The Pale Companion (25 page)

As I’d done on an earlier occasion I tugged at one arm of my companion. But Will had his other arm fastened about his doxy and was too absorbed in palping her tit to pay me any attention so I turned to leave. And walked straight into Oswald the steward.

I don’t know how long he’d been standing there by the barn entrance, regarding the antics of the Paradises and listening to Peter’s hell-fire talk. His long cadaverous face registered disapproval, though in truth it never registered anything else. My colliding with him seemed to prompt him into motion, into protestation.

“Players, are you mad? Or what are you?” he said. “Have you no wit or manners to talk and act thus in a house of mourning?”

For an instant I thought he was talking to me before realizing that his anger was aimed at the trio on stage. That peculiar dry voice, like a leaf rustling across dry stone, had an enviable carrying power. It scraped down the barn. Heads jerked round in surprise and then alarm. Sam the bailie shrunk into himself. There was a general air as of schoolchildren caught truanting. To emphasize his message, Oswald stretched out his long right arm and directed an accusing finger at the stage.

Peter Paradise had already stopped in mid-rant. Now he pretended to have just noticed the presence of an intruder.

“Who is he who interrupts the word of God?”

There was a fraught silence. Most of the little audience did not come directly under Oswald’s control, but everybody on the estate recognized the stick-man. I suspect that Peter Paradise did too. Oswald’s next words confirmed it.

“As you well know, I am Oswald the steward of Instede, and I tell you that you have no respect of place or person or time.”

You had to admire the dry, assured tones of the man, even as they intimidated you. And you had to admit that he had some justification on his side. The crowd in the barn evidently felt it too, quite apart from their natural fear of the steward.

“We respect only the word of God, brother.”

The shafts of sun which shot through the looped and ragged sides of the building suddenly turned hotter. The air, flecked with motes of dust and wisps of straw, grew heavier. There was a collective sigh from the audience. Here was true drama!

“No, player, here you will respect my word. And I say that you have no manners to rant in a house of mourning.”

There was some fervent nodding and yessing among the audience, and not simply because they wanted to look good in Oswald’s eyes. Rather, the steward had brought them back to a sense of what was right and proper. It was a question of manners. Lord Elcombe might have been Old Nick himself, but it still wasn’t the done thing – it wasn’t the
English
thing – to kick a man when he was dead and down.

Even Peter Paradise, armoured in his white robes and his whiter righteousness, sensed that he’d lost his grip on the crowd. His two fellows, Paul and Philip, had long since scrambled from their respective heaven and hell, and stood flanking their more solid brother. They made a formidable trinity. But, for all that, I considered Oswald was a match for them. Peter stepped off the raised area at the end of the barn which served for a stage, and strode through the audience which parted for him. Unobtrusively, I put a little distance between myself and Oswald. I noticed that Will Fall and Audrey had absented themselves altogether at some point during the last few minutes. They had better things to do.

Now at the entrance to the barn Peter and Oswald stood face to face, mingling breaths, tangling eye-beams. The preacher-player gave an inch or two of height to the steward but he made up for it in bulk. Oswald’s garb was even darker than usual, in tribute to his late master, while Peter Paradise wore the white robes that signified him as one of the self-chosen chosen. Behind him were his so-called brothers, ready to follow his lead wherever that might take them.

There was a long silence while each man waited for the other to do something first. To flinch, to speak, to raise a fist.

Finally, Peter said, “Have a care, steward.”

“You think that because you are virtuous, player, you have a licence to say what you please.”

“We have my Lady’s licence, brother,” boomed Peter.

“No longer. She has sent me to give you your dismissal.”

“We will hear that from her lips alone.”

“She has other business on her mind at the moment.”

“There is no business greater than God’s, Oswald. Certainly not yours.”

“While the late master was alive,” said Oswald, “he suffered her to entertain raggle-taggle groups like yours because what pleased her pleased him, but there is no need of that – or you – any longer.”

Paradise looked abashed at this answer. At any rate, his beard drooped. If their patroness had indeed withdrawn her favour, then there was no place for the Paradises at Instede. Perhaps not knowing how else to respond, he repeated, “Have a care, steward.”

