The True Prince

by J. B. Cheaney

  “What if they decide to disband?” he persisted. “Other companies have broken apart for less—”

  “Hold a moment.” Gregory had lifted his head. “Look yonder,” he said, nodding toward the front of the theater. “They just came in.”

  The hired help had arrived: penny gatherers who collected admission to the galleries and serving maids who swept the floors and sold sweets during the performance. But we knew at once which “they” Gregory meant: a man and boy standing just before the first gallery. The man was of middling height with a black beard streaked with gray, but that was all we noticed of him.

  The boy was beautiful—his face a little too wide in the mouth and brow, but cherubic and rosy. A cap of dark, curly hair set off eyes of so intense a blue that the color, even at a distance, made me think of calm summer skies.

  Looks matter on the stage—none of the apprentices were ugly and each had some particular appeal that suited him for certain roles. Robin was winsome and lively; Gregory's intelligent face bespoke keenness and subtlety; Kit's noble features and striking coloring set forth dignity and command. And I, with my wide dark eyes and small chin that could so easily be made to tremble, was the picture of pitiable suffering. Or that was my guess; if there was a lady in the play who went mad or killed herself, that part was likely to go to me. But the “quality” shining from this curly-headed boy was pure innocence, as if an angel in child's form stood in our midst.

  Playing the Man

  fter rehearsal, the boy was brought up on stage and introduced to us as David Morgan—as sweet- faced close up as he was far away, except for his teeth. They were small and brown, evenly spaced in his mouth like a row of worn posts. They looked something other than human, but caused no comment; bad teeth are a mark of Londoners in general.

  However, there was no London in his voice. When asked to recite for those Company members who had not yet heard him, his words chimed with a peculiar lilt. Then he sang, and words disappeared altogether in a soft, furry-sounding language I had never heard the like of. That, and his clear sweet voice, cast such a spell that for a moment after he was done, no one moved or spoke.

  “Do you speak Welsh, also?” inquired Master Shakespeare, eyebrows raised in a bright, absorbed expression. He wrote plays for the Company and stayed ever alert for any raw material he could use.

  “Aye, sir,” answered David Morgan with a little bow. “Monmouth was home to me, ere my mother went to heaven and I was sent here to live upon my uncle.” The uncle, whom I presumed to be the fellow with the streaky beard, had barely waited long enough to hand off the boy before disappearing. Davy stood before us all alone, a wide-eyed, trembling mouse making a brave show. As I had stood in almost that same place a year before—motherless and uprooted—my heart galloped out to him. The men of the Company showed only thoughtful calculation. No matter his secret sorrows; would he do for the stage?

  “He's worth a trial,” Master Shakespeare said then. “We've not had a Welsh boy for years.” That settled it: both Davy's future and his title. From that time forward most of us referred to him, though not to his face, as the Welsh Boy.

  “We thought you might be fetched with that part of him,” Henry Condell laughed. “I look for a Welsh lady in your next play. Now to your places, men—and you, boy, let me find you a guardian.” He harbored a softness for children: a good thing, as he was father to six of them and a foster father to Robin and me, who boarded in his house. He took the Welsh Boy's hand and swept his eyes around the galleries, where play-goers were already milling to and fro, seeking the best seats. “Starling!” he called to the second tier. A girl's round, pleasant face appeared, framed with wispy curls escaping from her cap. “Take charge of this lad for today, would you? Give him a sense of what he's in for.” I took one more look at the boy, who gazed up at the Theater galleries with clear, unsuspecting eyes. No doubt those eyes would be glazed over with perfect confusion by the day's end.

  “He's a strange one,” Starling Shaw remarked that evening as she bit off a length of black thread. According to our custom on chilly spring nights, we sat at one end of the great room of our master's house. At the other end, Robin, along with Harry, Alice, and Mary Condell, sang madrigals to the strumming of Alice's lute. Near the fireplace at the center, the mistress read aloud to the little ones. Supper was over, the table cleared, and soon enough I would have to climb the stairs to my cold attic room and learn my part in tomorrow's play. But in these few minutes of free time I often chose to rake through the events of the day with Starling. Talking to her came almost as easy as thinking to myself, and this day had given me much to think about. “Strange how?” I asked.

