King of Shadows (18 page)

I said, “I look like a vanilla ice-cream cone.”

“Well, try not to melt onstage,” Diane said nastily. She turned to Gil, who was trying to pretend he was somewhere else, and she began adjusting his cloak.

I stared at myself sulkily in the mirror, and tried not to think about Master Burbage's wonderful green leaves.

I found the run-through a very painful business. Here I was, straight out of Will Shakespeare's own fresh new
Midsummer Night's Dream,
trying to adjust to Arby's production, which was designed to shake up four hundred years of familiarity, not to mention the accumulated boredom of generations of kids forced to read it only on the page. I had to bite my tongue as we went along, to stop myself shouting out warnings of how a line would work or not work. Once or twice I said things anyway, and this was not popular. The company were all supposed to know this theater better than I did, not the other way around.

Arby must have been taken aback by the erratic behavior of quiet Nat Field, his athletic but shy Puck from Greenville, South Carolina. He wasn't to know that someone who starts off quiet and shy can be turned into a kind of simmering volcano, if he's flung in and out of the past, and given more emotions to cope with in a week than some people have in a lifetime.

Our real explosion came over that exit line when
Oberon sends Puck off to get the magic herb; when, for Will Shakespeare, I had cartwheeled my way upstage and all the way off. When the line came this time—

 

“I'll put a girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes—”

 

—instinctively I threw myself into the first cartwheel, and at once Arby's voice boomed out from the gallery where he was sitting.

“NO, Puck! Exit through the house, remember!”

I stopped, and looked toward the gallery; I couldn't see him properly.

“It's better this way!” I called out.

He ignored me. “Jump down, without hitting a groundling—run out through the yard door, and around back.”

I stood obstinately still on the stage. “Shakespeare hated exits through the theater!” I shouted at him.

Arby rasped, “Just do what I ask, Nat.”

“He did, he thought they were corny!”

“And who gave you that little gem?”

“I just know it!” I longed passionately to be able to yell,
He told me so, you idiot!

Arby was angry now; he had all the weight of two productions on his mind, and I guess he wasn't going to be crossed by one little actor. His voice began softly, and it rose and rose. “Whatever William Shakespeare may be said to have preferred, Nat, I want you to run forward, jump down and run out, as we rehearsed—you may have been sick, but you can still take direction, and I am alive and kicking and directing this show for this century and
Shakespeare is dead!”

It was just about the worst thing he could possibly have chosen to say, and it hit me like some terrible bolt of lightning. Sure, I knew Will Shakespeare was dead—he'd been dead for nearly four hundred years—but two days ago, for me, he had been alive, warm and alive and hugging me, promising me a place as an actor in his company. I loved him and I missed him, and I should never see him again, never, never, never, never, never—

Something in my mind fell apart. I looked out at the gallery and shouted my line, to Arby, not to patient Gil standing there on the stage.

 

“I'll put a girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes—”

 

I heard my voice crack on the last word, and I leapt down from the stage and ran out across the groundlings' yard and through the exit door, crying, and I kept on running, out and away and up the street, toward the River Thames, which flowed on fast and grey-green and unchanging, just as it had last week, just as it had four or forty centuries ago.

Gil came after me, and Rachel with him. She'd been sitting up in the gallery with Arby and he'd sent her, instantly, though I didn't know that for a while. I was in costume and so was Gil, and we must have looked pretty stupid running through the streets of London. But the Globe is a busy place, with tourists flocking through it constantly, so we might have been mistaken for a staged bit of local color. I had to thread my way through a crowd
on the jetty near the theater, a whole class of French schoolchildren with teachers yelling at them in French. I guess that was what slowed me down enough for Gil and Rachel to be able to spot me and follow.

I ran blindly, along the Thames, up a lot of steps to Southwark Bridge. A big cruise boat swept by on the river, with a blurred voice booming from it. Over the glass and concrete and brick buildings on the opposite bank rose the great dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, where there had been a different church altogether in Shakespeare's day. In my day, my other day. Southwark Bridge hadn't been there then either, nor any of the other bridges I could see through the green and yellow railings as I ran.

