فصل 10

TEN

So I found myself living in the house where Will Shakespeare lodged, and where, for the time being, he wrote his plays and his poems. He spent hours at a time sitting in an upstairs room, scratching away with a quill pen, beside a window that looked out onto a crab apple tree. The pen must have driven him crazy; he had to trim it often with a special little sharp knife, and a bristling bunch of big new feathers sat on his desk waiting for the moment when he threw the old quill irritably on the floor and reached to sharpen a new one. I longed to be able to hand him a ballpoint pen.

He was up there in his room my first day, when Harry and I brought my clothes from Master Burbage’s house, and the woman who looked after him, Mistress Fawcett, wouldn’t let us go upstairs. She was a fat, friendly soul, and gave us each a handful of little sugary cookies as consolation.

“Nobody must disturb him when he’s writing,” she said reverently. “But in any case thou art to sleep down here, Nathan—the room behind the kitchen. Too warm for summer, perhaps, but cozy.”

Harry was deeply impressed by my room, which wasn’t much bigger than a closet. It was the bed that did it: a little wooden bed, not unlike the one I had at home, four hundred years and three thousand miles from here. “A jointed bedstead!” he said, big-eyed. “And sheets, look! And a pillow!”

Mistress Fawcett had smiled proudly. Her house was quieter than Master Burbage’s, even though it was in a busier area; it was set back from the road and had a walled garden behind it that Master Shakespeare’s room and mine both faced. The streets all around were hopping, though. This was a district called a “liberty,” free from all the rules and regulations that had to be obeyed in the proper City of London across the river. Will Shakespeare lived in the Liberty of the Clink, in Southwark, a short walk from the Globe Theatre.

The London I’d come to from the U.S.A. was a huge city, stretching for miles on both sides of the Thames. But this London seemed to be tiny, just the walled city that held the Tower, with villages dotted all around. And here in Southwark, just across the river, we were in a noisy seaport that was quite separate.

Because I was Nathan Field, the sheltered lad from St. Paul’s School in the more law-abiding City of London, nobody would let me out in the streets of Southwark on my own. Mistress Fawcett wouldn’t anyway, next morning, though I protested that I knew my way and that I had work to do. The play that day was to be Henry V, and when we weren’t being princesses or waiting-women, we boys would be rushing on-or offstage as French or British soldiers, or both.

“Wait for Master Shakespeare,” said Mistress Fawcett obstinately, putting her large self between me and the door. “He will leave for the playhouse in good time, he always does.”

“But he’s writing—”

I stopped, remembering. My father had been a writer. One year when Aunt Jen was into needlepoint, she’d made him a little rectangular cushion, bright green with black letters on it: MAN AT WORK. When his study door was shut and the cushion propped beside it, you didn’t disturb him, not for anything. The only day when he hadn’t thought to put the cushion outside his door was his last one.

I suddenly realized I was thinking about him, without panic or tears, in a way I hadn’t done since he died.

But before I could wonder why, there was a great confused noise outside the front door: hoofbeats, and jingling harness, and men shouting. Mistress Fawcett frowned. Someone hammered at the door, and she frowned more darkly, and flung it open.

It was a serving man who had been doing the hammering, though he seemed to me as grandly dressed as a lord, with a gold crest embroidered on a red silk doublet. Out in the street behind him, in a straggle of gaping passersby, was a gleaming coach with four beautiful horses stamping and tossing their heads, and the same crest was painted on the coach doors.

The knocking man said loftily to Mistress Fawcett, “My Lord desires the presence of Master Shakespeare.”

“Master Shakespeare is working,” said Mistress Fawcett curtly. I got the feeling she’d come across my lord before and wasn’t impressed.

The man stared at her. “Then he must stop!”

“Let be, Anthony,” said a voice from the coach, and out of its shadowy inside stepped an amazing-looking young man: tall, handsome, swirling a brilliant yellow brocade cloak around his shoulders, wearing on his head a tall curly-feathered hat. He looked confident as a king, though there was something about his mouth that made me think of a spoiled little boy.

He glanced past Mistress Fawcett and me contemptuously, as if we weren’t there, and automatically we moved to one side as he swept into the little hallway. “Will!” he called out, loud and imperious. “Will!”

Master Shakespeare must have heard the commotion already, because he was standing at the top of the stairs, with his doublet and shirt both unbuttoned and a quill pen still in his hand. He looked as if he had just come back from somewhere a long long way away, and left his head behind him.

