The Pale Companion (11 page)

And here the business of gossip was interrupted by the need to play. Richard Sincklo and Thomas Pope had finished their pacing and pegging out of our stage and now all that was required of us was to enact W.S.’s
Dream
on the green. Or rather to work out our exits and entrances as a preliminary to the first rehearsal
in situ.
In the playhouse, or indeed any indoor area (such as Whitehall Palace where we’d played the previous winter), there is a comfort in knowing where your boundaries are, your fixed points of entry and disappearance. Also, indoors, there are places to hide away from the eyes of the audience. But in an open pastoral setting like Instede there is no such easy concealment. The nakedness of the player, which one may feel even in a snug indoor space, is greatly magnified when the only margins are greenery and sky. True, there were three or four trees fringing the playing-space between which some painted hangings could be strung, and there was a box-hedge to one side. These would have to do for our shelter and our transformations.

Anyway, this conversation of Jack’s and the others set me thinking about the forthcoming marriage and whether any of the speculations about young Harry Ascre might be correct. Certainly, the young man hadn’t looked happy when he appeared in our rehearsal chamber with his parents. Was his white-faced, sleepless look the mark of love-sickness? Had he watched the farce of Pyramus and Thisbe with watery eyes because he was actually affected by the death of those clowns in love? I couldn’t put myself in his position. Not so much because I’d never really suffered from love-sickness (that question of Lord Elcombe’s:
You have been pierced by Cupid’s dart?
), but because I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be heir to a great house and a vast swath of land and a title. Or to be directed by my father to marry someone against my wishes, if that was actually young Harry’s case. What Jack Wilson had said was right, though. In a wealthy family, the older son had little choice.

That there was something wrong in the situation was confirmed for me later that same afternoon. All of us were released by Thomas Pope after practising our entrances and exits several times over on the green. Once again we had an hour or two to spend as we wished, pursuing rustic girls in the kitchen or wild men in the woods, lying on our beds on the upper floor, poring over the scrolls containing our parts – what you will. Having several days to prepare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
was a June holiday for us and I began to see why companies liked to leave the city in mid-year. The rush of plays in London, where one piece is being rehearsed in the morning, another played in the afternoon, and a third scanned for next week, leaves you breathless. Here at Instede we had time to sit and stare, walk and talk.

And talking of walking. I stayed behind on the green when most of my fellows vanished after our practice. I had a mind to explore some of the nearby walks and arbours. Perhaps I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be heir to a great house after all. My curiosity was particularly roused by the garden enclosed by a high wall of hornbeams.

I ambled through the nearest entrance. And halted there for several moments, breathless. For, inside the hornbeam-enclosed garden, there was stored a cornucopia of scents and shapes. I shaded my eyes with my hand, as if to protect my sight from the dazzle. Even though there was no one to say I shouldn’t be here, I had an uneasy sense of trespassing. Directly ahead was a massy white marble fountain with figures of nymphs and sea-monsters twining around its base. On a pedestal in the centre of the basin stood Neptune, looking newly risen from the waves, his trident still dripping stone weeds. I peered over the thick rim. Dark finny shapes lounged in the depths, carp perhaps. Clouds of minute aerial creatures clustered over the water. I wandered round the fountain, running my fingers along its cool rim. To either side were narrow paths fringed with lavender and rosemary. A sanded walk stretched ahead to a little rise in the ground on which stood a summer-house, large enough to accommodate a yeoman farmer and his family. Standing in front of it was a low sun-dial whose sharp-pointed brass gnomon told me that it was after five in the afternoon. Round the face of the dial were engraved the Latin words
tempus edax rerum,
and I nodded sagely in agreement with the poet Ovid, whose words these are: time is indeed the devourer of all things.

This pleasure garden was parcelled up into precise areas marked off by paths or low hedges. Stone seats had been provided in sheltered, out-of-the-way corners. Black obelisks were grouped in pairs like impassive sentries. Statues of nymphs and fauns and of quite unaccountable creatures were dotted about. With the sun beginning to slip down the sky, the shadows were massing thickly at the base of the hedges. I wondered which members of the household took their ease in this garden. The place was immaculately tended but queerly devoid of activity, of human presence.

But while I stood gazing round, my nose and eyes assailed by the sights and scents, I caught a different noise beneath the plashing of the fountain and the humming of the bees. It sounded like someone talking softly to himself, a continuous low mumble broken by occasional sharper sounds. Recalling my earlier resolution that whatever was happening at Instede House was really no concern of N. Revill, my first instinct was to steal out of the hornbeam garden. So I turned away from the summer-house and walked back towards the Neptune fountain. But as I passed one of the many little bays which had been created out the low box hedges that crossed and re-crossed the garden, I noticed a figure sitting on a stone seat. He was in shadow and must have been very still for me not to have seen him earlier. He was bowed forward, with his hands covering his face. His whole posture bespoke gloom, even despair. Through his clasped hands there poured an indistinct stream of words, expressive of anger or lamentation, I couldn’t be sure which. Every so often his voice rose in a little bark, possibly a curse or a protest. I’d recognized him almost straightaway as Harry Ascre, Lord Elcombe’s son and the subject of our gossiping speculation on the lawn. Seeing him in this state made me feel for a moment ashamed of the light-hearted way we’d played at shuttlecock with his misery. For misery it certainly was.

I crept on. But he must have somehow sensed my presence because Lord Harry chose that instant to look up from between his parted hands. His face was chalk-white and forlorn. He gazed at me incuriously, then buried himself in his hands once more. I did not wait to hear whether he resumed his grumbling lament. Rather I hastened to get out of the garden.

