The ghost theatre, p.22
The Ghost Theatre, page 22
That night, before they made camp, Shay bought a rabbit from a passing poacher. It cost a day’s profit but there was nothing else to spend it on out here. She staked the body on the roof of the cart and when she woke in the morning it was gone.
Dover, Winchester, Bath. In and out like locusts for one performance per town; after that the place was sucked dry and they wouldn’t be able to return. Days of rain and nights of stars, as the shows got smaller and the taverns got worse. Once they’d exhausted the bigger towns, the troupe began to shed its Blackfriars skin. They left useless props and mouldering costumes by the roadside, sold the carts, sold the swords. Boys seeped away too, lost to uncomplicated country girls and farm work. Gone like ghosts, the only sign they’d been there a pair of boots by a rooming-house door or one horse unsaddled in the stables. Soon they became the Ghost Theatre again in all but name. Shay, Nonesuch, Alouette, Blank, Trussell and a couple of the more determinedly urban boys who huddled at the dead centre of their campsites and asked every day for news of the plague’s retreat.
Nonesuch wrote, rehearsed and discarded whole plays while lolling on horseback. Love scenes in the saddle and one-handed sword fights. Not that they needed new plays. Most nights he veered from the scripts the moment he was bored, and in the country he was always bored. He started what was supposed to be a version of Abelard and Heloise with the words, ‘Yesterday I awoke to discover I had become a bird…’ In these moods only Trussell would try to keep up with him and Nonesuch dragged him through labyrinthine two-handers with tales growing taller and taller. The crowd roared at their bird impressions and nonsense stories.
In a muddy village on the road to Oswestry, Nonesuch extemporised a whole play out of thin air. Two pairs of lovers were transformed by love potions. Shay and Trussell and Blank and Alouette were coupled and parted, entwined and divided in every conceivable pairing. Dandelion seeds in their hair, grass stains on their knees. Shay was washed away by the drama’s liquid logic and the words moved her like a chess piece from body to body and mouth to mouth. Trussell’s tongue in her ear and Alouette’s hand on her breast. Afterwards, she and Nonesuch lay alone in their tent as if it had happened to someone else.
Wild as birds, the troupe criss-crossed an England alive with rumours. They weren’t the only wanderers, it seemed. The signs of Elizabeth’s Black Swifts were everywhere. Gibbets so fresh that their wood was still green and sappy hung with corpses that flapped like flags under the onslaught of crows. And there were other, less explicable traces too. Twice they came across burning enclosures where smouldering fences cast a battleground pall for miles. The second was crowned with a tattered banner that read: NO MASTERS, NO FENCES, NO REST.
‘What does it mean?’ Shay asked everyone. But the boys had no idea and the locals scuttled away at the question. The burning places scared Shay. She’d proudly learnt London’s code and knew in her bones where was safe and where was dangerous; where she would be invisible and where she stood out; and where a girl, however well disguised, should never walk alone. But here danger struck as randomly as lightning. England’s interior was a wild, landmarkless place, as arbitrary as the marshes, and liable to burst into flame without warning.
Summer slouched into autumn. Dead skies opened up above them and the tips of things turned brown like burnt paper. Birds prepared for the winter assiduously, making Shay fret about the weeks to come. Devana followed often but visited rarely. She flitted in on wings of snow with her beak blood-black in the moonlight and took Shay’s pitiful offerings with a sniff.
They climbed the ladder of England, mimicking winter’s slow arrival as the land turned grey and bare and hard. The towns now were on no map and had no name. Hamlets. Villages. Encampments. Now the company acted without props or staging. A length of rope was enough to divide actors and audience. Swords were cardboard and crowns were fashioned from leaves. Everything was conveyed by the body. Here, they loved Trussell’s pratfalls, both inadvertent and deliberate. They watched Nonesuch in a dazed silence and Shay could never tell whether it bespoke scorn or awe.
Brecknock was nothing more than a ring of houses that cowered from the surrounding forest where the troupe ate acorn stew for dinner and shooed sheep from their stage-to-be. Nonesuch, awake before show time for once, spent an hour with the village children and Shay watched him squat and chat and ruffle hair. Once he was done, the children left in twos and threes, whispering happily to each other. She knew better than to ask what he was planning but something was afoot. With only minutes to go until show time, he pulled her aside. ‘Do you know “Every Lost Lamb?”’ he asked.
