How to Stop Time

Bow, near London, 1599

I had been walking near continuously for three days. My feet were red and blistered and throbbing with pain. My eyes felt dry and heavy from the short doses of sleep I had managed to steal beside forest paths and on grass verges by the highway. Though, in reality, I had hardly slept at all. My back was sore from carrying the lute. I was hungrier than I had ever been, having had nothing in the last three days but berries and mushrooms and a small end of bread thrown to me by a pitying squire who passed me on his horse.

But all of that was fine.

Indeed, all of that was a welcome distraction from the intensity of my mind. The intensity seemed to have spilled out of me, infecting the grass and the trees and every brook and stream. Every time I closed my eyes I thought of my mother on that last day, high in the air, her hair blowing in the wind towards me. And her cries still echoed in my ears.

I had been a ghost of myself for three days. I’d gone back to Edwardstone a free man, but I couldn’t stay there. They were murderers. Every single one of them. I went back to the cottage and picked up mother’s lute and searched for some money but there was none. Then I left. I just ran. I couldn’t be in Edwardstone. I never wanted to see the likes of Bess Small or Walter Earnshaw again, just as I never wanted to walk by the Giffords’ cottage. I wanted to run away from this feeling of terror and loss inside me, of infinite loneliness, but of course there was no running away from that.

But now I was getting close to London. I had been told by a man with a lisp in the village of Hackney that if I was heading in to London I would pass by the Green Goose Fair, at Fairfield Road in Bow, and there would be food there, and ‘various madness’. And now here I was. Fairfield Road. And there was the start of the madness: a cow, standing square in the road, eyeballing me. As if trying to communicate something that was too easily lost in the chasm between animals and people.

As I carried on walking, beyond the cow, there were houses on either side of me. And unlike in other villages, the houses just kept going on and on, in a straight line, on either side of the road. There was hardly any space between them. This was London, I realised. And I saw crowds and crowds of people ahead of me, filling the street.

I remembered how much my mother hated crowds, and felt her fear inside me, like a ghost emotion.

And then, as I got closer I noticed the noise. The competing shouts and cries of traders. The drunken laughter of the ale-sozzled. The grunts and moos and hisses of assorted animals.

Pipes. Singing. Mayhem.

I had never seen anything like it. It was chaos. The scene was made more intense by my delirium.

There were so many people. So many strangers. Laughter flapped out of people like bats from a cave.

An old red-cheeked woman sighing like a carthorse as she carried two panniers dangling from a wooden brace and loaded with fish and oysters.

Two boys fighting near an impromptu pen of pigs.

A pie stall.

A bread stand.

Radishes.

Lace.

A girl, no more than ten, carrying a basket full of cherries.

Roast goose stalls on both sides of the road.

A lettuce lying in a puddle.

An amused man passing me and pointing to a drunkard struggling to get back on his feet. ‘Two of the bell and mark him, boy, whip-cat tippled already.’

Rabbits.

Two live geese, hissing and widening their wings at each other.

More pigs. More cows. More drunks. Many more drunks.

A well-dressed blind woman being led around by a scruffy-looking orphan girl.

Lame beggars.

A woman, coming in close to a random stranger, grabbing between his legs and whispering a drunken offer.

The rowdy bustle around the ale stalls.

A giant ‘from the Nether Lands’ – cried a man, hawking the novelty – and a dwarf ‘from the West Country’, side by side, to maximise the money-making effect.

A man swallowing a sword.

A fiddler. A piper. A flautist, eyeing me with suspicion, with dexterous fingers playing ‘Three Ravens’.

And the smells: roasting meat, ale, cheese, lavender, fresh shit.

The dizziness was back, but I kept on staggering forward.

My hunger, presented with the scent of so much food, was now actually a kind of pain. I walked over towards one of the goose stalls. I stood there, inhaling the roast meat.

‘How much is the goose?’

‘Three shillings, lad.’

I didn’t have three shillings. The truth was: I didn’t have any money at all.

I staggered backwards. Stood on a man’s foot.

‘Mind yourself, boy!’

Boy, boy, boy.

‘Yes, I am a boy,’ I mumbled, even though eighteen was positively middle-aged at that time.

And that is when things began to spin.

I was generally quite strong. One of the many quirks of my biology was that I was never really ill. I’d never had a cold, or the flu. I’d never vomited in my entire life. I’d never even had a bout of diarrhoea, which, in 1599, was an incredibly, suspiciously rare thing to be able to say. Yet right then I was feeling dreadful. There had been rain earlier, but now the sun was out and the sky was a hard blue. The same oblivious blue it had been above the River Lark. The heat added to the intensity of everything, which was intense enough to begin with.

‘Maman,’ I muttered, delirious. ‘Maman.’

I felt like I could die. And, in that moment, I was perfectly fine with that.

But then I saw her.

She was standing holding a basket of fruit, frowning at me. She was about my age, but looked it. She had long dark hair and eyes that shone like pebbles in a stream.

I walked towards her, staring in wonder at the plums and damsons in the basket.

I felt a strange sensation, like I wasn’t in my own body.

‘Can I have a plum?’ I asked her.

She held open her palm. I thought of Manning’s hand and the outstretched fingers that kept my mother under the water.

‘I don’t . . . I . . . I . . . the . . . I . . .’

I saw the stray cow I had seen earlier, walking through the crowd. I closed my eyes and my mother fell through the sky with the weight of timber. I opened them and the fruit seller was frowning at me, cross or confused or a little of both.

I wobbled a little, as the street sped in circles.

‘Steady thyself,’ said the fruit seller.

Those were her first words to me.

Steady thyself.

But I couldn’t steady myself.

I could see why my mother needed walls to lean onto after Father died. Grief tilts you.

Things went very light and then very dark.

The next thing I knew – a moment, or five minutes later – was that I was lying flat on my front, half my face in a muddy puddle, surrounded by plums and damsons. Most of them were in the mud too. Some were getting crushed underfoot by passers-by. One was being eaten by a dog.

I slowly got to my feet.

A crowd of boys were laughing and mocking me.

The girl was scrabbling around on her knees trying to salvage any plums she could.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

I picked up a muddy plum and walked away.

‘Ho! Hey! Ho! You!’ She grabbed my shoulder. Her nostrils were flaring with rage. ‘Look what you have done!’

I thought I was going to faint again, and decided to keep moving, so I didn’t do any more damage.

‘Stop walking! You can’t just walk away!’

I bit into the muddied plum. She grabbed it out of my hand, fast as a bird, and threw it on the ground.

‘That basket was a week’s money. A good week. Now I have to pay Mr Sharpe for fruit I never sold.’

‘Mr Sharpe?’

‘So, you can pay me now.’

‘I have no money.’

She was red-faced with humiliation and anger. She looked confused about the money situation. Maybe it was because, despite the dirt on my clothes and compared to most of the crowd around us, I was quite well dressed. My mother had always made sure that, even though our circumstances had drastically changed since moving to England, we looked as noble as we could afford. Which was, with hindsight, one of the many reasons we had struggled to fit in among the raggedy villagers of Edwardstone. Not the main reason, obviously.

‘That,’ she said, pointing to the lute on my back.

‘What?’

‘Give me that. That can be your payment.’

‘No.’

She picked up a rock. ‘Well, I shall break it then, the way you broke my basket.’

I raised my hands. ‘No! No.’

She must have seen something in my face that made her think twice. ‘You have no food but you are worried about a lute.’

‘It was my mother’s.’

Her face softened, went from anger back to confusion. ‘Where is your mother?’

‘She died three days ago.’

She folded her arms. Yes. She looked around eighteen or nineteen years of age. I can tell you that she wore an ordinary white dress, a ‘kirtle’ as folk used to call it, and a simple red neckerchief, worn at an angle, with the knot tied at the left side of her neck. I can tell you that she had very clean skin – a rarity among this crowd – and had two moles on her right cheek, one smaller than the other, like a moon in a planet’s orbit, and a small constellation of freckles over her nose. Her dark hair was half inside a little white cloth cap, half free and wild.

She had the kind of face that had spent most of its time frowning, but there was also a glint of mischief to her that played around with the corners of her mouth, as if a smile was always in the process of wanting to emerge but being tightly regulated by some disapproving authority inside her mind. I can tell you she was tall too. A quarter head taller than me at that time, if shorter than me when I became, physically, a ‘grown up’.

‘Died?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded. Death was nothing remarkable. ‘So who do you have?’

‘I have myself.’

‘And where do you live?’

‘Nowhere now.’

‘You have no home?’

I shook my head and felt the shame of it.

‘Do you play?’ She pointed to the lute on my back.

‘I do.’

‘Then,’ she said resolutely, ‘you will come and live with us.’

‘I couldn’t do that.’

A young girl came and stood next to her, with an identical but unbroken basket. It was the cherry seller I had seen further along the street. She looked about ten or eleven. Sisters, clearly. The same dark hair and fierce stare. A drunk tried to grab a cherry, but she had quick reflexes and turned her basket away from him, and made daggers with her eyes.

‘This is not charity,’ said the older girl. ‘You will come and live with us until you have paid what you owe. For the fruit and the basket. And you can pay for your lodging too.’

The younger girl stared at me with eyes as direct as arrows.

‘This is Grace,’ the older girl explained. ‘And I am Rose Claybrook.’

‘Hello there, Grace.’

‘He sounds peculiar, and smells like a horse’s arse,’ Grace said, unimpressed. Then, to me, ‘Where did you spring from?’

‘Suffolk,’ I croaked. And very nearly added: and France. But I sensed I wouldn’t have to. Suffolk would be foreign enough.

I felt dizzy again.

Rose came to hold me up.

‘Suffolk? You walked from Suffolk? We will take you home. Grace, help me hold him. And give him some cherries. It’s a long walk in this state.’

‘Thank you,’ I whispered, as soft as the air, concentrating hard on placing one foot in front of the other, as though learning to walk again. ‘Thank you.’

And that is how my second life began.

London, now

Maybe I had been leaning against the wall too long in the gentle rain. Maybe you couldn’t be still any more in a relentlessly frantic city, without the city seeking some kind of soft unconscious revenge.

I hadn’t seen them approach. I had been lost, thinking about Rose, feeling the intense story of the road. But I hear Abraham growl and I look up and they are there.

