Free Mask of Night by Philip Gooden Page A

noticed a striking woman on the far side of the street. The sun was fast burning away the early mist, and it seemed as though this woman came striding out of the clouds. She was tall, with a fine head of dark tangled hair. She walked in a way which simultaneously suggested that she knew everyone’s eyes were on her – and although there were only a few people about, I am sure they were – and that she couldn’t care less. Handsome rather than beautiful, and not so young either, she was accustomed to being looked at without betraying the fact (as an actor is). Someone nudged me, and I turned to recognize one of the ostlers from the Golden Cross stables, a perky sandy-haired fellow. He had taken charge of Flem, the Company horse, after we arrived.
    “I can see where you’re looking,” he said.
    “Looking is free.”
    “That one’s a gypsy. Plays at fast and loose.”
    “At fairs?” I said, thinking he meant it literally and was referring to that con-game involving knots and string.
    “With her husband – and others maybe,” said the ostler.
    “Who is she then, since you obviously know her?”
    “Everybody in Oxford knows Mistress Jane Davenant.”
    The name struck a chord, and just as I made the connection between Jack Davenant, landlord of the Tavern, and the wife whom Shakespeare had enigmatically mentioned, this tall and striking woman crossed the street and turned into the yard of the Tavern next door to us.
    So that was Jane Davenant. What had WS said of her – that she was a woman you wouldn’t get used to, not in a lifetime?
    “So what else do you know about her?” I said.
    “She is witty and of good conversation, they say,” said the ostler.
    “And what
else
?”
    The little ostler giggled and tapped himself on his head in an odd gesture that conveyed, I suppose, that whatever knowledge he possessed was going to stay locked up inside his sandy skull. A penny or two would probably have unlocked it but I wasn’t going to pay for gossip. The ostler seemed disappointed.
    “Well, if you want to know more, you know where to come,” he said. “Christopher Kite at your service.”
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “But you may call me Kit. Kit Kite.”
    I thanked him again, reflecting that it was a funny old world where ostlers gave you permission to call them by their diminutives.
    It wasn’t Kit Kite I was really thinking of anyway but the handsome woman. If Mrs Davenant was as famous or notorious as all that then I’d probably find somebody willing to tell me all about her for free. Perhaps I’d ask WS next time we had a drink together.
    In any case I had other business apart from listening to an ostler’s chat that morning. We all had other business since we were due to go to the outskirts of the city and inspect the house where
Romeo and Juliet
was to be privately staged. (There was no early rehearsal as we were merely reprising
The World’s Diseas’d
that afternoon.)
    When we Chamberlain’s played away from home it was a requirement for all the players, as well as any hangers-on, to inspect in advance what you might call the field of battle, the arena of action. Each arena, whether it’s a playhouse or an inn yard or a private dwelling or simply an open stretch of ground under the stars, has its own quality and smell. We need to grow familiar with the dimensions of the place, its entrances and exits, and most important of all, its peculiarities, such as the creaking floorboards on the left or the fact that there’s a dead spot downstage where your voice never projects properly. And the only way to know your patch of ground is by walking it over, talking and declaiming to yourself while you’re doing so.
    William Shakespeare had already mentioned to me his friend Hugh Fern, the doctor who was on good terms with the Constant and Sadler families. Not only had he proposed a presentation of
Romeo and Juliet
and offered to pay for it, he had also offered a venue: the spacious hall of his own