King of Shadows

by Susan Cooper

  It was just about the worst thing he could possibly have chosen to say, and it hit me like some terrible bolt of lightning. Sure, I knew Will Shakespeare was dead—he’d been dead for nearly four hundred years—but two days ago, for me, he had been alive, warm and alive and hugging me, promising me a place as an actor in his company. I loved him and I missed him, and I should never see him again, never, never, never, never, never—

  Something in my mind fell apart. I looked out at the gallery and shouted my line, to Arby, not to patient Gil standing there on the stage.

  “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth

  In forty minutes—”

  I heard my voice crack on the last word, and I leapt down from the stage and ran out across the groundlings’ yard and through the exit door, crying, and I kept on running, out and away and up the street, toward the River Thames, which flowed on fast and grey-green and unchanging, just as it had last week, just as it had four or forty centuries ago.

  Gil came after me, and Rachel with him. She’d been sitting up in the gallery with Arby and he’d sent her, instantly, though I didn’t know that for a while. I was in costume and so was Gil, and we must have looked pretty stupid running through the streets of London. But the Globe is a busy place, with tourists flocking through it constantly, so we might have been mistaken for a staged bit of local color. I had to thread my way through a crowd on the jetty near the theater, a whole class of French schoolchildren with teachers yelling at them in French. I guess that was what slowed me down enough for Gil and Rachel to be able to spot me and follow.

  I ran blindly, along the Thames, up a lot of steps to Southwark Bridge. A big cruise boat swept by on the river, with a blurred voice booming from it. Over the glass and concrete and brick buildings on the opposite bank rose the great dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where there had been a different church altogether in Shakespeare’s day. In my day, my other day. Southwark Bridge hadn’t been there then either, nor any of the other bridges I could see through the green and yellow railings as I ran.

  But I wasn’t paying attention to bridges; I was dodging through puzzled people, running in my white Elizabethan costume, crying. Then I was across the river, turning into a narrow cobbled street under a sign that read SKINNERS LANE, and it was there that Gil and Rachel caught up with me.

  Rachel grabbed me and put her arms around me, and I sobbed into her shoulder and she rubbed my back. Just for a minute or two. Then I tried to pull myself together. Gil gave me a fistful of tissues, and squeezed my arm.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, snuffling through the tissues.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right,” they said, in several different ways, and Rachel started to explain how Arby was very stressed out and hadn’t meant to upset me, and how he thought I was a wonderful little actor, and all that sort of stuff.

  I said, “Can we sit somewhere for a while?”

  “As long as you want,” Gil said.

  So we went back around the corner to Southwark Bridge and found a bench, set back in the sidewalk under a curlicued wrought-iron lamppost, and up there over the Thames with the taxis and buses rumbling past us, I told them everything there was to tell.

  EIGHTEEN

  They sat there staring at me. The sun shone briefly out of the bustling clouds overhead, and glimmered on the little diamond in the side of Rachel’s nose.

  Gil said to me slowly, “You are so lucky.”

  “Wow, Nat,” Rachel said. “Oh wow!”

  For a moment they were quiet again, just looking, thinking, imagining.

  I said, “I was afraid you’d say it was all a dream.”

  Rachel laughed, and shook her head.

  “Of course not,” Gil said. Sitting there in his Elizabethan doublet and his beard, he looked a little like a younger version of Shakespeare. “How could anyone have such an incredibly long dream? And there’s stuff in there—people, details—that you couldn’t possibly have picked up just from reading, specially not at your age.”

  Rachel said, “And there’s the leaf.”

  “The leaf?” he said.

  “The painted green leaf on the side of Nat’s neck, remember? Left from his Puck makeup. I touched it. Some paint came off on my finger. My Lord. I touched paint that Richard Burbage painted on him four hundred years ago.”

  “Two days ago,” I said.

  “Is it still there?”

  “I tried to keep it, but it must have rubbed off on my T-shirt.”

