The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez

by Ann Swinfen

  For a moment I could not remember his name, though I remembered well enough that he was the boy actor who had fetched me to the Marshalsea, and so baited Poley’s trap.

  ‘Simon,’ I said, more embarrassed, it seemed, than he.

  ‘Are you here to pawn your household goods?’ he said merrily. ‘We must all come to it.’

  ‘No,’ I said stiffly, ‘I have brought medicine for Master de Barros’s wife. I must go to her.’ I hurried to the back of the shop, where the pawnbroker stood waiting.

  I was sure Simon would have gone when I came down to the street again, but there he was, sitting on a pile of wood outside a carpenter’s shop and whistling. He sprang to his feet when I came out of the pawnbroker’s.

  ‘I’m not ashamed to admit I was pawning a gold earring,’ he said cheerfully, picking up the conversation as if I had not been absent for half an hour. ‘I’m in the chinks now!’ He jingled the purse that hung at his belt.

  ‘Best not draw attention to it,’ I said, amused by his frankness. ‘There will be nips and foists a-plenty in this district.’

  ‘Never fear. I live just north of here, in the actors’ lodgings in Holywell Lane. I know these streets, and the scoundrels who prowl them.’

  ‘I thought you lived in Bankside.’

  ‘Nay, that was only for a time, while we were playing an inn in Southwark. I’m at the Theatre now. We have a play this afternoon, an old thing of the Queen’s Men, The Famous Victories of Henry V, but I have a good part.’ His eyes shone in a way I had not seen before. ‘I am to play the King of France’s daughter, who married our great King Hal.’

  We had begun walking back towards Bishopsgate. He jingled his purse again.

  ‘I will buy you a meal at an ordinary,’ he said, ‘while I am wealthy.’

  I tried to protest, but he looked so crestfallen that I let him persuade me. The ordinary was just inside the wall, a more modest place than the great inns, but decent and clean. As I have said, I do not hesitate to eat Gentile food, though I will not touch pig in any form. The very thought sickens me. The pigs on my grandfather’s solar were never served to the family, but sent to market.

  When we had eaten flounder and a good beef pottage served with pease pudding – a substantial meal for threepence each – I put my elbows on the table and my chin in my hands and regarded him over our half-finished tankards of ale.

  ‘And how did you come by a gold earring?’

  He looked uncomfortable, and drank some ale to give himself time.

  ‘Some of the gallants in the theatre . . . they fancy themselves in love with the maidens we play.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, enlightened, ‘or perhaps with the pretty boy disguised in skirts?’

  Simon turned a painful red.

  ‘I can see that you would make a lovely maiden,’ I teased. ‘Who could blame some rich young man for giving you a gold earring?’

  ‘You are pretty enough yourself,’ he retorted. ‘With the right training you could play a girl. Your voice is light, but you would need to learn how to move like a woman. You must take small steps, and lower your eyes, and move your hands delicately from the wrists.’ He looked at me critically. ‘You certainly could not sit like that, sprawled in your chair with your legs thrown out and your elbows on the table.’

  Before my eyes, he changed, drawing himself together so that he took up less space. His hands, suddenly fragile, lay delicately folded in his lap, his eyes modestly cast down. I stared at him. It was true. This was how a woman held herself, her very body conveying her lower position in society.

  ‘Nay,’ I said, with something like a laugh. ‘I could never do that – turn myself into a woman.’

  ‘It’s mostly training,’ he said modestly, as he relaxed again. ‘I have been acting since the age of seven.’

  ‘With James Burbage’s company?’

  ‘I started at St Paul’s. I lost my parents young and my uncle placed me there to school. My singing voice was good, so they took me without fees. It was a great opportunity for me. Then I was trained up to act with the company of Paul’s Children. We even performed before the Queen! When our singing voices break, the cleverest boys are sent to Oxford, the others are found good apprenticeships. With an education from Paul’s, your future is secured.’

  ‘Could you have gone to Oxford?’

