by Susan Cooper
“Ah,” said Nick, and nodded his head. He and Harry looked at each other again, and then at me, with what I felt was a mixture of respect and fear. It was creepy.
After rehearsal Will Shakespeare went with five other actors to a tavern not far from the Globe, to eat supper and drink and talk. He took me with him, which was great by me. Harry came too, because Master Burbage didn’t want to pay for two river crossings home to Shoreditch in one night. The tavern was noisy and smoky, full of shouting red-faced men, and bustling girls trying to carry trays of mugs and avoid having their bottoms pinched; Master Burbage led the way right through the main room to a quieter one at the back. We sat at a battered, heavy wooden table and ate bowls of a really good kind of stew, spicy, with onions in it, and hunks of new bread, and afterward Harry and I drank cider and tried not to fall asleep.
The actors fell into separate serious conversations—Master Burbage particularly earnest with Will Shakespeare, away in a corner, the two of them alone together. Pretty soon Harry and I were slumped against the wall near the glowing wood fire, which was comforting because the nights were decidedly cool even though it was August. At least, it was August in the world I had come from, so I assumed it was the same here. I never saw a calendar, and I never thought to ask. This London had all its bells ringing to tell you what time of day or night it was, but those were the only landmarks of Time to be seen or heard.
I said, “Harry, is it something special, to be a wise woman?”
Harry was drooping over his mug. He yawned. “A wise woman is a witch, of course.”
I felt suddenly cold. Harry blinked himself awake, and caught sight of my face. “What ails thee?”
“Nick Tooley said—about my Aunt Jen—”
Harry laughed. “Bless thee—anyone would be glad of a white witch in the family, to heal the sick and save life. Even Roper’s life.”
“But—people burned witches—”
“Not unless they do harm.” He hoisted himself upright, back against the wall. “Th’art an odd one, Nat Field—th’art such an innocent. Like a baby. Tha knowst so much, and then sometimes tha knows nothing.”
“I’ve led a quiet life,” I said. I took a breath. “Tell me about the Earl of Essex.”
Harry took a swig of cider, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Tell what?” he said cautiously.
“Anything.”
He shrugged. “Well, he is a fine lord, and handsome. We played at his great house, my first year as apprentice, and the Queen was there. She laughed with him a lot, and they whispered together. He was her favorite then. He is Earl Marshal of England, and they still cheer him in the streets.”
I said, “They cheered the lines about him in the play today.”
“Aye. But he angered the Queen somehow, he angers Robert Cecil who leads her Privy Council. Now he is in Ireland, with Will Shakespeare’s patron Southampton, sent to stop the Irish from joining with our enemies in Spain. But my father says he is all ambition, he is dangerous.”
There was that word again. “What sort of dangerous?”
Harry looked around nervously, though there was nobody in the room except our masters, drinking ale and spouting solemn words at one another. “The Queen is growing old, and has not said who will succeed her. London is full of spies—Spain longs to take England—” He stopped, and looked at me helplessly. “Dost not know any of this, Nat?”
I hung my head and tried to look dim-witted. “There is no chance to hear street talk at St. Paul’s—we are shut up like little nuns.”
“Nobody trusts anybody, that is the sum of it. They talk of plots, of assassinations—the Queen’s doctor was hanged and quartered two years ago, because Essex said he’d tried to poison her.” Harry glanced across at Master Burbage, still deep in talk with Will Shakespeare. “And those who know she is coming to our theater are frightened of it, they think people might do her harm. Master Burbage would stop her coming if he could.”
“He’s afraid of the people? The audience?”
“You heard how they cheered my Lord of Essex, who is on the outs with her.”
I looked at Richard Burbage, leaning forward anxiously to Will Shakespeare, tapping one long finger on the table to make a point. I saw Shakespeare shake his head vigorously; then he pushed back his chair with a screeching, scraping noise, and stood up. He called to me, pulling on his cloak.
“Nat? Come away, boy. Time to go home.”
So the party broke up, and everyone went off into the dark night to their respective homes. Master Shakespeare and I trudged in silence through the streets of Southwark to his lodging, in the company of a hired linkman: a kind of bodyguard, who carried a burning torch that gave off some light and a lot of bitter-smelling smoke, and had a heavy stick in his other hand to fight off anyone who tried to rob us. I don’t know why they were called linkmen, but they were nearly always big battered-looking fellows with large muscles and a few missing teeth, and the muscles were reassuring. Since there were no policemen in Elizabethan London, and no streetlights, there was no shortage of robbers and other villains. It was wise not to go out alone at night, not without a dagger or a sword or a linkman, or all three.
A fine drizzle began to fall, and I was damp and dismal by the time we reached the lodging. Mistress Fawcett had left two candles on the chest just inside the front door, with flint and steel; Shakespeare lit them. They burned with a smoky, flickering flame, and the house was full of dark dancing shadows. I only had to live in an Elizabethan house for one night to long for flashlights, and lightbulbs, and a switch to turn darkness into light.
I took my candle, mournfully. All my worries were thronging round my head, and now the distant Earl of Essex was the least of them; I could think of nothing but my despair at the prospect of having to leave Will Shakespeare.
