The True Prince

by J. B. Cheaney

  I threw my corset at his head: not a trifling weapon, with its metal grommets and whalebone stays. It unleashed the tiger in him. He picked up Elizabeth's crown and hurled it at me like a discus, so the clover points caught me in the neck. Robin pinned his arms, but Gregory would not restrain me. Lacking any other weapon, I hurled myself and knocked both Kit and Robin to the floor. Recovering, Kit pounced on me, rolling us so near the loft opening that I might have fallen through it if the other boys had not screamed a warning. He punched me, and I punched him. We had each drawn blood before Richard Burbage stuck his head through the opening, bellowing to shame any bull.

  I could not make out what he said at first, but it was round enough to make Kit release me and stand up, looking sullen. Burbage's words came clearer.

  “—and depend on it, you'll pay for every farthing of damage to these clothes. Kit, come down at once. Richard, shed those ridiculous petticoats and follow presently.”

  They all went down, leaving me to look around. I could see what touched off Master Burbage: the tiring room resembled an ambush in the Queen's Wardrobe, with velvets and silks splayed out like battle-sprung horses and beads littering the floor like musket balls. Upon my life, I could not remember doing such damage in so short a time. They'll have our heads for this, I thought gloomily, while untying the petticoat strings. Still, it was almost worth it to coax a little blood from Kit's haughty nose. For his part, he'd cut my lip. I ran my tongue around the place already swelling, then hastily tucked in my shirt, picked up my shoes and doublet, and descended the steep stairway, expecting a heavy fine to be laid on me.

  The lower room was empty. Tiring master, stage boys, apprentices, players, and hired men had all gathered on a stage that still flickered with dreadful torchlight under the lowering clouds. Richard Burbage was drawing a large circle on the planks with a piece of limestone as John Heminges hovered at his elbow, protesting, “But we must rehearse.”

  “This will not take long.” Master Burbage closed the circle, straightened his back, and tucked the limestone into a pocket on his sleeve.

  “But what if they do real damage, and we're out two players?”

  “Real damage can be prevented.”

  “And bruises, and cuts, and black eyes? Won't our gentle ladies look fetching with black eyes?”

  “That's what paint is for. Kit, Richard; stand here, please you.”

  Master Heminges threw up his hands and backed away, shaking his head. As Kit and I approached, I felt goose bumps rise on my arms, having by now gained a notion of where this wind blew. The murmurs around us fell silent as Master Burbage motioned us to stop.

  “Now,” said he, “the two of you have never managed to get along since you met. Whatever the bone of contention between you, I propose that you have it out this hour, for once and for all. That is how honest men settle things—”

  “It's how barbarians settle things!” Master Heminges called from the back of the stage.

  “Peace, John,” Will Sly spoke up. “For my part, I like it well. Straightforward and simple.”

  “And,” continued Burbage, “as it is bound to happen anyway, we might as well see that it happens where the least possible damage may be done.”

  Except to my own sweet person! thought I, desperately looking about for an advocate. But of the boys, only Robin appeared the least bit alarmed. I noticed Gregory shaking hands with one of the stage keepers and guessed that he had just made a wager. Of the men, Master Heminges had raised the only objection, and though one or two may have been impatient to get on with rehearsal, few would dare to take issue with Richard Burbage. The only two who might—Masters Kempe and Shakespeare— stood in grave discussion, with occasional glances to Kit and me. They seemed to be comparing our advantages, perhaps in view of a wager of their own. Even the serving girls and penny takers, who had just finished sweeping up, crowded among the men for choice places. I sent a look of distress to Starling, who merely raised her shoulders in a tiny shrug, then smacked her fist against her palm.

  “Box, or wrestle?” inquired Master Burbage.

  Kit deferred the choice to me. “Box,” I said helplessly. My fighting experience was of the untutored kind that consisted of aiming for the soft parts of the opponent while protecting my own soft parts. It might be called boxing.

  “Well enough,” Master Burbage said. “Remember you must be on your feet by Monday. We'll stop you before you cripple each other—”

  “And the faces—the faces!” called John Heminges.

