“Richard Burbage,” the tall actor stated. “My name. The renowned Richard Burbage.”
“Iseld Morveston,” Iseld said. The hand that took hers felt like calloused wood, but when he brought it to his lips she was a noble lady for that moment and he was a lord.
“Tell me about this place,” Burbage said. “We’ve not played here before, and we like to know our public. We have a little wine inside, or perhaps some moonshine, and I’m sure you’d like to meet the company.”
Iseld, who should have been bone-tired from the factory, and who should certainly never have gone off in company with a strange vagrant, found herself entering the world of the theatre via the back door. Cut off from censure for the first time in her life, she found herself explaining about the factory and Vender in far more candid terms than she had ever dared, laying bare the town’s flaws and shames with abandon. In return she got to see the heavy-set, unshaven man who adapted their plays as he sat like an old mole behind a desk the size of two open hands. “Simion the Garden Born?” he was muttering. “Damnfool idea. Dismal bloody story anyway.” Iseld saw the Lady of the Dawn washing her tights and the Lord of Night stitching a hole in his dread black mantle, and heard two eternal lovers engaged in a slanging match that turned the air blue. Hung about her, anatomised, was all the flummery and sham that theatres are made of: the tin crowns and wooden swords and kingly cloaks made out of curtains.
Even so… there was a presence in the air that none of the actors could account for, an unseen being that was theatre in potentia. Iseld found a worm-ribbon of excitement rising in her. The players had come to town.
“There are worse lives,” Burbage was saying. The junior clown walked past, practising his straight-man’s part to thin air. “Some people would say there’s no business like it. No business I know.”
“It’s got to be better than the factory,” Iseld said.
Burbage looked past the huddled buildings of Passendean to the smokestacks and vaults of Vender’s livelihood. “Yes,” he agreed softly. “It has got to be better than that.”
*
Everyone knows the story of Simion, that classical tale of death, war and unrequited love. The hero, suffering under the tragedy of being a made thing rather than a natural man, fights to escape his ordained fate as a creature of winter and death. In the process, of course, he happens to thwart the Lord of Night and save the Lady of the Dawn but, being a tragic hero, his very interference seals his fate, and he is lost even as his allies win through. All very sad, and quite familiar to the folk of Passendean. It was one of that interminable round of old stories that people told each other when they ran out of things to say. Still, the theatre was something new, and people queued up with shillings in their hands (fourpence for children and the mad) to see a troupe of actors drag the old tale out to new lengths.
Iseld, forewarned, watched them when they filed out. They were silent, and it was hard to recognise them from their expressions because all their innate character, meanness and discontent had been shouldered aside by a kind of rough magic. Simion was still a long-dead hero pursuing metaphysical ideals, but for three hours on a wooden stage something alien and terrible had left its footprints in their minds, its reflection in their eyes. Simion had lived, for those three hours, tormented by his heritage and desperate to simply be as other men. The lord of Night had coveted the Lady of the Dawn enough to steal her and put the world into darkness. As a battle had raged between her followers and Night’s creatures, Simion had fought his final duel and made his final speech, calling on all the powers of heaven to bring morning to the world again, though it meant his own damnation. Even Iseld, who knew it was gaunt Richard Burbage under Simion’s painted face, sat breathless as the play brought to life a world that never was, conjuring the extinct from the commonplace. That was what filled the slack faces of Passendean, the infinite possibilities of other places.
One face was not filled, though. A gnawing emptiness remained in it and showed so obviously that Iseld wondered why the man had come at all. The chief scientist from the factory, bleak as frost with a uniform beneath his coat, stepped untouched from the audience and walked over to Vender. She could not hear their words nor read the expressionless face of the man of science, but there was a danger hanging over the pair of them.
“Trouble.” It was the first word that Lansdowne had ever spoken to Iseld. He was standing at her shoulder, watching as Vender tried to pass something off as a joke. The scientist did not look amused. Iseld glanced up at the veteran’s face. It was as shrouded with secrecy and old pain as an aging wolf’s.
