Fools and Mortals

The last four names had no actors assigned to them, and they intrigued me. Pease-Blossome … Cobweb … I assumed they were fairies, but all I really cared about was that I was to play a man! ‘Francis Flute is a man?’ I asked, just to be sure.

‘Indeed he is,’ my brother wrote a few words, ‘so you will have to cut your hair. But not till just before the performance. Till then you must play your usual parts.’

‘Cut my hair?’

‘You want to play a man? You must appear as a man.’ He paused, nib poised above the paper. ‘Bellows menders do not wear their hair long.’

‘Francis Flute is a bellows mender?’ I asked, and could not keep the disappointment from my voice.

‘What did you expect him to be? A wandering knight? A tyrant?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘no. I just want to play a man.’

‘And you shall,’ he said, ‘you shall.’

‘Can I see the part?’ I asked eagerly.

‘Isaiah is copying it, so no.’

‘What’s the play about?’

He scratched a few more words. ‘Love.’

‘Because it’s a wedding?’

‘Because it’s a wedding.’

‘And I mend bellows at a wedding?’

‘I would not recommend it. I merely indicated your trade so you will know your place in society, as must we all.’

‘So what does Francis Flute do in the play?’

He paused to select a new sheet of paper. ‘You fall in love. You are a lover.’

For a moment I almost liked him. A lover! Onstage it is the lovers who strut, who draw swords, who make impassioned speeches, who have the audience’s sympathy, and who send folk back to their ordinary lives with an assurance that fate can triumph. A lover! ‘Who do I love?’ I asked.

He paused to dip the quill in his inkpot again, drained the nib carefully, and began writing on the new page. ‘What did the Reverend Venables want of you?’ he asked.

‘Venables?’ I was taken aback by the question.

‘Some weeks ago,’ he said, ‘after we performed his piece of dross, the Reverend Venables had words with you. What did he want?’

‘He thought I played Uashti well,’ I stammered.

‘Now tell me the truth.’

I paused, trying to gather my thoughts. ‘He’d heard that I might leave the company.’

‘Indeed. I told him so. And?’

‘He wanted me to stay,’ I lied.

The pen scratched. ‘He didn’t suggest you join the Earl of Lechlade’s new company?’ I said nothing, and that silence was eloquence enough. My brother smiled, or perhaps he sneered. ‘He did. Yet you have promised me to stay with the company through the winter.’

‘I did promise that.’

He nodded, then laid the quill down and sifted through the pile of papers. ‘You are always complaining that you lack money.’ He found the sheets he wanted, and, without looking at me, held them towards me. ‘Copy the part of Titania. I will pay you two shillings, and I want it done by Monday. Pray ensure it is legible.’

I took the sheets. ‘By Monday?’

‘We will begin rehearsing on Monday. At Blackfriars.’

‘Blackfriars?’

‘There’s an echo in the room,’ he said, handing me some clean sheets of paper. ‘Lord Hunsdon and his family are wintering in their Blackfriars mansion. We shall perform the play in their great hall.’

I felt another surge of happiness. Silvia was there! And there was a second pulse of joy at the thought of playing a man at last. ‘Who is Titania?’ I asked, wondering if she would end up in my arms.

‘The fairy queen. Do not lose those pages.’

‘So the play is about fairies?’

‘All plays are about fairies. Now go.’

I went.

I enjoyed copying. Not everyone likes the task, but I never resented it. I usually copied a part I would play, and writing the lines helped me to memorise them, but I was happy to copy other actors’ parts too.

Every actor received his part, and no other, which meant that for this wedding play there would be fifteen or so copied parts, which, if they were joined together, would make the whole play. Isaiah Humble, the bookkeeper, would have a complete copy, and usually another would be sent to the Master of the Revels, so he could ensure that no treason would be spoken onstage, though as our play would be a private performance in a noble house that permission was probably unnecessary. Besides, Sir Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, was appointed by the Lord Chamberlain, who had already approved the play.

I worked in Father Laurence’s room. He lived just beneath my attic in the Widow Morrison’s house. His room had a large table beneath a north-facing window. The room was also much warmer than mine. He had a hearth in which a sea-coal fire was burning, and beside which he sat wrapped in a woollen blanket, so that, with just his bald head showing, he looked like some aged tortoise. ‘Say it aloud, Richard,’ he encouraged me.

