The Enterprise of England (37 page)

‘True indeed, there is too much pain in the world. But can your patients spare you to come and see my profession, my passion?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Have you heard of the new piece,
Tamburlaine the Great
?’

‘Everyone has heard of it.’

‘Kit Marlowe wrote it.’

I made a face. I could not hide my dislike.

‘He thinks somewhat well of himself, I know,’ Simon conceded, ‘but he has good cause. He and Tom Kyd, they are writing a whole new kind of play. Come with me and see!
Tamburlaine
is to be played this afternoon at the Rose, with Ned Alleyn as Tamburlaine again. Come, and you shall see and hear such wonders as you have never seen or heard before.’

‘Are you to play in it?’

‘No, it is Henslowe’s company, but next month I am to play Bel Imperia in Kyd’s
Spanish Tragedy
. After that, they are to let me take men’s parts.’ His eyes gleamed. Ever since I had known him he had longed to make the move from playing women, despite his successes.

Eventually, I allowed him to persuade me. To leave behind all the sickness and death which had surrounded me these last weeks – it was a temptation I could not withstand. Although I did a grown man’s work, I was still but a girl of eighteen. And I could scarcely admit to myself how much I liked his company and his way of looking at the world, so different from my own. I would never have admitted it to him. Yet my heart gave a little jerk of pleasure as we set off from
Duck Lane, Simon whistling a new street ballad that was on everyone’s lips. We walked over the Bridge again, in the same direction we had taken nearly three years before, to the new-built theatre, The Rose, belonging to Master Henslowe, on Bankside, near the bear-gardens. Simon seemed to know all the people in this strange world of playhouses, so, without money changing hands, we found ourselves in threepenny seats with cushions, looking down on the stage. I had never before been seated so grandly in a playhouse.

‘Everything looks quite different from here,’ I said.

‘You will be able to see better how everyone moves about the stage, instead of craning up at the actors’ feet from below, like the groundlings, until your neck is stiff. It’s important for the actor to use the whole stage.’ He made a sweeping gesture, indicating the apron stage and the inner central chamber, and the upper stage on the large balcony behind the main stage.

‘Your sometime player,’ he said, in a schoolmaster’s voice, ‘your guildsman or schoolboy, will stand stiff and recite his lines to the audience, like a stuffed peacock. Your true player lives his part. He ignores his audience for the most part, walks about the stage as he would do in life, and talks to the other players. He will only speak directly to the audience when he wants to invite them into the play, or else when he puts his inmost thoughts into words, so we can share them. Then we seem to see inside his very mind. Do you understand?’

‘I think so.’ It had not occurred to me that the players’ trade was so complex. I had thought they simply conned their lines and then spoke them, though I had often listened to Simon talking about the way he imagined himself into a part. I had never thought about the way the players moved about on the stage or where they directed their words.

‘And notice how we use the different parts of the stage. The inner stage can be a private room, concealment for a spy, a place to die in – so we can draw the curtain across, you see? The balcony can present the ramparts of a castle, or a city wall, or the lookout of a ship, or the upstairs room of an inn, while the lower stage is the castle court, or the ground outside the city, or the stable
yard of an inn. Do you not see these very places when we describe them? Though they are nothing but the parts of a wooden playhouse, open to the sky, like any bear-pit?’

I nodded slowly. It was true. If the play was well written and played with the skill Simon described, I felt myself to be in a palace or on a battlefield or in a crowded street. When an army crossed the stage, I saw an army, though there might be no more than half a dozen players pretending to be many.

‘Yes, you are right,’ I said. ‘And it makes me wonder: How can we know substance from shadow? How know what is real, and what is pretence?’

I thought of
Walsingham’s projections two years before, and the Babington plotters, who were – or weren’t? – puppets whose strings he pulled. Perhaps all that terrible affair was no more real than a play in the theatre, with Walsingham as playwright and Phelippes as his theatre-master. I had stepped on to the stage to play my tiny rôle, then exited into the darkness of the tiring-house.

‘A play is another kind of reality,’ Simon said seriously. ‘We make something new, a New World which is as real to me, at any rate, as the unseen world of
Virginia that Raleigh speaks of so much. I do not think that is pretence or deception. It is beautiful. It has fire and passion. It is a world we create as surely as the Creator created this world we walk about in.’

