Alms for Oblivion (35 page)

“Don’t underestimate the public,” I said, thinking that William Shakespeare would have been proud of me for such a liberal sentiment. “Even so, with this Trojan play, I
rather think the shareholders are of your opinion.”

“I defer to you in the question of plays and public taste, Nicholas. Just as you must defer to me when it comes to crime and punishment.”

“I do,” I said, feeling rebuked. I could not be comfortable in this man’s company, for all that he had helped to save me.

“Then, after Richard Milford’s death,” Talbot continued, “there was the murder of the woman in the brothel. That was when things began to look really bleak for you. You
were intimately linked to Nell of Holland’s Leaguer, you were in the stew moments after she died. You were almost begging to be arrested, tried and hanged.”

“I thought . . . ”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

I stopped myself from saying that at one stage recently I’d thought that
he
, Alan Talbot, was the murderer of Nell. Instead I reverted to something he’d mentioned earlier.

“Hers wasn’t a – a death which benefited me though, was it? To go back to your question. Who benefits?”

“Ah,” said Talbot in his legalistic, hair-splitting way, “I didn’t say that that was the
only
question, merely that it was the
first
question. True, you
wouldn’t have benefited from your friend Nell’s death, you wouldn’t have gained advantage from it – but it might have satisfied your jealousy – or someone else’s
jealousy – or their anger – or their pride – ”

“ – or their need for advancement,” I added, thinking of the fragment of dialogue I’d overheard between Edmund Jute and his mother, about the murder of Nell. That she had
had to be discarded because of her ambitions and Jute’s sense of his place. ‘She was beginning to have ideas that she
would
do,’ Jute had said, and my gut tightened at the
memory.

“You see,” said Talbot, “there are plenty of motives for murder. But it never hurts to begin with the most obvious one. Who benefits? So after the first murder, after Peter
Agate’s death, I set myself to find out a little about him. I discovered that he came from a distinguished old family, which probably wouldn’t have been happy with the idea of his going
on stage – ”

“They weren’t.”

“That he was the only male child in a family of girls. That he came from a large estate just outside your own village.”

“You didn’t know that his father had died, though?”

“Not at the time. And ‘been murdered’ would be more accurate.”

“Gertrude killed her husband?”

“Yes, even though it will never be known for certain. But a letter was discovered in Jute’s lodgings which – hinted at that possibility. She was too cautious to commit herself
outright to paper.”

“You searched his lodgings?”

“I had them searched, after he had come to see me with his mother’s letter, and while I was delaying and asking myself questions. He roused my suspicions, as I’ve said. There
were other letters from her besides the one reporting your arrival in Miching. They corresponded frequently. Among them was one describing the manner of old Anthony Agate’s death. She had
underlined the words ‘rabbit stew’. Twice.”

“Perhaps she was sending him a recipe.”

“Only if the rabbit had been fed belladonna first.”

I must have looked baffled because Talbot explained.

“The nightshade isn’t only deadly on its own account. If you eat a bird or a rabbit which has eaten one of the berries, then you may be just as easily poisoned. I understand that
Anthony Agate was making a slow recovery from a fever. His daughter Anne tells me that the last things he ate were rabbit stew and a few grapes. After that he suffered a relapse.”

“She poisoned him for his estate.”

“Or if it wasn’t done that way with the rabbit stew, then it was done another way. I doubt that the fever was genuine. Anne Agate said that her father was always as strong as a horse.
Yes, she poisoned him for the sake of the estate, or for the sake of her son.”

“Much good it did her. But there was another son who would have inherited. I mean, Peter Agate.”

“And who’d disappeared,” said Talbot. “To make his fortune as a player, although no one knew that.”

“What if he had returned to Miching? To claim his inheritance.”

“No doubt she would have dealt with him in the same way that she dealt with Anthony Agate. But she didn’t have to. Because Edmund took over now.”

“When Peter arrived in London and got to know my Company and so got introduced to the law students at Middle Temple . . . ”

“Yes. By pure chance. And Edmund Jute saw his opportunity. Here was the heir to Quint House and all its lands, fallen into his lap. All he had to do was to ensure that young Agate never
returned home.”