  ‘I could. I chose not. For me, the theatre is my world, not to be cloistered away in some dusty Oxford college, conning ancient texts in Greek or Hebrew!’

  ‘I would dearly have loved to go there.’ I could not keep the longing out of my voice. I had begged my father, but we both knew it was impossible. Living and sleeping with three or four young men in our tutor’s rooms, I could not have kept my secret long.

  ‘Why did you not?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, my father could not spare me.’ I drank the last of my ale. ‘I must go. I’ve no leave to take a holiday.’

  ‘Come to the play!’ He had risen as I did, and caught me by the wrist. ‘I can get you in free. Come and see me as the French princess!’

  I was sore tempted. I had not seen a play in months and I loved the magic of the playhouse, which can help you forget, if only for an hour or two, the world of lies in which you live, by weaving its own sweet web of lies.

  ‘I shouldn’t.’ But already I was allowing myself to be drawn back through Bishopsgate and along past Bedlam to Shoreditch High Street. We turned left on Hog Lane, then at Curtain Road turned right, passing the Curtain theatre. When we drew level with Holywell Lane, Simon pointed out the lodgings of famous actors and managers: James Burbage and his sons Cuthbert and Richard, the great comic wit Richard Tarlton, and John Bentley and Tobias Mill.

  Simon gave ‘Good day!’ to a young man not much older than we were.

  ‘That’s Thomas Kyd,’ he said, with something like awe in his voice. ‘He’s writing a new play for us, called A Spanish Tragedy. It will be wonderful, it puts the old plays to shame with their sing-song verse. I have seen part of it that’s already written.’

  ‘Will you play another pretty maid?’ I could not resist it.

  He kicked the ground, raising a little puff of dust.

  ‘We won’t stage it until next year. I hope by then I may play men’s parts, but our company is short of boys, and those we have are too young to take the difficult women’s roles.’

  We came to the Great Barn, once part of the convent that stood here until the time of the Queen’s father. Nowadays the Barn is used as a cattle pen and slaughterhouse, filling the air around the Theatre with the rank, bloody Smithfield smell. Beyond it an archway had been knocked through the old convent wall to give admittance to the theatre audiences. We turned away from the outside staircases which led to the more expensive seats. A narrow door opened on to a passageway under the banked galleries to the area before the apron stage where the penny groundlings stood to watch the play. Simon whispered something in the ear of the man collecting the pennies and he motioned me through without paying. Simon disappeared along another passageway towards the back of the stage.

  I do not remember much of The Famous Victories of Henry V. Since then a much finer play has told of those events which so stir an Englishman’s heart and thumb the nose at the French. If they tell the truth (and who can know the truth, after so many years?), Henry was one of England’s greatest kings, in something of the same mould as our own Elizabeth, but he died young and his death brought years of war and suffering. Elizabeth had been luckier. Or perhaps wiser. For she had avoided war whenever she could, and the careful men around her, like Walsingham and Burghley, had kept her safe from the assassins bent on destroying her.

  Though I remember little of the play, I do remember Simon. It seemed to me that whenever he stepped on to the stage, the play came to life. As the French princess he was beautiful and desirable, intelligent and merry. When the king took the hand of the princess to plight his troth and bring peace to the two kingdoms, a sigh of satisfaction and pleasure filled the theatre.
I saw an old dame near me wipe her eyes on her apron, and a group of apprentices (who, like me, should have been about their masters’ work) whistled and cheered and called for the lovely maid at the end.

  I hurried off as soon as the play was over, making my way around the north side of the town wall to Smithfield instead of going through the crowds of the City, for I thought to save myself some time. I had been gone several hours longer than I should have been and my father might have begun to worry. As I hastened along the tenters’ fields and past Cripplegate, my mind seethed with confusion. Simon had looked so delicate and convincing as a girl, yet he surely believed me to be a boy, and one who could never pass for a maid. Maid or man? Jew or Gentile? Portuguese or English? My meeting with Simon had left me floundering in my own muddy thoughts.

