He’d never mentioned, never even hinted at that dreadful day in our past before. I prayed he hadn’t hexed this precious day by so much as alluding to it.
“I’ve a good nerve to stop by the Elephant Inn and buy us some ale to stoke our courage,” Will muttered as we walked around to the back door. Our feet crunched hazelnut shells that patrons dropped everywhere about the theatres.
“I’m not afraid,” I said. “I’m going in, and I think you’d best come along.”
He kissed me, a quick peck, and opened the door for me. The backstage lay before us, half practice hall, half tiring room with costumes on racks, and shoes, hats and armor on shelves. We wended our way past painted wooden flats that conveyed palaces or forests. It was quite dim here behind the curtain, though we peeked through to the audience area.
“Henslowe had the floor banked, so the groundlings can see better,” he whispered, pointing. “If I had this theatre, I’d have those wooden pillars painted to look like marble. His small privy chamber is back here.” He let the curtain fall closed, returning us to the dimmer light.
Will’s expression and whispers had become almost reverent, though I felt his sudden shyness and solemnity would not serve us well with the likes of Philip Henslowe. I could hear his distinctive, high-pitched voice even from here as he spoke with a man who used lower, resonant tones. We halted just outside his withdrawing chamber; the door was ajar. We sat on what must pass for the side of a sailing bark onstage and, shoulders pressed together, waited.
“Honored, honored, my lord, to serve you,” Henslowe was saying in an unctuous, boot-licking voice. Gone was the stern, tutorial tone with which he’d lectured me. “I’ll find you the very play, yes, indeed. Sir Walter Raleigh too, you say, and to be done after dark at his Durham house on the Strand a fortnight hence.”
“Something for the ladies too,” the other man put in. I thought I recognized the voice but could not place it. “We don’t oft invite them to our School of Night, where the talk is all of manly pursuits such as science, reason and exploration, but they need a sop now and then.”
“ ’Tis said the queen’s astrologer, Dr. John Dee, participates in Sir Walter Raleigh’s privy company of friends too,” Henslowe put in.
“
Who
says?” the man inquired sharply, and then I thought I knew who he was. “Some clay brains say he practices black magic too, but they are much mistaken!”
“A man I know from Mortlake mentioned it, that is all,” Henslowe stammered. “My source was merely an actor, so no one of consequence. But yes, I shall have the very play and the players for you too on that day, indeed I will, my lord.”
I was sure now that Henslowe’s guest was Lord Strange, the companion of the young Earl of Southampton, both of whom I’d conversed with briefly at Tarlton’s funeral. I’d learned more about Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, since then. His title was actually the Earl of Derby, and he had much in common with his young friend Southampton. Like the earl, he came from a powerful Catholic family. He also loved plays and players; he delighted to be their patron. But I’d heard too he was associated with the so-called School of Night, a group of brilliant men who met to speak of learned and even arcane subjects, so apparently that was the group of men he’d been alluding to.
As Henslowe said, “I bid you good day, my lord,” and we heard a chair scrape back, I bent close to Will’s ear and whispered to him.
“We’ll sell the comedy as the perfect play for those lords and their ladies—without letting on we’ve overheard them. Come on.” I pulled him farther away from Henslowe’s door.
We hid behind the curtain as the two men came out. Yes, Lord Strange, indeed. Will put his mouth to my ear this time. “That’s Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, Earl of Derby, a rich theatre patron, very learned and artistic. He’s one the Burbages mentioned might become our next sponsor.”
We gave Henslowe but a moment back in his chamber after he showed Lord Strange out, then headed that way. But evidently, Lord Strange had come back in, somehow without throwing light into the dim area, for he spoke behind us and we both startled.
“My lady of the mask and fan?” We both turned to face him. “Or not?” he added with an arch look at Will.
“How lovely to see you again, Lord Strange,” I managed to get out. I wasn’t certain whether I should curtsy or not, but I did and Will bowed.
“I see you did not take my advice about Master Henslowe, though.”