‘I’m only just starting, father.’

‘Aloud!’ he said again.

I had written down the words immediately before Titania’s entrance, the last two lines that Puck said, followed by a line from a fairy whose name was not given. Then came a stage direction which brought Oberon and Titania onstage. ‘“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,”’ I said aloud.

‘Who says that?’

‘Oberon, King of the Fairies.’

‘Titania! A lovely name,’ Father Laurence said, ‘your brother took it from Ovid, didn’t he?’

‘Did he?’

‘From the Metamorphoses, of course. And Oberon, Oberon?’ he frowned, thinking. ‘Ah! I remember, I had a copy of that book once.’

‘A copy of what, father?’

‘It’s an old French tale,’ he chuckled, ‘Huon of Bordeaux had to fulfil some dreadful errands, rather like the labours of Hercules, and he was helped by the King of the Fairies, who was called Oberon. Read on, Richard, read on!’

‘“What, jealous Oberon?”’ I read, ‘“Fairy skip hence, I have forsworn his bed and company.”’

I worked in Father Laurence’s room because the window gave good light and because the Percies, whatever else they stole, had left the old man his ink and a sheaf of quills. Besides, I liked Father Laurence. He was ancient, gentle, wise, and had long ceased to struggle against the enmity of Protestants. ‘I just want to die in peace,’ he would say, ‘and I’d prefer not to be dragged to the scaffold on a wicker hurdle to have my belly ripped open by some Smithfield butcher.’ He was crippled, and could scarcely walk without the help of a companion. The Widow Morrison, I think, let him live rent-free, and I suspected she made confession to him too, but it was best not to ask about things like that, yet most days I would hear footsteps on the lower stairs and the creak of his door and the mutter of voices, and suspect that some person had come to confess their sins and receive absolution. The parish constables must have known too, they were not fools, but he was a harmless old man, and well loved. The new minister of the parish was a fierce young zealot from Oxford who cursed all things of Rome, but when a parishioner lay dying it was often Father Laurence who was summoned, and he would limp down the street in his ancient, threadbare cassock, and local people greeted him with a smile, all but the Puritans, who were more likely to spit as he passed. When I had money I would take him food, coal, or firewood, and I always helped tidy his room after the Percies had ransacked it. ‘Read more to me,’ he said now. ‘Read more to me!’

‘“These are the forgeries of jealousy,”’ I read aloud,

‘And never since the middle summer’s spring

Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,

By pavéd fountain or by rushy brook,

Or in the beachéd margent by the sea,

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind.’

Father Laurence sighed, a small noise. I looked across the room to see his head had fallen against the high back of his chair, his eyes were closed, and his mouth open. He did not move, made no more sound, and I half started to my feet, thinking he had died. Then he spoke. ‘“To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind”!’ he said very softly. ‘“To dance our ringlets”! Oh, how perfect.’

‘Perfect?’

‘I remember, when I was a very young priest, seeing a girl dance. She had ringlets too, and her name was Jess.’ He sounded sad. ‘She danced beside a stream did my Jess, and I watched as she danced her ringlets to the whistling wind.’ He opened his eyes and smiled at me. ‘Your brother is so clever!’

‘Is he?’ I asked dourly.

‘You must be more generous, Richard. He speaks with the tongue of an angel.’

‘He doesn’t like me.’

‘Which is sad,’ Father Laurence said. ‘Perhaps it’s because you’re young and he’s not?’

‘He’s not old!’

‘Thirty-one, you told me? He’s in his middle age, Richard. And he dislikes you because you have what God never granted him. Good looks. His face is blunt, his chin weak, and his beard sparse. You, on the other hand …’ He left whatever he was about to say unfinished.

‘They call me pretty,’ I said resentfully.

‘But pretty in a boy grows to handsome in a man, and you’re a man now.’

‘Not according to my brother.’

‘And he dislikes you too,’ Father Laurence went on, ‘because you remind him of Stratford.’