“Go away,” he said.

The young man paid no attention. “I must speak with thee!” he said, and he bounded up the stairs and swept Master Shakespeare back into his room. The door closed, and within a few seconds you could hear the indistinct blur of raised voices from inside.

Mistress Fawcett snorted indignantly, and slammed the front door in the face of the lordly serving man. She looked up the stairs, and then turned to me, with a small odd smile. “Nat,” she said, “we are going to stay very quiet in thy room for a while.”

Puzzled, I followed her through the kitchen into my tiny bedroom. She beckoned me toward the far wall, and she stood close to it, sideways, with her ear against the rough plaster. I tiptoed over and did the same—and coming down through the wall, perhaps through some air-filled gap between the laths, I could hear the voices from above. They were clear now. I glanced up at Mistress Fawcett; she put her finger to her lips.

“I will not!” said Master Shakespeare loudly, through the air and plaster.

“It would be so easy a thing!” said the nameless lord. His voice sounded exasperated. “Tell her an actor is sick, a major actor—so you cannot play the play.”

“She would simply ask for another play, not requiring that actor.”

“You said she particularly requested A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“So she did, but also she is coming to see our new Globe Theatre, and sample the enjoyments of the common man. Of course, of course, the monarch does not go to a public theater—we take our plays to her at Court. When invited. But Gloriana is a monarch who does not always obey her own rules.”

“Gloriana?” I looked at Mistress Fawcett. “Who’s Gloriana?” I whispered.

“The Queen, of course!” she whispered, and frowned at me.

“And rash, and willful, and must be kept from dangers of her own making.” The lord’s voice softened, dropped, became cajoling. “Will, my dear—Sir Robert is much concerned over the perils of this escapade. If you would be in his good graces, you would do well to stop it happening.”

“Is that a threat, my lord?” Shakespeare sounded icy.

“Of course not! But thy debt to Southampton and thereby to Essex is well known, and that faction may be dangerous—”

“I have no debt!” Shakespeare shouted at him. There was a moment’s pause, and then you could tell he was trying to control his voice, but it was still fierce and cross. “My lord, thou know’st I am not political. I am a tedious burgher from Stratford, a player, a maker of plays. I do not play games outside the theater—I have no desire to go the way of poor Kit Marlowe. And I will not take sides!”

There was the abrupt sound of his door opening, and Mistress Fawcett and I hastily jerked our heads away from the wall. She scuttled into the kitchen and busied herself with punching down a bowl of dough that sat rising on the table; I stayed in my little room, and listened to the blurred sound of footsteps on the stairs, voices at the door, and pretty soon the sounds of horses and carriage jingling and clattering away.

Shakespeare’s voice came calling, clear and abrupt: “Nat! To the theater—now!”

He strode through the crowded, reeking, muddy streets of Southwark, so fast that I had to trot to keep up with him. “Factions!” he said irritably, half to himself. “Factions! A plague on both your houses!”

“Romeo and Juliet,” I said, smarty-pants, before I could stop myself.

Shakespeare glanced at me, distracted, and slowed his pace a little. “A sharp memory right enough, this boy Nathan. Hast played Juliet?”

“No,” I said. I’d never fancied the lovey-dovey parts in his plays, even for the sake of being the lead.

“No,” said Will Shakespeare, looking down at me as he walked, reading my mind as usual. “Our Nat is not a romantic beauty. Th’art a sprite, an aerial sprite, born of the air. One day I shall write thee an airier Robin Good-fellow—unless thou leave me, or grow old.”

He grinned at me, and for a moment I glowed all over and wanted to say: I’ll never leave you, I want to act with you forever. Instead I said awkwardly, “Was he very important, that lord with the carriage?”

Shakespeare frowned. “He thinks himself so,” he said, but he didn’t tell me who the man had been. And the theater was looming ahead of us, with the white flag flying, and the usual bustle of people and horses and street vendors—and a large beruffed lady, her skirts trailing in the mud, shrieking after a running figure: “Cutpurse! Cut-purse! Stop, thief!”

But the scurrying thief escaped into the crowd, and Will Shakespeare and I into the door that led to the tiring-house, behind the stage.

In the boys’ corner of the tiring-house, Roper was going through his lines with Thomas. He was to play the Boy in Henry V; it was a good part, this perky streetwise kid who hangs out with the roughneck soldiers Pistol and Bardolph and Nym, but is bright enough to deserve better. I’d met a few Boys back in twentieth-century America, and it wasn’t hard to spot them on the streets of Elizabethan London. Maybe Roper was one himself—though he had a serious job as an apprentice, and if the company kept him on after his voice broke as a regular actor—a hired man—he’d have a good enough life.

