The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (38 page)

11

A Larum for London (1595–6)

Fires begin with hope.

‘How did it happen?’ Hamnet cried in sheer wonder, as they huddled together in the street. They got out when the wind seemed to be bearing the fire towards the Shakespeare house. Their neighbours did it too, piling their goods in the middle of the street. That was the part Father John hated, Anne noticed, his things in the public sight. He urged his remaining sons, Richard and Edmund, to throw cloths over the heap, hide them.

Beautifully horrible, the orange flames making their flourishing way from High Street, to Wood Street, at last to Henley Street, throwing out windows, sucking down roofbeams. Smoke darkened the sky, making misplaced evening, and the flames could be seen in her children’s eyes. How they stared. And then when the pigeon flew out too late from the eaves where it was nesting, singed, falling … Susannah covered Judith’s eyes and they moaned together, in the unity of girlhood. Hamnet could only turn his fire-primed eyes up to his mother, seeking.

How did it happen? Fires begin with hope, destruction begins with it, with a benign shutting of eyes to what may come. The blind side of hope.

It was an accident. A spark in the thatch somewhere, added to a favouring wind … But that would not do for Hamnet, whose mind moved on moral lines. Whose fault was it? It was no one’s fault, Anne thought. There was an ordinance against thatched roofs in these streets, and people were careful with their houses, but then they added outbuildings, malt stores, sheds, and those they thatched because it was easier, and the outbuildings, after all, were different: they were not like inhabited houses. Though one or two people, she knew, in High Street and Wood Street, rented their outbuildings to strangers who came looking for work, and they shouldn’t have been in the parish either, but again the blind eye, the feeling that if it was not shrieking out wrong, then it could not be wrong, or not very. Oh, Anne knew that way of thinking very well.

So, hope, that was what caused the fires. Hope that the worst would not happen. What could be more human and natural than that? But Hamnet’s moral mind would not have it. Someone must be to blame. It was his grandfather who supplied the requisite: ‘Someone kindled a fire where they should not have, or lit a taper and left it untended in a draught. Someone neglected their duties as a householder. Hence the result: a house lost.’ Hamnet nodded solemnly.

They were lucky. The fire did not reach them. It wasn’t the splashing of the futile leather buckets but a drop in the wind, a connecting wall battered down with hammers. Dust mixed with the smoke, and the terrible greedy crackling stopped. An end. The town mourned its defacement: Alderman Quiney prepared to petition London for assistance. Father John was glad to get his possessions back into the house. He gave out charity, but he took no one in who lacked a home from the fire. Not coldness, Anne thought: secrecy the precious habit. Also she suspected he still hoped to emerge from the tunnel of his decline some day, unfeared of the sun, and bask in all his old admiration as if these dusky years had never been.

When it happened again the next year – another swathe of fire, this time on the north side of town – Hamnet, three inches taller, was ready with his response: ‘Someone has been careless again.’ It made him sound cold, which he was not.

By the time of the second fire, however, things were different. Life was different. Anne had written her first letter. It said
Yes, we will come.

Too short for a true letter, she knew that, but, oh, how much it took from her. All writing, even practising the alphabet, seemed to her an extraction of self. But this especially. She left it for Will to see, on the chest in their bedchamber, after their quarrel. It was a signal, writing it for him like that: a signal that she was joining his world, breathing his strange air.

And it was the only thing to do, short of a surrender she could not contemplate. The surrender of what she had believed when he had put a glove on her hand, then a ring on her finger.

The quarrel had begun perhaps with Hamnet, if you had to find a spark in the thatch. Children were dreadful for passing things on, and Hamnet had an indelible memory and he couldn’t be diverted. ‘Mother wants you at home,’ he announced, when Will arrived for Lent. ‘You need to stay, because Mother needs you. She said so.’ Being the man of the family, as his grandfather was always telling him he was. He glowed with it: responsible householder. At ten he was within sight of a formidable handsomeness, while Judith his twin was all heron legs and tomboy grimaces. Anne tried to mime a modification over his head: she had said something like that in a burst of irritation one day when the children had been too much for her. ‘If only your father was here,’ she had snapped.

