Cue for Treason

by Trease Geoffrey

  I stood my ground. ‘We're different,’ I began.

  ‘They're all different,’ he retorted, different as rotten apples – the rotten patch varies in each –’

  ‘You should try him, anyhow – he's good,’ I said, all in a rush. ‘You should have heard the crowd at Lancaster and Preston and Manchester –’

  He laughed contemptuously. ‘I've no doubt he squeaked and lisped very prettily. But what does for the little places like Manchester won't go down in London.’

  ‘You mean you won't try us?’ said Kit.

  ‘Sorry, I haven't time, and it really wouldn't be any use. We're not wanting boys of your type. Good day.’

  And that was that. Never mind, said Kit, taking my arm as we walked off, ‘there are other theatres.’

  There were, and we tried them one by one. We went back to Southwark to the Rose. We visited the Swan in Paris Garden, and the Blackfriars, which we heard was often used by companies made up entirely of boys. Surely we should find work there. But nothing came of it, and it was the same dismal tale when we tried the St Paul's Playhouse, close by the great church. We hadn't been to St Paul's School, and they didn't want us in the boys' company there. They pretended they couldn't understand our Cumberland speech.

  So there we were. Nobody wanted us, and we'd only a few shillings between us and starvation. If we couldn't find work of the kind we could do, what chance had we of branching out in a fresh occupation?

  We sat down, miserable and aching in every bone, on a bench in front of an alehouse in Fleet Street. Soon we were thinking of lodging for the night and something to eat. We'd had no meal since early morning, we'd been so hot on the trail of work.

  Kit quoted bitterly:

  ‘Now is the winter of our discontent

  Made glorious summer –’

  ‘I don't think,’ I grunted.

  A youngish man, standing in the alehouse doorway, gave us a sharp glance and stepped towards us. ‘How are you getting on?’ he asked pleasantly.

  We started. It was the first kind remark made to us since we entered the City.

  ‘I saw you this morning, talking to Burbage at the theatre,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh, do you act?’ said Kit eagerly.

  ‘I try,’ said the man, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But,’ he added modestly, ‘I never get any of the big parts.’

  ‘We'd be glad of any part,’ I put in. ‘We've tried everywhere. They won't even listen to us.’

  ‘I know.’ He looked grave and sympathetic now. ‘It's hard when you first come up here from the country. I've had some myself.’ Then he smiled again, and pulled a roll of script from his doublet. ‘It shan't be said you haven't had a hearing at all. Can you read my writing?’

  It was pretty bad – the writing, I mean, but we managed. I felt rather listless about it myself. This man had admitted that he was only a minor actor, and I couldn't see how much it would help us even if he liked our reading. But Kit read as she always did when she got a script in her hands – as if her heart and soul were in it:

  ‘Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;

  For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night

  Whiter than new snow on a raven's back…’

  ‘Good,’ said the young man hoarsely when she finished. ‘Do you know, you're the first boy who hasn't murdered that speech – siml murdered it?’

  ‘What a shame! It's beautiful.’

  ‘Do you think so? Really?’ The man looked pleased. ‘Look here, come inside and we'll discuss matters over a bite of supper. Perhaps I can help you, after al. What are your names? Where do you come from? I'm from Stratford myself – my name's Shakespeare.’

  9. Re-enter Danger!

  I THINK Will Shakespeare was the most understanding person I ever knew.

  He was in his thirties then, with all his glory still ahead of him; but to us, so much younger, he seemed to have had a lifetime of experience. Like me, he had come up to London to make his fortune – though it is a lie, I am sure, that he had run from Stratford, as I from Cumber-land, in fear of the law. But he was a countryman, and knew what it was to shear sheep and cart hay. He would catch my eye sometimes when I was in a home-sick mood, and give me a glance as much as to say: I know what it is.

  He feasted us handsomely that night, for, as he told us, he had just finished a new play and the company had paid him six pounds for it. I can see his face now, bending across the loaded table, the candle-light dancing in his deep eyes and on his great forehead, from which the dark hair was already receding.

