The True Prince

by J. B. Cheaney

  Gaining my feet, I heard at last those most welcome words: “Halt, in Her Majesty's name!” To my ears, Bartlemy's coarse- grained voice sounded sweeter than an angel's.

  LET THE END TRY THE MAN

  heard a cry from behind me as Tom's horse bolted. Confused voices shouted, “After him!” and a few men set off in pursuit, on foot. Meanwhile guards closed on Captain Penny as he worked himself out from under his fallen horse and got to his feet, groaning under a badly twisted knee. The horse had galloped full-tilt into a rope stretched across the road, and now thrashed about in a futile attempt to get up. Tewkesbury meanwhile was untied and ungagged, and he immediately launched upon a stream of accusations against his captors. He had barely warmed to the subject when a scream burned the cold air. It came from the direction Tom had taken.

  The captain of the guard rapped out an order for two of his men to lend their aid, and as they set off across the field, moonlight dashed off their polished helmets. I felt a tug on my sleeve as Bartlemy pulled me aside and loosened the handkerchief over my mouth, murmuring, “Good Mistress Shaw found me at Westminster. Stand here; don't speak unless you're called.”

  I could barely speak at all, owing to a badly bruised throat. Like a piece of furniture I stood where I was put. My body felt like an empty bottle, gradually filling with the Richard Malory who had been left behind at the Theater, in the iron grip of death. Soon my teeth were chattering again.

  Steady hoofbeats sounded on the road as a new personage arrived: an imposing fellow, even after dismounting. He had brought a torchbearer with him, and by its light I recognized the stern, handsome features of Bartlemy's master, John Clement.

  “So,” he remarked to his henchman. “Fair caught at last.”

  “Aye, sir. We have witnesses.”

  One of them, I thought with a start, would be me. The other would have to be Tewkesbury, who was already testifying as fast as he could that two ruffians had ambushed him and were in the act of spiriting him away to hold for ransom when, God be praised, the stalwart guardians of justice had arrived and—

  Master Clement tactfully interrupted him and with a few simple questions established the fact that Lord Philip had more to hide than to tell. “If you would, sir,” he concluded in an oily tone, “we must detain you for a short time in order to plumb the depths of this affair. Please you, go with these worthy men and I will be with you presently.”

  “Go where?” As the “worthy men” in Yeomen's livery approached him, Tewkesbury's voice rose. “I demand to be told!”

  “Please go quietly, sir.” Master Clement turned to Bartlemy as Tewkesbury was escorted—not too quietly—down the road. “Right good work. I commend you—and the lamented Lord Chamberlain's son will too, once his rage cools. He was put out when you didn't report for guard service. I'll mend it.”

  “My thanks to you, sir—” A squelchy tramping was heard as two or three of the guards returned from their expedition over the mud.

  “By your leave, Master Clement,” panted one. “The man is dead. He was bad thrown when his horse fell, and it appears his neck is broken.”

  Well, Davy, thought I—you are avenged. Then I remembered the voice in the Theater rafters. Surely it wasn't …

  “That's one bird down,” Clement remarked. “Another flown, and as for you, Captain Penny—”

  “Hark, sir!” called a voice among the guards. “Someone approaches.”

  Everyone turned—even I, now wrapped like a bundle in a cloak someone had thrown over me. A straight form, brushed by moonlight, was coming toward us on the road. From far behind him a light burned in one of the windows of the Theater. A finger of curiosity stirred in my addled brain: what was going on back there?

  “State your name!” called Master Clement.

  The figure on the road hesitated. Then: “Christopher Glover, so please you, sir.”

  “Kit!” That was Penny's voice, quiet but eager, as he strained against his bonds. Kit! I thought, more quietly yet. He must have been in the Theater all along.

  “Approach,” John Clement said. The cloaked figure came nearer and stood. “What is your business?”

  Another pause, then Kit said, “To turn myself in, sir.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Abetting armed robbery.”

  “Ah, lad!” Peregrine Penny surged forward, dragging a guard with him, and managed to come within a pace before the chain and the force of two men stopped him. “It's well done. Honor among thieves, they say—we'll face our doom together, eh?”

