فصل 7

SEVEN

By the time fencing class ended, my stomach was growling loudly to tell me that it was lunchtime, though I didn’t ask about that—which was just as well since I guess the word lunch. wasn’t used much in the sixteenth century. They ate midday dinner, anywhere between 10 A.M. and 2 P.M., and it was the main meal of the day. For us this time it was a kind of picnic, to be eaten fast before starting work at the theater. The plays were put on at 2 P.M. every afternoon, close to the times they would be done four hundred years hence in the theater designed to be a copy of this one, and if you weren’t acting, you’d be working backstage.

Mr. Heminges gave a few pennies to a bigger boy who’d just joined us, Sam Gilbourne, who was the senior apprentice, and he herded us outside and bought street food from a girl with a tray around her neck. It smelled wonderful. We each got a kind of turnover, a big pocket of tough pastry with meat and potatoes inside, and a wooden mug of ale from another street seller, a one-legged man with a barrel on a cart. Sam had six mugs with him in a bag; they were pretty clunky, and smelled of stale beer, but I was thirsty enough not to care. If you didn’t bring your own mug, you had to drink right there leather thong to the handle of the ale seller’s cart.

The noise outdoors was stupendous, even an hour before the play was due to begin. The air was filled with voices shouting and calling, the rumble of wheels, the whinnying of horses, and over it all the shrill cries of the hawkers selling food and drink. The streets around the theater were crammed with people, and here and there tumblers and musicians working their hearts out for an odd coin. It was more like a fairground than a city street.

We ate our pies, as Sam called them, perched on a fence over the river, watching long low boats called wherries unloading passengers at a jetty near the theater. Two or four brawny men rowed each boat, with long heavy wooden oars. Bigger boats, with sails, tacked up and down the river; it was much busier than in my day, and much more open, because there were hardly any bridges. London Bridge was the only one in sight.

Sam was a friendly, almost fatherly boy. You could tell from the huskiness of his voice and his gangly arms and legs that he was going to be too old to play women’s parts pretty soon. But he was to play one this afternoon, in a play called The Devil’s Revenge, in which his character had her throat cut halfway through.

“Pig’s blood,” he said cheerfully, chewing a piece of gristly meat. “To be squeezed from a bladder in my sleeve. And a beating if even a spot of it lands on my skirt.”

Roper snorted. “And show me a real throat-cutting where the blood does not splash everywhere like a broken waterpipe.”

“No matter,” said Sam peaceably. “The groundlings are happy so long as they see it gush. Come, we must go back.” He tossed his piece of gristle into the air, and three screaming seagulls made a dive for it. And I ran back to the theater, trying to keep up with the group, wondering uneasily where and how Roper had seen a man’s—or a woman’s—throat cut.

The Devil’s Revenge was full of blood and murders, and a spectacular swordfight, and from behind the stage you could hear the groundlings who stood in the yard yelling with delight. It made great use of a trapdoor in the center of the stage, through which the Devil carried people off to Hell, and I was given the job of helping chubby Thomas open and shut the trap, down in the dark space under the stage. Roper was our signalman, standing a few yards off in a place where he could peer through a gap at what was happening onstage. He would make a chopping motion with his hand when it was time for us to knock aside the heavy wooden latch that kept the trapdoor closed.

We’d been shown what to do by a tireman, a wizened, grey-haired little guy who grinned a lot, even though he was missing most of his front teeth. Strictly speaking his job was looking after the wardrobe (“tire” means “attire” means “costumes,” I found out), but he seemed to me more like a stage manager. He took us to the “plot,” the list of the play’s actions and exits and entrances that hung on the wall backstage, for everyone to check what they should be doing next. There were three trapdoor drops in the course of the play, and the cues for each were marked.

The first two went well; we couldn’t always hear the words above us clearly, through the wood of the stage and the noise of the audience, but Roper’s signals gave us our cue. Each time, Master Burbage, playing the Devil, came dropping down through the trap clutching another actor, and both of them landed lightly on their feet, on the big padded cushion that was there on the floor just in case. -Burbage caught my eye the second time, and grinned at me, a startling fantastical grin in the elaborate makeup that slanted his eyebrows up and out.

But the third time, nobody was grinning.

I didn’t understand what went wrong, at the time. We knew the cue for the third drop was almost due, and we were watching Roper carefully for the signal. I was closer to him than Thomas, and probably blocking Thomas’s view. So I was the one who saw Roper’s arm come smartly down in the same swift chopping motion as before, and I hissed to Thomas, “Now!” We knocked aside the latch and the trap dropped open—and through it, in a whirl of arms and legs, tumbled Master Burbage, taken by surprise. He fell on his back, and if it hadn’t been for the cushion he might have been badly hurt.

We heard a great roar of laughter go up from the audience, who had seen the Devil, in the middle of a highly dramatic speech, suddenly fall through the floor, and we saw Richard Burbage’s face change from astonishment to furious rage. He caught me a whack around the side of the head with his open hand, and aimed another at Thomas, who managed to duck. “Half-wit dolts!” he yelled at us over the uproar from the theater, and he rushed angrily out.

Then just for an instant, in the dim light of that darkened space, I caught the tail end of a satisfied smirk on Roper’s face that told me he had deliberately signaled us to do the wrong thing.

      *

He denied it completely, of course.

“You waved at us!” I said indignantly. “You waved at us just the way you had before.”

“I did no such thing,” Roper said coolly. “Thomas, did you see me wave?”

