I stumbled away from the gate. I had a thought to walk home, but I would have died of the cold long before I reached Shoreditch. I needed shelter, but by this time of night the taverns in Whitehall were tight shut, not even a lamp glimmering. I passed Charing Cross, and the snow crunched beneath my boots as I followed the Strand eastwards. I was almost sobbing with pain and cold. At least, I thought, I might find a church porch where, on cold nights, beggars sheltered. Then I saw a flicker of firelight down an alley to my right. The alley, which was bordered by high stone walls, led to the river and to the Yorke Stairs, and the firelight came from a watchman’s brazier.
At the alley’s end I could see the river skimmed with ice, and, jutting out towards the river’s centre, a long wooden jetty. A score of ice-locked wherries were moored to the jetty, while on the bank, at the top of the stairs, was a small wooden hut with one side open to the Thames. Two men sat there, warmed by the sea-coal burning in their iron basket. Such men were employed by the watermen of the Thames to protect their boats during the night, and, when I came from the alley, I heard the grinding click of a pistol being cocked. ‘You want to lose your face, son?’ a voice asked.
‘For the love of God,’ I said, ‘pity!’
‘Pox off, son.’ I saw the pistol raised towards me.
‘I’m a friend of Joe Lester,’ I said on a sudden inspiration.
‘Joe?’
‘Who lives over there,’ I said, pointing to the river’s southern bank.
‘Who’s his bow oar?’ the second man asked suspiciously.
‘Tom,’ I said, ‘and he has a son called Ned and a daughter named Silvia. For the love of God, I’m freezing.’
The pistol was lowered. ‘There’s a stool,’ the first man said grudgingly. ‘How do you know Joe?’
I dragged the stool near the brazier and felt the blessed warmth. ‘I’m Lord Hunsdon’s man,’ I explained. I made it sound as if I was a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s household rather than one of his players. ‘So I know Silvia and Ned.’
‘Silvia’s a pretty one,’ the first man said, laying the pistol on the bench next to him. He watched as I shivered. ‘So what are you doing out on this godforsaken night?’
I did not want to mention Pursuivants because such a mention might raise suspicion and I needed these men to welcome me. ‘I was with someone,’ I said through chattering teeth, then gestured towards Westminster. ‘Then her husband came home.’
They laughed. ‘That’ll teach you a lesson, son. Don’t plough other men’s wives on freezing nights, eh?’
‘And now her husband’s driving the warm furrow,’ the second man said, ‘not you!’
‘Dear God,’ I said in relief as the warmth at last began to seep into my bones. I found a shilling in my pouch and put it on the bench next to the pistol. ‘As thanks for your kindness,’ I explained. It was an extravagant gesture, and one I could hardly afford, but I would have paid twenty times as much to escape that bitter cold.
‘You’re welcome, son, welcome.’
And so I was.
‘Butter,’ Silvia said.
‘Ouch!’
‘Don’t be such a baby, hold your arm out.’ She peered down at the crusted wound on my forearm. ‘Why would he put an F on your arm?’
‘It’s a P.’
‘No it’s not, it’s an F. F for Francis Flute. Look!’
I looked and she was right. Sweaty-Face had not pressed hard enough, or else Simon Willoughby had snatched the brand away before Sweaty-Face could finish the job, and the curve of the P was missing. ‘F for fool,’ I said.
‘You’re no fool, no more than any other young man. Hold still. Butter.’ She slapped a handful of butter onto my arm. ‘That’ll mend it. Butter for burns.’
‘My mother always reckons on dock leaves.’
‘She’s from Stratford. What do they know in Stratford? Keep it still.’ She had a strip of linen that she used to bandage my arm. ‘So tell me what happened?’
I had left my Thames-side refuge when the bells announced the end of curfew. It was still cold, but a rising sun had offered an illusion of warmth as I walked along the Strand. I entered the city through Ludgate, then turned downhill to the Lord Chamberlain’s mansion. The guards knew me now and just nodded a companionable greeting. To my relief the fire in the great hall still burned and I fed it with logs, crouched by its warmth, and waited for the shivering to cease. No one else from the company had arrived, they were not due for at least another hour, and so I had waited, and while I was waiting Silvia had found me. ‘Pebble said he saw you arrive,’ she explained.