  “Honor among thieves,” Kit repeated. The company fell absolutely silent at the ringing, steely timbre of his voice. “Is that what you think it is?”

  “Why, lad—what else? We were bound to France together, you and I. Now we'll to prison.”

  “Aye, to France. A new start, a new name. Or many starts and many names, while we doff the world aside and let it pass. But the world does not stand aside so easily.” His voice took on a wondering tone. “You would have killed that boy, back there.” With a start, I recognized he meant me.

  “We do what is necessary,” Penny replied, a stern soldier now.

  “That we do.” Kit raised his hands and pulled at a chain around his neck. As he walked around his mentor, I caught my breath, guessing his intent. “Here,” he said to Bartlemy, holding out his hand. “Lord Cobham's ring.”

  “Kit!” Penny cried out. “What have you done? You've thrown away our fortune—”

  Kit turned back to him and the light flickered on his face, which to my astonishment was wet with tears. His lips parted: “I-I-I …”

  Often he had mocked my stammering speech in just this way, but now he was the one to have his words back up on him. He took a breath and started again.

  “I'll see you hang, old man.”

  The words, so cold and unyielding, did not sound cold the way he said them. Indeed, they could have wrung the hardest heart. He may as well have said, I know thee not, old man, for Captain Penny looked as stricken as Jack Falstaff, and as speechless.

  “Take him away.” Bartlemy shouldered through the press of men and horses. When he reached Captain Penny, he struck the nearest guard on the shoulder with his fist. “Take him away!”

  “Kit!” Penny cried as the Yeoman led him off, not without a struggle. “Speak for me—thy father in all but name!”

  But Kit had turned aside, wrapping his cloak tighter around him. “Why did you come back?” Bartlemy asked him sharply. “You could have run in the other direction, and us none the wiser.”

  Kit turned his head without looking directly at the speaker— his way, as I had so often had occasion to notice, with people he considered beneath him. But he answered. “Because … I have a name … that I wish to keep.” Then his pale eyes flashed, as he glanced around the gathering. “Is Richard here?”

  I literally jumped—not merely at the sound of my own name, but the fact that, in the year and more that I had known him, I could not remember ever hearing him speak it. “I'm here.” My voice came out at a croak as I squeezed between a pair of burly guards. Bartlemy stepped aside, and for a moment Kit and I faced each other as we had so often before, on or off the stage, in spite or scorn.

  “From this time on,” he said, “I want no argument when I say you will take over the stage.”

  “Th-the railing broke,” I stammered out.

  “A likely excuse. I meant to plant you there as a witness, not as a strangled corpse.”

  I nodded. By stalling Tom he had saved my life. “How … did you do that voice?”

  His lips twitched, but the light was too dim to show it for a smile. He reached under his cloak and took out a small object, a reed of some kind. When he tucked it into his mouth, I knew it for a “swazzle,” an instrument used by puppet masters to produce a high, shrill voice. But never used to better effect than that night. “Easily,” he said, in an eerie tone that made me shiver. No wonder Tom had been unnerved by it.

  I heard John Clement c
ough, somewhere behind us. “I fear we must arrest you, young Glover.”

  As his men came forward, I rasped out, “I'll come to you— tomorrow—I'll do anything—”

  He took the swazzle out of his mouth. “You've done enough.” His tone was surprisingly warm, as though to say I had done him more good than harm. Before the guards took hold of him, I stuck out my hand.

  He looked at it. Then I felt his grasp, a quick pressure of cold fingers that released almost immediately as he was taken away.

  In the space where he had been, the old Theater stood revealed. Every window now flickered like a firefly, as though sparkling with some fairy enchantment in a midwinter night's dream. “Kit!”

  He stopped and turned his head, as the guards on either side paused with him.

  “Those lights—at the Theater …”

  He lifted his head toward the place where he had earned his greatest fame. “A new birth.” When he moved forward again, it appeared that he was leading the guards, and not the other way around.

  “It was glorious,” Gregory assured me, two days later.

