Ruled Britannia (12 page)

More attendants raked the ground and spread sand and fresh dirt over the pools of blood. The first bear-baiting might never have happened. So Lope's senses said, at any rate. But when the handlers brought the next bear out to the stake, the lingering scent of blood in the air made him so wild, he almost broke free of them.

A fresh pack of mastiffs assailed the bear. He was smaller than the one that had fought before, but seemed wilier. He rolled again and again, and hunched himself so the dogs had trouble reaching his belly and privates. Mastiff after mastiff went down. Another one dragged itself out of the fight on stiff forelegs, its back broken. A handler smashed in its head with a club.

“He'll kill them all!” Nell was as happy to cheer for the bear as she had been to clap for the dogs in the first fight.

And the new bear
did
kill them all. As the last mastiff, its throat torn out, staggered off and fell down to die, Lope thought,
Most of the bettors want to hang themselves—that hardly ever happens. And the dog breeders, too, with so many expensive animals dead
. A whole new pack of mastiffs
had to be loosed against the bear. Since it had taken so many wounds from the earlier pack, the baiting ended in a hurry.

That was as well. London's short day was drawing to a close. Lope rose and gave Nell Lumley his arm. “Shall we away to the city and find a place for the two of us?”

Her answering smile had nothing coy in it. “Yes, let's,” she said. Sure enough, after a bear-baiting her own animal spirits were in the ascendant.

Lope and Nell had just left the bear-baiting garden when someone called his name from behind. It was a woman's voice. As if in the grip of nightmare, Lope slowly turned. Out of the arena came his other mistress, Martha Brock, walking with a man who looked enough like her to be her brother, and probably was.

He would be
, Lope thought in helpless horror.
If she were betraying me, she couldn't get in much of a temper. But if she's not . . . Oh, by the Virgin, if she's not . . . !
Too late, he realized the Virgin was the wrong one to ask for intercession here.

“Who's that?” Martha Brock demanded, pointing at Nell.

“Who's
that
?” Nell Lumley demanded, pointing at Martha.

“Dear ladies, I can explain—” Lope began hopelessly.

He never got the chance. He hadn't thought he would. “You are no surer, no, than is the coal of fire upon the ice, or hailstone in the sun!” Nell cried. “And I loved you!”

“Impersevant thing!” Martha added. “A truant disposition!”

Lope tried again. “I can expl—”

Again, no good. They both screamed at him. They both slapped him. They didn't even quarrel with each other, which might have saved him. When they both burst into tears and cried on each others shoulders, Martha's brother said, “Sirrah, thou'rt a recreant blackguard. Get thee hence!” He didn't even touch his sword. With de Vega so plainly in the wrong, he didn't need it.

Jeered by the Englishmen who'd watched his discomfiture, Lope walked back toward the Thames all alone. When Pizarro's men conquered the Incas, one of them got as his share of the loot a great golden sun . . . and gambled it away before morning. He'd made himself a Spanish proverb, too.
But here I've outdone him
, Lope thought glumly.
I lost not one mistress, but two, and both in the wink of an eye.

 

W
ILL
K
EMP LEERED
at Shakespeare. The clown's features were soft as clay, and could twist into any shape. What lay behind his mugging? Shakespeare couldn't tell. “The first thing we do,” Kemp exclaimed, “let's kill all the Spaniards!”

He didn't even try to keep his voice down. They were alone in the tiring room, but the tireman or his assistants or the Theatre watchmen might overhear. “God mend your voice,” Shakespeare hissed. “You but offend your lungs to speak so loud.”

“Not my lungs alone,” Kemp said innocently. “Are
you
not offended?”

“Offended? No.” Shakespeare shook his head. “Afeard? Yes, I am afeard.”

“And wherefore?” the clown asked. “Is't not the desired outcome of that which you broached to me just now?”

“Of course it is,” Shakespeare answered. “But would the fountain of your mind were clear again, you prancing ninny, that I might water an ass at it. Do you broadcast it to the general before the day, our heads go up on London Bridge and cur-dogs fatten on our bodies.”

“Ah, well. Ah, well.” Maybe Kemp hadn't thought of that at all. Maybe, too, he'd done his best to give Shakespeare an apoplexy. His best was much too good. He went on, “An you write the play, I'll act in't. There.” He beamed at Shakespeare. “Are you happy now, my pet?” He might have been soothing a fractious child.

“Why could you not have said that before?” Shakespeare did his best to hold his temper, but couldn't help adding another, “Why?”

“You want everything all in its place.” Again, Will Kemp might have been—likely was—humoring him. “I can see how that might be so for you—after all, you'd want Act First done or ever you went on to Act Second, eh?”

“I should hope so,” Shakespeare said between his teeth. What was the clown prattling about now?

Kemp deigned to explain: “But you're a poet, and so having all in order likes you well. But for a clown?” He shook his head. “As like as not, I've no notion what next I'll do on stage.”

“I've noticed that. We've all of us noticed that,” Shakespeare said.

“Good!” Kemp twisted what had been meant for a reproach into a compliment. “If I know not, nor can the groundlings guess. The more they're surprised, the harder they laugh.”

“Regardless of how your twisted turn mars the fabric o' the play,” Shakespeare said.

Kemp only shrugged. Shakespeare would have been angrier had he expected anything else. The clown said, “I know not what I'll do tomorrow, nor care. If I play, then I play. If I choose instead to morris-dance from London to Norwich, by God, I'll do that. I'll do well by it, too.” He seemed to fancy the ridiculous idea. “Folk would pay to watch me on the way, and I might write a book afterwards.
Kemp's Nine Days Wonder
, I'd call it.”

“No man could in nine days dance thither,” Shakespeare said, interested in spite of himself.

