The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (3 page)

Now summer, and the players would soon be here. Mud from the storm splashed up to his calves but the sky was all high blue contrition, temper-fit gone; the meadows brimmed with light and the trees were heavy, nodding drunken with leaf, and everything he saw and smelt said the players, time for the players to rattle their tinker’s cart of seduction over Stratford Bridge. Time to wake.

But his father wanted that promise from him, and a promise of deeds not just words. And the handiwork of stitching his two selves together was getting beyond his dexterity. He could feel tugging and tearing.

He passed Two Elms, the mare splashing disdainfully between muckhill floaters, and struck the Shottery road.

This is Will, as you might see him if you were one of Stratford’s two thousand citizens, chandler or seamstress, glancing from panel-dark interior through grid of window to bright summer outside. Master Shakespeare’s eldest, mounted – the horse a poor nag but lucky to keep it after those money troubles. William, Will to most, brother of Gilbert, Joan, Richard and Edmund; eighteen years old, bony, back as long as a stoat’s. Some of his father’s good looks, but not so square and strong: a longish face, clear-cut nose, and chin that makes the lips look a little indrawn. A good manner – indeed a gracious youth, as all will agree: it is not only the Puritans in the town, like Master Field, who lament the ways of the swearing, boozing, disrespectful young. The odd lapse, but a credit to his father, all in all; hasn’t bound himself prentice to him, but works hard in the trade. No
trouble
about him.

And then, probably, you look away.

*   *   *

‘What? Oh, that. You’re prompt.’ Master Hathaway gave Will a distracted attention. In the big kitchen of Hewlands Farm it was like a fair-day: a dozen people there, or going in and out. Big voices. Master Hathaway big too, fair, hair growing out of his ears as if he were stuffed with straw. A big girl was plucking at his sleeve. ‘
What,
Margaret? I’ve things to see to—’

‘John took the pie. The last piece—’

‘Damn you, boy, I’ve told you about stealing food. You want, you ask.’ With easy violence, in passing, Master Hathaway slapped the ducking head of a boy who began an outrageous howling, and turned to two farmhands. ‘Now
where
did the rain come in? And
how
many sacks spoiled? Well, show me, show me, then. God knows why it needed two of you to come tell me.’ He thrust the men towards the door with a big hand at each back, so they tittuped like dancers, then aimed a kick at a hen that had slipped in to peck at breakfast crumbs. There was something dispassionate about all this. The smooth fair face did not suggest a man of general ill-temper. Will caught a whiff of his sour breath and saw a night drinker for whom morning was a horrible rebirth. ‘Bella, when you find that wench, will you ask her why she has not been up to Stepmother’s room when the poor woman has been calling out this past hour?’ He turned back to Will in sudden frowning memory. ‘Sir, your pardon. A man would have to be twenty men … Anne! Anne will show you the carcass, by your leave. The notion was hers.’

A woman came away from the fireplace. Will had been here before, a few years ago with his father, buying a hide, in the old farmer’s time. He knew young Master Hathaway to nod to at market. But the womenfolk of the large household he could not identify, and this one he had not noticed at all; perhaps because she was the only stillness there.

Will bowed. ‘Mistress Hathaway.’

‘I am no mistress,’ she said.

He hesitated on the edge of apology. But she had spoken informatively, with a touch of a smile, as if correcting a child’s mistake. She turned and led him to the buttery.

While he examined the carcass she stood at a distance, looking out. He sensed a coldness about her, though not turned on him, not quite. While even the stone buttery was summer-warm, she seemed to inhabit winter, as if her gaze fell on frozen snow and a sky that would not lighten for long months.

‘The cow lived?’ he asked, replacing the sacking. He had seen animals dead, skinned, butchered since he was small: feeling was not absent, but it was mild.

‘Yes. That’s all we have for you.’ She made him seem greedy for more. ‘The storm last night maddened her and she dropped early. Did you hear the storm?’

‘I watched it all.’

She turned then, with a dubious look, as if he were hiding something behind his back. Her beauty came to him piecemeal. He was too shy to dwell on it, for she was a woman, and beyond him. With girls you exchanged frank rolling eyes, all the while aware that, like you, they knew nothing. With her he stood at the foot of a vast flight of steps. But his mind dared to put some elements of her by: the shape of that face, its strength one with its fineness and fragility; the translucent soft skin at the nape of her neck, and the way all the skin he could see was like that.