‘Pebble?’
‘The skinny guard. The one with warts on his nose. Gawd in His heaven, what have you done to your arm?’
Now, ten minutes later, she tied off the bandage. ‘So tell me what happened?’
‘Tell me about Tom.’
She looked me in the eyes. ‘Lord above, are you worried about him?’
‘You’re going to marry him?’
‘When the sky turns green, yes. My mum wants me to.’
‘And your father too,’ I said bitterly.
‘My dad wants what my mum tells him to want.’
‘What about Tom?’ I asked. ‘Does he?’
‘Does he what?’
‘Does he want to marry you?’
‘I should bleeding hope so, I’m not ugly! But he never says anything. I think a cat got his tongue when he was born.’
‘He’d be a good husband for you,’ I said unhappily.
‘And why is that, Richard Shakespeare?’
‘Because he’s reliable. He’s a waterman, there’ll always be a job for a waterman. He earns regular money.’
‘He does,’ she said, ‘at least when the river’s not frozen.’
‘So he’d be a good husband,’ I said.
‘You’re right!’
‘I know I am,’ I said, utterly miserable.
‘You’re not right about Tom,’ she said. ‘You’re right about F standing for fool. I ain’t going to marry Tom.’
‘You’re not?’
‘Of course not! His nose is too big.’
‘Will you marry me, then?’ I blurted out. I had not intended saying anything so foolish, but I did.
‘Probably,’ she said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it. Now tell me what bleeding happened!’ So I told her, all of it, and she crouched beside me in front of the great hall fire and listened. She frowned at some of the tale, and when she frowned her eyebrows drew closer together. ‘Like caterpillars,’ I said.
‘Like what?’
‘Your eyebrows,’ I said, touching one, ‘they’re like caterpillars.’
She rocked back on her heels and gave me a severe caterpillar-frown. ‘Maybe I should marry Tom after all.’
‘His nose is too big.’
‘Everyone says mine is too!’
‘It’s not small,’ I said.
‘Lord above! Big nose and caterpillars!’ She frowned again. ‘So the Percies are waiting for you, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then stay here. They’ll not dare come into his lordship’s house. He’ll have their heads in a bucket. He can be a fierce old bugger when he’s crossed.’
I looked into her eyes. She was crouching with me on the hearth, her face lit and shadowed by the flames. She looked so earnest. ‘You mean stay here in the mansion?’ I asked.
‘Of course I mean that!’ she said. ‘You’re not going to give the piggy man what he wants, are you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘And if you don’t give him the play, then the Percies will want to arrest you. But they won’t dare come in here. You’ll have to sleep here.’
‘But what if I’m found?’
‘Lord above it’s chaos here! More people coming and going than on London Bridge!’
‘But where …’ I began
‘Come here,’ she said. She stood, took my hand, and tugged me towards the stage. ‘Mister Harrison,’ she sa
id, meaning the household’s steward, ‘always looks around the house before he toddles off to bed, but he doesn’t look down there.’ She had climbed the temporary stairs that led to the stage and was trying to open the trapdoor that was used for some of Puck’s entrances. ‘Gawd,’ she said, ‘that’s heavy. How’s a bleeding fairy supposed to open that?’
‘They use magic,’ I said, and pulled the trapdoor open.
She peered down into the darkness. ‘I hope there are no spiders down there, I hate spiders.’
‘You want me to live down there?’
‘You can’t stay with me,’ she said, ‘I share an attic with four other girls.’ She frowned, pulling her caterpillar eyebrows close together. ‘There’s all that cloth down there. What we didn’t use. It will make a nice bed. And it’s warm in here,’ she meant the great hall, ‘warmer than my attic.’
‘You sleep in an attic?’
