Watching them say their lines and take their marks, Will Shakespeare, playwright and sometime actor, sighed. He felt too old now, too worn out, for the capers and acrobatics of the stage. At thirty-eight, he felt worn beyond his years.
But he missed the stage still, and he envied the actors.
This afternoon, for the performance proper, transformed, like tropical birds in this icy London, they’d wear their bright feathers: the satin and the silk, the shiny tinsel and brightly colored paste jewels of their art and craft.
Upon the stage, they’d be kings or noblemen, and figure in this place a distant city of spires and gold. And for a moment the audience would forget the cold and the bad harvests and the price of food, and laugh and cry and applaud the magic on the stage.
But for now the art was all craft, craft that must be polished and honed and sharpened against mistakes in the weaving of the illusion later.
And, watching, Will marked slips in craft and missteps in technique. But, most of all, he marked the absent one, his brother Edmund.
Where could the boy be?
Will Kemp and Ned Alleyn and all the other actors echoed their lines rigidly and made slow movements that would come fluid and tumbling in the play.
“Here comes the almanac of my true date.” Will Kemp said. “What now? How chance thou are returned so soon?”
The line fell like a stone into a well of silence, no line answering it.
Kemp, who’d been reciting with his eyes closed, now opened them, startled, like a man who puts his foot down, in a dark night and finds not beneath it the solid ground he expects. “…so soon?” he repeated, and looked about, obviously trying to raise a response. “…So soon!” he said, this time peremptorily, as if the very force of the exclamation would force the reply.
Will Shakespeare sighed.
Edmund Shakespeare, who would play Dromio in the play, was not there. Kemp glared around himself and his mouth formed the words, “luckless boy.” He took his hands to his waist, and looked towards Will Shakespeare.
“Will,” he started.
Will answered not. He heard running footsteps outside, and guessed whose they were. He pursed his lips in a command for silence.
Will marked Kemp’s exasperation and smiled. This was expected, this was normal. Edmund was but twenty and yet subject to those temptations and perils of the flesh that often turned young men’s hearts to battle grounds.
Will thought back on his own youth with the soft smile that men reserve for folly survived.
Yet, as Edmund appeared on the stage, shouting the answer to the line that he’d half heard before, the smile vanished from Will’s face. His heart turned sick, within him, at his brother’s pallor, Edmund’s halting speech, cut by struggles for breath.
“Returned so soon! Rather approach’d too late.” Edmund stopped and rewrapped himself in his cloak. He shivered, despite the cloak and the sheltering wooden walls of the theater. “The capon burns, the pig falls from the pit. The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell—My mistress made it one upon my cheek.”
A young man of twenty, he gave Will the impression of seeing himself in a time-erasing glass, such the resemblance between the two brothers.
The hair that had receded from Will’s forehead, leaving its domed expanse bare, still fell in lustrous curls framing Edmund’s oval face and lending contrast to Edmund’s intent golden eyes that reminded one of a bird of prey.
But Edmund’s lips, that should have been soft and rounded and pink with youth and life, had become pinched, shrunk, blue as if with unknown pain.
He spoke Dromio’s lines with no energy, each one pushed out flat and dead. And how pale he looked, Will thought. How deathly pale.
Hag ridden, Will thought. Hag ridden.
Once having thought it, he could not rid himself of it.
Will had reason to know that the old expressions, the folk sayings, the words and sentences that hinted at another world beyond this physical stage were more than mere parlance, mere weaving of tipsy tongues upon the scale of verb.
Born on a Sunday Will had ever been blessed with the seeing of that other world that, parallel to ours, runs like a golden thread upon the all too common fabric of existence.
In his youth, Will had consorted with elves in the nearby forest of Arden. And lived to know them neither so glittering, nor so benevolent as they looked, and yet neither so dark nor demonic as legend would have them.
Looking like angels, they were none—fallen nor whole.
And yet, elves were so powerful that to them mortals were like flies to wanton boys. They killed men for their sport.