  “Keep the T-shirt!” Rachel said, excited. “Someone could analyze the paint, show that it was old. Carbon dating, or something.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t need that.” I felt suddenly very tired, drained of energy. My head ached, and my eyes were puffy from crying. I stared out at the fast-flowing, grey-green river, where a small, tough tug was trying to tow an enormous barge upstream. I said, “All I want to know is, why has all this been happening to me?”.

  “The other boy,” Gil said. He gave a cold look to a pair of teenage girls, giggling at his costume as they passed. “The boy who was in the hospital here sick, when you were healthy in the past. Who was he?”

  “Another Nat Field. Nathan. That was his name too.”

  “Where’s he gone?”

  “Back where he came from, I guess. We must have swapped. And nobody was able to tell. Nobody who knew me was allowed near him in the hospital here. And at the old Globe, the only person who’d have known I wasn’t him was Will Kempe—who walked out just as I arrived.”

  “Nat Field—we have to find him!” Gil said. He jumped up, pulling Rachel with him.

  “That’s dumb,” I said wearily. “How can we possibly find him? He’s gone back in time.”

  “Get up,” said Gil. He grabbed my arm. “We’re going to find him in the record books. We’ll start with the books in Arby’s house, and Rachel will get us a sandwich, and maybe we’ll go back to the theater and maybe not.”

  “Actors!” Rachel said, and rolled her eyes. “Cast them as a king and they think they can behave like one.”

  Gil ignored her. He put his hands on both sides of my face, cupping it, and looked me in the eyes for an instant. “Nat—everything’s going to be all right.”

  Nothing was ever going to be all right, but it was nice of him to try.

  We went to the house that Arby was renting; Rachel had her key on a chain around her neck, along with a little grey stone with a hole in it, from some special beach she loved in Northern California. Julia wasn’t there; like everyone else, she was at the theater getting ready for our opening. I suppose I should have felt guilty that I wasn’t there, but I didn’t. I didn’t know how to feel involved in the way I had before.

  Rachel took us to the room Arby was using as a study—which actually was a study, belonging to the house’s owner, a lecturer at London University who was spending the summer in Australia.

  The room was full of bookshelves and books and piles of papers. Rachel made a beeline for a small tower of books on the floor next to the desk. “These are Arby’s, he’s been going mad buying books at the Globe shop. Specially some guy called Andrew Gurr, who writes about the Elizabethan theater. Arby thinks he’s God.”

  “I’ve seen those,” Gil said. He dropped on his knees next to her, and pretty soon all three of us were on the floor, each flipping through a book. I don’t know whose voice came first, Gil’s or mine.

  “Nathan Field!”

  “Nathan Field!”

  “He’s here too,” said Rachel, from her book, “but it calls him Nathaniel.”

  Gil was peering at the bottom of a page. “He did go to St. Paul’s School—that’s what you said, Nat, right? It says, in 1596 Richard Mulcaster became High Master at St. Paul’s School, and while he was there he taught Nathan Field, the Blackfriars Boys’ best player.”

  “Mulcaster!” I said. I heard Will Shakespeare’s voice in my head. “Richard Mulcaster has of his kindness lent us his Puck. you.”

  Gil looked up
at me quickly. “Did you meet him?”

  “Shakespeare said he was my teacher.”

  “And that was in 1599. It fits.”

  “The Blackfriars Boys were later than that,” Rachel said, turning pages. “A year later—1600. Nathan Field was their star.”

  “So in 1599 he spends a week in the twentieth century, which maybe he hardly notices because he’s so ill, and the next year he leaves school and joins the Blackfriars Boys Company. Goes from acting in school plays to being a pro.”