He who is forced to repeat himself in a dispute has already half-lost (Revill’s law). Perhaps sensing this, the senior Paradise continued, with the same resonant boom, “Have a care I say, or you may find yourself making your bed out in the dark – like your master.”

Then Oswald the steward did something very curious – very curious for him, that is. He laughed. He opened his thin mouth by more than a margin and from it emerged a crackling sound, rather like that made by dry thorny wood thrown onto a fire. It set my teeth on edge.

It affected Peter Paradise too, affected him worse than words might have done. If you regularly play God, Moses and Abraham, I suppose you get used to being treated with respect. Paradise retreated a step and raised his arm, as he had in Salisbury when he went to brand Cain. But Oswald held his ground. And Paradise, lowering his arm, resorted once again to obscure threats.

“I tell you, steward, that as God found out your master so too will his dart strike you, and that when you least expect. God alone looses the arrow of time, and no man controls his bow.”

Oswald stood unmoved by this minatory if poetic outpouring. Eventually, realizing that he was not going to face down this man, Peter stepped around him and out into the clear sunshine. Philip and Paul followed. There was a collective sigh in the barn – of relief and, possibly, of regret that it had not come to a physical trial of strength between these two men. (My money would have been on Oswald.)

The steward, who apparently had his own sense of theatre, waited a moment or two before casting cold eyes on the estate workers. No one dared to meet his glance. Then he said with weary contempt, “You are idle, shallow things. Get back to your work.”

Meekly, they trooped from the barn, like chastened school-boys. I remained behind, wanting to differentiate myself from the others. Oswald’s gaze rested on me for an instant but, just before I would have broken it and looked down, he turned away and exited the barn.

After a time I wandered out, musing on what I’d seen and heard. The day continued fine, the birds sang blithely, but my heart was full of murder.

The murder of Lord Elcombe, that is. I pursued the ideas which I’d outlined to Justice Fielding, in particular the notion that, because they must have been standing close, Elcombe had known the person who killed him. However, as I’d just seen in the encounter between Peter Paradise and Oswald, enemies stand close too – when they are about to join battle.

And Paradise’s final words filled my mind. All that talk of darts and arrows of time. A figure of speech, obviously, for time itself has no dart or arrow. Time has nothing, although it takes all that we possess.
But a sundial has a kind of dart
– in the shape of its gnomon. If we are to search for time’s arrow anywhere then it should be on the sundial’s face. Was Paradise’s choice of words just coincidence? Or was he making some subtle jest about the manner of Elcombe’s death? If so, it was in keeping with the disrespect of the remainder of his performance. Plainly, he did not mourn the death of Elcombe, that rich and godless man.

Another thought struck me: if you regularly played God, then how long would it be before you really played God, as it were. How hard would it be to grow into the belief that one was God’s agent on earth, entitled to loose off time’s arrow prematurely? No, not how hard but how easy? To bring to a close a life of which you – and more importantly, God – disapproved?

I stopped in my wanderings through the little copse which bordered this edge of the estate. Was I seriously saying to myself, I said to myself, that the Paradise Brothers had taken upon themselves the right to judge, to condemn and to punish. I looked about. Nearby was the cottage of Sam the bailie, where I examined the noose which had pinched Robin’s neck tight. If so – if the Paradise trinity had taken upon themselves the right to judge – then how did Robin fit into the scheme of things? I had Fielding’s opinion that everything was connected and my own instinct told a similiar tale.

Robin’s ramblings about the devil recurred to me. Talk of the devil might well be offensive to someone who thinks he’s God. Offensive enough to make one want to close the speaker’s mouth? I considered the expertise of the Paradise Brothers, their handiness with rope and harness as they hoisted each other aloft. When had the trio arrived at Instede? Was it before or after the woodman’s body was discovered? A little before, I thought. Some dark suspicions hovered on the edge of my thoughts.

Then I heard giggling and other sounds from a dense pack of undergrowth. I tensed, but relaxed after an instant. I recognized the deeper laugh that underpinned the giggling.