I laid my hand on his arm and glanced about. ‘Be careful, Simon, what you say. Your words could be taken for blasphemy.’

He gave me a strange look, then shrugged and smiled, and pointed up at the turret above the upper stage, where the flag was flying, to show that a play was to be performed this afternoon. A man had appeared up there. He raised a trumpet to his lips and played a fanfare. The noise of the audience faded into expectation. The play began.

It was like no play I had ever seen before. At the end of it, through the clapping and cheers and the bowing of the actors, I felt numb. It was terrible and beautiful, frightening and inspiring, and I was trembling as though I had lived the actions of that man, suffered the fate of his victims, been borne along by his triumphs. I said not a word as we descended the long dark staircase and emerged into the fading summer’s afternoon, jostled and elbowed by the crowd, wrapped in my own cocoon of silence against their noise.

‘Well?’ said Simon, as we walked back along the river toward the Bridge.

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘I think I begin to understand.’

Chapter Sixteen

B
y the beginning of September my life had fallen back into its old familiar pattern. Phelippes hardly needed me now, so that I began to spend much more time with my friends at the playhouse and was even able to join Raleigh’s circle at Durham House once again. Marlowe, mercifully, was away on some business of his own or Walsingham’s and Poley remained imprisoned in the Tower. After the excitement and terrors of the summer months I was glad to be back enjoying the rich poetry of the new plays which were creating such a sensation in London, while the discussions at Durham House reminded me of nothing so much as those long tranquil evenings at home in Coimbra, when my father’s university friends would sit out in the garden in the twilight after dinner, amiably disputing some nice point of philosophy or listening with keen interest to the details of some new scientific discovery made by one of their number. My sister Isabel, my brother Felipe and I would sometimes creep out into the shadows and listen to them, sitting on the steps of the fountain, while bats swooped overhead, feeding amongst the umbrella pines, and the distant music of my mother playing the virginals wound its way between the deep, quiet voices of the men.

This was the life I preferred – my work at the hospital and the occasional evening at Durham House. The longer it continued the more the memories of what had happened in the
Low Countries faded away, so that it seemed like a dream. Then early in September news spread rapidly through London that Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, had died. It came as a shock to many. On his return from the Low Countries he had shown himself more decisive and vigorous than ever he had been abroad. Perhaps the threat to the very nation of England aroused some strength in him that he had never found before. He had built an army camp at Tilbury as defence against an attack up the Thames, the camp to which Andrew and his men had been sent. And when the danger was past, he had ridden through London in glory, as though single-handed he had defeated the Spanish. I had seen him myself, and although both he and his horse were gloriously caparisoned, there had been a feverish look to his eyes which did not bode well. I had not been surprised when I heard he had travelled north to Derbyshire, to take the healing waters at Buxton. It was on the way there that death had suddenly overtaken him. He was fifty-six, several years younger than my father.

All his life he had been loaded with honours and offices, and I knew that Sir Francis respected him, despite his failings as a leader in war. Above all, however, it was common knowledge that he was something more than another courtier in the eyes of the Queen. In the years before ever I was born, it had been rumoured that Robert Dudley hoped to marry the Queen, and there was much scandalous talk which never quite died away. Whatever the truth of it, I remembered how courteously he had received Berden and me on my first visit to
Amsterdam, a courtesy not extended by his successor Lord Willoughby. And if he had laughed at my warning of a plot to poison him, he had made amends later.

Standing in my chamber at home, I took out the medal he had sent me and ran my thumb over the raised image of his head, then turned it over.
non gregem sed ingratos invitus desero
.
Perhaps he did feel with some justice that the Hollanders were ungrateful for his efforts in their country against Parma and his Spanish troops, but nonetheless I could not forget what had happened at Sluys, all the men dead and wounded there.

How would the Queen take his death? How could anyone know the true feelings of a queen, certainly of a queen who – by all accounts – was as inaccessible as a fortress? On one of my occasional visits to
Seething Lane about the middle of September, I put this to Phelippes. Having met Leicester, even dined at his table, and now carrying about with me his medal as a kind of talisman, I felt an odd personal interest in this.

‘How did Her Majesty take the Earl’s death?’ Phelippes said. ‘You have not heard? I thought it was common knowledge. She locked herself in her chamber, would allow no one to enter, took no food or drink. For days, this was.’ He shook his head in wonderment.

