Bailey said, “Ah, hell! Ernie’s.”
“Yes. Ernie’s. So Ernie shoved it over the tack. But Ernie says he found it there when he came down to get the Guiser. So what’s Ernie up to?”
“Rigging the old man’s indisposition?” Fox said.
“I think so.”
Fox raised his eyebrows and read the Guiser’s message aloud.
“ ‘Cant mannage it young Ern will have to. W.A.”’
“It’s the old man’s writing, isn’t it, Mr. Alleyn?” Thompson said. “Wasn’t that checked?”
“It’s his writing all right, but, in my opinion, it wasn’t intended for his fellow mummers, it wasn’t originally tacked to the door, it doesn’t refer to the Guiser’s inability to perform and it doesn’t mean young Ern will have to go on in his place.”
There was a short silence.
“Speaking for self,” Fox said, “I am willing to buy it, Mr. Alleyn.” He raised his hand. “Wait a bit, though,” he said. “Wait a bit! I’ve started.”
“Away you go.”
“The gardener’s boy went down on Tuesday afternoon with a note for the Guiser telling him he’d got to sharpen that slasher himself and return it by bearer. The Guiser was in Biddlefast. Ernie took the note. Next morning — wasn’t it? — the boy comes for the slasher. It isn’t ready and he’s told by Ernie that it’ll be brought up later. Any good?”
“You’re away to a pretty start.”
“All right, all right. So Ernie does sharpen the slasher and, on the Wednesday, he does take it up to the castle. Now, Ernie didn’t give the boy a note from the Guiser, but that doesn’t mean the Guiser didn’t write one. How’s that?”
“You’re thundering up the straight.”
“It means Ernie kept it and pushed it over that tack and pulled it off again and, when he was sent down to fetch his dad, he didn’t go near him. He dressed himself up in the Guiser’s rig while the old boy was snoozing on his bed and he lit off for the castle and showed the other chaps this ruddy note. Now, then!”
“You’ve breasted the tape, Br’er Fox, and the trophy is yours.”
“Not,” Alleyn said dubiously, observing his colleagues, “that it gets us all that much farther on. It gets us a length or two nearer, but that’s all.”
“What does it do for us?” Fox ruminated.
“It throws a light on Ernie’s frame of mind before the show. He’s told us himself he went hurtling up the hill in their station-waggon dressed in the Guiser’s kit and feeling wonderful. His dearest ambition was about to be realized: he was to act the leading role, literally to ‘play the Fool,’ in the Dance of the Sons. He was exalted. Ernie’s not the village idiot: he’s an epileptic with all the characteristics involved.”
“Exaggerated moods, sort of?”
“That’s it. He gets up there and hands over the note to his brothers. The understudy’s bundled into Ernie’s clothes, the note is sent in to Otterly. It’s all going Ernie’s way like a charm. The zeal of the folk dance sizzles in his nervous ganglions, or wherever fanaticism does sizzle. I wouldn’t mind betting he remembered his sacrifice of our last night’s dinner upon the Mardian Stone and decided it had brought him luck. Or something.”
Alleyn stopped short and then said in a changed voice, “ ‘It will have blood, they say. Blood will have blood.’ I bet Ernie subscribes to that unattractive theory.”
“Bringing him in pretty close to the mark, aren’t you, Mr. Alleyn?”
“Well, of course he’s close to the mark, Br’er Fox. He’s as hot as hell, is Ernie. Take a look at him. All dressed up and somewhere to go, with his audience waiting for him. Dr. Otterly, tuning his fiddle. Torches blazing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Stratford-upon-Avon with all the great ones waiting behind the curtain or the Little Puddleton Mummers quaking in their borrowed buskins; no, by Heaven, nor the Andersen brothers listening for the squeal of a fiddle in the snow: there’s the same kind of nervous excitement let loose. And, when you get a chap like Ernie — well, look at him. At the zero hour, when expectation is ready to topple over into performance, who turns up?”
“The Guiser.”
“The Guiser. Like a revengeful god. Driven up the hill by Mrs. Bünz. The Old Man himself, in what the boys would call a proper masterpiece of a rage. Out he gets, without a word to his driver, and wades in. He didn’t say much. If there was any mention of the hanky-panky with the written message, it didn’t lead to any explanation. He seems merely to have launched himself at Ernie, practically lugged the clothes off him, forced him to change back to his own gear and herded them on for the performance. All right. And how did Ernie feel? Ernie, whose pet dog the old man had put down, Ernie, who’d manoeuvred himself into the major role in this bit of prehistoric pantomime, Ernie, who was on top of the world? How did he feel?”
“Murderous?” Thompson offered.
“I think so. Murderous.”
“Yes,” said Fox and Bailey and Thompson. “Yes. Well. What?”
“He goes on for their show, doesn’t he, with the ritual sword that he’s sharpened until it’s like a razor: the sword that cut the Guiser’s hand in a row they had at their last practice, which was first blood to Ernie, by the way. On he goes and takes it out on the thistles. He slashes their heads off with great sweeps of his sword. Ernie is a thistle whiffler and he whiffles thistles with a thistle whiffler. Diction exercise for Camilla Campion. He prances about and acts the savage. After that he gets warmed up still more effectively by dancing and going through the pantomime of cutting the Fool’s head off. And, remember, he’s in a white-hot rage with the Fool. What happens next to Ernie? Nothing that’s calculated to soothe his nerves or sweeten his mood. When the fun is at its height and he’s looking on with his sword dangling by its red cord from his hand, young Stayne comes creeping up behind and collars it. Ernie loses his temper and gives chase. Stayne hides in view of the audience and Ernie plunges out at the back. He’s dithering with rage. Simon Begg says he was incoherent. Stayne comes out and gives him back the whiffler. Stayne re-enters by another archway. Ernie comes back complete with sword and takes part in the final dance. If you consider Ernie like that, in continuity, divorced for the moment from the trimmings, you get a picture of mounting fury, don’t you? The dog, the Guiser’s cut hand, the decapitated goose, the failure of the great plan, the Guiser’s rage, the stolen sword. A sort of crescendo.”
“Ending,” Fox mused, “in what?”
“Ending, in my opinion, with him performing, in deadly reality, the climax of their play.”
“Hey?” Bailey ejaculated.
“Ending in him taking his Old Man’s head off.”
“Ernie?”
“Ernie.”
“Then — well, cripes,” Thompson said, “so Ernie’s our chap, after all?”
“No.”
“Look — Mr. Alleyn—”
“He’s not our chap, because when he took his Old Man’s head off, his Old Man was already dead.”
Mr. Fox, as was his custom, glanced complacently at his subordinates. He had the air of drawing their attention to their chief’s virtuosity.
“Not enough blood,” he explained, “on anybody.”
“Yes, but if it was done from the rear,” Bailey objected.
“Which it wasn’t.”
“The character of the wound gives us that,” Alleyn said. “Utterly agrees and I’m sure Curtis will. It was done from the front. You’ll see when you look. Of course, the P.M. will tell us definitely. If decapitation was the cause of death, I imagine there will be a considerable amount of internal bleeding. I feel certain, though, that Curtis will find there is none.”