Page 57 of The Two Wills

Hughes nods and leaves, off to his rooms. I make my way back down the street to my own quarters and, just as I am reasoning how on the morrow I will go to the Poet and make my peace, a voice calls out from behind me.

“Rose! Please wait!”

It is he, the Poet, out of breath from galloping to catch up to me. He is sweating, and his cheeks are flushed with drink.

“Rose, I’m sorry. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I’m sorry for all those awful things I said to you.”

I am stunned. My flesh bubbles with excitement. I see true contrition in his eyes, but I know not to surrender so easily. “Thank you,” I say coldly, and then as if I’m ready to leave—“Is that all?”

“No,” he says with near tears in his voice. “I acted so brutally because I felt so betrayed, seeing the both of you together. But more than that, I was terrified that I had lost you forever. Over these weeks, it’s been unbearable. I’ve been unable to sleep, to write …”

He takes my hand and kisses it. How like a boy in love he appears. “Rose, please give me another chance. I beg you.” His voice quakes. “Just one more chance. I love you, Rose. You are my all.”

Twenty-FourA Season’s End

Wherein the heartbroken Willy Hughes receives an unexpected gift.

O, never say that I was false of heart,

Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.

—from Sonnet 109

It was a most bitter defeat seeing the Poet and Rose’s displays of affection all through the autumn. The worst part was, I knew her triumph was not based on her beauty alone. The woman had wit, humor, steadfast determination, and could wrest a passion from the most unlikely places—even me. It was but that one time, yet still an impressive feat.

As for me, I lapsed into that kind of melancholy that haunts the heartbroken, but I kept my word and did not try any more tricks to separate them. Making it worse, during those dark chilly months, I was never left alone with the Poet. He even stopped speaking to me directly. If he wanted to deliver a message per my performance or the installation of a new line, he’d have the messages relayed via Ed Knight, master of the book, or my master Augustine, which was the custom with the other apprentices.

One day during practice, Augustine told me, “Your frequent sighing in the tiring house has been disrupting the other actors, Hughes.”

“Sorry, sir,” I said. “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. I’ll try to be more merry.”

Augustine, being the wisest person I ever met, perceived my plight. “It’s this way lad,” he said. “While I am old and grizzled, I too have suffered heartache … and still suffer it from time-to-time, believe it or not. When I am in utter despair, I think to myself, ‘Now, how may I use this?’ ”

“Use it, sir?”

“Why, yes. I always examine how the heartbreak feels. I stare in a glass and see the set of my mouth, my eyes. I listen to my weary voice. By Saint George, think of any devastating setback as an opportunity to enhance your acting. This is the great benefit of being an artist of any sort, lad. We are gifted with the alchemy of turning our misery into gold.”

And so, as Augustine instructed, I fed my performance with my heart’s darkness. My Juliet’s weeping became truer, my Queen Anne’s bitterness filled with a deeper range of colors, my Young Queen Margaret became even more believably bloodthirsty. My misery was paying off splendidly! I was honored with even more boisterous cheers and stomping. Our audiences grew larger and larger, and many performances had to be added.

Then the most thrilling thing happened: Our company was readied to perform before the Queen at Greenwich Palace for the holiday. The palace was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The great hall had a ceiling painted gold and a dais in the center of the room where the Queen herself sat with no one between her and the stage. On raised levels on the sides and at the back of the hall sat five hundred courtiers dressed in their finest frippery. Thousands of candles and dozens of large chandeliers made everything glow and sparkle.

We players sparkled the brightest of all, for we’d added even more gold thread and shiny gewgaws to our wardrobe. At the end of the performance, as my Juliet lay dead on the stage, I peered out my nearly closed eyelids and saw the Queen on her throne. Her aged face was painted nearly white with ceruse. She had no eyebrows and an alarming forehead that reached to the middle of her scalp. And then I saw it: her vermillion lips quivered with tears as she looked directly at me and nodded her head in approval.

In the days after, while there was much joy due to our soaring success, I did not celebrate like the other company members. I’d return to my rooms after performances to study my words for the next day and allow myself to sigh with melancholy (and see what I might gain from it) without disturbing anyone.

That winter we had hoped to move into the Blackfriars indoor playhouse—a brand new venture from Burbage’s father, but the surrounding neighbors protested our relocation, claiming their wealthy environs would be disrupted by “lewd persons” who tended to frequent our performances, and thus our plans were put off.

It was during the Yuletide and New Year’s festivities that we premiered the Poet’s newest play, wherein I portrayed the character Rosalind, maintaining Rose’s green velvet costume, since it kept with the lies we had originally told. As You Like It became a great triumph. While it was clearly based on Thomas Lodge’s 1590 romance Rosalynde, there was little discussion as to how much the Poet had purloined from elsewhere. He was like a cook who, in a panic for a feast, grabs everything in the larder and throws it into a pot. Sometimes it was whatever the Poet was reading, sometimes he’d steal whole sayings and situations from the lives of his friends and lovers. There were times I felt we had given him far too much.

Before I knew it, January was ending, and we would get an entire week off, which we desperately needed. Little Goat would finally get to have his long-anticipated rapprochement with his beloved mother. He could barely contain his excitement. In less happy news, we learned that Sam the Hedgehog would not be back at all, since the sharers did not extend his apprenticeship. This was a surprise to no one, including Sam.

My own contract would be ending in but a handful of months, but all expected it to be renewed and most likely for much longer. Still, all three of us felt a mix of joy and sadness with the end of our triumvirate. We sat backstage, amidst the piles of costumes and props ready to be stashed away during our break. Sam had placed all his personal effects in a sack.

“So, this is our last night together,” I said aloud. “I shall miss the three of us.”

“I know,” Little Goat said. “We shall miss you, Sam the Hedgehog.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam grumbled. “It is what it is, I suppose. I’ll survive. And now when I get into a lady’s underthings, it’ll be for a good reason.”