‘In the end, Lord Burghley ordered the door to her chamber to be broken down. That took some courage! He feared for her safety. Even for her life. No one knows what happened then, but I do not suppose he was kindly received. At the very least she was alive and has resumed her duties.’

I am sure he did not mean it unkindly, but his words chilled me. She had resumed her duties. It was difficult to think of the Queen as a person, she was a symbol, God’s anointed, ruler absolute of her country and of her church,
England personified – yet she was a woman, too. A woman who had lost the man she had loved all her life.

For some reason these thoughts troubled me in the weeks that followed.
Leicester, after all, had seemed no more than common flesh and blood when I had met him. He was grandly dressed, his rooms were elegant, but encased within it all had been a mortal man.

It was the third week in October that I received a strange missive from Sir Francis, brought to me at the hospital one morning by Thomas Cassie, seeking me out where I was in the stillroom with Peter Lambert, assessing what supplies would be needed for the onset of winter. I recognised the seal on the letter and looked enquiringly at Thomas.

‘You do not usually come here,’ I said. ‘Could it not have waited until I was at home? Am I needed at
Seething Lane?’

Cassie shrugged. ‘I know only that I was to find you out at once and see it directly into your hands. Sir Francis is at
Greenwich. The letter was brought to Seething Lane by a court messenger.’

Very strange. I broke the sea with my thumbnail. The contents were brief and startling.

You must present yourself at Greenwich Palace at three of the clock this afternoon. Ask to be directed to me. Wear your best garments. W.

I stared at Cassie. ‘I am summoned to be at
Greenwich at three this afternoon. There is barely time!’ I turned to Peter. ‘You must tell my father, Peter. Explain. Make my excuses.’

He nodded and leaving them both staring after me I hurried from the hospital, glad that our house was but a few mi
nutes’ walk away. My best garments? Did he mean me to wear my physician’s gown? I decided I would do so. I could always shed it, if needed. I had not so many clothes that I took much time to decide what to wear. I had one quite good doublet that I wore when I went to Durham House, and a pair of breeches that would pass muster. I found a pair of stockings whose only mend was in the heel, where it would not show, and I rubbed my shoes clean of dust with a rag, which I thrust into my pocket, so that I could rub them again after I arrived. Over all I donned my gown, and set my square doctor’s cap on my head. I squinted at myself in my mirror of wavering glass. My hair was perhaps overly long, but there was no time to visit a barber. Still, at court I believed men wore their hair longer than did the common sort.

The only way to reach
Greenwich in time was to hire a two-man wherry – an extravagance I could have done without – and to ensure that they were capable of shooting the Bridge. It is a risky business at the best of times, but I knew I could not stop and leave one wherry on the upstream side, cross by land to the other side of the Bridge, and take another wherry on the downstream side.

‘Tide’s at the ebb, Master,’ the older wherryman said. ‘We’ll shoot the Bridge, never fear.’

I did fear. I had never done it, and more than one had died under the Bridge, where freak twists in the water could smash a boat against the piers like kindling. All went smoothly enough above the Bridge, but I could see that the force of the river, with the tide behind it, was flowing fast. The wherrymen hardly needed their oars, save for the odd stroke to keep the boat on course. We seemed to be approaching the Bridge much too fast, swept down the river helpless as a leaf, toward its towering pillars. From the level of the river it loomed like the ramparts of a castle. There was a great deal of water coming down the Thames and as it reached the Bridge it was funnelled beneath the arches, where it fought the stones to find a way through. There seemed hardly enough room for even a small boat to squeeze through the narrow space between raging water and damp stone.

There could be no turning back now. I clutched both gunwales of the boat convulsively, my knuckles showing white with the strain. We were being tossed like a hapless cork upon the swirling water. The boatman shouted something, but I could not hear him, for the roar of the water was echoing now like a man’s voice crying out in a cave. Instinctively I ducked my head. From the corner of my eye I could see the green slime on the curved roof of the tunnel as we bucketed through, the men fending us off the stones with their oars. The roaring in my ears was like a storm at sea. And then we were through! The river spread itself out like a quilt, like a wild animal released from a cage, suddenly tame.

