Ay me! For aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth . . .
And so we began. The lovers’ crossed fortunes, their wanderings in the forest whose mazy windings show the tangled paths we humans tread in pursuit of our desires, the intervention of Oberon and Titania who have the powers of gods and the appetites of mortals, the quite different contribution of the rude mechanicals to the love debate – all of this surely served as a fitting dessert course to the banquet they (and we) had just enjoyed. Master Shakespeare’s words are sweet enough but there is in them the tartness of observation and experience.
As the action of the Dream unfolded, the heavens above us gathered up the day’s gold and stowed it away in night’s dark trunk. But because it was midsummer the process seemed infinitely slow and gentle. Even as we drew towards an end, with all the confusions and cross-purposes resolved in wedding and celebration, there was still a sheen of light in the west while on the opposite side the moon – pale companion to our revels and almost at the full – gazed coolly down.
After Thomas Pope as Puck had spoken his final words – Give me your hands if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends – the noble troupe of children once more danced and sang, their burning tapers making stately circles in the twilight. The applause which Puck had solicited was duly given, the more generously perhaps because so many of the audience’s little darlings were on show, and the whole company bobbed and bowed on the moonlit sward. This is what it means to play before the quality. No whores and pickpockets, no swearing veterans or unlettered apprentices; instead there is taste, balance and restraint. I couldn’t have put up with it for too long but, once in a while, it’s a pleasant experience.
“How was I?” said Cuthbert Ascre to me as we gathered “backstage” behind the canvas screens. The area was fitfully illuminated by a couple of flares; the moonlight did better service. Here we changed back into our day clothes and Jack Horner took charge of our costumes. Because we were touring we were less lavishly garbed than we would have been at the Globe and, as usual in these circumstances, most of us were wearing a mixture of our own garments and Company property. The waning light of evening, by comparison with the bright glare of afternoon in the London playhouse, also allows one to make do with less in the way of face-painting &c.
“How was I?” Cuthbert Ascre repeated, impatient for opinion like all beginners. “Was I good?”
“Very good,” I said. “We’ll make a player of you yet.”
I was not straining to pay a compliment or not by much. Cuthbert really had shown a natural fluency as Demetrius, my rival in love. In that mood of easy jubilation which comes at the end of a successful performance, Cuthbert was as open to my praise as I was ready to give it. I could see his face glimmer with pleasure in the flickering light.
“Oh, this has given me a taste for it, to be sure. I could throw up my fortunes now, such as they are, and go on the road – with your company.”
“We would be delighted to have you,” I said, wondering what Laurence Savage – or any of us – would make of an aristocratic companion but willing enough to indulge Cuthbert for a moment.
“But that’s a fantasy,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. His face suddenly took on a harder cast. “My father would never permit it.”
“I didn’t know you were serious.”
“Nor did I,” he said. “But why should I be constrained to play a part I do not wish?”
I presumed he meant the part of a younger brother, usually a pretty thankless role in the real world. Trying to lighten his newly clouded mood, I said, “If you were a member of our company you’d find yourself playing plenty of unwelcome parts. Look at me, for example. I’ve only been with the Chamberlain’s a short time, yet I’ve been poisoned twice, torn asunder once and stabbed three times at least. The rest of the time I’ve stood around as an ambassador, or a soldier, or a member of council. That’s when I haven’t been skulking in the bushes as a murderer. There’s no great romance in this. Villains and placemen are my meat and drink.”
“And lovers.”
“I am only lately graduated to them.”
“But Nicholas, that is exactly what I would choose. To be one clay the murderer and the next his victim. To be the victor in battle, then the vanquished. Or the shop-keeper who sells poison on a Monday and the lovelorn youth who swallows it on the Thursday.”
I saw that my attempts to play down, as it were, the appeal of the playhouse were serving only to inflame him further and leave him with a sense of what he could never have, at least as long as his father stood in the way.
By now most of our company had wandered away from the area to mingle with the lords and ladies of the audience or, in a few cases perhaps, the men and maidservants. I was eager to be off myself, perhaps to catch up by accident with Kate Fielding and to have her opinion of what she’d just seen. I saw there was no placating Cuthbert Ascre who seemed to growing gloomier by the instant. So, assuring him that he’d made a fine Demetrius – no, really, an excellent performance – I sped off into the gathering darkness.
Almost immediately I ran into Kate. Literally. I didn’t recognize her at first, nor she me.
“Take care, sir,” she said.
“Oh Kate, Mistress Fielding . . .”
“Master Revill, is it?”
“The very same.”
“Well, you are obviously off somewhere in a rush. Don’t let me detain you.”
We looked at each other in the moonlight. Not too far away torches flickered, while soft voices and laughter blended in the mild air.
“No . . . I’m not. Nothing that can’t wait. Did you enjoy the play?”
“Yes. I saw it first some years ago in the city, but it’s better suited to this sylvan setting.”
“Where we may all imagine ourselves to be lovers in the woods of Athens?”
“Some of us perhaps.”
“Of course, I forget. You don’t believe in love poetry. You think that poets are just writing to the empty air.”
