Sleep of Death (27 page)

‘A false steward, together with a fat woman’s fat sibling and a mute charcoal-burner – you are no true court,’ I cried.

‘We will do.’

‘B-b-but f-f-f-first , f-f-f-first—’ stuttered Ralph. He was so angry, or excited at whatever was in prospect, that he was scarcely capable of getting the words out.

‘Recover yourself, friend,’ said Adrian, patting him on the shoulder.

Ralph took several deep breaths. I almost felt for him as he struggled to calm himself.

‘Think on this, p-p-p-player. We are not going to put an end to you without first p-p-p-purging you of your naughty p-p-p-part.’

‘You make no sense.’

‘Your vicious t-t-t-tool.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

But I was afraid that I did.

‘You have shamed and beslubbered my sister with the seed of your instrument, with your silly weapon. Not c-c-c-content with that, you have monstrously abused my mother with the waste and outpouring from that same p-p-p-part.’

‘I never laid a finger on your mother, I say again. What happened was an accident. She chanced to be standing underneath the window when – when – it wasn’t even me . . . And I never touched your sister with a will, either. Talk to her. She launched herself at me. She tricked me into entering her chamber—’

‘
You
tricked
her
and you entered more than her chamber, p-p-p-p-player. And for that you will pa-pa-pa-pay.’

‘Jesus.’

I was slick with sweat. The warm breath of the breeze penetrating the hut through its many crevices grew into a steady, somehow airless stream. Outside I heard the trees shaking their heads at the coming storm. Sweat ran from my forehead down my face, it gushed from under my arms. I began to shake. There was a flash outside the hut, followed seconds later by the thunder-crack. By the lightning, I glimpsed momentarily my three opponents, huddled about me. They looked human and not-human, like the wax effigies of the dead that you may see in Westminster Abbey.

‘As you untrussed and took down your hose for your pleasure with this good man’s good sister,’ said Adrian, ‘so we will now untruss you for ours.’ His voice was unsteady. He was excited, as Master Topclyffe in the Tower was said to grow excited when he had a priest on the rack.

‘Christ, no, wait.’

‘And after you have become our eunuch, after you have become a gelded player, the fingers will be removed from your right hand,’ said Adrian. ‘Then you will die.’

I groaned because I was incapable of speech. My head pounded. The murderous, mutilating trio before me appeared to grow smaller as if I was viewing them down a dark tunnel. For an instant I thought that I heard light, pattering footsteps outside the hut, and my mind leapt at the hope of rescue, but another instant was enough to identify the sound as the rain, falling slowly, falling in single fat blobs.

‘You trapped me with a trick,’ Adrian continued. ‘By sleight of hand you slipped a thread of somebody’s hair under my finger and claimed it was my Lady Alice’s. Because of you I was discharged from the Eliot household. Sir Thomas would never have discharged me but for you. Your hands are dangerous things and, like your cock, do harm to good and innocent people. Therefore, though the rest of your life be very short, your enjoyment of your organ of generation and of your fingers will be shorter still.’

The speech came off trippingly, as though he had learned it by heart, had stored it up in that dark chamber ready for the occasion of its delivery. But there was still that tremor in his voice. The thrill of seeing another hurt, tormented. Or was it? A further flash of lightning and thunder-clap, and I could have sworn that Adrian flinched. Like many, perhaps he was frightened of a storm. But I could not see how to turn it to my advantage.

He motioned to the sooty charcoal man, as if to say ‘Now your time is come.’

Through the haze that seemed to have filled the tiny cabin – a haze that may have proceeded from my own terror or from the smoky candles, or both – I saw Nub draw from somewhere among the dirty rags that hung off his person a long, rusty, curved knife. He loped towards me across the dirty floor and crouched at my feet. Obligingly, the lightning flashed once again and the thunder boomed out closer to. So, I thought, would this scene be staged: with noise and knife and quaking terror. Adrian and Ralph stood back. Evidently, like those citizens that crowd close to the scaffold to witness the agony of the dying, they were content to leave the dirty work to another but at the same time eager not to miss a moment’s pleasure. The charcoal-burner cut the cord that bound my feet together and with his blackened claws threw my legs apart as casually as if he was dealing with a beast in the shambles. My limbs were numb, I could not move them.