  “But before that—” I said. I was hunting urgently through my book to find out whether I—no, not me—whether Nat Field went back to Will Shakespeare’s company, to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Surely he must have gone back, how could he not have gone back? But I couldn’t find anything. Why not? He, we, couldn’t have stayed away from him for long—

  I reached for Gil’s book instead, frantic to know what happened. I was a crazy mixture of emotions by now, fiercely jealous of the first Nat Field for having gone back to the world and the people I’d had to leave; passionately concerned to make sure that he’d done the right things afterward, the things I would have done.

  Gil clutched his book. “Hey, hold on.”

  I said urgently, “I can’t find when he went back to Shakespeare’s company.”

  Rachel reached out and took hold of my arm. She said, “But, Nat, he was never in Shakespeare’s company. You were. He was here.”

  I stared at her. She let go of my arm, and patted it, and smiled at me, that hopeful kind of smile that doesn’t know if it’s managing to reach its target.

  She was right, of course. My first day in that century had been the day Nat Field and Will Shakespeare first met. My last was the day Nat Field left the Globe to go back to St. Paul’s School. But that Nat Field wasn’t him—it was me.

  I couldn’t get my head around it; all I could see was Shakespeare. I said, “But he said I could go back later on, he said I could have a place in the company.”

  “He was talking to you, honey,” Rachel said gently. “The other Nat Field didn’t want that, he didn’t even know Shakespeare, he wanted to be with the Blackfriars Boys.”

  It was me. Yes, it was me, not him. I was the one he rescued from the pit I was in. But why have I had to lose him?

  Gil was looking at another page. “Hey, he did well, the other Nathan. He was their star actor for years, he grew up in the company and he wrote plays too. And poetry.”

  “This book calls him a ‘major playwright,’” Rachel said.

  I turned to the next reference in the book I had—and suddenly there was a face on the page, and the caption read NATHAN FIELD.

  It was a black-and-white reproduction of a painting: a young man in his twenties, with a rather delicate, fine-boned face, and a pearl earring dangling from the only ear you could see. He had wide dark eyes, long curly dark hair, a moustache and a hint of a beard. He was wearing an expensive-looking, embroidered shirt, and holding his right hand over his heart. He didn’t look even remotely like me.

  On the opposite page was a painting of Richard Burbage. He looked older than the Burbage I knew—a bit like Arby with a beard—but otherwise it was a lot like him. The caption said it was “thought to be a self-portrait.” He was looking straight out at me from the page, and that made me feel very weird indeed.

  Rachel and Gil were peering over my shoulder. Rachel said, “Look at this. ‘Nathan Field died a bachelor with a considerable reputation, of the kind not uncommon among players, for success with women.’” She chuckled, and prodded my back.

  Gil wasn’t paying attention, he was studying another paragraph. “It says he was in the King’s Men for the last four years of his life. There you go, Nat—that was Shakespeare’s company.”

  “Shakespeare’s company was the Lord Chamberlain’s Men,” I said.

  “Only till the Queen died. When James I came to the throne, he made them the King’s Men.” Gil was back at his own book, flicking through. “Here it is—Nathan Field joined the King’s Men as an actor-writer in 1616 or so.”

  Rachel said, “That was the year Shakespeare died.”

  “Shoot,” I said. That made me really depressed. I’d wanted there to be a connection between Will Shakespeare and my namesake. It wouldn’t make any difference, it didn’t make any sense, but it would have been a tiny thing to hang on to, even though Nathan Field and I shared nothing but our name.

  “But there’s something else,” Gil said. “Those companies were all owned by the top actors—each of them had one share, except Burbage, he had more. And you know what? Nathan Field bought Shakespeare’s share.”

  I got up off the floor and went over to the window. The sky was grey, and so was the city, and the river. Okay, so I had my link between Field and Shakespeare now, I had all these dates and figures, but all I felt was the huge ache of separation. I’d been given such a wonderful present, the best thing to have happened since my father died, and then it had been taken away.

  Rachel came and put her arm over my shoulders.

  I said miserably, “But why? Why did it all happen?”