Five of them. Boys, or men, or something in between. They have stopped to look at me, as if curious, as if I am a sculpture in a museum. One of them, tall and gym-shouldered, comes close, in my face. Another boy, behind him, says, ‘Ah, don’t be a psycho, man, ’s’ late. Let’s go.’

But the large one isn’t going anywhere. He pulls a knife. The blade shines yellow under the streetlight. He expects to see fear in my eyes, but he doesn’t. You get to the point, after everything has happened to you, that nothing can surprise you.

Abraham growls and bares teeth.

‘Set your dog on me and he gets it too . . . Phone and wallet. Then we go.’

‘You don’t want to do this.’

The boy – he is a boy, I now realise, despite his height – shakes his head. ‘Quiet. Phone, wallet. Phone, wallet. Now. We got things to do.’ He looks around. The wet whisper of a car sloshes by in the rain. Keeps moving. It is then I recognise one of the boys. The youngest one. His face is half hidden, inside his hood. He has scared wide eyes. He is hopping from foot to foot, eyes darting, uttering words of panic under his breath, taking out his phone, pocketing it, taking it out again. It is the boy I had seen in class today. Anton.

‘Leave him,’ he says, his voice muffled, backing away, and my heart breaks for him. ‘C’mon, let’s go.’

Time, I realise, is a weapon these days. Nothing weakens people like having to wait. In the street. With a knife in their hand.

‘It’s small,’ I say, referencing the knife.

‘What?’

‘Everything gets smaller over time. Computers, phones, apples, knives, souls.’

‘Stop talking, man, now or for ever.’

‘Apples used to be giant. You should’ve seen them. They were like green pumpkins.’

‘Fucking shut up, you dead cunt.’

‘Have you ever killed someone?’

‘Fuck, man. Phone and wallet. Or I slice your throat.’

‘I have,’ I told him truthfully. ‘It’s horrible. You don’t want that feeling. It’s as though you become dead yourself. Like their death inhabits you. It sends you insane. And you carry it, you carry them, inside you, for ever . . .’

‘Stop talking.’

My eyes lock with his. I press the invisible force of centuries into him.

Abraham growls again. A growl that becomes a bark.

‘He’s basically a wolf. Very protective. If you stab me you just better make sure I don’t let go of the lead.’

The knife trembles a little, with the boy’s fear. Maybe it is this. This shame of his own fragility that makes him lower his arm.

‘Fuck this, man,’ he says. He walks away, backwards, then fast, with the other boys following. Anton steals a glance back at me and I smile and confuse him more. I understand. The way you can get caught up in things, find yourself floating, heading towards trouble you can hardly avoid.

Hackney, near London, 1599

They didn’t live in Bow. They lived further out, in a small narrow house on Well Lane, in the village of Hackney. There were a lot of strawberry fields and fruit orchards in Hackney at that time. Compared to much of the areas in and around London, Hackney smelled quite inoffensive, and the air healthy to inhale, though it was very different to the countryside I had known in Suffolk. For one thing, there had been a theatre there. It had been dismantled a few months before I arrived, but Rose told me it had been wonderful and that Richard Burbage himself had performed there and Lord Brown the bear.

I don’t know if it was the result of having a theatre but Hackney seemed to be a more open-minded kind of village than Edwardstone. There was no palpable fear of the outsider. Well, except for a lady called Old Mrs Adams who spat at people she walked past and often shouted ‘Shit-arse’ or ‘You walking Hell turd’ at them, but people laughed it off. And that didn’t really feel like fear of the outsider so much as general hatred for everyone, which was at least a non-discriminatory attitude.

‘She spat on my apples once and Grace went for her like a wild cat,’ Rose said, the first time I was Hell-turded, which was on my first walk to their cottage.

Their cottage was a timber and plaster affair, near a small stone wall that had its own overly ambitious name – the Great Stone Wall – and was a pebble’s throw from a modest stretch of water known as the Great Horsepond. The horses in question could mainly be found in a barn called – I kid you not – the Great Barn.

There was another barn behind that – called, alas, Oat Barn – and beyond there were the fruit orchards, with trees crammed close together for acres and acres. Further along was the stone circle of the well itself, tucked amid beech trees. To a twenty-first- century gaze it would all look quite rustic but to mine, then, the various walled partitions of the land and the close proximity of the trees in the orchard made it seem a very modern kind of place.

Rose and Grace had a deal with one of the local fruit farmers, whereby they would pick and sell the fruit of the season – plums and damsons and cherries, but also apples and greengages and gooseberries – and split the money they made unevenly in the favour of the farmer, Mr Sharpe, ‘a tight-fisted miser’, who had cultivated the fruit.

The cottage had more windows than I had seen in a house for a long time. It was nothing at all to what I had known in France, but it was a more advanced kind of lodging to the one I’d known in Edwardstone.

‘So,’ Rose asked me. She had a forthright look about her. A grown-up, take-no-nonsense look. ‘What is your name?’

‘Tom,’ I said. Which was the truth. But then I worried about the truth of me, and how it was dangerous. So I lied about my surname, for the first of many times: ‘Tom Smith.’

‘And so, how old are you, Tom Smith?’

I had to be careful here. The truth – eighteen – probably wouldn’t have been believed. And if it had been believed then it would have been dangerous for her to know. And yet I simply could not tell her the age she most likely assumed, thirteen or fourteen.

‘How old are you?’

She laughed at me. ‘I asked you first.’

‘I have sixteen years.’

She didn’t bat an eye at that. I suppose I was lucky in that when the condition took hold I was already tall, thick-necked and broad-shouldered. ‘Your eyes look older,’ is all she said. Which I found a marvellous comfort, as everyone in Edwardstone had been convinced I was set in stone in my early teens.

‘And I have eighteen,’ she said. ‘And Grace has ten.’

This was fine. This talk. It was fine. But I didn’t want to reveal any more. I couldn’t. I was a dangerous secret. It was better for them not to know about me.

They gave me a meal of bread and parsnip pottage and cherries.

Rose’s smile was like warm air. ‘You should have been here yesterday. We had pigeon pie. Grace is a master pigeon-catcher.’

Grace mimed catching a pigeon and twisting its neck.

A moment passed. Then, inevitably, another question.

‘Why did you come here?’ Rose asked.

‘You invited me.’

‘Not here. Why were you heading to London? On your own? What are you fleeing from?’

‘Suffolk. If you had ever been there you wouldn’t even question it. It is full of pig-headed superstitious hateful people. We were from France, you see. We never fitted in there.’

‘We?’

‘I mean, when my mother was still alive.’

‘What happened to her?’

I stared at Rose. ‘There are some things I would rather not talk of.’

Grace noticed my hand, the one holding the soup spoon. ‘He is shaking.’

‘He is also across the table,’ Rose said. ‘You can speak as if he is here.’ Then her eyes were upon me again. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘If the price of this food and a night of comfort is to talk of painful things then I would rather sleep outside in a ditch.’

Rose’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘You will find Hackney has some excellent ditches.’

I put down my spoon and stood up.

‘Do they never jest in Suffolk?’

‘I told you I am from France. And I am in no mood for jesting.’

‘You are a sour thing, aren’t you? Curdled like milk.’

Grace made a show of sniffing the air like a dog. ‘He even smells sour.’

Rose was stern with me. ‘Sit down, Tom. You have nowhere to go. And besides, you must stay here until you have paid us what you owe.’

I was a mess. I was confused. There was too much intensity inside me, after three weary days of walking and grieving. I wasn’t angry with these sisters, I was grateful to them, but that gratitude was swallowed up inside the pain of closing my eyes and seeing Manning’s hands.

‘You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don’t hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

Rose nodded. ‘That is all right. You are tired. And other things. You will sleep in the boys’ room.’

‘The boys’ room?’

She explained it was called the boys’ room because there had been two brothers – Nat and Rowland – but they were both dead. Nat had died of typhoid when he was twelve, and poor baby Rowland had died of a mystery cough before his first birthday. This led on to an explanation of how their parents were dead too: their mother had died of ‘childbed fever’ (a common thing back in the day), a month after giving birth to Rowland, which explained the baby’s frailty, and their father had died of smallpox. The girls seemed quite matter-of-fact about it all. Though apparently Grace often woke in the night, having nightmares about little Rowland.

‘See,’ Rose said, sprinkling salt on my shame. ‘Plenty of sorrows to go around.’

She took me into the room. There was a little square window about the size of a portable television from 1980. (When I lived in a hotel in São Paulo in 1980 I watched a lot of TV. It made me think of the small square Hackney window.) The room was spare and modest but the bed had blankets and even though the mattress was stuffed with straw I was so tired that the queen’s four poster itself wouldn’t have seemed any comfier.

I fell on the bed, and she pulled my shoes off and she looked at me, and the motherly sternness she had displayed before melted away and she said softly, as if to my soul itself, ‘It will be fine, Tom. Rest now.’

But the next thing I knew it was the dead of night and I was sitting up in bed awake from the sound of my own scream with a fat full moon outside the window and my whole body was shaking and I could hardly breathe. Terror was flooding into me from every side.

Rose was now there, holding my arm. Grace, behind her, yawned sleep away at the doorway.

‘It is all right, Tom.’

‘It will never be,’ I said, half delirious.

‘Dreams are not to be believed. Especially the bad ones.’

I didn’t tell her the dream was a memory. I had to try instead to deny the reality of what I knew and dream up a new one, as Tom Smith. She sent Grace back to bed and stayed there beside me. She leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. It was just a peck, but a peck on the lips was not just a peck.

‘What was that for?’ I asked.

I could just about see her smile in the moonlight. It wasn’t a flirtatious smile. It was a plain, matter-of-fact one. ‘For you to have something else to occupy your mind.’

‘I am not sure I have ever met someone like you,’ I said.

‘That is good. What point would my life have, if there was a duplicate?’

There was a tear in her eye.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘This was the bed Nat slept in. It’s strange. The space where he was being filled again. That’s all. He was there, and now he isn’t there.’

I saw she was hurt, and for a moment I felt selfish in my own grief. ‘I can sleep somewhere else. I could sleep on the floor.’

She shook her head and smiled. ‘No, no.’

Breakfast was rye bread and a small cup of ale. Grace had some ale too. It was the one drink people could afford that they knew wouldn’t kill them. Unlike water, of course, which was basically Russian roulette.

‘This is my house,’ Rose explained, ‘and the lease has passed to me now my parents have died. So, so long as you live here, you must live by my rules. And the first rule is that you will pay us what you owe, and after that you can pay us two shillings a week as long as you stay here. And help us fetch the water.’

