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 smal
lest 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.
EIGHT
For three days the time went by with much the same pattern to each day: classes or rehearsal in the morning, work during the performance; an hour or two with the other apprentices before supper and bed. Most of it was like a nightmare. Roper had decided to turn my life into a misery, and he made the most of every smallest chance. Because I was such a misfit, there were plenty of them.
There was hardly a moment when I wasn’t aware that I didn’t belong. I suppose a lot of it was what they call culture shock: the business of suddenly finding yourself without all the little everyday goodies that a kid living in the twentieth century takes for granted. Not only all the people and places of my life were missing but all the support systems too: electricity, gas, plumbing, running water, refrigeration, central heating, regular plates and knives and forks, packaged food, canned food, paper tissues, toilet paper . . . Without any of those, living in 1599 was like being on a permanent camping trip in a third world country. I began to feel grubby all the time, and itchy, and hungry, and vaguely sick.
At night, it was hard to sleep. Harry would lie on his mattress beside me, dead to the world, breathing evenly and peacefully, while I lay lost in my miserable thoughts, missing my own world, fighting off panic. What had happened to me, and why, and how? Where was the real Nathan Field? If I’d traveled through some sort of time warp, how was I going to I get back again?
What was everyone doing about my disappearance—Gil, Rachel and Arby, and Aunt Jen way over there at home in South Carolina? Had they told Aunt Jen? Did they think I was dead? A voice wailed in my head like the voice of a very small boy: I want to go home . . . I want to go home. . .
I didn’t let myself cry, because the last time I cried was when my father died, and that was something not to be thought about, not ever. Instead I’d lie there listening to all the little sounds of the Elizabethan night: the small outdoor shrieks of animals or birds, the rustling indoor sounds that might be rats or mice or cockroaches. I wouldn’t fall properly asleep until the first faint glimmer of dawn, and then there were very few hours left before the early beginning of our day.
The other boys, I began to realize, thought that my oddness was the result of my background, Nathan Field’s background. As Roper liked to remind me, I was a St. Paul’s Boy, a sheltered, educated softie from the choir school, where you performed plays only once or twice a week, in a swanky indoor playhouse for rich highborn folk. If my accent was different from theirs, my diction or training or vocabulary, they knew it was because I hadn’t been thrown out into the world at the age of ten and apprenticed to a company of actors.
Even my everyday clothes, I belatedly noticed, were better than theirs. I was privileged, living here only as a loan, and I would shortly go back to my privilege. (Would I really? Was I to have to cope with a whole separate new life again soon, at St. Paul’s School? I fought off panic at the thought of it.) Roper’s principal reason for his extreme dislike of me was simple envy.
But I didn’t feel privileged or enviable. I’d never been more miserable in my life.
Roper made a great story out of my reaction to the bearbaiting, and told it to anyone who would listen. He buttonholed two of the younger actors, Bryan and Phillips, one morning, as Harry, Thomas and I were sweeping the stage with twig brooms before rehearsal. Roper was supposed to be sweeping too, but he stood twirling his broom, reciting his tale with malicious glee while the actors smiled indulgently. He had begun to refer to me as “the little lass,” which filled me with fury.
“So the bear pulls the guts out of Ned Ashley’s dog—tha knows? the big black hound?—and the little lass looks a bit green, she closes her eyes. Then she really has a fainting fit when Quayle’s terrier has its head smashed open. ‘No!’ she calls out”—he put on a high, ridiculous falsetto—“‘No!’—and she runs away with her petticoats all abuzz—”
“Leave me alone, Roper!” I said angrily, as the actors chuckled. I wanted to bash him with my broom, and he saw it. He swung his own broom up into the air, holding it out like a barrier with one hand at either end.
“Quarterstaves, is it?” he said, and he came at me, pushing me with the flat of the stick, nudging me to the edge of the stage.
“Hit him, Nat!” said Thomas indignantly. “Pack him off!” And I was on the verge of doing just that, which of course was just what Roper wanted, when one of the actors, Bryan, strolled languidly across the stage, and then suddenly, startlingly, drew his dagger and held it straight out between us.
“Good actors do not quarrel,” he said. He didn’t look at me, but I think he was feeling bad about having laughed.
“And brooms are for sweeping,” said a deeper voice, behind him.
Everyone turned to look. It was Will Shakespeare, just come onstage from the tiring-house.
Roper wilted, in immediate respect. Bryan put his dagger away. Shakespeare’s eyes flickered from one to the other of us, and he chose to keep things light rather than heavy. “By your leave, good sirs, I need the stage for half an hour,” he said. “I also need a Puck without a broken head.”
They were gone before you could see them go; they all evaporated, like early mist. Will Shakespeare smiled at me, moving to stage center, and without another word he went straight into our first scene together in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after Titania has had her fight with Oberon and left in a huff.
“Well, go thy way; thou shalt not from this grove.
Till I torment thee for this injury.
My gentle Puck, come hither—”
He beckoned me. Instinctively I obeyed the direction that Arby would give me four hundred years from now, and I went to him in a double somersault. I came up on my feet close enough for him to touch me. Shakespeare, surprised, laughed aloud. He made no comment, he just went on.
“—thou remember’st
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin’s back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music?”
“I remember,” I said. Puck doesn’t have too much to say in this scene. Master Shakespeare went into Oberon’s speech about the magic flower that he wants fetched (“love-in-idleness,” which he told me later was another name for a pansy) and sent me off to find it.
“Fetch me this herb, and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.”
I was hopping around him like a bird longing to fly.
“I’ll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes—”.
That was my exit line. I remembered Arby’s direction, and I paused, uncertainly. “Can I go off through the house?”
“Through the house?” Shakespeare said.
I pointed into the auditorium.
“No, no,” he said firmly. “That is for clowns, and not clowns of my liking. Thy place is the stage.”
“Tumbling, then?”
“Show me.”
I threw myself hand over hand and cartwheeled across the stage toward the exit door. Arby had worked this out too, for a different scene, and I knew it looked good from the front. Shakespeare chuckled.
“Very pretty,” he said. “I have a dancing Puck. Yes—and let thy tumbling carry thee right o
ff the stage and out of sight. Find a trusty door opener, to save thy head.”
“Yes!” I said happily.
“Do not choose young Roper,” he said, and smiled wryly when he saw me blink. “Oh, Nat,” he said. “This company is a family, close and closeted. We all know what that miserable boy is at, and I am sorry for it, and for thee, But he is talented, and useful, and apprenticed to my friend Heminges—canst forgive us thy troubles, for the play’s sake?”
He put his arm over my shoulders and gave me a quick hug. And to my absolute horror, I fell apart. It was the sudden warmth and sympathy, the fact that somebody understood—and not just anybody, but him. I heard myself give a great ugly snorting sob, and suddenly, hating it, I was in a flood of tears.
Will Shakespeare was astonished, and probably appalled. By accident, he’d released an emotional overload far bigger than he expected—and far bigger than I could ever explain to him. Not that he gave a thought to explanation; he sat down abruptly on the stage, pulling me down with him, and sat there with his back against the great wooden pillar while I sobbed into his shoulder. He didn’t try to stop me; he just waited, patting me gently, saying softly once in a while, like a mother to a very small child, “There. There now.”
In a little while he said quietly, “There is more here than persecution by a nasty boy. What ails thee, Nat? What is it, this terrible buried sorrow? Dost miss thy parents?—where are they?”