King of Shadows (10 page)

“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 been. 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?”

“Anyone who speaks French.”

“Nobody in this audience will understand French, outside the Lords' Rooms.”

Thomas rolled his eyes at me in mock horror, and I grinned at him. An hour or two earlier, he and Nick Tooley, who was playing the Princess Katharine, had been onstage rehearsing a scene Master Shakespeare had written entirely in French. Probably Roper knew only his own scenes.

Thomas said to me,
“Parlez-vous français,
Nat?”

“Bien sûr,”
I said, because I did know some French—not much, but a year's worth.
“Je parle français. Un peu.”

Roper glared at me. “Who asked you?”

“Well, Thomas did, actually. In French.”

“Trust the little lass from St. Paul's to have some girlish talent to brag about,” said Roper nastily. “I don't want a French lesson, Thomas, I just want to run my lines.”

“Very well,” Thomas said amiably, and Roper went on spouting his impossible English French. I listened, remembering the lines from the time I'd played the Boy in Washington, D.C., when I hadn't understood any French words either. I'd had a terrible time learning the right way to say them, which is I suppose why they stuck. Roper clearly hadn't had a terrible time—he'd barely tried.

By the time the trumpeter climbed up above the stage to blow the fanfare that began the play, we boys were all dressed up as pages and attendants for a court scene, and the men in gorgeous robes: Master Burbage as King Henry, Henry Condell as the Archbishop of Canterbury, very grand. As usual, there were constant nervous visits to the “plot,” the list of entrances and exits that hung near the stage in the tiring-house, and whenever Master Burbage came offstage he made a beeline for the book-keeper, a small bespectacled man who sat beside a window—out of the traffic but handy to the stage—with the play's text on his lap.

“What's next, after the Boar's Head, what's next?”

“Be calm, Dick. The traitors' scene—‘
Now sits the wind fair, and we will aboard. . . .'”

Burbage went away muttering:
“Now sits the wind
fair
. . . .” and the tireman seized him, to change his robe.

Everyone always had trouble remembering lines, under the pressure of five different plays to perform every week, and there was a fair bit of improvising. “Thribbling,” they called it; isn't that a great word? But when the play was by Will Shakespeare, actors tried not to thribble, because Master Shakespeare was not pleased when people put in words that were not his own. Thomas said this had been the main reason for Shakespeare's row with Will Kempe, who was inclined to make winking asides to the audience in the hope of getting an extra laugh.

Henry V
went wonderfully well. Burbage was a terrific Henry, and the groundlings loved him; they cheered when he swashbuckled, and stood still as mice when he had a quiet moving speech, like the one that begins
“Upon the King
. . . .” They were hugely patriotic; they hissed the French so fiercely that it was quite frightening to come onstage as a French soldier and see all those hostile faces scowling and shouting at you. They also cheered something that surprised me—but before that there was a bit of drama that surprised me even more.

Roper had come offstage after a scene in Act Three that had included his biggest speech; he'd done it really well, and got a lot of laughs from the groundlings. I wanted to tell him it was good, because we were all actors, even though he was such a pain—but he was full of himself, and kicked at me when he found me in his way, though not with enough concentration to hit me. After that I forgot about him, because the rest of us had to mill about onstage as French soldiers—but once we were back, there he
was again, stirring things up even though Master Burbage was onstage doing Henry's best big speech.

 

“We few, we happy few, we hand of brothers. . . .

 

I was standing in the tiring-house trying to listen, when Roper came slipping past me, snatched an apple from the tireman's table, and started to chomp on it. Eating backstage was strictly forbidden while a performance was going on, and the man reached out to grab him, hissing a warning. Roper took a bigger bite, dancing out of his way, chewing, mouthing some cocky jeer as he moved—and then he choked.

