The Playmaker

by J. B. Cheaney

  “I was …” I cleared my throat, but could not stop the dreaded hand closing around it, choking off not only words but wind. To my horror I recognized what happened: my father had made it impossible for me to lie. The barest suggestion of becoming like him in that way caused my tongue to swell, my mouth to dry up. No cat and mouse now, with Master John Clement; I was caught by the tail.

  “What is your association with the man known as John Beauchamp?”

  But how could I tell the truth? Telling the truth would seal not only my doom, but Robert Malory's, and my aunt's, and put Starling in danger also. Plain fear waved me off that path.

  “It is no use pretending there is no association,” Master Clement went on. “We know that a man so named set out for the Port of Deptford yesterday around five o'clock. We also know that you did not appear in yesterday's performance. Another boy played your part.”

  “Badly too,” put in Bartlemy—not only kidnapper and mauler but theater critic as well. He leaned against the wall, arms folded, regarding me with his sharp eyes.

  “Well?” said his master. “Where were you yesterday at eventide?”

  “So please you, sir …” My voice came out as the barest whisper—both of them had to lean close to hear it. “I was sick—”

  “All day? Can anyone swear that you were in your bed around the first watch?”

  Starling would, but she was now in her own bed with a nasty cough picked up from yesterday's adventure. Besides, I could not let her lie for me.

  “Let me acquaint you with what we know, lest you try to dodge us again with some lame tale about losing your wallet. We have had an eye on you since you appeared at the chambers of Martin Feather. Since Bartlemy recognized you from the funeral, we marked you for questioning, but you appeared to be innocent when I confronted you. So we set you aside. But then last November a body was found in an abandoned house in Southwark. Know you the house I mean?”

  I managed a nod.

  “We got word of that body through one connected with this Company. Was it you?”

  “N-n-no, sir. It was not me.”

  “Would you swear to that?”

  “I would, sir.”

  “Have a care. We have caught you in one lie already. You claimed to know nothing of one Peter Kenton, yet Bartlemy discovered that you used that name to get a job on the wharf. Redeem yourself now with the truth. Where were you last eventide?”

  I said nothing. My father must have got away, else they would not be so desperate for information. And I had enough information now to hang me. The relief I felt at Robert Malory's escape was far outweighed by a sense of certain doom.

  “We are in no haste,” Master Clement said, his words grinding. “We can keep you here all night, if need be. Where were you last eventide?”

  I held my silence, which seemed to double and multiply until it filled the tiny room, pressing down upon me with inconceivable weight.

  “Where were you—”

  “Well, I'll tell you, since he can't,” came a voice from the curtained doorway, and my questioner started in surprise. It was Kit, half-changed into street clothes with his doublet unlaced, standing with one hand on his hip and the other grasping the door frame as though he had just leaned in to drop an indifferent word. Then he dropped it, and stunned us all. “He was in the play.”

  John Clement glanced from him to me, and back again. “We have reason to believe he was not. Why did Master Finch not recognize him?”

  “‘Tis unlikely anyone could have recognized him, covered head to foot in yon coat of fur.” Kit nodded to the opposite wall, where a huge ghostly form, hung upon two hooks, loomed out of the dim light.

  “You're saying he was the bear?” The man's tone clearly implied disbelief.

  “Just so. He was sick yesterday morning, and still sick when he arrived late. The Company thought it best not to let him on stage in a costume he could puke over. Puking within a costume matters not—the skin is due for cleaning anyway.”

  Master Clement released a short breath through his nose, then turned to his able assistant. “Well?”

  “What can I say to that?” Bartlemy exclaimed. “Anybody looks like anybody else in a bear skin.”

  “I can set you right on the other thing,” Kit continued smoothly. “‘Twas I got word to you about the body in that old house, though it wasn't supposed to come back to me.”

  John Clement—reluctantly, it seemed—shifted the focus of his questioning. I heard, as through a fog, Kit explaining our fracas on All Hallow's Eve, making it sound like nothing more than a boy's adventure that turned grim. He told it mostly as it happened, and so plausibly even the false elements made perfect sense. A long pause followed the tale before Master Clement spoke again, returning to the matter at hand. “So you still claim it was this boy in the bear skin yesterday.”

