Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Bernard Cornwell 2017

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018. Cover images © World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo (London panorama); Ian Dagnall/Alamy Stock Photo (Shakespeare’s last will and testament).

Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Part One illustration: 17th century view of London © Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

Part Two illustration: Elizabethan theatre scene © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy

Part Three illustration: The Globe Theatre from ‘Old and New London’ by Edward Walford © Montagu Images/Alamy

Part Four illustration: Scene from an Elizabethan playhouse © Chronicle/Alamy

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780007504145

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2018 ISBN: 9780007504138

Version: 2018-10-17

Dedication

Fools and Mortals

is dedicated, with affection,

to all the actors, actresses, directors,

musicians and technicians of the

Monomoy Theatre

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Part One: Excellent Men

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Two: Reason and Love

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Three: Things Base and Vile

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Four: A Sweet Comedy

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

Historical Note

About the Author

Keep Reading …

Also by Bernard Cornwell

The SHARPE Series (in chronological order)

The SHARPE Series (in order of publication)

About the Publisher

Map

PUCK: Lord, what fools these mortals be!

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Act III, Scene 2, line 115

HIPPOLYTA: This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.

THESEUS: The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

HIPPOLYTA: It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.

THESEUS: If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Act V, Scene 1, lines 207ff

PART ONE

EXCELLENT MEN

ONE

I DIED JUST after the clock in the passageway struck nine.

There are those who claim that Her Majesty, Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France, and of Ireland, will not allow clocks to strike the hour in her palaces. Time is not allowed to pass for her. She has defeated time. But that clock struck. I remember it.

I counted the bells. Nine. Then my killer struck.

And I died.

My brother says there is only one way to tell a story. ‘Begin,’ he says in his irritatingly pedantic manner, ‘at the beginning. Where else?’

I see I have started a little too late, so we shall go back to five minutes before nine, and begin again.

Imagine, if you will, a woman. She is no longer young, nor is she old. She is tall, and, I am constantly told, strikingly handsome. On the night of her death she is wearing a gown made from the darkest blue velvet, embroidered with a mass of silver stars, each star studded with a pearl. Panels of watered silk, pale lavender in colour, billow through the open-fronted skirt as she moves. The same expensive silk lines her sleeves, the lavender showing through slits cut into the star-studded velvet. The skirt brushes the floor, hiding her delicate slippers, which are cut from an antique tapestry. Such slippers were uncomfortable, as tapestry shoes always are unless lined with linen or, better, satin. She wears a ruff, high at the back and starched stiff, and above it her striking face is framed by raven-black hair, which is pinned into elaborate coils and rolls, all looped with strings of pearls to match the necklace that hangs down her bodice. A coronet of silver, again decorated with pearls, shows her high rank. Her pale face shimmers with a strange, almost unearthly glow, reflecting the light from the flames of a myriad candles, while her eyes are darkened, and her lips reddened. She has a straight back, and throws her hips forward and pushes her shoulders back so that her silk-clad bosom, which is neither too large nor vanishingly small, draws the eye. She draws many eyes that night for she is, as I am frequently told, a hauntingly beautiful woman.

The beautiful woman is in the company of two men and a younger woman, one of whom is her killer, though she does not yet know it. The younger woman is dressed every bit as beautifully as the older, if anything her bodice and skirt are even more expensive, bright with pale silks and precious stones. She has fair hair piled high, and a face of innocent loveliness, though that is deceptive, for she is pleading for the older woman’s imprisonment and disfigurement. She is the older woman’s rival in love, and, being younger and no less beautiful, she will win this confrontation. The two men listen, amused, as the younger woman insults her rival, and then watch as she picks up a heavy iron stand that holds four candles. She dances, pretending that the iron stand is a man. The candles flicker and smoke, but none goes out. The girl dances gracefully, puts the stand down, and gives one of the men a brazen look. ‘If thou would’st know me,’ she says archly, ‘then thou would’st know my grievance.’

‘Know you?’ the older woman intervenes, ‘oh, thou art known!’ It is a witty retort, clearly spoken, though the older woman’s voice is somewhat hoarse and breathy.

‘Thy grievance, lady,’ the shorter of the two men says, ‘is my duty.’ He draws a dagger. For a candle-flickering pause it seems he is about to plunge the blade into the younger woman, but then he turns and strikes at the older. The clock, a mechanical marvel that must be in the corridor just outside the hall, has started striking, and I count the bells.

The onlookers gasp.

The dagger slides between the older woman’s waist and her right arm. She gasps too. Then she staggers. In her left hand, hidden from the shocked onlookers, is a very small knife that she uses to pierce a pig’s bladder concealed in a simple linen pouch hanging by woven silver ropes from her belt. The belt is pretty, fashioned from cream-coloured kidskin with diamond-shaped panels of scarlet cloth on which small pearls glitter. When pricked, the pouch releases a gush of sheep’s blood.

‘I am slain,’ she cries, ‘alas! I am slain!’ I did not write the line, so I am not responsible for the older woman stating what must already have been obvious. The younger woman screams, not in shock, but in exultation.

The older woman staggers some more, turning now so that the onlookers can see the blood. If we had not been in a palace, then we would not have used the sheep’s blood, because the velvet gown was too rich and expensive, but for Elizabeth, for whom time does not exist, we must spend. So we spend. The blood soaks the velvet gown, hardly showing because the cloth is so dark, but plenty of blood stains the lavender silk, and spatters the canvas that has been spread across the Turkey carpets. The woman now sways, cries again, falls to her knees, and, with another exclamation, dies. In case anyone thinks she is merely fainting, she calls out two last despairing words, ‘I die!’ And then she dies.

The clock has just struck nine times.

The killer takes the coronet from the corpse’s hair, and, with elaborate courtesy, presents it to the younger woman. He then seizes the dead woman’s hands, and, with unnecessary force, drags her from view. ‘Her body here we’ll leave,’ he says loudly, grunting with the effort of pulling the corpse, ‘to moulder and to time’s eternity.’ He hides the woman behind a tall screen, which mostly hides a door at the back of the stage. The screen is decorated with embroidered panels showing entwined red and white roses springing from two leafy vines.

‘A pox on you,’ the dead woman says softly.

‘Piss on your bollocks,’ her killer whispers, and goes back to where the audience is motionless and silent, shocked by the sudden death of such dark beauty.

I was the older woman.

The room where I have just died is lit by countless candles, but behind the screen it is shadowed dark as death. I crawled to the half open door and wriggled through into the antechamber, taking care not to disturb the door itself, the top of which can be seen above the rosy screen.

‘Gawd help us, Richard,’ Jean said to me, speaking softly. She brushed a hand down my beautiful skirt that was stained with sheep’s blood. ‘What a mess!’

‘Will it wash out?’ I asked, standing.

‘It might,’ she said dubiously, ‘but it will never be the same again, will it? Pity that.’ Jean is a good woman, a widow, and our seamstress. ‘Here, let me wet the silk.’ She went to fetch a jug of water and a cloth.

A dozen men and boys lounged at the room’s edges. Alan was sitting close to two candles and silently mouthing words he was reading from a long piece of paper, while George Bryan and Will Kemp were playing cards, using one of our tiring boxes as a table. Kemp grinned. ‘One day he’ll stick that knife right through your ribs,’ he said to me, then grimaced, pretending to die. ‘He’d like that. So would I.’

‘A pox on you too,’ I said.

‘You should be nice to him,’ Jean said to me as she began dabbing ineffectually at the sheep’s blood. ‘Your brother, I mean,’ she went on. I said nothing, just stood there as she tried to clean the silk. I was half listening to the players in the great chamber where the Queen sits on her throne.

This was the fifth time I had played for the Queen; twice in Greenwich, twice at Richmond, and now at Whitehall, and folk are forever asking what is she like, and I usually make up an answer because she is impossible to see or describe. Most of the candles were at the players’ end of the hall, and Elizabeth, by the grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland, sat beneath a rich red canopy that shadowed her, but even in the shadow I could see her face white as a gull, unmoving, stern, beneath red hair piled high and crowned with silver or gold. She sat still as a statue except when she laughed. Her face, so white, looked disapproving, but it was evident she enjoyed the plays, and the courtiers watched her as much as they watched us, looking for clues as to whether they should enjoy us or not.

Her bosom was white like her face, and I knew she was wearing ceruse, a paste that makes the skin white and smooth. She wore her dresses low like a young girl enticing men with a hint of pale breasts, though God knows she was old. She did not look old, and she glowed in her expensive fabrics, which were studded with jewels that caught the candlelight. So old, so still, so pale, so royal. We dared not look at her, because to catch her eye would break the illusion we offered her, but I would snatch a glimpse when I could, seeing her paste-white face above the perfumed crowd, who sat on the lower seats.

‘I might have to sew new silk into the skirt,’ Jean said, still talking softly, then she shivered as a gust of wind blew rain against the antechamber’s high windows. ‘Nasty night to be out,’ she said, ‘raining like the devil’s piss, it is.’

‘How long before this piece of shit ends?’ Will Kemp asked.

‘Fifteen minutes,’ Alan said without looking up from the paper he was reading.

Simon Willoughby came through the door from the great hall. He was playing the younger woman, my rival, and he was grinning. He is a pretty boy, just sixteen years old, and he tossed the coronet to Jean then twirled around so that his bright pale skirts flared outwards. ‘We were good tonight!’ he said happily.

‘You’re always good, Simon,’ Will Kemp said fondly.

‘Not so loud, Simon, not so loud,’ Alan cautioned with a smile.

‘Where are you going?’ Jean demanded of me. I had gone to the door leading to the courtyard.

‘I need a piss.’

‘Don’t let the velvet get wet,’ she hissed. ‘Here, take this!’ She brought me a heavy cloak and draped it around my shoulders.

I went out into the yard where rain seethed on the cobbles, and I stood under the shelter of a wooden arcade that ran like a cheap cloister about the courtyard’s edge. I shivered. Winter was coming. There was a deeply arched gateway on the yard’s far side where two torches guttered feebly. Something dark twitched in the arcade’s corner. A rat perhaps, or one of the cats that lived in the palace. A pox on the palace, I thought, and a pox on Her Majesty, for whom time does not exist. She likes her plays to begin in the middle of the afternoon, but the visit of an ambassador had delayed this performance, and it would be a wet, dark and cold journey home.

‘I thought you needed to piss?’ Simon Willoughby had followed me into the courtyard.

‘I just wanted some fresh air.’

‘It was hot in there,’ he said, then hauled up his pretty skirts and began to piss into the rain, ‘but we were good, weren’t we?’ I said nothing. ‘Did you see the Queen?’ he asked. ‘She was watching me!’ Again I said nothing because there was nothing to say. Of course the Queen had been watching him. She had watched all of us. She had summoned us! ‘Did you see me dance with that tall candle-stand?’ Simon asked.

‘I did,’ I said curtly, then strolled away from him, following the cloister-like arcade about the courtyard’s edge. I knew he wanted me to praise him because young Simon Willoughby needs praise like a whore needs silver, but there could never be enough compliments to satisfy him. Other than that he is a decent enough boy, a good actor and, with his long blond hair, pretty enough to make men sigh when he plays a girl.

‘It was my idea,’ he called after me, ‘to pretend the candle-stand was a man!’

I ignored him.

‘It was good, wasn’t it?’ he asked plaintively.

I was at the courtyard’s far side now, deep in the shadows. No hint of the flames guttering in the archway could reach me here. There was a door to my right, barely visible, and I opened it cautiously. Whatever room lay beyond was in even deeper darkness. I sensed it was a small room, but did not enter, just listened, hearing nothing above the wind’s bluster and the rain’s ceaseless beat. I was hoping to find something to steal, something I could sell, something small and easily hidden. In Greenwich Palace I had found a small bag of seed pearls which must have been dropped and lay half obscured beneath a tapestry-covered stool in a passageway, and I had hidden the small bag beneath my skirts, then sold the pearls to an apothecary who ground them small and used them to cure insanity, or so he said. He paid me far less than they were worth because he knew they were stolen, but I still made more money in that one day than I usually make in a month.

‘Richard?’ Simon Willoughby called. I kept silent. The dark room smelled foul, as if it had been used to store horse feed that had turned rotten. I reckoned there would be nothing to steal and so closed the door.

‘Richard?’ Simon called again. I remained silent and did not move, knowing I would be invisible in my dark cloak. I liked Simon well enough, but I was in no mood to tell him over and over how good he had been.

Then a door on the courtyard’s far side opened, letting a wash of lantern-light into the rain-soaked courtyard. At first I thought it would be one of the players, come to let us know we were needed, but instead it was a man I had never seen before. He was young and he was rich. It is easy to tell the rich from their clothes, and this man was dressed in a doublet of shining yellow silk, slashed with blue. His hose was yellow, his high boots brown and polished. He wore a sword. His hat was blue with a long feather, and there was gold at his throat and more gold on his belt, but what stood out most was his long hair, so palely blond that it was almost white. I wondered if it was a wig. ‘Simon?’ the young man called.

Simon Willoughby answered with a nervous giggle.

‘Are you alone?’

‘I think so, my lord.’ Simon had heard me open and close a door, and must have thought I had gone into the palace. Then the far door closed, plunging the newcomer into shadow. I was utterly still, just another shadow within a shadow. The young man walked towards Simon, and the guttering torches in the gate arch threw just enough light for me to see that his boots had heels like those on women’s shoes. He was short and wanted to look taller. ‘Richard was here,’ I heard Simon say, ‘but he’s gone. I think he’s gone.’

The man said nothing, just pushed Simon against the wall and kissed him. I saw him haul up Simon’s skirts and I held my breath. The two were pressed together.

There was nothing surprising in this, except that his lordship, whoever he was, had not waited till the play’s ending to find Simon Willoughby. Every time we had played at one of the Queen’s palaces, the lordlings had come to the tiring room, and I had watched Simon disappear with one or other of them, which explained why Simon Willoughby always appeared to have money. I had none, which is why I needed to thieve.

‘Oh yes,’ I heard Simon say, ‘my lord!’

I crept nearer. My tapestry slippers were silent on the stones. The wind fretted loud around the palace roofs, and the rain, already relentless, increased in vehemence to drown whatever the two said. There was just enough light from the becketed torches to see Simon’s head bent back, his mouth open, and, still curious, I crept still nearer. ‘My lord!’ Simon cried, almost in pain.

His lordship chuckled and stepped back, releasing Simon’s skirts. ‘My little whore,’ he said, though not in an unkind voice. I could see that even with the women’s heels on his boots he was no taller than Simon, who is a full head shorter than me. ‘I don’t want you tonight,’ his lordship said, ‘but do your duty, little Simon, do your duty, and you shall live in my household.’ He said something more, though I could not hear it because the wind gusted to drive hard rain on the cloister’s roof, then his lordship leaned forward, kissed Simon’s cheek, and went back to the tiring room.

I stayed still. Simon was leaning against the wall, gasping. ‘So who is the dwarf?’ I asked.

‘Richard!’ he sounded both scared and alarmed. ‘Is that you?’

‘Of course it’s me. Who is his lordship?’

‘Just a friend,’ he said, then he was saved from answering any more questions because the antechamber door opened again, and Will Kemp leaned out. ‘You two whores, come,’ he snarled. ‘You’re needed! It’s the ending.’

My brother was evidently speaking the epilogue. I knew he had composed it specially, draping it onto the play’s end like ribbons on the tail of a harvest-home horse, and doubtless it smothered the Queen with compliments.

