He looked quite fragile for a moment, then scratched at his beard, and picked up his pipe again. Inhaled and closed his eyes. Blew the smoke over his left shoulder as I sipped my ale.
‘The acorn wasn’t rotten,’ I said.
‘Ah, yet the tree is twisted. But there is no moral to this tale, except with mirth and laughter let wrinkles come.’ I didn’t know for sure if he thought of me as another Henry Hemmings. Nor did I know for sure if Henry Hemmings actually had been like me, or if he was someone who was blessed and cursed with a more youthful disposition than average. I didn’t know if Shakespeare knew the story of what had happened in Edwardstone, and whether, possibly, my Suffolk connection had made a link in his mind. Yet I sensed a kind of warning, a friendly one, in his words. ‘So, why did you want to see me?’
I took a breath.
‘I know two sisters, Grace and Rose, and they need work. They need it urgently . . . They could sell apples.’
‘I have no say over the pippin-hawks.’
He shook his head. Seemed irritated that I would burden his great mind with such an irksome triviality.
‘Please, talk to me of something else, or leave me.’
I thought of Rose’s worried face. ‘I am sorry, sir. I owe these girls a great debt. They took me into their home at a time when I had no one. Please, sir.’
Shakespeare sighed. I felt like I was baiting a bear, and feared what he was going to say next. ‘And who is Rose? You spoke her name soft when you said it.’
‘She is my love.’
‘Oh dear. A serious love?’
He pointed over at Elsa and another worker from the Cardinal’s Hat, who often touted for trade in the tavern. Elsa was holding a gentleman’s groin under a table, her thumb caressing the bulge. ‘Look at the man she hangs on. Is that the kind of love you feel?’
‘No. Well, yes. But the other kind too.’
Shakespeare nodded. His eye glimmered with a tear. Maybe it was the smoke. ‘I will have a word. You can tell these girls they can sell their apples.’
And so they did.
And all was sweet and light, though every time I heard Jaques’ soliloquy I worried. I, more than most, was an actor in life. I was playing a part. What would my next role be, and when would I have to take it? How would I be able to leave this one behind, and when it would mean leaving Rose?
The night I told Rose that she and Grace could work at the Globe because ‘Mr Shakespeare made it so’ was a happy one, and I had bought a pack of cards on the way home. We sat all night laughing and singing and playing triumph and eating pies from Old Street and drinking more ale than usual.
Conversation turned to how Grace was looking more like a woman, and then Grace said to me, not in a rude way but in the straight-as-an-arrow truthful way that was the essence of Grace, ‘I will pass you by soon.’
And she laughed, because she had drank too much ale. She was used to drinking it, just not four jugs of it in a row.
But Rose didn’t laugh. ‘It is true. You haven’t aged a day.’
‘It is because I am happy,’ I said weakly. ‘I have no worries to line my face.’
Though of course the reality was that I had a sea of them, but it would be decades before a single line appeared.
I used to watch Rose, between the musical interludes, and she used to observe me too, in the gallery. What was it about those silent exchanges in a crowded place? There was a magic to them, like a secret shared.
The crowds, however, seemed to be getting rowdier as the season went on. On opening night – with the queen and her court in attendance – there hadn’t been a single scuffle. Towards the season’s end, there was always, at any time, some skirmish going on amid the groundlings in the pit. Once, for instance, a man sliced another man’s ear off with an oyster shell over one of the prostitutes who was always there. I worried about the girls being down there while I was safely up in the rarefied air of the gallery but generally they were all right, and enjoyed selling four times as much fruit as they would have sold at Whitechapel Market.
But then, one afternoon, under a sky full of stone-grey rain clouds: trouble.
I was midway through the tune of ‘What Shall He Have That Killed the Deer?’ – which by now, as with all the songs in the play, I could pretty much pluck my way through in my sleep – when I noticed something. Someone – a mean-looking saggy-lipped man from the benches – had stolen a pippin from Grace and was biting into it as she asked him for the penny it cost. He tried to bat her away like a fly, but Grace was Grace so she stood her ground. She was shouting words I couldn’t hear, but knowing Grace I could guess them. As she was standing in the way of another man, she was now getting into broader bother. This man – a grizzled brown-toothed brute in ale-soaked clothes – pushed Grace to the floor, sending her apples flying to the ground amid the sand and the nut and oyster shells, triggering a memory of all those scattered plums on Fairfield Road. Then it was a free for all, as several people jostled to grab the apples.
Grace got to her feet, and the first man, the apple thief, then grabbed her and made a gargoyle of his face, shoving his tongue in her ear.
I had, by this point, stopped playing.
Hal, next to me, tapped my foot while still playing his flute, as the actors continued singing below. I heard Christopher sighing his disapproval behind me. So I began to start playing again, but then spied Rose, leaving her basket and rushing back through the pit, concerned for her sister. She reached Grace, who was still having trouble with the ear-licker, when the apple-thief’s companion made a grab at her, pulling up her skirt and reaching his hand beneath it.
She slapped him, he yanked at her hair, I felt her distress as if it was my own, just as Grace was elbowing her harasser hard in the face, bloodying his nose. I didn’t know what happened next because I was climbing over the oakwood rail of the balcony, holding my lute like a club, and – to the sound of a thousand gasps – jumping down onto the stage.
I landed on top of Will Kemp, then shouldered past a shocked Shakespeare himself, as I lunged forward and leapt off the stage to reach Rose and Grace.
I ran around the side of the pit and pushed my way through as nuts and ale and apples were thrown in my direction from the angry crowd. The play went on behind me, as the play always did, but I doubt if even those in the fivepenny seats could hear a word that was being said, such was the commotion now in the pit and around the benches. Even in the balconies people were roaring and jeering and raining their theatre food down on me.
Rose was fine now – she had broken free of her lecherous assailant – and was trying to help Grace, who was still in trouble, being held in a headlock with a thick arm squeezed hard around her neck.
Between Rose and myself we managed to get Grace free.
I grabbed the sisters’ hands and urged them, ‘We have to go.’
But there was potentially an even bigger problem now.
One of the men from the expensive seats was now standing in our path as we tried to get out of the theatre. I hadn’t spotted him, and I doubt he had spotted me, before I had leapt out of the gallery.
He stood tall and strong and solid, better dressed than I had seen him last, with his thinning hair flattened in stripes across his head, clasping those thick butcher’s hands in front of him.
‘So,’ said Manning, looking down at me with his one good eye. ‘I see it is true. You made it to London . . . How long is it since I saw you last? It seems only yesterday. You haven’t changed in the slightest. But then, you don’t, do you?’