Ruled Britannia (46 page)

The Widow Kendall's voice rose in sharp indignation: “Here, now! What do you do? Would you waste it?”

“By no means.” King crooned, “Here, puss, puss, puss,” to the animal. “Come on your ways—open your mouth—here is that which will give language to you, cat. Open your mouth!”

Mommet sniffed at the ale slowly soaking into the rammed-earth floor. The cat's head bent. Ever so delicately, it lapped at the puddle. Then it looked up. It eyes caught the firelight from the hearth and glowed green.

“What game play you at?”

Sam King started violently and made the sign of the cross. Shakespeare jerked in surprise, too. But it wasn't the cat that had spoken. It was Cicely Sellis, standing in the doorway to her room, hands on hips, her face furious.

“What play you at?” she asked again. “Tell me straight out, else I'll make you sorry for your silence.”

“N-N-N-Naught, Mistress Sellis,” King stammered, his face going gray with fear. “I was but, ah, giving your cat, ah, somewhat to drink.”

“You play the palliard,” the cunning woman said. “Play not the fool, sirrah, or you'll find more in the way of foolery than ever was in your reckoning. Hear you me?”

“I—I do,” King answered in a very small voice.

“See to't, then,” Cicely Sellis snapped. She made a small, clucking sound. “Come you here, Mommet.”

Cats didn't come when called. Shakespeare had known that since he was a little boy in Stratford. Cats did as they pleased, not as anyone else pleased. But Mommet trotted over to Cicely Sellis like a lapdog. The cat's contented buzz filled the parlor.

That frightened Sam King all over again. “God be my judge, mistress, I meant no harm,” he whispered.

The look the cunning woman gave him said
she
would judge him, and that God would have nothing to do with it. “Some men there are that love not a gaping pig,” she said, “some, that are mad if they behold a cat. As there is no firm reason to be rendered why he cannot abide a harmless necessary cat, so he were wiser to show mercy, and pity, than to sport with a poor dumb beast that knoweth naught of sport. Or think you otherwise?”

“No.” King's lips shaped the word, but without sound. He vanished into the bedchamber he shared with Shakespeare. Jane Kendall disappeared almost as quickly.

That left Shakespeare all alone with Cicely Sellis—and with Mommet. He could have done without the honor, if that was what it was. As she stroked the cat's brindled coat, he asked, “Go you to the arena to see bears baited, or bulls, or to the cockfights?”

To his relief, she didn't take offense, and did take the point of the question. Shaking her head, she answered, “I go not to any such so-called sports. I cannot abide them. I am of one piece in mine affections and opinions, Master Shakespeare. Can you say the same?”

“Me, lady? Nay, nor would I essay it, for my wits are all in motley, now of one shade, now another. And which of us is better for't?” Shakespeare asked. Cicely Sellis thought, then shrugged, which struck him as basically honest.

 

A
SHARP COUGH BROUGHT
Lope de Vega up short. He looked back towards Shakespeare, who advanced across the stage of the Theatre. “You attend not, Master de Vega,” Shakespeare said severely. “That was your cue to say forth your lines, and it passed you by. I had not known you as such an unperfect actor on the stage, who with his fear is put besides his part.”

“Nor am I such.” Lope bowed apology. “You pardon, sir, I pray you. 'Twas not fear put me out.”

“What then?” Shakespeare asked, still frowning. “Whate'er the reason, you must improve, else you'll appear not. Would you have the groundlings pelt you with marrows and beetroots and apples gone all wormy? Would you have them outshout the action, crying, ‘O Jesu, he does it as like one of these harlotry players as ever I see'?” The Englishman's voice climbed to a mocking falsetto.

“No and no and no.” Lope shook his head. That
harlotry
struck too close to the mark. “I fear me I find myself distracted—a matter having naught to do with yourself or with your most excellent
King Philip
.”

He wondered how much more he would have to say. But Shakespeare, after cocking his head to one side, got to the nub of it in two words: “A woman?”

“Yes, a woman,” Lope answered in some relief. “She hath made promises, made them and then kept them not. And yet she may. This being so, I am torn 'twixt hope and fury.”

He hadn't thought Catalina Ibañez would play him for a fool. He hadn't thought she
could
play him for a fool. But Don Alejandro's mistress had been all warmth and seductiveness when she didn't have to deliver, and had either kept from seeing him alone or been frustratingly cool when she did. It drove Lope mad: too mad to realize it might have been intended to do just that.