‘Come!’ Will Kemp snapped again, and we both hurried back inside.

When we are at the playhouse, we end every performance with a jig. Even the tragedies end with a jig. We dance, and Will Kemp clowns, and the boys playing the girls squeal. Will scatters insults and makes bawdy jokes, the audience roars, and the tragedy is forgotten, but when we play for Her Majesty, we neither dance nor clown. We make no jokes about pricks and buttocks, instead we line like supplicants at the edge of the stage and bow respectfully to show that, though we might have pretended to be kings and queens, to be dukes and duchesses, and even gods and goddesses, we know our humble place. We are mere players, and as far beneath the palace audience as hell’s goblins are beneath heaven’s bright angels. And so, that night, we made obeisance, and the audience, because the Queen had nodded her approval, rewarded us with applause. I am certain half of them had hated the play, but they took their cue from Her Majesty, and applauded politely. The Queen just stared at us imperiously, her bone-white face unreadable, and then she stood, the courtiers fell silent, we all bowed again, and she was gone.

And so our play was over.

‘We shall meet at the Theatre,’ my brother announced when, at last, we were all back in the antechamber. He clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention because he knew he needed to speak swiftly before some of the lords and ladies from the audience came into the room. ‘We need everyone who has a part in Comedy, and in Hester. No one else need come.’

‘Musicians too?’ someone asked.

‘Musicians too, at the Theatre, tomorrow morning, early.’

Someone groaned. ‘How early?’

‘Nine of the clock,’ my brother said.

More groaning. ‘Will we be playing The Dead Man’s Fortune tomorrow?’ one of the hired men asked.

‘Don’t be an arsehole,’ Will Kemp answered instead of my brother, ‘how can we?’

The urgency and the scorn were both caused by a sickness that had afflicted Augustine Phillips, one of the company’s principal players, and Christopher Beeston, who was Augustine’s apprentice and lodged in his house. Both were too ill to work. Fortunately, Augustine was not in the play we had just performed, and I had been able to learn Christopher’s part and so take his place. We would need to replace the two in other plays, though if the rain that still seethed outside did not end then there would be no performance at the Theatre the next day. But that problem was forgotten as the door from the hall opened and a half-dozen lords with their perfumed ladies entered. My brother bowed low. I saw the young fair-haired man with the blue-slashed yellow doublet, and was surprised that he ignored Simon Willoughby. He walked right past him, and Simon, plainly forewarned, did nothing except offer a bow.

I turned my back on the visitors as I stepped out of my skirts, shrugged off the bodice, and pulled on my grubby shirt. I used a damp cloth to wipe off the ceruse that had whitened my skin and bosom, ceruse that had been mixed with crushed pearls to make the skin glow in the candlelight. I had retreated to the darkest corner of the room, praying no one would notice me, nor did they. I was also praying that we would be offered somewhere to sleep in the palace, perhaps a stable, but no such offer came except to those who, like my brother, lived inside the city walls and so could not get home before the gates opened at dawn. The rest of us were expected to leave, rain or no rain. It was near midnight by the time we left, and the walk home around the city’s northern edge took me at least an hour. It still rained, the road was night-black dark, but I walked with three of the hired men, which was company enough to deter any footpad crazy enough to be abroad in the foul weather. I had to wake Agnes, the maid who slept in the kitchen of the house where I rented the attic room, but Agnes was in love with me, poor girl, and did not mind. ‘You should stay here in the kitchen,’ she suggested coyly, ‘it’s warm!’

Instead I crept upstairs, careful not to wake the Widow Morrison, my landlady, to whom I owed too much rent, and, having stripped off my soaking wet clothes, I shivered under the thin blanket until I finally slept.

I woke next morning tired, cold, and damp. I pulled on a doublet and hose, crammed my hair into its cap, wiped my face with a half-frozen cloth, used the jakes in the backyard, swallowed a mug of weak ale, snatched a hard crust from the kitchen, promised to pay the Widow Morrison the rent I owed, and then went out into a chill morning. At least it was not raining.

I had two ways to reach the playhouse from the widow’s house. I could either turn left in the alley and then walk north up Bishopsgate Street, but most mornings that street was crowded with sheep or cows being herded towards the city’s slaughterhouses, and, besides, after the rain, it would be ankle deep in mud, shit, and muck, and so I turned right and leaped the open sewer that edged Finsbury Fields. I slipped as I landed, and my right foot shot back into the green-scummed water.

‘You appear with your customary grace,’ a sarcastic voice said. I looked up and saw my brother had chosen to walk north through the Fields rather than edge past frightened cattle in the street. John Heminges, another player in the company, was with him.

‘Good morrow, brother,’ I said, picking myself up.

He ignored that greeting and offered me no help as I scrambled up the slippery bank. Nettles stung my right hand, and I cursed, making him smile. It was John Heminges who stepped forward and held out a helping hand. I thanked him and looked resentfully at my brother. ‘You might have helped me,’ I said.

‘I might indeed,’ he agreed coldly. He wore a thick woollen cloak and a dark hat with an extravagant brim that shadowed his face. I look nothing like him. I am tall, thin-faced, and clean shaven, while he has a round, blunt face with a weak beard, full lips, and very dark eyes. My eyes are blue, his are secretive, shadowed, and always watching cautiously. I knew he would have preferred to walk on, ignoring me, but my sudden arrival in the ditch had forced him to acknowledge me and even talk to me. ‘Young Simon was excellent last night,’ he said, with false enthusiasm.

‘So he told me,’ I said, ‘often.’

He could not resist the smallest smile, a twitch that betrayed amusement and was immediately banished. ‘Dancing with the candle-stand?’ he went on, pretending not to have noticed my reply. ‘That was good.’ I knew he praised Simon Willoughby to annoy me.

‘Where is Simon?’ I asked. I would have expected Simon Willoughby to be with his apprentice master, John Heminges.

‘I …’ Heminges began, then just looked sheepish.

‘He’s smearing the sheets of some lordly bed,’ my brother said, as if the answer were obvious, ‘of course.’

‘He has friends in Westminster,’ John Heminges said, sounding embarrassed. He is a little younger than my brother, perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, but usually played older parts. He is a kind man who knows of the antagonism between my brother and I, and does his ineffectual best to relieve it.

My brother glanced at the sky. ‘I do believe it’s clearing. Not before time. But we can’t perform anything this afternoon, and that’s a pity.’ He gave me a sour smile. ‘It means no money for you today.’

‘We’re rehearsing, aren’t we?’ I asked.

‘You’re not paid for rehearsing,’ he said, ‘just for performing.’

‘We could stage The Dead Man’s Fortune?’ John Heminges put in, eager to stop our bickering.

‘Not without Augustine and Christopher,’ my brother said.

‘I suppose not, no, of course not. A pity! I like it.’

‘It’s a strange piece,’ my brother said, ‘but not without virtues. Two couples, and both the women enamoured of other men! Space there for some dance steps!’

‘We’re putting dances into it?’ Heminges asked, puzzled.

‘No, no, no, I mean scope for complications. Two women and four men. Too many men! Too many men!’ My brother had paused to gaze at the windmills across the Fields as he spoke. ‘Then there’s the love potion! An idea with possibilities, but all wrong, all wrong!’

‘Why wrong?’

‘Because the girls’ fathers concoct the potion. It should be the sorceress! What is the value of a sorceress if she doesn’t perform sorcery?’

‘She has a magic mirror,’ I pointed out. I knew because I played the sorceress.

‘Magic mirror!’ he said scornfully. He was striding on again, perhaps attempting to leave me behind. ‘Magic mirror!’ he said again. ‘That’s a mountebank’s trick. Magic lies in the …’ he paused, then decided that whatever he had been about to say would be wasted on me. ‘Not that it signifies! We can’t perform the play without Augustine and Christopher.’

‘How’s the Verona play?’ Heminges asked.

If I had dared ask that same question I would have been ignored, but my brother liked Heminges. Even so he was reluctant to answer in front of me. ‘Almost finished,’ he said vaguely, ‘almost.’ I knew he was writing a play set in Verona, a city in Italy, and that he had been forced to interrupt the writing to devise a wedding play for our patron, Lord Hunsdon. He had grumbled about the interruption.

‘You still like it?’ Heminges asked, oblivious to my brother’s irritation.

‘I’d like it more if I could finish it,’ he said savagely, ‘but Lord Hunsdon wants a wedding play, so damn Verona.’ We walked on in silence. To our right, beyond the scummed ditch and a brick wall, lay the Curtain, a playhouse built to rival ours. A blue flag flew from the staff on the Curtain’s high roof announcing that there would be an entertainment that afternoon. ‘Another beast show,’ my brother said derisively. There had been no plays at the Curtain for months, and it seemed there would be no play at the Theatre this afternoon either. We had nothing to perform until other players learned Augustine and Christopher’s parts. We could have performed the play we had presented to the Queen, except we had done it too often in the past month. Perform a play too often, and the audience is liable to pelt the stage with empty ale bottles.

We came to the wooden bridge that crossed the sewer ditch and which led to a crude gap in the long brick wall. Beyond the gap was the Theatre, our playhouse, a great wooden turret as tall as a church steeple. It had been James Burbage’s idea to build the playhouse, and his idea to make the bridge and pierce the wall, which meant playgoers did not have to walk up muddy Bishopsgate to reach us, but instead could leave the city through Cripplegate and stroll across Finsbury Fields. So many folk made that journey that there was now a broad and muddy path running diagonally across the open ground. ‘Does that cloak belong to the company?’ my brother asked as we crossed the bridge.

‘Yes.’

‘Make sure it’s returned to the tiring room,’ he said snidely, then stopped in the wall’s gap. He let John Heminges walk ahead, and then, for the first time since we had met at the ditch’s edge, looked up into my eyes. He had to look up because I was a full head taller. ‘You are going to stay with the company?’ he asked.

‘I can’t afford to,’ I said. ‘I owe rent. You’re not giving me enough work.’

‘Then stop spending your evenings in the Falcon,’ was his answer. I thought he would say no more because he walked on, but after two paces he turned back to me. ‘You’ll get more work,’ he said brusquely. ‘With Augustine sick and his boy sweating? We have to replace them.’

‘You won’t give me Augustine’s parts,’ I said, ‘and I’m too old to play girls.’

‘You’ll play what we ask you to play. We need you, at least through the winter.’

‘You need me!’ I threw that back into his face. ‘Then pay me more.’

He ignored the demand. ‘We begin today by rehearsing Hester,’ he said coldly, ‘we’ll only be working on Augustine and Christopher’s scenes. Tomorrow we’ll perform Hester, and we’ll play the Comedy on Saturday. I expect you to be here.’

I shrugged. In Hester and Ahasuerus I played Uashti, and in the Comedy I was Emilia. I knew all the lines. ‘You pay William Sly twice what you pay me,’ I said, ‘and my parts are just as large as his.’

‘Maybe because he’s twice as good as you? Besides, you’re my brother,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘Just stay through the winter, and after that? Do what you will. Leave the company and starve, if that’s what you want.’ He walked on towards the playhouse.

And I spat after him. Brotherly love.

George Bryan paced to the front of the stage, where he bowed so low that he almost lost his balance. ‘Noble Prince,’ he said when he recovered his footing, ‘according as I am bound, I will do you service till death me do confound.’

Isaiah Humble, the bookkeeper, coughed to attract attention. ‘Sorry! It’s “till death me confound”. There’s no “do”. Sorry!’

‘It’s better with the “do”,’ my brother said mildly.

‘It’s crapulous shit with or without the “do”,’ Alan Rust said, ‘but if George wants to say “do”, Master Humble, then he says “do”.’

‘Sorry,’ Isaiah said from his stool at the back of the stage.

‘You were right to correct him,’ my brother consoled him, ‘it’s your job.’

‘Sorry, though.’

George swept off his hat and bowed again. ‘Something, something, something,’ he said, ‘till death me do confound.’ George Bryan, a nervous and worried man who somehow always appeared confident and decisive when the playhouse was full, had replaced the sick Augustine Phillips. The rehearsal was to bind him and Simon Willoughby, who had replaced Christopher Beeston, into the play.

John Heminges acknowledged George’s second bow with a languid wave of a hand. ‘For a season we will, to our solace, into our orchard or some other place.’

Will Kemp bounded onto the stage with a mighty leap. ‘He that will drink wine,’ he bellowed, ‘and hath never a vine, must send or go to France. And if he do not he must needs shrink!’ On the word shrink he crouched, looked alarmed, and clutched his codpiece, which sent Simon Willoughby into a fit of giggling.

‘Do we go to the orchard?’ George interrupted Will Kemp to ask.

‘The orchard, yes,’ Isaiah said, ‘or some other place. That’s what it says in the text, “orchard or some other place”.’ He waved the prompt copy. ‘Sorry, Will.’

‘I’d like to know if it is the orchard.’

‘Why?’ Alan Rust asked belligerently.

‘Do I imagine trees? Or some other place without trees?’ George looked anxious. ‘It helps to know.’

‘Imagine trees,’ Rust barked. ‘Apple trees. Where you meet Hardydardy.’ He gestured towards Will Kemp.

‘Are the apples ripe?’ George asked.

‘Does it matter?’ Rust asked.

‘If they’re ripe,’ George said, still looking worried, ‘I could eat one.’

‘They’re small apples,’ Rust said, ‘unripe, like Simon’s tits.’

‘Isn’t this a tale from the scriptures?’ John Heminges put in.

‘My tits aren’t small,’ Simon Willoughby said, hefting his scrawny chest.

‘It’s from the Old Testament,’ my brother said, ‘you’ll find the story in the Book of Esther.’

‘But there’s no one called Hardydardy in the Bible!’ John Heminges said.

‘There bloody well is now,’ Alan Rust said. ‘Can we move on?’

‘Book of Esther?’ George asked. ‘Then why is she called Hester?’

‘Because the Reverend William Venables, who wrote this piece of shit, didn’t know his arse from his shrivelled prick,’ Alan Rust said forcefully. ‘Now will you all be quiet and let Will speak his lines?’

‘If it’s so bad,’ George asked, ‘why are we doing it again?’

‘Can you think of another play we can fit by tomorrow?’

‘No.’

‘Then that’s why.’

‘Go on, Will,’ my brother said tiredly.

‘There’s a loose board here,’ George said, stubbing his toe at the front of the stage, ‘that’s why I almost fell over when I bowed.’

‘I lack both drink and meat,’ Will Kemp appealed to the empty galleries of the Theatre, ‘but, as I say, a dog hath a day, my time is come to get some!’

‘Get some!’ Simon Willoughby almost peed himself with laughter. He had arrived at the Theatre before me, and looked surprisingly sprightly and alert. ‘You didn’t go home last night?’ I had asked him, but instead of answering he just grinned. ‘Did he pay you?’ I asked.

‘Perhaps.’

‘You can lend me some?’

‘I’m needed onstage,’ he had said, and hurried away.

‘Shouldn’t that be “meat and drink”?’ George now interrupted the rehearsal again.

‘It’s my line,’ Will Kemp growled, ‘why should you care?’

Isaiah peered at the text. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Will got it right, it’s “drink and meat”, sorry.’

