Death of Kings by Philip Gooden Read Free Book Online

should be famous one day. And see, I have taken the first steps with my
Whore.
Why don’t you ask them to plot your future?”
    “No,” I said, “I would rather carve for myself.”
    “I stayed several weeks with them last summer but then I considered that I required . . . more suitable lodgings.”
    “More suitable for a rising playwright, you mean.”
    He blushed when I called him ‘rising’.
    “I do not mean to imply that
you
are not rising, Nicholas. You, I am sure, have a fine future ahead of you.”
    It is extraordinary how quickly one can assume the role of patron! For this young man – to whom, only a couple of weeks earlier, I’d been giving wise words – was now assuring
me
of my ‘fine future’. I almost laughed to think that all this confidence sprang from a promised play performance and the few paltry pounds which he’d receive for it. The
vanity of authors!
    “Thank you,” I said, “but the sisters will do me for the time being – I can’t expect to rise to your giddy heights.”
    He smiled deprecatingly, though it was easy to see that he was pleased with any compliment, however lightly meant.
    “Try them for your fortune, Nicholas.”
    “If it comes to fortune-telling, for certain
their
future is all behind them.”
    “But they are cheap,” he said. No man quite escapes his early penny-pinching.
    The day following on my midnight meeting with the Secretary to the Council, was a busy one for us in the Chamberlain’s. In the afternoon the public paying for admission
to the Globe playhouse was going to enjoy
A Somerset Tragedy
, one of the first pieces I’d participated in when I joined the Company the previous autumn. And in the evening there was
yet another rehearsal at Clerkenwell for
Twelfth Night
, which we were to play at court in a little over three weeks’ time. So to those who consider that the player’s life in
between performances is like the parson’s in midweek or – and this may be a more persuasive analogy, considering the low regard in which players are held by the ignorant – like
the highwayman’s life when snow makes the roads impassable for the traveller, that is, an existence of idle if not insolent ease, I hold up this schedule which shows
two
plays to be
got through in the compass of a single day and evening.
    My thoughts, however, were not directed towards these plays, in each of which I had fairly small parts. Rather I was preoccupied with my midnight meeting with one of the most powerful men in the
kingdom, and with what he had asked of me. Through the day and evening of performance and then rehearsal, I found my thoughts tugged back to my conversation with the Secretary to the Council, to
say nothing of the extraordinary way I’d been ushered to and from his presence. I considered that I was moving in very high circles indeed. Why, within a few weeks, I was to be seen by the
Queen! And none of this conduced to my comfort. I did not wish to have greatness thrust upon me. So, at least, I thought I thought. Though a part of me delighted in being useful to great men and
earning their gratitude.
    Naturally I had to hold my tongue. Since my ‘mission’, as Sir Robert had grandly termed it, concerned the Chamberlain’s Company itself I could hint at nothing to my
fellow-players. Indeed, it had been impressed upon me that I might be in some danger if anyone at the Globe became aware of what I was doing. In different circumstances – in other words,
where I couldn’t normally confide in my fellows – I might have turned to my whore Nell, whose ear was always generously open and ready to receive whatever burdened me. But the grave
secret I laboured under could not be lightened by sharing it with
anyone.
On that point the Secretary had been insistent.
    It may be that she detected my distraction that night in her crib.
    “Why, Nicholas, this is not like you. To go only once and then without much – much spirit.”
    “I have played twice today,”