The Playmaker

by J. B. Cheaney

  An experienced actor can risk looking directly at the audience, and even addressing them in asides. I did not dare, but nevertheless, while sweeping near-sightless eyes over the gallery, my gaze caught and stuck on one face: a face neither old nor young, with round eyes and a wide mouth, shadowed by the square brim of a scholar's cap.

  “… Never, never, will I behold my pretty Arthur more—Oh!”

  Martin Feather's law clerk and I recognized each other at the same time, and his body jerked, as though pulled by a string.

  As for me, I forgot the rest of that speech.

  I paced back to the center of the stage wringing my hands and crying out “Oh! Oh!” while one of the men reproached me: “You hold too heinous a respect of grief.”

  “He talks to me that never had a son,” I snapped—remembering that line at the last moment. I turned back to the gallery, in time to see the clerk stepping over the feet of patrons as he worked his way out of the row. The tassel of his cap swung from side to side—his right side, though I recalled Master Will telling me that clerks always wore theirs on the left.

  King Philip: “You are as fond of grief as of your child.”

  Constance: “Grief … grief fills the room of my absent child! It … it lies in his bed, walks up and down with me. Up and down … up and down …” Here memory failed me as I walked up and down, and my eyes strayed to that spot in the second gallery, now empty. It was no use, and my exit almost due anyway: with one more “Up and down,” I gave it up and left the stage.

  King Philip then stated a fear that Constance might do harm to herself, and followed directly. “By heaven, Richard,” said Master Condell, once we were clear off, “that was well done. Thou hast caught it, lad; I know not how, but well done.”

  Such fulsome praise was uncommon for him and at any other time it would have pleased me no end. But the law clerk, if such he was, had set the afternoon at a tilt. I pulled off my wig, which was suddenly too hot to bear. “Thank you, sir. But if I could be excused—I've just thought of a thing that wants doing, and if you could grant me the afternoon, I'd be grateful.”

  He hesitated, being famously stingy with the time he allowed off. But I had never made such a request before, and he presently decided I had earned it. So I set about divesting myself, dumping my fine garments with a haste that did them no honor, ignoring Robin's jibes about calls of nature. He thought I had done well also, and told me so by an especially hard punch on the shoulder. I spared no time in trading compliments with him, but slipped out the back door of the Theater so quickly I was still buttoning my doublet on my way down the Shoreditch Road.

  My destination was Middle Temple and the chambers of Martin Feather, attorney.

  STRANGE ECHOES

  knew the way from my wine-delivering days. Though I had made the Châlons run with Ralph Downing only once, it was as simple as following Cheapside through the city and out Ludgate, then taking Fleet Street to Middle Temple. What I hoped to discover there was less clear to me—not the clerk himself, but perhaps something about him. All I knew was that seeing him again had spurred me to action. In the half hour it took to reach my destination and locate Master Feather's chambers, I hatched what seemed a reasonable line of presentation for myself.

  I climbed a set of creaky stairs and pushed open an arched door. A clerk and a young scrivener at his copy desk paused in the midst of a dictation to stare at me.

  “Is Master Feather within?” I asked, in my best London accent.

  “He's gone to the country,” the clerk informed me shortly. His narrow face wore a sour expression, or perhaps that was its natural cast. “Who wants him?”

  I ignored the question, so rudely put. “The other clerk, then— do you know where he might be found?”

  “You are raving, boy. And too much in haste. Your doublet is buttoned wrong, know you that?”

  I glanced down at the slovenly gap where I had missed a button and winced. No help for it now, though. “But the other—”

  “There is no other clerk here. I am Master Feather's sole assistant for the last sixmonth. Why should you think there was any other?”

  Something in his tone—a sudden sharpness, an attention too pointed—warned me to take care. “I may have been mistaken. I understood him to say he was a clerk.”

  “Who, sirrah?”

