The Playmaker (33 page)

A rising wind flattened the cloaks against our backs as we turned east on a miserable twisting lane. Ragged children and vagabonds stared at my merchant-class garb as we passed. For as long as we stuck to the back streets, my father regaled me with his adventures as Mercer-Kenton-Beauchamp, relating this incident or that as if it had happened only yesterday. If he lived to tell it, tonight's escape would be another tale for the books, all of a piece with the fantastic fabric he had made of his life.

As we approached the Bridge and the streets became more populated, he pulled his hood forward and slowed his walk to the halting shuffle of a beggar. We passed Winchester Palace in this manner, and St. Savior's, and on to Southwark Street. Here he turned north toward the Bridge and motioned me a few paces ahead of him. The roadway was fairly quiet at this hour, and over the wind
I could hear his flat-footed steps behind me, and the tapping stick of a blind man. As we passed under the central tower, I glanced up to where the remains of Martin Feather's head stared down with empty eye sockets. The shuffling steps behind me continued without a pause. A gentleman passed, and the next moment I heard a clink of metal on wood, and the beggar's whining thanks. He was an excellent actor, I thought, torn between shame and a twisted sort of pride. “Turn to the right,” he called, softly, as we neared the end of the Bridge. “We go to thy first place of employment, hey?”

I turned without a word, and once clear of Thames Street he joined me again, tucking a wooden bowl into the bosom of his rough jerkin and tying up the coin in his pouch. “A token for my journey—it bodes well.” Then he fell silent as we tramped down the rough plank walkway over the marsh. The wind set up a desolate wailing as we approached the former warehouse of Motheby and Southern, of which little remained but the pier. Those two had dissolved their partnership, as I had it from Ralph Downing. Motheby attempted to open a tavern on the South Bank, while Southern returned to his home in Kent and threw himself upon the mercy of relatives: two more lives ruined, or at least disrupted, by the intrigues of Martin Feather and the man beside me.

The river was at its height, lapping over the wharf. Two galle-asses were tied up at the end of the pier beside Roger Coverdale's fish warehouse—long ships from the Continent, of a kind that used to drop anchor before Motheby and Southern almost daily. My companion moved quickly from my side, stepped off the walkway, and
advanced toward the ships. What he saw between them appeared to satisfy him; he took a stone from his pouch and skimmed it over the water in the direction of the current. This must have been a signal, for he came back to me straightaway and said, “The skiff is here. Now we must find a place to change.”

He strode up the pier toward a boat shed, confident that I would follow. But I hesitated. What he asked me to do was a crime against Queen and country, yet his life was at stake. He was my father; how could I let him be taken and executed? On the other hand, how could I knowingly lend aid to a traitor? At the end of the pier he turned; the wind caught his voice and made it sound very far away. “… Richard?”

You chose it, I told myself savagely. You chose to risk and hazard all. Now finish it. I hurried after him.

In the boat shed, out of the wind, he traded his rags for my respectable garb and in so doing put on yet another identity. “Henrietta's name is on the papers, but I can rub it out,” he explained cheerfully—at least he bore me no grudge for spoiling that plan. “This will bend my sister's wit; she has no doubt been telling everybody to expect a lady. Well, I shall be Henrietta's twin. And that reminds me, how does Susanna?”

I told him what I knew, very mindful that after more than two hours together he had only now come around to inquiring of her. Nor had he inquired of me. True, he and his comrades had been watching me for the last many months and knew, in general terms, how I did. Still, it would have meant something if he had asked,
“And what of you, Richard? How is it with you?” We stood uneasily in the boat shed after changing. My doublet, handed down from Harry Condell, hung loose on him, for though he was slightly taller than me, the hardship of the last months had carved several pounds from his slender frame. I had already begun to itch; his clothes were lousy and I suspected the first thing to do on reaching home was burn them. Or chuck them in the alley and climb the roof to my room stark-naked. The wind had blown in a freezing rain that spattered like birdshot on the flimsy wooden walls of the shed. I thought of making my way home in it, and felt altogether as miserable as ever in my life. “I would know one thing more from you,” I said then.

“And what is that?”

