Mary snorted. “I’m raising up a member of her household. I’m not the one in need of her charity.” She glanced at Ester. “Or anyone’s!”
The carriage began to move. Ester said nothing.
“And if you think this such frivolity, why are you here?”
The street slid slowly past the carriage’s window. Not knowing whether she meant to be kind or cruel, Ester heard herself say, “Because of your mother.”
“What about my mother?” Mary shot back.
Ester hesitated, then spoke the words as gently as she could. “Your mother had a dream. She told me of it. She asked me to watch over you.”
Mary’s expression froze. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
Blinking, she turned to the driver—a sallow-faced, taciturn man. “Faster!” He chirruped to the horse and they lurched forward, down the narrow street and on toward Westminster.
Mary’s words came quickly. “If my mother had known your mother was born out of wedlock, she’d not have allowed you with me.”
It was the sole mention Mary had ever made of their long-ago conversation at the dressmaker’s, and Ester knew the words were meant to wound—yet she registered, too, the other message they carried: that Mary had kept Ester’s secret, even from her mother.
“Your mother welcomed me,” Ester said, “even though she knew I’d no prospects.”
“That’s right,” snapped Mary, “you’ve no prospects.”
Ester said nothing.
A moment later, Mary let a hand flutter in mute apology. She said, not unkindly, “You could marry, I suppose.” The notion seemed to give her energy. She turned to face Ester. “It’s not impossible, you know, even with no dowry. You could care for an older husband. Or even perhaps have children, and if the husband is wealthy enough you might have servants while you directed the household. You could forget everything that came before your wedding day—that would be a life. Imagine it!”
The carriage crawled on along the street. Ester imagined it.
When Mary spoke again, her voice was soft. “How did she think you could help me?”
“I don’t know,” Ester said.
They watched the city pass. Mary gave a sudden snort. “By escorting me to obscene comedies?” She laughed then, a crazy, dark laugh. With a pang Ester recognized it: the laugh of a grieving girl, who would pull a house down on her own head to see it fall.
Even before they entered the broad carved doors of the theater, the sour smell of the assembled audience reached them. With a white handkerchief wrapped around her hand, Mary fingered the necessary coins with difficulty and passed them into the dirty palm of the fat-faced fare collector, who winked at Mary before taking the money. “Don’t see many like you pay to watch from there,” he leered as she passed. Mary retorted with a bright smile, behind which Ester saw a flicker of worry.
They were late—the entertainments were underway, the crowd pressed forward, and as Ester followed Mary into the throng, she saw that in her bravado Mary had purchased entry to the pit, among the roughest crowd. But there was no time to question Mary’s choice, or how far she’d carry it. At the front of the theater the rope-dancers had begun their midair ballet: two sturdy men, faces blank with concentration, working their way in and out of the shadows over the stage. Ester had seen rope-dancers in Amsterdam, yet those had clowned and gibed as they worked. These men were solemn, even menacing, tumbling in slow, smooth spirals high above the crowd like priests of some silent and powerful religion. Over the thin accompaniment of a flute and a toneless drumbeat, the creaking of their ropes was audible. Their bodies furled and unfurled, a somber rite sculpted in air.
She pressed forward, trying to catch Mary—but Mary was piloting herself to the front of the throng, threading between the backless green benches, undaunted by the smell of open piss-pots. Bodies pushed back or gave way as Ester forged ahead to keep pace. She didn’t dare look about her, but kept her chin tipped up and followed the flight above the stage. Underfoot, the crunch of oyster shells, the slick of unseen puddles. Few seemed inclined to sit—some stood on benches, many in aisles. Men jostled about them—one blindly cuffed Ester as she passed and then was hugged about his neck by a companion who shouted in his ear, “Can’t tell the difference between man and wench? You need to feel for the soft bits, sirrah!” and then men on all sides let out shouts of laughter as Ester shoved blindly forward. She hurried after Mary, calling her name fruitlessly in a sharp whisper, and reached the edge of the stage an instant after her.
They stood catching their breath at the front of the pit. In the throng pressed about them, there was only a scattering of women, and it was no difficult thing to glean their livelihood from their attire. Above, in the dim and distant galleries, well-dressed ladies sat beside well-dressed gentlemen; a few had been so bold as to lift their masks to peer more closely at the rope-dancers. Ester lowered her gaze from the galleries just in time to see an orange go sailing through the air, launched by some unseen hand in the pit. It barely grazed the rope of the dancer it had been aimed for, but his body flinched from it like a mussel contracting into its shell, and for a moment he swung wide, fighting for control, his shadow looming and shrinking against the theater’s wall like a man swaying on a gallows. Looming, shrinking, looming, before regaining at last his slow deliberate dance.
Beside Ester, Mary watched as in a trance.
With a dull beat from the unseen drum and an abrupt spin downward, both dancers hit the stage feet first, bowed with abrupt violence, and disappeared behind the proscenium. At this signal, costumed players swarmed the stage and shouted in unison—“And now let us all praise honest men!”
“An honest man indeed am I,” intoned an actor from the center of the throng.
The play had begun, the players’ speech nearly drowned by the bawdy laughter that rolled from the audience behind and above. An actor playing a character named Roderick Rogue made his way about the stage codpiece first, his face made up like a clown’s. To Ester’s surprise, she understood most of the rapid English banter. “If she a fool would marry, I swear I’ll fool her grandly.” The throng in the pit rumbled appreciation; scattered applause sounded from the balconies. The players, warming to their task, seemed to hit each new rude line at ever-higher volume, drawing encouragement from the crowd, hauling their tale from lowest humor to a plateau of dull moral pronouncements, only to plunge gleefully back again, like a ship that regained speed in the trough of each wave.
“Be a man’s fortune not in his own hands?”
“And I pray, look what lies between mine!”
On stage amid the costumed men now appeared two women players in low-necked gowns, one with blond ringlets and one with brown. Cast as innocents, they parried each assault on their honor with unctuously feigned ignorance. Ester saw nothing especially provocative about them—surely their dress was hardly more immodest than that of the women in the theater’s balconies—yet by simple virtue of their elevation on the wooden platform they seemed to goad and tempt the men in the pit beyond endurance. A sea of work-rough hands extended each time one of the women neared the stage’s edge, as if to grab her by the ankles should she step too close.