  “Very well; try not to go for the other's face. A swollen jaw might pass, but—”

  “Richard!”

  Our mediator sighed. “Avoid the face, if you can. And below the belt—that leaves a wide expanse between neck and waist to work on, eh?” He rubbed his hands together, and I suddenly guessed that he needed this fight as much as he claimed we did. Better battling youths in plain sight than battling lawyers in court, perhaps. “Stay within the circle; any step outside and we'll push you back in. Ready?”

  Kit's flinty eyes told me he was more than ready. And indeed, the whole crowd of spectators appeared ready; I could almost feel their breath, and thought of bulls pawing the ground. I might vie with John Heminges for most reluctant player, but no honorable alternative occurred to me. I prayed a swift petition for speed, endurance, and fists like a hammer as I slowly pulled off my shirt and tossed it behind me. A voice—

  I could not tell whose—shouted out, “God speed you, Richard.” Another answered back, “Slam him, Kit!” and the battle of the voices was joined.

  As we closed in, the shouting made a hedge around us. I heard his name and mine, but saw only him, approaching at a crouch, fists raised. He made a jab at my chin, which told me that he did not intend to go by the rules, and while ducking, I replied with a blow to his side. Then we circled for a while, coming to know each other dreadfully as the world narrowed: just him, just me, each seeking out the other's weakness in the same way, I suppose, that lovers tease out each other's charms.

  His first hit, a straight punch to the chest, drove the wind out of my lungs and filled my vision with red. Coughing, I dodged right and left until he emerged from the haze, then swung wildly at his stomach and was amazed to see him double up. Only the shock to my wrist convinced me that the blow was mine, but making firm connection at last seemed to add weight to me. I swung again, expecting my knuckles to jar against his ribs—but missed, leaving myself open. Pain slammed into my own ribs instead. I felt the hurt I'd meant for him, which doubled my resolution to give it back. It was not anger that possessed me now, but a kind of hunger, a craving for the crack of bones. My left swung and missed again, but the right—beautifully—caught him on the point of the chin and flipped him back like a leaf. He caught himself in the midst of his fall, bounced upright again, and came directly at me, his pale eyes as sharp as sudden knives. I remember nothing clearly after that.

  They were shouting our names, though at that moment we were not Kit and Richard, but two unleashed winds. We bore into each other until our knuckles were bloody and our eyes glazed. I was down, I was up; we were locked chest to chest, twinned hearts furiously pounding. He was down, he was up; he knocked me out of the ring. The shouting—such a vital animal, it had grown hands and feet—pushed me back in.

  I do not know how long it was until a hard thump on the jaw spun me around. Next I knew, my right shoulder was mashed against the floor. Splinters from the rough boards speared up in my vision. From overhead Kit's voice pressed down on me like an unsteady hand: “Don't. Don't get up.” But all around me the noise contradicted him, chanting: get up, get up, get up. Slowly I rolled onto my chest, put my palms to the boards and pushed, flinging blood and sweat out of my eyes. The shouts rose with me, thick and fierce.

  “That's enough.” One voice stood out distinctly, and no wonder: it was Richard Burbage's, the most celebrated voice in London. “Enough,” he said again. I gained an unsteady foothold on the stage. Someone thrust a cold towe
l in my hands. I buried my face in it and heard my name again, but this time in one clear tone that gradually emerged as Starling's.

  “Who won?” I asked her as she was patching me up in the Condell kitchen. My voice came out at a rasp, owing to a bruised throat.

  “The orthodox view is that he did, but there's no canon to judge by.” She was wrapping my chest with linen to shore it up against possible cracks. “Master Burbage failed to make it clear how long you were to stay down. You started up again in far less than ten counts, so it should have gone on, but the Company feared for the damage, I think. No one denies you gave a very good account of yourself. He looks no better than you.” She finished the wrapping and pulled the end of the linen so tightly that I gasped. “Does that feel like knives gouging your vitals?”

  “No.” I took a careful breath. “More like … like babies gumming from inside my chest.”