‘Would that make things better?’ Hamnet wanted to know.

‘Certes it would. Why else be a husband and father? Does he just want the name?’ It had been the time of her menses, which were getting more exhausting as she drew near forty. So, irritable, she had let fly.

Perhaps it was right that Will should hear of it; perhaps she should have said it herself. Well, the quarrel came about, or the approximation of a quarrel.

He said, with his iciest gentleness: ‘Don’t use the children to reproach me.’

‘I don’t. It was Hamnet’s choice to say that. He heard me complaining one day, he took it to heart. He’s like that. As you’d know if you were here.’

‘I’m not here because my work isn’t here. You know that.’

‘Oh, yes, I know that.’ So it went grimly, in stiff circular steps. But in the end they faced a proposal. A change.

He said: ‘Listen. I’ve put down money on a good lodging in Bishopsgate.’

‘What’s that to me? I don’t know your bishops and gates and all those London places.’ This is what we do when we don’t know each other any more: make weapons of odds and ends.

He persisted: ‘It’s in the city proper, not outside the walls like Shoreditch. The house is a good one, the position airy, fair and decent rooms and none built over privies. Worth more than I’ve put down, but it’s someone I know.’ Another notable, baffling thing – he had become this Will of dealings, who always knew someone.

‘Well, I’m glad for you. London’s a pestilential place, though you don’t seem to mind—’

‘I want you to come and live there. You and the children. There I’m— Anne, I can give you life. Here I can’t, I’m…’

John Shakespeare’s son. She filled in his silences so easily, though she didn’t know if he realised it. Again, such a gulf. And not to be crossed, surely, so simply – and, besides, did she want to? She knew what her father-in-law would say: ‘Don’t do it, require him to settle properly, not drag you his way.’

‘You don’t truly want that,’ she said. ‘You can’t.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a thing you’ve – you’ve just plucked out of the air because we were fighting.’

He gazed steadily. He made her feel that she was snatching, looking for excuses, rather than him. She wondered if he was right. She thought of Bartholomew, unlikely prophet.

‘I want you and Susannah and Judith and Hamnet to come and live together as a family, a household, in the place where my work is.’

‘Leave Stratford?’

A shade of a smile. ‘People do. Richard Field. Gilbert. Me—’

‘All men, making a man’s way.’

‘Richard is married, has two babes.’

‘Married in London, to a London woman.’

‘French,’ he said, with an odd emphasis: as if it made any difference. ‘Only let us try. Spend a season there. Wilt try one season? We can live well, Anne. I promise thee a good life.’ He struggled. Will, struggling with words: it showed how desperate things had become. And then the words he chose: ‘After all, what dost thou leave?’

And at that she walked off. She couldn’t go away to another world as he did, but she walked away, down gutted High Street to sit and spin and talk with Judith Sadler, with purl on the hob. God-sibs, sighing over their men. Not what Anne liked, generally. Awareness still that her going off like this marked a certain something about their relation; he was not one to lock the doors against her, as many a man would do with a mutinous wife. Still, as she grumbled with Judith Sadler, I may have a husband who does not beat me but still there is this. What should I think of it – for after all I have perforce a life. ‘I am a fish in this pond,’ she said loudly, then laughed at herself: the purl was strong stuff.

‘Beshrew me if it’s not the old tale,’ Judith said. ‘It’s always down to the woman pleasing the man.’

There were, though, weapons you were permitted to pick up, as Father John was always hinting to her. You could protest ill-usage, work the man round to a consciousness of himself as detestable, less than a man. You pitched your rights as a wife and his duties as a husband: you made, in essence, a council-chamber bye-law matter of it. Or, as Judith Sadler said with fierce set teeth, you nagged and wheedled, withheld, threatened. ‘Make him rue.’

Anne could see the satisfaction in that. Especially after last time, when he had come home with his decision made: presenting to her the tightly bundled future, that was the insulting thing; like a present, when it was instead a puzzle. Undo this if you can.

‘A sharer. A sharer in the Chamberlain’s Men. That’s what I have become.’