  After this encounter, I tried to put Simon out of my mind, together with the confusion in my mind prompted by it. We were busy at the hospital after an outbreak of measles, a dreadful disease which seems to prefer to attack children. It heralds its entrance into the body with fever and sweating and the child complains of terrible pains in the head. With a young baby, too young to speak, there is constant crying and thrashing about. Indeed, once the epidemic had taken hold, the wards of St Bartholomew’s reverberated with the constant crying of babies and children. We had to move many of our other cases, who needed peacefulness and rest, away from the stress of the unrelieved noise. My own head throbbed with it.

  We treated the outbreak of fevers with the usual febrifuge herbs – borage is good and readily available and the extract from the bark of willow – but by the end of the first week it had become clear that it was not just fever we were dealing with, but measles. The telltale rashes were beginning to appear, first on the chests of our young patients, then spreading to faces and all other parts of their bodies, driving them mad with the itching. It is very difficult indeed to stop a young child from scratching, and of course the scratching causes the rash to explode into pustules which grow inflamed and infected, oozing pus and causing pain as well as the itch.

  It seemed as though we made bucketsful of the salve which is mainly composed of the ground root of camomile, a task in which I leant a hand to Peter Lambert, one of the young assistant apothecaries who had been assigned to help us. We were of much the same age and had started work at St Bartholomew’s within a month of each other. He was a charity boy, but one of the senior apothecaries had noticed how quick and neat he was, working as a servant in the hospital. He had been taken on as an apprentice and trained up. In a few years he would be licensed himself.

  ‘We need to shade the windows,’ my father said, as soon as we had ascertained that it was measles we were dealing with. I looked at him questioningly. Peter also raised his eyes from the mortar where he was grinding yet more camomile root.

  ‘Strong light is dangerous for the eyes of those suffering from measles,’ my father explained. ‘What are the worst effects of measles, Kit?’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘Blindness, of course. And deafness. In very severe cases it can cause serious damage to the brain, leaving the victim forever confused and childlike.’

  ‘Quite correct.’

  I noticed that Peter was listening carefully, with a horrified look on his face. He glanced around at the rows of cots and small beds.

  ‘You mean it will happen to these children, Dr Alvarez?’

  ‘To some of them, yes. I’m afraid whatever we do, some of them will suffer these terrible after-effects. That is why it is so important to detect and treat measles quickly, and to try to stop the outbreak from spreading. So you see, I am not being cruel when I ban visitors to our young patients. We cannot risk the disease being carried to others who are not yet infected. Now I must see about ordering the cloth for the windows.’

  By the next morning all the windows in the measles wards had been covered with red cloth, nailed to the frames, and we worked in the strange rosy glow they cast over everything. It was noticeable that the children seemed less distressed in the dimmer light, though the fever and the painful rash continued to torment them.

  At the end of the first week, we had our first death, a little boy about three years old. We had feared for him from the start, because he had been very ill when the parents brought him to the hospital, already in a dangerously high fever and unconscious. After that, three babies died. I began to dread going to the hospital, though I only left it for about three hours during the night, to go home and snatch a little sleep, before changing places with my father, so he could do the same.

  During the second week, my father called me over to the bed of a little girl of about ten. She was sitting up quietly, having come through the worst of the rash, which had begun to fade from her cheeks. Instead of a mass of ugly red weals, her forehead and cheeks were now spotted with small red bumps, each with a tiny scab at the centre. As one of the older children, she had understood she must not scratch and had done what she could to stop herself, sitting on her hands. Indeed she was one of our best patients, quiet and uncomplaining.

  My father had a candle in his hand and was moving it back and forth in front of the girl’s face. Her eyes were open, but they did not follow the movement of the flame.

  ‘What do you think, Kit?’

  I swallowed. ‘I think her eyes are affected,’ I murmured softly, not wanting the child to hear me use the word ‘blind’.

  My father nodded and sighed. He blew out the candle and set it down on the stool at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Yes, you are right. And you do not need to whisper. She cannot hear you.’ He turned to the child and raised his voice slightly. ‘Can you hear me, Lizzy?’

