The Playmaker (14 page)

I turned back to my part with an eagerness I had never felt about anything touching the stage. Reading over the lines again, I saw more and more of Susanna in them. She was, and is, a most capable person: a quick study and a tireless worker, with ambitions
to rise higher than her station. Yet when our mother took sick, Susanna found herself at a loss. It so happened that I was a better nurse: gentler, more patient, capable of sitting an entire afternoon at the bedside while my sister could manage no more than half an hour. The trial of our mother's illness and death had fed her longstanding resentment of me—I saw it now. Susanna could spend all day being better than me at a score of things, even my own job of managing the horses. And yet she could be defeated an hour before bedtime because, at the end of the day, I was the one who could make our mother laugh. “Everything is easy for you!” she had cried. The words seemed absolute nonsense to me then; I understood them now. Constance was like that, collapsing in despair because all her hard work and strong will had counted for naught.

So I could do it. I could speak her impossible lines from the heart, because I had found my way there.

I felt a sharp sting on the ear, where Robin had scored me with a paper pellet. “Up, bedslug! The dresser is taken sick today and we must lace each other. Stop thy sulking—this performance stands to pass like all the rest.”

The ensuing flutter of preparation left no more time for study, but as we helped each other dress we ran through my lines one more time, and found them fast. “All well, then?” Robin asked, taking a closer look at me.

“Very well,”

I replied. “We'll try to whisper any cues you misplace, won't we, Dick?” Dick, who had started down the steps to be ready for his entrance
as Queen Eleanor, nodded amiably—though he knew no more cues than I. My heart warmed to both of them, as though we were comrades-in-arms before the battle. Robin clapped me briefly on the arm. “God be with you, Richard.”

And indeed, I can give to no man or woman the credit that belongs to God for seeing me through that performance. What I did was not perfection, for I lost some lines and repeated at least one, and twice the Company had to smooth over a cue I had missed. But for the first time I caught the current of a play. My mistakes were snags that hindered for only a moment. The other players recognized the change almost at once and began playing to me rather than away. It was a subtle difference, hard to explain, but it meant that they felt free to call attention to Constance, instead of distracting the audience (by countless actor's tricks) from a weak performance.

On my last entrance, when I appeared with hair unbound, mourning for the captured Arthur, I heard a ripple through the audience, a gasp of alarm. Like a strong wine, it went straight to my head. “Lo, now!” I wailed. “Now see the issue of your peace!” A woman in a nearby gallery cried out in sympathy.

“Patience, good lady.” Master Condell, as King Philip, extended his hands. “Comfort, gentle Constance.”

“No!” I cried. “I defy all counsel, all redress, but death!” The utter stillness of audience made my voice ring with authority. They were on my side. It was like nothing I had ever known—a power, a sense that I could sway hearts and draw tears. “Oh death! Amiable,
lovely death …” I took Constance to the brink of madness but not beyond it; some cool hand of restraint kept me from overplaying.

King Philip spoke soothingly: “Come, bind up your hairs.”

“Yes, that I will. I envy their liberty, and will again commit them to their bonds, because my poor child is a prisoner.” When the lady began to put up her unruly locks, it became obvious to all that she knew not the first thing about hairdressing. I covered the awkwardness by pacing, like a princess striving to remember herself even as her hands forgot the simplest task. My steps took me far left, where the second gallery swings so close to the stage that patrons therein are all but sitting on it. “… and so he'll die; and rising so again, when I shall meet him in the court of heaven I shall not know him …”

An experienced actor can risk looking directly at the audience, and even addressing them in asides. I did not dare, but nevertheless, while sweeping near-sightless eyes over the gallery, my gaze caught and stuck on one face: a face neither old nor young, with round eyes and a wide mouth, shadowed by the square brim of a scholar's cap.

“… Never, never, will I behold my pretty Arthur more—Oh!”

Martin Feather's law clerk and I recognized each other at the same time, and his body jerked, as though pulled by a string.

As for me, I forgot the rest of that speech.

I paced back to the center of the stage wringing my hands and crying out “Oh! Oh!” while one of the men reproached me: “You hold too heinous a respect of grief.”

“He talks to me that never had a son,” I snapped—remembering that line at the last moment. I turned back to the gallery, in time to see the clerk stepping over the feet of patrons as he worked his way out of the row. The tassel of his cap swung from side to side—his right side, though I recalled Master Will telling me that clerks always wore theirs on the left.

King Philip: “You are as fond of grief as of your child.”

Constance: “Grief … grief fills the room of my absent child! It … it lies in his bed, walks up and down with me. Up and down … up and down …” Here memory failed me as I walked up and down, and my eyes strayed to that spot in the second gallery, now empty. It was no use, and my exit almost due anyway: with one more “Up and down,” I gave it up and left the stage.

