The Pale Companion by Philip Gooden Read Free Book Online Page B

provided with a chamber on the ground floor of Instede House. Once our play practice was done we were fed and watered, or rather aled, in a neighbouring room. In the glow of a rehearsal which has gone off properly – and with that pleasant tiredness which is well earned and soon to be relieved by a good night’s rest – and in the consideration that the Chamberlain’s Company’s stay on Lord Elcombe’s great estate might, after all, be a satisfactory affair – I felt like taking the air late on this summer’s evening before climbing the stairs toward heaven and my trestle bed.
    I asked one or two of my fellows to join me but, since I really wanted my own company, was glad enough when they refused. Jack Wilson anyway preferred to leave me to my own devices after the previous evening in Salisbury. “God knows what you’ll stir up this time, Nick,” he said. “Well, I won’t look to you for help,” I said.
    I walked out into the warm air. The formal gardens and working parts of the estate were obviously on the other quarters of Instede House because, from where I was standing outside the courtyard at which we’d first entered, the land dropped away towards a wooded area. I was facing west and the sun filled the sky with his evening benediction, drawing a few golden strands of cloud after him like a king going into exile. (That was a rather fine poetic figure, I thought; perhaps I should drop it casually in the hearing of someone like Master W.S.) Shading my eyes with my hand, I could see beyond the wood a low line of hills. Somewhere over there, and not so very many miles distant, was the village of Miching, where my father had preached from his pulpit, where I had played as a child, where my mother had summoned me indoors to bed at about this very time on a summer’s evening. And now, stolen from me by the plague, they were there no more and I would never again be welcomed home by them this side of paradise.
    Unexpectedly, I felt water come into my eyes. I dabbed at them and walked off down the gradual slope which led away from Instede and towards the woods. It is odd how even at moments of ease and content, perhaps especially at such moments, darker thoughts will come to shadow us. To dispel these I deliberately turned my mind elsewhere.
    Item: the excellence of my Company and how they were like a family to me, supplying what the plague had taken.
    Item: she whom I had left behind in London. So I asked myself what my Nell was doing at this instant. This very instant. A bad idea. Because she was most likely plying her trade in Holland’s Leaguer, just as I’d been plying mine in the rehearsal room. A mixture of jealousy (at the thought of the customer who was occupying her now) and regretful lust (that I was not in his place in her bed) overtook me.
    Well, business is business, as she would say . . . only business.
    Instead of Nell, I summoned up images from the previous evening. The kindly keen-eyed Justice of the Peace, Adam Fielding. His beautiful dark-haired daughter Kate, she of the soothing hands and ointments. Instinctively I raised my hand to touch the bruised, scraped places on my face. And that made me remember the stir in the square and the performance of the Cain and Abel story by the Paradise Brothers. An appropriate appellation for a travelling band which dealt in old Bible tales. I wondered whether they’d been drawn towards such subjects by their name alone.
    All this time I was making progress across a sheep-cropped area of grass and towards the woods which lay on one side of the mansion house. I paused, turned around and gazed up at the great palace on its knoll. From this angle it looked even grander and more imposing. The sinking sun struck the windows and they gave back a dazzling return. One or two diminished figures were moving around the side of the building. My attenuated shadow stretched out impossibly far in front of me.
    I turned back in the direction of the wood and entered the