  “Beyond belief,” Robin chimed in.

  “You should have been there,” they said together.

  We were in one of the royal barges—the white and silver swan, swooping upriver toward Whitehall Palace on the beat of twenty oars. The day glittered with a bracing cold that frosted reeds along the bank and marked every spoken word with a little gust of steam. Laughter cracked like gunshot in the sparkling air. The atmosphere aboard the barge was so expansive it made me feel that the Company had been in a box for the last several months, and the lid had just sprung open.

  “Sorry to miss it,” said I. It was still an effort to speak.

  In truth, I was not all that sorry. When Bartlemy saw me safely home after our wild night, I collapsed into bed with no intention of getting up again. But at dawn Master Condell burst into our room in a state of high excitement. He almost never climbed to the attic, yet here he was, respected church- warden, family man, and gentleman player, bubbling over like a schoolboy. “Robin! Richard! Are you up to an adventure?”

  I was up to a bad cold, hovering on a fever, and my throat had closed up entire. The master judged I'd better serve the Company by staying home. That was why I spent most of the day wrapped up by the fire with a poultice on my neck, while the rest of the Company tramped out to Finsbury Field and helped Peter Street the carpenter take apart the old Theater.

  Gregory and Robin did not wholly regret my absence; otherwise, they would have had no one to tell. “The landlord discovered what was afoot and rode himself into a sweat to get there,” Gregory was saying. “But he was too late—Master Street's men went up around midnight the night before. They had already taken apart the stage and stacked the trestles. They were dismantling the galleries by the time old Giles got there! He was almost jumping up and down, he was so furious.”

  “He'd have loved to throw a punch at Richard Burbage,” laughed Robin. “You could see it working in him, except that Burbage could have smashed him with one fist.”

  “And his mother would've moved in for the kill,” Gregory added.

  “True—old Mistress Burbage was there, Richard, in her cap and apron, giving the landlord a piece of her mind—”

  “With the rough side of her tongue.”

  “She picked up a broom, and he covered his head. Later, when the city watch arrived—he sent for them, though there wasn't a thing they could do about it—I heard him complain that the lady had threatened him with a pike!”

  “Wait,” I interrupted hoarsely. This story was moving too fast for me, although I understood the gist of it. Peter Street and his crew had chosen to break into the Theater, like a band of blundering angels, at the very moment Penny held me in his grasp. For which I was extremely grateful to them, and to God, but— “Was this legal? Can the landlord still bring suit against us?”

  “We already told you that,” Robin complained. “Your brains must be running out of your nose. Here, take my hand- kerchief—and use it.”

  Gregory explained slowly, as though to a half-wit. “According to the terms of the original agreement, the Burbages have the right to take down and carry away any of the materials of the building at any time, up to one and twenty years after signing the lease.”

  My head was not up to calculating. “I forgot—when does the one and twenty years expire?”

  “Last April,” said Robin.

  “Oh.”

  “But never fear,” Gregory hastened to say. “The deed's done. The old Theater is a stack of boards and beams and Peter Street is even now carting them down to his warehouse on the river.”

  “And as soon as the weather breaks,” Robin continued, “he'll barge them to the spot of land in Southwark that the Company men leased a month ago. It's not far from the Rose— fancy being within spitting distance of the Admiral's Men!”

  “How long is this lease?” I asked.

  “Thirty-one years! We'll all be old men by that time.”

  Gregory sniggered. “As old and tottering as Richard Burbage is now.”

  “Well, you'll agree—our troubles are ended for a while yet.”

  “Our landlord troubles, at least.”

  “And Master Street thinks he may have the new theater built by this coming spring. Fancy it! Our own stage again—”

  “With a bright new coat of paint—”

  “A new name, a new start—”

  A new birth. I listened to them, and smiled on cue, and tried to catch their high spirits. Here was a change even Robin could rejoice in—a most satisfying conclusion. Yet I felt about it the same way I had felt about the end of Part Two: sad. I was already missing Kit.

