The Playmaker (2 page)

My progress slowed as the crowd thickened and vendors pushed their wares at me: goodwives offering apples and sausages, noisy apprentices hawking every sort of useless trinket, a fishmonger who all but hit me over the head with a flounder. I hesitated before a pastry seller, moved on a few steps, drifted back, and finally laid out a half-pence from my carefully guarded hoard for a small meat pie. The seller would swear only that it was meat, and would not say what kind, but my hunger was such that I gobbled half of it straightaway, then wrapped the rest in my handkerchief. I had learned to stretch food as long as possible and besides, half was all I could hold. Five days of eating catch-as-catch-can on the road had shrunk my stomach to the size of a fist.

“The mighty Benjamin! A farthing will make him dance, good folk, only a farthing!” A lean man in leather made this cry in a hoarse voice as he twirled a red stick over his head. Looming shadow-like behind him stood the biggest bear I had ever seen, tied to a stout pole set in the ground. I stopped to gawk at him as a nursemaid with two squealing children in tow handed a farthing to his keeper. Then the beast turned his head my way.

His eyes caught and held me. A bear's eyes are black and tiny as beads, or so they appear in the vastness of a round, furry face.
With his frayed leather collar attached to the chain that secured him, this one appeared more comical than dangerous: a grandfather of bears with dark brown fur silvered at the tips. As his keeper tapped the ground with the red stick, Benjamin shuffled through a lumbering dance, drawing a circle of onlookers. Once the performance ended, he took the nuts and crusts thrown to him with lordly indifference. But to me, he smiled.

Or perhaps the smile was only a fancy, for the moment I imagined seeing it, it was gone. But one thing sure: in the commotion of Smithfield market, in the shrill of vendors and din of penned-up livestock, it was me the beast sought out. The glint in those buttony eyes drew me in, and I was hardly aware of my own feet until I stood scarcely a yard from him. Then, quickly and without malice, he lifted a heavy paw and raked the knitted cap off my head. I felt the force behind that blow, and knew that only a slight shift in aim could have taken off my face. A rude laugh went up from the onlookers roundabout.

“Nah, nah, young master,” said the keeper, easing me back with his stick, “Mind ye no' step too close. 'E's fiercer than 'e looks, aye, Benjamin? Give yon lad his covering back.”

The bear had set my cap on his own head, to the vast amusement of the crowd. My face burned, for I realized I had been cozened into the show.

“Here, Benjamin.” The laughter died as my voice rang out, steady as nerves alone could make it. A quarter of the meat pie trembled in my outstretched palm; his nose twitched as the smell
reached it. “Swap my cap for what's of more use to you, and let us be friends.”

The offer met with approval, both from the bear and the onlookers. “There's a bold lad,” ran the general refrain, while Benjamin gently cadged the morsel in his cracked yellow claws and suffered the cap to be lifted off his head by his keeper's stick. The man renewed his cries in praise of “The mighty Benjamin! A farthing will make him dance. …” I adjusted my pack again and gave the bear a last look. But his eyes were restless, already seeking out another cap to lift from an unwary head.

Directly before me loomed the thick gray walls of the city and the towering arch of Newgate. A stony chill fell upon me as I passed through the gate, trailing its long finger down my back as I moved out of its shadow. Then I stepped into a broad swathe of sunlight and blinked with amazement, overcome for the moment. I had arrived: this color, this clamor, this dust, stink, and roar, was London.

As I gazed around me like an idiot, a hard object struck the side of my head and bounced on the cobbled street. It was a piece of biscuit, as hard as any stone. “Ahoy, green lad!” called a coarse voice above my head. I glanced up to a row of narrow, barred windows, where a hand on a hairy forearm was waving. I could scarcely make out a face in the shadows. “You want a job?” Immediately the neighboring windows thronged with the thieves and ruffians of Newgate Prison, beseeching me to fetch them nuts and cheese and pints of ale, jeering when I shook my head and backed away.
“Watch your feet, boy,” shouted one, “or we'll look to see you here with us!”

Such warnings were wasted on me. Though poor, I was well brought up and incorrigibly honest. Or so I thought at the time.

I was scarcely out of earshot from the gaol when a shop girl danced up to me, slender and graceful at a distance but riddled with pockmarks close up. Braying through horsy teeth, she shook a crosstree before my face, its branches rattling. “Beads! Wooden beads! Brass beads! Did you ever see the like? Beads for your lady-love!”