“And you think, if I remember correctly, that even if they are that doesn’t mean that they don’t intend their words to be taken seriously.”
It was gratifying, of course, to have my own opinion recalled and quoted back at me, even if we were speaking in a rather combative spirit.
“Well, perhaps you’re right,” I said. “Who was it said that the truest poetry is the most feigning?”
“Your own Master Shakespeare, I believe.”
“I think I have found you out . . . Kate.”
“How so, Master Revill?”
“You see, you know the lines, you know the ideas and opinions of our poets. That tells me one thing. Under this guise of pretended indifference or even contempt for love poetry, you are really in thrall to it. Admit that you are a devotee in your closet of the latest volume of sonnets, that you pine and sigh with the lovesick – in spirit of course.”
“Really, Master Revill, you must change out of your costume. If you are still speaking as the impassioned Lysander.”
“Perhaps I am speaking in my own part,” I said, wondering how much longer I could continue without breaking cover. Did I dare to confess openly what I felt towards her? My heart pounded and there was a roaring in my ears. On the edge of my vision the light from the torches seemed to swim in the soft, mothy air. So, I noted (and a part of me was still sufficiently detached to note that I was noting it), this is what it means to be in love. These are the symptoms of the sickness.
I was about to open my mouth to make some declaration, which might have changed everything (or more probably left everything just the same), when I sensed rather than saw another figure approaching through the dark.
“Cuthbert,” said Kate.
“Kate,” said Cuthbert.
“Did you like my Demetrius? Good, was I?”
“I have never seen a finer lover, coz.”
&nb
sp; “I was a little worried at the start but I soon got into it. My friend Nicholas here assures me that it was an excellent performance.”
“Oh yes,” I mumbled. “Very good.”
“Tell me, Nicholas, when we were searching for each other in the mist . . . when you were chasing me, you know, with your sword . . . don’t you think that if instead of coming in from that side, the effect would have been better if . . .”
“Well, you must excuse me now,” I said, slipping away from them. I was half-relieved to be quit of Kate’s company for I feared her mocking reception of the stuttering declaration of love which I’d been about to make. And, though glad enough to see that Lord Cuthbert had recovered his good humour, I didn’t want to be exposed to his ideas on how the Dream performance might have been made sharper or funnier. Let him bend Kate’s ear for that.
But the ear-bending wasn’t finished for me either.
For I’d no sooner reached the company of my fellows, who by now had finished receiving the personal plaudits of the audience and were making up for the drink-deprived hours we’d endured while performing, than Laurence Savage reminded me that I hadn’t heard the end of his tale of the two boys.
“Very well, Laurence,” I said, a little impatient even though I’d been eager enough to hear its conclusion earlier on. “But can we get one thing clear. No more mystification if you please. You’re talking about yourself and your brother and your mother, aren’t you?”
“How did you guess, Nicholas?”
“Get on with the story.”
Taking a swig at some of Lord Elcombe’s ale, Laurence launched into the second half.
“As I was saying before I was interrupted by the play, these two boys of a poor widow-woman were together one day on the margins of Fleet Ditch. All of a sudden the little one, the one who had only lately learnt to walk, loses interest in what his brother is doing and sets out on his sturdy legs to examine something which has caught his eye on the other side of the street, something glinting in the sun, I dare say. Meanwhile the big brother is distracted for an instant, perhaps caught up in some day-dream. He is not looking after his charge.”
Laurence, still in his garb as Bottom, paused to slurp again at his tankard. It was evident that the scene he was describing was unfurling again before his eyes. I would have told him to hurry it up but something in his grave, determined expression suggested that it would be safer to hear him out in silence.
“All at once, round the corner of this stinking thoroughfare come a pair of horsemen riding as if the devil were at their heels. The older boy hears them before he sees them and makes a plunge to save the little one from being knocked to the ground and trampled upon. But he is too late. The child is struck by the hoofs of the leading horse and again by the hoofs of the second. The rush and frenzy of their passage throws the little boy against the wall of the tumbledown tenement. The older boy feels the heat and draught of these frantic travellers and their mounts and does not at first realize what has happened to his brother. In front of him is the empty roadway with the ditch beyond. He turns round and sees crumpled against the black wall a pile of clothing. Though the street is always filthy he hadn’t noticed that particular mound of rags earlier and he wonders how it came to be there. Then he understands.”
Laurence paused again to swig his drink. I saw his eyes moisten. He was sweating heavily. His cowlick of hair was glued to his forhead.
“I ran across and picked up the bundle in my arms. Thomas was dead, of course, several times over. If the first blow from the horse had not finished him then the second would have done, or the third or the fourth – and after that to be thrown violently against a brick wall. His brains were near dashed out. My mother, she emerged from the house, drawn by something or other. Perhaps I was crying out or screaming, I don’t know. And we took the little form back inside and laid him down on the chest which served as our table. He was not yet a year and a half.”
Laurence Savage gulped before resuming. “I had lost other brothers and sisters before – that is not much, provided they go early. But this one I had just got used to. Thomas his name was.”
