The Shakespeare Stealer

by Gary Blackwood

  “And though ’a be not comely, yet ’a must come,” I added, drawing an appreciative laugh from the others.

  “Very good, Widge,” said Mr. Heminges. “You’ve the wit of a true p-player.”

  As Sander and I walked toward the river, I said, “Do you think that I could actually be a player?”

  He gave me a puzzled look. “You say that as though the idea had just struck you. Isn’t that what you came here for?”

  “Oh. Aye, of course it is.” Once again, I was sorely tempted to tell him the truth. I was weary of carrying the baggage of that secret about with me, always having to be careful not to let it slip. I tried to imagine how Julia must have felt, guarding her secret for years, wanting so badly to belong to the company of players that she would risk such a desperate device and yet, because of that very device, never being able to truly belong.

  We were, as she had said, birds of a feather, for I had never belonged anywhere, either. Now there was a chance that I might, and I could not bring myself to endanger that chance by revealing my original purpose here, even though I had abandoned that purpose and, to all appearances, so had Falconer.

  The south bank of the Thames was like a poor reflection of the north bank, a sort of lesser London. Across the river the great houses of great gentlemen lined the embankment. Here on the lower ground the buildings were nearly as imposing in size but housed a separate family behind each of their many grimy windows. Scattered among these tenements were smaller dwellings that had given over their ground floors to some business, usually a tavern.

  “How in heaven’s name will we ken which one Nick is in?”

  “Any which looks prosperous or reputable,” Sander said, “we can surely pass by.”

  We found him in a place with a sagging roof and the customary ivy growing up the front wall. Nick sat at one of the stained, scarred tables, in the company of two fellows I took to be university students, a species we all knew well, as they had more money and leisure for playgoing than the working class.

  Sander and I stood just inside the door and tried to attract Nick’s attention, but he was too absorbed in his ale, or had absorbed too much of it, to notice. Finally we approached his table. “Nick,” Sander said.

  Nick glanced up. “What are you doing here? They don’t serve boys.”

  “Oh, they serve them occasionally,” one of the students put in. “Well roasted, with an apple in their mouth.”

  Nick laughed harder than the jest deserved. Sander said, “They’re wanting you back at the Globe. It’s nearly performance time.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me that. I’ll be along—when it suits me.”

  “I thought you’d want to know, too, that Julian isn’t badly hurt.”

  “What’s this?” the student said eagerly. “You’ve been dueling?”

  “A trifle,” Nick said with a pale smile, then turned on us. “Out of here with you now, before I give the same to you, and worse!”

  Sander backed away. “I just thought perhaps you were…well, reluctant to come back and face her.” I could tell as soon as the final word left his mouth that he would have liked to call it back. But the student had already seized upon it.

  “Her?” he echoed, laughing. “Don’t tell me you’ve taken to fighting women, Nick?”

  Nick clapped his mug on the table so fiercely that it cracked the earthenware. “I take that as an insult!”

  “Take it however you like,” the student said casually. “It was offered as a jest, nothing more.” He gave his companion a sidelong glance of amusement. “Unless of course it’s true.”

  Nick got unsteadily to his feet and reached across to tap the student on the front of his embroidered doublet. “Be careful what you say, or I’ll show you that steel is true.”

  “Quite a boast for a man without a sword,” the student said.

  “Swords are easily come by, as are university asses.”

  The student leaped up to face him, knocking his chair to the floor. “Your jest has the bitter taste of an insult!”

  “Here now, here now!” the tavern keeper called. “No quarreling inside! Take your dispute into the street!”

  Sander snatched at Nick’s sleeve. “Let’s go, Nick, before it comes to blows.”

  Nick pushed him away. “I’ve no fear of blows. They’re braver than words.” But I could see how his hand trembled.

  “No more do I fear them,” the student replied, though his face had gone white as Hamlet’s ghost.

  “I’ll give you cause to, then!” Nick raised a hand as if to strike the other.

  The student’s hand went to the hilt of his rapier. “I am no woman, to be silenced with a slap!”

  This was more than Nick’s pride could bear. He lunged across the table, seized the weapon of the second student, and yanked it free of its hanger. “Enough of words!”

  The student sprang away from the table and drew his sword as well. The tavern keeper shouted a curse, and Sander called out, “No!” but both protests were lost in the sudden clash of steel upon steel.

  It was obvious at once that Nick was overmatched, and I believe he recognized it. The look on his face was that of a man who has stepped into a stream and found that the water is over his head.

  He beat away the student’s first two blows, but the third stung his leg and made him shuffle backward. The student followed step for step, like his partner in a deadly dance.

  All the techniques Nick had learned at Mr. Armin’s hands seemed to desert him. He hardly tried to strike an offensive blow; it was all he could do to ward off those of his opponent. In desperation, he drew his dagger and held it before him as an added defense. The student did the same.

  As much as I disliked Nick, I felt something like sympathy for him. Though he was no friend, yet he was a fellow prentice, and I had no desire to see him run through. “What will we do?” I asked Sander above the din.

  He shook his head despondently. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s a matter of honor.”