  “Aye. It was to be me, but I get out of playing the bear anytime I can.”

  The man turned abruptly to me. “Why did you not say so at once?”

  I opened my mouth and tried again, but still could not force a single word.

  “What ails you, that you can't speak for yourself?” young Finch demanded.

  “He frights easy,” Kit explained, with the hint of a sneer. “He used to freeze like this even during a performance. If he weren't his own worst enemy, I would have choked him myself, long ago.”

  “What suits him for the stage, then?” Master Clement challenged.

  “Come and see for yourself, sometime,” Kit replied, his voice cold. “If you doubt me otherwise I pray you ask Master Condell, or any of the others.”

  The Queen's agents were not convinced, but they were out-faced. I recognized their dilemma: Lord Hunsdon, their master, was also our patron, with a long habit of protecting the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Unless John Clement possessed hard evidence to convict me, he could not lay a hand on my person, nor confront a respectable member of the Company with suspicions that might be groundless. So there the matter lay, at an awkward angle: he could get nothing out of me and could open no cracks in Kit's tale.

  After a few more questions, mere stabs in the dark, the two of them had no choice but to pack up their doubts and leave with as fair a grace as could be managed—though Bartholomew Finch sent me a look on his way out that clearly expressed his opinion: Guilty.

  I followed them to the doorway, and found myself trembling violently. Mixed with the relief was a strong tincture of guilt, for I had deceived them. Or allowed them to be deceived. A lie consented to was no different than one spoken, to my mind. But honesty was not so simple a proposition as I once had thought.

  Nor was friendship. Once the Queen's men were out of sight, a rustling sounded among the costume racks and a disheveled figure emerged—Robin, still in Juliet's white shroud, who had eavesdropped on the interview and made no bones about it. All came clear to me then: it was he who sized my peril when I disappeared and decided he could not let me sink after all, but fetched Kit to my rescue. Not entirely the scared rabbit. “Rob—” I began, my voice catching.

  He flung up a hand and backed away. “Say no more. If you are off the hook you were dangling from, 'tis well, but pray you have a care for my virgin ears.” With that, he scampered off to change.

  I turned to Kit, who had, against all expectation, saved my backside. He spoke before I could: “Someday, we may talk. You interest me; I'll not deny it. There is more to you than can be seen in a sixmonth, and curiosity has the better of me. For now we consider all debts canceled. Content?”

  “Content.” They were calling for us from the stage. I put out my hand, which he pretended not to see, but turned away with his straight back and gliding walk, ever a figure to inspire and provoke.

  That left only me and the bear.

  By now, he was little more than a shadow on the wall, but the fading sunlight brushed a gleam upon his glass eye and ivory tooth. He seemed alive and breathing, a broody presence haunting the edges of my life—not just now, but always. He was th
e unexpected element in the play that reared itself so suddenly the audience gasped aloud; that changed everything, then disappeared. Slowly I crossed the little distance that separated us, raised an unsteady hand, and placed it on his foreleg, high up where the shoulder would be. A powerful muscle had once inhabited that skin, the living flesh of a Brutus or Benjamin or Ajax, that could rip me open with a single swipe. Or, in another mood, fold me to himself and keep me warm. With a long sigh, I leaned my head upon the empty chest.

  I might never see my father again. Or he could reappear suddenly, years hence, and change everything. I could expect no more from such a gad-about soul. He had given me, perhaps, all he could: a chance at life, a rousing tale, and a word of advice. “Stick to acting”—another inheritance from him. But if I do, I resolved, the acting remains on stage. When I walk off, it will be as myself.

  Master Condell was calling my name. I stroked the rough fur, then let my hand fall and backed away from the beast, taking a last look into his open jaws—which, at that angle, appeared to grin.

  As we were locking up the Theater that evening, Ben Jonson arrived with a fair copy of his latest play, which the company had agreed to perform, tucked under one arm. “This is still a comedy, I hope?” Master Will inquired, taking it from him. “You've not delivered to us a changeling child in comic bands?”

  “Aye,” growled Master Jonson. “‘Tis Every Man in His Humor, as agreed. I remind you that my tragedies are highly regarded at Oxford—unlike, may we admit, this most lamentable tale of Romeo and Juliet which you trot out every time you need to stuff a house.”

