Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories

by Leon Garfield

  There was someone waiting to speak with Sir Oliver de Boys. A strange visitor indeed. A mountainous fellow, who might have broken the back of a bear with his powerful arms, or killed a lion with one blow of his huge fist. He was Monsieur Charles, the Duke’s wrestler, and the strongest man in France. Despite his great strength, the wrestler was a humble fellow and easily tongue-tied in the presence of a gentleman of rank.

  “Good Monsieur Charles,” said Oliver pleasantly, and meaning to put the fellow at his ease, “what’s the new news at the new court?”

  “There’s no news at the court, sir, but the old news,” answered the wrestler; and then, gaining courage, went on to tell that the new Duke was still the new Duke, and his elder brother, whom he had overthrown, had fled for safety into the Forest of Arden, “and a many merry men with him,” he related with growing eloquence; “and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.” He paused, and a small sigh crept out of him, like a mouse coming forth from a mountain . . .

  “You wrestle tomorrow before the new Duke?” inquired Oliver, impatient to bring the fellow out of the golden world and to the purpose of his visit, which, he supposed, must be to do with his trade. He was not mistaken. At once, a deeply serious look came over Monsieur Charles’s large countenance, and Oliver, his heart beating rapidly, listened in silence as the wrestler unburdened his troubled spirit. He had heard that, among the foolhardy youth who had put themselves forward to challenge him, there was none other than his lordship’s own younger brother, Orlando! It was for this reason that he had come. Earnestly, he begged his lordship to persuade his brother against so foolish a course. He, Charles, had no wish to break the young gentleman’s limbs.

  “I had as lief,” murmured Oliver, “thou didst break his neck as his finger!” And, as Monsieur Charles looked amazed at so unbrotherly a wish, he went on to represent Orlando as so black and treacherous a villain, that it would be a good deed to rid the world of him!

  Monsieur Charles sighed with relief. “I’ll give him his payment,” he promised; and, as the huge fellow departed, well-pleased to be doing his lordship a service, Oliver smiled with satisfaction. He hated his brother with all his heart; and for no stronger reason than that Orlando had always been loved better than himself. But it was reason enough . . .

  The new court, like a woman in a new gown, was proud, but inclined to be uneasy, as if wondering if all was secure behind. This shadow of unease had even darkened the ordinarily high spirits of the two young women who walked together in the great hall of the new Duke’s palace. They were Princesses, both. One was Celia, daughter of Frederick, the new Duke; the other was Rosalind, daughter of his brother, the overthrown Duke in the forest. Although Duke Frederick had protested that he loved Rosalind as tenderly as he loved his own daughter, it was impossible for Rosalind to forget her dearly loved father, living like an outlaw in Arden.

  “I pray thee, Rosalind,” pleaded Celia, for the hundredth time, “be merry!” But neither she nor Touchstone, the court jester—a fellow who, in his own opinion, could have squeezed laughter out of a lemon—could persuade her into more than the mouse of a smile, and a promise that she would try to do better.

  “Here comes Monsieur Le Beau!” said Celia; and Rosalind’s smile did indeed grow a little as that willowy gentleman of the court wafted towards them, like a flower in velvet boots.

  “Fair Princess,” he cried, addressing Celia with a twinkle of yellow stockings and a sweep of his feathered hat, “you have lost much good sport!”

  “Sport?” inquired Celia, upon which the courtier eagerly informed the ladies that Monsieur Charles, the Duke’s wrestler, had already broken the ribs of three young men who had been rash enough to answer his challenge. And the ladies had missed it!

  “It is the first time,” marvelled Touchstone, “that ever I heard breaking of ribs was sport for ladies!” But Monsieur Le Beau, ignoring the jester, assured the Princesses that they had not missed all. The best was yet to come. Another young man had come forward—

  Even as he spoke, there was a murmuring commotion and the Duke and his court flowed into the great hall like a perfumed silken tide. Among them towered the huge figure of Monsieur Charles and, beside him, like a frail sapling next to a mighty oak, walked the new challenger, a humbly dressed youth whose proud looks and straight limbs made the heart ache for the ruin that was to become of them. It was Orlando.