She nodded. A lullaby: everyone knew it. ‘What’s my cue?’ she asked.
‘You’ll know when.’
No costume or props. Nonesuch squatted on the wet grass and said, ‘I lived near here once. Maybe five miles away. I can’t remember the village’s name, it may have been too poor to have one.’ Someone in the front row laughed. ‘I didn’t live there for long. Three months, maybe. Enough to yearn for the excitement of Brecknock, anyway.’ More laughter.
‘My father was a sin-eater,’ he said, and a man near the back crossed himself, ‘but times were slow. There weren’t enough sinners dying in Brecknock. My childhood hunger was your fault. You Welsh are too clean-living to keep a sin-eater in the manner to which he’d become accustomed. “If only he was a London sin-eater,” I used to think. “Then his belly would be full of murders and mine would be full of meat.”’ He got another easy laugh for that.
‘So, no sins, and of course we had no land. So we foraged.’ Noises of sympathy came from the crowd. ‘One day we were picking mushrooms. Well, I was picking mushrooms. My parents lasted about a quarter-hour before the tavern called. The best spots had already been picked clean because my parents weren’t ones for early starts, so I had to go a little deeper into the forest.’
He leaned forward. ‘You all know how it swallows you up, out there. Even ten yards from the edge of the forest you’re in another world, like Jonah in the whale. Mushrooms prefer the damp and the dark, so that’s where I started. Looking for the black and sodden places, anywhere that you would usually avoid. I was just a little boy, y’know? In those cloth shoes with no heels that get wet through in a minute. But I had a good sense for where you might find mushrooms, it was a kind of gift.’ His voice thinned. ‘Dappled light on wet leaves, the smell of rot and the drip of water. Listen and look, and there they would be.’ As he talked, his hands made shapes in the air.
Shay was there. She saw ragged white phalluses pushing aside a carpet of leaves.
‘I picked hundreds. My basket was so full that I needed both hands to carry it.’ His voice was now boyishly high, spiced with a pinch of pride. ‘And then, of course, I looked up and I was lost. Hours had passed and I was deep in the forest, all alone.’
A child in the crowd gasped and the vision in Shay’s mind darkened. Now the treetops rose into a night sky and the undergrowth crowded around her. No air and no birds.
‘At first, I tried to retrace my steps but God knows where I’d come from. I shouted and cried.’ He crossed his hands over his chest now, like a child in his bed. ‘I knew that the sensible thing to do was to wait, but…’ His voice was tiny now. ‘I didn’t think anyone would come to look for me.’
Involuntarily, Shay looked up to see if Devana was there. Nonesuch said, ‘So, I walked in as straight a line as I could manage.’ He raised his hand into the air as a signpost. ‘Straight as an arrow and everything rotting and crumbling beneath my feet.’
The girl in the front row said, ‘So, what happened?’
He took her hand. ‘Oh, they came and found me eventually. I wasn’t even that far from the village.’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Even then, I was six, maybe seven, I was so surprised that they bothered looking for me.’
His laugh was a harsh punctuation. ‘They probably needed the basket back.’ When he started talking again, it was in a voice that Shay hadn’t heard from him before. It was flat and featureless: a fen of a voice. ‘I sometimes think that boy is still walking. Beneath those ancient trees. In the minutes before sleep, or straight after a show, or in the back of a boat, I see him. Deep in the forest and deeper with every step. But this time no one is coming to get him.’
He cleared his mouth and started to sing. ‘Every lost lamb will find a path…’
Shay joined in on the second line. An octave up with some space between them. It was one of those shallow melodies that rose and fell in easy intervals, worn like the dip in old stairs. Their voices followed each other but never met. She saw the pair of them running across the rooftops on that first day. Then a cry went up from the crowd.
The children of the village stepped out of the forest from every direction, each with a basket of mushrooms, each singing. At first their songs were separate, in different keys and different rhythms, but as the circle tightened they came together into one voice. One joyous voice singing ‘Every Lost Lamb’ until they collapsed, proud and giggling, onto the stage. They smothered Nonesuch under a mountain of laughter, and the song faded to rags, and then all Shay could hear was the noise of the hat jangling with coin after coin after coin.