I wondered whether that’s what would happen to me, if I never managed to get back to my own time.

They were a funny sight, the two of them sitting there running lines: Roper in his streetboy costume, Thomas all painted and bewigged and gowned to play Alice, the French princess’s attendant. They had reached the scene where Pistol has taken a French soldier prisoner in battle, but can’t talk to him because he doesn’t speak French. He’s using the Boy, who’s better educated, as interpreter.

Thomas read Roper his cue:

“Come hither, boy; ask me this slave in French

What is his name.”

Roper said, pronouncing it exactly as it’s written:

“Écoutez: comment êtes-vous appelé?”

Thomas said, mildly, “You don’t pronounce the z in écoutez. And the e isn’t like English. It’s not ee-coo-tez, it’s ay-coo-tay. And the next part—”

Roper snorted in scorn. “Who do you think is going to know the difference?”

“Anyone who speaks French.”

“Nobody in this audience will understand French, outside the Lords’ Rooms.”

Thomas rolled his eyes at me in mock horror, and I grinned at him. An hour or two earlier, he and Nick Tooley, who was playing the Princess Katharine, had been onstage rehearsing a scene Master Shakespeare had written entirely in French. Probably Roper knew only his own scenes.

Thomas said to me, “Parlez-vous français, Nat?”

“Bien sûr,” I said, because I did know some French—not much, but a year’s worth. “Je parle français. Un peu.”

Roper glared at me. “Who asked you?”

“Well, Thomas did, actually. In French.”

“Trust the little lass from St. Paul’s to have some girlish talent to brag about,” said Roper nastily. “I don’t want a French lesson, Thomas, I just want to run my lines.”

“Very well,” Thomas said amiably, and Roper went on spouting his impossible English French. I listened, remembering the lines from the time I’d played the Boy in Washington, D.C., when I hadn’t understood any French words either. I’d had a terrible time learning the right way to say them, which is I suppose why they stuck. Roper clearly hadn’t had a terrible time—he’d barely tried.

By the time the trumpeter climbed up above the stage to blow the fanfare that began the play, we boys were all dressed up as pages and attendants for a court scene, and the men in gorgeous robes: Master Burbage as King Henry, Henry Condell as the Archbishop of Canterbury, very grand. As usual, there were constant nervous visits to the “plot,” the list of entrances and exits that hung near the stage in the tiring-house, and whenever Master Burbage came offstage he made a beeline for the book-keeper, a small bespectacled man who sat beside a window—out of the traffic but handy to the stage—with the play’s text on his lap.

“What’s next, after the Boar’s Head, what’s next?”

“Be calm, Dick. The traitors’ scene—’Now sits the wind fair, and we will aboard. . . .’”

Burbage went away muttering: “Now sits the wind fair. . . .” and the tireman seized him, to change his robe.

Everyone always had trouble remembering lines, under the pressure of five different plays to perform every week, and there was a fair bit of improvising. “Thribbling,” they called it; isn’t that a great word? But when the play was by Will Shakespeare, actors tried not to thribble, because Master Shakespeare was not pleased when people put in words that were not his own. Thomas said this had been the main reason for Shakespeare’s row with Will Kempe, who was inclined to make winking asides to the audience in the hope of getting an extra laugh.

Henry V went wonderfully well. Burbage was a terrific Henry, and the groundlings loved him; they cheered when he swashbuckled, and stood still as mice when he had a quiet moving speech, like the one that begins “Upon the King. . . .” They were hugely patriotic; they hissed the French so fiercely that it was quite frightening to come onstage as a French soldier and see all those hostile faces scowling and shouting at you. They also cheered something that surprised me—but before that there was a bit of drama that surprised me even more.

Roper had come offstage after a scene in Act Three that had included his biggest speech; he’d done it really well, and got a lot of laughs from the groundlings. I wanted to tell him it was good, because we were all actors, even though he was such a pain—but he was full of himself, and kicked at me when he found me in his way, though not with enough concentration to hit me. After that I forgot about him, because the rest of us had to mill about onstage as French soldiers—but once we were back, there he was again, stirring things up even though Master Burbage was onstage doing Henry’s best big speech.

“We few, we happy few, we hand of brothers. . . .