Lansdown’s eyes touched down on her as though surprised to see who he was talking to. His meaning was plain: the play had dwelt much on Simion’s unnatural birth, grown by thoughtless men in some laboratory garden, then cast out when they disliked what they had made. It could be seen, she supposed, in a political context. People had shuffled restlessly through that first scene as though unwilling to be caught enjoying it. Then the magic of the theatre had taken them, and it had been forgotten. Now it all came back.
Lansdowne nodded as though reading her mind, then turned without warning and limped away.
*
“Next, I think, ‘The Good Toad of Cetslan,’” declared de Venezi grandly. The writer, whose name Iseld never learned, nodded wearily.
“Good idea. Give ‘em a laugh, why not?” he said.
“Not so fast,” Burbage warned him. “I’ve been speaking to our mascot here and I’ve got a few changes I’d like made.”
“Oh of course,” the writer complained. “Why can’t you stick to strutting like the rest?”
The mascot was Iseld, whom Burbage had re-adopted as soon as she was freed by the twin devils of sleep and the factory. She sat in the re-assembled wagon with half a dozen of the company and fretted over her reputation in the town.
“You put things into Simion, didn’t you?” she asked cautiously. “At the beginning.”
“Certainly he did,” the writer snapped. “Reams of it. Bad prose and worse verse, and who gets to hack it into shape?”
“I’m not sure you should,” Iseld said, but Burbage carried his stage-nobility with such assurance that he was unmoveable.
“Art,” he pronounced, “should have something to say.”
Sidney, Lord Essex; a real lord deposed by his scheming brother; was preparing for the role of Thenard, a much-loved comic turn. “So long as it doesn’t say ‘Please don’t execute me for treason,’ I’ll be happy,” he murmured.
“Treason,” Burbage sneered. He had a practiced sneer that almost had a life of its own. “Treason, by God. Just listening to that bloated magnate threaten Tim with treason made me want to run him through.”
“With your wooden sword,” Sidney nodded absently, flicking through script pages. “If we’re going to re-write this, give me a decent soliloquy. The part’s just begging for it.”
As he and the writer began to argue, Iseld shuffled closer to Burbage.
“You shouldn’t annoy Mr. Vender,” she warned. “Everyone round here does what he says, and the scientists are awful. The king sent them himself.”
“Petty provincial politics,” Burbage enunciated perfectly. “The October Players have been to more places than you can guess at, dear Iseld, and we have seen kings fall and wars start and radiant princesses kill themselves for love. What matter to us the displeasure of one factory owner, or one king, for that matter?”
“But that’s just in plays!” Iseld said, her patience absconding all in one go, to creep back, shamefaced, later in the day. “It’s only in plays. It’s not real.”
Burbage tilted his head only slightly but she was, without warning, sitting next to a total stranger whose face was the product of another time and place. “Are you sure?” the stranger said, in a voice that might pronounce death sentences or create worlds. “Are you so sure we have not played to courts unimaginable to you, to Simion himself before his final fall, perhaps? Can you be sure?”
Then Richard Burbage was smiling at her through the last shreds of the stranger’s stern expression, and the writer was clapping sarcastically from somewhere beyond them. Iseld put a smile on to match, but their eyes met in silent communion and she saw herself in his: a tiny reversed reflection crowded out by all the mysteries of the ages. She was not sure, she decided. She was not sure at all.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said eventually, too quietly for anyone else to hear. She had seen other girls receive looks like that, but had been proof against them until now. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not one to be looked at like that.”
“And I am not Simion or any other hero, but a plain and simple player,” Burbage told her. “On the stage, though, we can be anything.”
