The Playmaker (16 page)

Meanwhile, Antigonus has landed with the infant child on a seacoast, which happens to belong to Polixenes' kingdom of Bohemia (much as Ben Jonson would vigorously deny it). He leaves the baby on the shore, but before he can reach his ship he is dispatched by a bear. However, the baby is rescued by a simple shepherd and his oafish son, who guess that she must be of high birth by the baptismal cloth wrapped around her.

Sixteen years pass. The baby has grown into a lovely maid of noble bearing called Perdita, “the Lost One.” She has captured the heart of Prince Florizel, son of Polixenes, who visits her humble home disguised as a shepherd. During a sheep-shearing festival, he proposes marriage to her—not a wise choice of time and place as it happens, for Polixenes is present, in disguise, spying on his son. The king flies into a rage and forbids the lovers to meet ever again, but they decide to flee together to Sicilia. There follows some comic business with an amiable thief known as Autolycus, by whose schemes Perdita and Florizel, the shepherd and his son, Polixenes and Autolycus himself all board various ships for Leontes' kingdom, Sicilia.

“So then,” I explained to Starling, “it all remains to be tied up. Leontes has been living like a monk all these years, though his counselors are urging him to marry again. But Paulina reminds him—”

“Wait. Who is Paulina, again?”

“A lady of the court, the late queen's closest friend. She reminds Leontes what the Oracle said, that he will die without an heir if ‘that which was lost be not found.'”

“I remember now.” Starling was shelling peas, and I was resting my cramped fingers from copy work. We sat near the garden under a spreading oak whose leaves barely moved in a listless summer breeze. “It would serve him right to die without heir, the jealous tyrant.”

“Perhaps, but the fates have decided that he's suffered enough, for soon Perdita and Florizel arrive, followed directly by the shepherd, who just happens to bring Perdita's baptismal cloth. And from that it ravels out—”

“‘Ravels out.' Oh, such wit!” She was in a snippish mood, which I ignored.

“—and Polixenes, when he arrives, forgives everyone in sight and all are friends again. The only blot on all this rejoicing is the memory of Hermione and poor little Mamillius, long dead. But Paulina has a surprise in store …” I paused, to bait her a little.

“… Yes?” Starling asked, when she could bear it no longer.

“She claims to own a statue of the late queen, which is so lifelike it could deceive Hermione's own kin into thinking she lives. So of course all must go to Paulina's house to see it, and it seems she spoke true. The statue shows Hermione as she would appear in the present—still beautiful, but older, even to the lines on her face. Both Leontes and Perdita long to touch it, but Paulina forbids
them. Instead, she commands the form to step down. The statue moves, then speaks, and behold! It is the real Hermione, who only pretended to be dead all these years and has hidden herself in Paulina's house until her husband is well and truly sorry. So all's well that ends well.”

“Oh,” Starling sighed. “I love the way it ends.”

“Well, I think it's too bad nobody produces a statue of Mamillius, full grown. The boy stays dead.”

She made a little sniff and went back to shelling peas. “It is a beautiful story. Why do you mock it?”

She had misjudged me. If I mocked, it was only because the play had touched a deep place in me that disliked being stirred. In this tale I heard echoes of my own life. I knew firsthand how Mamillius had suffered, with his mother falsely accused and his father become strange and distant. I knew how a faithful wife could be rejected and spend long years waiting for her husband's repentance. When I pictured Hermione waiting through those years, I saw Rebekah Malory, sitting by the window in a plain gown with neglected mending in her lap and a hurt, fretful look in her eyes—only my mother's wait was never rewarded.

But it was the character of Leontes who haunted me. He was the villain of the story, yet there was nobility in him, a greatness, both in his sins and his repentance. He had done terrible things, but forgiveness restored him. One night I dreamed that Leontes was my father, carrying me around on broad, kingly shoulders and laughing a rich, rolling laugh. He set me down and went away. I
was searching for him in the tiring rooms behind the stage, in coves and closets that ever multiplied, while over my head the third trumpet sounded. Only it was the Oracle that spoke in its windy tones, warning that something terrible would befall us “if that which was lost be not found. … ”

It was the kind of dream that makes you wake feeling wrung out like a rag.

Not that I wished to explain any of this to Starling. “Master Will's plays always have something awry,” I said. “It's as if he were twisting life to fit the story he wants to tell. First, there's Leontes setting out to destroy his family, for no reason—”

“There is always a reason,” she said sagely. “It may not be so soon apparent, is all.”

“—And the way people just die, of grief or whatnot, when it suits the plot. I watched my mother die—it's not that easy. And then,” I hurried on, “there's that bear. He shows up with no rhyme or reason and kills a man and disappears, and we never see him more. What purpose does he serve?”

“Whatsoever God pleases. Sometimes we are granted to know, or know who to ask. If my own father were alive, I would ask him.”

“Was he so wise as you?” Now I was the one being snippish, but her knowing manner had begun to wear on me.

“Not in most ways,” she said, gravely. “But he
was
a bear.”