It helped him that she was dazzled – everyone was – by this distant patron who had handed him up. The earl of. Dear God, the earl.

‘He’s a very young man who is generous to poets and such poor cattle,’ Will said – but that only made it more alarming, that smiling casualness. It was beyond her.

And in that beyond, Will had taken the money his patron gave him and converted it into his future.

A sharer. They talked of it a good deal, and John Shakespeare joined in, for this was a deep matter of men and money. Edmund, who considered himself part Londoner and part player, was briskest of all.

‘It’s the best and only notion, trust me. A player earns a fair wage. A play-maker gets more, when he writes a play and it’s acted. But as a sharer, he has a stake in the company, so he stands to make money from everything it earns.’

‘And to lose if it loses,’ said his brother Richard, heavy and cautious. Nowadays he ran the shop for his father, and was happy with it.

‘Aye, that too.’ Edmund frowned in tousled impatience: he was young, what could possibly be wrong with risk? ‘It’s the best of all, for a player, it’s putting your whole substance into it.’ And to Anne, exultantly – with the exultation she should be feeling: ‘He’s climbing to the top of the tree.’

Yes: exactly. He’s made his decision on his life. So, she ought to be paying him back for this new imposition.

But it was complicated, and she was glad of that in a way, for she dreaded the day when it all became terribly simple. Now lately she had woken with the words in her mind, transferred from dream to murmuring lips: the words
Once I was loved.

So what did she want? She ought to have wanted to pin him down. But what she wanted really was to be what she once was, wielder of magic, world-changer. Once I was loved, maybe. Once I was power, yes. Once I created.

So she wrote it.
Yes, we will come.
She found him poring over it, as if it were the deepest of works. He reached out for her hand. She decided, after a moment, to give it to him. She wondered if he could feel her cold, cold fear.

There was a last question: Edmund. Though Joan had once begged her not to leave, when it came to it she was resigned. ‘It only means,’ she sighed, ‘that I had better start thinking about that husband before my bosoms point downward.’ But Edmund: once he learned they were going to live in London, if only for a season, he looked like someone bleeding, bleeding at the eyes. It was Will he approached, in the end: not Anne, the sharer of small secrets, dancer to no music.

‘Edmund wants to come with us,’ Will said.

‘I know that.’ She studied him: the slightly worn complexion, the heavy eyes, the curved and speaking mouth. If she were meeting him for the first time she would probably fall in love with him, and part of her fear at the prospect of London was actual shyness of being so much with him. ‘Have you said he can, then? Made another decision for me?’

‘I see no reason why he shouldn’t go.’

‘No? Not the very reason why we are going, to be our own household and family, you and me and the children?’

The trouble was, she could see the other reasons very well. There was practicality: he could help look after the children, who adored him. And then, Will and Gilbert had had the chance of London, why not the youngest? And, besides that, there was the question of leaving him with his father.

He would, Anne knew, come in for it all. Will had always borne the majority of it, and she and her children had shouldered some, but they had an elsewhere in heart and mind to live. Edmund left here would have nothing. Richard was his father’s man, and as for her mother-in-law, she had decided early: my man matters most. Now there was nothing for her except to embrace the martyrdom of her church, at the shrine of the holy St John. Oh, forgive me for thinking it; and if He will still hear me, God forbid that I am like that, going with Will to London, to start a new life at near forty.

So to this: the road south, and the Shakespeare family starting on it, including Edmund, with London their destination. John Shakespeare came out to see them off: actually came out to the Swan yard to see them mount the horses. Change in the air. Certainly his face was set in disapproval. He mourned his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren going over that sun-bit chancy horizon. And yet here he was braving the ostler’s stare, and murmuring advice about cast shoes and highway robbers. Change. Trace it to the conversation, the other night. A true conversation between him and Will, with no dog snarl.

Will had been telling the children again about the Queen. The Chamberlain’s Men had played before the Queen at Greenwich Palace, and so he had seen her. They never tired of it.

‘When will you go again?’ Judith cried. ‘Has she asked you back?’

‘Well, she summons one of the companies to perform for her each Christmastide. You may imagine how we contend for the honour.’