Exit, Pursued by a Bear Page 5

  “Aye,” said Charles eagerly. “And here is Callisto, that was leapt by Jove.”

  “Was she so? Thou elf get,” said the elder, pinching inattentively. He turned to the men. “I am na rash Phaeton. I wad mak guid my harness ere I ride.”

  “Tom?” said Revels sternly.

  The bearward jerked a bow. “I tell ye, y’r emptyship: my chicks is peevy today. But by’r lady, they will draw like lions out o’ love. For them they know. And him there”—he jerked his chin at York—“has made a pretty leg and they’ve cursied.”

  “David?” said Wales.

  His Master of Wardrobe (Ben knew him: procurator of pearls, Medicean go-between, wiper of the princely arse, poet) said, “Wadna the prudent course be private audience?”

  “Wadst bring them veiled? As I wad meet a Moorish princess and her Grand Vizir?” Henry laughed. “I—and my brother York—will parley with these creatures.”

  Wardrobe to the bearward. “Thou wilt attend their Graces in the morning.” A blank. “Wait upon them wi’ thy beasties. Nine o’ clock.”

  “And thou shalt ride the bear, hey, Charlie?” A smile, which fell like silver to a beggar’s hand. “Oh, and David? Fine that wee man for swearing.”

  And glancing from the crooked penny to the man, both tarnished, Wardrobe murmured shrewdly, “Thair ane elph, on ane aipe, ane unsell begate.”[3]

  The prince leapt lightly up into his chariot; was at once iconic: Victory entering a city, and the gates thrown open out of love. He leapt down. Looked about him, at the underside of spectacle: the scaffolding, the planks. “So will I stand here—”

  “As the sun beneath the horizon—” said a courtier.

  “—whilst others watch the antimasque?”

  “—that heralds only your arising. They await the dawn.”

  Ben was still chuckling, like a potful of marmalade over a fire, with now and then a bubble breaking. Plop! He could constrain himself no longer, and fluted, “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon / Who is already sick and pale with grief.” Will had his uses.

  “What’s that, sir?” said the Master of Wardrobe.

  “I quote the Groom extraordinary of the Chamber: who serves well. His moon, I think, stays up.”

  Prince Henry had decided; spoke. “I wad see this triumph.” And he ran lightly to the high end of the room, and sat. Not in his father’s place: you were to see that it was not.

  He commanded.

  All that had been (all that day) mere anarchy was now in order. Sphere within great sphere—the music, scene, speech, act, and art—fit flawlessly as one, one cosmic harmony. All—save the moon—played perfectly. On New Year’s Day, the threshold of the year, the door would open and the elves first-foot it. Satyrs frisked; Silenus lauded in his bass, which shook the marrow of the listeners’ bones. Flawlessly, the gates groaned open and disclosed the faerie court, as empty as a shell: sublimity withheld. All of rank were absent, as they must be. The masque was not yet held. There stood the chariot, as bright and empty as its fellow in the sky. Men lifted the limbers, drew it onward. A loud triumphant music rang out from the galleries, with sackbuts, shawms, and measured drums. On came the viols and the lutes. And all of Elfin sang. But he the wonder is of tongues, of ears, of eyes. The empty chariot rolled on. And before it, Charles, the Duke of York, paced pale and radiant beside a beast of air, as if he held the North wind by its collar.

  In Blackfriars

  Ben dreamed he was Endymion and could not wake. His sleep was chains. The moon hung towering above him with her great pale wings, her talons of the light. On a sudden she stooped. Her cry was, Regicide! He knew, in his transfixion, she would tear his privities away, devouring . . .

  He woke shrieking. Found his jack with trembling hands. Drank heavily and read Quintilian until he fell again into uneasy sleep.

  And in the third part of the night, he dreamed again.

  Snow falling, snow on snow. And in the snow—of snow—a moving brightness like the moon in clouds, he saw the Great Bear and the Less. They paced the streets of London, that was empty as the sky. The one-eyed bearward turned to Ben: and he was Kit. The burning Thames I have to cross.

  The ice will not bear you, Kit.

  Then am I lost.

  A voice behind them: He must go by Watling Street.

