STAGS 2, page 3
Then a weird thing happened. He started to laugh. ‘Very good, Greer,’ he said. ‘You got me. But seriously, what have you chosen? I’d like to get everyone’s production schedules done today so we can book rehearsal time in here. Between you and me, the music department can be very greedy with this space.’
I wasn’t sure why he wouldn’t believe me. ‘I’ve chosen this. The Isle of Dogs – by Ben Jonson, it says.’
I climbed onto the stage and held the pages out to him. The Abbot looked at them for a moment and then took them in the manner of someone wary of a practical joke. He read the title page and went suddenly still. He actually sat down on the edge of the stage so that he could read in the candlelight. I sat beside him, but not too close. He lay each page down as he’d finished it on the stage behind him, as tenderly as if they were made of butterflies’ wings. I waited nervously, as if I had actually written it myself. Had he got to that line yet? Had he got to the bit where this happened, or that happened?
I distracted myself by looking round at the De Warlencourt Playhouse. It must’ve cost the family a bomb, and I wondered then why theatre was so important to them that they’d put up the money. It was basically an oak structure built inside the circular brick shell. We were sitting on a thrust stage with a musicians’ gallery behind us and an ornately painted ceiling above, with this kind of heavenly sky painted on it, clouds and stars and a sun and a moon – day and night at the same time. There were two horseshoe galleries, so the audience would be quite close to the actors, and I felt for the first time a shiver of nerves. The candles were not just ordinary ones like you’d buy in a supermarket, but made of beeswax, which gave off a funny olde-worlde smell. They were mounted in sconces, and in six high candelabra that could be winched up and down. (The theatre was basically a massive firetrap.) Sitting there, next to the Abbot in his dark monastic habit, watching him leaf through a handwritten manuscript, with the Christmassy candle smell in my nose, I could’ve been transported back in time.
When the Abbot looked up, the air of being constantly wry and amused had gone and he looked deadly serious. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Like I said. Someone put it under my door last night. After Commons. What’s up?’
He gathered the pages together again as he carefully formed his reply. ‘This play doesn’t exist.’ It was almost a whisper and his voice sounded around the theatre spookily.
‘How do you mean? It’s right there.’ I pointed foolishly, now thinking it was me who was on the business end of a practical joke.
‘I mean, it did exist. But there was no surviving copy.’
‘Explain.’
‘The play was written in 1597, at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign. It was performed, then quickly suppressed.’
‘What does “supressed” mean? They closed the play?’
‘Closed the play, closed the theatre it was performed in, closed all the other theatres too, and burned all the copies.’
I whistled, and the sound was amplified in the auditorium. ‘Jeeesus. That sounds like overkill. Why?’
‘Blasphemy. Sedition. Treason. Demonic practices. Black magic. The full house of Elizabethan sins.’
Wow. ‘But it’s pretty tame so far. I mean, I think it’s really good, but it’s not offensive.’
‘No. Act One does seem pretty blameless. Perhaps the dangerous bits are in the later acts, and that’s why only this fragment survives.’
Huh. ‘So what happened to Ben Jonson?’
‘The queen had him thrown in jail.’
‘So that was the end of Ben.’
‘Not at all. He was released, and fell out of favour – but the queen was quite an old lady by that time. When she died, Jonson became rather a favourite of Elizabeth’s successor, James. He ended up as court poet.’
‘Posh boy then?’ I decided, my lip curling.
‘Hardly. He was the son of a bricklayer, and had become a bricklayer himself. He was once described as having a trowel in one pocket and a book in the other.’ He looked at me sideways, a smile in his voice. ‘He wasn’t a fan of Shakespeare either – thought he was overrated.’
‘I’m starting to like him.’
‘You should,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a lot in common. He got a scholarship to a very prestigious school in Westminster, and then went on to Cambridge. But he had to leave to make a living, and went into the theatre. At his death he was considered to be the greatest playwright of his time. Much better than Shakespeare.’
‘Wow. Good for Ben.’
