The Tiger Catcher

by Paullina Simons

  “We do!” She crosses her arms.

  “Then let’s go.”

  She climbs into the seat by herself, he grabs the reins and they’re off. They don’t speak down Fish Street. Irritated and stressed out, Julian is halfway across London Bridge before he even realizes he’s on it. The tall houses and shops are so densely jammed together, they hide the river from him. Look at that, he’s on London Bridge! In the 1600s! And he’s too busy fighting with Aphrodite to even lift his eyes. It’s shameful.

  The bridge is not just a water crossing, it’s a narrow city. It stinks of old cheese, sweat, fish, and horse manure. It takes a long time to silently drive the wagon across the river to the south side. Horse and foot traffic is at a near standstill. Pedestrians, carriages, wagons, and pack mules all must share the path between the tall homes. The bells ring in noon while they’re still crossing. “I could walk it quicker,” Mary says through her teeth.

  “You’re welcome to, my lady,” Julian responds through his teeth.

  When they finally clop under the grotesque severed heads at Great Stone Gate on the south side of the bridge, the bells ring in one o’clock. None of the Londoners gawk up, so he doesn’t either, playing it cool, as if a dozen heads with open bulging eyes is nothing to him, a trifle.

  The Borough Market is up ahead, red and yellow florals glowing invitingly under the green awnings, but they turn on Clink Street instead, an alley of prisons and white-walled brothels. The area is not fit for a lady. It’s barely fit for a man. The toxic fumes emanating from the tanneries and dyers over on Maiden Lane are overpowering.

  By the time they arrive, sweaty and fed up to the slate-colored spherical Globe Theatre, it’s nearly two o’clock in the afternoon.

  And wouldn’t you know it—the Globe is closed!

  (Wouldn’t you know it, Nicole Kidman had an understudy!)

  Silently the round magnificent theatre rises on the shores of the wild river, in the midst of primordial ooze, surrounded by muddy ponds, marsh fields and Bankside brothels. The Cardinal’s Cap house of bawd is just across the road from the theatre, next to the bear circus. On wide display the swollen Thames flows, peppered with barges and shallops. London billows on the opposite bank. Though the Globe is built from ordinary wattle and daub—sticks and clay mashed together—it’s been painted the color of silver-gray to look like a Roman forum, and when the afternoon sun hits it, it shimmers like a jewel.

  A quiet jewel. There are no auditions, no plays, no other people, no sausage or walnut sellers as there were on Throgmorton Street. The wooden doors are shut. The sign on the chalk board on the door reads that the Globe is closed—as is apparently every playhouse in England—to observe the twelve-day mourning period after the Queen’s funeral. Next to it is a list of the three plays the Lord Chamberlain’s Men will perform when the theatre reopens. Sir Thomas More, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and All’s Well That Ends Well. Three plays a day? Julian is impressed. While Mary stands stunned, he counts the days. Finally, he knows exactly what day it is. The Queen was buried on April 28. The Globe will reopen on May 11. Today is May 8.

  He would like to tie up the horse and wander around the theatre (it’s the Globe!) but there’s no time for marveling because Mary bursts into tears.

  “There, there,” Julian says without touching her. “We can come back when they reopen. Maybe we can stay and see All’s Well That Ends Well. How would that be? The mightiest space in fortune nature brings, to join like likes and kiss like native things. We’ll get here early. I’ll take us another way into the city. Just wear your girl clothes next time. We’ll cross by ferry at Temple.”

  “By wherry!” she cries, blowing her nose into a handkerchief. “Welshman . . . you don’t even know how to speak.”

  “I know how to count the minutes in the day, though,” Julian says. “Let’s hurry to Borough Market. There are probably no flowers left.”

  “I’d rather burn in hell than help you,” she says, a true Persephone. “I’d rather marry Lord Falk than help you.”

  His heart squeezes. He makes his face impassive. “Did I ask you to help me?” he says, jumping up into the seat and grabbing the reins. “Just sit quietly and say nothing. That’ll be the biggest help of all.”

