was a man who had murder in his blood. Think of his mother. He must have imbibed it with her milk. He would have done it, with or without your prompting. After the first occasion, he enjoyed killing. I have met the type before.”

  I’d already told Talbot of that chilling exchange between mother and son, of how he’d acquired a taste for ‘it’. Now I said, “And that is why he went on to murder Richard – and Nell?”

  “There your guess is as good as mine. It may have been that he was covering his tracks.”

  “By committing even more murders?”

  “The best place to hide a fallen leaf is on the forest floor,” said Talbot in riddling mode. “I mean, that if he wanted to cover up the motive for killing Peter Agate then an opportune way to do it was to kill others, and confuse the issue. That you would be blamed for it was an unexpected blessing.”

  “Blessing!”

  I almost choked on my drink.

  “Any motive might have done,” pursued Talbot. “For example, there was some altercation between the law students and Richard Milford after the play in Middle Temple. I noticed that myself. Perhaps Jute was so swollen with arrogance that he determined to pay the playwright back there and then. Or rather, somewhere else and a little later.”

  “And with my friend Nell,” I said, “I think it was the belief that he was better than her and that he did not want her company when he became a gentleman with a fine house and lands. He had been visiting her for some time, I believe. And she must have got ideas from things that he said or promised . . . For she had – she had ambitions, you know, and was not content to be a whore all her life – and she was – ”

  Here I embarrassed myself by breaking down into tears. We were in the inn-chamber of the Night Owl, sitting side by side on a settle. I turned my head aside from Master Talbot and stuck my face into my tankard, not wishing him to see my grief, while he, like a true English gentleman, pretended that there was nothing wrong with me.

  “ – she was a thousand times better than him,” I finally got out through clenched teeth.

  Our journey to London was nearly over. It took four days and, by the end of it, I could hardly walk. Still, the hard ride, in the teeth of the worsening weather, and the discomfort of keeping my place in the saddle as well as keeping up with Alan Talbot, helped to steer my mind away from the dire events of the autumn.

  As we rode Talbot revealed other things. While he and Edmund Jute had been riding down to Miching together, on their hired horses, the young man had let things slip, perhaps more things than he was aware of. Talbot finished the journey convinced he was keeping company with a murderer. It was a family concern too, handed down through the generations. Talbot believed that Gertrude Agate had done away with her first two husbands – one Thomas Jute of Sutton Valence and one Randolph Potts of Peckham – respectively, some thirteen and six years previously. There had been a similar history of a prolonged fever and an apparent recovery, followed by a rabbit pie and an abrupt demise.

  I vowed never to eat rabbit pie again. And a thought occurred to me (though I didn’t pass it on to Talbot). It was what Edmund Jute had said to his mother after she’d drunk the poisoned wine: “You taught me the way when you poisoned the old man. That was the beginning.” I’d assumed he was referring to Anthony Agate, his stepfather. But it might have been his natural father, Thomas Jute, that he meant. Perhaps killing his mother was a cold, delayed revenge for her killing of his father, if that was something that concerned him. Or perhaps it was simply that he was impatient to come into possession of Quint House, and had set himself to finish off Gertrude almost as soon as he’d arrived in Miching, assuming in his arrogance that I was taken care of, as good as dead, and that his mother’s sudden departure could be passed off as a sudden fit. Or perhaps it was, even more simply, that he had acquired a taste for killing and could not be weaned from it. Whatever the reason, we would never know now. They were all gone from us now into oblivion.

  Talbot also thought that Jute had instructed his mother to keep me in Miching as long as possible, or at least until the coroner should arrive and I could be apprehended. That would explain Gertrude Agate’s amorousness on the afternoon before her death. I remembered the pear juice dribbling down her chin, the warm hand on my thigh, the questions about where I was going. Equally, Mrs Agate could have been serving her own appetites here. A young man, almos
t any man in fact, was to her like a hare to a hound. She couldn’t help herself.

  Talbot and I parted in Southwark. We arrived on a late afternoon in early December. I signed a formal deposition in his chambers in Long Southwark to the effect that Edmund Jute had died as a result of wounds which were self-inflicted. That wicked young man had killed himself in a fit of remorse after he was surprised in the act of poisoning his mother. He had also confessed to the murders of three other people, two of them from the borough of Southwark and one from over the water in Thames Street. The charges which had resulted in my being clapped up in the Counter prison were annulled. I was a free man again. There was a strange mixture of truth and untruth in this version of events. But Talbot was insistent on it. It seemed to serve some higher notion of justice and truth – and who is to say that he was wrong?

  I returned, unutterably weary and saddle-sore, to Dead Man’s Place. Samuel Benwell had not found anyone to take my place. I don’t think he’d been looking for another tenant. I wasn’t surprised. Who’d take a hole of a room like mine? And the landlord didn’t seem surprised to see me. He didn’t even mention murders, or anything like that.

  “Been touring, Nicholas?”

  “Something like that, Master Benwell. Can I have my old room back?”

  “Are you still with the Chamberlain’s?”

  “Yes,” I said, although the truth was that I didn’t know.

  “Any titbits?”

  “There is a great scandal in the offing.”

  He licked his thin lips.

  “But I am tired now. I’ll tell you tomorrow – or the next day – or the one after . . . ”

  Muttering, I plodded up the stairs and opened my door and threw myself on my low bed. The room wasn’t much – it was hardly anything – but it was home.

  At the end of a story there’s a certain satisfaction in settling the characters into their appointed stations. It must be rather like the satisfaction which the tire-man Bartholomew Ridd feels when all his costumes come back at the end of a play, and are put away, neat and folded in their resting places. So it is with some of the remaining figures in this story.