The Playmakers (6 page)

To get away from
Her,
he kept thinking, as he struck out at a vigorous pace.
And that child.

No, wait, the word was
children now! Twins had arrived, would you believe? My God, from
one to three children in one leap. Is that possible? What are you
doing to me, Lord? What did I do to deserve this?

I’m better off out of
there,
he thought, as the miles and the hours passed.

Better off.

Better off.

I’m better off out of
there.

The phrase had been running through his mind
all day, and now it positively bounced around his head as he
splashed the freezing water on his face, arms and chest.

Better off. I’m better
off,
he thought, as the snap-cold water peeled away the
grime and cleaned the blood from the wound on his temple.

Better off. I’m better
off,
he thought, as he held a piece of the ice to his
forehead, stimulating a shocking but brief surge of pain which,
when it faded, mercifully took away the thumping headache of his
hangover.

“I’m better off! I’m better off without you
all,” he shouted, the words bouncing across the water and echoing
through the thin poplars adjoining the creek. “Better off, do you
hear? Better off!”

There was silence.

He looked back into the still water to see
the reflection of William Shakespeare.

The New William
Shakespeare!

Yes! The New Shakespeare,
now freed from the tentacles of that harridan; now marching down a
different and exciting road on the journey of life; for the first
time, taking the route decided by him, and not decreed by others.
Or determined by circumstance. Or engineered by
trickery.

Why,
he thought,
even his mother had given up on him
now.

And for the first time in the day he felt
acutely sad.

She had been his only supporter. She had
backed him through the shock of Anne Hathaway’s declaration of her
pregnancy, through the tragedy of Anne Whateley’s suicide, through
the grim facade of a wedding ceremony and the joyless union that
followed.

But now she had withdrawn her support,
too.

He took a deep breath and expelled it. That
part hurt. The fact that his mother had given up on her oldest son,
who loved her dearly.

And that she had demonstrated it, too, by
hurling the symbolic pot - the pot that his screeching wife had
used as her principal weapon in the minor skirmishes and the major
battles that had constituted the war known as their marriage.

That was the final, deepest cut.

“She cut me to the quick,” he murmured to
himself.

But, in doing so,
he
reflected, brightening up a little,
she has cut
the rope holding me back.

He looked down into the still stream. Peering
back at him was the watery reflection of the New William
Shakespeare.

He studied the face.
Not
bad,
he thought. The beard had started to fill out, the
pimples had gone, the seductive brown eyes would look even better
once the red lines, etched in the night before by numerous tankards
of the Stratford Arms’ finest ale, had disappeared. The nose was
developing a sort of regal nobility.

Not a bad face,
he
thought.
Not a bad face at all.

Certainly better than the
face of the gargoyle next to it …

The gargoyle?

He shook his head, startled.

He thought he had spotted it a moment before
out of the corner of his eye, but tried to convince himself he was
seeing things - an understandable reaction after the physical and
emotional pounding he had taken over the last twenty-four
hours.

But this time he flicked his eyes slightly to
the right, and there, in the water, adjacent to the splendid,
confident visage of the New Shakespeare, shimmered another
face.

The face of, well, not to put too fine a
point on it, a gargoyle. Like the type he had seen poking out from
the corner of a forbidding Gothic church.

It had a huge mouth containing a handful of
misshapen teeth, large almond-shape eyes with half-closed lids, a
squashed nose with two giant nostrils turned outwards for all the
world to peer up, an unruly thatch of flaxen hair, and a giant pair
of ears, one of which was bent forward.

The New Shakespeare recoiled from the vision
in the water, frantically spun his head, and looked over his right
shoulder. There, but an inch away, was the real version of the
gargoyle’s face, leering at him.

Shakespeare jumped back with fright, his left
foot slipping on the icy rocks, and he tumbled backwards into the
water. He landed flat on his back and disappeared under the
shallows, and as the icy water burrowed into his skin, he concluded
that this was not the start to the redefined life he had envisaged
for the New Shakespeare.

