King of Shadows

by Susan Cooper

  “Anyone who speaks French.”

  “Nobody in this audience will understand French, outside the Lords’ Rooms.”

  Thomas rolled his eyes at me in mock horror, and I grinned at him. An hour or two earlier, he and Nick Tooley, who was playing the Princess Katharine, had been onstage rehearsing a scene Master Shakespeare had written entirely in French. Probably Roper knew only his own scenes.

  Thomas said to me, “Parlez-vous français, Nat?”

  “Bien sûr,” I said, because I did know some French—not much, but a year’s worth. “Je parle français. Un peu.”

  Roper glared at me. “Who asked you?”

  “Well, Thomas did, actually. In French.”

  “Trust the little lass from St. Paul’s to have some girlish talent to brag about,” said Roper nastily. “I don’t want a French lesson, Thomas, I just want to run my lines.”

  “Very well,” Thomas said amiably, and Roper went on spouting his impossible English French. I listened, remembering the lines from the time I’d played the Boy in Washington, D.C., when I hadn’t understood any French words either. I’d had a terrible time learning the right way to say them, which is I suppose why they stuck. Roper clearly hadn’t had a terrible time—he’d barely tried.

  By the time the trumpeter climbed up above the stage to blow the fanfare that began the play, we boys were all dressed up as pages and attendants for a court scene, and the men in gorgeous robes: Master Burbage as King Henry, Henry Condell as the Archbishop of Canterbury, very grand. As usual, there were constant nervous visits to the “plot,” the list of entrances and exits that hung near the stage in the tiring-house, and whenever Master Burbage came offstage he made a beeline for the book-keeper, a small bespectacled man who sat beside a window—out of the traffic but handy to the stage—with the play’s text on his lap.

  “What’s next, after the Boar’s Head, what’s next?”

  “Be calm, Dick. The traitors’ scene—‘Now sits the wind fair, and we will aboard. . . .’”

  Burbage went away muttering: “Now sits the wind fair. . . .” and the tireman seized him, to change his robe.

  Everyone always had trouble remembering lines, under the pressure of five different plays to perform every week, and there was a fair bit of improvising. “Thribbling,” they called it; isn’t that a great word? But when the play was by Will Shakespeare, actors tried not to thribble, because Master Shakespeare was not pleased when people put in words that were not his own. Thomas said this had been the main reason for Shakespeare’s row with Will Kempe, who was inclined to make winking asides to the audience in the hope of getting an extra laugh.

  Henry V went wonderfully well. Burbage was a terrific Henry, and the groundlings loved him; they cheered when he swashbuckled, and stood still as mice when he had a quiet moving speech, like the one that begins “Upon the King. . . .” They were hugely patriotic; they hissed the French so fiercely that it was quite frightening to come onstage as a French soldier and see all those hostile faces scowling and shouting at you. They also cheered something that surprised me—but before that there was a bit of drama that surprised me even more.

  Roper had come offstage after a scene in Act Three that had included his biggest speech; he’d done it really well, and got a lot of laughs from the groundlings. I wanted to tell him it was good, because we were all actors, even though he was such a pain—but he was full of himself, and kicked at me when he found me in his way, though not with enough concentration to hit me. After that I forgot about him, because the rest of us had to mill about onstage as French soldiers—but once we were back, there he was again, stirring things up even though Master Burbage was onstage doing Henry’s best big speech.

  “We few, we happy few, we hand of brothers. . . .

  I was standing in the tiring-house trying to listen, when Roper came slipping past me, snatched an apple from the tireman’s table, and started to chomp on it. Eating backstage was strictly forbidden while a performance was going on, and the man reached out to grab him, hissing a warning. Roper took a bigger bite, dancing out of his way, chewing, mouthing some cocky jeer as he moved—and then he choked.

