The next morning my father and I were back in the wards, which were full of wounded sailors and soldiers. My father looked better after his rest, more at ease amongst these familiar surroundings. Unlike the cases in Deptford, it was clear what we could do for these men, removing stinking bandages stiff with blackened blood, cleaning and salving open wounds, easing fever and pain. Where gangrene had taken hold, we had perforce to send for a surgeon to cut back more of a damaged limb.
Men died.
Sometimes, I thought that death was a more merciful end than the future which awaited our crippled and broken patients whose lives henceforth would be nothing but misery and destitution.
Three weeks after our return from Deptford, Simon Hetherington arrived on our doorstep one early afternoon, when my father had sent me home to rest from the long hours of caring for the sick. We had not met for months and I noticed that he had grown even taller since I had last seen him. My heart lurched at the sight of him and I admitted to myself how much I had missed him. Andrew was a fine companion in a scrape, but somehow Simon touched something within me that I did not want to analyse too closely. He was dressed today quite grandly, in a costly velvet doublet. I had not thought that actors’ earnings would rise to such finery.
‘Not sporting with your friend Kit Marlowe?’ I said caustically.
He grinned. ‘Marlowe is abroad somewhere, on one of his secret missions. I must needs make do with Kit Alvarez instead. Now that he has returned from his own mission abroad.’
‘I hope you have not come to fetch me to the Marshalsea again.’
That was more than two years ago now, I thought. Nearly three.
‘Not to Master Poley, certainly,’ he said. ‘I hear that he is still in the Tower, and living like a king.’
I knew it. It was one of the first things I had asked Phelippes when I returned from the Low Countries. As long as Poley was imprisoned I felt my secret identity was safer.
‘You keep your friends amongst the prison warders, then?’
He laughed. ‘Still a sharp tongue, I see, Kit! You have not come to Durham House of late.’
‘We have been too much occupied with the men who served in the fleet against the Spanish, first in Deptford and then here with the men who survived the virulent epidemic that wiped out whole ships’ crews, but instead have lost limbs.’
I turned aside to the task I had been engaged on when he arrived, tidying the shelves of tinctures and salves, noting down what new supplies we needed.
‘While the country rejoices,’ I said, keeping my back turned to him that I might not betray my feelings, ‘they forget that men of our own were killed and injured. And as well as the sawbones during the battle, our surgeons at the hospital have had more than a few amputations, and we must care for the men after their butchery. It’s not a pretty sight,’ I said bitterly, ‘to see a man first lose his leg and afterwards find the gangrene creeping up the stump of it. And there have been festering wounds from shot. We have brought in four whole barrels of Coventry water to cleanse them. And even in the short time they were at sea, many of them contracted scurvy.’
I turned back and glared at him, as if it were his fault.
He raised his eyebrows enquiringly.
‘It makes me so angry!’ I said. ‘We physicians tell the sea captains what they must do – some fresh fruit for the men, or at least a little lemon juice. Too costly, they complain. Why, all they need, if they will not carry lemon juice, is a little cochlearia officinalis – scurvy grass is the common name. It’s to be found all round the coast, as if God planted it there for the sake of seamen!’
I spun round and gestured at our medicine cupboard, to make my point with greater force. ‘We keep it all the time here and in the hospital for the children of the poor, who are as likely as seamen to suffer from a bad diet. So easily cured, but so painful a disease, with swollen joints and bleeding gums, and the teeth growing loose and falling out!’
‘You really care for your profession, do you not, Kit? Such passion!’
‘Of course, I do!’ Then I smiled apologetically.
‘I am sorry for ranting like one of you players, but I hate to see uncalled-for pain. There is pain enough in the world.’
I did not tell him, for I had been sworn by Sir Francis to secrecy, that it was now estimated that, although only a hundred men had died in the battle, eight thousand had since died of sickness and wounds. The horror of it haunted me.
‘True indeed, there is too much pain in the world. But can your patients spare you to come and see my profession, my passion?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you heard of the new piece, Tamburlaine the Great?’
‘Everyone has heard of it.’
‘Kit Marlowe wrote it.’
I made a face. I could not hide my dislike.
‘He thinks somewhat well of himself, I know,’ Simon conceded, ‘but he has good cause. He and Tom Kyd, they are writing a whole new kind of play. Come with me and see! Tamburlaine is to be played this afternoon at the Rose, with Ned Alleyn as Tamburlaine again. Come, and you shall see and hear such wonders as you have never seen or heard before.’
‘Are you to play in it?’
‘No, it is Henslowe’s company, but next month I am to play Bel Imperia in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. After that, they are to let me take men’s parts.’ His eyes gleamed. Ever since I had known him he had longed to make the move from playing women, despite his successes.
Eventually, I allowed him to persuade me. To leave behind all the sickness and death which had surrounded me these last weeks – it was a temptation I could not withstand. Although I did a grown man’s work, I was still but a girl of eighteen. And I could scarcely admit to myself how much I liked his company and his way of looking at the world, so different from my own. I would never have admitted it to him. Yet my heart gave a little jerk of pleasure as we set off from Duck Lane, Simon whistling a new street ballad that was on everyone’s lips. We walked over the Bridge again, in the same direction we had taken nearly three years before, to the new-built theatre, The Rose, belonging to Master Henslowe, on Bankside, near the bear-gardens. Simon seemed to know all the people in this strange world of playhouses, so, without money changing hands, we found ourselves in threepenny seats with cushions, looking down on the stage. I had never before been seated so grandly in a playhouse.
‘Everything looks quite different from here,’ I said.
‘You will be able to see better how everyone moves about the stage, instead of craning up at the actors’ feet from below, like the groundlings, until your neck is stiff. It’s important for the actor to use the whole stage.’ He made a sweeping gesture, indicating the apron stage and the inner central chamber, and the upper stage on the large balcony behind the main stage.
‘Your sometime player,’ he said, in a schoolmaster’s voice, ‘your guildsman or schoolboy, will stand stiff and recite his lines to the audience, like a stuffed peacock. Your true player lives his part. He ignores his audience for the most part, walks about the stage as he would do in life, and talks to the other players. He will only speak directly to the audience when he wants to invite them into the play, or else when he puts his inmost thoughts into words, so we can share them. Then we seem to see inside his very mind. Do you understand?’
‘I think so.’ It had not occurred to me that the players’ trade was so complex. I had thought they simply conned their lines and then spoke them, though I had often listened to Simon talking about the way he imagined himself into a part. I had never thought about the way the players moved about on the stage or where they directed their words.
‘And notice how we use the different parts of the stage. The inner stage can be a private room, concealment for a spy, a place to die in – so we can draw the curtain across, you see? The balcony can present the ramparts of a castle, or a city wall, or the lookout of a ship, or the upstairs room of an inn, while the lower stage is the castle court, or the ground outside the city, or the stable yard of an inn. Do you not see these very places when we describe them? Though they are nothing but the parts of a wooden playhouse, open to the sky, like any bear-pit?’