Much Ado About Murder (12 page)

Dickens grinned. "It feels somewhat strange to be back again after all this time," he said. "And yet, despite that, it also feels most welcome and familiar. It has been only a few years, and yet so much seems to have happened in that time. Can it have been so long since last I trod the boards in women's clothing, declaiming in my high and squeaky, boyish voice the lines that I had worked so hard to drill into my memory, dreaming of the day when I could at last cast off my girlish gowns and walk out like a young knight in doubtlet, cape and hose, and carrying a sword?"

"That day has come," said Shakespeare.

"Aye," said Smythe, with a chuckle, "and a good thing, too, for you would make a most unnatural woman now with that deep voice, those broad shoulders, and that beard."

"Well, we could shave off the beard," said Shakespeare, as if contemplating the idea. "The face would look comely enough with a bit of paint upon it, but there would be no hiding that breadth of arm or depth of chest. S'trewth, Tuck, he is a strapping youth, indeed, almost as big as you."

"We could always cast him as a horse," said Smythe.

"Soft now, keep your voice down, else Kemp may hear and wish to ride him," Shakespeare replied, with a wink.

"Ben
!" Fleming called out, as he spied him from the stage. He threw his arms out as if to hug him from up there.
"Welcome! Welcome
! Well met and welcome once again! Look, everyone, look! Ben has come! Ben Dickens has come back to join us!"

They all gathered round to greet him, Speed and Fleming, Burbage, Flemings, Pope and Phillips, Kemp and Bryan… all a motley looking crew, but still a happy lot, despite their tribulations. And as he saw them all together, Smythe thought of Liam Bailey's admonitions against wasting his time amongst the players and realized that for all his good intentions, Liam Bailey simply did not understand. How could he?

They were a family, much more of a family than he had ever known. Symington Smythe had never truly been a father to him in anything save name, for all that they had shared that name. That patronymic bond was one of the reasons he now preferred to be called Tuck. That grasping woman that his father married, whom Tuck did not even care to think of as his stepmother, had never wanted to be bothered with having a child underfoot, so to appease her and free his father of a burdensome responsibility at the same time, he had been packed off to his uncle's. And much as he would always love his uncle, Thomas Smythe was a quiet man by nature and by disposition, reserved and not given to boistrous demonstrations of his thoughts and feelings. Uncle Thomas gave him what he could, and did as well by him as he knew how, but Tuck had always felt that there was something missing. Now he knew that he had found it.

These simple players wore their hearts upon their sleeves and everything they did was boistrous and demonstrative, done not only with feeling, but frequently with an overabundance of it. Smythe found it impossible to be around them without his spirits soon being raised. They gave an honest, open boon companionship that was worth more to him than all the money he could make working as a journeyman in Liam Bailey's shop or elsewhere.

It was something that his father had never understood, nor did Smythe hope to ever make him understand it. The world his father lived in now seemed as far removed from him as the life that he had left behind. And good riddance, too, he thought. He had walked away from it without a backward glance the day that he had started on the road to London. What did chasing dreams of wealth, social position, and respectability ever do for his father? He had managed, with diligence and perseverence—and more than a little bribery—to make himself a gentleman at last, and to give him his due, it was an achievement of no small scope for a man of his beginnings. Nevertheless, it proved not to be enough. No sooner had he hung up his newly won escutcheon than he began to covet spurs. And where had it all left him? In debt, and nearly penniless, dependent on his brother's charity to help keep him out of prison. Surely, there was a lesson to be learned in that.

Meanwhile, Tuck had come to London without anything at all save the clothes upon his back and a friend that he had made upon his journey, and now, for all that times were difficult, he felt richer by far than he had ever been. He had a place to live, where many shivered on the streets at night. He had work that helped to feed and clothe him, where many went hungry every day. He had a trade, of sorts, that admitedly he was not much good at, but it gave him pleasure and he felt that he was learning how to be a better player every day… or at the very least, he tried his best to learn. While his father, who had accused him of being a wastrel, had wasted his own life, Tuck had built a life in which not one moment felt wasted. The thought of losing this life and these friends was more than he could bear. Somehow, despite their difficulties, he felt certain they would manage. Somehow, he knew that they would see it through.

