Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Author’s Note

About the Author

Also by Susan Cooper

Praise

Copyright

About the Book

I lay very still, with all my senses telling me that I had gone mad. The plague? Nobody’s had the plague for centuries . . .

Nathan Field, a talented young actor, arrives at the newly rebuilt Globe Theatre in London to play Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As rehearsals begin, eerie echoes of the past begin to haunt Nat, and he falls ill with a mysterious sickness.

When he wakes, Nat finds himself in 1599, an actor at the original Globe – and his co-star is none other than the King of Shadows himself: William Shakespeare.

Nat’s new life is full of excitement, danger and the passionate friendship that he has longed for since the tragic death of his parents. But why has he been sent to the past – and is he trapped there forever?

Award-winning author Susan Cooper brings the vivid, magical world of Shakespeare’s London to life in this rich and powerful novel.

For my actor

Chapter One

TAG. THE LITTLE kids’ game, plain ordinary old tag, that’s what he had us playing. Even though none of us was younger than eleven, and the older ones were big as men. Gil Warmun even had a triangle of beard on his chin. Warmun was ‘it’ for now, the tagger, chasing us; suddenly he swung round at me before I could dodge, and hit me on the shoulder.

‘Nat!’

‘Nat’s it!’

‘Go, go, go!’

Run round the big echoing space, trainers squealing on the shiny floor; try to catch someone, anyone, any of the bodies twisting and diving out of my way. I paused in the middle, all of them dancing round me ready to dodge, breathless, laughing.

‘Go, Nat! Keep it moving, don’t let it drop! Tag, tag!’

That huge voice was ringing out from the end of the room, Arby’s voice, clear and deep, like a blow on a big gong. You did whatever that voice said, now; you moved quick as lightning. For the Company of Boys, Arby was director, actor, teacher, bossman. I dashed across the room towards a swirling group of them, saw the carrotty red head of little Eric Sawyer from Maine, chased him in and out and finally tagged him when he cannoned into a slower boy.

‘Go, Eric, go – keep the energy up—’

The voice again, as Eric’s scrawny legs scurried desperately through the noisy crowd – then suddenly a change, abrupt, commanding.

‘O-kay! Stop! That’s it! Now we’re going to turn that energy inside, anywhere in the room. I want small boys with small, bigger guys together, each group matching.’

We milled about uncertainly. Small to medium, that was me. I linked up with two other boys from someplace in the South, a cheerful, wiry New York kid named Ferdie, and red-headed Eric, sticking to me as usual like a little shadow. Arby’s big hand came down and removed Eric straight away.

‘Pick guys your own size, Sawyer.’ He replaced him with a bigger boy in unlaced trainers and baggy jeans, with an odd face like a squishy pudding. I’d seen him around, but I didn’t know him. Now there were four groups of five, and Eric left over. Arby put a consoling hand on his shoulder, and faced us all.

‘Now cool it!’ The voice boomed out, deep and hypnotic. He was holding Eric like a walking-stick, like a prop; Arby was so completely an actor that sometimes you couldn’t tell where the division was between performance and real life.

‘This company is a family, a big family,’ he said. ‘Always remember that. We shall be performing in a foreign country, we shall be absolutely dependent on one another, we must each be totally trustworthy.’ He patted Eric absently on the shoulder, and Eric looked at his feet, embarrassed. But we were all listening, waiting.

Arby said, ‘The game you’re going to play now is an exercise in trust. Trust. In each group I want one boy in the middle, the other four close round him.’

The squishy-faced boy nudged me into the centre of our group. I looked at him in surprise and he gave me an amiable, toothy grin.

‘Those of you in the middle,’ Arby said, ‘shut your eyes, straighten your spine, turn yourself into a broomstick. Then fall, stiff, like a stick. Those of you round him, save him when he falls towards you, catch him gently, and gently push him towards someone else. Fall . . . and catch . . . fall . . . and catch . . . This is all about trust. The one falling must trust the catcher, the catcher must be trusted to catch. Go!’