I was feeling tired, so I wandered out of the yard and through the shadowed entrance tunnel where Jeremiah Poll, an old soldier who had lost an eye in Ireland, guarded the outer gate. ‘It’s going to rain again,’ he said as I passed, and I nodded. Jeremiah said it every time I passed him, even on the warmest, driest days. I could hear the clash and scrape of blades, and emerged into the weak sunlight to see Richard Burbage and Henry Condell practising their sword skills. They were fast, their blades darting, retreating, crossing, and lunging. Henry laughed at something Richard Burbage said, then saw me, and his sword went upwards as he stepped back and motioned with his dagger hand for the practice to stop. They both turned to look at me, but I pretended not to have noticed them and went to the door that led to the galleries. I heard them laugh as I stepped through.

I climbed the short stairs to the lower gallery, from where I glanced across at the stage where George was still fretting about apples or loose planks, then, as the sound of the swords started again, I lay down. I was playing Uashti, a queen of Persia, but my lines would not be needed for at least an hour, and so I closed my eyes.

I was woken by a kick to my legs and opened my eyes to see James Burbage standing over me. ‘There are Percies in your house,’ he said.

‘There are what?’ I asked, struggling to wake and stand up.

‘Percies,’ he said, ‘in your house. I just walked past.’

‘They’re there for Father Laurence,’ I explained, ‘the bastards.’

‘They’ve been before?’

‘The bastards come every month.’

Father Laurence, like me, lived in the Widow Morrison’s house. He was an ancient priest who rented the room directly beneath my attic, though I suspected the widow let him live there for free. He was in his sixties, half crippled by pains in his joints, but still with a spry mind. He was a Roman Catholic priest, which was reason enough to have most men dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn or Tower Hill and there have their innards plucked out while they still lived, but Father Laurence was a Marian priest, meaning he had been ordained during the reign of our Queen’s half-sister, the Catholic Queen Mary, and such men, if they made no trouble, were allowed to live. Father Laurence made no trouble, but the Pursuivants, those men who hunted down traitorous Catholics, were forever searching his room as if the poor old man might be hiding a Jesuit behind his close-stool. They never found anything because my brother had hidden Father Laurence’s vestments and chalices among the Theatre’s costumes and properties.

‘They’ll find nothing,’ I said, ‘they never do.’ I looked towards the stage. ‘Do they need me?’

‘It’s the dance of the Jewish women,’ James Burbage said, ‘so no.’

On the stage Simon Willoughby, Billy Rowley, Alexander Cooke and Tom Belte were prancing in a line, goaded by a man who carried a silver-tipped staff with which he rapped their legs or arms. ‘Higher!’ he called. ‘You’re here to show your legs. Leap, you spavined infants, leap!’

‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

‘Ralph Perkins. Friend of mine. He teaches dancing at the court.’

‘At the court?’ I was impressed.

‘The Queen likes to see dancing done well. So do I.’

‘One, two, three, four, five, leap!’ Ralph Perkins called. ‘It’s the galliard, you lumpen urchins, not some country dump dance! Leap!’

‘Goddam ill fortune about Augustine and his boy,’ James Burbage grumbled.

‘They’ll recover?’

‘Who knows? They’ve been purged, bled, and buggered about. They might. I pray they do.’ He frowned. ‘Simon Willoughby will be busy till Christopher recovers.’

‘That’ll please him,’ I said sourly.

‘But not you?’ I shrugged and did not answer. I was frightened of James Burbage. He leased the Theatre, which made him the owner of the building if not the land on which it stood, and his eldest son, called Richard like me, was one of our leading players. James had been a player himself once, and, before that, a carpenter, and he still had the muscular build of a man who worked with his hands. He was tall, grey-haired, and hard-faced, with a short beard, and though he no longer acted, he was a Sharer, one of the eight men who shared the expenses of the Theatre and divided the profits among themselves. ‘He drives a hard bargain,’ my brother, another of the Sharers, had once told me, ‘but he keeps to it. He’s a good man.’ Now James frowned at the stage as he talked to me. ‘Are you still thinking about leaving?’

I said nothing.

‘Henry Lanman,’ Burbage said the name flatly, ‘has that bastard been talking to you?’

‘No.’

‘Is he trying to poach you?’

‘No,’ I said again.

‘But is your brother right? He says you’re thinking of walking away from us. Is that true?’

‘I’ve thought about it,’ I said sullenly.

‘Don’t be a fool, boy. And don’t be tempted by Lanman. He’s losing money.’ Henry Lanman owned the Curtain playhouse that lay just a brief walk to the south of ours. During our performances we could hear their audience cheering, the beat of their drummers, and the sound of their trumpeters, though of late those sounds had become scarcer. ‘He’s showing sword fights these days,’ Burbage went on, ‘sword fights and bear baiting. So what does he want you to do? Piss about in a frock and look pretty?’

‘I haven’t talked to him,’ I insisted truthfully.

‘So you’ve a lick of sense. He’s got nobody to write plays, and nobody to play in them.’

‘I haven’t talked to him!’ I repeated testily.

‘You think Philip Henslowe will hire you?’

‘No!’

‘He’s got plenty of actors.’ Henslowe owned the Rose playhouse, south of the Thames, and was our chief rival.

‘Then there’s Francis Langley,’ James Burbage went on relentlessly, ‘has he talked to you?’

‘No.’

‘He’s building that monstrous great lump of a playhouse on Bankside, and he’s got no players, and he’s got no plays either. Rivals and enemies,’ he said the last three words bitterly.

‘Enemies?’

‘Lanman and Langley? Lanman hates us. The landlord here hates us. The bloody city fathers hate us. The lord mayor hates us. Do you hate us?’

‘No.’

‘But you’re thinking of leaving?’

‘I’m not making any money,’ I muttered, ‘I’m poor.’

‘Of course you’re bloody poor! How old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘You think I started with money?’ Burbage asked belligerently. ‘I served my apprenticeship, boy, I earned my money, saved money, borrowed money, bought the lease here, built the playhouse! I worked, boy!’

I gazed out into the yard. ‘You were a joiner, yes?’

‘A good one,’ he said proudly, ‘but I didn’t start with money. All I had was a pair of hands and a willingness to work. I learned to saw and chisel and augur and shape wood. I learned a trade. I worked.’

‘And this is the only trade I know,’ I said bitterly. I nodded towards my brother. ‘He made sure of that, didn’t he? But in a year or so you’ll spit me out. There’ll be no more parts for me.’

‘You don’t know that,’ he said, though he did not sound convincing. ‘So what parts do you want?’

I was about to answer when Burbage held up a hand to silence me. I turned to see that a group of strangers had just come into the playhouse and were now standing in the yard, staring at the prancing boys on the stage. Four were grim-looking men, all with scabbarded swords and all wearing the white rose of Lord Hunsdon’s livery. The men stood, foursquare and challenging, to guard four women. One of the women was older, with grey hair showing beneath her coif. She signalled the men to stay where they were, and strode towards the stage, straight-backed and confident. My brother, seeing her, bowed low. ‘My lady!’ he greeted her, sounding surprised.

‘We have been inspecting an estate at Finsbury,’ her ladyship said in brusque explanation, ‘and my granddaughter wished to see your playhouse.’

‘You’re most welcome,’ my brother said. The boys onstage had all snatched off their caps and knelt.

‘Stop grovelling,’ her ladyship said sharply, ‘were you dancing?’

‘Yes, your ladyship,’ Ralph Perkins answered.

‘Then dance on,’ she said imperiously, before gesturing to my brother. ‘A word, if you please?’

I knew she was Lady Anne Hunsdon, the wife of the Lord Chamberlain, who was our company’s patron. Some nobles showed their wealth by having a retinue of finely clothed retainers ever at their heels, or by owning the swiftest deerhounds in the kingdom, or by their lavish palaces and wide parks, while some, a few, patronised the acting companies. We were Lord Hunsdon’s pets, we played at his pleasure, and grovelled when he deigned to notice us. And when we toured the country, which we did whenever a plague closed the London playhouses, the Lord Chamberlain’s name and badge protected us from the miserable Puritan town fathers who wanted to imprison us, or, better still, whip us out of town. ‘Come, Elizabeth,’ Lady Hunsdon ordered, and her grand-daughter, for whose marriage my brother had been forced to abandon his Italian play and write something new, went to join her grandmother and my brother. The two maidservants waited with the guards, and it was one of those two maids who caught my eye and stopped the breath in my throat.

Lady Anne Hunsdon and her granddaughter were cloaked in finery. Elizabeth Carey was glorious in a farthingale of cream linen, slashed to show the shimmer of silver sarsenet beneath. I could not see her bodice because she was wearing a short cape, light grey, embroidered with the white roses that were her father and grandfather’s badge. Her hair was pale gold, covered only with a net of silver-gilt thread on which small pearls shone, her skin was fashionably white, but she needed no ceruse to keep it that way, for her face was unblemished, not even touched with a hint of rouge on the cheeks. Her painted lips were full and smiling, and her blue eyes bright as she stared with evident delight at the four boys who had started dancing again to Ralph Perkins’s instructions. Elizabeth Carey was a beauty, but I stared only at her maid, a small, slim girl whose eyes were bright with fascination for what happened on the stage. She was wearing a skirt and bodice of dark grey wool, and had a black coif over her light brown hair, but there was something about her face, some trick of lip and bone, that made her outshine the glowing Elizabeth. She turned to look around the playhouse and caught my eye, and there was the hint of a mischievous smile before she turned back towards the stage. ‘Dear sweet Jesus,’ I murmured, though luckily too softly for the words to reach any of the women.

James Burbage chuckled. I ignored him.

Elizabeth Carey clapped her gloved hands when the dance finished. My brother was speaking with her grandmother, who laughed at something he said. I stared at the maid. ‘So you like her,’ James Burbage said caustically. He thought I was staring at Elizabeth Carey.

‘Don’t you?’

‘She’s a rare little kickshaw,’ he allowed, ‘but take your bloody eyes off her. She’ll be married in a couple of months. Married to a Berkeley,’ he went on, ‘Thomas. He gets ploughing rights, not you.’

‘What is she doing here?’ I asked.

‘How the hell would I know?’

‘Maybe she wants to see the play my brother’s written,’ I suggested.

‘He won’t show it to her.’

‘Have you seen it?’

He nodded. ‘But why are you interested? I thought you were leaving us.’

‘I was hoping there’s a part for me,’ I said weakly.

James Burbage laughed. ‘There’s a part for bloody everyone! It’s a big play. It has to be big because we need to do something special for his lordship. Big and new. You don’t serve up cold meat for the Lord Chamberlain’s granddaughter, you give her something fresh. Something frothy.’

‘Frothy?’

‘It’s a wedding, not a bloody funeral. They want singing, dancing, and lovers soaked in moonbeams.’

I looked across the yard. My brother was gesticulating, almost as though he were making a speech from the stage. Lady Anne Hunsdon and her granddaughter were laughing, and the young maid was still staring wide-eyed around the Theatre.

‘Of course,’ Burbage went on, ‘if we perform a play for her wedding then we’ll need to rehearse where we’ll play it.’

‘Somerset House?’ I asked. I knew that was where Lord Hunsdon lived.

‘Bloody roof of the great hall fell in,’ Burbage said, sounding amused, ‘so like as not we’ll be rehearsing in their Blackfriars house.’

‘Where I’ll play a woman,’ I said bitterly.

He turned and frowned at me. ‘Is that it? You’re tired of wearing a skirt?’

‘I’m too old! My voice has broken.’

Burbage waved to show me the whole circle of the playhouse. ‘Look at it, boy! Timber, plaster and lath. Rain-rotted planks on the forestage, some slaps of paint, and that’s all it is. But we turn it into ancient Rome, into Persia, into Ephesus, and the groundlings believe it. They stare. They gasp! You know what your brother told me?’ He had gripped my jerkin and pulled me close. ‘They don’t see what they see, they see what they think they see.’ He let go of me and gave a crooked grin. ‘He says things like that, your brother, but I know what he means. When you act, they think they see a woman! Maybe you can’t play a young girl any more, but as a woman in her prime, you’re good!’

‘I’ve a man’s voice,’ I said sullenly.

‘Aye, and you shave, and you have a cock, but when you speak small they love it!’

‘But for how long?’ I demanded. ‘In a month or so you’ll say I’m only good for men’s parts, and you’ve plenty of men players.’

‘You want to play the hero?’ he sneered.

I said nothing to that. His son Richard, who I had seen crossing swords with Henry Condell, always played the hero in our plays, and there was a temptation to think that he was only given the best parts because his father owned the playhouse’s lease, just as it was tempting to believe he had been made one of the company’s Sharers because of his father, but in truth he was good. People loved him. They walked across Finsbury Fields to watch Richard Burbage win the girl, destroy the villains, and put the world to rights. Richard was only three or four years older than I, which meant I had no chance of winning a girl or of dazzling an audience with my swordplay. And some of the apprentices, the boys who were capering onstage right now, were growing taller and could soon play the parts I played, and that would save the playhouse money because apprentices were paid in pennies. At least I got a couple of shillings a week, but for how long?

The sun was glinting off the puddles among the yard’s cobblestones. Elizabeth Carey and her grandmother, holding their skirts up, crossed to the stage, and the boys there stopped dancing, took off their caps, and bowed, all except Simon, who offered an elaborate curtsey instead. Lady Anne spoke to them, and they laughed, then she turned, and, with her granddaughter beside her, headed for the Theatre’s entrance. Elizabeth was talking animatedly. I saw that the hair had been plucked from her forehead, raising her hairline by a fashionable inch or more. ‘Fairies,’ I heard her say, ‘I do adore fairies!’

James Burbage and I, anticipating that the ladies would walk within a few paces of the gallery where we talked, had taken off our caps, which meant my long hair fell about my face. I brushed it back. ‘We shall have to ask our chaplain to exorcise the house,’ Elizabeth Carey went on happily, ‘in case the fairies stay!’

‘Better a flock of fairies than the rats in Blackfriars,’ Lady Anne said shortly, then caught sight of me and stopped. ‘You were good last night,’ she said abruptly.

‘My lady,’ I said, bowing.

‘I like a good death.’

‘It was thrilling,’ Elizabeth Carey added. Her face, already merry, brightened. ‘When you died,’ she said, letting go of her skirts and clasping her hands in front of her breasts, ‘I didn’t expect that, and I was so …’ she hesitated, not finding the word she wanted for a heartbeat, ‘mortified.’

‘Thank you, my lady,’ I said dutifully.

‘And now it’s so strange seeing you in a doublet!’ she exclaimed.

‘To the carriage, my dear,’ her grandmother interrupted.

‘You must play the Queen of the Fairies,’ Elizabeth Carey ordered me with mock severity.

The young maid’s eyes widened. She was staring at me, and I stared back. She had grey eyes. I thought I saw a hint of a smile again, a suspicion of mischief in her face. Was she mocking me because I would play a woman? Then, realising that I might offend Elizabeth Carey by ignoring her, I bowed a second time. ‘Your ladyship,’ I said, for lack of anything else to say.

‘Come, Elizabeth,’ Lady Anne ordered. ‘And you, Silvia,’ she added sharply to the grey-eyed maid, who was still looking at me.

Silvia! I thought it the most beautiful name I had ever heard.

James Burbage was laughing. When the women and their guards had left, he pulled his cap onto his cropped grey hair. ‘Mortified,’ he said. ‘Mortified! The mort has wit.’

‘We’re doing a play about fairies?’ I asked in disgust.

‘Fairies and fools,’ he said, ‘and it’s not fully finished yet.’ He paused, scratching his short beard. ‘But mayhap you’re right, Richard.’

‘Right?’