They began rehearsing one of their old standards,
The Wastrel and the Maid,
a comedy about a rogue who sought to woo and bed a virtuous maiden, and it seemed only natural for Ben to play the rogue, because he was by far the most handsome among them and the most suited to the part. Burbage took the demanding part of the young maiden's much beleagured father, once played to great acclaim by Edward Alleyn, and Kemp took the part he always played, that of the rogue's hapless, comic henchman. George Bryan, as the youngest and the slightest of them, was assigned to play the maiden. Sadly, they had lost both their juveniles, one of whom had sickened and died at the beginning of the plague season and the other, doubtless frightened by the fate which had befallen his young companion, ran away to parts unknown. They had not yet managed to find suitable replacements, but for that matter, they had not looked very hard, either. Any juvenile apprentices that the company took on would have to be housed and fed by the players, and without being certain where their own next meals were coming from, none of them wished to take on such an additional expense.

The play was old enough that Dickens was able to remember some of it, having played the part of the maiden when he was a boy. Needless to say, he did not have any of the same lines, some of which had been changed in the intervening years in any case, but it all came to him quickly, the way a familiar task comes to one who has not practiced it in a while, but has never entirely forgotten. They all worked with prompting from Will Shakespeare, who as book holder gave them their lines if they could not remember—Kemp, of course, being the chief offender save for Dickens, who had to learn almost everything anew—and if some line or bit of business did not seem quite right, they experimented with changes on the spot.

They all knew that they had a great deal of work to do in order to be ready for their reopening, especially with the strength of their company reduced. Most of them would have to play several parts, which would involve rapid costume changes, but then that was nothing they had not done before. There would simply be more of them doing it this time, crowding the tiring room with rapid changes, necessitating careful planning as to who would stand exactly where and how in order to avoid confusion backstage. This did not concern them greatly; they had dealt with worse. Many times, while on the road, their stage had been nothing more than planks hammered together and placed across barrels and their tiring rooms nothing more than narrow curtains hung from poles. A player had to learn to improvise amidst adversity. One way or another, the show always went on.

This would be only the first of the plays they would rehearse in preparation for reopening, for staging just one play would never do. One of the things that had both surprised and dismayed Smythe after he had joined the Queen's Men was the discovery that no company ever staged the same play two days in a row, unless a particular production became unusually popular and there was great demand for it, though that was rare. Audiences were easily jaded and they demanded variety. Generally, the selection of the plays was somewhat random, and it was not at all uncommon for a player to arrive for a performance only to discover that, at the last minute, there had been a change and a different play was being staged. Thus, one of the requirements of the actor's trade was the ability to "con" or learn a new play very quickly, something Smythe could never do, for which reason he was always relegated to to playing nonspeaking parts or else to roles which had only one or two lines, at most. Ben Dickens,

on the other hand, proved every bit up to the challenge of conning a new role quickly.

Dickens required at most a little bit of stage direction and a quick reading of the line that he was to deliver before playing the scene and doing it almost flawlessly. Shakespeare would make a small correction here, a helpful prompt there, and Dickens would seem to absorb it all like a sponge and just continue on.

" 'Tis like he had never even left us," Fleming said proudly, watching from the wings with Smythe as Ben worked through a scene with Kemp and Bryan. Tuck had learned that it had been John Fleming who had housed young Dickens when he had apprenticed with the company as a juvenile and so, strictly speaking, Ben had been Fleming's apprentice, even though all the players generally regarded the juveniles as their apprentices in common. Fleming was married, but he and his wife were childless and no longer young. They had both taken to Dickens as if he were their own. Now, he looked for all the world like a proud and beaming father as he watched his grown "son" rehearsing on the stage.

"He is very good and a quick study," Smythe observed. "Was he this good as a juvenile?"

"Aye, he always had the gift, I thought," Fleming replied, nodding his silver-maned head emphatically. "Methinks that he could be another Ned Alleyn if he set his mind to it."

"Indeed?" said Smythe, with admiration. "That is high praise, coming from another player."

