فصل 11

ELEVEN

I began to be frightened too, that evening, for the first time—even through the delight I had from being with Will Shakespeare, being one of the Chamberlain’s Men. Partly I was afraid of this business about the Earl of Essex, whatever it was. Shakespeare had some connection with him, the nameless lord had called him dangerous, Master Burbage was clearly nervous—and worst of all, though I could remember very little about Arby’s potted history of Elizabethan England, I did remember that Queen Elizabeth had had Essex’s head chopped off. So that Essex was about to end up, sooner or later, among those terrible pecked-at skulls stuck up over London Bridge.

Why did that happen, and when? I was afloat in Time, I didn’t know where I was.

But I did know one other thing that worried me. In less than twenty-four hours’ time, we would perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream in front of the Queen, and after that the Chamberlain’s Men would have no more need for Nathan Field, and he would be sent back to St. Paul’s School, where he came from. What would become of me then? I should lose Will Shakespeare—and be faced with the friends and family of the real Nathan, who would instantly know that whoever I was, I was certainly not Nathan Field. If I felt I had very little place in my own world anymore, I was going to have even less in this one. It was terrifying, like facing a drop over a huge cliff.

In fact it was so terrifying that I pushed it out of my head, and tried to concentrate on the shadowy Earl of Essex instead.

After Henry V and a break, we rehearsed A Midsummer Night’s Dream until dark, though without Bottom the Weaver, because Master Burbage was exhausted. He took a nap on a mattress at the back of the tiring-house, oblivious of us. I loved doing my scenes with Will Shakespeare—and I loved our costumes, which the tireman produced for a fitting. They were wildly fantastical; Shakespeare had shimmering robes over a bare chest and full, shot-silk pants, with a weird headdress and antennae on his head.

I was to wear gleaming green tights, like the skin of some exotic snake, and nothing else but a lot of body paint. The tireman told me that the tights had cost the equivalent of six months of his wages, so that he would personally destroy me if I tore them. He showed me a drawing of the design for the makeup on the rest of me. “Master Burbage will paint you,” he said, “but not till the day. It will take almost an hour.”

Shakespeare said to me, as we were waiting for an entrance, “I hear thou leapt into the breach this afternoon.”

“It was good luck,” I said. I was going to tell him I’d played the Boy before, but I suddenly remembered that it was a new play. “Uh—I’d been listening to Roper rehearse, and I have a memory like a sponge. So I remembered his lines.”

It sounded improbable, but he seemed to believe it.

“And what ailed our friend Roper?” he said.

“He was ill,” I said evasively. “Something he ate.”

Will Shakespeare looked down at me with an odd smile. “My small magician,” he said. And then it was our cue, and we went through the door to the stage.

The other boys were more interested in Roper’s choking and its cure than in my having done his scene. They made me uneasy: they were looking at me warily as if I’d grown another head. Harry said, “What didst tha do to him?”

“If someone chokes, you hold him from behind and push hard into his belly, so the air pushes up out of his lungs and blows out whatever he’s choking on. That’s all.”

“Who taught thee how?”

“My aunt. I told you.”

Harry and fair-haired Nick Tooley looked at each other like conspirators. Nick said, “Is she a wise woman?”

“Well, I suppose so,” I said. It wasn’t quite how I would have described Aunt Jen, who is a perky little person with a grey ponytail.

“Ah,” said Nick, and nodded his head. He and Harry looked at each other again, and then at me, with what I felt was a mixture of respect and fear. It was creepy.

After rehearsal Will Shakespeare went with five other actors to a tavern not far from the Globe, to eat supper and drink and talk. He took me with him, which was great by me. Harry came too, because Master Burbage didn’t want to pay for two river crossings home to Shoreditch in one night. The tavern was noisy and smoky, full of shouting red-faced men, and bustling girls trying to carry trays of mugs and avoid having their bottoms pinched; Master Burbage led the way right through the main room to a quieter one at the back. We sat at a battered, heavy wooden table and ate bowls of a really good kind of stew, spicy, with onions in it, and hunks of new bread, and afterward Harry and I drank cider and tried not to fall asleep.

The actors fell into separate serious conversations—Master Burbage particularly earnest with Will Shakespeare, away in a corner, the two of them alone together. Pretty soon Harry and I were slumped against the wall near the glowing wood fire, which was comforting because the nights were decidedly cool even though it was August. At least, it was August in the world I had come from, so I assumed it was the same here. I never saw a calendar, and I never thought to ask. This London had all its bells ringing to tell you what time of day or night it was, but those were the only landmarks of Time to be seen or heard.

I said, “Harry, is it something special, to be a wise woman?”

Harry was drooping over his mug. He yawned. “A wise woman is a witch, of course.”

I felt suddenly cold. Harry blinked himself awake, and caught sight of my face. “What ails thee?”

“Nick Tooley said—about my Aunt Jen—”

Harry laughed. “Bless thee—anyone would be glad of a white witch in the family, to heal the sick and save life. Even Roper’s life.”

“But—people burned witches—”

“Not unless they do harm.” He hoisted himself upright, back against the wall. “Th’art an odd one, Nat Field—th’art such an innocent. Like a baby. Tha knowst so much, and then sometimes tha knows nothing.”

“I’ve led a quiet life,” I said. I took a breath. “Tell me about the Earl of Essex.”

Harry took a swig of cider, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Tell what?” he said cautiously.

“Anything.”

He shrugged. “Well, he is a fine lord, and handsome. We played at his great house, my first year as apprentice, and the Queen was there. She laughed with him a lot, and they whispered together. He was her favorite then. He is Earl Marshal of England, and they still cheer him in the streets.”