As long as you stay here.

It was quite a nice prospect, having somewhere I could stay indefinitely. And the cottage was a sufficient home. Dry and clean and well aired and smelling of lavender. A bunch of lavender, I now noted, stuck out of a simple vase. There was a fireplace for when the weather became cool. The cottage was a little larger than the one in Edwardstone, with separate rooms, but the same level of care was taken to keep everything as clean and tidy and well scented as possible.

And yet, the offer of indefinitely staying there – if that is what it was – made me feel sad.

I had the sense, even then, that there could be nothing permanent in my life from now on.

You see, at this point, I didn’t know things were going to change. I had no understanding of my condition. It had no name. And I wouldn’t have known even if it had. I just assumed that was it. I was going to stay looking this age for ever. Which you might think would be quite joyful but, no, not really. My condition had already caused the death of my mother. I knew I wouldn’t be able to tell Rose or her sister about it, without putting them at similar risk. And back then, things changed fast, especially if you were young. Faces changed almost with the seasons.

‘Thank you,’ I told her.

‘It will be good for Grace, having you here. She misses her brothers greatly, we both do. But if you cause any mischief – if you bring us into any disrepute – and if you refuse to pay’ – she held the moment like a cherry still to be swallowed – ‘you will be out on your arse.’

‘In a ditch?’

‘Covered in shit,’ said little Grace, having finished her ale.

‘Sorry, Tom. Grace is her name, not a description.’

‘Shit is a fine word,’ I said diplomatically. ‘It is quick to its point.’

‘There are no ladies in this house,’ Rose said.

‘And I am no lord.’ Now wasn’t the time to tell them that I was, however, technically a member of the French aristocracy.

Rose sighed. I can remember her sighs. They were rarely sad sighs. They always had a sense of this is the way things are and how they are going to be and that is perfectly fine about them. ‘Good. Well, today is a new day.’

I liked these two. They were a comfort amid the silent howl of grief.

I wanted to stay. But I didn’t want them to be in danger. They couldn’t be curious about me. That was the main thing.

‘My mother was thrown from a horse,’ I said, from out of nowhere. ‘That’s how she died.’

‘That’s sad,’ said Grace.

‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘Very sad.’

‘That is what I dream of sometimes.’

She nodded. She may still have had questions but she kept them inside.

‘You should probably rest today. Restore your humours. So, while we go to the orchard you can stay in the cottage. And tomorrow you can go and play your lute and bring us money.’

‘No, no, I will pay my debt. I will earn some money today. You are right, I will go into the street and I will play.’

‘Any street?’ asked Grace, amused.

‘A busy one.’

Rose shook her head. ‘You need to be in London. South of the city walls.’

She pointed. She showed me the way.

‘A boy playing the lute! They will rain pennies on you.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Look, the sun is out. There will be good crowds. It might give you new things to dream about.’

And the sun shone through the window and lit her face and strands of her brown hair turned gold, and for the first time in four days my soul – or what I used to consider my soul – for the smallest sliver of a moment felt something other than insufferable torment.

And her little sister picked up her basket and opened the door and the day streamed in, a slanted rectangle of light working its alchemy on the wooden floor.

‘So then,’ I said, as if I was going to say something more. And Rose caught my gaze and smiled and nodded as if I just had.

London, now

It is three in the morning.

I really should be in bed. There are only four hours left before I have to be up for work, for school.

Yet, realistically, there is no way I am getting to sleep. I switch off the Discovery Channel documentary about Ming, the five-hundred-and-seven-year-old clam, which I was watching on the computer.

I am sitting here staring at the screen. It probably isn’t very good for my headache to be doing this. But I am resigned to it now. It is the curse of the alba. A kind of altitude sickness, but of time, not height. The competing memories, the jumble of time, the stress of it all, made these headaches an inevitability.

And then, of course, being threatened at knife point hadn’t helped. And seeing Anton among the boys had unsettled me.

I go on the BBC and Guardian websites. I read a couple of news articles about fracturing US and Chinese relations. Everyone in the comments section is predicting the apocalypse. This is the chief comfort of being four hundred and thirty-nine years old. You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history. The twenty-first century could still turn out to be a bad cover version of the twentieth, but what could we do? People’s minds across the world were filling with utopias that could never overlap. It was a recipe for disaster, but, alas, a familiar one. Empathy was waning, as it often had. Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.

After reading the news, I go on Twitter. I don’t have an account but I find it interesting – all the different voices, the squabbles, the arrogance of certainty, the ignorance, the occasional, but wonderful, compassion, and watching the evolution of language head towards a new kind of hieroglyphics.

I then do what I always do, and type the names ‘Marion Hazard’ and ‘Marion Claybrook’ into Google, but there is nothing new. If she is alive, she isn’t using either name.

Then I head over to Facebook.

I see a post from Camille.

‘Life is confusing.’

That is all it says. It has six likes. I feel guilty about how rude I was to her. I wonder, as I often do, if it is ever going to be possible to have anything resembling a normal life. Looking at Camille made me want that. There was an intensity to her that I could sense and relate to. I can imagine sitting next to her on a bench, watching Abraham. Just sitting there, in the comfortable silence of a couple. I haven’t wanted such a thing for centuries.

I shouldn’t do anything, really. But I find myself pressing ‘like’ on her update, and even adding ‘C’est vrai’ as a comment. The moment I comment and see the words there with my name beside them I think I should delete them.

But I don’t. I leave them. And I go to bed, a bed Abraham is already asleep on. He is whimpering in his sleep.

For years now I had convinced myself that the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So I had, through some crude emotional mathematics, decided it was better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship. To be a little island in the alba archipelago, detached from humanity’s continent, instead. Hendrich was right, I believed. It was best not to fall in love.

But recently, now, I was starting to feel that you couldn’t do mathematics with emotions. In protecting yourself from hurt you could create a new, subtler type of pain. It is a dilemma. And not one I am going to solve tonight.

Life is confusing.

That is all we really know, I think, and the thought keeps repeating like a musical motif as I slowly fall into sleep.

London, 1599

Bankside, in those days, was made up of liberties. A liberty was a designated area outside the city walls where normal laws didn’t apply. In fact, no laws applied. Anything went. Any kind of trade could be plied. Any entertainment was allowed, however disreputable. Prostitution. Bear-baiting. Street performance. Theatre. You name it. It was there.

It was an area, essentially, of freedom. And the first thing I discovered about freedom was that it smelled of shit. Of course, compared to now, everywhere in or out of London smelled of shit. But Bankside, in particular, was the shittiest. That was because of the tanneries dotted about the place. There were five tanneries all in close proximity, just after you crossed the bridge. And the reason they stank, I would later learn, was because tanners steeped the leather in faeces.

As I walked on, the smell fused into others. The animal fat and bones from the makers of glue and soap. And the stale sweat of the crowd. It was a whole new world of stench.

I walked past the bear garden – called the Paris Garden for some reason I never knew – and saw a giant black-furred bear in chains. It looked like the saddest creature I had ever seen. Wounded and unkempt and resigned to his fate, sitting on the ground. The bear was a celebrity. A major draw of Bankside. ‘Sackerson’ they called him. And there would be many times I would see or hear him in action over the coming weeks and months, pink-eyed, clawing dogs from his throat, his mouth frothing with rage, as the crowd roared in cruel and fevered excitement. It was the only time the bear ever seemed alive, when it was fighting off death. And I would often think of that bear, and that pointless will to survive, through whatever kind of cruelty and pain life chose to throw in his direction.

Anyway, on that first day, I had followed Rose’s directions but I did not necessarily feel like I had come to the right place. It was far enough away from the noise of the soapmakers, though not as far as I would have liked from a shit-smelling tannery. There were some people milling around. There was a woman in green, with a blackened tooth and coarsely powdered face, staring at me with some curiosity as she leaned against the wall of a stone building with a painted sign depicting a cardinal’s hat. This, as I already suspected, was one of the many brothels in the area. The busiest, it turned out, with a flurry of trade at any time of day. There was also an inn. The Queen’s Tavern. It was one of the more pristine buildings in the area, although its clientele turned out to be at the filthier end of the scale.

There was an open space in front of this pub and the brothel, a rectangle of grass where people hung about, and that was the spot where I decided to stand.

I took a deep breath.

And then I started to play.

There was no shame in music. There was no shame even in playing music. Even Queen Elizabeth herself could strum the odd instrument or two. But playing music in public – in both France, and here in England – was something you didn’t do if you were from a noble background. Certainly you didn’t do it on the street. For the son of a French count and countess to be there, playing music in the least salubrious part of Bankside, would have been something of a disgrace.

And yet, I played.

I played some French chansons my mother had taught me and people walked by and raised the occasional eyebrow. But throughout the day my confidence grew and I switched to English songs and ballads and I quickly acquired an audience. Once or twice, someone in the audience even threw a penny. I had seen from the other performers that the thing to do was to take around a hat at regular intervals – much as buskers still do today – but I had no hat, so I went around after every couple of songs with my left shoe, hopping around, which the crowd seemed to enjoy as much as the music. The audience was a strange and intimidating mix of watermen and hawkers and drunks and prostitutes and theatregoers. Half heading from the tenements to the south and half – the half more prone to losing pennies – from across the bridge. It may have been because of the gawping crowd that I found I played best when I closed my eyes. At the end of the first day, I had made enough to pay for the basket of fruit. By the end of the week, I had paid for a new basket.

‘Don’t get ahead of yourself, Tom Smith,’ said Rose, stifling her smile, eating the hot rabbit pie I had bought on my way home. ‘You still have your lodgings to pay for.’

‘Can we have a meat pie every day?’ asked Grace, her face decorated in pastry crumbs. ‘It’s a lot better than stew and shitting parsnips.’

‘Parsnips do not shit, Grace.’

‘And better for you than parsnips too,’ I told her, recounting the wisdom of the day. ‘You’d never catch the queen or a nobleman eating a parsnip.’

Rose rolled her eyes. ‘We are not noblemen, though, that is the thing.’

To them I was just Tom Smith from Suffolk and that was how it would have to stay. And besides, I knew I would never be a count. I would never live in a fine house again. There would be no manservants for me. My parents were dead. France was a hostile world to me. I was a street performer in London. Any airs above that station would only lead to trouble.

