Free Sleep of Death by Philip Gooden

door that opened into this walled garden. It was his retreat, his sanctuary, a place where he could think or rest undisturbed. There was nothing unusual in these afternoon absences. When he did not reappear in the house by nightfall of this same day, however, his wife and their son and the servants began to grow worried. They called from the outer part of the garden, they rattled at the locked door. No response. Eventually one of the servants was sent over the wall on a ladder. What the servant found in the twilight caused the wife to order the door broken down. When the household – by now most of them were assembled – poured though the narrow entrance to the walled garden they found the head of the household dead in his hammock. The body was almost cold. He had apparently lain there since the early afternoon. There were no marks of violence, no signs of foul play. He had died naturally. What does this remind you of?’
    ‘It’s obvious enough,’ I said.
    ‘Well?’
    ‘It’s what happens before the beginning of the play of
Hamlet.
Hamlet’s father, old Hamlet, dies in his orchard one afternoon. The story’s put around that it was as a result of a snake-bite. But the Ghost tells the Prince that he was poisoned – and that the murderer is now on the throne of Denmark and married to Hamlet’s mother.’
    ‘I said that Master Shakespeare’s plots were closer to the truth,’ said William. ‘What I’ve just described to you is the manner of my father’s death. Asleep, one afternoon, in his garden, in his house, on the other side of the river, his death apparently a natural one.’
    ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘And then to have your mother remarry – and to your uncle. All this really happened, what you’re saying?’
    ‘It’s easy enough to check it if you don’t believe me. My mother or my uncle or any member of the household will confirm it. There was even a ballad made on the subject of my father’s passing, how death comes for rich and poor alike or some such profundity.’
    ‘It stretches belief that your family’s history should mimic so exactly the action of a play,’ I said.
    ‘Yes. It is disturbing to find that nature is so short of material that it is forced to hold up the mirror to art, if I may vary one of the Prince of Denmark’s own observations,’ said William languidly. ‘But consider these things, consider them separately. Then they are less surprising. My father was several years older than my mother. He had not been in the best of health. One might ask, why should he die then and there, one fine spring afternoon in a hammock in his private garden? But, to look at it another way, why shouldn’t he? As good a time as any other. Death is not always the thief who comes in the night.’
    ‘You sound very, ah, unmoved about this,’ I said.
    ‘I have thought long and hard about it. I have tried to be dispassionate. Then, I examine the sequel to this. My mother sincerely grieves, I think, at my father’s death. That was no playing, such as Hamlet complains of when he calls his mother Gertrude a hypocrite. My uncle Sir Thomas too showed grief, though in a manly way. He is not a Claudius, surely, full of fine words as he secretly clutches the knife. Each of them, widow and brother, naturally turned to the other for consolation. Consolation soon – very soon – changed to love. Again, what’s exceptional about that? We are told in Leviticus that if brothers dwell together and one of them dies then the widow should not be married outside the family to a stranger.’
    ‘That is the case when the wife has not produced a son,’ I said. ‘Then the brother should perform the duties of a husband. But in this situation there was at least one son, you.’
    William glanced at me in surprise.
    ‘My father was a parson,’ I said. ‘Whether I wanted to or not, I soaked up Bible learning every day of the week.’
    ‘There is no great gap between pulpit and stage. That’s why they’re always at