He stopped absolutely still, clutching his throat; after one awful first croak he didn't make a sound. A piece of apple must have gone right into his windpipe. Onstage, a cheer went up as Burbage finished his speech, and John Heminges, all in armor as Lord Salisbury, rushed onstage through an entry door. Augustine Phillips as the French herald Mountjoy waited for his cue at the opposite side. Neither of them noticed the bigger drama going on backstage as everyone not in the scene hurried to crowd around Roper, banging him on the back, desperately trying to save him. He stood there terrified, suffocating, his face a dusky red, his eyes popping; in all the turmoil he could do nothing but flap his hands in a speechless plea for help.

I didn't
think,
really; I just knew what they ought to be doing, because Aunt Jen had taught me, the year before, when she was taking some lifesaving course at the Red Cross. I ran over to Roper and shoved Nick aside, spilling the water he was trying to get Roper to drink.

“Look out!” I said, and I stood behind Roper, put my arms around him, made a fist with one hand between his ribs and his belly button, put my other hand over it, and jerked in and upward, hard. So the air was pushed up out of Roper's lungs, up through his windpipe, and the piece of apple popped out. It fell out of his mouth and he hung there over my arm, making awful noises, great croaking gasps for air. But he was breathing.

The voices from the stage went echoing on around us, but everyone backstage was staring at me. I looked at them, and felt uneasy; they looked almost as scared as they had when he was choking.

Nick said, amazed, “What did you do?”

I guess I babbled, because I was nervous. I said, “It's called the Heimlich maneuver, some guy called Heimlich invented it—” And they went on staring, and I realized too late that I was sounding completely like a modern kid, because in Elizabethan England they didn't use the word
guy
or probably the word
maneuver
either, and how could they know who Mr. Heimlich was, when he wasn't going to be born for hundreds of years yet?

I said lamely, “My aunt showed me how.”

Then Roper rescued me. He threw up on the floor.

And suddenly the book-keeper was there, very agitated, with the actors playing Pistol and the French soldier, and he was hissing at us to be ready to run onstage fighting, for the battle scene out of which Pistol would seize the Frenchman prisoner.

Pistol looked in horror at Roper's white face. “What ails the boy! Our cue is next! We need him!”

I didn't think this time either, I just jumped in again—
and this time my brain nearly died of shock when it heard what I said.

“I can do it,” I said. “I know the scene.”

Theater people can move very fast sometimes. In that theater particularly, I guess they were used to people being able to jump into other people's parts in an emergency. Before you could blink, the book-keeper whipped off the French soldier's surcoat I was wearing, and the tireman pulled Roper's jerkin off his back and onto mine. Thomas grabbed up Roper's pages from somewhere and thrust them under my nose, for a quick frantic reminding look, and then fireworks were being set off onstage in a sequence of huge bangs, and clouds of smoke from a crude smoke machine being puffed out from a backstage bellows, for the battle effects, and Pistol grabbed my arm. And we were on.

The first few lines of that scene belong just to Pistol and the French soldier, fortunately. It gave me a chance to get my bearings, before the dreaded cue.

 

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

What is his name.”

 

I almost shouted my line, I was so nervous:

 

“Écoutez: comment êtes-vous appelé?”

 

I forget the actor's name, but he sounded marvelously French.
“Monsieur le Fer,”
he said.

The next line was easy to remember. I said to Pistol:

 

“He says his name is Master Fer.”

 

Pistol rolled his drunken eyes.
“Master Fer! I'll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him—discuss the same in French unto him.”

There was a ripple of laughter from the audience, and a drunken voice from the yard shouted, “Ferret him! Ferret him!” But my next line came into my head too.

 

“I do not know the French for fer, and ferret, and firk.”

 

That got a real laugh, probably helped by the fact my voice went up into a squeak because I was so scared—and then suddenly I was all right, I was the Boy, I was acting, and we went sailing through the scene, loudmouthed Pistol and the terrified French prisoner and me. I picked up the cues, I remembered the French speeches—there were only two really—and the audience carried us along. The other two were really good actors, caricature-funny; the groundlings loved them.