Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard (20 page)

“Do it yourself, then,” I said. “I’ll be gone by week’s end and you can do them all yourself, every damnable one of them.”

Her hands did not reach for the pot. I don’t know why—perhaps she was too startled, but I let it fall anyway. Somehow it missed her feet and clattered to the flagstones. With my aunt’s perpetual scowl, it was often difficult to detect in her features any increase in the wrath that was so constant to her nature. She was not one for screaming but spoke always in an even manner. I had overstepped myself, she said.

“You will learn obedience where you are going, Aerlene. John Trethwick is not a man who will long tolerate insolence.”

“Nor will I his,” I said, “and if he lays a hand on me, I’ll take the poker to him. Then you can thank yourself for having put me in his house.”

Those words brought on the blow, which struck smartly, and when I turned my burning cheek I saw only surprise on the faces of Marion and her mother, who were standing in the kitchen doorway, no doubt drawn there by the noise. Behind them Margaret Brown looked astonished.

I went to my bedroom, and a few minutes later Aunt Eliza came up to tell me that she and Marion were going to
Woodstock to buy a few things for their journey and she had persuaded Aunt Sarah to accompany them.

“It will be good for both of you to be apart a little. She wants you to finish your work in the scullery and keep an eye on Margaret Brown, who has a collar to mend for Marion.” She offered a wan smile. “Try to look upward as your life unfolds, Aerlene. Perhaps this man Trethwick will not be a bad master for you.”

But I was almost certain she didn’t believe a word of it.

After I heard them leave, I went below stairs, as I was restless and eager to be out in the bright, windy morning. I certainly had no intention of staying indoors on such a fine day with Margaret Brown, whom I came upon in the parlour; she was crouching by the hearth while she blew on the embers of the breakfast fire. I saw two buns, one already skewered to a toasting fork, and I knew she had stolen them from the larder, but I didn’t care. Let Margaret Brown enjoy her toasted bread. Was it not little enough to ask in this life?

She was surprised to see me, saying, “Oh, Miss, I thought you had left the house too.”

“I am going out now, Margaret,” I said.

She looked up beseechingly. “I’m sorry you and your auntie had an argument, Miss. You won’t tell her about the bread, will you?”

Poor little wheedler, I thought. Aunt Sarah would find out soon enough on her own, for she knew to the last onion
what lay in her pantry. And when she found out, it would go hard for Margaret Brown.

Yet all I said was “I won’t tell her, Margaret. Toast your bread.”

I walked to the end of the village and across a field already gleaned and into the woods by the river. In a nearby glade I lay on my back to watch the tops of the trees thrashing about in the wind and beyond the trees the clouds like great towering galleons coursing along the sky. Later I skirted the Easton estate and watched the harvesters cutting the field in good order, a dozen at least moving steadily forward, the corn falling to their scythes; behind them women and boys were raking the grain into piles for the carters to draw to the barns. The boisterous air was filled with the shouting and laughter of the young gleaners, for the harvest was drawing to an end with the promise of ale and a good supper later in the week in the squire’s orchard.

A young girl lost her bonnet in the wind and everyone laughed as it rolled comically across the field. A boy tried to fetch it, yet each time he bent down, the wind snatched it away and off he would run while everyone cheered. I knew the girl; she was no older than I and not handsome, but filled out now and ready for young men. I watched the boy finally capture the bonnet and tie it beneath the girl’s chin while others laughed at his red-faced embarrassment, and I wished more than words can say that I was that girl.

Henry Easton came by on his horse and talked to the foreman; from time to time they both looked up at the thickening clouds, pointing this way and that as though gauging the wind’s intent. Then he galloped off. I think now of that day and what a fine figure Henry Easton cut on his horse, and his young wife back at this very house and carrying their first child, for Mr. Walter was born the following spring.