  She knew not what to make of this comparison. “Well … I hope that means nothing is broken.” She gave a final pull and tucked in the strip securely. “You'll live, and feel better for it, in time.”

  Nell the cook had larded my cuts and slapped a piece of raw stew meat on my swollen cheek and boiled up a batch of onions to make a poultice for my throat—with a pot to cook in, I might have made a good dinner. “I felt better when he was pounding me than I do now.”

  “That's because you were pounding him back. You haven't told me yet what it was all about.”

  I had told her almost nothing. The Company released me from rehearsal early so she could see to my injuries (Kit had to stay). The walk home—stopping once for me to vomit in the gutter—was too painful for speech. Nor did it help to clarify the matter for me. “I don't know myself what it was all about. I don't hate him, for all he makes me mad. Sometimes I think we might be friends, except for the small fact that he hates me.”

  “But he doesn't—”

  Nell bustled in and demanded her kitchen back, so Starling bundled me up—meat, onions, and all—and helped me climb the two sets of stairs to the attic. Along the way we had to fend off the eager attention of the youngest Condell boys, stop to let the mistress gently feel my ribs, and respectfully ignore Alice's pointed remark about warring savages. When we finally reached the room I shared with Robin, she eased me down on the low bed and took off my shoes, but I had to tell her I could remove my own breeches, and would do so once she was out of the room. Then she pulled up a three-legged stool and sat by the bed. “He doesn't hate you. There's more to it than that.”

  “What?” My brain was sinking into the dark waters of oblivion, but the subject held enough interest to keep me awake a little longer.

  “He's the only one—besides me—who knows how good a player you are apt to become.”

  “Oh.” She had voiced this notion before, and it seemed in the same company with her other flights of fancy. “My performance today must have terrified him.”

  “Your performance today means nothing, in the balance. He's always seen the promise in you, better than most. I think it challenged him before. But now that he's begun to falter, it threatens him.”

  “Falter? You mean one bad performance, in that putrid play?”

  “One bad performance—one truly bad performance—is too many for him.” She was speaking with some passion, as though she had thought this out fully and had longed for the moment to share it with me. “Master Burbage spoke of ending it once and for all today. But I believe it's only begun.”

  “That's a comforting thought to sleep on.” A memory of the way Kit had said that line about being “usurped” stirred in my brain, but that brain was rapidly sinking. “You've drawn too long a bow about his opinion of me. What brought this on today was mainly the way he treats the Welsh Boy.”

  “Davy?” her voice pierced my throbbing ears. “You were fighting over him?”

  “In a way … I've told you how Kit's been nasty to him … I know not why….”

  “That's strange.”

  “How so?”

  “I noticed him, in the midst of the combat. He always looks so bland, you can never guess what he thinks, but as he watched you and Kit pound each other, I saw him smile. A strange, inward smile, perhaps even a little smug….”

  Her voice faded. Shortly afterward, I felt the covers settle over me, and a light touch on my forehead.

  When I woke again, the room was as black as pitch. Robin lay on his back beside me, snoring; Thomas, Ned, and Cole Condell rustled in their box bed on the floor. Through the open window a watchman cried three o'clock, and in some dark recess of my aching head, a bloodthirsty crowd was still shouting. Starling had told me something about the Welsh Boy. I remembered him now, had caught sight of him as I braced my palms against the rough boards and pushed up: saw him watching. And, yes, smiling.

  Fat Jack

  unday allowed me one day of rest before returning to the stage on Monday—which I was expected to do, no matter how sore in the ribs. Kit had a cut on his chin and a bruised eye I could not remember giving him. But that, as Master Burbage had said, was what paint was for, and Kit took more time with the paint than he normally did. While waiting for him to finish so that I could occupy the space before the window, I found myself wondering if he was dawdling on purpose to make me late. The performance was to begin in only half an hour. His manner toward me seemed unchanged—cool and superior as ever—but I feared he might take some subtle revenge. Gregory and Robin were treating us gently but preferred avoiding us altogether; they had dressed and cleared out as soon as possible, leaving us alone.

