I had, I sensed, caught him on a bad day. ‘I write because then I can make a play happen and then I and my shareholders can make money. And money is no bad thing. Money stops a man from going mad.’ He stared sadly a while. ‘I saw my father suffer when I was a boy, not so younger in years than you are now. He was a good man. He could never read but knew many a trade. Ale taster, a glover, then traded wool. And other things. He did well. We dined happily. Fowl every supper. He lost all his money. Loaned it with not a shilling in return once too often. And with a wife and seven children to keep it sent him into an antic disposition for a long time. He would shake and rock and fear the shadow of a mouse. That is why I write. I am just for ever running from madness.’ He sighed, glancing over at the draughts board a moment, as one of the men laid their piece down. ‘Now, you. What about you? Was your father mad too?’
‘I don’t know, sir. He died when I was young. He was killed at war. In France.’
‘The Catholics?’
‘The Catholics.’
‘So you came to England?’
I obviously didn’t want to be talking about myself, but Shakespeare seemed to want to do exactly that, and if I was going to ask him for a favour, then I had no choice but to oblige.
‘We did, yes. Myself and my mother. To Suffolk.’
‘And did you not like the country air, Tom?’
‘It was not the air that was the problem.’
‘The people?’
‘There were all manner of things.’
He sipped, he smoked, he studied. ‘You possess a young face and a wise tongue. People hate that. They know it could fool them.’
I was worried, felt for a moment like he was testing me. Remembered the conversation with Christopher and Hal.
‘Do you know of the Queen’s Men?’ he asked.
‘The troupe of players?’
‘That is them. Yes. Well, this man joined them. Henry Hemmings. He had been in some other player companies before, and when people turned suspicious that he was not at time’s mercy, he moved to a new company. It gives reason, I would suppose. But by the time he reached the Queen’s Men the whispers were flying like sparrows. One of the actors recognised him, from north of ten years before, and a fight broke out. The most vicious fight anyone watching had ever witnessed. At the town of Thame, in the county of Oxfordshire. By the end, two more of the troupe were at him, like dogs at a rabbit.’ He rested his pipe carefully on the table, the smoke twisting a thin line directly to the ceiling.
‘Were you there?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘I never knew him. Yet I have to thank him.’
‘For?’
He smiled, a life-weary smile. ‘His death. He died and the Queen’s Men had lost one of their key players. So when they came to Stratford I saw their predicament and my opportunity. I asked to join them. I drank with them. We spoke a little on general matters. We spoke of Plutarch and Robin Hood. And then chance blessed me. I became a Queen’s Man. And that led me to London.’
‘I see.’
He sighed. ‘Yet it was in truth an ominous beginning. Though I had no part in his death, the shadow of Hemmings passes over me quite often. And I often feel as though I am, even now, in a place that is not mine. That it happened unjustly. They were a violent and amoral rag-tag band of brothers. Killers. Twelve Wolstan the Trees. And Henry Hemmings had committed no crime, except being different. He had a face that didn’t age. That was my beginning – the rotten acorn of it all.’
He looked quite fragile for a moment, then scratched at his beard, and picked up his pipe again. Inhaled and closed his eyes. Blew the smoke over his left shoulder as I sipped my ale.
‘The acorn wasn’t rotten,’ I said.
‘Ah, yet the tree is twisted. But there is no moral to this tale, except with mirth and laughter let wrinkles come.’ I didn’t know for sure if he thought of me as another Henry Hemmings. Nor did I know for sure if Henry Hemmings actually had been like me, or if he was someone who was blessed and cursed with a more youthful disposition than average. I didn’t know if Shakespeare knew the story of what had happened in Edwardstone, and whether, possibly, my Suffolk connection had made a link in his mind. Yet I sensed a kind of warning, a friendly one, in his words. ‘So, why did you want to see me?’
I took a breath.
‘I know two sisters, Grace and Rose, and they need work. They need it urgently . . . They could sell apples.’
