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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 have 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?’
‘I’m needed onstage,’ he had said, and hurried away.
‘Shouldn’t that be “meat and drink”?’ George now interrupted the rehearsal again.
‘It’s my line,’ Will Kemp growled, ‘why should you care?’
Isaiah peered at the text. ‘No,’ he said, ‘Will got it right, it’s “drink and meat”, sorry.’
I was feeling tired, so I wandered out of the yard and through the shadowed entrance tunnel where Jeremiah Poll, an old soldier who had lost an eye in Ireland, guarded the outer gate. ‘It’s going to rain again,’ he said as I passed, and I nodded. Jeremiah said it every time I passed him, even on the warmest, driest days. I could hear the clash and scrape of blades, and emerged into the weak sunlight to see Richard Burbage and Henry Condell practising their sword skills. They were fast, their blades darting, retreating, crossing, and lunging. Henry laughed at something Richard Burbage said, then saw me, and his sword went upwards as he stepped back and motioned with his dagger hand for the practice to stop. They both turned to look at me, but I pretended not to have noticed them and went to the door that led to the galleries. I heard them laugh as I stepped through.
I climbed the short stairs to the lower gallery, from where I glanced across at the stage where George was still fretting about apples or loose planks, then, as the sound of the swords started again, I lay down. I was playing Uashti, a queen of Persia, but my lines would not be needed for at least an hour, and so I closed my eyes.
I was woken by a kick to my legs and opened my eyes to see James Burbage standing over me. ‘There are Percies in your house,’ he said.
‘There are what?’ I asked, struggling to wake and stand up.
‘Percies,’ he said, ‘in your house. I just walked past.’
‘They’re there for Father Laurence,’ I explained, ‘the bastards.’
‘They’ve been before?’
‘The bastards come every month.’
Father Laurence, like me, lived in the Widow Morrison’s house. He was an ancient priest who rented the room directly beneath my attic, though I suspected the widow let him live there for free. He was in his sixties, half crippled by pains in his joints, but still with a spry mind. He was a Roman Catholic priest, which was reason enough to have most men dragged on a hurdle to Tyburn or Tower Hill and there have their innards plucked out while they still lived, but Father Laurence was a Marian priest, meaning he had been ordained during the reign of our Queen’s half-sister, the Catholic Queen Mary, and such men, if they made no trouble, were allowed to live. Father Laurence made no trouble, but the Pursuivants, those men who hunted down traitorous Catholics, were forever searching his room as if the poor old man might be hiding a Jesuit behind his close-stool. They never found anything because my brother had hidden Father Laurence’s vestments and chalices among the Theatre’s costumes and properties.
‘They’ll find nothing,’ I said, ‘they never do.’ I looked towards the stage. ‘Do they need me?’
‘It’s the dance of the Jewish women,’ James Burbage said, ‘so no.’
On the stage Simon Willoughby, Billy Rowley, Alexander Cooke and Tom Belte were prancing in a line, goaded by a man who carried a silver-tipped staff with which he rapped their legs or arms. ‘Higher!’ he called. ‘You’re here to show your legs. Leap, you spavined infants, leap!’
‘Who’s that?’ I asked.
‘Ralph Perkins. Friend of mine. He teaches dancing at the court.’
‘At the court?’ I was impressed.
‘The Queen likes to see dancing done well. So do I.’
‘One, two, three, four, five, leap!’ Ralph Perkins called. ‘It’s the galliard, you lumpen urchins, not some country dump dance! Leap!’
‘Goddam ill fortune about Augustine and his boy,’ James Burbage grumbled.
‘They’ll recover?’
‘Who knows? They’ve been purged, bled, and buggered about. They might. I pray they do.’ He frowned. ‘Simon Willoughby will be busy till Christopher recovers.’
‘That’ll please him,’ I said sourly.
‘But not you?’ I shrugged and did not answer. I was frightened of James Burbage. He leased the Theatre, which made him the owner of the building if not the land on which it stood, and his eldest son, called Richard like me, was one of our leading players. James had been a player himself once, and, before that, a carpenter, and he still had the muscular build of a man who worked with his hands. He was tall, grey-haired, and hard-faced, with a short beard, and though he no longer acted, he was a Sharer, one of the eight men who shared the expenses of the Theatre and divided the profits among themselves. ‘He drives a hard bargain,’ my brother, another of the Sharers, had once told me, ‘but he keeps to it. He’s a good man.’ Now James frowned at the stage as he talked to me. ‘Are you still thinking about leaving?’
I said nothing.
‘Henry Lanman,’ Burbage said the name flatly, ‘has that bastard been talking to you?’
‘No.’
‘Is he trying to poach you?’
‘No,’ I said again.
‘But is your brother right? He says you’re thinking of walking away from us. Is that true?’
‘I’ve thought about it,’ I said sullenly.
‘Don’t be a fool, boy. And don’t be tempted by Lanman. He’s losing money.’ Henry Lanman owned the Curtain playhouse that lay just a brief walk to the south of ours. During our performances we could hear their audience cheering, the beat of their drummers, and the sound of their trumpeters, though of late those sounds had become scarcer. ‘He’s showing sword fights these days,’ Burbage went on, ‘sword fights and bear baiting. So what does he want you to do? Piss about in a frock and look pretty?’