That August day, as I continued homeward, I smelled the smoke before ever I saw it, and when I reached the village it was billowing above Market Lane. My first thought was of the dunghill by the blacksmith’s, where sparks from his anvil often set manure ablaze, bringing his wife out with her pail of water. But that day there was far too much smoke for a midden fire, and when I turned in to our street, I saw the crowd holding their hands before their faces against the sparks flying in the hot wind and watching our house burn. Smoke gushed from under the roof as the rafters splintered and burned, taking with them my birthday shilling and my father’s playbooks. It was too late to do anything about our place, but men and boys were already climbing ladders on nearby houses with pails of water to dampen roofs.

I thought of Margaret Brown in all those flames, but then I saw her at the edge of the crowd sobbing into the apron of the blacksmith’s wife, and I was glad at least that I would not have her death on my conscience. The church
bell was ringing and I ran towards Margaret, but when she saw me she only turned her head away and clung to the blacksmith’s wife. By the grass beneath a casement window, I saw a half-eaten bun.

There came a great rumble of thunder and a woman who lived nearby fell to her knees to pray for her house. And her prayer was answered, as on the instant the rain came down hard, and most bowed their heads to give thanks. Slipping away as fast as I could, I ran to Cattle Lane and hid in an open-ended shed where sheep and cattle were quartered overnight before market day. The shed stank of old hay and cowpats and the roof leaked. But I piled straw in a corner and sat there wondering about all that had happened that day. Within a few minutes, the downpour ended and left a clammy grey stillness in the air. Now and then I saw people passing by in the laneway.

Someone must have seen me near the shed because in time Uncle Jack found me. I could see him in the light of the doorway and he called to me and I told him I was there, and he came and sat down. It was late in the afternoon and beyond the doorway the sky was darkening with more rain. In the shed I could not read my uncle’s features; he was just a figure beside me.

Finally he said, “Everyone is in church now for a service of thanksgiving. The rain saved the village, but the farmers’ fields are drenched and with the corn not fully gathered.
‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’” He laughed mirthlessly as if those familiar lines from Scripture were no more than a bad jest.

But I could be wrong; he may not have thought that at all. Perhaps that was only my thinking.

We said nothing for the longest time and I guessed he was trying to get his mind around the fact that when he left for work that morning, he had had a house and the furnishings of a lifetime. Now everything was gone, and this vast and sudden oddness in his life was difficult to grasp.

As he stared into the darkness at the other end of the shed he asked me how the fire had started and, without waiting for an answer, said, “It was the girl, wasn’t it? I have heard she was toasting bread. You should not have allowed that, Aerlene. The girl is slow.”

I began to weep and said I was sorry for using those horrible words against him in the churchyard on Sunday. But he only asked me again why I had not watched Margaret Brown more closely.

“There must have been a casement open to that wind,” he said. “It carried a spark from the hearth onto something.”

I thought of Marion’s dress on the settle, where Margaret Brown had put it to mend the collar. That was likely where the spark had landed and Margaret may not at first have noticed; she may have taken her bread to eat by the open casement, where she could enjoy the wind’s commotion on
her face. It was something I might have done myself. But as she ate, the fire was already leaping across the settle to the wall hangings. When she felt the heat behind her, she turned and, seeing the flames, threw the bread out the window and looked about for something to cover the fire. But what and how could that be done? It was too late and the heat was fierce and she was terrified, her fears multiplying by the moment, racing ahead to consequences.

Sitting on the straw in that shed, I imagined that it must have been something like that. And so she fled from the house and into the arms of the blacksmith’s wife.

“I wasn’t there, Uncle,” I said. “I went out to the Easton fields to watch the harvesters.”

He turned his face to me. “Why would you do that? Were you not told to stay with the girl?”

“I am sorry, Uncle.”

He looked away again. “That was poor judgment, Aerlene. The girl is slow.”

“I never thought her slow, Uncle,” I said, “but only shy and uncertain.”

For the first time his voice sharpened. “The girl is slow and you shouldn’t have left her alone in the house. A spark in the wind and that’s how it went.
Everything
went.”