  Celia heard a sigh, a sigh that was deep enough to drown a world in. She turned. Her cousin was gazing, with enormous eyes, at the doomed young man; and her face was pale as death. “Alas,” she whispered, “he is too young!”

  Nor was Rosalind the only one to be affected. Duke Frederick himself had sought to persuade the young man from his foolhardy course; but to no avail. “Speak to him, ladies,” he urged his daughter and his niece; “see if you can move him.”

  So Orlando was brought before the two Princesses who, one after another, begged him to abandon the unequal contest.

  “Do, young sir!” pleaded Rosalind, and with a passion that seemed, to Celia, to have been stirred by something stronger than a mere wish to please the Duke. But the young man was resolved. He declared it did not matter to him whether he lived or died . . . although his eyes, as he gazed at Rosalind, seemed, to the curious Celia, to tell a very different tale. “The little strength that I have, I would it were with you!” breathed Rosalind, as the young man bowed to the two princesses and departed to do battle with the cruel giant.

  Rosalind could not bear to watch. She covered her face with her hands. But, at the same time, could not bear not to watch, and her eyes kept sparkling through a lattice-work of fingers. “You shall try but one fall,” she heard the Duke command; and she glimpsed the wide seated circle of the eager court.

  “But come your ways!” the young man shouted defiantly; and the contest began!

  She shut her eyes. She could hear grunts and gasps and cries, and the scrape and thump of staggering feet . . . She opened her eyes . . . caught a sudden sight of the giant’s face, swollen with fierce triumph . . . then the young man, his poor head in a halter of mighty arms. The Duke was leaning forward, his fists were tightly clenched. A lady of the court had fainted clean away; a gentleman was sprinkling her with water, and a lady by her side was frantically tugging to free her gown. There was a loud cry! Then came a great shout. The Duke was on his feet, amazed—

  Fearfully, Rosalind took her hands away from her face. She stared. “O excellent young man!” she cried out. Most marvellously, he was standing upright and unharmed! Beside him, like a fallen mountain, lay Monsieur Charles. The contest was ended. The youth had overthrown the giant!

  Everyone was on their feet and applauding, and, while half a dozen servants carried the groaning Charles away, the Duke himself, all smiles, was shaking the young man by the hand and asking his name. “Orlando, my liege,” he answered proudly; “the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys.”

  At once, the Duke let go of his hand. Sir Rowland de Boys had been the good friend of the Duke in the forest; therefore his son was the new Duke’s enemy. In an instant, smiles were changed to frowns, and joy to darkness and anger. “I would thou hadst told me of another father,” he said abruptly, and departed from the hall, with the suddenly alarmed court hastening after.

  Orlando and the two Princesses were alone in the great hall, with some awkward yards of silence between them.

  “Let us go thank him,” said Celia, feeling that, if she did not speak, her cousin and the young man would remain motionless, like two posts in a field, for ever and a day. Gently but firmly she urged Rosalind forward.

  “Gentleman,” murmured Rosalind, “wear this for me.” And, impulsively taking a gold chain from her neck, offered it to Orlando. He stared at it. Impatiently, Rosalind put it over his head; and then, overcome with confusion at her own boldness, she turned to Celia. “Shall we go,
coz?”

  “Ay. Fare you well, fair gentleman,” said Celia with a smile, and took her cousin by the arm.

  They were half-way to vanishing from the hall before Orlando recovered the power of speech.

  “Can I not say, I thank you?” he whispered, marvelling at the suddenness of the affliction that had struck him dumb.

  “He calls us back!” cried Rosalind, catching the whisper and dragging Celia nearly off her feet in her haste to return. “Did you call, sir?” she asked eagerly; but Orlando was speechless again. “Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown more than your enemies,” she went on, with such warmth in her voice and honesty in her eyes that a stone would have been moved to speak. But not Orlando.

  “Will you go, coz?” murmured Celia, seeing it was a hopeless case. Reluctantly, Rosalind agreed, and with a sad shake of her head, accompanied her cousin out of the hall. Helplessly, the young man gazed after her.

  “O poor Orlando,” he sighed, “thou art overthrown!” The God of Love had shot him, not with a single arrow, but with his whole quiverful!

