Sleep of Death (6 page)

‘I saw Jacob slip this from my lady’s white neck’ – he waved the pearl necklace so that it looked like a stream of milk – ‘oh so closely while all of you were attending to the play. He’s a cunning one. He possesses subtle pickers and stealers for all his size. I saw it all from where I was standing behind you. How did he think that he would get away with it?’

In demonstration, Black Cloak seized the right hand of the larger man in his left and held it up to display to the others. I had the impression that, if he could, he would have detached each of the large man’s blunt fingers and passed them around in proof of what he was saying. Yet I could see nothing delicate in these fingers that were supposed to have stolen. I stood, uneasily, at the rear of the box, puzzled because the large man made no attempt to wrest his hand away from the other’s grasp. Nor did he speak. He merely hung, crestfallen, in the centre of this little group.

‘He saw that I had witnessed all of it,’ continued the man in the black cloak. ‘My eyes are everywhere, you know, in your service, Sir Thomas. He tried to get away. I followed him out and, by good fortune, this gentleman was coming along the passage. Our friend Jacob bumped into him and fell. I overcame him and recovered the necklace.’

Again he flourished the milky chain. The whole report was delivered in a clipped, dry style as if Black Cloak were recounting some military skirmish in which he had been modestly victorious.

‘This gentleman is one of the players,’ he added.

I bowed slightly, and gave my name. Whatever the circumstances, I saw no reason why these good folk should not be acquainted with Master Nick Revill.

None of the three occupants of the box had yet spoken. Now the one who had been addressed as Sir Thomas stood up and came forward. I was aware of the play proceeding below, the buzz of voices, the answering laughter and noises of approval from the groundlings. These boxes were designed for privacy and whatever drama was taking place here would not touch on the absorbed attention of the rest of the audience.

‘This is a sorry state of affairs, Jacob,’ said Sir Thomas, ‘and after I had kept you in my household.’

He was, like Black Cloak, shorter than Jacob and had to look up into the thief’s face. But he had an air of authority and spoke with easy assurance. I wasn’t able to judge the expression on Jacob’s face but I saw the shake of his head.

‘What’s the matter, Jacob?’ said Sir Thomas. ‘Are you trying to deny what Master Adrian is saying? Much better to come clean over this business now.’

The big man continued to move his head slowly from side to side, and I understood then that he was dumb. Bear-like not only in size and the colouring of hair and beard, but also in his inability to articulate his predicament. The man with the black cloak, who was apparently called Adrian, glanced at me, as if wanting a confirmation of everything which he had described. I knew that I should have to return to the stage within a few minutes. Although I couldn’t have said exactly how I knew it, I knew too that Adrian was lying. Everything he’d said from beginning to end was false. There was something glib in his speech, and in the way he had protested too much. If he had been on stage, one would have perceived immediately that within this figure – with his black clothing, his showy gestures and his overstatement – lurked the villain. Most probably, it was he who had taken the necklace, and the hulking Jacob who’d pursued him through the door, rather than the other way about. The passage was so narrow and the two men so close that such a confusion between pursuer and pursued might have occured. Then, when the large man collided with me, Adrian – seeing it was all up with the robbery and needing a story to channel suspicion from himself – spotted his opportunity. He pretended to find the stolen item in the other’s jerkin, having placed it there during his rummaging.

All this I saw in an instant, and yet I had not a shred of proof.

We must have made an odd tableau, standing or seated as if all six of us were blocked for the stage and waiting for someone to tell us what to do next. Although Adrian, whom I supposed to be some kind of steward in this household, had named another and lower servant as a thief, it did not seem to me as though the others were ready to act on his accusation. I noticed that the woman was looking at Jacob more in bafflement than anger. Her hand remained at her neck. The necklace dangled from Adrian’s grasp, as if reluctant to be loosed. For some reason, this confirmed his guilt in my eyes. For certain, it was he who had filched the necklace; if Adrian had recovered it from Jacob’s clothing, as he had mimed doing outside the box, he would by now have handed it back to the lady. There is a taint in stolen goods and no honest man will hold on to them. Sir Thomas turned to the second man who had remained seated. He was younger, a pale-faced individual dressed in black.