“Oh I am sorry to hear it,” I said, “but even in a case like this we still have judgement here. Surely those who caused your brother’s death were brought to account.”
“They were not,” said Laurence. He grinned but it was a very grim grin. “They were too rich and powerful, or rather one of them was.”
“No-one is above the rule of law,” I said piously.
“Wait. Later that day, while the bundle lay wrapped up in his cradle, his last resting-place before the grave, a man came calling. A gentleman judging by his voice and manner. He explained to my mother that he had heard of our misfortune and that he came to offer condolences. More than condolences, as it turned out. Because even as he spoke he drew forth a leather pouch and casually tipped its contents onto the very chest which my brother’s body had so recently occupied. I couldn’t help noticing how my mother’s eyes were drawn towards the little pile of silver or how she responded to the visitor’s manner. She had always been vulnerable to smooth tones, to an easy address. As I said before, I was old enough by now to know how the world works.
“Our visitor gave her to understand that the money he had so carelessly disbursed was hers on condition that she made no fuss about the dead child – or no more fuss than might reasonably be expected from any woman who lived in circumstances like ours. What he meant was that any family inhabiting one of the Fleet Ditch hovels had not much more entitlement to life than the rats which crawled about its banks. Every third day some infant fell from an upper window or was drowned in the stinking channel or was trampled underfoot. There was nothing out of the way in this. In return for not taking the case before the coroner, my mother would receive a further payment in three months – by which time Thomas would be safely underground and forgotten. Our visitor didn’t say this but it’s what he meant.”
“Who was this gentleman?”
“I discovered later that he was Elcombe’s steward, Oswald Eden, the very man who is still in his employ and who greeted us so warmly when we arrived the other day. He was the second horseman in the street who rode down my little brother. The two of them, master and man, were no doubt going somewhere on pressing business. Elcombe has a town house near Whitefriars.”
“But it was an accident,” I said mildly, and looking round half fearfully to see whether this great man or any of his immediate family was in earshot. The grander members of the party, however, had shifted indoors while we poor players and a handful of lesser guests remained scattered about the playing area. I’d have wagered that none was engaged in so earnest a dialogue as Savage and Revill.
“An accident,” I repeated.
“Oh yes, Nicholas, it was an accident. Half the children in the borough succumb to such accidents, falling, dropping, drowning. Or if they don’t go that way then the plague will catch them out. Nothing remarkable, nothing particular.”
I had it in mind to ask why, then, it was so particular with him. But tact prevented me. Anyway Laurence went on to supply the answer, unprompted.
“My mother hesitated for an instant then she reached out a hand for the silver on the chest, realized that the pile of coin was just too large to be contained within a single clutch and so stretched out both hands and scooped the money into her apron, which, by the by, still carried slight traces of my brother’s mortal remains. That is the picture of her which lodges like a beam in my mind’s eye and cannot be dislodged. My mother tipping money into her spread lap. By comparison, the action of Lord Elcombe and his steward was a mote, a speck of dust – though I hate them both for it and will do until my dying day.”
I had never seen Laurence Savage in such a mood. Usually the blandest of men, he was now red-faced and sweat-streaked. As he uttered those last words, he seemed for once to fit his surname. Then, in a more relenting tone, he said, “After all, what else can you expect of the rich and powerful but t
hat they will ride roughshod over all who are in their way. It is my mother who I cannot forgive. All her pride dwindled to a pile of coin.”
“What happened to you after this?”
“It is easily told, Nick. My brother Thomas was buried and forgotten. After that our fortunes seemed to change. A few months later another visitor, not Oswald but a man with a cast in his eye, came calling with a second packet of blood money. My mother accepted it of course and soon after that she received a proposal of marriage. It was from the very glover who’d bought up my father’s shop. Perhaps he was waiting for her to be a little stretched and strained by circumstances, in order that he might wear her more easily. So we returned to the shop and the business which we’d lost scarcely a year earlier. My stepfather was an unpleasant man, and it is some consolation to know that my mother was not happy with him. He beat me, as was his right, until I grew too large and he was afraid I might hit him in return. One day, encouraged by his fear, I did. Then I ran and ran. Until one day, another day, I fetched up on the shores of the Chamberlain’s Company as an apprentice.”
I had no idea that Laurence’s history was so, well, dramatic. I looked on him with new eyes.
“So now you know why I hate Elcombe and all that he stands for. Wealth and power.”
“Why did you agree to come and play the Dream at Instede then?”
“I am a player, Nick. No doubt you recognize the breed. I thought you were one yourself. We’d play in front of Old Nick himself, wouldn’t we, if we were paid for it and the shareholders told us to get on with it. Anyway, I didn’t realize that I would feel so . . . bitter towards this great nobleman until we actually came within sight of his fine pile. And I was amazed to see Oswald himself still in his master’s employ, still the same arrogant, high-handed bastard. Little did he think that the boy in the Fleet Ditch house who watched him spill his silver on a chest would one day turn up at his master’s country seat.”
The Pale Companion Page 15