He lifted his head out of the water and wiped
his eyes, to see that the gargoyle was now itself laughing. Or at
least giving the impression of laughing. Its mouth was wide open
and its body shook with mirth as it pointed at him. But no sound
was being emitted from the black cavern of a mouth. He could also
see that this awful ugly head was actually stuck on top of a tiny,
ugly body. The figure was approximately a yard tall, with short,
stubby legs, and tiny arms, at the end of which was a pair of hands
that somehow matched large open palms with roly-poly truncated
fingers.

It was dressed in a bizarre costume of
pantaloons and top, made of silk in a pattern of red and white
diamonds, with a yellow ruff around its neck. It wore a big leather
belt. A small pair of leather bootees peaked out from under the
flowing trousers.

“Who … what … er, who are you?” Shakespeare
scrambled to his feet, his voice quivering partly from fright and
partly as a result of his unexpected icy bath.

There was another roar of laughter, coming
from behind the gargoyle, somewhere amongst the forest of
poplars.

And whereas the gargoyle’s laugh had been a
weird, silent pantomime, this was a deep, resounding bassoon of a
laugh. A laugh, Shakespeare reckoned, that would have to come from
a much bigger body. A laugh that sounded as if it had been
generated from the depths of a sizeable stomach, fuelled by air
from prodigious lungs, and expelled through a throat well lined
with cheap wine residue and roughened by inhalation of England’s
new social pastime, tobacco.

His previously shattered and drenched
confidence in the skills of the New Shakespeare was given a boost
when he looked past the gargoyle to see just such a source of
laughter slowly heading toward him.

The stomach was not only sizeable, it was
enormous, a big red cummerbund stretching itself to the limit to
cover the mighty girth and give the panting trousers some sense of
decency. The trousers were brown, the elephantine shirt a greasy
white, the waistcoat yellow, and over these was draped a massive
brown cape that looked like the result of two enormous tents having
been stitched together. A magnificent hat, trimmed with a piece of
silk the same slashing red as the cummerbund, sat jauntily atop the
imposing figure.

The giant held a solid piece of Blackwood
beautifully fashioned into a walking stick, with a large silver cap
at one end. He used this device to both assist his progress and
accentuate his laughter by periodically jabbing it in the air.

A pair of calf-high leather boots covered
surprisingly tiny feet, which picked their way through the rocks
and mud.

“Ha-ha-ha,” roared the laugh. “He can’t tell
you who he is. He can laugh or express any emotion you wish, but
not in the way your or I do, for he is condemned to eternal silence
- as you have just seen. But he can mime beautifully, especially if
there is a tankard of ale passing by in the hands of a well-endowed
serving wench. He knows everything you say. But, sadly, he cannot
tell you his name.”

“Well, I …” Shakespeare moved to say.

The big man cut off any reply with a wave of
the stick. “However, there there’s no finer comedian, no better
joker, no funnier man that’s travelling the roads these days, I’ll
warrant you that,” he said, his big hazel eyes sparkling.
“Although, looking at you now my friend, and having just witnessed
your performance in these icy waters, you might be a challenger for
his position.”

At the mention of this, the gargoyle looked
at the big man, frowned, clenched his fists and moved at
Shakespeare with a menacing motion.

“Easy, easy, Soho,” said the big man, pushing
him gently back with the cane. “I’m just teasing.”

The gargoyle dropped his aggressive pose and
the big man moved forward with the outstretched hand of
greeting.

Shakespeare could see the face clearer now -
it was a face of epic proportions, appropriately matching the
mountainous girth. It was round, it was red, it was cheery. The
puffed cheeks glowed. The bulbous proboscis was not so much a nose
but a fleshy morass of facial mud flats in which flowed a delta of
inter-connecting red veins. The wild whiskers flew in every
direction.

“First up, I would recommend you get out of
that stream, young man,” came the hearty voice.

“I am! It’s cold.”