‘What do you think, William?’

‘I think that this gentleman from the players could say more if he wished.’

He looked steadily at me. Sir Thomas nodded.

‘No doubt. You have heard what Adrian has told us, Master . . . forgive me, you said your name was . . .?’

‘Nicholas Revill.’

‘Master Revill. Is this how it appeared to you?’

‘I saw what I saw. These two men exited from your box in some confusion. One stumbled into me, the other recovered that necklace from him. I think.’

Jacob now turned towards me. His large brown eyes were blank; he expected no favours from me or from anybody. His helpless air would have moved a savage to pity. And it may be, too, that a dumb man will remind a player of the treasury of his tongue, and cause him to thank God for giving him all his faculties complete. Adrian’s razor nose quivered. He continued to hold up the necklace as damning evidence of the other servant’s guilt. Rings glittered on his fingers.

‘Well, Jacob,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘I fear I have no alternative but to to have you escorted to the Clink.’

The Clink is one of half a dozen or so prisons in Southwark. Our lawlesslessness is well provided for.

‘No,’ I said.

There was a pause while everyone swallowed the enormity of my contradicting Sir Thomas.

‘No?’ he said.

‘I mean,’ I added hastily, ‘that Jacob did not steal this lady’s necklace.’

Like Caesar, I had crossed the Rubicon. No stepping back. I was about to be exposed as a fool, and a malicious fool at that.

‘Explain, if you would,’ said Sir Thomas.

‘Master Adrian, give me your hand if you please.’

I spoke with all the assurance of the budding alderman that I played in
A City Pleasure.
Thinking of which, I glanced down towards the stage. Well, this too was a kind of act. Hurry.

The steward with the black cloak glanced at Sir Thomas, who shrugged, but in such a way as to indicate that Adrian should comply. Adrian held out his left hand, raising his eyes heavenward. He was a good player, perhaps a more subtle villain than I had at first assumed, but I was the better player, and, knowing this, I felt a sudden gust of certainty sweep through me. I gestured at the other hand, the one grasping the necklace. Even now unwilling to lay down the string of pearls, he transferred it to his left. I took his free palm between mine. It was a narrow, dry hand, and that must signify something . . . everything that we have signifies, everything is pregnant with indication. And now I was about to draw conclusions from this hand or, rather, from its accessories.

He wore several rings. From under one of them I slid something out. I walked over to where the woman sat by the rail of the box, no longer even pretending to watch the play.

‘Forgive me, my lady,’ I said. I pulled taut what I held in my hand. It was a thread of hair. I placed it near her ladyship’s golden, unbonneted head, trying to angle the single thread so that it caught the light. The hair was a match, or close enough for my purposes. The four men – Sir Thomas, the younger William, bear-like Jacob, and the sharp-nosed Adrian – held me with their eyes as attentively as if I were an alchemist who had just effected that magical transformation of base material into gold.

‘This was under the ring on his middle finger,’ I said. ‘As you can see, it is from my lady’s head.’

I left the connection for them to make.

‘This is absurd, a piece of playing,’ said Adrian. ‘What is he saying? He is saying nothing.’

He still held the necklace, but I think that he would have been willing enough to get rid of it now.

William spoke. ‘This gentleman from the players is saying, I believe, that you removed the necklace, and as you did so a hair from my mother’s head was caught between the ring and your finger.’

William’s words clarified slightly the relationship between the occupants of the box. Even so, the lady hardly looked old enough to have a son in his twenties. From my vantage point, a little to one side and above where she sat, I saw nothing but a head of gold untarnished by the years. Unlike many ladies of rank – unlike, for instance, our beloved Queen (whom I saw three days after I arrived in London, and from a mere eight yards off) – she wore no wig but rested content and justified in what Nature provided. Furthermore, her partly uncovered breasts were full and smooth and white. If she was William’s mother, then presumably Sir Thomas was his father.

‘Do you know what happened, Alice?’ said Sir Thomas, appealing to her.

‘I am not sure. I felt nothing.’ Her voice was low and resonant. ‘But this should be simple enough to prove. Let Jacob steal the necklace again. If he can take it once then he can surely take it twice. Give it to me, Adrian.’