‘What will you give for the – for the calf?’

I am no mistress.
But empowered to make the bargain, it seemed. He said, ‘Ninepence.’

She inclined her head and, when he had put the money into her hand, left him. Her tread was quite silent. Passing through the place where she had stood he found faintly a scented stir: the air felt impressed, like a pillow from which a head has lately risen.

In the yard he fastened the bundle to the mare’s saddle. The mare, sensing something about her burden, twitched and tugged as he led her out through the gate.

Halfway down the farm track he heard a cry.

‘Wait. Please.’ She was flushed from running: from something else. Will found his hand seized, the coins pressed hard into it. ‘Here. I’ve changed my mind. Don’t take it.’

For a moment he thought this some odd refinement of haggling. ‘Truly, you’ll get no better price, if—’

‘I don’t care for that.’ She put up a trembling hand to brush back loose gold strands from her temples. ‘It’s the fitness of it, and somehow this – this is not fit. When my brother last killed the pig I caught the blood in a pail. I cured the meat and dressed it and I ate of it. It was in the course of things. But that calf – it’s something that never was. It’s wrong and wry to make something of it.’ A sob caught her: she turned from him, sagged, looked as if she would fall. ‘I wish it undone, that’s all. Everything. It’s so hot, it’s the heat, no more. Pray you, don’t look at me.’

‘It’s fearful hot, and you’ll take sick. Come. Step into the shade.’ Pity made him bold. He took her arm and led her under a tree and tethered the mare to a low branch.

‘This isn’t the one,’ she said, as if to herself, back against the bole, looking up. Green tinged her wet, distracted face. ‘Dear God, but if I bring it back my brother will think I’m a fool. As I am, a great fool. I don’t know what to do.’

It was not so much the tears. It was the knowledge that she must hate his seeing them, hate it like death, that spurred him to speech. Words could do and undo. ‘The beast was stillborn, yes, before its time,’ he said quickly. ‘And so, certainly, a thing that never was. But everything that never was is also a thing that might have been – and such a thing has more existence than you or I, for it has a thousand potential existences, and we have only the one we were born to. And of all those possibilities, what could be more fantastical a transformation? Not mere gloves. The gloves from such a skin are so fine, they say, you can fold them into a nutshell. Who could suppose from poor sad dead flesh a creation so airy? A fairy’s dream of gloves. You wouldn’t – you couldn’t wear them to warm your hands. No, no, you would slip them on in the dog-days, to make your hands feel cooler.’

He held her gaze – a test for him, because he could never look anyone in the eye for long: it always overwhelmed him.

After a moment she shook her head. ‘Your pardon,’ she said distantly. ‘I never thought … I know nothing of these matters.’ But her eyes were dry.

‘Take the money. It’s a fair purchase,’ he said, and offered her the coins on his open palm. Now words took him by surprise. ‘Why did you say you are no mistress?’

She looked up at him. He was half a head taller but she seemed to be looking down, and his youth shivered over him, as if he found himself standing ribbed and shirtless.

‘I spoke without thinking,’ she said. She picked the coins from his hands without touching his skin. ‘Do you never do that?’

‘Let me think about that question.’

She did not smile; but he saw the smile as, at least, one of those thousand possibilities of unborn things. ‘I’m not the mistress of Hewlands Farm. That’s my stepmother. Or my brother’s wife, while she’s sick. That’s all I meant. I am – how does it go? – a woman at my own government.’ She shook out her skirts, looked blinking and shrewd around her, like someone arrived from a long journey. Sister, then, not wife to the strawy farmer. That fairness. It changed nothing, of course. She was still a woman, and he felt her using it against him, like a carter bunching his muscles at the reins. ‘I’ve been a great fool over the calf. Please forget all about it.’

‘I needn’t take it home,’ he said, loud and urgent, as if she were already far off. ‘If you wish, I could – I could bury it somewhere.’

‘What would you tell Master Shakespeare?’

‘Say I looked over the carcass, and it was fit for nothing.’

‘And then what of the money you have given over?’ She shook her head. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t force you to lie to your father.’

