King of Shadows (7 page)

What he didn't know was that I could in fact do better. I'd been good at gymnastics ever since I was very young; the phys ed teacher at my little grade school in Greenville had been a passionate gymnast and tai chi expert, and I'd been his prótegé, even after I'd gone on to junior high. We'd worked out a real show-off routine that had been the high point of my audition in front of Arby, when I was trying out for the Company of Boys. Four hundred years from now.

Henry Condell shook his head, frowning. “This is not a contest,” he said. “Nathan has not worked on a display.”

“But there's something I can do,” I said. “May I?”

Roper laughed.

Master Condell's eyes flickered from one to the other of us. He didn't really like this situation; he was a kind man. “Very well,” he said.

So I got up on the stage, ungracefully, and I took a deep breath and I did my routine. It started with a double flip from standing, and it went on through some really phenomenal stuff, some of it made out of tai chi movements, to end with a triple back flip that I only just managed, because of having been sick. I wobbled a bit but I landed standing, hearing them gasp, and there was a tiny
silence and then all the boys clapped. So did Master Condell.

But not Roper. He just sat there.

Henry Condell said to me,
“Who taught thee?”

I searched for a name Will Shakespeare had used. “Master Mulcaster,” I said.

Condell's eyebrows went up, and he looked at me with extreme skepticism. I looked back innocently, and he frowned uncertainly, and shook his head. “Richard Mulcaster's tastes must have changed since last I had words with him,” he said.

I suddenly remembered the other name. “And Will Kempe,” I said.

Condell's face cleared, and he laughed. “I had forgot thy connection,” he said. “Angry Will, who has stalked out, I hear, leaving me to find the money to buy his share in the company. Thy cousin, was he?”

“Will Kempe was Nat's mother's cousin,” Harry said importantly. I had found him suddenly at my side after I did my show-off turn, though he hadn't paid me too much attention before that.

I said, “I have not seen him often this past year.” That was certainly true.

“He taught thee well,” Condell said. He was looking at me thoughtfully; I hoped he wasn't going to ask about the tai chi.

Inside the back of the theater, someone was ringing a handbell. Roper scrambled to his feet. “Our time is over, Master Condell.” For our different reasons, he and I were both glad of the interruption.

The boy actors often had classes in the morning, I discovered—taught by whichever member of the company
was free and willing. After the tumbling class, Master Burbage came back and gave us a lesson in what the others seemed to call declamation, though I'd have described it just as verse speaking. Everyone had a prepared speech that they got up and delivered from the stage. Burbage went up to the very top gallery of the audience, and bellowed down criticisms from there. The worst crime was to be inaudible, though it seemed to me that most of the boys were trying too hard to be heard, and overacting horribly as a result. Master Burbage seemed to think so too. “Not so much!” he would yell down at them. “Not so much!”

I didn't recognize most of the speeches they did. They were pretty ranty and ravy, and I don't think any of them was from Shakespeare. When it was my turn, I wanted to do the “To be or not to be” soliloquy from
Hamlet,
which I'd learned for my audition for Arby, but it occurred to me just in time that I didn't know whether Shakespeare had written
Hamlet
yet, in 1599.

I didn't want to do a speech of Puck's in case they thought that was the only thing in the world I knew by heart, so I did Oberon's speech, when he's telling Puck what they're going to do with the juice of the magic flower that makes people fall in love with whatever they see. It starts:

 

“I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows. . . .”

 

I was so nervous that I did all the things Arby hates: I went much too fast, and I sounded like a real southern
boy from the Carolinas, not at all like an Englishman. While I was rattling along I saw a movement up in the gallery, as someone joined Master Burbage; I couldn't see who it was and I didn't care. I was just relieved when I got to the end of the speech without forgetting the words. But when I'd finished, a voice came soft but clear from up there, echoing through the theater, and it wasn't Richard Burbage.

“Well done.”

It was Will Shakespeare.

