King of Shadows (19 page)

On the opposite page was a painting of Richard Burbage. He looked older than the Burbage I knew—a bit like Arby with a beard—but otherwise it was a lot like him. The caption said it was “thought to be a self-portrait.” He was looking straight out at me from the page, and that made me feel very weird indeed.

Rachel and Gil were peering over my shoulder. Rachel said, “Look at this. ‘Nathan Field died a bachelor with a considerable reputation, of the kind not uncommon among players, for success with women.'” She chuckled, and prodded my back.

Gil wasn't paying attention, he was studying another paragraph. “It says he was in the King's Men for the last four years of his life. There you go, Nat—that was Shakespeare's company.”

“Shakespeare's company was the Lord Chamberlain's Men,” I said.

“Only till the Queen died. When James I came to the throne, he made them the King's Men.” Gil was back at his own book, flicking through. “Here it is—Nathan Field joined the King's Men as an actor-writer in 1616 or so.”

Rachel said, “That was the year Shakespeare died.”

“Shoot,” I said. That made me really depressed. I'd wanted there to be a connection between Will Shakespeare and my namesake. It wouldn't make any difference, it didn't make any sense, but it would have been a tiny thing to hang on to, even though Nathan Field and I shared nothing but our name.

“But there's something else,” Gil said. “Those companies were all owned by the top actors—each of them had one share, except Burbage, he had more. And you know what? Nathan Field bought Shakespeare's share.”

I got up off the floor and went over to the window. The sky was grey, and so was the city, and the river. Okay, so I had my link between Field and Shakespeare now, I had all these dates and figures, but all I felt was the huge ache of separation. I'd been given such a wonderful present, the best thing to have happened since my father died, and then it had been taken away.

Rachel came and put her arm over my shoulders.

I said miserably, “But why?
Why
did it all happen?”

Gil said, “I've been thinking about that.” He was sitting there cross-legged on the floor, still in his Elizabethan costume of course; he looked like a portrait himself. “I think it must have been the plague.”

“The plague?”

“Nathan Field had bubonic plague. If you got the plague in those days, you died. But if you get it today, they can cure you quite easily, if they catch it soon enough. With antibiotics.
You were switched with Nathan Field so that he could hp cured of the plague.”

I stared at him. “Who switched us?”

“Ah, that's another question,” Gil said. He shrugged.

“Time. God. Fate. Depends what you believe in.”

“Nathan Field wasn't so very special, to have that happen. None of us had ever heard of him.”

“It wasn't done for Nathan Field,” Gil said. His eyes looked very bright, as if he were suddenly high.

“Oh my Lord!” said Rachel. She turned to him. “Shakespeare!”

Gil nodded. He was grinning.

“It was 1599, Nat,” Rachel said. “Shakespeare was only in his thirties, he wrote most of his greatest plays after that. If he'd acted with Nathan Field instead of with you, he'd have caught the plague and died.”

“We wouldn't have had
Hamlet
or
Othello
or
King Lear
or a dozen others,” Gil said. “We'd have lost the best playwright that ever lived. You may feel you've lost him, Nat, but you saved him. If you hadn't gone back in time, William Shakespeare would have died.”

It was true, I guess; if there was a reason for the time slip, that was it. Realizing it should have knocked me sideways.

But it didn't, not then. Whether Will Shakespeare had been in his thirties or his fifties when he died, the fact remained that he was dead. Like my mom, like my dad. I didn't have long enough with any of them. And Shakespeare was so clear in my mind, he'd flashed through my life like a shooting star such a little while ago; I couldn't bear to let go of the image of him alive and unpredictable, of the sound of his voice, the sight of that quick smile brightening his face.

I dropped to the floor next to them again. I said, swallowing to keep the misery out of my voice, “He gave me a
poem. He copied it for me, after I'd told him about my dad dying. He wanted me to keep it so it would help. I put it under my pillow, but”—I choked up, and thumped my fist on the floor to make myself go on—“but then I woke up in the hospital, and it was gone.”

Gil said, “Was it one of the sonnets? D'you remember any of it?”

I tried, but I'd only heard it the once, when Shakespeare read it for me. “There was something about marriage in the first line. And further on it said that love was an ever-fixed mark.”

Gil and Rachel looked at each other, a quick private look.

Gil said quietly, “We can find that for you.”

Rachel got up, and fetched a book from one of the shelves behind the desk. It was a big fat
Complete Works of Shakespeare.
She gave it to Gil, and sat down cross-legged beside us.

Gil opened the book near the back, and flipped through pages of sonnets, until he paused. He said, “Number one sixteen,” and he began to read it aloud.

 

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments—”.

 

From the doorway, a deeper voice said,

 

“—Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken—

 

It was Arby. Standing there, casually, one hand in his pocket, he went right through the poem to the end, in that deep actor's voice of his, reminding me suddenly of Master Burbage's voice, and when he'd finished I saw Gil and Rachel were unobtrusively holding hands. I glanced away fast, so as not to embarrass them.

There was a silence for a moment, and then Arby gave us a little crooked grin. He said, “Thought you might be here. I came home to grab a sandwich, and to find my Puck.” He turned and went off down the hallway toward the kitchen.

Gil stood up. “I'll be back,” he said. He leaned over and gave Rachel and me a squeeze on the shoulder, one hand on each, and went after Arby.

Rachel said, “You still have your poem, Nat.”

“I guess so,” I said. I looked at the page, and felt slightly better. “I do, don't I?”

“I think I know why he gave you it,” she said. “Specially if it was after talking about your father. It's a wonderful poem. It says, loving doesn't change just because someone isn't there, or because time gets in the way, or even death. It's always with you, keeping you safe, it won't ever leave you.”

“An
ever-fixed mark,”
I said.

