Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

‘You have as your trug or doxy or housewife, what you will, a woman called Nell? She is a notorious whore. You are her pimp or pa-pa-pa-pander.’

Of what use was it to protest that Nell loved me and that I, in my way, loved her, and that whatever might be her relations with other men, with me they were unsoiled by the taint of money either offered or taken? So I might have said before yesterday, anyway. I gave up the attempt. These men had already convicted me. All that remained was the sentence.

‘You know so much that you must have been following me,’ I said, lamely. And, indeed, I thought of the plump man who had been on my tail a few days before when I had left my Nell. I became certain that it was this individual who was now standing in front of me in the candlelit cabin.

‘We have sniffed you out,’ said Adrian, who had been content to leave Ralph to batter away at me. ‘We have sniffed you out to your stinking lair. You have cheated and abused my friend Ralph through his mother and his sister as surely as you have cheated and abused me.’

‘Oh, you are a thief,’ I said, feigning a boldness I did not feel.

‘Let losers have their words,’ said Adrian.

‘You would have stole my lady’s necklace — and loaded the blame onto poor mute Jacob too.’

‘You trapped me with a trick,’ he said. ‘You slipped a hair around my finger and said that it was one of my lady’s when it was no such thing. Say that is not true, player, if you can.’

How could I, when it was true, perfectly true? Never mind that Adrian really was a thief. I had used a subterfuge to trap him, as William Eliot had discerned. I’d dishonestly caught a dishonest man. There was a germ of truth in all their accusations and it was enough to dishearten me.

‘What’s he got against me?’ I asked, gesturing with my head in the direction of the third member of this triumvirate, the long-armed and grimy charcoal-burner. Up to this point he had said nothing.

‘He is in my employ,’ said Adrian.

The grimy creature nodded his head and smiled — that is, he opened a hole of a mouth. He had two remaining teeth at the top that huddled together for comfort.

‘He is a man of few words,’ I said. ‘Is he dumb?’

‘Nub is serviceable,’ said Adrian. ‘He lives in this forest.’

At this announcement of his name and dwelling, Nub again performed a smile.

‘Like a faun or a satyr,’ I said.

‘Simple he may be,’ said Adrian, ‘but at least he is not a city fellow like you, player, full of deceits and trickery.’

‘I’m from the country myself.’ I tried to be jaunty but it is hard when your limbs are numb and your heart is dancing with fear. ‘From the West. I am a stranger to London.’

‘Why are we wasting time?’ said fat Ralph to Adrian. ‘He keeps us talking to delay us.’

‘Waiting adds relish to the meat,’ said Adrian.

Of the three, Ralph was the most eager to exact revenge. Adrian, I judged, was no less enthusiastic to hurt me, probably to kill me, but he enjoyed his taunting and his hand-rubbing and his gleeful leers too much to get straight down to business as his companion wished. The other man, the ape of a charcoal-burner, was a hanger-on, probably vicious on request.

While we’d been talking I had been casting surreptitious eyes round the simple room, like a trapped beast. I was reclining awkwardly and painfully on a mound of straw, Nub’s bedding, fit for a brute. My hands and feet I could scarcely feel, so long and securely had they been bound. I was sweating with fear although little gusts of night air entered through the many gaps and holes in the plaited willow of the hut walls. There wasn’t so much a doorway as a place where a section of the wall was more tattered and incomplete than elsewhere. Small bones from the charcoal-burner’s meals were scattered about. It was more like the den of an animal than the dwelling-place of a human being.

In the centre of the earth floor a pile of ash and burnt twigs lay heaped up together with the charred remains of some small forest creature; directly above this was an uncertain hole in the roof for the smoke to climb through. When I was forced, because of the discomfort of my position, to fall backwards on the prickly bedding from time to time, I glimpsed a single cold star shining far above the hole, hazed over by the smoke from the two candles. I doubted that Nub had ever been prosperous enough to possess a candle in his life. Adrian must have supplied them so that this absurd tribunal was not staged in utter darkness. Even as I looked up the cold star was snuffed out by a black curtain of cloud. That star was my hope, and now it was gone. The air grew even more still.

Fat Ralph was correct, of course. I was talking because I was frightened and because as long as I could get them to talk and keep them at it they were not doing anything worse, like beating me or killing me. Only two of them counted in this respect. The third, the charcoal-burner, showed no interest in my supposed crimes. However, as well as wanting to live a little longer, I was curious.

‘Tell me one thing,’ I said, ‘before. .’

‘Before. . before what, player?’ said Adrian, practically hoisting himself into the air in his villainous dance of glee.

‘Before the, ah, epilogue,’ I said.

‘Your epilogue and your exit,’ said Adrian.

‘Why did you kill Old Nick? Why did you bring him out here?’

‘The latter is easily answered,’ said the false steward. ‘Old Nick, as you call him, was brought out here to keep you company. As long as the pit be big enough, what matter how many bodies it contain.’

So they planned to do away with me. Well, that was hardly news. Yet there was something about hearing it cold that made me break out hot all over again. At the same time, like a bass accompaniment to the villain’s threats, a growling broke out in the distance. Thunder. Once again, my mind reverted to Master WS, and how, often at some moment of crisis in his drama, he would interpolate a human storm with a heavenly one. Well, here was my crisis, and here was the storm, come pat. So Nature copies Art.

‘And the first part?’ I persisted. ‘How had the apothecary deserved to die? Had he whored your sister too, Master Ralph? Or bepissed your mother perhaps?’

Ralph took a step towards me. His leg was already pulling back for a kick but Adrian put out a restraining arm.

‘Later,’ he said. ‘I wish the player to know exactly what is due to him. I don’t want him kicked insensible.’ Then, to me, ‘There is no harm in answering your question since your mouth and your eyes and ears will soon be stopped. Do you think you have seen all of us, player? Know that there is another in the shadows. It is with us even as it is with you theatre people. We are the ones on-stage — yet there is another off-stage who keeps his own counsel.’

This was somehow not surprising. The whole tangled business was beyond Adrian’s grasp alone.

‘I knew it,’ I said.

‘You know nothing,’ said Adrian. I sensed that the false steward already regretted saying what little he had said.

‘He killed the apothecary, this individual in the shadows?’

Adrian seemed to want to withdraw his wicked and winking hints. For a moment his black cloak subsided into stillness, his tall black hat ceased to wag. He was silent.

‘And Sir William Eliot, your old master. He was murdered, wasn’t he?’ I persisted, momentarily at an advantage. ‘But you didn’t kill him. It was the man in the shadows, surely?’

From outside came renewed rumbling, as if some beast was roaming on the outskirts of the forest.

‘I have said enough,’ said Adrian, now distinctly subdued.

‘I am right,’ I said.