  “Honor? ’A’ll be spitted like a pigeon an we don’t help him. Where’s the honor in that?”

  “It’s his fight, not ours.”

  “Then I’ll make it ours!” I hoisted a three-legged stool, meaning to launch it at Nick’s opponent. Before I could, the student moved in and feinted an edge blow at Nick’s legs. When Nick lowered his dagger to ward it, the student delivered a quick stocatta to Nick’s throat.

  Nick gave a strangled cry and staggered backward. Both his weapons fell from his grasp as he clutched at the wound. He collided with a bench and toppled to the floor.

  “The devil take you!” I shouted at the student. “You’ve killed him!”

  22

  I let fly with the stool. It knocked the student’s rapier from his hand and struck him on the shoulder. Without waiting to see what he would do, I knelt beside Nick and pulled his hands away from the wound. It was a serious one, but the knowledge of medicine and anatomy I’d absorbed willy-nilly in Dr. Bright’s service told me that no artery had been severed. The thrust had struck next to his throat-bole and been stopped by his jaw. Still, there was a copious flow of blood. Using Nick’s dagger, I cut off the sleeve of his linen shirt and pressed it into a ball over the wound.

  Nick’s eyes were wide, darting about as though searching for something. He tried to rise, and I put a knee on his chest. “Lie still, now. We’ve got to stop the bleeding.” When the first compress was dyed red, I had Sander cut another and pressed it to the wound until at last the bleeding slowed enough to allow me to bind it in place.

  “Stay there a bit, yet,” I told Nick. When I rose and looked about, the two students were gone.

  “How bad is he?” Sander asked, his voice anxious and unsteady.

  “’A’ll live, most like. What do we do wi’ him now?”

  “The tavern keeper’s sent for a constable—which is why those two fled. You can go to prison for dueling.”

  “That doesn’t seem to keep anyone from it.�
��

  “No. Some men’s honor is easily insulted.”

  “Not mine,” I said. “There’s little in this world worth fighting over, as far as I can see.”

  “Then why did you take Nick’s part?”

  “Did you not once say he was a part of the family?”

  “So I did. All the same, it was a brave thing.”

  I shrugged. “’A’d have done as much for me.”

  Sander looked down at Nick, who lay staring at the rotted ceiling. “I doubt it.”

  The authorities seemed to feel that Nick had suffered enough. Instead of taking him to prison, they took him to a hospital. Within a fortnight, he was on his feet again—too late to be of any use in our command performance at Whitehall.

  We could have dealt with his absence alone, for Sander had been studying the part of Hamlet’s mother, but we were deprived of our Ophelia as well. Had the decision been left to Julia, I feel sure she would have taken the risk, for she had gone on playing her old roles on the stage of the Globe, despite the fact that her secret was out. Though I didn’t expect anyone would deliberately give her away, someone might let the truth slip, as Sander himself had done at the tavern.

  I knew that, were my own secret revealed, I would not have had the nerve to face Mr. Pope or Mr. Heminges or Mr. Shakespeare or Sander. Julia was the only one I felt might understand. Yet I wasn’t sure. When I believed her to be a boy, I had begun to think of her as a friend. Now suddenly I felt as though she were a stranger. Before, I had talked freely with her, more freely than I ever had with anyone, even Sander. Now, when we were thrown together, I scarcely knew what to say.

  During a performance of A Larum for London I was assisting in the tiring-room when she came into the room to change costume. “You don’t mind if I forgo your help, do you?” she said dryly.

  “No, no,” I said, embarrassed. She disappeared into the wardrobe. It took me some time to think of how best to ask what I wanted to ask her. Finally, concluding that there was no good way, I said it straight out. “Why did you do it?”

  After a long pause, her voice came from the other room. “Do what?”

  “You ken.”

  She emerged, still hooking her bodice together. “Disguise myself?” She shrugged. “For the same reason we all do it. To give others what they expect of us.”

  “I don’t ken what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do. You do the same yourself.”

  “Disguise meself?”

  “Of course. Why do you speak so politely to Mr. Armin and Mr. Pope and the other sharers, and do as they tell you without complaint?”

  I laughed. “Because they’d box me ears an I did not.”

  “I doubt that. Anyway, you don’t act that way with Sander and me.”

  “You’d think me daft an I did.”

  “You see? We play the roles others expect of us. If I’d come here as a girl and said I wished to be a player, they’d have laughed and turned me away. Girls are not permitted on the stage; it corrupts them.” She shook her head and smiled bitterly. “If I was not corrupted long since, growing up in Alsatia among thieves and beggars, then I must be incorruptible.” She hoisted herself up on the table next to me so casually that I had to remind myself that this was no boy made up to resemble a girl, but the actual thing.

  “It was nothing new to me,” she went on, “dressing and acting as a boy does. My da wanted a boy, and made no secret of it—to carry on the family trade, you might say. He didn’t provide me with much girl’s clothing. ‘You can’t outrun the law wearing skirts,’ he always said.” She laughed and flapped the hem of her elegant costume. “In truth, I wore skirts and bodices regularly only after I began masquerading as a boy.”

  “Will they let you go on wi’ it?”

