Fools and Mortals Read online

  ‘Oh yes,’ I heard Simon say, ‘my lord!’

  I crept nearer. My tapestry slippers were silent on the stones. The wind fretted loud around the palace roofs, and the rain, already relentless, increased in vehemence to drown whatever the two said. There was just enough light from the becketed torches to see Simon’s head bent back, his mouth open, and, still curious, I crept still nearer. ‘My lord!’ Simon cried, almost in pain.

  His lordship chuckled and stepped back, releasing Simon’s skirts. ‘My little whore,’ he said, though not in an unkind voice. I could see that even with the women’s heels on his boots he was no taller than Simon, who is a full head shorter than me. ‘I don’t want you tonight,’ his lordship said, ‘but do your duty, little Simon, do your duty, and you shall live in my household.’ He said something more, though I could not hear it because the wind gusted to drive hard rain on the cloister’s roof, then his lordship leaned forward, kissed Simon’s cheek, and went back to the tiring room.

  I stayed still. Simon was leaning against the wall, gasping. ‘So who is the dwarf?’ I asked.

  ‘Richard!’ he sounded both scared and alarmed. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Of course it’s me. Who is his lordship?’

  ‘Just a friend,’ he said, then he was saved from answering any more questions because the antechamber door opened again, and Will Kemp leaned out. ‘You two whores, come,’ he snarled. ‘You’re needed! It’s the ending.’

  My brother was evidently speaking the epilogue. I knew he had composed it specially, draping it onto the play’s end like ribbons on the tail of a harvest-home horse, and doubtless it smothered the Queen with compliments.

  ‘Come!’ Will Kemp snapped again, and we both hurried back inside.

  When we are at the playhouse, we end every performance with a jig. Even the tragedies end with a jig. We dance, and Will Kemp clowns, and the boys playing the girls squeal. Will scatters insults and makes bawdy jokes, the audience roars, and the tragedy is forgotten, but when we play for Her Majesty, we neither dance nor clown. We make no jokes about pricks and buttocks, instead we line like supplicants at the edge of the stage and bow respectfully to show that, though we might have pretended to be kings and queens, to be dukes and duchesses, and even gods and goddesses, we know our humble place. We are mere players, and as far beneath the palace audience as hell’s goblins are beneath heaven’s bright angels. And so, that night, we made obeisance, and the audience, because the Queen had nodded her approval, rewarded us with applause. I am certain half of them had hated the play, but they took their cue from Her Majesty, and applauded politely. The Queen just stared at us imperiously, her bone-white face unreadable, and then she stood, the courtiers fell silent, we all bowed again, and she was gone.

  And so our play was over.

  ‘We shall meet at the Theatre,’ my brother announced when, at last, we were all back in the antechamber. He clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention because he knew he needed to speak swiftly before some of the lords and ladies from the audience came into the room. ‘We need everyone who has a part in Comedy, and in Hester. No one else need come.’

  ‘Musicians too?’ someone asked.

  ‘Musicians too, at the Theatre, tomorrow morning, early.’

  Someone groaned. ‘How early?’

  ‘Nine of the clock,’ my brother said.

  More groaning. ‘Will we be playing The Dead Man’s Fortune tomorrow?’ one of the hired men asked.

  ‘Don’t be an arsehole,’ Will Kemp answered instead of my brother, ‘how can we?’

  The urgency and the scorn were both caused by a sickness that had afflicted Augustine Phillips, one of the company’s principal players, and Christopher Beeston, who was Augustine’s apprentice and lodged in his house. Both were too ill to work. Fortunately, Augustine was not in the play we had just performed, and I had been able to learn Christopher’s part and so take his place. We would need to replace the two in other plays, though if the rain that still seethed outside did not end then there would be no performance at the Theatre the next day. But that problem was forgotten as the door from the hall opened and a half-dozen lords with their perfumed ladies entered. My brother bowed low. I saw the young fair-haired man with the blue-slashed yellow doublet, and was surprised that he ignored Simon Willoughby. He walked right past him, and Simon, plainly forewarned, did nothing except offer a bow.