I couldn’t bear to tell him the truth, that I had encouraged Margaret Brown to toast her bread before I left that morning, and so I asked about Aunt Sarah. He told me she
had taken to bed at a neighbour’s and the doctor had been sent for; she would stay the night, and Eliza and Marion with her. Uncle Jack said he was sleeping that night on the floor in the back of his shop and I would have to make do there as well. He would lay down some cloth for us near the workbenches. For the rest of the week he had arranged lodgings for us at the White Hart, the best hostelry in Woodstock; he wanted us all in comfort, especially his wife, whose mind, he said, was greatly unsettled. At the end of the week, Marion and her mother would leave for London, and on Saturday afternoon I would go to John Trethwick’s house on Hensington Road. He would take me there himself.

He was silent for a few moments before he said, “The girl cannot be found. At first the blacksmith’s wife took her in and said she was sitting in a corner of the kitchen with a porringer of soup, and when next she looked, the girl was gone. There were many in the house, she said, all coming and going, all eager to hear the story since she’d been the first to smell the fire. So with everyone coming and going, she didn’t notice the girl leaving in all that rain, and now no one can find her. I expect she ran off. God alone knows where.”

That night a storm swept over us, and I was glad to lie beside my uncle on the floor of his workshop under old cloth. I lay thinking of Margaret Brown out in that weather, looking for shelter, alone and fearful.

Whenever I have returned to my father’s
Lear,
I have been especially moved by the passage in which the old King, thrust out into the storm by his two evil daughters, looks about in his wretchedness and feels at last a sympathy for those in want:

And always I think of Margaret Brown, cowering in woods or wayside on the night she ran away.

At the White Hart in Woodstock, my two aunts shared one room and Marion and I another; my uncle had his own, for he wanted Aunt Sarah attended to by her sister, and he himself was often awake through the late hours working on plans for a new house. By nature my uncle was a sanguine man, and his disposition soon overcame the bitterness of his loss. By midweek, he was already conferring with masons and carpenters and bricklayers about his plans; and because he was so highly esteemed in the community, all were eager to help. Aunt Sarah, however, fell into a melancholy and stayed in her room all week.

Marion and I unwittingly declared a truce, deciding we could ignore the petty differences that so often soured our time together over the summer. Her intense self-enchantment with her constant primping at the looking-glass, her daily admiration of her dancer’s legs, my mordant and grumbling temperament, her muttering in sleep, my prodigious wind—all could be endured for a few days, because each day drew me nearer to the farmhouse on Hensington Road.

As though reading my apprehensive mind, Marion often expressed sympathy, though I soon came to regard her concern as nothing more than spite; she would warn me of things I had already considered and hearing them again only served to deject me. She would tell me, for instance, to be wary of the sister because the mad can be crafty and unpredictable; they can stick a fork in your arm on the merest whim and when you least expect it. How she knew this, I can’t say; she had little imagination. Perhaps she had overheard her mother talking about mad folk. As for John Trethwick himself, she didn’t like the look of him. Was the door to my bedroom bolted? Masters take liberties with their servants, that’s common knowledge. And in a farmhouse far from others? Who would know and who could help? She said that Margaret Brown had told her stories of girls who suffered under men like John
Trethwick. Maidenheads taken with force and many tears. It would do well for me to be watchful in the night; he might climb through a window. I would try to change the subject by asking if she ever wondered what had become of Margaret Brown, but Marion would only say that the girl had been responsible for the fire and was scarcely deserving of thought or sympathy.

When Marion wasn’t forecasting the imminent loss of my maidenhead to John Trethwick, her other bedtime narrative contrasted our different fates; by this measuring, she was looking forward to city life with its dancing lessons and parties, its Sunday service at a proper church—her father preferred the French service at St. Anthony’s on Threadneedle Street, but her mother now worshipped at St. Mary-le-Bow, where the finery of the ladies could not be surpassed and the admiring looks of merchants’ sons were most pleasing to Marion. On Thursday night of that week at the White Hart, she was going on yet again about the various pleasures awaiting her in London when my uncle knocked on the door and told me to get dressed and come to his room at once. I left Marion wide-eyed with curiosity.