The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (5 page)

‘I’m thankful for that. Because it is a question just now, Will, a great question.’

‘Too great for an answer. Somewhere behind it is this God for whom one burns people, or for whom one is willing to be burned, and damn me if I can conceive him. I’m drunk, pay no heed.’

‘There are men coming out of the universities talking like that.’ Richard’s voice is pained and precise. ‘Atheist, or near it. You must be careful.’

‘I’m never anything else.’ Will laughs. But the truth remains: he cannot imagine living for God or dying for God. Being able to imagine almost everything else, he feels it as a failure, confirming his suspicion of himself as a person of light weight. Place him in the mortal scales, and they would scarcely quiver. ‘As for going prentice to my father, he wants it, I don’t, and so we rub along.’ A sort of truth. In very truth, thinks Will, he wants me to be him. To live him over again, only this time … ‘We shall see. Look, you. When you are made Lord Mayor of London—’

‘As I will be.’ Richard sits up, taut and solemn. ‘I aim at nothing less. You may think me a vain fool—’

‘No, no, I don’t. If you can see it, then you can reach it. If you can’t … if it’s not to be seen, then…’

‘What?’

‘Invent it, perhaps.’ He shakes his head, turning from Richard’s too-enquiring gaze. ‘Do it, Richard. Lord Mayor. For Stratford. Bring glory to us left behind here. God knows the old hole needs it.’

‘Is that what you truly think, Will?’

‘I thought it just then. In an hour’s time, who knows?’ Will is trying, at least, to be truthful. ‘And tomorrow, who knows?’ And then he plays and sings loud again, to erase that look from Richard’s face, to drown that note he heard. The note of pity.

*   *   *

It could never be the same again. Still, Will and Richard were much together during his stay. They walked in the fields and talked, and Richard lost his city pallor. And when Richard spoke of London, Will listened and was careful not to listen devouringly, not to ask too many questions: not to let the pictures become too vivid. He treated himself like a fever patient. The goldsmiths’ shops, one glittering after another, a goblin’s dream-hoard; and then the spiked heads of the executed on London Bridge, the bull-baiting yards, Smithfield Market all bludgeoning and blood; and then the young gallants practising archery in the Moorfields in the dewy morning … Yes, the pulse a little fast but not so bad. And then the booksellers lining St Paul’s churchyard – step in beneath the signs of the White Greyhound and the Red Bull and the Green Dragon, encounter quires and reams, and then the dubious lanes of Shoreditch, mentioned by Richard with a grimace, for here had lately risen the theatres, and cutpurses and queans flocked with the crowds to the flag and trumpet … Now the pulse was hectic and the patient in danger. Will turned the talk to the state of the crops.

Just once, Richard supped with Will’s family. In the days of his glory John Shakespeare had been a notable host: always room at his board, no need to bring your own knife, send in the dressed pork and manchet bread. Now a guest was a rarity. Will’s father was for a time easy, expansive, talking to Richard of London trade and London ways, until he fell into a low silence and stared at the candle-flame. His mother was tenderly anxious over plague, and thieves lurking in alleys. Joan, at first, gazed and swallowed and turned scarlet, reminding Will of how much his friend had changed: always seemly and civil, he now seemed rooted in assurance, calmly listening, breaking bread in thin, elegant fingers. But by the time the apple tansey was brought in her look had changed. Joan was thirteen, learning scorn, and Will saw her touching her upper lip in imitation of Richard petting his infant moustache.

‘He’s a pretty figure of a man,’ she yawned afterwards, ‘but he needn’t give himself such airs. Just because he had some fiddle-faced Puritan godfather who could put him in the way of a London prenticeship. They
always
look after each other.’ Her upturned chin and glinting eye invited Will to be scurrilous with her: they often did it. But Will responded with temperate loyalty, declining to hear a word against Richard. Because if he did, he might reveal how much he envied him. The envy would hurtle out, snarling and dripping foam from its jaws.

Will read twice over all the books Richard had brought him, and when he was not reading them he had the words inside him and drew on them – the way, he supposed, the Puritans drew on the spirit and the papists drew on the faith. Once he made the mistake of reading at the workbench. He didn’t hear his father approach.

It was not so much the throwing of the books on the floor, as the way his father threw them: with a grunt and heft, like a roadmender heaving stones. A reminder. They didn’t need to say anything.

