King of Shadows

  How did he know, to go to it so fast and direct, through four hundred years? He thought he was coping with lonely Nathan Field of 1599, but his instinct took him ahead through centuries, to a truth that he couldn’t possibly have sensed. Like an arrow he went to my haunting, which I had tried so hard and so long to hide from everyone, and most of all from myself. With a small innocent question, he made me dig myself out of a grave.

  I lifted my head off his damp sleeve and looked out at the groundlings’ yard, though I wasn’t seeing it. “She died when I was five,” I said. “She had cancer. She was very pretty and she smelled of flowers, and she used to sing to me. But she died, and that left my dad and me, just the two of us. My Aunt Jen—she’s his sister—she came to live with us, to help, and after a while things got better, I thought. Dad would play games with me, and I’d help him in the garden. He liked his garden, he had rosebushes for Mom.”

  Will Shakespeare was sitting absolutely still, listening, waiting.

  “My dad—” I said, and I had to swallow, to keep going. “My dad missed her. I was all he had left, and I tried to be enough for him, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t enough. He went on missing her. One day I came home from school early. And he was lying on the floor of his study, he’d killed himself. He had all her old letters around him, there was blood on the floor, bright red, a pool of red blood, spreading.” I had to swallow again. I could see it all so clearly.

  Shakespeare shifted a little. He said quietly, “Nat Field. Thou hast a lot to bear.”

  Suddenly I wanted to defend my father. “He didn’t mean me to find him,” I said. “He’d locked the door and left a note for Aunt Jen, with the key. He just didn’t know there was a spare key.” I felt another sob come welling up like a huge bubble. I tried to stop it, but it came out as an ugly croak.

  Will Shakespeare sat there with his hand on the back of my neck, rubbing it gently. “I have seen men die,” he said. “Too often, and always for bad reasons. But here is thy father dying for love of a woman, and that is even harder to bear, especially for his son. I had a son—” He stopped.

  I said, “Had?”

  “He died, three years ago. He was just your age. A sweet pretty boy.”

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Thy loss was the greater,” Shakespeare said. “I have two daughters still, one of them his twin.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Hamnet.”

  I said, thinking I’d heard it wrong, “Hamlet?”

  “Hamnet,” Shakespeare said. “He was named for my oldest friend, and my daughter Judith for his wife.” He turned his head and looked at me oddly. “What dost thou know of Hamlet?”

  “Only the name,” I said.

  “I have a new play in mind, for Burbage—” But he was looking at my face more closely, and I guess he saw it was still all covered in tears and snot. He pulled a cream-colored handkerchief from a slit in his sleeve, and mopped me up. Then he took hold of my chin to make me look him in the eye, straight and serious.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “Do not say thou wast not enough for thy father. Never say that. Some things are beyond our command. A man so caught and held—men will destroy much for love, even the lives of their children, even their own lives. I have a poem that I shall copy for thee, that thou shalt read and remember. Remember.”

  He jumped to his feet and called out, to an invisible Helena leaving the stage:

  “Fare thee well, nymph; ere he do leave this grove

  Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love.”

  It was my next cue for coming onstage. I sniffed hard, took a deep breath, and stood up, facing him.

  He said: “Hast thou the flower there? Welcome, wanderer.”

  I held out an imaginary pansy. “Aye, there it is.”

  Shakespeare smiled. “—I prithee, give it me.

  I know a bank where the wild thyme blows. . . .”

  And on we went, into the rest of our scenes together, until one of the tiremen came looking for him to put him into his costume, because soon the day’s play would begin and he had a part in it.

  Shakespeare tugged at his beard, exasperated. “We are but halfway through our scenes, and two days hence is the Dream, with this our untried Puck—”

  “And thirty minutes hence is Master Jonson’s play,” said the tireman unsympathetically, “and thou not yet in reach of thy costume.”

