I envisaged the carts and the improvised sledges creaking under the weight of the frame of the playhouse — its bare bones, so to speak. I could see the panting breath of the men, the shareholder-players, as they tugged at their precious cargo, searching for a purchase on the ice. I envy these men who are now my colleagues, I envy them their part in the epic undertaking. Above them wheels all the starry heaven of a frosty winter night. I could imagine the urgency of the crossing, and the relief of reaching the far bank. Then Master Peter Street, the carpenter, had worked a near-miracle in putting together what had been taken asunder. And behold! As broken bones are sometimes stronger when they mend, so the Globe which arose, phoenix-like, from the remnants of the Theatre in Finsbury is a greater and stronger edifice than anything that is or that ever was before.
From the stern of the little ferry I saw the white playhouse on the far bank, a sight now grown familiar but still capable of making my heart beat faster. My boatman, blessedly silent apart from the occasional oath which is as necessary to the breed as breathing, thrust his oars into the stream. I hadn’t seen Adam Gibbons again, the man who had collided with me and then nearly throttled the life out of me. There were boatmen by the hundred, by the thousand, plying this stretch of the river, it is true, but London, great as she is, is also in some sense a small place and one may be sure of meeting again those whom one has encountered once.
We were now halfway across the murky river, and my thoughts turned to the household of Sir Thomas Eliot and Lady Alice and William. If I had twisted round in my seat I could have glimpsed it, one of the fine mansions on the north bank. I had lodged there for some days now and been received kindly, if distantly, by the head of the house. William’s story was that I was a player in temporary distress for accommodation. True enough. And, considering the good turn I had done the family in helping to expose the false steward Adrian and vindicate the good servant Jacob, it was the least they could do to provide for my needs while I searched for somewhere more permanent to lodge. So, William said, he had said to his mother and his stepfather-uncle. Of the more obscure reason for my being there — to observe whether there was anything ‘out of place’ — he naturally said nothing. I was his spy or intelligencer, primed to uncover the secrets of others, and this was the secret between us.
While I am halfway across the river, and nothing of interest can happen (unless the ferry be suddenly overwhelmed or the royal barge swan into view) I will recount the first of my discoveries. In the same way I will set down at intervals in the rest of this narrative the other things that I discovered inside — and outside — Lady Alice’s house. I will produce them accurately and keeping to the sequence in which they occurred or in which I found out about them. Though I now know what really happened, I will not anticipate my discovery of the final, strange truth by hinting at or foreshadowing the end.
I took my mission seriously. I even kept a little black-bound book in which I literally noted down what I had uncovered. And, to please myself, I kept it in the crude cipher which I had used once with a friend at schooclass="underline" that is, I simply transposed English characters into their equivalent in the Greek (so that an a became an alpha, a b a beta, and so on). To be truthful, this would not have concealed what I meant from many eyes, but it gave to my investigation an agreeably cabbalistic air. I mention all this to show how innocently I entered upon this business, as greenly as a schoolboy scrawling notes to a classmate. I wanted to please William Eliot. There is value in having a well-connected young patron — but also I had taken to him, and thought our acquaintance might turn to friendship. And I was attracted by what I might call the ‘matter’.
To begin with the body.
I spoke to the servants. I found people were willing to talk to me. I had won some credit in the Eliot household in a twofold fashion: I had assisted the unfortunate Jacob, who tended now to trail about after me when not otherwise engaged on his daily duties. And I had been instrumental in helping to get rid of Adrian the steward. He, I gathered, had been feared and unpopular with the servants because of his high-handed ways and his slyness. The story of what I, Nick Revill, had said and done in the box at the Globe playhouse had filtered through the house.
I spoke to the servants, I say. In particular, the one who had been sent up the wall on a ladder to see what what had happened to old Sir William Eliot. His name was Francis. He was a small, wiry man with a creased brow. He found it hard to keep still, and jigged and mimed, for example, his mounting of the ladder. He needed little prompting to speak about that evening. It might be the most exciting thing that would happen to him in his life, and the story he told must have been repeated a hundred times in the servants’ quarters. I was merely the latest questioner wanting to know about the mysterious and tragic death of Sir William Eliot.
I have here set down the things that I discovered in my investigation into Eliot’s death as if I were interrogating witnesses in a court of law. In doing so, I have formalised my own questions and I have condensed answers — and probably given them a coherence they did not possess — but I have not materially changed what was meant. It may seem surprising that a mere servant such as Francis should speak so frankly about his master or mistress, but I believe it to be true of these large households that they are more like parishes where neighbours gossip to one another and speak openly of the parson or the schoolmaster or the lord of the manor. And among people who live all under one roof, although they will be respectful to their betters, there is often a queer sense of equality too.
Nick Revilclass="underline" When did you first understand that there was something wrong in Sir William’s house?
Francis the servant: Janet came to me, on Lady Alice’s orders. She told me to bring a ladder into the garden.
N: A ladder? Now you surely thought that was odd, Francis?
F: I thought one of the women had lost something. The wind had caught a hood or a bonnet and blown it into a tree, maybe. But, to be honest, sir, I did not think much. I did what I was told.
N: What did you see when you went out into the garden?
F: My lady and her son William were together near the door into the hidden garden.
N: The hidden garden. This is what you call it?
F: The secret garden or the hidden garden, yes. Or Sir William’s garden. We still use that name sometimes.
N: Because he was the only one who went there?
F: No one else had a key to it. Not even Lady Alice.
N: And now it was she that you saw waiting by the closed door?
F: Master William also. Some of the other servants were standing there too. None of them spoke when I arrived with my ladder across my shoulders, so. [Here Francis mimes the porting of a ladder.] It was dusk on a spring evening. It had been a fine day, a warm day, but now the air was cold. And I felt my skin prickling, like, at the cold. I shivered, I remember that I shivered.
N: What were you told to do?
F: Lady Alice said something like, ‘Francis, I’m rather troubled about Sir William. He will get cold if he’s sleeping in there. I think he should be woken up before it grows any later.’ But I knew that she was not just thinking of his sleep.
N: How did you know?
F: I have seen my lady Alice in many moods. I have seen her angry and soft, and gentle and uppish, and. .
N: Yes?
F: I mean no disrespect to her, sir, but there is a saltiness in her looks sometimes — you understand what I say?
N: Yes.
F [here the good honest servant starts to gulp his words]: I mean even towards me, or so I have thought, sir. I am sure she does not know she is doing it but there is something salt in her, and it is leftover in her expression sometimes like the lees is left in a glass of wine, and her voice falls away all low even if she is giving me a command only, and I have to bend forward to catch her words, and I am uncomfortable, and I hope you can understand me if I have misspoken, sir.