Will looked hard at Edmund. Was he reading too much in the natural dissipation of his brother’s youth? There was no reason for elf here.
Less than a year ago, Edmund had fallen in love—or professed himself so—with a girl, better than a bawd and less than an honest woman. She’d proved with child, though both she and that child were now dead.
Did that not speak of Edmund’s hot blood? Could his tired, wan paleness mean more than a few nights of dissipation?
Did that pale brow, those lackluster eyes, those lips tinged my bluish pallor, really mean more than the late nights, the drinking bouts, the easy ways of a twenty year old.
Will watched Edmund shiver and thought that his brother looked deadly tired.
“He’ll never make it,” Will Kemp said, from Shakespeare’s right, making Shakespeare jump.
Like most men gifted in the art of clowning on stage, Kemp compensated for it with a ponderous gravity, a lugubrious seriousness of thought and deed at all other times.
Now his eyes, doleful and brown, met Will Shakespeare’s inquiring glance with the forlorn look of a masterless hound. “He’ll never make it, Will, you know it well. He has no energy to caper, no joy in his words. Were he not your brother, we would not let him play.”
Will sighed. “Leave it be, Kemp. Leave it be. Let well enough serve its turn.”
Perhaps Edmund was ill. He looked forlorn, true, but must that sadness mean that Edmund had brushed fingers against the icy diamonds of fairyland?
Will sighed. He must speak with the boy. Sure, he must.
Seventeen years older than Edmund, Will loved Edmund as a father loved his first son.
He’d been lavish with Edmund, in money and education, in help and friendship. But fathers owed their sons discipline as well as love, did they not? Did not the Bible say so?
Yet, in his mind, Will remembered his little brother as he’d been, three or four years old at most, with chubby cheeks and a toss of dark curls, chasing chickens and tumbling with dogs in the garden of their parents’ house.
And he knew he could not be too hard with the boy.
* * *
Later, after the performance, Will sought Edmund out in the tiring room behind the stage.
Amid the smell of grease paint and in a confusion of discarded garments and hastily dropped tinsel crowns, every actor hurried and talked, each trying to wring from the other the praises that might lack from the audience.
“We’ve done well, think you not?” Ned Alleyn said.
And Will Kemp answered in his voice that ever, out of stage, sounded like the mournful tolling of a death bell. “Well at what, well? It did not go as it should. Not as it should, I say it. When young people lack the energy to…”
He stared at Edmund.
Edmund stood there, in the dark red velvet suit that had been Will’s and that Will had given him barely worn. He had put on his left boot, but the right he held up to his eyes and frowned at the sole as though it had done him offense.
“Edmund,” Will said, meaning to invite the youth to a tavern where, over mutton and wine, they might speak, like father to errant son and—with the medicine of Edmund’s good repentance—minister the spreading blight that threatened to consume their friendship.
Edmund looked up. “Look here, Will,” he said. In the shining pallor of his face, his golden eyes burned wi
th something like fire. “Look here, Will. Look at this boot.”
Speaking thus, he waved under Will’s eyes the very worn sole of a boot, with a finger-thick hole starting at the center.
Will blinked. He pushed the boot away. “I gave you new boots, Edmund. Less than a fortnight ago,” he said. “Why not wear those?”
Edmund cackled like a mad man, attracting the gazes of the nearest actors. “I am wearing them, brother. Your fine gift. You never give me aught that’s not near worn through, do you?”
“They were new.” Will looked around at the staring actors, his gaze making each one avert his own gaze.
But he knew they looked back again, as Edmund yelled, “They looked new. I’ll grant you that. But unless they were rotten they would not have worn through in two weeks, would they Will? Not in two weeks, of walking home and to the Theater and nowhere else.”
Will felt the pressure of the actors’ gazes on his back. He could almost hear them begging Will to put the young pup in his place. The young pup who was an actor only on Will’s fiat.