  I pulled back the curtain at the back of the stage to let them into the tiring-house, which was buzzing with actors and musicians. Master Burbage was there, painting a spectacular depraved makeup onto the chubby face of Thomas, who was to play an elderly whore. Shakespeare was still lost in his own head as the tireman, clicking his tongue like an anxious mother, began unbuttoning his doublet. “Richard,” Shakespeare said to Burbage, “a thought—let us have the boy’s things taken from thy lodging to mine, since time is so short. Breakfast and supper may give me the space to run lines with him.”

  “Hold this,” said Burbage, thrusting a dish of purple paint into my hands. He dipped in a brush, and began painting the closed lids of Thomas’s eyes. “Lord love you, Will, you’d think there were no other play toward in London but this little Dream of thine. Nat, canst tolerate living in the house of a mad poet for a few days?”

  “Oh yes sir,” I said. “I think so.”

  NINE

  Isolated in Guy’s Hospital, the boy Nathan lies half-conscious in bed, his head tossing from side to side on the pillow. His wrists are tied to the bed by padded restraints because he has twice pulled the intravenous line out of his arm, and that line—carrying fluids, nutrients, and antibiotic drugs—is the only thing keeping him from death. The nurses are not troubled by the unfamiliarity of his face, because they have never seen him before; nor by his strange ramblings and cries of fear, because he is semidelirious and cannot be expected to behave like a normal boy. They are concerned only with the astonishing fact that he is suffering from bubonic plague, once known as the Black Death, and that he must, if possible, be cured.

  Chubby Nurse Stevens, who has just been sponging the boy’s thin, fevered body as best she can, pulls a sheet over him and rests a gentle hand briefly against his cheek. Nathan opens his eyes and stares up at her, distraught; he can see only her brown eyes, in the dark face covered by the white mask. The eyes crinkle, as she smiles at him behind the mask, and without really thinking about it, she hums him the tune she was singing last night in St. Anne’s Parish Hall, at a rehearsal of the early music group that is her only recreation.

  Lullay lullay, my littel tiny child. . . .

  It’s a pretty tune—a carol, really. In the sixteenth century, mothers used to sing it to their babies. Nathan’s head stops tossing. His eyes gradually close, and he falls asleep.

  TEN

  So I found myself living in the house where Will Shakespeare lodged, and where, for the time being, he wrote his plays and his poems. He spent hours at a time sitting in an upstairs room, scratching away with a quill pen, beside a window that looked out onto a crab apple tree. The pen must have driven him crazy; he had to trim it often with a special little sharp knife, and a bristling bunch of big new feathers sat on his desk waiting for the moment when he threw the old quill irritably on the floor and reached to sharpen a new one. I longed to be able to hand him a ballpoint pen.

  He was up there in his room my first day, when Harry and I brought my clothes from Master Burbage’s house, and the woman who looked after him, Mistress Fawcett, wouldn’t let us go upstairs. She was a fat, friendly soul, and gave us each a handful of little sugary cookies as consolation.

  “Nobody must disturb him when he’s writing,” she said reverently. “But in any case thou art to sleep down here, Nathan—the room behind the kitchen. Too warm for summer, perhaps, but cozy.”

  Harry was deeply impressed by my room, which wasn’t much bigger than a closet. It was the bed that did it: a little wooden bed, not unlike the one I had at home, four hundred years and t
hree thousand miles from here. “A jointed bedstead!” he said, big-eyed. “And sheets, look! And a pillow!”

  Mistress Fawcett had smiled proudly. Her house was quieter than Master Burbage’s, even though it was in a busier area; it was set back from the road and had a walled garden behind it that Master Shakespeare’s room and mine both faced. The streets all around were hopping, though. This was a district called a “liberty,” free from all the rules and regulations that had to be obeyed in the proper City of London across the river. Will Shakespeare lived in the Liberty of the Clink, in Southwark, a short walk from the Globe Theatre.

  The London I’d come to from the U.S.A. was a huge city, stretching for miles on both sides of the Thames. But this London seemed to be tiny, just the walled city that held the Tower, with villages dotted all around. And here in Southwark, just across the river, we were in a noisy seaport that was quite separate.

