All Night Awake (2 page)

In his dreams he’d been a poet, but waking no such matter.

His gaze swept over the yellowed papers and the crisp white ones, perusing the words scrawled upon them with desperate longing.

Si Quis would be smith. Si Quis would be weaver. Si Quis would be horse holder outside the bear garden.

Will’s breath arrested.
Wait
. He could do
that.
He put his finger on the paper.

He could look after horses for customers who went inside to watch the bear baiting.

He grasped the corner of the sheet, meaning to tear it out and follow instructions on how to apply for the job.

“Holding horses,” a man said, so close to Will that his breath tickled Will’s ear. “Well, I could have done that.”

Looking over his shoulder, Will saw a blond man as threadbare as himself. He looked back at Will and smiled, disarmingly. “Though, for my money, I’d rather have been an actor.” He grimaced as though he’d named the lowest profession he could think of.

Will sighed. “I came to London to be a playwright,” he said.

“No.” His new acquaintance looked skeptical. “Did you indeed?” He pointed with sudden animation toward a man a few steps from them. “Look, there, in the red doublet and green hose. That’s Philip Henslowe, the owner of The Rose, as I live and breathe.”

In a moment, Will let go of the paper and turned, the thought of a job vanishing from his mind. The idea of holding horses in front of the bear garden became abhorrent, as did the idea of any job
not
in the theater. As abhorrent as stale beer when fresh wine is offered.

If Philip Henslowe was the owner of The Rose, in Southwark, then Henslowe was the owner of the largest and most successful theater in London. In The Rose were enacted Kit Marlowe’s plays, the most acclaimed shows of the age. Even in far-off Stratford-upon-Avon Will had heard of
Tamburlaine the
Great
and, with trembling admiration, read its lines printed on the cheap paper of a hastily copied booklet.

All his dreams reviving, Will thought that if only he could meet Henslowe, if he could impress Henslowe—why, Will would conquer the theater and become as great as Marlowe, and perhaps greater. He blushed at the hope, which he would never dare voice, even as it beat madly in his shying heart like a bird imprisoned in a glass dome.

The man in the red doublet and green hose stood in the center of the nave, right in the middle of Paul’s Walk, talking to an auburn-haired dandy in a dark velvet doublet slashed through to show flame-colored fabric beneath.

The dandy didn’t matter, but Philip Henslowe did. In six months, Will had yet to meet someone as important in the theater. This could be the turning point of his luck that led to the fulfillment of all his hopes.

Now he would brave Henslowe on his own, with no introduction. Or, Will thought, clenching his fists while his lower lip curled in disdain, Will deserved no better work than to hold horses in front of the bear garden.

Will elbowed the surrounding men out of the way, cut through the middle of a group of loudly arguing dandies, and extending his hand, as though to beg, charged toward Henslowe.

His extended fingers touched shabby red velvet and he spoke indistinctly through a mouth that suddenly felt too dry. “Please, Master Henslowe, I am a poet.”

At that, all of Will’s wit fled him and he stood, mute and frozen, before the theater owner.

Will wanted to say that he would like to write plays, that he was sure he could write plays as fire-woven as Marlowe’s, or better. But he could say no more.

Up close, Henslowe looked older than Will had expected, his face as suntanned and worry-creased as the face of Will’s wife, back in Stratford.

Will’s mouth opened, but his tongue could not find the turn of a rounded phrase or even the trick of a single word.

Philip Henslowe looked average: a man with brown eyes and longish, straight brown hair.

His bold-colored doublet and bright green pants showed as much sign of wear as Will’s russet suit. At elbows and knees, the fabric had worn old and thin, all the pile gone and nothing but the threadbare weave beneath.

He looked back at Will with lusterless eyes and arched his eyebrows. “A poet?” he said, as though the word were a fantastical sound referring to some obscure occupation or some marvel told by sailors returned from distant lands.

“A poet, Philip,” the dandy to whom Henslowe had been talking said, and tittered. He glanced at Will, and his long-lashed grey eyes sparked with humor. “You know them, surely. They grow under rocks and in untended places, and hide in clusters in universities.”

The dandy smiled, showing white teeth that went well with his fine-featured, smooth, oval face, his well-clipped beard, and the fine moustache that traced his upper lip like a well-drawn line. He turned to Will and winked. “Tell me, good man, did you go to a university or to an inn of the court and there tend your wit as others tend vegetable patches, with the manure of learning and the heat of argument?”

