The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez Read online

  My father made a sudden movement at that, but said nothing.

  ‘Have you a play tomorrow?’ I said. ‘I could come to see you.’

  Simon smiled at me, his whole face full of delight. ‘I have no part tomorrow, but if you came early I could introduce you to the rest of the company and show you something of my world. If you would like that?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I should like that.’

  ‘Good!’ He thumped me on the shoulder. ‘Come about midday. And take care you do not let Master Burbage recruit you this time!’

  He made a deep actor’s bow to us both, then he was gone.

  The door had barely closed when my father said, ‘That is not a suitable friend for you, Kit. An actor! They are mountebanks, not to be trusted. And do I understand that you have already met this Burbage fellow?’

  I felt a surge of resentment towards my father, something I had never experienced before.

  ‘Simon Hetherington is a decent young man,’ I said stiffly. ‘He was educated at St Paul’s School and could have gone to Oxford, but did not choose the academic life. He has appeared before the Queen herself. And I merely ran into Master Burbage by chance.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I do not think he is a suitable friend for you. You must remember how dangerous your situation is.’

  Of course I knew what he meant. I must always be on my guard against forming close friendships, lest my secret be discovered. Yet now, for the first time in my life, I found my heart rising in rebellion against my father. Why should I not make friends of my own age, if I was careful? I worked hard. Indeed, since my recruitment into Sir Francis’s service, I worked doubly hard, as both physician and code-breaker. Rarely did I have any moment to myself. That evening making music with Harriot was the first time I had known any leisure for months. And now I had just returned from a frightening mission for Sir Francis, masquerading in a Catholic household which might be engaged in dangerous treason. I had braved Sir Damian’s study to search for traitors’ letters, escaped from the house and ridden through the night, all on my own. I did not think my father understood the risks I had taken.

  To my shame, tears began to fill my eyes.

  ‘I just enjoy his company, Father. He is, truly, a decent, well brought-up young man. Not a mountebank at all. You should come to the play one day. The theatre is changing. It’s no longer crude entertainment for the rougher element of London streets. There are men like Thomas Kyd who are writing wonderful plays, plays written in beautiful poetry, serious plays.’

  He looked unconvinced, but he must have seen my tears, for his voice softened.

  ‘Very well, Kit. You may occasionally meet this Simon Hetherington, but you must be careful. If he should ever suspect . . . you do understand just how serious it would be? You would be in his power. If he reported you to the authorities, you could be burned for heresy.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said. I did not say that one man, a treacherous and possibly treasonous man, already knew that I was a girl and would betray me whenever it suited him. And in my heart I knew that for the first time in my life I would disobey my father. I would see Simon whenever I chose.

  I slept late the next morning, exhausted from lack of sleep and the fears of the previous day, so that when I woke at last my father had gone to the hospital and Joan to the market. The weather had turned warm and spring-like again after the storm. Bright sunlight flooded in through my window when I threw back the shutters. A sparrow flew past, its beak loaded with nesting materials, while from the direction of the river there was a sudden clamour of gulls which heralded the dumping of waste overboard from one of the ships in the docks.

  My heart lifted in sudden happiness. Here I was with a whole day to myself! I could use it how I chose, a luxury that was almost unknown to me. I dressed slowly in clean clothes and a pair of respectable shoes, and took time to comb my hair which curled tightly now that I wore it cut short like a boy’s. It was tangled and it took me time to tug the comb through the knots. The sounds of London going about its daily business floated up from the street – the lowing of a herd of cattle being driven to Smithfield, the clatter of carts bumping over the ruts in the lane, hawkers shouting their wares. When I heard the milkmaid calling, I ran downstairs for the jug and out into the street.

  ‘Morning, Master Kit,’ she said, filling my jug from the barrel carried on the back of her donkey.’

  ‘Morning, Jess. Isn’t it a lovely day?’ I sounded as obsessed with weather as the English.

  ‘It is that. Not working at the hospital today?’