“But you too are here, my lord, and if you have some business with him, I can think of no greater recommendation. My lord, may I present to you a playwright and friend, William Shakespeare.”
“But—an unfamiliar name.”
Before Will could answer, I put in, “But your name is not unfamiliar to Will, my lord. His admiration of you from afar has been so great that he named the hero of his play—King Ferdinand of Navarre, with but a slight change in the spelling of it—in your honor, a worthy man, indirectly inspired by you and your learning—isn’t that so, Will?”
“It is indeed,” he declared, managing to cover up his surprise at my ploy. “You see, my lord, I’m an actor with the Burbages, formerly the Queen’s Men, but I’ve written new plays for Master Henslowe.” Will took the manuscript of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
from me. “This one’s a comedy, one with much variety in it—poetry, sonnets and songs. The main characters are a group of men who would form an academy of learning but realize they cannot do so without the support of their ladyloves.”
“Henslowe!” Lord Strange shouted, though I noted Henslowe already stood in the doorway. “Take a look at this play and see if it’s of any account—if it would suit. I’d favor having one not performed elsewhere first. I just came back in because I failed to tell you that there is to be no blood spilt in whatever you come up with for my use on that night.”
I was about to blurt there was not one drop in Will’s comedy, but Henslowe already looked angry. Still he held his tongue until he had escorted Lord Strange out for a second time and, frowning, returned to face us.
“This had better be good,” Henslowe said, propping both hands on his padded trunk hose. “But then, if it’s only half as clever as the way you’ve set me up here, I’ll not only forgive you for coming a day late, but buy it for the playhouses too. Give it here then, give it here.”
“And a second one,” Will said, “but it’s bold and bloody.”
“Come back on the morrow, and by then, I’ll have had a look. ’S teeth, man, after the playacting you both put on for Lord Strange just now, I hope to hell you can write too.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I saw our love as dangerous,
though not forbidden. I came to think of the Stratford Anne as Will’s other wife, for I had married him first. Will and I were legally registered to wed in our shire. We had been united in a church by a holy man we both trusted and honored, one Will’s father honored too. Granted, Will and I both should have had parental consent, but we were convinced that without his seduction by Anne Hathaway and the connivance and coercion of her neighbors, we would have won over both his father and mine. As for Will’s children, somehow that seemed a separate thing: he loved them, and I envied him that love.
Teeming, busy London seemed so far from little Stratford that it was easy to live in a world of our own. Discovery or shame seemed as distant as the Avon. Our love was heedless and headstrong, heightened by the aphrodisiac of the sales of Will’s first two plays. We were together! Success was on the horizon!
Our problem was, however, that we could not be seen together by the world—even our London world—as lovers or certainly not as spouses, or it would mean my humiliation and his ruination. Our time alone as well as places for trysts were scarce. Will refused to let me come to his tiny room on Holywell in Shoreditch. The name Holywell invoked a pretty, peaceful location, but it was a raucous place packed with people, many in the theatre trade, including most of his fellow actors. However wicked people might be themselves, reputations mattered, especially if Will was to prosper and find a patron from the nobility.
Honoring our friends the Davenants as we did, neither could we bring ourselves to steal away to my chamber. I had a privy staircase, but my room was accessible from their lower floors and their bedchamber lay directly under mine. Rather, when Will was not acting or writing and the weather was warm enough, we took walks into the countryside, though the autumn days were turning crisp and cold. We lay together as we had once under Stratford’s open sky, only now to the north of the great city beyond Moor Fields where laundresses dried their linens and men practiced shooting at the butts.
I would say more, but I believe such ecstatic memories are privy and sacred. I hope you have your own youthful obsessions and passions and that you think of them, and then you will know how we loved. Why I did not catch a child from him, I know not, but I always thought that for the best. Why, I might have had to marry the wine merchant Nicholas Clere, who still called on me when he visited the Davenants. But I must share one time, a special memory.
Will and I were walking through Blackfriars after seeing our old friend Dick Field in the mid-autumn of the year Will sold his first plays to Henslowe, the very month, I believe that
Love’s Labour’s Lost
was performed for the gentlemen and their ladies of Lord Strange’s so-called School of Night.