He didn't stay. He went away again almost at once, and before long it was another class, given this time by a quiet, serious man called John Heminges. Fencing, he taught us. That is to say, he divided us into pairs and he watched us fight. We wore masks for protection, thank goodness, and we used rapiers, longer and heavier than any I'd ever seen, with a kind of button on the tip to keep you from hurting or being hurt.

I fought Harry first. It was kind of a joke, because I've done hardly any fencing; I just know the basic moves. And this kind of fencing was different; you didn't parry a sword thrust, you jumped out of its way, or ducked, or knocked it aside with your left hand, on which you wore a very heavy leather glove. Harry realized how little I knew as soon as we started, and was very patient; he never pushed me, but if we'd been fighting for real, I'd have been dead in the first half-minute.

Then we changed partners and I got Roper.

He was as good at fencing as he was at gymnastics,
and twice as aggressive. He wasn't about to be patient with my clumsiness; he was going to make me look as bad as he possibly could, to get his own back. He yelled in triumph every time his rapier touched me, which was every few seconds, and he chased me all the way around the stage, stabbing and lunging as I backed helplessly off.

“Let be, Roper!” Master Heminges called at last. “This is the Paul's Boy, is it not? He has not thy training.”

“No—nor any skill neither,” Roper said nastily. And his rapier came full at my throat, and would have hurt, button or no button, if John Heminges had not grabbed his sword arm with a large strong hand and twisted it roughly.

Roper yelped with pain and his rapier clattered to the floor, and I knew I had a real enemy now.

By the time fencing class ended, my stomach was growling loudly to tell me that it was lunchtime, though I didn't ask about that—which was just as well since I guess the word
lunch.
wasn't used much in the sixteenth century. They ate midday dinner, anywhere between 10
A.M
. and 2
P.M
., and it was the main meal of the day. For us this time it was a kind of picnic, to be eaten fast before starting work at the theater. The plays were put on at 2
P.M
. every afternoon, close to the times they would be done four hundred years hence in the theater designed to be a copy of this one, and if you weren't acting, you'd be working backstage.

Mr. Heminges gave a few pennies to a bigger boy who'd just joined us, Sam Gilbourne, who was the senior apprentice, and he herded us outside and bought street food from a girl with a tray around her neck. It smelled wonderful. We each got a kind of turnover, a big pocket of tough pastry with meat and potatoes inside, and a wooden mug of ale from another street seller, a one-legged man with a barrel on a cart. Sam had six mugs with him in a bag; they were pretty clunky, and smelled of stale beer, but I was thirsty enough not to care. If you didn't bring your own mug, you had to drink right there
leather thong to the handle of the ale seller's cart.

The noise outdoors was stupendous, even an hour before the play was due to begin. The air was filled with voices shouting and calling, the rumble of wheels, the whinnying of horses, and over it all the shrill cries of the hawkers selling food and drink. The streets around the theater were crammed with people, and here and there tumblers and musicians working their hearts out for an odd coin. It was more like a fairground than a city street.

We ate our pies, as Sam called them, perched on a fence over the river, watching long low boats called wherries unloading passengers at a jetty near the theater. Two or four brawny men rowed each boat, with long heavy wooden oars. Bigger boats, with sails, tacked up and down the river; it was much busier than in my day, and much more open, because there were hardly any bridges. London Bridge was the only one in sight.

Sam was a friendly, almost fatherly boy. You could tell from the huskiness of his voice and his gangly arms and legs that he was going to be too old to play women's parts pretty soon. But he was to play one this afternoon, in a play called
The Devil's Revenge,
in which his character had her throat cut halfway through.

“Pig's blood,” he said cheerfully, chewing a piece of gristly meat. “To be squeezed from a bladder in my sleeve. And a beating if even a spot of it lands on my skirt.”

Roper snorted. “And show me a real throat-cutting where the blood does not splash everywhere like a broken waterpipe.”

“No matter,” said Sam peaceably. “The groundlings are happy so long as they see it gush. Come, we must go
back.” He tossed his piece of gristle into the air, and three screaming seagulls made a dive for it. And I ran back to the theater, trying to keep up with the group, wondering uneasily where and how Roper had seen a man's—or a woman's—throat cut.