  I turned my back on the visitors as I stepped out of my skirts, shrugged off the bodice, and pulled on my grubby shirt. I used a damp cloth to wipe off the ceruse that had whitened my skin and bosom, ceruse that had been mixed with crushed pearls to make the skin glow in the candlelight. I had retreated to the darkest corner of the room, praying no one would notice me, nor did they. I was also praying that we would be offered somewhere to sleep in the palace, perhaps a stable, but no such offer came except to those who, like my brother, lived inside the city walls and so could not get home before the gates opened at dawn. The rest of us were expected to leave, rain or no rain. It was near midnight by the time we left, and the walk home around the city’s northern edge took me at least an hour. It still rained, the road was night-black dark, but I walked with three of the hired men, which was company enough to deter any footpad crazy enough to be abroad in the foul weather. I had to wake Agnes, the maid who slept in the kitchen of the house where I rented the attic room, but Agnes was in love with me, poor girl, and did not mind. ‘You should stay here in the kitchen,’ she suggested coyly, ‘it’s warm!’

  Instead I crept upstairs, careful not to wake the Widow Morrison, my landlady, to whom I owed too much rent, and, having stripped off my soaking wet clothes, I shivered under the thin blanket until I finally slept.

  I woke next morning tired, cold, and damp. I pulled on a doublet and hose, crammed my hair into its cap, wiped my face with a half-frozen cloth, used the jakes in the backyard, swallowed a mug of weak ale, snatched a hard crust from the kitchen, promised to pay the Widow Morrison the rent I owed, and then went out into a chill morning. At least it was not raining.

  I had two ways to reach the playhouse from the widow’s house. I could either turn left in the alley and then walk north up Bishopsgate Street, but most mornings that street was crowded with sheep or cows being herded towards the city’s slaughterhouses, and, besides, after the rain, it would be ankle deep in mud, shit, and muck, and so I turned right and leaped the open sewer that edged Finsbury Fields. I slipped as I landed, and my right foot shot back into the green-scummed water.

  ‘You appear with your customary grace,’ a sarcastic voice said. I looked up and saw my brother had chosen to walk north through the Fields rather than edge past frightened cattle in the street. John Heminges, another player in the company, was with him.

  ‘Good morrow, brother,’ I said, picking myself up.

  He ignored that greeting and offered me no help as I scrambled up the slippery bank. Nettles stung my right hand, and I cursed, making him smile. It was John Heminges who stepped forward and held out a helping hand. I thanked him and looked resentfully at my brother. ‘You might have helped me,’ I said.

  ‘I might indeed,’ he agreed coldly. He wore a thick woollen cloak and a dark hat with an extravagant brim that shadowed his face. I look nothing like him. I am tall, thin-faced, and clean shaven, while he has a round, blunt face with a weak beard, full lips, and very dark eyes. My eyes are blue, his are secretive, shadowed, and always watching cautiously. I knew he would have preferred to walk on, ignoring me, but my sudden arrival in the ditch had forced him to acknowledge me and even talk to me. ‘Young Simon was excellent last night,’ he said, with false enthusiasm.

  ‘So he told me,’ I said, ‘often.’

  He could not resist the smallest smile, a twitch that betrayed amusement and was immediately banished. ‘Dancing with the candle-stand?’ he went on, pretending not to have noticed my reply. ‘That was good.’ I knew he praised Simon Willoughby to annoy me.

  ‘Where is Simon?’ I asked. I would h
ave expected Simon Willoughby to be with his apprentice master, John Heminges.

  ‘I …’ Heminges began, then just looked sheepish.

  ‘He’s smearing the sheets of some lordly bed,’ my brother said, as if the answer were obvious, ‘of course.’

  ‘He has friends in Westminster,’ John Heminges said, sounding embarrassed. He is a little younger than my brother, perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, but usually played older parts. He is a kind man who knows of the antagonism between my brother and I, and does his ineffectual best to relieve it.

  My brother glanced at the sky. ‘I do believe it’s clearing. Not before time. But we can’t perform anything this afternoon, and that’s a pity,’ he gave me a sour smile, ‘it means no money for you today.’

  ‘We’re rehearsing, aren’t we?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re not paid for rehearsing,’ he said, ‘just for performing.’

  ‘We could stage The Dead Man’s Fortune?’ John Heminges put in, eager to stop our bickering.

  ‘Not without Augustine and Christopher,’ my brother said.

