At last I found the house I wanted, at the sign of the Black Boy. It was a secretive shop, and I entered hesitantly. At first I could make out nothing in the gloom, then I saw two people talking quietly at the back of the narrow room. One I recognised as the husband of the woman I sought, for I had seen him at services in the synagogue. The other, a slight, fair-haired youth, had his back to me. I waited by the door until they had concluded their business, for Manoel de Barros was a pawnbroker, and such business was often delicate. When the young man turned at last toward the door, I realised that I knew him.
‘Kit!’ he cried, ‘Kit Alvarez!’ And he seized me by the hand as though he was glad to see me, and not one jot embarrassed at being caught in a pawnbroker’s shop.
For a moment I could not remember his name, though I remembered well enough that he was the boy actor who had fetched me to the Marshalsea, and so baited Poley’s trap.
‘Simon,’ I said, more embarrassed, it seemed, than he.
‘Are you here to pawn your household goods?’ he said merrily. ‘We must all come to it.’
‘No,’ I said stiffly, ‘I have brought medicine for Master de Barros’s wife. I must go to her.’ I hurried to the back of the shop, where the pawnbroker stood waiting.
I was sure Simon would have gone when I came down to the street again, but there he was, sitting on a pile of wood outside a carpenter’s shop and whistling. He sprang to his feet when I came out of the pawnbroker’s.
‘I’m not ashamed to admit I was pawning a gold earring,’ he said cheerfully, picking up the conversation as if I had not been absent for half an hour. ‘I’m in the chinks now!’ He jingled the purse that hung at his belt.
‘Best not draw attention to it,’ I said, amused by his frankness. ‘There will be nips and foists a-plenty in this district.’
‘Never fear. I live just north of here, in the actors’ lodgings in Holywell Lane. I know these streets, and the scoundrels who prowl them.’
‘I thought you lived in Bankside.’
‘Nay, that was only for a time, while we were playing an inn in Southwark. I’m at the Theatre now. We have a play this afternoon, an old thing of the Queen’s Men, The Famous Victories of Henry V, but I have a good part.’ His eyes shone in a way I had not seen before. ‘I am to play the King of France’s daughter, who married our great King Hal.’
We had begun walking back towards Bishopsgate. He jingled his purse again.
‘I will buy you a meal at an ordinary,’ he said, ‘while I am wealthy.’
I tried to protest, but he looked so crestfallen that I let him persuade me. The ordinary was just inside the wall, a more modest place than the great inns, but decent and clean. As I have said, I do not hesitate to eat Gentile food, though I will not touch pig in any form. The very thought sickens me. The pigs on my grandfather’s solar were never served to the family, but sent to market.
When we had eaten flounder and a good beef pottage served with pease pudding – a substantial meal for threepence each – I put my elbows on the table and my chin in my hands and regarded him over our half-finished tankards of ale.
‘And how did you come by a gold earring?’
He looked uncomfortable, and drank some ale to give himself time.
‘Some of the gallants in the theatre . . . they fancy themselves in love with the maidens we play.’
‘Ah,’ I said, enlightened, ‘or perhaps with the pretty boy disguised in skirts?’
Simon turned a painful red.
‘I can see that you would make a lovely maiden,’ I teased. ‘Who could blame some rich young man for giving you a gold earring?’
‘You are pretty enough yourself,’ he retorted. ‘With the right training you could play a girl. Your voice is light, but you would need to learn how to move like a woman. You must take small steps, and lower your eyes, and move your hands delicately from the wrists.’ He looked at me critically. ‘You certainly could not sit like that, sprawled in your chair with your legs thrown out and your elbows on the table.’
Before my eyes, he changed, drawing himself together so that he took up less space. His hands, suddenly fragile, lay delicately folded in his lap, his eyes modestly cast down. I stared at him. It was true. This was how a woman held herself, her very body conveying her lower position in society.
‘Nay,’ I said, with something like a laugh. ‘I could never do that – turn myself into a woman.’
‘It’s mostly training,’ he said modestly, as he relaxed again. ‘I have been acting since the age of seven.’
‘With James Burbage’s company?’
‘I started at St Paul’s. I lost my parents young and my uncle placed me there to school. My singing voice was good, so they took me without fees. It was a great opportunity for me. Then I was trained up to act with the company of Paul’s Children. We even performed before the Queen! When our singing voices break, the cleverest boys are sent to Oxford, the others are found good apprenticeships. With an education from Paul’s, your future is secured.’
‘Could you have gone to Oxford?’
‘I could. I chose not. For me, the theatre is my world, not to be cloistered away in some dusty Oxford college, conning ancient texts in Greek or Hebrew!’
‘I would dearly have loved to go there.’ I could not keep the longing out of my voice. I had begged my father, but we both knew it was impossible. Living and sleeping with three or four young men in our tutor’s rooms, I could not have kept my secret long.
‘Why did you not?’ he said.
‘Oh, my father could not spare me.’ I drank the last of my ale. ‘I must go. I’ve no leave to take a holiday.’
‘Come to the play!’ He had risen as I did, and caught me by the wrist. ‘I can get you in free. Come and see me as the French princess!’
I was sore tempted. I had not seen a play in months and I loved the magic of the playhouse, which can help you forget, if only for an hour or two, the world of lies in which you live, by weaving its own sweet web of lies.
‘I shouldn’t.’ But already I was allowing myself to be drawn back through Bishopsgate and along past Bedlam to Shoreditch High Street. We turned left on Hog Lane, then at Curtain Road turned right, passing the Curtain theatre. When we drew level with Holywell Lane, Simon pointed out the lodgings of famous actors and managers: James Burbage and his sons Cuthbert and Richard, the great comic wit Richard Tarlton, and John Bentley and Tobias Mill.
Simon gave ‘Good day!’ to a young man not much older than we were.
‘That’s Thomas Kyd,’ he said, with something like awe in his voice. ‘He’s writing a new play for us, called A Spanish Tragedy. It will be wonderful, it puts the old plays to shame with their sing-song verse. I have seen part of it that’s already written.’
‘Will you play another pretty maid?’ I could not resist it.
He kicked the ground, raising a little puff of dust.
‘We won’t stage it until next year. I hope by then I may play men’s parts, but our company is short of boys, and those we have are too young to take the difficult women’s roles.’
We came to the Great Barn, once part of the convent that stood here until the time of the Queen’s father. Nowadays the Barn is used as a cattle pen and slaughterhouse, filling the air around the Theatre with the rank, bloody Smithfield smell. Beyond it an archway had been knocked through the old convent wall to give admittance to the theatre audiences. We turned away from the outside staircases which led to the more expensive seats. A narrow door opened on to a passageway under the banked galleries to the area before the apron stage where the penny groundlings stood to watch the play. Simon whispered something in the ear of the man collecting the pennies and he motioned me through without paying. Simon disappeared along another passageway towards the back of the stage.