  Because I was Nathan Field, the sheltered lad from St. Paul’s School in the more law-abiding City of London, nobody would let me out in the streets of Southwark on my own. Mistress Fawcett wouldn’t anyway, next morning, though I protested that I knew my way and that I had work to do. The play that day was to be Henry V, and when we weren’t being princesses or waiting-women, we boys would be rushing on-or offstage as French or British soldiers, or both.

  “Wait for Master Shakespeare,” said Mistress Fawcett obstinately, putting her large self between me and the door. “He will leave for the playhouse in good time, he always does.”

  “But he’s writing—”

  I stopped, remembering. My father had been a writer. One year when Aunt Jen was into needlepoint, she’d made him a little rectangular cushion, bright green with black letters on it: MAN AT WORK. When his study door was shut and the cushion propped beside it, you didn’t disturb him, not for anything. The only day when he hadn’t thought to put the cushion outside his door was his last one.

  I suddenly realized I was thinking about him, without panic or tears, in a way I hadn’t done since he died.

  But before I could wonder why, there was a great confused noise outside the front door: hoofbeats, and jingling harness, and men shouting. Mistress Fawcett frowned. Someone hammered at the door, and she frowned more darkly, and flung it open.

  It was a serving man who had been doing the hammering, though he seemed to me as grandly dressed as a lord, with a gold crest embroidered on a red silk doublet. Out in the street behind him, in a straggle of gaping passersby, was a gleaming coach with four beautiful horses stamping and tossing their heads, and the same crest was painted on the coach doors.

  The knocking man said loftily to Mistress Fawcett, “My Lord desires the presence of Master Shakespeare.”

  “Master Shakespeare is working,” said Mistress Fawcett curtly. I got the feeling she’d come across my lord before and wasn’t impressed.

  The man stared at her. “Then he must stop!”

  “Let be, Anthony,” said a voice from the coach, and out of its shadowy inside stepped an amazing-looking young man: tall, handsome, swirling a brilliant yellow brocade cloak around his shoulders, wearing on his head a tall curly-feathered hat. He looked confident as a king, though there was something about his mouth that made me think of a spoiled little boy.

  He glanced past Mistress Fawcett and me contemptuously, as if we weren’t there, and automatically we moved to one side as he swept into the little hallway. “Will!” he called out, loud and imperious. “Will!”

  Master Shakespeare must have heard the commotion already, because he was standing at the top of the stairs, with his doublet and shirt both unbuttoned and a quill pen still in his hand. He looked as if he had just come back from somewhere a long long way away, and left his head behind him.

  “Go away,” he said.

  The young man paid no attention. “I must speak with thee!” he said, and he bounded up the stairs and swept Master Shakespeare back into his room. The door closed, and within a few seconds you could hear the indistinct blur of raised voices from inside.

  Mistress Fawcett snorted indignantly, and slammed the front door in the face of the lordly serving man. She looked up the stairs, and then turned to me, with a small odd smile. “Nat,” she said, “we are going to stay very quiet in thy room for a while.”

  Puzzled, I followed her through the kitchen into my tiny bedroom. She beckoned me toward the far wall, and she stood close to it, sideways, with her ear against the rough plaster. I tiptoed over and did the same—and coming down through the wall, perhaps through some air-filled gap between the laths, I could hear the voices from above. They were clear now. I glanced up at Mistress Fawcett; she put her finger to her lips.

  “I will not!” said Master Shakespeare loudly, through the air and plaster.

  “It would be so easy a thing!” said the nameless lord. His voice sounded exasperated. “Tell her an actor is sick, a major actor—so you cannot play the play.”

  “She would simply ask for another play, not requiring that actor.”

  “You said she particularly requested A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  “So she did, but also she is coming to see our new Globe Theatre, and sample the enjoyments of the common man. Of course, of course, the monarch does not go to a public theater—we take our plays to her at Court. When invited. But Gloriana is a monarch who does not always obey her own rules.”

  “Gloriana?” I looked at Mistress Fawcett. “Who’s Gloriana?” I whispered.

  “The Queen, of course!” she whispered, and frowned at me.

