King of Shadows (20 page)

There was always something about the way Arby dressed that told you he had to be an actor, or a director, or maybe a painter. It wasn't that he looked outrageous, he just never looked ordinary. Quite often he was dressed all in black. Today, as a tribute to the opening, he wore black jeans, a purple shirt open at the neck, and a gold medallion around his neck.

He was also being extremely irritable, rehearsing Gil, Alan Wong, Eric, me and four other “fairies” onstage in the dance that hallows the Duke's house at the end of the play. He had a group of English musicians up in the gallery, and couldn't get their tabor player, who was also their leader, to give him the tempo he wanted. By the time they got it right, the smaller fairies were beginning to fool around at the back of the stage. One boy in particular was being obnoxious, trying to start a belching contest, ignoring all warnings. After the loudest belch, Gil flicked a finger sharply against the side of his head, and the kid shrieked as if he were being murdered. And Arby blew.

“Warmun
—you just touch one of those kids again, and I'll have you out of this play faster than light! Are you
crazy? People who hit children end up in jail!”

I was so indignant on Gil's behalf that I made the huge mistake of shouting back at him. “It was the kid's fault, not Gil's!”

“Keep your mouth shut, Field!” Arby snapped.

“You didn't see what was happening! Leave him alone!”

“Shut up!”

“Shut up yourself!” I shouted. I could feel Gil's hand gripping my shoulder, but it was no good, I couldn't stop. I was so angry with the world, with everyone and everything—and now suddenly the rage had found an outlet and there was no way to stop it pouring out. “You think you're God!” I shrieked at Arby. “You have to be right all the time, don't you, you won't let anyone else have feelings, it's all you, you, you! Who do you think you are?”

I was screaming at him like a mad person, and everyone on stage was standing frozen, staring at me. I heard the shrill echo of my voice curve around the theater as I stopped.

There was a moment's stunned silence, and then Arby said from the stage gallery, “Everyone take a ten-minute break in the greenroom. Or get into costume, if you aren't already.” His voice was calm and level now. “Keep those small children under control, Maisie. Nat Field, I want to see you up here. Now.” His eyes shifted briefly to Gil. “Alone.”

Everyone quietly moved away, out through the stage exits to the big backstage doors, which led to parts of the theater that hadn't been there in my other Globe. Gil rubbed my back for an instant and went away; we both knew there was nothing he could do. I hadn't really been yelling because of him, I'd been yelling because of me.

I went up to the gallery. The musicians' chairs were grouped there, a music stand in front of each, and Arby was sitting in one of them with his back to me.

For a moment I felt a kind of giddiness, and I put out a hand to the wall to steady myself. In the air, from the wooden O of the roof, I could hear the burbling of the doves that I'd heard four hundred years ago, loud, very loud, growing louder.

Arby didn't move. His broad shoulders looked different suddenly, yet still familiar, and my neck prickled with uncertainty. He turned his head, and there he still was, the same face, with the long chin and the rather big nose, but with a look of someone else too.

“Sit down, Nat,” he said quietly. “I didn't intend to have this conversation, but there's no way to predict how fast a wound will heal. Or how slowly. And you have your deep cut right on top of the old scar, and so you scream.”

I sat down on one of the musicians' chairs. I suddenly felt he knew far, far more about me than I knew about him. It was like being on the edge of a precipice and trying not to look down. “What do you mean?” I said.

“It's cruel, isn't it?” Arby said. “You lost your father, in that terrible way, and part of you froze into a little ice block, like the heart of the Snow Queen. Then a man from the past warmed you to life again, and before you could blink, you lost him too. Time took him away. Cruel, cruel.”

How did he know about my father? I'd never told him. How
did he know about Will Shakespeare?

“Has Gil talked to you?” I said.

Arby paid no attention. He wasn't listening to me. “We think too much about past and present, Nat,” he said.
“Time does not always run in a straight line. And once in a while, something is taken away in order that it may be given back.”

