by Ann Swinfen
I had taken to sleeping on deck myself, when I could spare the time to sleep, and one early morning I found myself being shaken awake by my father.
‘Kit, wake up! Tom Barley is struck down.’
I had feared it, as I had feared that my father, growing old and weak, would take the illness. But my father was spared and it was Tom who now lay in a corner of the gun deck, sweating and raving and striking out wildly. It was impossible to get him into a hammock in that state, so we made him as comfortable as we could on the boards of the deck. I forced febrifuges down his throat, though he fought me, and I bathed his burning limbs, dosed his pain with poppy juice and fed him sage pounded with honey for the cough that wracked him every few minutes.
I blamed myself for using him as an assistant. If he died, it would be my fault. But his body was strong and struggled against the illness. After five days he was no longer delirious, and at the end of a week it was clear that he would recover.
‘I’ve never known anything like it, Doctor,’ he said to me shakily, managing to hold a spoon for the first time himself. ‘My head – it was like, I don’t know . . .’ He moved his head, and touched his temple gently with his finger tips. ‘I can’t find the words. It was like there was a cannon in there, that kept blowing up. Not one shot after another, see. But all the time.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I just wanted to die. Just wanted to stop the pain. If I could have got up on deck I’d have throwed myself in the Thames.’
Tom was one of the last cases. The men who had recovered were sent off to their homes, still without pay. Even those who had refused to go earlier had grown so fearful of the illness which had killed so many that they trudged off, to try to beg their way home. I demanded that the harried officer on the quayside write out licences for them to beg, for without a licence a wandering beggar can be confined to the stocks by any parish official who lays hands on him. The final group of men, weak but recovering, were moved to St Thomas’s, the hospital south of the river. Tom refused to go with them.
‘I’ll manage the walk home to Rochester,’ he said, ‘given I take it slowly. I’ll fare better in the clean air of Kent than shut up in St Thomas’s.’
My father gave him five shillings. ‘It is no more than you deserve in payment for the work you have done for us,’ he said, ‘caring for the sick.’
‘You should buy a place with a carrier,’ I said, ‘to spare you the walk. You are not yet back to your full strength.’
But he merely laughed and shook his head. ‘I’ve better use for five shillings than to waste it on a carrier. My wife will be glad of it.’
The last we saw of him was his back, sturdy but stooped, as he set off along the road leading southeast.
Our work in Deptford finished, the last morning spent moving the final patients, my father and I took a wherry back up river to St Bartholomew’s. We were quiet most of the way and I watched my father nodding in and out of sleep as his chin fell forward on his breast. We stopped at our house for a meal and a change of clothes before reporting back at the hospital. Although my father revived a little with a good meal inside him, I could see he was fighting to stay awake.
I laid my hand on his arm. ‘They don’t expect us until tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and it’s nearly evening. I will go and see what’s to be done in the morning. Do you go and rest on your bed, you’ll be the fitter for work tomorrow.’
‘You’re a good lad, Kit,’ he said, mumbling a little.
A slight shock ran through me. We were alone, and when there was no one to hear he usually relaxed his guard and acknowledged me as his daughter. Bitterly, I thought: Soon even I will forget what I am, who I am.
He allowed himself to be persuaded to bed and I took myself off to the hospital, where I reported to the deputy superintendent before going to the wards. The first person I met there was Peter Lambert.
‘How was it at Deptford?’ he asked, without preamble.
‘Grim.’ I could not bear to say more. ‘Are there many new cases here?’
‘Plenty. Those navy saw-bones have sent on all their bungled work to us.’
I groaned. The naval surgeons, I had to concede, worked under terrible conditions, sawing off half-severed or crushed limbs while cannon balls crashed overhead, in a welter of blood and screaming men. Usually there was no way to save a man’s arm or leg. But the filth amongst which they operated meant that the terrible wounds, even when they had been cauterised with hot iron and coated with tar, almost always became infected and could turn gangrenous. Very few of our men had been killed in the battle itself, but many had died, and were still dying, of the typhus and bloody flux, and of their wounds.
