King of Shadows

  “I hope you are not writing another.”

  Burbage said, “A Roman history only, Your Majesty. We have just played Will’s tragedy of Julius Caesar.”

  Elizabeth waved a long finger at them. On several fingers of each hand, she wore enormous jeweled rings. “Enough of the downfall of great leaders, Master Shakespeare. Julius Caesar, and all those senators with bloody hands—it is almost as painful as Richard II giving away his crown.”

  I couldn’t see Will Shakespeare’s face, because I was behind him, but his shoulders were beginning to droop. “I beg Your Majesty’s forgiveness,” he said, rather muffled.

  The Queen flashed her terrible teeth at him, and the black eyes twinkled. For an old lady, she had an amazingly flirty way of talking. “Never mind. Thy Dream was excellent, and so was thine Oberon.” Her gaze flicked over to Master Burbage, standing there stiff and nervous in his leather jerkin with silly little ribbons crossing it. “Dick Burbage, I am pleased to have seen your new theater. The audience was as much an entertainment as the play.”

  “We are honored by Your Majesty’s gracious presence,” Burbage said. Everyone seemed to use long stiff words by instinct when they talked to the Queen, as if she wasn’t a real person.

  “Bottom the Weaver was wonderful tragical-comical. Well done. It was all well done.” She looked over his shoulder. “And where is the green boy?”

  Some strong hand in my back pushed me forward to stand between Shakespeare and Burbage, and I bowed so low that my forehead nearly touched my shins.

  “Th’art a pretty sight, Puck,” said the Queen amiably as I came up, “and a good little player. With a way of speaking that I cannot place—where dost thou come from?”

  I stammered out, “St. Paul’s School, Your Majesty.”

  “Wast born there?” said the Queen, and she made her eyes so comically wide that I couldn’t help grinning.

  “No, ma’am. I was born in Falmouth.” And so I was. It’s a little town in Kentucky, where my parents lived at the time.

  “A West Countryman!” said the Queen. “Like my good old pirate Sir Francis Drake.” Those beady black eyes peered at me thoughtfully, scarily intelligent. “And thou hast a particularity, a strangeness—wouldst like to be a page at Court, little Puck?”

  I said without thinking, appalled, “I am an actor, Your Majesty!” And I guess it came out sounding ridiculous, because they all laughed, though it didn’t seem ridiculous to me, just true.

  The Queen was smiling. She wore around her neck a thick pleated white ruff, which would have made her head look tiny if it hadn’t been for the tall red wig above it. She said to the room in general, “It is a lucky man whose ambition does not vault over his talent.”

  Then suddenly she had had enough of us. She looked over my head at someone behind me. “Sir Robert?”

  I turned to see. An odd, runty little man was standing there, with his head slightly crooked on his neck. But he wore a green satin cloak with a fur collar, and a plumed hat, and he was clearly someone important.

  “Your barge awaits, Your Majesty, and the guard is thick-lined to the dock. I shall be glad to see Your Majesty safely homeward bound.”

  They all started fussing about the Queen as she stood up, and two brightly gowned ladies-in-waiting draped an enormous hooded cape over her shoulders. “You are a fidgety old lady, Cecil,” she said irritably, “far more so than I. Did you not hear them cheer their Queen? Or at any rate a wicked replication of their Queen.” She patted Master Burbage’s arm flirtatiously as she came past him, and she smiled at Master Shakespeare. “The hair a little too red, masters,” she said. “A little too red.”

  Then she was passing me on her way out of the narrow gallery, so that I caught a whiff of perfume, and a hint of a much nastier smell, perhaps from those teeth. “Sweet Puck,” she said, “tell thy fellow that the Queen thought him a pretty boy too.”

  I bowed very low again, and by the time I straightened up, she was gone.

  I said to Sam, back in the noisy, hysterical, paintsmelling tiring-house, “She said, ‘Tell thy fellow that the Queen thought him a pretty boy.’”

  Sam was still caught under his long skirt, which hung from his shoulders from straps like suspenders. Joseph the tireman was carefully peeling off his pearl-encrusted bodice. “Stand still, boy!” he said.