It would have been easier, of course, not to love him. Will’s love for his mother was simple; it merely claimed you, as thirst made you drink. His love for his father was like an illness, or a wound. You could not rest with it; it must come to some issue.

Will was there to see Richard off, early on a hot July morning. Richard was making the journey with the Stratford carrier, young Will Greenaway, who was taking the job on from his father. Ah, just as it should be. A merchant from Leamington was travelling with them too: safety in numbers. The saddlebagged horses flicked their ears at the teasing flies and looked mournful. They did not want to be striking the road to London. They wanted to graze in the paddock for ever. Will and Richard clasped hands, then stood shuffling while Greenaway tightened pack-threads and the Fields intoned godly advice. The young, Will thought, are not good at greetings and farewells. They feel their hollowness.

‘I didn’t think me,’ Richard said at the last. ‘You could have had my lute. Father – let Will take my lute.’

‘No, no, I can’t,’ Will said urgently. He had no idea why.

‘Will, if ever you—’ Richard said, and broke off with a rueful, surprised look, like a sleeper who wakes himself up talking. ‘God be with you.’

Soon after the riders were out of sight Will found himself walking down Wood Street for no reason. A window banged open and an ill rainbow of slops hit the cobbles. An open yard-gate showed him a brawny maid plucking a live goose, its legs tied over its back. She was not doing it well: blood spotted the white drift at her feet. She was a moon-faced creature but pretty dimples appeared as she set her little pearly teeth against the shrieking goose’s struggles. Some man would see her beauty; or else lunge and fumble, thinking she would do. Perhaps, Will thought, he could carry on like this for ever: circumambulate, loiter, watch. Perhaps it would do, as a fumble at life.

But at last he turned his steps for home, as if he were making a choice. On Henley Street the Shakespeare house stood roomy and solid and unassailable. A few rents in the roof tiles could not gainsay it: here dwells a man of substance. Cloud-flashing sunlight passed across the upper windows, like sly eyes rolling.

Indoors, dark wood panels after summer dazzle made him grope blindfolded for a moment. His mother was finishing the baking. ‘You’ll miss Richard, I should think,’ she said. There was flour on her nose and cheek, and as she kissed him she placed a little on him, like a token of her understanding, or a mark. Someone was in the workshop with his father, talking of the price of dyes: elder, indigo, madder. ‘Oh, but as to madder…’ his father rumbled. Joan popped her head in: when did they last change the rushes? Thursday fortnight. No, stay, not so long. Madder. Feeling of a day beginning: turn over the rushes, they’ll serve. Turn over the new-old day. He thought of the hour-glass in the church, always the same grains running through. The thought gave him a curious panic. His head and stomach seemed to change places as if the hour-glass of his being had been turned over.

As if drawn by instinct, Edmund blocked his way at the bright door.

‘Where going?’

Will vaulted right over him, landed running. He ran as, it seemed to him, he had never run before: not when running races with his schoolfriends, not when they had filched fruit from mad Dame Harris’s orchard and she had set her mastiffs after them – never running like this, knees almost up to his chest, lungs tearing at the air. Faces mouthed as they flashed by, but he heard only the pump and snatch of his own breath. At Clopton Bridge, still running, he clawed his doublet over his head and flung it, pounded on in sweat-wet shirt, grinning hard and grim against the sun, twitching the salt drops from his eyebrows and eyelashes. The stone-dry ruts of the country road seized at his ankles, trying to twist and break. Tawny fields, harvest-ripe, ringed his reddening vision. Stratford was lost behind him and somewhere ahead, soon, over the next heat-wavering rise, the horses and riders and wagging packs, bound for London …

Only a wide empty shimmer, though. Only the extinction of his breath, the aching slap of his slowing feet: truth, stern kind parent, cuffing him as he staggered in heat and his throat bubbled. No good. He could not reach the horses. Already, far out of his parish and with no destination, he was in law a vagabond. If he caught up with them it would be no different: there was only freakish folly in this. He could not reach so far. Will heard little contemptible groans coming from himself as he made a mazy stumble, and the hard green ground, springing up as if on a hinge, slammed against his cheek.

For a time he could only lie with his heart thundering in his chest and his stupidity raging in his mind. It seemed at least probable that one or the other would kill him there, by the side of the road: it certainly did not seem unjust.

Faintly his roaring ears picked up the sound of hoofs and rumbling wheels.

‘Sleep it off, that’s the way.’

