AEgypt (22 page)

Will, grown tall and earnest-looking, played the pedant Rhombus, a stock comedy character he was good at: pedants and scholars with mouthfuls of inkhorn terms he alone of the boys could commit easily to memory. Let me delicidate the very intrinsical maribone of the matter. Well-spoken, Doctor, I see you have your degree
Magister artis.
I do, if it please your Majesty (sweeping a low bow, with a hand to the crick in his old pedant's back), I have it
honorificabilitudinitatibus.
The Queen laughed aloud at that, a word he had used to rattle out to make Simon Hunt laugh at Stratford School; and after the play she reviewed the Boys, and stopped before Will, a head higher almost than his fellows, a red-haired head.

Uh-oh, Rosie thought, she's going to make a prophecy.

The Queen's head rose up out of her rich dress small and white and lined, the face of a maiden long imprisoned in a fairy castle; her red hair was dressed in jewels as complex as curls, and a stiff white ruff of lace rose up behind to frame her wide-eyed, domed, long-nosed face. So she was a peacock too, a white peacock all displayed. Will before this fabulous monster could not look away; her bird's eye looked sharply into his, green as emeralds.

Two things the Queen loved were red hair and jewels. She brushed Will's hair with her ringed hand, and her white mask smiled.

Honorificabili-tudini-tatibus
, she said.

When cool weather came the Earl of Leicester's Men returned from their tour of the North and took up their stand again at the playhouse James Burbage had built out beyond the reach of the London magistrates. It was a playhouse like no other in England at that time, and Burbage loved it and lavished money on it as on a wife (his wife had more than once noted so to him); in fact it was not a playhouse at all, not a bear pit or an adapted innyard or a hall fitted out with a stage and some doors and some seats for gentlemen—no, it was not a playhouse but a Theatre, as the Romans had named their circular buildings, and so it was called: the Theatre, the only one in England.

—We shall have those vessels, this year, Master Burbage said.

He stood feet wide apart on the stage, looking out over the empty pit and the ranks of galleries for the penny custom. Behind him the boys’ company rehearsed a new piece. Above him the heavens looked down, painted in gold on the night-blue canopy, the zodiac and its resident planets, the sun, the moon.

—What vessels? Will asked him.

The boy—hardly a boy any longer—sat on the stage's edge, dangling his long skinny legs. He had the playbook in his hand, but he had no part in the new play. There was no comic pedant or poet in it, only heroes and their loves. The new fashion. Stern and antique.

—Brazen vessels, Burbage said. Brazen vessels, made—made in a certain fashion—made and placed under the ambries here, and there: I know not just how: and so they echo or swell the voice, catch it and cast it back.

Will looked around the Theatre, trying to imagine this.

—Vitruvius saith, Burbage intoned, that the true antique Roman theatre had such vessels. Placed here and there by careful art. So says my learned friend Doctor Dee. Who has read Vitruvy and all those authors. Whom you should read and study, boy. A player need not be
ignoramus
.

He looked down at the boy. What was he to do with him. If his coming into the Boys had been regular, well, his going out of it when the time came might be regular too. Master Burbage in his haste had not considered that part of it. If a boy had good parts, and grew up lissome, sweet, small, and of the right voice, he might easily at adolescence graduate to women's parts in the men's company, and thence to a full share in the company; if he did not, well, he could be returned to his family, his contract finished, let him try another trade.

Somewhere, tucked in among bills and receipts in Burbage's lead box, was that ridiculous paper of Will's. He had better burn that.

For Will had not grown lissome and small: he had grown like a weed. His knees great knobs holding calf and thigh together like a poor piece of furniture. His red hair had gone dull and thin, a big bulge of forehead swelling out from it, Burbage wondered if he had water on the brain, for sure he had grown vague and silent and almost idiotic in the last year. And that voice: that sweet, piercing voice was broken: broken and showing coarse squawks and toneless tones like hay stuffing.

What if he had clipped him. Clipped his little stones in time as the Italians do. Burbage shuddered to think of it.

—We shall have them, he said. If the antique theatre had such marvels, this age should show them too. Now. Doctor Dee will know about this. We must get from him his book of Vitruvius, or have him look in it, and draw for us a picture and a plan of them, so they can be cast. Leave that, leave that.