Fleming nodded. "I saw it in him even when he was just a boy. He has the ability to become the role he plays, to believe it so that it no longer seems like acting, but more like
being.
In that respect, however, he is not at all the same as Alleyn. Ned was always Ned, at heart. He never lost sight of being Ned, because he was very fond of Ned, you see. Whenever Ned Alleyn stepped out upon the stage, 'twas Ned Alleyn that the audience was seeing, Ned Alleyn playing a part, and often playing it brilliantly,

mind you, but nevertheless, one could never quite lose sight of that."

"What do you mean?" asked Smythe, not quite following him.

"I mean that when you see Ned Alleyn playing a part, you always remain aware that you are watching Ned Alleyn playing a part. You never quite forget that 'tis Ned Alleyn, the great actor, you are seeing." He purposely broke up the word 'actor' into two syllables, accentuating each one pointedly. "The very nature of his performance demands that you remember it." To illustrate, Fleming took a dramatic pose, standing bolt upright with his right hand upon his chest, his chin up aristocratically, his left arm held out before him as if he were Caesar speaking to his troops. And when he spoke, his voice performed a very credible imitation of Ned Alleyn's ringing and bombastic stage cry. " 'Lo!" he intoned, " 'tis I, the great Ned Alleyn, playing this part! Behold how brilliantly I act! Revel in the very wonder of me!"

Smythe laughed. "He would kill you if he saw that, you know."

"Oh, I have no doubt," Fleming replied offhandedly, in his normal voice. "He would squash me like a beetle, the great oaf. But still, it changes nothing." He shrugged. "That is how he acts."

"Perhaps, but if we are truly going to be honest with ourselves, John, is that not how all players act?" asked Smythe.

"Aye, most of us do, I suppose," Fleming agreed, nonchalantly. "If, as you say, Tuck, we are truly to be honest with ourselves, then perforce we must admit that once all the trappings of our craft are stripped away, we are all nothing more than great infants in want of much attention. We live or die at the whim of the groundlings; we fatten our pride on their applause. But not Ben. Ben is something else entirely."

"What makes him different?" Smythe asked curiously, as he watched him rehearse out on the stage.

"For Ben, 'tis not the applause that truly matters. For him, the play's the thing. And not really the play so much as the playing. In that, I perceive he has not changed."

Smythe frowned. " 'Twould seem to me that playing matters neither more nor less to him than to any of the others. Or do my eyes see things less keenly than do yours?"

Fleming smiled. "The flaw lies not so much in your observation as in your knowledge, Tuck. I have known Ben since he was but a boy, whilst you have only met him recently. And the truth is that there is rather more to Ben than the eye can plainly see. Ben did not much like his life, and so he went off to make himself another. And now he has come back, because the life he went in search of doubtless proved a disappointment, and so once again he seeks to make himself another."

Fondness seemed to mingle with a sort of wistful regret in John Fleming's exression as he watched Ben Dickens on the stage. He sighed and continued while Smythe listened with great interest.

"There is a sort of magic to our Ben," Fleming said. "For all that he is a grown man now, there is still the child within him, a fey child, a changling who possesses the ability to believe in things the way only a child can believe. I first saw it within him when he came to us as an apprentice player and I see it still. When you and I go out upon that stage, Tuck, we take the parts we are to play and play them as best as we are able, do we not?"

"Well, I fear my best is not to be compared with yours on equal footing," Smythe said, somewhat sheepishly.

"Nevertheless," the older man replied, gently patting him on the shoulder, "you put forth your best effort each and every time, for which you are to be commended, and you strive always to improve. But that is not the point. Tis this: when the rest of us step out upon the stage, we are but playing parts, pretending to be something we are not. Yet when Ben steps out upon the stage, what he does is rather different. He
becomes
something he is not. That is his gift, you see, his special magic, and perhaps, his curse, as well. He has the ability to so completely throw himself into a role that he becomes that role during the time he plays it… for howsoever long that time may be. I first saw him start to do it on the stage and I did marvel at it. I thought that he had the potential to be better than merely good; I thought he could be great. And I still think so. But when I later saw him do the same thing in his life, offstage, then I became truly concerned for him. It frightened me."