  “And rash, and willful, and must be kept from dangers of her own making.” The lord’s voice softened, dropped, became cajoling. “Will, my dear—Sir Robert is much concerned over the perils of this escapade. If you would be in his good graces, you would do well to stop it happening.”

  “Is that a threat, my lord?” Shakespeare sounded icy.

  “Of course not! But thy debt to Southampton and thereby to Essex is well known, and that faction may be dangerous—”

  “I have no debt!” Shakespeare shouted at him. There was a moment’s pause, and then you could tell he was trying to control his voice, but it was still fierce and cross. “My lord, thou know’st I am not political. I am a tedious burgher from Stratford, a player, a maker of plays. I do not play games outside the theater—I have no desire to go the way of poor Kit Marlowe. And I will not take sides!”

  There was the abrupt sound of his door opening, and Mistress Fawcett and I hastily jerked our heads away from the wall. She scuttled into the kitchen and busied herself with punching down a bowl of dough that sat rising on the table; I stayed in my little room, and listened to the blurred sound of footsteps on the stairs, voices at the door, and pretty soon the sounds of horses and carriage jingling and clattering away.

  Shakespeare’s voice came calling, clear and abrupt: “Nat! To the theater—now!”

  He strode through the crowded, reeking, muddy streets of Southwark, so fast that I had to trot to keep up with him. “Factions!” he said irritably, half to himself. “Factions! A plague on both your houses!”

  “Romeo and Juliet,” I said, smarty-pants, before I could stop myself.

  Shakespeare glanced at me, distracted, and slowed his pace a little. “A sharp memory right enough, this boy Nathan. Hast played Juliet?”

  “No,” I said. I’d never fancied the lovey-dovey parts in his plays, even for the sake of being the lead.

  “No,” said Will Shakespeare, looking down at me as he walked, reading my mind as usual. “Our Nat is not a romantic beauty. Th’art a sprite, an aerial sprite, born of the air. One day I shall write thee an airier Robin Good-fellow—unless thou leave me, or grow old.”

  He grinned at me, and for a moment I glowed all over and wanted to say: I’ll never leave you, I want to act with you forever. Instead I said awkwardly, “Was he very important, that lord with the carriage?”

  Shakespeare frowned. “He thinks himself so,” he said, but he didn’t tell me who the man had b
een. And the theater was looming ahead of us, with the white flag flying, and the usual bustle of people and horses and street vendors—and a large beruffed lady, her skirts trailing in the mud, shrieking after a running figure: “Cutpurse! Cut-purse! Stop, thief!”

  But the scurrying thief escaped into the crowd, and Will Shakespeare and I into the door that led to the tiring-house, behind the stage.

  In the boys’ corner of the tiring-house, Roper was going through his lines with Thomas. He was to play the Boy in Henry V; it was a good part, this perky streetwise kid who hangs out with the roughneck soldiers Pistol and Bardolph and Nym, but is bright enough to deserve better. I’d met a few Boys back in twentieth-century America, and it wasn’t hard to spot them on the streets of Elizabethan London. Maybe Roper was one himself—though he had a serious job as an apprentice, and if the company kept him on after his voice broke as a regular actor—a hired man—he’d have a good enough life.

  I wondered whether that’s what would happen to me, if I never managed to get back to my own time.

  They were a funny sight, the two of them sitting there running lines: Roper in his streetboy costume, Thomas all painted and bewigged and gowned to play Alice, the French princess’s attendant. They had reached the scene where Pistol has taken a French soldier prisoner in battle, but can’t talk to him because he doesn’t speak French. He’s using the Boy, who’s better educated, as interpreter.

  Thomas read Roper his cue:

  “Come hither, boy; ask me this slave in French

  What is his name.”

  Roper said, pronouncing it exactly as it’s written:

  “Écoutez: comment êtes-vous appelé?”

  Thomas said, mildly, “You don’t pronounce the z in écoutez. And the e isn’t like English. It’s not ee-coo-tez, it’s ay-coo-tay. And the next part—”

  Roper snorted in scorn. “Who do you think is going to know the difference?”