That evening, in the tent, Shay straddled and pinned him. ‘How much of that was true? Did you really live here?’
He tried to push her off and failed. His face was a blank piece of paper. ‘I don’t know. Probably. It all looks the same here.’
She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark. Her hands gripped his wrists. Her lips on his brow.
She said, ‘If you are ever lost again, I will find you. I will search and I will never stop looking for you.’
32
The next day, they lost the last Blackfriars Boy. Pavey had met a girl in Hereford and then pined all the way through Wales, so none of them were surprised to wake to find one tent with its sides open and a note fluttering on the front. Pavey could read well enough, but he couldn’t write, so he’d pinned a battered page from a script to the canvas. It read: ‘Jezebel exits stage right – night falls.’
So they were five again: Alouette, Blank, Nonesuch, Shay and Trussell, the Ghost Theatre on horseback. That day they rode for hours without seeing a soul, but fresh signs of devastation preceded them everywhere they went. The roads were fringed with blackened, smouldering stumps where mile upon mile of hawthorn hedge had been set alight. Shay’s arms ached from holding the reins tight – the horses shied at the smoke and the crackling of embers. At a bleak country crossroads a teetering bonfire churned with smoke and turned the sky to dusk. The troupe rode warily past smoking fenceposts that were piled head-high. In the valley beyond, livestock had been set free and a herd of cows sat unmoving across the road until Alouette scared them off with a firecracker.
They came to a village green that had been scythed as short as a beard. Smoke rose from the east. The five sprawled around a cook-pot with just wood pigeon calls and river burble to break their various silences. It was enough, though, thought Shay, it was more than enough. She lay in Alouette’s lap and let her braid dandelions into her hair. Scritch of nails like a cat grooming.
‘You know that gibbet we passed a couple of miles back? Do you think we could drag it here?’ A low moan came from the others; this was one of Nonesuch’s ideas. Only Alouette took the bait.
‘I don’t see why not. Borrow an ox-cart. Two men to tip it on its side. The lane was fairly wide. What’s the plan?’
Nonesuch stood. ‘Me, centre stage…’
(‘What a surprise,’ whispered Trussell).
‘With my neck in a noose.’ He mimed it, cocking his head to one side. ‘A hangman next to me.’
Trussell raised a hand. ‘Respectfully, I’d very much like to volunteer for that role.’ He brushed grass from his hair and put on a country accent. ‘Less mouth, more neck, sonny.’
Nonesuch waved him away. ‘It’s got to look realistic, so I’d rather not have the clumsiest man I know holding the other end of the rope. Alouette can do it.’
He wheeled around, facing Trussell like a boxer. ‘I’ve been arrested for…’
‘Sedition?’ said Blank.
‘Sumptuary?’ suggested Alouette.
‘Sodomy,’ said Trussell.
Nonesuch rolled his eyes.
‘Stealing cattle?’ said Shay.
‘Stealing cattle, thank you, Shay.’ He blew her a kiss.
Blank propped himself up on his elbows. ‘I see it. The audience is a jury.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Nonesuch was almost dancing now.
Trussell circled him, saying, ‘I produce evidence: witnesses, bloodstains, cuts of meat.’
Nonesuch raised an invisible sword. ‘I parry. My good name, my unblemished character.’
They all scoffed at that. Alouette said, ‘I’ll be a local – that way I can sow doubt. There have been thieves in the area. Strange tribes are afoot.’
Trussell raised his hand. ‘I tighten the noose; just enough breath for one last speech.’
Nonesuch bowed. ‘In which I plead my innocence for the final time. I beg and entreat, even through the tightening rope. When I convince them of my innocence, the audience carry me out of there on their shoulders.’
‘Only if you convince,’ said Trussell. ‘What if I win?’ He watched Nonesuch dance around the fire.
Nonesuch threw himself back onto the ground. ‘Trussell, the day I can’t sway a crowd of ignorant peasants is the day you can hang me for real.’
The silence rushed back to cover them. Shay dozed. Alouette read. Trussell drew. It was Nonesuch who broke the spell again.