  “You know how new boys are, especially if they've not been upon the stage—think of yourself, a year ago: jumpy as a cat.”

  “Scared as a rabbit, more like.”

  “Very true. But this boy …” She paused over the costume she was mending and twitched her nose as though smelling young David from two leagues away. “He took in everything I told him, without a ripple to cross his face. And he never asked a question.”

  “That must be because you did such good work of explaining.” I made a flapping mouth with my hand. Star was a fair talker, once primed.

  “Do curb your wit. He watched the play with the same attention he gave me—no more, no less—and you know how new apprentices watch plays. As though they were either thrilled or—”

  “Terrified,” I finished for her. “I know. So what ails him? Is he sick?”

  “No; bewitched.” With an expert twist, she tied off the thread and flipped the garment right-side out: a child's cape of dark blue velvet, embroidered with stars in gold thread and seed pearls. She spread it out upon her lap, like a deep, dark night sparkling with mystery. “Wales reeks with magic, you know. Merlyn was born there, and there he learned his craft, and there he lies imprisoned in the cave under a stone, enchanted by the treachery of Vivien the witch. But the stones and trees remember him and mourn for him, and a lad who ventures too near the seams of that earth—those deep places where the memory of Merlyn has taken root—may find himself caught when the branches shake down their sorrow. The magic sets upon him like dew, so light and fine he may not notice, but it enchants him with a great and deadly calm that cannot be broken, unless …”

  She raised the needle, and her lively green eyes—the eyes that could fool an observer into thinking she was beautiful— waited for me to prompt her with a breathless, “Unless what?” Instead I took the needle from her and made a little jab with it, along with a popping sound meant to prick her illusion. “He's just a boy. From Wales.”

  “Did I say otherwise?” She retrieved her needle and attacked a loose seed pearl with it, her expression as pert and businesslike as any housemaid's. “Don't you have a part to learn?”

  “Directly. There's another piece of news today—we were told it after you left the Theater.” She looked up, alert again. “It's been a day for news,” I went on, placidly, “first our land- lord's treachery, then the Welsh Boy, now this. It makes me wonder if we have already used up our allotment for the year, what with—”

  “Stow it!” she hissed. “Tell me at once, or I'll ply this needle where it will do some good.”

  “The Company handed out parts for a new play, to be performed two weeks hence. It's called The House of Maximus, and Kit is to play the role of Adrian, the hero's brother.”

  Her eyes went wide, and for a moment she looked more like a little girl than a maid almost sixteen. “At last. He finally gets to play the man. How did he take it?”

  “Cool as spring water. At least, on the outside. But when we were ready to start for home, he forgot he hadn't washed all the stage paint off his face until Master Heminges remarked on it.”

  She giggled and I grinned—Kit shaken from his self- possession was a rare event. “But what is the play?” she asked. “Do you know anything of it?”

  “Richard Burbage lined it out. It's a most lamentable tragedy of th
e usual sort. Adrian's is not the biggest part, but he has the showiest death. He is burned by a poisoned cloak, or poisoned tunic, or something.” She nodded; lethal garments were a common means of dispatch in lamentable tragedies. “I sense that the Company thinks little of it. When they like a new play, their eagerness shows, but for this one, all they seem eager for is getting it done. They've allowed themselves only two weeks to learn it, instead of the usual three.”

  She tilted her head to one side while thinking this over. “Perhaps they are doing it by request—to please somebody of importance.”

  “Not important enough to give it their best. Richard Burbage has taken a small role and left the hero's part to young Ned Shakespeare. They've given the lover's part to Kit, who has not played anything like it since joining the Company. And …” I paused, for this was the moment I had been building to: the major event of the day, for me.

  “Yes?” Starling prompted.

  “They have cast me as the lady he falls in love with.”