King Philip then stated a fear that Constance might do harm to herself, and followed directly. “By heaven, Richard,” said Master Condell, once we were clear off, “that was
well done
. Thou hast caught it, lad; I know not how, but well done.”

Such fulsome praise was uncommon for him and at any other time it would have pleased me no end. But the law clerk, if such he was, had set the afternoon at a tilt. I pulled off my wig, which was suddenly too hot to bear. “Thank you, sir. But if I could be excused—I've just thought of a thing that wants doing, and if you could grant me the afternoon, I'd be grateful.”

He hesitated, being famously stingy with the time he allowed off. But I had never made such a request before, and he presently decided I had earned it. So I set about divesting myself, dumping
my fine garments with a haste that did them no honor, ignoring Robin's jibes about calls of nature. He thought I had done well also, and told me so by an especially hard punch on the shoulder. I spared no time in trading compliments with him, but slipped out the back door of the Theater so quickly I was still buttoning my doublet on my way down the Shoreditch Road.

My destination was Middle Temple and the chambers of Martin Feather, attorney.

S
TRANGE
E
CHOES

knew the way from my wine-delivering days. Though I had made the Châlons run with Ralph Downing only once, it was as simple as following Cheapside through the city and out Ludgate, then taking Fleet Street to Middle Temple. What I hoped to discover there was less clear to me—not the clerk himself, but perhaps something about him. All I knew was that seeing him again had spurred me to action. In the half hour it took to reach my destination and locate Master Feather's chambers, I hatched what seemed a reasonable line of presentation for myself.

I climbed a set of creaky stairs and pushed open an arched door. A clerk and a young scrivener at his copy desk paused in the midst of a dictation to stare at me.

“Is Master Feather within?” I asked, in my best London accent.

“He's gone to the country,” the clerk informed me shortly. His narrow face wore a sour expression, or perhaps that was its natural cast. “Who wants him?”

I ignored the question, so rudely put. “The other clerk, then— do you know where he might be found?”

“You are raving, boy. And too much in haste. Your doublet is buttoned wrong, know you that?”

I glanced down at the slovenly gap where I had missed a button and winced. No help for it now, though. “But the other—”

“There is no other clerk here. I am Master Feather's sole assistant for the last sixmonth. Why should you think there was any other?”

Something in his tone—a sudden sharpness, an attention too pointed—warned me to take care. “I may have been mistaken. I understood him to say he was a clerk.”

“Who, sirrah?”

I took a chance and described the man I sought, and directly saw the gamble rewarded. For as I spoke, the scrivener's eyes lit with the eager glow of young climbers everywhere who see a chance to show off their knowledge. “It sounds like John Beecham, Master Merry.”

I saw one side of the clerk's face twitch. “The same thought crossed my mind, Samuel,” he remarked dryly. “Though my tongue be not so limber as yours.” He folded his arms, then absently ran his index finger along his lower lip as he regarded me with a prosecutor's stare. “You saw him, you say? In this room?”

“No, sir. Outside Master Feather's lodgings in Cheapside.”

“Oh?” There was that sharp tone again. “What was he about?”

“Sir?” I was confused now; the man seemed as eager for information as I myself.

“What business? What was he doing?”

“Well … he was leaving.” “What is it
you
want with him?”

I had an answer ready for this. “If you please, sir, he lent me a shilling once, and I want to pay him back.”

The clerk blinked at this, then let out a harsh laugh. “You owe money to
him
? You must be the only one in London—with everyone else it's the other way round. When was it you saw him, pray?”

The air had become too thick for me; I began backing toward the door. “I disremember, sir—”

“Come. The month, at least. Surely you recall the month.”

I paused and screwed up my face like a half-wit in an effort to surrender as little as possible without lying outright. “April, I believe—or was it March?”

“How many weeks past?
Think,
boy.”

I goggled my eyes at him, as though thinking were beyond my skill. “Truth, sir, I do not mark the days so well—”

“Leave off, you caviling calf-brain!” Patience and pretense flew away together as Master Merry advanced toward me with murder in his look. This was all the push I needed; I was halfway down the stairs before he reached the landing and had soon outrun even his voice as it bellowed, “Stop!”

“It was ill thought,” Starling said firmly. She had latched on to me when I came in early and dragged me to the garden to hear all. “You should not have let them see your face.”

“What was the harm?”

“Someone could have followed you back here and discovered who you are.”

“I thought of that,” I informed her loftily. “At Ludgate I stopped to watch a juggler and carefully looked all around. There was no figure in robes behind me. Or the scrivener, Samuel. He was such a pretty little fop I would know him anywhere.”

“It's easy enough to throw
off
the lawyer's robes and look like a common man.”

That, I saw belatedly, was all too true. “Well … at least I learned two things sure. The man I saw at the Theater is not Martin Feather's clerk, and his name is John Beecham.”