Rebels and Traitors Read Online Free PDF

satin. The ladies pronounced compliments to one another in curiously bad poetry before the entire cast moved towards the King and Queen and addressed Their Majesties with sanctimonious song. Gideon was at the back, so could barely glimpse the monarch.
    The scene changed. The song changed, though not in quality. A finale was anticipated, yet the dance was interrupted by apparently real stagehands and costume-makers, whose dialogue was significantly more spirited than anything else in the pageant. Backstage, a small girl who was skipping about unattended shrieked with joy. Gideon Jukes had almost fallen over her as she stood below his line of sight, constricted as his vision was through the eyeholes. She pushed him aside, almost sick with excitement as actors playing a painter and a carpenter, a tailor’s wife, a feather-maker’s wife and an embroiderer’s wife exchanged banter on stage. They represented ordinary people from a backstage world to which she had just been introduced by her somewhat frowsty grandmother.
‘Juliane! Où es-tu?’
She was eight years old, and had been helping with the costumes, thrilled by the responsibility — but that night she was most entranced that she had seen the Queen.
    The scene changed yet again. A representation of
Morning Twilight
glided onstage — a pale girl in a partly see-through costume, with whom Gideon was much taken. This brought the formal entertainment to its end. The Queen did dance with the masquers, proving her indifference to William Prynne’s insults and delighting at least one small girl
quite utterly!
    Gideon felt shocked when Her Majesty danced. The rebel in him was out-rebelled. Any idea of running away from home to be a player evaporated. He would have to accept some other career.
    So delighted with
The Triumph of Peace
was Henrietta Maria that she ordered it to be played all over again at Merchant Taylors Hall, where its anti-puritan message might reach larger numbers of people, especially the young. Third Dotterel would be forbidden by his parents from acting the second time. The small girl would not attend either, since her grandmother, always a game woman, wanted privacy to encourage a legal man called William Gadd, whom she had met at the first performance.
    On that royal night at the Banqueting House, all the players and lawyers were taken afterwards to an enormous feast which lasted until daylight. Gideon was too sleepy to eat much. Next morning, Third Dotterel stumbled home to his mother with his bird’s head under his arm, shedding feathers all the way from Ludgate Hill to Cheapside.

Chapter Three

London: 1634-42
    Parthenope forgave him.
    He was her baby — and she was about to lose him. She thought this was not the best moment to send Gideon half across London to another home. But sometimes it is easier for a youngster to respect strangers.
    Gideon almost backed out before he started. His first task was to locate Robert Allibone, his new master, who worked at the sign of the Auger. This, his great-uncle had airily instructed, would be found off Fleet Lane. Brought up in the City, Gideon had to leave the few streets around Cheapside that he knew well, pass through the hubbub of booksellers around St Paul’s and explore westwards beyond the city wall to Ludgate Hill and the busy environs of the Old Bailey. Though only half an hour’s walk away, this was unknown territory. He was reluctant to ask directions. He had walked to an area of lawyers and their hangers-on, some visibly seedy. He sensed that his steps were dogged by sneak-thieves; he could hear the drunks raucously tippling in dark taverns and victualling houses. He had come among scriveners, printers, carriage-men and — since the law was so lucrative — goldsmiths and jewellers.
    When few side streets had names and no premises had house numbers, wooden signboards swung by almost every door; they were high enough not to decapitate a man on horseback, but were otherwise unregulated. The