“I have no lady-love,” I said, my head spinning with all the new sights packed into it. Otherwise I would have realized that she knew that already. I was not much to look at—never tall, and now underfed, with wide staring eyes that made me seem younger than my fourteen years.

“No lady-love? A likely fellow such as you?” Even I caught the mockery in this; as I moved to pass her, she added quickly, “Your mother, then. Your mother would want to know you've not forgot her.”

I spun around. My mouth opened but no sound emerged— exactly as if an invisible hand had closed over my throat and squeezed hard. This was an affliction that had beset me since childhood: in moments of extreme feeling, I literally could not speak. Mother used to say that my eyes spoke for me at such times, but if they talked now, it was not in a language the bead seller understood. Her pitted forehead wrinkled in bewilderment as I labored to spit out two words. “H-how m-m-much?”

“Ha'penny for the wood, twopence for the brass.”

I groped in the leather pouch at my belt and came up with a penny, which I offered to her. She looked at it with suspicion, as though I'd shaved it. “But it's two for the—”

I pointed to a string of painted wooden beads whose colors— blue and white with a soft, pearly luster—pleased me most.

“But I can't change a penny,” she whined.

“K-k-keep it.” I plucked the string of beads from their hook and turned away. My mother was barely a week in her grave.

I gripped the beads so hard they touched bone, thinking, I'll not forget you, ever. Nor desert you. Ever.

Not like
he
did.

My mother's illness was short, which may have been a blessing. One day she was queasy, the next faint; the third she took to her bed, and four days later departed this life for the next. Sir John Hawthorne, whom she had served as housekeeper, was not generous with the time he allowed his servants to be off work; he seemed to begrudge even the week she took to die, to say nothing of the labor lost by my sister, Susanna, and me while we tended her. Mother fretted over burdening us. Poor lady—I would have traded a year in purgatory for each additional day that I could sit by the bed, to hold her hand and spoon broth between her lips and sing back the Psalms she had taught me.

Rebekah Malory was her name. Rebekah Malory, Rebekah Malory—oft on my journey to London I caught myself saying it aloud, as if the sound alone could keep some part of her living still.

Sir John offered the position of housekeeper to Susanna at half
the pay plus board. But there was no place for me, who had served him as a stable boy since I was old enough to shovel dung. All of England was suffering hard times after three years of bad harvests, and Sir John had no choice but to let me go. Not a tender man, but fair in his way, he'd slipped a silver sixpence into my palm with a furtive, sideways motion, as if his right hand truly did not know what the left was doing. “No hard feelin's, Richard, and I'm sorry about yer mother, God rest her soul, but the truth is you've been a burden for the last twelvemonth. I'd give you a hoe and set you in the field, but there's three lads had to be uprooted even there, you see. London's the place; I've been there twice meself. A word to the wise: don't ever eat with a fork. It's a fiendish device brought on us by the French, to make honest Englishmen poke out their eyes.” Then he sent me off with an encouraging slap on the back that rattled my shoulder blades.

So I had turned my face toward London, only to be knocked off my course, moments after arriving, by a few chance words about my mother. For at least an hour after the encounter with the bead seller I wandered aimlessly, seeing much, understanding little, too confounded even to get my bearings and ask directions to Abbot Lane. Somewhere in the neighborhood of St. Paul's, two passing boys spotted the beads dangling from my hand.

“Yah!” piped one, a lad no older than twelve. “A murdering papist, then!”

“He's some gall, ha'nt he?” remarked his companion, “Waving a rosary about as if he'd a right to.”

I hastily tucked the beads between the buttons of my doublet. “‘Tis no rosary,” was my protest. “I just bought them—”

But my explanation landed on deaf ears; these lads were in search of adventure, not enlightenment. Hearing in my voice the broad accents of the country, they fell upon me with a cry, not reckoning on the pack that held all my possessions. I swung the same, and caught the larger of the two square on his ear with all the force of its contents, which included a New Testament, a copy of Horace, and a Lyly's Latin grammar. I dealt the other boy a blow to the stomach with my stable-hand fist, and when he doubled over, I dodged away and sprinted down the busy cobbled street. I was not quite so puny as I looked, and necessity lent me speed.

