‘Her last charm for all God knows. Perhaps she changed form. Perhaps she stands among us now.’
He stared at Rose, then Grace, as if trying to read an abstruse text. I couldn’t stay another moment. The nightmare was coming true. A mere knowledge of me was a danger to anyone. My very existence a curse. The crowd around us was becoming still, but watching Manning more than the stage. I recognised a face staring at me. I didn’t know his name but I knew he was a knife grinder. I had seen him on the bridge of a morning, plying his trade.
He was a pale weak-looking skinny man, no more than twenty, who always wore a belt of shining knives.
I contemplated grabbing one of them, but that would only have assured me a one-way ticket to Tyburn and a noose around my neck.
But I knew it was too late. The risk of Manning knowing I knew the girls was less than the risk of my leaving and them staying with him.
So I implored Rose, ‘We must leave.’
‘. . . I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways. Therefore tremble and depart . . .’
But then even the actors fell quiet as Manning grabbed a handful of Grace’s hair.
‘This one!’ Manning shouted. ‘How many years has she?’
Grace was kicking at him.
‘Has she twenty? Has she thirty? She might have sixty years to her. She looks like a child but we know of other deceptions, don’t we?’
Grace punched him hard in the groin.
‘Get off me, you eel, you piss-cunt!’
But it seemed no good. The crowd was with Manning and against us. We would be contained here. Manning would get some kind of hearing. Accusations of witchcraft and devilry would follow. I had endangered Rose and Grace. The only thing that could have saved us, right at that moment, was the one thing that did.
‘Pray, get thy hands off that young girl.’
It was Shakespeare himself, front of stage and out of character.
Manning held on. ‘I am William Manning, I am the—’
‘I care not,’ said Shakespeare. ‘These players care not. This Globe cares not. Unhand her and free her and her friends afore we end this play.’
This was enough. The threat of no more of the performance was enough. Even then it was clear that the masses wanted something far more than justice. They wanted entertainment. And Shakespeare knew that as well as anyone.
The whole theatre was now jeering at William Manning. Oyster shells were flung at his reddening face. A nerve bulged blue in his forehead. His hand let go of Grace. We clutched onto her as we made our way towards the side of the building, our feet crunching the detritus in the sand. I turned to the stage, wondering if Shakespeare had returned. He caught my glance, then when he spoke to the enlivened crowd to tell them the rest of the performance was dedicated to an actor to whom he owed a debt – ‘a man by the name of Henry Hemmings’ – I knew it was a message, a code, and one intended for me.
And so it was that I knew we could never return to the Globe, or Bankside, ever again.
Hackney, outside London, 1599
Gossip.
Gossip lived. It wasn’t just a currency, it had a life.
Stories buzzed and hummed and circulated like gadflies in the air, hovering amid the stench of sewage and the clatter of carts.
For instance, when Mary Peters suddenly went missing, every household to the east of the walls seemed to know about it. Rose, incidentally, had been so upset about that she hardly spoke for a day. And now, due to what Rose called ‘the heat of my tempers’, the story of the lutist who jumped onto the stage at the Globe would surely be talked about in every inn in London.
‘But you and Grace were in trouble!’
‘We can handle ourselves. We always have. And now we shall have to go back to Whitechapel . . .’
The conversation turned, and headed where I knew it would. She wanted to know who the man was. Manning.
‘I don’t know.’
‘That is a lie.’
‘I can’t tell you who he is.’
‘He said your mother was a witch. What was his meaning?’
‘He must have been confused. He must have mistaken me for somebody else.’
Her green eyes glared at me, alive with quiet fury. ‘Do you take me for a fool, Tom Smith?’
And it was that. The saying of the name that was only half mine, that made me feel I had to tell her something.
‘Forgive me, Rose. It was a mistake. I should never have come here. I should have earned the money I owed and left. I should never have let my feelings for you grow, and I should never let you feel anything for me.’
‘What are you saying, Tom? Your talk is a puzzle.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is. And I am a puzzle too. And you won’t solve it. I can’t even solve it myself.’
I had stood up from the stool and was pacing around in frantic circles. Grace was now asleep in her room, so I kept my voice low but urgent.
‘You need to find someone else. Look at me. Look at me, Rose! I am too young for you.’
‘Two years, Tom. That is not such a difference.’
‘The difference will grow.’
She looked confused. ‘How can it? What can you mean, Tom? How can a difference grow? You are not making sense.’
‘I am no use to you now. I can’t go back to Southwark.’
‘Use? Use? You have my heart, Tom.’
I exhaled heavily. I wanted to sigh away reality. I wanted the tear that was in her eye never to fall. I wanted her to hate me. I wanted not to love her. ‘Well, you gave it to the wrong person.’
‘Tell me about your mother, Tom . . . the truth.’
Her eyes wouldn’t let me lie.
‘The reason they killed her is me.’
‘What?’
‘There is something most strange about me, Rose.’
‘What is it?’
‘I am not growing older.’
‘What?’
‘Look at me. Time passes, but not on my face. I am in love with you. I am. I truly am. And what use is that? I am like a boy trying to climb a tree but the branches keep getting higher and higher.’
She was so dumbfounded by what I was saying she could only utter, ‘I am not a tree.’
‘You will look fifty years old and I will still look like this. It is best you leave me. It is best I go. It is best I—’
And she kissed me, then, simply because she wanted me to stop talking.
And she could only half believe it. For days, she thought I was insane. But, as the weeks and months passed by, she realised it was true.
It was something she couldn’t comprehend, yet there it was. There it was.
My truth.
London, now
I have no idea if anything I have said to Anton has got through. I have only been alive for four hundred and thirty-nine years, which is of course nowhere near long enough to understand the minimal facial expressions of the average teenage boy.
So, it is pretty late, twenty past twelve, when I finally make it into the staff room for lunch break. I sit there inhaling the scent of instant coffee and processed ham. My headache is bad today. Also, I have tinnitus. I get that too, sometimes. Have had it on and off since the near-deafening artillery fire I heard in the Spanish Civil War.