A/N:Welcome to my new historical!AU! Before we start, I'd like to say that this has been a lot of trouble for me so far, and if I wasn't so enthralled by the idea I would have given up by now. I hate posting things without a perfect title, but I am doing just that: the title is from King Lear, act 4 scene 6: "When we are born, we cry, that we are come to this great stage of fools." The sentiment of the scene the quote is embedded in is a lot darker than this story will be, but the quote on its own will become appropriate later. As with Infamia, I have endeavored to be as close to historically accurate as possible, but have bent a few obvious facts to fit the boys into history so blatantly. Any characterisations of historical figures are my own and not based on fact.

Also, after a few comments over on AO3, this has been edited slightly to correct a historical inaccuracy.

Now, onwards, for England, Harry and St George!

London, 1602. Summer.

John watched the boy closely as he stepped out onto the bare stage, smiling slightly to himself. This afternoon's performance had been a bit of a shambles, but Ben, the boy standing quietly on stage and surveying his audience, could make them forget that. Had made them forget that all afternoon. John liked Ben, liked playing with him - it almost made his own co-star's ineptitude bearable.

Almost, he thought to himself, glancing over at where a stage-hand was helping Tobias back into costume.

Ben lifted his head, opened his mouth, and struck the audience almost-silent with one intake of breath. John smiled again. That boy was going to go places.

"If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumbered here
Whilst these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme -
No more yielding than a dream -
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck,
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long,
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Take my hands if we be friends
And Robin shall restore amends."

John had always loved that speech. A Midsummer Night's Dream had been the first play he had seen when he first returned from the war; he could still remember standing in the audience, spellbound by the young Puck and the knowledge that William Shakespeare had created all of this from the thin air everyone had always assumed lay between his ears.

Dream had been playing on and off for eight years now, and so this audience did not leave the hushed silence that John's had before bursting into applause and chatter and shrieks of laughter. John grinned at Ben when he slipped backstage again, clapping him on the back. "Nicely done," he commented.

Ben beamed at him. "Thanks, John. Want to do your bow with me, or the Queen of the Fairies over there tripping over the Royal gown?"

John frowned at Tobias, who was indeed tripping over the hem of his costume as the stagehand struggled to fasten the back of the dress. "We'd better go all together," he said, sharing a resigned look with the boy nonetheless. "Let the lovers go first, though."

He waved at the four young actors until he caught their attention and gestured towards the stage. None of them had done much yet, all at the beginnings of their careers. Actually, John was the most experienced actor on the stage this afternoon, and he was trying to fight the people who were claiming that this meant he was on his way out, stepping down from lead roles for good.

The crowd recognised him, though, judging by the cheer that had gone up when he'd opened the play for them. They certainly hadn't been cheering for his Hippolyta, who had barely got one line right all afternoon. Once the season was over, John would be recommending that the boy take an apprenticeship in something a long way from the South Bank theatres. He took Tobias' hand now to steady him as they strode onto the stage to take a bow and the boy almost tripped over his skirts again. Maybe something that didn't require physical co-ordination, he amended to himself, grinning out at the audience. They bowed once, then John pushed Ben forwards to take his own bow. He'd always felt that Puck was the star of the play, despite the people who argued over the respective merits of Lysander and Demetrius.

They waited on stage until everyone had taken a bow, then took one last one with the entire cast. John caught the stagehand's eye as they left the stage, already hurrying forwards to help Tobias out of his dress. "Have you seen him?" he asked.

The stagehand gave him a wry smirk. "You know where he'll be when you're ready."

John grinned and slapped Ben on the shoulder again as the boy pulled a shirt on over his intricate, leafy body-paint. "Pub?"

"Well played, John," the Elephant's barman grinned, sliding a mug down the polished wood until it stopped right in front of John's crossed arms. "On the house. And you, Molly."

John grinned back at the barman, seeing the boy grin out of the corner of his eye. Ben had come to the Lord Chamberlain's Men after Will Shakespeare had found him at the back of a pub, performing something that the company had devised themselves, in which he was playing a lascivious scullery-maid named Molly. The nickname had been with him ever since. John didn't think that the boy minded; it was a reminder of his talent, after all. "Cheers," he replied, lifting the beer in a sort of grateful salute. "Haven't seen Will, have you?"

The barman rolled his eyes. "He's over there," he said wryly. "Follow the sound of poetry and giggling."

William Shakespeare was sat at a table at the back of the pub, a mug of beer in one hand and an ample-bosomed doxy in the other. John caught his eye across the room and raised an eyebrow, making his amusement clear. Shakespeare's dark eyes gleamed as he waved him over, his angular face softening into a grin. John put a hand on Ben's shoulder and guided the boy through the crowd.

"Testing out a new sonnet?" he asked as they sat down. The doxy giggled.

"Starting to," the playwright said happily. "I think it's going to be a big hit, romantically. My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red.
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head…"

John eyed the woman, who giggled again, tilting her chest forward so that her breasts almost spilled out of her dress as though to demonstrate that they were, indeed, dun-coloured. "Flattering," he commented. "Women will swoon."