  ‘I have a holiday.’ I smiled, feeling that same quivering lift to my heart as I gave her the farthing for the milk.

  She grinned back. ‘You’re lucky, then. No holiday for me.’

  ‘Well, it’s rare for me. I shall make the most of it.’

  ‘You do that.’ She chirruped to the donkey and went on her way, singing out her cry of ‘Milk! Sweet milk! Come and buy your sweet milk!’

  I went back inside and decided I would cook myself porridge and serve it with milk while it was still fresh. Even on the stone shelf in the pantry it would soon go sour in the heat of the day. It was fresh now, that was why we always bought from Jess, whose father’s farm was just north of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She rose to milk just after dawn and brought the milk into the city straight afterwards, And she carried it in a covered barrel, unlike some of the sluttish milkmaids who used open pails that were always crawling with flies.

  The porridge was good, almost as good as the Barn Elms porridge. It was one of the few things I knew how to cook. The milk was sweet and creamy. I filled up with bread and hard cheese. It was yesterday’s bread, a little stale, but Joan had clearly not been to the baker yet today. She did not bake her own bread, for we had no bread oven. When the fireplace had been added to the house many years ago, replacing the central hearth and smoke hole, it seemed the hospital authorities had not thought it worthwhile going to the expenses of building a bread oven, when just round the corner there was a row of pie shops, which also baked bread for the parish.

  My meal was part breakfast, part midday dinner. I would not wait for my father to come home to eat, in case he tried to dissuade me from going to the theatre. That hostility of his the night before had taken me by surprise. We had occasionally attended the theatre in Coimbra, but then life had been much easier in those days, we had mixed with other people. There had been not only plays but concerts and some parties – rather polite, sober parties amongst the families of my father’s university colleagues. When I thought about it, I realised that he had never been to a play or a concert or a party here in London. It was as though he had withdrawn into his shell, like snail touching salt. Our home, the hospital, the meetings for worship at the Nuñez house, these made up his world. A few times we had been invited to dinner with the Lopez or Nuñez family, but he was often reluctant to go, since we could hardly entertain them in Duck Lane.

  I had been to the play perhaps three times in our four years in London, before Simon invited me to The Famous Victories of Henry V. But never with my father. Sara Lopez, taking pity on me, I suppose, had sometimes invited me to join their family party at the theatre. I preferred it when her husband Ruy did not join us, for he had a way of commented loudly during the play, comparing it unfavourably to the plays he had attended in Portugal. He so often made these disparaging comparisons that I had once asked my father why Ruy Lopez had moved to England. He had smiled grimly.

  ‘Like us, he had no choice.’

  Today, however, I was on my own, free to visit the theatre and even go behind the stage into those mysterious dim caverns I had glimpsed briefly before. And I would meet the members of the company who worked such magic upon the stage. I wondered whether Thomas Kyd would be there. And surely the great actor and manager James Burbage. And there were the others Simon had mentioned when he pointed out their lodgings – the Burbage sons, Richard and Cuthbert. The great comic actor Tarleton I knew had joined the Qu
een’s Men.

  I threw a light cloak round my shoulders and stepped out into the street. The very houses, the crumbling, low-built houses of Duck Lane, appeared to be smiling at me. All the way across the city, the citizens seemed to share in my own holiday mood. Perhaps the reason the English talk so much about the weather is because it is so changeable, and with the changes, their mood changes too. In Portugal we knew that once summer came we could be assured of almost continual sunshine until autumn closed in. There would be sudden storms of rain, and they were always welcome, for without rain the crops would wither and perish, but the rain would soon pass and the exhausting heat would return.

  Here in England I had grown to love the shifting pattern of the days, sunshine to showers, showers to sparkle of raindrops glistening on every surface under a shy sun, and a rainbow in the sky. Oh, the skies! I could have watched the cloud patterns endlessly. Sometimes the skies were as dappled as the back of a trout swimming in a clear stream. Sometimes the clouds piled up like the ramparts of some ancient castellated city. Sometimes the colour of the sky was the soft blue of a newborn baby’s eyes, but within hours – or minutes – would mutate into pigeon grey, then darken almost to night black. And the sunsets. I have never seen such sunsets. Looking up river, especially in autumn, I would see gold and crimson and fiery orange draped across the sky like a monarch’s robes, but more splendid than any earthly king’s.

