The Eagle sat at the end of a dim alley which, like all the others in the city at this time of year, was hot, muddy, and rank with the odors of wandering livestock and abandoned refuse. It was a typical Cresdon theatre: round (near enough), with a raised thrust stage, a pair of stage entrances, a balcony, a discovery space, and a trapdoor to the cellarage. The house held close to three thousand, packing eight hundred standing into the pit and seating the rest in three galleries, one on top of the other. The best view of the stage was from up top and would cost you three standard silver pieces, but you could get a good deal if you were prepared to stand down front. Some of the local aristos would pay six or seven silvers to actually sit on the stage and show off their fancy new duds, something all the actors hated with a passion. They never kept still and you were lucky if they did no more than yawn and wave to their friends. Sometimes they gave you acting notes or stopped the show to argue a plot point. Rich people always think they know best.

I got into my dress and blond wig as quickly as I could, and took a last glance over the script. We were doing a pompous tragedy called Reynath’s Revenge, whose entire last act was a series of preposterously engineered assassinations. It wasn’t just the end that was stupid. The whole play was rubbish. We’d just put it back into the repertory because a new one by the same author had opened a week or so ago over at the Blue Lion. The only audience who bothered showing up to ours had probably seen it a dozen times. It had been crap every time, but they kept coming back.

My dress was too tight around the throat because it had been made for Bob Evans, who had had the frame of a plucked chicken till he was about sixteen, when he had doubled in all possible dimensions, bursting every seam in every dress they put him in. By sheer surging hormonal bulk, combined with the timely death of old Silas Woods from the wheezing sickness, Bob attained what the kid actors all dreamed of: he had started playing men’s roles.