“Tell me about your play, Nicholas. I trust the rehearsals are going well and so on.”
“Well enough, your worship. We are unused to having so much time at our disposal. In London we’d already’ve played the Dream a couple of times before a congregation and be engaged in something else by now.”
“Congregation?”
“What Dick Burbage calls our audiences. Congregations.”
Fielding laughed. He had a pleasant, unforced laugh.
“Because the playhouse is the temple where they do their devotions? Where they come to worship their idols?”
“I am sure Dick means nothing disrespectful by it.”
“And I am equally sure he does. At least I hope he does.”
Knowing Master Burbage’s combative attitude to most things, I could only agree.
“You miss the press and hurry of your London life?” Fielding asked.
“The country is well enough in its way and I’m glad to be here, but as to missing London, if I’m honest I do. Perhaps we should be staging a city play to relieve this itch of mine. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is all palaces and woods.”
“Like Instede,” said Fielding. He paused before continuing, “And in this Dream you must be one of the lovers.”
“You have seen Master Shakespeare’s play?”
“Yes, in – let me see – ’95, when it was played in . . . I cannot recall the name of the place . . .”
“The Theatre? Near Finsbury Fields.”
“Over there. My sister-in-law lives on the north side of the city,” he added.
I remembered that Kate had mentioned her aunt while I’d been trying to impress her with London wickedness.
“The Chamberlain’s Company are better lodged now in the Globe playhouse,” I said, “though some would say that we’re in a, ah, less respectable district.”
“Respectability again, Nicholas. Anyone would think you were my age. The day a player becomes too respectable is the day he dies, in his craft at least.”
“You are right, sir,” I said, though such sentiments were surprising in the mouth of a magistrate. “And to answer your question, I do play one of the lovers, Lysander by name. While for my co-rival in love I am privileged to be playing alongside Cuthbert, Lord Elcombe’s younger son.”
“So he plays at playing.”
“Oh, he is quite in earnest about it, I think. Wait!”
I stopped, for we were passing the spot where Robin had had his lair. Almost certain of it, I looked about. Yes, there was the tall shoulder of trees rearing up to the right while below was a leaf-strewn bank. I crouched down. Straight in front of me was the dank hole that led to his hide-away.
“It is here.”
Fielding crouched down beside me.
“I found it when I wasn’t looking for it.”
“That happens, sometimes,” he said. Then, “Go on. I’ll wait here. You know what it is you’re searching for.”
Since I’d started this particular hare running, I had no choice but to see it through. So I set off down the earth passage, slightly reassured by the weighty presence of a Justice of the Peace to my rear, but apprehensive nonetheless. Even in my short crawl through the malodorous tunnel I had the notion that Robin would be waiting for me at the other end, raggedly dressed in the pelts of small animals, earth-mouldy. That bony hand which could not clutch. The talk which did not make sense.
Then I emerged into the hollowed-out space where he’d lived. It took some moments for my eyes to get used to the deep gloom. Light broke through the leaf-matting in threads and tiny spoonfuls. A little low creature scuttered behind me. Root tendrils tickled my face. To my overtaxed mind, it seemed that someone sat sighing in the corner. The white form which I’d glimpsed moments before. Or the ghost of Robin perhaps. His true self but incorporeal. Everyone knows that a violent despatch makes for a restless spirit.
Just find it, Revill, and make your escape before the woodwoses get you too and string you up from the nearest tree.
What was I looking for? Ah yes, the little leathern box that I’d been shown. Or rather, not the box so much as the papers which it contained. Papers which Robin – a man near the edge of his wits if not toppled off them altogether – considered important. I moved forward on my knees, sweeping ahead warily with my hands. Almost straightaway, in the near dark, I struck something. Touch and a dim sense of sight gave me an oblong box with some kind of hasp on it. I scooped it up and backed out of that place as fast as my hands and knees would carry me, bringing down clods of earth as I exited.
The sun was most welcome on my face after my immersion in the gloom. Adam Fielding was standing by the entrance. He looked pleased to see me. I held out the box to him.
“No, Nicholas, it’s your find. Complete your search.”
I examined the box. It was less than a foot in length, about half that in width and a couple of inches deep. It felt light but, when shaken, something shifted inside it. Where the leather cladding hadn’t turned black it was green from damp and mould. The hasp was stiff and rusty but not secured by any kind of padlock. Hands slightly trembling, I opened the lid. Inside were several sheets of grimy paper, close-packed and crammed on top of each other. To my horror, as sunlight struck the interior of the box, these sheets of paper started to shift about like living things. They quivered and heaved up and down as if the box was going to vomit out its contents.
“Jesus!”
Repelled, I dropped the box instinctively. The lid snapped off as it hit the ground and the sheets of paper slithered out. From beneath the pile scrabbled and crawled several of the largest beetles I’d ever seen. Their backs, iridescent in the sunlight, showed a glossy green. Speedily the beetles lost themselves amongst the grass and leaves. Feeling foolish, I bent down to retrieve the scattered papers. They were creased and chewed-looking as well as being badly mildewed – to the extent that if anything had been written on them in the first place it was surely now obscured for ever.