The men set their oars in the rowlocks again, and we proceeded calmly on our way as if we had never passed through that watery Hell. My heart was fluttering in my chest like a bird trapped in a chimney.

The rest of the way to Greenwich the men rowed steadily, but the flow of the river also carried us along, so that when I disembarked at Greenwich stairs I reckoned I had a good half hour in hand. I shook out my gown, which had been bunched together in the boat to keep it from the wet, and made my way with what dignity I could muster to enquire of a servant in royal livery where I might find Sir Francis Walsingham. My legs were trembling still from shooting the Bridge.

It seemed Walsingham was occupying the same apartments where I had brought messages to him before, two years ago now, at the height of the operation against the Babington plotters. The rooms were located in one of the innermost parts of the palace, close to the royal quarters.

‘Come in, Kit.’ Sir Francis’s face, as so often, showed the strains of illness, but today he also appeared remarkably cheerful. ‘Come in and take a seat. We have a few minutes.’

‘A few minutes, Sir Francis?’ I said, sitting where he had indicated. ‘For?’

‘For me to explain why you are here.’

I nodded, folding my hands in my lap and waiting.

‘It has been noted,’ he said with a smile. ‘Your good service in the
Low Countries. First in foiling an attempt on the Earl’s life – may he rest in peace – and then in uncovering a treasonous plot to supply arms and equipment to the enemy. Her Majesty herself has taken note.’

I looked at him in alarm. ‘Her Majesty?’

‘Aye. She wished to express her thanks to you in person.’

I gaped at him. ‘But–’. I could think of nothing to say.

‘I will conduct you to her shortly. You will make your obeisance and not speak unless invited to do so by Her Majesty.’

This seemed even more terrifying than shooting the Bridge. To be face-to-face with Elizabeth Tudor. Gloriana. Queen by God’s good grace. The greatest Protestant monarch in the world. And now, after the defeat of the Spanish fleet, the monarch of the oceans. I began to shake and thought I might very well be sick.

‘Do not be alarmed, Kit,’ Sir Francis said kindly. Clearly he could read my appalled expression as easily as a schoolboy’s primer. ‘She is well disposed towards you. There is nothing to be afraid of.’

That was all very well for a man to say who dealt daily with our great monarch, but it did nothing to steady my knocking knees as he led me toward the innermost of the royal apartments. I was glad I had worn my gown, which concealed much of my trembling.

The double doors were opened by liveried servants. I heard Walsingham presenting me as if his voice came from a long way away. My eyes were cast humbly down. I was aware of rustling gowns, silk upon silk, a heavy scent of many perfumes – too many perfumes – billowing and mingling in a great wave across the room. I bowed deeply, in the courtly fashion I had learned from Simon and the other players. I hoped my hat would not fall off.

‘You may stand, Doctor Alvarez.’ A voice filled with a certain wry humour spoke from somewhere above my head. ‘Let us see you face.’

I straightened and raised my eyes. At first I was aware only of a living tapestry of colour, a flower-garden of velvets and silks and brocades, where rubies and emeralds and pearls nestled instead of bees or butterflies, and dyed plumes of exotic birds nodded instead of fresh green branches. Then this overpowering riot of colour resolved itself into a group of ladies and gentlemen clustered about one central figure, poised as if in some theatrical tableau. And that central figure was far more splendid than the rest, attired in cloth of gold, with a ruff of lace so fragile it seemed impossible that human hands could have wrought it. The hair was the colour of a fox’s pelt, piled high and laced with pearls.

Yet for all that splendour, it was the eyes which held you. Her face, no. It was painted and powdered till it became a mask. And I realised now that her whole body was encased, wired and boned and caged within those magnificent garments, until the only parts free to move were the long fine hands gripping the arms of her throne and those remarkable eyes. Suddenly a terrible sense of pity overwhelmed me. This woman had been trapped from childhood into a role she must play or die. And she had played it magnificently. A woman, ruling
England better than any monarch before her, yet a woman declared a heretic and a bastard by the ruler of the all-powerful Catholic Church. A woman dressed in gowns and jewels worth a city’s ransom, yet a woman playing a man’s part. A woman who had loved a man, but could not marry him, and his loss gleamed in those eyes which, despite all the efforts of her tiring-women, bore the unmistakably traces of much weeping.