I was standing by the window looking out at the elms, presenting themselves to me now only as two rows of shimmering greenery in the August sunlight, when Charlotte said, “Linny, I want you to promise not to be angry if I tell you something.”
So, I thought, it is not about the wedding after all. I told her, however, that I would promise nothing of the sort. “You are tied to the post, Charlotte, and must face matters.”
“Very well,” she said. “Last evening on our walk, Simon told me a very interesting story.”
“Oh yes? And what was this story, Charlotte?”
“Well,” she began, as if relating tea-party gossip, “it seems that in certain circles in Oxford, where Simon has many cultivated friends, it is well known that a certain gentleman, Sir William Davenant, a playwright and poet, has long claimed to be the son of William Shakespeare. It seems that Shakespeare knew the Davenants in London, and when they moved to Oxford, he used to visit them. John Davenant bought a wine tavern in Oxford and Shakespeare used to break his journey to Stratford by stopping there. The story goes that he was enamoured of Davenant’s wife, Jane, who apparently was very beautiful and witty, and Shakespeare got a child upon her, or so this man claims. Davenant has a considerable reputation in London. His sympathies with the King in the war got him into trouble with Parliament and he spent some time in France. But
he is now back in London and writing plays. Is that not remarkable?”
I said it might be no more remarkable than two plus two equals four if you consider that actors or playwrights like my father who achieve success tend to attract female admirers, and may as a consequence spread their seed throughout the land. A glib response, I admit, and I don’t really think I believed that of my own father. But really—how little I knew about him. It could have been so with this Davenant woman.
“And how, Charlotte,” I continued, “did all this crop up in your conversation with Mr. Thwaites? Could it possibly have appeared because despite your solemn promise to me, you have told Mr. Thwaites the whole story of my mother, my father and my illegitimacy?”
I knew from the way she was looking down at her hands that she was distressed. Why do I take such delight in catching her out? It is a moral failing that I seem unable to conquer. Yet she was quick off the mark, eager to confess.
“Linny, it has been so hard to take down your words and keep all this inside me. Simon has told me much about himself these past few months. His childhood illnesses and pranks. How as a young man he was very nearly expelled from St. John’s. How he turned down important livings and chose instead a country parish like Worsley. How he wanted so badly to be a poet in his youth. He still
writes poetry, though he says none of it is good enough to show anyone. He wants to know about me too. But what is there to tell? I lead such a dull life. More than once he has asked me how I spend my days. Do I read? And if so, what do I read? Surely I don’t just embroider and gossip like so many ladies in the parish? I know you think I am a dunderhead, Linny, but I can’t bear the thought of Simon thinking me one too. I so want his good opinion of me and I am trying to improve my mind with reading. So when I told him that I was writing down your memoirs because your eyesight was failing, he told me it was a virtuous act and one to be admired. But I felt I was not doing justice to our mornings together, Linny. I wanted Simon to know how important your story is. That it is not just the account of a lifetime as nursemaid and housekeeper in a country home, filled with tales of children and harvest suppers. You are the daughter of the greatest poet our country has produced. Simon has read all his plays, and when he was a student he even saw two or three performances and was reported to the authorities by Puritan enemies. He said he saw
Hamlet
only weeks before Parliament closed down the theatres. So when he told me about this man Davenant, and of how he boasts of being Shakespeare’s son, I could no longer contain myself. I said to him, ‘Simon, this man Davenant’s story is nothing to what I am taking down each morning. I am recording the words of a woman whose
mother was Shakespeare’s mistress and had a child by him. And that child is now a woman who has lived in this parish for seventy years and no one has known.’”
Charlotte stopped. Even with my poor eyesight, I could see how flushed she was with the telling of all this. And I felt … Well, how did I feel? All my life I have been terrified of ridicule. Who would possibly believe such a tale? I seem to have convinced Charlotte—but others less credulous? She had turned in her chair and was again looking down at her hands like a child who has misbehaved. I felt a fluttering in my chest. Was I unwell, I wondered, or merely confused—angered by her broken promise, yet curiously thrilled that an educated man like Simon Thwaites might know the true condition of my mother’s history and mine? And if it came to that, had Charlotte really meant any harm by revealing the truth? I suppose she wanted to impress the man she loves, and what was so terrible about that? It was perfectly understandable. But old termagant that I am, I said nothing except that I had to lie down.
