Читать книгу Fools and Mortals - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 9

I DIED JUST after the clock in the passageway struck nine.

There are those who claim that Her Majesty, Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France, and of Ireland, will not allow clocks to strike the hour in her palaces. Time is not allowed to pass for her. She has defeated time. But that clock struck. I remember it.

I counted the bells. Nine. Then my killer struck.

And I died.

My brother says there is only one way to tell a story. ‘Begin,’ he says in his irritatingly pedantic manner, ‘at the beginning. Where else?’

I see I have started a little too late, so we shall go back to five minutes before nine, and begin again.

Imagine, if you will, a woman. She is no longer young, nor is she old. She is tall, and, I am constantly told, strikingly handsome. On the night of her death she is wearing a gown made from the darkest blue velvet, embroidered with a mass of silver stars, each star studded with a pearl. Panels of watered silk, pale lavender in colour, billow through the open-fronted skirt as she moves. The same expensive silk lines her sleeves, the lavender showing through slits cut into the star-studded velvet. The skirt brushes the floor, hiding her delicate slippers, which are cut from an antique tapestry. Such slippers were uncomfortable, as tapestry shoes always are unless lined with linen or, better, satin. She wears a ruff, high at the back and starched stiff, and above it her striking face is framed by raven-black hair, which is pinned into elaborate coils and rolls, all looped with strings of pearls to match the necklace that hangs down her bodice. A coronet of silver, again decorated with pearls, shows her high rank. Her pale face shimmers with a strange, almost unearthly glow, reflecting the light from the flames of a myriad candles, while her eyes are darkened, and her lips reddened. She has a straight back, and throws her hips forward and pushes her shoulders back so that her silk-clad bosom, which is neither too large nor vanishingly small, draws the eye. She draws many eyes that night for she is, as I am frequently told, a hauntingly beautiful woman.

The beautiful woman is in the company of two men and a younger woman, one of whom is her killer, though she does not yet know it. The younger woman is dressed every bit as beautifully as the older, if anything her bodice and skirt are even more expensive, bright with pale silks and precious stones. She has fair hair piled high, and a face of innocent loveliness, though that is deceptive, for she is pleading for the older woman’s imprisonment and disfigurement. She is the older woman’s rival in love, and, being younger and no less beautiful, she will win this confrontation. The two men listen, amused, as the younger woman insults her rival, and then watch as she picks up a heavy iron stand that holds four candles. She dances, pretending that the iron stand is a man. The candles flicker and smoke, but none goes out. The girl dances gracefully, puts the stand down, and gives one of the men a brazen look. ‘If thou would’st know me,’ she says archly, ‘then thou would’st know my grievance.’

‘Know you?’ the older woman intervenes, ‘oh, thou art known!’ It is a witty retort, clearly spoken, though the older woman’s voice is somewhat hoarse and breathy.

‘Thy grievance, lady,’ the shorter of the two men says, ‘is my duty.’ He draws a dagger. For a candle-flickering pause it seems he is about to plunge the blade into the younger woman, but then he turns and strikes at the older. The clock, a mechanical marvel that must be in the corridor just outside the hall, has started striking, and I count the bells.

The onlookers gasp.

The dagger slides between the older woman’s waist and her right arm. She gasps too. Then she staggers. In her left hand, hidden from the shocked onlookers, is a very small knife that she uses to pierce a pig’s bladder concealed in a simple linen pouch hanging by woven silver ropes from her belt. The belt is pretty, fashioned from cream-coloured kidskin with diamond-shaped panels of scarlet cloth on which small pearls glitter. When pricked, the pouch releases a gush of sheep’s blood.

‘I am slain,’ she cries, ‘alas! I am slain!’ I did not write the line, so I am not responsible for the older woman stating what must already have been obvious. The younger woman screams, not in shock, but in exultation.

The older woman staggers some more, turning now so that the onlookers can see the blood. If we had not been in a palace, then we would not have used the sheep’s blood, because the velvet gown was too rich and expensive, but for Elizabeth, for whom time does not exist, we must spend. So we spend. The blood soaks the velvet gown, hardly showing because the cloth is so dark, but plenty of blood stains the lavender silk, and spatters the canvas that has been spread across the Turkey carpets. The woman now sways, cries again, falls to her knees, and, with another exclamation, dies. In case anyone thinks she is merely fainting, she calls out two last despairing words, ‘I die!’ And then she dies.

The clock has just struck nine times.

The killer takes the coronet from the corpse’s hair, and, with elaborate courtesy, presents it to the younger woman. He then seizes the dead woman’s hands, and, with unnecessary force, drags her from view. ‘Her body here we’ll leave,’ he says loudly, grunting with the effort of pulling the corpse, ‘to moulder and to time’s eternity.’ He hides the woman behind a tall screen, which mostly hides a door at the back of the stage. The screen is decorated with embroidered panels showing entwined red and white roses springing from two leafy vines.

‘A pox on you,’ the dead woman says softly.

‘Piss on your bollocks,’ her killer whispers, and goes back to where the audience is motionless and silent, shocked by the sudden death of such dark beauty.

I was the older woman.

The room where I have just died is lit by countless candles, but behind the screen it is shadowed dark as death. I crawled to the half open door and wriggled through into the antechamber, taking care not to disturb the door itself, the top of which can be seen above the rosy screen.

‘Gawd help us, Richard,’ Jean said to me, speaking softly. She brushed a hand down my beautiful skirt that was stained with sheep’s blood. ‘What a mess!’

‘Will it wash out?’ I asked, standing.

‘It might,’ she said dubiously, ‘but it will never be the same again, will it? Pity that.’ Jean is a good woman, a widow, and our seamstress. ‘Here, let me wet the silk.’ She went to fetch a jug of water and a cloth.

