The Secret of the Rose

by Sarah L. Thomson

  I finished one tabard and picked up another. Below us Master Alleyn’s voice boomed from the stage.

  “I hold the fates bound fast in iron chains,

  And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about,

  And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere,

  Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.”

  Magnificent, his rich voice rolling forth like a dark, deep river. Magnificent, but absurd. No one held the fates captive, no one spun Fortune’s wheel at his own will. Not Tamburlaine the barbarian king nor Will the tireman’s son. We were all who we had been born to be.

  But I had not been born to be Richard, a playmaker’s servant boy, and yet here I sat, in my breeches and doublet, sewing costumes in the playhouse, and no one suspected my duplicity. If my new life as Richard was so easy, what did that say of my old life as Rosalind? Was that the secret of the Rose—that none of our lives were any more real than a part played on Master Henslowe’s stage?

  We had been sewing quietly for some little time when Will spoke again, and now his voice was more wistful than angry. “They show foreign lands on that stage every day, and people crowd in to see it. But ’tis all a show, ’tis nothing. When there are true lands to explore, lands where no one has ever set foot, how could anyone be content to molder away here?” His gaze went up over the roofs of the galleries to the clear sky, though his hands never faltered in their quick, neat work.

  I knew what it was to long for something like that, something beyond my reach. The iron band inside me loosened suddenly and, released from its pressure, my heart seemed to turn liquid and gush out into the hollow spaces of my chest. I wished I could speak, to tell Will that I understood a little of what he felt. But I was no playmaker like Master Marlowe, no player like Master Alleyn, to let words roll easily and lightly off my tongue.

  “You think it foolish, no doubt.” His eyes were back on his sewing.

  “No, in truth—”

  “There, ’tis done.” He bit the thread off deftly between his teeth. “Why, you’re finished as well. You are wasted as a servant, Richard; you should find a place as a tailor’s apprentice. I’ll repay you for your help one day.”

  I thought to tell him there was no need of repayment, but he was already getting to his feet, folding the tabards neatly and setting the skirt on top. Then he held out a hand to me.

  “Many thanks, Richard.”

  His skin was smooth and warm.

  “I hope you get your wish, Will Green,” I said to him. His eyes were blue, like cornflowers wet with rain. He looked a little puzzled at my earnestness, as well he might, and I blushed suddenly, my cheeks painfully hot. What must he be thinking? I tugged my hand free, muttered a graceless farewell, and hurried down the gallery stairs.

  How could I have forgotten, even for a moment, that I was no longer Rosalind? That Will Green saw a servant boy when he looked at me, and a fool of one at that? Did I think I could hide a woman’s heart under a man’s doublet? Did I think I could keep up this lie when convenient, and discard it when I chose?

  I scolded myself all the way back to Master Marlowe’s lodgings. It was better than crying in the streets.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SEPTEMBER 1592

  Not many days after my first meeting with Will, I woke in the night to find that I’d drunk too much with dinner. Now the ale was making itself felt. There was a chamber pot, of course, but to use it was out of the question. If Master Marlowe were to wake and find me crouching rather than standing over the pot, it would be the end of all my concealment.

  The nights had taken on a touch of real chill, and I lay for some time with the blanket clutched to my chin before I gave up and admitted that I must slip outside to the privy, or I would never be able to sleep for the rest of the night.

  All was dark and quiet in Master Marlowe’s room. As was usual, he had not come home by the time I’d gone to bed. But it was pitch black outside now, and the streets were silent. Even Master Marlowe would not be abroad this late. He must have come in while I was sleeping. Moving quietly so as not to wake him, I pulled on my breeches, carried my shoes until I could sit on the stairs to put them on, and dashed to the privy in the yard to take care of my needs.

  Back inside, I was preparing to climb the stairs when the front door to the shop shifted slightly as if touched by a breeze. It had been left unlatched.

  Master Marlowe was usually the last one in at night. He must have carelessly forgotten to lock the door behind him. I went to do it myself, but paused as I heard the mutter of voices close by, as if men were standing on the doorstep. Thieves! My hand darted to fasten the latch and shut them out, but then I recognized the voice that was speaking.

