I asked one or two of my fellows to join me but, since I really wanted my own company, was glad enough when they refused. Jack Wilson anyway preferred to leave me to my own devices after the previous evening in Salisbury. “God knows what you’ll stir up this time, Nick,” he said. “Well, I won’t look to you for help,” I said.
I walked out into the warm air. The formal gardens and working parts of the estate were obviously on the other quarters of Instede House because, from where I was standing outside the courtyard at which we’d first entered, the land dropped away towards a wooded area. I was facing west and the sun filled the sky with his evening benediction, drawing a few golden strands of cloud after him like a king going into exile. (That was a rather fine poetic figure, I thought; perhaps I should drop it casually in the hearing of someone like Master W.S.) Shading my eyes with my hand, I could see beyond the wood a low line of hills. Somewhere over there, and not so very many miles distant, was the village of Miching, where my father had preached from his pulpit, where I had played as a child, where my mother had summoned me indoors to bed at about this very time on a summer’s evening. And now, stolen from me by the plague, they were there no more and I would never again be welcomed home by them this side of paradise.
Unexpectedly, I felt water come into my eyes. I dabbed at them and walked off down the gradual slope which led away from Instede and towards the woods. It is odd how even at moments of ease and content, perhaps especially at such moments, darker thoughts will come to shadow us. To dispel these I deliberately turned my mind elsewhere.
Item: the excellence of my Company and how they were like a family to me, supplying what the plague had taken.
Item: she whom I had left behind in London. So I asked myself what my Nell was doing at this instant. This very instant. A bad idea. Because she was most likely plying her trade in Holland’s Leaguer, just as I’d been plying mine in the rehearsal room. A mixture of jealousy (at the thought of the customer who was occupying her now) and regretful lust (that I was not in his place in her bed) overtook me.
Well, business is business, as she would say . . . only business.
Instead of Nell, I summoned up images from the previous evening. The kindly keen-eyed Justice of the Peace, Adam Fielding. His beautiful dark-haired daughter Kate, she of the soothing hands and ointments. Instinctively I raised my hand to touch the bruised, scraped places on my face. And that made me remember the stir in the square and the performance of the Cain and Abel story by the Paradise Brothers. An appropriate appellation for a travelling band which dealt in old Bible tales. I wondered whether they’d been drawn towards such subjects by their name alone.
All this time I was making progress across a sheep-cropped area of grass and towards the woods which lay on one side of the mansion house. I paused, turned around and gazed up at the great palace on its knoll. From this angle it looked even grander and more imposing. The sinking sun struck the windows and they gave back a dazzling return. One or two diminished figures were moving around the side of the building. My attenuated shadow stretched out impossibly far in front of me.
I turned back in the direction of the wood and entered the trees’ own long-drawn shadows. Either my eyes were still affected by the sun’s glare or there was actually something there, because I saw – or thought I saw – and for the second time that day – an object moving in the darkness among the trunks. Not white, but a gloomier flickering shade. I stopped, blinked and looked again. I almost made to return to the shelter of the great house with the excuse that we had a long day of rehearsal on the morrow, that there was no requirement to walk any further, &c. It also occurred to me that I’d had enough of this nonsense. If an energetic and straight-thinking young man was going to be frightened by some silly shifting shapes among the trees, then it was a pretty poor look-out for all concerned.
I walked on, tasting again my panic of the afternoon and determined to face down my fears.
A rough path led from the field into the wood and it was apparent from the beaten-down grass that feet often wandered this way. Perhaps it was a trysting-place for the lads and lasses cramped up in the servants’ quarters of Instede. I threaded my way through outcrops of bush and briar. Once inside the wood, I hesitated, to let my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. It was old, this pocket of woodland, much older than the house. The lower branches of the oaks and elms writhed overhead. Mossy, misshapen trunks clustered on every side. After the heat of the day it was cool in here. The airs of evening were stirring, bringing with them the pungent odour of wild garlic. A hidden stream murmured in my ear. There were animal rustlings and whirrings. These were familiar sounds. They posed no threat. By now I was able to see quite clear. I wiped my sweaty palms on my shirtfront and breathed deep. The best way – the only way – to overcome fear is to walk up to that old rascal and face him down.
“Hist!”
“Jesus save us!’
I would have jumped clean out of my shoes if I could. As it was, I stumbled backwards over a fallen branch. Winded, I lay on the ground looking up at the splinters of light among the topmost branches. A strange face thrust itself between me and the view.
A disordered face, with straggly grey hair and a beard all grimed and leaf-strewn, and exhaling reeky breath from a toothy hole of a mouth.
A figure dressed in animal pelts and skins tied about his person.
A wild man of the woods!
I must have screamed or shouted in terror, even as I frantically scrambled to my feet, for this weird individual backed away in alarm and lifted his hands protectively in front of his face. His evident fear helped me to get the better of mine.
For an instant I wondered whether he was a man at all, but his apprehensive posture and (to be candid) his smell even at a distance persuaded me that I was not dealing with a wood-spirit or demon.
