The Roaring Boy

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Death came calling at a most inconvenient hour and in a singularly inappropriate place. The play being performed that afternoon, before an attentive audience in the yard of the Queen’s Head, was still deep in Act Three when its main character was summarily excised from the dramatis personae. It was an eerie sensation. Out went Alonso, the exiled Duke of Genoa: in came panic and confusion among Westfield’s Men. Each actor who stormed offstage brought fresh protest into the tiring-house.

‘Ben Skeat has fallen sick.’

‘The man is drunk.’

‘Fast asleep.’

‘I could get no sound from him.’

‘His memory has crumbled with age.’

‘Fright has seized him.’

‘Madness.’

‘Sorcery. Ben is plainly bewitched.’

Nicholas Bracewell, the company’s book holder, had only a limited view of the actor from his station behind the scenes but he could see enough to sense a crisis. In the habit of a friar, Ben Skeat sat silent and motionless in his chair. Instead of dominating the scene as the play required, he was completely detached from it. Nicholas felt a stab of pain as he realised what must have happened. It gave him no satisfaction to be able to contradict the other diagnoses of Duke Alonso’s condition. Ben Skeat was the oldest and most experienced member of the troupe, known for his prodigious feats of memory and for his total reliability. There was no chance that he was ill, drunk, asleep or lost for words. Still less had he taken leave of his senses or become spellbound.

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