  Sam’s face was a study in relief and surprise, overlaid by a big pleased grin. “She said that, truly? She wasn’t angry?”

  Dick Burbage said, swigging from a goblet of wine as he elbowed his way past us, “She said thy hair was too red. Mark that, Joseph.”

  Joseph paused, looking stricken. “The Queen thought the wig too red?”

  “A little. too red,” I said. “And she may have been joking.”

  “No joke,” said Master Burbage, shaking his head with wicked solemnity. “She never jokes about wigs.” He took another pull at the goblet, and moved on to join the milling, celebrating company.

  Sam said, “A pretty boy?”

  Joseph was looking disapprovingly after Master Burbage. He yelled at his vanishing back, “No wine in the tiring-house!”

  Sam said again, happily, “A pretty boy. The Queen!”

  Most of the Chamberlain’s Men ended up in the tavern that evening, boys and all. We ate roasted meat and vegetables, and a sticky tart with apples and plums in it, all in the uninhibited greasy way they had of using nothing but fingers and knives. Still, there was a big bowl of water to rinse your fingers, and a napkin to wipe them on. The meat was good; it was mutton, which is like lamb only tougher, and something called coney, which I liked a lot. It was only several months later that I found out a coney is a rabbit.

  This was a feast of celebration, because the Master of the Revels, who was in charge of all the Queen’s entertainment at Court, had promised the company a performance at the Queen’s palace in Greenwich in a month’s time. That meant a handsome amount of money, as well as a great deal of prestige. It was to make up for our Dream, which carried no prestige because the Queen had been there in secret, and no royal money either, because it had been the Queen’s whim not to command us to take our play to her, but to come herself to our commercial theater.

  Roper said, “It is a great matter, going to Greenwich, it starts before sunup that day. All the costumes and properties have to be loaded into boats, and taken up to the palace by water.” He took a swig of ale, and spluttered noisily with laughter as he suddenly remembered something. “Last time, Thomas fell in the river, and lost his boots.”

  “That was no joke,” Thomas said with feeling. “I got a terrible beating.”

  Master Burbage had taken over a whole room at the tavern, with a big long table, and we boys were at one end, together. We were only apprentices, after all, to be tolerated but not necessarily heard. It was a musty room, full of good smells and bad. The rushes that were spread everywhere on indoor floors were perhaps changed more often in a tavern than in an ordinary house, because more bits of food and muck fell on them, but even so they were pretty dirty on an average day. Quite often you’d find a mouse or a rat scavenging through them.

  As for the people who walked on the floors, I’d begun to realize that hardly anyone in this century except the rich ever took a bath. The more private parts of your body were washed only if you went swimming, in sea or river or lake, or if you deliberately removed all your clothes and washed yourself all over from a basin of water—something that didn’t seem to happen often. It no longer bothered me as much as it had in the beginning; maybe I was getting used to body smells, including my own.

  I was getting used to a lot of things. I looked down the long table at Will Shakespeare, who was laughing, raising his mug to John Heminges—and suddenly a wave of panic hit me, at the thought of the things that were about to change. I had a very perilous time ahead of me, in which I could no longer be mistaken for the real Elizabethan Nat Field.

  Why was all this happening to me?

  Harry splashed some mo
re ale into my mug from the big pewter pitcher. “Why the long face, Nat? Tha met the Queen today!”

  I said, truthfully, “I don’t want to go back to St. Paul’s.”

  Roper said, “There was a boy from St. Paul’s came round to see thee, while tha wast with the Queen. Full of compliments, he was.”

  I stared at him. “He saw the play?”

  “Of course.”

  “He knew me?”

  “A classmate of thine, he said.”

  “And he really recognized me?”

  “Ah well, through all that green paint, who knows. . . Of course he recognized thee, blockhead, he was thy classmate.”

  For a wild moment I wondered if I might look like a twin of the real Nathan Field. Did Nathan Field have parents here in London? When they saw me, would they instantly know I was a stranger, or—if I did look like him—would they believe me to be their son?

  My wonderings got wilder and wilder. Would they look like my real parents? Would they somehow be my parents—already dead, yet not to be born for more than 350 years? My memories of my mother were no longer very clear, but the thought of seeing my father again made me shiver with a mixture of excitement and a kind of fear.