But I wasn't paying attention to bridges; I was dodging through puzzled people, running in my white Elizabethan costume, crying. Then I was across the river, turning into a narrow cobbled street under a sign that read
SKINNERS LANE
, and it was there that Gil and Rachel caught up with me.

Rachel grabbed me and put her arms around me, and I sobbed into her shoulder and she rubbed my back. Just for a minute or two. Then I tried to pull myself together. Gil gave me a fistful of tissues, and squeezed my arm.

“I'm sorry,” I said, snuffling through the tissues.

“It's all right, it's all right,” they said, in several different ways, and Rachel started to explain how Arby was very stressed out and hadn't meant to upset me, and how he thought I was a wonderful little actor, and all that sort of stuff.

I said, “Can we sit somewhere for a while?”

“As long as you want,” Gil said.

So we went back around the corner to Southwark
Bridge and found a bench, set back in the sidewalk under a curlicued wrought-iron lamppost, and up there over the Thames with the taxis and buses rumbling past us, I told them everything there was to tell.

They sat there staring at me. The sun shone briefly out of the bustling clouds overhead, and glimmered on the little diamond in the side of Rachel's nose.

Gil said to me slowly, “You are so
lucky.”

“Wow, Nat,” Rachel said. “Oh wow!”

For a moment they were quiet again, just looking, thinking, imagining.

I said, “I was afraid you'd say it was all a dream.”

Rachel laughed, and shook her head.

“Of course not,” Gil said. Sitting there in his Elizabethan doublet and his beard, he looked a little like a younger version of Shakespeare. “How could anyone have such an incredibly long dream? And there's stuff in there—people, details—that you couldn't possibly have picked up just from reading, specially not at your age.”

Rachel said, “And there's the leaf.”

“The leaf?” he said.

“The painted green leaf on the side of Nat's neck, remember? Left from his Puck makeup. I touched it. Some paint came off on my finger. My Lord. I touched paint that
Richard Burbage
painted on him four hundred years ago.”

“Two days ago,” I said.

“Is it still there?”

“I tried to keep it, but it must have rubbed off on my T-shirt.”

“Keep the T-shirt!” Rachel said, excited. “Someone could analyze the paint, show that it was old. Carbon dating, or something.”

“No,” I said. “I don't need that.” I felt suddenly very tired, drained of energy. My head ached, and my eyes were puffy from crying. I stared out at the fast-flowing, grey-green river, where a small, tough tug was trying to tow an enormous barge upstream. I said, “All I want to know is,
why has all this been happening to me?”.

“The other boy,” Gil said. He gave a cold look to a pair of teenage girls, giggling at his costume as they passed. “The boy who was in the hospital here sick, when you were healthy in the past. Who was he?”

“Another Nat Field. Nathan. That was his name too.”

“Where's he gone?”

“Back where he came from, I guess. We must have swapped. And nobody was able to tell. Nobody who knew me was allowed near him in the hospital here. And at the old Globe, the only person who'd have known I wasn't him was Will Kempe—who walked out just as I arrived.”

“Nat Field—we have to find him!” Gil said. He jumped up, pulling Rachel with him.

“That's dumb,” I said wearily. “How can we possibly find him? He's gone back in time.”

“Get up,” said Gil. He grabbed my arm. “We're going to find him in the record books. We'll start with the books in Arby's house, and Rachel will get us a sandwich, and maybe we'll go back to the theater and maybe not.”

“Actors!” Rachel said, and rolled her eyes. “Cast them
as a king and they think they can behave like one.”

Gil ignored her. He put his hands on both sides of my face, cupping it, and looked me in the eyes for an instant. “Nat—everything's going to be all right.”

Nothing was ever going to be all right, but it was nice of him to try.