  He listened to all our tales of Desmond's company, and laughed when he heard of our poor reception at Stratford-upon-Avon. He laughed again, more ruefully, when he heard that our most popular play was his own Two Gentlemen of Verona.

  ‘They're all doing my plays now,’ he said, ‘and I never get a penny except from my own company. They'd steal even my new plays if they could lay hands on them. Pirates, I call them – pirates of the playhouse.’

  We drank in all he told us, for every scrap of knowledge about the London theatres was welcome to such a stage-struck pair as we. We felt that everything was going to be all right now. Shakespeare filled our stomachs with supper and our hearts with hope. At last, when we were nodding in our seats, he called the landlord, arranged for us to sleep free of charge that night, and told us to ask for him at the Curtain Theatre tomorrow.

  It was very different, that second visit.

  Burbage was as sunny as June, and greeted us as if we had never met before. ‘Which is your wonderful Juliet?’ he asked.

  ‘This one,’ said Shakespeare, pushing Kit forward and handing him the play. ‘Listen.’ Kit read:

  ‘Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.

  I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,

  That almost freezes up the heat of life…’

  When he had finished, Burbage slapped his thigh and swore delightedly. ‘Yes! And he'll look the part, too, by thunder!’ Then he turned doubtfully to me, standing there with my scratched face. ‘What about this one? He's no Italian beauty.’

  ‘He's a born mimic,’ said Shakespeare. ‘You should have heard him last night, spinning yarns of the Desmonds' summer tour, taking off all the people they met. Here, Peter, read the part of Juliet's Nurse, and make her the funniest, gossipiest old creature you've ever know.’

  I did my best, though it's hard trying to be funny in front of two or three people. Still, I seemed to satisfy them, for Burbage agreed to take me into the company. I couldn't play the Nurse yet, for they had a good boy in the part already, but I could walk on in small parts like Lady Montague and understudy the bigger ones in case another boy fell ill.

  We both became Shakespeare's apprentices. The company paid him for our work at the rate of four shillings a week each, and he handed the whole of it over to us. He, and most of the other regular grown-up actors, held shares in the company and divided the profits accordingly. When we were older we might become sharers too, by paying money into the pool, or we might be taken on as ‘hirelings’, earning a weekly wage of anything from five to eight shillings.

  Now, with eight shillings a week between us, we could just live. With Shakespeare's help, we found a little garret not far from the theatre, and he told us the cheapest places to buy our food. London was a cold, hungry place that winter, with fogs rising from the river to join the smoke-pall thickened by a thousand chimneys. How I longed, sometimes, for a bright, sweet-smelling fire of peat from Skiddaw and a few slices of my mother's mutton hams!

  I had a letter from her, early in December, brought by a pedlar to the Flower de Luce Tavern, where I collected it a few days later. It had been written on 22 November.

  ‘You will do well to keep away, at any rate until the spring' [she wrote], ‘for things are more bitter than ever between us and Sir Philip. He began to rebuild his wall in October. John Keld – you know his temper! – went to stop him, and the end of the matter was a fight, with one of Si
r Philip's servants half-drowned in the river. John Keld has left home for the present, and we think he is in Scotland. There seems no end to Sir Philip's ambition; he has enclosed some meadows on the Penrith side of the estate, and the meek fools never raised a finger to stop him. He is making money hand over fist, and people say he means to make himself one of the biggest men in Cumberland. But not all his little plans have come off as he liked, and there are some good chuckling tales going round the farms, which you shall hear when you come home…’

  There was a lot then about the family and the farm, with news of all the neighbours and our animals, especially the old pony. Besides the letter, there was a big parcel with a piece of that very mutton ham for which I'd been longing, a pot of sweet butter, and other Cumberland dainties which Kit enjoyed as much as I did. ‘Nice, having a mother,’ she said.

  Those were busy days.