I have heard of these feral beings – unfortunates abandoned at birth, suckled by wolves and raised among the beasts, and who scarcely know themselves to be human. Men who, when they perish in the winter’s cold, have no gravestone to mark the place where they fall and only a veil of dead leaves to cover them.
He lowered his hands from his face. They were oddly crooked, like animal paws – or, with their long nails, more like claws. Then, still keeping a distance between us, he said, “Well, sirrah. What are you doing in my territory? Have you come to spy?”
In the dimness of the wood I stared at this wild figure, from whose bewhiskered mouth emerged sensible, if slightly threatening, sentences.
Out of my own mouth emerged nothing. I was too surprised to speak.
“Well then?”
He crept a couple of paces towards me while I retreated. He had a strange, swaying movement. I was frightened of tumbling over backward again and having him on top of me. Him and his reeky breath.
“I – I – am . . .”
“Out with it!”
Something in his peremptory tone, incongruous in this dishevelled, rank-smelling figure, struck me as absurd. I nearly laughed out loud and then thought better of it.
“Nicholas Revill is who I am,” I managed to get out finally.
“And who might Nicholas Revill be? Is he a spy?”
“No spy but a player in the Chamberlain’s Company. We are newly arrived from London to – to this place here. We are the guests of Lord Elcombe.”
I jerked with my thumb in the general direction of Instede House.
“What do you play, sirrah?”
“We play the words that are set down for us.”
He nodded at this deliberately unilluminating reply, seeming to think about it. I took the opening to ask him a question, “Now that I have given you my name and trade, as the phrase goes, you must give me yours.”
“Who am I?” he said curiously, as if he’d never heard the question before. “I? Some call me Robin.”
Well, that name fitted one who flitted and bobbed about in the greenery, although the breast of this one was dun-coloured rather than red.
It also brought to mind the thief called Robin Hood. And that character called Robin Good-fellow in Master W.S.’s Dream, he who is jester and attendant to King Oberon in the same piece.
“But I have no trade,” he added.
“Oh I would say you have not,” I said, humouring this odd fellow and casting my eyes up and down his ragged outline.
“Does a lord need a living?”
“As you say.”
“I am the lord of all this little land,” said Robin the wood-man.“Look around you. I am master of what you see.”
At this moment I wasn’t able to see very much but I nodded and said soothing things and wondered how quickly I might escape from this individual’s company.
“Master . . . Revill, is it?”
“Aye, Nick Revill.”
“I can see by your looks that you do not altogether believe my words. [This remark – which was right enough – took me aback a little because my own eyes couldn’t have read a face. The fellow’s must be adapted to the darkness under the trees.] And it is late for you to be out, Master Revill. But if you return tomorrow I will show you my kingdom.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Come to me when the sun is directly overhead,” said Robin. “I have things to show you.”
“Very well.”
“You may leave my kingdom now, Master Revill,” said this scarecrow in the dusk.
“Thank you, your majesty – Robin.”
I almost bowed my way of his “court” in the woods, half in jest but half struck too by the earnestness of the man. Maybe I would go back next day, for my own amusement – and instruction. It’s a player’s duty, almost, to study those among whom he finds himself.
By the time I exited the woods only a few fragments of day remained to the sky. The great bulk of Instede House blocked half the horizon in front of me, with little flickers and gleams of light signifying some of the windows. A young moon lolled low on the earth, as if unwilling to make the effort to hoist herself higher in the heavens. I hastened across the short turf which separated the wood from the bank on which the house perched. At one point, I thought I heard someone breathing quite close by, a kind of sighing, and I looked round and went a little faster. I had had enough of woodland shapes, sounds and spectres for one day.
It didn’t take long the next morning to establish the identity of the weird man in the woods. The cold reception we’d received from Oswald Eden the steward on our arrival was thawed out by the warmer manners of some of the lower servants. In conversation with one of them, Davy by name, I happened to let slip that we’d recently played before the Queen and the Royal Court in Whitehall. After that he was like warm wax in my hands, even if the notion of Whitehall was so unfamiliar to him it might as well have been on the moon.
Anyway, what I learned was straightforward and confirmed what the wood-man had told me the previous evening. Robin was indeed his name; he had no other that anyone knew.
How long had he dwelt among the trees? I asked.
Oh, since time immemorabilial, sir, replied Davy. He was like a whatdyecallem? an anchor? or was it a helmet? Living off all by himself and away from the haunts of man.
He meant an anchoret or an hermit: I gently corrected Davy.
So he did, sir, ah what a fine thing was letters and learning in the right hands!
And what did Robin do down in the woods?
Do? – why he talked to squirrels and toads and attercops.
Attercops?
Spiders, sir. Didn’t they know that word in Whitehall town, them with all their letters and learning?
He said he was lord of the wood.
He was lord and master in the wood just as Elcombe was lord and master there in Instede House.
And Lord Elcombe, didn’t he mind this, ah, wild man saying such things?
He was harmless enough, sir, Robin was harmless enough. And there were some said he brought good luck on the house.