I wasn’t too sure I liked this game, but I shut my eyes and leaned to one side, falling stiff as a rail. I found myself against someone’s chest, his hands touching my shoulders; for an instant my cheek was against his face, and then he was pushing me – I thought: stiff, stay stiff, Nat – and like a pendulum I slanted towards the other side. And again hands stopped me, and gently shoved me back again.

So it went, like music in its rhythm, and it was fun. The feeling of giving yourself to other people, people you couldn’t even see, flicked me back to being a very little boy, when my mother was still alive. I couldn’t remember much about her, but I did remember how safe she made me feel.

The room was quiet; there was only the soft sound of hands brushing clothes, and feet shuffling a little, and a murmur of pleased surprise sometimes that must have come from the boys in the middle. Maybe from me. Arby’s deep voice was a soothing background: ‘Fall . . . and catch . . . fall . . . and catch . . . good, that’s the way. Feel the trust . . .’

Then, falling, waiting for the reassuring hands to save me, I found myself not saved but still falling, and I shouted in alarm and stumbled, clutching for support, opening my eyes. I caught a look of mischievous glee on the face of the pudgy boy, as he grabbed me up just before I could hit the floor.

‘Wow, sorry!’ he said, grinning, mocking – and then his face was crumpled into shock as a thunderbolt hit him.

‘Out!’ Arby was shouting. ‘You – out of this company! Go home!’

‘It was just a joke,’ said Pudding-face, appalled. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘You meant exactly what you did – playing your own little trick. We don’t play tricks here, feller. Nothing is more important than the company, nothing is more important than the play. You betrayed a trust and I don’t want you here. Out! Go pack your things!’

Pudding-face shambled out of the room, without a word. Someone told me afterwards that he was a wonderful actor; Arby had recruited him from a school in Cleveland, specially to play Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But back to Cleveland he went, the very next day. We never saw him again.

‘Trust,’ Arby said softly, into the startled silence of the room. ‘Remember it. Someone else in the centre, now. Keep going.’

He pushed small Eric gently into the centre of our group, in spite of his size, and Eric gulped, closed his eyes and stiffened his back. The game went on.

There were twenty-four of us in the company altogether, if you counted Arby, his partner Julia, Maisie the stage manager, and Rachel the voice coach. The rest were all boys. The Company of Boys, chosen by Arby and his committee from schools and youth theatres all over the United States. We were all shapes and sizes and ages, up to eighteen; the only thing we had in common was that, by accident or experience or both, we all knew how to act. Supposedly we were the best young stage actors in the country.

We had one other thing in common, too. Most of us were pretty weird. When you think about it, a normal kid wants to watch TV or movies, videos or computer games: there’s something odd about him if instead he’s more interested in the stage. And we were all crazy about it; crazy, and confident that we had talent. Arby had made sure of that when he first interviewed each of us, last winter.

Now it was summer. By bus or train or plane, we’d all been brought to this school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to rehearse two plays by Shakespeare together. Some rich theatre nut had left money in his will to have Shakespeare’s plays performed the way they were four hundred years ago, when he first wrote them. There were no actresses in the theatre in those days; the women’s parts were all played by boys whose voices hadn’t broken yet. Some of the theatre companies were made up of men and boys, some just of boys. Like ours.

And when we’d rehearsed for three weeks, the rich man’s money was going to fly us across the Atlantic to London, to perform at the new Globe, a theatre that was an exact copy of the one the plays were first acted in, four centuries ago. We were going into a kind of time warp. My dad would have thought that was really cool: he was a big Star Trek fan. But I try not to think about my dad.

Arby called a break for lunch. That meant going down to the cafeteria of the school where we were working. Ferdie walked with me – not that he ever really walked, offstage; it was more a sort of spastic bouncing jive. He draped one arm briefly over my shoulders.

‘That was severe, man. If he chops guys for little things like that, he’s gonna have my ass in a week.’

