Will’s mother came out into the passageway, frowning and wiping floury hands on her apron, and gave a sharp cry at the sight of her son. ‘Will!’
He kissed her on both cheeks and she laughed, staring. ‘It’s the way a Londoner kisses a lady,’ he explained, then embraced his mother properly. ‘I’ve missed you.’
‘Come, I know someone who has missed you,’ his father said meaningfully, and pushed him into the doorway to the house.
Anne stood in the shadows just inside, her blue eyes very wide, a small child balanced on her hip. She looked at Will blankly, her fair hair straggling from under a white cap that sat askew as though it had been too hurriedly pinned in place. There was a streak of soot on her cheek from the oven, and he could smell fresh bread baking in the kitchen behind her.
‘Will, you’re back,’ she managed faintly, then looked away from him as though dazzled, into the tender, round-cheeked face of the child, also staring up at him with the wide blue eyes of her mother. ‘Susanna, this is your father. Say “Hello, Papa.”’
The child gurgled something, and he stroked her cheek wonderingly. So soft.
‘Hello, my little daughter,’ he said gently, then rather wretchedly wished his child was not there, that someone would take her away, so he could kiss his wife properly. He looked at Anne’s pursed
lips
, her downcast eyes, and knew she was furious with him.
Will frowned and hoisted his bag on to his shoulder again. He was struggling through the various possibilities, confused by what he sensed as his wife’s simmering anger, her lack of a proper greeting. Did he not merit a kiss? He had come home, and this was his welcome. A cold face, and a child in the way of his kiss.
‘How was London?’ Anne asked, following him into the house, where he threw down his heavy bag and settled himself at the table as though in expectation of lunch.
‘Busy.’
She played with the child’s fingers, her head bent. ‘It must have been,’ she agreed quietly, ‘for you to have forgotten about us so completely this past year.’
‘D … did I not write you letters?’ he asked, and heard himself stammer as he had once done as a boy. It made him angry. ‘Send money home whenever I could? Provide for you and the child?’
‘You know I cannot read. It is not enough to hear my husband’s words read out to me, like a sermon on Sundays. And I thought you would call us to London too. I kept a bag packed for the first few months. Then I realized you had no wish to bring me and Susanna to London, that you had abandoned us here.’
Taken aback by the sudden sharpness of her tone, Will was not sure how to answer. His father disappeared discreetly back into his workshop, and his mother signalled their serving girl to take up his bag and bear it away next door, to the little adjoining cottage his father had given them for their own. His mother followed in the girl’s wake, issuing orders about the freshening of linen and rushes.
They were alone in the downstairs of the house, just him, Anne and the child. He stared at the child’s downy cheek and could not quite believe she was his. Susanna had been so tiny when he had left; now she had a thatch of dark hair and a few small white teeth that he could see as she beamed at him, waving and gurgling. He remembered Cutler’s jibe about asking his wife who had fathered their children, but set it aside in a second. Anne was not that sort of woman. Fierce and passionate she might be in private, when no one but Will could see, but she was not a whore.
‘I could not have brought you to London. I cannot support you there. London is no fit place to house my wife and child: the streets
are
full of whores and cut-throats.’ He shook his head. ‘I need to know that you and little Susanna are here in Warwickshire, safe in the heart of my family.’
She raised her head and met his gaze frankly. ‘It is the whores I worry about most.’
‘Anne,’ he began, shaking his head, then paused, and felt a little frown tug at his brows. Lucy Morgan.
Will squirmed against the memory of his attempted adultery, like a fish caught on a hook. He tried to tell himself that the overriding lust he felt for Lucy Morgan was no threat to his love for Anne, and that for a married man to want a mistress was not to disown or dishonour his wife. Such backstreet dealings went on in every town in England, and they were the smooth and easy lies on which most lives were built.
But when he looked into Anne’s strong and stubborn face, he knew his wife would never agree with him. Her belief in the sanctity of marriage was a cliff against which such neatly thought-out arguments could only ever dash themselves in vain.
She had seen his hesitation, and her thin brows arched in a question. ‘Well?’