  Why was all this happening to me?

  Roper was staring at me, faintly hostile. “Th’art an odd fish, Nat Field,” he said. “Art mad, perhaps?”

  “Different,” Harry said. “He’s different, that’s all.” He smiled at me, to show he meant no harm.

  “Nat is a white witch,” Sam said amiably. He made that sign at me, briefly, unobtrusively, the fist with the two pointing fingers, warding off the evil eye. “If we are good to him, he will keep us all from harm.”

  “And save us all from choking,” said Nick Tooley. He thumped Roper on the back. They were all looking at me owlishly, affectionate but a bit wary. It wouldn’t have taken much for Roper to have picked a quarrel, but he still remembered that he owed me.

  The ale was making us all a bit fuzzy. Looking around the crowded, low-ceilinged room, with its flickering candles and bare plaster walls, I wondered how much longer I could live in this century without trying to do something for it. I might be only a kid, but I knew things they didn’t. I could tell them to boil water before drinking it; to keep their food cold so it wouldn’t spoil; to keep garbage out of the streets so that it didn’t bring the rats, who spread diseases; to brush their teeth . . .

  But did I know how to make a toothbrush? No—no more than I knew how to give them electricity or gas or plumbing, radio or television or the telephone. I knew how to use those things, but not how to invent them. I wasn’t twentieth-century civilization—I was only a kid.

  “What does thy father do, Nat?” said Sam. “Is he a wise man?”

  I said, “No. My father is dead.”

  We straggled home through the dim-lit streets in a gradually dwindling group, walking by way of the Thames jetty to drop off those of the company, like Burbage and Harry, who would cross by boat to the north bank. The river was dark and murky, but a half-moon hung in the sky, scudding in and out of ragged clouds.

  Will Shakespeare walked a little unsteadily, with his arm across my shoulders.

  “I shall miss thee, little Puck,” he said.

  In my head a voice screamed: Then don’t let me go! Keep me with you! I didn’t say anything, except a sort of muffled “Mmm.”

  He said, “I leave very early tomorrow for Stratford. I must see my family, and my father has a lawsuit beginning . . . I shall be gone until Dick Burbage hauls me back again. Which will not be long, I dare say. The carrier will take thee over to St. Paul’s at about ten o’clock.”

  “Thank you,” I said miserably.

  “Mistress Fawcett has a purse for thee, with twopence for the carrier and ten shillings for thee.” He chuckled. “Do not tell the other boys it is so much, and do not tell Master Mulcaster I gave thee anything at all. The school has been paid already.”

  “You shouldn’t pay me,” I said. “I acted for you, not for money.”

  We had reached the house, and he was fumbling in his pocket for the doorkey.

  “We are players, Nat,” he said. “We are working men, you and I.” He found the key, and had some trouble finding the keyhole. Locks were pretty clunky things then, and his hand might have been stronger if he’d drunk a little less ale. I heard Mistress Fawcett opening the door from the other side.

  She paused. “Master Shakespeare?” her voice said, uncertainly.

  “The players are returned from triumph, Mistress Fawcett!” Shakespeare said grandly. “Pray welcome us in!”

  She had a candlestick in her hand and a funny puffy cap on her head, and she shushed us like two naughty little boys as she opened the door. I guess the neighbors went to bed early in a London where people got up at dawn.

  We took off our shoes, and lighted more candles. Mistress Fawcett was wearing a long cotton gown as well as her nightcap, and was clearly on her way to bed. But she paused at the staircase, and looked at Will Shakespeare tentatively. “So she did come?” she said.

  Shakespeare turned to her, leaned carefully past her candle flame, and kissed her loudly on her broad cheek. “She came, she was content, she went safely home, she commanded us to play at Court next month—and she told our Nathan here he was a pretty boy.”

  Mistress Fawcett smiled broadly, nodding at us both like a devoted aunt. “And so he is,” she said, and she went off up the narrow stairs, filling the space, her little light disappearing with her.

  Shakespeare yawned suddenly: a huge yawn, like a picture I’d once seen of an old lion, full and sleepy after a kill. “I expect to hear of thee, Puck,” he said.

