“What do you mean?” asked Smythe, not quite following him.

“I mean that when you see Ned Alleyn playing a part, you always remain aware that you are watching Ned Alleyn playing a part. You never quite forget that ‘tis Ned Alleyn, the great actor, you are seeing.” He purposely broke up the word ‘actor’ into two syllables, accentuating each one pointedly. “The very nature of his performance demands that you remember it.” To illustrate, Fleming took a dramatic pose, standing bolt upright with his right hand upon his chest, his chin up aristocratically, his left arm held out before him as if he were Caesar speaking to his troops. And when he spoke, his voice performed a very credible imitation of Ned Alleyn’s ringing and bombastic stage cry. “ ‘Lo!” he intoned, “ ‘tis I, the great Ned Alleyn, playing this part! Behold how brilliantly I act! Revel in the very wonder of me!”

Smythe laughed. “He would kill you if he saw that, you know.”

“Oh, I have no doubt,” Fleming replied offhandedly, in his normal voice. “He would squash me like a beetle, the great oaf. But still, it changes nothing.” He shrugged. “That is how he acts.”

“Perhaps, but if we are truly going to be honest with ourselves, John, is that not how all players act?” asked Smythe.

“Aye, most of us do, I suppose,” Fleming agreed, nonchalantly. “If, as you say, Tuck, we are truly to be honest with ourselves, then perforce we must admit that once all the trappings of our craft are stripped away, we are all nothing more than great infants in want of much attention. We live or die at the whim of the groundlings; we fatten our pride on their applause. But not Ben. Ben is something else entirely.”

“What makes him different?” Smythe asked curiously, as he watched him rehearse out on the stage.

“For Ben, ‘tis not the applause that truly matters. For him, the play’s the thing. And not really the play so much as the playing. In that, I perceive he has not changed.”

Smythe frowned. “ ‘Twould seem to me that playing matters neither more nor less to him than to any of the others. Or do my eyes see things less keenly than do yours?”

Fleming smiled. “The flaw lies not so much in your observation as in your knowledge, Tuck. I have known Ben since he was but a boy, whilst you have only met him recently. And the truth is that there is rather more to Ben than the eye can plainly see. Ben did not much like his life, and so he went off to make himself another. And now he has come back, because the life he went in search of doubtless proved a disappointment, and so once again he seeks to make himself another.”

Fondness seemed to mingle with a sort of wistful regret in John Fleming’s exression as he watched Ben Dickens on the stage. He sighed and continued while Smythe listened with great interest.

“There is a sort of magic to our Ben,” Fleming said. “For all that he is a grown man now, there is still the child within him, a fey child, a changling who possesses the ability to believe in things the way only a child can believe. I first saw it within him when he came to us as an apprentice player and I see it still. When you and I go out upon that stage, Tuck, we take the parts we are to play and play them as best as we are able, do we not?”

“Well, I fear my best is not to be compared with yours on equal footing,” Smythe said, somewhat sheepishly.

“Nevertheless,” the older man replied, gently patting him on the shoulder, “you put forth your best effort each and every time, for which you are to be commended, and you strive always to improve. But that is not the point. Tis this: when the rest of us step out upon the stage, we are but playing parts, pretending to be something we are not. Yet when Ben steps out upon the stage, what he does is rather different. He becomes something he is not. That is his gift, you see, his special magic, and perhaps, his curse, as well. He has the ability to so completely throw himself into a role that he becomes that role during the time he plays it… for howsoever long that time may be. I first saw him start to do it on the stage and I did marvel at it. I thought that he had the potential to be better than merely good; I thought he could be great. And I still think so. But when I later saw him do the same thing in his life, offstage, then I became truly concerned for him. It frightened me.”

“In what way were you frightened?” Smythe asked.

“Do you recall those two thoroughly unpleasant ruffians who came into the Toad and Badger that day when Ben returned?”

“Aye,” Smythe said, with a grimace. “Jack Darnley and Bruce McEnery were their names.”

