The Pale Companion by Philip Gooden

before we left London. My first impressions were favourable enough. Though the son of a nobleman, and therefore never likely to be in the position of having to scrape a living (and certainly not in the ungentlemanly business of the playhouse), Cuthbert seemed modest enough as well as responsive to instruction. He was the humblest of apprentices. Actually, he appeared to believe that players were hung about with clouds of mystery, that their jokes were funnier, their thoughts more elevated and their farts more perfumed than ordinary men’s.
    In short, I’d thought we’d probably get along fine. I did wonder, though, whether he was getting paid at our rate of a shilling a day for his performance. Or was he paying us for the privilege?
    A morning’s playing gives you an appetite. Today’s dinner, like last night’s supper, was calculated to satisfy it and all of us, except Cuthbert who’d withdrawn to more refined quarters, fell on our pigeon pie and mutton. There was no sign of Oswald, the haughty steward who’d “welcomed” us the previous day. Perhaps he was unwilling to sully himself by further association with rag-tag players. At least his master showed a more accommodating face.
    We had more work later, of an ambling kind, when we were due to go out and prospect the ground where the
Dream
would be played – for this was going to be an outdoors performance, with the sward for stage, the woods and fields for hangings, and the stars above for our roof. Richard Sincklo told us to be in attendance on the south side of the house at three in the afternoon. Once on our space, we’d pace out the area and mark off the boundaries enclosing what would become the short-lived kingdom of the players. Thomas Pope would consider how best to incorporate whatever we found there to our advantage, such as paths and hedges and little irregularities in the ground. But between times the post-dinner gap was our own. I remembered that I’d made a half-promise to Robin, the man of the woods, that I’d allow him to show me his “kingdom” among the trees.
    Well, no harm in it, I thought.
    As a player I ought to be interested in humanity in all its guises, I thought.
    Too much thinking, I thought.
    Once again I crossed the grassy space between one side of the great house and the wood where Robin lived. The sun shone benevolently on my head and a spacious afternoon peace sprawled across the landscape. It was weather to bless all life. I recalled the drunken farmer who’d clambered up on the makeshift stage in Salisbury. What would he say to this even-tempered climate? No doubt, he’d find fault. Too little of one thing, too much of another. Farmers are like that. Then, as if to confirm that farmers are by no means alone when it comes to perverse fits of feeling, I suddenly missed the smells and sights and sounds of the capital. The sweet stench of the river, which particularly tickles your nose on warm summer days like this; the boiling crowds of apprentices, moving like packs of dogs through the streets; the everlasting peal of the church bells and the coarser peal of the orange-sellers and other street-hawkers. And I was pleased to miss these things because that must mean I was on my way to becoming a true Londoner. Why, I was even missing the sly insinuations of Master Benwell, my landlord. I missed Nell also, and our sessions in Dead Man’s Place and elsewhere. But I could not have put my hand on my heart and answered yes to Elcombe’s question about Cupid’s dart, at least not in relation to her.
    By now I had entered the wood once again and a profounder hush folded itself about me. I paused. I felt oddly at ease. As though this wood posed no danger.
    “Master Revill.”
    “Robin,” I replied.
    He appeared seemingly through the trees. But in truth I’d nosed him out before I’d seen him.
    “You have come.”
    I bowed slightly.
    “So that you can show me your kingdom,” I said, “as you promised.”
    He put himself into