"You were wonderful in the play this afternoon, Master Watson," the doxy lilted, leaning still further towards him across the table. "I really believed you could be the king of the fairies. And of the Greeks."

He smiled modestly. "Thank you…" he said, leaving the sentence inflected like a question so that she would provide her name.

"Celine," she obliged.

"Thank you, Celine."

Shakespeare grinned over his mug of beer. "I told you people would understand doubling Theseus and Oberon," he said smugly.

John shrugged, a dry smile making itself known on his face. "I think the only person who didn't understand it was Tobias," he commented lightly.

The playwright's face darkened. "Don't mention that boy to me," he said irritably. "Once this season is over I never have to speak to him again. God knows why he wanted to be an actor. He gets nervous just speaking to me."

"I get nervous speaking to you, too, Master Shakespeare," Ben piped up.

Shakespeare eyed him loftily. "That didn't sound particularly nervous, my boy," he replied.

Ben grinned. "Oh, but I was trembling on the inside," he said with an air of mock-innocence.

"Which is exactly my point," the playwright persisted. "You keep it on the inside. Outwardly, you look beautifully confident. You, my lad, are a fantastic actor." Ben buried his nose in his mug in an attempt to hide his pleased flush.

"I've just finished a new comedy," Shakespeare announced. "John, I want you to play the hero. Molly, I have a hefty female part for you."

The boy frowned. "But not the female part?"

John copied the expression as Shakespeare's smile became smugly mysterious. "Yesterday, I went to the Admiral's Men's performance of The Spanish Tragedy," he began.

"You know they're only playing that because Hamlet went down so well," John interrupted.

Shakespeare waved an airy hand. "I know," he said shortly, "and Hamlet was only such a success because it drew so heavily on The Spanish Tragedy, that's not the point." John hid a smirk at his friend's cavalier attitude to his popularity. "It was a good performance, well put-together. That's not the point either - the point was, their Bel-imperia absolutely blew me away."

John sat up, interested. "Oh?" he prompted. He'd seen their usual lead female play Kyd's Cornelia before and she hadn't been anything special.

"I went backstage to talk to the boy afterwards because I didn't recognise him. Turns out he's not actually one of the Admiral's Men. He plays with all kinds of companies, so long as he likes the play and respects the other actors. Sort of… freelances."

Ben frowned. "He sounds a bit jumped-up to me. He'd have to be good to support that kind of fussy attitude."

"How old is he, to have that kind of attitude?" John asked.

Shakespeare grinned. "That was the surprising bit. He's twenty-seven. He still plays women because they're more of a challenge to him."

It was a moment before John realised his mouth was open, and closed it sharply. The man was only three years younger than he was himself, and John had not played women since before he joined the army. Could not play women, he wouldn't think, not that he had ever been asked to try. He wasn't sure whether to respect or scorn this man. Perhaps he played women to hide his own effeminacy. Perhaps John shouldn't judge too heavily until he had met him.

"Anyway, I told him about this new comedy and he said the part sounded wonderful and he enjoyed my writing, but he wouldn't work with Burbage. I said that was good, because I wanted you as my lead. He said he'd been impressed by your Julius Caesar, but he wanted to meet you before he said yea or nay. He was going to watch your Dream and approach you afterwards sometime."

John couldn't help but smile. Julius Caesar was the play he was most proud of being in. He suspected it was also the one that had set his rivalry with Richard Burbage in motion. "Does he have a name, then, this man, so I might know when to make a good impression?"

Shakespeare grinned. "Sherlock Holmes," he said. "And please do make a good impression, John, unless you want to work with Tobias again."

Ben gasped excitedly, sitting up and accidentally slopping beer over the table. "Sherlock Holmes?" he said, waving away the slowly spreading puddle agitatedly. "I get to play next to Sherlock Holmes?"

"You've heard of him?" John asked in surprise.

"Everyone's heard of him," the boy replied. "He used to play all the time when I was little. He was the one that made me want to act. By the time I joined a company he'd gone abroad. In and out of Italy, I heard. He probably played with actual women there."

John raised an eyebrow at Shakespeare over the table as the barman mopped up the beer Ben had spilt with a good-natured had too many, Molly?. Being in Italy explained why John hadn't heard of him before - Ben had begun training with the Lord Chamberlain's men the year after John had returned from the military, which meant that this Holmes had probably been there the entire time John had been in the theatre trade. It could also explain why he had impressed Will so much; the French and Italian theatres held a certain reverence in the playwright's view, and surely Holmes would have picked up elements of their style.

"He sounds like a very interesting man," John concluded, raising his mug in a toast.

Ben left the pub early, but the sun had set by the time John stumbled out the door, shouting slightly inebriated thanks at the barman and leaning slightly on Will, who was singing a song about a cat and a haddock to which John had run out of verses an hour ago. He was fairly sure that the playwright was just making them up as he went along, but the style and quality of the verses hadn't changed, so it was difficult to tell, especially with a stomach full of beer.

