“We had crossed the bridge by then and I was unsure. I had got myself into trouble with men over the years, and I wanted no more. At the same time, I needed someone, if only to talk to, so when Mary said, ‘If you’re interested in meeting this Will from Warwickshire, I’ll make him known to you on Saturday.’ I told her I would think on it.”
T
HIS MORNING
C
HARLOTTE RAISED
some questions about the composition of my work. Beyond the library window was another dark, wet day. The middle of May is usually fair, but this year the rain has been relentless. Poor Mr. Walter is not a happy man, for already the swales in some fields are under water. I myself have been feeling gloomy too, whether from the rain or from this damnable stone, I do not know. Our conversation went as follows, more or less:
“Did all these things really happen, Linny?”
“Yes, they did. More or less.”
“What do you mean by ‘more or less’?”
“Exactly what the phrase suggests.”
“Are you saying, then, that some things have been invented?”
“Things are always invented in the telling of a story, Charlotte.”
“Then this is more like a novel we are writing?”
I took note of her pronoun in the first person plural.
“By which I mean,” she continued, “that your mother and this Mary Pinder are having a conversation at a playhouse in London. But I must wonder how your mother could recall that conversation in such detail and so convey it to you, and you to me after more than seventy years. How can we account it as true?”
“Charlotte,” I said, “that is an uncommonly literal reading of events and, if I may say so, does a disservice to your intelligence. In relating anything we only
approach
the truth; we are never exactly there. Moreover, does not another truth besides the factual lurk in any account of events? A truth perhaps far more important? Given what my mother told me when I was a girl, I have imagined her in London. She told me she went one day to the Rose playhouse with Mary Pinder. They must have talked about something as Mary, disguised as a gentleman, cracked hazelnuts while they awaited the performance. Am I then to write, ‘That day they went to the playhouse,’ and leave it so? Is the reader not entitled to a little more, even if it is not
exactly
what happened? And is it not also possible that out of that imagined conversation, a truth beyond the factual might emerge? Something, for example, that casts light on what my mother and Mary Pinder were like at that time?”
I wondered if she was listening to all this, for she had the faraway gaze of the child in a classroom who is alone in a world of her own devising. But yes, Charlotte was listening, indeed she was, for at once she said, “How odd, because the other day Simon told me something very like what you say. He enjoys poetry and novels, and he was commenting on some character in a book, remarking on the soundness of this person’s views. And I said, ‘But he is only a character in a book, Simon. He doesn’t really exist, does he?’ And he said something about the character existing within the words on the page.” Charlotte laughed. “Am I not getting a little too philosophical, Linny?”
I said I hoped not, adding, “But is your Mr. Thwaites not an estimable man? Should I not therefore fetch something from the decanter and ale cask so that before dinner we might both drink to his good health?”
So we did, both of us greatly heartened and with no more questions raised.
O
N THAT
S
ATURDAY EVENING
in late September 1587, Mam went to the Dolphin as arranged and found Mary Pinder at a table by herself looking ill-tempered. The tavern was filled with song and laughter, and there was this great solemn presence by herself at a corner table. As Mam sat down, Mary was already ordering another glass of sack and said, “And how are things in the haberdashery with those Puritan relatives of yours? Still turning a profitable trade, I trust.”
Mary was in a dangerous humour that evening, Mam told me, glaring around the crowded, smoky room as though seeking out someone to quarrel with. “I didn’t know what to say to her. And where was this young man from Warwickshire who wanted to meet me?”
“Mary then turned and said, ‘I’m talking to a green girl, am I not? A simple soul from,—what is it?—Worsley?’
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Worsley under Woodstock. You know that now, Mary.’
“The barmaid brought her wine and I said I would have nothing, for to tell the truth I thought of leaving.
“Mary said, ‘I don’t imagine, however, that you’re not so simple as to know what I’m about. Sometimes I fancy you look at me with the face of a churchwarden.’
“‘I do no such thing,’ I said, and I must have shown some colour, for Mary shrugged.
“‘Well, perhaps not. But I’m sure by now you’ve guessed that I don’t sell bonnets for a living.’ She laughed. ‘Look at you now. Your face is a beetroot, girl.’
