The Shakespeare Stealer: Chapters 18-22

If I groped about in the dark long enough, I might manage eventually to break into the book keeper's trunk and liberate the script.

If discovered here in the morning, I could contrive some explanation of how I came to be shut up in the property room.

"Well, sir, the truth is, it's...it's me old master. 'A hunted me down here—'a kenned how I had me heart set on being a player, you see—and 'a tried to force me to return to Yorkshire wi' him. I went along as far as St. Albans"—such details add credibility to a lie—"where I slipped away, and I've spent the night walking back."

"I never walked the whole time. A farmer brought me half that way on his cart. I even slept a bit on his load of straw." I brushed imaginary chaff from my tunic.

This seemed to satisfy him, and he grew more solicitous.

I was accustomed to being called someone's "boy." Like the term "his man," it can mean you are the servant, or chattel, of that person.

My empty belly made the morning's lessons seem interminable.

"Neither is wearing skirts and prancing about the stage like a woman!"

"And I'm sick of being thought a callow boy wherever I go, because I'm forced to shave my beard."

As we thrust over and over at the unyielding wall, I whispered to Sander, "An Nick is so much of a trouble, why do you not give him the chuck?"

Mr. Heminges sat within at a table, writing figures in a ledger. He looked up and beckoned to me. "C-come in, Widge. I'm just d-doing accounts. My least favorite d-duty, but a n-necessary one."

I shook my head glumly. "Me master seemed bent on having me back."

I nodded, so taken aback by this offer of kindness where I had looked for wrath that I could scarcely speak.

But it was also true that I no longer found the landscape of church spires and grimy tenements so strange.

"It's too bad you're not as quick with your sword as with your tongue. I think you've all been playing at girls too long. That's what you look like, with your mincing steps and your polite little cuts and thrusts. And you—"

The first principle of wrestling is to hang on to your opponent come what may, so I clung to Nick's breeches like a leech, though he kicked madly and pummeled my back with his fists.

"Better not. If he's mulling over some problem in a play, he won't welcome the interruption."

Julian slid closer to me and said confidentially, "I've heard it said he's brooding on a thwarted love affair."

Julian slid closer to me and said confidentially, "I've heard it said he's brooding on a thwarted love affair."

"You clod. If you want to know what I think, I think it's his son that's the cause of it."

"Me old master says we're all ruled by the four humours, and when we're ill or out of sorts, it's because we ha' too much of one. Now, Nick, 'a's choleric—hot and dry. Dr. Bright would prescribe something cold and wet, to offset it."

He grabbed me, and laughing, we rolled about in the grass like two pups. "You're daft, the both of you," Julian said.

But gradually we warmed to one another again and spent several hours poking about a stagnant pond and playing a game of nineholes with stones, and in other pursuits too trivial to recount.

Compared to the preceding perilous weeks, this was a veritable holiday.

Yet, though he received advice from all quarters, he heeded none of it.

Our property men spent most of their day at the office of the queen's master of revels, preparing elaborate scenery for the great event, so the task of seeing to the properties for the regular performances fell to us prentices.

It was not unusual in those next weeks for a player to cry "Behold!" and open the curtains of the rear alcove to reveal two frantic prentices struggling with some unwieldy piece of scenery or furniture.

It was not unusual in those next weeks for a player to cry "Behold!" and open the curtains of the rear alcove to reveal two frantic prentices struggling with some unwieldy piece of scenery or furniture.

Even Julian and Sander, who ordinarily took things as they came, seemed to breathe in the air of anxiety that hung about the place. "Why is everyone in such a dither?" I asked Julian.

The queen had said that no one should perform the play, because it shows a ruler being deposed.

But they're all walking very carefully now, to avoid treading on the queen's toes.

We were even permitted one day to strap on a bag of sheep's blood, which gave an added luster to our mock death throes.

Julian gave a sharp gasp and went down on one knee, holding his chest and biting his lip against the pain. Sander laughed, obviously thinking it was all a sham. "Good acting!"

"It's a hard morsel for him to swallow. But even harder for Julian. They'll never let him go on performing."

Mistress Phillips tried to coax Julia to come home with her, but Julia refused.

"And though 'a be not comely, yet 'a must come," I added, drawing an appreciative laugh from the others.

Scattered among these tenements were smaller dwellings that had given over their ground floors to some business, usually a tavern.

As much as I disliked Nick, I felt something like sympathy for him. Though he was no friend, yet he was a fellow prentice, and I had no desire to see him run through.

"What will we do?" I asked Sander above the din.

He shook his head despondently. "There's nothing we can do. It's a matter of honor."

Before I could, the student moved in and feinted an edge blow at Nick's legs.

Still, there was a copious flow of blood.

During a performance of A Larum for London I was assisting in the tiring-room when she came into the room to change costume. "You don't mind if I forgo your help, do you?" she said dryly.

"In truth, I wore skirts and bodices regularly only after I began masquerading as a boy."

When two paths were open to me—which is not often in the life of a prentice—I took the one easiest to travel, without regard to where it led. I had never deliberately chosen the perilous or demanding path.