‘I have no say over the pippin-hawks.’
He shook his head. Seemed irritated that I would burden his great mind with such an irksome triviality.
‘Please, talk to me of something else, or leave me.’
I thought of Rose’s worried face. ‘I am sorry, sir. I owe these girls a great debt. They took me into their home at a time when I had no one. Please, sir.’
Shakespeare sighed. I felt like I was baiting a bear, and feared what he was going to say next. ‘And who is Rose? You spoke her name soft when you said it.’
‘She is my love.’
‘Oh dear. A serious love?’
He pointed over at Elsa and another worker from the Cardinal’s Hat, who often touted for trade in the tavern. Elsa was holding a gentleman’s groin under a table, her thumb caressing the bulge. ‘Look at the man she hangs on. Is that the kind of love you feel?’
‘No. Well, yes. But the other kind too.’
Shakespeare nodded. His eye glimmered with a tear. Maybe it was the smoke. ‘I will have a word. You can tell these girls they can sell their apples.’
And so they did.
And all was sweet and light, though every time I heard Jaques’ soliloquy I worried. I, more than most, was an actor in life. I was playing a part. What would my next role be, and when would I have to take it? How would I be able to leave this one behind, and when it would mean leaving Rose?
The night I told Rose that she and Grace could work at the Globe because ‘Mr Shakespeare made it so’ was a happy one, and I had bought a pack of cards on the way home. We sat all night laughing and singing and playing triumph and eating pies from Old Street and drinking more ale than usual.
Conversation turned to how Grace was looking more like a woman, and then Grace said to me, not in a rude way but in the straight-as-an-arrow truthful way that was the essence of Grace, ‘I will pass you by soon.’
And she laughed, because she had drank too much ale. She was used to drinking it, just not four jugs of it in a row.
But Rose didn’t laugh. ‘It is true. You haven’t aged a day.’
‘It is because I am happy,’ I said weakly. ‘I have no worries to line my face.’
Though of course the reality was that I had a sea of them, but it would be decades before a single line appeared.
I used to watch Rose, between the musical interludes, and she used to observe me too, in the gallery. What was it about those silent exchanges in a crowded place? There was a magic to them, like a secret shared.
The crowds, however, seemed to be getting rowdier as the season went on. On opening night – with the queen and her court in attendance – there hadn’t been a single scuffle. Towards the season’s end, there was always, at any time, some skirmish going on amid the groundlings in the pit. Once, for instance, a man sliced another man’s ear off with an oyster shell over one of the prostitutes who was always there. I worried about the girls being down there while I was safely up in the rarefied air of the gallery but generally they were all right, and enjoyed selling four times as much fruit as they would have sold at Whitechapel Market.
But then, one afternoon, under a sky full of stone-grey rain clouds: trouble.
I was midway through the tune of ‘What Shall He Have That Killed the Deer?’ – which by now, as with all the songs in the play, I could pretty much pluck my way through in my sleep – when I noticed something. Someone – a mean-looking saggy-lipped man from the benches – had stolen a pippin from Grace and was biting into it as she asked him for the penny it cost. He tried to bat
her away like a fly, but Grace was Grace so she stood her ground. She was shouting words I couldn’t hear, but knowing Grace I could guess them. As she was standing in the way of another man, she was now getting into broader bother. This man – a grizzled brown-toothed brute in ale-soaked clothes – pushed Grace to the floor, sending her apples flying to the ground amid the sand and the nut and oyster shells, triggering a memory of all those scattered plums on Fairfield Road. Then it was a free for all, as several people jostled to grab the apples.
Grace got to her feet, and the first man, the apple thief, then grabbed her and made a gargoyle of his face, shoving his tongue in her ear.
I had, by this point, stopped playing.