  “I’ve no time for it now. I’ve a new play to finish.”

  It was Master Marlowe.

  “Shall I tell the hunchback so?” The other man had a smooth, gentle voice, tender as a woman’s.

  “What’s the need for it, Pooley?” I had never heard Master Marlowe sound like this—exhausted, humble, almost pleading. “We burned the Spanish ships on the sea, and France is half our friend. Who is there that threatens us now? And I’ve work to do.”

  “What a poor fool of a poet you are after all, Kit.” That soft voice should have been soothing to listen to, but somehow it was not. It sounded as if the speaker knew a secret that made a mock of the rest of the world. “Did you think you could leave the hunchback’s service any time you chose?”

  “I have other men will speak for me,” Master Marlowe said sharply. The second man laughed.

  “Do you think your highborn friend will save you? Poor, fond Kit. Dedicate your poems to him by all means, but do not trust him to keep you from having your conscience scraped clean if you cross the hunchback’s will. Look here.” Through the crack between the door and the frame, I could see the dim glow of a horn lantern. “My master did that to me, stretched me on the rack just to find out what I knew. And I was working for him at the time, mind you.”

  “I thought you were working for the Queen of Scots,” Master Marlowe said coldly.

  I had backed away from the door as quietly as I could, thinking to creep up the stairs so that Master Marlowe would not catch me listening to his conversation. But at this sentence I froze in shock.

  Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth’s cousin Mary, who was a Catholic? They said she had plotted against Elizabeth’s crown and her life. But was it true? True enough, at any rate, that Elizabeth had executed her for it.

  And Master Marlowe, who was a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh’s, just out of the Tower—he knew a man who’d worked for her?

  Pooley laughed, as if it were a joke to hear himself all but accused of treason.

  “Ah, well, it was one of them,” he answered lightly. “Perhaps even both. You are always working for someone in this business, Kit, do not forget. I’ll speak with you soon.” His voice grew fainter as if he were walking away.

  The door swung inward. The light from the lantern in Master Marlowe’s hand fell on me.

  Shock held us both transfixed for the space of a heartbeat. Then, before I could move or speak, Master Marlowe had dropped the lantern, which went out as it hit the ground, took three steps inside, and had one hand clamped around my arm. There was the faint silky whisper of sharpened metal sliding from a sheath.

  “What dost mean, overlistening our speech?” His voice was rough and low, full of menace. A variety of noises tumbled out of my throat, none of them quite full-blown words, but all meant to convince him of my innocence and harmlessness. In the distance I heard the call of the watch: “One o’clock and all’s well!” All was not in the least well, since I seemed likely to lose my place and my home, if not my head, in the next few moments.

  Master Marlowe heard the watchman’s call, too. He let his rapier slide back into its sheath. Still holding me fast by the arm, he kicked the door shut behind him, latched it, bent down to snatch up the lantern, and pushed me ahead of him up the narrow staircase, all with
out a word.

  Once in his lodgings, he let me go, but he still did not speak, not until he had shut the door and struck a spark to light the lantern again. Then he turned to face me. I was still shivering in my thin shirt from the chill of the night air, rubbing my arm where his fingers had bruised and wrenched it, sick to my stomach and waiting for disaster, wrath, and ruin to fall. Would he at least let me stay until morning? Or would he cast me out into the London night, prey for every thief and worse? Would he let me take the few things I owned—the old doublet, my purse with its pitiful few shillings?

  Master Marlowe reached out a hand toward me. I flinched, expecting a blow, but he only passed the backs of his fingers quickly across my cheek, a touch that was almost gentle. His thumb lingered a moment under my jaw. Before I could understand what his action meant, he frowned and pushed me so that I stumbled back a pace or two away from him.

  “Did they send thee to spy on me?” Master Marlowe demanded. In the tarnished light that shone through the sheets of horn shielding the lantern’s flame, his face looked savage, thinner and older. “Are they watching me? Who hired thee?”