‘Except when the Lady Elizabeth wants me in the antechamber, which ain’t often.’ She frowned at me. ‘Once she’s married she’ll move, won’t she?’
‘Will she?’
‘Of course she will! She’ll have to live with her husband, won’t she? Probably in Gloucestershire. They have a London house too, on the Strand. But wherever it is, she’ll want me to go with her.’
‘You can’t,’ I said.
‘Can’t? And why’s that, Richard Shakespeare?’
‘Because we’re getting married.’
‘Oh, I’d forgotten that!’ She grinned, then sat at the hatch’s edge and dropped down to the floor beneath. ‘You can’t have candles,’ she called up from the gloom, ‘you’ll be found, but it ain’t bad!’
I followed her through the hatch. The back of the stage was wide open, leading into the makeshift tiring room, but there were plenty of places to hide beneath the stage because the space was being used to store unused timber, empty barrels, crates, and bolts of cloth. ‘Here,’ Silvia called from the darkness, ‘you can sleep here. No one will find you. Just don’t snore.’
I found her at the front of the stage, between the frame that held the green cloth frontal, and a heap of timber. She could almost stand upright, but I had to stoop low. ‘No one will see you,’ she whispered, as if she feared someone was already searching for me. ‘It’s like a little cave, you’ll be cosy.’
‘And lonely,’ I said, thinking I would have to hide in this dark space from nightfall to dawn.
‘Don’t be such a crybaby,’ she said. ‘Better to be lonely than dangling at a rope’s end.’
‘And where do I go when the wedding’s over?’ I asked.
‘Well, we worry about that later,’ she said.
‘We?’
‘We,’ she said firmly and I remembered my mother’s words that girls set their caps at a likely man. I had been capped.
‘The Percies will still be looking for me,’ I reminded her. ‘They want to hang me.’
‘Lord Hunsdon will stop that!’ she said firmly.
I shook my head. ‘My brother doesn’t want him involved.’
‘Don’t be daft! He’s your patron. Only now’s not a good time to talk to his lordship on account that he’s grumpy because of all the money he’s spending. But he likes me. I’ll tell him when I ask permission to get married.’
‘You need his permission?’
‘Of course I do! But he’ll say yes. And he gave the last girl fifty shillings when she got married!’
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘Of course you do,’ she sat on the floor, ‘probably fifty times more than you did a minute ago. I have this idea, you see?’
‘Idea?’
‘Jean and I have been talking. She’s a wonderful seamstress. So neat! I swear that woman could sew up the devil’s arsehole and he’d never know he’d been touched. And rich folk pay well for nice things. Hoods, collars, masks, shifts, belts, sleeves, headbands, stomachers, veils, billaments, purses, partlets, garters. We can make them all!’
‘You and Jean?’
‘I don’t expect you to sew,’ she said. ‘Can you sew?’
‘No.’
‘Of course you can’t. So yes, me and Jean, and fifty shillings would buy us a lot of lovely fabrics.’
‘So Jean will leave the Theatre?’
‘She likes working at the playhouse, and I’ll help her. We can do both jobs. Jean would be making all those things now if she knew where to sell them, but I know lots of the gentry’s maids. Her ladyship will buy from me, she likes me, and so will others.’
‘I like you too,’ I said.
‘But you’ll have to stop thieving,’ she said suddenly. I began to speak, then had no idea what to say, and she reached out and touched my cheek. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I know about you. And I know you’ve done some stupid things, but we all do stupid things when we’re young. You just have to stop. I don’t want you swinging off a gibbet.’
‘You’ve done stupid things?’ I asked.
‘Not yet, but I will.’
‘What stupid things will you do?’
‘Marry you, of course.’ She leaned forward and kissed me, and just then we heard the main door of the hall open, and footsteps sounded loud on the flagstones. ‘Someone’s already fed the fire,’ a manservant’s voice said.
‘It must be the fairies from the play.’ It was Walter Harrison, the steward, who answered. ‘The mansion is apparently infested. Go and draw water instead.’