‘God-a-mercy, what hour must a man begin drinking to be soused flat before noon?’

‘The night before, of course.’

‘Hold, look, he’s half stripped. Think you he was robbed?’

Will sat up and coughed. When he saw the painted cart he was swept with a feeling of unworthy relief. The players’ troupe, arrived at last. Of all the people in the world, he thought, they were the least likely to find him ridiculous.

One approached. His face was nut-brown, his worn clothes dust-white from travel: a scorched scarecrow. Yet that something in his walk, in his voice. ‘Are you hurt, friend?’

Will shook his head. ‘A rest,’ he gasped. ‘A little rest on God’s good earth, sir.’

‘We thought you ready to be buried in it. Are you faint? Set your head low a moment. It’s a trying heat.’

‘Let’s get on.’ A fractious voice behind him. ‘Are we turned village constables now? Let him … God’s blood. Don’t I know you?’

Will looked up into the blue-grey eyes, and memory at once filled in the tall, slender figure. Towne. Jack Towne. He had been the principal woman-player with the troupe who visited Stratford last summer. Will had talked long with him at the Swan after the play, buying him drinks, hardly able to believe that this dazzling world-changer was his own age.

‘Master Towne. Your servant, sir.’

The fair youth’s eyes narrowed. ‘I do know you. Will Something. God, yes. We have an admirer here, friends. When I was with Lord Strange’s Men, this pretty fellow stood us a good hogshead of ale, I swear, and then recited our speeches back at us.’ Towne grasped Will’s hand and hauled him to his feet. ‘Still in Stratford, hey, Will? I thought you hankering after a better place. You’re in a muck of a sweat, what have you been about? I suppose it’s harvest and whatnaught.’ Towne gestured disdainfully. He was a Londoner, Will remembered. He remembered him, too, playing a robber’s stolen bride, spirited and sorrowful: you wanted to jump on the stage and fall before her. ‘Come, up and ride on our chariot; the beasts will bear.’

‘No, no, there’s no need—’

‘To please me, then. I’ve a whim for being the dispenser of benevolence. Naturally it’ll pass.’

Will sat on the cart-tail. Above his head pans and tankards swung alongside stage properties: helmets, crowns, banners, a bearskin. A human skull grinned at him through a lady’s veil. Jack Towne walked alongside, grumbling about his feet.

‘A plague on your country roads. I feel bastinadoed. So how goes it in Stratford, hey, Will? Are your citizens plump in the purse and begging for a play? In truth we’ve had a wretched season – and to speak frankly, my friend –’ Towne raised his voice slightly – ‘this is a sorry sort of company compared with my last. We have the most lamentable clown. Mind, there’s still Knell, mighty shouting William Knell, do you remember him?’

Oak voice, leonine, just warding off fat. ‘He played the Lydian King.’

‘Aye, and he never ceases to play the king, trust me. But when it comes to kinging it over me … He should remember I only
play
the woman.’ Towne suddenly, coldly, smiled: it was like something one should not see, a dagger in a drawer. ‘Aye, he can act. But his temper’s another matter. You can’t play and live in the same place. Partitions, Will, nail ’em up secure. God, you look like a man racked.’ He reached out and brushed the sweat-sticky hair from Will’s brow. ‘What
have
you been doing? Not making the beast by the wayside, I hope, and pushing poor Moll in the ditch when you saw us coming.’

‘No, chasing a fay,’ said Will. He didn’t know he could speak so sharply, cutting off the moment like a fowl’s head on the stump. ‘But I couldn’t reach it. Such are our country follies.’

Towne drew back his hand. ‘You need a drink. Another way of saying I need a drink. Remind me, what’s the best here – ale, cider? I’ll share the reckoning.’

‘Ale, but I can’t. I have work to do.’

‘Hang your work. Hang everything, because we are here now, Will, and we bring a little beauty. The one thing there is no living without.’ Towne leaped up beside Will and twisted round to prod the heap of blankets in the bed of the cart. ‘Isn’t that so, shit-pan? Rouse yourself, you lazy bastard, the rest of us have walked all night.’ Finding a groan, he added a quick fist. ‘There, alive now?’

A great pink tiny-eyed poxed face, like a ham studded with cloves, blubbered up to blink at them.

‘Our clown. You’d suppose he’d only to step on the stage to set them laughing, but he counteracts nature, this one. Beauty, sweetling, that’s what we bring, eh?’