‘What wealth you have gained,’ said Lady Alice, and from her tone I judged that she did not mean only her bodily self.
‘Oh, we have benefited, my dear. This has been to our advantage,’ said her new husband.
‘As the cat said when the farmer’s wife rescued it from the well,’ she said.
But this proverbial analogy, rather surprising in the mouth of my Lady Alice, was not much to Sir Thomas’s liking, for he now raised himself into a sitting position. The sniggering understanding between the two, the sense that they shared a history of secrets, had been replaced with a brisker mood. The first gusts of evening were blowing over the wall and ruffling the trees. My back was clammily cold with sweat. Sir Thomas got to his feet and then offered his hand to Lady Alice. But she raised herself up without his assistance and then, together but at a little distance from each other, they made their way towards the garden door.
I waited a good five minutes up the pear tree, to ensure that they would be safely across the larger garden beyond and into the great house, before lowering my stiff limbs to the ground.
Excerpts from my notebook:
I have changed my mind. I thought William’s belief that there was something odd about his father’s death was the result of his grief or, perhaps, of attending one too many performances of Master WS’s Hamlet. But now the discovery of Francis’s body in the river, the emergence of the shirt that was missing and then found wrapped round his corpse, the disturbing behaviour of Old Nick the apothecary and his vision of somebody talking to Francis, talking in an urgent, commanding whisper, talking him over to his death — all this compels me to acknowledge that old Sir William’s death cannot have been natural.
Another point (under a sub-head, as it were): after Old Nick had taken hold of Francis’s shirt and was speaking in that strange, tranced manner and using words and a tone not his own, it seemed to me that the voice was familiar. There was in it something faint, but recognisable.
So I must conclude that Sir William was murdered.
What follows from that?
Where, when, how, who? And why?
These are the questions which follow, as the night the day.
Let us start with an easy question. Where?
Response: in his orchard, where it was his custom to sleep on warm afternoons. This was no secret. Anybody wanting to take him at his most vulnerable would choose that moment, particularly as they knew that he regularly went there alone. No one else had a key to the secret garden, Francis told me. I have established this from other servants too.
Another question, almost as easy: When?
Response: at some time between the beginning and the end of the afternoon, a gap of perhaps four hours. Francis says that the body was scarcely warm. Even allowing for the coldness of a spring evening he must have been dead some time. Also: his wife and his son and other members of the household came out to search because they were worried at his absence. This too indicates to me that the murder occurred earlier. If he’d been in the habit of staying in his orchard for hours, until it grew dark in fact, they would not have worried.
A harder question: How?
This may be broken down into several smaller questions as, how did our murderer get into the garden, how did he conceal himself, how did he kill Sir William?
Response: I don’t know. Or, rather, I know only what I think I know. When I reconstructed the crime in the garden, attended by the faithful Jacob, I was at first sure that I had found the hiding place of our murderer, up in the old spreading pear tree. Then I doubted. But the discovery of those initials, WS, has in a manner confirmed my suspicion — yes, this was an ‘occupied’ tree — while throwing me further into confusion. Both times I felt in my bones that I was crouching, uncomfortably, up in the branches where our murderer had crouched, that I was in his bloody shoes. My confusion comes from what those initials may stand for. Here I waver, shuttling between doubt and certainty. At one moment I think: The playwright sat up the pear. The next I tell myself: It cannot be that the foremost author in the finest playhouse in the greatest city in the world skulks in trees, waiting to drop down on an unsuspecting knight so as to put him to death.
As to the other part of the ‘how’ question, that is how did Sir William actually shuffle off this mortal coil, what precisely procured his exit? That, too, I don’t know. But I have some hopes of the apothecary.
Question: Who?
Who wanted Sir William dead? (If I leave aside Master WS.) Who benefited from his death?
Look to his family.
Lady Alice I know from my own experience to be a woman with, as Francis expressed it, a saltiness in her looks — and not just in her looks. Witness the behaviour of the couple which I had spied from the tree in the evening. That they were bed-partners before the death of Sir William was hardly to be doubted. Suppose, however, that the occasional stolen afternoon, when the sun shone, or when she might go and see him in his lodgings in ‘Dover’, was not sufficient for her, or for him. Suppose that she wanted Sir Thomas for a husband, now and for next week; suppose that Sir Thomas wanted her for his wife, also now and for next week; and therefore they would not wait for mortality to strike the first husband down but must needs give him a thrust. Suppose that Sir Thomas wanted control over more than his brother’s human relict; that he wanted the fine mansion on the edge of the Thames? I have heard it whispered, and not just by the unfortunate Francis, that Sir Thomas was near bankrout; he was heavily in debt, he was about to lose his estate in Richmond. What had she said in the garden? ‘What wealth you have gained.’ Isn’t this enough to make them plot together — lust and avarice conjoined — to get rid of the first husband? (As Gertrude and Claudius may have plotted together in Master WS’s Hamlet.)
Or perhaps the plot was all Sir Thomas’s, and Lady Alice merely accepted the result without enquiring into it too closely, as women are always inclined to take what fortune drops into their laps.
On the other hand, young William Eliot has informed me that both his mother and his uncle were, in their own ways, genuinely distressed by the death of a husband-brother. What I’d witnessed of them from the tree didn’t suggest that their grief had lasted long. Just so do Gertrude and Claudius appear to be genuinely distressed. They are good players at grief. So too is Hamlet, good at grief. Who is to say what is real and what is play? I go round in circles. Each argument meets a counter-argument. In this real-life drama it is William Eliot who is playing the part of Hamlet, the son of a mother recently married to an uncle, and of a father dead in strange circumstances. What reason might William have for wishing his father dead? A voice whispers to me, and I am almost afraid to commit this thought to paper: haven’t all sons, in some hidden part of themselves, a wish to see their fathers dead?
Who is guilty then? All? None?
A final question for myself: Why compare everything to a play? Why should I hold every incident up and see whether it matches something in Master Shakespeare’s imagination?
Response: Because it seems to me that the play is the answer — the play’s the thing. This starts with Hamlet and it will end with Hamlet.
As it happens, the next afternoon we did Hamlet again. It was a sure crowd-puller and — pleaser, so the Burbage brothers had put another performance on the schedule in two days’ time. The tragedy of the Prince of Denmark was to be leavened by the little satire of Boscombe’s A City Pleasure, performed on the middle afternoon. After the Sunday break, we were to revert to our diet of crazed Milanese dukes and cardinals, and murderous painters and rustics in the county of Somerset. Such is the player’s round. So dizzying is it that one scarcely knows on any one day whether one’s first line should be ‘Buon giorno’, or ‘Good den, zur’, or ‘Greetings, my fair dame’. And while these plays, together with WS’s Hamlet, were going forward, we were preparing for the next batch which included Love’s Sacrifice (the minimal part of Maximus) and Julius Caesar (the disposable part of the poet Cinna).