The Pale Companion by Philip Gooden

Author:Philip Gooden
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472104304
Publisher: Constable & Robinson

Waning Gibbous

The next day Adam Fielding and I rode away together from Instede House. I was never so glad in my life to turn my back on anywhere. The Chamberlain’s Company had arrived to celebrate a marriage and to contribute our mite towards the festivities by staging WS’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But, instead of the harmony of Hymen, we had attended a triple feast of death. The demise of Robin the woodman was the harbinger for the killing of Lord Elcombe and the subsequent death, whether by accident or suicide, of his sad simpleton of a son.

But the fates were not to be satisfied with this catalogue of misery. A poor drowned soul lay in a downstairs room of the great house, lifeless testimony to the ruthlessness of his father all those years before and an agonizing reproach to the living mother now. The older son of the family, now revealed to be the middle child, was still imprisoned for that same father’s murder even if Justice Fielding seemed convinced that the clutch of affidavits he carried in his saddle-pouch would secure the young man’s release. There was yet more: a marriage had been disarranged, and two families violently disappointed in their hopes and ambitions. One of those familes had been as good as broken.

I wondered whether, even if Harry were released from gaol, the union with Marianne Morland would proceed. It seemed doubtful. The Morland parents had looked, from my glimpses of them at the wedding feast, to be more interested in the gloss of rank than anything else. They already had the money, you see. (With the Elcombes it was apparently the other way about: they possessed the rank but not the pecuniary means to support it. All these things are relative, I suppose. Instede House and its occupants certainly looked pretty prosperous to me – unhappy but prosperous.) It seemed unlikely that the merchant family from Bristol would consider allying itself with a noble house in which shame and the prospect of the scaffold figured so prominently. In any case there’d been little enough enthusiasm on Harry’s part for the match. Now, without Elcombe’s insistence, there seemed no reason for the alliance to be concluded.

Justice Fielding and I were riding across the open plain which lies to the north and west of Salisbury. The larks still sang beneath the blue bowl of the sky, summer’s good humour restored. It was afternoon. A deal of time had been spent at Instede taking depositions from Lady Elcombe and Oswald, each being heard in private. I don’t think they would have agreed to it without Fielding’s assurances that their witness was necessary to quash the indictment against Harry Ascre. He had also taken a statement from me about what I’d seen from the players’ dormitory on midsummer’s night. Although I several times repeated that my vision was confused and wavering, Fielding insisted it would contribute towards the task of freeing young Ascre. “Part of the picture,” he said. “An item in the pattern.

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