Thinking about it afterwards, what was almost as disturbing – and as inexplicable – as his distress was the fact that he hadn’t challenged me for trespassing in the garden; or, at the least, that he hadn’t attempted to hide what he was feeling. And yet here was a man due to be married within a few days!

*

Two things happened the next day, apart from the continuing round of play preparations (for us) and marriage arrangements (for the rest of the household). It was a Friday and those who regard the day as unlucky will have their fears confirmed when I tell what occurred.

Sometime in the morning we heard that the Paradise Brothers, the holy little trinity which Jack Wilson and I had seen perform in Salisbury, had fetched up at Instede with the intention of playing out their Bible tales to any who would come and watch. The Brothers were not housed in the main building, I’m glad to say; we would have taken that ill. Rather they were accommodated in some outbuildings by the brew-house. Nor were they expected to have anything to do with the wedding celebrations; we would have taken that
very
ill indeed. But the servants of the house and any of the fieldworkers were permitted, if they had time on their hands in the late afternoon, to slip off and be entertained by the story of Cain and Abel or Noah and his Ark. I couldn’t understand why these people were tolerated on the estate until I heard that they were there by the allowance of Lady Penelope, Elcombe’s wife. She apparently considered it edifying for the household menials to be instructed with pious drama.

Perhaps I was a bit touchy on this topic, although rivalry between acting companies is natural and inevitable. It was true that the Paradise Brothers’ presentations had a force and effectiveness about them, but of a crude sort. Where, in their thumping dialogue and straightforward tales, was to be found anything approaching the supple beauty of Master Shakespeare or even of our lesser writers like Edgar Boscombe and Richard Milford? Why didn’t the Paradise Brothers deal with real people – with kings and dukes and clowns and the like – instead of Abraham and Isaac? Didn’t they realize that they were living in the seventeenth century! Anyway, there was no reason why the paths of our two companies should cross as long as the Brothers stuck to their outbuildings and their rustic audiences and left the palaces and nobles to us.

The other event of that Friday was more serious than the arrival of a pack of pious players. In fact, it was the real beginning of a catalogue of misfortune and worse.

From what Davy, my informant in the household, had said I gathered that Robin the wild wood-man was regarded as a species of walking charm – albeit a somewhat shaggy and smelly one. His continued presence in the woods of Instede was thought to confer good fortune on the house. It was apparent that Robin was treated almost like a sprite or sylvan deity by some of the less educated members of the establishment. They left offerings for him once or twice a day, those little items which he’d referred to, the turnips and sallets and goosegogs, according to the season.

The kitchen drabs took it in turns to convey food to the edge of the wood, carrying it not on a silver salver, as Robin had claimed, but on a simple wooden trencher. Every day they left the food on the stump of a felled tree, at the same time retrieving the empty platter from the previous day. It happened that on this Friday afternoon it was the turn of Audrey, the kitchen girl that Will Fall had his lecherous eye on. She walked down the slope from the house and across the cropped turf towards the dark bank of trees, with her trencher loaded with scraps of fruit and green stuff. She was one of the more intrepid of the drabs and sometimes watched the wood-man take his food. Today, on this Friday, she wondered whether she might go so far as to call out “Robin!” Or better, to whisper it. She didn’t want to alarm him. He was harmless, everybody said so. And if he wasn’t . . . well, she trusted to a pretty pair of heels. But would he respond? Even a dog responds to its given name. That would be something to take back to the servants’ hall. She might even tell the story of her daring to Master Will Fall, that gentleman player from somewhere in the east.

In the event, Audrey did not have the opportunity to see whether Robin would respond like a dog to the calling of his name. Once she’d placed the trencher of food on the stump and tucked the empty one under her arm, she made to turn towards the thornbush where she’d successfully hidden herself on previous occasions. Then she screamed. Dangling before her face were two objects which she had some difficulty in identifying. She knew only that they were ill to look at. There was a strong, disagreeable smell in the clearing. Then the objects gradually resolved themselves into familiar items: a pair of feet – blackened, curled and scabbed feet. Fearfully she glanced up. The feet belonged to Robin, who was hanging by a rope from the branch of an elm tree. His face was even darker than usual. A swollen tongue extruded itself from his mouth.

*
see
Death of Kings

T
he death of Robin had a lowering effect on the Instede household. I would’ve said that it cast a shadow over the wedding preparations but there hadn’t been any great signs of joy to these beforehand, and they went forward without interruption. No, I mean that it made the servants’ hall a gossiping, troubled place from which all kinds of stories and rumours spread through the estate. As newcomers, we of the Chamberlain’s were largely unaffected by the death. (For some reason I kept my two encounters with the man to myself.) Nevertheless, an episode like this gives a disagreeable tinge to everything for a day or two. And these same days should have had a midsummer bloom to them. Ever since we’d arrived at Instede the mornings had dawned clear, warm and bright. Throughout the day the sky was scarcely blotted with a single cloud and, when evening approached, the golden glow of day seemed to gather itself round the great house in fold upon fold. The death of the wood-man sat oddly with all this warmth and tranquillity.

I spoke to the servant Davy about the stories concerning Robin’s death – or rather he sought me out to tell me of them.

“Some say he hung himself up because he had run mad in the woods.”

Remembering Robin’s half-crazed behaviour and his strange talk, I had to agree that this seemed the most likely explanation. How long would I have lasted in such circumstances without going out of my wits? However, the simple explanation obviously wasn’t good enough.