That pressure made Will speak. “But you walk elsewhere, do you not, brother?” Will asked, his voice severe. “To what brothels, what houses of assignation, what drinking holes do those boots carry you, brother, that you come in here late, always late, and always having forgotten your lines, and always looking like death tottering upon its own skeleton?”
Edmund opened his mouth. His golden eyes stared in surprised shock. He roared, an indistinct sound. “Curse your moralizing and your vanity,” he said. He stomped his newly-shod foot upon the theater boards and trembled. “Now that your daughter is marrying a puritan, will you be a puritan too?
I wasn’t so young that I don’t remember how big bellied your Nan was when she married you. You had your fun too, when you were young, did you not? Why must I be a saint? Wouldst you see me still in my tomb before my time?” He glowered at Will, who glowered back.
Will remembered his mad youth all too well. But remembering it, he remembered other things: his consorting with the elves in the forest of Arden hard by Stratford-upon-Avon.
Worse, Will remembered Kit Marlowe, that brittle genius who’d taught Will the ways of poetry.
Kit Marlowe had fallen in love with an elf, when little younger than Edmund. And that love, unrequited, for a creature who could requite lust but never warm human feelings, had been Marlowe’s undoing. He’d pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy he’d sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief till his reason gave away and his mad plots killed him.
There was an air of Marlowe about Edmund, an impatience for joy which life did not give.
Will remembered Edmund as a little boy, with curls, playing in the backyard of their parents house.
Behind him the actors muttered of shame and lack of respect.
Will sighed. He must be firm. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! Away, away!”
Edmund looked astonished for a moment, hands on either side of him, slightly drawn, his whole body tensed for a response, a gesture that would quell Will’s responding words.
Then he laughed again. The cold ripple of his laughter shook the ice on the makeshift roofs over the best seats.
“You quote your own words at me, do you?” he said, and laughed. “Your own words that you got from the gospel? Ah, Will. You say my own poems are never good enough and that my poetry is trite. But I’ve never stolen so much from the commonplace, everyday prayers and psalms as you have.” He trembled visibly, and a tide of color ascended to his cheeks, then receded again, leaving them paler. “Maybe that is why you always tell me my poetry is no good, Will. Maybe because it’s better than yours.”
Will could not answer that. Edmund’s poetry, such as it was, had all the fire and power that Will’s own words had possessed at twenty. But he lacked the calm of tutored thought, the quiet of reflected experience. Thus much had Will told him, ever. Thus much and naught more.
He’d always encouraged Edmund, had he not? Did he, in some corner of his being, fear this boy who reminded him so of Marlowe’s greatness?
Before Will could reel in his thought, before he could respond to Edmund, Edmund smiled, a triumphant smile as if having proved his point, and turned on his heel, and headed for the door.
“You did well,” Will Kemp said in a stage whisper. “You did well. Someone needs to rein in that boy, for his own good.”
But Will watched his brother walk away in a stumbling, shambling walk, and thought he’d not done well at all.
The boy looked ill.
Will was at that age when his friends died, one after the other. Sometimes it seemed that all his acquaintance and everyone he remembered were mere ghosts, crowding around him with memoried affection but no living presence.
Old Mr. Pope, the actor, had died only two years ago. And this year Augustin Phillips, another actor, had died. Elizabeth, the great Queen in whose reign Will had been born, had died years ago, and before her brave, thundering Essex, her erstwhile favorite, who had for a while seemed to bestride the Earth and make the skies shake.
And Marlowe, great Marlowe whose words had taught Shakespeare’s speech to sing, had lain ten years a-moldering in his anonymous grave in a Deptford cemetery.
It was as though Will had started a trip in this one coach, with coachmen and fellow-travelers, and one by one they’d all dropped off, leaving him alone and afraid.
But Edmund… Edmund had come into the coach long after the trip had started—he’d come into the world well enough after Will that he could have been Will’s own son.
Will watched Edmund trip and right himself slowly, in the hesitant movements of the infirm or old.
Edmund could not be allowed to dissipate himself until he died of it.