  His fate was not general knowledge yet. Of the Company, I alone knew that Kit had been indicted that very morning on charges of accessory to theft and was now in Fleet Prison awaiting his trial. Bartlemy had sent word of the hearing, and since I could not risk being absent when the Company departed for Whitehall, Starling contrived to go. She returned home while Master Condell was laying down instructions for the servants and pulled me up to the stair landing to tell me what had happened.

  She and Bartlemy had sat behind the bar in the magistrate's chamber while a clerk read the charges against the defendant. The murder charge had been dismissed, but what remained was enough to hang him, if he were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law—a recommendation read by the clerk with no change in voice or expression.

  Kit pleaded benefit of clergy, a privilege more often claimed by those accused of murder or manslaughter. Ben Jonson had done the same last month, which was why he was serving time in Newgate Prison rather than moldering in a criminal's grave. Kit was allowed to choose his text and turned to the Gospel of John: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born anew, he cannot enter the kingdom of God….”

  “He read it so well even the clerk was wiping tears away,” Starling said. “I think the magistrate was persuaded to deal gently with him. Kit seemed to be speaking those words from his heart. I hope so: his poor mother sobbed the whole time, while his father sat there looking more stricken and guilty than the prisoner. But at the end, when they were leading him away, Master Glover stood up and walked to the bar and held out both his hands. Kit hesitated, but he took them. So perhaps he's making amends.”

  “What of the Tewkesburys?” I asked her. “Any mention of them?”

  Her smile popped out, as though it had been waiting for this very question. “Not by name. But wait until you hear. The charges against Kit allowed that a certain person or persons unnamed had set the scheme in motion. There was an elderly servant in blue livery present, and the justice seemed to regard him as a proxy for the unnamed. I've seen him, Richard. He was the one who used to accompany Mistress Critic to the theater—the one whose ear she used to bend with her opinions.

  Lady Tewkesbury has been attending our plays all along!”

  I could not share her pleasure in the disco
very. “‘Persons unnamed.' What sort of penalty gets dealt out to phantoms?”

  “Oh, they'll pay, though perhaps not in a court of law. Bartlemy says Lord Philip has thrown himself on the mercy of Essex. He'll be banned from court, sure, and they'll have to sell off more property to pay their debts. The House of Maximus is fallen indeed.”

  “And what's to become of Captain Penny?”

  “He will hang, belike. So Bartlemy says. But he thinks Kit will serve no more than two years in Newgate.”

  Two years. It wasn't so bad, in a way. Ben Jonson was said to be writing another play in his prison cell; if Jonson could resume his career, then so perhaps could a young man formerly known as the best boy player of London. Still, my face must have reflected my dismay, for Starling suddenly wrapped her arms around me and squeezed tight, a comfort I had not recognized I needed. “You helped him, after all,” she said.

  I returned the squeeze. “He helped me.”

  “Sometimes it amounts to the same thing.”

  “What cheer, Richard?” Gregory slapped me on the back. “The landlord is beat and old Cobham's resting in peace and we're on our way to see the Queen! I've not heard you laugh all day.”

  “He's too busy sniffling,” Robin said. “He's blown a whole bucket of slime into my handkerchief.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “D'you want it back?”

  “Nay! Keep it, with my regards. The Queen will shower us with handkerchiefs. Money too, let's hope.”

  “Hotspur will fetch the handkerchiefs,” Gregory predicted, “and Falstaff the money.”

  “What about Hal?” I asked.

  “Hal?” Gregory frowned. “I never liked him—a conniver and a cold heart.”

  Somewhat more than that, I thought. “He's to become a great king.”

  Gregory shrugged. “So the histories say.” He turned his attention to the riverbank, as Robin pointed out landmarks. It was Gregory's first time to play at Whitehall, and anticipation consumed his thoughts.

  But I was already thinking of our return. Once back in London, I meant to visit Newgate, where I would tell Kit that acting noble can indeed make one noble and perhaps even inspire nobility in others. That honor is more than a word or a prize to be plucked from the pale-faced moon. That he had found the best in himself and been true to it, in spite of the cost—and that made his reputation, as far as I was concerned.