‘I haven’t talked to him,’ I insisted truthfully.
‘So you’ve a lick of sense. He’s got nobody to write plays, and nobody to play in them.’
‘I haven’t talked to him!’ I repeated testily.
‘You think Philip Henslowe will hire you?’
‘No!’
‘He’s got plenty of actors.’ Henslowe owned the Rose playhouse, south of the Thames, and was our chief rival.
‘Then there’s Francis Langley,’ James Burbage went on relentlessly, ‘has he talked to you?’
‘No.’
‘He’s building that monstrous great lump of a playhouse on Bankside, and he’s got no players, and he’s got no plays either. Rivals and enemies,’ he said the last three words bitterly.
‘Enemies?’
‘Lanman and Langley? Lanman hates us. The landlord here hates us. The bloody city fathers hate us. The lord mayor hates us. Do you hate us?’
‘No.’
‘But you’re thinking of leaving?’
‘I’m not making any money,’ I muttered, ‘I’m poor.’
‘Of course you’re bloody poor! How old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?’
‘Twenty-one.’
‘You think I started with money?’ Burbage asked belligerently. ‘I served my apprenticeship, boy, I earned my money, saved money, borrowed money, bought the lease here, built the playhouse! I worked, boy!’
I gazed out into the yard. ‘You were a joiner, yes?’
‘A good one,’ he said proudly, ‘but I didn’t start with money. All I had was a pair of hands and a willingness to work. I learned to saw and chisel and augur and shape wood. I learned a trade. I worked.’
‘And this is the only trade I know,’ I said bitterly. I nodded towards my brother. ‘He made sure of that, didn’t he? But in a year or so you’ll spit me out. There’ll be no more parts for me.’
‘You don’t know that,’ he said, though he did not sound convincing. ‘So what parts do you want?’
I was about to answer when Burbage held up a hand to silence me. I turned to see that a group of strangers had just come into the playhouse and were now standing in the yard, staring at the prancing boys on the stage. Four were grim-looking men, all with scabbarded swords and all wearing the white rose of Lord Hunsdon’s livery. The men stood, foursquare and challenging, to guard four women. One of the women was older, with grey hair showing beneath her coif. She signalled the men to stay where they were, and strode towards the stage, straight-backed and confident. My brother, seeing her, bowed low. ‘My lady!’ he greeted her, sounding surprised.
‘We have been inspecting an estate at Finsbury,’ her ladyship said in brusque explanation, ‘and my granddaughter wished to see your playhouse.’
‘You’re most welcome,’ my brother said. The boys onstage had all snatched off their caps and knelt.
‘Stop grovelling,’ her ladyship said sharply, ‘were you dancing?’
‘Yes, your ladyship,’ Ralph Perkins answered.
‘Then dance on,’ she said imperiously, before gesturing to my brother. ‘A word, if you please?’
I knew she was Lady Anne Hunsdon, the wife of the Lord Chamberlain, who was our company’s patron. Some nobles showed their wealth by having a retinue of finely clothed retainers ever at their heels, or by owning the swiftest deerhounds in the kingdom, or by their lavish palaces and wide parks, while some, a few, patronised the acting companies. We were Lord Hunsdon’s pets, we played at his pleasure, and grovelled when he deigned to notice us. And when we toured the country, which we did whenever a plague closed the London playhouses, the Lord Chamberlain’s name and badge protected us from the miserable Puritan town fathers who wanted to imprison us, or, better still, whip us out of town. ‘Come, Elizabeth,’ Lady Hunsdon ordered, and her grand-daughter, for whose marriage my brother had been forced to abandon his Italian play and write something new, went to join her grandmother and my brother. The two maidservants waited with the guards, and it was one of those two maids who caught my eye and stopped the breath in my throat.
Lady Anne Hunsdon and her granddaughter were cloaked in finery. Elizabeth Carey was glorious in a farthingale of cream linen, slashed to show the shimmer of silver sarsenet beneath. I could not see her bodice because she was wearing a short cape, light grey, embroidered with the white roses that were her father and grandfather’s badge. Her hair was pale gold, covered only with a net of silver-gilt thread on which small pearls shone, her skin was fashionably white, but she needed no ceruse to keep it that way, for her face was unblemished, not even touched with a hint of rouge on the cheeks. Her painted lips were full and smiling, and her blue eyes bright as she stared with evident delight at the four boys who had started dancing again to Ralph Perkins’s instructions. Elizabeth Carey was a beauty, but I stared only at her maid, a small, slim girl whose eyes were bright with fascination for what happened on the stage. She was wearing a skirt and bodice of dark grey wool, and had a black coif over her light brown hair, but there was something about her face, some trick of lip and bone, that made her outshine the glowing Elizabeth. She turned to look around the playhouse and caught my eye, and there was the hint of a mischievous smile before she turned back towards the stage. ‘Dear sweet Jesus,’ I murmured, though luckily too softly for the words to reach any of the women.