“‘It doesn’t matter, Mary,’ I said, and she gave me another glare. Mocked my voice.
“‘It
doesn’t matter, Mary.
My, aren’t you the generous little gospeller! Do you pray every Sunday morning for my salvation, Elizabeth?’
“‘You’re too quarrelsome tonight,’ I said. ‘We’ll meet another time, when you are better humoured.’ I was so confused and disappointed. I was dressed as smartly as I could be to meet this fellow she had so praised. And where was he? I was angry and said to her, ‘It’s nothing to me what you do. I haven’t the right to call anyone to account, because I have done things myself that merit little praise. I am in London on sufferance, and you are the only person who has troubled herself to
befriend me. If you have changed your mind, so be it. I’ll take my leave.’
“But Mary had grasped my wrist by then and was close to tears. ‘As God is my witness, Elizabeth, I’m sorry. I’ve had too much wine and it’s soured me. You take what you get in this trade, but I had a nasty one this afternoon. Some like it rough, and I’m all for that if they pay well. But this one. A devil out of nature and I didn’t at all take to his inclinations. Then didn’t he quibble over payment and laugh about it? Slumming in Shoreditch, he said. Out for an afternoon with his friends and he’d heard I was good sport.’ She looked away. ‘I promised him a clout if he didn’t pay as we agreed and he said I could swing for my threat. I had to shake the coins from his breeches and his friends were laughing at him while he cursed me. I may not have seen the last of that arsewipe.’
“Our faces were close while she confided this to me and therefore we didn’t notice the figure above us until he said, ‘I fear I am late and I offer apologies to you both.’
“We looked up and there was your father standing above us looking grave and polite.
“I wondered if he’d overheard Mary’s last sentence, but if so he didn’t let on.
“Mary brightened at the sight of him. ‘Ah, Will from Warwickshire. I’d almost forgotten about you, but your arrival is timely, as I am to leave. But first let me introduce
you to our young widow from Oxfordshire, Elizabeth Ward. And this young man, Elizabeth, is Will Shakespeare, late of Stratford, now resident in Shoreditch and a player with the Queen’s company.’
“‘Apprentice player,’ he corrected.
“‘Gainfully employed, at any rate,’ said Mary, standing and towering over him. ‘I will pay my reckoning and be off now. And you two can become acquainted. I wish you both well.’ Then she was gone, shouldering her way through others near the door.”
As I listened, I was trying to summon up the scene in my mind’s eye: Mam as a young woman sitting in that crowded inn with the man who would be my father amid the tobacco smoke and laughter and loud talk. I remember asking Mam endless questions: How did he seem at first? Was he handsome? What height and form? How did he talk? He must have had a good wit, for look at all the plays he composed. Did she see that gift in him then?
Poor Mam. Putting up with all my chattering as she grew more haggard each day from the sickness that was consuming her. My uncle had called in a doctor, a churlish fellow from Woodstock who examined her and said the sickness was caused from an impostume in her parts. Mam laughed when she told me this. “I may tell you, Aerlene, that he had his hand in there long enough.” Mam was duly bled, much good that did her, for already she was grey as
wood ash. Only my reading from the
Dream
each night could soothe her into sleep.
But in the afternoons for an hour or two, she was yet strong enough to tell me what happened to her in London. As for her first meeting with my father, she could only laugh at all my sifting.
“Goodness, Aerlene,” she said, “I can no longer remember what we talked about that first meeting. Very likely where we came from, as we both loved the countryside. And since you asked about his looks, I can say he was of moderate height. I wouldn’t have called him handsome, but he had a pleasing aspect, was of good proportion, his brow impressive.”
“Like my own,” I said.
She smiled. “Yes, yes, very like your own, I suppose. He had good legs, your father. I had noticed them before he sat down. And later, when we knew each other, I was bold enough to compliment him, and he was pleased because there was vanity in him. Not huge conceit like many others, but he liked to think well of himself. He told me he had done a great deal of dancing as part of his trade, and he was well practised in the galliard and the pavan. He
was
graceful on his feet, and once danced for me in his room to prove his worth.”