  “That swelling on your cheek,” Kit said abruptly. I looked up, directly into the small hand mirror he was holding out to me. My face, a white-powdered blob, wove in and out of the mirror, while his held steady behind it. When painting ourselves for the stage, we imitated the ladies at court, who in turn followed the Queen's example of an almost dead-white purity of skin. We looked familiar yet strange, as though something had sucked the blood of our essential selves. “You can make swellings less with a tincture of lead,” he went on. “Do you know how to do that?”

  I shook my head, and he dug among his effects for a lead spoon. Giving me the glass to hold, he showed me how to draw the back of the spoon down the swollen side of my face, creating the palest of shadows. “Don't do it often, or your skin will rough up like a pig's hide.”

  “Thank you,” I said, mightily confused as to where I stood with him. It occurred to me to ask: Do I threaten you? Did our fight settle anything? Is there any way we could be friends? But a silence stood between us, like a wall of glass I dared not break for fear of getting myself cut.

  As for Davy, he hooked onto me as I climbed upon the stage and hung close all morning, but spoke no word about the fight. I thought he might have shown some gratitude; did he know what it was about?

  “He knows,” Gregory told me as we waited for an entrance together later that afternoon. “Robin let it slip when he was trying to feel out the little weasel. The boy all but laughed in his face. Depend on it; you're the only friend he will have soon.”

  “Why do you say that? Has the Company turned against him?”

  “No, but they haven't warmed to him.” Gregory's mouth twisted. “There's something about him that's not right.”

  “In that case, he's more an object for pity than—”

  “Do as you please,” he said abruptly. “Only if I were you, I would drop him like a hot iron.”

  That evening the entire Company adjourned to the Mermaid Tavern for the casting of Master Will's latest play. I had heard some of the chief players discussing the work with happy anticipation, though the meat of it did not sound promising to me: a history of the troubled reign of Henry IV. This king had usurped the throne from his cousin but never sat easily on it; his reign, from what I could remember, was plagued with rebellion and unrest. Master Will could coax life from it if anyone could, but I expected a rather solemn evening when I squeezed onto a bench at one end of the table, with Robin on one side
and Davy on the other.

  On casting nights the proprietor of the Mermaid reserved the long board in the loft for the Company to discuss their work in private. By the time we broke up to go home, we'd be cured like hams in the close, smoky air, but one advantage was that the tavern servers were always bringing us more ale and meat. They liked to eavesdrop on the new plays and be great men amongst their friends when they shared their knowledge the next day.

  “Before I begin,” Master Will announced, “you should know that I have found so much matter for this subject that it can't all be packed into one performance. Therefore the reign of King Henry IV must be presented in two parts: the first for the spring and the second, God willing, next fall.”

  Will Kempe laughed. “By all the saints, what treasures did you mine out of old Holinshed to fill a double dose of theater?” He was referring to Holinshed's Chronicles, our author's main source of information for the history plays. I had read some of it in school and felt as doubtful as Master Kempe. But Shakespeare surprised me, once he plunged into his reading of all the parts.

  As the play begins, King Henry is sick and sad and longs to ease his troubled conscience with a crusade to Jerusalem. But he must first deal with ill winds in his own country. Two of his strongest supporters, Henry Percy the elder and Henry Percy his son (called “Hotspur”), have become dissatisfied with the king's treatment of them and join forces with other unhappy nobles to plot rebellion.

  If these three were not enough Henrys already, there is yet one more: the king's oldest son is Henry too, but better known as Hal. Hal prefers carousing in taverns to sitting in council with his father's advisors, and his companions are the sort that no respectable prince would expose to the light of day— chief among them a fat and cowardly knight called Sir John Oldcastle.

  The Percys, father and son, join forces with Owen Glendower, a Welsh lord who has never submitted to English rule. This Glendower is a sorcerer who claims to command supernatural powers, but the real heart and soul of the rebellion is the gallant Hotspur. He lives for glory and holds complete faith in his own brilliant reputation: “By heaven,” he cries, “methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon!”