Will looked up from his playbook. The one thing he had to make him a player, Burbage thought, was the memory. Verse caught in his brain like sheep's wool on briars, he could gather it at will. He would have all the parts in the new piece tomorrow. So. If anyone fell ill.

—Listen, he said. He took money from his purse. I want you to go down to Mortlake, to Doctor Dee's house there; go down by water. Are you listening? To Mortlake. Between the church and the river his house is, ask the way at the church.

Will had tossed down the playbook and stood, nearly tripping himself on his big feet.

—Yes, he said. Mortlake, between the river and the church.

—Give him, Burbage said, my duty. Say to him, say...

—About the brazen vessels. I will. I understand.

—Good lad. Now brush yourself and clean your nails. Find a clean shirt. That is a learned man, and the Queen's friend. Hear? Don't dawdle.

Will took the coin, and turned to go.

—Will.

The boy looked back. That way he had come to have, that not a thing mattered to him, that he was hereby only by some accident, with his big head and loose bones, it had nothing to do with him: all that belied by his great watchful eyes. What to do, what to do.

—Ask Doctor Dee, Burbage said. He is a wise man, lad, and could help you. Tell him to look into your nativity, and see what he can see. Tell him the expense is mine. Tell him that.

Will turned to go without answering.

Down by water all alone! He was not to dawdle, but it was impossible not to dawdle, down Bishopsgate street and through the city wall at Bishopsgate, past the inns on Fenchurch street where plays were cried. At Leadenhall street he turned right and into the Cheapside throngs; carriages—only come to share the narrow streets with chairs and drays and people in these last few years—pushed through them arrogantly, the coachmen up behind lashing the horses forward. Several rich carriages were standing outside the huge new emporium built by Thomas Gresham for his own glory and the realm's: the Exchange, newly dubbed “Royal” by Her Majesty, a whole world's worth of markets under a pillared roof. Inside—and through ‘Change was a shortcut riverward that Will knew—inside the merchants fat and lean in sad gowns of stuff did important business in grains, hides, corn, leather, and wine in the cloistered shops of the ground floor, while above, in the Pawn, the jewelers, instrument-makers, bookbinders, the glovers and hatters and haberdashers, the armorers and druggists and clockmakers did their business and sold their wares. At the doors, though, and along the walls and streets beyond, smaller merchants without shops carried on their trade too, carrying it on their backs, crying oysters, apples, cherries ripe and cockles new, brooms good brooms, samphire gathered from the cliffs of Dover, even water, sold by the tankard.

Will bought a pippin, and ate it on his way down Cheapside toward Paul's, past the shops of the goldsmiths where the swells and the foreign gentlemen went in and out, and the nips and foists and cutpurses too who preyed on them. By the time Paul's yard was reached the crowds were thick with beggars, old soldiers limbless or eyeless, counterfeit-cranks pretending to loathsome diseases who pawed or tried to paw you, only bought off with alms; at the cathedral doors the poor like a flock of importunate geese set up a clacking with their clap-dishes whenever anyone likely-looking passed within. Paul's had lost its wooden steeple to lightning long before, and was anyway as much public concourse as church—though divine worship did go on daily; the beruffed boy choristers (oh Will pitied them, with glee in his heart) sang out by thoughtless rote into the vast spaces.

Will, cutting through the church from the north-side door to the south-side across the nave, stopped to read the notices posted up on the pillars: men offering themselves for hire, dancing-masters and fencing-masters offering lessons, teachers of Italian and French and doctors and astrologers advertising their services. He read an apothecary's broadside:

These Oiles, Waters, extractions or Essences, Saltes, and other Compositions; are at Paules Wharfe ready made to be sold, by IOHN CLERKSON, practisioner in the arte of Distillation; who will also be ready for a reasonable stipend to instruct any that are desirous to learne the secrets of the same in a fewe dayes &c.

