LITMIR.BIZ

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we did, but slowly. I was sitting at the edge of the stage because I would not be needed for some time. I was playing Emilia, wife to Egeon. It was not a large part, my words scarcely filled a sheet of paper, but we had not performed the Comedy for some weeks, and I had forgotten many of the lines. ‘“Most mighty duke,”’ I kept saying to myself, trying to relearn the words, ‘“behold a man much wronged!”’

      ‘Go and mutter somewhere else,’ Rust snarled at me, ‘somewhere I can’t hear you.’

      I went to the lower gallery, where I had talked with James Burbage. There were at least a score of people already in the gallery because the Sharers never minded folk watching the rehearsals. There were the girlfriends of some of the players, two boyfriends, and a happy gaggle of girls from the Dolphin. The Dolphin is a fine tavern which sells ale, food, and whores, and the girls earned a few pence more by selling hazelnuts to the groundlings before each performance, and then earned shillings by climbing to the galleries and selling themselves. Three of them were now giggling on the front bench, and they gave me coy looks as I settled just behind and above them. Jeremiah, the sour old soldier who guarded the front door, was fond of the girls, and had given them each a small bag of hazelnuts that they cracked under their heels while Robert Pallant laboriously told the story of his shipwreck.

      The tale had always seemed most unlikely to me. Egeon, the merchant, had been at sea with his wife, his twin sons, and twin boy servants, when the ship had hit a rock and they had all been thrown into the stormy waves, and the wife, one son, and one servant had drifted one way, while Egeon, with the other son and servant, had drifted the other. It took Pallant forever to tell the story. I closed my eyes, and a moment later a voice said, ‘Open your mouth.’

      ‘Hello, Alice,’ I said, without opening my eyes.

      ‘Nut for you,’ she said. I opened my mouth, and she put a hazelnut on my tongue. ‘Are you a girl again?’ she asked.

      ‘I’m a woman. An abbess.’

      She tucked her arm through mine and nestled into me. ‘Can’t see you as an abbess,’ she said. It was chilly, but at least it was not raining. ‘But you do look lovely as a girl,’ she went on.

      ‘Thank you,’ I said, as ungratefully as I could.

      ‘You should come and work with us.’

      ‘I’d like that,’ I said, ‘but what happens when some bastard lifts my skirts?’

      ‘Just roll over, of course,’ she said.

      ‘Your hands will be tied behind your back,’ Rust shouted at poor Pallant, ‘so don’t gesture!’

      ‘Does he find his wife again?’ Alice asked me.

      ‘I’m his wife,’ I said, ‘and yes. He finds me at the end of the play.’

      ‘But you’re an abbess! How could an abbess be married? They were nuns, weren’t they?’

      ‘It’s a long story,’ I said.

      ‘But he does find her?’

      ‘He does,’ I said, ‘and his long lost son too.’

      ‘Oh good! I was worried.’

      She was sixteen, perhaps fifteen or maybe seventeen, a slight girl from Huntingdonshire, with very fair hair, a narrow face, squirrel eyes, and a weak chin, but somehow the parts added up to a delicate beauty. She could play an elf, I thought, or a fairy, except the surest way to rouse the fury of the Puritans was to put a girl on the stage. They already accused us of being the devil’s playthings, purveyors of evil and the spawn of Satan, and if we did not have the protection of the Queen and of the nobility, we would have been whipped out of town on hurdles long ago.

      ‘It’s so sad,’ Alice said.

      ‘What’s sad?’

      ‘That he was shipwrecked and lost his wife.’

      ‘It’s poxy stupid,’ I said. ‘If they’d all drifted, they’d have drifted in the same direction.’

      ‘But it didn’t happen that way,’ she protested. ‘Poor old man.’

      ‘Why don’t you go home?’ I asked her.

      ‘To the Dolphin?’

      ‘No, to Huntingdon.’

      ‘And milk cows? Churn butter?’ she sounded wistful. ‘I was shipwrecked. So were you.’

      ‘By my bastard brother,’ I said vengefully.

      ‘By my bastard lover,’ she echoed. She had been seduced by a charming rogue, a man who wandered the country selling buttons and combs and needles, and he had enticed her with a vision of a happily married life in London, and the silly girl had believed every word only to find herself sold to the Dolphin, in which she was half fortunate because it was a kindly house run by Mother Harwood, who had taken a liking to the waif-like Alice. I liked her too.

      Hoofbeats sounded in the outer yard, but I gave them no thought. I knew we were expecting a cartload of timber to make repairs to the forestage, and I assumed the wood had arrived. I closed my eyes again, trying to remember my second line, then Alice uttered a small squeal. ‘Oooh, I don’t like them!’ she said and I opened my eyes.

      The Percies had come.

      There were five Pursuivants. They strutted through the entrance tunnel, all dressed in black, with the Queen’s badge on their black sleeves, and all with swords sheathed in black scabbards. Two stayed in the yard, while three vaulted up onto the stage and walked towards the tiring room. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Alan Rust demanded.

      They ignored him, going instead into the tiring room. The two remaining Percies stood in the yard’s centre, and Rust turned on them. ‘What are you doing?’

      ‘The Queen’s business,’ one snarled.

      They turned to look around the Theatre, and I saw the two men were twins. I remember thinking how strange it was that we were rehearsing a play about two sets of twins and here was the real thing. And there was something about the pair that made me dislike them from the first. They were young, perhaps a year or two older than me, and they were cocky. They were not tall, yet everything about them seemed too big; big rumps, big noses, big chins, with bushy black hair bulging under their black velvet caps, and brawny muscles plump under their black hose and sleeves. They looked to me like bulbous graceless bullies, each armed with a sword and a sneer. Alice shuddered. ‘They look horrible,’ she said. ‘Like bullocks! Can you imagine them …’

      ‘I’d rather not,’ I said.

      ‘Me too,’ Alice said fervently, and made the sign of the cross.

      ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I hissed at her, ‘don’t do that! Not in front of Percies.’

      ‘I keep forgetting. At home, see, we had to do it.’

      ‘Then stop doing it here!’

      ‘They’re horrible,’ Alice whispered, as the twins turned back to stare at the girls from the Dolphin. They sauntered towards us. ‘Show us your tits, ladies,’ one said, grinning.

      ‘They’re not ladies, brother,’ the other said, ‘they’re meat.’

      ‘Show us your tits, meat!’

      ‘I’m leaving,’ Alice muttered.

      The girls fled through the back, and the two young men laughed. The players, all but my brother and Will Kemp, had retreated to the edges of the stage, unsure what to do. Kemp stood at the stage’s centre, while my brother had followed the Percies into the tiring room. The twins strolled towards the stage and saw Simon Willoughby in his long skirt. ‘He’s a pretty boy, brother.’

      ‘Isn’t he?’

      ‘Are you a player?’ one of them demanded of Simon.

      ‘Show us

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