Alms for Oblivion (34 page)

“Master Talbot talked of nothing else all the journey down,” said Jute. “Revill’s guilt, that is, not his handsomeness. He is consumed with fury at the way the player
slipped through his fingers in London and determined that justice shall be done.”

If a smirk was ever audible I reckoned that Gertrude Agate’s was then.

“It is fortunate that I wrote to my boy to tell him of the wicked player’s arrival,” she said.

“Talbot already had an idea that Master Nicholas would return to his home village. But he was grateful when I informed him. And even more grateful when I offered to accompany
him.”

“To visit your mother?”

“And see my estate.”

“Not yet.”

“One day.”

“May it be long in coming,” she said.

“You should not wish yourself long life, mother.”

“Why not?”

“You are tempting fate.”

No reply, except a slurp from the wine glass.

“It is bad luck to wish yourself long life, I say,” said Jute again.

I wondered at his insistence.

And then there was a long silence in this loving dialogue. When Gertrude Agate next spoke her tone was quite different. It was like the chill which descends after the sun goes behind a cloud. A
glass shattered on the ground.

“What have you done?”

“It is rather what you have done. You taught me the way when you poisoned the old man. That was the beginning.”

“It was for your sake, Edmund.”

“So is this, for my sake.”

“You could have waited.”

The voice was growing weaker, wheezier.

“Oh wicked son,” she wailed. It was like a line from a play.

“I could have waited,” said Edmund Jute. His voice was remarkably even and untroubled. “But I have acquired a taste for it now. I have not yet told you about the playwright . .
. ”

No need to enquire what this particular ‘it’ was, the activity for which he had acquired a taste. And no reply from Gertrude Agate either – she was beyond enquiry –
except a strangled cry and a strange noise as if she was tapping her feet.

“Spiced wine will hide a multitude of sins, mother.”

There was a thump and a series of terrible retchings and groans, as if the damned had been permitted to speak. I stood round the corner, among the withered creeper, until the sounds became
unbearable. Then I moved out into the open.

How can I describe the scene before me? How can I convey its horror? I did not sleep easy for many nights afterwards.

Edmund Jute – the red-haired law student, with the round innocent face – stood over the body of his mother as she writhed and flailed her last. She was on her back, purple and
mottled in the face. Her eyes were wide and stary. She looked but did not see. Her clothing was disordered and vomit-stained, and one of her breasts was exposed. Her state was horrible enough. But
more horrible, much more horrible, was the behaviour of her son. Having done his worst, he was now doing nothing. He was watching her, standing quite unmoved a little to one side. It flashed
through my mind that he had probably watched the dying agonies of Peter Agate – and Richard Milford – and Nell – in the same detached spirit.

So absorbed was he in this dreadful scene of his own making that he did not become aware of my presence for an instant. Perhaps I cried out. Then Edmund Jute turned round and saw who it was, and
saw that I knew his cold wickedness. We looked each other in the face and – this is most strange – I was ashamed for him, since he belonged to some distant branch of humanity and could
not be ashamed for himself. And I was angry. And I don’t know what else besides. Then Jute reached for the little paring-knife which still lay beside the platter of fruit on the table and
swept through the air towards me.

Without thought, I raised my arm up to deflect him, and caught him a swinging blow on the side of the head. He must have already been off balance because the blow, not strong in itself, was
sufficient to knock him to the ground. As he lay there, close to his dying mother, a red mist descended again in front of my eyes. It was blood, my own blood. His knife must have caught me after
all, somewhere on the forehead. I wiped at the blood to clear it from my sight and fell on him and we tussled on the ground. I smelled on him that feral smell which I had smelled in the wake of the
headless figure which had swept past me in Middle Temple and which I’d afterwards glimpsed in the corridors of Holland’s Leaguer. It was a rank, vulpine scent. Ever afterwards when I
smelled it – smelled it naturally, that is, in the open air – it made me think not of a fox, but of Jute and the scent he exuded when death and murder were in question.