  Her response did not disappoint; she whistled in astonishment, then glanced down the room at Robin, who was making a great show of good cheer. “So that's why he hasn't spoken to you all evening.”

  “No doubt.” Leave it to her to notice. The “Juliet” parts, as we called them, usually went to Robin, who had the looks for them. But anyone who looked closely at him of late noticed that he had grown taller and bulkier and less pretty. He seemed to believe I had stolen this part. If so, I would have gladly given it back; the thought of playing Kit's beloved made my stomach feel like it was protesting a dinner of old eel. We were usually cast as rivals because the company liked the bite that worked its way into our stage quarrels. “It's not what I would call inspired casting. All in all, a day for unsettling news. What could be next?”

  A smile flickered across her face; then she swept the velvet cape from her lap and over her shoulders, clutching it to her chest as one clawed hand shot out to me. “The poisoned cloak!” she gasped, her face contorted in agony. “Beware!”

  “Starling.” The voice of Mistress Condell floated toward us from the opposite side of the room. “Costumes are too expensive to serve as toys.”

  “Aye, lady.” She pulled off the cape, but whispered to me:

  “Beware.”

  After only ten days our new apprentice played his first role. Though it was rare to lay a speaking part so soon on a boy with no experience, the players were eager to try him. The play was a bubble of a story called A Midsummer Night's Dream, written by Master Will. London audiences love its woodland fairies and enchantments and four bewildered lovers wandering in the forest—and especially the clown, Bottom, who grows a donkey's head. None of it made sense to me in rehearsal, but Robin said I should not insist on making sense: “It's just a story!”

  David Morgan played a woodland sprite, whose long speech in the second act should have been shortened. Not that he dropped many lines; he just rattled them off like a catechism. But his voice was strong and round, and at the end of the speech he turned two handsprings and a backflip, flinging himself in the air like a street tumbler as though his weight were nothing at all. This drew a cheer from the audience who had been yawning, and a light shower of applause followed his exit. In the next act Davy sang the Fairy Queen to sleep, and the men of the Company, from the way they glanced and nodded to each other behind the stage, seemed to agree that the boy was worth training.

  So he had a place in the Company. But would the Company still have a place? As soon as he could, Master Cuthbert arranged another meeting with Giles Allen, which accomplished nothing. Richard Burbage and John Heminges excused themselves from the next day's performance—a thing most rare—and the rumor was that they had gone to scout for property. That was how matters lay as we approached our performance of The House of Maximus.

  “You were right,” I told Starling on Thursday, the night before. “The Company is performing this play to please some- body—though certainly not our audience.”

  “Is it so bad?” She never looked up from the pan of dried apples she was picking over for worms. As a housemaid and costume mender at home, and penny gatherer at the Theater, her hands were seldom idle.

  “It is,” I said. “I could not have told you how bad, until we put on A Midsummer Night's Dream. You know the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, that the tradesmen perform for the duke's wedding?” She nodded, her green eyes dancing. “Pyramus and Thisbe” is an overblown, bleeding heart of a “tragedy,” a play within the play that always makes audiences weep—with laughter. “Well, The House of Maximus is near cousin to that, only it's not supposed to be funny. Sylvester and Adrian are a pair of noble brothers whose family has been brought low: falsely accused of treason; their father murdered; their property stolen. A villainous relative is at the bottom of all this. The brothers vow revenge for the honor of their house, but they've barely started when Adrian—that's Kit's part, the younger brother—falls hard in love with a woodcutter's daughter named Silvia.” Here I pointed to myself, and Starling blew me a kiss. “The brothers fall out because Adrian loses interest in seeking revenge. Unfortunately for him, Silvia is really the daughter of the treacherous uncle, who has placed her in the care of the wood- cutter, who is really an evil magician. Adrian suffers various enchantments and does not learn until the end that Silvia was part of the plot against him, and so he wraps himself in the enchanted lethal cloak because it's the only way to redeem his honor. But there's no hope for redeeming the play.”

  “What's wrong with it? It could be a good story, if written with a fine pen.”

