The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (20 page)

*   *   *

Jacqueline Vautrollier.

The name first struck Will in all its head-spinning beauty when he heard her speak it. Before that, as Madame Vautrollier, she had impressed him enough: charmed too. Calling for the first time at the Vautrollier shop in Blackfriars, Will had found himself feeling awkwardly deferential. He was coming to see Richard Field, and Richard he remembered as the dutiful apprentice, and he half expected the pair of them to be consigned to the kitchen to talk quietly with small beer. He had forgotten the years – or, perhaps, had fallen back into his Stratford habit of mistaking adulthood for lack of expectancy.

Richard was no longer the apprentice. He was out of his time. He was a Member of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, and he looked it. Will surreptitiously fingered his own face after they shook hands: was he growing jowls too? Or was it just Richard’s expression that created that fullness, that repletion?

‘I should never have supposed it,’ Richard said. ‘Lord, Lord. A player, eh? Well, well. It’s a bold undertaking, Will. Let’s hope it will answer. Mind, you were always one for the play, and sometimes I suspicioned…’ An older, younger Richard flashed through, admiring. Then, jowly again: ‘A pity it’s so uncertain as a profession. A bad bout of plague, and the theatres are closed, and then what? You’ll have thought of that, naturally, with a family to feed – aye, I heard, Greenaway always brings me a budget of news from Stratford. They thrive?’

No small beer in the kitchen, then. Richard was easy, like a man in possession, rapping the knuckles of the prentice-boy dawdling at the press as he took Will through to the living-quarters behind. Will sniffed appreciatively – ink, hot paper – and tucked away, like a tattered shirt-tail, the longing to investigate those shelves of books he had seen in the shop. The Queen’s Men had paid him off, and after finding a lodging and having his ravaged shoes mended and his beard barbered, he had one shilling and sixpence left in the world.

‘Madame Vautrollier. Here’s my good friend from Stratford, William Shakespeare, lately come to London…’

Richard was very much at home in this close parlour where, though the day was mild, an oddly scented fire burned and reproduced itself in Venetian glasses, polished marquetry, a round mirror. Will began to understand, as the woman in black looked up, pen in hand, from the velvet-covered table. He made his bow, his London bow, as he already thought of it. To his surprise he saw she wore no shoes.

‘Madam, your servant.’

‘Sir. You are very welcome. Please be easy, and pardon me one minute…’

The tour of England had made him a connoisseur of accents, but he had heard nothing as fascinating as this. French, of course. The Vautrolliers were Huguenots – numerous in London now. ‘Too numerous,’ grumbled the fat cat-faced landlady of his Shoreditch lodging as she supped her almond-milk, ‘naught but foreigners coming in and taking up all the trade, and no doubt papists to boot…’

‘They’re Protestant,’ he said, ‘that’s why they seek refuge with us.’

But he had had nothing to do with them yet. Madame Vautrollier was the first, and she was all unplaceable difference, like that resinous fire: very dark, yet with something waxen about her skin; about thirty, he guessed, wide-hipped, round-armed, yet not at all matronly, her mouth a sad bow as she held up a paper to the tactful light.

‘I have written it again,’ she said to Richard, ‘to end so: “As for the debt, I have had much ado to recover it, and trust in your patience. Yours in Christ, Jacqueline Vautrollier.”’

And that was when Will first heard her pronounce it: that exquisite mixture of liquid and guttural. It came not from France, he felt, but from somewhere he had dreamed or fancied in a broken midnight.

Richard took the paper, glancing over it. Madame Vautrollier watched him, and Will watched them both.

‘Yes.’ The jowls were back. ‘Yes, this will do very well. Brief is best. If you say too much, you look unsure of your position.’

‘I know my position well, Richard.’ She sighed. ‘I am a poor widow, and so they all try to take advantage of me.’

Poor widow
– well, the widow he had guessed, and
poor
could not be taken literally, not in this room, and with those jewels in her hair.

The wry smile she turned on Will seemed to acknowledge it. ‘You must forgive us talking business, sir. It’s three months since my husband died. There is so much to do. All this now belongs to me. But I don’t belong to it. I know that is not good English, but it is good truth. Thank God for Richard.’ Returning her pen to the inkstand, she grimaced and showed her inky fingers. Richard brought ewer and finger-bowl. The spout of the ewer was shaped like a lion’s mouth. Will watched in fascination as Richard washed Madame Vautrollier’s fingers and patted them dry. Something of the humble servant, but intimate too; and something of the officious parent besides. How people lived. The infinite detail of it sometimes made him reel a little to think of, especially here in London, with another world behind each and every door. Fascination, but unease too: an intensified version of a curious feeling often lurking in Will that he shouldn’t be here. Here meaning anywhere; that he really ought to make his excuses and go, and the world was waiting, fidgeting for him to do so.

