Love is a spirit all compact of fire,
Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.
“Venus and Adonis”
Chapter XX
June 1592
Raspberries and fresh cream were set out on the breakfast table. When I glanced at Kit, he winked back. I did my best to return a jaunty smile and tucked into my bowl of berries with gusto.
After breakfast as the poets retreated to their pens, Kemp stopped Jack and me.
“Come along, boys. I know a widow woman who brews ale that tastes like the nectar of the gods. Workmen who find the town inns too rich for their tastes drink and sing their hearts out on a Saturday night. She’s good company, Mag is.”
Mag? I knew the woman! I would be more than happy to leave Audley Inn, not just to escape Kit but to come closer to Saffron Walden. But Mag’s cottage? I had no idea she brewed ale, though I’d not remained long enough to find out the day that Johnny carried me there to escape my wedding. Mag could tell me about Gran and Johnny, but how risky would it be to reveal that I was in the neighborhood?
We turned down a half-overgrown path along the river. After some meandering, we came to the familiar solitary thatched cottage. No drinkers could be seen, just Mag drawing water from her well. What I remembered when I woke that long ago day in her cottage was her weather-beaten face and kindly eyes. Now I saw her for a woman with the strong arms of a field worker.
The gap-toothed smile she gave Kemp extended to Jack and me. “Come, come, sit you down.” She pulled a bench into the dappled sunlight, her eye catching mine. She paused in surprise, then squinted a wink my way. “What brings you three here?”
“Boredom, my dear Mag,” Kemp replied. “We’ve come to your bucolic countryside to escape the plague that stalks London. We’re at Audley Inn with a crew of scribblers. Makes a man crazy for home-brewed nectar and jovial company.”
“I’m your company this morning,” she laughed, “unless someone arrives with a jug to fill. Do entertain me. You boys are actors?”
“I’m Sander Cooke and this is Jack. We’re apprentices with Lord Strange’s Men in London.”
“Are you now.” Mag chuckled. “Good for you.” I felt her words aimed at me. “Ale’s on the house. Many a one would dearly love to share a drink with Will Kemp and a pair of player boys.”
“We shall give you a private entertainment, Mag,” Kemp said, “and thank you for a generous pot of ale in recompense. I’ll dance you one of my best jigs, and the lads will sing anything you like.”
He helped himself to tambourine and a strip of bells hanging from nails by the door, tied the bells around one knee, and began dancing on the cottage yard, a hard surface of dried mud pressed with brownish-green growth sprouting hardy yellow flowers which would be none the better for his stomping.
We clapped our hands in time, the racket so loud that none of us noticed that someone came into the yard. When his jig ended, Kemp said over my shoulder, “Hello, my boy. What can we do for you?”
“I came to see Mag,” the replied, in a voice my heart knew well. I turned to see his face: my brother Johnny. He paid no attention to me but spoke quietly to our hostess, his body rigid with a fear I could almost smell.
“No, I haven’t seen him,” she replied, glancing my way to suggest that Johnny do the same, but he talked on, oblivious.
“Pray god he hasn’t fallen into the river again! It was pure luck I found him last time before he drowned himself.”
“Can we help?” I asked in my raspy boy’s voice, quite certain of whom he spoke.
“Who’s lost?” Jack asked.
“He’s lost to himself,” Mag said. “Oliver Collins, poor man.”
I stood up. “Hello, Johnny. The playing troupe calls me Sander.” He looked at me in startled recognition.
“You know this boy?” Kemp asked.
“He’s my brother!” Johnny said. “I thought you’d gone to sea, Sander.”
“I was sidetracked by actors, ended up in London, and here we are, refugees from the plague.”
Johnny pulled me into an embrace. “A player in London! How I wish I could join you.”
“Wouldn’t that be a lark!”
“You can be fair proud of your Sander,” Kemp said. “Did he never write you of his success?”
“Not a word, the laggard.” He turned to me. “We need to talk.”
Kemp shook his head at Jack, ever curious. “You stay here, Jack. Mag wants a song.”
Johnny and I walked across the yard, stopping beyond Mag’s bramble hedge.
“Kate! I can’t believe it. You’re here, safe and sound.”
“Perfectly safe, Johnny. What’s happened to Father?” I stopped. “First tell me about Gran.”
“Gran’s fine as ever. Do try to see her. As for Father, I must find him. Now. He’s gone badly downhill. I hope I can meet you again when we have time to talk.”
“When?”
“Come here tomorrow, early.”
“We stay at Audley Inn.”
“Audley Inn! You’ve moved up in the world. I want to hear all about it. You’re truly an actor?”
“Sander Cooke, player boy.”
He slapped me on the back. “Good for you. Till tomorrow.”
“Please tell me—” But he was gone.
Poor Johnny, I thought: Father in decline was too much for a boy alone.
Jack was singing, “Who is Silvia? What is she, that all our swains commend her?” Just the song for this sylvan paradise—if it were that in truth. Shepherds in these parts more resemble my would-be husband Martin Day than poetic pastoral swains, and as for the beautiful shepherdess of poetry—she would more resemble Mag than a curly-haired beauty wearing a flower crown.
I knew the Sylvia song from Two Gentlemen of Verona, and joined in harmony, but all I could think of was how to help Johnny. He needed me, and perhaps sometime I might need him. I must talk to Gran. But how?
“So Johnny is your brother,” Kemp said. “A likely lad, who shouldn’t have to fish the river for a drunken old Da. You did well to leave here, Sander.”
“Father wasn’t so bad when I left home.” Was even that much safe to say? I felt Kemp’s searching eye on me: I feared he had his suspicions.
“Don’t you worry, Sander,” Mag said. “Johnny’s not the only one looking out for Collins.”
Kemp said, “Sander goes by Cooke.”
“His gran’s name,” Mag said with a chuckle. “In his place I would disown Oliver Collins too. Make my way on my own, so to say. I scarce recognized you, Sander. Little did I expect you to get yourself to London and meet up with the likes of Will Kemp.”
“My mother died when I was a babe,” I told Kemp, picturing the child in this story as male. “Our Gran raised Johnny and me.”
“And Collins was no doting father.”
“You’re right. I’m sure he didn’t miss me, the extra mouth and all. Johnny wanted to come along with me, but he was too young.”
“And you were heading to sea,” Kemp said.
“So I was, until I took up with Lord North’s Men.”
From The Secret Player, © Jinny Webber