‘Mayhap it’s time we gave you men’s parts. You’re tall! That doesn’t signify for parts like Uashti, because she’s a queen. But tall is better for men’s parts.’ He frowned towards the stage. ‘Simon’s not really tall enough, is he? Scarcely comes up to a dwarf’s arsehole. And your voice will deepen more as you add years, and you do act well.’ He climbed the gallery to the outer corridor. ‘You act well, so if we give you a man’s part in the wedding play, will you stay through the winter?’

I hesitated, then remembered that James Burbage was a man of his word. A hard man, my brother said, but a fair one. ‘Is that a promise, Mister Burbage?’ I asked.

‘As near as I can make it a promise, yes it is.’ He spat on his hand and held it out to me. ‘I’ll do the best I can to make sure you play a man in the wedding play. That’s my promise.’

I shook his hand. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘But right now you’re the Queen of bloody Persia, so get up onstage and be queenly.’

I got up onstage and was queenly.

TWO

SATURDAY.

The weather had cleared to leave a pale sky in which the early winter sun cast long shadows even at noon, when the bells of the city churches rang in jangling disharmony. High clouds blew ragged from the west, but there was no hint of rain, and the fine weather meant that we could perform, and so, when the cacophony of the noon bells ended, our trumpeter, standing on the Theatre’s tower, sounded a flourish, and the flag, which displayed the red cross of Saint George, was hoisted to show we were presenting a play.

The first playgoers began arriving before one o’clock. They came across Finsbury Fields, a trickle at first, but the trickle swelled, as men, women, apprentices, tradesmen, and gentry, all came from the Cripplegate. Others walked up from the Bishopsgate and turned down the narrow path that led by the horse pond to the playhouse, where one-eyed Jeremiah stood at the entrance with a locked box that had a slit in its lid, and where two men, both armed with swords, cudgels, and scowls, guarded the old soldier and his box. Every playgoer had to drop a penny through the slot. Three whores from the Dolphin tavern were selling hazelnuts just outside the Theatre, Blind Michael, who was guarded by a huge deaf and dumb son, was selling oysters, and Pitchfork Harry sold bottles of ale. The crowd, as always, was in a merry mood. They greeted old friends, chatted, and laughed as the yard filled.

Richer folk went to the smaller door, paid tuppence, and climbed the stairs to the galleries, where, for yet another penny, they could hire a cushion to soften the oak benches. Women leaned over the upper balustrade to stare at the groundlings, and some young men, often elegantly dressed, gazed back. Many of the men who had paid their penny to stand in the yard had no intention of staying there. Instead they scanned the galleries for the prettiest women, and, seeing one they liked, paid more pennies to climb the stairs.

Will Kemp peered through a spyhole. ‘A goodly number,’ he said.

‘How many?’ someone asked.

‘Fifteen hundred?’ he guessed. ‘And they’re still coming. I’m surprised.’

‘Surprised?’ John Heminges queried. ‘Why?’

‘Because this play is a piece of shit, that’s why.’ Will stepped away from the spyhole and picked up a pair of boots. ‘Still,’ he went on, ‘I like being in plays that are shit.’

‘Good Lord, you do? Why?’

‘Because then I don’t have to watch the damn things.’

‘Jean,’ someone called from the shadows, ‘this hose is torn.’

‘I’ll bring you another.’

The trumpeter sounded his flourish more often, each cascade of notes being greeted by a cheer from the gathering crowd. ‘Remind me what jig we’re doing today?’ Henry Condell asked.

‘Jeremiah,’ Will Kemp answered.

‘Again?’

‘They like it,’ Will said aggressively.

George Bryan was shivering in a corner of the room. Not shivering with cold, but nervousness. One leg twitched uncontrollably. He was blinking, biting his lip, trying to say his lines in a low voice, but stuttering instead. George was always terrified before a play, though once on the stage he appeared the soul of confidence. Richard Burbage was stretching in another corner, loosening his arms and legs for the acrobatics to come, while Simon Willoughby, resplendent in an ivory-panelled skirt and with his hair piled high and hung with glass rubies, swirled back and forth in the tiring room’s centre until Alan Rust growled at him to be still, whereupon Simon sulkily retreated to the back of the room, sat on a barrel, and picked his nose. My brother came down the stairs, evidently from the office where the money boxes were taken to be emptied. ‘Seven lordlings on the stage,’ he said happily. It cost sixpence to sit at the stage’s edge, so the Sharers had just earned three shillings and sixpence from seven hard stools. I was lucky to earn three shillings and sixpence in a week, and soon, when the winter weather closed the playhouse down for days at a time, I would be lucky to earn a shilling.

Jean, our seamstress, shaved me. It was my second shave that day, and this one, with cold water, stung as she scraped my chin, upper lip, cheeks, and then my hairline to heighten my forehead. She used tweezers to shape my eyebrows, then told me to tip my head back. ‘I hate this,’ I said.

‘Don’t be a fusspot, Richard!’ She dipped a sliver of wood into a small pot. ‘And don’t blink!’ She held the sliver over my right eye. A drop of liquid fell into my eye, and I blinked. It stung. ‘Now the other one,’ she said.

‘They call it deadly nightshade,’ I said.

‘You’re being silly. It’s just juice of belladonna.’ She shook a second drop into my left eye. ‘There. All done.’ The belladonna, besides stinging and making my vision blurry for a time, dilated my pupils so that my eyes seemed larger. I kept them closed as Jean covered my face, neck, and upper chest with ceruse, the paste that made my skin look white as snow. ‘Now the black,’ she said happily, and used a finger to smear a paste of pig’s fat and soot around my eyes. ‘You look lovely!’

I growled, and she laughed. She took another pot from her capacious bag and leaned close. ‘Cochineal, darling, don’t tell Simon.’

‘Why not?’

‘I gave him madder because it’s cheaper,’ she whispered, then smeared my lips with her finger, leaving them red as cherries. I was no longer Richard, I was Uashti, Queen of Persia.

‘Give us a kiss!’ Henry Condell called to me.

‘Dear sweet God,’ George Bryan muttered, and bent his head between his knees. I thought he was going to vomit, but he sat up and took a deep breath. ‘Dear sweet God,’ he said again. We all ignored him, we had seen and heard it before, and knew he would play as well as ever. My brother held a breastplate to his chest and let Richard Burbage buckle the straps.

‘There should be a helmet too,’ my brother said, shrugging to make the newly buckled breastplate comfortable. ‘Where’s the helmet?’

‘In the fur chest,’ Jean called, ‘by the back door.’

‘What’s it doing there?’

‘Keeping warm.’

I climbed the wooden stairs to the upper room where most of the costumes and the smaller pieces of stage furniture were stored, and where the musicians were tuning their instruments. ‘You look lovely, Richard,’ Philip, who was the chief musician, greeted me.

‘Put your lute up your arse,’ I told him, ‘and give it a twist.’ We were friends.

‘Give us a kiss first.’

‘Then give it another twist,’ I finished. I peered through the balcony door. The musicians would play on the balcony that afternoon, and a tabour player was already standing there. ‘Nice big audience,’ he told me, then tapped his drumsticks on the tabour’s skin, provoking a cheer from the crowd below.

I turned back into the room and climbed the ladder to the tower roof. I was clumsy in my long dark skirts, but I hoisted them up and slowly mounted the rungs. ‘I can see your arse!’ Philip called.

‘You lucky musician,’ I said, then clambered through the trapdoor onto the platform, where Will Tawyer the trumpeter stood.

Will grinned at me. ‘I was waiting for you,’ he said. Will knew I would join him, because climbing to the rickety platform before a performance was my superstition. Every time I played in the Theatre I had to climb the tower. There was no reason I knew of, except a firm belief that I would play badly if I did not struggle up the ladder in my heavy and cumbersome skirts. All the players had their superstitions. John Heminges wore a hare’s foot on a silver chain, George Bryan, in between his shivering and twitching, would reach up to touch a beam in the tiring room ceiling, Will Kemp would force a kiss on Jean, the seamstress, while Richard Burbage would draw his sword and kiss the blade. My brother tried to pretend he had no ritual, but when he thought no one was looking, he made the sign of the cross. He was no papist, but when he was challenged by Will Kemp, who accused him of kissing the filthy arse of the Great Whore of Babylon, my brother had just laughed. ‘I do it,’ he explained, ‘because it was the very first thing I ever did on a stage. At least, the very first thing that I was paid to do on a stage.’

‘And what part was that?’

‘Cardinal Pandulph.’

‘You were in that piece of crap?’

My brother nodded. ‘First play I ever performed. At least as a paid player. The Troublesome Reign of King John, and Cardinal Pandulph was forever crossing himself. It signifies nothing.’

‘It signifies Rome!’

‘And does your kissing Jean signify love for her?’

‘God forbid!’

‘You could do worse,’ my brother had said, ‘she works hard.’

‘Too hard!’ Jean had overheard the conversation. ‘I need someone to help me. One woman can’t do everything.’

‘She can try,’ Will Kemp growled.

‘Bleeding animal,’ Jean said under her breath.

The superstitions, whether it was climbing the tower, making the sign of the cross, or kissing the seamstress, were hardly meaningless, because we all believed that they kept the devils away from the playhouse; the devils that made us forget our words or brought us a sullen audience or made the trapdoor in the stage stick, which it sometimes did after damp weather.

I stood for a moment longer on the tower’s platform. A breeze gusted, fretting the red-crossed flag on its pole above us. I looked south and saw there was no flag and no trumpeter on the Curtain playhouse, which meant they were not even presenting a beast show on this fine afternoon. Beyond the empty playhouse, the city was dark beneath its ever-present smoke. I flinched as Will Tawyer blew another fanfare to rouse the groundlings, who dutifully cheered the sound. ‘That woke them up,’ Will said happily.

‘It woke me up too,’ I said. I stared north, past the tower of Saint Leonard’s church, to the green hills beyond the village of Shoreditch where cloud shadows raced across woods and hedges. The noise of the audience rose from the yard and galleries. The playhouse was almost full, which meant the Sharers would have six or seven pounds in coins this day, and I would be paid a shilling.

I clambered down the ladder. ‘Do you have a ritual?’ I asked Phil.

‘A ritual?’

‘Something you must do before every performance?’

‘I look up your skirts!’

‘Besides that.’

He grinned. ‘I kiss Robert’s crumhorn.’

‘Really?’

Robert, Phil’s friend, raised the instrument, which looked like a shepherd’s short crook. ‘He kisses it,’ he said, ‘and I blow it.’

The other musicians laughed. I laughed too, then went down the stairs and saw Isaiah Humble, the bookkeeper, pinning a paper by the right-hand stage door. ‘Your entrances and exits, masters,’ he called, as he always did. We all knew our entrances, but it was comforting to know the list was there. It was even more comforting to see Pickles, the playhouse’s bad-tempered cat, waiting by the same door. Everyone using that door had to touch Pickles to keep the demons at bay and if Pickles lashed out with a spiteful claw and drew blood, that was regarded as an especially good omen.

‘I need a piss,’ Thomas Pope said. He always needed a piss before a play.

‘Piss in your breeches,’ Will Kemp growled, as he also always did.

‘Jean! Where’s the green cloak?’ John Duke called.

‘Where it always is.’

‘Sweet Jesus,’ George Bryan said. He was visibly shaking, but no one tried to calm or encourage him because that would bring ill-luck, and besides, we all knew that George’s whimpering nerves would vanish the moment he went through one of the stage doors, and the mouse turned into a lion.

The white-faced, red-lipped, black-eyed boys in their pretty dresses gathered by the left-hand door, their tresses bulked out with hair-rolls and ribbons. Simon Willoughby stared into a polished piece of metal nailed by that door and admired his reflection. Then Will the trumpeter, far above us, blew six high and urgent notes that sounded like a call on the hunting field. The first city church had just struck two o’clock.

‘Wait,’ my brother said, as he always did, and we stood silent as one after another the churches rang the hour, filling the sky with their bells. The last bell tolled, but no one moved and no one spoke. Even the waiting crowd was silent. Then, somewhere to the south of the city, a distant church sounded the hours. It tolled a good minute after all the others, but still we did not move.

‘We still wait,’ my brother said quietly. He had his eyes closed.

‘Dear God,’ George Bryan whispered.

‘I really do need a piss!’ Thomas Pope moaned.

‘Keep the words moving!’ Will Kemp snarled, as he always did. ‘Keep them moving!’

And then, after what seemed an eternity, Saint Leonard’s rang two o’clock. The church, just to the north of us in Shoreditch, was always the last, and the crowd, knowing that its bells were the signal for the play to begin, cheered again. Footsteps sounded above us as the musicians went onto the balcony. There was a pause, then the trumpet flourished a final time, and the two drums began beating.

‘Now!’ my brother said to the waiting boys, and Simon Willoughby threw open the left-hand door and the boys danced onto the stage.

We were players and we were playing.

‘The fretting heads of furious foes have skill,’ I said, ‘as well by fraud as force to find their prey!’ I spoke small, meaning I pitched my voice as high as I could and still kept it loud enough to reach the folk leaning over the upper gallery’s balustrade. ‘In smiling looks doth lurk a lot as ill,’ I piped, ‘as where both stern and sturdy streams do sway!’

In fairness I have to say my brother had not written this hodge-pudding of nonsense, though God knows he has written enough idiocies that I have declaimed onstage. We were playing Hester and Ahasuerus, so I was Uashti, Queen of Persia, though I was dressed in fine modern clothes, the only concession to the biblical setting being a great cloak of fur-trimmed linen that swirled prettily whenever I turned around. The cloak was a very dark grey, almost black, because I was a villainess, the heroine being the nose-picker Simon Willoughby, the plump little sixteen-year-old, who played Hester in a pale cream cloak. God only knows why the role was named Hester, because her name was Esther, but whatever she was called, she was about to become Queen of Persia in my place. The story is from the Bible, so I have no need to retell it here except to explain where the play has changed the tale. In our version, Uashti tries to poison Hester, fails, has a skin-the-cat moment of fury, then relinquishes her crown and licks Hester’s plump arse, which is what I was now doing. I was kneeling to the smirking little bastard. ‘Be still, good Queen,’ I said, and gave the word ‘still’ a lot more force than it needed because Willoughby, the preening little slut, was flicking a fan of peacock feathers to keep the audience’s eyes on his over-painted face, ‘their refuge and their rock,’ I went on, ‘as they are thine to serve in love and fear. So fraud nor force nor foreign foe may stand against the strength of thy most puissant hand!’

The groundlings love this stuff. Some cheered as I prostrated myself in front of Hester, while the richer folk in the galleries clapped their hands. They knew they were not really watching a tale from the Bible. Uashti might be Queen of Persia, but she represented Katherine of Aragon, while Hester was Queen Anne Boleyn, and the whole piece was an arse-sucking flattery of Elizabeth, which pretended that the popish Katherine had respected the rightful status of Elizabeth’s Protestant mother. We did the play rarely because, even though audiences seemed to like the tale, it truly was dross, but when the dross is written by a royal chaplain it has to be performed now and then. That chaplain, the Most Reverend William Venables, was in the lower gallery, beaming at us, convinced he had written a masterpiece. He thought we were performing the play because of its brilliance, but in truth we were currying royal favour because the city’s aldermen were having another of their attempts to close the playhouses. The Theatre was built outside the city’s boundaries, so they had no authority over us, but they did possess influence. They said we were sinks of sin, and cockpits of corruption, ‘which is wholly accurate, of course,’ my brother liked to say.

‘Thou, to a convent will conveniently convey,’ my brother, playing Mordechaus, kicked me in the ribs, ‘there to contemplate and in constance pray.’ And with that two Persian guards wearing burgonets and breastplates and both armed with mighty halberds hauled me to my feet and took me to the tiring room. The play was ending.