The next morning my father and I were back in the wards, which were full of wounded sailors and soldiers. My father looked better after his rest, more at ease amongst these familiar surroundings. Unlike the cases in Deptford, it was clear what we could do for these men, removing stinking bandages stiff with blackened blood, cleaning and salving open wounds, easing fever and pain. Where gangrene had taken hold, we had perforce to send for a surgeon to cut back more of a damaged limb.
Men died.
Sometimes, I thought that death was a more merciful end than the future which awaited our crippled and broken patients whose lives henceforth would be nothing but misery and destitution.
Three weeks after our return from Deptford, Simon Hetherington arrived on our doorstep one early afternoon, when my father had sent me home to rest from the long hours of caring for the sick. We had not met for months and I noticed that he had grown even taller since I had last seen him. My heart lurched at the sight of him and I admitted to myself how much I had missed him. Andrew was a fine companion in a scrape, but somehow Simon touched something within me that I did not want to analyse too closely. He was dressed today quite grandly, in a costly velvet doublet. I had not thought that actors’ earnings would rise to such finery.
‘Not sporting with your friend Kit Marlowe?’ I said caustically.
He grinned. ‘Marlowe is abroad somewhere, on one of his secret missions. I must needs make do with Kit Alvarez instead. Now that he has returned from his own mission abroad.’
‘I hope you have not come to fetch me to the Marshalsea again.’
That was more than two years ago now, I thought. Nearly three.
‘Not to Master Poley, certainly,’ he said. ‘I hear that he is still in the Tower, and living like a king.’
I knew it. It was one of the first things I had asked Phelippes when I returned from the Low Countries. As long as Poley was imprisoned I felt my secret identity was safer.
‘You keep your friends amongst the prison warders, then?’
He laughed. ‘Still a sharp tongue, I see, Kit! You have not come to Durham House of late.’
‘We have been too much occupied with the men who served in the fleet against the Spanish, first in Deptford and then here with the men who survived the virulent epidemic that wiped out whole ships’ crews, but instead have lost limbs.’
I turned aside to the task I had been engaged on when he arrived, tidying the shelves of tinctures and salves, noting down what new supplies we needed.
‘While the country rejoices,’ I said, keeping my back turned to him that I might not betray my feelings, ‘they forget that men of our own were killed and injured. And as well as the sawbones during the battle, our surgeons at the hospital have had more than a few amputations, and we must care for the men after their butchery. It’s not a pretty sight,’ I said bitterly, ‘to see a man first lose his leg and afterwards find the gangrene creeping up the stump of it. And there have been festering wounds from shot. We have brought in four whole barrels of Coventry water to cleanse them. And even in the short time they were at sea, many of them contracted scurvy.’
I turned back and glared at him, as if it were his fault.
He raised his eyebrows enquiringly.
‘It makes me so angry!’ I said. ‘We physicians tell the sea captains what they must do – some fresh
fruit for the men, or at least a little lemon juice. Too costly, they complain. Why, all they need, if they will not carry lemon juice, is a little cochlearia officinalis – scurvy grass is the common name. It’s to be found all round the coast, as if God planted it there for the sake of seamen!’
I spun round and gestured at our medicine cupboard, to make my point with greater force. ‘We keep it all the time here and in the hospital for the children of the poor, who are as likely as seamen to suffer from a bad diet. So easily cured, but so painful a disease, with swollen joints and bleeding gums, and the teeth growing loose and falling out!’
‘You really care for your profession, do you not, Kit? Such passion!’
‘Of course, I do!’ Then I smiled apologetically.
‘I am sorry for ranting like one of you players, but I hate to see uncalled-for pain. There is pain enough in the world.’