I said, “They cheered the lines about him in the play today.”

“Aye. But he angered the Queen somehow, he angers Robert Cecil who leads her Privy Council. Now he is in Ireland, with Will Shakespeare’s patron Southampton, sent to stop the Irish from joining with our enemies in Spain. But my father says he is all ambition, he is dangerous.”

There was that word again. “What sort of dangerous?”

Harry looked around nervously, though there was nobody in the room except our masters, drinking ale and spouting solemn words at one another. “The Queen is growing old, and has not said who will succeed her. London is full of spies—Spain longs to take England—” He stopped, and looked at me helplessly. “Dost not know any of this, Nat?”

I hung my head and tried to look dim-witted. “There is no chance to hear street talk at St. Paul’s—we are shut up like little nuns.”

“Nobody trusts anybody, that is the sum of it. They talk of plots, of assassinations—the Queen’s doctor was hanged and quartered two years ago, because Essex said he’d tried to poison her.” Harry glanced across at Master Burbage, still deep in talk with Will Shakespeare. “And those who know she is coming to our theater are frightened of it, they think people might do her harm. Master Burbage would stop her coming if he could.”

“He’s afraid of the people? The audience?”

“You heard how they cheered my Lord of Essex, who is on the outs with her.”

I looked at Richard Burbage, leaning forward anxiously to Will Shakespeare, tapping one long finger on the table to make a point. I saw Shakespeare shake his head vigorously; then he pushed back his chair with a screeching, scraping noise, and stood up. He called to me, pulling on his cloak.

“Nat? Come away, boy. Time to go home.”

So the party broke up, and everyone went off into the dark night to their respective homes. Master Shakespeare and I trudged in silence through the streets of Southwark to his lodging, in the company of a hired linkman: a kind of bodyguard, who carried a burning torch that gave off some light and a lot of bitter-smelling smoke, and had a heavy stick in his other hand to fight off anyone who tried to rob us. I don’t know why they were called linkmen, but they were nearly always big battered-looking fellows with large muscles and a few missing teeth, and the muscles were reassuring. Since there were no policemen in Elizabethan London, and no streetlights, there was no shortage of robbers and other villains. It was wise not to go out alone at night, not without a dagger or a sword or a linkman, or all three.

A fine drizzle began to fall, and I was damp and dismal by the time we reached the lodging. Mistress Fawcett had left two candles on the chest just inside the front door, with flint and steel; Shakespeare lit them. They burned with a smoky, flickering flame, and the house was full of dark dancing shadows. I only had to live in an Elizabethan house for one night to long for flashlights, and lightbulbs, and a switch to turn darkness into light.

I took my candle, mournfully. All my worries were thronging round my head, and now the distant Earl of Essex was the least of them; I could think of nothing but my despair at the prospect of having to leave Will Shakespeare.

I said, rather wobbly, and quietly so as not to wake Mistress Fawcett, “Master Shakespeare?”

He was about to climb the stair to his room. He looked tired, his eyes shadowed. “What is it?”

“When the play is over—instead of going back to St. Paul’s—could I—would you take me as your apprentice?”

Shakespeare laughed abruptly, in surprise; but he held up his candle and saw my face, and stopped laughing. “Nat, my dear—th’art enrolled at St. Paul’s, th’art one of Richard Mulcaster’s prize actors, I am told. He would never let thee go.”

I couldn’t explain to him, I couldn’t tell him Richard Mulcaster would take one look at me and demand the real Nathan Field. Maybe I would even be accused of having murdered him, in this dangerous world where Roper had seen throats cut.

I said miserably, “I shall be so lonely.”

Shakespeare put his hand on my shoulder. He was thinking of me as the orphan boy, I knew; thinking my head was haunted only by the death of my father—as it had been, too, until now. Perhaps he was thinking of his own boy Hamnet as well.

“Go—get into thy nightshirt,” he said. “And I will bring thee something.”

The little room behind the kitchen was warmer than the hallway had been, but still chilly. I scrambled out of my damp clothes and into my thick linen nightshirt, draped the clothes over a chair, and huddled down under the blankets. The candle by my bed sent a thin stream of black smoke quivering up to the ceiling, and the shadows swung and flickered on the wall. Then new shadows danced over them, and Will Shakespeare came into the room. He was carrying his own candle in one hand, and a sheet of paper in the other.

He went down on one knee beside the bed, probably feeling the little bedstead would collapse under him if he sat on it, and he showed me the paper. “This is a sonnet I copied for thee after we talked the other day,” he said. “It is about love, and loving. I wrote it for a woman, but it could just as well be for thee and thy father. I give it you to remind you that love does not vanish with death.”

I looked at the page; it was covered in the cramped Elizabethan handwriting that I could never understand.

I said, “Will you read it to me?”

Shakespeare looked a little taken aback, but not displeased. He was an actor, after all. He tilted the page so that the candlelight shone on it, and very quietly and simply, he read me the poem.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.

If this be error, and upon me prov’d,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.”

Before I could say anything, he held out the page to me, and stood up. “I have no picture of what may become of us after we are dead, Nat,” he said. “But I do know thy father’s love for thee did not die with him, nor thine for him. Nor mine for my Hamnet—or for this lady. Love is love. An ever-fixed mark. Remember that, and try to be comforted.”

He said “fixed” as if it had two syllables. I remember that.

I took the stiff, curling paper, and put it carefully smooth under my pillow. “Thank you very, very much,” I said.

“Sleep well, sprite,” Shakespeare said. He bent down and kissed me on the forehead. Then he blew out my candle, and went out, carrying his own. The shadows flickered away with him, and left the room dark.