A dozen men and boys lounged at the room’s edges. Alan was sitting close to two candles and silently mouthing words he was reading from a long piece of paper, while George Bryan and Will Kemp were playing cards, using one of our tiring boxes as a table. Kemp grinned. ‘One day he’ll stick that knife right through your ribs,’ he said to me, then grimaced, pretending to die. ‘He’d like that. So would I.’

‘A pox on you too,’ I said.

‘You should be nice to him,’ Jean said to me as she began dabbing ineffectually at the sheep’s blood. ‘Your brother, I mean,’ she went on. I said nothing, just stood there as she tried to clean the silk. I was half listening to the players in the great chamber where the Queen sits on her throne.

This was the fifth time I had played for the Queen; twice in Greenwich, twice at Richmond, and now at Whitehall, and folk are forever asking what is she like, and I usually make up an answer because she is impossible to see or describe. Most of the candles were at the players’ end of the hall, and Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland, sat beneath a rich red canopy that shadowed her, but even in the shadow I could see her face white as a gull, unmoving, stern, beneath red hair piled high and crowned with silver or gold. She sat still as a statue except when she laughed. Her face, so white, looked disapproving, but it was evident she enjoyed the plays, and the courtiers watched her as much as they watched us, looking for clues as to whether they should enjoy us or not.

Her bosom was white like her face, and I knew she was wearing ceruse, a paste that makes the skin white and smooth. She wore her dresses low like a young girl enticing men with a hint of pale breasts, though God knows she was old. She did not look old, and she glowed in her expensive fabrics, which were studded with jewels that caught the candlelight. So old, so still, so pale, so royal. We dared not look at her, because to catch her eye would break the illusion we offered her, but I would snatch a glimpse when I could, seeing her paste-white face above the perfumed crowd, who sat on the lower seats.

‘I might have to sew new silk into the skirt,’ Jean said, still talking softly, then she shivered as a gust of wind blew rain against the antechamber’s high windows. ‘Nasty night to be out,’ she said, ‘raining like the devil’s piss, it is.’

‘How long before this piece of shit ends?’ Will Kemp asked.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ Alan said without looking up from the paper he was reading.

Simon Willoughby came through the door from the great hall. He was playing the younger woman, my rival, and he was grinning. He is a pretty boy, just sixteen years old, and he tossed the coronet to Jean then twirled around so that his bright pale skirts flared outwards. ‘We were good tonight!’ he said happily.

‘You’re always good, Simon,’ Will Kemp said fondly.

‘Not so loud, Simon, not so loud,’ Alan cautioned with a smile.

‘Where are you going?’ Jean demanded of me. I had gone to the door leading to the courtyard.

‘I need a piss.’

‘Don’t let the velvet get wet,’ she hissed. ‘Here, take this!’ She brought me a heavy cloak and draped it around my shoulders.

I went out into the yard where rain seethed on the cobbles, and I stood under the shelter of a wooden arcade that ran like a cheap cloister about the courtyard’s edge. I shivered. Winter was coming. There was a deeply arched gateway on the yard’s far side where two torches guttered feebly. Something dark twitched in the arcade’s corner. A rat perhaps, or one of the cats that lived in the palace. A pox on the palace, I thought, and a pox on Her Majesty, for whom time does not exist. She likes her plays to begin in the middle of the afternoon, but the visit of an ambassador had delayed this performance, and it would be a wet, dark and cold journey home.

‘I thought you needed to piss?’ Simon Willoughby had followed me into the courtyard.

‘I just wanted some fresh air.’

‘It was hot in there,’ he said, then hauled up his pretty skirts and began to piss into the rain, ‘but we were good, weren’t we?’ I said nothing. ‘Did you see the Queen?’ he asked. ‘She was watching me!’ Again I said nothing because there was nothing to say. Of course the Queen had been watching him. She had watched all of us. She had summoned us! ‘Did you see me dance with that tall candle-stand?’ Simon asked.

‘I did,’ I said curtly, then strolled away from him, following the cloister-like arcade about the courtyard’s edge. I knew he wanted me to praise him because young Simon Willoughby needs praise like a whore needs silver, but there could never be enough compliments to satisfy him. Other than that he is a decent enough boy, a good actor and, with his long blond hair, pretty enough to make men sigh when he plays a girl.

‘It was my idea,’ he called after me, ‘to pretend the candle-stand was a man!’

I ignored him.

‘It was good, wasn’t it?’ he asked plaintively.

I was at the courtyard’s far side now, deep in the shadows. No hint of the flames guttering in the archway could reach me here. There was a door to my right, barely visible, and I opened it cautiously. Whatever room lay beyond was in even deeper darkness. I sensed it was a small room, but did not enter, just listened, hearing nothing above the wind’s bluster and the rain’s ceaseless beat. I was hoping to find something to steal, something I could sell, something small and easily hidden. In Greenwich Palace I had found a small bag of seed pearls which must have been dropped and lay half obscured beneath a tapestry-covered stool in a passageway, and I had hidden the small bag beneath my skirts, then sold the pearls to an apothecary who ground them small and used them to cure insanity, or so he said. He paid me far less than they were worth because he knew they were stolen, but I still made more money in that one day than I usually make in a month.

‘Richard?’ Simon Willoughby called. I kept silent. The dark room smelled foul, as if it had been used to store horse feed that had turned rotten. I reckoned there would be nothing to steal and so closed the door.

‘Richard?’ Simon called again. I remained silent and did not move, knowing I would be invisible in my dark cloak. I liked Simon well enough, but I was in no mood to tell him over and over how good he had been.

Then a door on the courtyard’s far side opened, letting a wash of lantern-light into the rain-soaked courtyard. At first I thought it would be one of the players, come to let us know we were needed, but instead it was a man I had never seen before. He was young and he was rich. It is easy to tell the rich from their clothes, and this man was dressed in a doublet of shining yellow silk, slashed with blue. His hose was yellow, his high boots brown and polished. He wore a sword. His hat was blue with a long feather, and there was gold at his throat and more gold on his belt, but what stood out most was his long hair, so palely blond that it was almost white. I wondered if it was a wig. ‘Simon?’ the young man called.

