“Vile,” murmured Mary, moving so close, Ester could feel every breath she drew.
The stage cleared of other players, and now a lively man of indeterminate age with a long curled wig stood at the center, his thin face sweaty and cheeks pink as from liquor. He made a grand speech, part of it seeming improvised, as though he’d been tasked with engaging the audience while some transformation was achieved behind the proscenium’s curtain. His speech, beginning with a rumination on love, “a man’s worst and most delicious folly,” and proceeding to detail the ideal lover’s qualities, soon turned overlong. Amid a winking repetition of the requirement that a lover be generously endowed in body, a piece of refuse sailed at his head. He batted it away and continued unperturbed, which provoked further assaults from the pit, yet he went on until he’d done with his speech and exited, sweeping the refuse from the stage with the insides of his feet, making a gay dance of it. Three players emerged in his wake, then, and sang a rollicking song. “If she be not as kind as fair, but peevish and unhandy . . . Leave her, she’s only worth the care of some spruce Jack-a-Dandy.”
From behind, a callused hand crept about Ester’s waist and immediately began to search higher. Panicking, she dug into it, hard, with the tips of all her fingernails; it withdrew in haste.
“We should leave,” Mary whispered faintly. Yet she stood transfixed.
And then the singers exited and a strange vision greeted Ester’s eyes.
A woman—the blond-ringleted player who’d sashayed about the stage in a bright yellow gown moments earlier—had now emerged onto the proscenium stage in a man’s attire. Her hair had been gathered back and knotted behind, her breasts were concealed beneath a heavy doublet, the slenderness of her arms was masked under gilt sleeves. She might have been a particularly tender-faced courtier.
The calls of the crowd grew so loud, her words could barely be heard; she obliged by ceasing all speech and adopting a wide stance, allowing them to take in the oddity of her split legs.
“The fish has a forked tail!” a man shouted, and the player swiveled prettily in response.
The theater shook with the men’s answering roar—a sound that went on and on, beating in Ester’s ears.
The crowd at length quieting, the player resumed her speech. Screwing her flushed face into a facsimile of determination, she intoned her character’s purpose. Some turn in the plot, the audience was made to understand, required that she perform this subterfuge: she would masquerade as a man and, by deceit, gain her suitor’s confidence and learn his true feelings for her.
A woman in breeches. What power the maiden in this play had seized in one stroke, with a simple change of costume. Yet for her, the deception was all for the sake of a passing vanity: to learn the mind of an insufficiently complimentary suitor.
Had Ester such a power, she thought, she would use it otherwise.
The woman ceased her speech. And then, with a simplicity that stunned Ester, she walked out from under the proscenium, and onto the thrust stage, like a figure stepping out of a framed portrait and into the living, breathing world. And as she posed just out of reach of grasping hands, and as the other players emerged from the wings to be fooled by her costumery and the absurd story of the play wound on and on, Ester laid her hand on the stage to feel that it was real.
An idea came to her then, as simple as it was impossible. She gripped the wood until her fingers ached.
The play was ended. The audience broke up about them and poured out of the theater; the flushed, restive throng turned into men and women blinking at the bright haze at the theater’s opened doors. They stepped out into the city, singly or in clusters.
Ester’s hand remained on the edge of the empty stage. She could feel the theater growing quiet behind her. She let her gaze rise to the soaring dome of the roof, the emptying galleries with their elaborately carved posts. Here and there she could make out a lady’s mask—delicate arched eye-holes and blank velvet face—lying discarded or forgotten.
A soft cry beside her. Ester turned, in time to glimpse Mary’s face gone pale, barren and unknowable as the moon. Then Mary slumped against her.
Ester caught Mary in her arms, but could hardly hold her. Staggering back, Ester looked for a clean place to lay her. But the floor was a mess of oyster shells, and a piss-pot in the corner had overflowed, fouling the floor. With effort she pulled Mary, legs trailing, to a dry patch, then took off her own shawl and bunched it under Mary’s head.
Mary’s breath was shallow. Crouched awkwardly above her, Ester watched her eyelids flicker. At the far edges of the proscenium, figures moved here and there: the players setting costumes in order for tomorrow’s performances. Ester cast about for help, to no avail—the remnant of audience still trailing from pit or gallery paid her no mind. Without help she’d never succeed in carrying Mary’s limp weight to the coach waiting outside, nor dared she leave Mary here alone while she summoned the coachman for assistance.
Something small and hard hit her in the center of the back. She turned in time to see one of the players retreat, his slim form disappearing behind the curtain. By her feet was the cloth-wrapped object he’d thrown. She opened it and saw a dirty cube of some whitish substance. She gave it an uncertain sniff, and immediately recoiled: hartshorn. She held it beneath Mary’s nose and watched her jolt awake, her lids fluttering and her lips shaping a curse.
Mary gazed at the balconies, the fouled floor, the stage, before at length seeming to recognize her surroundings. Registering the amusement on Ester’s face, Mary swore again, louder. She raised herself on her elbows.
“A disgrace,” Mary muttered—though it was unclear whether she was referring to the play or to her own position amid the shell fragments. Attempting to rise too swiftly, she lurched against a bench. With a scowl, keeping her eyes fixed ahead so as not to admit the indignity, she awaited assistance. Ester helped her stand, and kept a hand on her elbow to stabilize her until Mary, surveying the theater with head held high, shook herself free.
“Let me loosen your stays,” Ester said.
“Don’t be absurd,” Mary said. “I simply overtaxed myself.” When Ester shook her head sharply Mary added, glancing away as though in embarrassment, “In the garden this morning. Working.”
Ester couldn’t restrain a laugh. “Since when does Mary da Costa Mendes work a garden?”
“I’ll claim that, my does.” A man—the slim player who had thrown the hartshorn—was striding toward them on the thrust stage. Still cleaning the paint off his face with a soiled cloth, he hopped to the floor of the pit and extended a palm. Ester gave him the hartshorn.
He lowered the cloth. This was, Ester saw, the same man who’d borne the storm of refuse on stage and kept on with his rambling monologue about love. Yet shed of the puckish spirit that had animated him on stage, he was barely recognizable. The gaudy paint he’d worn still marked the channels of his face, so that he appeared petty and carved by age, a man divided into pieces. In place of his flowing wig, his own graying brown hair showed, slicked back from his face, and the years that had been disguised by his youthful grace on stage were now evident. Instead of an elaborate doublet and hose, he now wore the threadbare clothing of a man fallen from wealth. His silk shirt was darned, his velvet breeches worn.
He took in Mary, from the crown of her glossy head to her pretty mouth to the patches on her breasts, the fine shoes nested in pattens. A rakish smile lit his face. Swiftly he wiped the remaining paint from his cheeks and neck. “You’re the third to go down since Lord’s Day,” he said to Mary. “But most of the fainting sort pay to do it in the galleries rather than the pit.”