  I took a chance and described the man I sought, and directly saw the gamble rewarded. For as I spoke, the scrivener's eyes lit with the eager glow of young climbers everywhere who see a chance to show off their knowledge. “It sounds like John Beecham, Master Merry.”

  I saw one side of the clerk's face twitch. “The same thought crossed my mind, Samuel,” he remarked dryly. “Though my tongue be not so limber as yours.” He folded his arms, then absently ran his index finger along his lower lip as he regarded me with a prosecutor's stare. “You saw him, you say? In this room?”

  “No, sir. Outside Master Feather's lodgings in Cheapside.”

  “Oh?” There was that sharp tone again. “What was he about?”

  “Sir?” I was confused now; the man seemed as eager for information as I myself.

  “What business? What was he doing?”

  “Well … he was leaving.” “What is it you want with him?”

  I had an answer ready for this. “If you please, sir, he lent me a shilling once, and I want to pay him back.”

  The clerk blinked at this, then let out a harsh laugh. “You owe money to him? You must be the only one in London—with everyone else it's the other way round. When was it you saw him, pray?”

  The air had become too thick for me; I began backing toward the door. “I disremember, sir—”

  “Come. The month, at least. Surely you recall the month.”

  I paused and screwed up my face like a half-wit in an effort to surrender as little as possible without lying outright. “April, I believe—or was it March?”

  “How many weeks past? Think, boy.”

  I goggled my eyes at him, as though thinking were beyond my skill. “Truth, sir, I do not mark the days so well—”

  “Leave off, you caviling calf-brain!” Patience and pretense flew away together as Master Merry advanced toward me with murder in his look. This was all the push I needed; I was halfway down the stairs before he reached the landing and had soon outrun even his voice as it bellowed, “Stop!”

  “It was ill thought,” Starling said firmly. She had latched on to me when I came in early and dragged me to the garden to hear all. “You should not have let them see your face.”

  “What was the harm?”

  “Someone could have followed you back here and discovered who you are.”

  “I thought of that,” I informed her loftily. “At Ludgate I stopped to watch a juggler and carefully looked all around. There was no figure in robes behind me. Or the scrivener, Samuel. He was such a pretty little fop I would know him anywhere.”

  “It's easy enough to throw off the lawyer's robes and look like a common man.”

  That, I saw belatedly, was all too true. “Well … at least I learned two things sure. The man I saw at the Theater is not Martin Feather's clerk, and his name is John Beecham.”

  “So he lied to you. And it seems they have an interest in him as great as yours.”

  “It does. This fellow Master Merry—what a name for one so grim!—he was right startled to hear where I met the man—”

  “—as if Beecham were in a place he had no business being. Did you mark anything about him that day? Think.”

  I cast back to my meeting with John Beecham, and the longer I thought, the more curious it appeared. There was that rustling behind the door, which ceased when I knocked, and those papers spilled, and the iron grip of his hand on my wrist—

  “The paper you picked up,” Starling interrupted. “Did you see anything on it?”

  “A name. It seemed a proclamation of some sort. Not a letter. ‘By order of,' ‘By the will of'—something like that.”

  “And
the name?”

  “I disremember. Something with a ford. Shallowford, Streamford, or the like.”

  “It meant much to him that it not be seen. Do you suppose he stole the papers from Master Feather?”

  I was thinking the same, and my clerk was taking on a darker color. I liked it not, but what other conclusion? His violent start upon recognizing me at the Theater, and the fact that he saw fit to disappear immediately after, only added to my suspicions. Starling went on, “You say he's the one who sent you to the wine merchants in the name of—who was it?”

  “Peter Kenton.”

  “I wonder if we should try to uncover this Peter Kenton.” “How? I can't go down to the docks and ask for him.” “True.” Her mouth was stopped but not her brain; I could almost see it working behind those clear green eyes.

  “Starling, have a care. If you take this up on your own, you could bring me harm.”