“Will?” I said.

A small girlish shriek, then silence, then a male voice: “Nick?”

“No, a wood spirit come to curb your licentious activities.”

“Go away, Nick. Audrey and I are discussing country matters.”

Another bout of giggles. However much distress she felt for her employer’s death, Audrey had evidently come unclammed.

I crept away.

Well, I suppose it’s reassuring to know that some activities persist regardless of time’s arrow.

The air of Instede was getting oppressive. Sudden death seemed to hang about us, just as the house was hung with swags and bows of black. For all the beauty of the place there was something rotten at its heart, as I’d said to Kate.

The day before the funeral I set out to escape from the estate. While preparations continued for Elcombe’s interment, Instede House was possessed by a gloomy stir and I felt my own face set in a miserable mask. It was hard to remember what it was like to laugh or smile. I exaggerate, but not much. As I wandered through the grounds I even thought of whistling – but it would have been an act of defiance not a natural thing. And it’s as well I didn’t because moments later I glimpsed Lady Elcombe with her son Cuthbert and Kate Fielding, deep in talk. I was pleased enough that she had youthful company until I noticed Oswald making for the group. The stick-man bent forward to whisper in my Lady’s ear, no doubt to recall her to her mourning duties, and she broke away from the others. I passed Adam Fielding too, looking grim and furrow-browed like the rest. He scarcely gave me good morning.

Well, I thought, a moment comes when you’ve had enough of the world’s woes and of tasting the cup of grief, particularly if it’s not your own preparation. The world – or the unwoeful part of it – goes on. Thank God.

My spirits lightened as I strolled down the great ride which formed the main approach to Instede. It was like slipping out of a prison or, in Cuthbert Ascre’s image, through the bars of a gilded cage. I was heading nowhere in particular but soon found myself in the hamlet of Rung Withers, which lay just outside the estate boundaries. After the magnificence of the great house, there was a comfort in the homely cottages with their pinched windows and lop-sided doors. Even the hovels spoke of plain Englishness while the midden at the entrance to the village exuded an honest, direct stench in the mid-morning sun. There was a modest church and a no-nonsense tavern which rejoiced in the name of Ye Clod Pole, a farrier’s, a bake-house and so on. Gossips clustered in the high street (the only street) and occasional wagons trundled through. The straightforward feel to the place reminded me a little of my home village of Miching.

Yet it was not so easy to escape from trouble after all. Not the Instede variety this time but a return of the Salisbury business. I spied an individual weaving down the street in my direction. There was something faintly familar about his gait. What was it? In his right hand there was a bottle which, even in mid-stagger, he tilted towards his mouth. But it was form’s sake only and nothing emerged, not even a dribble. Then there came out of his mouth another kind of dribble: “Snoffair. Snorright. Snoffair.” Where had I heard
that
before? Why, for sure, from the Salisbury scaffold when the Paradises had for a moment been upstaged by this inebriate. It was the soused farmer – Tom, was he called? – who’d been clouted over the head by Cain. Obviously, drunkenness with Tom was not just an evening treat but a morning requirement.

He wasn’t causing heads to turn as he passed down the high street. They were used to him. Perhaps he lived here. I made to steer clear of him. As we passed each other I saw him casting his little eyes about in that watchful way drunks sometimes have, always on the alert for anyone making aspersions on their sodden selves.

“Hey youse.”

I didn’t look back.

“I said youse – stranger.”

Yes, apparently he was talking to me. I put on speed to travel through the village, hoping that, like a bad-tempered cur, he’d leave me alone when I got out of his domain. But no such luck.

“Stop, youse.”

So I did stop and turn about to give him a piece of my mind. By now half a dozen of the gossips and other passengers had gathered in the hope of an argument or something worse (and what could be better from their point of view than something worse?). The gentleman came swaying up to me. With his piggy eyes, he looked no more fetching in the glare of day than by the flaring torches in Salisbury market. I moved back, keeping out of reach of that empty bottle, fists handy in case he swung out with it. He shambled to a halt within a few feet of me and I was enveloped by the vapour of small beer. He held out a scroll.