  But the God of Hate was also aiming his arrows at Orlando. He felt a touch upon his shoulder. Startled, he turned. Monsieur Le Beau, on his velvet feet, had tiptoed up beside him. “Good sir,” muttered the courtier, with anxious looks behind, “I do in friendship counsel you to leave this place!” Orlando frowned in puzzlement, and the courtier went on to confide that the Duke, who trusted no one, had suddenly taken it into his head that the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Boys was a threat to him. “Sir, fare you well,” he urged; and, as he spoke, the mask of smiles that he, like everyone else in the new Duke’s court habitually wore, slipped to reveal an honest man with an honest care for the young man’s safety. “Hereafter, in a better world than this,” he murmured softly, “I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.”

  Orlando thanked him warmly; and, cursing the cruelty of fortune that had offered him love with one hand only to snatch it back with the other, he hastened away. Sadly, Monsieur Le Beau watched him go; then, adjusting his courtier’s mask of smiles, he trotted off to wait upon his master.

  The Duke was in a fever of enemies. He saw them all around him. Every smile hid a frown; every word of love hid a thought of hate. No one was beyond suspicion; and least of all Rosalind, the daughter of the brother he had wronged, and whose presence in the court he had only tolerated on account of the love his own daughter had for her. But that was all over—“Mistress!” he shouted, bursting into the apartment where his daughter and the hated one were laughing together. “Get you from our court!”

  “Me, uncle?” cried Rosalind, amazed.

  “You!” answered the Duke in a mounting rage; and he swore that if she should be found within twenty miles of the court, she would die for it! Celia, outraged by her father’s cruel injustice, declared that she would go wherever her cousin went.

  “You are a fool!” said the Duke contemptuously; and, with his palely smiling courtiers, swept out of the room.

  The cousins stared at one another in fear and stark amazement. “Whither shall we go?” whispered Rosalind at length.

  “To seek my uncle in the Forest of Arden,” decided Celia, without hesitation.

  The forest! At once, the image of a dark and dreadful place of savage beasts and lurking robbers presented itself to the cousins’ imagination. Surely it was no place for a pair of tender Princesses! “I’ll put myself in poor and mean attire,” proposed Celia. “The like do you.”

  “Were it not better,” suggested Rosalind, “because I am more than common tall, that I do suit me all points like a man?” So it was agreed: Rosalind, in man’s attire, would be known as Ganymede, and Celia, dressed like a shepherdess, would be his sister, Aliena. Then Rosalind had another thought. Should they not take Touchstone, the court jester, with them for company?

  Celia nodded. “He’ll go along o’er the wide world with me,” she promised; and straightway the cousins set about making ready for their flight.

  While the two Princesses, in secret haste, were stuffing their purses with gold and their satchels with clothing, and Touchstone, gnawing his fingernails, was waiting below their window to steady the ladder for their night-time descent, Orlando, that other victim of the Duke’s frantic suspicions, returned to his lodging.

  As he approached, all was dark. A shadow stirred. “Who’s there?”

  It was old Adam, his face as white as his hair. “O unhappy youth, come not within these doors!” he cried out, barring Orlando’s path. In a shaking voice, he warned the young man that his brother Oliver, enraged by his success, meant to burn down his lodging that very night, with the sleeping Orlando inside it! “This house is but a butchery,” he whispered. “Do not enter it!”

  Orlando, his life now threatened in his own home, asked bitterly what was to become of him: must he get his living by robbing on the highway, or by begging in the town? The old servant shook his head. He had five hundred crowns, he said, that he had saved up during his long years of service; and now at last he had found a better use for his little fortune than ever he could have supposed. He offered it to Orlando and asked no more in return than that the young man should take him as his servant. “Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty,” he protested, as Orlando looked sadly at his white hair and frail limbs. “Let me go with you; I’ll do the service of a younger man . . .”

  “O good old man!” cried Orlando, his eyes filling up with tears. “Thou art not for the fashion of these times, where none will sweat but for promotion . . .” Adam bowed his head. “But come thy ways,” said Orlando with a smile, “we’ll go along together!” and with lifting hearts and sturdy pace, they set off side by side into the night.