  “Would I bring you harm?” Her tone was all light and innocence—a very angel she sounded. “By the way, you were excellent today as Lady Constance. I knew there was an actor in you. What brought him out?”

  I lacked the words to explain, and doubted whether I could bring him out again, but fortunately our conference was interrupted by Alice Condell coming across the lawn.

  Lady Alice was not one to be denied. At a mere sixteen, she was one of the most daunting people I knew—tall and handsome like her mother, with much the same air of command but lacking the subtlety. Like a troop of cavalry she bore toward us now with her un-mincing walk, ribbons streaming like banners from her cap and a folded paper in her hand. “Here, Richard,” she called while still yards distant, “My mother bids you carry this message to Father. He's at the Mermaid. You must be quick about it—'tis a church matter.”

  I took the message with a bow. “Never mind,” Starling said when Alice was out of earshot. “I will think of something.”

  I already knew the sort of thing that happened when Starling proposed to think, but there was no time to argue over it. I took the back gate out of the garden, then followed the alley all the way to Bread Street, arriving at the Mermaid just as dusk had curled around the city and tavern keepers were setting out their lamps.

  Yellow light gilded the smoke of a dozen pipes inside the tavern. Spanish tobacco from the West Indies had become all the rage in recent years, biting hard into the Lord Chamberlain's Men. At least half the Company were puffing on clay pipes lit with coals off the grate, and the sight was still wonderful to me—like so many genial, smoldering dragons gathered about the hearth of their dragon kitchen. In this blue-gold haze I spied Master Condell seated at one end of the board, gazing toward Will Shakespeare. That gentleman occupied a space at the middle of the table surrounded by listeners, a stack of papers before him. With broad actor's vowels and eloquent pauses, he was reading all the parts in his latest play. This was the custom for a playmaker, to declaim his work before the company he hoped would perform it. If the work failed to please, they would silence the author and send him packing, with his hero's love unfulfilled, the lady's virtue unavenged, or the knife still planted in some hapless victim's chest.

  But Master Will was never silenced; his readings held all listeners spellbound to the end. He was at that moment conveying to his audience the sorrow of a man compelled to carry out a hateful act. I did not grasp all the particulars, but it seemed that the character he was reading had taken an infant child to a distant land, where he must leave it exposed on a rocky beach to die: “Blossom, speed thee well! There lie, and there thy character—which may, if fortune please, still rest thine. …” His listeners were silent in the brief pause that followed this speech, except for a sniff or two.

  “Then,” said our reader in his everyday voice, “there follows a clap of thunder and Antigonus makes ready to fly back to his ship. But a bear appears and chases him off the stage, and we soon understand—”

  A sputtering from across the table interrupted him. “A bear? Come, Will, a bear?” This came from a stocky, square-faced man with dark hair and deep-set eyes, who stared at the playmaker with a look that managed to be belligerent and affectionate at the same time.

  “Yes, a bear.” Master Will showed no offense at the badgering tone. “Antigonus must die, you see. The bear is as good a means as any to finish him off.”

  “But you allow us no preparation for the beast. There are no bears in the plot, no warnings from a madwoman or wise fool or any of the usual devices. And I daresay the animal never reappears after dispatching Antigonus? I thought not. At least give us a verse on the subject from the Oracle, otherwise shalt be an unbearable play.”

  “I'll think on it, Ben. But what hurt to have the beast appear as a stroke of divine judgment?”

  “Oh, by your leave, no hurt at all to the louse-bait audiences you play to. May as well let Jove himself descend on a lightning bolt, and 'twould please them equally. They are not even like to know you've put a seacoast on the land of Bohemia.”

  Richard Cowley, seated next to Master Will, wrinkled his brow. “But isn't there a seacoast on Bohemia?”

  The square-faced man swore and slammed a heavy fist on the board. “Why did our Drake sail around the globe, if Englishmen hold no more knowledge of geography than that? Bohemia is land-locked entire, Master Cowley! At least, Will, call the land by some other title than Bohemia. A coast by any other name would smell as sweet, eh? Sweeter, in my nose, for being true.”