I did not tell him, for I had been sworn by Sir Francis to secrecy, that it was now estimated that, although only a hundred men had died in the battle, eight thousand had since died of sickness and wounds. The horror of it haunted me.
‘True indeed, there is too much pain in the world. But can your patients spare you to come and see my profession, my passion?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you heard of the new piece, Tamburlaine the Great?’
‘Everyone has heard of it.’
‘Kit Marlowe wrote it.’
I made a face. I could not hide my dislike.
‘He thinks somewhat well of himself, I know,’ Simon conceded, ‘but he has good cause. He and Tom Kyd, they are writing a whole new kind of play. Come with me and see! Tamburlaine is to be played this afternoon at the Rose, with Ned Alleyn as Tamburlaine again. Come, and you shall see and hear such wonders as you have never seen or heard before.’
‘Are you to play in it?’
‘No, it is Henslowe’s company, but next month I am to play Bel Imperia in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. After that, they are to let me take men’s parts.’ His eyes gleamed. Ever since I had known him he had longed to make the move from playing women, despite his successes.
Eventually, I allowed him to persuade me. To leave behind all the sickness and death which had surrounded me these last weeks – it was a temptation I could not withstand. Although I did a grown man’s work, I was still but a girl of eighteen. And I could scarcely admit to myself how much I liked his company and his way of looking at the world, so different from my own. I would never have admitted it to him. Yet my heart gave a little jerk of pleasure as we set off from Duck Lane, Simon whistling a new street ballad that was on everyone’s lips. We walked over the Bridge again, in the same direction we had taken nearly three years before, to the new-built theatre, The Rose, belonging to Master Henslowe, on Bankside, near the bear-gardens. Simon seemed to know all the people in this strange world of playhouses, so, without money changing hands, we found ourselves in threepenny seats with cushions, looking down on the stage. I had never before been seated so grandly in a playhouse.
‘Everything looks quite different from here,’ I said.
‘You will be able to see better how everyone moves about the stage, instead of craning up at the actors’ feet from below, like the groundlings, until your neck is stiff. It’s important for the actor to use the whole stage.’ He made a sweeping gesture, indicating the apron stage and the inner central chamber, and the upper stage on the large balcony behind the main stage.
‘Your sometime player,’ he said, in a schoolmaster’s voice, ‘your guildsman or schoolboy, will stand stiff and recite his lines to the audience, like a stuffed peacock. Your true player lives his part. He ignores his audience for the most part, walks about the stage as he would do in life, and talks to the other players. He will only speak directly to the audience when he wants to invite them into the play, or else when he puts his inmost thoughts into words, so we can share them. Then we seem to see inside his very mind. Do you understand?’
‘I think so.’ It had not occurred to me that the players’ trade was so complex. I had thought they simply conned their lines and then spoke them, though I had often listened to Simon talking about the way he imagined himself into a part. I had never thought about the way the players moved about on the stage or where they directed their words.
‘And notice how we use the different parts of the stage. The inner stage can be a private room, concealment for a spy, a place to die in – so we can draw the curtain across, you see? The balcony can present the ramparts of a castle, or a city wall, or the lookout of a ship, or the upstairs room of an inn, while the lower stage is the castle court, or the ground outside the city, or the stable yard of an inn. Do you not see these very places when we describe them? Though they are nothing but the parts of a wooden playhouse, open to the sky, like any bear-pit?’
I nodded slowly. It was true. If the play was well written and played with the skill Simon described, I felt myself to be in a palace or on a battlefield or in a crowded street. When an army crossed the stage, I saw an army, though there might be no more than half a dozen players pretending to be many.
‘Yes, you are right,’ I said. ‘And it makes me wonder: How can we know substance from shadow? How know what is real, and what is pretence?’
I thought of Walsingham’s projections two years before, and the Babington plotters, who were – or weren’t? – puppets whose strings he pulled. Perhaps all that terrible affair was no more real than a play in the theatre, with Walsingham as playwright and Phelippes as his theatre-master. I had stepped on to the stage to play my tiny rôle, then exited into the darkness of the tiring-house.