He nearly said: ‘My father is made of lies.’ But in fact he could say nothing. Words had flown out from him and done their work, like the hawk flying to the kill from the falconer’s wrist. Now the hood was back on. Now Mistress Hathaway was restored and queenly, and Will was reduced again to the unsatisfactory flesh and bowing low as she left him.

She said softly: ‘Thank you.’

He imagined her thinking: No one saw it, no one saw me. Only a youth. No one saw.

*   *   *

Benjamin. The name often given to the son of an older father. Child of my age.

But why, Ben sometimes asked of his dead father’s shade, just why did you leave it so long? Why did your loins not stir with the making of me when you were young? Then you might have seen me grow – seen me born at least – instead of going to your grave when I had yet a month in the womb.

And, above all, I might not have had a stepfather.

It was on an evening of hot storm over Westminster, in his eighth year, that he first learned about the business of loins stirring, and what came of it. At that time he went whenever he could to the little parish school in St Martin’s Lane. On this particular day, with his stepfather in the beating mood, Ben decided when the clerk clanged the bell that he would not go home. One of his schoolfellows, seeing him loitering, said Ben could come home with him. So instead of darting across the spattering Strand, between cattle and cartwheels, he followed his friend into a warren of courts and alleys behind St Martin’s. The boy said his parents wouldn’t be there – his father was a barber, his mother a cow-keeper – but his sister, he added with a special look, would be home. Ben could see his sister.

In an upstairs room above a stable, Ben saw. The girl was about fifteen, swart, big-breasted, simple. She giggled over the shoulder of the man who, Ben thought at first, was trying somehow to kill her by smothering her while half naked. The man didn’t seem to mind the boys watching. He winked and commented on the progress of the work. When he was done he fastened his breeches, saw Ben’s bewilderment, and gave him a brief explanation.

Ah. So when, Ben asked, would the baby come? The man laughed. Never, with any luck: he believed the mother knew her business and dosed the girl. Before he left, the man threw a farthing on the floor. It rolled. Giggling, the girl chased it down.

It was grim, but it was knowledge, therefore precious. And it even helped him understand the mystery of his stepfather. To whom, of course, he still had to go home that night, and who beat him all the harder for being late.

When the man had gone to the tavern, Ben came out with it: why?

‘Why do I have to have a stepfather at all?’

His mother looked at him, considering. Her eyes were large and mild but the rest of her features sharp: sometimes she looked like two people at once. She seemed to decide that Ben was a child who could be told hard things. ‘Because of money, Benjamin. When your father died, he left us with no money.’

‘Why? Did he spend it all?’

‘None to spend. A minister’s living dies with him, and he had no estate. Oh, once he did, but it was lost in Queen Mary’s time. She brought back the Romish rites, but the Jonsons would not conform to them. For a time your father even lay in prison.’

‘Good,’ Ben said. ‘To go to prison for what you believe.’

‘So say I,’ his mother said, after a silent, still moment. ‘But that was why we needed money when he died. More than I could earn with my needle. A woman cannot shift for herself in this world, Benjamin, save she be bred up to it. Even then, it’s hard to make your way unprotected. For my sake and yours, I had to marry again. Not because I longed for linen sheets instead of hempen. No. To keep us safe.’

And Ben understood. So far, and no further. Marrying again, very well. Marrying
him
– marrying Robert ham-fist brick-dust dull-wit Brett, not so well.

Once when his stepfather tired himself out plying the strap and sat down to yawn and rub his arm muscles, Ben said: ‘As soon as I’m big enough, I shall hit you back, you know.’

His stepfather grinned. ‘That day’s not yet.’

‘It will come, though.’

His stepfather shrugged. He was a heavy, full-lipped man with colourless eyes. ‘It will come, aye. The same with our death, boy. Same with our death.’

Not mine, Ben thought. He intended living for ever, and could not imagine anyone living with any other aim.

What he saw in the room above the stables gave him firmer ideas about many things. His mother was a stronger woman than that poor idiot creature: still, she was a woman. Ben watched when his stepfather was in loving vein and she turned small in his embrace, offering him little kissing troubles. ‘Poor chick, how dost?’ he cooed. ‘Thou hast a world of grief on thy pretty brow tonight. Wilt let me love it away, hey?’ The back of his neck formed two precise rolls of flesh, like some pastry-cook’s confection. Ben watched his mother’s fingers caress them.