The rest of the day in bed, then, with the curtains drawn. Below me the sounds of others moving about. Voices drifting up from the partly opened windows behind the curtains, the gardener Johnson talking to someone. Then a knocking on the door and Emily peering in with a smile. “Is there anything I can get you, Miss?” What a big, healthy-looking girl she is! “Mrs. Sproule would like to know if there
is anything she can prepare for you. Is it your stomach or the other end, Miss Ward? She can put together some rhubarb and tartar.”
“No, thank you” came the faint reply from the old child in the bed. And yet I did feel the onset of something. Some mild agitation about the heart, which perhaps foretells a weakening.
After Emily left I thought of how I might have told Charlotte that all was forgiven. Was that so difficult? My damnable pride. What difference did it make if Simon Thwaites knew my story? Perhaps he didn’t believe it anyway and was only humouring Charlotte. I ought to have forgiven her.
Then in the late afternoon she came to see me, bearing a tray, which she set upon the table next to my bed. Mrs. Sproule had prepared some chicken broth and cold pork and two tarts made with pippins from the orchard, the first of the season. The old trout is usually frugal with her confections, so two apple tarts was a pleasing surprise. Charlotte still looked worried and took my hand. I was drawn to the strength of her grip on my old veined claw. She was eager to please me. Did I want the doctor? Mr. Walter wanted to send for him. I said I wanted no doctor. Emily too was worried, Charlotte said, and Mrs. Sproule. An air of consternation in the house. I revelled in it all. Told Charlotte I wasn’t hungry, though truly I could have eaten the cloth off the tray.
“Linny, I’m sorry I upset you,” she said. “After my promise I shouldn’t have told Simon.”
I then surprised both of us by asking, “But does Mr. Thwaites believe it? Does he not think it passing strange that a servant in Easton House is the daughter of a great poet? I will not be made a laughing-stock, Charlotte. I would rather go out in the rain and die by a hedgerow than be laughed at.” That was too melodramatic even for Charlotte and she laughed, and so did I.
“Please don’t be silly,” she said. “Let’s have no talk of lying out by hedgerows in the rain. When I told Simon about your mother and father, he said nothing at first, but he had his thoughtful look about him. It’s the look I see on his face when he is thinking of a homily or what he might say on a visit to someone who is ill. Then he said, ‘It is remarkable, but why should it not be true? You have told me how Miss Ward’s mother met the poet in London all those years ago. It’s certainly possible. And why should it not be so? Why do people make up things about themselves? Is it not usually to gain admiration from others? To be noticed? To be seen as more important than they really are? But as you suggested, Miss Ward wants no attention whatsoever—indeed wants none of this known. Imagine, if this were known, how she would be troubled by visitors eager to know more of her father. Many would welcome such attention, but she wants none of it. Take this man Davenant; he bruits it about
London that Shakespeare was his father, not minding in the least the damage to his poor dead mother’s reputation. Now she is seen as a woman who had a child by a family friend under the very roof of the house in which her husband slept. And her son is boasting of it. And why? Audacity? To boast of carrying the poet’s blood? A kind of fame, I suppose, but at what cost? Yet Miss Ward wants nothing more than that the truth of her story be quietly recorded before she passes beyond all earthly vexations. She doesn’t care a pin for fame, and I for one find that admirable.’”
Charlotte’s account of Mr. Thwaites’s remarks put me into a pleasing fluster. “You’re making it up, Charlotte,” I said. “You couldn’t remember all that word for word.”
She laughed. “I have given you the gist of Simon’s remarks. Whether exactly word for word doesn’t necessarily pertain to the truth. Is that not what you once told me, Linny?”
So I had and I was pleased that Charlotte remembered. “Very well,” I said, “but can I have faith in Mr. Thwaites’s discretion?”
“Absolutely,” said Charlotte. “I have not spent these last few months in his company without realizing how trustworthy he is. And he is so delighted with your story. He can’t wait to hear how you get to London to meet your father, and your impressions of him.”