‘He likes Stratford,’ I protested. ‘He keeps telling me he’ll buy property there.’

‘You tell me he was born in Stratford, that he grew up and married there, but I wonder if he was ever happy there. I think he became a different man in London, and he doesn’t want to be reminded of the old, unhappy William.’

‘Then why would he buy property there?’

‘Because when he returns, Richard, he would be the biggest man in town. He wants revenge on his childhood. He wants the respect of the town. Saint Paul tells us that when we were children we spoke as children, we understood and thought as children, but when we become men we put away childish things, but I’m not so sure we ever do put them away. I think the childish things linger on, and your brother craves what he wanted as a child, the respect of his home town.’

‘Did he tell you that, father?’

He smiled. ‘He doesn’t visit me often, but when he does, we talk. He’s an interesting man.’

‘I just wish he’d help me more,’ I said resentfully.

‘Richard, Richard! In this life we can look to God for help, but God also expects us to look to ourselves. You must be a good player, a good man, and your brother will see it in the end. Don’t look to your brother for help, be a help to him.’

I laughed at that, not because it was funny, but because I could not think what to say, then I dipped the quill in ink again and went on copying. As ever, when I used a pen, I remembered Thomas Mulliver, one of the ushers in the school at Stratford, and the man who had taught me to read and write. He carried a stick, which he rapped across our skulls if he detected inattention or a mistake. ‘Writing raises us above the beasts,’ he would chant. ‘Are you a beast, boy?’ And the stick would whistle through the air, and the sharp pain slice through the skull. He liked to quote Latin to us, even though most of us struggled with the strange language. ‘Audaces fortuna iuvat,’ he would chant. ‘And what does that mean? It means fortune favours the brave! Are you brave, boy?’ And the stick would hiss again. He was kinder in the afternoon, when his breath smelled richly of ale, and he would tell us jokes and even slip us a small coin if our work pleased him. I liked him well enough, but then he was discovered behind Holy Trinity Church with his hand up the skirt of Mistress Cybbes, wife of the bailiff, and that was the end of Thomas Mulliver.

I had followed not long after. I hated Stratford. I hated my father’s sullen anger and my mother’s tears. My brother had left his wife and three small children in the house, the children cried, and Anne screamed at my mother, who wept and worried. No one was happy. Bad harvests had made food cruelly expensive, the summers were wet, the winters were cold, and my father plucked me from school because, he insisted, they could no longer afford to educate me nor feed me. I was fourteen when he told me my schooldays were over and that I was to learn a trade. ‘Thomas Butler has agreed you’ll be his apprentice. It’s a good opportunity.’ Butler was a carpenter, and by becoming his apprentice I would have to live in his house and thus be one less mouth for my mother to feed. I remember my father marching me around to the Butler house on a Thursday morning. ‘It’s a good trade, carpentry,’ he told me as we walked under the elms of Henley Street. ‘The blessed Virgin’s husband was a carpenter, God bless him.’

‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘Why not Gilbert or Edmund?’

‘Don’t be daft, boy. Gilbert’s already apprenticed. And your younger brother’s not old enough. Your sister is working, why shouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t want to be a carpenter!’

‘Well, that’s what you’ll be. And be glad you can read, write, and sum! That’s more schooling than most boys get. Doesn’t do no harm to know your letters and numbers, and now you can learn a trade too.’ I carried a bag with a change of clothes, which I clung to as my father stood in the Butler kitchen and drank a pot of ale with my new master, and as Agnes Butler, a surly creature, eyed me suspiciously. They had no children of their own, though Bess, an orphan who was just eleven years old, was their maid. She was a skinny little thing, with wide brown eyes, lank red hair, and a dark bruise on her forehead. Agnes saw me looking at her. ‘Take your lusting eyes off her, boy!’ she snapped. ‘He must sleep in the workshop,’ she added to her husband.

‘He shall,’ my new master said, ‘so he shall.’

Then my father patted me on the head. ‘He’s a good boy, most of the time. Behave yourself, Richard.’ And with that he was gone.