The Devil's Revenge
was full of blood and murders, and a spectacular swordfight, and from behind the stage you could hear the groundlings who stood in the yard yelling with delight. It made great use of a trapdoor in the center of the stage, through which the Devil carried people off to Hell, and I was given the job of helping chubby Thomas open and shut the trap, down in the dark space under the stage. Roper was our signalman, standing a few yards off in a place where he could peer through a gap at what was happening onstage. He would make a chopping motion with his hand when it was time for us to knock aside the heavy wooden latch that kept the trapdoor closed.

We'd been shown what to do by a tireman, a wizened, grey-haired little guy who grinned a lot, even though he was missing most of his front teeth. Strictly speaking his job was looking after the wardrobe (“tire” means “attire” means “costumes,” I found out), but he seemed to me more like a stage manager. He took us to the “plot,” the list of the play's actions and exits and entrances that hung on the wall backstage, for everyone to check what they should be doing next. There were three trapdoor drops in the course of the play, and the cues for each were marked.

The first two went well; we couldn't always hear the words above us clearly, through the wood of the stage and the noise of the audience, but Roper's signals gave us our
cue. Each time, Master Burbage, playing the Devil, came dropping down through the trap clutching another actor, and both of them landed lightly on their feet, on the big padded cushion that was there on the floor just in case. -Burbage caught my eye the second time, and grinned at me, a startling fantastical grin in the elaborate makeup that slanted his eyebrows up and out.

But the third time, nobody was grinning.

I didn't understand what went wrong, at the time. We knew the cue for the third drop was almost due, and we were watching Roper carefully for the signal. I was closer to him than Thomas, and probably blocking Thomas's view. So I was the one who saw Roper's arm come smartly down in the same swift chopping motion as before, and I hissed to Thomas,
“Now!”
We knocked aside the latch and the trap dropped open—and through it, in a whirl of arms and legs, tumbled Master Burbage, taken by surprise. He fell on his back, and if it hadn't been for the cushion he might have been badly hurt.

We heard a great roar of laughter go up from the audience, who had seen the Devil, in the middle of a highly dramatic speech, suddenly fall through the floor, and we saw Richard Burbage's face change from astonishment to furious rage. He caught me a whack around the side of the head with his open hand, and aimed another at Thomas, who managed to duck. “Half-wit dolts!” he yelled at us over the uproar from the theater, and he rushed angrily out.

Then just for an instant, in the dim light of that darkened space, I caught the tail end of a satisfied smirk on Roper's face that told me he had deliberately signaled us to do the wrong thing.

*   *   *

He denied it completely, of course.

“You waved at us!” I said indignantly. “You waved at us just the way you had before.”

“I did no such thing,” Roper said coolly. “Thomas, did you see me wave?”

Thomas looked at me, troubled, but he was an honest fellow. “No, I did not,” he said. “I was too close to Nat—? but I know he saw something, he was so definite.”

“He was mistaken,” Roper said. He gave a patronizing little sigh. “His ignorance made him nervous. They are a soft lot, in the boys' companies.”

I was on the edge of punching him, but Sam's large hand was on my shoulder. He said mildly, “Thou hast been known to make a mistake, Roper. So have we all.”

“Not such a stupid mistake as this, to ruin a whole play,” Roper said.

“Enough!” Sam said sharply. “The thing is over, and paid for.” After the play, Master Burbage had been angry enough to beat us, and I knew it was only the fact that I was on loan, and not a regular apprentice, that saved Thomas and me from a thrashing. But the tongue-lashing he gave us had almost been worse.

“He will still be angry at the house tonight,” Harry said ruefully. “There will be no supper for you, Nat, and likely not me neither.”

Roper said, “Enough. Let's go to the bear pit. There's time.”

We were sitting under a tree near the theater, all six of us. The adult actors had all gone their ways, some to their homes, some to an alehouse. Round-faced Henry
Condell had emptied a bag of apples into our hands as he left. He had heard Master Burbage's rage, and had looked at me sympathetically, I thought. The apples were small and a bit worm-infested, but crunchy and wonderfully sweet.