London - Edward Rutherfurd [331]
But Meredith was not so easily gainsaid. “Yet what is the world, sir –” he demanded, “if not a stage? And when our life is done, sir, what remains? How shall we be remembered? For our fortune? Our deeds? Our tomb? But give me a theatre – even a pit like this,” he gestured round. “I can contain a life within this circle, sir,” he cried. “I can show you a man, his deeds, his qualities, his very essence.”
Black Barnikel’s eyes continued to rest upon the little group. “Do you mean,” he asked curiously, “that you could write a play about me?”
“Aye, sir,” the other rejoined, “which makes my pen still greater. For not only can I make you immortal,” he smiled, “but I can change your very form, sir, turn you into something else, like a magician.”
“I do not follow you.” The seafarer’s eyelid drooped.
“Nay but you shall, like a hound on a leash,” he blithely continued. “For this reason. My pen can make you into what it will. Perhaps a hero; or just as well, a fool; one who loved wisely, or a helpless cuckold. Captain or coward, handsome or loathsome. Upon the stage, sir, in the hands of a poet, a character is tethered like that bear upon a chain.” And he smiled in triumph.
How fine, how clever he was, thought Jane, as she gazed at Edmund. The dark-skinned stranger rather frightened her, though she could not help stealing glances at him too.
Black Barnikel said nothing. If he felt threatened or insulted, he gave no sign; but had either Jane or Edmund looked more closely, they might have noticed that his eyes were somewhat smoky. Only after a pause, did he softly murmur:
“I shall come to your play then, young master.”
The leafy little suburb of Shoreditch lay half a mile to the north of the city, above Moorfields. It was here that the two playhouses lay. For Jane Fleming, it was also the place she had called home all her life.
As she walked into her parents’ lodgings an hour later she could not help smiling. She knew her parents were a little strange. “Don’t be like them,” her uncle used to urge her. But she loved them as they were. And she smiled because the house was like her father: small and thin. Just eight feet wide and two storeys high it stood, jammed between two larger houses, just behind the Theatre. And it was completely full of clothes.
Gabriel Fleming was the trusted keeper of the tiring house – the room in the theatre where the actors changed their costumes – for the Chamberlain’s men. The whole family was in the theatre too: his wife Nan, and Jane, who both assisted him, and even Jane’s little brother Henry, who had just started as a boy-actor, taking, as the custom was, the female roles. As for the clothes, for reasons of safety Gabriel liked to keep most of the theatre wardrobe in his house.
Nothing was ever tidy. With her parents shuttling between house and theatre, and actors dropping in at all hours, Jane was used to a genial mess. But life was never dull. In autumn and winter the theatre was in full swing, culminating, if the company were chosen, with performances before the queen at the Christmas court. During Lent, when plays were forbidden, she and her mother went over the entire wardrobe, washing, repairing, renewing, and thanks to this she was a first-rate sempstress. Then, after Easter, the performances began again. But it was the summer that she enjoyed best of all; for then the whole company set out on the road. There would be a line of wagons – one loaded with the travelling stage and props, her parents in another filled with costumes, which would also serve as a tiring house at each stop. They would trundle out of London and be gone for weeks, into the surrounding counties. Each time they came to a town, members of the troupe would go ahead to announce their arrival with kettledrum and trumpet. The stage was set up, usually in the yard of an inn so that people would have to pay to enter; and for several days they would go through their repertoire until it was time to move on. Sometimes they turned aside to play in a noble house. And how Jane loved it all