Henslowe looked at the ceiling, as though beseeching a far-off divinity.

Will’s mouth remained dry. He shook his head.

Who could this be, whose clothing looked newly made, whose auburn hair showed the darker roots that indicated art aiding nature, whose every trait and feature betrayed a nobleman? Why would such a one talk to a theater owner, the impious rabble of society? And why would such a one bother to mock Will?

The dandy’s grey eyes looked a question, and his eyebrows arched. “Not a university man?”

Will cleared his throat. “I’ve never gone to university.” He bowed slightly. “I went to grammar school and then I taught for a time in the country. Then I helped my father in his shop.”

The finely drawn eyebrows of the auburn-haired gentleman arched upon his white brow, a movement more intent and meaning than Henslowe’s similar look. “Not gone to university? And your father had a shop? Why, that’s fatal.”

The dandy pulled from within his sleeve a kerchief edged with lace worth more than all of Will’s clothing. He waved this foppery in front of his nose, as though to dispel a bad stench. “A poet should never be a useful kind of person, capable of handling the grosser stuff of life. Tell me, your father is, mayhap, not a butcher, or some such gross occupation?”

Will shook his head, bewildered, “I pray, no. He’s a glover, but—”

“Ah, he busies himself with the egg and flour of tanning, does he? And was it at his foot that you learned the fine chervil leather of a couplet, the whiting of poetry?” The gentleman smiled.

“I . . .” Will swallowed nervously. “I’ve always made poems, pray, to the local girls and . . . . And I admire Marlowe’s plays much.”

The dandy laughed, a delighted cackle that jangled in the air, mingling with the calls of tradespeople, the enticements of bawds. “A good thing to love Marlowe’s plays. I sometimes enjoy them myself. Do you not, yourself, enjoy them, Phillip?”

Henslowe rolled his eyes in silence.

The dandy laughed and turned to Will with sudden, giddy enthusiasm, “So, say a poem for us. A poem.” He stuffed his handkerchief back into his sleeve and stepped back, as if to make room for Will’s expansive wit.

“Declaim,” the dandy said, and waved a hand encased in pearly grey chervil gloves with a heavy golden fringe at the end that dangled over a dainty wrist.

Will glanced at Henslowe, who stared not at Will but at the other man, with something like wonder or alarm.

Would Henslowe listen? Could Will earn his place as a playwright this way?

Standing with his feet close, Will cleared his throat.

When he’d dreamed of a moment like this, he’d imagined a tiring room, the air thick with the smell of grease paint, the actors all bespelled by Will’s very presence.

A theater owner, or perhaps even a nobleman, would ask Will to recite a poem and all the actors would fall silent, all movement stop, till, in the end, nothing stirred amid props and costumes, nothing moved except Will’s voice rising and falling and dazzling all.

But Will’s reality always fell short of his dreams, and therefore, he cleared his throat and made to start.

“I have Dutch coins, and German, and French too. Change your coins here, before you set abroad,” a money changer yelled near Will’s ear.

Will jumped, but his would-be listeners didn’t move. The dandy looked attentive, the theater owner bored.

His voice shaking, Will started, in measured cadences, to speak his best sonnet.

It was the one he’d written for Nan when they were courting, the one that ended in
hate from hate away she threw / And saved my life, saying not you.

When Will had finished, the noise of Paul’s had not died down. From somewhere came the high-pitched laughter of a bawd, and somewhere behind Will two gentlemen argued loudly.

“The sad ballad and sorrowful fate of Romeo,” a ballad seller called out, just to the right of Henslowe, waving a sheaf of smudged printed sheets just within the theater owner’s field of vision. “How he did kill himself for love unrequited.”

And the dandy, his eyebrows more arched than ever, looked puzzled. “A fine sonnet, to be sure,” he told Will. “A fine sonnet.” Despite the man’s words, his lips worked in and out, battling some emotion that Will feared was mirth.

With sudden heat, Will attempted to explain, “Your lordship will allow,” Will said. “That my lady’s name is Hathaway, you see.”

The small, neat mouth—whose corners trembled upward, beneath the narrow moustache, when Will addressed its owner as “lordship”—opened in a round “o” of astonishment.