Simon Willoughby answered with a nervous giggle.

‘Are you alone?’

‘I think so, my lord.’ Simon had heard me open and close a door, and must have thought I had gone into the palace. Then the far door closed, plunging the newcomer into shadow. I was utterly still, just another shadow within a shadow. The young man walked towards Simon, and the guttering torches in the gate arch threw just enough light for me to see that his boots had heels like those on women’s shoes. He was short and wanted to look taller. ‘Richard was here,’ I heard Simon say, ‘but he’s gone. I think he’s gone.’

The man said nothing, just pushed Simon against the wall and kissed him. I saw him haul up Simon’s skirts and I held my breath. The two were pressed together.

There was nothing surprising in this, except that his lordship, whoever he was, had not waited till the play’s ending to find Simon Willoughby. Every time we had played at one of the Queen’s palaces, the lordlings had come to the tiring room, and I had watched Simon disappear with one or other of them, which explained why Simon Willoughby always appeared to have money. I had none, which is why I needed to thieve.

‘Oh yes,’ I heard Simon say, ‘my lord!’

I crept nearer. My tapestry slippers were silent on the stones. The wind fretted loud around the palace roofs, and the rain, already relentless, increased in vehemence to drown whatever the two said. There was just enough light from the becketed torches to see Simon’s head bent back, his mouth open, and, still curious, I crept still nearer. ‘My lord!’ Simon cried, almost in pain.

His lordship chuckled and stepped back, releasing Simon’s skirts. ‘My little whore,’ he said, though not in an unkind voice. I could see that even with the women’s heels on his boots he was no taller than Simon, who is a full head shorter than me. ‘I don’t want you tonight,’ his lordship said, ‘but do your duty, little Simon, do your duty, and you shall live in my household.’ He said something more, though I could not hear it because the wind gusted to drive hard rain on the cloister’s roof, then his lordship leaned forward, kissed Simon’s cheek, and went back to the tiring room.

I stayed still. Simon was leaning against the wall, gasping. ‘So who is the dwarf?’ I asked.

‘Richard!’ he sounded both scared and alarmed. ‘Is that you?’

‘Of course it’s me. Who is his lordship?’

‘Just a friend,’ he said, then he was saved from answering any more questions because the antechamber door opened again, and Will Kemp leaned out. ‘You two whores, come,’ he snarled. ‘You’re needed! It’s the ending.’

My brother was evidently speaking the epilogue. I knew he had composed it specially, draping it onto the play’s end like ribbons on the tail of a harvest-home horse, and doubtless it smothered the Queen with compliments.

‘Come!’ Will Kemp snapped again, and we both hurried back inside.

When we are at the playhouse, we end every performance with a jig. Even the tragedies end with a jig. We dance, and Will Kemp clowns, and the boys playing the girls squeal. Will scatters insults and makes bawdy jokes, the audience roars, and the tragedy is forgotten, but when we play for Her Majesty, we neither dance nor clown. We make no jokes about pricks and buttocks, instead we line like supplicants at the edge of the stage and bow respectfully to show that, though we might have pretended to be kings and queens, to be dukes and duchesses, and even gods and goddesses, we know our humble place. We are mere players, and as far beneath the palace audience as hell’s goblins are beneath heaven’s bright angels. And so, that night, we made obeisance, and the audience, because the Queen had nodded her approval, rewarded us with applause. I am certain half of them had hated the play, but they took their cue from Her Majesty, and applauded politely. The Queen just stared at us imperiously, her bone-white face unreadable, and then she stood, the courtiers fell silent, we all bowed again, and she was gone.

And so our play was over.

‘We shall meet at the Theatre,’ my brother announced when, at last, we were all back in the antechamber. He clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention because he knew he needed to speak swiftly before some of the lords and ladies from the audience came into the room. ‘We need everyone who has a part in Comedy, and in Hester. No one else need come.’

‘Musicians too?’ someone asked.

‘Musicians too, at the Theatre, tomorrow morning, early.’

Someone groaned. ‘How early?’

‘Nine of the clock,’ my brother said.

More groaning. ‘Will we be playing The Dead Man’s Fortune tomorrow?’ one of the hired men asked.

‘Don’t be an arsehole,’ Will Kemp answered instead of my brother, ‘how can we?’

The urgency and the scorn were both caused by a sickness that had afflicted Augustine Phillips, one of the company’s principal players, and Christopher Beeston, who was Augustine’s apprentice and lodged in his house. Both were too ill to work. Fortunately, Augustine was not in the play we had just performed, and I had been able to learn Christopher’s part and so take his place. We would need to replace the two in other plays, though if the rain that still seethed outside did not end then there would be no performance at the Theatre the next day. But that problem was forgotten as the door from the hall opened and a half-dozen lords with their perfumed ladies entered. My brother bowed low. I saw the young fair-haired man with the blue-slashed yellow doublet, and was surprised that he ignored Simon Willoughby. He walked right past him, and Simon, plainly forewarned, did nothing except offer a bow.

I turned my back on the visitors as I stepped out of my skirts, shrugged off the bodice, and pulled on my grubby shirt. I used a damp cloth to wipe off the ceruse that had whitened my skin and bosom, ceruse that had been mixed with crushed pearls to make the skin glow in the candlelight. I had retreated to the darkest corner of the room, praying no one would notice me, nor did they. I was also praying that we would be offered somewhere to sleep in the palace, perhaps a stable, but no such offer came except to those who, like my brother, lived inside the city walls and so could not get home before the gates opened at dawn. The rest of us were expected to leave, rain or no rain. It was near midnight by the time we left, and the walk home around the city’s northern edge took me at least an hour. It still rained, the road was night-black dark, but I walked with three of the hired men, which was company enough to deter any footpad crazy enough to be abroad in the foul weather. I had to wake Agnes, the maid who slept in the kitchen of the house where I rented the attic room, but Agnes was in love with me, poor girl, and did not mind. ‘You should stay here in the kitchen,’ she suggested coyly, ‘it’s warm!’