  Ben’s mother’s voice. They turned. She crouched like a beggar woman on the bank of Thames, and fed her fire, twig by twig, with lives. Glints of armor showed beneath her rags. The city keeper.

  By the Two White Boys, straight on. . . .

  Straight on, said Kit.

  . . . past the Queen’s Head, and the Swan.

  Kit crouched to her. There will be hue-and-cry.

  Knock at the Horse and Rider, at the Galilee-door. There’s worlds all beyond.

  And Kit sprang up, as if he’d been rekindled at her fire. His hat and knee to her. My thanks, Dame Sibyl.

  Ben! Take this fellow’s bears. He must travel light.

  As Ben stood lumbered with his leash of bears, Kit turned to him. A riddle: who walks with Duke Humphrey?

  He knew that. Nuncius.

  Ben woke. Nuncius, of course. Who sauntered in and out among the monuments, as if he tickled for boys. And the snub-nosed fellow following, who read his halts. Amid the Babel of voices, a conspiracy of silence. He saw now, clear as on a figured map, the tombs they’d halted at. Ranulphus Munday. Guillelmus Fay. And last, with a grinning Death about to pierce him with a dart, Henricus King.

  Moon. Fay. Henry.

  He was up at once. And having dressed in a fumbling haste, was off to Whitehall.

  All down the sleeping Strand, Ben knew he was too late. Yet hurried on, through filthy snow, churned up with excrements; past torches long burnt out. Late revellers still bumped and staggered, singing hoarsely. Whores and beggars huddled by a fire they had made of straw. A wain or two still rumbled on; and here and there, a nighted traveller, whose one thought was to get inside, would turn and stare at him: the King’s rhinoceros that had escaped the Tower. He leaned panting in a doorway, with a stitch at heart. Drew breath and thundered on.

  His one thought was to rouse the palace, cry out, Treason! at the gates.

  But they stood open. Not a candle burned. No: in the windows of the banquet hall, a light, a living thing that sank and wavered, crouched and leapt. But very faint.

  He crossed the threshold. “Holla?” His cry was eaten by the air. A step. He twitched a cobweb from his face; put up a seeking hand: felt nothing. They were everywhere and nowhere. With prickling thumbs, he shook a warder. Then his fellows. All asleep.

  Sword drawn, he hastened through the shadowed rooms.

  He smelt gunpowder.

  He went in through the paltry door, at the backside of faerie. A dark lantern burned. By its light, Ben saw the snub-nosed fellow, with the moon before him on a trestle: the Venetian, whistling between his teeth. The artificer.

  “You come late.”

  He fixed Ben’s gaze: which sought and darted, even as he marked his adversary. There were two of them, he’d swear. Yes: up there on the scaffold. The magician. He that wove the spell. And Ben laughed. Saltpeter, charcoal—and Phosphor.

  Coolly, the Venetian said, “They will wake when he bids them. Some will not.”

  With his foot, he turned the watchman of the chariot. The cipher. Stone dead.

  Then he drew. His rapier and dagger, as sudden and as bright as lightning strikes, against Ben’s hacked sword. They faced each other, circling for vantage. Too old for this, thought Ben. Too old and cumbrous. He had killed three men in open combat, fairly. Within reason, fairly. But—he eyed the young Venetian—never such a swordsman.

  Round they went, and round.

  And suddenly, the other stilled. His eyes went wide.

  “Pistol,” said a gruff voice at his back. Tom Tukeler, with his long long shadows stretched behind him, growling.

  “Oh,” said the Venetian. And Tom raised up his iron gad, and struck
him to the ground. He disarmed him, rolled him with his foot into the bears’ cage: where he lay amid the filthy straw, astounded, staring up at two pale deaths.

  Tom thrust the sword and dagger in a bale. Gave the Ben another pistol, primed. “I sleeps here,” he said. “Those bears is worth Queen Key o’ Pantry’s rubies.”

  To the one, he called, “Grip, Toby!” And exultantly, he loosed the other. “Juggy, seek!”