She thought further on it and said, “We must have talked that first time about how we came to London, because that’s what you did if you were newcomers to the
city. I told him about Worsley, and he talked about his childhood in Stratford and how he liked to get out into the countryside. He said he had been with the company since early summer, when they had passed through his town and he heard they were short a man, killed, he said, in a brawl. The troupe then spent the summer touring in the south. Will had seen Canterbury Cathedral and Hythe and Rochester, and the cliffs of Dover, which had amazed him. He told me about the samphire gatherers perched on the cliffside high above the sea, and wondered at the time how a man or woman could work at such a dreadful trade. So he had been in London only since July’s ending. He liked the city well enough, though he found it noisome and clamorous and often longed for the quiet of the country. We soon learned that we both loved walking in the woods and meadows, and I remember how he spoke knowingly of herbs and flowers and all manner of plant life: of wild thyme and cowslips and musk roses and woodbine. He knew such things and I thought it strange knowledge in a young man who was not a farmer’s son, for he’d told me that his father was a glover. But his feelings for nature were delicate and I found that attractive in him. Aerlene, you remember Oberon’s speech about the riverbank in the
Dream,
the one that begins,
I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, / Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows?”
“Of course I know it,” I said. “Haven’t I read it to you enough times?”
Mam was scarcely listening, so rapt was she now in her memories. “I love that speech,” she said. “And it’s true, I have seen the woodland violets nodding their little heads in an April breeze. And sometimes when I am trying to find sleep in the middle of the night, I tell myself that I once knew the man who wrote those words and I had his child. It is still a great wonder to me by times.”
“And to me as well, Mam,” I said.
“I may say that I remember your father’s hands from that first meeting,” she continued. “He had fine hands, not large but shapely, though it surprised me to see that the palms were as callused as a wagoner’s. Some weeks later I asked if I might read his hand, which made him laugh and he asked me did I really believe in such things and called me his pretty witch. I asked him then how he came by such hard hands, and he said it was from practice with the foils. ‘All players must master fencing,’ he said.
“That first night he saw me back to Threadneedle Street. I remember that. We walked along the dark streets and he told me about his father and mother. He expressed a great affection for his mother and called her an excellent, quiet woman of deep faith. And his father, he said, was a good man who had suffered some misfortunes in business, but I can’t recall him saying much more about him at that time.
Your father seemed a bit lonely and homesick, and I believe he could see that I was not like most women who hung by the players in those taverns in Shoreditch. Your father, Aerlene, was not one for trugging-houses and debauchery. He was a quiet and thoughtful young man who wanted to better himself. I noticed how favourably he looked upon the address and shop of the Boyers.”
“So,” I said, “he liked you well enough at your first meeting, Mam?”
“Oh, he liked me well enough,” she laughed. “He may have talked of country fairs and nodding violets, but he could scarcely take his eyes off my bosom. We agreed to meet the next morning after service, for Sundays were the only days free to him. They worked apprentices hard in those playhouses. Sometimes we met on a Saturday evening at a tavern, where he would sit a full two hours over a tankard of ale, for he can’t have had much money then. I understood that and I always paid for my own wine and he didn’t resist.
“In the autumn there was great demand for Boyer’s wares with masques at court and dances in guildhalls and the lawyers’ inns. Philip and Eliza were often so occupied at week’s end with their money counting and ledgers that my free time was not as severely governed.
“A walk costs nothing but shoe leather and soon your father and I were discovering the city together on Sunday
mornings with all those bells ringing around us. Sometimes we almost had to shout at each other and then we’d laugh. What curiosity he had! I see that in you too, Aerlene. Always asking questions about this and that, puzzling over how things came to be. Casting looks at passersby and imagining how their lives were lived. He took so much into himself, your father, but he was good company for all that, even if he sometimes wore me thin with his questions and observations. We might be walking eastward by the Tower with him surmising who might lie within and what privations and what tortures awaited him, what thoughts might course through a man’s restless mind the night before the scaffold or the block. Or we might walk westward to gape at the great houses near Whitehall. And then he might be wondering what they were eating for dinner that day. Or how many servants it took to dress the lady of the house.