Instead I crept upstairs, careful not to wake the Widow Morrison, my landlady, to whom I owed too much rent, and, having stripped off my soaking wet clothes, I shivered under the thin blanket until I finally slept.

I woke next morning tired, cold, and damp. I pulled on a doublet and hose, crammed my hair into its cap, wiped my face with a half-frozen cloth, used the jakes in the backyard, swallowed a mug of weak ale, snatched a hard crust from the kitchen, promised to pay the Widow Morrison the rent I owed, and then went out into a chill morning. At least it was not raining.

I had two ways to reach the playhouse from the widow’s house. I could either turn left in the alley and then walk north up Bishopsgate Street, but most mornings that street was crowded with sheep or cows being herded towards the city’s slaughterhouses, and, besides, after the rain, it would be ankle deep in mud, shit, and muck, and so I turned right and leaped the open sewer that edged Finsbury Fields. I slipped as I landed, and my right foot shot back into the green-scummed water.

‘You appear with your customary grace,’ a sarcastic voice said. I looked up and saw my brother had chosen to walk north through the Fields rather than edge past frightened cattle in the street. John Heminges, another player in the company, was with him.

‘Good morrow, brother,’ I said, picking myself up.

He ignored that greeting and offered me no help as I scrambled up the slippery bank. Nettles stung my right hand, and I cursed, making him smile. It was John Heminges who stepped forward and held out a helping hand. I thanked him and looked resentfully at my brother. ‘You might have helped me,’ I said.

‘I might indeed,’ he agreed coldly. He wore a thick woollen cloak and a dark hat with an extravagant brim that shadowed his face. I look nothing like him. I am tall, thin-faced, and clean shaven, while he has a round, blunt face with a weak beard, full lips, and very dark eyes. My eyes are blue, his are secretive, shadowed, and always watching cautiously. I knew he would have preferred to walk on, ignoring me, but my sudden arrival in the ditch had forced him to acknowledge me and even talk to me. ‘Young Simon was excellent last night,’ he said, with false enthusiasm.

‘So he told me,’ I said, ‘often.’

He could not resist the smallest smile, a twitch that betrayed amusement and was immediately banished. ‘Dancing with the candle-stand?’ he went on, pretending not to have noticed my reply. ‘That was good.’ I knew he praised Simon Willoughby to annoy me.

‘Where is Simon?’ I asked. I would have expected Simon Willoughby to be with his apprentice master, John Heminges.

‘I …’ Heminges began, then just looked sheepish.

‘He’s smearing the sheets of some lordly bed,’ my brother said, as if the answer were obvious, ‘of course.’

‘He has friends in Westminster,’ John Heminges said, sounding embarrassed. He is a little younger than my brother, perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, but usually played older parts. He is a kind man who knows of the antagonism between my brother and I, and does his ineffectual best to relieve it.

My brother glanced at the sky. ‘I do believe it’s clearing. Not before time. But we can’t perform anything this afternoon, and that’s a pity.’ He gave me a sour smile. ‘It means no money for you today.’

‘We’re rehearsing, aren’t we?’ I asked.

‘You’re not paid for rehearsing,’ he said, ‘just for performing.’

‘We could stage The Dead Man’s Fortune?’ John Heminges put in, eager to stop our bickering.

‘Not without Augustine and Christopher,’ my brother said.

‘I suppose not, no, of course not. A pity! I like it.’

‘It’s a strange piece,’ my brother said, ‘but not without virtues. Two couples, and both the women enamoured of other men! Space there for some dance steps!’

‘We’re putting dances into it?’ Heminges asked, puzzled.

‘No, no, no, I mean scope for complications. Two women and four men. Too many men! Too many men!’ My brother had paused to gaze at the windmills across the Fields as he spoke. ‘Then there’s the love potion! An idea with possibilities, but all wrong, all wrong!’

‘Why wrong?’

‘Because the girls’ fathers concoct the potion. It should be the sorceress! What is the value of a sorceress if she doesn’t perform sorcery?’

‘She has a magic mirror,’ I pointed out. I knew because I played the sorceress.

‘Magic mirror!’ he said scornfully. He was striding on again, perhaps attempting to leave me behind. ‘Magic mirror!’ he said again. ‘That’s a mountebank’s trick. Magic lies in the …’ he paused, then decided that whatever he had been about to say would be wasted on me. ‘Not that it signifies! We can’t perform the play without Augustine and Christopher.’

‘How’s the Verona play?’ Heminges asked.

If I had dared ask that same question I would have been ignored, but my brother liked Heminges. Even so he was reluctant to answer in front of me. ‘Almost finished,’ he said vaguely, ‘almost.’ I knew he was writing a play set in Verona, a city in Italy, and that he had been forced to interrupt the writing to devise a wedding play for our patron, Lord Hunsdon. He had grumbled about the interruption.

‘You still like it?’ Heminges asked, oblivious to my brother’s irritation.

‘I’d like it more if I could finish it,’ he said savagely, ‘but Lord Hunsdon wants a wedding play, so damn Verona.’ We walked on in silence. To our right, beyond the scummed ditch and a brick wall, lay the Curtain, a playhouse built to rival ours. A blue flag flew from the staff on the Curtain’s high roof announcing that there would be an entertainment that afternoon. ‘Another beast show,’ my brother said derisively. There had been no plays at the Curtain for months, and it seemed there would be no play at the Theatre this afternoon either. We had nothing to perform until other players learned Augustine and Christopher’s parts. We could have performed the play we had presented to the Queen, except we had done it too often in the past month. Perform a play too often, and the audience is liable to pelt the stage with empty ale bottles.