  He stopped absolutely still, clutching his throat; after one awful first croak he didn’t make a sound. A piece of apple must have gone right into his windpipe. Onstage, a cheer went up as Burbage finished his speech, and John Heminges, all in armor as Lord Salisbury, rushed onstage through an entry door. Augustine Phillips as the French herald Mountjoy waited for his cue at the opposite side. Neither of them noticed the bigger drama going on backstage as everyone not in the scene hurried to crowd around Roper, banging him on the back, desperately trying to save him. He stood there terrified, suffocating, his face a dusky red, his eyes popping; in all the turmoil he could do nothing but flap his hands in a speechless plea for help.

  I didn’t think, really; I just knew what they ought to be doing, because Aunt Jen had taught me, the year before, when she was taking some lifesaving course at the Red Cross. I ran over to Roper and shoved Nick aside, spilling the water he was trying to get Roper to drink.

  “Look out!” I said, and I stood behind Roper, put my arms around him, made a fist with one hand between his ribs and his belly button, put my other hand over it, and jerked in and upward, hard. So the air was pushed up out of Roper’s lungs, up through his windpipe, and the piece of apple popped out. It fell out of his mouth and he hung there over my arm, making awful noises, great croaking gasps for air. But he was breathing.

  The voices from the stage went echoing on around us, but everyone backstage was staring at me. I looked at them, and felt uneasy; they looked almost as scared as they had when he was choking.

  Nick said, amazed, “What did you do?”

  I guess I babbled, because I was nervous. I said, “It’s called the Heimlich maneuver, some guy called Heimlich invented it—” And they went on staring, and I realized too late that I was sounding completely like a modern kid, because in Elizabethan England they didn’t use the word guy or probably the word maneuver either, and how could they know who Mr. Heimlich was, when he wasn’t going to be born for hundreds of years yet?

  I said lamely, “My aunt showed me how.”

  Then Roper rescued me. He threw up on the floor.

  And suddenly the book-keeper was there, very agitated, with the actors playing Pistol and the French soldier, and he was hissing at us to be ready to run onstage fighting, for the battle scene out of which Pistol would seize the Frenchman prisoner.

  Pistol looked in horror at Roper’s white face. “What ails the boy! Our cue is next! We need him!”

  I didn’t think this time either, I just jumped in again—and this time my brain nearly died of shock when it heard what I said.

  “I can do it,” I said. “I know the scene.”

  Theater people can move very fast sometimes. In that theater particularly, I guess they were used to people being able to jump into other people’s parts in an emergency. Before you could blink, the book-keeper whipped off the French soldier’s surcoat I was wearing, and the tireman pulled Roper’s jerkin off his back and onto mine. Thomas grabbed up Roper’s pages from somewhere and thrust them under my nose, for a quick frantic reminding look, and then fireworks were being set off onstage in a sequence of huge bangs, and clouds of smoke from a crude smoke machine being puffed out from a backstage bellows, for the battle effects, and Pistol grabbed my arm. And we were on.

  The first few lines of that scene belong just to Pistol and the French soldier, fortunately. It gave me a chance to get my bearings, before the dreaded cue.

  “Come hither, boy; ask me this slave in French

  What is his name.”

  I almost shouted my line, I was so nervous:

  “Écoutez: comment êtes-vous appelé?”

  I forget the actor’s name, but he sounded marvelously French. “Monsieur le Fer,” he said.

  The next line was easy to remember. I said to Pistol:

  “He says his n
ame is Master Fer.”

  Pistol rolled his drunken eyes. “Master Fer! I’ll fer him, and firk him, and ferret him—discuss the same in French unto him.”

  There was a ripple of laughter from the audience, and a drunken voice from the yard shouted, “Ferret him! Ferret him!” But my next line came into my head too.

  “I do not know the French for fer, and ferret, and firk.”

  That got a real laugh, probably helped by the fact my voice went up into a squeak because I was so scared—and then suddenly I was all right, I was the Boy, I was acting, and we went sailing through the scene, loudmouthed Pistol and the terrified French prisoner and me. I picked up the cues, I remembered the French speeches—there were only two really—and the audience carried us along. The other two were really good actors, caricature-funny; the groundlings loved them.