  ***

  “I wish I were a man,” Mary says as she watches him load up the wagon with purchases from Borough Market: cheese, smoked meat, vinegar, soapwort, lye, flowers. “Look at the freedom you have, and yet you’re nothing. You come and go as you please, and no one says a word. But me!” She sniffles. “Plus, it took me five minutes to put on a man’s clothes this morning. Some britches, some hose, a loose shirt, a jacket, a coat. It will take me over an hour to get back into my dresses in your idiotic wagon before Mother sees me. I’ve got petticoats and underskirts and overskirts and aprons and corsets, and blouses and overcoats and three layers of bonnets on my head. I’m a magpie. A patch of everything. And the Globe is closed. Everything’s awful!”

  “I consider this not your finest performance, Lady Mary,” Julian says with love but without sympathy. He wipes his brow. “You want to be one of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men? Then act like one. Stop crying. Do what you must do. Be gracious. Start with that. See how you do.”

  “I hate you,” she says.

  “So you keep telling me. How can you be an actor, how can you turn into another human being if yourself is all you see?”

  “Myself is not all I see, unfortunately,” she says, almost spitting. “I see you.”

  “Do you think you’re the only one suffering?”

  “I’m certain you are not suffering enough.”

  “You’re blind to other people, Mary.” Julian hears Devi saying this about the L.A. Josephine and tries not to hang his head.

  “I wish I were blind and deaf right now,” Mary says.

  “Lift your eyes,” says Julian. “Everywhere you look, people teem with anguish. Go visit the Black Friar Pub on Queen Victoria Street. Old men in wrinkled suits sit in the garden, glasses of beer long empty, hearts full, not wanting to leave, watching the world, trying to find their best selves. As you should try to do.”

  Mary glares at him with fury and worry. “Shut up, you demented Welsh lout. Who in the name of all that is holy is Queen Victoria?”

  Julian is wiped out. Why is it so hard to drive a horse, to say the right things, to be reunited with her in this old new world? His shoulder is sore from being pounded with the oar.

  They don’t speak the rest of the way. Leaving his side, she climbs into the covered wagon. After driving past the aptly named church of St. Giles Without Cripplegate, just outside the Roman wall, Julian lifts the canvas flap to check on her. She has changed into her normal clothes. The wig is loose on her head, pinned to her bonnet, she’s in a smock and a gray ladies’ coat. She has fallen asleep curled up on her side on the floor of the wooden wagon, surrounded by his recently bought purple heather and white asphodel.

  44

  Josephine and the Flying Machine

  MARY DOESN’T SPEAK TO JULIAN AS THE NEXT FEW DAYS PASS filled with dripping candles, ale mash, and flower plantings. She doesn’t speak to him, but she also says nothing to her mother about their misadventure or his vile nature, as she had threatened. Her silence heartens and encourages him. If she really wanted to harm him, she could’ve done it with a word.

  The morning the theatres reopen, he hears a rapping at his casement. He’s been up, anxious she wouldn’t come. But there she is, her wig on, wearing her white bonnet. She looks like a lady this morning, albeit a lady in a man’s dark overcoat.

  “Are you sleeping in again, princess?” Mary says. “Hurry up. Because today I’m not turning back. I don’t care if the pillory awaits you. In fact, I would find that rather enchanting.”

  It’s unseemly how happy Julian is to be insulted by her.

  He takes her a different way to London to avoid the bad roads and the crush of the inner city. Instead of going down Farringdon through the congestion
at Cripplegate, he makes a right on Clerkenwell and heads west down a country road that becomes Theobalds Street. He has set his sights on the other church of St. Giles, the better known one, on top of the hill on Holbourne. He won’t deny it, he too wishes he could take her in a carriage not a wagon. She is too lovely to ride on a bench with him.

  They clomp down a country lane. He still struggles to control the horse. “Please sit a little closer to me, Lady Mary,” he says. “Or with the next pothole you’re sure to fall into the street.”

  “I’d rather be trampled by a horse than sit closer to you,” she returns cheerfully.

  Julian has lost his game. He can’t stumble into a flirtation even by accident. How did he manage to charm her at Book Soup, or any girl, ever? How did he manage to have sex with anyone? Excalibur indeed. He can’t even control a horse!

  “For someone who’s supposed to be from some Welsh forest,” Mary says, “you seem to be quite an expert on London gates and country lanes, and how to get to the Globe the roundabout way. How is that possible?”