  She did not respond.

  I turned away, filled with a sudden great rage. Her parents had brought her in quickly, we had treated her at once, and she had done everything we told her to do. Now, this. Not only blind, but deaf as well.

  For the rest of the time the epidemic lasted, another ten days, I went about my work in a kind of numb fury. Four more children died. Two others were blind. And one boy of twelve babbled and dribbled like an infant.

  When at last the wards were clear of measles cases, the rooms washed from top to bottom under my father’s severe scrutiny, and the red cloth taken down, we moved the regular patients back in from other wards where they had been crowded together. We went home late that evening and as soon as we were through the door, I sank down on a kitchen bench. I felt like a cloth doll which has lost its stuffing and hung my head between my knees. The iron grip in which I had held myself for so long collapsed and I began sobbing uncontrollably.

  My father sat down beside me and put his arms around me.

  ‘Hush, Kit, hush, child. It’s over.’

  ‘But it will never be truly over, will it?’ My voice came out thick and blurred and shaking with anger. ‘How can God visit such suffering and punishment on innocent children? Killing some. Leaving others blind or deaf or mad? Is that the work of a benign God? I do not think so! How can I go on being a doctor in a world of such wickedness, a world where even God seems evil?’

  He said nothing for a while, letting me sob into his shoulder. At last he said, ‘I cannot understand the ways of God, or His plan for any of us. Do not give way to despair, Kit, because you cannot understand Him either. All we can do, as doctors, is to relieve suffering and to cure those we can. Remember, far more of those who came to us were cured than endured the effects we all grieve over. A doctor must be courageous and carry on, in the face of distress and agony. Our strength must uphold our patients and give them strength and hope. I know that you can do this, or I would never have allowed you to take up medicine.’

  His words comforted me a little. I vowed I would try to be strong and not allow distress to undermine my work. But I would never forget that epidemic of measles, or the girl sitting up in bed, neither seeing the flame of a candles before her eyes nor hearing our voices when we spoke to her.

  Although we had finished that first mountain of le
tters, several times in the weeks following the outbreak of measles Phelippes sent a servant to fetch me when he wanted help in deciphering. He had the key to some of the codes, but fresh ones were always turning up and it can be a time-consuming business, breaking a new code. And it was due to the volume of documents that must be deciphered swiftly that he needed my assistance. Another large bundle of them, letters to the Scots queen, had been intercepted on the way to her from the French embassy by the courier Gifford. From what I read, Mary’s chief agent in Paris, one Thomas Morgan, was busy organising treason even from within his prison cell at the Bastille, where he had been held, at the request of the English government, since the discovery of the Parry conspiracy. England had asked France to hand him over for trial, but the most the French would do was to confine him to the Bastille, where he appeared to have considerable freedom, receiving other agents and controlling the Scottish queen’s correspondence in its two stages, from France smuggled into England and then from the French embassy carried on to Mary. Or at least he thought he controlled it. Little did he guess that much of it ended up on my desk.

  Phelippes and I worked together quietly in his small back office with Arthur Gregory in the adjoining room. Here I still had my own table and copy of the codes. I climbed up there by the back stairs and only rarely saw Walsingham himself. It could be dull work, merely a matter of transcribing from code and then (since most of these latest documents were in French) translating them into English. When a new code appeared I pounced on it eagerly, as relief from the boredom, much to Phelippes’s amusement.

  I had not seen Poley for some while, to my relief. Thomas Phelippes was a different breed of man from Poley, whom I sensed he did not altogether trust. Phelippes was heart and soul Walsingham’s man.

  ‘Sir Francis uses Poley to pose as a Catholic and infiltrate the network of Catholic exiles and citizens who plot the Queen’s downfall,’ Phelippes explained to me, after I had noticed Poley twice more about the house soon after I began to work there.

  There was something in his voice which made me wonder whether Poley’s allegiance was sometimes open to doubt.