  I could only gape wordlessly in confusion.

  “Thou’rt not—what I thought thee.” His hand fell to his sword hilt again. “Whose art thou?”

  I held out my empty hands to show him I was unarmed, defenseless, helpless. “No one’s, master, I swear it. I serve you only. I do not understand,” I pleaded. I had thought him mad the first time I’d met him, but with a light, bantering lunacy. Not like this. This was a madness with a rapier’s edge. This was a man who wrote verse about bloody murder.

  “I found thee in the street,” Master Marlowe said, eyeing me strangely. “They could not know I’d pick thee up out of the gutter. But they might have hired thee since.”

  “No one has hired me, master. No one but you.” I felt the weakness of it, and longed for some kind of proof. The truth felt flimsy as a cobweb next to the fire of his suspicion. “I will swear it. I will swear by anything.”

  A look of cunning touched Master Marlowe’s face, and suddenly he took two long steps to kneel down by my bed and reach beneath the pallet. He stood again to face me, with my rosary dangling from his fingers.

  “Wilt swear by thy saints?”

  A gasp froze into a block of ice in my throat. A tiny piece of my brain thought gratefully that at least he’d missed the linen wrappings, but this was bad enough.

  Master Marlowe smiled briefly, showing his teeth. “Didst think I did not know? That I do not recognize Latin when I hear it? I’ve been in Newgate, Richard. There are few debtors there. But a goodly number of papists.” He flung the rosary at me and I fumbled to catch it. “Thou’rt a clumsy liar. Indeed, ’tis why I half believe thee now. But swear it.”

  “Master, please,” I whispered. “Do not denounce me.”

  “I care not if thou prayest in Latin or English or a heathen tongue of the Indies,” Master Marlowe said impatiently. “Thy soul is none of my concern. But thou believest, I know. Let me hear thee swear on thy saints that thou art no spy.”

  Was it a trap? Did he only want to hear me swear by a Catholic saint so that he could accuse me and see me tossed, along with my brother, into the prison that had killed my father? But he stood between me and the door, and his hand was still on his sword. I knew if I did not satisfy him now, it was not just my place I was in danger of losing.

  “By the Holy Virgin and Saint Anne her mother, I swear it,” I choked out, my voice shaking over the oath. “As I shall be saved, I am no spy.”

  Suddenly he moved toward me, his hand reaching for my throat. I gasped, but he only seized my jaw between his fingers and strained my head back so that he could look into my eyes. I am sure he saw nothing but terror there, and it seemed enough for him. He let his breath out in a long, slow sigh.

  “Well, I will believe thee. For tonight.” His hand moved quickly, and he had my ear pinched between two fingers, pulling hard enough that I thought it would come out at the roots. I rose up on my toes, trying to ease the pressure, but he only pulled the harder.

  “Listen well, now. It would be better for thee that I slice this ear off than that thou shouldst remember what took place tonight. Forget it, Richard.” Strangely, his voice was no longer angry. He sounded only grieved and very tired, even as he gave my ear such a cruel twist that I could not hold back a whimper. “Thou’rt afraid? Be so. ’Tis for thine own good I speak it. Better to have stayed on the streets where I found thee, than come to know too much of my affairs. Dost understand?”

  Of course, I said that I did. I would have said anything by then, to make him let go. He did so. I clapped a hand over my throbbing ear.

  “What wast thou doing downstairs in the black of night?”

  “The privy, master,” I said as humbly as I could.

  He snorted. “God’s teeth. Next time piss in a pot and spare both of us.” And, turning, he snatched up the lantern from the table. It swung in his hand and made black shadows flail and flare wildly across the walls and ceiling as he strode to his bedchamber. The light disappeared when he shut the door behind him.

  “Thou shouldst leave his service,” Robin said the next morning.

  “How can I?” I asked despondently. “I’ve a contract with him for a year.”

  “But even so—if he knows the truth—”

  We sat backstage at the Rose, tucked into a dark corner where we hoped no one would overhear.