  And as the seasons and the sky, the frost and snow, the sun and rain played out a kind of dance, so our very minds took on the cast of the weather, mine as much as anyone’s. When the long winter nights closed in and the sky was pregnant with rain or snow, I could feel it pressing down on my head like a tangible weight. But now, with the spring sunshine lighting up a city washed clean by the storm, not only the world but everyone I passed seemed infected with gaiety. Apprentices whistled as they went about their masters’ business. The street hawkers cried their wares in cheerful voices. Strangers smiled at each other in the street. I smiled myself.

  I was still smiling when I reached the Theatre. The doorman recognised me this time, and even he smiled, though for the most part he had a forbidding expression, etched on his face by years of trying to stop young rascals from slipping into the playhouse without paying.

  ‘Master Alvarez, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Simon said you was to go through. You know the way.’

  I climbed up the steps and crossed the stage to the left hand entrance again. When I lifted the curtain to pass through, I looked around carefully for the throne I had nearly fallen over before, but it was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the stack of spears. Instead there was a sort of oriental litter, propped up on its end. Where the rich drapes fell away I could see the rough wood underneath. Looking more closely I realised that what I had taken to be the embroidered cloth of the drapes was cheap cloth painted to look like embroidery. Here and there coloured glass gems had been glued on. The light flowing in from my raised curtain made them gleam and I could see that from the audience the whole litter would look fit for some eastern Sultan.

  Beyond the litter there was something that looked suspiciously like an executioner’s block, with the axe casually leaning against it. The sides of the block appeared to be smeared with blood. Red paint, no doubt.

  ‘Kit, there you are!’ Simon emerged from the shadows, carrying a bundle of costumes. ‘Come with me. Can you pick up that turban I’ve dropped?’

  I did as he asked. I thought a turban was a long piece of cloth wound by the wearer directly on to his head. When I was a child in Coimbra, there were still a few Moors living there who wore the turban. However, I found that the turban I picked up was already wound into shape and firmly stitched in place. I asked Simon about it as I followed him deeper into the area behind the stage and through another curtain.

  ‘Do you know how long it takes to put on a turban?’ he said. ‘In the company we often have to play many parts. In the first act I might be the sweet daughter of the wicked Sultan of Araby, but in the second I am a soldier in his bodyguard – no lines, just standing there holding a pennant and looking menacing. I have to discard my girl’s wig and my skirts, wipe the make-up off my face, don a soldier’s uniform and sword, and put on a turban. A turban ready to wear, because in another minute I have to be on stage.’

  ‘I see.’ It sounded very complicated.

  ‘And then, of course, I may need to be the sweet maiden in the following act, falling on her knees before her wicked father, begging him to spare the life of the hero, who is her secret lover, so they can escape from the Sultan’s palace and sail away to a new life.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you would fly off on a magic carpet. Through the air.’

  He stopped and looked at me seriously. ‘I don’t think that has ever been done. A faraway look glazed his eyes. ‘But you could do it, with wires.’ He pointed overhead, where I could see men moving about on timbers which formed a canopy over the rear part of the stage area. Then he gave me a sharp look. ‘You were joking.’

  ‘Only a little,’ I said.

  ‘Still, it could be done. Shall I suggest it to Master Burbage?’

  ‘Better not. I don’t want to be held responsible when they have to pick the pieces of you off the stage.’

  ‘I won’t, then. Oh, it’s good to have you back, Kit!’ He began laying the costumes carefully in a large wicker clothes hamper, making sure they were not creased. When I commented on this, he said, ‘I’d have my ears boxed by the mistress of the wardrobe if they had to be ironed again.’