  “I lived here some time ago,” Julian replies. “I had lost something and spent a long time on these streets trying to find it.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “I did, yes.” He doesn’t look at her as he hurries the horse. I don’t know how, but somehow I found it.

  There are few people around them, mostly water carriers and milkmaids. Holbourne is a rural road, no shops, no buildings, no statues, no museums, no squares. The sun rises behind them, lighting up the rolling meadows. It’s May, and warm. Bluebells and bugle line the fields; heather blankets the grass with its pale purple blooms. Wild cherry trees, the broadleaf ornamentals, are bursting with white buds, and meadowsweet grows tall in the long grasses. Up in the distance Julian spots the long graceful white spire of St. Giles, cloistered behind the stone walls of a Catholic priory and a leper hospital. The monastery has been shut down, but the church still runs the hospital. The air is so crisp that Julian’s nose hurts and his eyes water.

  Before he turns south to begin their descent into London, Julian stops the horse at the crest of St. Giles High Street and Drury Lane. His breath catches in his throat. He hopes Mary’s does, too.

  There is no Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross, Seven Dials, Covent Garden, St. Martin in the Fields, or Long Acre. They don’t exist. There is nothing but a dirt path that winds down through the meadows to the gate at Temple Bar near the shimmering river.

  There is nothing around them but springs of asphodel. Every growing thing they gaze upon is purple, white, or green. Laid out in the low-lying valley, as far as the eye can see, is the sprawling, barely awake London. Cheapside and the Strand connect the old city with the Parliament towers and abbey spires of Westminster. In the city, the red brick monolith of St. Paul’s towers on its very own hill among the haze of a hundred pale church steeples, needled against the packed Tudors. All the bells are ringing.

  Julian waits for Mary to hurry him along, but she says nothing. He has no words, and she has none either. Silently they sit side-by-side, reins in his hands, bedazzled by the sun, gazing at the city before them, their horse grazing.

  “Did you know,” Julian says to her softly, “that long ago St. Giles had the freshest air in the city?” He is using the wrong tense, but he doesn’t care.

  “Oh, no, is this the church of St. Giles in the Fields?” Mary exclaims, returning to her old self. “Lord Falk lives around here. Take me from this revolting place at once. Why did you come this way? What if he or one of his men sees us? You could’ve ruined everything. If I get chosen by Lord Burbage, you need to promise me you’ll take me the normal way from now on.”

  Julian snaps the reins and the horse lurches forward. “Yes, Lady Mary,” he says. “From now on, I’ll take you the normal way.”

  She blushes before recovering. They clop downhill on Drury Lane. “Did you know that St. Giles is the patron saint of lepers?” Mary says.

  Julian does know that. “Lepers and cripples.”

  “There’s a leper colony back there, by St. Giles.” Her voice rises and falls on the word leper. “Mother says I shouldn’t be afraid of them. How does one become a leper, I wonder?”

  “Well, first, one has to say: when I grow up, I want to be a leper.”

  “What?”

  “I’m joking,” Julian says. “Lack of hygiene is how. You are right to be wary. Leprosy is incurable, unfortunately.”

  “No, it’s not,” Mary says, frowning. “What are you talking about? You’re cured through Christ.”

  “Well, I don’t know if Jesus is wandering around Holbourne,” Julian says, “looking to heal the lepers.”

  “Yes,” Mary says, “they didn’t think Jesus was wandering around Palestine either. I’m surprised at you, Julian. Baffled, really.”

  “Why?” Julian smiles. “Do you find my lack of faith disturbing?”

  “I suppose I do,” Mary says, not understanding the smile and not returning it.

  The dogs bark. The church bells ring.

  At Temple, they tie up the horse and wagon, and hire a boat to take them across the full-bodied Thames. They ride without incident. Mary lets him help her into the boat by leaning on his proffered arm, and no one beats them with oars because today he is a gentleman and she is a lady.

  This late morning, the shining slate-colored Globe is a hive of activity. Vendors hawk sausages and candied apples, while inside the wooden multi-tiered playhouse men stand in the sandy dust under the open sky, waiting their turn to audition. Because they’ve left their wagon on the north bank, Mary must slip into a nearby alley to change into her hose and tunic and pull off her wig, while Julian keeps watch nearby.