  “But there's the rub—it's written with a meat ax. When the action slows, somebody gets stabbed or disemboweled. Dull stretches of poetry are laid between the bloody parts. Adrian makes a long speech while dying; it ends with, ‘Happy garb, that ends my vile disgrace! Ye Fates: bear me up to a happier place!'”

  She held her nose. “Alas! Poor Kit, to speak such with a straight face! Is no one letting slip who wrote this?”

  “I'm sure the chief players know—Burbage and Shakespeare and a few others. But they're keeping it close. The rumors all agree that some nobleman at court thinks he's the poet of the age and longs to have his plays performed by a distinguished company.”

  “Who could it be?” Starling loved a mystery—I could almost hear the hum of her busy mind as she harried a worm out of an apple core with the point of her knife. “Sir Walter Raleigh, do you think?”

  “Raleigh's poetry is better. And his influence at court is not so great just now. Our author is a bold, impetuous sort, with enough sway to get his way. Someone like Essex.”

  “Essex is a warrior, not a poet. Perhaps it is Burghley.”

  “Burghley!” I scoffed. “The Queen's Secretary? He's too busy with state business to write plays.”

  “How do you know? Do you visit him once a week and share his burdens? ‘Alas, Richard, the Queen has ordered me to write a new treaty with the King of Spain. I think I may write a play instead.'”

  I slipped a piece of apple out of her bowl. “Resist the temptation, my lord. It's harder than it looks.”

  She grinned. “You would be surprised how many seem to think it's easy. Today I overheard a lady in the third gallery instructing her servant on the elements of a well-wrought play. She seemed to think our Shakespeare was a mere upstart. But how is it with you and Kit? Have you managed to fall in love yet?”

  “Hardly.” I thought back over that day's rehearsal, when Kit had “wooed” me under the watchful eye of John Heminges. It had not gone well—he took my hand as though it were a piece of liver and spoke of my “moon-bright orbs” and “swanlike neck” in a voice that would have better called out a challenge to combat. Master Heminges kept reminding him that I was his beloved, not his enemy, finally bursting out with, “Why so cold, boy? Love melts a man!” Kit blushed to a shade I could not recall seeing on his face and muttered that he could hardly play the scene as a puddle, which only provoked his master further and cut o
ur rehearsal short.

  “They should have cast Robin as Silvia,” I told Starling. “Kit could probably muster a bit of affection for him. He speaks to me as if I was a fortress and he a warrior laying siege. He comes to conquer.”

  “He always comes to conquer. But what's the state of his fingernails?”

  I knew what she meant. In spite of his seemingly perfect confidence, Kit's fingernails were often bitten down to the quick before an especially demanding performance. “They're bleeding already.”

  “Ah. Becoming a man may not be so easy as he— Ow! A pox on thee!” This was said not to me, but to Ned Condell, age seven, who had thrown a tennis ball to land precisely in the bowl of worms.

  Clearing the bowl and ball of worm guts brought an end to that conversation, after which Starling drilled me on my lines for Silvia and agreed with me on their quality. “Whoever wrote this play must be very important, else the Company would have used it to start fires. But perhaps there will be enough stabbing and disemboweling to please the audience.”

  Next day, Kit dressed downstairs with the other men and soon was pacing the length of the tiring room. He often paced before a performance, but without a full skirt or train to sweep around at the turns, he seemed strangely off balance. He jerked where he was wont to flow, and watching him, I felt an apprehension that did not bode well for the afternoon.

  As Starling had suggested, sometimes an audience will think better of a work than the Company does. But on this occasion our opinions matched perfectly. The first scene consisted of tedious complaint by Sylvester, which almost put our audience to sleep before Kit swaggered on as Adrian. A fight with the wicked uncle's men roused them briefly, but once Adrian met Silvia nothing would please. During the courtship scene, as Kit professed his undying love, the groundlings became more and more restless until someone called out, “Enough, lad—you'll talk her to death!” In the brutal laugh that followed, an orange peel landed on the stage. Kit threw his shoulders back and set his feet wide apart and spoke louder—but faster, to speed the scene.