The Pale Companion by Philip Gooden Page A

Supposing this wedding was called off and we players sent home with a few groats and our tails between our legs?”
    “Won’t happen,” said Jack. “Not with all the arrangements made. Besides it would leave whatsisname Cuthbert with nobody to play with.”
    “Isn’t there another possibility with Elcombe’s son?” I said. “Besides this loving boys or hating his father.”
    “Which is?”
    “That he loves another woman rather than the one his father has chosen.”
    “This is no play,” said Will. “This is not the
Dream.”
    “I tell you,” I said, “there
is
another woman in the case. I have even seen them conversing close together.”
    At this, the other three sat up a little straighter and waited for me to enlighten them.
    “She is not of his class, I think. In fact she is far beneath him. She has a red face and coarse features and thick limbs but that is on account of her trade.”
    “A washerwoman?” said Fall.
    “No, she works among great heats and odours and the clanging of metal.”
    “In a forge?” said puzzled Donegrace.
    “No,” I said. “In a kitchen . . .”
    “Oh I see where you are headed,” said Jack Wilson.
    “. . . and her name is – let me see – I have it somewhere in mind – ah yes, Audrey.”
    I would have gone on to add one or two choice remarks about this kitchen-piece except that Will Fall launched himself in my direction and started to pummel me. After I’d thrown him off and we were lying side by side, panting slightly in the sun, Will said, “Seriously though, Nick, do you know anything?”
    “About your Audrey?”
    “About the woman he really loves.”
    “Nothing at all,” I said. “But, admit it, it’s as least as likely as any of the tales you brought back from your kitchen-piece.”
    And here the business of gossip was interrupted by the need to play. Richard Sincklo and Thomas Pope had finished their pacing and pegging out of our stage and now all that was required of us was to enact W.S.’s
Dream
on the green. Or rather to work out our exits and entrances as a preliminary to the first rehearsal
in situ.
In the playhouse, or indeed any indoor area (such as Whitehall Palace where we’d played the previous winter), there is a comfort in knowing where your boundaries are, your fixed points of entry and disappearance. Also, indoors, there are places to hide away from the eyes of the audience. But in an open pastoral setting like Instede there is no such easy concealment. The nakedness of the player, which one may feel even in a snug indoor space, is greatly magnified when the only margins are greenery and sky. True, there were three or four trees fringing the playing-space between which some painted hangings could be strung, and there was a box-hedge to one side. These would have to do for our shelter and our transformations.
    Anyway, this conversation of Jack’s and the others set me thinking about the forthcoming marriage and whether any of the speculations about young Harry Ascre might be correct. Certainly, the young man hadn’t looked happy when he appeared in our rehearsal chamber with his parents. Was his white-faced, sleepless look the mark of love-sickness? Had he watched the farce of Pyramus and Thisbe with watery eyes because he was actually affected by the death of those clowns in love? I couldn’t put myself in his position. Not so much because I’d never really suffered from love-sickness (that question of Lord Elcombe’s:
You have been pierced by Cupid’s dart?
), but because I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be heir to a great house and a vast swath of land and a title. Or to be directed by my father to marry someone against my wishes, if that was actually young Harry’s case. What Jack Wilson had said was right, though. In a wealthy family, the older son had little choice.
    That there was something wrong in the situation was confirmed for me later that same afternoon. All of us were released by Thomas Pope after