King of Shadows Read online

  How could I say: Yes, I remember? That wasn’t what I remembered at all.

  “Aah,” I said. Our new Globe Theatre, he had said. In 1999, where I lived, it was the Globe’s four hundredth anniversary. So, if the Globe was new, this was 1599.

  I sat there gaping at him, trying to cope with the unbelievable, with being bang in the middle of something that was totally impossible. All I could think was: Why is this happening to me?

  “Come,” Harry said. “It’s past five. Master Burbage will be up and ready—dress, quickly—” And he began thrusting clothes at me from a heap at the bottom of the mattress; it was lucky he was there, to show me the right order. There was a kind of padded jockstrap of thick rough cotton; then long dark tights, like those I’d worn onstage sometimes but much worse fitting; then a bulgy, padded pair of shorts, a thin floppy undershirt, and a fitted jacket to match the shorts. A doublet, he called it. Around my waist went a leather belt, with a knife like a dagger in a leather sheath attached to it.

  “And I cleaned thy shoes,” Harry said, and held them out; they were leather, rather like loafers, with a buckle on top. “Tha couldst never have done it, the way tha wast last night.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I have to write down the way he spoke, the way they all spoke, not as they really sounded but as I understood them. I’ll use things like “thou” and “tha” for “you,” sometimes, just to remind you that they didn’t sound like us, but I can’t make you hear the real speech. It was like a thick, thick dialect, with strange vowels, strange words, strange elaborate phrases. But it was more like the speech of my home than the English of today’s London or New York, so perhaps that’s how I understood them and they understood me.

  Or then again it could just be part of the whole impossible change that took me there. I was living, but not in real life at all.

  A round-faced woman came in, kind looking, with a long dress, a white pleated ruff around her neck and a sort of floppy cap on her head. Harry said at once, happily, “See, Mistress Burbage—he’s well again.”

  She took my chin in one hand and felt my forehead with the other. I had the best-felt forehead in London by now, it seemed to me. “The Lord be praised,” she said, and then she looked at me critically, reached to the bureau, and took a damp cloth and scrubbed my face with it. I laughed, feebly, and she gave me an amiable pat. She reminded me of my Aunt Jen, a little; she was a link with the real world, in this mad dream that I was living.

  Down a wooden staircase we went, clattering, Harry leading; it wasn’t much more than a slanted ladder, with a rail to hold on to. In the room below, a man was sitting at a heavy wooden table with plates and mugs in front of him, and a sheaf of papers; he was chewing, and muttering to himself through the mouthfuls.

  “Good day, Master Burbage,” Harry said, so I said it too, and Burbage blinked at me. He was a chunky, good-looking man, younger than Arby, older than Gil. He had a neat beard, and a rather big nose. His doublet was a wonderful glowing blue, with a broad collar.

  “Better, art t’a? Good!” he said, and went back to his munching and muttering.

  Mistress Burbage filled two mugs for us, from a jug with a curly handle; all these were made from a grey metal that I found out later was pewter. There was a big round loaf on the table, and a hunk of white cheese, both on square wooden plates. Harry cut us slabs from both of them, with his knife. Suddenly hungry, I took a big bite, chewed, and washed it down with a swig from my mug. The drink was cool, sour tasting but not unpleasant; I realized, with a shock, that it was a kind of beer. Ale, they called it, and it was the main thing I drank in all my time there; a weak homemade ale was the main thing everybody drank, from morning till night. You could say the whole population of Elizabethan England was slightly buzzed all day long.

  Burbage said to himself, through his bread and cheese, “If I were fair, Thisbe, I were only thine. . . .”

  So he was learning Bottom’s part. I knew that bit. Bottom the Weaver comes back onstage saying his lines for the little play they’re rehearsing, and his buddies rush away screaming because Puck has given him an ass’s head.

  I said, very fast and agitated, “O monstrous! O strange! We are haunted! Pray masters, fly masters! Help!”

  Burbage chewed more slowly, looking at me. I could see a muscle twitching in his cheek, under his left eye. It looked sinister, though later I realized that it was just a sign of mild stress. “Hast played Quince too?” he said.