Children should not die before their parents, Will thought, despite the daily evidence of his eyes, despite the example of his own family.
Will, himself, would die, sure, but he’d leave behind himself this brother who was like a son and who’d continue Will’s own path.
Not knowing which he feared more: That Edmund’s distracted mind betrayed illness or that the boy was consorting with fairyland, Will sighed.
He was an old man. Old men had sick fancies and turns of the spirit that bode no good. It meant nothing.
* * *
“Your brother is ill, Master Shakespeare,” Edmund’s landlady said.
She stood at the door to Will Shakespeare’s Black Friar’s house, a disreputable woman with a flying untidiness of hair. Her garments, rough homespun inexpertly dyed black, stood out in this upper middle class neighborhood. She spoke with a decided French accent.
“He’s so ill he could not get up from his bed this morning.” As she spoke, she twisted a disreputable, frayed handkerchief in her hand. “He told me to tell you that he’d not be at rehearsal.”
And at this woman who, no doubt, consorted daily with actors and lived cheek to jowl with brothels, sniffed, a sniff of disapproval, at the theater and all the workings thereof.
Will nodded. What else could he do? He nodded and he searched the purse at his waist for two coins, which he handed the woman, and he spoke in the soft, cultivated voice he’d learned to use ever since his wealth, his name had set him above the normal run of actors. “I will be along, shortly, madam.”
Ill. Edmund was ill, after all.
He felt an odd relief.
Was this the coughing sickness that had claimed Edmund’s Jenny and her illegitimate son by Edmund?
Will shook his head. It mattered not.
If Will’s money could buy them, Edmund would have the best physicians, the most assured medicine.
If it was just this, just physical illness, then Edmund would survive.
And if not…
* * *
But all his hopes were dispelled as, after climbing Edmund’s stairs two by two, faster than his own aging legs should carry him, Will entered his brother’s shabby room.
Oh, sure, Edmund looked ill: parchment pale and drawn, he smelled of bitter sweat, of wasting illness. His breath left his lips like a howling wind, to be called back with groans of effort. The lustrous curls of youth lay matted and damp upon Edmund’s yellowing pillow.
And yet none of this mattered. None of this.
A maiden stood between Edmund’s small, rickety bed and the unsteady table that was meant to serve as Edmund’s desk—where a ream of paper that Will had bought for Edmund sat, virgin of words, next to the untouched inkstone.
Solid as stone, unreal as ether, the beautiful stranger with the golden hair, stood and smiled at Edmund, and beckoned with wide smile, with enticing gaze.
She wore a white, semi-transparent gown, tight to her tiny waist and stopping short of the swelling roundness of her breasts, which peeked above the fabric with the creaminess of fresh butter and the sheen of fine silk.
“Come, Edmund, come,” she said, her voice the soft whisper of a brook upon parched land. “Come with me to the plain of pleasure, Moy Mell, where Boadag is king for aye and where there’s neither anger nor sorrow, nor pain.”
Will stared. From the creature there came the heady scent of lilac flowering in a Summer night.
Hag ridden. He’d been right there. Edmund was prey of creatures like this, of creatures like onto the ones that Will had known in the far off days of his youth.
Standing at the door to that shabby room in the heart of London, Will ran his hand back over his domed forehead, through his thinning salt-and-pepper curls.
The smell of fairyland enveloped him. The creature’s voice was soft temptation. She glimmered in the scant light coming through the thick lead-paneled window. She shone with her own vitality, her power, her magic.
Her golden hair flowed like molten metal, as she turned to smile at Will.
In his heart, at that moment, as its beats sped like a mad drum played by a drunken reveler at a fair, Will was again twenty and, again, stood in a forest and, artless, was made the dupe of a fairy princess.
It was a moment. A moment only.
The smell of Edmund’s sour, bitter sweat mingled with the scent of lilacs. This smell of all too human mortality, the smell of the condition to which Will was born woke him from his dream.
Crawling Between Heaven and Earth Page 16