I was standing in the tiring-house trying to listen, when Roper came slipping past me, snatched an apple from the tireman’s table, and started to chomp on it. Eating backstage was strictly forbidden while a performance was going on, and the man reached out to grab him, hissing a warning. Roper took a bigger bite, dancing out of his way, chewing, mouthing some cocky jeer as he moved—and then he choked.

He stopped absolutely still, clutching his throat; after one awful first croak he didn’t make a sound. A piece of apple must have gone right into his windpipe. Onstage, a cheer went up as Burbage finished his speech, and John Heminges, all in armor as Lord Salisbury, rushed onstage through an entry door. Augustine Phillips as the French herald Mountjoy waited for his cue at the opposite side. Neither of them noticed the bigger drama going on backstage as everyone not in the scene hurried to crowd around Roper, banging him on the back, desperately trying to save him. He stood there terrified, suffocating, his face a dusky red, his eyes popping; in all the turmoil he could do nothing but flap his hands in a speechless plea for help.

I didn’t think, really; I just knew what they ought to be doing, because Aunt Jen had taught me, the year before, when she was taking some lifesaving course at the Red Cross. I ran over to Roper and shoved Nick aside, spilling the water he was trying to get Roper to drink.

“Look out!” I said, and I stood behind Roper, put my arms around him, made a fist with one hand between his ribs and his belly button, put my other hand over it, and jerked in and upward, hard. So the air was pushed up out of Roper’s lungs, up through his windpipe, and the piece of apple popped out. It fell out of his mouth and he hung there over my arm, making awful noises, great croaking gasps for air. But he was breathing.

The voices from the stage went echoing on around us, but everyone backstage was staring at me. I looked at them, and felt uneasy; they looked almost as scared as they had when he was choking.

Nick said, amazed, “What did you do?”

I guess I babbled, because I was nervous. I said, “It’s called the Heimlich maneuver, some guy called Heimlich invented it—” And they went on staring, and I realized too late that I was sounding completely like a modern kid, because in Elizabethan England they didn’t use the word guy or probably the word maneuver either, and how could they know who Mr. Heimlich was, when he wasn’t going to be born for hundreds of years yet?

I said lamely, “My aunt showed me how.”

Then Roper rescued me. He threw up on the floor.

And suddenly the book-keeper was there, very agitated, with the actors playing Pistol and the French soldier, and he was hissing at us to be ready to run onstage fighting, for the battle scene out of which Pistol would seize the Frenchman prisoner.

Pistol looked in horror at Roper’s white face. “What ails the boy! Our cue is next! We need him!”

I didn’t think this time either, I just jumped in again—and this time my brain nearly died of shock when it heard what I said.

“I can do it,” I said. “I know the scene.”

Theater people can move very fast sometimes. In that theater particularly, I guess they were used to people being able to jump into other people’s parts in an emergency. Before you could blink, the book-keeper whipped off the French soldier’s surcoat I was wearing, and the tireman pulled Roper’s jerkin off his back and onto mine. Thomas grabbed up Roper’s pages from somewhere and thrust them under my nose, for a quick frantic reminding look, and then fireworks were being set off onstage in a sequence of huge bangs, and clouds of smoke from a crude smoke machine being puffed out from a backstage bellows, for the battle effects, and Pistol grabbed my arm. And we were on.

The first few lines of that scene belong just to Pistol and the French soldier, fortunately. It gave me a chance to get my bearings, before the dreaded cue.

“Come hither, boy; ask me this slave in French

What is his name.”

I almost shouted my line, I was so nervous:

“Écoutez: comment êtes-vous appelé?”

I forget the actor’s name, but he sounded marvelously French. “Monsieur le Fer,” he said.

The next line was easy to remember. I said to Pistol:

“He says his name is Master Fer.”

Pistol rolled his drunken eyes. “Master Fer! I’ll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him—discuss the same in French unto him.”

There was a ripple of laughter from the audience, and a drunken voice from the yard shouted, “Ferret him! Ferret him!” But my next line came into my head too.

“I do not know the French for fer, and ferret, and firk.”

That got a real laugh, probably helped by the fact my voice went up into a squeak because I was so scared—and then suddenly I was all right, I was the Boy, I was acting, and we went sailing through the scene, loudmouthed Pistol and the terrified French prisoner and me. I picked up the cues, I remembered the French speeches—there were only two really—and the audience carried us along. The other two were really good actors, caricature-funny; the groundlings loved them.