  “Puck is onstage for those lines,” I said.

  “Thy memory is good. Will Kempe says thy tumbling is even better, is that true?”

  “I do well enough,” I said modestly, thinking: Wait till I show you. I knew that Arby had put me in the company partly because of my cartwheels and somersaults, back flips and handstands. For the way he wanted to do the play, they were as important as my acting or singing.

  But I wasn’t working for Arby now.

  I had no time to worry about that; Burbage rushed us through our breakfast, eager to get to the theater. “Across the bridge today,” he said. “No boat. We need to use our legs.”

  He swung a wonderful short cloak about his shoulders, the same blue as his doublet, and Harry jammed a flat floppy hat on my head and the same on his own. Master Burbage had a hat with a brim, and a curling, slightly battered feather. He wore it at a jaunty angle. Out we went, raising the wooden latch of the heavy front door.

  And their London swept over me, caught me up, in a nightmare mix of sight and sound and smell. Even before six in the morning, the street was filled with people bustling about, carrying huge bundles, selling fruit or pastries or pamphlets from trays slung from their necks, dodging to avoid men or horses. Carts clattered over the cobbles, creaking, rocking, splashing up muck sometimes from the stinking ditches into which Harry and everyone else had emptied their waste. Water ran through those ditches, but slowly. There were flies buzzing everywhere. The whole street smelled bad; so did the people sometimes, if a particularly unwashed one jostled you too close. Where there were gaps in the crowd, squawking crows and ravens hopped and pecked and fought over garbage in the ditches.

  We passed shop fronts where bloody meat hung on enormous hooks, or vegetables and fruit were set out in gleaming rows, or a wonderful smell of fresh bread wafted out from hidden ovens. We passed a door with a bush tied over it, and the stale smell of ale strong from inside, and raucous shouting. We stayed close to Master Burbage, Harry and I, as he strode lordly down the street with his hand on the hilt of his short sword. People greeted him, here and there; sometimes he lifted his plumed hat, but he never paused. I scurried along in a blur of amazement, wonder and the beginnings of fear, past delights and horrors. A dog with no ears or tail snapped at me beside a bank of glorious roses set out for sale, and a beggar clutched at me, screaming, a filthy child with no legs, propped on a little wheeled trolley.

  Then we were around another corner into an even more crowded street, narrow, lined with tall wooden buildings; between them I caught glimpses of the flat brown River Thames. We were crossing the river; the street was the bridge. It was London Bridge, I found out later; the only way of crossing the river except by taking a boat. There were houses built all along it, a row on either side, their roofs touching over the road running between. It didn’t take us long to cross over; the Thames was not wide here.

  And above the roofs where the bridge ended was the worst horror of all: a series of tall poles, with a strange round lump stuck on the top of each, lumps that gleamed white here and there, lumps attracting flurries of crows and other black birds that shrieked and tore at them, pecking and ripping and gobbling. It was only when I saw the farthest pole topped by a grinning white skull that I realized all the round lumps were human heads, the heads of men and women chopped off by an axe, and I stopped abruptly and heaved up my breakfast into the reeking ditch.

  It occurred to me later that I’d now thrown up in two different centuries in the space of twenty-four hours
.

  Harry patted my back, consoling me over this last sign of my departed fever. Master Burbage was only concerned in case I’d splashed my tights.

  FIVE

  In the Fishers’ concrete apartment block overlooking the River Thames, the boy Nat lies shivering in bed, curled up, clasping his hot-water bottle, growing gradually warm. He sleeps a little.

  Then he grows warmer, hotter, his fever rising; he tosses off the bedclothes, muttering, sweating, no longer knowing who or where he is. Mrs. Fisher comes back to check him. Flushed and damp-skinned, he is barely recognizable. Alarmed, she tries to wake him, but the fever is galloping, edging on delirium. She has never seen anything like this. His skin is on fire, his hair wet with perspiration; there are strange swellings in his neck. She calls her husband, and in sudden fear they telephone their doctor.