“Exactly, and I have it on good authority
that cold water weakens the spine. You don’t want to end up like
Soho here, do you?” Shakespeare looked at him, astonished, as he
stepped out of the water. The mighty laugh erupted from the belly
and echoed across the creek again. “Just joking,” he said. “Poor
old Soho, alas, was dealt one of life’s wild cards at birth. But I
have no more loyal an employee. Allow me to introduce myself, I am
Rufus J. Budsby, entertainment entrepreneur … raconteur … and bon
vivant.”

The French reference was lost on Shakespeare,
whose studies had been limited to modest Latin and whose knowledge
of France was restricted to the understanding that they were
Protestant England’s worst enemy, especially as their monarchs
stuck assiduously to the dangerous faith he himself had been
brought up on - Catholicism.

“Bon ..?” said Shakespeare.

“Vivant,” added the big man, rolling the word
up from his tummy. “I enjoy life.” And so saying, he began to
unscrew the silver cap from the Blackwood stick. It came off, to
reveal a thin, corked silver tube secreted in a hollow in the top
of the stick. He pulled the cork out and proceeded to drink some
sort of liquid from the tube. After two swallows, he proffered the
tube.

“Whisky?” he said. “It’s an engaging little
spirit out of Scotland, also known as the ‘water of life’. It’ll
warm you up.”

“No thanks,” said Shakespeare wanly.

“So, I’ve given you my name and a brief
account of my life, what is yours?”

“Oh, yes,” said Shakespeare, stepping
forward, confusedly wiping his hands on his trousers, and shaking
the big man’s hand, “William Shakespeare.”

“And you are a ..?”

“Ah, leather worker.”

“And ..?"

“Er, lover of fine ale.”

“And ..?”

“Um.”

There were several seconds silence as the two
men stared at each other and Shakespeare groped for a third point
to adequately round out his own trilogy of endeavour.

Finally, the notion came to his head -
of course, he knew what he was now!
He
cleared his throat.

“And free man! That’s it, free man. I am the
New William Shakespeare. The born-again William Shakespeare. The
Shakespeare ready to take on the world.”

“Excellent!” said Budsby, shaking the hand of
his new associate warmly. “Excellent. I can use your talents Mr New
William Shakespeare. Look over there.”

He nodded to an area a hundred yards
downstream, where, at the narrowest and shallowest point of the
creek, seven horse-drawn carts and carriages were slowly fording
the cold, listless water. The horses, a collection of chestnuts,
piebalds and blacks of varying ages, were hooked together in twos,
and stuck wearily at their task of pulling a series of brightly
painted wagons. The clatter of their hooves over the stones mixed
with the ring of banging pots and pans hanging off the last
wagon.

In the distance, in the fading afternoon
light, Shakespeare could just make out that the lead wagon had a
large sign on its side.

As he strained to make sense of it, the big
man spoke up. “Let me tell you what it says,” he said, as he put
the whisky tube back in the stick, and screwed the silver cap on.
“It reads, ‘Rufus J. Budsby presents for your enjoyment and
edification his leading troupe of Mummers’.”

“Mummers?” said Shakespeare.

“We dance, we sing, we juggle, old boy,” he
said.

“Oh, I see.”

“We have fun, don’t we, Soho?” he added,
ruffling the gargoyle’s hair. “We go from village to village,
enhancing the otherwise dull lives of the good residents with our
skills, our humour, our athleticism.”

“Athleticism?” said Shakespeare
incredulously, staring at the giant.

“Well,” said Budsby, patting his rounded
stomach, “not my athleticism, as such. I leave that to my
artistes.” He rolled this last word out as ‘arteests.’

“We amaze, we intrigue, we astonish,” the big
man continued. “Surely you’ve seen us? Where are you from?”

“Stratford. Just up the road.”

“Ah-ha! Performed there only yesterday, in
that muddy little paddock at the south end of town. You were not
amongst the enthusiastic audience?”

“Yesterday was not a very good day for
me.”

“So I see,” said the big man, pointing at the
cut on Shakespeare’s temple with his stick. “I therefore take it
that is why you are here, beside a cold stream, all alone,
endeavouring to clean the grime and blood and, dare I suggest, the
memories away?”