We were down there on the flagged stonework of the pavilion for hours. It seemed hours. Yet in reality, it can only have been seconds. Jute kept trying to reach around with the little knife and
gouge me in the back. Once again Master Topcourt’s coat helped to protect me, and Jute was unable to gain a real purchase on me. And I kept batting his hand away and trying to catch hold of
his stabbing wrist. His breath was hot in my face and his rank scent high in my nostrils. Then his mother, Gertrude, intervened. In her dying throes she made a rattling noise in her throat and her
own arm swept out and knocked the knife from his grasp. There was more strength in that final blow than there was in both our hands. The paring-knife fell on the stone and in an instant I had it in
my grip and in another instant was burrowing away at the chest of the man who lay beneath me, like a dreadful lover.

It was a sharp-pointed, sharp-edged knife, for all that it was little.

Even so, it wasn’t easy. I was shocked by the resistance which met the blade. Jute battered at me with his arms, and I was compelled to withdraw the blade and strike at him many times
over. The knife seemed to tangle in his garments, and sometimes the blade skidded on some inner obstacle. But I suddenly knew that I would win. By main force and determination and cold anger, I
knew that I would win. I grunted. I thought of Nell – no, I didn’t think of her but felt her presence. I shouted. I remembered Peter Agate, my friend from Miching. I spoke. Doubtless I
spoke. Spoke incomprehensible things. Edmund Jute made noises too as he breathed his last, with his mother beside him.

But he did breathe his last at last, and I rolled off him, exhausted.

“D
id you kill him?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure, Nicholas?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But he might have fallen on his knife, his own knife?”

“I – it is possible, I suppose.”

Only it hadn’t happened like that.

I had no more than a blurred memory of those last few moments of my mortal engagement with Edmund Jute. But I was sure of one thing. That he had died at my hands, not his own. I would not have
had it any other way. This wicked young lawyer had slaughtered my friends because they were in his way. And if anyone was justified in despatching him with a perfect conscience it was I. My
conscience may have been clear – I tried to argue with myself that it was clear, I had killed Edmund Jute in self-defence – but that didn’t prevent a single dream from pursuing me
for a long time afterwards. In my dream I was struggling with Jute in a lead-lined cistern that was slowly filling with blood. I had to dispose of him before the blood rose over our heads, and put
an end to both of us. I had a knife but so did he, and his knife was bigger than mine. In addition there was a cord dangling from his waist with which he could strangle me. We were both slick with
blood and panting hard, and I was terrified of losing my footing and slipping beneath the rising tide of red. On every occasion I woke up, sweating and breathless, before this fight was
concluded.

Jute might not have been on my conscience but he was still lodged in my head and it was many months before the dream faded. Alan Talbot, however, was determined to exonerate me of any blame in
the death of Edmund Jute. I couldn’t help reflecting on the irony of this, that after all the coroner’s work in trying to pin on me the guilt for murders which I hadn’t committed,
he was now attempting to leave me free and clear.

By the time Talbot arrived on the scene in the pavilion the main action was finished. Gertrude Agate (or Jute, as she was by the first of her three husbands) was dead, poisoned by her own son.
That same son was stretched out beside her on the ground, holed and stabbed. At a little distance lay Nicholas Revill, covered with blood. A shambles. At first sight, Talbot told me, he thought we
were all dead. Then I groaned and stirred, and he was glad to see that something might be recovered from this ruin.

The coroner’s attitude towards me had undergone a sea-change, even when he was still in London. He had ridden down to Miching not in pursuit of an escaped felon but in pursuit of the
truth. When Jute – who had learned of my whereabouts in a letter from his mother – went to the coroner to inform against me and proposed that the two of them should travel to Somerset
together, Talbot had seized the opportunity of keeping an eye on the man he had begun to suspect of the Southwark murders.

“How did you know?” I asked. “Why did you suspect Jute?”