‘I’ll teach you a useful trade,’ Thomas Butler promised me, though all he ever taught me was how to stack firewood. ‘Winter’s coming,’ he told me, ‘time to split timber and slaughter hogs.’ When he deemed I had not worked hard enough, he hit me and he hit hard, sometimes using a piece of wood. He hit Bess too, and sometimes his wife, who hit back. They shrieked at each other. I hated them and missed my home. My father, when he was sober, was jovial, and my mother, when she was not distraught with worry, was loving. She had told us stories, weaving fantasies of castles and gallant knights, of animals that could talk, and of the spirits who haunted the green woodlands. I cried once after she had visited me, and Agnes Butler slapped me about the head. ‘You can’t go back home,’ she snarled, ‘we bought you! Seven years’ labour you owe us, and seven years’ labour you will give us.’

They fed me stale bread and weak slops, and made me sleep in the workshop, which was a shabby, dank shed in their yard. I was locked in at night, with no candles, and forbidden to feed the small fire on which Thomas Butler melted his glue. He found the ashes warm one morning, and I was beaten for that even though I had not fed the fire, which had simply burned longer than usual. Thomas Butler had hit me, then flourished an awl in my face. ‘Do that again, boy, and I’ll take out an eye. You won’t be so pretty then, will you?’

Seven years’ labour, and it lasted three weeks.

It ended on a Saturday morning when I accidentally knocked over the glue pot. ‘You little bastard,’ Thomas snarled, and picked up a length of beechwood waiting by the lathe, ‘I’ll beat you senseless.’ He ran at me, and, in panic, I snatched up a heavy wooden maul that I swung at him.

It hit. It slammed into the side of his skull, and he went down like a stunned ox. I remember he twitched among the wood shavings for a brief moment, then went still. A trickle of blood oozed from his ear, and I stood, whimpering, remembering that they hanged murderers. Thomas Butler did not move. A purse hung from his belt, and when he fell some coins had rolled out of it. Three shillings and eight pennies, which I stole. They hanged thieves too, but I reasoned they could not hang me twice.

I could not go home. The constables would look for me in Henley Street, but nor could I stay. I was not thinking properly. The panic that had made me snatch up the wooden hammer was still making me shake. I was fourteen and a murderer. So I ran. I was crying, I remember that, crying as I ran into the world.

Fate is strange, but real. I was told, much later, that I had been born under a lucky star, while my mother, God save her soul, believed the angels watched over us, one angel to every person, and my angel was watchful that morning. I fled the yard and turned north towards Warwick. Why Warwick? Perhaps because the thought of hanging was still tormenting me, and Warwick was where murderers were hanged, but within a few yards I saw Peg Quiney, a friend of my mother’s who would have recognised me, and so I turned and ran the other way. I ran blindly, not stopping to catch my breath until I had crossed the bridge and was on the road to Ettington. Sheep bleated in a field beyond a ditch and hedge. Two horsemen came from the south and I hid deep in a great bunch of cow parsley. The horsemen passed without seeing me. I was shaking still, trying not to sob.

The horsemen went towards the town, and I fell asleep. That still surprises me, that in my terror I slept, and Lord knows for how long. Maybe an hour? Maybe two, but then I was woken by a dog licking my face, and I heard a familiar and friendly voice. ‘Hiding, boy?’ It was Edward Sales, a Stratford carrier and a kindly man, sitting high on his wagon with his two brindle horses, Gog and Magog, in the wagon’s harness. The wagon’s bed was heaped with sacks and crates. Edward had once carried woolsacks to London for my father, back when there was money in the house. ‘Come here, Lucifer!’ he called to his dog. ‘I wouldn’t have spied you,’ he said, ‘if Lucifer hadn’t smelled you out.’ Lucifer, a great ugly hound, looked terrifying, but I knew of old that he was more likely to lick a man to death than bite him. ‘They’re looking for you, Richard,’ Edward went on, ‘hue and cry, uphill and down dale.’

‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ I stammered.

‘What? Kill Tom Butler!’ He laughed. ‘He’s not dead. He’ll have a pain in his skull for a month, and serve the miserable old bugger right. But you didn’t kill him. He’s got a noddle like an oak stump.’

‘He’s alive?’

‘Alive and spitting curses.’

