‘He don’t mean you, mate!’ a groundling yelled to the men around him.
Sir Edward Winterton tapped his foot in disgust. ‘Shh, Edward!’ his wife hissed, although the man had yet to open his mouth.
‘Good crowd!’ the Fair Maid of Kent beamed to Ned Sledd at his elbow.
The veteran player was less sure of that. ‘We’ll see,’ he muttered. On Fludd’s word, the little knot of constables broke up and took their positions at the edge of the crowd, walking softly and keeping their tipstaffs out of sight.
‘Pardon us,’ the Prologue went on. ‘Our sorry postures and our feeble antics . . .’
‘You got that right, son!’ somebody else called.
‘We come before you to present the story of Esmerelda the Fair Maid of Kent. And you shall see her played, and by her father twice betrayed.’
There was booing and hissing from the crowd. Nothing went down with country clods like a good villain. He duly stepped forward, Ned Sledd in all his Elizabethan patrician finery and a little servant scurried after him.
‘How now, sirrah,’ Sledd delivered, scanning the crowd below him. ‘Where is Esmerelda, the apple of my eye?’
An apple accordingly whizzed through the air from somewhere near the front and the crowd shrieked its approval as it bounced and caught the servant a nasty one on the kneecap.
‘Didst call, father and founder of our race?’ Thomas tripped on with a full-blown falsetto, to the catcalls and whistles of the groundlings.
Edward Winterton had had enough. He was about to get up and remind the rabble that they were letting down their fair town – it certainly didn’t look as if the Mayor was going to do it; the man seemed nailed to his chair – when a strangled cry broke from the crowd on Fludd’s side.
‘Harlot!’
Sledd spun to his prompter, hidden in the wings. ‘That’s not yet, surely?’ he hissed. ‘Not ‘til Act Two.’
‘Er . . .’ the prompter was riffling through the papers balanced on his knees, desperate to make sense of what was happening.
‘Whoredom!’ the voice shouted again, taken up by others. In the centre, a group of black-robed clerics and scholars was forcing its way towards the stage.
‘Uh-oh,’ Marlowe muttered and half-turned to be ready for what was to follow.
‘They’re St John’s men,’ Parker said as the hubbub grew. One of them was up on stage, while others at the front were tussling with the groundlings who were draped on its edge.
‘If you will tear and blaspheme Heaven and Earth,’ the Scholar shouted. ‘If you will learn to become a bawd . . .’
Roars of approval rose from the crowd.
‘. . . if you will learn to devirginate maids . . .’
‘I already know how to do that, sonny!’ a Bedford Levels man shouted back to the delight of the men around him.
‘If you will commit lewd and ungodly filthiness . . .’
‘Well, there have to be some perks,’ somebody else shouted.
The Scholar grabbed the Fair Maid of Kent and proceeded to haul up the lad’s skirts. ‘Sodomites!’ he roared. ‘All of them!’
Thomas pushed him away and tried to regain some composure. ‘Do you mind?’ he said in his own voice. ‘There’s nothing funny about Lord Strange’s Men,’ he insisted.
But the Scholar wasn’t listening. ‘Are we going to allow this filth in our town?’ he screamed. ‘Within the precincts of our University? On this very piece of land bequeathed to us by Archbishop Parker of blessed memory?’
‘Oh, yes, wonderful,’ Matt Parker muttered in the increasingly mutinous crowd. ‘Let’s bring granddad into this again, by all means.’
A fight had broken out below the stage where a Dry Drayton man was kicking a John’s scholar for all he was worth. The muscular Christians of the college leapt to his defence and Fludd’s under-constables darted through the swaying mob to prevent a murder.
‘Ned?’ the Fair Maid of Kent looked at his master for approval.
‘All right,’ Sledd sighed, pulling off his grey beard. ‘The whole bloody thing’s ruined now anyway.’
And Thomas lowered his head and butted the John’s man in the stomach, grappling with him until they both fell off the stage. Edward Winterton’s sword was in his hand and at last the Mayor was galvanized into movement. He clapped his hands and attempted a calming speech, but nobody was listening. All over the crowd, fights were breaking out here and there. Dry Drayton men against the scholars; Bedford Levels boys against the scholars. Everybody against the Puritans.
‘It’s a little late for that now, Mayor,’ Winterton yelled in his ear, trying to be heard over the din.
‘Edward!’ the Coroner’s wife was bewildered. Doling out domestic violence was her meat and drink, but this was getting out of hand.
‘Not now, dearest,’ Winterton snapped. ‘Mayor, get the ladies out of here, will you?’ And the Mayor was only too happy to oblige.
On the edge of the field, Nicholas Drew, the ferryman, was trading punches with a couple of Jesus men. He really wanted to get across to the Corpus lads to give them a smacking for pinching his church. His wife stood behind him, fists clenched, ducking and diving for her husband. Then it was cudgels out and the clack of quarterstaff on quarterstaff, among the screams and cries.
‘How are we doing?’ The Fair Maid of Kent popped his head above the stage parapet. His nose was bleeding, but his stomacher and farthingale were holding up quite well.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Thomas.’ Ned Sledd was kneeling on one knee above him, his temple dripping blood from a carelessly-lobbed stone. ‘But Lord Strange’s Men appear to be outnumbered about twenty to one.’ He had a commanding view of the battlefield that was Parker’s Piece from where he crouched and his troupe were in danger of being engulfed by sheer numbers.
‘Rally with the boys on the right,’ Sledd ordered, as much a general as a player-king if the need arose. ‘I’ll take the lot on the left. Push them all back from the stage area. I don’t want to face his Lordship if they get their hands on our flats.’
Thomas complied, hauling up his skirts and shouldering struggling scholars out of the way.
‘Not easy, is it, sonny?’ a village woman snarled at him. ‘Fighting in a skirt.’ And she smacked a shovel down on the head of the Fair Maid of Kent. It was the last thing he saw for quite a while.
‘We can’t hold them on the left, Joe!’ an exhausted under-constable stumbled alongside Fludd. ‘We need the militia.’
Fludd looked at him. The man must have taken too many knocks to the head. ‘Well, I’ll just write a letter to the Lord Lieutenant, shall I?’ he asked. ‘Send a messenger to London for him? Wait for him to issue a commission of array? That’ll be perfect. They’ll be here in a month or so. Oh, and by the way,’ he said, pointing to the melee, where men were knocking lumps out of each other, ‘most of the Cambridge militia are already here!’
The constables knew only too well that fists, boots and cudgels would soon be replaced by knives and then things would get really nasty. Fludd sent his man back into the fray and clouted a man over the head with his staff. In the centre, Harry Rushe, his broken arm strapped into his jerkin, was kicking a Puritan in the groin. Meg Hawley, alongside him, was doing her best to drag her man away. Part of her felt sorry for him – he was at a serious disadvantage, after all, with only one arm. But part of her hated him for the lout he was, gouging the eyes of another scholar with his good hand.
One woman who wasn’t helping her man was Allys Fludd. In fact, she’d only seen him once, before the trouble began and had done her best to shrink down in the crowd, hoping that little Kate wouldn’t see her daddy and call out to him. But the excitement of earlier in the day had given way to terror and knots of people, some bleeding and hurt, were staggering away from the chaos on Parker’s Piece. Allys was with them. She’d lost her bundle back in the terrifying, swaying mob and had held Kate to her, the little girl screaming and crying. If this was what a play was like, she never wanted to see one again.