Ruled Britannia (5 page)

“Indeed yes, the play,” Lope said. “So much going on there, almost all at once.”

“Master Will don't write 'em simple,” the tireman's assistant agreed. “But he hath the knack of helping folk recall who's who, and meseems the crowd followed tolerably well.” Nodding, de Vega passed by. Edward glowered at the Englishman behind him. “And who are
you
, friend?”

Chaos reigned in the tiring room. Some of the players were still in costume; some had already returned to the drabber wear normal to men and boys of their class; and some, between the one stage and the other, wore very little. They took near nudity in stride, as Spanish actors would have done. The room was close with the reek of sweat and perfume and torch smoke.

Lope moved through as best he could, shaking hands, bowing when he had the space, and congratulating the players. Someone—he didn't see who—handed him a leather drinking jack. Sipping, he found it full of sweet, strong Spanish wine. The English were even fonder of it than his own folk, perhaps because they had to import it and couldn't take it for granted.

He bumped into a woman—someone's wife, he couldn't remember whose. “So sorry, my lady,” he said. “With your permission?” He bowed over her hand and kissed it. She smiled back in a manner that might have been encouraging.

“Watch out for Master Lope,” round-faced Will Kemp said behind him. “Lope the
loup
, Lope the
lobo
.” The company clown howled wolfishly. Raucous laughter rose. Lope joined it, the easiest way he knew to deflect suspicion. The woman turned to talk to an Englishman, so there was no suspicion to deflect, anyhow.
Así es la vida
, de Vega thought, and sighed.

He congratulated Burbage and the boy who'd played Rosalind. “I thank you kindly, sir,” the youth replied. In his powder and paint, he still
looked quite feminine—even tempting—but his natural voice, though not yet a man's, was deeper than the one he'd used on stage. He wouldn't be able to pretend to womanhood much longer.

At last, de Vega made his way to Shakespeare. The actor and playwright stood off in a corner, talking shop with darkly handsome Christopher Marlowe. Lope bowed in delight. “My two favorites of the English stage, here together!” he cried.

“Good day—or should I say good even, Master de Vega?” Shakespeare replied. “Have you met Master Marlowe here?” To Marlowe, he added, “Lieutenant de Vega writes plays in Spanish, and more than once hath trodden the boards with Lord Westmorland's Men as extra.”

“Indeed?” Marlowe murmured. His cool, dark eyes measured Lope. “How . . . versatile of him.” He nodded and bowed. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir.”

“We have met once or twice, sir, but how can I be surprised if you recall it not?” de Vega said. By the way Marlowe eyed him, though, he wondered if the Englishman ever forgot anything. Enrique, Captain Guzmán's servant, had that same too-clever-by-half look, and
he
never did.

But then Lope started talking shop with the English playwrights, and forgot everything else for a while. He didn't worry about spying. He didn't even worry about the pretty women in the room. What did any of that matter, next to the passion for the word, for the play, the three men shared?

 

A
TORCH GUTTERED
out, sending shadows swooping through the tiring room, filling a quarter of it with darkness, and adding the reek of hot fat to the crowded air. Christopher Marlowe clapped a hand to his forehead in one of the melodramatic gestures he used so naturally. “ 'Struth!” he burst out. “Would the poxy Spaniard never leave?”

Shakespeare stood several inches taller. He set a hand on the other playwright's shoulder. “However long he lingered, he's gone now, Kit. He's harmless, or as harmless as a man of his kingdom can be. Mad for the stage, as you heard.”

“Think you so?” Marlowe said, and Shakespeare nodded. Marlowe rolled his eyes. “And think you babes are hid 'neath cabbage leaves for their mothers to find?”

The tireman coughed. He wanted the room empty so he could lock
up the precious costumes and go home. Only a few people were left now, still hashing over what they'd done, what they might have done, what they would do the next time they put on
If You Like It
. Even Will Kemp, a law unto himself, took the tireman seriously. With a mocking bow to those who remained, he swept out the door.