  ‘I suppose not, no, of course not. A pity! I like it.’

  ‘It’s a strange piece,’ my brother said, ‘but not without virtues. Two couples, and both the women enamoured of other men! Space there for some dance steps!’

  ‘We’re putting dances into it?’ Heminges asked, puzzled.

  ‘No, no, no, I mean scope for complications. Two women and four men. Too many men! Too many men!’ My brother had paused to gaze at the windmills across the Fields as he spoke. ‘Then there’s the love potion! An idea with possibilities, but all wrong, all wrong!’

  ‘Why wrong?’

  ‘Because the girls’ fathers concoct the potion. It should be the sorceress! What is the value of a sorceress if she doesn’t perform sorcery?’

  ‘She has a magic mirror,’ I pointed out. I knew because I played the sorceress.

  ‘Magic mirror!’ he said scornfully. He was striding on again, perhaps attempting to leave me behind. ‘Magic mirror!’ he said again. ‘That’s a mountebank’s trick. Magic lies in the …’ he paused, then decided that whatever he had been about to say would be wasted on me. ‘Not that it signifies! We can’t perform the play without Augustine and Christopher.’

  ‘How’s the Verona play?’ Heminges asked.

  If I had dared ask that same question I would have been ignored, but my brother liked Heminges. Even so he was reluctant to answer in front of me. ‘Almost finished,’ he said vaguely, ‘almost.’ I knew he was writing a play set in Verona, a city in Italy, and that he had been forced to interrupt the writing to devise a wedding play for our patron, Lord Hunsdon. He had grumbled about the interruption.

  ‘You still like it?’ Heminges asked, oblivious to my brother’s irritation.

  ‘I’d like it more if I could finish it,’ he said savagely, ‘but Lord Hunsdon wants a wedding play, so damn Verona.’ We walked on in silence. To our right, beyond the scummed ditch and a brick wall, lay the Curtain, a playhouse built to rival ours. A blue flag flew from the staff on the Curtain’s high roof announcing that there would be an entertainment that afternoon. ‘Another beast show,’ my brother said derisively. There had been no plays at the Curtain for months, and it seemed there would be no play at the Theatre this afternoon either. We had nothing to perform until other players learned Augustine and Christopher’s parts. We could have performed the play we had presented to the Queen, except we had done it too often in the past month. Perform a play too often, and the audience is liable to pelt the stage with empty ale bottles.

  We came to the wooden bridge that crossed the sewer ditch and which led to a crude gap in the long brick wall. Beyond the gap was the Theatre, our playhouse, a great wooden turret as tall as a church steeple. It had been James Burbage’s idea to build the playhouse, and his idea to make the bridge and pierce the wall, which meant playgoers did not have to walk up muddy Bishopsgate to reach us, but instead could leave the city through Cripplegate and stroll across Finsbury Fields. So many folk made that journey that there was now a broad and muddy path running diagonally across the open ground. ‘Does that cloak belong to the company?’ my brother asked as we crossed the bridge.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Make sure it’s returned to the tiring room,’ he said snidely, then stopped in the wall’s gap. He let John Heminges walk ahead, and then, for the first time since we had met at the ditch’s edge, looked up into my eyes. He had to look up because I was a full head taller. ‘You are going to stay with the company?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t afford to,’ I said. ‘I owe rent. You’re not giving me enough work.’

  ‘Then stop spending your evenings in the Falcon,’ was his answer. I thought he would say no more because he walked on, but after two paces he turned back to me. ‘You’ll get more work,’ he said brusquely. ‘With Augustine sick and his boy sweating? We have to replace them.’

  ‘You won’t give me Augustine’s parts,’ I said, ‘and I’m too old to play girls.’

  ‘You’ll play what we ask you to play. We need you, at least through the winter.’

  ‘You need me!’ I threw that back into his face. ‘Then pay me more.’

  He ignored the demand. ‘We begin today by rehearsing Hester,’ he said coldly, ‘we’ll only be working on Augustine and Christopher’s scenes. Tomorrow we’ll perform Hester, and we’ll play the Comedy on Saturday. I expect you to be here.’

  I shrugged. In Hester and Ahasuerus I played Uashti, and in the Comedy I was Emilia. I knew all the lines. ‘You pay William Sly twice what you pay me,’ I said, ‘and my parts are just as large as his.’