This dirty man looked at me, and the red-streaked whites of his eyes stood out clear in his face. He smiled his toothless smile. If he had earlier reminded me of an ape, he now appeared to me with his two protruding teeth in the likeness of a rat. And like a great rat he started to crawl up my body, gripping the knife with one hand and fumbling between my legs with the other, deliberately protracting his pleasure and my pain. He had no liking for the subtleties of untrussing and pulling down my hose, not Nub. He intended to slice through cloth and skin and sinew and all, without discrimination. I writhed, I twisted, I dwindled, as it were, into myself but to no avail. He was wiry and strong. I was lying on my back with my hands bound beneath me. His weight was on the lower part of my body from which feeling had, in any case, almost departed.

But extreme fear may give a sharpness to the mind, even to the senses. The haze over my vision cleared and I saw things clear, more clear than ever in my life. I saw the four of us as if from the outside, a frozen tableau, and here again a flash of lightning fixed us all in unmoving postures. In an instant I considered – and rejected – attempting to delay the charcoal-burner by pointing out that, if he did his worst there, where I lay on the pile of straw, the blood and mess would stain his sleeping-place. But that wouldn’t bother a torturer and executioner.

‘Wait,’ I said. My voice came out thick, as though my tongue had turned into a bolster.

‘No more words, player,’ said Adrian from where he stood on the far side of the hut. Was he putting a distance between himself and the blood that was about to be spilt? ‘We have heard enough of you.’

‘This concerns your friend – the one who is off-stage – the one in the shadows.’

I spoke as calmly and clearly as I could manage. Outside, the rain pattered steadily. My life depended on being understood. The charcoal man was still groping at my centre, questing after my fear-shrunken parts.

‘He does not exist,’ said Adrian, almost calling across the space of the tiny hut.

‘I have a message from him,’ I said.

I remembered the scrap of paper which I had retrieved from the apothecary’s shop just before the ambush in the dark. The paper with the writing which it had been too gloomy to decipher. It was still in my grasp, actually in my hand. Like a dying man clutching at a straw I had clenched my hand over it as I was assaulted in the shop, and it had remained in my closed fist ever since. At least I hoped it had. The careless cruelty with which my hands had been wound round with cord might actually have helped to keep a grip on the fragment of paper. There was no sensation in my limbs now, but I recalled how earlier, in the jolting back of the wagon, I had been half aware of holding something. In my clear-sighted desperation I suddenly realised what it might be.

‘A message?’ said Adrian.

‘He is t-t-t-time-wasting,’ stuttered Ralph. ‘Get on with it.’ This was directed at Nub, who seemed to be distracted by the conversation passing backwards and forwards over his black head. The curved, rusty knife stood erect in one hand while the other hand hovered above my groin. Possibly he waiting for the final word of command from Adrian. But Adrian was himself distracted by the noise from the black sky over the forest. He could not fully savour his revenge because he was somewhat fearful for himself. From the top of my great terror I looked down on his little fright. The other two had less imagination.

‘In my hand I have a message. See for yourself.’

I tried to speak with a confidence and sureness that I did not feel. But I am a player.

‘Behind my back. In my hand I feel it still. I have a message from your friend in the shadows. I found it in the shop of the dead apothecary. It is important. He will not thank you if you don’t recover it.’

There was a pause while my life – to say nothing of my fingers and my private parts – hung in the balance.

‘Turn him over.’

Through the ragged door I saw lightning stab at the trees. I was roughly manhandled onto my front. I lay, face down, on the stinking, prickly pile of straw. Adrian’s next words were covered by the thunder so that he had to repeat himself.

‘Look at his hands. See what he is holding.’

As if through a thick blanket, I felt a fumbling at my own bound and benumbed hands. There was a grunt from Nub which might have signified ‘here’ or ‘see’. I sensed rather than saw Adrian move closer to see what he had discovered.

‘Bring it here.’

Another grunt. The charcoal burner’s black claws tugged and twisted at something that was in my own grasp. Thank Christ the scrap of paper was still there.

‘Don’t tear it, you fool,’ said Adrian.