Will Kemp laughed. The clown pitched his voice high, as Shakespeare had: “If thou thinkest I am too quickly won, I'll frown and be perverse and say thee nay. So thou wilt woo.” He let it drop back to its usual register: “Sits the wind so?”

He'd summed it up more neatly than de Vega had on his own. “Yes, just so,” Lope answered. “What am I to do?”

“You are to have your lines as Master Idiáquez by heart, even an she be heartless,” Shakespeare told him. “Let not your honor as a man touch your honor as a player, or no player shall you be.”

“I understand,” Lope said contritely. “You have reason,
señor
. My private woe should not unsettle this your play.”

“As for the wench, a boot in the bum may haply work wonders, as hath been known aforetimes,” Kemp said. “And if you cannot cure her by the foot, belike you'll do't by the yard.”

He leered. Shakespeare snorted. So did the rest of the Englishmen in earshot. Lope scratched his head. He spoke English well, but every so often something flew past him. He had the feeling this was one of those times.

“I do know my lines,” he said, ignoring what he couldn't follow. “Hear me, if you will:

 

‘This cardinal,

Though from an humble stock, undoubtedly

Was fashioned to much honour. From his cradle

He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one:

Exceeding wise, fair-spoken, and persuading;

Lofty and sour to them that lov'd him not,

But to those men that sought him sweet as summer.

And, to add greater honours to his age

Than man could give him, he died fearing God.' ”

 

“In sooth, you have them,” Shakespeare agreed. “It were better, though, to bring them forth when called for.”

“And so I shall,” Lope promised. “Before God, I shall.”

“Before God, ay—we are ever before God,” Will Kemp said. “But can you stand and deliver before the groundlings? There's the rub.”

He couldn't mean he thought the groundlings a more important and more difficult audience than God . . . could he? No one could be that blasphemous. The English Inquisition would get its hooks into a man who dared say anything of the sort—would get them in and never let go again. An ordinary man, fetched before the inquisitors, would have no defense. But a player, Lope realized, just might. He could say he'd put the thought of his craft ahead of his soul for a moment. He probably wouldn't escape scot-free, but might avoid the worst.

“Let us try again,” Shakespeare said. “The more we work afore ourselves alone, the better we shall seem when the Theatre's full.”

“Or not, an God will it so,” Kemp said. “The best-rehearsed company will now and again make a hash of things.”

“I have myself seen the same, more often than I should wish,” Lope agreed.

“Ay, certes. So have we all,” Shakespeare said. “But a company less than well rehearsed will make a hash of things more than now and again. Thus I tell you, once more into the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the show up with our bungled lines. Disguise fair nature with hard-summoned art. When the trumpet's blast blows in your ears, then imitate the action of the Spaniard.”

“I need not imitate,” Lope pointed out.

Shakespeare made a leg at him. “Indeed not, Lieutenant. But as for you others, I'd see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start. Follow your spirit, and upon your cue cry, ‘God for Philip! Sweet Spain and Saint James!' ”

Richard Burbage had left the stage, probably for the jakes. Returning, he clapped his hands and said, “By God, Will, I've gone off to war with words less heartening ringing in my ears.”

“Never mind war,” Shakespeare said. “Let us instead piece together this
King Philip
. Take your places. We shall once more essay the scene.”

This time, Lope remembered his lines. He sent them ringing out into the empty Theatre. As he spoke and gestured, he tried to imagine the place full of noisy, excited people, all straining forward to catch his every word—and all ready to pelt him with whatever they had handy if
he came up dry, or simply if they didn't care for what he had to say. From everything he'd seen, English audiences had less mercy in them than their Spanish counterparts. When they scented weakness, they went straight for the kill.

Here, though, Shakespeare seemed satisfied. “Enough for now, methinks,” he said. “God grant we have time aplenty for further work herewith. The day's play, however, we must give at two o' the clock. That wherein we should be good betimes needs must yield pride of place to that wherein we must be good anon. Master Lope, gramercy for your work this day.”

“The pleasure is mine.” De Vega touched a finger to the broad brim of his hat in salute. The phrase was an English translation of a Spanish commonplace, but he meant it. “You—all of you—show me every day I am here what a company of players should be.”

“ 'Steeth, Master Lope, I take it as an insult that anyone should style me an exemplar,” Will Kemp growled. “Do you withdraw it, or will you give satisfaction?”