And look what he offered:
essentia perlarum
, was that essence of pearls?, and
balsamum sulphuris
, and
saccharum plumbi
or sugar of lead, the
vitrum antimonii
; that was the antimonial cup;
sal cranii humani
(Will shuddered to translate this, salt of human skull, what could it be); and more ordinary stuff too, “divers and sundrie vernishes, strange and terrible Fireworks."

An aged bawd who mistook his idling over this fascinating notice came close and made to speak to him; Will, startled, moved quickly away, stumbling over his feet, and a knot of lawyers watching for clients at their accustomed pillar laughed together, perhaps at him. Quickly he went out, back into the sun.

There was another world there: Paul's churchyard was London's book market, and in stalls sheltered amid the buttresses, under the sign of the Hart or the Compasses or the Dolphin, books were offered that Will could not buy but could look at: Holinshed's chronicles in enormous folios,
Joyfull News Brought Out of the Newe Worlde.
And amid and among the stalls went the ballad-and-broadside sellers, with news of their own: Spanish plots and double murders, rules for love and rules for chess, stories new-brought out of the Italian, all true, all true.

Past Blackfriars then the traffic was all for the water, the greatest thoroughfare of London. Will was chivied down the water stairs with all the others, to contest with them there for the watermen's services, and only made his way onto one after being shouldered aside by an alderman and his servant for the first boat to stop; and then down the river. Clouds scudding fast beyond the crowded steeples outpaced the fast river traffic, the eelboats and wherries and other light craft bobbing with bellied sails and the towering merchantmen. Will hugged his knees in his cramped space aboard the boat, and listened and saw and tasted the whole September day, seeming to have all of it inscribed on his heart for good.

Late now, and hurrying, he climbed the water stairs at Mortlake and asked the woman washing for Doctor Dee's house, and asked again at the church, and again at a gate leading into a garden, where a woman leaned, smiling, her cheeks blushed like September apples and so plump they narrowed her smiling eyes.

—Doctor Dee is it. And who might you be.

—I am sent by Master James Burbage of the Theatre in Shoreditch.

—A player.

—I am that.

She studied him, amused and good-natured, and at last opened the gate she leaned against.

—The doctor is in the garden, she said. This is his house. And this is his wife.

She curtseyed slightly, mockingly. Will bowed.

—Go quietly in, she said. He is busy there, with I know not what. But then he ever is. Busy. With I know not what.

Will went where she pointed, into a well-kept garden now pillaged and gone yellow with autumn. There were knots of herbs and a carp pool and two, no three sundials of different kinds; and in the center something that didn't belong to a garden. A sort of small house or tent, rigged up on poles with heavy cloths hung around it, and on the front of it a panel, painted black, in which there was a glass, a lens, a small round lens that caught the sun.

The curtains fluttered and bellied, and out from the little house came stooping a long man, made longer by a long sad-colored robe and a long narrow beard going gray. He glanced at Will and raised his eyebrows, but took no further note of him; he took from his clothes a little round cap, and with it he covered the glass eye in the black panel. Then he went back within.

Will stood, shifting from foot to foot.

When he came back out, Doctor Dee wore a pair of blackrimmed spectacles with claw-ends that fitted to his ears; they made his round wide eyes even more surprised, even more round, than they had been. He motioned to Will.

—Come here.

Will went to him, and the doctor took his shoulder. He led him to stand in front of the tent house, facing the blinkered glass; then he bethought himself, and moved Will back some feet from it.

—Master Burbage, sir, sends you his duty, and...

—Now what you must do, said the doctor, holding up a long finger in warning, is to stand perfectly still. Bat not a single eyelash till I tell you so. Do you hear?

Will nodded. He was growing alarmed. Was he to be charmed? Best to do what he was told. Doctor Dee went back to the black house, stood by it, and again warned Will with a skinny finger.

—Still. Still as the dead. Now.

He snatched off the little cap that covered the glass eye, and seemed to count or pray under his breath. Will, motionless, stared at the glass eye as though from it, as from a basilisk's, killing rays might shoot. Then the doctor covered it again; he breathed deeply, and disappeared within.

Will stood frozen, hearing his heartbeats, tears gathering in his unwinked eyes.

At last Doctor Dee came out again, and seemed to see Will for the first time.

—I beg your pardon, sir! You may move, move, leap and dance.