There was more fumbling at my back. I hoped that, in the struggle to retrieve the note, my hands might be completely unfastened. No such luck. But in order to extricate the scrap of paper from where it was wedged between my hands and the cords that secured them, Nub had to pull at the ropes and the constriction on my lower arms became a little less.

‘Give it to me.’

Over my shoulder, I again sensed rather than saw Adrian as he reached out for the paper. There was a shift in the shadows thrown by one of the candles as someone, presumably Ralph, picked it up and brought a light to bear on this puzzle. I had no idea what was on the paper which I had been clutching for hours. It might be some recipe of Old Nick’s, it might be a note of assignation dropped by a customer as he was paying for one of the apothecary’s love-philtres, it might (for all I knew) contain the identity of the secret, off-stage man who Adrian had hinted at.

None of these questions was preoccupying me at that instant. I had at most a few seconds while the attention of my captors was distracted. Not the sooty, rat-like Nub of course. Reading and writing did not concern him. Even though I was lying on my front he continued to squat on my lower legs, knife in hand, ready to continue the business of emasculation once Adrian had given the word.

I heard the low breathing of the two upright men, a whispering below the pattering rain and the thunder-grumble. From this I could deduce that there was indeed something which concerned them on the scrap of paper. There were more whispers. I went limp. I groaned and my head fell forward onto the bed of straw. I wanted Nub to think – if he was capable of thought – that I had fainted from pain or fear.

‘There are words here, player,’ said Adrian.

I stayed still and silent.

‘Valerian, ipomea, agrimony, gall-bladder, ratsfoot, antimony.’

I said nothing.

‘Why, this is nothing, Nicholas.’

‘Look carefully, it is a code,’ I said. Anything to delay them for an instant longer.

‘Well, code or no, we will decipher you first. Nub, unman Master Revill.’

Nobody moved. I thought that most probably the filthy charcoal burner had not understood the meaning of ‘unman’ – or ‘decipher’, come to that.

‘Turn him over and go on with your business.’ Adrian’s voice was unsteady.

Nub raised himself off from where he had been sitting on my calves and prepared to heave me over onto my back. Even while the business was proceeding with the scrap of paper, I had been all ears for the advance of the storm. Fortune was with me. The patron saint of players (Genesius), to whom I had prayed for aid, was above, beyond the thunder and lightning but surely directing it. There was a flash of lightning almost directly outside and a deafening burst of thunder, as if the very fabric of the world had been torn in two, and straightaway a smell of burning in my nostrils. All were distracted. Each man, torturer and victim alike, cowered within himself.

I had an instant of opportunity, and an instant only. I was half turned over on my side, still shamming faintness. My legs were free, though without much feeling in them. My hands were bound yet not so tightly as before. Drawing my breath deep inside me, I jerked up my head, which had been lolling inertly, and struck out in the general direction of the charcoal-burner’s face. I connected with his dirty nose or his hole of a mouth or some such – I cared not but was well pleased with the feel of the blow. He fell back and away from me and, by good fortune, on top of one of the candles. He may have been a little burnt and cried out in pain, but my ears still resonated to the thunder’s voice. I flailed around and struggled to get upright. My legs were weak and I staggered, stumbled and almost fell, but then was upright once more.

Adrian and Ralph stood opposite. They had not moved during this moment’s action, as if they themselves had just been transfixed by a lightning-bolt. Whether they were still deafened by the noise or dumbfounded by my sudden movement I do not know. Perhaps they were like spectators at an execution, ready for the pleasure of the event and never imagining that the condemned man might leap off the scaffold and join them in the crowd. I raised my head and screamed. A sudden shriek or scream can arrest and cow others, and on this night it seemed to me that I was the very epitome of the storm. Then I lowered my head and, with arms still tethered and on legs that were not yet altogether mine, I charged like a bull between my two tormentors. I was aiming for the ragged gap that served as a doorway to the hut. I butted into Ralph. He had a soft surface, and uttered a non-word that may have been ‘ouf’ and was anyway blotted out by the surrounding noise. He dropped the candle, which promptly extinguished itself on the ground. I tore on through the entrance, ripping my clothing on the sharp twigs and branches that surrounded it.