Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

‘What Jacob here is, ah, saying is that Francis, God rest his soul, had dealings with Master Adrian?’

‘Just so,’ said Peter, who had taken on the role of interpreter to Jacob. Long association with the dumb giant had given him a facility of understanding. ‘He saw them together.’

‘When?’

Here Jacob went into further contortions. I turned to Peter for enlightenment.

‘In the morning it was, yesterday.’

‘But Francis was a good servant, a loyal one,’ I protested with a vehemence that surprised me. ‘He wouldn’t have gone against Sir Thomas’s command.’

Jacob nodded, not in agreement but in denial of what I’d just said.

‘He was troubled by his shirt, sir,’ said Peter.

‘I know, I know all about the missing shirt.’

‘No longer missing,’ said Peter, producing, with a flourish which might be described as theatrical, a battered, crumpled and dirty garment from under his own not very much cleaner tunic.

I reached out. It was made of coarse cloth and was damp. It smelt of the river. A sudden shiver ran through me.

‘Where did this come from?’

‘Why, off him,’ said Peter, nodding his head in the direction of the body on the makeshift bier. ‘It were wrapped round his middle, like.’

‘Who gave it back to him?’ I said, half to myself. ‘You’re sure it belongs to Francis?’

‘Why, yes,’ said Peter. ‘Look at this mark here on the sleeve. He was wearing it on the night he found old Sir William and when he came back he took off the shirt and folded it and put it away in his trunk and never wore it again.’

On the sleeve was a greasy smear. I raised it to my nostrils but the only scent was the river.

‘Would you keep it, sir?’ said Peter.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

But I hadn’t the least idea what to do with a dead man’s shirt.

It was Nell who suggested an answer.

‘Why don’t you,’ she said, as she saw me peering and sniffing at the discoloured sleeve, ‘take it to old Nick?’

‘Old Nick’s got enough to do, surely, without troubling himself with dead man’s wear. Why, he may have the man entire and all without the encumbrance of clothing.’

Though, even as I said it, I considered that if Francis, the meek and inoffensive Francis, were destined for the undying bonfire, then which of us should escape a whipping for our sins? None, my masters, none.

‘Not him, you fool,’ said Nell fondly. ‘Not that old Nick.’

‘Nor young Nick neither,’ I said.

‘Nor you neither, you fool.’

‘Who then?’

‘Old Nick off Paul’s Walk,’ she said.

‘That one. Oh.’

‘You know him?’

‘Never heard of him. Who is he?’

And here my Nell came over coy and simpering so I guessed that this man was someone she had to do with in the way of business, the business of giving pleasure in her case.

‘He is. . he does. . mixtures. . preparations. . compounds. . in his shop. . under the counter. . They say that he. .’

At this point my Nell whispered in my ear a secret concerning this individual, old Nick, and our glorious (but ageing) Queen. What she said is too dangerous to commit to paper but, if it were true, it might shake the foundations of our state, like all gossip.

‘Can you introduce me?’ I said. ‘To your old Nick, not the Queen.’

Cartographers are accustomed to make Jerusalem the centre of this earthly world. But if they considered more carefully they would put our capital in the place of the holy city, for my money. And of all the places in London the very navel is Paul’s and, to be more precise, Paul’s Walk. Here is all of Britain in little, the gulls and the gallants, the captains and the clowns, the cut-throat, the knight and the apple-squire. Here the lawyer parades in front of the idiot, the money-lender walks with the bankrout, and the scholar accompanies the beggar (often one and the same in our poor fallen world). Here will you see the ruffian, the cheater, the Puritan, and all the rest of the crew. Why, you may even glimpse the odd honest citizen. Paul’s Walk is a babel. One would think men had newly discovered their tongues, and each one of them different from any other. To my country eyes it appeared still a little shocking that such a worldly buzz, such a trade in flesh and metal, filled what was meant to be a sanctified place, the nave of a great church. I said as much to Nell.

‘Religion is good for business, Nick. Devotion makes men randy.’

I remembered the noises of my parents on a Sunday night after my father had given what he considered to be a specially fine performance in the pulpit. Perhaps she was right.

Now, late in the afternoon after the play, we made our way through streaming Paul’s Walk, avoiding the peacocking clusters of the gallants, the reefs of the ne’er-do-wells. The men, I noticed, appraised my Nell, slyly or brazenly. Some of them might even know her. Some of them undoubtedly did know her. I did not like the idea of this.

We made our way across the churchyard and to a shop squeezed into a corner. It was the dingiest apothecary’s I’d ever seen.

‘This is the place?’

Nell didn’t reply but pushed open the door. The light outside was strong and it took some moments for my vision to adjust to the gloom indoors. I hadn’t had much to do with apothecaries since my arrival in London Perhaps I bought with me something of the countryman’s distrust of new-fangled city remedies, as well as a suspicion that coney-catchers were to be found not only on the exterior in Paul’s Walk.

Old Nick’s place didn’t hold out much promise. The shop had a squinting slit rather than a window, and little light was allowed in. Wooden boxes and earthenware pots were strewn on lop-sided shelves and the smoky walls were hung with sacs and bladders of animal and vegetable origin. Overhead a stuffed alligator swayed slightly in the draught from the door. I say that it was stuffed, but I believe that at two or three moments during what followed I caught it twitching its tail out of the corner of my eye. On a clear space of the wall behind the counter had been chalked various cabbalistic signs together with pointed stars and overlapping circles and, imperfectly rubbed out, a detailed drawing of a lady sporting a great dildo. There was a smell in the shop, not a completely agreeable one.

‘Hello,’ Nell called, and then after a pause, ‘Nick?’

Silence. The alligator’s eye gleamed in the gloom. I noticed that other impedimenta hung from the ceiling: a couple of large tortoises, a shaft of bone with a saw-like edge, a scaly tail (doubtless a mermaid’s), a kind of tusk (a unicorn’s for certain).

‘This is a waste of time,’ I said. I wasn’t sure what we were doing here anyway. The place made me uneasy.

‘Wait,’ said Nell. ‘He will come when you call him.’

‘Yes,’ said a voice from the corner.

I looked towards the sound. I could have have sworn that the corner was empty when I first surveyed the grimy room. A figure seemed to come together out of the gloom, to assemble itself from patches of light and dark.

‘I always come when my Nell calls.’

The man who shuffled forward was very old. He looked like a plant root or stem that has been hung up in some dusty corner and forgotten. Despite his age his voice had a sweet, almost youthful quality, but it set the hairs on my arms bristling.

‘This is also Nick,’ said Nell to the apothecary. ‘Master Revill, that is.’

‘Call me Old Nick,’ said the old man. ‘That is how I am known.’

I made a very slight bow.

‘He wanted to meet you,’ said Nell.

‘But now he is not so sure.’

I, by the by, had said nothing.

‘Did you recover your ring?’ said the apothecary.