The Playmaker (4 page)

“Very well, boy.” Master Southern addressed me for the first time since our interview began. “We shall put you on for board and lodging, and fourpence a week after trial. If it appears you will suit, we'll draw up the papers two weeks hence. Are we agreed?”

It seemed the best offer I could get. So we struck hands upon it, and I entered my term in hell.

In my brief years, I've noticed something about large business concerns that employ many laborers. When the masters are hard or deceitful, the workers unite against them. When the masters are fair, the workers—or apprentices, at least—turn upon each other. Motheby and Southern paid an honest wage for an honest day's labor, but they left the dockhands to look after themselves. Dockhands being of a rough cut generally, that put me in a bad way.

The first day, a Thursday, I was beaten under the pier at low tide by three of them. Then I was beaten above the pier at high tide by two. There was no malice in it, only contempt for my newness and rawness and a mistaken belief that I was ignorant of fighting. Not true; no boy growing up in your working-day English village is ignorant of fighting, and I had long ago learned to dodge the kicks aimed at me by James and Walter Hawthorne, my former master's pork-brained sons. Though not a strong boxer, I was naturally quick, and when forced to defend myself, I had been known to land a fortunate punch at a critical moment. But two or three bull-necked ruffians coming at me at once cast my small talent in self-defense to the wind.

Before, after, and in between beatings, I unloaded kegs of wine from the ships, trundled them into the warehouse, stacked them in ranks, and delivered them in barrows to nearby taverns. I slept on a rough sacking mattress nested among the other boys and awoke so sore that merely getting myself off the floor and into my clothes seemed labor enough for a Hercules. The beatings slacked off after
the first day, but two fellows named Jack worked me over on Saturday afternoon, just to keep up their form.

I could not count on their taking Sunday off from this recreation, so after church that day I took a long walk to avoid them. The sky hovered dank and drizzly, as flat as my future looked. I crossed London Bridge, but mist hung so thick over the river I could make out little of it. On the other side lay Southwark, where my aunt supposedly lived, and as I warmed up in a tavern on the south bank my thoughts turned to her. I was just miserable enough to consider any fate preferable to another week at Motheby and Southern.

In the smudgy light of the tavern lamps I took out my wallet and removed two of its papers, which I had taken to pondering in forlorn moments because they made me feel less alone. Both had belonged to my mother. One was a sonnet written to her. The other was a rubbing, such as children make when they lay a paper on raised letters or figures and brush lightly over it with slate.

I remembered well the first time I saw it, on a cold dripping day like this one. I was eleven, and recovering from a spell of croup that kept me in bed for upwards of a week. My fever had broken and I was feeling better, but restless, and so had pulled a chest of my mother's belongings from under the bed and was rummaging through it. It was full of things we seldom saw: a lace tablecloth, a cap she wore at her wedding. Not much of interest to me, but at the bottom of the chest, under a pair of fine yarn stockings, was a thin packet of letters tied with a blue ribbon. Among them was this rubbing.

It showed two circles, which appeared to be both sides of a medal. On one circle were the words “Watch and Wait.” The other displayed a cup in a disembodied hand, and over it arched the inscription
“Bibite ex hoc omnes.”
These of course were the words of our Lord at His last supper: “Drink ye all of it.”

I had stared long and hard at the image, wondering what such a strange device could signify. Then I looked at the packet of letters, which all seemed to be written in the same hand, small and neat. I turned over one of them and read the signature, Anne Billings—

Then my head jerked backward and my mother's voice above me cried, “Young mouse!” She had me by the hair, pulling so hard I thought my scalp might come off. “Nosing about in that which does not concern thee, hey?” She had a passionate nature, in spite of earnest efforts to keep control of it. She could skip like a child or scold like a fishwife. “Can I not keep some little thing to myself, without thy prying fingers seek it out?”

Directly she calmed down, and I tearfully begged her pardon, which she granted. But before going back to work, she pulled a chair up to our little fireplace and burned the letters one by one. I could still recall her face in the glow: her dark eyes and pert nose, and the soft girlish mouth that was made for smiling but seldom did, those days. After a while I asked, hesitantly, “Who is Anne Billings?”