‘Yes. But sadly he died penniless. He was buried standing up in Westminster Abbey, because he could only afford a grave that was two feet square, not six feet long. Then he became less popular after the Restoration, and Shakespeare started to take over. And now, of course, barely anyone on the street would know who Ben Jonson was.’
‘OK, but still, if he was such a genius in his day, shouldn’t this be in a museum?’ I looked at the pages in my grubby hand, and moved my fingers so I was holding the manuscript carefully by the edges.
‘If it was given to you here, I presume it was in the Scriptorium. I imagine it must be from the school’s manuscript collection, and therefore it belongs to STAGS. But I’m new here. Have you spoken to Friar Waterlow?’
Friar Waterlow was the librarian who worked in the oldest bit of the library, the literally medieval Scriptorium. ‘Not yet. But …’ My mind was whirling. ’How could the manuscript have got this far north, even? If Ben Jonson lived in London.’
Abbot Ridley thought for a moment. ‘Good point. I do know that later in life Jonson went on a pilgrimage from London to Edinburgh and that he had a very dear friend in the North by the name of Esmé Stuart. He may have risked all to bring a copy north to give to her so that it would at least survive for posterity. He knew he could trust Esmé Stuart.’
I recoiled. The name Esme to me would always mean Esme Dawson, Medieval, Mean Girl and would-be murderess. ‘Who was Esmé Stuart?’
‘A powerful noblewoman. Jonson’s patron and protector. He lived in her house in London and visited her home at Lennox Castle in Scotland. She sometimes summered at Alnwick Castle, just down the road from here. Perhaps Jonson sought lodging here at STAGS on his way to visit her.’
‘Huh.’ I wasn’t really interested in Esmé Stuart. I was still thinking of Queen Cynthia, the slimy father–son courtier team who were simultaneously working for her and against her, and the earl she loved but couldn’t have. I had to ask the question. ‘Could I direct this? I mean, if it belongs to the school, that’s OK, right?’
‘Of course you could direct it. You should direct it.’
‘Even though there’s only one act?’
‘Well, that’s a pity. But you still should present it as an extract.’ He studied me for a moment. ‘Greer, where are you up to in your university admissions? Remind me.’
‘Oxford,’ I said. ‘I’ve got an offer. I just need to get the grades.’ I grimaced.
He looked pleased. ‘Then this is what I suggest: you perform it here. It’s a wonderful discovery. Think of it, Greer. If you put this play on here, not only would it be an amazing coup – the first time those words have been spoken in four hundred years! – but if you are the first to direct the rediscovered Isle of Dogs, and you do as well as expected in your other Probitiones, then I don’t see how Oxford could possibly turn you down to read English and drama.’
He had me there. The idea of making history began to take hold in my mind. Then the chapel clock struck nine and some of the other drama students started to filter in from breakfast and began to sit, dotting around the auditorium. Nel waved at me and motioned to a seat beside her. I nodded and slid off the stage, holding the pages like they were gold leaf. Which they kind of were.
Abbot Ridley spent the rest of drama briefing the others about the play. ‘An exciting lost manuscript’ at STAGS, which had recently been uncovered ‘by our own Greer MacDonald’.
Nel turned to me, china-blue eyes very wide. Of course, the last she’d heard, I was floundering about trying to find a play to direct for the class, and the next thing, here was I, clutching a lost manuscript like Nic Cage in National Treasure.
The rest of the lesson was lots of chat about the rehearsal schedule, the performance date (last Friday of term, just before we broke up for Christmas). I wasn’t exactly concentrating, because I was briefing Nel, low-voiced, about how Act One of the play had been pushed under my door the night before. Her eyes got wider and wider, and even in the gloom of the theatre you could see the whites of her eyes all the way around her irises.
Despite her obvious surprise, I had to ask the question. ‘I don’t suppose it was you, was it?’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah. I’d just left you – you could have gone to your room and picked up the manuscript to give me.’
She shook her head. ‘No. If I’d had that up my sleeve, I’d have told you at Commons.’ She smiled. ‘Saved you from all that Shakespeare.’