  The palace was in an uproar! The Princesses had gone, and the jester with them! Their beds had been unslept in, and none knew when or where they had fled. All that could be found out was from a gentlewoman who had overheard the Princesses warmly praising the youth who had overthrown the wrestler. Find that youth, was her shrewd advice, and you will find the others.

  “Fetch that gallant hither!” commanded the Duke. “If he be absent, bring his brother!” and, as frightened courtiers hastened to obey, the search went on, high and low, for the runaways.

  The day was ending, and in the forest the gathering gloom turned every tree into a lurking robber, and every bush into a bear. “O Jupiter, how merry are my spirits!” cried Rosalind, for all the world as if she meant it; but her companions were not of her mind.

  “I care not for my spirits, if my legs were not weary,” groaned Touchstone, his melancholy countenance drooping onto the bright patchwork of his jester’s coat; and Celia, a Princess of burrs and scratches, limping far behind, wailed:

  “I pray you, bear with me: I can go no further.”

  “Well, this is the Forest of Arden!” said Rosalind, determined to be cheerful; for now she was in man’s attire, with her golden hair crammed up inside her feathered cap, she was resolved, against all private inclination, to be a prop and a comfort to her frailer friends.

  “Ay, now am I in Arden,” moaned Touchstone, sitting down on a tree-stump and nursing his blistered feet, “the more fool I; when I was at home I was in a better place—”

  There came a sound of footfalls and a murmur of voices! The three travellers looked to one another in alarm; and then, forgetful of their aching limbs, skipped, brisk as lambs, into the concealment of the trees.

  No sooner had they vanished from the clearing, than two inhabitants of the forest appeared. They proved to be nothing more alarming than a pair of shepherds: one sturdy and grey-haired; the other, young and tender, and full of sighs. They were talking of love, and the elder was gently advising his young companion against being too slavish in his courtship of his beloved. But his words went unheeded. “O Corin,” cried the afflicted one, clapping a hand to his pale brow, “that thou knew’st how I do love her!”

  “I partly guess,” smiled Corin, “for I have loved ere now.” But th
e youth would not have it. He could not believe that any man had loved as he loved, and not bear the scars for all to see.

  “Thou hast not loved!” he cried indignantly; and, clutching his hair as if to pull it out by the roots, rushed off into the forest, calling: “O Phebe, Phebe, Phebe!” to the unfeeling bushes and trees.

  Rosalind, in concealment, felt an ache in her heart. The shepherd’s passion for his Phebe reminded her sharply of her own for Orlando; and such was the power of visible love, that even the ever-mocking Touchstone was driven to recollect a time when he, too, had been laid low by the same madness. “We that are true lovers,” he sighed, “run into strange capers.”

  Celia alone felt differently. True, she felt pangs; but they were in her stomach, not in her heart. “I pray you,” she begged, “one of you question yond man, if he for gold will give us any food: I faint almost to death.”

  “Holla, you clown!” called out Touchstone, with a courtier’s contempt for simple countrymen who were little better than the beasts they tended.

  “Who calls?” asked Corin; and he stared in wonderment as the trees disgorged themselves of strange fruit indeed: a haughty jester, a lady dressed as a shepherdess who, he would have taken his oath, had never tended sheep save with a knife and spoon, as mutton, and a swaggering young huntsman with villainous sword and fearsome spear, whose complexion was as soft as a flower.

  “Good even to you, friend,” said the huntsman, with a mildness that belied his fierce ironmongery; and he went on to beg, for his fainting sister’s sake, food and shelter for which he was willing to pay. Sadly, Corin shook his head. He was not his own master, but served a man who cared nothing for hospitality, and wanted only to sell his cottage, pasture and flock, and have done with them.

  On hearing this, the young huntsman glanced at his sister; and she, poor famished soul, eagerly nodded her head. Without more ado, the huntsman offered to buy the property and pay Corin his wages for tending the sheep. “Assuredly the thing is to be sold,” said Corin, well-pleased at the prospect of so pleasant and monied a young master; and they all went off together, new landlords of a piece of Arden.