Fortune had favored Dick, for his master had died and he had inherited his widow and the print shop near St. Paul’s. He informed us he was nevermore to be called just plain Dick, but Richard. The newlywed Fields lived on the fringes of Blackfriars, the fine liberty not far from Lilypot Lane where I resided.
We had called on Richard at his house, and Will had a book under his arm his friend had given him, Holinshed’s
Chronicles,
I think, for he was working hard on his history plays then. He had left Richard money to take home to the Shakespeares. Will usually sent it with the Greenaway carriers—never with my men—but the Fields were going for a visit and would deliver it, with, of course, news only of Will and not of the both of us.
As we left the print shop and strolled away from the river, we saw the door and windows to the beautiful Blackfriars eastern gatehouse stood ajar. Though its stalwart sides were attached to tall brick walls that surrounded mansions and gardens within, the structure nevertheless seemed to stand proudly on its own. The slate-roofed building was three stories tall, of muted red brick with black diamond designs that echoed the diamond panes of the leaded windows. It must have fine views of London in each direction, we thought, including the privy gardens of some of the noble mansions nearby. I sighed each time I beheld the place.
“Hello!” Will called in the open door as we stood at the bottom of the stairs. “Just passing by! May we come up and see the view?”
Only the sharp scent of fresh whitewash drifted to us. Because the gatehouse was an edifice with a passageway through the center of the ground floor, the two stories of narrow chambers were upstairs. Holding hands, we tiptoed up a few steps.
“Perhaps they’ve left it to air out,” I whispered. Whether Will was shouting or I was whispering, our voices echoed in the stairwell, which looked newly whitewashed but, with the breeze sucked in and up, seemed dry.
We peeked in the two rooms on the first landing: not one stick of furniture on the polished oak floors and the sunlight streaming in danced along the snow-white walls, dazzling our eyes.
“Does no one live here?” I wondered aloud. “Or perhaps the tenants are about to change.”
“Next time ’tis offered, I’ll buy it for you,” Will promised, though he had but three pounds to his name after sending money back to Stratford.
“Says you, the dreamer, my marvelous maker of fine fictions.”
Still holding hands, we tiptoed from room to room as if we were thieves entering while the residents were abed. We ventured up to the next floor, which boasted an even finer view of rooftops, river and sky. This high above the streets, the air blowing in smelled heavenly as it ruffled our hair and buffeted my skirts.
“Of course, when we live here,” I said, picking up on his promise, “this shall be our bedchamber, and we shall use the next room for your writing. We shall awake each day in a huge bed here, pull the bed curtains back and—”
“Shh!” he said and turned me to him, putting a finger over my lips.
“You hear someone coming?”
“I don’t—that’s the point. When someone does return, we’ll hear their footfalls or voices before they get to us—to give us time.”
Humming, we danced about the room in a fast lavolta, then a slow pavane. Smothering our laughter and love words with kisses, we joined our bodies and hearts standing against the wall between the windows with the panorama of London below and beyond. If the queen herself had come in with a parade of courtiers to see my bodice down and my skirts up to my waist and Will all unlaced, we would not have known nor cared. Not the view, not the city, not the vast world, nothing else existed but we two.
And the highest compliment to me: when we were finished with our loving, Will was so sublimely moved that he forgot his new book and had to run back a block to retrieve it. It was then I knew the power I had over not only the body of the man but his brain too.
I continued
to live in the bosom of the Davenant family, but they presented problems for me. The more I cuddled my little godchild Kate, the more I felt guilty about Will’s children back in Stratford without their father. The conception of his firstborn, Susannah, had nigh on ruined my life, but I could not blame her and wished her well. And his twins—I know he missed them. It was then I hit upon the idea of commissioning a portrait of Will for him to send home to them, like the one Kit Marlowe had hanging in his bedchamber—well, perhaps one with not so cocky a gaze and imperious a posture.