  “I will think on it, Ben,” Master Will repeated, with the ghost of a smile.

  I noticed Kit, perched raven-like on a stool drawn up behind John Heminges. Looking a little peaked from his encounter with the putrid goat, he sipped ale sparingly from a wooden mug as he followed the conversation. On his face was something that, small and tight though it was, I could not recall seeing there before—a smile. It encouraged me to step over to him and murmur, “Who is yon professor, with the soul of a poet?”

  Kit may have gained a particle of respect for me after I carried his role that day—enough to answer, though he did not trouble to look. “You speak wiser than you know. He is a poet, though not as great as he thinks. 'Tis Ben Jonson.”

  I gave the man another look; so this was Ben Jonson. All the talk in the Company that week was of his recent release from Marshalsea Prison, where he had spent a time for writing a play that annoyed certain officials of the Court.

  Kit said, “If you came here to angle for my part tomorrow, I assure you I am recovered quite.” I felt a sting in his last words, and wondered if it was only my imagination.

  Shakespeare had resumed his narrative, a comic scene involving a shepherd and his lame-witted son. I worked my way through the crowd (for the reading had attracted almost every patron in the tavern) and over their laughter delivered my message to Master Condell.

  “Stay a little, Richard.” He scanned the paper, refolded it, and stuck it in the pocket of his sleeve before returning to me. “You write a clerkly hand, d'you not?”

  “I have been told so, sir.”

  “Hold, then. We may have work for you.”

  I would have held till Doomsday on the promise of work, but it was less than an hour for the play to run its reading, especially since Master Will would begin a long speech, then break off and skip to the last two lines. Since I had missed the first half, the story made little sense, but given the run of a Shakespeare plot, this may have been true even if I had heard it from the beginning. Even so, it was pleasant to sit among the players, gathered close in the warm night while crickets tuned up in their corners and smiles came and went like fireflies. Strange, how a trifling story can lure the mind away from its worries.

  The Lord Chamberlain's Men clapped and cheered when the reading was done, and decided by unanimous vote to perform the play during the autumn season. With that in view, it wanted copying. “For which I propose,” said Master Condell, “that young Richard here will serve. He writes a fair hand, and stands in need of work.”

  The Company approved with
no debate and went on to discuss where and how deep to make the cuts in the play. With a start, I realized that the riddle of my situation was answered: I now had a place. By his proposal Master Condell implied that the Company could use me in future and thought it worthwhile to keep me on through the summer. I felt a bit dizzy at first, then relief filled me, warm as mulled wine. The smoky, stuffy room glowed with a new light, and every face looked more dear. Even Kit's, as difficult and distant as it was, took on a softer cast as he listened intently to the talk around him. I lingered until my master stood to meet his appointment with the vestry, indicating to me with a nod that I must now go home. I went with a will, almost floating.

  “Copy work?” Robin exclaimed, in our room. “That pleases you? Copy work is the gate to hell, in my view.”

  “I am good at it.” Nothing could shake my mood.

  “I am good, too, at any number of sins.” He unlaced his breeches and slipped them off in one swift motion that rid him of shoes and hose as well. Then he flopped on our mattress in his shirt, bent his elbows, and stretched until they popped.

  “None of which you will indulge tonight, I take it.” The approach of summer worked like strong ale on Robin, who had lately embarked on a new enterprise. At least once per week, during the changing of the watch an hour before midnight, he would slip through our narrow window, cut light-footed over the tiled roof, and climb down a stone trellis by the kitchen garden. Then he would join Kit at a designated spot and roam the streets for three or four hours, jesting with tavern maids and sailors on the docks, hovering on the outskirts of a dice game or bear fight. I was told of these excursions in detail, but never invited to join them—a snub, probably from Kit, that troubled me more than I cared to own.