  I said, “Can I come back? When I finish school—or if things don’t go well—can I come back? Please?”

  “Of course. Ask and I will take thee. Thou hast a gift that will not break with thy voice—I give thee my promise of a place with the Chamberlain’s Men.” He reached out one hand and took hold of my chin, tilting my head toward the nearest candle. For a moment he stared at me, the tawny eyes narrowed, thoughtful, puzzled. It was like the way the boys had looked at me in the tavern.

  “The Queen saw it too,” he said. “The strangeness. My aerial sprite. I shall not forget thee, Nat Field. And thou must remember what my poem tells thee, and be at peace.”

  If he’d said anything else, I should have burst into tears. I remember I gave a sort of strangled throaty noise and flung my arms around his waist, and hugged him.

  He held me close for a moment, and kissed the top of my head. Then he went upstairs, taking his candle and its dancing shadows and leaving darkness behind.

  In a blur of unhappiness I went into my bedroom, and sat on the bed for a while, thinking about him. The candle was burning down, guttering, warning me it wouldn’t last. I washed my hands and splashed my face from the bowl of water that good-hearted Mistress Fawcett had left there. Then I pulled off my clothes and put on my night-shirt, and got into bed.

  The poem Will Shakespeare had given me was under my pillow; I took it out and stared at the angular, difficult handwriting. Tomorrow, I thought, I would work out each word and copy them out privately myself. It was a wonderful poem. Even though I didn’t wholly understand it, deep down it had begun to heal the hurt that I’d been trying not to look at for the past three years.

  I put the crackling paper carefully back under my pillow, blew out the candle, and lay down to sleep. I wasn’t quite as afraid of the next day as I had been, now that Roper had reported on a St. Paul’s Boy who seemed to recognize me. Maybe what I was facing wasn’t disaster, but more mystery.

  And I tried to comfort myself about having to leave Will Shakespeare. After all, he had promised me a place with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men; he wouldn’t forget me, he wanted me to come back. This was a parting, but it wouldn’t be forever.

  But it was forever.

  SIXTEEN

  Nathan Field has a dream, lying in his bed that night. It is a sum
mer day, in his dream, with sunlight shafting through green trees, and Nat in the dream is a very small boy, not much more than a baby. His father has his two hands clasped around Nat’s body, and he is throwing him a little way up into the air, laughing. He tosses and catches him, tosses and catches. Nat is laughing too; he can hear his own laughter, happy, gurgling.

  He looks down—and sees not just his father’s bright face but hundreds of other faces, all around them, all looking up, laughing and applauding. And he is no longer among green trees but in a theater, though the blue sky is still there at the top; when he looks up, he can see it through an open circle in the roof.

  His father tosses him higher, higher, and a great bird swoops down through the O of the open roof and catches him up, holding his clothes in its beak. Hanging there, rising, he looks down, but he is not frightened. Below him, his father, the rows of faces and the theater itself shrink and disappear, and there is only the misty green of the earth and the blue of the sky, and a wonderful sense of being on his way to a great adventure. A sense of freedom.

  But a woman’s voice, which he does not recognize, is calling him.

  “Nat! Wake up, now! You’re leaving today! Wake up, Nat!”

  SEVENTEEN

  For a moment I thought it was Mistress Fawcett’s voice, but then I knew it was a voice I’d never heard before, and I woke to a vague but terrible premonition of change, of unfamiliarity.

  “Wake up, Nat!”

  As my senses came awake too, there was the feel of a different pillow under my head, a smoother sheet against my cheek, an odd antiseptic sort of smell in the air, a brighter light outside my closed eyelids. It was the second time in my life that I had woken to find myself somewhere I hadn’t been when I went to sleep. And so even today, sometimes, I wake in uncertainty, full of fear that when I open my eyes I shall find my reality has been taken away.

  The room was filled with daylight, reflected at me from white walls. There were a lot of electric sockets in the walls, with wires running to strange boxes and little screens, and a mysterious red light blinking. I was lying on a bed with a metal frame around all four sides, and beside the bed stood a woman, smiling. She wore white, and she was quite young; her hair was pulled back tightly behind her head.