I held out the sheaf of filthy papers to Fielding, as if to say: see, something was there inside the cavern after all, that box and these its dirty contents. The Justice took them and, with less delicacy than I’d shown, raised them to his nose before wiping at the smutted, greasy surface of the topmost sheet. His expression showed nothing.
“Is this everything that was in the box?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He only showed me one or two sheets and even those I couldn’t see clearly.”
“What did you think these would prove to be?”
“I’ve no idea,” I said, rather abjectly. “But I suppose I believed them to have a value – like most items kept in a box.”
“As legal documents, deeds of title, and such?”
“Yes . . . perhaps.” I hesitated. “Robin talked to me of having had great estates once, of lands that it would’ve taken him a day to ride across. I don’t think he’d always lived here.”
I indicated the hole in the ground.
“So you consider this to be some kind of story, Nicholas, in which he’ll turn out to have been a great man.”
“Not necessarily,” I said, though that had perhaps been a notion at the back of my mind. “But it was obvious that what he was now was not what he had been once.”
“No, he was half out of his wits by your account.”
Adam Fielding gestured with the bundle of papers at the earth-hole from which I’d just emerged. When looked at in that way, Robin’s talk seemed to be indeed the fruits of long solitude and privation.
“This is thin cheap paper,” said Fielding. “Not intended to last. No lawyer would commit anything to it. There might have been some ink markings here but they are dirtied over or washed away beyond recall.”
He handed the sheaf back to me. I must have looked disappointed for he added, “You have done well, Nicholas, to recover these. If you would be so good as to take the box and put those back inside, I’ll ensure that it is kept safe.”
“Bu
t it’s worthless.”
“Not worthless. Its value is not apparent at the moment, that is all,” said Fielding cryptically.
I squatted down to retrieve the box and its separated lid and then made to return the papers to the beetle-free interior. Something caught my eye. Adam Fielding had already moved a few paces off and was examining the environs of Robin’s dwelling.
“Sir,” I said. “Your worship.”
“Adam, you may call me,” he said abstractedly.
I felt a tiny surge of pleasure at this mark of familiarity.
“Adam, there is something here after all.”
He was by my side in a moment. I jabbed with my finger at a word which was distinguishable near the bottom of an otherwise blackened scrap of paper. It was scrawled in thick, crude letters.
It was a plea.
It read: MERCY.
Demetrius was calling me a coward, for hiding my head in a bush. Then Puck retorted, in my voice:
Thou coward, art thou bragging to the stars,
Telling the bushes that thou look’st for wars,
And will not come?
Thomas Pope, our “guider”, had the part of Puck. He presented an aged sprite with just a touch of malevolence about him. As I listened to him speaking in “my” voice, I wondered whether I actually sounded like that, whether he had me off pat. We cannot hear ourselves, or only indirectly in the aping of others. It’s like trying to catch a glimpse of the back of your head in a glass.
Finally I, as Lysander, drooped to the ground, overcome with weariness. I was closely followed by Demetrius, Helena and Hermia, all of us led to this spot by Puck, here to be cured of our love-sickness or, rather, of our misdirections in love. The ground was dry and the air warm. We were meant to have got lost in a fog but that would exist only in our – and our audience’s – minds. No fog now, but golden warmth. On this June evening one could happily fall asleep lying on the turf.
We were practising again for the Dream and not so distant prospect of the real thing on midsummer’s night. The ample rehearsal time was justified now by the presence in our band of Cuthbert Ascre, who played Demetrius. In fact, Cuthbert had proved quick and adept at learning his part. He was a natural, in the good sense. If he hadn’t had the prospect of an idle life in front of him as a great man’s younger son he would have made a most acceptable addition to any company. True, he found our jokes too amusing and he hung onto our seniors’ words as if his life depended on them, but all of us have been guilty of these faults, and much worse ones, in our ’prentice days. Perhaps I was disposed in his favour because we shared so much time on stage. Because he regarded me as an oracle on the subject of plays and players, he badgered me with questions, something which, though it can be irritating, is also flattering.
As well as Cuthbert, we’d taken on other temporary members for this performance, in the shape of several children who’d lately arrived at Instede with their families for the wedding celebrations. The great house was beginning to fill up with guests, who appeared to my easily-dazzled eyes to fall into three types: grand, grander and grandest. I’ve performed at court in Whitehall Palace but somehow this seemed an even more splendid and lavish concourse. Some of the exalted visitors nevertheless had sufficient share in our common humanity to have brought themselves – once or twice anyway – to perform the act of generation. It was the children of these lords and ladies, knights and their dames, who were to swell our numbers, by appearing at various points in the action, dancing in a ring, bearing lighted tapers, singing in their piping trebles.
I marvelled at the skill and diplomacy with which Thomas Pope and Richard Sincklo marshalled their small charges, combining firmness with kindness and patience. At the same time I realized that performing in a great man’s house was never going to be straightforward. You do not have that freedom of decision and action which comes from treading your own boards.