“When you left us—what you told my aunt … She said you left because you were m-maddened by jealousy, and I must know … I must know if there was anything in it—”

“No, Richard.” His voice fell gently. “But your aunt is a woman who must have reasons, and I gave her one she would understand.”

“‘Twas a vile slander, then.” “I won't deny it, but where's the harm? I knew it would not get back to the lady in question, and never meant it to get to thee. Know, then, that thy mother was honest and true. And much too good for me.”

I wanted to ask how he could allow that good woman to waste away in the provinces and never let her know his whereabouts or
whether he lived or died. And how he could put the children of his body so out of mind as to make up a world in which they had no part—as though his imaginings meant more to him than anything real.

But the words crowded my throat and would not emerge. What finally came out, after a struggle that left me feeling hot and ashamed, was a line from
The Winter's Tale:
“Then we need no grave to bury honesty; there's not a grain of it left upon the earth.”

He was silent for some time, and though it was too dark to see anything but shadows, I could feel his eyes upon me. “You are too young for bitterness, boy. I am sorry the scene ends this way. Still, you are at the beginning of your own play, and free to make of it what you will. As for me—”

Over the steel-gray water darted two tones of a whistle, a signal from the waiting boatman.

“The tide turns. I must be off.” My father picked up my cloak to wrap himself in, then hesitated. “Why, Richard,” he said. “Would you take the beggar's cloak from him, his only covering? Here, give it back to me. 'Tis a bitter night—I must have some solace.” I felt him pluck his old patched cloak out of my hands and throw my good, warm, and whole one about my own shoulders. He accomplished this with fair grace and light spirit, disguising the fact that he had just sentenced himself to a long river passage with only a threadbare covering. “Come with me a ways before we part.”

The squall of frozen rain had passed while we were in the shed, and the wind blew a rift in the clouds. A near-full moon, now on
the rise, beamed an alien brightness. “A blessing or a curse?” he mused. “For by it I may see thee, but I dare not be seen. Well, lad—” He halted suddenly on the pier, as did I. The glancing moon silvered the water and revealed a little skiff looking small and anxious between the two galleys, its square stern tugged seaward by the tide. I felt his hand touch my arm lightly. “Who knows if we shall meet again? I must say, there is much in thee to be proud of, and I—”

His last words twisted off in a kind of sob. I turned to him and felt his cold hands on my face. My own hands moved, as though of their own will, and gripped his shoulders—those same shoulders I had perched upon as a child, that proved too unsteady to support me for long. The rain had stopped, so the wetness he felt on my face must be tears; I could not begrudge him those. It was a lifetime of longing he gathered up in his hands, he who could not hold it.

Thus he was. The lost had been found, and yet a greater part lost again. He had told me truth, but made his whole life a lie, a trick. I had searched for Leontes and found Autolycus instead.

“Ah, Richard …,” he began, and I heard great feeling in his voice but knew not what kind, or how true. I was never to know, for at that moment we heard thudding steps upon the pier and sprang apart. A fluttering figure blew at us like a full-rigged ship in a gale and plowed into my father, knocking him off-balance.

“Richard!” it cried. “Thank God I found you—I've searched everywhere—”

“What demon from hell is this!” he sputtered as I hissed at her, “Star! What is it?”

She was well-nigh undone, and the sound of my voice coming out of the beggar's clothes sent her reeling back, staring at the figure she had supposed, by the cap he was wearing, to be me. But she recovered quickly, took stock, and asked no foolish questions. “You must be off. All of us—must disappear at once. The Queen's Yeomen are searching the bank and will be here soon.”

“By the bloody nails!” my father swore. “They must have tracked me to my lodging at last, and Margery has opened her mouth and spilled the little she knew.”

“Who is Margery?” I shouted, all my wistful feeling quite gone. “Another ‘fine woman' you've taken up with?”

“Please you, Richard,” Starling begged. “Let it go!”