*
When her next shift came up, she had Miriam tell the timekeeper that she was sick and spent the time with the players. It was like a dream. She could not afford to miss the work, even less to bring herself so to the attention of Vender or his subordinates. Anyone in the town who cared to enquire could discover where she was spending her day, but her mind was full of peacock-splendour and false images, often as not, the lean hawk-features of Richard Burbage.
The Good Toad of Cetslan went up mid-afternoon on a windless day. Iseld stood with de Venezi and the junior clown, a gangling youth by the name of Worthing, as the audience began to file in. The cast were readying themselves, slapping on make-up and fighting with their costumes and each other. She thought of Richard, currently attired as the villainous Sumer, and smiled. Worthing took shillings and handed out playbills printed in shocking red ink, and de Venezi was counting the crowd, his eyes narrow and businesslike behind his spectacles. The play was another old favourite, a comedy laden with the required clichés: mistaken identity, cross-dressing, vulgar innuendo and a deux ex machina ending. What worried Iseld were the changes that Burbage had made to the plot. She was wondering how the audience would cope when Sumer the villain was revealed to be, not a historian as was hitherto believed, but an artificer intent on creating machines of warfare. Burbage and the writer had been up all night hammering out a grand speech about the follies of a man of science meddling with politics. The symbolism was heavy-handed and uncompromising. Iseld thought of the scientists huddling within the grey-lit walls of the factory in their white coats and protective gauntlets and goggles, looking like made-things themselves. She doubted they would be here to see the show, ever since their leader had expressed such displeasure at the last. He was a Major in the King’s army, according to the girls who had worked a shift in the new wing. The other scientists, who had no obvious feelings about anything else, were scared of him in the awkward, uncomfortable way that even soulless men can be scared.
The last punter handed over his shilling and fourpence and took his daughter off to find a place. Timoti de Venezi did something complicated on his fingers, employing a mathematics reserved only for theatre promoters.
“We’re short,” He glanced sidelong at Iseld. “You were quite serious about your man Vender’s influence here, weren’t you?”
“Very,” Iseld agreed.
“By my calculations, everyone who saw your man unhappy with our tragedy has stayed at home,” de Venezi concluded. “Thankfully, not many noticed him. I’ll give Burbage this, he hangs about their minds like no one else.”
“Yes,” said Iseld, with more feeling that she had intended. De Venezi looked up at her with mischief riding his spectacles for a moment. Then his face set into more serious lines.
“Short,” he repeated. “I hope we have enough.” Worthing nodded unhappily.
“Enough money?” Iseld asked.
“Oh we made enough profit on Simion, no worries to be had there. Enough people.” For a moment, de Venezi’s face, that normally harboured a vulpine cheer that made him seem far too young for any sensible trade, was old and haunted with misgivings, cut from the same dark wood as Burbage’s and Sidney’s and the writer’s. They were all of a piece, like chessmen, or images from an obsolete style of painting.
*
After the show, the folk of Passendean came out laughing, talking amongst themselves. They had transformed improbably into happy people, where before had been such a stony ground that happiness could never have grown there. They wandered away in groups and twos and threes, and de Venezi watched them go. Only when the last had gone, the final note of laughter ebbed away on the air, did Burbage come out from behind the stage to stand beside him.
“Well?” was all he asked.
De Venezi shook his head. “No,” he said simply. “Not by my numbers.”
“We’ll do the second house as planned,” Burbage pressed.
“Oh yes. The show must go on.” And de Venezi was old again, stripped of the energy that lent him a tenuous youth.
“What is it?” she asked Burbage, when the manager had gone behind the scenes.
“We’ve given the town something to think about,” he told her candidly. “Everyone who left here laughing will spend tonight thinking. Art must have something to say.”
“So what’s wrong?”
Burbage sighed. “Those people who stayed away after Simion will not be thinking tonight. They’ll be waiting to be told what to think.” His face creased into something that only resembled a smile. “I need to be ready for the next house.” The words rang hollow and heavy in the still, cool air, and he was gone.