I had duly paid my first two weeks’ lodgings by the following Tuesday. And from that moment on, I was an equal in the cottage, and part of the family. I felt, in short, like I belonged, and I tried my best to ignore the future and the problems that might come. While singing a madrigal to a large pre-theatre crowd or watching Rose’s cheeks bloom with colour, mid-laugh, I could imagine that I was happy.

Grace wanted to learn how to play the lute so one night I began giving her lessons. Her hand hung over the strings like a spider dangling from a roof. I repositioned it, so her fingers were parallel with the length of the instrument.

She wanted to learn how to play ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘The Sweet and Merry Month of May’, two of her favourites. I was a bit worried about teaching her ‘Greensleeves’. As with much of the popular music throughout history, ‘Greensleeves’ was a wildly inappropriate tune for a child to know. I wasn’t that worldly wise at that time but I was wise enough to know that Lady Greensleeves was the standard insult du jour for promiscuous women. Her sleeves were green because of all that outdoor sex she was supposedly having. But still, Grace was adamant, and I didn’t want to burst her innocence in the name of protecting it, and so I obliged her with lessons. She was quite hard to teach, wanting to run before she could walk, but we persevered with each other. We played outside on midsummer’s eve and I turned to see Rose watching us from the window, smiling.

One evening, around the beginning of autumn, Rose came into my room. She was tired. She seemed different. A bit muted, a bit lost.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘A million little things. No matter.’

There was something I felt she wanted to tell me but didn’t.

She sat on the bed and asked if I could teach her to play the lute. She said if I taught her how to play she would lower the rent by five pence. I said yes. Not so much because of the rent, but because I welcomed the excuse to sit next to her a while.

She had another little mole, like the two on her cheek, between her thumb and forefinger. Her hands were stained a little from the leftover cherries she’d been eating. I imagined holding her hand. What a childish thought! Maybe my brain was still as young as my face looked.

‘It is a beautiful lute. I have never seen one like it. All the decoration,’ she said.

‘My mother received it from . . . a friend. And you see this here?’ – I pointed to the ornately crafted sound-hole, under the strings – ‘It’s called the rose.’

‘It is nothing but air.’

I laughed. ‘It is the most important part.’

I got her to play two strings, back and forth, plucking at a quickening pace, along with my heart. I touched her arm. I closed my eyes, and felt fearful of how much I felt for her.

‘Music is about time,’ I told her. ‘It is about controlling time.’

When she stopped playing, she looked thoughtful for a moment and said something like, ‘I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the market again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky . . . But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, aren’t we?’

She definitely said that last bit: We are all the strings.

Rose was too good for picking fruit. Rose was a philosopher, really. She was the wisest person I ever knew. (And I would soon know Shakespeare, so that’s saying a lot.) She talked to me as if I was her age and I loved her for that. When I was with her, everything faded away and I felt calm. She was a counterbalance. She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people any more. I wanted her in every sense. To want is to lack. That is what it means. There was an emptiness, a void, made vast and wide when my mother had drowned, which I thought was never-ending, but when I looked at Rose I started to feel solid again, as if there was something to hold on to. Steady.

‘I want you to stay, Tom.’

‘Stay?’

‘Yes. Stay. Here.’

‘Oh.’

‘I don’t want you to have to leave. Grace likes having you here. And I do too. Very much so. You are a comfort to us both. The place has felt too empty, and now it does not.’

‘Well, I like being here.’

‘Good.’

‘But one day I may have to leave.’

‘And why would that be?’

I wanted to tell her, right then. I wanted to say that I was different and strange and peculiar. That I would not grow old like other people grow old. I wanted to tell her that my mother had not been bucked off a horse and that she had drowned on the ducking stool, accused of murder by witchcraft. I wanted to tell her about William Manning. I wanted to tell her how hard it was to feel responsible for losing the person you had loved the most. To tell her the frustration of being a mystery, even to yourself. That there was some flaw in the balance of my humours. I wanted to tell her that my first name was Estienne and that my last name was Hazard, not Smith. I wanted to tell her that she had been the one true comfort I had known since Mother died. All these wants rose up, but had nowhere to go.

‘I can’t say.’

‘You are a mystery to be solved.’

A moment of stillness.

Birdsong.

‘Have you ever been kissed, Tom?’ I thought of that first night, when she had given me a small peck on my lips. ‘A proper kiss, Tom?’ Rose clarified, as if reading my mind.

My silence was the embarrassing answer.

‘A kiss,’ she said, ‘is like music. It stops time . . . I had a romance once,’ she said simply. ‘One summer. He worked in the orchard. We kissed and did merry things together but I never really felt for him. If you feel for someone, just one single kiss can stop the sparrows, they say. Do you think that can happen?’

And she placed the lute beside her on the bed and kissed me and I closed my eyes and the rest of the world faded. There was nothing else. Nothing but her. She was the stars and the heavens and the oceans. There was nothing but that single fragment of time, and this bud of love we had planted inside it. And then, at some point after it started, the kiss ended, and I stroked her hair, and the church bells rang in the distance and everything in the world was in alignment.

London, now

I am standing in front of the year nine class. Again. I am tired. Going to bed after three is not what teachers should do. Raindrops shine like jewels on the windows. Continuing from the disastrous previous lesson on immigration, I am starting to discuss the social history of late Tudor, specifically Elizabethan, England.

‘What do you know about Elizabethan England?’ I ask, while thinking, Maybe this time I should have chosen, say, Sardinia. Or to be among lemon groves in Mallorca. Or by a beach in Indonesia. Or on a palm-filled island beside turquoise waters in the Maldives. ‘Who lived there?’

A girl puts her hand up. ‘People who’re dead now.’

‘Thanks, Lauren.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘People with no Snapchat.’

‘True, Nina.’

‘Sir Francis Someone.’

I nod. ‘Drake and Bacon. Take your pick. But who now do we think of as the person who defined that era in England?’

For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.

And then my eyes rest on the one person I am surprised to see here.

‘Anton? Do you know anyone from Elizabethan times?’

Anton looks at me timidly. He is scared. Guilty. ‘Shakespeare,’ he says, almost like an apology.

‘Yes! It was the age of Shakespeare. Now, what do you know about Shakespeare, Anton?’

Lauren obliged. ‘He’s dead, sir.’

‘I’m detecting a theme, Lauren.’

‘Happy to help, sir.’

‘Romeo and Juliet,’ says Anton, his voice quiet, hoping he is making things all right. ‘And Henry the Fourth Part One. We’re studying it in English.’

I hold his gaze, enough for him to look down at his desk in shame.

‘What do you think he was like? How do you think he lived?’

Anton doesn’t answer.

‘The thing I want to get across, though, is that Shakespeare was a person. I mean, he lived. He was a man. He was an actual man. Not just a writer, but a businessman, a networker, a producer. A man who walked real streets in real rain and drank ale and ate real oysters. A man who wore an earring and smoked and breathed and slept and went to the toilet. A man with hands and feet and bad breath.’

‘But,’ says Lauren, coiling her hair around a finger, ‘how do you know what his breath smelled like, sir?’

And I think for a moment how nice it would be if they could know. But of course I just smile and say something about a lack of toothpaste and get on with the lesson.

London, 1599

I had been playing the lute in Southwark all summer and into autumn. I often worked late, till after they closed the city gates, and had to walk the long way home, which could take over an hour.

Now, the weather had turned and the crowds were thinning out. I went around all the inns, asking for work, but they didn’t have any room for me. Being an inn musician was seen as a far better thing to be than a random street performer. I was part of a dying and undesirable breed, I realised. The trouble was, though, that there was a band of musicians – Pembroke’s Men – who had the market pretty much sewn up.

And having heard I was after a job, one of them – a giant bearded fiddler known locally as ‘Wolstan the Tree’ on account of his size and, possibly, the fact that his wild hair looked a bit like foliage in a storm – came up to me outside the Cardinal’s Hat just as it was getting dark.

He grabbed me by the neck and slammed me hard against a wall.

‘Leave him be,’ said Elsa, a friendly flame-haired prostitute I always spoke to on the way home.

‘Shut up, wench.’ Then he turned to me. His teeth were rotten, just a random row of brown pebbles. It was hard to tell if the smell of shit was coming from him or the tanners next door. ‘You ain’t playin’ music in any inn this side of Bishopsgate, lad. Especially not round Bankside. Not alive, you ain’t. This is ours. Ain’t no place for lamb-faced boys like you.’

I spat in his face.

He grabbed the neck of the lute.

‘Get off that!’

‘I’m going to break this first, and then your fingers.’

‘Give it me back, you thieving—’

Elsa was over at him now. ‘Ho, Wolstan! Give it him back!’

He swung the lute high behind him, ready to swing it and smash it against the wall.

Then came a voice, a grand, deep theatrical kind of voice.

‘Stop there, Wolstan.’

Wolstan turned to see the three men who had just appeared on the path behind him.

‘Oh my,’ said Elsa, suddenly excited – or, very possibly, feigning it – as she smoothed the creases in her dress with strokes as slow as cat licks. The whole area was theatre. On or off the stage. ‘It’s Richard the Third himself.’

Of course, it wasn’t Richard the Third. It was Richard Burbage, who even I knew was the most famous actor in London. He was quite formidable-looking at that time. He was not an Errol Flynn or a Tyrone Power or a Paul Newman or a Ryan Gosling. If he was on Tinder he’d be lucky to get a single swipe right. His hair was thin and mousy and his face as lumpy and misshapen as Rembrandt’s, but he had something else, something Elizabethans recognised in a way people in the twenty-first century no longer do: an aura. Something strong and metaphysical, a soul sense, a presence, a power.

‘A splendid evening to you, Mr Burbage, sir,’ said the Tree, lowering the lute.

‘But not, it would appear, to everyone,’ said Burbage.

I noticed the other two men. One was as round as a barrel, and with an impressive beard, neater than Wolstan’s. He was sneering so dramatically I guessed he was another actor. He seemed quite drunk.

‘You frothing stream of bull’s piss, give the boy his lute back.’

The other man was slim and quite handsome, albeit with a small mouth and long hair combed back ill-advisedly. His eyes were soft and cow-like. Like the other two, he was dressed in a padded, laced and buttoned doublet; in his case gold-coloured, I think, though it was hard to tell in the fading light. A well-paid bohemian, complete with gold hooped earring. These were clearly actors, and well-paid ones. I knew they must have been members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, along with Burbage.