  “No one would take me for a servant if I’ve broken my last contract,” I pointed out. “And I’ve hardly any money, Robin.” Quarter day, when I’d be paid the first of my wages, had not yet come.

  “Thou couldst change thy name again. He would not follow thee.”

  “He’d have no need to.” Robin frowned in confusion. “Dost not see? If he knows I am…” I could not say it aloud. “If he knows the truth about me, he knows it about thee as well.”

  Robin looked startled, and then ill.

  “As long as thou’rt here, Master Marlowe would have no need to pursue me across London. He knows I would not go far from thee. And I do not suppose thou’lt leave the playhouse even now.”

  “’Tis my place,” he muttered awkwardly. “I’ve nowhere else—”

  “Nor I.”

  “But he has known—and for long?”

  “I know not. Since early on, I think.” He’d known my lie for what it was, when I said that our father was in Newgate for debt. That must have aroused his suspicions, and then my carelessness had let him catch a whispered prayer and glimpse the rosary tucked beneath my pallet.

  “And he has not told. So perhaps…”

  “Aye, but we do not know why he has not—”

  “Good day, Will!”

  My nerves were so bad that I jumped like a startled cat. Will, standing behind me with a tangle of old hose in his hands and a red doublet over his arm, gave me a puzzled look.

  “They want you onstage,” he said to Robin. “Good day, Richard. Are you well?”

  “We’ll talk more on’t later,” I said to Robin as we got to our feet, and he gave me an anxious look as he hurried off toward the stage.

  “What’s the trouble?” Will asked.

  “’Tis nothing.”

  “Oh, indeed? I thought the Spanish had invaded, from your look. Come, truly, what is wrong?”

  I hesitated. But he could see from my face that I was worried, and he seemed honestly concerned. Almost as if I were a friend.

  “My master’s angry with me,” I said, dancing awkwardly around the truth. Thou’rt a clumsy liar, Master Marlowe had said to me last night, and I feared he was right. “I overheard him last night, speaking to a man. ’Twas an accident, in truth, but he seemed so…”

  “Did he beat you?” Will asked sympathetically.

  “No.” He had only drawn his sword on me, that was all.

  “Well, then, his wrath cannot have been much,” Will said cheerfully. “My father’s angry with me twice a day at least
, but it comes to nothing. Bruises mend, after all.”

  “And what dost thou backstage?”

  Will jumped almost as badly as I had done to find his father at his elbow. Master Green frowned at his son over his spectacles.

  “Master Cowley sent me to find Robin Archer,” Will said in quick defense.

  “And if thou hadst been in the tireroom at thy work, Master Cowley would not have sent thee to run his errands,” Master Green said severely. “Hast Master Alleyn’s doublet there? Look here, Richard.” Will handed the doublet to his father and Master Green shook it by the shoulders, holding it out so that I could see. “It looks well, does’t not? The fur was an excellent thought.”

  It did look well, the red and golden brown just as I had imagined them, rich and grand and a little savage, well suited to a barbarian king.

  “Aye, Richard, well done,” Will said. “I’ll take these hose up to the galleries and mend them.”

  “No, thou wilt not!” Master Green’s voice, friendly and approving before, was suddenly harsh. “Thou canst work well enough in the tireroom. Thou hast no need to idle away thy time watching the players.” He strode toward the stage, leaving Will with a face as sullen and threatening as a thundercloud.

  “Did he discover it?” I asked tentatively. “That you were reading that day?”

  “No, he did not!” Will was scowling in the direction his father had taken. “No, thanks to you, he never knew I’d been idling away my time.” Even in his anger, he remembered to give me a grateful smile. “What harm if I sit and sew in the galleries, where I can see the sun, instead of in that dark pit? ’Tis only his ill nature.”

  Master Green had not been ill-natured toward me, I thought in confusion. He had even been kind. But when his attention had turned to his son…

  “Enough,” Will said. “Come, Richard, I’ve an idea.”

  We passed by the tireroom, where Will tossed the hose inside, and out into the yard below the stage. “But your father,” I protested. “And my master…”