‘I feel bad about it.’ I was remembering the horror on the pudgy boy’s face, as Arby banished him.

‘He could’ve hurt you,’ said little Eric self-righteously, shadowing me. ‘Could’ve broken your back, if you’d hit the ground.’

‘But he didn’t let me hit the ground, he caught me. Just a bit late.’

‘Late is too late,’ said Gil Warmun, behind us. He towered over our heads as we all went down the stairs. ‘The old man was right – nobody can mess with trusting. You kids remember that.’

‘Okay, Dad,’ said Ferdie cheerfully.

‘I mean it. You feel bad about that guy, Nat? That’s dumb, that’s soft. He’s history and he deserved it. Grow up.’

‘Grow up yourself,’ I said, stung.

‘Arby’s big voice rang down the stairwell from above. The man was everywhere, like God.

‘Read-through of The Dream in forty-five minutes, gentlemen,’ the voice said. ‘And just bear in mind, this is going to be the most sublime six weeks of your lives, and the toughest. In the theatre, they go together.’

The first weeks were certainly that kind of mixture. Even that first day. It wasn’t literally the first day, because we’d had a rather muddled week of ‘orientation’, but it was the beginning of serious rehearsal.

For the reading, Arby went on with his game pattern. He had us all sit crosslegged on the floor in a big circle, with our scripts, and he sat in the middle with a soccer ball in his hands. He threw his ball at each of us in turn, and when you caught it you had to say in a loud clear voice the name of the characters you were playing, then your own name and where you came from. Then everyone said hallo to you. Then you threw the ball back. We’d been through this whole exercise once already, on the day we arrived, but I have to admit it was helpful to do it again.

The ball came at me, stinging my hand as I caught it.

‘I’m Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pindarus in Julius Caesar. Nat Field, from Greenville, North Carolina.’

It was Eric’s turn.

‘Eric Sawyer. From Camden, Maine. I’m Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Cinna the Poet in Julius Caesar.’

We chorused, ‘Hi, Eric!’

‘Character names first,’ Arby said. ‘They’re more important than you are.’ Little Eric flushed. Arby threw the ball at the next boy, a tall, brawny character in a black tank top and black jeans.

‘Duke Theseus in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Brutus in Julius Caesar.’ He had a voice as strong as Arby’s. ‘I’m Ray Danza from Chicago.’

‘Hi, Ray!’

The boy next to him was tall too, but chubbier, with a mop of curly black hair like a floppy Afro.

‘Starveling in The Dream, Caesar in Julius Caesar. Hy Schwartz from Los Angeles.’

‘Hi, Hy—’ and we all broke up, it sounded so silly. Everyone laughed except Arby.

‘Get a haircut, Hy,’ he said, and he went on throwing the ball.

I was having a good time all afternoon until the middle of the read-through, when Arby had a go at me for going too fast. He’d already told me twice to slow down, and I’d tried, but I guess I was nervous. We all were, of course. Everyone had a crystal-clear memory of the sudden end of Pudding-face’s career.

It was in Act Three, when Puck has a long speech telling Oberon how his queen Titania has fallen in love with a donkey. Oberon is mad with Titania because she’s refused to let him have one of her servants, so while she’s sleeping in a wood, he squeezes the juice of a magic plant on her eyes, that’ll make her totally obsessed with whatever person or creature she sees when she wakes up. (Oberon and Titania aren’t human, they’re the king and queen of the fairies – and if that makes you go ‘Haw-haw-haw’ you might as well stop reading my story right now.)

I started out:

‘My mistress with a monster is in love!

Near to her close and consecrated bower,

While she was in her dull and sleeping hour . . .’

‘Puck!’ Arby boomed from across the circle. ‘I keep telling you, will you slow down! We’re acting this play in England! It’s their language, it’s called English – you can’t help sounding like an American, but at least you can be in-tell-ig-ible!’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘A Southern drawl has a certain charm,’ Arby said. Everyone was looking at him now. He smiled his famous warm smile at me, crinkling his eyes – and then suddenly the smile dropped away and his face was sour. It was as if a light had gone out. ‘But a Southern gabble is hideous. Vile. You sound like a cross between a monkey and a duck.’