‘Fie . . . Look here. Look at this. Hell is empty and all the devils are here on Bankside,’ said the handsome one, in a resigned but bitter kind of way.

Elsa noticed this man. ‘Shakespeare himself.’

Shakespeare – for it was he – smiled the smallest of smiles.

Elsa turned to the man next to Shakespeare, who was as large as a barrel. ‘And I know who you are too. You’re the other Will. Will Kemp.’

Kemp nodded, and patted his stomach with pride. ‘I am he.’

‘Give me my lute,’ I told Wolstan one more time, and this time he knew the night was against him. He placed the lute in my hands and sloped off.

Elsa gave a mocking wave, waggling her little finger. ‘A pox on you, maggot-cock!’

The three actors laughed. ‘Come on, let’s head to the Queen’s for a quart,’ said Kemp.

Shakespeare frowned at his friend as if he were a headache. ‘You ale-soused old apple.’

Elsa was whispering into Richard Burbage’s ear as he was helping himself to a feel of her.

Shakespeare came over to me. ‘Wolstan is a beast.’

‘Yes, Mr Shakespeare.’

He smelled of ale and tobacco and cloves. ‘It is a shame to see the Tree being himself . . . So, lad, do you play well?’

I was still a little shook up. ‘Well?’

‘At the lute.’

‘I suppose, sir.’

He leaned in closer. ‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen, sir,’ I said, keeping my age consistent with what Rose thought.

‘You look two years less than that. At least. But also two years more. Your face is a riddle.’

‘I have sixteen years, sir.’

‘No matter, no matter . . .’ He wobbled slightly and rested his hand on my chest, as if for support. He was as drunk as the others, I realised. But he straightened himself up.

‘We, the shareholders of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, are currently looking for musicians. I have written a new play, As You Like It, and it requires music. There are a lot of songs. And we need a lute. You see, we had a lutist but the pox has taken him.’

I stared at Shakespeare. His eyes contained two golden fires, reflecting a nearby burning torch.

Kemp, tugging Burbage away from Elsa’s attentions, was keen to speed things up, so said to me brusquely: ‘Tomorrow, the Globe, by eleven of the clock.’

Shakespeare ignored him. ‘Play now,’ he said, nodding at the lute.

‘Now?’

‘While the iron is hot.’

Elsa started singing a bawdy song I didn’t know.

‘The poor lad is still shaken,’ said Kemp, feigning sympathy. ‘Onwards.’

‘No,’ said Shakespeare. ‘Let the boy play.’

‘I don’t know what I shall play.’

‘Play from the heart. Pretend we are not here. To thine own self be true.’

He hushed Elsa.

Eight eyes watched me.

So I closed mine and played a tune I had recently been playing, and thought of Rose as I did so.

All the day the sun that lends me shine

By frowns do cause me pine

And feeds me with delay;

Her smiles, my springs that makes my joys to grow,

Her frowns the Winters of my woe.

When I stopped singing I looked at the four faces staring silently at me.

‘Ale!’ shouted Kemp. ‘Lord, give me ale!’

‘The boy’s good,’ said Burbage, ‘if you ignore the song.’

‘And the singing,’ said Elsa.

‘You play well,’ said Shakespeare. ‘Be at the Globe Theatre tomorrow. Eleven o’clock. Twelve shillings a week.’

‘Thank you, Mr Shakespeare.’

‘Twelve shillings a week?’

Rose couldn’t believe it. It was morning. We were out fetching water before work. Rose had to stop and place the bucket of water down. I placed mine down too. The water – for cleaning, not drinking – was from the well at the end of the lane, nearly a mile north of Oat Barn and the orchards, so we needed the rest. The morning sky blushed an ominous pink.

‘Yes. Twelve shillings a week.’

‘Working for Mr Shakespeare?’

‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Yes.’

‘Tom, that is joy.’

She hugged me. Like a sister. More than a sister.

And then a cloud of sadness fell across her face as she picked up her bucket again.

‘What?’

‘I expect we won’t be seeing much more of you then.’

‘I will walk home each evening just the same. Around the walls or through.’

‘That was not my meaning.’

‘So, what is your meaning?’

‘Your life will be too colourful for a dull market girl.’

‘You are not dull, Rose.’

‘A blade of grass is not dull until you see a flower.’

‘It is. A blade of grass is always dull. You are not a blade of grass.’

‘And you are not a stayer, Tom. You ran from France. And you ran from Suffolk. You will run from here. You do not settle. Since we kissed even your eyes fear settling on mine.’

‘Rose, if ever I flee it will not be because of you.’

‘So when you flee why will it be, Tom? Why will it be?’

And that I couldn’t answer.

The water was heavy but we were nearly home. We had reached the stables now, and saw a row of horses, like lords in a gallery watching a play they had already seen, staring at us. Rose fell silent. I felt guilty for the lie I had told about my mother’s death. I needed to tell her the truth about me. At some point, I would surely have to.

Just as we were reaching the cottage, we saw two women in the street. One of the women was Old Mrs Adams. She was shouting at another. Hell-turding away.

Rose knew the other woman from Whitechapel Market. Mary Peters.

A quiet woman, with a sad look about her. She was probably forty. Which, back then, was an age you could not take for granted you would reach. She wore widow’s black all the time.

Old Mrs Adams was leaning in, spitting mad words at her, but Mary turned to stare her down with such a silent fury the old lady backed away like a cat suddenly scared of its prey.

Then Mary kept on walking down Well Lane towards us.

She didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by her encounter with Old Mrs Adams. Rose, I noted, seemed to tighten a little at the sight of Mary.

‘Good morrow, Mary.’

Mary smiled briefly. She looked at me. ‘Is this your Tom?’

Your Tom.

It felt embarrassingly good. To know Rose had spoken of me. To feel as if I belonged to her. It made me feel solid, real, as if the space I occupied was meant to be occupied by me.

‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ Rose blushed a little. Faint pink, like the morning clouds.

Mary nodded. Took it in. ‘He’s not there today. You and Grace will be pleased to hear this.’

‘Really?’ Rose seemed relieved.

‘He has a fever. Let’s hope it is the pox, eh?’

I was confused. ‘Who are we talking about?’

Mary shrank back a little, as if she had said something she shouldn’t have.

‘Just Mr Willow,’ Rose said. ‘The warden from the market.’

Mary was walking away. ‘I shall see you there later.’

‘You shall.’

As we carried on towards the cottage I asked Rose about Mr Willow.

‘Oh, don’t worry. He is a little strict, that’s all.’

And that was all she said. The next thing I knew she was talking about Mary. Rose said that she had come to the area a few years ago and was a very private person. She wouldn’t be drawn into talking about her past so there wasn’t much to tell.

‘She is a kind woman. But she is a mystery. Much as you are. But I will solve you. Tell me something I do not know. A small thing. A crumb.’

I could buy all the gold on the Strand and I would still rather be living in a small cottage on Well Lane if it meant living with you, I didn’t say.

‘I saw a boatman fall in the Thames just yesterday, right below Nonesuch House, with all the crowds there watching, and all I thought was how I wished you were there to see it too.’

‘My sense of amusement isn’t as cruel as yours.’

‘He lived, I believe.’

She gave a suspicious and cynical kind of look. I gave her something else.

‘I like the way you look after Grace. The way you know yourself. The way you have made a life, a good one, with a good home, when you have lost so much. You find beauty where there is none. You are the light that glimmers in a puddle.’

‘A puddle?’ she laughed. ‘I am sorry. Go on . . . I am starved of compliments. Feed me more.’

‘I like the way you think. I like the way you don’t just go through life unaware of its nature.’

‘I am not a pale theatre lady. I am a fruit picker. I am plain.’

‘You are the least plain thing I know.’

Her hand was on me. ‘My clothes are just rags with dreams.’

‘You may be better without them, then.’

‘Dreams?’

‘No.’

I was standing close to her now. And I held her gaze. There was no running away. I had no idea I had been looking for her, but now I had found her, I had no idea what would happen. I felt like I was spinning fast and out of control, like the seed of a sycamore, travelling on a changing wind.

‘Go,’ she said. ‘Save our pleasure. You will be late.’

We kissed and I closed my eyes and inhaled lavender and her, and I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they – the terror, the love – were one and the same thing.

London, now

I remember how it feels, that dizzy spinning fusion of love and terror. I remember, as the bell rings. I remember the orchard scent of her hair, and still miss her so much it can burn.

Steady thyself.

I open my eyes, and see Anton sloping out of the room.

‘Anton,’ I say, ‘a minute.’

He looks scared. He has looked like that for the whole lesson. He is in the process of putting an earphone in his ear.

‘Do you like music?’

He seems confused by the question. He’d been expecting another one. Everything about him was playing it cool except his eyes. ‘Yeah. Yes, sir.’

‘Do you play?’

He nods. ‘Yeah, piano, a bit. My mum taught me when I was younger.’

‘You have to be careful with that. It can screw you up. Messes with your brain chemistry. The emotion.’

He looks at me quizzically.

I move on. ‘Does your mum know about your friends?’

He shrugs sheepishly.

‘Because you could do better.’

He knows he can’t sulk, but he almost does. Pouts a little. ‘Si isn’t my friend. He’s just the older brother of someone I know.’

‘Someone? A school someone? Someone from here?’

He shakes his head. ‘Used to be.’

‘Used to be?’

‘He got expelled.’

I nod. It made sense.

There is a pause. His face clenches, building up to something. ‘Did you mean what you said last night? About killing someone.’

‘Oh yes. Yes, I did. In a desert. Arizona. Quite a long time ago. I don’t advise it.’

He laughs, doesn’t quite know if it is a joke. (It isn’t.) ‘Did you ever get caught?’

‘No, not in the way you mean. No, I didn’t. But as you get older, Anton, you realise that you never get away with things. The human mind has its own. . . prisons. You don’t have a choice over everything in life.’

‘Yeah. I’ve worked that one out, sir.’

‘You can’t choose where you are born, you can’t decide who won’t leave you, you can’t choose much. A life has unchangeable tides the same as history does. But there is still room inside it for choice. For decisions.’

‘I suppose.’

‘It’s true. You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versailles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don’t get away with anything.’

‘Seems that way.’

‘People talk about a moral compass and I think that is it. We always know the right and wrong for ourselves, the north and south. You have to trust it, Anton. People can tell you all kinds of wrong directions, lead you around any corner. You can’t trust any of that. You can’t even trust me. What do they say in car adverts? About the navigation system? Comes as standard. Everything you need to know about right and wrong is already there. It comes as standard. It’s like music. You just have to listen.’