I feared she would not answer, but after a long pause she did. “Your father's sister. She lives in Southwark, by London.”

“He had a sister?” This was news; as my father had no kin nearby, I had supposed him to be kinless.

“Aye. And perchance he still does.” Another silence followed.

“Where did you get the picture—of the hand with the cup—”

She held out an arm, with a sigh and a rueful smile. “Come hither, mouse.” I went at once, and nestled beside her on the bench, which was barely wide enough for both of us. “I will strike thee a bargain, and tell this if thou'lt ask me no more. You children had just turned four when he first went to London, and was gone for a month. He said it was a family matter, some business his sister had to settle with him. He came back with a medal around his neck. I made the copy, one night while he slept. Two months after his return he left again, and this time for good. Whether that medal had aught to do with it, I know not. But it was of the devil, somehow.” Tiny flames from the hearth fire danced in her dark eyes, bright with tears. “It was a devilish business.”

With such an opinion, I supposed she had burned the rubbing along with the letters. But later I found it, in a box with her most prized possessions. I took it to keep, with the notion in mind that there might be someone in Southwark who could tell me what it meant.

The tavern keeper had never heard of Anne Billings; nor had the strolling musician I encountered on the street, nor the maid who sold honey cakes in a nearby stall. By then the sun was setting and a thick fog had rolled up from the river, throwing a blanket of gloom upon Southwark. Wads of torchlight flickered past,
men and women brushed by me with muffled apologies or curses or no sound at all. I made my way along the bank, heading west. Anne Billings? Know you a lady hereabouts called Anne Billings? The name began to echo inside my own muddled head until it seemed I was asking the question of myself. Three brass helmets leapt out of the fog, so suddenly I made a little yelp, but they passed me by unseeing: members of the city watch patrolling the streets, as alike as mechanical men.

The evening chill seeped through my clothes. I wrapped my arms about me, shivering in my thin doublet and hugging the wallet that held those scraps of who I was. With heavy steps and a heavier heart, I turned and made my way back to the warehouse.

On Monday morning, after breakfast, I raised my eyes from a stack of empty kegs to see two apprentices approaching gleefully over the boards. The masters were nowhere in sight; I was trapped at the end of the pier and lacked the spirit to dodge them. My body quaked, a lump of flesh appealing to heaven for deliverance.

Deliverance came, and that swiftly. Into my head darted the words of Psalm 71. They lodged, they grew, and so filled my mouth that I had only to open swollen lips for the verses to roll out, on full-rounded syllables: “Deliver me, O God, out of the hand of the wicked, out of the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man!”

This stopped the cruel and unrighteous in their very tracks. Though it seemed a fair guess that scripture study did not take up
their free hours, they knew their Psalms, as all Englishmen did. The dilemma showed in their faces: here before them was a sniveling shrimp, begging for a wallop, but it might be inviting wrath from heaven to punch a mouth filled with the word of God.

“Let them be confounded and consumed that are adversaries to my soul! Let them be covered with reproach and dishonor that seek my hurt!”

My voice is strong, especially for a lad of my size, with a carrying power that could shiver the rafters of our cottage in Alford. Mother often commended its pleasing melody when I declaimed scripture indoors, while Susanna put her hands to her ears in protest. On the pier in a fishy April breeze, the words mounted up on eagle's wings and dove straight at my tormentors. They paused, they considered—and in a moment they backed away.

I tried not to look too obviously relieved.

My whispered prayer of thanks was interrupted by the sound of vigorous applause, which changed in tone as soon as I looked that way. A girl was straddling two of the upright piles that supported the dock. Though rather plump, she balanced easily, a market basket dangling from one arm and a long shawl from the other, whipping in the breeze. Once she had my attention, the clapping slowed to a steady pound of one hand against another in mocking compliment. Deliberately, I turned my back.

Later that day, as Mistress Southern served dinner from a brick fireplace the size of a hut, one of the boys sidled up to me: a stocky, moon-faced lad with freckles. “Saw you face down those
two on the dock. Ruffians, the lot of them. Clever work. Ralph Downing's my name.”