‘Oh, Richard,’ Jean said, then tutted, ‘look at your bodice. All torn! Let me pin it for you.’

‘It was George Bryan,’ I said, ‘he bloody mauled me.’

I sometimes wonder about the Most Reverend William Venables. In the biblical story, Haman, the villain, is accused of assaulting Esther, but that wasn’t good enough for the reverend, who added a scene where Uashti is half raped by the bastard. The scene made no sense because Haman and Uashti are supposedly allies, but the groundlings adored it anyway. George Bryan, all nervousness gone, had been clawing at me, much to the audience’s joy. They were urging him to drag up my skirts and show them my legs, but I managed to get a knee between his thighs and jerk it up hard. He went very still, and the audience probably thought he was having a moment of even greater joy, and I pushed him off while I screamed my next line, which provoked a cheer.

The audience liked me. I knew that. I know it still. Even when I play the villain they cheer me on. There are always a few who are coarse, shouting at me to show my tits, but they are swiftly silenced by others. The coarser members of the audience have their moment at the play’s end, when we perform the jig, a separate play altogether, and one designed to send the groundlings home happy. They applauded when our play ended, then shouted for the players to return to the stage. Phil and his musicians gave them a jaunty tune, but the calls for our return got louder, then there was a raucous cheer as the big central door from the tiring room was thrown open and the boys danced onto the stage.

There was a roar of welcome when Simon Willoughby joined the jig, still costumed as Queen Hester, but the roar was twice as loud when I danced onto the stage. I played to the grinning faces, whirling around at the stage’s front, lifting my skirts and winking at some red-faced butcher who was gazing raptly up at me. This jig was called Jeremiah and the Milk Cow, and it had been written by Will Kemp, who played a soldier who had been blinded in the wars and had returned home and was searching for his wife, who had run off with a farmer played by my brother. The farmer kept offering other girls to the soldier. Jeremiah, though blind, realised none of the offered girls was his missing wife, until, in the end, my brother offered Bessie the cow, who was played by me. I made horns with my fingers, and mooed, and ran away from Will Kemp, who finally caught me by the hips, turned me about and gave a massive jerk of his loins, which got the crowd cheering again. ‘I’d know this arse anywhere!’ Will Kemp roared, I bellowed as he jerked again, the crowd was laughing, and Will slammed his body into mine time after time and kept shouting that he had found his wife at last. He finally let go of me and rattled off a string of bawdy jokes as I went back to join the dance with the other players. I managed to step on Simon’s cloak, which made him miss his step and half fall. The playhouse does have its compensations.

‘You were, you were,’ the Reverend Venables had come to the tiring room after the play and now waved his hands as if he could not find the words he wanted. He was talking to all the half-undressed players. ‘You were magnificent!’ he said. ‘Quite magnificent! Richard, my dear,’ he darted at me, and, before I could evade, put his hands on my cheeks and kissed my lips, ‘the best I have ever seen you! And you, dear sweet Simon,’ off he went to buss Willoughby, ‘I shall tell Her Majesty of your loyalty,’ the reverend said, beaming at us, then looked to my brother. ‘I’ve written another piece. Judith and Holofernes.’

There was a beat before my brother responded. ‘I am replete with happiness,’ he said drily.

‘And young Richard,’ the reverend’s fingers brushed my shoulder, ‘would be superb as Judith. While dear Simon can play her sister.’

‘Judith had a sister?’ my brother asked, evidently puzzled.

‘She doesn’t in the Vulgate,’ Venables said coyly, ‘but in my play? One cannot have too many darlings, can one?’ He smiled at Simon, who duly wriggled and smiled back.

My brother just looked tired. ‘Doesn’t Judith cut off Holofernes’s head?’ he asked.

‘With a sword!’

‘Beheadings,’ my brother warned, ‘are monstrous difficult to do onstage.’

‘But you can do it!’ Venables exclaimed. ‘You are all magicians. You are all …’ he hesitated, looking pained as if he could not find the right word to do us justice, ‘you are all sorcerers!’

What is it about the playhouse that turns men and women into quivering puppies? All we do is pretend. We tell stories. Yet after the play the audience lingers at the tiring-house door wanting to see us, wanting to talk to us as if we are saints whose very touch could cure their sickness. But what sickness? Dullness? Boredom? The Most Reverend William Venables was evidently entranced by us, by the playhouse, and by what he believed was some kind of benign magic. He touched my elbow. ‘Dear Richard,’ he murmured, ‘a word?’ He gripped my upper arm and pulled me towards the stage door. I resisted for a heartbeat, but for a small, thin man he was surprisingly strong, and he dragged me away as Simon Willoughby smirked and my brother looked surprised.

The reverend took me through the left-hand door onto the stage, where he stopped and gazed into the courtyard where Jeremiah was sweeping hazelnut and oyster shells from the cobbles. Pickles the cat lay in a patch of weak sunlight and began licking a battered paw. ‘I hear you might leave the company,’ the reverend said, ‘is that true?’

The sudden question confused me. ‘I might,’ I muttered. In truth I had no plans, no offers of other employment, and no future. My threat to walk away from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was nothing but pique, an attempt to gain some sympathy from my brother in hopes that he would give me men’s parts and a larger wage. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ I added sullenly.

‘Why would you leave?’ he asked sharply.

I hesitated. ‘I want to grow a beard,’ I finally said.

He laughed at that. ‘What a shame that would be! But I do understand.’

‘You do?’

‘Oh, dear boy, isn’t it obvious? You’re getting too old. Your voice is just passable for an older woman, but how long will that endure? And what men’s parts are there for you? Richard and Henry won’t make way for you, will they? They are our young and handsome heroes, are they not? And Alexander and Simon are snapping at your heels, and they’re both so exquisitely talented.’ He gave me a pitying smile. ‘Perhaps you can run away to sea?’

‘I’m no sailor,’ I said. I had seen the sea once, and that once was enough.

‘No, you’re not,’ Venables said forcefully, ‘you’re a player and a very good one.’

‘Am I?’ I asked, sounding like Simon Willoughby.

‘You have grace onstage, you have been blessed with beauty, you speak clearly.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said in Uashti’s voice, ‘but I have no beard.’

‘You don’t need a beard,’ he said, and took my arm again, steering me towards the front of the stage.

‘I can’t grow one yet,’ I said, ‘because I still have to play the women’s parts. But James has promised me a man’s part soon.’

He let go of my arm. ‘James Burbage has promised you a man’s part?’ his tone was surprisingly harsh.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What part?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And in what play?’

He still spoke harshly, and I remembered my brother saying that it was easy to underestimate the Reverend William Venables. ‘He might appear a light fool,’ my brother had said, ‘but he keeps his place in the royal court, and Her Majesty likes neither clergymen nor fools.’

‘She doesn’t like clergymen?’ I had asked, surprised.

‘After the way her sister’s bishops treated her? She despises them. She believes churchmen stir up unnecessary trouble, and she hates unnecessary trouble. But she likes Venables. He amuses her.’

The Very Reverend William Venables was not amusing me. He was gripping my elbow again and leaning too close. I tried to pull away, but he kept hold of me. ‘What play?’ he demanded a second time.

‘It’s a wedding play,’ I told him, ‘for the Lord Chamberlain’s granddaughter.’

‘Ah! Of course.’ He relaxed his grip and smiled at me. ‘A new play, how exciting! Do you know who is writing it?’

‘My brother, sir.’

‘Of course he is,’ he said, still smiling. ‘Tell me, Richard. Have you heard of Lancelot Torrens?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Lancelot Torrens is the third Earl of Lechlade and a quite remarkable young man.’ I sensed that this was why he had drawn me out onto the empty stage where no one could overhear what we said, and that impression was intensified when Venables lowered his voice. ‘His grand-daddy became rich under gross Henry, gave the fat king money, and suddenly a leather merchant from Bristol is translated into an earl. Almighty God moves in a stupefying way sometimes, but I must confess young Lancelot graces the rank, and young Lancelot also has money.’ He paused, smiling slyly at me. ‘Do you like money, young Richard?’

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘Your brother tells me you’re a thief.’

I blushed at that. ‘It’s not true, sir,’ I said, too forcefully.

‘What young man isn’t? And onstage you steal our hearts!’ He smiled brightly. ‘You are good.’

‘Thank you,’ I said awkwardly.

‘And Lancelot Torrens, third Earl of Lechlade, would like to possess a company of actors, and the young man has money, a great deal of money. He would, I think, regard you as a most valued member of any company that was fortunate enough to boast of his patronage.’ He watched me, waiting for me to speak, but I had no idea what to say. ‘He knows of you,’ he added coyly.

I laughed at that. ‘I’m sure he doesn’t, sir.’

‘And I assure you he does, or rather his man of business knows of you. I supplied him with a list of players fit for his new playhouse.’

‘He has a playhouse?’

‘Of course! A company needs a playhouse, and only the finest will satisfy young Lancelot. Who do you think is paying for that monstrosity on Bankside?’

I tried to remember the name of the man building the new playhouse, the one James Burbage had been worried I might have talked to. ‘Francis Langley?’

‘Langley has money, but if he owned every brothel in Southwark it wouldn’t be sufficient. The little earl is paying.’

‘Little?’ I asked.

‘He has beauty, but lacks stature,’ the reverend explained, ‘while you, my dear, have both.’

I had a sudden memory of Simon Willoughby being pinned against the palace courtyard wall as the rain fell. ‘The earl,’ I said, then hesitated.

‘Richard?’

‘Is he fair-haired?’

‘Fair-haired?’ The Reverend William Venables smiled seraphically. ‘I should rather say that his locks were spun from the palest gold on the distaff of an angel.’ So it was the Earl of Lechlade who had accosted Simon that night? I could not be sure, of course, but it seemed most likely. ‘Why do you ask?’ the reverend demanded.

‘I wondered if I’d seen him, that’s all.’

‘You’d remember him if you had.’

‘Are you writing for him?’ I asked.

Venables looked hurt. ‘Your brother won’t stage any more plays of mine. Hester brings in the crowds, but will he perform Susannah and the Elders? No! Or David and Bathsheba? No!’

‘And Langley will?’ I asked.

‘Francis and the earl recognise quality,’ he said stiffly, ‘but they need other plays.’ He turned to look me straight in the eyes. ‘If you were to take Langley your brother’s new play I think you would find that you never need steal again!’

I just stared at him, too shocked to speak.

‘You should talk to Langley,’ the reverend said.

I did not know what to say. His proposal was so dishonest, so shocking, that I could not find the words. A playhouse’s scripts are among its most precious possessions because if another company could find a copy of a play then that company could present that play. Sometimes, when plague closed the playhouses, a company would publish one of its scripts to make some money, and then that play became the property of anyone who wanted it. That was how we had secured The Seven Deadly Sins. We needed to pay no money to its author, we just performed it when we liked, though too many performances would soon see an empty playhouse. If the Earl of Lechlade’s company came by a copy of the wedding play, or of the new play set in Verona that my brother was still writing, they could perform the plays and so steal our audience. A play script is precious, worth eight, nine, or ten pounds each, and so they are locked safely away. To steal one would be to betray the company, and so I hesitated, stammered, and finally evaded an answer by saying I had promised to stay with my brother’s company through the winter.

‘Promises in playhouses,’ the Reverend William Venables said airily, ‘are like kisses on May Day. They don’t count. Go and talk to Langley.’

Because the earl had money.

And I had none.

I did not go to find Francis Langley. London might be a mighty city, but the players in the playhouses all know each other. I feared that if James Burbage or my brother discovered I had been talking with Langley, then their promise of a man’s part in the new play might vanish like a summer mist. I was tempted, but for once I did not yield to temptation.

Then the Percies came on Monday.

We call them the Percies, but they are really Her Majesty’s Pursuivants, black-dressed retainers whose job is to hunt down and root out those Roman Catholics who would slaughter the Queen and take England back to the Roman church. Their prize quarry are the Jesuits, but any Roman priest or anyone who shelters such a priest can expect the Percies to come calling and on the Monday they came to the Theatre.

We were rehearsing the Comedy, or, to give the play its full title, The Comedy of Errors. We knew the play well, but on Sunday George Bryan had tripped over the lintel of Saint Leonard’s church and broken his nose. ‘We are cursed,’ my brother had said, delivering the news, ‘first Augustine, now George.’

The rehearsal was not going well. A hired man called Robert Pallant had to take George’s part. Pallant was a middle-aged man with a paunch, a spade beard, and a hangdog face. He was nervous because he was playing Egeon, a merchant, who opened the play with an immensely long speech that Pallant had memorised, but kept mangling. Everyone else was just bad-tempered. ‘Let’s start again,’ my brother had suggested, after Pallant stammered to a halt for the fourth or fifth time.

The six players all went to the back of the stage as if they had just come through the doors from the tiring room. ‘The trumpet sounds,’ Alan Rust said, ‘it ends, and you enter.’

Pallant walked towards the front of the stage. ‘Proceed,’ he began and got no further.

‘Jesu! You walk as if you’ve got a bone up your arse!’ Alan Rust bellowed. Pallant stopped and looked astonished.

‘What?’ he began.

‘What’s your first line?’ Rust growled.

‘Um …’

‘Christ on his silver-painted cross! If I ever hear the word “um” on this stage I will kill! I will kill! What’s your goddamned line?’

‘“Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall and by the doom of death end woes and all.”’

‘End our woes. Christ grant us that blessing! And to whom are you speaking? Pray tell me?’

‘The duke.’

‘The duke! So why are you wandering like a constipated goose to the front of the goddamned stage? The duke is there!’ He pointed to my brother, who was standing on the right-hand side of the stage.

‘The speech …’ Pallant began weakly.

‘I’ve read the goddamned speech,’ Rust snarled. ‘It took a week of my life, but I read it! God in His feather-stuffed bed, man! There isn’t time to watch you waddle as well as listen to the endless stuff. Say the words to the duke! This is a goddamned play, not a bleeding sermon in Saint Paul’s. It needs life, man, life! Start again.’

Alan Rust was new to the company. He had been playing with Lord Pembroke’s men, and James Burbage and my brother had persuaded the other Sharers to let Rust join us. ‘He’s very good,’ my brother had explained to the company, ‘and the audiences like him. He’s also very good at staging. Have you noticed?’

‘No,’ Will Kemp said. He alone among the Sharers had opposed Rust, suspecting that the newcomer had a character as forceful as his own. Kemp had been out-voted, and so Rust was here to tell us what to do on the stage; where to move, how to say the words, how to do all the things that previously the Sharers had squabbled about. They still squabbled, of course, but Rust had imposed some order on the chaos.

‘Jesus on his jakes,’ Rust now shouted at Robert Pallant, ‘what in Christ’s name are you doing?’

‘Going towards the duke,’ Pallant said hopefully.

‘You move like a constipated nun! If you’re moving,’ Rust spoke from the yard where the groundlings stood to watch the plays, ‘then for Christ’s sake move! And talk at the same time! You can do that, can’t you? Go back to the duke’s last line. What is it?’ he demanded of my brother, who played Duke Solinus.

‘“Well, Syracusian, say in brief …”’ my brother began.

‘In brief? Jesus in a rainstorm! Brief? The speech is longer than the book of Genesis! And you,’ he pointed at me, ‘what are you smiling at?’

‘Simon Willoughby just farted,’ I said.

‘At least that’s more interesting than Egeon’s speech,’ Rust said.