He bid farewell to his friend on the corner of the street and made his way slowly and unevenly towards his tiny flat. It was rubbish, but on an army pension and the few, insignificant spoils to be gained from acting it was all he could afford, and he'd been there for longer than he cared to mention.

Someone sprinted past him, shoving him roughly against the wall as they barrelled past. John shouted something after him, turning around to see if he was being chased; the youth was bent almost double as he ran and seemed to be clutching something to his chest. A thief, then. As he turned, a tall figure swathed in a dark coat and looking shadowy and sinister burst out of an alley in hot pursuit.

"Stop him!" the figure yelled as it got closer, and John immediately took off after the first sprinter, the fuzz of alcohol stripping from his head in the wind.

He was faster than the youth from his years of military and then stage training; he wasn't required to be in top physical condition anymore, but he hadn't quite lost the habit of rigorous exercising, and so the youth's shorter, less fit legs couldn't carry him as fast as John's and he caught up with him two doors before John's front door.

"I'd give it up if I were you," John told the young man when he was jogging comfortably beside him. He couldn't help the ridiculous grin that was spreading over his face; he hadn't felt this alive with the thrill of a chase for years.

The youth stopped running, doubling over whatever it was still clutched in his hands, obscuring it from John's view as he gasped for breath. John leaned against a nearby wall, affecting a casual pose but still ready to react if the man tried anything. After a moment of heaving and panting, the dark-haired man pushed off the wall and made to dodge past him.

John moved without thinking, slinging his fist up to connect with the side of the man's head and dropping him like a sack of potatoes.

On reflection, there were probably less violent ways of stopping him, John thought as the pursuant in the dark coat rounded the last corner and pulled up short beside them, frowning down at the fallen thief. He had a noble, angular face with high cheekbones and a strong nose, pale eyes flicking up to John with a tiny smile on lush, cupid's-bowed lips. "Was the punch really necessary?" the man asked, a touch of humour in his deep voice. He enunciated like a gentleman; John wondered what he was doing in the South Bank after dark.

He grinned in response. "Probably not. I was on my way home from the pub, might have got a bit carried away. I haven't run like that in years."

The man chuckled richly. "It's probably for the best," he decreed. "He might have been a bother to get back to Westminster conscious and struggling."

"What did he steal?" John asked, bending to try and roll the man over to retrieve whatever it was, quickly checking his pulse and feeling the cheekbone where he had hit it in case he'd broken it. He hadn't.

The dark coat billowed slightly as the man made a dismissive gesture. "An old widow's wedding jewels," he told him. "The usual, although slightly cleverer than your average thief. She only noticed they were missing because her harpiscord was off-key. You're welcome to a share in the reward, clearly you could use the money."

John frowned. "I only stepped in at the end," he protested. "You were the one who tracked the man down."

"And yet, I would have lost him had you not stepped in," came the reply. "Would you help me carry him to the Constable's house? And then surely you'll deserve a reward."

He knew the man would have trouble carrying the unconscious thief back to Westminster on his own, so he nodded slightly grudging acceptance. "So are you with the Constable, then?" he asked as the man bent and recovered a small cloth parcel from the unconscious thief's hands and stowed it in his coat pocket. He wasn't sure whether Constables, who were usually employed by the unpaid Justices of the Peace, were permitted assistants of their own. "Or just a citizen helping out and claiming the reward?"

"If I were only in it for the reward, I would not have offered any of it to you," the man said logically, offering John a cool but not unpleasant smile. "I'm a consulting detective," he explained, holding out a hand in introduction. "The name is Sherlock Holmes."

John blinked in surprise. "You're Sherlock Holmes?" he repeated stupidly. Surely there couldn't be more than one Sherlock Holmes in London. He took the proffered hand and shook it eagerly. "John Watson, Lord Chamberlain's Men. I must admit this isn't how I expected to meet you."

Holmes' eyebrows reached the line of his dark, riotous curls and a smile broke onto his lips. "No," he agreed, his eyes sweeping along the length of John's body before meeting his eyes again approvingly. "But, now that we have, Master Watson, we may as well make use of it. It's a long shuffle from here to Westminster."

A/N: You've probably figured out by now that Ben ("Molly") is in fact a genderbent Molly Hooper. I spent ages trying to figure out what the male version of 'Molly' was, and by the time I figured it out, I didn't like it. The play that they're getting together to perform, as I've discussed with people who follow my other work, is Twelfth Night, another area I've had trouble with because I don't like certain elements of the play. I'm slowly coming to realise that this is not going to be as easy as Infamia, and not just because I'm doing it on my own. I feel a little like I'm publishing it before it's ready, but I think that's for the best in order to get feedback, which I would of course appreciate.

I need to thank Mr_CSI over on AO3 and chocolate fish and SplendidDust here,without all of whom this story would not have left my head.