‘You have nothing to fear from that quarter,’ he finished flatly, and stood up. ‘Now I’m tired and need to sleep. Does Susanna still cry at night?’
‘A little. But I can keep her quiet on the breast.’
‘She is not yet weaned?’
‘She likes the breast,’ Anne said simply.
Surprised, his gaze dropped to her breasts. They pushed high and firm against the bodice of her gown, their milk-bloated swell not quite hidden by the cloth she had draped about her neck like a shawl. He wished then that he had not looked at her like that, nor thought of her breasts when she was unclothed, for suddenly he was filled with a desperate urge to make love to his wife, to see her naked once more and feel her body press against his.
The women had stopped moving about upstairs and the house was suddenly quiet. The silence felt strange after the restless hubbub of London, where no one was private and there could never be a moment of complete quiet, even in the long watches of the night.
Hurriedly, he closed his mind to thoughts of London. He would
not
allow himself to think of Lucy Morgan’s dark beauty and quick, light-footed grace. Not here in Stratford, and not in their bed.
‘Will you come upstairs with me?’
Anne stared at his question, then hot colour ran into her cheeks.
‘The child,’ she whispered.
‘My mother can take her for an hour or two, surely?’ He dropped his voice, knowing that when the house was still like this, every word that was spoken could be heard from one end to the other. ‘I must lie with you.’
‘Cannot you wait until tonight?’
‘No,’ he said decisively, and saw her eyes widen. He had never spoken to Anne like that before – as a man speaks to his wife, rather than as a boy pleads with his older lover – and he could see that she was surprised and, he hoped, at least a little impressed. ‘It has been too long since we were last … intimate. I am impatient to remind myself why I married you, Anne. Now give the child to my mother and come to bed with me.’
Later, watching his wife undress with her back to him and the shutters drawn against the sunlight and the noise of the street below, he commanded her to turn and face him. Anne obeyed, but with an uncertain look on her face, as though she was no longer sure who he was. Methodically, she unpinned and combed out her long fair hair while he waited. She laid her gown and cap neatly on the clothes chest for when they had finished and she would have to get dressed again. Then she climbed into bed beside him, wearing only her thin shift and stockings, and the old bedstead creaked comfortably about them as they looked at each other through the shadows.
‘Your parents can hear us,’ she muttered. ‘The walls are thin.’
‘Then they will have to close their ears,’ Will told her, a little more sharply than he had intended.
Trying not to hurry, though his need was now urgent, he stroked her hair, which fell almost to her breasts. ‘It has grown,’ he remarked, and ran his fingers through the smooth fair tresses, which seemed brighter and more shining than he remembered. Her hair was like sunshine, he thought, and at once could not help comparing it with Lucy Morgan’s tight black curls, so strange and yet so fascinating at the same time. He suddenly felt angry. He did not want to be in bed with his wife and thinking of another woman.
‘Kiss me,’ he told Anne abruptly, and was relieved when she obeyed that order too, despite her surprise, placing her lips against his very lightly.
Will pressed her back into the fresh sheets, ignoring the creaks and moans of the bed supports beneath the mattress. She whispered his name, and he kissed her throat and breasts. He turned her face away from his after that, covering her eyes with her hair, twining its thick length about her throat. Anne gave a tiny cry which she tried to stifle, and he knew she was frightened of him for the first time in their marriage, of his sudden, unexpected return, and the urgent desire he was making no attempt to conceal.
He pushed between her pale thighs a moment later, entering her with a groan of relief that reminded him of the first time he had lain with her, that incredible surge of triumphant lust.
When he pulled out, not wanting to spill his seed inside her, Anne hissed under her breath, then covered her face with a sob.
Will rolled away from her in the darkness, his skin suddenly prickling with annoyance. What on earth did Anne expect of him? Did she wish for another baby, knowing he would be away most of the year in London? Wouldn’t that be like giving birth to a stranger’s child?
No wife could want that, surely?
The baby’s cries through the wall stopped abruptly. Will stretched out his legs to the low-burning fire and closed his eyes. Susanna must have been put to the breast, he reasoned, greedy little thing that she was.