‘I did not fart!’ Simon squealed. The rest of us wore our usual clothes, but little Simon had put on a long skirt for the rehearsal. He flounced towards the front of the stage. ‘I did not!’

‘Can we proceed, gentlemen?’ Rust asked sourly.

So we did, but slowly. I was sitting at the edge of the stage because I would not be needed for some time. I was playing Emilia, wife to Egeon. It was not a large part, my words scarcely filled a sheet of paper, but we had not performed the Comedy for some weeks, and I had forgotten many of the lines. ‘“Most mighty duke,”’ I kept saying to myself, trying to relearn the words, ‘“behold a man much wronged!”’

‘Go and mutter somewhere else,’ Rust snarled at me, ‘somewhere I can’t hear you.’

I went to the lower gallery, where I had talked with James Burbage. There were at least a score of people already in the gallery because the Sharers never minded folk watching the rehearsals. There were the girlfriends of some of the players, two boyfriends, and a happy gaggle of girls from the Dolphin. The Dolphin is a fine tavern which sells ale, food, and whores, and the girls earned a few pence more by selling hazelnuts to the groundlings before each performance, and then earned shillings by climbing to the galleries and selling themselves. Three of them were now giggling on the front bench, and they gave me coy looks as I settled just behind and above them. Jeremiah, the sour old soldier who guarded the front door, was fond of the girls, and had given them each a small bag of hazelnuts that they cracked under their heels while Robert Pallant laboriously told the story of his shipwreck.

The tale had always seemed most unlikely to me. Egeon, the merchant, had been at sea with his wife, his twin sons, and twin boy servants, when the ship had hit a rock and they had all been thrown into the stormy waves, and the wife, one son, and one servant had drifted one way, while Egeon, with the other son and servant, had drifted the other. It took Pallant forever to tell the story. I closed my eyes, and a moment later a voice said, ‘Open your mouth.’

‘Hello, Alice,’ I said, without opening my eyes.

‘Nut for you,’ she said. I opened my mouth, and she put a hazelnut on my tongue. ‘Are you a girl again?’ she asked.

‘I’m a woman. An abbess.’

She tucked her arm through mine and nestled into me. ‘Can’t see you as an abbess,’ she said. It was chilly, but at least it was not raining. ‘But you do look lovely as a girl,’ she went on.

‘Thank you,’ I said, as ungratefully as I could.

‘You should come and work with us.’

‘I’d like that,’ I said, ‘but what happens when some bastard lifts my skirts?’

‘Just roll over, of course,’ she said.

‘Your hands will be tied behind your back,’ Rust shouted at poor Pallant, ‘so don’t gesture!’

‘Does he find his wife again?’ Alice asked me.

‘I’m his wife,’ I said, ‘and yes. He finds me at the end of the play.’

‘But you’re an abbess! How could an abbess be married? They were nuns, weren’t they?’

‘It’s a long story,’ I said.

‘But he does find her?’

‘He does,’ I said, ‘and his long lost son too.’

‘Oh good! I was worried.’

She was sixteen, perhaps fifteen or maybe seventeen, a slight girl from Huntingdonshire, with very fair hair, a narrow face, squirrel eyes, and a weak chin, but somehow the parts added up to a delicate beauty. She could play an elf, I thought, or a fairy, except the surest way to rouse the fury of the Puritans was to put a girl on the stage. They already accused us of being the devil’s playthings, purveyors of evil and the spawn of Satan, and if we did not have the protection of the Queen and of the nobility, we would have been whipped out of town on hurdles long ago.

‘It’s so sad,’ Alice said.

‘What’s sad?’

‘That he was shipwrecked and lost his wife.’

‘It’s poxy stupid,’ I said. ‘If they’d all drifted, they’d have drifted in the same direction.’

‘But it didn’t happen that way,’ she protested. ‘Poor old man.’

‘Why don’t you go home?’ I asked her.

‘To the Dolphin?’

‘No, to Huntingdon.’

‘And milk cows? Churn butter?’ she sounded wistful. ‘I was shipwrecked. So were you.’

‘By my bastard brother,’ I said vengefully.

‘By my bastard lover,’ she echoed. She had been seduced by a charming rogue, a man who wandered the country selling buttons and combs and needles, and he had enticed her with a vision of a happily married life in London, and the silly girl had believed every word only to find herself sold to the Dolphin, in which she was half fortunate because it was a kindly house run by Mother Harwood, who had taken a liking to the waif-like Alice. I liked her too.

Hoofbeats sounded in the outer yard, but I gave them no thought. I knew we were expecting a cartload of timber to make repairs to the forestage, and I assumed the wood had arrived. I closed my eyes again, trying to remember my second line, then Alice uttered a small squeal. ‘Oooh, I don’t like them!’ she said and I opened my eyes.

The Percies had come.

There were five Pursuivants. They strutted through the entrance tunnel, all dressed in black, with the Queen’s badge on their black sleeves, and all with swords sheathed in black scabbards. Two stayed in the yard, while three vaulted up onto the stage and walked towards the tiring room. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Alan Rust demanded.

They ignored him, going instead into the tiring room. The two remaining Percies stood in the yard’s centre, and Rust turned on them. ‘What are you doing?’

‘The Queen’s business,’ one snarled.

They turned to look around the Theatre, and I saw the two men were twins. I remember thinking how strange it was that we were rehearsing a play about two sets of twins and here was the real thing. And there was something about the pair that made me dislike them from the first. They were young, perhaps a year or two older than me, and they were cocky. They were not tall, yet everything about them seemed too big; big rumps, big noses, big chins, with bushy black hair bulging under their black velvet caps, and brawny muscles plump under their black hose and sleeves. They looked to me like bulbous graceless bullies, each armed with a sword and a sneer. Alice shuddered. ‘They look horrible,’ she said. ‘Like bullocks! Can you imagine them …’

‘I’d rather not,’ I said.

‘Me too,’ Alice said fervently, and made the sign of the cross.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I hissed at her, ‘don’t do that! Not in front of Percies.’

‘I keep forgetting. At home, see, we had to do it.’

‘Then stop doing it here!’

‘They’re horrible,’ Alice whispered, as the twins turned back to stare at the girls from the Dolphin. They sauntered towards us. ‘Show us your tits, ladies,’ one said, grinning.

‘They’re not ladies, brother,’ the other said, ‘they’re meat.’

‘Show us your tits, meat!’

‘I’m leaving,’ Alice muttered.

The girls fled through the back, and the two young men laughed. The players, all but my brother and Will Kemp, had retreated to the edges of the stage, unsure what to do. Kemp stood at the stage’s centre, while my brother had followed the Percies into the tiring room. The twins strolled towards the stage and saw Simon Willoughby in his long skirt. ‘He’s a pretty boy, brother.’

‘Isn’t he?’

‘Are you a player?’ one of them demanded of Simon.

‘Show us your duckies, pretty boy,’ the other one said, and they both laughed.

‘Give us a treat, boy!’

‘What,’ Will Kemp demanded belligerently, ‘are you doing here?’

‘Our duty,’ one of the twins answered.

‘The Queen’s duty,’ the other one said.

‘This playhouse,’ Rust said grandly, ‘lies under the protection of the Lord Chamberlain.’

‘Oh, I’m terrified,’ one of the twins said.

‘God help me,’ the other said, then looked at Simon, ‘come on, boy, show us your bubbies!’

‘Leave!’ Kemp bellowed from the stage.

‘He’s so frightening!’ One of the twins pretended to be scared by hunching his shoulders and shivering. ‘You want to make us leave?’ he demanded.

‘Oh, I will!’ Alan said.

One of the twins drew his sword. ‘Then try,’ he sneered.

Alan Rust snapped his fingers, and one of the men who had been guarding the prisoner Egeon understood what the snap meant and tossed Rust a sword. Rust, who was standing close to the bulbous twins, pointed the blade at their smirking faces. ‘This,’ he snarled, ‘is a playhouse. It is not a farmyard. If you wish to spew your dung, do it elsewhere. Go to your unmannered homes and tell your mother she is a whore for birthing you.’

‘God damn you,’ the twin with the drawn sword said, but then, just before any fight could begin, the right-hand door opened and two of the three Percies who had evidently searched the tiring room came back onto the stage. One was carrying clothes heaped in his arms, while the second had a bag, which he flourished towards the twins. ‘Baubles!’ he said. ‘Baubles and beads! Romish rubbish.’

‘They are costumes,’ Will Kemp snarled, ‘costumes and properties.’

‘And this?’ the Pursuivant took a chalice from the bag.

‘Or this?’ His companion held up a white rochet, heavily trimmed with lace.

‘A costume, you fool!’ Kemp protested.

‘Everything you need to say a Romish mass,’ the Pursuivant said.

‘Show me the nightgown!’ the twin whose sword was still scabbarded demanded, and the Percy tossed down the rochet. ‘Oh pretty,’ the twin said. ‘Is this what papists wear to vomit their filth?’

‘Give it back,’ Alan Rust demanded, slightly raising his borrowed sword.

‘Are you threatening me?’ the twin with the drawn blade asked.

‘Yes,’ Rust said.

‘Maybe we should arrest him,’ the twin said, and lunged his blade at Alan.

And that was a mistake.

It was a mistake because one of the first skills any actor learns is how to use a sword. The audience love combats. They see enough fights, God knows, in the streets, but those fights are almost always between enraged oafs who hack and slash until, usually within seconds, one of them has a broken pate or a pierced belly and is flat on his back. What the groundlings admire is a man who can fight skilfully, and some of our loudest applause happens when Richard Burbage and Henry Condell are clashing blades. The audience gasp at their grace, at the speed of their blades, and even though they know the fight is not real, they know the skill is very real. My brother had insisted I take fencing lessons, which I did, because if I had any hope of assuming a man’s part in a play I needed to be able to fight. Alan Rust had learned long before, he had been an attraction with Lord Pembroke’s men, and though what he had learned was how to pretend a fight, he could only do that because he really could fight, and the twins were about to receive a lesson.

Because by the time the second twin had pulled his blade from its scabbard, Alan Rust had already disarmed the first, twisting his sword elegantly around the first clumsy thrust and wrenching his blade wide and fast to rip the young man’s weapon away. He brought the sword back, parried the second twin’s cut, lunged into that twin’s belly to drive him backwards, and then cut left again so that the tip of the sword threatened the first twin’s face. ‘Drop the rochet, you vile turd,’ Rust said, speaking to one twin while threatening the other, and using the voice he might have employed to play a tyrant king; a voice that seemed to emerge from the bowels of the earth, ‘unless you want your brother to lose an eye?’

‘Arrest him!’ one of the twins called to the Pursuivants. His voice was pitched too high, too desperate.

Just then the last of the Pursuivants came from the tiring room, his arms piled with papers. They were our play scripts that had been locked in the big chest on the upper floor. ‘We have what we want,’ he called to his companions, then frowned when he saw the discomfited twins. ‘What …’ he began.

‘You have nothing,’ my brother interrupted him. He looked angrier than I had ever seen him, yet he kept his voice calm.

For a heartbeat or two no one moved. Then Richard Burbage and Henry Condell both drew their swords, the blades scraping on the throats of their scabbards. ‘Not the scripts,’ Burbage said.

‘Not anything,’ Rust said, his sword’s tip quivering an inch from the twin’s eyeball.

‘We are here on the Queen’s business …’ the Pursuivant carrying our scripts began, but again was interrupted by my brother.

‘There has been a misunderstanding,’ my brother said. ‘If you have business here,’ he spoke quietly and reasonably, ‘then you must make enquiries of the Lord Chamberlain, whose men we are.’

‘And we are the Queen’s men,’ the tallest of the Pursuivants on the stage insisted.

‘And the Lord Chamberlain,’ my brother still spoke gently, ‘is Her Majesty’s cousin. I am sure he would want to consult her. You will give me those,’ he held out his hands for the precious pile of scripts. ‘A misunderstanding,’ he said again.

‘A misunderstanding,’ the Pursuivant said, and meekly allowed my brother to take the papers. The tall man dropped the costumes. He had seen the ease with which Alan Rust had disarmed one man, and he gave a wary glance at Richard Burbage, whose sword was lifted, ready to lunge. I doubted it was the swords that had persuaded him to stand down, despite Rust’s display of skill. I suspected it was the mention of Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain, which had convinced him. ‘We’re leaving,’ he called to his fellows.

‘But …’ one of the twins began a protest.

‘We’re leaving!’

They took nothing with them, instead, trying to hold onto their damaged dignity, they stalked from the Theatre, and I heard the hoofbeats as they rode away.

‘What in the name of God …’ Richard Burbage began, then shook his head. ‘Why would they dare come here? Don’t they know Lord Hunsdon is our patron?’

‘Lord Hunsdon can’t protect us from heresy,’ my brother said.

‘There’s no heresy here!’ Will Kemp said angrily.

‘It’s the city,’ my brother sounded weary. ‘They can’t close us because we’re outside their jurisdiction, but they can hint to the Pursuivants that we’re a den of corruption.’

‘I should bloody well hope we are,’ Will Kemp growled.

‘They’ll be back,’ Alan Rust said, ‘unless Lord Hunsdon can stop them.’

‘He won’t like it,’ my brother said, ‘but I’ll write to his lordship.’

‘Do it now!’ Will Kemp said angrily.

My brother bridled at the aggressive tone, then nodded. ‘Indeed now, and someone must deliver the letter.’

I hoped he would ask me because that would give me a chance to visit the Lord Chamberlain’s mansion in Blackfriars, and it was there that the grey-eyed girl with the impish smile was employed. Silvia, I said the name to myself, Silvia. Then I said it aloud, ‘Silvia.’

But my brother asked John Duke to carry the message instead.

And I went back to Ephesus to play Emilia.

THREE

IT WAS TWO weeks later that Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain and our patron, came to the Theatre himself. He did not come to watch a performance, indeed he had never seen a play in the Theatre, but instead arrived unexpectedly during a morning rehearsal. The first we knew of it was when four of his retainers, all wearing dark grey livery with the Carey badge of the white rose bright on their shoulders, strode into the yard. They wore swords, they came confidently, and those of us onstage went very still. The four men were followed by an older man, limping slightly, with a harsh, life-battered face, and a cropped grey beard. He was stocky, with a broad chest, and wore simple clothes, undecorated, but dyed a deep black, betraying their expense. He had a gold chain about his neck and a golden badge on his black velvet cap. If it had not been for the gold and the expensively dyed clothes, a man might have mistaken him for a tradesman, one who had spent his working life wrestling with timber or stone, a hard, strong man, and certainly not a man to cross lightly. ‘Master Shakespeare,’ he addressed my brother, ‘I received your message.’

‘My lord,’ my brother snatched off his hat and went down onto one knee. We all did the same. No one needed to tell us who the hard-faced older man was. The badge on his retainers’ shoulders told us all we needed to know. A fifth retainer, a slim man also in the dark grey livery that displayed the Carey badge, had followed the older man and now stood respectfully a few paces behind his lordship with a satchel in his hands.

‘No need to kneel, no need to kneel,’ Lord Hunsdon said. ‘I have business in Hampstead, and thought I might as well look at the place you fellows lurk.’ He turned to stare at the Theatre’s high galleries. ‘It reminds me of an inn yard.’

‘Very like, my lord,’ my brother agreed.

‘So this is a playhouse, eh?’ His lordship looked around with evident interest, gazing from the galleries to the stage’s high canopy supported by its twin pillars. ‘You think they’ll last?’

‘Last, my lord?’