I said, rather wobbly, and quietly so as not to wake Mistress Fawcett, “Master Shakespeare?”
He was about to climb the stair to his room. He looked tired, his eyes shadowed. “What is it?”
“When the play is over—instead of going back to St. Paul’s—could I—would you take me as your apprentice?”
Shakespeare laughed abruptly, in surprise; but he held up his candle and saw my face, and stopped laughing. “Nat, my dear—th’art enrolled at St. Paul’s, th’art one of Richard Mulcaster’s prize actors, I am told. He would never let thee go.”
I couldn’t explain to him, I couldn’t tell him Richard Mulcaster would take one look at me and demand the real Nathan Field. Maybe I would even be accused of having murdered him, in this dangerous world where Roper had seen throats cut.
I said miserably, “I shall be so lonely.”
Shakespeare put his hand on my shoulder. He was thinking of me as the orphan boy, I knew; thinking my head was haunted only by the death of my father—as it had been, too, until now. Perhaps he was thinking of his own boy Hamnet as well.
“Go—get into thy nightshirt,” he said. “And I will bring thee something.”
The little room behind the kitchen was warmer than the hallway had been, but still chilly. I scrambled out of my damp clothes and into my thick linen nightshirt, draped the clothes over a chair, and huddled down under the blankets. The candle by my bed sent a thin stream of black smoke quivering up to the ceiling, and the shadows swung and flickered on the wall. Then new shadows danced over them, and Will Shakespeare came into the room. He was carrying his own candle in one hand, and a sheet of paper in the other.
He went down on one knee beside the bed, probably feeling the little bedstead would collapse under him if he sat on it, and he showed me the paper. “This is a sonnet I copied for thee after we talked the other day,” he said. “It is about love, and loving. I wrote it for a woman, but it could just as well be for thee and thy father. I give it you to remind you that love does not vanish with death.”
I looked at the page; it was covered in the cramped Elizabethan handwriting that I could never understand.
I said, “Will you
read it to me?”
Shakespeare looked a little taken aback, but not displeased. He was an actor, after all. He tilted the page so that the candlelight shone on it, and very quietly and simply, he read me the poem.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.”
Before I could say anything, he held out the page to me, and stood up. “I have no picture of what may become of us after we are dead, Nat,” he said. “But I do know thy father’s love for thee did not die with him, nor thine for him. Nor mine for my Hamnet—or for this lady. Love is love. An ever-fixed mark. Remember that, and try to be comforted.”
He said “fixed” as if it had two syllables. I remember that.
I took the stiff, curling paper, and put it carefully smooth under my pillow. “Thank you very, very much,” I said.
“Sleep well, sprite,” Shakespeare said. He bent down and kissed me on the forehead. Then he blew out my candle, and went out, carrying his own. The shadows flickered away with him, and left the room dark.
TWELVE
Mrs. Fisher stands at the Information desk of Guy’s Hospital, on the Southwark bank of the River Thames. She’s waiting for someone to become free to speak to her; this is a huge and very busy hospital. Beside her stands a smallish woman in the trademark raincoat of the American tourist visiting England; her face looks younger than her grey hair. She is Jennifer Field, who has flown from Greenville, South Carolina, to London, alarmed by the astounding news that her nephew Nat is in the hospital suffering from bubonic plague. She looks around her at the bustling, echoing lobby of the hospital, feeling lost.
“I don’t know which ward,” Mrs. Fisher is saying now to a friendly face behind the desk. “They’ve had him isolated, on the top floor. It’s Nathan Field, his doctor is Dr. Ravi Singh.”
The friendly person taps at her computer keyboard, and inspects the screen. “I’m afraid you can’t see him. Not yet.”
“But this is the right time for visiting hours, isn’t it?”
“I’m awfully sorry, but it says ‘Absolutely No Visitors’ against his name.”
“This lady is his aunt, she’s flown all the way from America to see him.”
“Tell you what,” says the friendly person, “I’ll let you talk to the duty nurse.”
She reaches for the telephone, and soon Jennifer Field is explaining herself to the soothing voice of Nurse Stevens.
“Tomorrow,” says Nurse Stevens. “Or maybe the day after. Hasn’t Dr. Singh reached you yet? You’ll see your nephew, you might even be taking him out. He’s much better, we took him off his IV this morning.”
“But can’t I just see him for a moment now? He’d love to see someone from home. This is crazy—what harm could it possibly do?”
Nurse Stevens is inclined to agree, but Dr. Singh is strict, and orders are orders. “I’m sorry, really I am, but Dr. Singh wants to be careful, it being such a rare disease. Don’t worry, Miss Field—Nathan’s going to be fine.”
Jennifer Field says rebelliously, “This is all nonsense. I’m going to call Dr. Singh.”
“Please do,” Nurse Stevens says.
“Well—thank you. It’s not your fault, I guess. Tell Nat—tell him Aunt Jen is here, and sends him a big hug.”
“Indeed I will,” says Nurse Stevens. “Good-bye.” And she puts down the phone, up in the high ward, and wonders how best to communicate this message to the strange boy with the heavy accent that is not quite American and not quite West Country English. He is no longer really ill, thanks to the antibiotics, but seems wholly disoriented, with ho idea of where he is or what has been happening to him.