We came to the wooden bridge that crossed the sewer ditch and which led to a crude gap in the long brick wall. Beyond the gap was the Theatre, our playhouse, a great wooden turret as tall as a church steeple. It had been James Burbage’s idea to build the playhouse, and his idea to make the bridge and pierce the wall, which meant playgoers did not have to walk up muddy Bishopsgate to reach us, but instead could leave the city through Cripplegate and stroll across Finsbury Fields. So many folk made that journey that there was now a broad and muddy path running diagonally across the open ground. ‘Does that cloak belong to the company?’ my brother asked as we crossed the bridge.

‘Yes.’

‘Make sure it’s returned to the tiring room,’ he said snidely, then stopped in the wall’s gap. He let John Heminges walk ahead, and then, for the first time since we had met at the ditch’s edge, looked up into my eyes. He had to look up because I was a full head taller. ‘You are going to stay with the company?’ he asked.

‘I can’t afford to,’ I said. ‘I owe rent. You’re not giving me enough work.’

‘Then stop spending your evenings in the Falcon,’ was his answer. I thought he would say no more because he walked on, but after two paces he turned back to me. ‘You’ll get more work,’ he said brusquely. ‘With Augustine sick and his boy sweating? We have to replace them.’

‘You won’t give me Augustine’s parts,’ I said, ‘and I’m too old to play girls.’

‘You’ll play what we ask you to play. We need you, at least through the winter.’

‘You need me!’ I threw that back into his face. ‘Then pay me more.’

He ignored the demand. ‘We begin today by rehearsing Hester,’ he said coldly, ‘we’ll only be working on Augustine and Christopher’s scenes. Tomorrow we’ll perform Hester, and we’ll play the Comedy on Saturday. I expect you to be here.’

I shrugged. In Hester and Ahasuerus I played Uashti, and in the Comedy I was Emilia. I knew all the lines. ‘You pay William Sly twice what you pay me,’ I said, ‘and my parts are just as large as his.’

‘Maybe because he’s twice as good as you? Besides, you’re my brother,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘Just stay through the winter, and after that? Do what you will. Leave the company and starve, if that’s what you want.’ He walked on towards the playhouse.

And I spat after him. Brotherly love.

George Bryan paced to the front of the stage, where he bowed so low that he almost lost his balance. ‘Noble Prince,’ he said when he recovered his footing, ‘according as I am bound, I will do you service till death me do confound.’

Isaiah Humble, the bookkeeper, coughed to attract attention. ‘Sorry! It’s “till death me confound”. There’s no “do”. Sorry!’

‘It’s better with the “do”,’ my brother said mildly.

‘It’s crapulous shit with or without the “do”,’ Alan Rust said, ‘but if George wants to say “do”, Master Humble, then he says “do”.’

‘Sorry,’ Isaiah said from his stool at the back of the stage.

‘You were right to correct him,’ my brother consoled him, ‘it’s your job.’

‘Sorry, though.’

George swept off his hat and bowed again. ‘Something, something, something,’ he said, ‘till death me do confound.’ George Bryan, a nervous and worried man who somehow always appeared confident and decisive when the playhouse was full, had replaced the sick Augustine Phillips. The rehearsal was to bind him and Simon Willoughby, who had replaced Christopher Beeston, into the play.

John Heminges acknowledged George’s second bow with a languid wave of a hand. ‘For a season we will, to our solace, into our orchard or some other place.’

Will Kemp bounded onto the stage with a mighty leap. ‘He that will drink wine,’ he bellowed, ‘and hath never a vine, must send or go to France. And if he do not he must needs shrink!’ On the word shrink he crouched, looked alarmed, and clutched his codpiece, which sent Simon Willoughby into a fit of giggling.

‘Do we go to the orchard?’ George interrupted Will Kemp to ask.

‘The orchard, yes,’ Isaiah said, ‘or some other place. That’s what it says in the text, “orchard or some other place”.’ He waved the prompt copy. ‘Sorry, Will.’

‘I’d like to know if it is the orchard.’

‘Why?’ Alan Rust asked belligerently.

‘Do I imagine trees? Or some other place without trees?’ George looked anxious. ‘It helps to know.’

‘Imagine trees,’ Rust barked. ‘Apple trees. Where you meet Hardydardy.’ He gestured towards Will Kemp.

‘Are the apples ripe?’ George asked.

‘Does it matter?’ Rust asked.

‘If they’re ripe,’ George said, still looking worried, ‘I could eat one.’

‘They’re small apples,’ Rust said, ‘unripe, like Simon’s tits.’

‘Isn’t this a tale from the scriptures?’ John Heminges put in.

‘My tits aren’t small,’ Simon Willoughby said, hefting his scrawny chest.

‘It’s from the Old Testament,’ my brother said, ‘you’ll find the story in the Book of Esther.’

‘But there’s no one called Hardydardy in the Bible!’ John Heminges said.

‘There bloody well is now,’ Alan Rust said. ‘Can we move on?’

‘Book of Esther?’ George asked. ‘Then why is she called Hester?’

‘Because the Reverend William Venables, who wrote this piece of shit, didn’t know his arse from his shrivelled prick,’ Alan Rust said forcefully. ‘Now will you all be quiet and let Will speak his lines?’

‘If it’s so bad,’ George asked, ‘why are we doing it again?’

‘Can you think of another play we can fit by tomorrow?’

‘No.’

‘Then that’s why.’

‘Go on, Will,’ my brother said tiredly.

‘There’s a loose board here,’ George said, stubbing his toe at the front of the stage, ‘that’s why I almost fell over when I bowed.’

‘I lack both drink and meat,’ Will Kemp appealed to the empty galleries of the Theatre, ‘but, as I say, a dog hath a day, my time is come to get some!’