As Pope was instructing these little eyases in their movements and gestures at the close of the action, the rest of our company took their ease on the fringes of the playing area. Earlier on in the evening I’d spotted Adam Fielding and Kate observing us from the side. Their presence, hers in particular, gave a spring to Lysander’s (and my) step. Now, however, they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, Cuthbert Ascre came to join me and resumed a conversation, or rather a question-and-answer session, we’d been having earlier.
“You were telling me about your early days with the Admiral’s, Nicholas.”
“I served a kind of apprenticeship with them. I played little things, attendant lords, third murderers. But they are a good Company.”
“Not as fine as the Chamberlain’s though?”
“No, it is the general opinion that we carry it away.”
“So you are at the pinnacle.”
“For myself, I am at the bottom of a hill or at best on its lower reaches, Cuthbert [you may see by this that we were already on good terms]. But it is the highest hill in the region and, though the way up is steep and winding, I am resolved to reach the top.”
“That is highly poetical, Nicholas. You should write it down. And your ambition as a player speaks well for you.”
“Your father,” I said, encouraged, “he is a friend to the playhouse also?”
“He is, but not through a liking for the art for its own sake, I think, or not so much. He took his cue from Her Majesty. Queen Elizabeth stayed here several times when I was small. I can scarce remember her, though she did give me a silver pin.”
“I know that the Queen is a votary at the altar of the drama,” I said – without adding that I’d met her and that we’d discussed plays, among various matters.
“Votary at the altar, hmm . . . Anyway, my father realized that players enjoyed the highest possible patronage and that it might advantage him to befriend them too. This is what my mother says.”
I was a little embarrassed by the openness of Cuthbert in describing his father’s motives. Almost disappointed too. True, where the Queen led others were bound to follow, but it is agreeable to be liked for one’s own sake. Since Cuthbert was evidently in a mood to be confidential I thought I’d press him on another question.
“Your mother also is a supporter of the drama,” I said. “I understand that those wandering players on the estate-farm are here by her allowance.”
“You mean the Paradises? Oh they have connections here, yes. By your tone I can see you don’t approve of the ‘wandering players’.”
“I saw them first in Salisbury and was surprised when they fetched up here.”
“They’re not really brothers. They just call each other that.”
“And their audiences as well,” I commented. “Brothering and sistering away like mad.”
“They’ve visited us with their Bible stuff before. My mother believes that everything should be for our instruction and edification. Accordingly, she hopes to improve the conduct of our workers by allowing them to watch plays in which punishment is always meted out to wrong-doers and despair overtakes the sinner.”
“But that’s what happens in any play,” I said. I kept quiet about the little speeches and sermons with which Peter Paradise prefaced or rounded off their performances.
“My lady mother would say that not all drama is blessed with the tinct of scripture. It is not specifically designed to elevate or frighten.”
“I’m not sure if that’s what was happening when your labourers were watching Judas hang himself the other day in the barn. I think they were simply enjoying a spectacle. It was elevation in a strictly limited sense.”
Cuthbert grinned gratifyingly at my little word-play on elevation, then said, “But spectacle is the business of players, isn’t it, whether they’re wandering or fixed?”
“May I ask you a question?”
Cuthbert looked at me. Underneath the friendly, easy-going exterior, there was a shrewdness about him, an inwardness. Before us, Thomas Pope continued to put the little sons and daughters of the great noblemen th
rough their paces, as they danced in circles on the green or held up imaginary tapers to the declining sun. I noticed two or three of our company, in particular Laurence Savage, casting frequent glances in Cuthbert’s and my direction. I supposed that there was a certain resentment when the son of our patron fastened on to so junior a member of the Company.
“Would you act, if you were free to do so?”
“I am acting in the Dream, Nicholas – although of course I would never claim to be the equal of any of you.”
“For a living, I mean.”
“Very well. Perhaps I would. If I was free. But I am not free. To be born to all this, even if it will never be yours, is to be born in a cage.”
“A cage with golden bars and a marble floor.”
“Oh yes, and fine views and so on. But a cage nonetheless. I tell you, Nicholas, I would give much to be as free as you are.”
To be envied (and especially by the scion of a wealthy house) for something you’ve hardly ever considered, is a disconcerting experience. Free! Yes, free to worry about where your next month’s rent will come from, if your fortunes turn Turk. Free to find your lodgings in a ditch should you fall out of favour with the audience or the shareholders!
I said none of this, but instead asked another question which had been nagging at my brain.
“Your brother Harry, is he not free either?’
The changed expression on Cuthbert’s face made me realize I’d overstepped the mark. At once, there was a chill between us.
“I am not sure what you mean.”
His voice had something of the aloofness of his father’s.
“It was nothing,” I said lamely. “A foolish remark.”
He seemed to accept this as a species of apology, but the closeness which had been between us moments before was dissipated in the cooling evening. Perhaps it was fortunate that the practice drew to a close at this point, with Thomas Pope himself rounding off the action by delivering Puck’s valedictory lines. Before we dispersed Pope spoke to us all, consulting the notes he’d made during the rehearsal. As I’ve said, he had the gift of offering criticism in the guise of encouragement. He had some comments, of a shrewd but generous sort, to make to Cuthbert Ascre and I noticed that my new friend (if that’s what he still was) accepted the guider’s advice like a meek boy.
The Pale Companion Page 12