Fools and Mortals - Bernard Cornwell

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are ill-suited, my lord,’ my brother managed to say, taking the offered pages from his lordship.

      ‘But there is one thing. My wife noticed that it doesn’t have a title yet.’

      ‘I was thinking …’ my brother began, then hesitated.

      ‘Yes? Well?’

      ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream, my lord.’

      ‘A midsummer night’s what?’ Lord Hunsdon asked, frowning. ‘But the bloody wedding will be in midwinter. In February!’

      ‘Precisely so, my lord.’

      There was a pause, then Lord Hunsdon burst out laughing. ‘I like it! Upon my soul, I do. It’s all bloody nonsense, isn’t it?’

      ‘Nonsense, my lord?’ my brother enquired delicately.

      ‘Fairies! Pyramids and thimbles! That fellow turning into a donkey!’

      ‘Oh yes, all nonsense, my lord,’ my brother said. ‘Of course.’ He bowed again.

      ‘But the womenfolk like nonsense, so it’s fit for a wedding. Fit for a wedding! If that bloody man Price troubles you again without cause, let me know. I’ll happily strangle the bastard.’ His lordship waved genially, then turned and walked from the playhouse, followed by his retainers.

      And my brother was laughing.

      ‘It is nonsense,’ my brother said. As ever, when he talked to me, he sounded distant. When I had run away from home and had first found him in London, he had greeted me with a bitter chill that had not changed over the years. ‘His lordship was right. What we do is nonsense,’ he said now.

      ‘Nonsense?’

      ‘We do not work, we play. We are players. We have a playhouse.’ He spoke to me as if I were a small child who had annoyed him with my question. It was the day after Lord Hunsdon’s visit to the Theatre, and my brother had sent me a message asking me to go to his lodgings, which were then in Wormwood Street, just inside the Bishopsgate. He was sitting at his table beneath the window, writing; his quill scratching swiftly across a piece of paper. ‘Other people,’ he went on, though he did not look at me, ‘other people work. They dig ditches, they saw wood, they lay stone, they plough fields. They hedge, they sew, they milk, they churn, they spin, they draw water, they work. Even Lord Hunsdon works. He was a soldier. Now he has heavy responsibilities to the Queen. Almost everyone works, brother, except us. We play.’ He slid one piece of paper aside and took a clean sheet from a pile beside his table. I tried to see what he was writing, but he hunched forward and hid it with his shoulder.

      I waited for him to tell me why I had been summoned, but he went on writing, saying nothing. ‘So what’s a conference?’ I asked him.

      ‘A conference is commonly an occasion where people confer together.’

      ‘I mean the one Lord Hunsdon mentioned.’

      He sighed in exasperation, then reached over and took the top volume from a small pile of books. The book had no cover, it was just pages sewn together. ‘That,’ he said, holding it towards me, ‘is A Conference.’

      I carried the book to the second window, where the light would allow me to read. The book’s title was A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland, and the date was printed as MDXCIIII. ‘It’s new,’ I said.

      ‘Recent,’ he corrected me pedantically.

      ‘Published by R. Doleman,’ I read aloud.

      ‘Of whom no one has heard,’ my brother said, writing again, ‘but he is undoubtedly a Roman Catholic.’

      ‘So it’s seditious?’

      ‘It suggests,’ he paused to dip the quill into his inkpot, drained the nib on the pot’s rim, then started writing again, ‘it suggests that we, the people of England, have the right to choose our own monarch, and that we should choose Princess Isabella of Spain, who, naturally, would insist that England again becomes a Roman Catholic country.’

      ‘We should choose a monarch?’ I asked, astonished at the thought.

      ‘The writer is provocative,’ he said, ‘and the Queen is enraged. She has not named any successor, and all talk of the succession turns her into a shrieking fury. That book is banned. Give it back.’

      I dutifully gave it back. ‘And you’d go to jail if they found the book?’

      ‘By “they”,’ he said acidly, ‘I assume you mean the Pursuivants. Yes. That would please you, wouldn’t it?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘I am touched, brother,’ he said acidly, ‘touched.’

      ‘Why would someone lie and say we had copies of the book at the Theatre?’ I asked.

      He turned and gave me a look of exasperation, as if my question was stupid. ‘We have enemies,’ he said, looking back to the page he was writing. ‘The Puritans preach against us, the city council would like to close the playhouse, and our own landlord hates us.’

      ‘He hates us?’

      ‘Gyles Allen has seen the light. He has become a Puritan. He now regrets leasing the land for use as a playhouse and wishes to evict us. He cannot, because the law is on our side for once. But either he, or one of our other enemies, informed against us.’

      ‘But it wasn’t true!’

      ‘Of course the accusation wasn’t true. Truth does not matter in matters of faith, only belief. We are being harassed.’

      I thought he would say more, but he went back to his writing. A red kite sailed past the window and settled on the ridge of a nearby tiled roof. I watched the bird, but it did not move. My brother’s quill scratched. ‘What are you writing?’ I asked.

      ‘A letter.’

      ‘So the new play is finished?’ I asked.

      ‘You heard as much from Lord Hunsdon.’ Scratch scratch.

      ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream?’

      ‘Your memory works. Good.’

      ‘In which I’ll play a man?’ I asked suspiciously.

      His answer was to sigh again, then look through a heap of paper to find one sheet, which he wordlessly passed to me. Then he started writing again.

      The page was a list of parts and players. Peter Quince was written at the top, and next to it was my brother’s name. The rest looked like this:

Theseus George Bryan, if well
Hippolita Tom Belte
Lisander Richard Burbage
Demetrius Henry Condell
Helena Christopher Beeston, if well
Hermia Kit Saunders
Oberon John Heminges
Tytania Simon Willoughby
Pucke Alan Rust

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