Rachel nodded.
“Even to the edge of doom.”
She looked down at the page, and then across at me. “You met him!” she said softly. “You
spoke
to him!”

Then suddenly she got up, pulling me with her. “Let's go eat lunch. Are you coming back to rehearsal? We open tomorrow.”

I said reluctantly, “It's so hard playing it, after everything.”

“I know. But if he gave you a poem, I figure you can give him a performance. Even if it's not the same as the one you did with him. What do you think?”

“I'll let you know,” I said.

In the kitchen, Gil and Arby were making tuna fish sandwiches and talking about Titania's little unseen serving boy in
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
the one she and Oberon fight about. This had always been a sore point with Rachel, who was permanently pissed off that Titania gives way in the end, and lets Oberon take the boy, in spite of all the good reasons she's given earlier in the play for being attached to him. Pretty soon there was a brisk, though quite friendly, argument going on about antifeminist stereotypes, or something like that. It suited me fine. I ate my sandwich and sat quietly on the edge of the conversation. I was feeling totally numb.

But I went back to rehearsal. What else was I going to do? Arby had brought me from the United States to play Puck, that was my job. And Rachel was right: Will Shakespeare had given me a poem, so I owed him a performance—a second performance. Most important of all perhaps, I was an actor, I wanted always to be an actor, so the Globe Theatre—and all other theaters like and unlike it—would always be my world.

Just before we left the house, I slipped back into Arby's study. I wanted to copy out my poem, so that I could keep it with me. I had the big
Complete Works
open on the desk, and I was scribbling hastily on a piece of
scrap paper, when Arby came into the room and saw me.

He came to the desk and looked at my paper. He didn't say a thing at first, he didn't ask me what I was doing or why; he simply reached down to the pile of books on the floor beside the desk, did a little excavation and pulled out two slim paperbacks.

“This is for you,” he said, and he handed me one of the books. It was a copy of Shakespeare's
Sonnets.

I was startled. “Uh—thank you,” I said. “Uh—are you sure you—”

“I have a bunch of copies,” Arby said. He handed me the other paperback. “Do you know this one?”

The title said
The Tempest,
by William Shakespeare.

“No,” I said.

He said, “Take it. You should read it sometime. Better still, see it acted, if you're ever in the right place.”

“Why?” I said.

“You'll know why,” Arby said.

Then we went back to the Globe, and I forgot all about
The Tempest
in the pressure of rehearsing the
Dream.
But I didn't forget about my poem.

I slept like a log that night. I was worn out by all the emotion, not to mention the rehearsing. They had it all down pat, it was a very smooth production by now. Things weren't like that in my day—in Shakespeare's day, I mean—when there simply wasn't time to rehearse so much. Every performance had its awkwardnesses and thribblings.

My day.
What was my day? Which side of the four-hundred-year gap?

This
Dream
was going to look and sound gorgeous; I had to admit that, once I'd reconciled myself to seeing on the stage the clothes I'd seen on the streets only days before. Arby had taken great pains with every detail. Even the music sounded just like what I remembered—not the exact tunes, but the sound of it, the kind of instruments the musicians played.

I was due at the Globe at ten in the morning for our two o'clock opening performance. Mrs. Fisher had gone to work by the time I got up, though she was taking the afternoon off to see the play. I ate a huge breakfast; Aunt Jen cooked me two fried eggs and some thick, meaty English bacon. We'd already done all our catching up with news from home; we were just comfortable together. I reread my poem while I ate—Aunt Jen wasn't one of those people who ban books from the table a hundred percent of the time—and looked at some of the other sonnets. There was one couplet I liked a lot:

 

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 

“Thee” was the person he was writing the poem about, but it seemed to me that it could also mean him, Shakespeare. Even though he'd been dead for almost four hundred years, here we were still acting his plays, reading his sonnets, as if he were alive.

I just wished I could find that comforting.

Aunt Jen said, right out of the blue, “I wish Gabriel could see you this afternoon. He'd have been so proud.”

Gabriel was my father.

I felt my eyes fill with tears, before I'd even had time
to think—but they were good tears, somehow, better than the dry pain that I'd had for so long.

She put a hand on the back of my neck. “I'm sorry, honey, I didn't mean to upset you.”

“You haven't,” I said. “I wish he was here too.”

“He's been on my mind a lot this past week,” she said. “We never talk about him, do we? I think we shall, more often, now you're getting older.” She sat down opposite me. She was wearing jeans and a white shirt, with a Navajo turquoise ornament on a chain around her neck; she looked rather like a kid, except for the grey ponytail. She said, “Do you remember him well?”

“Not as well as I used to. I remember little-kid things, like him throwing me up in the air and catching me, when I must have been really young. I remember him reading to me, at night when I was in bed. Aunt Jen—I'd like to read his poems.”

“They're all waiting for you at home,” she said. “They're difficult—but if you can manage the Sonnets, you can try him. You'll find yourself in a few of them.”

“Really?”

She picked up my paperback. “Poets find truth by writing about what they love,” she said.

“Did he say that?”

Aunt Jen laughed. “No—I just said it. Your father and William Shakespeare say things better than that.” She looked at her watch. “You should leave soon—I'll walk you to the theater. Mustn't keep Mr. Babbage waiting, not today.”

I said blankly, “Who?”

She blinked at me. “Your director, of course.”

I sat very still. I said, “We're so used to calling him Arby, I guess we forget his other name.”

“Arby,” said Aunt Jen with mild interest. “The initials, I suppose. RB. Richard Babbage.”

I thought about that name, and those initials, all the way to the theater. It was a weird echo, and it spooked me out. But I didn't take it any further, not then. The moment I was back with Arby, it went out of my head. He was so much his very positive self, so firmly planted in the theater of today and his own ideas about what it should be like.