Free Sleep of Death by Philip Gooden Page B

remember that I had a proposition to put to you?’
    ‘Yes.’
    He broke off to order another drink for each of us, and, when our hands were full and our mouths refreshed once more, said, ‘You’ve nowhere to lodge presently?’
    ‘You know already of the difference of opinion with my landlady, apparently.’
    ‘I can offer you quarters in my house, that is in my mother’s and stepfather’s house. It’s on the other side of river, not so convenient for the Globe perhaps, but in a rather better neighbourhood.’
    ‘I like it here,’ I said. ‘This is the players’ district.’
    And it was true. Southwark was near to being lawless territory, outside the writ of the City authorities. Our one respectable building was the Bishop of Winchester’s Palace. Otherwise we were all stews, playhouses and thieves’ kitchens, together with an array of prisons from the Clink to the Marshalsea – the ultimate destination for many of our folk. Southwark residents tended towards the unrespectable: coney-catchers and bully boys, whores and veterans . . . and yet somehow I, the country parson’s son, felt in my element down here in a way that I hadn’t when I lodged north of the river.
    ‘I didn’t mean permanent quarters,’ said William. ‘I can see that there are advantages to living near your workplace. Though you’re only temporarily with the Chamberlain’s Men, I understand. There’s a man who is off visiting his dying mother, is there not?’
    Who had he been talking to?
    ‘I’m not interested in your offer,’ I said. ‘I prefer to find my own accommodation.’
    ‘No offence, Master Revill. I have an ulterior motive in asking you to take a room in my house. I’m not in the business of looking after players who have been thrown out of their lodgings for covering their landladies with piss.’
    A smile took the offence out of his words. But I was busy wondering if he knew Nell.
    ‘Master Eliot, get to the point.’
    ‘I would like you to help me find the murderer of my father.’
    I began to think that my new acquaintance shared more than clothing and a fashionable melancholy with that figure who had swept the London stage, the lord Hamlet. Master William Eliot, like the Prince, had a trace of madness in him.
    ‘I thought there was nothing suspicious in his death.’
    ‘Outwardly, no.’
    ‘When you break it down into a series of events there is nothing particularly remarkable about it. Isn’t that what you said – or something like it?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well then?’
    ‘Master Revill, when you see a play you watch as one scene succeeds another, and you will perhaps not at first understand how the scenes are linked, or that the play with all its disparate parts is nevertheless a whole – sometimes a ragged, clumsy whole – but still something complete unto itself. Whether the play is well-made or ill-made there is connection, there is a plan, a plot.’
    ‘You should not confuse a play with real life. If there is a plot down here in this world, it is not likely to be discerned by us poor mortals,’ I said, and then realised I was echoing the kind of thing my father would have uttered on Sunday (and the rest of the week).
    ‘Surely you can see,’ said William, ‘that someone has already created that confusion? My father’s death in some of its details, my mother’s remarriage to my uncle and so on – all of this has been revealed on the stage not a few hundred yards from where we are sitting. You say coincidence, but I say coincidence is simply a word for what we don’t yet understand. And if there is a plot behind Master Shakespeare’s work, which there is certainly is, then why should there not be a plot behind what has happened to the Eliot family?’
    I made no answer. There was some flaw in his argument but I was unable to identify it.
    ‘So what am I supposed to do?’
    ‘Accept my offer of lodgings. You would be received into the house as a friend who has done the Eliot family a favour