My only bad moment was my last speech, the Boy alone onstage after the other two have gone off; I did an awful lot of thribbling. But I was helped by the fact that I’d come way downstage, so that I was right on top of the groundlings: I fixed my eyes on one man near the front, with a round red face and two front teeth missing, and said everything right to him. It was a perfect eye contact; he was gaping at me, fascinated. And I did remember to say the last line, telling that the English camp was guarded only by boys—and that was the most important, because what happens then is that the French invade the camp and murder all the boys, and that makes King Henry truly furious.

So it all went okay, and I slipped offstage as the French soldiers came running on the other side. I’m not sure the audience ever knew or cared that they’d been watching a different Boy from the last one they’d seen. A boy was a boy; what they cared about was the story.

In the tiring-house I ran straight into Roper, and he threw his arms around me. He smelled terrible, because of having thrown up. I guess he knew that, since he let me go almost at once, but he stood there looking at me very seriously. He said, “I thought I was dead. Tha saved my life.”

“And me only a little lass,” I said.

Roper looked down at his feet. He said, rather muffled, “Tha saved me a beating too. Missing that cue—missing that scene—Master Burbage would have—”

“Cut off thine ears,” I said. “One by one, very slowly, inch by inch.” I grinned at him, which took some effort because my doing the Heimlich business had nothing to do with him. As far as I was concerned he was the same mean little monster he’d been before. He didn’t grin back; he went on giving me this same earnest look. I think Roper was feeling an emotion he’d never had to cope with before: guilt.

“I am in thy debt, Nathan Field,” he said stiffly. “I shall not forget.”

He patted me on the shoulder and I gave a sort of awkward shrug. I was wishing I knew the Elizabethan way to say, “Okay—just stop bugging me from now on.”

Will Shakespeare came sweeping past us toward the stage, pulling on the robe he wore as Chorus, ignoring an anxious tireman running after him with his hat. He caught sight of me, and stopped suddenly, and the tireman bumped into him, frantically holding out the hat so it wouldn’t get squashed. From the stage we heard a great cheer; Master Burbage had reached the end of the scene in which King Henry hears that his little army of Brits have managed to kill ten thousand Frenchmen in battle while losing only twenty-nine men themselves. (Ten thousand? Are you kidding me?)

Shakespeare paused for a moment, gazing at me, but he had no chance to say anything, because his cue had come: the tireman plunked his hat on his head, straightened it, and pushed him around to face the stage. And as Master Burbage came stalking backstage through the door stage right, out went Will Shakespeare stage left, to face the world, our world, the audience.

“Vouchsafe to those that have not read the story

That I may prompt them….”

I stood behind the stage hangings, listening. He had a wonderful voice, clear and warm and sort of mid-brown. I was as happy that moment as I think I’ll ever be: standing there listening to him, knowing I was part—and a useful part, just now—of his company, safe in the small family world of the theater. I wanted it never to end.

Shakespeare went on with that speech that tells the audience how King Henry is now coming back in triumph to London from France, and I was half hearing it, half just enjoying the sound of his voice, when a few particular words came, interrupting my vague head because suddenly they didn’t make sense.

“Were now the General of our gracious Empress—

As in good time he may—from Ireland coming,

Bringing rebellion broached upon his sword,

How many would the peaceful city quit

To welcome him!”

Empress? Ireland? I didn’t understand. I’d never noticed that part before. And then there was a huge cheer from the audience at the word welcome, so that Master Shakespeare had to wait for them to quiet down before he could go on.

“Much more, and much more cause

Did they this Harry. . . .”

Close to me, Tom the book-keeper was sitting with his script, listening, looking sour. I said in his ear, “What are they shouting about?”

“Essex, of course,” he said. “Where hast’a been, boy? Pretty Robin, Earl of Essex, who is in Ireland about the Queen’s business putting down rebellion. And let’s hope, not starting one of his own.” But he dropped his voice on this last bit, and his eyes flickered cautiously to and fro.

I remembered Will Shakespeare protesting that morning to the nameless lord that he was not political, and wondered why, in that case, he had dropped such an obvious compliment to the Earl of Essex into his Henry V.

It didn’t seem to bother Roper, who was clapping along with the audience, his face bright and intent. Behind him in the shadowy tiring-house I saw Master Burbage, listening too, caught into stillness after his bustling exit from the stage. He was King Henry, confident and magnificent in his gleaming armor, but suddenly his face was quite different. He was shaking his head, uneasy. He looked frightened.