“I've ten pound to say you're a liar.” By the gleam in Kemp's eye, he was ready to strap bells on his legs and set off with a man to play the flute and drums. He'd meant what he told Shakespeare—he didn't know what he'd do next, on stage or anywhere else. “Come on, poet. Will you match me?”

The man's a weathervane, blowing now this way, now that, in the wind of his appetites
, Shakespeare thought. He held up a placating hand. “I haven't the money to set against you,” he lied. “Let it be even as you claim. Fly not to Norwich, nor to any other place.” He realized he was pleading. “You perform this afternoon, you know, and on the morrow as well.”

“There's no more valor in you than in a wild duck,” Kemp said scornfully. “You are as valiant as the wrathful dove, or most magnanimous mouse.”

He told the truth. Shakespeare knew too well how little courage he held. But he wagged a finger at Will Kemp and said, “If you'd bandy insults, think somewhat before you speak. You twice running used
valor
; it might better in the first instance have been
courage
.”

“Woe upon you, and all such false professors!” Kemp retorted. “O judgement! Thou art fled to brutish beasts.”

Shakespeare threw his hands in the air. “Enough!” And so, however maddening, it was. Kemp had, in his own way, said he'd do what needed doing. Shakespeare didn't think the clown would betray him to the Spaniards after that—not on purpose, anyhow. “Not a word now, on your life,” he warned.
On my life, too, not that Kemp cares a farthing for't
.

“What, gone without a word?” the clown said. “Oh, very well, for your joy.”

When Shakespeare came out of the tiring room, he felt he'd aged ten years. The tireman gave him a curious glance. “What's toward?” he asked.

“That Kemp is more stubborn-hard than hammered iron,” Shakespeare said disdainfully, telling the truth and acting at the same time. “At last, meseems, he hath been brought towards reason.”

“Towards doing what you'd have him do, you mean,” the tireman said. His name was Jack Hungerford. His beard, which once had been red, was now white; that only made his eyes seem bluer. He'd had charge of costumes and props for decades before Marlowe's
Tamberlane
made blank verse the standard for plays, and he had all the shrewdness of his years.

Here, though, he played into Shakespeare's hands. “I'll not say you're mistaken,” the poet replied, and Hungerford looked smug. But keeping the tireman happy wasn't enough. As much as the players, he would be a part of what followed. Shakespeare picked his words with care: “How now, Master Jack? You've seen more than is to most men given.”

“And if I have?” Hungerford asked. His eyes were suddenly intent, while the rest of his face showed nothing whatever. Shakespeare had seen that blank vizard more times than he could count, these years since the Armada landed. Indeed, he'd worn that blank vizard more times than he could count. It was an Englishman's shield against discovery, against treachery, in a land no longer his own. Having it raised against him saddened Shakespeare, but he understood why Hungerford showed so little. The safest answer to the question
Whom to trust?
was
No one
.

He'll make me discover myself to him
, Shakespeare thought unhappily.
Then the risk is mine, not his. Well, no help for't
. He said, “You well recall the days before Isabella and Albert took the throne.”

“ 'Twas not so long ago, Master Will,” Hungerford replied, his tone studiously neutral. “You recall 'em yourself, though you've only half my years.”

“Good days, I thought,” Shakespeare said.

“Some were. Some not so good.” The tireman revealed nothing, nothing at all. Behind Shakespeare's back, one of his hands folded into a fist.
I might have known it would be like this
. But then Hungerford went on, “Better days, I will allow, than some of those we live in. I say as much—I hope I say as much—not only for that a man's youth doth naturally seem sweeter in the years of his age.”

“Think you those good days might come again?”

“I know not,” Hungerford said, and Shakespeare wanted to hit him. “Would it were so, but I know not.”

Was that enough encouragement to go on? Shakespeare didn't think so.
Damn you, Jack Hungerford
, he raged, but only to himself. He stalked away from the tireman as if Hungerford had offered him some deadly insult. Behind him, Hungerford called for one of his assistants. If he knew where Shakespeare had been heading, he gave no sign of it.

That day, Lord Westmorland's Men put on Marlowe's
The Cid
. Shakespeare had only a small part: one of the Moorish princes whom the Cid first befriended and then, in the name of Christianity, betrayed. He unwound his turban, shed his bright green robe, and left the Theatre early, hoping to take advantage of what little daylight was left in the sky.

Booksellers hawked their wares in the shadow of St. Paul's. Most of them sold pamphlets denouncing Protestantism and hair-raising accounts of witches out in the countryside. Some others offered the texts of plays—as often as not pirated editions, printed up from actors' memories of their lines. The volumes usually proved actors' memories less than they might have been.

Shakespeare ground his teeth as he walked past a stall full of such plays. He'd suffered from stolen and surreptitious publications himself. That he got nothing for them was bad enough. That they mangled his words was worse. What they'd done to his
Prince of Denmark . . .

He'd added injury to insult by buying his own copy of that one, to see if it were as bad as everyone told him. It wasn't. It was worse. When he thought about the Prince's so-called soliloquy:

 

To be, or not to be. Aye there's the point.

To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye all:

No, to sleep, to dream, aye marry there it goes.

 

He'd seen that, burned it into his memory, so he could quote it as readily as what he'd really written. He could—but he didn't have the stomach to get past the third line.

Splendid in his red robes, a bishop came out of St. Paul's and down the steps, surrounded by a retinue of more plainly dressed priests and laymen. The soldiers on guard at the bottom of the stairs stiffened to attention. One of them—by his fair hair, surely an Englishman—knelt to kiss the cleric's ring as he went past.

The Spaniards enslaved some of us
, Shakespeare thought.
Others, though—others enslaved themselves
. No one had made that soldier bend
the knee to the bishop. No one would have thought less of him had he not done it. But he had. By all appearances, he'd been proud to do it.