“I rather think I might have prompted Jute to make his move,” I said. “I told him that Peter was thinking of going back to Miching. My friend was not altogether, ah, happy in
London. He thought of it as a place which brought out his worser self. I am sorry for it.”

“Sorry for London?”

“Sorry that I should have given Jute his cue to act.”

“Do not reproach yourself, Nicholas. Jute was a man who had murder in his blood. Think of his mother. He must have imbibed it with her milk. He would have done it, with or without your
prompting. After the first occasion, he enjoyed killing. I have met the type before.”

I’d already told Talbot of that chilling exchange between mother and son, of how he’d acquired a taste for ‘it’. Now I said, “And that is why he went on to murder
Richard – and Nell?”

“There your guess is as good as mine. It may have been that he was covering his tracks.”

“By committing even more murders?”

“The best place to hide a fallen leaf is on the forest floor,” said Talbot in riddling mode. “I mean, that if he wanted to cover up the motive for killing Peter Agate then an
opportune way to do it was to kill others, and confuse the issue. That you would be blamed for it was an unexpected blessing.”

“Blessing!”

I almost choked on my drink.

“Any motive might have done,” pursued Talbot. “For example, there was some altercation between the law students and Richard Milford after the play in Middle Temple. I noticed
that myself. Perhaps Jute was so swollen with arrogance that he determined to pay the playwright back there and then. Or rather, somewhere else and a little later.”

“And with my friend Nell,” I said, “I think it was the belief that he was better than her and that he did not want her company when he became a gentleman with a fine house and
lands. He had been visiting her for some time, I believe. And she must have got ideas from things that he said or promised . . . For she had – she had ambitions, you know, and was not content
to be a whore all her life – and she was – ”

Here I embarrassed myself by breaking down into tears. We were in the inn-chamber of the Night Owl, sitting side by side on a settle. I turned my head aside from Master Talbot and stuck my face
into my tankard, not wishing him to see my grief, while he, like a true English gentleman, pretended that there was nothing wrong with me.

“ – she was a thousand times better than him,” I finally got out through clenched teeth.

Our journey to London was nearly over. It took four days and, by the end of it, I could hardly walk. Still, the hard ride, in the teeth of the worsening weather, and the discomfort of keeping my
place in the saddle as well as keeping up with Alan Talbot, helped to steer my mind away from the dire events of the autumn.

As we rode Talbot revealed other things. While he and Edmund Jute had been riding down to Miching together, on their hired horses, the young man had let things slip, perhaps more things than he
was aware of. Talbot finished the journey convinced he was keeping company with a murderer. It was a family concern too, handed down through the generations. Talbot believed that Gertrude Agate had
done away with her first two husbands – one Thomas Jute of Sutton Valence and one Randolph Potts of Peckham – respectively, some thirteen and six years previously. There had been a
similar history of a prolonged fever and an apparent recovery, followed by a rabbit pie and an abrupt demise.

I vowed never to eat rabbit pie again. And a thought occurred to me (though I didn’t pass it on to Talbot). It was what Edmund Jute had said to his mother after she’d drunk the
poisoned wine:
“You taught me the way when you poisoned the old man. That was the beginning.”
I’d assumed he was referring to Anthony Agate, his stepfather. But it might
have been his natural father, Thomas Jute, that he meant. Perhaps killing his mother was a cold, delayed revenge for her killing of his father, if that was something that concerned him. Or perhaps
it was simply that he was impatient to come into possession of Quint House, and had set himself to finish off Gertrude almost as soon as he’d arrived in Miching, assuming in his arrogance
that I was taken care of, as good as dead, and that his mother’s sudden departure could be passed off as a sudden fit. Or perhaps it was, even more simply, that he had acquired a taste for
killing and could not be weaned from it. Whatever the reason, we would never know now. They were all gone from us now into oblivion.

Talbot also thought that Jute had instructed his mother to keep me in Miching as long as possible, or at least until the coroner should arrive and I could be apprehended. That would explain
Gertrude Agate’s amorousness on the afternoon before her death. I remembered the pear juice dribbling down her chin, the warm hand on my thigh, the questions about where I was going. Equally,
Mrs Agate could have been serving her own appetites here. A young man, almost any man in fact, was to her like a hare to a hound. She couldn’t help herself.