  ‘Maybe because he’s twice as good as you? Besides, you’re my brother,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘Just stay through the winter, and after that? Do what you will. Leave the company and starve, if that’s what you want.’ He walked on towards the playhouse.

  And I spat after him. Brotherly love.

  George Bryan paced to the front of the stage, where he bowed so low that he almost lost his balance. ‘Noble Prince,’ he said when he recovered his footing, ‘according as I am bound, I will do you service till death me do confound.’

  Isaiah Humble, the bookkeeper, coughed to attract attention. ‘Sorry! It’s “till death me confound”. There’s no “do”. Sorry!’

  ‘It’s better with the “do”,’ my brother said mildly.

  ‘It’s crapulous shit with or without the “do”,’ Alan Rust said, ‘but if George wants to say “do”, Master Humble, then he says “do”.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Isaiah said from his stool at the back of the stage.

  ‘You were right to correct him,’ my brother consoled him, ‘it’s your job.’

  ‘Sorry, though.’

  George swept off his hat and bowed again. ‘Something, something, something,’ he said, ‘till death me do confound.’ George Bryan, a nervous and worried man who somehow always appeared confident and decisive when the playhouse was full, had replaced the sick Augustine Phillips. The rehearsal was to bind him and Simon Willoughby, who had replaced Christopher Beeston, into the play.

  John Heminges acknowledged George’s second bow with a languid wave of a hand. ‘For a season we will, to our solace, into our orchard or some other place.’

  Will Kemp bounded onto the stage with a mighty leap. ‘He that will drink wine,’ he bellowed, ‘and hath never a vine, must send or go to France. And if he do not he must needs shrink!’ On the word shrink he crouched, looked alarmed, and clutched his codpiece, which sent Simon Willoughby into a fit of giggling.

  ‘Do we go to the orchard?’ George interrupted Will Kemp to ask.

  ‘The orchard, yes,’ Isaiah said, ‘or some other place. That’s what it says in the text, “orchard or some other place”.’ He waved the prompt copy. ‘Sorry, Will.’

  ‘I’d like to know if it is the orchard.’

  ‘Why?’ Alan Rust asked belligerently.

  ‘Do I imagine trees? Or some
other place without trees?’ George looked anxious. ‘It helps to know.’

  ‘Imagine trees,’ Rust barked. ‘Apple trees. Where you meet Hardydardy.’ He gestured towards Will Kemp.

  ‘Are the apples ripe?’ George asked.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Rust asked.

  ‘If they’re ripe,’ George said, still looking worried, ‘I could eat one.’

  ‘They’re small apples,’ Rust said, ‘unripe, like Simon’s tits.’

  ‘Isn’t this a tale from the scriptures?’ John Heminges put in.

  ‘My tits aren’t small,’ Simon Willoughby said, hefting his scrawny chest.

  ‘It’s from the Old Testament,’ my brother said, ‘you’ll find the story in the Book of Esther.’

  ‘But there’s no one called Hardydardy in the Bible!’ John Heminges said.

  ‘There bloody well is now,’ Alan Rust said. ‘Can we move on?’

  ‘Book of Esther?’ George asked. ‘Then why is she called Hester?’

  ‘Because the Reverend William Venables, who wrote this piece of shit, didn’t know his arse from his shrivelled prick,’ Alan Rust said forcefully. ‘Now will you all be quiet and let Will speak his lines?’

  ‘If it’s so bad,’ George asked, ‘why are we doing it again?’

  ‘Can you think of another play we can fit by tomorrow?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then that’s why.’

  ‘Go on, Will,’ my brother said tiredly.

  ‘There’s a loose board here,’ George said, stubbing his toe at the front of the stage, ‘that’s why I almost fell over when I bowed.’

  ‘I lack both drink and meat,’ Will Kemp appealed to the empty galleries of the Theatre, ‘but, as I say, a dog hath a day, my time is come to get some!’

  ‘Get some!’ Simon Willoughby almost peed himself with laughter. He had arrived at the Theatre before me, and looked surprisingly sprightly and alert. ‘You didn’t go home last night?’ I had asked him, but instead of answering he just grinned. ‘Did he pay you?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘You can lend me some?’