The steward, who now appeared to wish himself anywhere but in this box in the playhouse, returned the necklace to Lady Alice. Swiftly she reclasped it around the white pillar of her neck. Now she was the centre of the scene, and we five men mere bystanders.

‘I am looking at this play once more, this – what’s it called . . .?’

‘
A City Pleasure
,’ I said.

‘I am absorbed in
A City Pleasure.
I am all ears and eyes on the stage. The back of my neck is bare, save for the necklace, and I am quite undefended. You may do what you please with me.’

She still spoke softly, but as she described what she was doing she suited the word to the action and, becoming a rapt spectator, bent her head slightly forward to expose the upswept golden hair and the contrasting snowy white skin and the clasp of the necklace.

‘Now, Jacob,’ she said in a tone that was almost kindly. ‘You must remove this necklace from my neck. You must try your best.’

Sir Thomas pushed gently at the hapless Jacob who, until this point, had been standing in the centre of the box. Slow and worried as he was, he nevertheless understood what he had to do. He shuffled a couple of paces forward to where my lady Alice was leaning over the balustrade. She gave no sign of being aware of anything except the play unfolding below. Jacob stretched out his arms, then seemed to realise that this was more a job for dexterity than force. He looked at his large hands, and tried to flex his fingers but they were quivering so much that he could get no control over them. These great paws, covered on the backs with reddish hair, approached the pale column of his mistress’s neck, and he had the wit to realise that this was a kind of sacrilege, as well as the simplicity not to be able to conceal it. In the middle of her bare nape glowed the intricate clasp that secured the pearl necklace.

I glanced at the others. Sir Thomas was watching his ungainly servant advance on Lady Alice. Her son, the black-suited William, who had still not risen from his seat in the other corner of the box, was dividing his attention between the tremulous thief and Adrian. The latter had positioned himself near to the door. The steward caught my eye and shot me a look as sharp as his nose. It was apparent that he held me responsible for this little scene, even though this part had been his mistress’s suggestion. His own version of events would have seen Jacob safely on his way to the Clink by now.

Jacob’s hands arrived at Lady Alice’s neck. They were shaking uncontrollably. For all her self-control, the woman tensed as she felt his fingers scraping and scrabbling at the clasp. After a few moments Jacob turned to look at his master, Sir Thomas. I do not think that I have ever seen such a combination of helplessness and entreaty. He made some strangulated sound in his throat. But speech here was quite unnecessary. All of our actions speak, and his dumbness was pitifully eloquent. Sir Thomas nodded, and Jacob let his huge hands drop to his sides.

Nobody spoke. It was quite evident to every person in that little room that Jacob could never have taken Lady Alice’s necklace. For one thing, he was far too clumsy, barely capable of undoing the catch even had it been around his own neck and his hands absolutely steady. Certainly, he could not have performed the trick without her noticing. But a stronger reason was that his every movement, his every gesture, showed that he lived with a respect that amounted almost to reverence for this man and woman, his master and mistress. We had all witnessed how his hands shook as they drew close to her neck, how reluctantly his feet had dragged across the oak flooring of the box. He was attempting to be a thief only at the command of Sir Thomas and the Lady Alice. If they’d told him to leap out of the box into the area where the groundlings stood below, he most likely would have obeyed. Nor was this a matter of acting. He was too stupid to act, but he was also – and this I saw suddenly – too
good
to act anything. Jacob was simply what he was, a single man and nothing more. For the rest of us in that box I cannot speak; we might all have been players, and even the poorest of players is a double man.

The silence was broken by Adrian. (I mean the silence in our little box, for all the time during this interlude the buzz and hum of stage business floated up to our unlistening ears.) But before he spoke, he smiled. A little lop-sided grin. Like Jacob he had a kind of wit, in his case the wit to realise that he was cornered.

‘Player is clever,’ he said. ‘Player knows his business, as I hope I know mine.’

I felt chilled, even though the afternoon was warm and I was sweating in my heavy town costume. But there was guilt in his words and in his crooked smiling face. Now Sir Thomas spoke, but with a peculiar reluctance which I attributed to the difficult task which confronted him.