  We had so many parts to learn, especially Kit. The Lord Chamberlain's Men had a host of plays in their repertory – comedies, histories, and tragedies, not only by Shakespeare, but by Marlowe, the new playwright Ben Jonson, and half a dozen others. Almost every day we played a different piece, sometimes a new one, sometimes one that hadn't been acted for months or even years. One day we might have quite big parts, and the next have not a line to say. Kit might just sweep across the stage in silence, looking divinely beautiful as the Spirit of Helen of Troy in Doctor Faustus, and I might appear as one of the Seven Deadly Sins (Gluttony, usually, with a great padded belly and a mask!), or I might have nothing to do but move furniture on the stage and hold up a board saying: ‘A Street in London' or ‘A Battlefield’.

  It wasn't for weeks that Kit was able to make her first appearance as Juliet. By that time the Desmonds had arrived, fatter and jollier than ever, and been received into the company with open arms. But I could see that, popular as he was, Desmond was only second-rate beside Burbage and the other leading men.

  Everyone was certain that Kit, as Juliet, would be the sensation of the town. Her other performances had been clapped to the echo – people were talking of the wonderful new boy-actor from the North – but she hadn't really had a chance to spread her wings yet. Romeo and Juliet was to provide that chance. It was Shakespeare's best play; Burbage was to be Romeo, and we all felt sure that, once news of the performance reached the Queen, we should get a command to take the play to Court.

  The great day dawned.

  ‘Nervous?’ I asked, with a laugh, because I knew she wasn't – she never was.

  She shook her head. ‘I wish you were Nurse, though,’ she said; ‘you're twice as funny in the part as Mortimer – he's like cold pudding. I'd act better with you, Pete.’

  ‘Thanks! Well, maybe Mortimer will slip on some orange-peel; I know his part if he does, and yours too for that matter.’

  It was true. Standing there day after day at rehearsals, and hearing Kit repeating her lines in our garret, I had come to know every word of it. But there, anyone can learn lines. Neither I nor any other boy in the theatre could say them, look them, and live them, as Kit could.

  We went along to the Curtain together. People were streaming in by the hundred. Hot chestnuts were on sale at the door, mulled ale, and other good things to keep the cold out. The pit was full. Gentlemen were paying as much as a shilling to hire stools on the stage, so that they could study the new ‘Juliet' at close range. How I hated the practice! Sometimes they so packed the sides of the stage that there was barely room to act, and all the time one was conscious of their whisperings and nudgings and the tobacco smoke they puffed into one's face. I was sorry that Kit should have to act under such difficult conditions.

  I had put on my heavy costume – I was playing Lady Montague, and I was supposed to be the mother of great Burbage! – when I found Kit at my elbow, her eyes like harvest moons. She too had dressed (the company had bought magnificent new costumes for the occasion), but she was tearing at the fastening with panic-stricken fingers.

  ‘What's the matter?’ I demanded.

  ‘I can't go on,’ she stammered, letting her great golden farthingale flop to the ground, and kicking her feet out of it.

  ‘Can't go on?’

  I couldn't believe my ears. After all her other successes, surely she hadn't been gripped by stage fright? I don't think she knew the meaning of the word.

  ‘Let's get out of here,’ she said wildly, and ran from the room in her shirt and hose, still wearing Juliet's golden slippers. I rushed after her, but, hampered as I was in my billowing farthingale and the high heels to which I could never get quite accustomed, I hadn't the remotest chance of catching her.

  Just then Burbage came along. ‘Where's Kit? Why is his costume kicking about on the ground?’

  I told him.

  He swore terribly. I quaked in my little high-heeled shoes.

  ‘Search the building!’ he bellowed at last, in a voice which shook the roof, and then, as men ran to obey, he cursed them for making so much noise. Didn't they realize the audience were just in front there, and would hear every sound?

  I gathered up the lovely golden farthingale. I knew they wouldn't find Kit. She didn't mean to be found. But Dick Prior, her understudy, would be wanting the costume quickly.

  Burbage came storming back. ‘Get into that thing,’ he ordered.

  ‘But I – I – that is, Dick Prior –’

  ‘Get into it! Don't argue! Prior cleared off as soon as Kirkstone arrived. How was he to know he'd be wanted? Kirkstone looked fit as a fiddle half an hour ago. You know the lines, don't you?’