  My only bad moment was my last speech, the Boy alone onstage after the other two have gone off; I did an awful lot of thribbling. But I was helped by the fact that I’d come way downstage, so that I was right on top of the groundlings: I fixed my eyes on one man near the front, with a round red face and two front teeth missing, and said everything right to him. It was a perfect eye contact; he was gaping at me, fascinated. And I did remember to say the last line, telling that the English camp was guarded only by boys—and that was the most important, because what happens then is that the French invade the camp and murder all the boys, and that makes King Henry truly furious.

  So it all went okay, and I slipped offstage as the French soldiers came running on the other side. I’m not sure the audience ever knew or cared that they’d been watching a different Boy from the last one they’d seen. A boy was a boy; what they cared about was the story.

  In the tiring-house I ran straight into Roper, and he threw his arms around me. He smelled terrible, because of having thrown up. I guess he knew that, since he let me go almost at once, but he stood there looking at me very seriously. He said, “I thought I was dead. Tha saved my life.”

  “And me only a little lass,” I said.

  Roper looked down at his feet. He said, rather muffled, “Tha saved me a beating too. Missing that cue—missing that scene—Master Burbage would have—”

  “Cut off thine ears,” I said. “One by one, very slowly, inch by inch.” I grinned at him, which took some effort because my doing the Heimlich business had nothing to do with him. As far as I was concerned he was the same mean little monster he’d been before. He didn’t grin back; he went on giving me this same earnest look. I think Roper was feeling an emotion he’d never had to cope with before: guilt.

  “I am in thy debt, Nathan Field,” he said stiffly. “I shall not forget.”

  He patted me on the shoulder and I gave a sort of awkward shrug. I was wishing I knew the Elizabethan way to say, “Okay—just stop bugging me from now on.”

  Will Shakespeare came sweeping past us toward the stage, pulling on the robe he wore as Chorus, ignoring an anxious tireman running after him with his hat. He caught sight of me, and stopped suddenly, and the tireman bumped into him, frantically holding out the hat so it wouldn’t get squashed. From the stage we heard a great cheer; Master Burbage had reached the end of the scene in which King Henry hears that his little army of Brits have managed to kill ten thousand Frenchmen in battle while losing only twenty-nine men themselves. (Ten thousand? Are you kidding me?)

  Shakespeare paused for a moment, gazing at me, but he had no chance to say anything, because his cue had come: the tireman plunked his hat on his head, straightened it, and pushed him around to face the stage. And as Master Burbage came stalking backstage through the door stage right, out went Will Shakespeare stage left, to face the world, our world, the audience.

  “Vouchsafe to those that have not read the story

  That I may prompt them....”

  I stood behind the stage hangings, listening. He had a wonderful voice, clear and warm and sort of mid-brown. I was as happy that moment as I think I’ll ever be: standing there listening to him, knowing I was part—and a useful part, just now—of his company, safe in the small family world of the theater. I wanted it never to end.

  Shakespeare went on with that speech that tells the audience how King Henry is now coming back in triumph to London from France, and I was half hearing it, half just enjoying the sound of his voice, when a few particular words came, interrupting my vague head because suddenly they didn’t make sense.

  “Were now the General of our gracious Empress—

  As in good time he may—from Ireland coming,

  Bringing rebellion broached upon his sword,

  How many would the peaceful city quit

  To welcome him!”

  Empress? Ireland? I didn’t understand. I’d never noticed that part before. And then there was a huge cheer from the audience at the word welcome, so that Master Shakespeare had to wait for them to quiet down before he could go on.

  “Much more, and much more cause

  Did they this Harry. . . .”

  Close to me, Tom the book-keeper was sitting with his script, listening, looking sour. I said in his ear, “What are they shouting about?”

  “Essex, of course,” he said. “Where hast’a been, boy? Pretty Robin, Earl of Essex, who is in Ireland about the Queen’s business putting down rebellion. And let’s hope, not starting one of his own.” But he dropped his voice on this last bit, and his eyes flickered cautiously to and fro.