Scene vi
When the class was over I didn’t go to the Paulinus well to meet Shafeen like I usually would. I went to the Scriptorium instead, to find Friar Waterlow.
Nel came with me, because she was almost as excited by the mystery of The Isle of Dogs as I was. We went into the rare-books bit, which looked so old that I wouldn’t be surprised if St Aidan himself used to hang out here. It had lots of stained glass, dark-wood shelves crammed with ancient texts and these kind of crossribs holding up a wooden ceiling, like you see in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. We looked among the shelving for the librarian and it was then that I started to get a weird sense of foreboding. It was some moments before I realised why. Everything about this particular bit of the library, appropriately the medieval bit, reminded me like a punch to the gut of the library at Longcross where I’d found the hunting books. But more than anything, more than the dark wood, or the stained glass, or the ornamental ceiling, it was the smell. The smell flipped me back like a time-machine, straight to Longcross library, and that very particular fusty, dusty aroma of ancient manuscripts. Modern libraries don’t smell like that – there’s something about the paper and the ink and the binding that’s very particular. That smell, the smell of History, had a dark association for me. I was suddenly hiding among those ancient tomes in Longcross with that mastodon Perfect prowling around below, the barrels of his shotgun gleaming. I swear the memory scared me so much that if Nel hadn’t been there I would have run right out of the place into the sunlight. But just then we caught sight of the shambling figure of the librarian, his friar’s habit absolutely fitting his surroundings.
Friar Waterlow was about a hundred years old and had definitely been there in the days of the old Abbot. Probably due to his lifetime of expertise with rare books and manuscripts he’d escaped the cull – when all the old friars had been retired and replaced – so I was plenty wary of him. But I supposed if I was only asking about books, he couldn’t do me any harm, and there was no doubt that books were his life. ‘Friar Waterlow?’
The old friar turned and straightened up. ‘Ladies? What can I do for you?’ He spoke with this olde-worlde courtesy, but he was a pretty formidable-looking dude. He was small, and stooped, but he had these milky blue eyes that looked at you very directly, like he was straight out of The Name of the Rose.
‘We were just wondering,’ I began casually, ‘do you have any of the works of Ben Jonson?’
‘Oh yes, my dear,’ he said. He pointed waveringly back to the more modern bit of the library – by that I mean Tudor – where the printed books were kept. ‘Have a look in the second carrel on the left, in Renaissance drama. We certainly have the better-known ones, The Alchemist, for example, and Volpone.’
I’d spent the entire afternoon there yesterday. ‘No, I didn’t mean copies. I meant the real ones.’
‘Are you talking about original manuscripts? Not here, I fear. The best I can do is a facsimile of his folio edition, collected plays, poems, masques, et cetera.’
‘This folio – does it …’ I licked my lips. ‘Does it have The Isle of Dogs in it?’
‘Dear me, no,’ he chuckled. ‘You’re out of luck there, I’m afraid. That play no longer exists – every copy was destroyed when it was suppressed in 1597. Although …’ He stroked his chin with a papery hand – I didn’t realise people actually did that when they were thinking. And I don’t think Nel or I breathed till he spoke again. ‘It’s funny you should mention that play. The only recorded mention of the script, written in Jonson’s own hand, was held at Alnwick Castle in the private collection, oddly enough.’
So it seemed Abbot Ridley had been right. Ben Jonson had been in the ’hood. That seemed like a massive coincidence to me. Alnwick Castle (used as the film version of Hogwarts, irony of ironies) was just down the road. The Old Abbot had died en route to the cottage hospital in its very shadow.
I knew it was time to show the Friar the play. I’d put the pages carefully in a folder in my standard-issue deer-leather STAGS satchel. My fingers twitched towards the clasp, but I didn’t get the manuscript out.
‘So, his other plays, the ones that do exist,’ I asked, ‘where would their originals be?’
‘The British Library,’ he said. ‘The Bodleian Library in Oxford. Possibly the library of St John’s College, Cambridge, to which he was briefly admitted as an undergraduate.’