‘Get some!’ Simon Willoughby almost peed himself with laughter. He had arrived at the Theatre before me, and looked surprisingly sprightly and alert. ‘You didn’t go home last night?’ I had asked him, but instead of answering he just grinned. ‘Did he pay you?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps.’

‘You can lend me some?’

‘I’m needed onstage,’ he had said, and hurried away.

‘Shouldn’t that be “meat and drink”?’ George now interrupted the rehearsal again.

‘It’s my line,’ Will Kemp growled, ‘why should you care?’

Isaiah peered at the text. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Will got it right, it’s “drink and meat”, sorry.’

I was feeling tired, so I wandered out of the yard and through the shadowed entrance tunnel where Jeremiah Poll, an old soldier who had lost an eye in Ireland, guarded the outer gate. ‘It’s going to rain again,’ he said as I passed, and I nodded. Jeremiah said it every time I passed him, even on the warmest, driest days. I could hear the clash and scrape of blades, and emerged into the weak sunlight to see Richard Burbage and Henry Condell practising their sword skills. They were fast, their blades darting, retreating, crossing, and lunging. Henry laughed at something Richard Burbage said, then saw me, and his sword went upwards as he stepped back and motioned with his dagger hand for the practice to stop. They both turned to look at me, but I pretended not to have noticed them and went to the door that led to the galleries. I heard them laugh as I stepped through.

I climbed the short stairs to the lower gallery, from where I glanced across at the stage where George was still fretting about apples or loose planks, then, as the sound of the swords started again, I lay down. I was playing Uashti, a queen of Persia, but my lines would not be needed for at least an hour, and so I closed my eyes.

I was woken by a kick to my legs and opened my eyes to see James Burbage standing over me. ‘There are Percies in your house,’ he said.

‘There are what?’ I asked, struggling to wake and stand up.

‘Percies,’ he said, ‘in your house. I just walked past.’

‘They’re there for Father Laurence,’ I explained, ‘the bastards.’

‘They’ve been before?’

‘The bastards come every month.’

Father Laurence, like me, lived in the Widow Morrison’s house. He was an ancient priest who rented the room directly beneath my attic, though I suspected the widow let him live there for free. He was in his sixties, half crippled by pains in his joints, but still with a spry mind. He was a Roman Catholic priest, which was reason enough to have most men dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn or Tower Hill and there have their innards plucked out while they still lived, but Father Laurence was a Marian priest, meaning he had been ordained during the reign of our Queen’s half-sister, the Catholic Queen Mary, and such men, if they made no trouble, were allowed to live. Father Laurence made no trouble, but the Pursuivants, those men who hunted down traitorous Catholics, were forever searching his room as if the poor old man might be hiding a Jesuit behind his close-stool. They never found anything because my brother had hidden Father Laurence’s vestments and chalices among the Theatre’s costumes and properties.

‘They’ll find nothing,’ I said, ‘they never do.’ I looked towards the stage. ‘Do they need me?’

‘It’s the dance of the Jewish women,’ James Burbage said, ‘so no.’

On the stage Simon Willoughby, Billy Rowley, Alexander Cooke and Tom Belte were prancing in a line, goaded by a man who carried a silver-tipped staff with which he rapped their legs or arms. ‘Higher!’ he called. ‘You’re here to show your legs. Leap, you spavined infants, leap!’

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘Ralph Perkins. Friend of mine. He teaches dancing at the court.’

‘At the court?’ I was impressed.

‘The Queen likes to see dancing done well. So do I.’

‘One, two, three, four, five, leap!’ Ralph Perkins called. ‘It’s the galliard, you lumpen urchins, not some country dump dance! Leap!’

‘Goddam ill fortune about Augustine and his boy,’ James Burbage grumbled.

‘They’ll recover?’

‘Who knows? They’ve been purged, bled, and buggered about. They might. I pray they do.’ He frowned. ‘Simon Willoughby will be busy till Christopher recovers.’

‘That’ll please him,’ I said sourly.

‘But not you?’ I shrugged and did not answer. I was frightened of James Burbage. He leased the Theatre, which made him the owner of the building if not the land on which it stood, and his eldest son, called Richard like me, was one of our leading players. James had been a player himself once, and, before that, a carpenter, and he still had the muscular build of a man who worked with his hands. He was tall, grey-haired, and hard-faced, with a short beard, and though he no longer acted, he was a Sharer, one of the eight men who shared the expenses of the Theatre and divided the profits among themselves. ‘He drives a hard bargain,’ my brother, another of the Sharers, had once told me, ‘but he keeps to it. He’s a good man.’ Now James frowned at the stage as he talked to me. ‘Are you still thinking about leaving?’

I said nothing.

‘Henry Lanman,’ Burbage said the name flatly, ‘has that bastard been talking to you?’

‘No.’

‘Is he trying to poach you?’

‘No,’ I said again.

‘But is your brother right? He says you’re thinking of walking away from us. Is that true?’

‘I’ve thought about it,’ I said sullenly.

‘Don’t be a fool, boy. And don’t be tempted by Lanman. He’s losing money.’ Henry Lanman owned the Curtain playhouse that lay just a brief walk to the south of ours. During our performances we could hear their audience cheering, the beat of their drummers, and the sound of their trumpeters, though of late those sounds had become scarcer. ‘He’s showing sword fights these days,’ Burbage went on, ‘sword fights and bear baiting. So what does he want you to do? Piss about in a frock and look pretty?’

‘I haven’t talked to him,’ I insisted truthfully.

‘So you’ve a lick of sense. He’s got nobody to write plays, and nobody to play in them.’

‘I haven’t talked to him!’ I repeated testily.

‘You think Philip Henslowe will hire you?’

‘No!’

‘He’s got plenty of actors.’ Henslowe owned the Rose playhouse, south of the Thames, and was our chief rival.