  The doctor is not at home. They call for an ambulance. It takes the boy to Guy’s Hospital: a short swift ride through the dark midnight streets. In the emergency ward, nurses receive the boy in puzzled alarm; they start sponging down the fevered body, they peer at the red swollen glands. Meningitis? The doctor on duty comes, frowns, orders an intravenous line, blood tests, antibiotics. Surprising the nurses, he orders the boy to be moved to an isolation ward. Intent, unsmiling, he goes to an office where there is a telephone with a direct outside line, and he closes the door. He calls, even at this hour of 3 A.M., a colleague who is a specialist in tropical medicine.

  He says, “You aren’t going to believe this, but I think we have a case of bubonic plague.”

  SIX

  “There it is—our new theater!” said Harry proudly. “Hast seen it before?”

  “No,” I said truthfully, staring. A white flag was flying from the flagpole on top of the Globe, the signal to audiences that a play would be done there that day. For the moment, it was the only thing I recognized. It wasn’t the theater itself that was so startlingly different from the copy that would be built in my time; it was the surroundings. This Globe wasn’t crowded and dwarfed by towering office buildings; it stood up proud and high, and to the south it looked out over green fields and billowing trees. In fact there were trees nearly all around it; once we had left the main street that went over London Bridge, I’d felt, with astonishment, that we were walking into the countryside. The streets were still busy and noisy, though, with carts and coaches and horsemen, and others like us bustling on foot.

  Like the Globe of my own time, the theater looked new; its plaster gleamed white, the reeds of its thatch lay tight and straight-edged. As Harry chattered proudly on, the apprentice of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men explaining his company to the borrowed boy from St. Paul’s School, I realized that it really was new, finished only a few months earlier. Before that, the company had been playing for years in a theater—called, believe it or not, just The Theatre—across the river, in Shoreditch, until their lease on the land ran out and the landlord refused to renew it. Master Burbage and his brother Cuthbert had just inherited The Theatre from their father, James, who built it. There it stood, useless, on ground they weren’t allowed to set foot on. Where were they to act?

  It was the actors who solved the problem, Harry said, grinning. Five of them got together with the Burbages, raised enough money to lease a piece of land here in Southwark, and hired a master carpenter. (“My uncle,” said Harry possessively. “His name is Peter Streete.”) Then, one dark winter’s night just after Christmas, taking a dozen strong workmen with them, they went quietly to Shoreditch and with axes and sledgehammers and crowbars they took The Theatre apart. They did it very carefully, numbering each piece, and it took them three days. The demolition must have been a very noisy process, but Harry said not many people lived in the area close by.

  After that they carted all The Theatre’s major beams and timbers to the River Thames—huge oak beams, Harry said, some of them thirty feet long—and shipped them over to the other side. And there, using them for a framework, Peter Streete and his workmen gradually built the theater that they christened the Globe.

  Birds were singing in the trees outside the theater as we went in. The doors seemed smaller than in my day, and in different places, so that I couldn’t tell whether we were headed backstage or for the groundlings’ pit. I followed Harry and Burbage blindly, through narrow pasfollowed Harry and Burbage blindly, through narrow passages, past busy preoccupied men and boys; the whole theater had an odd musty, grassy smell that I couldn’t place, and everywhere of course there were the unfamiliar accents and clothes. To keep from thinking I was crazy, I’d begun to pretend that I was in the middle of a movie set in Elizabethan times, among actors dressed in costume. It was comforting until something screamingly real hit me, like those heads over London Bridge.

  Two boys hurried past us, paused, and looked back, calling to Harry. I went quickly on after Master Burbage, who was climbing a narrow staircase. From somewhere beyond it came the sound of voices, indistinct but loud, one of them very loud, as if angry.

  There was bright light ahead of us all at once. Master Burbage paused, and I found we had come out onto the central little balcony at the back of the stage. I had to step over a coil of thick rope lying on the balcony floor, and saw one end of it tied firmly to the balcony rail; it was a knotted climbing rope for a quick descent to the stage, something Arby had planned to use in my own time. I might have thought myself still in my own time if it hadn’t been for Master Burbage at my side. Ahead and around us were the empty galleries of the theater; above us the painted sky of the “heavens” that gave the stage its roof—and below, on the broad thrusting stage, two figures, arguing. One of them—a small, lean, brown-faced man—was pacing angrily to and fro, thumping his fist into the palm of his other hand.