Talbot and I parted in Southwark. We arrived on a late afternoon in early December. I signed a formal deposition in his chambers in Long Southwark to the effect that Edmund Jute had died as a
result of wounds which were self-inflicted. That wicked young man had killed himself in a fit of remorse after he was surprised in the act of poisoning his mother. He had also confessed to the
murders of three other people, two of them from the borough of Southwark and one from over the water in Thames Street. The charges which had resulted in my being clapped up in the Counter prison
were annulled. I was a free man again. There was a strange mixture of truth and untruth in this version of events. But Talbot was insistent on it. It seemed to serve some higher notion of justice
and truth – and who is to say that he was wrong?

I returned, unutterably weary and saddle-sore, to Dead Man’s Place. Samuel Benwell had not found anyone to take my place. I don’t think he’d been looking for another tenant. I
wasn’t surprised. Who’d take a hole of a room like mine? And the landlord didn’t seem surprised to see me. He didn’t even mention murders, or anything like that.

“Been touring, Nicholas?”

“Something like that, Master Benwell. Can I have my old room back?”

“Are you still with the Chamberlain’s?”

“Yes,” I said, although the truth was that I didn’t know.

“Any titbits?”

“There is a great scandal in the offing.”

He licked his thin lips.

“But I am tired now. I’ll tell you tomorrow – or the next day – or the one after . . . ”

Muttering, I plodded up the stairs and opened my door and threw myself on my low bed. The room wasn’t much – it was hardly anything – but it was home.

At the end of a story there’s a certain satisfaction in settling the characters into their appointed stations. It must be rather like the satisfaction which the tire-man
Bartholomew Ridd feels when all his costumes come back at the end of a play, and are put away, neat and folded in their resting places. So it is with some of the remaining figures in this story.

I can’t speak for the spirit in which Coroner Talbot quit the village of Miching but I was heartily glad to see the back of my birthplace, and hoped never to have to return to it. Two
people had died there, violently and within minutes of each other. I had escaped murder by a hair’s-breadth. It was as if that old rascal death, angry that the occupants of Quint House had
been spared the pestilence, was determined that they should nonetheless suffer extensively. In this case, though, you could not say that the son and mother should have been spared. If anyone ever
deserved to die . . .

My feelings – and, I think, Alan Talbot’s – were chiefly for the three Agate sisters, Anne, Margaret and Katie. They had witnessed their mother’s and father’s
deaths within little more than a year, and lost a loved brother. Now those murderous intruders into the family, Gertrude and Edmund Jute, had perished on their doorstep. They couldn’t be
expected to feel grief for the pair but they did feel the shock, the horror of what had occurred.

It took several days to deal with the aftermath of the event. Talbot’s authority did not, of course, extend to the wilds of Somerset but he still carried weight – both in his office
and his person – with the local coroner (who had to come from Wells, some miles distant). The two men were closeted together for a long time. No doubt Talbot described his investigations into
the murder of Peter Agate, as well as his suspicions about the death of Anthony Agate and Gertrude Jute’s first husbands. I was called on to add my twopenny-worth. Talbot had already
questioned me about what had happened and we had agreed a version of events. I couldn’t help reflecting that this was the
third
occasion on which he’d interrogated me about a
violent death. This time, however, as I’ve said, he was determined to exonerate me of any blame.

Mother and son were buried without much ceremony on the north side of Miching churchyard. The parson Ralph Verney, good Christian that he was, prayed for the repose of their immortal souls. I
don’t think he knew – or perhaps he didn’t choose to know – the full wickedness of the pair.

The full extent of it was kept from the Agate sisters too. They were consoled by me, to a degree, but much more by Ralph Verney. Mrs Hobbs, clucking, maternal Mrs Hobbs, suggested that the young
sisters should move into the parsonage for a time – “Chill look a’ter the poor volk, poor parentless volk” – but Anne Agate, who was now the head of the family, said
that none of them were going to shift out of the house where they’d been born. Even so they were without a protector, and there was an estate to superintend.