Irked, Shakespeare stayed where he was. He snapped, “I know whence babes come—I know better than you, by God.” Even in the dim, uncertain light left in the tiring room, he saw Marlowe flush. The other poet chased boys as avidly as prickproud Lope went after other men's wives.

“All right, Will.” Marlowe visibly held in his anger. “You're no blushing maid—be it so stipulated. But he loves us not for ourselves alone. Were we wenches, then yes, mayhap. Things being as they are . . .” He shook his head.

“What, you reckon Lope Stagestruck an intelligencer?” Shakespeare almost laughed in his face. “Where's the reason behind that?”

“
Imprimis
, he's a Spaniard.
Secundus
, he's a man.
Tertius
, an you suspect a man not, he'll ever prove the viper who ups and stings you.”

He meant every word. Shakespeare saw as much. He let out a sigh as exasperated as the tireman's cough. “A pretty world wherein you must live, Kit, there within the fortress of your skull.”

“I
do
live,” Marlowe said, “and I purpose living some while longer, too. Were I so careless as you, I had died ten times over ere now. Quarrels are easy enough to frame: a swaggering bravo imagining an insult in the street, peradventure, or over the reckoning in a little room. You're a better man than I am. See to it your goodness harms you not.”

“Gentlemen,
please
,” the tireman said, something close to despair in his voice.

Shakespeare walked out of the Theatre, Marlowe in his wake. Autumn twilight came early, and was falling fast. Before long, the gray clouds overhead would turn black. With the play over, the streets around the Theatre were almost empty. As he started back toward London and his lodgings, Shakespeare said, “Well, the Spaniard's not about. What would you say to me you could not say within the spying rascal's hearing?”

“You make a mock of it,” Marlowe said. “One day you'll be sorry—God grant it be not soon. What would I say? I've said already more than I
would
say.”

“Then say no more, and have done.” Shakespeare lengthened his
stride; Marlowe had to half trot to try to keep up. Over his shoulder, Shakespeare added, “Enough real worries in the world—aye, enough and to spare—without the hobgoblins bubbling from the too fertile cauldron of your fears.”

“Damn you, will you listen to me?” Marlowe shouted. A limping old woman carrying a pail of water stared at him.

“Listen? How, when you will not speak, save only in riddles?” But Shakespeare stopped.

Marlowe took a deep breath. Slowly, deliberately, he let it out. “Hear me plain, then,” he said, and gave Shakespeare a mocking bow. “I should like you to meet a friend of mine.”

“A friend?” Shakespeare said in surprise. As far as he knew—as far as anyone in London knew—Christopher Marlowe neither had nor particularly wanted friends. He did have a great many acquaintances of one degree of intimacy or another, that being defined by how useful they proved to him.

He was almost as aware of the lack as were other folk. He hesitated before nodding, and added, “A man with whom I've been yoked in harness some little while.”

“Yoked in harness of what sort?” Shakespeare asked.

“Side by side, vile-minded lecher, not fore and aft,” Marlowe said. “ 'Tis a matter of business on which he's fain to make your acquaintance.” His shoulders hunched. He glared down at the ground. He was furious, and not trying hard at all to hide it.

Shakespeare judged he would burst like the hellburner of Antwerp if not humored. Marlowe in a temper was nothing to take lightly, so Shakespeare said, “I'll meet him, and right gladly, too, whosoever he may be. Bring him to my ordinary while I dine or sup, an't please you.”

“I'll do't,” Marlowe said, though he sounded far from pleased. If anything, he seemed angrier than ever.

In God's name, what now?
Shakespeare wondered. Now, instead of hastening on toward Bishopsgate, he stopped in his tracks. Marlowe was the one who kept striding on before also halting a few paces farther on. “I have said I will do as you would have me do, Kit,” Shakespeare said. “Wherefore, then, wax you wroth with me still?”

“I do not.” Marlowe flung the three words at him and started on again.

“What then?” Now Shakespeare had to hurry after him—either that or shout after him and make their talk a public matter for any who
cared to hear it. He asked the only question that occurred to him: “If not for me, is your anger for your ‘friend'?”