  It becomes quickly apparent to him that Mary is far from the only woman pretending to be a man at the Globe. A dozen others mill around the groundling gallery, waiting to audition, soft of body, their skin creamy, their eyelashes long. These “men” wear baggy coats and long tunics to hide their breasts and hips and slender necks. Do they really think a man won’t be able to tell? These women do not know men.

  Mary gets ready to take the stage, her lips mouthing the Katherina monologue.

  “Stop ogling me,” she says. “Do you want somebody to hit you with an oar again?”

  “You’re doing great,” Julian says. “But slow down. Why are you speaking so fast?”

  “That’s how everyone speaks on stage,” Mary says. “Have you ever seen a play?”

  Julian is skeptical. “When you get up there, act as if you already have the part.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. Don’t audition. Rehearse. That’s the trick.”

  “Oh, suddenly you know things.”

  “I’m a Mr. Know-it-All.” He smiles.

  “Well, no one likes a know-it-all,” Mary returns.

  She acquits herself well with her speedily recited memorized monologue. “The more my wrong, the more his spite appears. Did he marry me to famish me?” It sounds like themoremywrongthemorehisspiteappears.

  The unkempt, gray-haired man who, Julian assumes, is Burbage, doesn’t blink at the haste with which Mary delivers her lines. He asks her to read something else, maybe from Bianca? Mary doesn’t know Bianca’s part. Julian encourages her silently from the ground. The producer hands her a folio with her new lines in it, which she reads once to herself and once out loud. She does okay. It’s the right line but the wrong reading. “Believe me, sister, of all the men alive, I never yet beheld that special face, which I could love more than any other.” She rushes through the words as if she hasn’t yet beheld the special face she can love more than any other.

  Despite this, Burbage doesn’t send Mary away.

  She returns to Julian in the archway, where they await the decision in silence. He wishes it weren’t so late. He wishes they could stay, see the next performance. And the next. He’s at the Globe! But it’s going to take them hours to get back home. Maybe they can come back. Maybe—

  Mary doesn�
�t get the part of Katherina. But shockingly she gets the part of Bianca. When Julian looks around, he realizes that most of the female roles—Katherina, Bianca, the widow wooed by Hortensio and the hostess of the alehouse—have been given to the women posing as men, while the parts of Petruchio, Hortensio, Lucentio and Haberdasher, have gone to men proper. It’s as if everyone is aware of the crossdressing farce and is all right with it. The question is, will Lady Collins be all right with it when she discovers what her soon-to-be-married noble daughter is up to?

  Burbage invites the auditioners to stay for the two o’clock premiere of All’s Well That Ends Well. “We think you’ll love it,” he booms from the stage. “It’s never been performed before.”

  Mary turns her head. Julian catches her staring at him. “Did you hear that?” she says.

  “Hear what? We can’t stay—unfortunately. Wish we could. Let’s go.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Her tone is mischievous. “Master Burbage just announced the play has never been performed before.”

  “I heard him. Another time, perhaps.” He takes her by the elbow. Any opportunity to touch her.

  “Yes, of course. And why should we see it, in any case? You said you’ve already seen it. Why, days ago, you read lines to me from this play. Join like likes, kiss like native things. Do you remember?”

  Julian hurries her out of the playhouse. “Who knew you paid such close attention to the things I say, Lady Mary?”

  “You were reciting the words so slowly,” Mary returns, “I couldn’t help it.”

  Nothing is safe!

  On the ride home, an exhilarated Mary talks non-stop, but Julian detects an underlying anxiety about the practicalities of her future at the Globe. He tries to nudge her in a different direction.

  Two Gentlemen of Verona is being staged at the Fortune, he tells her, “near your house.” After Mary finishes scoffing, he continues to hawk caution like a champion. The Fortune is every bit as big and beautiful as the Globe, he says. Okay, not quite, but she doesn’t have to know that. He can sell it. “Maybe more so,” he says. He’s seen it with his own eyes. It has amazing flying machinery that even the Globe doesn’t have, a special effect contraption for the winged entrance of angels and apparitions.