“Ah. Hathaway. Hate from hate away. Why it’s marvelous, man. No more than a poet in two would think of such a clever pun, I say. What say you, Henslowe?” He turned to the theater owner.

Suspecting he was being mocked and feeling his heart droop down to consort with his worn-out boots, Will, too, turned toward the theater owner.

But Henslowe never once glanced in his direction. Instead, he looked impatiently at the dandy and flicked him on the shoulder with a shabby glove, as though to call his attention. “I think you have strange amusements, Kit.” And before the dandy could more than open his mouth for what promised to be a droll reply, Henslowe added, “And I think your time would be better employed in writing me a play that I could stage. What, with the plague raging over this winter and the playhouses just reopened, we could use a new play to pack the groundlings in. Faustus has run its time upon the stage. Give us something new. I have a new playhouse to pay for.”

In Will’s brain the given name of
Kit
added to Henslowe’s request for a new play, and to the name of
Faustus
, and as Will turned to gaze on the dandy—Will’s mouth opening in wonder, his eyes wide—he realized that this creature, with his slashed-through sleeves, his immaculate, white silk hose, his expensive boots, his lace handkerchief, and gold-fringed grey gloves was no other than Kit Marlowe, the leading playwright of the age, the Muses’ darling, the light of the London stage.

“Many good simples for all illnesses,” a shrunken man in a black cloak called out, walking between them and away, waving a large, dark bottle. “It cures the French Pox, the ague, and the plague.”

Kit Marlowe laughed.

“In time, my dear Henslowe, in good time. I’ll write another play.” Marlowe smiled on the theater owner. “But first I’ve promised my lord Thomas Walsingham to write a long poem on the sad tragedy and most sorrowful death of Hero and Leander.”

Philip Henslowe made a rude noise at the sad tragedy. “And on their romping, perforce, beneath a silken sheet. No. Don’t answer that.” He waved away Marlowe’s attempt at speech with a hand clad in a glove dark with wearing. “Don’t answer that. It doesn’t bear discussing. I know why lordlings care about long-dead lovers. More honest, I say, to write for the people.”

“And make sure plenty of blood spurts, to make the populus throw its greasy cloaks in the air,” Marlowe said softly. “More honest that might be, Henslowe. But not nearly so profitable.”

Marlowe swept his hand left to right through the air, describing a perfect arc and as though signifying the futility of human life. “Stay.” He held Henslowe’s arm as Henslowe made to turn away. “Soon as I’m done, I’ll write you something new. A piteous doomed romance, maybe. Or would you prefer a revenge tragedy, like Thomas Kyd’s?”

Kit’s eyes acquired a faraway look as if he were reading in the entrails of his future for plays not yet written. “Perhaps I could write on the legend of Hamlet, the Dane, and how he avenged the murder of his heroic father.”

Henslowe sighed. “Write on what you will, so long as you write. Marlowe’s name on a playbill still draws them in.”

Marlowe laughed. “For which you pay me enough to buy the buttons for one of my doublets. No. Mind not. I’ll write my poem for Walsingham and get my money there. I would be finishing my poem even now at the lord’s home of Scagmore, had not urgent business called me to London yesterday.” He sighed and grinned. “Be gone with you. When I have my play, I’ll come searching.”

The playhouse owner patted Marlowe on the shoulder, as if acknowledging a joke or thanking Marlowe for a favor.

“But pray what did you think of my poem?” Will asked. His voice, strangled and small, did not carry very far and missed Philip Henslowe altogether, as the theater owner turned his back and disappeared amid the throng.

“He didn’t listen to your poem,” Marlowe said and smiled at Will as though this too were droll.

Will’s stomach twisted in hunger. Did Marlowe not understand that this was Will’s very life in the balance of the theater owner’s attention?

“They never do. Why would you wish him to? They know nothing of poetry, the unfeeling philistines. Theater owners listen only to the soft tinkling of coins, the whisper of gold.” Marlowe adjusted the gilded fringe on his gloves, and bent upon Will a look of disarming honesty. “No, do yourself better, friend. Write a long poem. Know you the classics?”

Will’s mouth went dry again. Marlowe, who had translated Ovid’s
Amores
, asked if Will knew the classics. Even the
Amores
, Will had read in translation. “I have little Latin and small Greek,” he stammered.