‘The house is waking up,’ Silvia whispered, ‘I must go.’ She scrambled away towards the back of the stage.
Reason and love keep little company together nowadays. And thank God for that.
And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy. No more words. Away! Go, away!
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Act IV, Scene 2, lines 39ff
ELEVEN
LADY ANNE HUNSDON, the bride’s grandmother, sat in state at the very centre of the great hall. Two maidservants, neither of them Silvia, sat on stools at her feet, while beside her, on a small table, was an hourglass. We had just finished our first rehearsal in which we had performed the whole play in costume, or at least in as many costumes as we could because many of the elaborate garments were still being sewn, and now the players, all of us, stood awkwardly on the stage, waiting for her ladyship’s verdict. It was the afternoon after my encounter with the Pursuivants, the wedding was just six days away, and Lady Anne had demanded that we perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream for her. ‘After that interlude you did at Christmas,’ she had announced to the Sharers, ‘I want to make certain we do not send our guests to sleep.’
Lady Anne was dressed in fashionable black, her grey hair coiled beneath a French hood. She gazed at us, her jewelled fingers drumming on the table. We had watched her, of course, as we played, and her stern face, scarce breaking into a smile, let alone laughter, had made us all apprehensive. Now she delivered her judgement. ‘Almost two and one half hours, Mister Shakespeare, two and one half!’
‘Was it that long, my lady?’ my brother responded.
‘Two and one half!’ she repeated, lifting the hourglass as proof.
‘Indeed, my lady.’
‘His lordship cannot abide two and one half hours,’ she said sternly.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, my lady.’
‘But if we played it to amuse my husband, Mister Shakespeare, we’d scarcely be sat down before the play ended.’
‘His lordship was kind enough to say,’ my brother began.
‘My husband’s opinion of plays is of no account,’ Lady Anne interrupted brusquely, ‘none whatsoever. He likes entertainments in which people die. Gorily and frequently. Write more of those, Mister Shakespeare, and he will be your patron for ever.’
My brother bowed in response.
‘My opinion, on the other hand,’ her ladyship went on, ‘does matter! And I do like this play. I like it very much, and I dare
say that if Her Majesty deigns to appear among us, she will like it too.’
‘Your ladyship is most kind,’ my brother began as he bowed.
‘I most certainly am not! As I said, I like the play, but I do not like it at two and a half hours …’ She paused, evidently expecting a response, but my brother said nothing, and the rest of us just shuffled our feet. ‘I have a question,’ Lady Anne said.
‘Of course, your ladyship.’
‘The play postulates,’ she clearly liked the last word because she stressed it heavily, ‘that if the poor girl Hermia does not marry the man of her father’s choice then she will face execution. Is that truly the law in Athens?’
‘Indeed it is, your ladyship,’ my brother said confidently.
‘Extraordinary!’ she said. ‘Quite extraordinary, but of course the Greeks are foreigners, so one can’t expect good sense.’ She stood, straight-backed and imperious, and her two attendants scrambled to their feet. ‘Mark me, Mister Shakespeare. The play is too long at two and a half hours. Consider that we shall already have endured a sermon from the bishop, and God knows that man can preach for ever. You,’ she pointed at Thomas Pope, ‘remind me what your character is named?’
‘Egeus, my lady.’
‘He complains for far too long, far too long. The man’s a fool, anyway, so the less of him the better. You,’ she pointed at George Bryan, ‘you play the duke?’
‘I do, my lady.’
‘Dukes should speak less. In my experience they rarely have anything useful to say, and you are no exception. And you, my child,’ she pointed at Bobby Gough who was swathed in Titania’s gauze and silk, ‘you have one speech of utter tedium. Fairy queens are not bishops, and so should not be tedious.’
Bobby, not knowing whether he should bow or curtsey, did neither. ‘I’m sorry, my lady,’ he mumbled.
‘And learn your lines, young woman!’ she snapped, before pointing at Puck. ‘What is your name?’