“It is.” Two more words, bitten off short.

“Here's a tangled coil!” Shakespeare exclaimed. “Why such fury for him?”

“Because he's fain to see you in this business,” Marlowe said sullenly.

By then, with the darkness coming on fast, with a few drops of drizzle falling cold on his hand, Shakespeare was beginning to lose his temper, too. “Enough of riddles, of puzzles, of conundrums,” he said. “Do me the honor, do me the courtesy, of speaking plain.”

“I could speak no plainer—because he's fain to see you in this business.” But then, unwillingly, Marlowe made it a great deal plainer: “Because he's fain to see you, and not me. Damn you.” He hurried off, leaning forward as if into a heavy wind.

“Oh, Kit!” Now Shakespeare knew exactly where the trouble lay. What he did not know was whether he could mend it. Marlowe had been a success in London before Shakespeare rose from performing in plays to trying to write them. Some of Shakespeare's early dramas bore Marlowe's stamp heavily upon them.
If a man imitate, let him imitate the best
, Shakespeare thought.

Marlowe remained popular even now. He made a living by his pen, as few could. But those who had given him first place now rated him second. For a proud man, as he surely was, that had to grate. If the “business” had to do with the theatre, if his “friend” wanted Shakespeare and not him . . . No wonder he was scowling.

“Wait!” Shakespeare called, and loped after him. “Shall I tell this cullion that, if he be your friend, the business should be yours?”

To his surprise, the other playwright shook his head. “Nay. He hath reason. For what he purposes, you were the better choice. I would 'twere otherwise, but the world is as it is, not as we would have it.”

“You intrigue me mightily, and perplex me, too,” Shakespeare said.

Marlowe's laugh held more bile than mirth. “And I might say the same of you, Will. Did you tender me this plum, I'd not offer it back again. You may be sure of that.”

Shakespeare was. In a cutthroat business, Marlowe owned sharper knives than most. Unlike some, he seldom bothered pretending otherwise. After a moment's thought, Shakespeare said, “God be praised, I am not so hungry I needs must take bread from another man's mouth.”

“Ah, dear Will. An there be a God, He might do worse than hear
praises from such as you. You're a blockhead, but an honest blockhead.” Marlowe stood up on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. “I'll bring the fellow to your ordinary at eventide tomorrow—I know the place you favor. Till then.” He hurried toward Bishopsgate. This time, the set of his shoulders said Shakespeare would have been unwelcome had he tried to stay up with him.

With a sigh, Shakespeare trudged down Shoreditch High Street after him. Just when a man looked like understanding Marlowe, he would do something like that. He could not praise without putting a poison sting in amongst the honey, but the kiss had been, or at least had seemed, real.

“Hurry up, hurry up,” guards at the gate called. “Get on in, the lot of you.” They were a mixed lot, Englishmen and rawboned Irish mercenaries. The Irish soldiers looked achingly eager to kill someone, anyone. Rumor said they ate human flesh. Shakespeare didn't care to find out if rumor were true. Not meeting their fierce, falconlike gazes, he scuttled into the city.

His lodgings were in Bishopsgate Ward, not far from the wall, in a house owned by a widow who made her living by letting out most of the space. He had his own bed, but two others crowded the room where he slept. One of the men who shared the chamber, a glazier named Jack Street, had a snore that sounded like a lion's roar. The other, a lively little fellow called Peter Foster, called himself a tinker. Shakespeare suspected he was a sneakthief. He didn't foul his own nest, though; nothing had ever gone missing at the lodging house.

“You're late today, Master William,” said Jane Kendall, Shakespeare's landlady. “By Our Lady, I hope all went well at the Theatre.” She made the sign of the cross. From things she'd said over the couple of years he'd lived there, she'd been a Catholic even before the Armada restored England's allegiance to Rome.

“Well enough, I thank you,” he replied. “Sometimes, when talking amongst ourselves after the play, we do lose track of time.” With so many people living so close together, secrets were hard to keep. Telling a piece of the truth often proved the best way to keep all of it from coming out.