‘A play is another kind of reality,’ Simon said seriously. ‘We make something new, a New World which is as real to me, at any rate, as the unseen world of Virginia that Raleigh speaks of so much. I do not think that is pretence or deception. It is beautiful. It has fire and passion. It is a world we create as surely as the Creator created this world we walk about in.’
I laid my hand on his arm and glanced about. ‘Be careful, Simon, what you say. Your words could be taken for blasphemy.’
He gave me a strange look, then shrugged and smiled, and pointed up at the turret above the upper stage, where the flag was flying, to show that a play was to be performed this afternoon. A man had appeared up there. He raised a trumpet to his lips and played a fanfare. The noise of the audience faded into expectation. The play began.
It was like no play I had ever seen before. At the end of it, through the clapping and cheers and the bowing of the actors, I felt numb. It was terrible and beautiful, frightening and inspiring, and I was trembling as though I had lived the actions of that man, suffered the fate of his victims, been borne along by his triumphs. I said not a word as we descended the long dark staircase and emerged into the fading summer’s afternoon, jostled and elbowed by the crowd, wrapped in my own cocoon of silence against their noise.
‘Well?’ said Simon, as we walked back along the river toward the Bridge.
‘Yes.’ I said. ‘I think I begin to understand.’
Chapter Sixteen
By the beginning of September my life had fallen back into its old familiar pattern. Phelippes hardly needed me now, so that I began to spend much more time with my friends at the playhouse and was even able to join Raleigh’s circle at Durham House once again. Marlowe, mercifully, was away on some business of his own or Walsingham’s and Poley remained imprisoned in the Tower. After the excitement and terrors of the summer months I was glad to be back enjoying the rich poetry of the new plays which were creating such a sensation in London, while the discussions at Durham House reminded me of nothing so much as those long tranquil evenings at home in Coimbra, when my father’s university friends would sit out in the garden in the twilight after dinner, amiably disputing some nice point of philosophy or listening with keen interest to the details of some new scientific discovery made by one of their number. My sister Isabel, my brother Felipe and I would sometimes creep out in
to the shadows and listen to them, sitting on the steps of the fountain, while bats swooped overhead, feeding amongst the umbrella pines, and the distant music of my mother playing the virginals wound its way between the deep, quiet voices of the men.
This was the life I preferred – my work at the hospital and the occasional evening at Durham House. The longer it continued the more the memories of what had happened in the Low Countries faded away, so that it seemed like a dream. Then early in September news spread rapidly through London that Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had died. It came as a shock to many. On his return from the Low Countries he had shown himself more decisive and vigorous than ever he had been abroad. Perhaps the threat to the very nation of England aroused some strength in him that he had never found before. He had built an army camp at Tilbury as defence against an attack up the Thames, the camp to which Andrew and his men had been sent. And when the danger was past, he had ridden through London in glory, as though single-handed he had defeated the Spanish. I had seen him myself, and although both he and his horse were gloriously caparisoned, there had been a feverish look to his eyes which did not bode well. I had not been surprised when I heard he had travelled north to Derbyshire, to take the healing waters at Buxton. It was on the way there that death had suddenly overtaken him. He was fifty-six, several years younger than my father.
All his life he had been loaded with honours and offices, and I knew that Sir Francis respected him, despite his failings as a leader in war. Above all, however, it was common knowledge that he was something more than another courtier in the eyes of the Queen. In the years before ever I was born, it had been rumoured that Robert Dudley hoped to marry the Queen, and there was much scandalous talk which never quite died away. Whatever the truth of it, I remembered how courteously he had received Berden and me on my first visit to Amsterdam, a courtesy not extended by his successor Lord Willoughby. And if he had laughed at my warning of a plot to poison him, he had made amends later.