“So you have been reading my words to him?”
“Yes. For the past fortnight or so. And he wants to read it himself one day.”
“He finds it worthwhile?”
“Yes.”
“Believable?”
“Absolutely.”
How vanity sweeps away all before it! I now had another reader, an educated man who believed my words. I held out my arms to Charlotte; when all is said and done, she is the only person in the world who truly loves me.
Before leaving she asked whether I wanted the tray removed, but I said I might try a little of Mrs. Sproule’s broth. As it happened, I ate everything.
When Emily came in to take the tray, she was carrying a tankard of ale.
“Mrs. Sproule thought a drop might furnish you with cheer, Miss.”
“And so it might,” I said. “And I thank you for it, Emily.”
Then I said her hair looked pretty in the evening light, though really I could make little of her features.
“Thank you, Miss Ward,” she said. “And sleep well tonight.”
And so I shall, if the stone will grant me peace for a few hours.
T
HE LAST
S
UNDAY OF
August in the year 1602, a sun-filled day with a light wind, a day in which farmers sniff and scan the clear blue sky in hopes that the fair weather holds. I am fourteen years and twenty-three days old and I am standing under the branches of the two-hundred-year-old beech tree in St. Cuthbert’s churchyard, watching Aunt Sarah and John Trethwick stroll among the gravestones as they talk, my aunt in a violet taffeta dress and bonnet, John Trethwick in his Sunday suit and dark hat, his clasped hands behind him, leaning inward to my aunt as he listens. They are talking about me, conducting business over the bones of the dead.
Is that the best you can do on wages? What day shall she have free, Wednesday or Sunday? Will you provide her clothes?
If this weather lasts, the corn will be gathered by week’s end and John Trethwick can pay off his day labour and set aside the pennies for the maidservant, whose primary task
will be the care of his older sister, who is now waiting for him to take her home; she is sitting on the grass by the iron railing that encloses the Easton family plots. I am watching her too as she plucks the petals from the Michaelmas daisies she has taken from a new grave.
I have just quarrelled with Uncle Jack, if
quarrel
is the word, for he seldom disputes, and that of course is what angered me. As we left the church, he drew me apart and we walked to this beech tree, where he said there was nothing he could do.
“I am sorry, Aerlene, but your aunt’s mind is firm. She will have you in John Trethwick’s house by the end of the coming week.”
That is when I reminded him that we were only footsteps from my mother’s grave, yet he was renouncing his vow to her to be my guardian. I told him he was a weakling and a coward, terrible words to call the man who had protected me all those years, but he now seemed worn down and unable to resist his wife’s bidding. He left me and walked home alone while I stared across to the church door where Aunt Eliza and Marion and a few others were still gathered around the rector.
I found it bitterly amusing how over the weeks Obadiah Littlejohn had changed his tune about finery in church; after seeing Eliza and her daughter that first Sunday in June, he had the following week preached a sermon on the
vanity of dress. At that time, Eliza and Marion had not noticed that the homily was directed at them, and their London fashion. Over the weeks, however, Aunt Eliza had put Littlejohn into a swoon, and now he fawned over her. And on this August morning, both Aunt Eliza and Marion are at their best because they are nearly done with their long country holiday and are returning to London in a few days. By the churchyard gate Margaret Brown was waiting for them and for the first time she too looked happy.
Watching them all, I was angry and envious. I would soon be living with the mad creature who was plucking at the daisy petals and her skinflint brother with his shifty eyes and manner. My dream of running away was only that, a dream. I had my birthday shilling and nothing besides, and I felt out of touch with everything and everyone. I dreaded the week ahead.
That week began badly too, with a slap to my face delivered by Aunt Sarah. I will try to reconstruct this as best I can. I know we were both in a foul temper that Monday morning, my aunt for reasons of her own and me because the last week had now started and it would end with me in the Trethwick farmhouse. Over that summer my aunt had assigned various household tasks to prepare me for service, and that particular morning I was cleaning pots in the scullery. At one point my aunt came in from the kitchen and made some trivial criticism, a remark that another day I
might have received with a shrug and a wry face behind her back. Instead I thrust the pot directly at her stomach.