The True Prince (20 page)

If you would know who, turn around and let him speak first.' So of course I turned around and there he was, making a most elegant bow. In truth, I was so surprised I could not have spoken my own name.”

“And you call that simple?” I said. “
Simple
would be appearing at the gate with a piece of raw meat for you.”

This was meant as a jest—mostly—but she took it ill, turning her back and speaking in a small, tight voice. “Do you mean to say I'm no better than a dog?”

“No, of course not. But look you—the last time you saw him, he appeared just the opposite of a friend. Allow me to wonder how he won you over so easily.”

“How do you know it was easy? You don't know what he said.”

I held back an impatient sigh. “Right. Forgive me, I assumed too much. What did he say?”

After a moment she made a swipe at her nose and turned around. “Leave it at this: he convinced me that what's past is past and he means you no harm. He only wants to catch a thief.”

“Well? Say on.”

“That button led him first to the Admiral's Men, because of the Robin Hood play they put on last spring. He soon determined that their Robin Hood has nothing to do with the ballads, but some of the players told him about Kit's being dismissed. That was all the gossip this summer: according to
rumor, Kit mysteriously lost his powers and tried to kill the Welsh Boy in a fit of madness. Some are even saying he succeeded, since Davy hasn't been seen. Bartlemy tried to find him but turned up Kit instead—in Captain Penny's company.”

“Has he questioned them?”

“No; he's only watching now.”

She and Bartlemy had had quite a little talk, it seemed. “Do you know if he's approached anyone else in the Company?”

“Only John Heminges, who refused to say much. He was Kit's guardian for five years, you know, and loved him like a son. But by the time you joined the Company, Kit was becoming difficult, and it's gone from bad to worse. Master Heminges feels betrayed, I think; his hurt goes so deep, he can't talk about it.”

“So Bartlemy, sensitive hound that he is, backed away from Master Heminges and came to gnaw on me.”

Angrily, she threw down a handful of rushes. “It's all of a piece with his work. It can't be easy, running down lawless men.”

“Especially when he's not much better than they.”

“Have some charity, Richard. That ring he saw could have been the other one stolen from Henry Brooke, else Bartlemy would not be so desperate to question the bearer.”

“The alehouse was dark enough I could scarce see my own hand—am I to believe that he is so eagle-eyed he could glom on a finger from halfway across the room? Here's what I think:
he saw an old fellow wearing a ring, and thought it might be Brooke's, and waylaid him on the long chance that it was. And just a few moments before he was preaching against the use of torture. ‘A confession drawn off the rack wouldn't satisfy me,' says he. As if
he
is the only one in this case who needs to be satisfied.”

My voice was rising, and she held up a hand in warning. “He may have reasons for acting as he does.”

“I care not. Whatever his reasons I want nothing more to do with him—that's flat.” So saying, I scattered the last of my rushes.

“And what of Kit?” she asked.

“What of him?”

“He could bring shame on the Company.” Her loyalty to the Company was as fierce as any player's, and she had never liked Kit.

“He
left
the Company, as you recall.”

“He hasn't left London, and his name is still linked with ours.”

I sneezed again; the rushes were irritating me, and I had slept hardly at all. Those two things made me sharper with her than I should have been. “Let Bartlemy bring him to justice, then. He doesn't need the help of a milk-faced prig like me.” Before she could reply, I started for the stairs. “The fall season begins in two days, and after church tomorrow we'll be moving our things out of storage. That leaves me one idle day; pray tell the mistress I'm going to St. Paul's.”

But this was not to be. I was dressed and on my way out the door when Master Condell called to me. “Richard! Doth my wife put you on some errand? Good—you may do one for me. Here are the receipts from our tour, all summed. Pray deliver them to Master Heminges—you'll find him at the Curtain.”

There went the morning; with a bow I took the parcel he handed me and set off toward Shoreditch. At least it made a pleasant walk, with the sun climbing the sky, the hot season turning, and a fresh breeze blowing off the river. All this helped me sort my thoughts, which badly needed sorting after my quarrel with Star. The blame for that was mostly mine, and I resolved to buy her a book at St. Paul's by way of apology.