There were some muffled sniggers round the circle. I wanted to disappear through the floor. From behind me a girl’s calm voice said, ‘It’s okay, Arby – we’ll work on it, Nat and I. Hey – you chose these guys for their talent, not their accents.’

It was Rachel Levin, and I could have hugged her. She was a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Art, and she was attached to the company as Arby’s assistant and our voice coach; I guess they felt we’d be able to relate to her because she was so young. They were right. I glanced round at her and she shook her long hair back over her shoulders and winked at me. The light glinted on the tiny diamond stud in the side of her nose.

Arby looked at her expressionlessly for a moment; I was waiting for him to yell at her. Rachel looked calmly back. Suddenly he grabbed up his soccer ball, which was still beside him on the floor, and threw it violently right at her.

Rachel caught it, smooth as silk, though it rocked her backwards. She smiled. ‘Voice coach and dragon’s assistant,’ she said. ‘Rachel Levin, from Cambridge, Mass.’ She tossed the ball back to Arby gently, and the rehearsal went on.

‘He’s so mean,’ Eric said. ‘He’s mean to everyone. Is he always like that?’

Rachel was rummaging in her backpack. She laughed. ‘I doubt it. He lives with Julia, and I bet she gives as good as she gets.’ She produced a glossy green apple from the rucksack, took a big noisy bite, and passed it on to Gil Warmun.

‘Don’t take it personally, Eric,’ Gil said. ‘Or you, Nat. He just wants everyone to know who’s the boss.’ He bit into Rachel’s apple and held it out to Eric. We were all sitting on the tired grass of the riverbank, beside the Charles River that flows slow and brown through Cambridge and Boston to the sea. Rachel had been hearing Gil and me do one of our Puck-Oberon scenes, and Eric was there because, well, because he was always there. It was a hot day, with only a whisper of breeze, and the air felt thick as a blanket. Joggers pounded by on the path a few yards away, glistening with sweat, and sometimes cyclists whirred past them, perilously close. On the river, long slender boats zipped up and down, rowed by one oarsman or two, four or even eight; they were amazingly quiet, and you heard only the small smack of oars against water as the boats rushed by. Cambridge seemed to be a very competitive place.

I said, pointing, ‘Arby is like that!’ A single oarsman was sculling furiously upriver, very close to our bank. As he came by you could see the intensity tight on his face, and hear the rhythmic gasps for breath.

‘Obsessed,’ Gil said.

‘Yeah.’

‘Nothing wrong with that, though. If he hadn’t been obsessed with getting a boys’ company to London, he wouldn’t have got the money from that millionaire, and we wouldn’t be going.’

‘It’s not obsession,’ Rachel said. She reached out and took the apple back from Eric, who was already into his second bite. ‘Not like crew. I know people who row – if you want to be really good at that it has to be like a religion. But theatre? It’s not a sport, it’s not about winning, it’s about people.’

‘And applause,’ Gil said, needling. ‘All those lovely hands clapping. That’s what we all like most.’

‘Not true,’ Rachel said.

He grinned at her. ‘An actor’s not much use without an audience.’

‘There you go then,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s about people.’

This wasn’t a real argument though, it was cheerful bickering. We all knew Gil was as obsessed as anyone could be – in his case, with Shakespeare. He’d read every single one of the plays, and knew huge chunks of them by heart.

‘What I like best is the smell, backstage,’ I said. I was thinking of the little theatre back at home, where I’d played an evil little boy in a grown-up play last summer. It had been our space, my space, a kind of home. ‘Theatre smell. Dusty. Safe.’

‘Good word,’ Gil said, sounding surprised. He reached out and gave me a quick pat on the shoulder.