*
Iseld spent the intervening time with Worthing and an actress named Felice, being taught a complicated and arbitrary card game. There was tension hanging in the air like a cloud of midges, refusing to disperse, always on the edge of vision. She saw nothing of Burbage or de Venezi, although the writer spared her a nod. He had moved his little desk into the dying sunlight and was working on something or other with many stops and starts. She was caught unawares, later, when things started to go wrong, but only because she was waiting for the next show. Trouble showed its hand an hour after sunset.
She was inside the wagon and so the first sign was simply that Worthing, Felice and Sidney Lord Essex all stood up at the same time. They were all actors, and for that moment they were playing soldiers ready for the final battle, or the condemned going to execution. Sidney had even taken up a wooden sword, but after a second he put it down.
By the time Iseld got to the wagon door she could hear the crowd. De Venezi’s numbers must have been close. There were fewer people out there than she might have guessed, but enough to handle a band of players and any hangers-on they might have accumulated. They had torches, of course, and factory tools and sticks and stones. They coursed down from the direction of the factory itself towards the market square and the players, with oaths and threats and wordless shouting. Iseld stared at them. It was like watching a tide, a natural force. She knew most of the people there but she could recognise not one face. The same monstrous hand had gripped them all in turn and reshaped them into something mindless and brutal. There were factory workers and tradesmen, and the solid, leather-clad engineers that acted as Vender’s private militia. They crashed down like an avalanche upon the wagon, rolling and shuddering to an unnatural halt a bare four feet from the wheels.
Richard Burbage had come out, dressed like a king, a rod of gilded wood in his hand. His presence and his scorn held back the crowd for a moment as he declared, “What is this unrest? What is this rabble? Why have you come?”
In retrospect, Iseld thought that he might have employed more tact, but tact was clearly not his strong point. The other players were gathered around him and the wagon, and they were pale and frightened, just as anyone would be. Burbage gave nothing to his enemies save a performance.
“We’ve come to see justice done!” shouted one of the engineers. He was a big, uncomplicated man, and not a patron of the theatre.
“Justice?” Burbage said in what was surely the beginnings of a speech that would have calmed nations and ended wars mid-battle. He never had a chance to go through with it. A stone, flung
from the crowd, whistled through the air towards him and, though he ducked it, his moment was gone, his royalty revealed as a sham. The crowd gathered itself like a single thing and leapt.
Iseld remembered little of the next minute or so except the jostling. The crowd had too many hands. It got in its own way, surging back and forth trying to lick the wagon clean of players and gather them all in one place. The players did not cooperate. They climbed the walls and stood on the roof. They brandished tin crowns and wooden swords. They made a nuisance of themselves by grabbing their attackers’ knees and begging for mercy or pretending to faint. The crowd got them all eventually without a fight, but not without a show.
Iseld, they ignored. She was neither of one world nor the other and had been shuffled out of the conflict as soon as it began.
In the end the folk of Passendean managed to lay hands on the whole troupe, men and women, actors and manager. They pinned them in a rough herd and various mobsters suggested unpleasant fates for them. The engineers took charge so swiftly that Tomas Vender might as well have been there himself. One of them stood to the fore and struck Burbage across the face, apropos of nothing, merely to draw the crowd’s attention. Iseld tried to fight her way forwards but there were too many people. Her eyes found Burbage’s once, and she saw an unexpected humour in them. And a farewell.
“You bastards come into our town,” the engineer was saying. “You put on your fancy airs and graces. You disrupt our work and you make free with our women.” Here he pointed straight at Iseld, and she cried out at the unfairness of it, but nobody heard.
“You come here with your treason and your lies,” the engineer continued, “when hard-working people are trying to make a living. When a war’s being fought to keep us safe, you try and spread your filth. Look at you! Where were you born, hey? Nowhere near here. You bloody foreigners and vagabonds the lot of you.”
Feast and Famine Page 5