  I remembered Will Shakespeare protesting that morning to the nameless lord that he was not political, and wondered why, in that case, he had dropped such an obvious compliment to the Earl of Essex into his Henry V.

  It didn’t seem to bother Roper, who was clapping along with the audience, his face bright and intent. Behind him in the shadowy tiring-house I saw Master Burbage, listening too, caught into stillness after his bustling exit from the stage. He was King Henry, confident and magnificent in his gleaming armor, but suddenly his face was quite different. He was shaking his head, uneasy. He looked frightened.

  ELEVEN

  I began to be frightened too, that evening, for the first time—even through the delight I had from being with Will Shakespeare, being one of the Chamberlain’s Men. Partly I was afraid of this business about the Earl of Essex, whatever it was. Shakespeare had some connection with him, the nameless lord had called him dangerous, Master Burbage was clearly nervous—and worst of all, though I could remember very little about Arby’s potted history of Elizabethan England, I did remember that Queen Elizabeth had had Essex’s head chopped off. So that Essex was about to end up, sooner or later, among those terrible pecked-at skulls stuck up over London Bridge.

  Why did that happen, and when? I was afloat in Time, I didn’t know where I was.

  But I did know one other thing that worried me. In less than twenty-four hours’ time, we would perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream in front of the Queen, and after that the Chamberlain’s Men would have no more need for Nathan Field, and he would be sent back to St. Paul’s School, where he came from. What would become of me then? I should lose Will Shakespeare—and be faced with the friends and family of the real Nathan, who would instantly know that whoever I was, I was certainly not Nathan Field. If I felt I had very little place in my own world anymore, I was going to have even less in this one. It was terrifying, like facing a drop over a huge cliff.

  In fact it was so terrifying that I pushed it out of my head, and tried to concentrate on the shadowy Earl of Essex instead.

  After Henry V and a break, we rehearsed A Midsummer Night’s Dream until dark, though without Bottom the Weaver, because Master Burbage was exhausted. He took a nap on a mattress at the back of the tiring-house, oblivious of us. I loved doing my scenes with Will Shakespeare—and I loved our costumes, which the tireman produced for a fitting. They were wildly fantastical; Shakespeare had shimmering robes over a bare chest and full, shot-silk pants, with a weird headdress and antennae on his head.

  I was to wear gleaming green tights, li
ke the skin of some exotic snake, and nothing else but a lot of body paint. The tireman told me that the tights had cost the equivalent of six months of his wages, so that he would personally destroy me if I tore them. He showed me a drawing of the design for the makeup on the rest of me. “Master Burbage will paint you,” he said, “but not till the day. It will take almost an hour.”

  Shakespeare said to me, as we were waiting for an entrance, “I hear thou leapt into the breach this afternoon.”

  “It was good luck,” I said. I was going to tell him I’d played the Boy before, but I suddenly remembered that it was a new play. “Uh—I’d been listening to Roper rehearse, and I have a memory like a sponge. So I remembered his lines.”

  It sounded improbable, but he seemed to believe it.

  “And what ailed our friend Roper?” he said.

  “He was ill,” I said evasively. “Something he ate.”

  Will Shakespeare looked down at me with an odd smile. “My small magician,” he said. And then it was our cue, and we went through the door to the stage.

  The other boys were more interested in Roper’s choking and its cure than in my having done his scene. They made me uneasy: they were looking at me warily as if I’d grown another head. Harry said, “What didst tha do to him?”

  “If someone chokes, you hold him from behind and push hard into his belly, so the air pushes up out of his lungs and blows out whatever he’s choking on. That’s all.”

  “Who taught thee how?”

  “My aunt. I told you.”

  Harry and fair-haired Nick Tooley looked at each other like conspirators. Nick said, “Is she a wise woman?”

  “Well, I suppose so,” I said. It wasn’t quite how I would have described Aunt Jen, who is a perky little person with a grey ponytail.