‘Safe,’ Rachel said thoughtfully. On the brown water, a pair of mallard ducks paddled slowly past us, and she threw one of them a piece of apple. The duck looked at her scornfully, and paddled on.

Eric said, ‘My mom thinks theatre’s dangerous. My dad had to talk her into letting me come.’

Gil fingered his beard, looking at him deadpan. ‘She thought her beautiful little boy’d get attacked by nasty molesters? Not with that hair, kid.’

Eric looked uncomfortable. ‘She’s . . . religious.’

‘Arby had to do some convincing, with the younger boys’ parents,’ Rachel said. ‘They couldn’t understand why they couldn’t go to London too.’

‘Why couldn’t they?’

‘This company is a family!’ said Gil, in a perfect imitation of Arby’s booming voice. ‘Families only have one set of parents!’

Eric looked at me. ‘Did yours care?’

‘My what?’

‘Your parents, did they give you grief?’

Oh please. I came here to get away from this. I thought I could get away from this.

I said, ‘I don’t have any parents.’

They all stared at me. Those faces stunned out of movement for an instant, they always look the same. An eight slid past us on the river; I could hear the rhythmic creaking of the oarlocks, and the small splash of the oars.

‘Oh, Nat, I’m sorry,’ Rachel said.

‘I live with my aunt. She didn’t mind me coming, she thought it was a great idea.’

Don’t ask me, please don’t ask me.

Eric asked, direct, young, a hundred years younger than me: ‘Are they dead?’

‘Yeah.’ I got to my feet, quicker than any of them could say anything else. ‘I gotta go pee – I’ll see you back at the school.’

And I was off, escaping, the way you always have to escape sooner or later if you don’t want to be clucked over and sympathised with and have to listen to all that mush, or, worse, have to answer the next question and the next and the next. If you have to answer questions every time, how are you ever going to learn to forget?

It would be better in London, it would be better in the Company; I wouldn’t be Nat there, I would be Puck.

Chapter Two

I LOVED LONDON. It wasn’t like any of the American cities I’d seen: Atlanta, New York, Boston, Cambridge. Looking down from the plane, you saw a sprawling city of red roofs and grey stone, scattered with green trees, with the River Thames winding through the middle criss-crossed by bridge after bridge. When the bus first drove us in from the airport, everything seemed smaller than in the United States: the houses, so many of them joined together in long rows; the cars, the highways. There were tall office buildings, but not gigantic; there were supermarkets, but not the same greedy sprawl. An English taxicab wasn’t a normal yellow cab with a light glowing on the roof; it was a boxy black car whose shape dated back, Arby told us, to the days when it had to have enough room for a sitting-down passenger wearing a top hat.

Arby was full of stuff like that. He mellowed, the moment he looked down from the plane and saw all those lines and curves of little red-tiled roofs. He’d been born in England, though nobody knew when or why he’d come to the United States, and somehow nobody had ever asked. Once he started talking to English people again, he began to sound a lot more English than he ever had at home.

Some of the Company of Boys stayed in a London University hostel north of the River Thames; some of us stayed in ordinary houses, each with a family. Most of these people were Friends of the Globe, members of a group who’d spent years helping to raise money to build the new Globe Theatre, the copy of the one where Shakespeare worked. My foster-family were called Fisher. Aunt Jen had been nervous about letting me go to stay with strange foreigners, until she had a long transatlantic telephone conversation with Mrs Fisher and they both ended up swapping recipes for baking bread, which seemed to make her feel much better.

The Fishers lived in an apartment in a big ugly concrete block with a great view of the River Thames. There was a daughter, older than me, called Claire, and a son who was spending the summer doing a course at the Sorbonne, in Paris. I used his room. It had black wallpaper and several paintings of very strange squashed-looking people, so I didn’t ask too much about him. Claire was a serious girl whose favourite subject was politics, and she was always asking questions about the U.S. that I couldn’t answer. She was very nice to me though, they all were. When I talked about living with my aunt it didn’t make them inquisitive, it made them keep their distance; like, oh, there’s something private here, something we mustn’t be nosy about. Maybe the Brits are all like that.

