Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard by Richard B. Wright Page B

quarrelling for space. The fruit and ale vendors had scarcely room to peddle their wares, holding their baskets aloft as they made their way. ‘You couldn’t make room for an eel down there,’ said Mary, paying two pennies more for gallery seats.
    “‘We’re better off up here,’ she said as she settled herself on the bench beside a gentleman whispering to his lady friend.
    “Below us the groundlings were jostling one another and laughing, drinking bottled ale and cracking hazelnuts,spitting out the shells and shouting as they stretched their necks for a better view of the stage. But even in the galleries there was much roistering and the exchange of coarse jests among the lawyers and merchants’ sons and courtiers. Mary nudged me with her elbow so I would glance at the man with his hand beneath the woman’s skirts.
    “‘They like to bring their lady friends,’ Mary whispered, ‘or whoever to the playhouses. Watching the plays is supposed to influence their appetites, if you take my meaning, Elizabeth.’
    “It was like being in another world sitting there with Mary Pinder. Only three months before, I had been in Worsley avoiding the eyes of neighbours and the taunts of tavern oafs inviting me out to the woods and meadows, putting up with your tedious aunt and the pitying looks of your uncle. Now I was surrounded by people who knew neither me nor what I had done; for all that, they might well have done worse. Soon I was transfixed by the blare of the trumpets announcing the beginning of the play.
    “When Tamburlaine, in his crimson hose and doublet, strode on stage, leading his beautiful captive, the daughter of the Egyptian King, the crowd gasped at his magnificence, and Mary whispered in my ear, ‘That’s Ned Alleyn. Is he not a fine specimen of manhood? And listen to the tongue on him, Elizabeth!’”
    Mam told me the play was noisy and colourful, withflags flying and cannons roaring and blood-soaked men groaning as they died on battlefields, and everything governed by Tamburlaine’s ruthless will. “But,” she said, “I had trouble keeping track of all the names and the people and where they came from.”
    “But was there poetry in it?” I asked. “Were there words to recall?”
    She shrugged. “I suppose there were. This Tamburlaine was forever bragging about himself being once a lowly shepherd who was now conquering the world.
    “And that,” said Mam, smiling, “reminded me of the old woman by the river and I began to laugh, and when Mary asked me what was so funny, I told her about the fortune teller who said I would meet a shepherd who would become a king. And there he was in front of me, a player pretending it was all true.
    “Mary derided me, just as you might have done, Aerlene. ‘Of course, she told you that,’ said Mary. ‘She probably told a hundred others too for a penny a turn. She saw the play herself, or more likely heard the story, and so she knew most people wanted to see it. She took your penny for telling what many already knew. You are green as lettuce, Elizabeth, and the old fraud could see it. There’s enough like you in London to make a thousand beggars’ livelihoods.’
    “She was right,” said Mam. “But I didn’t care. Thatafternoon was happiness to me and I loved it all. The gentlemen and ladies in their finery, the apprentices in the pit throwing their caps in the air at the end of the play, the excitement of it all. It wasn’t the play itself so much. All that killing and blood was not to my liking. But it was everything around it that I enjoyed. This, I thought, was living.”
    I remember Mam stopped and looked at me. “And since you’re wondering—and I can see from that pinched, quizzical face of yours that you
are
wondering—it was on that afternoon, on our walk back across London Bridge, that Mary Pinder first mentioned your father.”
    “And what did she say about him, Mam?” I asked.
    “Well, Mary told me that a week before, she had met a