After three or four turns down side streets I had shaken their pursuit and got myself winded as well as lost. A narrow alley beside an eel-seller's stall offered a place of rest and concealment while I took another look at those beads. Four blues alternated with two whites all the way around the string. It was not the proper sequence for a rosary, and the thought that anyone would take me for a Catholic stunned me. But then, I had never been a stranger before. Everyone in my home town knew me; in London, no one did. For all that anyone knew, I might be a Spanish agent, a cutpurse, a conspirator, a grave-robber, a rowdy, or any sort of public nuisance. Some might find it exhilarating, to start over and cast themselves anew in any mold they chose. But the very thought frightened me.

When I could breathe easier, I took out my wallet—nothing
more than a strip of soft leather folded once lengthwise and then in thirds across. In it were some personal papers, including a testimony from the rector of our village, which began, “To the reader: Be it known that Richard Malory, late of Alford in Lincolnshire, is of honest disposition and industrious habits …” I read the entire letter in that stinking London alley, as though to reassure myself that I was indeed the boy who could read Caesar and write a fair hand and quote scripture like a divinity student. Thus affirmed, I replaced the letter in my wallet, added the beads, folded it all up carefully, and tucked it away in my doublet. I finished off the last of the meat pie, washing it down with a half-pennyworth of ale, and set forth at last on my business.

On the day before she died, my mother had given me some words of counsel. Her hot hand seemed to weigh even now on my sleeve, gripping with unexpected force as she whispered, “When you get to London”—I leaned close, for her voice was failing and she had to rest after every phrase—“you must find … Martin Feather. On Abbot Lane, in Cheapside. Whether he's still there… I know not. But he was there … four years ago.”

Four years ago was when she heard last from my father, who abandoned us when Susanna and I were very small. To say that she had heard from
him
may be overstating the case—we heard only from ten shillings sent by the hand of one Martin Feather, attorney. The money was not talkative; it merely muttered that my father, Robert Malory, was in London, at least at that time, and had come by a fair sum, which he entrusted to a lawyer to pass on to
his family. These tokens of support came to us now and again in the years following his departure, prompted either by a generous nature or a guilty conscience. But after the ten shillings sent by way of Martin Feather, the trickle had dried up altogether.

We knew nothing of this Martin Feather beyond his occupation and address, and could not guess his relation to my father. If I could not find him, there was one other possible source of aid. “If all else fails …,” Mother had whispered, “you may seek out your aunt.”

“Anne Billings?” I asked, hesitantly.

“Aye,” she said. “Anne Billings of Southwark. But do not apply to her unless you are starving, or—” Here she broke off in a coughing fit, and when she was quiet again I feared to pursue the subject. There was no love between her and my father's sister, though the meat of their quarrel was a mystery to me. Martin Feather sounded more promising: if nothing else, an attorney would be a useful man to know in London. Mother hoped for more—she hoped that the attorney would take me on as a clerk of some sort. I suppose she shared in the fond hopes of mothers everywhere that her boy should become a man of some account; a lawyer would do. Her family had respectable roots and she had seen to it that I received the best education our little village in Lincolnshire could supply. As a result I shined up well against the country oafs, but Lincolnshire is not London. This became plain to me once I began asking directions of Londoners and received, from all manner of folk down to the lowliest apprentice, that unmistakable look that a superior being bestows upon a … country oaf.

I turned east under the shadow of St. Paul's Cathedral, with its towering walls and buttresses. Just beyond St. Paul's, the narrow cobbled lane widens into Cheapside—the backbone of London, with counting houses, taverns, and shops of every description. The businesses are located at street level, with living quarters in the second or third storeys that jut out over the street and cut off great slices of sunlight.

Cheapside ends in three forks. Between two of these rises the Royal Exchange: a huge brick building with a lofty tower and wide doors where merchants and buyers pour in and out like ants, all day long. In this neighborhood I finally located Abbot Lane: one of the countless narrow, unpaved byways that make London a maze to rival the Minotaur's. The lane reeked with the slops of kitchen and sewer; I wondered how anyone could live in such a stench. Taking shallow breaths, I groped my way in the gloom to a half-timbered house with a red door and an outside staircase. The steps ended on a landing, where a small brass plate quietly announced that Martin Feather, Gentleman, dwelled within. Trembling with exhaustion and hunger and no little fear, I lifted the latch on the oak door and let myself into a cold, empty gallery with wide windows overlooking the street below.