He nods. I have no idea if any of this has gone in, or if he is just bored or frightened and wants to get out of the room as quickly as he can.

‘Okay, sir. Good speech.’

‘Okay.’

Strange saying this to a mayfly. As if I care. Hendrich has always told me there is nothing more dangerous than caring for an ordinary mortal human, because it ‘compromises our priorities’. But maybe Hendrich’s priorities are no longer my priorities, and maybe they need to be compromised. Maybe I just need to feel vaguely human again. It has been a while. It has been four hundred years.

I decide to lighten the tone. ‘Do you like school, Anton?’

He shrugs. ‘Sometimes. Sometimes it seems . . . irrelevant.’

‘Irrelevant?’

‘Yeah. Trigonometry and Shakespeare and shit.’

‘Oh yes. Shakespeare. Henry the Fourth.’

‘Part One.’

‘Yes, you said. So you don’t like it?’

He shrugs. ‘We went to see it. School trip. Was pretty boring.’

‘You don’t like theatre?’

‘Nah. It’s for old posh people, innit?’

‘It didn’t used to be like that. It used to be for everyone. It used to be the maddest place in London. You’d get everyone there. You’d get the posh old people, sure, up on the balconies, dressed to be seen, but then you’d get everyone else. You could get in for a penny, which even then wasn’t so much. A loaf of bread, that’s all. There used to be fights too, sometimes knife fights. People used to throw stuff at the actors if they didn’t like what they saw. Oyster shells. Apples. All kinds of stuff. And Shakespeare used to be on the stage too. William Shakespeare. That dead man from the posters. There. On stage. It’s not that long ago, not really. History is right here, Anton. It’s breathing down our necks.’

He smiles a little. This is the point of being a teacher. A glimmer of hope where you thought it didn’t exist. ‘You almost sound like you were there.’

‘I was,’ I say.

‘What, sir?’

I smile this time. It is tantalising, to be this close to revealing your own truth, like holding a bird you are about to set free.

‘I knew Shakespeare.’

And then he laughs like he knows I am joking.

‘All right, yeah, Mr Hazard.’

‘See you tomorrow.’ Tomorrow. I have always hated that word. And yet, somehow, it doesn’t grate too much. ‘Tomorrow. Yeah.’

London, 1599

I sat in the gallery high above the stage next to an old, snooty, cadaverous man named Christopher, who played the virginal. I say ‘old’. He was probably no more than fifty, but he was the oldest of any man working for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. We were visible to much of the audience, should they have cared to look up in our direction, but we were in shadow, and I felt safely anonymous. Christopher rarely said a word to me, either before or after the performance.

I remember one conversation with him.

‘You are not from London, are you?’ he asked me with disdain.

It was a peculiar disdain, really. Then, as now, much of London was from elsewhere. That was the whole point of London. And, given that there were far more deaths about than births, it was the only way London kept going, and growing.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I am from France. My mother sought refuge here. From the king’s forces.’

‘The Catholics?’

‘Yes.’

‘And where is your mother now?’

‘She passed.’

Not a flicker of sympathy. Or curiosity. Just a long studious look. ‘You play like a Frenchman. You have foreign fingers.’

I stared at my hands. ‘Do I?’

‘Yes. You stroke the strings rather than pluck them. It makes a strange noise.’

‘Well, it is a strange noise that Mr Shakespeare likes.’

‘You play well for your age, I suppose. It is a novelty. But you shan’t stay young for ever. No one does. Except that boy out east.’

And there it was.

The moment I realised, even in a place as large as London, I still had to be on my guard.

‘They killed his mother. She was a witch.’

My heart started beating uncontrollably. It took every ounce of effort to fake a semblance of calm.

‘Well, if she drowned, that proved her innocence.’

He looked with suspicion. ‘I never said drowned.’

‘I assumed it was the ducking stool, if it was for witchcraft.’

His eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘You seem most excited about this. Look, your French fingers tremble. To be honest, I don’t have the details. It was Hal who told me.’

Hal, the mild-mannered flautist, sitting on the bench in front of ours, didn’t really want to be dragged into the conversation. They had known each other for quite a while, and worked on other productions together.

‘The son didn’t age.’ Hal, pale and mousy and small-mouthed, relayed. ‘She had cast a charm and killed a man to give her boy eternal life.’

I had no idea what to say.

Christopher was still scrutinising me. And then we heard footsteps on the galley.

‘Is this an open conversation?’

It was Shakespeare himself. Standing there, opening an oyster shell, then sucking the mollusc out, careful not to make any mess on the quilted taffeta of his costume. As he savoured the taste his eyes stayed on Christopher.

‘Yes,’ said Christopher, ‘of course.’

‘Well, I trust you are making young Tom feel at home.’

‘Oh yes, young Tom is just fine.’

Shakespeare let the oyster shell drop to the floor. He gave a quick smile. ‘Good.’

He pointed at me. ‘We need to move you forward, to the next bench. To hear the lute.’

I could see Christopher simmering. It was quite a delicious moment. I stood up and walked to my new position, as Hal budged along. I sat down. The inside of an oyster shell shone up at me from the dusty wood, like a watching eye.

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said to my employer.

Shakespeare shook his head, impassive. ‘I assure you it isn’t charity. Now, all of you, play your finest. Sir Walter is in attendance.’

The thing about the front bench was that it meant I had a good view. And the audience was always a show in itself. On a sunny afternoon thousands of people crammed into the place. Far more than you’d fit in the average theatre nowadays, even the Globe. There were often brawls and raucousness among the penny groundlings in the pit and the tuppenny benchers further back. If you had the three pennies needed for a bench and a cushion it seemed, somehow, that you thought yourself above such things, though I noticed that the bad behaviour returned again when you cast your eye up to the upper classes in the balconies.

In other words, you would get all types. Thieves. Troublemakers. Prostitutes. Pale-faced ladies with artificially blackened teeth to simulate the mark of luxury that was sugar-induced decay (a fact I always remember in our modern age of bottle tans and teeth whitening procedures).

There were many songs to enliven the crowd. I particularly enjoyed ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, sung by a jolly blond actor I have forgotten the name of, who played the faithful Lord Amiens, one of the loyal men willing to go into exile in the French forest with the heroine Rosalind’s father, Duke Senior.

Who loves to lie with me,

And turn his merry note

Unto the sweet bird’s throat,

Come hither, come hither, come hither:

Here shall he see no enemy

But winter and rough weather.

In my mind, the French Forest of Ardennes became la Forêt de Pons that I had known as a child, where Maman and I would sometimes go. We would sit by a large sycamore tree, and she would sing to me there, as I watched falling sycamore seeds. A world far away from the stench and squalor of Bankside, or the smell of beer and shellfish and urine coming from the pit below. Yet the play stirred many other things in me. There were people being exiled, changing their identities, falling in love.

It was a comedy, but I found it quite troubling.

I think it was the character of Jaques that was the problem. He does absolutely nothing. I saw the play eighty-four times and I still can’t remember what he did. He just walked around, amid all the bright young optimists, being cynical and miserable. He was played by Shakespeare himself, and every time he spoke, the words got into my bones, as if warning me of my own future:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts . . .

Shakespeare was a strange actor. He was very quiet – I don’t mean in volume, I mean in mannerisms and presence. Such the opposite of a Burbage or a Kemp. There was something very un-Shakespearean about Shakespeare, especially when he was sober. A quietness, on stage and off it, as though he was absorbing the world rather than projecting it.

One Thursday I came home and found Grace crying and Rose hugging her. It turned out that Mr Willow had given their space to a woman who gave him sexual favours. He had tried it on with Rose too. And had strong words for both her and Grace.

‘It will be all right. We can still work there. Just not in the spot we had.’

I felt such rage. A burning anger devoured me. The next day, before heading to Southwark, I went to the market and I found Mr Willow, and, in my juvenile stupidity, ended up hitting him and shoving him into the spice stall. He fell in an orange cloud of exotic New World aromas.

Grace and Rose were now banned from the market completely. And it was only the knowledge that we knew about his desire for sexual favours that prevented him from taking further action against us.

Rose cursed my hot-headedness, even as she fired back her own in my direction.

It was our first argument. I remember the fury more than the words. I remember her worry about what she would tell Mr Sharpe.

‘We can’t just pick fruit, Tom. We have to sell it. Where will we sell it?’

‘I will mend this. I broke this. I will mend it, Rose. I promise.’

So I spoke to Shakespeare about the chance of Rose and Grace working as fruit sellers in the theatre. I saw him, after a performance, walking through the crowds on the green, in front of the Queen’s Tavern. He was heading into the alehouse, on his own, ignoring a man who recognised him as he disappeared in through the door.

I followed him. I had been in the Queen’s before. My young face was no problem there. I found Shakespeare, jar in hand, in a quiet corner.

I was wondering how – and if – I should approach him when his hand raised and beckoned me over.

‘Young Tom! Take a pew.’

I went over and sat on the bench opposite him, with a small oak table between us. Two men further along the table were studiously engaged in a game of draughts.

‘Hello, Mr Shakespeare.’

A barmaid nearby was clearing up abandoned jars, and Shakespeare called over.

‘An ale for my friend here.’

She nodded, then Shakespeare reconsidered. ‘But you are from France, aren’t you? You probably like beer.’

‘No, sir. I prefer ale.’

‘Your wisdom calms me, Tom. They serve the greatest and sweetest ale in all of London in here.’

He sipped on his, closing his eyes. ‘Ale doesn’t live well,’ he said. ‘A week from today this will taste as sour as a knight’s breeches. Beer lasts for ever. All the hops, they say, causes its immortality. Ale is a more worthy lesson on life. You wait too long, and you will be saying farewell before you say good day. My father was once an ale taster. I have an education in it.’

The ale came. It was indeed sweet. Shakespeare filled and lit a pipe. Like most theatre types with access to money he was a fan of tobacco. (‘The indian herb works wonders for my ailments.’) He told me it also helped with his writing.

‘Are you writing a new play?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Am I keeping you from your writing?’

He nodded. ‘I am, and, no, you are not.’

‘Ah,’ I said. (There was no one like Will Shakespeare to make you feel tongue-tied.) ‘Good. And good.’

‘It shall be called Julius Caesar.’

