The clown sighed. 'Alas, that love, so gentle in his view, should be so tyrannous and rough in proof.' He puckered up again.
'Good Lord, what madness rules in brainsick men,' Burbage said.
'I am not mad; I would to heaven I were,' Kemp replied. 'For then, 'tis like, I should forget myself.' He capered bonelessly-and more than a little lewdly.
Burbage looked ready to thwack him in good earnest. 'Give over, the both of you,' Shakespeare said.
Will Kemp gave him another extravagant bow. 'I'd sooner be a cock and disobey the day than myself and disobey a knight.'
'Half cock, belike,' Burbage said.
'I yield to your judgment, sweet Dick, for you of all men surely are all cock as well.'
'Enough!' Shakespeare shouted, loud enough to cut through the din in the tiring room and make everyone stare at him. He didn't care. 'Give over I said, and give over I meant,' he went on. 'The Queen hath said we are to be rewarded according to our deserts, and you'd quarrel one with another? 'Tis foolishness. 'Tis worse than foolishness: 'swounds, 'tis madness. Did we brabble so whilst in the mist of terrible and unavoided danger we readied
Shaming them into stopping their sniping didn't work as he'd hoped. Burbage nodded. 'Ay, by my troth, we did,' he declared.
Kemp only shrugged. 'Me, I know not. Ask of Matt Quinn.'
Shakespeare threw his hands in the air. 'Go on, then,' he said. 'Since it likes you so well, go on. You were pleased to play on cocks. Strap spurs on your heels, then, and and tear each other i'the pit.' Will Kemp stirred. Shakespeare glared at him.
As the players left the Theatre, Burbage caught up with Shakespeare and said, 'There be times. ' His big hands made a twisting motion, as if he were wringing a cock's neck.
'Easy,' Shakespeare said. 'Easy. He roils you of purpose.'
'And I know it,' Burbage replied. 'Natheless, he doth roil me.'
'Showing him which, you but urge him on to roil you further.'
'If he prick me, do I not bleed? If he poison me, do I not die? Have I not dimensions, sense, affections, passions? If he wrong me, shall I not revenge? The villainy he teacheth me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.'
'He is a clown by very nature,' Shakespeare said. 'It will out, will he or no. And he hath a gift the auditors do cherish-as have you,' he added hastily. 'The company is better-the Queen's Men are better-for having both you twain.'
'The Queen's Men.' Burbage's glower softened. 'There you have me, Will. A prize worth winning, and we have won it. And I needs must own he holp us in the winning.' He was, when he remembered to be, a just man.
When Shakespeare walked into his lodging-house, he found Jane Kendall all fluttering with excitement.
'Is it true, Master Shakespeare?' she trilled. 'Is it true?'
'Is what true?' he asked, confused.
'Are you. Sir William?'
He nodded. 'I am. But how knew you that?'
Before his landlady answered, she took him in her arms, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him on the cheek.
With her blasting and scandalous breath, he would rather have had a kiss from Will Kemp's lips. He didn't say so. He would have had no chance anyhow, for she was off: 'Why, I had it from Lily Perkins three doors down, who had it from her neighbor Joanna Ball, who had it from Peg Mercer, who had it from her husband Peter, who had it in his shop in Bishopsgate Street from a wight returned to London from the Theatre. Naught simpler.'
'I see,' Shakespeare said, and so, in a way, he did. Rumor ran so fast, before long it would likely start reporting things before they happened. As well it did not with Boudicca, he thought, else the dons had found some way to thwart us.
'Sir William,' the Widow Kendall repeated, fluttering her eyelashes at him. 'To have a knight dwelling in mine own house-dwelling so that he may pay his scot, I should say.'
'Fear not, Mistress Kendall,' Shakespeare said. 'Whilst I be no rich man, still I am not poor, neither.
Have I ever failed to pay what's owed you?'
'Never once-the proof of which being you dwell here yet,' his landlady replied. Shakespeare hid a sigh.
She loved him for his silver alone.
The door to Cicely Sellis' room opened. Out came the cunning woman, with a round-faced matron with a worried expression. Almost everyone who came to see her had a worried expression. Who that was not worried would come to see a cunning woman? Mommet bounded out and started sniffing Shakespeare's shoes, which to his nose must have told the tale of where the poet had been.
'Rest you easy. All will be well,' Cicely Sellis told her client. 'That which you dread shall remain dark-'
'God grant it be so!' the other woman burst out.
'It shall remain dark,' Cicely Sellis said soothingly, 'an you betray yourself not by reason of your own alarums internal.'
'I would not,' the woman said. 'I will not. God's blessings upon you, Mistress Sellis.' Out she went, seeming happier than she had a moment before.
Shakespeare wondered what she didn't want revealed. Had she collaborated with the Spaniards? Or had she simply taken a lover? He was unlikely to find out. If he were putting this scene in a play, though, what would he choose?
If he were putting this scene in a play, he would be hard pressed to find a boy actor who could reproduce the terror and loathing on Jane Kendall's face as she stared at the cunning woman.Whore, she mouthed silently. Witch. But she said not a word aloud. Cicely Sellis paid her rent on time, too.
She nodded now to Shakespeare. 'God give you good even, Sir William.'
The Widow Kendall jerked. That proved too much for her to bear. 'How knew you of's knighthood, hussy?' she demanded. 'These past two hours, were you not closeted away with bell, book, and candle?'
She had that wrong. Bell, book, and candle were parts of the ceremony of excommunication, not the tools of the witch who might deserve it. Shakespeare knew as much. By the glint of amusement in Cicely Sellis' eye, so did she. She didn't try to tell her landlady so. All she said was, 'Did you not call Master Shakespeare Sir William just now? And did not Lily Perkins bring you word of the said knighthood, clucking like a hen the while? I am not deaf, Mistress Kendall-though betimes, in your disorderly house, I wish I were.'
After a moment to take that in, Jane Kendall jerked again. Shakespeare looked down at Mommet to hide his smile. The cunning woman had got her revenge for the Widow Kendall's mouthed whore. When his face was sober again, he nodded to her and said, 'Good den to you as well, Mistress Sellis.'
'I do congratulate you, you having done so much the honor to deserve,' Cicely Sellis said.
'My thanks,' Shakespeare answered.
'May your fame grow, and your wealth with it, so that, like any rich and famous man, you may build your own grand house and need no longer live in any such place as this,' the cunning woman told him.
Jane Kendall jerked once more. 'Naught's amiss here!' she said shrilly. 'An you find somewhat here mislikes you, Mistress Sellis, why seek
'For that I can afford no better,' Cicely Sellis said. 'The same holds not for Master Shakes-for Sir William.'
'No better's to be found,' Jane Kendall asserted. Cicely Sellis said nothing at all. Her silence seemed to Shakespeare the most devastating reply of all. And so it must have seemed to his landlady, too, for she yelped, 'Why, 'tis true!' as if the cunning woman had called her a liar to her face.
And Cicely Sellis was right: he could afford finer than a one-third share of a Bishopsgate bedchamber.
Whether he wanted to spend the money for better was a different question. He had in full measure the player's ingrained mistrust of good fortune and fear it would not last. How many men had he known who, briefly flush, spent what they had while they had it and then, misfortune striking, wished they hadn't been so prodigal? Too many, far too many.