  Sweet Christ. One bound, and she was at the scaffold, ramping: long and fell as if a cataract poured upward, rocks and all. But long, long as she was, the pinnacle was higher. Inigo had set a dome above the Heavens, with a lantern-ledge. His day-star would astonish. Enter Phosphorus. At the first, bedazzled blink, Ben thought the player wore his masquing. But no mortal hand could stitch this—body? Do the stars rehearse? Not he, light-bringing. Fire flowed from him as from a comet’s tail, broke off in flinders from his body, endlessly renewing. All that had been ever built, Creation and the works of Man, was but to say: Here is a Prince.

  He spoke: “I am the herald of great Anarchy.”

  By God, Kit wrote this play.

  Callisto jumped and clawed the air for blood. She turned—

  “My rise is downfall—”

  Hurled herself against the wall, to shake him down. Boom! His palace swayed and shuddered.

  “Death to princes.”

  Boom! A crack in it.

  “Death . . .”

  Boom! Boom! The scaffold split.

  “. . . to kings and queens!”

  And Elfland toppled.

  Brightness fell from the empyrean—clawed wildly for the harness—caught it, and was gone.

  “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” said Ben: and cared not that the words were Will’s.

  Callisto, baffled, sought her lost prey, nosing for a scent. Caught only sulphur.

  “There, my Pope Joan. There, my Bodyseer. Shalt have a dolphin to thy breakfast.”

  They turned back to the Venetian, lying moveless in a sickly terror, under Toby’s paws. He’d raked and buffeted his prisoner; killed not but at his keeper’s nod. “Hup, boy,” said the bearward. “Bully boy! Thou’rt a Salmon for discretion and a Sampson for thy beard. Shalt dine on whale.”

  The Venetian’s face was slick; his bravado, like a swealing candle, all but guttered out. A spark of him remained. “Only two of us. I swear it. Two. He promised I . . .” And all that moved of him, the eyes, sought out the moon. “Would have the praise of it. Would be Surveyor.”

  “Knowst thou what they will do to thee? As an intended regicide?”

  The eyes wide, wide. He nodded. “I repent.” And with trembling hand he signed himself: a cross as tiny as a spider. “Please.”

  “Ne reminiscaris, Domine, delicta famuli tui. Remember not, Lord, the sins of thy servant,” said Ben, who’d known communion in both kinds. He whispered. “Christ have mercy on us both.” And shot him through the eye.

  In the wakened house, they heard the running feet.

  “Tuke. I have no stomach for torture. My soul revolts.”

  Tom took the pistol. “Thou wast not here. I heard him and I shot.” He looked down at the Venetian’s body. “’A was a good mechanical. ’Tis cunning work, yon moon.” The shouting now on all sides, almost at the doors. “So then. He’ll drink on Watling Street tonight. At the Rider.” He pushed Ben: “Shift!”

  New Year’s Day at Night, 1611

  After all, the bears were played by men in rugs. ’Twas thought the Prince’s brother acted with an ill grace, sullen-sick. His eyes were red.

  Prince Henry rode in panoply his way to crownless death, of fever and a flux. His brother at the last would curve the dying hands about the bronze horse, will them to desire. They knew it not. Mere dumbshow, prologue to The Tragedy of Charles the First: the scaffold and the axe. As Kit devised for him, there would be blood.

  The part of Phosphorus was taken—not by an exultant Fourth Satyr, who would have thrown his rival from the parapet himself, if he’d thought of it—but by a minion of the King’s: a pretty pair of legs, and quick of study.

  The moon, played by a parchment lantern and a length of string, was much admired.

  And Nat Field broke his acorn to discover nothing but a mouse’s bones within. By cock, an addle egg. Nan Argyll, dancing past with Phosphor, with her bee’s wings and her rosy paps, threw him a ticing glance. Come catch me. So the boy had nothing of the fairies but chagrin and gingerbread.

  And elsewhere, Oberon and his—her own!—Titania quarrelled for a prettier new toy, a prince of darkness. He in turn, delighting in confusion, as a salmander in his element of fire, set one against the other. Lightning struck an oak in Arden, burning it from roots to crown. A tempest whirled away a sheepfold in Northumbria. In Wiltshire it hailed: through which a sudden bow shone out. And on a green hill anywhere, unseen, a pear-tree flowered in the frost.