  Gil said, “I’ve been thinking about that.” He was sitting there cross-legged on the floor, still in his Elizabethan costume of course; he looked like a portrait himself. “I think it must have been the plague.”

  “The plague?”

  “Nathan Field had bubonic plague. If you got the plague in those days, you died. But if you get it today, they can cure you quite easily, if they catch it soon enough. With antibiotics. You were switched with Nathan Field so that he could hp cured of the plague.”

  I stared at him. “Who switched us?”

  “Ah, that’s another question,” Gil said. He shrugged.

  “Time. God. Fate. Depends what you believe in.”

  “Nathan Field wasn’t so very special, to have that happen. None of us had ever heard of him.”

  “It wasn’t done for Nathan Field,” Gil said. His eyes looked very bright, as if he were suddenly high.

  “Oh my Lord!” said Rachel. She turned to him. “Shakespeare!”

  Gil nodded. He was grinning.

  “It was 1599, Nat,” Rachel said. “Shakespeare was only in his thirties, he wrote most of his greatest plays after that. If he’d acted with Nathan Field instead of with you, he’d have caught the plague and died.”

  “We wouldn’t have had Hamlet or Othello or King Lear or a dozen others,” Gil said. “We’d have lost the best playwright that ever lived. You may feel you’ve lost him, Nat, but you saved him. If you hadn’t gone back in time, William Shakespeare would have died.”

  It was true, I guess; if there was a reason for the time slip, that was it. Realizing it should have knocked me sideways.

  But it didn’t, not then. Whether Will Shakespeare had been in his thirties or his fifties when he died, the fact remained that he was dead. Like my mom, like my dad. I didn’t have long enough with any of them. And Shakespeare was so clear in my mind, he’d flashed through my life like a shooting star such a little while ago; I couldn’t bear to let go of the image of him alive and unpredictable, of the sound of his voice, the sight of that quick smile brightening his face.

  I dropped to the floor next to them again. I said, swallowing to keep the misery out of my voice, “He gave me a poem. He copied it for me, after I’d told him about my dad dying. He wanted me to keep it so it would help. I put it under my pillow, but”—I choked up, and thumped my fist on the floor to make myself go on—“but then I woke up in the hospital, and it was gone.”

  Gil said, “Was it one of the sonnets? D’you remember any of it?”

  I tried, but I’d only heard it the once, when Shakespeare read it for me. “There was something about marriage in the first line. And further on it said that love was an ever-fixed mark.”

  Gil and Rachel looked at each other, a quick private look.

  Gil said quietly, “We can find that for you.”

  Rachel got up, and fetched a book
from one of the shelves behind the desk. It was a big fat Complete Works of Shakespeare. She gave it to Gil, and sat down cross-legged beside us.

  Gil opened the book near the back, and flipped through pages of sonnets, until he paused. He said, “Number one sixteen,” and he began to read it aloud.

  “Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments—”.

  From the doorway, a deeper voice said,

  “—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 was Arby. Standing there, casually, one hand in his pocket, he went right through the poem to the end, in that deep actor’s voice of his, reminding me suddenly of Master Burbage’s voice, and when he’d finished I saw Gil and Rachel were unobtrusively holding hands. I glanced away fast, so as not to embarrass them.

  There was a silence for a moment, and then Arby gave us a little crooked grin. He said, “Thought you might be here. I came home to grab a sandwich, and to find my Puck.” He turned and went off down the hallway toward the kitchen.

  Gil stood up. “I’ll be back,” he said. He leaned over and gave Rachel and me a squeeze on the shoulder, one hand on each, and went after Arby.

  Rachel said, “You still have your poem, Nat.”

  “I guess so,” I said. I looked at the page, and felt slightly better. “I do, don’t I?”

  “I think I know why he gave you it,” she said. “Specially if it was after talking about your father. It’s a wonderful poem. It says, loving doesn’t change just because someone isn’t there, or because time gets in the way, or even death. It’s always with you, keeping you safe, it won’t ever leave you.”