Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

‘Are you due to appear again?’ he said. ‘I mean in this piece down below? Your part is surely not yet concluded.’

‘Jesus God!’

For the sake of the drama that had been staged in Sir Thomas’s box I had forgotten the real drama in which I was appearing on the Globe stage. Jesus, perhaps I’d missed my cue. I thought of Master’s Burbage’s three-shilling fine. I thought more feelingly of the disgrace — the unprofessionalism — of missing one’s entrance. My very brief career with the Chamberlain’s Men rolled up and vanished before my eyes.

But I made it. I returned to the tiring-room moments before my final entry as the would-be alderman in A City Pleasure. Fresh from my private triumph in the box of Sir Thomas and his Lady, I gave my all. I was the foolish townsman John Southwold, who showed, by the absurdity of his language and gestures, that the hapless brother and sister (who weren’t brother and sister) would be better off away from the falsity of the city. Only in a rural setting does virtue flourish. I have observed, by the way, that although many of our poets and satirists are ready to attack the town for its blackness and corruption, and to praise the country for its Arcadian innocence, few indeed of those same poets and satirists are willing to live up to their words and exchange the taint of corruption for the fruit of innocence. In short, they show no great desire to go out to grass.

My part in A City Pleasure was not that large but I flatter myself that my performance, with its little twists and flourishes, went down well with the groundlings (who always enjoy laughing at their betters) as well as with the quality (who are pleased enough to watch some upstart guyed upon the stage). Robert Mink looked at me afterwards in a puzzled way. No doubt he was wondering just why I had been absent on his errand for so long. But I merely nodded; I had done what he requested and saw no reason to unravel the confused business that had occurred in the gallery box. If he was friendly with Lady Alice — as the note presumably signified — then he would find out about everything soon enough, if she chose to tell him.

Later, sitting in the Goat amp; Monkey, I pondered on my role not just in the drama on stage but in the business in Sir Thomas’s box. I considered that I had tilted the scales in favour of justice. True, I had my thumb in the pan. A little ‘unfair’ but. . There was no doubting that Adrian the steward was a nasty piece of work, while Jacob was a good-hearted, loyal and simple fellow. It is not often that right prevails. As for the steward’s threats, I had no fear of those. I felt protected, secure. I had won the approval and thanks of a wealthy man and his wife, Sir Thomas and Lady Alice Eliot. I was, albeit temporarily, a member of the most prestigious company of players in London. My Nell provided for me free, and lovingly, what other men had to pay for, lovelessly. I was energetic, and as near being immortal as a sound head, lungs and limbs can make you at the age of twenty six.

This is the moment when fortune crouches lower as she prepares to pounce.

‘How did you do it?’

It was William Eliot, Lady Alice’s son. He slipped onto the bench beside me.

‘Do what?’

‘The trick with the hair. Dextrous.’

‘Ah,’ I said, and was glad to be given time to think by a tapster’s interruption asking what we wanted.

‘Tell me,’ said William, after he had ordered a tankard for himself and another for me. ‘It doesn’t matter now, and Adrian was obviously guilty. So the right thing has occurred by indirection.’

He was echoing my own thoughts.

‘Do you, for example, carry around a stock of head-hair for just such an eventuality? It certainly wasn’t one of your own. Yours is coal-black.’

‘It was from your mother’s youthful head.’

‘The others may have been fooled,’ said William, ‘but I was sitting closer and the thread of hair you were holding was not hers. I know my mother’s hair well. Quite a different tint.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘The hair wasn’t your mother’s. It belonged. . to someone else. There were a few threads on my shirt under the costume I was wearing. I noticed them by chance as I was changing into it this afternoon. I suppose I didn’t remove them because the thought of having some threads of this person’s hair about me was pleasing. Nobody could see them. I’m not sure that I thought about it at all. But it was chance, pure good fortune, that the colour was close to your mother’s.’

‘Then you pretended to discover it under one of the steward’s rings, took it over to where my mother was sitting — and invited us all to jump to the wrong conclusion?’

‘As you said yourself, the steward was guilty,’ I said, a little uneasily. ‘After all he admitted it, as good as admitted it.’

‘Yes, yes. I don’t quarrel with my uncle dismissing him. Adrian is more fortunate than he deserves to be. He might be in jail. I was curious how you came to produce a hair that came from somewhere else, from someone else — and now you’ve told me.’

‘Now I’ve told you.’

‘It was a sleight of hand.’

‘Only a trick,’ I said, anxious to move the conversation on, perhaps anxious to rid myself of this superior young man’s company.

‘And I am interested too in the justice of tricking the truth out of someone.’

‘I imagine that those men in the Tower who have a confession wrung out of them on the rack would rather be “tricked” into the truth, as you put it, if they were given the choice.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said William. ‘I am more concerned with the idea in the abstract.’

‘Oh, the abstract.’

‘Suppose that there is a fixed quantity of truth, and that every word of ours, every action, great or little, adds to or subtracts from this quantity. This pile of truth. This truth-mountain. Our steward has been dishonest, he has stolen from my mother and then attempted to pass the blame for the crime onto Jacob. This cluster of false words and actions obviously represents a great subtraction from our truth-mountain. A veritable weight. But then you come along, and to establish what has occurred you pass a little falsehood among the rest of us. You pretend that a thread of hair from your sister-’

‘Hardly my sister!’ I protested, irritated at the man’s high-handed manner.

‘No, of course not. I must have been thinking of that play we saw this afternoon, where the brother and sister turn out not to be be brother and sister after all. What a transparent device to produce a happy ending! I do not think we shall hearing too much more of the author of that. Who was he again?’

‘A Master Edgar Boscombe, I believe.’

‘I prefer Master Shakespeare myself. His plots are much closer to truth, however ridiculous they seem on the surface. Also he shares my given name. What was I saying? Oh yes. The hair that was secreted about your person. Well, if it didn’t derive from your sister, it was from your wife or your mistress, it doesn’t matter which. I don’t think it was a boy’s hair.’

He waited an instant for me to respond. I said nothing.

‘You do not look like a lover of boys, even though you are a player. My point is this. Your action in pretending that it was Lady Alice’s, my mother’s, also represents a tiny subtraction from the great mountain of truth.’

‘And you’re making a mountain out of a molehill,’ I said. ‘What I did was to commit a little falsehood in order to secure a greater truth.’

‘Ah, so you are simultaneously taking away and adding to the truth-mountain,’ said William. ‘I wonder, is that possible? I enjoy speculating on these things.’

‘Very Jesuitical,’ I sneered, then looked round to make sure no one was within earshot. It was not a good idea to use that word in a public place. But Master William Eliot seemed in no way discomposed. Thoughtfully, he drained off the last of his drink.