Yet even with the baby’s insistent cries, the silence of this place was a godsend after London’s restless stir and hubbub. It was good to be back home for a space, away from the noise and filth of the capital. His lodgings in London with the narrow cot and soiled rushes seemed to belong to another man, a chaos somehow unimaginable in the quiet order of his mother’s household.
It was quiet upstairs, even his younger brother Edmund asleep, a stout, restless child of four years who loved to run about, shouting in a high piping voice. Will had carried the boy up earlier, then watched him prayed over and put to bed by their mother. Next to Edmund in the bed lay Dick, ten years old now and an intelligent enough lad, for all he rarely spoke.
Outside, Henley Street had fallen silent too, only the town Watch still going about their business, sometimes calling out the hour as they passed. Will’s younger sister Joan peered in at him on her way to bed, shaking her head: ‘Don’t set fire to your boots.’ Yes, life was peaceful here with its steady routines, its lack of surprises.
His father came in from the workshop, hung up his cap and sat down beside him on the tall-backed wooden settle. ‘Well, William,’ he said heavily.
‘Father.’ Will nodded.
‘I’m glad you’re home.’ His father sat for a while in silence, staring into the fire. Then he shifted his buttocks uncomfortably on the settle, and also stretched out his feet to the warmth. ‘It’s not been easy without you this past year. Anne helps your mother about the house, but she is busy with the child, too. Your wife struggles, having another mouth to feed.’
‘I’ve started making a little money now from what I write. I’ll send more this winter, I promise.’
‘It’s not just about the money. Your brother Gilbert is a steady lad, but he’s not often here these days, and I miss having another man about the house. All that trouble we had last year.’ John Shakespeare frowned, shaking his head. ‘John Somerville marching on London to assassinate the Queen! That was a bad time for us. Twice, men came to search the house that month. They even took away our family Bible, and we’ve not had it back. We were afraid to set foot outside the house at one time, in case we were arrested.’
Will thought of his father’s books and documents, the ones he always kept locked away for fear of discovery. ‘They searched the house?’
His father smiled grimly. ‘Aye, but found nothing. We had word they might be coming and hid what was necessary under the eaves. The carved statue of St Ignatius was too large to hide, so I had to burn that, and the little wooden crucifix that your sister made for your mother.’
‘Bastards.’
‘I needed you here that day, for sure.’
‘Forgive me.’
His father shrugged. ‘You are a man now, William. You must do as you think best for your wife and child. Just as I have always done.
Though
your mother suffered terribly when we heard the full tale of the Ardens’ disgrace. You know how proud she was to be one of their blood. She cried for hours when she heard Edward Arden had been executed.’ He sighed. ‘A man of his rank and distinction, brought low by an idiot.’
‘I know, I heard it all.’
‘Did you go out to Smithfield to witness his death?’ His father spoke in a lower voice so that the women, moving quietly above as they prepared for bed, would not hear through the cracks in the floorboards. ‘They say his head was stuck on a pike on London Bridge afterwards for all to see.’
‘I did not watch Edward Arden executed, no. There was much strong feeling against the Ardens at the time, and I did not want to run the risk of being recognized in the crowd at Smithfield. But I did glimpse Master Arden’s head once or twice on the bridge.’ Will hesitated, recalling the grisly sight of his kinsman’s severed head stuck high on a pike above London Bridge, blackened lips curled back in a perpetual grin, his eyes long since plucked out by birds. ‘They leave traitors’ heads to rot there for months. Hard to miss when you live in the city.’
His father nodded. Folding his arms across his burly chest, he looked not at Will but at the floor. ‘While we are talking of troubles, I believe you had a visitor come to see you in London last year.’
Will frowned. ‘You mean Richard Arden?’
‘I do.’ His father glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, just a quick flash, then stared again at the dark knots in the floorboards as though he had never seen them before. ‘Richard came to see me on his return. He said you had agreed to write if there was any news we should know back here in Warwickshire.’
‘I did, yes. But happily there was never any news to send home.’
‘Did you make a hard push to find out the talk on the streets, or is that the truth?’ his father asked quietly.