‘Where is everyone?’ It was already past four bells and usually by now village children would be milling around, but there was no sound bar the birds.
Nonesuch took Trussell’s pencil from him and gave him a handful of coins. ‘Go into the village. Buy an ale or two and show off the quality of your costume. Tell them that the Sparrow will be singing as well.’
Shay hid a smile. The further they rode from London, the more of a draw she became. North of Oxford, the audiences didn’t care about the plays that had made the Blackfriars Boys’ name, but a soothsaying half-girl, half-bird was worth a penny or two. Nonesuch had resisted at first. She hadn’t even been mentioned on the original playbills, but as the weather turned and the trees thinned her name appeared, then rose, and then topped the page. Sparrow, that’s the Sparrow, she advises the Queen: that’s what she heard when she climbed on stage. But she was content to play the parts Nonesuch created for her and be gawped at – only now did she realise how much the weeks of fortune-telling had drained her. Now she sang only when she wanted, and the trances felt more gift than burden.
An hour of nothing and then Trussell was back, wet-mouthed and smelling of ale. He said, ‘They’ve all gone to Cockaigne.’ Crumbs clung to his jacket.
‘The magical city of Cockaigne?’ The icing of scorn on Nonesuch’s voice was the one that he reserved for the most rural of beliefs. ‘It’s supposed to be in Europe somewhere, isn’t it? If there really were a city of endless treasure on the outskirts of Ulverton, then I think we might have heard of it.’ He stared around, as if daring the city to materialise in front of them.
Trussell sighed. ‘Obviously I know it’s a myth, I’m just telling you what they told me. Cockaigne rises for one night only.’ He put on his yokel accent again. ‘I’d rather see a city of wonders than a bunch of Londoners in dresses.’ He scratched himself. ‘Anyway, they’re not coming, not a single one of them.’
Cockaigne: Shay had heard the name, but no picture came to mind. Alouette would know, though. The shows out here in the sticks had no need for props and Alouette was relegated to a supporting player. She spent her days collecting specimens: poisonous mushrooms that would kill in less time than it took to draw breath; herbs to stoke ardour, or to quell it; animal blood that made the drinker invincible. In Bury she finally found a source of Dee’s foxfire, those glowing mushrooms that grew on rotting wood. Now, when she rode, her saddlebags clinked with the bottles of the luminous liquid that she painstakingly distilled over campfires every night. In Herefordshire the troupe had come across the remnants of a massacre; men’s skeletons lay where they’d fallen, not long stripped of flesh by the crows. Most of the players averted their eyes, but Alouette dived in, scraping any shred of moss that had grown on the skulls. It cost her a crown – an enormous sum – to send the skull-moss back to Doctor Dee by horse messenger, but three days later a rider appeared with two guineas and a sealed letter for her.
Shay found her lying on her bedroll, surrounded by jars and boxes. She scowled when she heard what Shay had come to ask. ‘Cockaigne? It’s a children’s story. Hang on.’ She took a book from the chest and read. “‘In the city of Cockaigne, roast pigs carve slices from their own backs for you to eat, and grilled rabbits leap happily into your mouth. The rivers are made of wine, the sun always shines and legs are…’” She snapped the book closed ‘… always open.’
Shay laughed. ‘Well, get your best dress on – we’re visiting it tonight.’
You could see it from miles away. High golden walls shimmered in the night air, and as the troupe grew closer, the glimmer resolved into the shape of a fiery castle. It rose from the hilltop, haloed with blazing torches that threw the surrounding fields into darkness. A relentless one-two-three, one-two-three drumbeat drew a stream of villagers up a torchlit path. The troupe mixed in with the throng, swept up by the carnival atmosphere. The queue ran hundreds of yards down the slope, a slap in the face after the Ghost Theatre’s thinning audiences.
Nonesuch squinted at the end of the line, far enough down the hill that the lights of Cockaigne hardly reached it.
‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers. Come on.’ He set his face at its most contemptuous. At the entrance, two sweating drummers, stripped to the waist, worked feverishly as lads took pennies from the newcomers. Nonesuch walked past them and made for a figure in the shadows. The man was tall, maybe six foot, in muddy hose and shirt that would have shamed a farmer, but he wore silver at his ears and neck, great shining lumps of it.
