Sleep of Death by Philip Gooden Page B

even had it been around his own neck and his hands absolutely steady. Certainly, he could not have performed the trick without her noticing. But a stronger reason was that his every movement, his every gesture, showed that he lived with a respect that amounted almost to reverence for this man and woman, his master and mistress. We had all witnessed how his hands shook as they drew close to her neck, how reluctantly his feet had dragged across the oak flooring of the box. He was attempting to be a thief only at the command of Sir Thomas and the Lady Alice. If they’d told him to leap out of the box into the area where the groundlings stood below, he most likely would have obeyed. Nor was this a matter of acting. He was too stupid to act, but he was also – and this I saw suddenly – too
good
to act anything. Jacob was simply what he was, a single man and nothing more. For the rest of us in that box I cannot speak; we might all have been players, and even the poorest of players is a double man.
    The silence was broken by Adrian. (I mean the silence in our little box, for all the time during this interlude the buzz and hum of stage business floated up to our unlistening ears.) But before he spoke, he smiled. A little lop-sided grin. Like Jacob he had a kind of wit, in his case the wit to realise that he was cornered.
    ‘Player is clever,’ he said. ‘Player knows his business, as I hope I know mine.’
    I felt chilled, even though the afternoon was warm and I was sweating in my heavy town costume. But there was guilt in his words and in his crooked smiling face. Now Sir Thomas spoke, but with a peculiar reluctance which I attributed to the difficult task which confronted him.
    ‘Adrian, this is not the first time in which you have been detected in some malpractice. Coming at this particular time of difficulty, when we have looked to you for integrity, what you have attempted to do – to your lady Alice, to poor Jacob – is unforgivable. I am mindful of the good service you have performed for this family over the years, and for that reason I will not set the law on you.’
    He paused, and I had time to be surprised at his leniency.
    ‘But you will leave our company and this box now, and if ever I or any member of my household discovers you within our precincts again, then I will not hesitate to turn you over to justice.’
    ‘There are things I could say,’ said Adrian. ‘To you, Sir Thomas, and you Lady Alice and even to young William, but this is not the time or the place. To the gentleman player here’ – the way in which he spoke indicated that such a description was for him a contradiction in terms – ‘I wish that he may always have such, ah, easy spectators for his performances, such eyes that are quick to believe, such ears as are quick to trust.
His
presence you are unable to bar me from. I can have him before me at any time by paying a penny and standing with the common people.’
    He slid from the box, with his short black cloak and his black hat somehow seeming to swell, an exit performed with as much relish as if he were taking the devil’s part in some old Morality Play.
    ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ said Sir Thomas, turning attentively towards Lady Alice.
    ‘Perfectly,’ she replied.
    Sir Thomas patted Jacob on the shoulder in an avuncular way. This bear of a man appeared hardly to have recovered from the sacrilege of attempting to slip the pearls from his mistress’s neck.
    ‘I must thank you, Master Revill, for your part in exposing Adrian. It is of course obvious now that Jacob could never have taken my wife’s necklace, but sometimes we need the obvious pointed out to us. Thank you.’
    I inclined my head slightly, grateful at his gratitude. Sir Thomas went to the door of the box, perhaps to check that the steward really had gone. Lady Alice beckoned me to her side. Her voice dropped even lower so that I had to bend forward to hear her. No hardship because I was only inches from the