‘So, Richard, how long is it since you and Master Shakespeare met? Faith, so long? And yet you stand there as if it’s a usual day. Wine, fetch wine. Drink to such a friendship, mark it. Lord, you men.’ But the sidelong look she gave seemed to mean not
men
but
Richard.

They drank, and Madame Vautrollier asked about their schooldays together; but even to Will that felt stale and artificial stuff, here amid the invoices and money-pouches with the creak and boom of the press coming from the shop. Soon enough they were talking of business again, in tones that Will knew already, from a few weeks in London: everything depended hugely, everything stood at a moment of crisis, and there had never been such times. Meanwhile Madame Vautrollier stretched out her slender stockinged feet towards the fire, flexing them, seeming to look critically on the shape of her ankles. She caught Will looking too, and he wondered if he was supposed to: Richard, deep in the threat of Spain and the price of paper, did not seem to notice. Will wondered what one would do if the news came that the Spanish had landed and all was lost. Run indulgent riot? (Those books. Those ankles.) Or finish one’s wine and sigh at the inevitability of things? He wondered when Richard and Madame Vautrollier would marry.

‘Come any time,’ Richard said, at the street-door, when Will left. He winced at the openness of that, as if he had walked into a bad bargain, then relented and shook Will’s hand. ‘Any time. Ask young Maarten to place you a chair in the shop if I’m not about. I know you’ll love the books. I look to expand, go beyond Monsieur Vautrollier’s limits. His list was strongly devotional – oh, all honour to him for it – but I want to bring in more poetry, languages, grammars.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It’s understood, you see, though we haven’t spoken of it publicly yet. Madame Vautrollier can’t manage the business alone. Indeed she doesn’t want to. I fancy even Monsieur Vautrollier, in his last illness, had it in mind…’ Really? thought Will.
Really?
But, then, who was he to question the power of wanting to believe? It moved worlds. ‘We think to marry when six months’ mourning is up, perhaps. Though there are plenty who’ll do it after three months…’ Richard wagged his head in a generalised way, indicating a moral question he had no time to go into. ‘Madame Vautrollier is an excellent creature, Will, as you have seen. And I believe the matrimonial state is the best, the most natural for a man in this world, if he wants to apply himself. Well, you must know that.’

Later, in his cold lodging, Will sat and watched his taper dwindle and listened to the mice pattering behind the panels. He thought he was very stupid, or bad, and could not decide which was worse. When his taper was gone he thought he might go and seek Jack Towne, who had said he was lodging at the sign of the Dolphin in Bishopsgate, though when Will had gone there last, they had never heard of him, and he had wondered if he had the right Dolphin. Every street had so many of these damned signs: how would you ever know? How…?

He sat on after the taper went out. At some point, in the darkness, he put his face in his hands.

*   *   *

A starveling winter set in. If I can survive this, Will told himself, I can survive anything; but that did not mean he could survive this. Money, money. The Queen’s Men, reorganising from top to bottom, no longer needed him. Well, there were other troupes, there were the Admiral’s and Leicester’s and Lord Strange’s, and there were the theatres – look, another one was growing up on the south bank of the Thames, its timbers putting on flesh even as Will’s ribs began to protrude, Master Henslowe’s splendid new Rose. All this, and he could not get enough work. His talents, such as they were, did not stand out here. He was a goodish player with not much experience and a turn for improvising. So
nearly
handsome, as one veteran player remarked, waving him away. Persistence got him hired here and there, usually when a player was sick. For a fortnight with Leicester’s Men he stood in as book-holder, giving the prompts, a job he excelled at, for he quickly had virtually the whole play memorised and did not have to leaf and search. Then the regular got out of debtors’ prison, and that was an end. The excitement of appearing on the stage of a true theatre turned fitful at best: aye, a brave sight, an astonishing sight, when he slipped on to mouth his few dull lines, and all round and up and down except for a topmost slice of sky was people, a great roaring ring of them; yet they were as indifferent as they were many – you couldn’t thrill or tickle them as you could the willing gazers in the country inn-yard. They were impatient for novelty; and in the tiring-house he was brushed aside because the hero’s entrance was due, and the groundlings were hissing, and tomorrow was another harsh, brash new day, in which he might or might not exist.