‘Then there’s Francis Langley,’ James Burbage went on relentlessly, ‘has he talked to you?’

‘No.’

‘He’s building that monstrous great lump of a playhouse on Bankside, and he’s got no players, and he’s got no plays either. Rivals and enemies,’ he said the last three words bitterly.

‘Enemies?’

‘Lanman and Langley? Lanman hates us. The landlord here hates us. The bloody city fathers hate us. The lord mayor hates us. Do you hate us?’

‘No.’

‘But you’re thinking of leaving?’

‘I’m not making any money,’ I muttered, ‘I’m poor.’

‘Of course you’re bloody poor! How old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘You think I started with money?’ Burbage asked belligerently. ‘I served my apprenticeship, boy, I earned my money, saved money, borrowed money, bought the lease here, built the playhouse! I worked, boy!’

I gazed out into the yard. ‘You were a joiner, yes?’

‘A good one,’ he said proudly, ‘but I didn’t start with money. All I had was a pair of hands and a willingness to work. I learned to saw and chisel and augur and shape wood. I learned a trade. I worked.’

‘And this is the only trade I know,’ I said bitterly. I nodded towards my brother. ‘He made sure of that, didn’t he? But in a year or so you’ll spit me out. There’ll be no more parts for me.’

‘You don’t know that,’ he said, though he did not sound convincing. ‘So what parts do you want?’

I was about to answer when Burbage held up a hand to silence me. I turned to see that a group of strangers had just come into the playhouse and were now standing in the yard, staring at the prancing boys on the stage. Four were grim-looking men, all with scabbarded swords and all wearing the white rose of Lord Hunsdon’s livery. The men stood, foursquare and challenging, to guard four women. One of the women was older, with grey hair showing beneath her coif. She signalled the men to stay where they were, and strode towards the stage, straight-backed and confident. My brother, seeing her, bowed low. ‘My lady!’ he greeted her, sounding surprised.

‘We have been inspecting an estate at Finsbury,’ her ladyship said in brusque explanation, ‘and my granddaughter wished to see your playhouse.’

‘You’re most welcome,’ my brother said. The boys onstage had all snatched off their caps and knelt.

‘Stop grovelling,’ her ladyship said sharply, ‘were you dancing?’

‘Yes, your ladyship,’ Ralph Perkins answered.

‘Then dance on,’ she said imperiously, before gesturing to my brother. ‘A word, if you please?’

I knew she was Lady Anne Hunsdon, the wife of the Lord Chamberlain, who was our company’s patron. Some nobles showed their wealth by having a retinue of finely clothed retainers ever at their heels, or by owning the swiftest deerhounds in the kingdom, or by their lavish palaces and wide parks, while some, a few, patronised the acting companies. We were Lord Hunsdon’s pets, we played at his pleasure, and grovelled when he deigned to notice us. And when we toured the country, which we did whenever a plague closed the London playhouses, the Lord Chamberlain’s name and badge protected us from the miserable Puritan town fathers who wanted to imprison us, or, better still, whip us out of town. ‘Come, Elizabeth,’ Lady Hunsdon ordered, and her grand-daughter, for whose marriage my brother had been forced to abandon his Italian play and write something new, went to join her grandmother and my brother. The two maidservants waited with the guards, and it was one of those two maids who caught my eye and stopped the breath in my throat.

Lady Anne Hunsdon and her granddaughter were cloaked in finery. Elizabeth Carey was glorious in a farthingale of cream linen, slashed to show the shimmer of silver sarsenet beneath. I could not see her bodice because she was wearing a short cape, light grey, embroidered with the white roses that were her father and grandfather’s badge. Her hair was pale gold, covered only with a net of silver-gilt thread on which small pearls shone, her skin was fashionably white, but she needed no ceruse to keep it that way, for her face was unblemished, not even touched with a hint of rouge on the cheeks. Her painted lips were full and smiling, and her blue eyes bright as she stared with evident delight at the four boys who had started dancing again to Ralph Perkins’s instructions. Elizabeth Carey was a beauty, but I stared only at her maid, a small, slim girl whose eyes were bright with fascination for what happened on the stage. She was wearing a skirt and bodice of dark grey wool, and had a black coif over her light brown hair, but there was something about her face, some trick of lip and bone, that made her outshine the glowing Elizabeth. She turned to look around the playhouse and caught my eye, and there was the hint of a mischievous smile before she turned back towards the stage. ‘Dear sweet Jesus,’ I murmured, though luckily too softly for the words to reach any of the women.

James Burbage chuckled. I ignored him.

Elizabeth Carey clapped her gloved hands when the dance finished. My brother was speaking with her grandmother, who laughed at something he said. I stared at the maid. ‘So you like her,’ James Burbage said caustically. He thought I was staring at Elizabeth Carey.

‘Don’t you?’

‘She’s a rare little kickshaw,’ he allowed, ‘but take your bloody eyes off her. She’ll be married in a couple of months. Married to a Berkeley,’ he went on, ‘Thomas. He gets ploughing rights, not you.’

‘What is she doing here?’ I asked.

‘How the hell would I know?’

‘Maybe she wants to see the play my brother’s written,’ I suggested.

‘He won’t show it to her.’

‘Have you seen it?’

He nodded. ‘But why are you interested? I thought you were leaving us.’

‘I was hoping there’s a part for me,’ I said weakly.

James Burbage laughed. ‘There’s a part for bloody everyone! It’s a big play. It has to be big because we need to do something special for his lordship. Big and new. You don’t serve up cold meat for the Lord Chamberlain’s granddaughter, you give her something fresh. Something frothy.’

‘Frothy?’

‘It’s a wedding, not a bloody funeral. They want singing, dancing, and lovers soaked in moonbeams.’

I looked across the yard. My brother was gesticulating, almost as though he were making a speech from the stage. Lady Anne Hunsdon and her granddaughter were laughing, and the young maid was still staring wide-eyed around the Theatre.