“Aye, Richard, let it go,” said my father, “as I go. God be with thee.” He backed away a few steps, then raised his hand. “One thing more—stick to acting. You are quite as good as me.” His triangular smile flitted by like a ghost in the moonlight, then he turned and strode down the long pier, the ragged cloak snapping. He walked with a smooth confidence, and never looked back—the playmaker of my life, who had created and moved me from afar and now left me again. Yet in spite of all I found myself admiring his self-possession. Starling tugged at my arm.

“Now
come,
you must. There's no time. I hear them.”

And indeed, over the quay came scattered shouts, cries, a splash of torchlight on the water. There was no outrunning them.
Starling appeared to have thought it out already, for, never slacking her grip on my arm, she skimmed over the pier and around to the back side of Roger Coverdale's warehouse. I cast one glance toward the river and caught the shadow of a little skiff riding the gray current, outlined by the moon. The sight stayed with me as we ducked under the boardwalk and skirted the brick foundation of the warehouse, bending low. Starling discovered an alcove in the foundation and darted in, pulling me after her. The narrow space was filled with barrels of salt fish, but we wedged between two of them, dislodging a family of rats. The briny smell burned in my nose as I leaned my head against a barrel. Broken clouds were scudding overhead, and perhaps the boat escaped detection. I wished so, and didn't wish, and was overtaken with violent shudders not entirely due to cold.

Starling told me what had happened at the Theater: how, at the beginning of the fourth act, she was accosted in the second gallery by a thin, loose-jointed young man with bright red hair sticking out from under his cap. He demanded to know why I was not playing Perdita. She refused to say anything unless he identified himself (though of course she guessed), and Bartlemy lost his temper. “He was furious to miss you, and I think it made him careless. He told me you seemed to have a special attachment to an enemy of the Queen's, and that he and I would hang together until he found you. He seized my arm and when I pulled away, he snatched me back, and so I screamed that he meant to take advantage of me. It stopped the play for an instant. He turned as red as St. George's
cross, and let me pull away from him, and everybody laughed.”

The shouting voices were very near—directly overhead. Footsteps trampled the boards one way and then another, and Starling paused in her story. We shrank against each other as though to make ourselves small, and suffered a bad moment when someone jumped off the wharf and ran along the mudflats just outside our hiding place. But the opening in the bricks is near-impossible to see at night, and the steps faded away. Starling went on. “I slipped back to the tiring rooms just long enough to tell Robin to cover for you, if you weren't in bed when he got home.”

“Lie for me, you mean.” The sound of my own voice, after lying silent for so long, surprised us both.

“I suppose. What would you have me do? He disappointed me, though—said he wouldn't get into trouble for you. Little rabbit!”

“Why should he risk his position with the Company?”

She paused, then whispered, “I would.”

“You are not Robin.” I felt drained of all emotion, including gratitude. “What else?”

“Oh, a nightmare. I ran home straightaway and of course you weren't there. I got out of Neddie what he'd read in that message to you. He dropped some hints this morning—you know how he can't keep anything to himself. But all he could say was that you were to meet somebody at the Bear Garden, so I went there, and had such a time trying to find you, with the taunts of the men and all and—oh, leave it. So I tried to think of all the places connected with this business, and went next to your aunt's house, but found
nothing—even the beggar's things were gone. So I came back across the Bridge, and on the other side I saw a party of the Yeomen marching toward me, headed east. That made me think of the warehouse, so I outran them and reached the wharf, and saw someone I thought was you, only—”

The anguish and strain of the last hours had caught up with her, and she was sobbing, unable to continue. The novelty of Starling rendered speechless bumped me out of my own misery. I felt her shaking, as I was, and opened my arm to spread my cloak around us both. She burrowed into the scratchy fabric of my father's jerkin; soon I felt the warmth of her tears through it, and the beat of her good, loyal heart. I took her hand, grateful after all.

She should not have come. I was now accessory to a crime, and she had made herself accessory to me. But I was not strong enough to bear this burden alone.

“Star,” I said. “Let us not lie anymore.”

“Of—of course not, Richard. Have I ever lied to you?”

“That fellow you took for me … was the man we knew as John Beecham. But don't ask me who it was really.”

“I think I know—” she began.

“Then don't say it. It would put you at risk, and I could tell you neither yea or nay. I don't want to lie. I cannot—”