Hal, next to me, tapped my foot while still playing his flute, as the actors continued singing below. I heard Christopher sighing his disapproval behind me. So I began to start playing again, but then spied Rose, leaving her basket and rushing back through the pit, concerned for her sister. She reached Grace, who was still having trouble with the ear-licker, when the apple-thief’s companion made a grab at her, pulling up her skirt and reaching his hand beneath it.
She slapped him, he yanked at her hair, I felt her distress as if it was my own, just as Grace was elbowing her harasser hard in the face, bloodying his nose. I didn’t know what happened next because I was climbing over the oakwood rail of the balcony, holding my lute like a club, and – to the sound of a thousand gasps – jumping down onto the stage.
I landed on top of Will Kemp, then shouldered past a shocked Shakespeare himself, as I lunged forward and leapt off the stage to reach Rose and Grace.
I ran around the side of the pit and pushed my way through as nuts and ale and apples were thrown in my direction from the angry crowd. The play went on behind me, as the play always did, but I doubt if even those in the fivepenny seats could hear a word that was being said, such was the commotion now in the pit and around the benches. Even in the balconies people were roaring and jeering and raining their theatre food down on me.
Rose was fine now – she had broken free of her lecherous assailant – and was trying to help Grace, who was still in trouble, being held in a headlock with a thick arm squeezed hard around her neck.
Between Rose and myself we managed to get Grace free.
I grabbed the sisters’ hands and urged them, ‘We have to go.’ But there was potentially an even bigger problem now.
One of the men from the expensive seats was now standing in our path as we tried to get out of the theatre. I hadn’t spotted him, and I doubt he had spotted me, before I had leapt out of the gallery.
He stood tall and strong and solid, better dressed than I had seen him last, with his thinning hair flattened in stripes across his head, clasping those thick butcher’s hands in front of him.
‘So,’ said Manning, looking down at me with his one good eye. ‘I see it is true. You made it to London . . . How long is it since I saw you last? It seems only yesterday. You haven’t changed in the slightest. But then, you don’t, do you?’
I see it is true.
I would never know for sure if Christopher had spread his suspicions about me beyond the musicians’ gallery. Nor would I ever know if the men who manhandled Rose and Grace were in on the whole thing.
‘I see you have made some friends.’
‘No,’ I said, as if a word could cancel a reality. He surveyed a confused Grace and Rose.
‘No?’
‘They are not my friends,’ I said, determined he knew as little about the sisters as possible, or their connection to me. ‘I have never seen them before this day.’
I gestured with my eyes for Rose to leave, but she wouldn’t.
‘Ah, and still he lies. Well, be aware of this, girls, for he is not what he seems. He is an unnatural malevolence, incarnate. A witch’s boy.’
‘My mother died an innocent woman. She died because of you.’
‘Her last charm for all God knows. Perhaps she changed form. Perhaps she stands among us now.’
He stared at Rose, then Grace, as if trying to read an abstruse text. I couldn’t stay another moment. The nightmare was coming true. A mere knowledge of me was a danger to anyone. My very existence a curse. The crowd around us was becoming still, but watching Manning more than the stage. I recognised a face staring at me. I didn’t know his name but I knew he was a knife grinder. I had seen him on the bridge of a morning, plying his trade.
He was a pale weak-looking skinny man, no more than twenty, who always wore a belt of shining knives.
I contemplated grabbing one of them, but that would only have assured me a one-way ticket to Tyburn and a noose around my neck.
But I knew it was too late. The risk of Manning knowing I knew the girls was less than the risk of my leaving and them staying with him.
So I implored Rose, ‘We must leave.’
‘. . . I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways. Therefore tremble and depart . . .’
But then even the actors fell quiet as Manning grabbed a handful of Grace’s hair.
‘This one!’ Manning shouted. ‘How many years has she?’
Grace was kicking at him.
‘Has she twenty? Has she thirty? She might have sixty years to her. She looks like a child but we know of other deceptions, don’t we?’
Grace punched him hard in the groin.