‘Of course,’ Burbage went on, ‘if we perform a play for her wedding then we’ll need to rehearse where we’ll play it.’

‘Somerset House?’ I asked. I knew that was where Lord Hunsdon lived.

‘Bloody roof of the great hall fell in,’ Burbage said, sounding amused, ‘so like as not we’ll be rehearsing in their Blackfriars house.’

‘Where I’ll play a woman,’ I said bitterly.

He turned and frowned at me. ‘Is that it? You’re tired of wearing a skirt?’

‘I’m too old! My voice has broken.’

Burbage waved to show me the whole circle of the playhouse. ‘Look at it, boy! Timber, plaster and lath. Rain-rotted planks on the forestage, some slaps of paint, and that’s all it is. But we turn it into ancient Rome, into Persia, into Ephesus, and the groundlings believe it. They stare. They gasp! You know what your brother told me?’ He had gripped my jerkin and pulled me close. ‘They don’t see what they see, they see what they think they see.’ He let go of me and gave a crooked grin. ‘He says things like that, your brother, but I know what he means. When you act, they think they see a woman! Maybe you can’t play a young girl any more, but as a woman in her prime, you’re good!’

‘I’ve a man’s voice,’ I said sullenly.

‘Aye, and you shave, and you have a cock, but when you speak small they love it!’

‘But for how long?’ I demanded. ‘In a month or so you’ll say I’m only good for men’s parts, and you’ve plenty of men players.’

‘You want to play the hero?’ he sneered.

I said nothing to that. His son Richard, who I had seen crossing swords with Henry Condell, always played the hero in our plays, and there was a temptation to think that he was only given the best parts because his father owned the playhouse’s lease, just as it was tempting to believe he had been made one of the company’s Sharers because of his father, but in truth he was good. People loved him. They walked across Finsbury Fields to watch Richard Burbage win the girl, destroy the villains, and put the world to rights. Richard was only three or four years older than I, which meant I had no chance of winning a girl or of dazzling an audience with my swordplay. And some of the apprentices, the boys who were capering onstage right now, were growing taller and could soon play the parts I played, and that would save the playhouse money because apprentices were paid in pennies. At least I got a couple of shillings a week, but for how long?

The sun was glinting off the puddles among the yard’s cobblestones. Elizabeth Carey and her grandmother, holding their skirts up, crossed to the stage, and the boys there stopped dancing, took off their caps, and bowed, all except Simon, who offered an elaborate curtsey instead. Lady Anne spoke to them, and they laughed, then she turned, and, with her granddaughter beside her, headed for the Theatre’s entrance. Elizabeth was talking animatedly. I saw that the hair had been plucked from her forehead, raising her hairline by a fashionable inch or more. ‘Fairies,’ I heard her say, ‘I do adore fairies!’

James Burbage and I, anticipating that the ladies would walk within a few paces of the gallery where we talked, had taken off our caps, which meant my long hair fell about my face. I brushed it back. ‘We shall have to ask our chaplain to exorcise the house,’ Elizabeth Carey went on happily, ‘in case the fairies stay!’

‘Better a flock of fairies than the rats in Blackfriars,’ Lady Anne said shortly, then caught sight of me and stopped. ‘You were good last night,’ she said abruptly.

‘My lady,’ I said, bowing.

‘I like a good death.’

‘It was thrilling,’ Elizabeth Carey added. Her face, already merry, brightened. ‘When you died,’ she said, letting go of her skirts and clasping her hands in front of her breasts, ‘I didn’t expect that, and I was so …’ she hesitated, not finding the word she wanted for a heartbeat, ‘mortified.’

‘Thank you, my lady,’ I said dutifully.

‘And now it’s so strange seeing you in a doublet!’ she exclaimed.

‘To the carriage, my dear,’ her grandmother interrupted.

‘You must play the Queen of the Fairies,’ Elizabeth Carey ordered me with mock severity.

The young maid’s eyes widened. She was staring at me, and I stared back. She had grey eyes. I thought I saw a hint of a smile again, a suspicion of mischief in her face. Was she mocking me because I would play a woman? Then, realising that I might offend Elizabeth Carey by ignoring her, I bowed a second time. ‘Your ladyship,’ I said, for lack of anything else to say.

‘Come, Elizabeth,’ Lady Anne ordered. ‘And you, Silvia,’ she added sharply to the grey-eyed maid, who was still looking at me.

Silvia! I thought it the most beautiful name I had ever heard.

James Burbage was laughing. When the women and their guards had left, he pulled his cap onto his cropped grey hair. ‘Mortified,’ he said. ‘Mortified! The mort has wit.’

‘We’re doing a play about fairies?’ I asked in disgust.

‘Fairies and fools,’ he said, ‘and it’s not fully finished yet.’ He paused, scratching his short beard. ‘But mayhap you’re right, Richard.’

‘Right?’

‘Mayhap it’s time we gave you men’s parts. You’re tall! That doesn’t signify for parts like Uashti, because she’s a queen. But tall is better for men’s parts.’ He frowned towards the stage. ‘Simon’s not really tall enough, is he? Scarcely comes up to a dwarf’s arsehole. And your voice will deepen more as you add years, and you do act well.’ He climbed the gallery to the outer corridor. ‘You act well, so if we give you a man’s part in the wedding play, will you stay through the winter?’

I hesitated, then remembered that James Burbage was a man of his word. A hard man, my brother said, but a fair one. ‘Is that a promise, Mister Burbage?’ I asked.

‘As near as I can make it a promise, yes it is.’ He spat on his hand and held it out to me. ‘I’ll do the best I can to make sure you play a man in the wedding play. That’s my promise.’

I shook his hand. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘But right now you’re the Queen of bloody Persia, so get up onstage and be queenly.’

I got up onstage and was queenly.