  ‘Surely you are too old and too grand for that.’ I handed him the turban, which he fixed into its own box.

  ‘You haven’t seen the mistress of the wardrobe. Twice the size of Master Burbage, with a fist like a bare-knuckle boxer.’

  ‘Yet she made these?’ I gestured toward the costumes, which – for all their fakery – were exquisite.

  ‘She did. You cannot judge anyone in the theatre by their outward appearance, though outward appearance can be a help, if you want to play heroes, or comics.’

  ‘Or dainty maidens?’

  ‘Or dainty maidens indeed.’

  I laughed.

  ‘And how well did your own play-acting succeed?’ He closed the hamper and leaned back against it with his arms crossed. ‘I feared you would be absent for three weeks. Had I known you would be back in a week, I should not have troubled your father.’

  It was there, unspoken between us.

  ‘My play-acting went well, I thank you. I was a very point-devise tutor. I was even pursued by the extremely beautiful daughter of the house.’ I could joke about it, now that it was behind me.

  ‘Were you? Lucky fellow! Extremely beautiful, did you say? And of an amorous turn of mind. Do you think she would like a personable young actor?’

  ‘Oh, a young actor, however personable, would be far beneath her notice. Nothing less than a belted Earl for Mistress Cecilia Fitzgerald.’

  ‘New money,’ he said shrewdly.

  ‘Certainly. And still climbing. So I fear that she is also not for the likes of a young doctor, however distinguished.’ I gestured toward the box which held the turban. ‘This play about the Sultan, is it truly as dreadful as you make out?’

  ‘Quite as dreadful. It’s an ancient thing, but the groundlings like it and we could all play it half asleep and with our eyes shut. It brings in the pennies, until people accept what we are trying to do with the new plays.’

  ‘I hope you do not play the Sultan piece too often. I have been telling my father that the playhouses are changing, that the new plays are far finer.’

  It was an apology and he understood that, but before he could answer, a small man appeared out of the shadows, carrying a lute.

  ‘So the new plays are finer, are they?’ he said. ‘But will there still be room for comedy? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘This is Guy, Kit. Comic actor and the finest lute player outside the court.’

  ‘I am honoured,’ I said, with a bow
, ‘to meet the finest lute player outside the court.’

  ‘And you must be the sawbones Simon is always taking about.’

  ‘Oh no, I am not a surgeon, I am a physician. We leave the butchery to other men.’ So Simon was always talking about me. I felt a small thrill of pleasure.

  ‘Kit also plays the lute,’ Simon said with a grin. ‘He has just been tutoring the very beautiful daughter of a very rich man in a very grand house in Surrey.’

  I think he did not like Guy mentioning that he often spoke of me. For myself, I would have preferred him not to have mentioned what I had been doing in Surrey. I frowned slightly and shook my head, but the other actor ignored what he said.

  ‘Let me hear you play, then, Kit,’ he said, holding out his lute to me.

  I held up my hands in protest. ‘I am not a professional player like you. I play only for my own pleasure.’

  ‘Come, give us a melody,’ Simon said.

  I saw that they would not leave off until I obliged, so I took the lute and perched on the edge of the costume basket. Running my fingers over the strings, I found that only one needed tuning and adjusted it, wondering whether Guy had loosened it to test me. What should I play for them? Then I remembered the haunting tune Harriot had brought us the other evening. Settling the belly of the lute on my knees, I began to play.

  First I played the simple melody, but as it came to an end I wove it into an extemporised variation and then another, forgetting where I was and losing myself in the music until I brought the richly plaited melodies together and down into the original simple, heart-breaking fall.

  When I looked up, I saw that quite a crowd had gathered silently around us. As I handed the lute back to Guy, they broke into spontaneous applause.

  ‘You may not be a professional musician, Christoval Alvarez,’ he said, ‘but you play like one. Where did you find that melody?’

  ‘Master Harriot brought it to me, but he had heard it at Raleigh’s house. It is by John Dowland.’

  ‘But the variations were your own.’