Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

I was half hopping, half being hauled along like a sack. My two escorts were panting and sweating with the effort of carrying me, particularly the man on my left who was plumper and heavier than his companion. The one on my right was more wiry. His face seemed to be in shadow. He smelt woody and smoky. Several times one or other of them lost his grip and we had to pause while he got a firmer handhold. I would have suggested, conversationally, that it would be easier for all of us if my feet were unbound and I was allowed to walk. But it was plain that they wouldn’t do anything without their leader Adrian authorising it and, no doubt, he thought that, with free feet, I would attempt to run away. As I would have done, given the smallest chance.

After we’d travelled a few hundred yards in this fashion Adrian made a decisive turn off the path. I saw a tiny light glimmering among the trees. Soon we arrived at what looked like a ramshackle hut, a darker shape in the enveloping darkness. A candle was burning in a gap between the intertwined branches of which the hut was made. I was pushed, almost thrown, through an open door. I landed face down on a scratchy mound of straw. I twisted round, spitting out fragments of it. The hut was small and barely enclosed my three captors as they stood upright while I sprawled on what I took to be a simple bed.

I suddenly understood in what sort of place I was and the probable identity of one of my escorts, the one who smelt and whose face was in shadow. As the greatest and most populous city in the world, London has more need of fuel than lesser towns and it is charcoal that is used in preference to any other. Our city is ringed about by charcoal-burners, men who live out in the woods where they ply their trade and who bring their supplies early in the morning to Croydon or Greenwich or Romford. There they sell their wares to the city colliers, who deliver sacks to the needy wives. The charcoal-burners are shy men, living more like beasts in the forest than like human beings in society, while their city cousins, the colliers, are crafty and think nothing of short-changing their customers by switching a larger sack for a smaller or filling the bottoms of them with dross.

I was convinced that this place where I lay bound and helpless was a charcoal-burner’s hut, and the blackened, shadowy figure who had escorted me here together with the plump man was a charcoal-burner. For sure, I had smelt the woody, sooty scent on him but had not realised it for what it was.

This shadowy figure now scuttled about the hut in a way that suggested it was his own. He lit another candle from the one that had guided us there and placed them both on the earthen floor. The candles flickered in the draughts piercing the ragged sides of the hut. The shadows of the three men confronting me jumped and swelled on the walls and roof, which were crudely made of wattle and daub. Adrian seemed to swirl in his black cloak and hat, a dancing devil. The shadowy shape of the charcoal-burner was so encrusted with soot and grime that his features were indecipherable. He had long arms and his posture reminded me of a melancholy ape which I had once seen in a cage. The third man, the plump one, wheezed as he gazed at me with an expression hovering between hatred and satisfaction.

‘Well,’ said Adrian, ‘we have met before.’

‘If you’re going to take so long on the prologue,’ I said, ‘you may never get to the main action.’

‘We shall shortly move to the epilogue with no interim,’ he said. ‘Your epilogue, your exit.’

Adrian accompanied these histrionic words with a leer. It is odd how even in a desperate situation — and this was the most desperate I had ever experienced — the mind can work clearly. What the false steward’s expressions reminded me of was a line from Master WS’s Hamlet about ‘damnable faces’. Since I had played Lucianus, the poisoner in the play-within-the-play, and these were in fact the words that described my appearance, or rather his appearance, I suppose you could say I am something of an expert on looking horrid. And, in my judgement, Adrian was overdoing it.

‘And so the whirligig of time brings in his revenges,’ I said.

‘Sweet meat will have sour sauce,’ he said, and I saw that we might beat each other to death with sayings.

‘Who are these gentlemen? Have they also got a grudge against me?’

There was a movement from the plump man. He had only recently recovered his breath after the exertion of dragging me through the forest.

‘You are Master Revill, the player. Master Nicholas Revill?’

He had a thick, greasy voice, like his person.

‘Surely you haven’t brought me all this way without knowing who I am?’

Underneath my easy air there was fear. If I stopped to think I would start to shake, and a tremor would enter my voice. Accordingly, I said the first things that occurred to me, hoping to keep the fear at bay.

‘Master Nicholas Revill, formerly of Ship Street?’

Ship Street. What was he talking about? That was where I’d lodged with the stuck-up Mistress Ransom and her overblown daughter, the one who tried to tumble me on her bed. Where I’d lodged, that is, until Nell had emptied a chamber-pot over the mother’s head.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I said.

‘Look on this as an action for breach of promise, Master Revill,’ said the plump man.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, not having to play at being baffled.

‘I am Ralph Ransom, brother to Meg, the simple virgin whose flower you cropped.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ I said.

‘That is not the end of it,’ said the plump man. ‘In order to take from her that precious jewel which she could bestow once and only once, you also promised yourself to her in marriage.’

‘It’s not true.’

‘You deny that you lay together?’

‘I, yes, we never. . she. .’

‘You came to her room, you spent yourself in extravagant words, she — oh foolish virgin, Margaret — took your forged notes as true tender and succumbed to your blandishments. You speedily untrussed and took down your hose, and my sister Margaret lost her honour to a man who possesses not a shred of that quality. She gave way, because you gave your oath that she would be your bride.’

‘This is absurd,’ I said, recalling all too clearly the scene in the woman’s chamber, she all red smoke and fire and I wallowing under her like a bobbing bark in a tempest.

‘There is more,’ said plump Ralph, determined to have his day and his say.

I groaned. In truth, I was in pain. The beating I’d received at the apothecary’s, the jolting ride out of London in the back of the wagon, the prospect that I would end like Old Nick on the far side of death’s door, all of these things afflicted me. And yet I played at being in a worse state still.

I groaned again and fat Ralph Ransom took this for a sufficient answer.

‘You have abused my mother.’

‘I never touched her.’

‘Abused her most monstrously.’

‘Not a finger, I swear by my own mother.’

‘After deflowering my sister, you emptied the contents of your filthy chamber pot over my mother. Do you deny that?’

‘I, well, it’s. .’

‘She was covered in your piss.’

‘No, well. . not. .’

‘A mother drenched with your waste, a sister defiled with your lust. Are not these good reasons for my hatred, Master Revill?’

I sighed.

‘I know you for what you are,’ Ralph pursued, scarcely able to speak for the fury that had been building in him. ‘You are a filthy p-p-p-player, you are a dirty crawling c-c-c-caterpillar, a double-dealing ambidexter. You are a frequenter of b-b-b-brothels and houses of sale.’

‘That could be said of half the men in London,’ I said.