“They are the very ones,” said Fleming, nodding emphatically. “After Ben had been with us for a few years, he met those two somehow. I do not know where precisely, perhaps here at the theatre, perhaps in town somewhere… in truth, it matters not. What matters is that he fell in with them and began to spend his free time roaming the streets with that unruly lot of theirs -”

“The Steady Boys,” said Smythe.

“Aye, steady on the road to ruin, if you ask me. I watched him begin to change before my own two eyes, become another Ben… a Ben that I no longer knew, in many ways. And yet, in other respects, he still seemed much the same. When he was with us, he was the Ben that we had always known and loved. But then there were times when it seemed as if he were a changling, as if the faeries came whilst he had slept and stolen him away, leaving in his place some evil creature that merely had his aspect. It puzzled me at first, until at last I understood what was afoot. It always used to happen when he was returning from keeping company with those troublesome apprentices. There was something about those roaring boys that very much appealed to Ben, you see.”

“I cannot imagine what it may have been,” said Smythe.

“Nor could I,” said Fleming, with a grimace of distaste. “But methinks perhaps that what he saw in them in the beginning was something of what he wished to be himself, a sort of adventurer, a man of action and determination, a young gallant… not that they were any of those things, in truth, but I suppose that they believed they were, and spoke as if they were, and so Ben believed it, also. I attempted to dissuade him from their company, to convince him that they were a bad influence upon him and would bring him naught but trouble, yet ‘twas all to no avail, of course. When did youth ever credit the wisdom of their elders?”

“I do not recall that I ever did, myself,” said Smythe. “Well, save for my Uncle Thomas, to whom I always listened with respect. But for the most part, when I was younger, I did not find that my elders seemed to possess very much wisdom.”

“Amusing, is it not, how the older one becomes, the wiser one’s elders seem to grow?” said Fleming, with a smile. “Well, as you might imagine, the more I prevailed upon him to abandon this bad company, the more he sought it out. In the end, he drifted away from us. He found a position as apprentice to an armorer, which was just the sort of manly thing for a young gallant to be, I suppose, but then, he soon drifted away from that, as well. The rest you know. He saw how his friends paled in comparison to the genuine adventurers he met at his new master’s shop and ‘twas not long before he left them behind, as well, to make himself yet another life.”

“I do not believe they liked that very much,” said Smythe.

“Aye, that sort never would,” agreed Fleming. “When one leaves that sort of company, ‘tis often perceived as weakening the others, for they find their strength in numbers. But much more than their strength, methinks, they find their very identity in numbers. And so when someone leaves them, they feel threatened and betrayed.”

“I realize that they do, but I am not sure that I understand why they should,” said Smythe.

“Consider who they are and how they live,” said Fleming. “They are young and working class, though not yet old enough or, in most cases, skilled enough to work in their own right as journeymen or master craftsmen. Yet at the same time, they are old enough to consider themselves full grown, though again, in most cases, they have not yet acquired the wisdom of adulthood. And so they find themselves in service as apprentices, at the bidding of their masters and unable to achieve their independence until such time as their masters deem them worthy. They have no ability to determine the course of their own lives, no true feeling of worth, and no power of their own. In their masters’ shops, they labor hard and long and must do as they are told. But when they go out on their own and band together with others like themselves, why then they find within that company a strength of purpose and a sense of belonging to something that gives them worth and a feeling of respect. One becomes more than merely a lowly young apprentice; one becomes a Steady Boy, or a Bishopsgate Brawler, or a Fleet Street Clubman, or whatever other colorful appellation these gangs of apprentices choose for themselves. And this company thus becomes a band of brothers, in one sense a family, in another sense an army… not unlike your highland clans. And if you are a member of this clan, then you are someone worthy of respect, someone to be feared… for when one is young, fear and respect seem much like the same thing. If you should become the leader of such a band, why then you have importance, power, and position, all of which is yours by virtue of the men you lead. The more men, the more power; the more power, the more prestige.”