He got to his feet, and stood there looking down at me, in his purple and black. The light glinted on the medallion around his neck, drawing my eyes like a hypnotist's finger. It was as if he had taken us both out of the real world and we were up in the sky, in space, looking down at it. Looking down at the blue planet that the astronauts see. Looking at all the centuries, all the things that happen and are so hard to explain or understand.

That was the picture that came into my head, just for that moment, and I swear he'd put it there.

Arby reached out and took my hand. He said, “An American actor called Sam Wanamaker spent half his life making a dream come true, making it possible for Shakespeare's Globe to be rebuilt in this place. So it was built, and here it is. The place where Nat Field could be brought to Nat Field. But not by accident.”

The hair was beginning to prickle on the back of my neck again.

“Will Shakespeare had to be saved,”
Arby said. “Once the Globe was here, I had my own work to do. To form a company of boys. To choose the right play, and arrange for it to be played at the Globe. To find and cast a boy whose name was Nat Field, who had a fierce painful need strong enough to take him through Time.”

I was staring at him. I must have looked like a frightened rabbit. I said,
“Who are you?”

“Just an actor,” Arby said. He let go my hand. “Richard Babbage, from London via Massachusetts, at your service.”

But he slurred the word a little, in his English-American accent. There was no knowing whether he had actually said “Babbage”—or “Burbage.”

The doves were cooing in the roof.

“Everything is repaired, everything is healed,” Arby said. “Nat Field was made well, Will Shakespeare lived to give us his plays. But a part of you is still wounded, still angry, so there is one more thing I must tell you, to bring the healing full circle. I think Will missed you, Nat. He missed his Puck, his aerial sprite, when the sprite went to St. Paul's and never came back.”

I thought:
I miss him too. Oh I miss him too.

He was looking down at the stage, this man we called Arby. He was in profile, half shadowed, unreadable.

I was sitting very still; I hardly dared breathe.

“And though he had lost you, I think he kept the memory of you in his head,” he said. “Toward the end of his life, when he was writing little, and acting less, he wrote one more great play, and he wrote you into it.” He looked across at me. “Do you remember what he used to call you?”

I heard that warm, velvety voice in my memory.
Th'art a sprite, an aerial sprite, born of the air. One day I shall write thee an airier Robin Goodfellow—unless thou leave me, or grow old . . .

I said, “Like you said. He called me his Puck. His aerial sprite.”

He smiled. “That play I gave you to read,
The Tempest.
It's about a great magician, called Prospero. Will Shakespeare played him, a few times—it was the last part he ever played. And in the play, Prospero has a servant, a spirit, a sort of ethereal Puck, whose name is
Ariel. No doubt a good little actor played him, a pretty light-footed boy with a sweet voice, but Ariel was written for Will Shakespeare's vanished Nat, the boy in his memory. You.”

My aerial sprite. I shall not forget thee, Nat Field.

I couldn't speak for a moment. Whoever he was, this man, whatever he was, he leaned over me and looked in through my eyes, into the inside of my mind. “You have not lost him, Nat,” he said. “You will never lose him, never.”

Then he was Arby again, director, actor, teacher, boss man, dragon. He put a hand under my arm and yanked me up out of the chair. “Next summer, the Company of Boys will do a production of
The Tempest”
he said. “And you'll play Ariel. So you'd better be damn good as Puck today, or I might change my mind.”

I cleared my throat, though I still sounded husky. “All right,” I said.

Arby looked at me with a half-smile. I saw a muscle twitch in his cheek, below his left eye. He said, “At the end of
The Tempest
Prospero lets Ariel go free.
I shall miss thee,'
he says,
“but still thou shalt have freedom.'
Go free, Nat—free of grieving. And your two poets will go with you always.”

In the sky overhead a big jet moved across the wooden O, high up, and its distant roar rose and faded. The sound of the doves had gone.

And from the top window in the little roof house over our gallery, the long clear note of a single trumpet rang out, signaling the audience, telling the actors, calling the world to the theater. In one hour from now, our play would begin.