‘There were no such things when I was a young man. Not one! Now there’s what? Three of them? Four?’

‘I think they’ll last, my lord. They’re popular.’

‘But not with the Puritans, eh? They’d have us all singing psalms instead of watching plays. Like those bloody Percies.’

My brother stiffened at the mention of the Pursuivants. ‘We managed to avoid blooding them, my lord.’

‘A pity,’ Lord Hunsdon said with a grin. Simon Willoughby, wearing a skirt over his hose, had fetched a chair from the tiring house and jumped off the stage to offer it, but the courtesy only provoked a scowl from Lord Hunsdon. ‘I’m not a bloody cripple, boy.’ He looked back to my brother. ‘There’s a disgusting man called Price. George Price. He’s the chief Pursuivant, and a pig in human form. Heard of him?’

‘I have heard of him, my lord, yes. But I don’t know him.’ My brother was doing all the talking for the company. Even Will Kemp, who was usually so voluble, was stunned into silence by the Lord Chamberlain’s arrival.

‘He’s an eager little bugger, our Piggy Price,’ Lord Hunsdon said. ‘He’s a Puritan, of course, which makes him tiresome. I don’t mind the bloody man finding Jesuits, but I’ll be damned if he’ll interfere with my retainers. Which you are.’

‘We have that honour, my lord.’

‘You’re unpaid retainers too, the best sort!’ Lord Hunsdon gave a bark of laughter. ‘I told the bloody man to leave you alone.’

‘I’m grateful to your lordship.’

‘Which he might or might not do. They’re an insolent pack of curs, the Percies. I suppose insolence goes with the office, eh?’

‘It frequently does, my lord,’ my brother said.

‘And the Queen likes her Pursuivants,’ the Lord Chamberlain continued. ‘She doesn’t want some bloody Jesuit slitting her throat, which is understandable, and Piggy Price is damned good at sniffing the buggers out. He’s valued by Her Majesty. I told him to leave you alone, but the moment he smells sedition he’ll let loose the dogs, and if they succeed in finding it then even I can’t protect you.’

‘Sedition, my lord?’ my brother sounded puzzled.

‘You heard me, Master Shakespeare. Sedition.’

‘We’re players, my lord, not plotters.’

‘He claimed you’re harbouring copies of A Conference.’ The accusation was hard and sharp, spoken in a quite different tone to his lordship’s previous remarks. ‘He has been informed, reliably he tells me, that you distribute copies of the damned book to your audiences.’

‘We do what, my lord?’ my brother asked in amazement.

We are players. We pretend, and by pretending, we persuade. If a man were to ask me whether I had stolen his purse I would give him a look of such shocked innocence that even before I offered a reply he would know the answer, and all the while his purse would be concealed in my doublet.

Yet at that moment we had no need to pretend. I doubt many of us knew what his lordship meant by ‘A Conference’, and so most of us just looked puzzled or worried. My brother plainly knew, but he also looked puzzled, even disbelieving. If we had been pretending at that moment then it would have been the most convincing performance ever given at the Theatre, more than sufficient to persuade the Lord Chamberlain that we were innocent of whatever sin he had levelled at us. My brother, frowning, shook his head. ‘My lord,’ he bowed low, ‘we do no such thing!’

James Burbage must have known what ‘A Conference’ was because he also bowed, and then, as he straightened, spread his hands. ‘Search the playhouse, my lord.’

‘Ha!’ Lord Hunsdon treated that invitation with the derision it deserved. ‘You’ll have hidden the copies by now. You take me for a fool?’

My brother spoke earnestly. ‘We do not possess a copy, my lord, nor have we ever possessed one.’

His lordship smiled suddenly. ‘Master Shakespeare, I don’t give the quills off a duck’s arse if you do have one. Just hide the damned thing well. Have you read it?’

My brother hesitated, then nodded. ‘Yes, my lord.’

‘So have I. But if Piggy Price’s men do find a copy here, you’ll all end up in the Marshalsea. All of you! My cousin,’ he meant the Queen, ‘will tolerate much, but she cannot abide that book.’

The Marshalsea is a prison south of the Thames, not far from the Rose playhouse, which is home to the Lord Admiral’s men with whom our company have a friendly rivalry. ‘My lord,’ my brother still spoke slowly and carefully, ‘we have never harboured a copy.’

‘I can’t see why you should.’ Lord Hunsdon was suddenly cheerful again. ‘It’s none of your damned business, is it? Fairies and lovers are your business, eh?’

‘Indeed they are, my lord.’

Lord Hunsdon clicked his fingers, and the thin retainer unbuckled his satchel and took out a sheaf of papers. ‘I like it,’ Lord Hunsdon said, though not entirely convincingly.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ my brother responded cautiously.

‘I didn’t read it all,’ his lordship said, taking the papers from the thin man, ‘but I liked what I read. Especially that business at the end. Pyramid and Thimble. Very good!’

‘Thank you,’ my brother said faintly.

‘But my wife read it. She says it’s a marvel. A marvel!’

My brother looked lost for words.

‘And it’s her ladyship’s opinion that counts,’ Lord Hunsdon went on. ‘I’d have preferred a few fights myself, maybe a stabbing or two, a slit throat perhaps? But I suppose blood and weddings don’t mix?’

‘They are ill-suited, my lord,’ my brother managed to say, taking the offered pages from his lordship.

‘But there is one thing. My wife noticed that it doesn’t have a title yet.’

‘I was thinking …’ my brother began, then hesitated.

‘Yes? Well?’

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream, my lord.’

‘A midsummer night’s what?’ Lord Hunsdon asked, frowning. ‘But the bloody wedding will be in midwinter. In February!’

‘Precisely so, my lord.’

There was a pause, then Lord Hunsdon burst out laughing. ‘I like it! Upon my soul, I do. It’s all bloody nonsense, isn’t it?’

‘Nonsense, my lord?’ my brother enquired delicately.

‘Fairies! Pyramids and thimbles! That fellow turning into a donkey!’

‘Oh yes, all nonsense, my lord,’ my brother said. ‘Of course.’ He bowed again.

‘But the womenfolk like nonsense, so it’s fit for a wedding. Fit for a wedding! If that bloody man Price troubles you again without cause, let me know. I’ll happily strangle the bastard.’ His lordship waved genially, then turned and walked from the playhouse, followed by his retainers.

And my brother was laughing.

‘It is nonsense,’ my brother said. As ever, when he talked to me, he sounded distant. When I had run away from home and had first found him in London, he had greeted me with a bitter chill that had not changed over the years. ‘His lordship was right. What we do is nonsense,’ he said now.

‘Nonsense?’

‘We do not work, we play. We are players. We have a playhouse.’ He spoke to me as if I were a small child who had annoyed him with my question. It was the day after Lord Hunsdon’s visit to the Theatre, and my brother had sent me a message asking me to go to his lodgings, which were then in Wormwood Street, just inside the Bishopsgate. He was sitting at his table beneath the window, writing; his quill scratching swiftly across a piece of paper. ‘Other people,’ he went on, though he did not look at me, ‘other people work. They dig ditches, they saw wood, they lay stone, they plough fields. They hedge, they sew, they milk, they churn, they spin, they draw water, they work. Even Lord Hunsdon works. He was a soldier. Now he has heavy responsibilities to the Queen. Almost everyone works, brother, except us. We play.’ He slid one piece of paper aside and took a clean sheet from a pile beside his table. I tried to see what he was writing, but he hunched forward and hid it with his shoulder.

I waited for him to tell me why I had been summoned, but he went on writing, saying nothing. ‘So what’s a conference?’ I asked him.

‘A conference is commonly an occasion where people confer together.’

‘I mean the one Lord Hunsdon mentioned.’

He sighed in exasperation, then reached over and took the top volume from a small pile of books. The book had no cover, it was just pages sewn together. ‘That,’ he said, holding it towards me, ‘is A Conference.’

I carried the book to the second window, where the light would allow me to read. The book’s title was A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland, and the date was printed as MDXCIIII. ‘It’s new,’ I said.

‘Recent,’ he corrected me pedantically.

‘Published by R. Doleman,’ I read aloud.

‘Of whom no one has heard,’ my brother said, writing again, ‘but he is undoubtedly a Roman Catholic.’

‘So it’s seditious?’

‘It suggests,’ he paused to dip the quill into his inkpot, drained the nib on the pot’s rim, then started writing again, ‘it suggests that we, the people of England, have the right to choose our own monarch, and that we should choose Princess Isabella of Spain, who, naturally, would insist that England again becomes a Roman Catholic country.’

‘We should choose a monarch?’ I asked, astonished at the thought.

‘The writer is provocative,’ he said, ‘and the Queen is enraged. She has not named any successor, and all talk of the succession turns her into a shrieking fury. That book is banned. Give it back.’

I dutifully gave it back. ‘And you’d go to jail if they found the book?’

‘By “they”,’ he said acidly, ‘I assume you mean the Pursuivants. Yes. That would please you, wouldn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘I am touched, brother,’ he said acidly, ‘touched.’

‘Why would someone lie and say we had copies of the book at the Theatre?’ I asked.

He turned and gave me a look of exasperation, as if my question was stupid. ‘We have enemies,’ he said, looking back to the page he was writing. ‘The Puritans preach against us, the city council would like to close the playhouse, and our own landlord hates us.’

‘He hates us?’

‘Gyles Allen has seen the light. He has become a Puritan. He now regrets leasing the land for use as a playhouse and wishes to evict us. He cannot, because the law is on our side for once. But either he, or one of our other enemies, informed against us.’

‘But it wasn’t true!’

‘Of course the accusation wasn’t true. Truth does not matter in matters of faith, only belief. We are being harassed.’

I thought he would say more, but he went back to his writing. A red kite sailed past the window and settled on the ridge of a nearby tiled roof. I watched the bird, but it did not move. My brother’s quill scratched. ‘What are you writing?’ I asked.

‘A letter.’

‘So the new play is finished?’ I asked.

‘You heard as much from Lord Hunsdon.’ Scratch scratch.

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream?’

‘Your memory works. Good.’

‘In which I’ll play a man?’ I asked suspiciously.

His answer was to sigh again, then look through a heap of paper to find one sheet, which he wordlessly passed to me. Then he started writing again.

The page was a list of parts and players. Peter Quince was written at the top, and next to it was my brother’s name. The rest looked like this:

Theseus | George Bryan, if well
Hippolita | Tom Belte
Lisander | Richard Burbage
Demetrius | Henry Condell
Helena | Christopher Beeston, if well
Hermia | Kit Saunders
Oberon | John Heminges
Tytania | Simon Willoughby
Pucke | Alan Rust
Egeus | Thomas Pope
Philostrate | Robert Pallant
Nick Bottome | Will Kemp
Snout | Richard Cowley
Snug | John Duke
Starveling | John Sinklo
Francis Flute | Richard Shakspere
Pease-blossome |
Moth |
Cobweb |
Mustard-seede |

The last four names had no actors assigned to them, and they intrigued me. Pease-Blossome … Cobweb … I assumed they were fairies, but all I really cared about was that I was to play a man! ‘Francis Flute is a man?’ I asked, just to be sure.

‘Indeed he is,’ my brother wrote a few words, ‘so you will have to cut your hair. But not till just before the performance. Till then you must play your usual parts.’

‘Cut my hair?’

‘You want to play a man? You must appear as a man.’ He paused, nib poised above the paper. ‘Bellows menders do not wear their hair long.’

‘Francis Flute is a bellows mender?’ I asked, and could not keep the disappointment from my voice.

‘What did you expect him to be? A wandering knight? A tyrant?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no. I just want to play a man.’

‘And you shall,’ he said, ‘you shall.’

‘Can I see the part?’ I asked eagerly.

‘Isaiah is copying it, so no.’

‘What’s the play about?’

He scratched a few more words. ‘Love.’

‘Because it’s a wedding?’

‘Because it’s a wedding.’

‘And I mend bellows at a wedding?’

‘I would not recommend it. I merely indicated your trade so you will know your place in society, as must we all.’

‘So what does Francis Flute do in the play?’

He paused to select a new sheet of paper. ‘You fall in love. You are a lover.’

For a moment I almost liked him. A lover! Onstage it is the lovers who strut, who draw swords, who make impassioned speeches, who have the audience’s sympathy, and who send folk back to their ordinary lives with an assurance that fate can triumph. A lover! ‘Who do I love?’ I asked.

He paused to dip the quill in his inkpot again, drained the nib carefully, and began writing on the new page. ‘What did the Reverend Venables want of you?’ he asked.

‘Venables?’ I was taken aback by the question.

‘Some weeks ago,’ he said, ‘after we performed his piece of dross, the Reverend Venables had words with you. What did he want?’

‘He thought I played Uashti well,’ I stammered.

‘Now tell me the truth.’

I paused, trying to gather my thoughts. ‘He’d heard that I might leave the company.’

‘Indeed. I told him so. And?’

‘He wanted me to stay,’ I lied.

The pen scratched. ‘He didn’t suggest you join the Earl of Lechlade’s new company?’ I said nothing, and that silence was eloquence enough. My brother smiled, or perhaps he sneered. ‘He did. Yet you have promised me to stay with the company through the winter.’

‘I did promise that.’

He nodded, then laid the quill down and sifted through the pile of papers. ‘You are always complaining that you lack money.’ He found the sheets he wanted, and, without looking at me, held them towards me. ‘Copy the part of Titania. I will pay you two shillings, and I want it done by Monday. Pray ensure it is legible.’

I took the sheets. ‘By Monday?’

‘We will begin rehearsing on Monday. At Blackfriars.’

‘Blackfriars?’

‘There’s an echo in the room,’ he said, handing me some clean sheets of paper. ‘Lord Hunsdon and his family are wintering in their Blackfriars mansion. We shall perform the play in their great hall.’

I felt another surge of happiness. Silvia was there! And there was a second pulse of joy at the thought of playing a man at last. ‘Who is Titania?’ I asked, wondering if she would end up in my arms.

‘The fairy queen. Do not lose those pages.’

‘So the play is about fairies?’

‘All plays are about fairies. Now go.’

I went.

I enjoyed copying. Not everyone likes the task, but I never resented it. I usually copied a part I would play, and writing the lines helped me to memorise them, but I was happy to copy other actors’ parts too.

Every actor received his part, and no other, which meant that for this wedding play there would be fifteen or so copied parts, which, if they were joined together, would make the whole play. Isaiah Humble, the bookkeeper, would have a complete copy, and usually another would be sent to the Master of the Revels, so he could ensure that no treason would be spoken onstage, though as our play would be a private performance in a noble house that permission was probably unnecessary. Besides, Sir Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, was appointed by the Lord Chamberlain, who had already approved the play.

I worked in Father Laurence’s room. He lived just beneath my attic in the Widow Morrison’s house. His room had a large table beneath a north-facing window. The room was also much warmer than mine. He had a hearth in which a sea-coal fire was burning, and beside which he sat wrapped in a woollen blanket, so that, with just his bald head showing, he looked like some aged tortoise. ‘Say it aloud, Richard,’ he encouraged me.

‘I’m only just starting, father.’

‘Aloud!’ he said again.

I had written down the words immediately before Titania’s entrance, the last two lines that Puck said, followed by a line from a fairy whose name was not given. Then came a stage direction which brought Oberon and Titania onstage. ‘“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,”’ I said aloud.

‘Who says that?’

‘Oberon, King of the Fairies.’

‘Titania! A lovely name,’ Father Laurence said, ‘your brother took it from Ovid, didn’t he?’

