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over this last sign of my departed fever. Master Burbage was only concerned in case I’d splashed my tights.

FIVE
    In the Fishers’ concrete apartment block overlooking the River Thames, the boy Nat lies shivering in bed, curled up, clasping his hot-water bottle, growing gradually warm. He sleeps a little.
    Then he grows warmer, hotter, his fever rising; he tosses off the bedclothes, muttering, sweating, no longer knowing who or where he is. Mrs. Fisher comes back to check him. Flushed and damp-skinned, he is barely recognizable. Alarmed, she tries to wake him, but the fever is galloping, edging on delirium. She has never seen anything like this. His skin is on fire, his hair wet with perspiration; there are strange swellings in his neck. She calls her husband, and in sudden fear they telephone their doctor.
    The doctor is not at home. They call for an ambulance. It takes the boy to Guy’s Hospital: a short swift ride through the dark midnight streets. In the emergency ward, nurses receive the boy in puzzled alarm; they start sponging down the fevered body, they peer at the red swollen glands. Meningitis? The doctor on duty comes, frowns, orders an intravenous line, blood tests, antibiotics. Surprising the nurses, he orders the boy to be moved to an isolation ward. Intent, unsmiling, he goes to an office where there is a telephone with a directoutside line, and he closes the door. He calls, even at this hour of 3 A.M. , a colleague who is a specialist in tropical medicine.
    He says, “You aren’t going to believe this, but I think we have a case of bubonic plague.”

SIX
    â€œThere it is—our new theater!” said Harry proudly. “Hast seen it before?”
    â€œNo,” I said truthfully, staring. A white flag was flying from the flagpole on top of the Globe, the signal to audiences that a play would be done there that day. For the moment, it was the only thing I recognized. It wasn’t the theater itself that was so startlingly different from the copy that would be built in my time; it was the surroundings. This Globe wasn’t crowded and dwarfed by towering office buildings; it stood up proud and high, and to the south it looked out over green fields and billowing trees. In fact there were trees nearly all around it; once we had left the main street that went over London Bridge, I’d felt, with astonishment, that we were walking into the countryside. The streets were still busy and noisy, though, with carts and coaches and horsemen, and others like us bustling on foot.
    Like the Globe of my own time, the theater looked new; its plaster gleamed white, the reeds of its thatch lay tight and straight-edged. As Harry chattered proudly on, the apprentice of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men explaining his company to the borrowed boy from St. Paul’s School, I realized that it really was new, finished only a fewmonths earlier. Before that, the company had been playing for years in a theater—called, believe it or not, just The Theatre—across the river, in Shoreditch, until their lease on the land ran out and the landlord refused to renew it. Master Burbage and his brother Cuthbert had just inherited The Theatre from their father, James, who built it. There it stood, useless, on ground they weren’t allowed to set foot on. Where were they to act?
    It was the actors who solved the problem, Harry said, grinning. Five of them got together with the Burbages, raised enough money to lease a piece of land here in Southwark, and hired a master carpenter. (“My uncle,” said Harry possessively. “His name is Peter Streete.”) Then, one dark winter’s night just after Christmas, taking a dozen strong workmen with them, they went quietly to Shoreditch and with axes and sledgehammers and crowbars they took The Theatre apart. They did it very carefully, numbering each piece, and it took them three days. The demolition must have been a very noisy process, but