  “Thou shalt never have me back!” he snapped at the other man. “I shall dance my nine days’ Morris, I shall be the wonder of London, and who will come see thy clowns then, I’d like to know! Lose Will Kempe and you lose his following—and then you will all be sorry!”

  “Indeed thou hast a great following, Will,” said the other man mildly. He was sitting on a stool at the front of the stage, with a book at his feet.

  Will Kempe wasn’t listening. “And I shall write the tale of it!” he shouted. “My own book, I shall write! Th’art not the only wordsmith in this company, only a great fusser and fiddler who would have every point his own!”

  “I tie no points,” said the man sitting down. “I guard only the words I set down.” I liked his voice; it was soft, but pitched to carry. Without ranting and raving, he was just as forceful as this small angry man. I liked his face too, lined and humorous above the short brown beard. It wasn’t an old face, but one that had seen a lot.

  He stood up, and held out his hand to the other. “Play our Dream once more, Will,” he said, coaxingly. “Play once more, before a great lady.”

  “’Tis a dream of your own,” Will Kempe said coldly. “She will not come. And I am gone, and you and Dick may go hang.”

  He swung himself over the edge of the stage, with the nimbleness of an acrobat, and marched across the floor of the yard—a dirt floor, where two men, oblivious of the shouting and the fury, were raking up a layer of some sort of coarse grass. Out he went, out of the theater. The man below us sighed.

  Over our heads, doves were cooing in the thatched roof, a long burbling sound.

  Master Burbage called down, “I told thee! I told thee! So now I am thy Bottom, heaven help me.”

  The bearded face tilted up to us. “Thou art my top and my bottom and all things between, Dick Burbage, saving decency.” His eyes were a strange color, a dark tawny mixture of hazel and green. They shifted toward me. “Is this the boy?”

  “Will Kempe’s lad, who will not now be playing with Will Kempe.” He poked me in the back. “Greet Master Shakespeare, boy.”

  Shakespeare. William Shakespeare.

  It was as if he’d said, “Say hello to God.”

  I stared down at the stage, speechless. I sup
pose we were ten feet or so above him. For a moment I couldn’t move—and then more than anything I wanted to be closer to him. On impulse I grabbed up the climbing rope and tossed it over the rail; then swung my legs over and went down it, hand over hand, feet gripping the rope. Fortunately he was far enough forward that I didn’t kick him in the head.

  My feet hit the stage. Harry had jammed my cap so firmly on my head that it was still there, so I pulled it off and ducked my head in what I hoped was a neat little bow, the way Arby had taught us.

  Will Shakespeare grinned at me. He wasn’t a tall man: he was about Gil’s size. His hair was receding, leaving lots of forehead, like in the pictures you see in books, but he didn’t otherwise look much like the pictures at all. There were more lines on his skin, lines from laughing, and a thicker beard. He wore a little gold hoop in his left ear.

  “So you are Nathan Field.” The hazel eyes were looking me over, appraisingly.

  I said rather shakily, “They call me Nat.”

  “Well, Nat, welcome to the Chamberlain’s Men. Thy friend Will Kempe has left us in a huff—wilt play in our company even now he is gone?”

  “Oh yes!” I said instantly. The words must have come out so fast, so eager, that both Shakespeare and Burbage laughed.

  “When he was my friend he spoke highly of thy tumbling,” Shakespeare said. “And Dick Mulcaster of thy voice, bless his generous soul. We have all whirled you about London this past day or two, Nat—do you under-stand what’s happening?”

  This was so on the nose that for a dizzy moment I thought he must know where I really came from, who I really was. “No, sir,” I said.

  But he didn’t know. He said, “Three days from now we are to play a piece of mine from some years past, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We had more boys in the company when first we played it—now we have only enough for the women, and we lack a boy for Robin Goodfellow, for the Puck. So Richard Mulcaster, having played the play of late, has of his kindness lent us his Puck. You.”