  Saint Valentine’s Eve, 1613

  Ben, in his good broadcloth with a ruff that galled his neck, attended court. The King his daughter would be wed tomorrow. Crowns and emperors had heaped rich gifts upon the bride: hailed diamonds on her, so she might have walked in Indies to the knee. Her passage like a Milky Way.

  The Surveyor had (Ben heard) outdone himself, and would disclose a sky of stars at shovel-board; a great cloud like a sow in farrow, pigging masquers in a sty of chrysoprase. The Queen’s attendants would be silver-gilt as statues, all a-row like a cupboard of plate; would descend to invocation by a droning Orpheus. First four; then (play and overplay) another four: the full chest. Yet another too-substantial pageant: not to fade, but to be trundled off.

  Jack Donne (who’d fallen off from his Muse) had sent an Epithalamion: phoenixes and fairies mingling with his hobbyhorses of celestial motion and bed-galliards. Ben snorted. Hah. Spherical smicket-lifting.

  And Will? The fripperer had rummaged in his box of offcasts, and would give them an old play. That one with the subjunctive seacoast. A thing of patches from the first, thought Ben. As if thief Mercury turned hussif, stitching what he stole, rebroidering—And said out loud: “He took my Bear!” The courtiers beside him started.

  Ben prowled.

  And my satyrs. Aye, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. A prigger of sheets.

  He eased his neckband with a searching finger. Already a sore.

  Like Mercury too, Will went by retrograde. Never lauded but by indirection. Showings in a glass. If Galileo’s moons were his, presented to the King, Will would have named them Ganymede, Callisto, Jug and Toby. Yet Will’s indifference to occasion, his refusal to mourn or celebrate—to court—was here rewarded. Half the crowns of Europe now were talking through his play.

  They could have asked me.

  Fuming, Ben went out to make water. His piss should have smoked.

  And doing up his breech, he thought: If not my work, then not with Inigo. There’s comfort. Tearing off his great frill, he stuffed it in his coat. There went threepence of starching. Bah. He looked in it like a Christmas boar’s head, all but the apple, on a dish. Let them take me for a pantler.

  He came in on Leontes ranting. A sniffer of sheets. “Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a fork’d one!” The virgin princess hid her mouth. She was laughing now, in unbelief: as at a savage. Her boy Elector scowled.

  This looks not like a nuptial. Will again! He’d a trick of—what?—of forehand echoes: so that his words, like fairy slippers, fitted all. And more: he spoke the inward of men’s souls. Aye, and of monsters, too.

  The child on stage to his father: “I am like you, they say.”

  Ben watched Prince Charles, the heir apparent, watch Mamillius.

  Not Henry’s like. His cipher: all at once anointed and bereft. Charles had walked beside his brother’s empty chariot a second time. (Beneath his effigy in wood and wax, his month-old body sealed in lead; above, his soul in bliss.) The boy, not twelve, had been chief mourner in his prostrate father’s stead. A hundred thousand eyes had marked his car
riage; and their stare said openly: You should have died instead. A Tom o’ Bedlam had run stark naked through the mourners, like an antimasque—no, like a play of Will’s, like life—crying out that he was Henry’s ghost.

  The play went on: rage, innocence destroyed, grief, banishment, remorse.

  And so the bear.

  Not Tom’s Diogenes this time—who was now taller than a Maypole, and half-a-dozen Bens in weight. But still: a bear. That woke ’em up.

  Now an interval for candling, and a longer for sack, avoiding that damned cheating Chorus. When Ben returned, the tragedy had changed to pastoral.

  O Proserpina,

  For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall

  From Dis’s waggon . . .

  And the girl Elizabeth, who could have scattered jewels for flowers, garlanded her waiting-women’s waiting-maids with carcanets, leaned forward, with a wild rose in her cheek. She would try those slippers.

  This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever

  Ran on the green-sward

  She reached for the boy Elector’s hand. He bent and whispered in her ear.

  He tells her something

  That makes her blood look out

  To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day.

  Toward the last, Will came and stood a moment in a doorway, looking in. He wore his livery: an upper servant to the Muses. Clio’s, Thalia’s, Melpomene’s all-serving Will. What he thinks, nobody knows. He stayed as Paulina scolded, as the curtain was drawn back. There stood a boy pearl-powdered, motionless: an artifice of woman in an artifice of death. A paltry trick.