“Richard's mine.” I was devoting full attention to dinner. Indeed, I never devoted anything less than full attention to meals at Motheby and Southern, the best thing about working there. For the first time in months, I was getting enough to eat. I did take time to notice Ralph's ear, which had a chewed look, as though he had been on the wrong side of a sharp encounter. “‘Twas God's work,” I added, giving credit where it was due as I swallowed a mouthful of brown bread and cheese.

“Look you. I'm going over to Southwark on Saturday next. Would you come along?”

“For what?”

“Why—” He slid me a sideways look, appraising my wits. “A play, that's what. A play at the Rose. Only a penny gets you in.”

“Plays are of the devil. I'll none of them.”

Ralph jerked back, as though I had told him I bore the plague. “Call yourself a Londoner? But no, I hear the country in your voice. Full of pigs and cabbages, for all you talk like the Lord Mayor. Huh. I'll shug off, then.” And he did, having discovered that I was not worth an honest Londoner's time.

I understood what he meant about talking like the Lord Mayor only later. It happens that His Honor is opposed to all forms of the theater and never misses an opportunity to shut it down. He sees it as a school for vice, a seedbed of rebellion, and a thief of the laborer's time, which could be better spent elsewhere. My mother
shared this view, and it was her saying I quoted back to Ralph Downing with hardly a thought. My true opinion, however, was more complicated.

One of my first memories is of a play. I was only three years old, standing in the yard of the Royal Inn of Lincoln. It must have been a market day, for the inn yard was full, and all eyes turned upon a cleared space at one end. I clung to the hem of a man's brown wool cloak and caught the fever of anticipation in the crowd. Shut out of it, as all children are by their size, I whimpered and tugged at the cloak until two strong arms came to my aid. They swept me into the sky, settling me upon broad shoulders. From a paltry nothing, I was suddenly master of the inn yard, surveying the whole of the crowd as they gazed intently toward one spot.

This was a rude wooden platform holding a host of players, fantastically dressed: clowns and kings, demons and saints. I remember nothing of the play save that the devil was literally in it, capering about in red with fiery horns and forked tail and sent to hell in the end by means of a trapdoor. I remember being so startled at his disappearance that I cried out, and felt the shoulders beneath me shake with laughter. Such a laugh my father had— boisterous and catching, like a fever—bystanders turned to look at us and smiled.

I had seen no plays since then, for he was not there to take me. Yet though I agreed with the logic of my mother's arguments against the theater, I could never summon her passion. Despite my quick response to Ralph Downing, I found myself reconsidering his offer.

“I told you,” said Motheby to Southern, “He's a bright lad. We can put him on the Châlons run.”

“On the Châlons run?” said Southern to Motheby. “What's become of young Taylor, then?”

“Cut up in a dagger match with a lad from Coverdale's warehouse.”

“Ah youth, youth,” sighed Master Southern, shaking his head. “How lethal its folly.” They had paused, in the course of their customary morning walk, to watch me sweep the dock. After one week on this job, I had mastered its few demands; my muscles had hardened up already and I could stack and toss my share of kegs and make nearby deliveries without getting lost.

“But the Châlons run,” Southern continued. “That's a heavy charge. And he's not bound to us yet. Can we trust him?”

They studied me as I went on sweeping in a most trustworthy manner. I was eager for any chance to get off the docks. After a moment, Master Motheby raised his voice. “Look you, boy—”

I straightened to full height, even stretching a little as I held the broom upright. “Sir?”

“You see that ship.” He pointed to a long double-masted vessel—a galleass, as I had learned to call it, rocking gently on the current. “‘Tis loaded with a priceless cargo we receive once per fortnight: burgundy from the Châlons vineyards of France.”

“Very choice,” put in Southern. “Very select,” his partner agreed, and they both appeared to
swell like a pair of roosters. “And who do you suppose has the sole right to import it to England's blessed shore?”

I appeared to ponder this question. “Could it be you, sirs?”

“The same. And, marry, 'twas your friend Peter Kenton who secured us that right.” I thought to remind him that I had never met Master Kenton, but considered it better to look as delighted as they obviously felt.