Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

From quite near at hand there came a dull thump and a drawn-out sigh, and I jumped nearly out of my skin because I thought that someone else was on my patch of bank. The noise was almost direct ahead of me. I stopped breathing. Now there was nothing to be heard above or below the sound of the gliding river.

I crouched down and whistled softly, as you might to draw on a frightened dog.

‘Francis,’ I said softly, ‘oh Francis. Come back. I mean you no harm and never did.’

Silence.

I groaned.

‘Francis. I have injured myself. I need your assistance. Help me.’

In front of me coiled the dirty yellow mist. To my left there was a plop and then a splash as small things returned to the water. But no human sound. I waited a few more moments and then, half crouching, I edged my way forward, hands splayed, feet slithering on the slime and stone.

He was closer than I expected, and face down in the mud. He had slipped as he was trying to effect his escape from me. Whether by accident or design he had made off in a direction parallel to the river rather than attempting to regain the little lane that ran up beside the house. In the darkness I was able to make out his shape — for who else could it be? — together with a black pointed object that sat next to his head. This I reached out to touch and then more quickly withdrew my hand. It was hard and slick, and not with river-mud. When Francis fell he struck his head on a rocky outcrop which might have been fashioned to brain a man, it was so sharp-pointed and so angled upwards.

Francis groaned. A tremor passed down the dark form at my feet. He was still breathing. With my nerves on fire, with a buzzing in my ears, with a red curtain closing in front of my eyes, I straddled his prone body. I half raised him from the ground by his head, using my two hands as if I were lifting a small round boulder. His body seemed to make a motion to go after the head and to rise up between my legs as if to overthrow me, but it was light, it was tiny, it was like a tail to this round head clasped between my hands. Then I flung him back down again, head and all, so that the protruding stone might do its work properly. Something spattered my face. There was the same sound that I had heard earlier, of his head striking against the rock, but this time it was not followed by a sigh.

I sat down on the bank of our Thames, careless of the dirt and other filth. Slowly my breathing calmed. Close by me ran the unseen river, with an innocent purling sound like a stream. I waited. In my hands, on my palms and finger-ends I could feel still the shape of Francis’s head as I had raised it up from where he had lain on the ground. In size and texture it was like a ball of stone, but warm as if left out in the sun. In one place it was not smooth at all but soft and dented. I had the leisure to wonder whether I would ever forget the roundness, the warm smoothness of that other man’s head before I threw it at the pointed rock. I gazed at my invisible hands, which were, I surmised, black with mud, with blood, with the night.

After a time I went towards the river. The ground grew softer and boggier. I thrust my hands into the water and wrung them together and it seemed to me that each hand was the enemy of the other, and I the enemy of both. The water was cold and continually tried to push my hands away from my body, and take them off downstream. Once I grew unsteady on my footing and almost toppled into the river.

Then I sat again and considered the matter. I had not done anything so bad. Francis was a figure of no account. He knew what I was, and for that reason he had to die. It was true that I had somewhat lost sight of my original aim in all this, and that I had been ushered down a path not of my own choosing. But I had made the best of the road I was forced to travel. Anyway, Francis slept. He was secure, secure as sleep. I was safe from him and he was safe from me.

I got up and laid hold of Francis’s feet. I tugged and hauled, while he slipped and stuck in places as he was drawn unwillingly over the rough foreshore. It was several hours until high tide by my reckoning. I might safely leave the body on the water’s edge, and by morning it would be carried away downstream to join the other detritus of our watery thoroughfare. The only impediment were the massive piers of the Bridge, and if Francis’s corpse was smashed against them by the downsweep of the tide it would be even further disfigured.

I left him there, half in, half out of the water. And so an end.

It was only much later, after I was indoors again, that I remembered the shirt that I had given back to Francis.

I went to pay my last respects to Francis and was rewarded for my pains. His body was laid out on a table in an empty ground-floor room. There was no watcher, such as I had been accustomed to when people perished in my father’s parish, but of course that was a country custom, and therefore most likely to be shunned in the great city. Francis had been in the water for several hours and received severe injuries to his head where he had struck a rock. But something of the old Francis remained still. Enough to show that he was as anxious-looking in death as he had been in life. He gave the lie, as plague victims do, to the idea that sleep awaits us on the other side of death, the bourne from which no traveller returns. I shuddered.

As I was exiting the room I collided with a tall, gloomy fellow whom I recognised as one of the Eliot servants. Behind him hovered the bear-like figure of Jacob.

‘Master Revill?’

Jacob nudged him from the back. The two looked as if they were on a deputation.

‘I lodged with our Francis in this house, I was his bedfellow.’

‘Yes, he told me of you. . Alfred?’

‘Peter.’

‘Peter, of course.’

The mute Joseph again banged this skinny fellow in the ribs to prompt him, but it was apparent that he didn’t know how to begin.

‘I am sorry that he is gone,’ I said.

‘Death comes for all,’ said Peter.

‘Indeed,’ I said.

‘To some he comes early,’ said Peter, evidently considering that the way forward was by remarks of riddling obviousness.

‘The river is treacherous,’ I replied.

‘Treacherous enough — but not as dark as a man’s heart,’ said lugubrious Peter.

‘No doubt,’ I said, curious as to why these two wished to speak to me, for they had the air of men with something to impart; but I was also — to be honest — growing rather tired of all these theatrical hints and whispers.

‘Master Revill, Jacob here saw something. .’

Jacob proceeded to sketch shapes in the air. His arms flailed and he hopped from foot to foot. He pointed through the door to where the dead man lay. He shrugged his shoulders. He tugged at his shaggy hair as though trying to draw down his brows. He stood in one place, then in another. It was plain that he was enacting the roles played by two individuals, one of them presumably being Francis. Unfortunately I hadn’t the least idea what he was trying to demonstrate.

I smiled and nodded, and that drove Jacob to ever greater efforts at a dumb-show. I remembered his clumsiness in the box at the Globe when he had shown how utterly incapable he would have been in the business of stealing Lady Alice’s necklace. Suddenly a likeness occurred to me. The shrugging of the shoulders was Jacob’s way of fastening a cloak, while the brow-tugging signified a hat being pulled down.

‘Adrian the steward?’ I said.

At this Jacob nodded furiously, and Peter said, ‘That’s it, sir.’

‘I thought he had been banished by Sir Thomas, on pain of punishment.’

‘He’s a sly one,’ said Peter, ‘as you’d be the first to know, Master Revill.’

It will be seen that the subterfuge which had resulted in Adrian’s dismissal had made me something of a hero, if I may thus express it, to the staff in this household.