But deeper down lay my thoughts of Kit, in a hopeless tangle. Memories of him had thronged the night, in particular of our boxing match at the Curtain. Every time I drifted toward sleep, the bloody voice of the crowd jolted me awake, along with the recollection of how we had drilled into each other and seemed for an endless moment to become a single person. And then, half dreaming, I would see him in the upper tiring room, holding out the mirror. My white-powdered face reflected in it, and his emerging behind it, were like two planets crossing in their orbits.

He had always gone his own way. What could I do to stop him?

I reached the Curtain in a gloomy state of mind made worse by the sight of our old Theater, locked and barred on the
other side of the road. Over the summer a wreath of brambles had grown up around its neglected walls until the building appeared to be caught in a stranglehold, like a castle under enchantment.

Inside the Curtain, Masters Burbage, Kempe, Heminges, and Shakespeare were gathered on the first gallery, huddled like conspirators. In the thick bars of light that fell from the narrow windows I saw eyebrows raised, heads nodding, fingers pointing. They seemed in a cheerful mood, making me wonder if they had come to an agreement with the landlord. A burst of laughter jumped out at me as I crossed the sawdust floor, then Kempe said, “But this must go no further. Keep it close, except for—” He broke off as Master Heminges nudged him, then turned to me. “What is it, boy?”

“Pardon, sirs. Master Condell sent me with the tour receipts.”

“Well done, Richard.” John Heminges, the Company treasurer, climbed over the gallery rail and took the packet from me. “I spoke with your master last night—so the tour went well, eh? He says you found your feet—and lost them once.”

His blue eyes crinkled, inviting me to laugh along with him. I managed a smile. “Aye, sir. Thanks to Crab.” He had some questions for me, which I answered as the other men broke up their meeting.

“By the bye,” concluded Master Heminges, “pass along word that we will perform here at the Curtain for six weeks,
beginning Monday. Today is a bull-baiting—we will have to watch where we step.”

He tucked the receipts under his arm and caught up with the Burbages, on their way out. The stage keeper of the Curtain had arrived, along with two of his boys, who began setting up partitions to form a bull pit. I turned to go, but a movement in the gallery caught my eye. Master Shakespeare had taken a seat and pulled out his table book. Since he was lingering, this seemed an opportunity to ask him a question that had gnawed for some time—and bit especially hard last night. I approached carefully, trying to read his mood.

To look at, he was like any other man of ambition: quietly but elegantly dressed, with a manner nicely calculated not to offend. But I had known him to snarl and snap, especially when under pressure to finish a play. Everyone left him alone when he tucked himself into an alcove behind the stage and set up his writing desk. At other times, like now, he appeared to be merely scribbling, setting down thoughts and lines as they came to him. “He leaks poetry,” Robin said once.

To me it was more like spinning poetry, trailing lines like cobwebby strands that caught in the minds of other men. I learned his words because I was required to, often with little notion what they meant—but once learned they were not easily forgotten. They would come back to me on restless nights, or in jostling crowds, or apply themselves unexpectedly to situations I found myself in. Ever since last night, for instance, I
kept hearing his words in Kit's voice: “There's a devil haunts us, in the likeness of an old fat man….”

Master Will glanced up. “What is it, lad?”

I stopped. “If you please, sir. I would … I've had a thing in mind to ask, if you could spare the time.”

He considered. Then, “Ben Jonson and his new play are to meet me here at any moment. Until he claims my time, it is yours.”

“Thank you, sir.” I stepped close enough to put my hands on the railing, like a petitioner before a judge. “There's a thing that troubles me about Sir John Oldcastle—Falstaff, I mean.”

“Aye?” He made a little frown; it had irked him to change Oldcastle's name.

“What troubles me … is that everyone likes him so much. I mean, there is nothing in him that warrants liking, yet the stage seems duller when he's not on it, and that shouldn't be … should it? A man who lies and cheats like that should scarcely be tolerated, much less given the best lines of the play … and …”

A smile had lit on his face soon after I began my speech, and as I spoke on, it spread and quivered and finally broke out in a laugh. Embarrassed, I fell silent. “And that's your complaint?”