  “Success is a telling argument, Ben,” Shakespeare replied. He and his sparring partner fell in behind me as I trailed Kit and Robin, Condell and Heminges, Watt and Jacob with their torches. I was exhausted, after a day that sorely tried both body and spirit, but by now was daring to hope that the nightmare was over.

  “Time will vindicate me,” Jonson stubbornly affirmed, and he went on to relate exactly what it was that troubled him about Romeo and Juliet. This seemed to be an old argument—I saw Kit glance back at them with a sardonic grin—but it was new to me. Master Jonson's chief complaint was that the story skipped around too much, and certain other Shakespeare plays were even worse. He believed in something called “the unities,” which meant that the action in a play should occur in one time and place, with each scene unfolding directly from the previous one. This was how the Greeks did it.

  “But life is not like that,” Master Will insisted. “Life cannot be tied in a package. It sprawls and tumbles.”

  “Oh, life!” Ben Jonson snorted. “Art should exalt life, not reflect it.”

  “Illuminate it, rather …”

  True enough, I thought. Life was not theater, where stories come to an end and all is understood. I might never understand Kit, who walked ahead of me now, turning a negligent ear to Robin's ramblings. I might never fulfill Starling's hopes, never satisfy all my mother's aspirations, or my own. The theater could not answer all my questions. But it could, perhaps, illuminate them.

  I looked back at it—a worn, somewhat shabby building packed with shadows—and for the first time felt a pure, unmixed affection. I had been driven to it by circumstance, but knew I would stay—for now, at least—by choice. Facing forward again, I caught Master Will's preoccupied smile, as he listened to his companion's weighty judgments.

  “Time discloses the truth, and the merit …,” Ben Jonson said. “… and did you see that gull in the side gallery, with the white sleeves?” Robin cried indignantly. “He blew a tobacco ring right in my face during the ball scene!”

  “Receipts down, and the rent due in a month,” John Heminges complained. “If Master Giles raises it again we may be playing in the street. …”

  Bishopsgate loomed out of the darkness, pricked with torch-light. I had a part to learn, a dance to practice, then sleep—the dreamless, unhaunted sleep of an honest laborer whose debts are canceled. Content?

  Content.

  All the characters named as principal players of the Lord Chamberlain's Men are historical figures, as is the Lord Chamberlain himself. However, Henry Carey (Lord Hunsdon) actually died in 1596, a year before this story takes place. I extended his life a little longer because his sympathetic presence was needed. Lord Cobham, the next Lord Chamberlain, was no theater fan, and London's acting companies went through several anxious months before Cobham himself passed away and the office went to Henry Carey's son, the second Lord Hunsdon.

  Lord Hurleigh, Martin Feather, and all the members of the Holy Restoration Society are fictional, though their aims were not. Throughout her long reign, Elizabeth survived several attempts to replace her with a Catholic monarch. The most famous was the Babington plot, which centered around Mary Queen of Scots. Another was the Throckmorton conspiracy of 1583, in which a Catholic nobleman negotiated with agents of Spain and France to invade England and restore the “true church.” Just before and immediately after Elizabeth's death in 1603, rumors of plots swirled around Arabella Stuart, a distant cousin of the Queen. The king of all plots was discovered in 1605, when Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up Elizabeth's successor, King James, together with Parliament, making a clean sweep of the Protestant government. Needless to say, he did not succeed.

  Readers may wonder why the Globe Theater is not mentioned in this story. The answer is, it wasn't built yet. The Theater, where the Lord Chamberlain's Men performed most of their plays at this time, was owned by Richard and Cuthbert Burbage. Unfortunately, the Burbages did not own the land their structure was built on, and disputes over the rent would soon lead them to seek other options. The result was the Globe—but that's another story.

  Shakespeare scholars agree that The Winter's Tale was one of his last plays, not an earlier one as it's represented here. But undoubtedly he borrowed the plot from a book by Robert Greene, which had been published in 1588. Suppose Shakespeare wrote the play, shelved it for several years, then came out with a rewrite? It's possible. A historical novelist, like a playwright, might step outside the facts for the sake of a story, but should never step outside the realm of possibility.

  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children's Books

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  Copyright © 2000 by J. B. Cheaney

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-55911-1

  February 2002

  v3.0