Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night
Romeo and Juliet
Chapter XIX
Midsummer 1592
We rolled into Audley Inn late on the long June evening before my birthday. Bird songs rose amidst the fragrance of cut grass and summer roses on air so fresh as to cleanse us from the stench and tears of plague-wracked London and the grime of our journey.
All through my girlhood in Saffron Walden, I’d never seen the manor house within its lacework of leaves, nor beyond the twisty branches which hid it even in winter. Its stone was so encrusted with ivy and clematis and climbing roses that at first glance the house appeared to be constructed of vines and flowers. What a faery-tale sort of place, surrounded by rolling lawns and rangy gardens that revealed no touch of a groundsman’s shears. Gran would have thought it the dwelling of Bounteous Nature herself. Flowering chestnuts, fruit trees heavy with apricots and peaches and cherries, berry bushes and, in the distance, a grassy hill suited to pretty shepherds and shepherdesses: we could be in Eden or Arcadia.
The Howard’s maidservant Ella showed Jack and me to our room—pleasant and airy if small. That night, wakeful as Jack slept beside me, I understood that Audley Inn could not simply be an Eden for me. Today I turned sixteen: I was a woman with breasts and womb, a voice that would not change, a chin that would sprout no beard. Yes, I had a strong slim build and passed for thirteen or fourteen. But I was not a carefree innocent lad, however adept I was at playing that role.
Next morning Jack and I rose early to swim in the river flowing below the manor house. I meant only to wade my toes, but the lapping water drew me. I stripped to my long shirt, which floated about me as I bathed. Jack’s bare body arced past me as he stroked upstream, while I drifted in quiet eddies.
When the sun burned bright, I floated to where I had left my breeches and boots, assuring myself of deserted banks before I clambered out. I pulled on my breeches, removed my sopping shirt, crouched low to the river to wring it out, gave it a shake, and slipped it back on. Sitting on a large flat stone, I closed my eyes and fanned my hair to dry.
“Ganymede bathing,” a voice laughed behind me. I jumped, smoothing back my hair with a masculine gesture before I turned toward Kit Marlowe smiling from between the trees like a satyr.
“Swimming in your shirt, my lad? Such modesty.”
Jack had vanished up river. Marlowe moved close enough for me to catch a faint aroma of tobacco on his clothes. I prayed that my shirt didn’t cling to my body, which this once lacked its breast-binding. “I didn’t expect to find you here, Alexander.” He rolled my name over his tongue.
Dared I breathe? He leant over me, and I smelt strawberries on his breath as he came closer, closer.
I froze, face turned towards him and his lips touched mine. A warming sensation rushed through my body and I pulled back in terror.
“Alexander,” he murmured. “I want only to admire you, beautiful Alexander.”
Whatever desire Kit Marlowe might arouse in me was woman’s desire. No! I twisted away, scrambled to my feet, and ran toward the sound of Jack’s splashing, Kit’s laughter following me.
“I shall rise earlier tomorrow, my pretty lad.”
When Jack and I returned to the garden, my shirt nearly dry and loosely tucked into my breeches, the rest of the company was sitting under a bower, the table laid with fresh-picked strawberries, white machet bread, and tubs of new-churned butter, the likes of which I had not seen since our travels with Lord North’s Men through the countryside.
“These poets plan a contest,” Kemp said. “You lads will supply the music. The question: should we forbid mention of plague?”
“I say nay. Plague is our reason,” Nashe said.
“You’re right, Tom. We can no more control the Muse than we may comic Pan.” Kemp wiggled his ears like a Pan himself. “On our last day here, you present your works in competition. Meantime, I shall invent other merriments.”
“A battle of the poets. Just the thing for the likes of us,” Kit smiled across the table to Nashe and Shakespeare.
“Pastorals or old pagan tales, here’s the place,” Shakespeare said. “You have your chance to play the shepherd, Kit.”
“Perhaps I shall write about a Ganymede. Thus would Neptune discover a swimmer on the shore: Leander, so lovely that he might be a maid in man’s attire. Or I shall write what else may appeal, perhaps arguments on theology and the devil.”
“Altogether too tedious for poetry,” Nashe replied. “You played that game in Faustus.”
“No plays here,” Shakespeare said. “Closed theatres drive us to poetry.”
While the poets courted the Muse, Jack and I explored Audley Inn’s vast grounds. In the heat of the afternoon, we retreated to the Great Hall, a winter room of tall ceilings decorated with red, green, and gold rosettes, heavy tables, velour-seated chairs, and woven tapestries on walls paneled in oak carved into soft folds like linen.
“Would you wish to live in a place like this?” I asked Jack as we sat in the Howards’ high-backed chairs.
“Nothing could make me happier than the theatres opening again. If not,” he gestured toward the dark musicians’ gallery above us, “I would be pleased to play my songs there.”
“Pope has books that might inspire you.”
“Like that Ovid you like so much? I have done, silly. All fanciful stories, more for the pen of Shakespeare or Marlowe than a song-writer. If you didn’t return Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet poem to Master Shakespeare, I’d like a look. Just now I’m making a song of love and sadness.”
What did Jack know of love and sadness? In his secret heart, perhaps he longed for a pretty London girl or a shepherdess named Corinna. Jack had my blessing if he could express the pain and confusion of love through music.
“You’re welcome to Brooke’s verses, Jack. And I’ll listen to your songs anytime.”
From The Secret Player, ©️ Jinny Webber