We were travelling back to London, after matters had been sorted out in Miching – or sorted out so far as they could be after such a shocking tragedy (of which more in a moment). We
travelled fast by horse, Talbot and I. The roads were stickier than when I’d walked this way about a fortnight earlier but they were still passable. I wasn’t comfortable in the saddle
but wanted to get back to London as quickly as possible.

Talbot already had his rented horse from the outward journey and I hired a sturdy hack from a stable in Wells, at the rate of a shilling for the first day and eightpence per day thereafter.
Talbot loaned me the money, telling me that I could repay him when I resumed my position with the Chamberlain’s Company. I didn’t say that I wasn’t certain I still had a position
with the Chamberlain’s. He also paid for my share of our lodgings. One of the places we stopped at was the Night Owl near Buckingham, the very inn which I had been too fearful to stay at
during the early stages of my trudge out of London.

We kept company, Talbot and I, but it was an uneasy journey for me. I couldn’t rid myself of my old image of the man as a cold-eyed questioner, with the power to cast me into gaol and
worse. For his part, Talbot seemed easy enough, almost genial and expansive. As we travelled or stopped and ate, it was my turn to ask questions. (I’ve condensed the conversations we had for
the sake of easy reading here.) I was naturally curious about the chain of circumstance, the thread of suspicion, which had led him from Southwark to Miching.

“How did you know?” I repeated. “What made you suspect Edmund Jute?”

“He was too hot for justice.”

“He was a lawyer.”

“That was what made me suspicious.”

“I thought that justice was the supreme good,” I said, remembering how Talbot had always insisted on it.

“So it is. But Jute was eager, over-eager, to have you hunted down for the sake of justice. And that made me to turn the matter upside down, and to ask myself whether he wasn’t
really more interested in hunting you down than in the justice.”

“To make sure that I was finally silenced for
his
crimes.”

“When Jute came to see me,” said Talbot, “bearing a letter from his mother which said that Nicholas Revill had turned up unexpectedly in Miching, I asked myself why he was so
concerned with an escaped felon.”

“I was a murderer. Perhaps he was worried about his mother’s safety.”

“If he was he didn’t mention it. In any case Gertrude Agate said that you were just passing through. And so Jute was insistent that we should boot and saddle up immediately before
you could get away. But I delayed, and set myself a question or two to answer.”

“Do you often ask yourself questions, Master Talbot?”

“If I do, I’m at least sure of an honest answer. Or at least, honest uncertainty. Sometimes the right question will take you a long way. For instance, when your friend Peter Agate
died I asked myself what should always be the first question in such cases.”

I said nothing. Talbot was enjoying this, in his legalistic fashion. Let him have his hour or two in the sun.

“It was, who benefited from his death? Now, it was plain that you didn’t benefit from it. In fact, it was plain that your friend was so newly arrived in London that his death was
more likely to be connected with where he’d come
from
rather than where he’d arrived
at
. You said yourself, Nicholas, that he was an inoffensive fellow, one without
enemies. So who would want to kill him?”

“You thought that I would, for one.”

“It looked as though you had, or might have done. But then you protested your innocence.”

“You believed me?”

If I sounded surprised it was because I was surprised.

“I didn’t
disbelieve
you,” said Talbot.

“I wondered why you made no move against me. I was expecting to be arrested at any moment.”

“You didn’t seem guilty. One gets a nose for guilt after a time, although it’s not an infallible nose. The problem was that murder seemed to be dogging your heels, Nicholas.
There was the death of Richard Milford, and just before that your interest in his wife and all that talk of a dead man – ”

“I’m not interested in Lucy Milford.”

Talbot looked at me.

“Oh yes, all right, I am.”

“Be careful, Nicholas, I may know more than you think. I saw you talking together after the play.”

“So you
were
at the performance of
Troilus and Cressida
In Middle Temple?”

“Yes. I enjoyed the play, to an extent.”

“You didn’t mention that you were there when you were questioning me about it.”

“It wasn’t material, to use your expression.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of plays – or players.”

“I don’t as a rule,” said Talbot. “But this was a little different. A dry piece. It wouldn’t appeal to the public. Too intelligent for them.”