‘Get off me, you eel, you piss-cunt!’
But it seemed no good. The crowd was with Manning and against us. We would be contained here. Manning would get some kind of hearing. Accusations of witchcraft and devilry would follow. I had endangered Rose and Grace. The only thing that could have saved us, right at that moment, was the one thing that did.
‘Pray, get thy hands off that young girl.’
It was Shakespeare himself, front of stage and out of character.
Manning held on. ‘I am William Manning, I am the—’
‘I care not,’ said Shakespeare. ‘These players care not. This Globe cares not. Unhand her and free her and her friends afore we end this play.’
This was enough. The threat of no more of the performance was enough. Even then it was clear that the masses wanted something far more than justice. They wanted entertainment. And Shakespeare knew that as well as anyone.
The whole theatre was now jeering at William Manning. Oyster shells were flung at his reddening face. A nerve bulged blue in his forehead. His hand let go of Grace. We clutched onto her as we made our way towards the side of the building, our feet crunching the detritus in the sand. I turned to the stage, wondering if Shakespeare had returned. He caught my glance, then when he spoke to the enlivened crowd to tell them the rest of the performance was dedicated to an actor to whom he owed a debt – ‘a man by the name of Henry Hemmings’ – I knew it was a message, a code, and one intended for me.
And so it was that I knew we could never return to the Globe, or Bankside, ever again.
Hackney, outside London, 1599
Gossip.
Gossip lived. It wasn’t just a currency, it had a life.
Stories buzzed and hummed and circulated like gadflies in the air, hovering amid the stench of sewage and the clatter of carts.
For instance, when Mary Peters suddenly went missing, every household to the east of the walls seemed to know about it. Rose, incidentally, had been so upset about that she hardly spoke for a day. And now, due to what Rose called ‘the heat of my tempers’, the story of the lutist who jumped onto the stage at the Globe would surely be talked about in every inn in London.
‘But you and Grace were in trouble!’
‘We can handle ourselves. We always have. And now we shall have to go back to Whitechapel . . .’
The conversation turned, and headed where I knew it would. She wanted to know who the man was. Manning.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That is a lie.’
‘I can’t tell you who he is.’
‘He said your mother was a witch. What was his meaning?’
&nb
sp; ‘He must have been confused. He must have mistaken me for somebody else.’
Her green eyes glared at me, alive with quiet fury. ‘Do you take me for a fool, Tom Smith?’
And it was that. The saying of the name that was only half mine, that made me feel I had to tell her something.
‘Forgive me, Rose. It was a mistake. I should never have come here. I should have earned the money I owed and left. I should never have let my feelings for you grow, and I should never let you feel anything for me.’
‘What are you saying, Tom? Your talk is a puzzle.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is. And I am a puzzle too. And you won’t solve it. I can’t even solve it myself.’
I had stood up from the stool and was pacing around in frantic circles. Grace was now asleep in her room, so I kept my voice low but urgent.
‘You need to find someone else. Look at me. Look at me, Rose! I am too young for you.’
‘Two years, Tom. That is not such a difference.’
‘The difference will grow.’
She looked confused. ‘How can it? What can you mean, Tom? How can a difference grow? You are not making sense.’
‘I am no use to you now. I can’t go back to Southwark.’
‘Use? Use? You have my heart, Tom.’
I exhaled heavily. I wanted to sigh away reality. I wanted the tear that was in her eye never to fall. I wanted her to hate me. I wanted not to love her. ‘Well, you gave it to the wrong person.’
‘Tell me about your mother, Tom . . . the truth.’
Her eyes wouldn’t let me lie.
‘The reason they killed her is me.’
‘What?’
‘There is something most strange about me, Rose.’
‘What is it?’
‘I am not growing older.’
‘What?’
‘Look at me. Time passes, but not on my face. I am in love with you. I am. I truly am. And what use is that? I am like a boy trying to climb a tree but the branches keep getting higher and higher.’