  Her face grew solemn, and she shook her head. “They can’t, now that they know. If the queen gets wind of it, we’re all in the soup.”

  “What will you do, then?”

  “Would that I knew,” she said, with something nearer to despair than I had ever heard from her. “I’ve never wanted anything but to be a player, ever since the day I crept into the theatre at Blackfriars and watched The Lady of May through the crack of the door.” She stared into space, as though seeing that performance once more. A tear welled in her eye and coursed down her rouged cheek. She raised a sleeve to dash it impatiently away and forced a smile. “Perhaps I’ll take up my da’s trade after all. As I said, it’s best to be what people expect of you.”

  “It’s not fair,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “It’s not.” She jumped down from the table. “I’ll miss my cue.”

  “Does it matter, now?”

  She shrugged and gave an ironic smile. “It does to me.”

  Of course what she said was perfectly true. The company could not let her go on performing for long. No matter how loyal or how closemouthed the other players were, sooner or later someone was sure to let the truth slip out, and this time the company might not be let off lightly as they had been in the Essex affair.

  Even if we could have carried the deceit off successfully at the Globe, we dared not risk it under the very nose of the queen. The part of Ophelia would have to go to a boy. Sander was out of the question, being occupied with Nick’s part. Sam and James, the hopefuls, were neither old enough nor experienced enough.

  So the company was left with a clear choice: either they must hire a boy from some other company, someone who would be unfamiliar with the role and with the methods of the Chamberlain’s Men, or they must settle for me.

  They settled for me.

  To the company’s credit, they did not simply thrust the part upon me. Mr. Heminges asked me if I wanted it. I was not used to being asked my opinion on anything, and it confused me. Did I truly have a choice, or was this an offer, like Simon Bass’s offer, that I was not permitted to refuse? “I don’t suppose I could think on it.”

  “We have less than a w-week left until the p-performance.”

  “Aye,” I said mournfully. “I ken that.”

  “Julia has offered to g-go over the p-part with you.”

  “That would help,” I admitted. “But I’m just not certain. I mean, do you really think I’m ready to play so important a role? Before so important an audience?”

  “If we didn’t feel you c-could do it, we would not have offered it to you. Whether or n-no you have the ability is not the question, but whether or n-not you have the c-courage.”

  If this was calculated to prick my pride, it worked, and that surprised me. I was sure that what small pride I had was buried deep, for it seldom bothered me. I had never been much of a hand for courage, either. When two paths were open to me—which is not often in the life of a prentice—I took the one easiest to travel, without regard to where it led. I had never deliberately chosen the perilous or demanding path.

  But I had done many things recently that I had never done before, and never dreamed I would do. “Well,” I said with a sigh, “I suppose if Julian could be a boy for three years, I can be a girl for an hour or two.”

  23

  Without Julia’s help, I could never have hoped to be ready. Each afternoon, long after the others had gone, we sat and went over the lines again and again. She taught me not only the words but their proper reading and what gestures to use. As difficult as this was for me, it must have been doubly difficult for her, having to tutor me in a role she had worked so hard to make her own, a role she had gone through years of disguise and deception to be able to play.

  And here was I, with no real notion of being a player until a few weeks before, having the part handed to me. Yet she made no complaint. In fact, she was so generous as to tell me that, if she had to surrender the part to someone, she was glad it was me. I feel sure, though, that her cheerful acceptance was itself a disguise. Something in her eyes spoke of sorrow, and in unguarded moments they sometimes shone with tears. I determined then to put every ounce of effort and ability I had into playing the part, so
that she would not be disappointed in me.

  I had no time for a prentice’s lessons, or a prentice’s tasks. Every available moment was spent rehearsing, sometimes under the eye of Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Phillips, who pointed out my many flaws. For an hour or two each day, I worked with the other players. Only twice did I share the stage with our Hamlet, Mr. Burbage, and then only to work out where I was to move and on what line. He was patient enough with me and my blunders, but he seldom displayed any real warmth or friendliness.

  That week was a paradoxical one. Because I trod the same ground over and over, repeating my lines until they threatened to choke me, each day seemed endless. Yet taken as a whole, the week passed with astounding speed. On Wednesday evening, we ferried across the river to rehearse before the queen’s master of revels. The performance was a nightmare.

  The stage was half the size of the Globe’s, which drove us to distraction. To add to the confusion, there were all the new properties and painted backdrops our hired men had constructed. Whatever way I turned, I came up against another player or a piece of scenery. My lines, which were not yet securely seated in my brain, flew from it like startled birds.

  To our tiny audience, it must have looked as though we were playing not The Tragedy of Hamlet but The Comedy of Errors. When at long last we came to the end of it, I had made up my mind that my best course would be to share Ophelia’s fate—that is, to throw myself over the side of the wherryboat into the Thames and join the rest of the offal there, none of which could be any more putrid than my performance had been.

  No one else seemed upset, either with the rehearsal or with my part in it. “You needn’t look so glum, Widge,” Mr. Armin said. “A bad rehearsal means a good performance.”

  “That makes no sense at all. You may as well say a bad cook makes a good meal.”