And what on earth, she wonders, can his background be like? He seems never to have seen a thermometer before, or a washbasin, or even a toilet. He fought like a tiger the first time she tried to put a blood pressure cuff around his arm, and when he had his first glimpse out the window of this fifteenth-floor room, he screamed. As for his personal habits. . . . He picks up food with his fingers, or on the point of his knife, and everything goes downhill from there on. Nurse Stevens plans to get him into a hath today, and to wash his long hair. She expects to become very wet in the process.
She opens the door to Nathan Field’s room, and sees his wide-eyed unhappy face turn toward her, on the pillow.
“I want to go home,” he says. “Prithee, ask thy master to let me go home.”
THIRTEEN
We were up with the sun the morning of the performance. The sky was a hazy blue, and the birds were shouting. I was so nervous I didn’t want any breakfast, but Mistress Fawcett made me sit down and eat a bowl of bread and milk. It sounds awful—cubes of bread soaked in warm milk, sweetened—but it was comforting, and the idea of it must have survived the centuries, because Aunt Jen used to give me the same thing when I was sick. Once when I had the chicken pox I wouldn’t eat anything else for three days.
Will Shakespeare was so nervous he wouldn’t eat anything at all. He changed his doublet three times in half an hour, and looked no better in the third than he had in the first. Unlike Master Burbage, he had very little of the peacock in him, and all his clothes were serviceable rather than showy. Even his one gold earring was very small. Mistress Fawcett had told me that within the past year he’d bought a big house in Stratford, his home in Warwickshire, and that he would be paying for it for some time yet.
When he was back in the brown doublet and white shirt that he had started with, we walked to the theater, over the square cobbles of the street, which were hard and lumpy through the thin leather soles of Elizabethan shoes. It had rained during the night, and the roofs and roads were still gleaming and new-washed; the crows were hopping and quarreling over garbage, here and there, but the smells weren’t so bad as usual.
Wagons were creaking through the streets, loaded with sacks and baskets of fruit and vegetables from the country, for early delivery; the horses’ hooves clopped over the cobbles, echoing to and fro. You had to dodge them, but you could walk without the constant shock of hands tugging at you, because the beggars weren’t about yet: the dirty barefoot children; the old soldiers missing an arm or a leg or an eye, or all three; the hollow-eyed, stringy-haired women with whimpering babies in their skinny arms. Ahead of us, over the rippling green tree-tops, the flag was already flying from the roof of the Globe, announcing that a play would be given there today. Not many people knew quite how special this performance would be.
Will Shakespeare was striding along, silent. I had to hurry to keep up.
I said, tentatively, trotting at his side, “Do we know if . . . Do we know who will be there?”
“If there are soldiers, that will tell thee,” he said. And that was all he said, until we reached the Globe.
In the theater, even though it was so early, Richard Burbage was onstage with the other “mechanicals,” rehearsing their Pyramus and Thisbe play. They were very funny, especially round-faced Henry Condell as Moonshine. While I was watching, I completely forgot to wonder about the Queen. I stood in the tiring-house, peeking at them from the corner where the book-keeper would sit, trying not to snort with laughter—though it’s a rare actor who objects to hearing a laugh, unless of course he’s trying to make people cry.
There was a sort of scuffling behind me, and I glanced around. Two of the
extra men, hired by the day to help fetch and carry, were dragging in a rolled stage hanging, a long, unwieldy cylinder of painted canvas. I knew them both by sight; they’d been in the theater for most of the week. They caught sight of me, and the first one stopped in his tracks and stood stone-still, so that the second tripped over the canvas and yelped crossly at him. The other began to move again—but before that, just for a moment, he raised one hand at me with the first and fourth fingers pointing, and the others clenched into the palm by the thumb. It was a swift little gesture, but unmistakable. Then they laid the stage hanging at the back of the room, and were gone.
But I’d seen that gesture before, four hundred years later, in a play, and so I knew what it meant. It was very old, and I think it came from Europe. It was a sign to ward off the evil eye.
Clearly at least one person in this company thought I might be a witch.
Later in the morning, the soldiers came. They weren’t very obtrusive, and they weren’t your basic ordinary foot soldiers; they were quiet, sharp-eyed men, with gleaming armor under their expensive cloaks, and they went through every smallest closet and cranny of the Globe Theatre. I don’t know what they were looking for; I don’t know whether people made bombs in those days, though even if they did, I’m sure they couldn’t have set them off by detonator, or remote control. At any rate the soldiers didn’t seem to find anything. We kept running into them around corners, but they paid us no attention; they just went about their business and so did we, and after about an hour we started taking them for granted as a necessary nuisance.
By now everyone in the company knew that Her Majesty the Queen might be sitting up in one of the gallery rooms at this performance, behind a curtain—and everyone in the company, even those who had played several times at Court, was shaking with nervousness. They had lots of reasons, of course, but I think a very large one was the fact that they all loved their new Globe Theatre, and were proud of it—and they wanted to do it credit. It was almost as if they wanted their theater to be proud of them.