  ‘Yes, sir –’

  ‘Then say them, for pity's sake, say them.’ He clapped his hand to his brow, tragically. ‘That's all you need do. The show's ruined. We'll be lucky if they don't burn the theatre to the ground.’

  Willing hands helped me into Juliet's costume, fitted my wig, painted my lips and cheeks, and tried to perform the impossible task of making me look beautiful. We could hear, through the curtains that the play had begun, and that so far it was going excellently.

  Shakespeare's hand was on my shoulder. His pale face masked his disappointment. ‘Don't let them worry you, he murmured. ‘Remember, you can act. And the moon's fine to look at – when the sun isn't there.’

  ‘I'll do my best,’ I said.

  The moment had come for my first entrance. I heard my cue, the Nurse shouting: ‘Where's this girl? What, Juliet!’

  I held up my skirts and slipped through the gap in the curtains. I heard my own voice, thin and clear: ‘How now! Who calls?’ and then I heard the murmur of surprise and disappointment run round the theatre. It stung my pride. All right, I'd show them I too could act. I

  lifted my head proudly to face the whispering gentlemen on their stools…

  And looked straight into the eyes of Sir Philip Morton!

  10. Sir Philip is the Man

  HE sat there in his crimson velvet doublet, one black leg crossed over the other, his thin lips parted above his golden beard as he sucked the stem of his tobacco-pipe. There was surprise in his cold blue eyes, but it was not the surprise of recognition – only the surprise of hundreds of others that afternoon, that Juliet was not to be played by the good-looking boy who had become the talk of the town.

  He did not know me – yet.

  Would his memory be stirred before the long play was over? Would some trick of my walk or my voice – my voice especially, which had never lost its Cumberland ring – start a train of recollection in his mind which would mean disaster? I can only play on, I thought to myself, and hope for the best; with this wig and make-up and these flouncing clothes I must look utterly different from the boy he saw in the dawn-light under Blencathra and chased through the Penrith inn.

  I'd watched Kit play the part so often at rehearsals, and she used to act as though she were inspired – as though she were Juliet, living it all, instead of Kit Kirkstone pretending. I couldn't act like that to save my life, but, as Shakespeare said, I was a pretty good mimic. I remembered the way
Kit used to speak each line, the words she stressed, the rise and fall of her voice. I knew her moves, too, and the way she looked when she spoke certain lines, and all her by-play with hands and handkerchiefs and the dagger at the end.

  My Juliet was like a looking-glass reflection of hers.

  That is a perfect comparison. There wasn't the depth in my acting, but at least it looked all right.

  At first I was acting for only one member of the audience – Sir Philip. I knew that my safety depended on my complete concealment of Peter Brownrigg. Sir Philip must see me only as Juliet.

  But as the afternoon wore on, and the spectators lost their original disappointment and grew more friendly, I began to forget my danger and play, as a good actor should, for the whole audience. At my second exit there was a real round of applause, which warmed me as a glass of wine would have done. Burbage encouraged me in a gruff whisper, Shakespeare tweaked my ear affectionately. The situation was saved – so far as the play was concerned. Sir Philip was another matter.

  His eyes were on me the whole time I was on the stage. Sometimes my acting brought me within a pace or two of his outstretched foot. Once his tobacco set me coughing in the middle of a long speech. He muttered an apology, and immediately tapped out his pipe against his heel.

  Yes, it was lucky for me that Sir Philip, with all his faults, was a true lover of the theatre. He enjoyed our show that afternoon. Had he been bored, his mind might have started idly wandering, and goodness knows to what perilous conclusions it might have come!

  As it was, when I finally drove my blunt stage-dagger into the folds of my dress, and subsided carefully and gracefully on Burbage's chest, I felt pretty certain that all was well.

  I got a shock a minute or two later. No sooner had my ‘corpse' been ceremoniously carried off the stage by the Prince's attendants (and rather less ceremoniously set down on its feet in the wings!) than a hefty fellow tapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘Juliet?’ he inquired.