‘So it is about the life of Julius Caesar?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

He sucked long on his pipe. ‘I hate writing,’ he said, through the spiralling smoke. ‘That is the truth of it.’

‘But you are very good at it.’

‘So? My talent is not worth a pot of ale. It signifies nothing. Nought. To be good at writing is to be good at pulling out your own hair. What use is a talent that pains you? It is a gift that smells to heaven and it smells of fox shit. You should rather be a whore in the Cardinal’s Hat than be a writer. My quill is my curse.’

I had, I sensed, caught him on a bad day.

‘I write because then I can make a play happen and then I and my shareholders can make money. And money is no bad thing. Money stops a man from going mad.’ He stared sadly a while. ‘I saw my father suffer when I was a boy, not so younger in years than you are now. He was a good man. He could never read but knew many a trade. Ale taster, a glover, then traded wool. And other things. He did well. We dined happily. Fowl every supper. He lost all his money. Loaned it with not a shilling in return once too often. And with a wife and seven children to keep it sent him into an antic disposition for a long time. He would shake and rock and fear the shadow of a mouse. That is why I write. I am just for ever running from madness.’ He sighed, glancing over at the draughts board a moment, as one of the men laid their piece down. ‘Now, you. What about you? Was your father mad too?’

‘I don’t know, sir. He died when I was young. He was killed at war. In France.’

‘The Catholics?’

‘The Catholics.’

‘So you came to England?’

I obviously didn’t want to be talking about myself, but Shakespeare seemed to want to do exactly that, and if I was going to ask him for a favour, then I had no choice but to oblige.

‘We did, yes. Myself and my mother. To Suffolk.’

‘And did you not like the country air, Tom?’

‘It was not the air that was the problem.’

‘The people?’

‘There were all manner of things.’

He sipped, he smoked, he studied. ‘You possess a young face and a wise tongue. People hate that. They know it could fool them.’

I was worried, felt for a moment like he was testing me. Remembered the conversation with Christopher and Hal.

‘Do you know of the Queen’s Men?’ he asked.

‘The troupe of players?’

‘That is them. Yes. Well, this man joined them. Henry Hemmings. He had been in some other player companies before, and when people turned suspicious that he was not at time’s mercy, he moved to a new company. It gives reason, I would suppose. But by the time he reached the Queen’s Men the whispers were flying like sparrows. One of the actors recognised him, from north of ten years before, and a fight broke out. The most vicious fight anyone watching had ever witnessed. At the town of Thame, in the county of Oxfordshire. By the end, two more of the troupe were at him, like dogs at a rabbit.’ He rested his pipe carefully on the table, the smoke twisting a thin line directly to the ceiling.

‘Were you there?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I never knew him. Yet I have to thank him.’

‘For?’

He smiled, a life-weary smile. ‘His death. He died and the Queen’s Men had lost one of their key players. So when they came to Stratford I saw their predicament and my opportunity. I asked to join them. I drank with them. We spoke a little on general matters. We spoke of Plutarch and Robin Hood. And then chance blessed me. I became a Queen’s Man. And that led me to London.’

‘I see.’

He sighed. ‘Yet it was in truth an ominous beginning. Though I had no part in his death, the shadow of Hemmings passes over me quite often. And I often feel as though I am, even now, in a place that is not mine. That it happened unjustly. They were a violent and amoral rag-tag band of brothers. Killers. Twelve Wolstan the Trees. And Henry Hemmings had committed no crime, except being different. He had a face that didn’t age. That was my beginning – the rotten acorn of it all.’

He looked quite fragile for a moment, then scratched at his beard, and picked up his pipe again. Inhaled and closed his eyes. Blew the smoke over his left shoulder as I sipped my ale.

‘The acorn wasn’t rotten,’ I said.

‘Ah, yet the tree is twisted. But there is no moral to this tale, except with mirth and laughter let wrinkles come.’ I didn’t know for sure if he thought of me as another Henry Hemmings. Nor did I know for sure if Henry Hemmings actually had been like me, or if he was someone who was blessed and cursed with a more youthful disposition than average. I didn’t know if Shakespeare knew the story of what had happened in Edwardstone, and whether, possibly, my Suffolk connection had made a link in his mind. Yet I sensed a kind of warning, a friendly one, in his words. ‘So, why did you want to see me?’

I took a breath.

‘I know two sisters, Grace and Rose, and they need work. They need it urgently . . . They could sell apples.’

‘I have no say over the pippin-hawks.’

He shook his head. Seemed irritated that I would burden his great mind with such an irksome triviality.

‘Please, talk to me of something else, or leave me.’

I thought of Rose’s worried face. ‘I am sorry, sir. I owe these girls a great debt. They took me into their home at a time when I had no one. Please, sir.’

Shakespeare sighed. I felt like I was baiting a bear, and feared what he was going to say next. ‘And who is Rose? You spoke her name soft when you said it.’

‘She is my love.’

‘Oh dear. A serious love?’

He pointed over at Elsa and another worker from the Cardinal’s Hat, who often touted for trade in the tavern. Elsa was holding a gentleman’s groin under a table, her thumb caressing the bulge. ‘Look at the man she hangs on. Is that the kind of love you feel?’

‘No. Well, yes. But the other kind too.’

Shakespeare nodded. His eye glimmered with a tear. Maybe it was the smoke. ‘I will have a word. You can tell these girls they can sell their apples.’

And so they did.

And all was sweet and light, though every time I heard Jaques’ soliloquy I worried. I, more than most, was an actor in life. I was playing a part. What would my next role be, and when would I have to take it? How would I be able to leave this one behind, and when it would mean leaving Rose?

The night I told Rose that she and Grace could work at the Globe because ‘Mr Shakespeare made it so’ was a happy one, and I had bought a pack of cards on the way home. We sat all night laughing and singing and playing triumph and eating pies from Old Street and drinking more ale than usual.

Conversation turned to how Grace was looking more like a woman, and then Grace said to me, not in a rude way but in the straight-as-an-arrow truthful way that was the essence of Grace, ‘I will pass you by soon.’

And she laughed, because she had drank too much ale. She was used to drinking it, just not four jugs of it in a row.

But Rose didn’t laugh. ‘It is true. You haven’t aged a day.’

‘It is because I am happy,’ I said weakly. ‘I have no worries to line my face.’

Though of course the reality was that I had a sea of them, but it would be decades before a single line appeared.

I used to watch Rose, between the musical interludes, and she used to observe me too, in the gallery. What was it about those silent exchanges in a crowded place? There was a magic to them, like a secret shared.

The crowds, however, seemed to be getting rowdier as the season went on. On opening night – with the queen and her court in attendance – there hadn’t been a single scuffle. Towards the season’s end, there was always, at any time, some skirmish going on amid the groundlings in the pit. Once, for instance, a man sliced another man’s ear off with an oyster shell over one of the prostitutes who was always there. I worried about the girls being down there while I was safely up in the rarefied air of the gallery but generally they were all right, and enjoyed selling four times as much fruit as they would have sold at Whitechapel Market.

But then, one afternoon, under a sky full of stone-grey rain clouds: trouble.

I was midway through the tune of ‘What Shall He Have That Killed the Deer?’ – which by now, as with all the songs in the play, I could pretty much pluck my way through in my sleep – when I noticed something. Someone – a mean-looking saggy-lipped man from the benches – had stolen a pippin from Grace and was biting into it as she asked him for the penny it cost. He tried to bat her away like a fly, but Grace was Grace so she stood her ground. She was shouting words I couldn’t hear, but knowing Grace I could guess them. As she was standing in the way of another man, she was now getting into broader bother. This man – a grizzled brown-toothed brute in ale-soaked clothes – pushed Grace to the floor, sending her apples flying to the ground amid the sand and the nut and oyster shells, triggering a memory of all those scattered plums on Fairfield Road. Then it was a free for all, as several people jostled to grab the apples.

Grace got to her feet, and the first man, the apple thief, then grabbed her and made a gargoyle of his face, shoving his tongue in her ear.

I had, by this point, stopped playing.

Hal, next to me, tapped my foot while still playing his flute, as the actors continued singing below. I heard Christopher sighing his disapproval behind me. So I began to start playing again, but then spied Rose, leaving her basket and rushing back through the pit, concerned for her sister. She reached Grace, who was still having trouble with the ear-licker, when the apple-thief’s companion made a grab at her, pulling up her skirt and reaching his hand beneath it.

She slapped him, he yanked at her hair, I felt her distress as if it was my own, just as Grace was elbowing her harasser hard in the face, bloodying his nose. I didn’t know what happened next because I was climbing over the oakwood rail of the balcony, holding my lute like a club, and – to the sound of a thousand gasps – jumping down onto the stage.

I landed on top of Will Kemp, then shouldered past a shocked Shakespeare himself, as I lunged forward and leapt off the stage to reach Rose and Grace.

I ran around the side of the pit and pushed my way through as nuts and ale and apples were thrown in my direction from the angry crowd. The play went on behind me, as the play always did, but I doubt if even those in the fivepenny seats could hear a word that was being said, such was the commotion now in the pit and around the benches. Even in the balconies people were roaring and jeering and raining their theatre food down on me.

Rose was fine now – she had broken free of her lecherous assailant – and was trying to help Grace, who was still in trouble, being held in a headlock with a thick arm squeezed hard around her neck.

Between Rose and myself we managed to get Grace free.

I grabbed the sisters’ hands and urged them, ‘We have to go.’

But there was potentially an even bigger problem now.

One of the men from the expensive seats was now standing in our path as we tried to get out of the theatre. I hadn’t spotted him, and I doubt he had spotted me, before I had leapt out of the gallery.

He stood tall and strong and solid, better dressed than I had seen him last, with his thinning hair flattened in stripes across his head, clasping those thick butcher’s hands in front of him.

‘So,’ said Manning, looking down at me with his one good eye. ‘I see it is true. You made it to London . . . How long is it since I saw you last? It seems only yesterday. You haven’t changed in the slightest. But then, you don’t, do you?’

I see it is true.

I would never know for sure if Christopher had spread his suspicions about me beyond the musicians’ gallery. Nor would I ever know if the men who manhandled Rose and Grace were in on the whole thing.

‘I see you have made some friends.’

‘No,’ I said, as if a word could cancel a reality. He surveyed a confused Grace and Rose.

‘No?’

‘They are not my friends,’ I said, determined he knew as little about the sisters as possible, or their connection to me. ‘I have never seen them before this day.’