We went to the house that Arby was renting; Rachel had her key on a chain around her neck, along with a little grey stone with a hole in it, from some special beach she loved in Northern California. Julia wasn't there; like everyone else, she was at the theater getting ready for our opening. I suppose I should have felt guilty that I wasn't there, but I didn't. I didn't know how to feel involved in the way I had before.

Rachel took us to the room Arby was using as a study—which actually was a study, belonging to the house's owner, a lecturer at London University who was spending the summer in Australia.

The room was full of bookshelves and books and piles of papers. Rachel made a beeline for a small tower of books on the floor next to the desk. “These are Arby's, he's been going mad buying books at the Globe shop. Specially some guy called Andrew Gurr, who writes about the Elizabethan theater. Arby thinks he's God.”

“I've seen those,” Gil said. He dropped on his knees next to her, and pretty soon all three of us were on the floor, each flipping through a book. I don't know whose voice came first, Gil's or mine.

“Nathan Field!”

“Nathan Field!”

“He's here too,” said Rachel, from her book, “but it calls him Nathaniel.”

Gil was peering at the bottom of a page. “He did go to St. Paul's School—that's what you said, Nat, right? It says, in 1596 Richard Mulcaster became High Master at St. Paul's School, and while he was there he taught Nathan Field, the Blackfriars Boys' best player.”

“Mulcaster!” I said. I heard Will Shakespeare's voice in my head.
“Richard Mulcaster has of his kindness lent us his Puck. you.”

Gil looked up at me quickly. “Did you meet him?”

“Shakespeare said he was my teacher.”

“And that was in 1599. It fits.”

“The Blackfriars Boys were later than that,” Rachel said, turning pages. “A year later—1600. Nathan Field was their star.”

“So in 1599 he spends a week in the twentieth century, which maybe he hardly notices because he's so ill, and the next year he leaves school and joins the Blackfriars Boys Company. Goes from acting in school plays to being a pro.”

“But before that—” I said. I was hunting urgently through my book to find out whether I—no, not me—whether Nat Field went back to Will Shakespeare's company, to the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Surely he must have gone back, how could he not have gone back? But I couldn't find anything. Why not? He, we, couldn't have stayed away from him for long—

I reached for Gil's book instead, frantic to know what happened. I was a crazy mixture of emotions by now, fiercely jealous of the first Nat Field for having gone
back to the world and the people I'd had to leave; passionately concerned to make sure that he'd done the right things afterward, the things I would have done.

Gil clutched his book. “Hey, hold on.”

I said urgently, “I can't find when he went back to Shakespeare's company.”

Rachel reached out and took hold of my arm. She said, “But, Nat, he was never in Shakespeare's company. You were. He was here.”

I stared at her. She let go of my arm, and patted it, and smiled at me, that hopeful kind of smile that doesn't know if it's managing to reach its target.

She was right, of course. My first day in that century had been the day Nat Field and Will Shakespeare first met. My last was the day Nat Field left the Globe to go back to St. Paul's School. But that Nat Field wasn't him—it was me.

I couldn't get my head around it; all I could see was Shakespeare. I said, “But he said I could go back later on, he said I could have a place in the company.”

“He was talking to
you,
honey,” Rachel said gently. “The other Nat Field didn't want that, he didn't even know Shakespeare, he wanted to be with the Blackfriars Boys.”

It was me. Yes, it was me, not him. I was the one he rescued from the pit I was in. But why have I had to lose him?

Gil was looking at another page. “Hey, he did well, the other Nathan. He was their star actor for years, he grew up in the company and he wrote plays too. And poetry.”

“This book calls him a ‘major playwright,'” Rachel said.

I turned to the next reference in the book I had—and suddenly there was a face on the page, and the caption read
NATHAN FIELD.

It was a black-and-white reproduction of a painting: a young man in his twenties, with a rather delicate, fine-boned face, and a pearl earring dangling from the only ear you could see. He had wide dark eyes, long curly dark hair, a moustache and a hint of a beard. He was wearing an expensive-looking, embroidered shirt, and holding his right hand over his heart. He didn't look even remotely like me.