‘He’ll kill me if I go back,’ I said.

‘More than like, yes he will. Not a forgiving man, is he? Nor would I be, married to that shrew. She’d claw the eyes out of an angel, that one, then piss in the sockets.’

I climbed out of the ditch. ‘I can’t go home either.’ I had stolen money. I was a thief, and thieves are hanged.

Ned seemed to know what I was thinking, because he grinned. ‘They won’t hang you, boy. Maybe brand you? A big T on your forehead? But most like your father will pay Tom Butler some silver and send you back to him.’

I hesitated for a moment, then asked the question that changed my life. ‘Where are you going, Ned?’

‘London, boy. Down to the big stink.’

‘I have money,’ I pulled two of the shillings from my pocket and brushed the sawdust from them, ‘can I come?’

Ned stared at me for what seemed a long time. One of his horses, either Gog or Magog, grazed the thick roadside grass. ‘He’ll get wind eating that,’ Ned said, and jerked a rein. ‘And what will you do in London, Richard?’

‘My brother’s there.’

‘So he is. Well, hop up, then, hop up.’

I went to London.

London!

Ever since my brother had gone to London I had been fascinated by the city, by the stories men and women told of it, and of its glory that was so much greater than Warwick or Kenilworth, let alone little Stratford. Ned Sales had often talked of it when sitting in our kitchen. ‘I saw the Queen herself once,’ I remember him saying, ‘and she had a thousand horsemen carrying lit torches that flamed all around her. She glowed! Like a ruby, all red and shiny! Of course they cleaned the city for her,’ he had chuckled. ‘They hung tapestries and flags over the windows. Sometimes just bed sheets.’ He had sipped his ale and looked at me. ‘That’s to stop folk chucking their turds and piss out the window. Wouldn’t do to have a common turd spattered on Her Majesty’s hair.’

‘Don’t talk so,’ my mother had said, but with a smile.

‘’Tis true, Mistress Mary, I swear it.’ He had made the sign of the cross, which made my mother tut, but again with a smile.

‘I’ve never been to London,’ she had said wistfully.

‘It’s full of strangers. From France, the Netherlands, the Germanies, even blackamoors! And the buildings … My sweet Lord, but you could cram all Stratford into Saint Paul’s and have room left over for Shottery!’

‘I worry about my Will being there,’ my mother had said.

‘He’s thriving, mistress. I saw him last week when he gave me that missive.’ Ned had brought a letter from my brother, along with two gold eagles wrapped in a scrap of linen. ‘He’s thriving,’ he said again. ‘He has silver aiglets on his laces!’

My mother had toyed with the golden coins. ‘They say the plague strikes harder in London.’

Ned had made the sign of the cross again. ‘Everything’s bigger, better, or worse in London. That’s just the way of it.’

Now, riding Ned’s wagon behind the big rumps of Gog and Magog, I had a whole week to ask more questions. ‘It’s a dirty city, boy,’ he told me as we trundled slow between wide Oxfordshire pastures and fields of growing barley, ‘filthy like you’ve no idea. And the city smells … shit underfoot and smoke overhead, but there’s gold between the shit and the smoke. Not for the likes of us, of course.’

‘My brother sends gold …’

‘Aye, but your Will is a clever one. He always was.’

‘Mother says he should go back to his school-teaching.’

‘Mothers are like that, boy. They think you mustn’t rise too high in case you fall too far.’

I knew what my mother thought because I had usually written her letters as she dictated them, and in every one she had pleaded with my brother to return to his old job as an usher in a Warwickshire school.

‘But he won’t,’ Ned said with a grin, ‘he’s having a high time, he is. Just you wait and see.’

At that time my brother had lodgings in the Dolphin, the tavern just north of the Bishopsgate, and that is where Ned took me. ‘I’m not letting you walk through London, boy, I’d rather let you loose in hell.’ He stopped his wagon beneath the huge inn sign on which a grotesque fish leaped out of the water, and gave me the newest letter my mother had dictated, a letter that had probably been written by Gilbert or by Edmund, then tossed me one of the two shillings I had given him. ‘Look after yourself, boy. It might be a grand city, but London can be dangerous.’

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