‘Did he?’

‘From the Metamorphoses, of course. And Oberon, Oberon?’ he frowned, thinking. ‘Ah! I remember, I had a copy of that book once.’

‘A copy of what, father?’

‘It’s an old French tale,’ he chuckled, ‘Huon of Bordeaux had to fulfil some dreadful errands, rather like the labours of Hercules, and he was helped by the King of the Fairies, who was called Oberon. Read on, Richard, read on!’

‘“What, jealous Oberon?”’ I read, ‘“Fairy skip hence, I have forsworn his bed and company.”’

I worked in Father Laurence’s room because the window gave good light and because the Percies, whatever else they stole, had left the old man his ink and a sheaf of quills. Besides, I liked Father Laurence. He was ancient, gentle, wise, and had long ceased to struggle against the enmity of Protestants. ‘I just want to die in peace,’ he would say, ‘and I’d prefer not to be dragged to the scaffold on a wicker hurdle to have my belly ripped open by some Smithfield butcher.’ He was crippled, and could scarcely walk without the help of a companion. The Widow Morrison, I think, let him live rent-free, and I suspected she made confession to him too, but it was best not to ask about things like that, yet most days I would hear footsteps on the lower stairs and the creak of his door and the mutter of voices, and suspect that some person had come to confess their sins and receive absolution. The parish constables must have known too, they were not fools, but he was a harmless old man, and well loved. The new minister of the parish was a fierce young zealot from Oxford who cursed all things of Rome, but when a parishioner lay dying it was often Father Laurence who was summoned, and he would limp down the street in his ancient, threadbare cassock, and local people greeted him with a smile, all but the Puritans, who were more likely to spit as he passed. When I had money I would take him food, coal, or firewood, and I always helped tidy his room after the Percies had ransacked it. ‘Read more to me,’ he said now. ‘Read more to me!’

‘“These are the forgeries of jealousy,”’ I read aloud,

‘And never since the middle summer’s spring

Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,

By pavéd fountain or by rushy brook,

Or in the beachéd margent by the sea,

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind.’

Father Laurence sighed, a small noise. I looked across the room to see his head had fallen against the high back of his chair, his eyes were closed, and his mouth open. He did not move, made no more sound, and I half started to my feet, thinking he had died. Then he spoke. ‘“To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind”!’ he said very softly. ‘“To dance our ringlets”! Oh, how perfect.’

‘Perfect?’

‘I remember, when I was a very young priest, seeing a girl dance. She had ringlets too, and her name was Jess.’ He sounded sad. ‘She danced beside a stream did my Jess, and I watched as she danced her ringlets to the whistling wind.’ He opened his eyes and smiled at me. ‘Your brother is so clever!’

‘Is he?’ I asked dourly.

‘You must be more generous, Richard. He speaks with the tongue of an angel.’

‘He doesn’t like me.’

‘Which is sad,’ Father Laurence said. ‘Perhaps it’s because you’re young and he’s not?’

‘He’s not old!’

‘Thirty-one, you told me? He’s in his middle age, Richard. And he dislikes you because you have what God never granted him. Good looks. His face is blunt, his chin weak, and his beard sparse. You, on the other hand …’ He left whatever he was about to say unfinished.

‘They call me pretty,’ I said resentfully.

‘But pretty in a boy grows to handsome in a man, and you’re a man now.’

‘Not according to my brother.’

‘And he dislikes you too,’ Father Laurence went on, ‘because you remind him of Stratford.’

‘He likes Stratford,’ I protested. ‘He keeps telling me he’ll buy property there.’

‘You tell me he was born in Stratford, that he grew up and married there, but I wonder if he was ever happy there. I think he became a different man in London, and he doesn’t want to be reminded of the old, unhappy William.’

‘Then why would he buy property there?’

‘Because when he returns, Richard, he would be the biggest man in town. He wants revenge on his childhood. He wants the respect of the town. Saint Paul tells us that when we were children we spoke as children, we understood and thought as children, but when we become men we put away childish things, but I’m not so sure we ever do put them away. I think the childish things linger on, and your brother craves what he wanted as a child, the respect of his home town.’

‘Did he tell you that, father?’

He smiled. ‘He doesn’t visit me often, but when he does, we talk. He’s an interesting man.’

‘I just wish he’d help me more,’ I said resentfully.

‘Richard, Richard! In this life we can look to God for help, but God also expects us to look to ourselves. You must be a good player, a good man, and your brother will see it in the end. Don’t look to your brother for help, be a help to him.’

I laughed at that, not because it was funny, but because I could not think what to say, then I dipped the quill in ink again and went on copying. As ever, when I used a pen, I remembered Thomas Mulliver, one of the ushers in the school at Stratford, and the man who had taught me to read and write. He carried a stick, which he rapped across our skulls if he detected inattention or a mistake. ‘Writing raises us above the beasts,’ he would chant. ‘Are you a beast, boy?’ And the stick would whistle through the air, and the sharp pain slice through the skull. He liked to quote Latin to us, even though most of us struggled with the strange language. ‘Audaces fortuna iuvat,’ he would chant. ‘And what does that mean? It means fortune favours the brave! Are you brave, boy?’ And the stick would hiss again. He was kinder in the afternoon, when his breath smelled richly of ale, and he would tell us jokes and even slip us a small coin if our work pleased him. I liked him well enough, but then he was discovered behind Holy Trinity Church with his hand up the skirt of Mistress Cybbes, wife of the bailiff, and that was the end of Thomas Mulliver.

I had followed not long after. I hated Stratford. I hated my father’s sullen anger and my mother’s tears. My brother had left his wife and three small children in the house, the children cried, and Anne screamed at my mother, who wept and worried. No one was happy. Bad harvests had made food cruelly expensive, the summers were wet, the winters were cold, and my father plucked me from school because, he insisted, they could no longer afford to educate me nor feed me. I was fourteen when he told me my schooldays were over and that I was to learn a trade. ‘Thomas Butler has agreed you’ll be his apprentice. It’s a good opportunity.’ Butler was a carpenter, and by becoming his apprentice I would have to live in his house and thus be one less mouth for my mother to feed. I remember my father marching me around to the Butler house on a Thursday morning. ‘It’s a good trade, carpentry,’ he told me as we walked under the elms of Henley Street. ‘The blessed Virgin’s husband was a carpenter, God bless him.’

‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘Why not Gilbert or Edmund?’

‘Don’t be daft, boy. Gilbert’s already apprenticed. And your younger brother’s not old enough. Your sister is working, why shouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t want to be a carpenter!’

‘Well, that’s what you’ll be. And be glad you can read, write, and sum! That’s more schooling than most boys get. Doesn’t do no harm to know your letters and numbers, and now you can learn a trade too.’ I carried a bag with a change of clothes, which I clung to as my father stood in the Butler kitchen and drank a pot of ale with my new master, and as Agnes Butler, a surly creature, eyed me suspiciously. They had no children of their own, though Bess, an orphan who was just eleven years old, was their maid. She was a skinny little thing, with wide brown eyes, lank red hair, and a dark bruise on her forehead. Agnes saw me looking at her. ‘Take your lusting eyes off her, boy!’ she snapped. ‘He must sleep in the workshop,’ she added to her husband.

‘He shall,’ my new master said, ‘so he shall.’

Then my father patted me on the head. ‘He’s a good boy, most of the time. Behave yourself, Richard.’ And with that he was gone.

‘I’ll teach you a useful trade,’ Thomas Butler promised me, though all he ever taught me was how to stack firewood. ‘Winter’s coming,’ he told me, ‘time to split timber and slaughter hogs.’ When he deemed I had not worked hard enough, he hit me and he hit hard, sometimes using a piece of wood. He hit Bess too, and sometimes his wife, who hit back. They shrieked at each other. I hated them and missed my home. My father, when he was sober, was jovial, and my mother, when she was not distraught with worry, was loving. She had told us stories, weaving fantasies of castles and gallant knights, of animals that could talk, and of the spirits who haunted the green woodlands. I cried once after she had visited me, and Agnes Butler slapped me about the head. ‘You can’t go back home,’ she snarled, ‘we bought you! Seven years’ labour you owe us, and seven years’ labour you will give us.’

They fed me stale bread and weak slops, and made me sleep in the workshop, which was a shabby, dank shed in their yard. I was locked in at night, with no candles, and forbidden to feed the small fire on which Thomas Butler melted his glue. He found the ashes warm one morning, and I was beaten for that even though I had not fed the fire, which had simply burned longer than usual. Thomas Butler had hit me, then flourished an awl in my face. ‘Do that again, boy, and I’ll take out an eye. You won’t be so pretty then, will you?’

Seven years’ labour, and it lasted three weeks.

It ended on a Saturday morning when I accidentally knocked over the glue pot. ‘You little bastard,’ Thomas snarled, and picked up a length of beechwood waiting by the lathe, ‘I’ll beat you senseless.’ He ran at me, and, in panic, I snatched up a heavy wooden maul that I swung at him.

It hit. It slammed into the side of his skull, and he went down like a stunned ox. I remember he twitched among the wood shavings for a brief moment, then went still. A trickle of blood oozed from his ear, and I stood, whimpering, remembering that they hanged murderers. Thomas Butler did not move. A purse hung from his belt, and when he fell some coins had rolled out of it. Three shillings and eight pennies, which I stole. They hanged thieves too, but I reasoned they could not hang me twice.

I could not go home. The constables would look for me in Henley Street, but nor could I stay. I was not thinking properly. The panic that had made me snatch up the wooden hammer was still making me shake. I was fourteen and a murderer. So I ran. I was crying, I remember that, crying as I ran into the world.

Fate is strange, but real. I was told, much later, that I had been born under a lucky star, while my mother, God save her soul, believed the angels watched over us, one angel to every person, and my angel was watchful that morning. I fled the yard and turned north towards Warwick. Why Warwick? Perhaps because the thought of hanging was still tormenting me, and Warwick was where murderers were hanged, but within a few yards I saw Peg Quiney, a friend of my mother’s who would have recognised me, and so I turned and ran the other way. I ran blindly, not stopping to catch my breath until I had crossed the bridge and was on the road to Ettington. Sheep bleated in a field beyond a ditch and hedge. Two horsemen came from the south and I hid deep in a great bunch of cow parsley. The horsemen passed without seeing me. I was shaking still, trying not to sob.

The horsemen went towards the town, and I fell asleep. That still surprises me, that in my terror I slept, and Lord knows for how long. Maybe an hour? Maybe two, but then I was woken by a dog licking my face, and I heard a familiar and friendly voice. ‘Hiding, boy?’ It was Edward Sales, a Stratford carrier and a kindly man, sitting high on his wagon with his two brindle horses, Gog and Magog, in the wagon’s harness. The wagon’s bed was heaped with sacks and crates. Edward had once carried woolsacks to London for my father, back when there was money in the house. ‘Come here, Lucifer!’ he called to his dog. ‘I wouldn’t have spied you,’ he said, ‘if Lucifer hadn’t smelled you out.’ Lucifer, a great ugly hound, looked terrifying, but I knew of old that he was more likely to lick a man to death than bite him. ‘They’re looking for you, Richard,’ Edward went on, ‘hue and cry, uphill and down dale.’

‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ I stammered.

‘What? Kill Tom Butler!’ He laughed. ‘He’s not dead. He’ll have a pain in his skull for a month, and serve the miserable old bugger right. But you didn’t kill him. He’s got a noddle like an oak stump.’

‘He’s alive?’

‘Alive and spitting curses.’

‘He’ll kill me if I go back,’ I said.

‘More than like, yes he will. Not a forgiving man, is he? Nor would I be, married to that shrew. She’d claw the eyes out of an angel, that one, then piss in the sockets.’

I climbed out of the ditch. ‘I can’t go home either.’ I had stolen money. I was a thief, and thieves are hanged.

Ned seemed to know what I was thinking, because he grinned. ‘They won’t hang you, boy. Maybe brand you? A big T on your forehead? But most like your father will pay Tom Butler some silver and send you back to him.’

I hesitated for a moment, then asked the question that changed my life. ‘Where are you going, Ned?’

‘London, boy. Down to the big stink.’

‘I have money,’ I pulled two of the shillings from my pocket and brushed the sawdust from them, ‘can I come?’

Ned stared at me for what seemed a long time. One of his horses, either Gog or Magog, grazed the thick roadside grass. ‘He’ll get wind eating that,’ Ned said, and jerked a rein. ‘And what will you do in London, Richard?’

‘My brother’s there.’

‘So he is. Well, hop up, then, hop up.’

I went to London.

London!

Ever since my brother had gone to London I had been fascinated by the city, by the stories men and women told of it, and of its glory that was so much greater than Warwick or Kenilworth, let alone little Stratford. Ned Sales had often talked of it when sitting in our kitchen. ‘I saw the Queen herself once,’ I remember him saying, ‘and she had a thousand horsemen carrying lit torches that flamed all around her. She glowed! Like a ruby, all red and shiny! Of course they cleaned the city for her,’ he had chuckled. ‘They hung tapestries and flags over the windows. Sometimes just bed sheets.’ He had sipped his ale and looked at me. ‘That’s to stop folk chucking their turds and piss out the window. Wouldn’t do to have a common turd spattered on Her Majesty’s hair.’

‘Don’t talk so,’ my mother had said, but with a smile.

‘’Tis true, Mistress Mary, I swear it.’ He had made the sign of the cross, which made my mother tut, but again with a smile.

‘I’ve never been to London,’ she had said wistfully.

‘It’s full of strangers. From France, the Netherlands, the Germanies, even blackamoors! And the buildings … My sweet Lord, but you could cram all Stratford into Saint Paul’s and have room left over for Shottery!’

‘I worry about my Will being there,’ my mother had said.

‘He’s thriving, mistress. I saw him last week when he gave me that missive.’ Ned had brought a letter from my brother, along with two gold eagles wrapped in a scrap of linen. ‘He’s thriving,’ he said again. ‘He has silver aiglets on his laces!’

My mother had toyed with the golden coins. ‘They say the plague strikes harder in London.’

Ned had made the sign of the cross again. ‘Everything’s bigger, better, or worse in London. That’s just the way of it.’

Now, riding Ned’s wagon behind the big rumps of Gog and Magog, I had a whole week to ask more questions. ‘It’s a dirty city, boy,’ he told me as we trundled slow between wide Oxfordshire pastures and fields of growing barley, ‘filthy like you’ve no idea. And the city smells … shit underfoot and smoke overhead, but there’s gold between the shit and the smoke. Not for the likes of us, of course.’

‘My brother sends gold …’

‘Aye, but your Will is a clever one. He always was.’

‘Mother says he should go back to his school-teaching.’

‘Mothers are like that, boy. They think you mustn’t rise too high in case you fall too far.’

I knew what my mother thought because I had usually written her letters as she dictated them, and in every one she had pleaded with my brother to return to his old job as an usher in a Warwickshire school.

‘But he won’t,’ Ned said with a grin, ‘he’s having a high time, he is. Just you wait and see.’

At that time my brother had lodgings in the Dolphin, the tavern just north of the Bishopsgate, and that is where Ned took me. ‘I’m not letting you walk through London, boy, I’d rather let you loose in hell.’ He stopped his wagon beneath the huge inn sign on which a grotesque fish leaped out of the water, and gave me the newest letter my mother had dictated, a letter that had probably been written by Gilbert or by Edmund, then tossed me one of the two shillings I had given him. ‘Look after yourself, boy. It might be a grand city, but London can be dangerous.’

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