I wished some of his poetry would leak out on my clumsy tongue. “Well— Aye, sir.”

“So your question is: Why do we love a rogue?”

“
I
don't love the rogue, sir—”

“Don't you?”

“Well …” Perhaps I did, a little. And perhaps that was the main thing that troubled me.

“Do you think Jack gets away with the king's ransom, and murder besides?”

“God is not mocked, sir. Thievery should not go unpunished.”

“True.” He thought for a moment. “You were raised in the country, were you not? So was I. Have you ever been close to a peacock?” Puzzled, I shook my head. “The great houses keep them for show. God never framed creatures so beautiful, but they bear it with ill grace—they're noisy, evil-tempered birds, and two cocks confined together will tear each other's lovely blue throats, ere long. The beauty and temper together are their nature. And there is in one part the capacity to destroy the other. Do you see the point?”

“No, sir.”

He sighed. “Then wait for Part Two of the play.”

“Wait … do you mean that Sir John's own nature will bring him down?”

“Ah. Now you are asking me to give too much away.”

His smile encouraged me to go a little further. “But I know someone like him, sir.” Master Will's expression of polite interest gave no hint he knew what I was talking about. “It's one thing to watch justice work in a play, but real life is … different.”

He looked at me keenly for a moment, then shut his book. “Perhaps not so different. A good play is like life, except that it tells, swift and at a safe distance, what life can only tell over time and up close. And you cannot merely watch your life from a place of safety in the gallery; you must act in it, at your peril.”

“But what if you don't know how to act? Or what your role is?”

His eyebrows rose. “Are you asking
me
that? I am a humble poet, not Holy Writ.”

“Of course, sir. Forgive me, sir.” I dropped my hands from the railing and backed away. “I shall look forward to Part Two.”

“You and all the rest of London. I pray you will not be disappointed.”

He had a reputation to maintain as the city's leading author, and it must have weighed heavily on him at times. I bowed a farewell as Ben Jonson bustled into the theater with a bulky manuscript under his arm. Master Jonson's plays had thus far been the property of the Admiral's Men, but we were to perform one of them in September. I had heard that our rivals were not pleased. “Ho, Will!” he cried. “I made the cuts—raw butchery, I call it!”

I took my leave, mostly unsatisfied, but more eager to learn the outcome of Part Two. For now, half the day remained for me to snatch some time for myself in St. Paul's churchyard.

As the day was fine, most of London seemed to be struck with the same notion, and I had to dodge shoulders and elbows while making my way down the rows of stalls. St. Paul's is home to almost all the booksellers and stationers of the city. The larger shops cluster around the cathedral walls, where a patron might find elegant bound copies of theology, poetry, history, and law. The stalls were friendlier to my purse, and livelier as well, with broadsides, ballads, and quartos rippling in the breeze and apprentices bawling their wares: “What do you lack, sirs? Here's a marvelous strange account of the late voyage to the New World, and the wild men there encountered!” “Here, friends! Here be the last words of the murdering fiend Black Hand before his hanging on Tyburn Hill!” “What do you lack, gentlemen? Here's news of the latest adventure of him they call Robin Hood—”

“What's that?” I stopped, as though I'd run against an invisible wall, and made a grab for the paper.

“Ah no, sir.” The boy who had been crying the ballad stuck it behind his broad back. “I'll see your penny first.”

“Little chiseler! Ballads are a halfpenny.”

“Not when they are this fresh, and no other stationer has them.”

I didn't believe this, but paid the penny anyhow and stepped aside to scan the sheet of paper he gave me.

It was illustrated with a woodcut showing a young girl beside a river, hands raised so stiffly she resembled a fork.

Two men in a wherry were rowing toward her, while another man stuck his head out of the water off their bow, grinning like a crocodile. The picture raised all sorts of questions, answered by the ballad: a tale of how Robin and his accomplices set up a vague, colorless knight called “Sir Biscuit.” At “dusk of day” (Master Hood's favorite time for mischief) while on his way upriver, Sir Biscuit was diverted by a cry of distress from the bank. A pretty little child in costly dress was sobbing that her brother had fallen into the water.