Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

‘Do you know what happened, Alice?’ said Sir Thomas, appealing to her.

‘I am not sure. I felt nothing.’ Her voice was low and resonant. ‘But this should be simple enough to prove. Let Jacob steal the necklace again. If he can take it once then he can surely take it twice. Give it to me, Adrian.’

The steward, who now appeared to wish himself anywhere but in this box in the playhouse, returned the necklace to Lady Alice. Swiftly she reclasped it around the white pillar of her neck. Now she was the centre of the scene, and we five men mere bystanders.

‘I am looking at this play once more, this — what’s it called. .?’

‘ A City Pleasure ,’ I said.

‘I am absorbed in A City Pleasure. I am all ears and eyes on the stage. The back of my neck is bare, save for the necklace, and I am quite undefended. You may do what you please with me.’

She still spoke softly, but as she described what she was doing she suited the word to the action and, becoming a rapt spectator, bent her head slightly forward to expose the upswept golden hair and the contrasting snowy white skin and the clasp of the necklace.

‘Now, Jacob,’ she said in a tone that was almost kindly. ‘You must remove this necklace from my neck. You must try your best.’

Sir Thomas pushed gently at the hapless Jacob who, until this point, had been standing in the centre of the box. Slow and worried as he was, he nevertheless understood what he had to do. He shuffled a couple of paces forward to where my lady Alice was leaning over the balustrade. She gave no sign of being aware of anything except the play unfolding below. Jacob stretched out his arms, then seemed to realise that this was more a job for dexterity than force. He looked at his large hands, and tried to flex his fingers but they were quivering so much that he could get no control over them. These great paws, covered on the backs with reddish hair, approached the pale column of his mistress’s neck, and he had the wit to realise that this was a kind of sacrilege, as well as the simplicity not to be able to conceal it. In the middle of her bare nape glowed the intricate clasp that secured the pearl necklace.

I glanced at the others. Sir Thomas was watching his ungainly servant advance on Lady Alice. Her son, the black-suited William, who had still not risen from his seat in the other corner of the box, was dividing his attention between the tremulous thief and Adrian. The latter had positioned himself near to the door. The steward caught my eye and shot me a look as sharp as his nose. It was apparent that he held me responsible for this little scene, even though this part had been his mistress’s suggestion. His own version of events would have seen Jacob safely on his way to the Clink by now.

Jacob’s hands arrived at Lady Alice’s neck. They were shaking uncontrollably. For all her self-control, the woman tensed as she felt his fingers scraping and scrabbling at the clasp. After a few moments Jacob turned to look at his master, Sir Thomas. I do not think that I have ever seen such a combination of helplessness and entreaty. He made some strangulated sound in his throat. But speech here was quite unnecessary. All of our actions speak, and his dumbness was pitifully eloquent. Sir Thomas nodded, and Jacob let his huge hands drop to his sides.

Nobody spoke. It was quite evident to every person in that little room that Jacob could never have taken Lady Alice’s necklace. For one thing, he was far too clumsy, barely capable of undoing the catch even had it been around his own neck and his hands absolutely steady. Certainly, he could not have performed the trick without her noticing. But a stronger reason was that his every movement, his every gesture, showed that he lived with a respect that amounted almost to reverence for this man and woman, his master and mistress. We had all witnessed how his hands shook as they drew close to her neck, how reluctantly his feet had dragged across the oak flooring of the box. He was attempting to be a thief only at the command of Sir Thomas and the Lady Alice. If they’d told him to leap out of the box into the area where the groundlings stood below, he most likely would have obeyed. Nor was this a matter of acting. He was too stupid to act, but he was also — and this I saw suddenly — too good to act anything. Jacob was simply what he was, a single man and nothing more. For the rest of us in that box I cannot speak; we might all have been players, and even the poorest of players is a double man.

The silence was broken by Adrian. (I mean the silence in our little box, for all the time during this interlude the buzz and hum of stage business floated up to our unlistening ears.) But before he spoke, he smiled. A little lop-sided grin. Like Jacob he had a kind of wit, in his case the wit to realise that he was cornered.

‘Player is clever,’ he said. ‘Player knows his business, as I hope I know mine.’

I felt chilled, even though the afternoon was warm and I was sweating in my heavy town costume. But there was guilt in his words and in his crooked smiling face. Now Sir Thomas spoke, but with a peculiar reluctance which I attributed to the difficult task which confronted him.

‘Adrian, this is not the first time in which you have been detected in some malpractice. Coming at this particular time of difficulty, when we have looked to you for integrity, what you have attempted to do — to your lady Alice, to poor Jacob — is unforgivable. I am mindful of the good service you have performed for this family over the years, and for that reason I will not set the law on you.’

He paused, and I had time to be surprised at his leniency.

‘But you will leave our company and this box now, and if ever I or any member of my household discovers you within our precincts again, then I will not hesitate to turn you over to justice.’

‘There are things I could say,’ said Adrian. ‘To you, Sir Thomas, and you Lady Alice and even to young William, but this is not the time or the place. To the gentleman player here’ — the way in which he spoke indicated that such a description was for him a contradiction in terms — ‘I wish that he may always have such, ah, easy spectators for his performances, such eyes that are quick to believe, such ears as are quick to trust. His presence you are unable to bar me from. I can have him before me at any time by paying a penny and standing with the common people.’

He slid from the box, with his short black cloak and his black hat somehow seeming to swell, an exit performed with as much relish as if he were taking the devil’s part in some old Morality Play.

‘Are you all right, my dear?’ said Sir Thomas, turning attentively towards Lady Alice.

‘Perfectly,’ she replied.

Sir Thomas patted Jacob on the shoulder in an avuncular way. This bear of a man appeared hardly to have recovered from the sacrilege of attempting to slip the pearls from his mistress’s neck.

‘I must thank you, Master Revill, for your part in exposing Adrian. It is of course obvious now that Jacob could never have taken my wife’s necklace, but sometimes we need the obvious pointed out to us. Thank you.’

I inclined my head slightly, grateful at his gratitude. Sir Thomas went to the door of the box, perhaps to check that the steward really had gone. Lady Alice beckoned me to her side. Her voice dropped even lower so that I had to bend forward to hear her. No hardship because I was only inches from the snowy slope of her breasts.

‘I must thank you too,’ she whispered. ‘And I believe you have something to deliver to me.’

I suddenly remembered the note from Master Robert Mink which had brought me up to the gallery in the first place. So this was the lady it was intended for! I fumbled in a pocket of my costume and passed it across. This was half secret and half open business. Her son, who had remained sitting in the opposite corner of the box, most likely saw the transfer. He had made no comment so far on what had transpired.