Once he sat down and began to write a letter to Stratford for money. But if to Anne, someone would have to read it to her; and if to his father … To finish the letter, besides, would be to finish this. If he had been acting, he might have crumpled the paper with a fierce motion. But paper was expensive, and he used it for writing something else.

Forty yards down the street from Will’s lodging, a man sleeping on the bulks froze to death one night just before Christmas. The shopkeeper, opening his shutters in the morning, saw him there and gave him a shove with a stick, and he thumped to the ground like a rolled log. Someone added that his fingers snapped off like twigs, but Will doubted that part.

‘Within a week there’ll be twenty people ready to swear they saw it with their own eyes,’ as Richard Tarlton said. He was the one who helped Will avoid a similar fate. A boy came running after Will in Shoreditch that iron-hard afternoon, said that Master Tarlton wanted to speak to him, and escorted him back to a roomy house hard by St Leonard’s, where the clown was sitting in the window-seat, smoking tobacco and drinking sherris-sack. He had seen Will go by. ‘Or half of you. What happened? Are you ill?’

‘No. Just – under-employed.’

‘Jesus. Philip, run down to the kitchen, chick, have the girl bring up bread, meat, whatever’s there. Bless thee. My son,’ he said, as the boy scurried off. ‘The best thing, the only truly good thing I ever did. His mother was a trull, so I must take all the credit. Is that your best cloak?’

‘Only cloak.’

‘God save us. You have to dress well, man. It’s how they judge you first, the looks, the port. Ever thought of an earring? To be sure, it’s money. Sit, sit. Why didn’t you come to see me? Didn’t I say come and see me?’

‘Yes.’ The heat of the fire was making him feel pleasantly faint and distant: not a bad way to go, if it must be … ‘I thought it one of those things a man says…’

‘And doesn’t mean. Lord, you must have learned a sad, worldly sort of lesson from us. Mind, I’m a changing man. I’m ill.’ Tarlton said it with a certain pride, as of some subtle accomplishment. ‘That’s why I’ve retired. I drink, but I can’t eat. And sometimes I piss blood. Oh, yes, I’ve consulted a physician. He mumbles of sol and sulphur, and Saturn in the house of life, and looks forward to a good long fee – for I seem hale enough, don’t I?’ He lifted his shrewd round snub face to the window-light, eyes sliding to Will’s. Hard to say what was different, except that the skin looked curiously soft, like a bathed child’s. ‘Well, I can let you have some money. I’ve been careful. You should be too, Will, once you’re fairly set up. Put money in your purse. Not for its own sake, but to make a fence.’ A maid brought in a tray. ‘Eat, eat it all. Keep it over there, though, the smell turns me up. Within that fence, ah, you can be yourself, safe from the wolves and the creeping woods. Have you tried Sussex’s Men? They always seem to be on the tramp now, mind.’

Tarlton fed him, lent him enough money to buy a new cloak and to prevent his landlady throwing him out, and helped equip him for the London players’ world. He dropped an influential word here and there. He passed on hints about who to flatter and who to ignore, who was on his way up and who was drinking himself to death; likewise on the tortuous relationship between the owners and managers of the theatres and the leaders of the companies. You had to be part subtle and rarefied, part brutally assertive: spiderish. Little by little Will found himself learning to move on the great quivering web. He was grateful to Tarlton, who shrugged it off: as he did indeed seem to be dying, good works were in order.

‘I don’t know what it is. Who knows what goes on inside our bodies? For fifty years I’ve been a human ox. I drank and ate all I wanted and never broke a sweat; I whored and never caught a dose. Now this.’ It was not so much that he was going thin: his bones seemed to be thrusting their way to the surface of him. Looking into Tarlton’s face, Will saw his clean-picked skull at the same time. ‘I’ve left off the physic. Now I’m doctoring my soul. See, I’ve always been a tolerable good Christian, for all my little profanities. And I’ve always thought that when the time came I would properly set my wits to these great matters.’ Ensconced with high-backed chair, footstool, pillows and furs – he refused bed – Tarlton gestured to the books on the table. ‘See there. Works of devotion. Oh, I’ve tried. But you can’t stop a book and say, “Hold there, let me pursue that.” So I have divines come talk to me. Last week a good solid Queen’s Protestant who said all will be well. Yesterday a hungry Puritan who was not so sure. I think to smoke out one of those secret papists next and have him put his side of the question. You have only to send to Yorkshire or somewhere, rap on the walls of your gentleman’s manor-house – the priests are rattling about in there like old rats’ nests. What d’you think?’