Instead of asking questions, the Fishers made sure they were even nicer to me. They had a flyer for our plays stuck up on their refrigerator door, and a poster out in the hallway to advertise us to the rest of the people in the apartment building. THE AMERICAN COMPANY OF BOYS, it said, with weird bright pictures of Bottom in his ass’s head and Caesar with blood all over his toga. ‘We have tickets for both your opening performances!’ said cosy Mrs Fisher happily. ‘We’re looking forward to it all so much!’

Mr Fisher was a tall, bald man with a voice that rang out like Arby’s, though he wasn’t an actor, he worked in a bank. ‘But I’ve done a lot of amateur stuff, y’know,’ he said to me. ‘Trod the boards, after a fashion.’ There was a faintly apologetic note in his voice. Because we were to play at the Globe, and perhaps because we were foreign, he seemed to think of us as professionals even though we were only boys.

Gil Warmun was going to be a professional some day, that was for sure. The more I rehearsed, with him playing Oberon, the more I learned about Puck. I was a mischievous spirit but I was also a king’s servant, and Gil never let me forget it. I ran lines with him every day before rehearsal, and had acrobatics lessons – they called it ‘tumbling’ – with the other youngest boys, from an English friend of Arby’s called Paddy, who had first been an Olympic gymnast and then worked in a circus. I was really happy. We all were. We thought about nothing but the two plays, and the day when we’d be up there performing them. Though we had classes every day, they were no more like school than chocolate cake is like rice pudding.

I had speech lessons often too, from Rachel, early in the morning at the house Arby and Julia had rented in Southwark, not far from the theatre. It was a tall, narrow house made of brick, with a tiny front garden full of roses. I was amazed how many London houses had flowers on and around them, even if only in window-boxes. Rachel lived in this house too, sharing a room with our stage manager Maisie, a quiet, chunky girl who knew how to yell like a drill sergeant.

Gil was there as well, in a tiny attic room at the top of the house. He and Rachel were a sort of couple, though they kidded around all the time. They’d each in turn been Arby’s star pupil at the school where he taught drama, though Rachel must have been two years ahead of Gil. Next September he’d be joining her at drama school in New York. Some day I hope I’ll go there too.

I knew all my lines by now, and Gil’s too.

‘I am that merry wanderer of the night.

I jest to Oberon, and make him smile . . .’

Rachel said, ‘Jest – to. Two words, Nat.’ We were having an early rehearsal in the kitchen, while Julia answered phone calls in the living-room. I guess you have a lot of phone calls to answer when you take twenty kids across the Atlantic for a month.

‘Okay. I jest to Oberon, and make him smile

When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile . . .’

She turned her back to listen as I went to the end of the speech, and then held up a hand and turned round again. ‘It’s good – the speed’s just right now.’

‘And not too Southern?’

‘Nat – Arby knows as well as I do that you probably sound more the way they did in Shakespeare’s time than anyone in this company. Or even any English actor.’

I looked at her sceptically.

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘The English and the Scots who settled those North Carolina and Georgia mountains of yours, they took their accents with them. And because they didn’t hear too much else up there, they didn’t change, the way everyone else did.’ She turned to the sink and started rinsing the breakfast dishes.

‘My gentle Puck,’ said Gil, ‘you’re a fossil.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ I said.

‘Maybe I should try to match him,’ he said to Rachel. He jumped up, spread his arms out to me and put on a heavy fake Southern accent. ‘Ma jennel Perk, cerm hithah!’

‘Poppa!’ I said in a high falsetto, and flung my arms round his waist. Gil was a lot taller than me.

He laughed, rumpled my hair with one hand and shoved me away with the other. Rachel rolled her eyes, and closed the dishwasher. ‘Time out, comedians,’ she said. ‘You’ve got twenty minutes before rehearsal.’