Again, just as Abbot Ridley had said.
‘They later honoured him there when he became court poet. The other likely place would be Christ Church College, Oxford, where he taught for a short period.’
Another coinkydink. Like I said, that was the very college I was applying to. This was just weird.
‘And how much would an original Ben Jonson play be worth?’ said Nel.
I had to smile. Nel was always interested in money and how much things cost – I wondered if she inherited this commercial side from her dad.
‘Well, given that in his lifetime he was considered the foremost poet of England,’ said Friar Waterlow, ‘far superior to Shakespeare, such a thing would be … priceless.’
I stopped smiling.
‘Van Gogh’s Sunflowers priceless?’
He smiled a wet, formless smile. He didn’t have the greatest teeth, so the effect wasn’t very pleasant. ‘I should imagine so. And then some.’ He looked at us beadily with his creepy-monk eyes. ‘May I ask where these questions tend?’
‘Well,’ said Nel, ‘you won’t believe –’
‘The time!’ I trilled, grabbing her arm. ‘You won’t believe the time – we have to get to history. Thanks a lot, though, Friar Waterlow, you’ve been really helpful.’
He waved his hand in a little flourish and turned back to the stacks.
I dragged Nel away before she could blurt anything out. But I needn’t have worried. In the last year we’d learned to read each other and she left quietly with me. When we were well outside, safely crossing the moat between Honorius and Paulinus, she spoke. ‘You don’t trust him?’
‘Are you kidding? I don’t trust anyone after last year.’
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I can’t picture Friar Waterlow running around Longcross in the 1960s hunting schoolkids.’
‘That’s what we thought about the old Abbot,’ I reminded her.
Nel twisted a rope of her blonde hair around her manicured hand, like she always did when she was thinking. ‘I s’pose so. But he might have had some clues. Not showing him the manuscript doesn’t help you find out who gave it to you.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It might. If the play doesn’t belong to STAGS, then it belongs in a museum, and surely you won’t be able to just keep it and put it on here at the end of term. You’ll have to tell Abbot Ridley it’s not from the Scriptorium.’
I looked at her sideways. ‘I might forget to tell him. I might just let him, you know, assume.’
‘Greer MacDonald!’
‘What?’
‘That’s lying.’
‘It’s not lying. It’s just … not telling the truth.’ We were crossing the manicured lawn of the Honorius quad and I stopped dead centre and turned to her. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Suppose I tell him. He calls in the Government and they come along in their helicopters or some shit.’
‘Helicopters?’
‘Well, I don’t know what they do. They take away the play and we don’t get to put it on, we don’t get to make history, Chanel.’
She was silent, and I could see that I was getting through to her. I toyed with the idea of saying how fantastic the play would be for my Probitio, but realising that that didn’t make me sound all that great, I went another way. ‘Also, try this for size,’ I said. ‘What’s a play meant to be?’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, if a play had a wishlist, what would be top of it?’
‘Well, I s’pose, to be performed.’
‘Ex-act-ly. And I bet you old Ben Jonson, if he came back to life right now …’
‘… like that’s going to happen …’
‘… if he came back to life right now,’ I persisted, ‘would be totally chuffed that his play was finally getting performed, and that this time no one’s going to get thrown in jail.’
Nel let her hair go and it unwound itself. ‘Still be good to know where it came from though.’
‘Yes,’ I mused, as we started to walk again. ‘I do have one more notion about that, actually.’
Scene vii
I caught up with Shafeen after Commons – I’d missed him all day because he was in pretty serious work mode, but I tracked him down to his room in Honorius.
He opened the door with his glasses on, so I knew he’d been revising. He had his triple-science mocks just after Christmas. When he let me in he pushed his glasses up into his hair. His eyes sort of had this special light in them when they looked at me. He looked lovely. ‘Hello, stranger.’
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘Yes, but it’s very welcome. I can’t read one more molecular formula.’ He collapsed backwards on his bed, dead straight like a tree that had just been felled. Without opening his eyes, he put out a hand and pulled me down beside him.