Thomas looked at me, troubled, but he was an honest fellow. “No, I did not,” he said. “I was too close to Nat—? but I know he saw something, he was so definite.”

“He was mistaken,” Roper said. He gave a patronizing little sigh. “His ignorance made him nervous. They are a soft lot, in the boys’ companies.”

I was on the edge of punching him, but Sam’s large hand was on my shoulder. He said mildly, “Thou hast been known to make a mistake, Roper. So have we all.”

“Not such a stupid mistake as this, to ruin a whole play,” Roper said.

“Enough!” Sam said sharply. “The thing is over, and paid for.” After the play, Master Burbage had been angry enough to beat us, and I knew it was only the fact that I was on loan, and not a regular apprentice, that saved Thomas and me from a thrashing. But the tongue-lashing he gave us had almost been worse.

“He will still be angry at the house tonight,” Harry said ruefully. “There will be no supper for you, Nat, and likely not me neither.”

Roper said, “Enough. Let’s go to the bear pit. There’s time.”

We were sitting under a tree near the theater, all six of us. The adult actors had all gone their ways, some to their homes, some to an alehouse. Round-faced Henry Condell had emptied a bag of apples into our hands as he left. He had heard Master Burbage’s rage, and had looked at me sympathetically, I thought. The apples were small and a bit worm-infested, but crunchy and wonderfully sweet.

“Time but no money,” Harry said.

“Thou needst none. I have found a way in. Come.” Roper glanced at me maliciously. “Unless your Paul’s Boy has no stomach for it, of course.”

So of course I had to go with them. Through the crowds, through streets that grew narrower and noisier, full of rougher trade, jostling and cursing. It was the kind of area where you kept a cautious hand on your purse, if you had a purse. Loud, quarrelsome men lurched out of alehouses; women in low-cut dresses leaned out of windows and called softly, or not so softly—indeed some of them came stumbling out into the streets, calling, clutching at men’s sleeves. Harry and the rest shouted catcalls at them, and dodged their pinching fingers. Trying to follow Sam, I came face-to-face with one of them, a woman whose dress hung half open, torn. She was not much more than a girl, but her teeth were blackened and uneven, and her breath in my face stunk of garlic and ale and decay. There was an open sore on her cheek, and her eyes were empty, without any expression. She was probably not much older than me. She was gone in an instant as we rushed by, but I can still see that face in my mind.

The bear pit was like a theater, a little; it had the same shape, it had the same outer wall, the same shouting audience. There were two entrances, with gatherers to take your penny fee. Roper hustled us past them to a place halfway around the building where there was a reeking pile of garbage.

“Hold your noses,” he said, and he pulled back a loose piece of wood in the wall, close behind the garbage, and one by one we slipped through, into the bellowing crowd. Nobody noticed. We came out under a ledge that was a bit like the space underneath the bleachers at a baseball field. Galleries ran all around the walls, like a theater, but the focus of the bear pit was a central arena, fenced in, with people standing all around.

We were moving through people so excited they never glanced at us; in the din and confusion it was hard to know what words they were shouting. Screaming, some of them, men and women alike. Harry tugged me into a gap, and I looked out into the arena and saw what they were screaming about.

In the center of the space, a huge brown bear was tethered by a chain to a heavy wooden post. The chain came from a collar around his neck; it was maybe four feet long. Around him, leaping up, snapping, snarling, barking, were three smooth-haired dogs as big as wolves. I couldn’t tell what breeds they were, but they were awesome muscular creatures, one black, two brown. Teeth bared, they flung themselves at the bear in furious intent to kill. With wordless, bloodthirsty shouts, the crowd urged them on.

The bear was bellowing, striking out with his powerful forearms; his mouth was open, and foam dripped from his long yellow teeth. In one long swipe he hit the black dog, and his sharp claws opened the animal’s belly like a knife. The dog screamed. You could see its guts begin to spill out as the body spun sideways to the ground. The crowd shrieked with delight, or horror, or both, and I looked away, feeling sick. Around me the other boys were yelling with the rest.

I had to look back. Two men were dragging the black dog’s twitching body away. Another dog was released into the arena, smaller, chunky as a pit bull; it too rushed at the bear, but silently, teeth bared in a soundless snarl—and suddenly the three dogs seemed to start working instinctively as a team. The first two leapt at the bear from one side, turn by turn, twisting in midair to avoid the flashing claws, and while the bear’s head was turned, straining against the collar and chain, the third dog jumped for his throat.

The crowd roared. Even over the din you could hear the bear bellow with pain and rage. His face was turned full in our direction as he tossed up his head, blood dripping from his neck, and in sick horror I realized that he could not see.

I shouted into Harry’s ear, appalled, “The bear is blind!”

Harry’s cheerful open face was alight with excitement. “Of course—Blind Edward—they put out his eyes, for better sport.” He shouted in sudden glee. “Look there!”

In his blind fury the bear had swung with all his force at the smallest dog, or where he supposed the dog to be, and had chanced to hit it full on, sideways. The animal was dashed to the hard ground, lying instantly still, and whether from a slash or a ruptured artery, blood poured out from its body in a bright pool.

. . . blood on the floor, bright red, a pool of red blood, spreading. . .

“No!” I said, choking, caught inside my memory. “No!” And I flung myself away from the other boys, stumbling as blind as the bear, pushing my way through the crowd to find the gap in the wall, and the stinking pile of garbage that was less sickening than the joy of the people in that shouting crowd.