Very well, I said.
He should be looked after, said Davy. And he was looked after, was Robin.
No doubt, I said.
I still had it in mind to go back and visit Robin later that day. It was curiosity and that player’s itch to observe his species in all their manifestations which prompted me. And a dangerous itch it turned out to be.
Meantime, we of the Chamberlain’s-in-the-country had further rehearsals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to fill our mornings, although it was hardly a new play for us. Indeed, I was one of the few who had not taken part in a previous performance, and even I had seen it when the Chamberlain’s were still based north of the river in Finsbury. You might think rehearsals were hardly necessary. And if it had been an everyday Dream at the Globe it would not have received much attention. But this was a special performance, not quite the equivalent of playing before our Sovereign Lady but not so far beneath it either. Lord Elcombe was a valued patron of the Chamberlain’s and a friend to some of our seniors. Players and their companies can never have too many friends – for the reason that we have several very potent enemies like the watchers in Council, or the puritan, or, worst of all, the plague which canters in on a pale horse to close us all down. So we need friends, the more powerful the better. And there were few more powerful than Elcombe, possessor of a good slice of Wiltshire as well as of a grand Whitefriars mansion in London. When such a man invites you to perform at his son’s wedding and offers to pay you handsomely for the privilege, you don’t hesitate.
However, as I’ve said, we knew the Dream pretty well. Even I knew it. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that my mind wandered in the rehearsal room when I wasn’t being called on to spout my lines and make my moves as Lysander.
Something to do with my part as one of the young lovers caused me to remember, in the long intervals of practice, how only a few days before I’d been at home in London town and talking to Nell – my whore and my good friend – about this strange, fantastical piece of Master Shakespeare’s.
She and I were in my lodgings south of the river. Not the fourpenny-a-week upstairs hole belonging to the witch-like sisters where I’d shivered and suffered during the last winter, but a more commodious establishment nearer to the Globe playhouse. My room was on the second floor of a house in a street called Dead Man’s Place (why it had this unfortunate appellation I don’t know). Perhaps because of the ill-omened street name, rooms there were not hard to rent on favourable terms. In addition, I’d caught the eye of my landlord, one Master Benwell. He looked me up and down at our first meeting, not once but many times. When I told him that I was a player – a revelation not always guaranteed to cause delight – he licked his thin lips. I speedily concluded that he was, in all likelihood, a gentleman who preferred the male gender and the back door. Certainly he liked to talk about such things. He fired questions at me, hinting that the Chamberlain’s was a hot-bed of sodomy. I was about to get on my high horse but realized how his prying interest might be turned to my advantage. From a starting-point of one shilling and three-pence I bargained him down to 1s a week. This was more than I’d been paying in Broadwall, but the room in Dead Man’s Place, though not ample, was much better than the one in the Coven. In exchange for a reasonable rent it was understood that I’d provide him with little snippets and snatchets of tittle and tattle to do with the Chamberlain’s Company.
So this shilling chamber in Dead Man’s Place was where I was lying with Nell on an evening in June. Once our more pressing needs had been met, she started to ask me about where we were going on tour, and what we were going to do there, and who for, and how much we’d earn by it, and whether I had a big part this time (“What do you mean, this time?” I said), and a dozen other questions which came tumbling out at once.
“One at a time,” I said. “I can only answer one at a time.”
I was subjected to a rigorous catechism which I pretended to be wearied by but which, in truth, I took pleasure in answering. Doesn’t every man enjoy talking about the mysteries of his craft – and if he d
oes not, he has no business practising it, I think.
“Is that it?” I said after many minutes. “You will leave me with no energy for anything else.”
“Almost there, Nick. Tell me this too. Are you all going to the country? Or are some of you left behind in town?”
“No, ‘we’ are not all going,” I said, slightly annoyed. What was she thinking about? Her trade? “Shakespeare and Burbage and Heminges and most of the seniors remain here.”
“So the children are being let out to play. How will they fare?”
Strangely, the same idea had occurred to me but to hear Nell voice it out loud was somehow aggravating.
“If by that you mean that we are not capable of conducting –”
“It was a joke, Nick.”
“We are to visit Instede House at the personal invitation of Lord Elcombe, I’ll have you know.”
“Hush. Save your passion for later.”
“You’re in danger of dousing it.”
“Then tell me of the play, this Midsummer Nightmare.”
“Dream.”
“Dream. See how much you have to tell me still. And talk of your part in it.”
Even if she was only being conciliatory at this instant, Nell did like to hear some account of the plays in which I participated. Inevitably she hung about the playhouses in the way of business but, equally inevitably, she did not much attend to the action on stage. (I’d tried to prohibit her from attending the Globe when I was playing there at first and she eventually told me I had no more right to regulate her trade than she had to regulate mine.)
So I lay flat on my back, eyes fixed on the lumpy plaster of the ceiling, and started to give my Dream narration. Nell snuggled up beside me. In fact, my narrow bed didn’t permit of any relation other than snugness.
The Pale Companion Page 5