For a moment, de Vega thought he'd truly been challenged. Then he thought he might draw on the clown, to cure him of such insolence once for all. But, after a pause that couldn't have spanned two heartbeats, he drew himself up as if affronted. “I, give satisfaction, sirrah? Do you take me for a woman?”

The players laughed. Will Kemp's grin showed uneven teeth. “By my troth, no,” he answered. “D'you take me for Kit Marlowe?”

More laughter arose, the baying laughter of men mocking one another's prowess. “I am wounded,” de Vega said, and clapped both hands over his heart.

“Which only shows you know not where Kit'd wound you,” Kemp said, and clapped both
his
hands over his backside. That coarse, baying laughter redoubled.

Lope joined it. He'd admired—still did admire—Marlowe the poet. It was as if Marlowe the sodomite were some different creature, divorced from the other. Life would have been simpler were that true. But they both made up different parts of the same man. De Vega wondered, not for the first time, how God could instill such great gifts and such a great sin into the same flesh and spirit. He sometimes thought God did such things to keep mortals from believing they understood Him and getting an exaggerated notion of their own cleverness.

Does Marlowe's fall, then, save other men from sins of their own?
he
wondered.
If that be so, does it not make Marlowe like our Lord?
Lope shook his head. There was one bit of speculation his confessor would never hear. If it should reach an inquisitor's ears . . . No, Lope didn't want to think about that.

As Lord Westmorland's Men began going through the play they'd put on when the Theatre opened, de Vega walked out, swung up onto his horse, and rode back to London. This time, no one in the crowded tenements outside the wall troubled him: not beyond the usual catcalls and curses from behind his back. Ignoring those was always easier; trying to track down the folk who loosed them led only to frustration and fury.

At Bishopsgate, the Irish guards also recognized him for a Spaniard. From them, he got respect instead of scorn. Their sergeant, an immense man, made a clumsy leg at him. The common soldiers murmured in what might have been Irish or might have been what they reckoned English. Either way, it was unintelligible to Lope. He tipped his hat and rode on.

Not far inside the gate, he was struck by the spectacle of a handsome woman coming out of an ordinary with a cat perched on her left shoulder as if it were a sailor's bird. He reined in. “Give you good day, my lady,” he said, “and why, I pray you, sits the beast there?”

She gave him a measuring look. “Good day to you, sir,” she answered. Lope realized then she was a few years older than he; he hadn't noticed at first glance, as he would have with most women. Her smile held a certain challenge. “As for Mommet here—well,
porqué no?
”

Of course she would know him for a Spaniard by his dress, his looks, his accent. He laughed. “Why not indeed? What an extraordinary beast, though, to stay where you choose to set it.”

The cat—Mommet—sent him a slit-eyed green stare a good deal more dismissive than its mistress'. Its yawn displayed needle teeth and a pink tongue. The woman said, “What cat is not an extraordinary beast? Come to that, what man is not an extraordinary beast?”

Lope blinked. He was in love with Lucy Watkins. He was also in love with Catalina Ibañez, a love that tormented his soul—among other things—all the more because it remained as yet unconsummated. Even so, a woman who spoke in riddles could not help but intrigue him. Love of the body, yes. Love of the spirit—yes, that, too. But also love of the mind, especially for a man with a leaping, darting mind like Lope's, a love neither of his two present amours returned.

“Who are you?” he asked urgently.

He wondered if she would tell him. A modest woman wouldn't have. But then, a modest woman wouldn't have spoken to him in the street at all. “I'm called Cicely Sellis,” she answered, with no hesitation he noted. “And you, sir, are . . . ?”

With another woman, or with a woman of another sort, he would have given his rank and the rolling grandeur of his full name. To this one, he said only, “I am known as Lope de Vega.” He couldn't help bowing in the saddle and adding, “Very much at your service, Mistress Sellis.”

Mommet yawned again, as if to say how little his service meant. Cicely Sellis dropped him a token curtsy, careful not to dislodge the cat. “You are Master Shakespeare's friend,” she said.

He started to cross himself—it hadn't been a question, but a calm statement of fact. Arresting the gesture, he demanded, “How know you that?”

“No mystery.” Amusement sparkled in her eyes. “His lodging-house and mine own are the same, and full many a time hath he spoke your name.”

“Oh.” Lope wanted to ask what Shakespeare had said about him. Regretfully, he decided that wouldn't be a good idea. With a nod, he urged his horse forward. “I hope to see you again, Mistress Sellis.”

“May it be so,” she said, and English spring truly came home to Lope.