This was so unexpected I could think of no clever reply. “Oh?”

“Indeed. A most burly, furry, and fearsome bear. To be sure, he started out as a man, else he could never have got me. But he was
wedded to the forest and we never saw him, my sisters and I, except when he showed himself with a haunch of venison over his shoulder or a brace of rabbits in his fist. Big, hairy hands he had, and his laugh was like a roar.

“Then one day he went into the forest and we never saw him more. Or not as a man. For you see, he passed so much time amongst the caves and the trees and the leaf-mold that his hair grew out into fur to keep him warm, and his fingernails hardened into claws to protect him. His round, whiskery face doubled up in a muzzle so he could smell out his food. He curled up in a cave one snowy winter's eve to sleep and when he woke, the sky was weeping warm tears and the trees had put out a fuzz of green. When he came forth from the cave, he found himself walking on his hands, and when a squirrel chattered at him from a branch overhead he brought it down with one swipe of his paw. Then he ripped it open and scooped out the flesh and cracked the bones between his huge yellow teeth.”

Starling was a renowned storyteller among the Condell children, but this was the first she had worked her wiles on me. I let my breath out in a shallow stream. “How do you know this?”

“I saw him,” she said calmly. “Two years ago last Whitsuntide. He had been caught, you see, and was on his way to the bear pit. They had him chained to a post in Smithfield, where they matched him against two champion dogs and he broke them easily. Then he looked over the clearing and found me. His eyes were ever small, even as a man, and shiny as onyx stones. Those were his eyes staring at me, and they told me all.”

With a jolt I remembered the eyes of Benjamin in the Smithfield market, and how I, too, once fancied that a bear had talked to me. “Did you ever see him after?”

“Nay. But heard of him. He ruled the Bear Garden for almost a year, until his wounds finally made him weak. There was a dog named Savage who got him square in the neck, where they could not staunch the blood. 'Twas a sad day at the Bear Garden, for many a wagered shilling was made off Black Jack. That was what they called him—as chance would have it, Jack was my father's name. He made a sad end but died fighting. Truth to tell, I don't think he minded being a bear, though he'd as lief be one in the freedom of the forest.”

She had finished with the peas; her fingers sifted idly through the limp green pods, their papery skins so thin I could see the tiny veins in them. Suddenly, she gathered a handful of these slivers and threw them at me. “‘Tis all true, I swear it,” she laughed, springing to her feet and shaking pods off her skirt. She trotted off toward the kitchen, her gait so smooth that not a single pea jumped out of the pan.

As for me, I felt as though I'd had a hat pulled over my eyes and my nose tweaked.

“Jack Shaw?” young Henry Condell repeated, in answer to my question. “I remember him well. He was gamekeeper for my aunt and uncle Fredericks, in Barkshire.” Harry drew hard on his pipe to make it catch, then blew out smoke with the satisfied air of a youth
who's mastered a manly art at the age of eighteen. He was in a mellow humor, having worked out a tangle in the household accounts with a bit of help from me. “Jack was a big, hairy fellow. Great for telling tales—the children loved him. He lived to hunt. That was his downfall. A hardened poacher, poor man; no one could break him of it. The wardens caught him on the neighbor's land gutting a deer—red of hand, as the saying goes—and in the scuffle Jack was killed. A sad tale.”

“Was it an accident?”

“Oh, no doubt.” Harry put one foot on the accounting table and puffed contentedly—two things he would never have done had his mother been anywhere about. “I know Starling has … enriched the story. One thing sure, the deed made three girls orphan. All named after birds—Starling, Skylark, and … I forget the other. Raven? Nuthatch?”

“Titmouse,” I suggested.

“Hah! That wouldn't bear shortening, would it? Starling is the eldest, and my mother and father took her in out of kindness. She used to be a flighty wench, but she has settled down to earn her bread in the last year or so. She's told you the bear story, then? As I thought. Had you believing it, didn't she?”

T
HE
W
ATCHER
W
ITHOUT
E
YES

few days after bewitching me with her “Black Jack” story, Starling burst into the master's study, so agitated she could scarcely draw breath. “Richard! You must come at once. He was just here, at the gate. If you hurry, you might catch him!”

I was industriously copying, and she had made me skip; I glared at the ugly blot left on the paper and demanded, “What—”

She stamped her foot. “Don't argue. He's getting away.”

“Who?”

“Peter Kenton!”

That was all I needed to move me—why had she not said so in the first place? The next instant we were out of the house and pelting down the street in the
direction she had seen the man go.“What did he want?” I asked, on the lope.

“Not now. Hurry!”

We ran to the corner, where a row of trees compromised the view. Starling pointed east. “I watched him down the street, and he turned that way.” But except for a carter, a dustman, a sprinkling of housemaids, and a distant, black-robed scholar, the street was empty.

Star wrung her hands while her mouth went sideways. “Ah, what a simpleton I am! I should have followed him straight and not gone to fetch you. My faith, what a foolish—”