I gestured with my eyes for Rose to leave, but she wouldn’t.

‘Ah, and still he lies. Well, be aware of this, girls, for he is not what he seems. He is an unnatural malevolence, incarnate. A witch’s boy.’

‘My mother died an innocent woman. She died because of you.’

‘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.

I no longer go to the supermarket at lunch. Instead I make my own sandwich in the morning. But I’m not even hungry, so I just sit there, eyes closed.

When I open them I see Isham, the geography teacher, busy working out which sachet of herbal tea to put in his mug.

I also see Camille.

She is on the other side of the room and is peeling open her carton of salad. She has apple juice too, and a book, which she is using as a kind of makeshift little tray.

Daphne, taking a clementine from the communal fruit bowl, gives me a smile that might be a smirk. ‘How are you, Tom? How are things going?’

‘Good,’ I say. ‘I feel good.’

She nods, knowing it is a lie. ‘It will get better. The first ten years here are always the hardest.’ She laughs, and heads out of the staff room to her office.

I feel bad about Camille. I had been rude to her the last time we had spoken. I notice now that she is taking something out of her pocket. A pill. She swallows it down with the help of some apple juice.

I should just stay in my seat.

That is what Hendrich would want me to do. I mean, it is now – from an Albatross Society point of view – perfect. Camille will probably never speak to me again.

Yet, here I am, crossing the room.

‘I just want to say sorry,’ I tell her.

‘What for?’ she says, which is good of her.

I sit down, so I can speak to her at a lower volume, and less suspiciously. Another teacher, a maths teacher called Stephanie, is frowning at us as she eats a plum.

‘I didn’t mean to be so weird. So rude.’

‘Well, some people can’t help it. Some people are just like that.’

‘Well, I didn’t mean to be.’

‘What we are and what we mean are different things. It’s fine. The world makes it very hard not to be a prick.’

She just says it casually, gently. I have never been so insulted so delicately.

I try to explain without explaining. ‘I’m just . . . I have a lot of stuff going on, and I have one of those faces. Generic. I get a lot of people thinking I’m a friend of a friend. Or some actor they’ve seen on TV.’

She nods, unconvinced. ‘That’s probably it, then. Let’s say it’s that.’

I then notice the book beneath Camille’s salad. It is a novel. I wonder if it is the novel she had been reading that day I saw her in the park. A Penguin Classic. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with a photograph of the author on the front cover.

She must have seen me staring. ‘Oh, have you read it? What do you think?’

I find it hard to talk. The memories jam my mind, like too many open windows on a computer, or too much water in a boat.

My headache rises.

‘I . . . I . . . don’t know . . .’ Each word feels like an oar in the water. ‘Boats against the current,’ I say aloud.

‘Boats against the current? Gatsby?’

I hold my breath and I am now in a staff room in London and a bar in Paris all at once, torn between centuries, between place and time, now and then, water and air.

Paris, 1928

I was on my own, walking the long walk home from the grand hotel where I had been doing my shift, playing the piano for the rich Americans and Europeans who were enjoying tea or cocktails. I felt alone. I needed to be around people, to mask the loneliness inside myself. So I headed into the thronging buzz of Harry’s Bar, as I did on occasion. Almost everyone in there was from somewhere else, which was always the kind of crowd I liked.

I fought my way to the bar and found a place next to a glamorous couple with matching centre partings.

The man looked at me, and maybe sensed my loneliness.

‘Try the Bloody Mary,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s the thing. A cocktail. Zee loves it, don’t you, sweetheart?’

The woman looked at me with sad, heavy eyes. She was either drunk or ready for sleep or both. They both looked pretty drunk, now that I thought about it. She nodded. ‘It is a great ally in the war.’

‘Which war is that?’ I wondered aloud.

‘The war against boredom. It is a very real war. It is a war in which the enemy is all around us.’

I ordered the Bloody Mary. I was surprised to see it involved tomato juice. The man eyeballed the woman sternly. It was hard to tell if it was fake stern or the real deal. ‘I have to say I feel mildly insulted when you talk like that, Zee.’

‘Oh, not you, Scott . . . you haven’t been too dull. This has been one of your better evenings.’

It was then he held out his hand. ‘Scott Fitzgerald. And this is Zelda.’

The great thing about being deep into your fourth century was that you rarely got star struck, but even so it was quite something to accidentally happen upon the author of the book that was beside your bed.

‘I’ve just finished reading your book, The Great Gatsby. And I read This Side of Paradise when it came out.’

He suddenly seemed sober. ‘What did you make of it? Of Gatsby? Everyone prefers Paradise. Everyone. My publishers struggle on with the poor thing, out of pity mainly.’

Zelda made a face as if she was about to be sick. ‘That dust jacket. Ernest is so seldom right about anything but he was right about that. It is a war against eyes.’

‘Not everything is a war, sweetheart.’

‘Of course it is, Scott.’

They looked like they were about to squabble, so I interjected: ‘Well, I thought it was exceptional. The book, I mean.’

Zelda nodded. She looked like a child, I realised. They both did. They looked like children dressing up in grown-up clothes. There was such a fragile innocence to them.

‘I try to tell him it is good,’ she said. ‘You can tell him and tell him and tell him but it is just raindrops against the roof.’

Scott seemed relieved I liked it, though. ‘Well, that makes you a better person than the guy at the Herald Tribune. Now, there’s your drink . . .’ He handed me the Bloody Mary.

‘They invented it here, you know,’ said Zelda.

I sipped the strange drink. ‘Did they really?’

And then Scott interrupted and said, ‘Tell us, what do you do?’

‘I play piano. At Ciro’s.’

‘As in the Paris Ciro’s?’ he asked. ‘Rue Daunou? How wonderful. You win already.’

Zelda took a long mouthful of some kind of gin cocktail. ‘What are you scared of?’

Scott smiled apologetically. ‘It’s her drunk question. Every time.’

‘Scared of?’

‘Everyone is scared of something. I’m scared of bedtime. And housekeeping. And all the things you have housemaids for. Scott is scared of reviews. And Hemingway. And loneliness.’

‘I am not scared of Hemingway.’

I tried to think. I wanted, for once, to give an honest answer. ‘I’m scared of time.’

Zelda smiled, leaning her head in a kind of glazed sympathy, or resignation. ‘You mean growing old?’

‘No, I mean—’

‘Scotty and I don’t plan to grow old, do we?’

‘The plan is,’ Scott added, with exaggerated seriousness, ‘to hop from one childhood to the next.’

I sighed, hoping this would make me appear thoughtful and serious and in possession of a great Golden Age intelligence. ‘The trouble is, if you live long enough, you end up running out of childhoods eventually.’

Zelda offered me a cigarette, which I accepted (I was smoking now – everyone was smoking now), and then placed one in Scott’s mouth, and another in her own. A kind of wild despair flared suddenly in her eyes as she struck the match. ‘Grow up or crack up,’ she said, after the first inhale. ‘The divine choices we have . . .’

‘If only we could find a way to stop time,’ said her husband. ‘That’s what we need to work on. You know, for when a moment of happiness floats along. We could swing our net and catch it like a butterfly, and have that moment for ever.’

Zelda was now looking across the crowded bar. ‘The trouble is they stick pins in butterflies. And then they are dead . . .’ She seemed to be looking for someone. ‘Sherwood’s gone. But, oh, look! It’s Gertrude and Alice.’

And within moments they had disappeared through the packed room with their cocktails and, though they made it perfectly clear I could join them, I stayed there with nothing but vodka and tomato juice for company, staying in the safe shadows of history.

London, now

It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.

The past is not one separate place. It is many, many places, and they are always ready to rise into the present. One minute it is the 1590s, the next it is the 1920s. And it is all related. It is all the accumulation of time. It builds up and builds up and can catch you violently off guard at any moment. The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is. It bleeds out from road signs and plaques on park benches and songs and surnames and faces and the covers of books. Sometimes just the sight of a tree or a sunset can smack you with the power of every tree or sunset you have ever seen and there is no way to protect yourself. There is no possible way of living in a world without books or trees or sunsets. There just isn’t.

‘Are you okay?’ Camille asks me, her hand resting on the cover of her book, so only the word ‘tender’ is visible.

‘Yes. I’m still getting these headaches, though.’

‘Have you been to the doctor?’

‘No. But I will.’ Going to the doctor, of course, is the last thing I am going to do.

I look at her. She has the kind of face that makes you want to speak, to tell things to. It is a dangerous face.

‘Maybe you need some more sleep,’ she says.

I wonder what she means, and she can see me wondering, because then she says: ‘I saw on Facebook that you liked my post at three in the morning. That’s an interesting time for you to be awake on a school night.’

‘Oh.’

There is a sliver of mischief in her smile. ‘Is it a habit of yours? Spying on women’s Facebook pages in the middle of the night?’

I feel ashamed.

‘It . . . wh . . . came up on my feed.’

‘I’m only joking with you, Tom. You need to lighten up a little bit.’

If only she could understand the weight of things. The gravity of time. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘for the heaviness.’

‘It’s all right. Life is like that sometimes.’

Maybe she does understand. ‘I’m just a bit awkward around people.’

‘I get it. L’enfer, c’est les autres.’

‘Sartre?’

‘Oui. Dix points. Sartre. Mr Comedy himself.’

I force a smile and don’t say anything because the only thing I have in my head is that the sight of her face comforts me and scares me all at once. So instead I ask her something. It is a question I have often asked over the years. The question is: ‘Do you know anyone called Marion?’

She frowns. I really confuse her.

‘A French Marion or an English one?’

‘English,’ I say. ‘Or either.’

She thinks. ‘I went to school with a Marion. Marion Rey. She told me about periods. My parents were prudes. They never told me. And it is quite a thing not to be told about, you know, this blood coming out of you.’

She says this at a normal volume. There are still other people in the room. Stephanie is still frowning at us, holding the stone of her plum between her fingers. Isham is on his mobile phone, two seats away. I like her lack of shame.

I know I should engage in chit-chat. I know all the signs that chit-chat is required are there. But I ignore the signs.

‘Any other Marions?’

‘No, I’m sorry.’

‘That’s all right. I’m sorry. That is all I really wanted to say.’

She smiles and looks at me, and finds something in my gaze that troubles her. I feel she is trying to think where she knows me from again.

‘Life is always mysterious,’ she says. ‘But some mysteries are bigger than others.’

And then there is a little silence, and I force another smile and I walk away.