The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (51 page)

Canterbury: Marlowe flashed upon Will’s mind again. He imagined Marlowe hearing this story: his savage grin. It helped to keep it at a distance, to quiet the screams of the boy dragged out and slashed. Had he looked like Isabelle? Not in the picture in his head, no. More familiar. He felt tears somewhere in his throat or deeper. They weren’t much use, now: words likewise. But he tried to find some.

‘You do well to speak of madness, Isabelle. The madness was inflicted by those who did the killing. Not only the dead were victims. Living minds too. Your father—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t you think I’ve been everywhere, down every path? He said it, Will. He meant it. And if we had been caught, I believe he would have said: “Take her, leave me him.” And, in a curious way, I wish that had happened. We never spoke of it again. And as soon as we came to London, and my father began to prosper, I looked out for a husband. So I could go. I was sixteen, Monsieur Berger forty. It counted for nothing. What was my body anyway? What is anyone’s, but a piece of flesh, to be desired perhaps for a time, in youth and a little later, now and then – but mostly it is a corpse waiting to be completed, like those piles in the squares and rivers on St Bartholomew’s Day. When my father died I didn’t go to his burying. Just another body.’ She was weeping now. The tears came thick and slow, oozing, like blood. ‘And yet you want mine, I know you do – and you might after all have had my body, Will, if you had not been so covetous of my mind, for this is what you’ve wanted, isn’t it? To know, know about me. The true possession. There’s the pity: as mere bodies we might have done very well, you and I.’ She came to the table, swallowed the last of the Rhenish. ‘Good wine. But all wine is good. Don’t come near me, now.’ Shadow-fast, she was at the door. ‘You’ve seen too much. Goodbye.’

*   *   *

‘Check,’ says Jonson. ‘You know, you can’t win with what’s left on the board. Have you writ nothing for the new king? An ode, verses, something? You should, everyone has. Even clodpoll Dekker.’

Will searches the squares for a way out. ‘And you?’

‘Can you doubt it? His majesty must have the best as well as the dross.’

Will tries to picture the new king, James, who separately from his queen is making a slow progress down from Scotland to take up his new throne. None of the feared disturbances, after all, a smooth transition. Thank heaven. No heaped corpses, choked rivers. ‘No. I’ve writ nothing. I can’t quite – he seems not real to me, not like the late Queen.’ For now I see a king with a round base and no legs, making his way across the white bloodless squares of towns, the chequered fields. ‘We have hopes of favour, naturally, in the Chamberlain’s. We hear from my lord Hunsdon that the King is much affected to the theatre.’

‘There you have it, man. Yours is the best company. Make him know it. Get in the loyal verses while you can. It’s not policy. It’s a poet’s true part to honour his sovereign. Ours are the public voices, the trumpets of the state, handmaids of the national muse. I have a commission in the bud, you know, for the Queen’s entertainment, when she comes to Althorp. Sir John Spencer entreated me. A masque, in the grounds. An enchanting thought: I see the prettiest little sport in my eye, chaste, classical, beyond the groundlings’ brute ken…’

‘I was right. Being popish hasn’t hurt you.’

‘Nothing ever hurts me. How else live?’

‘The other way. Where all hurts.’

‘Now you’re seeing in black and white,’ Jonson says approvingly. ‘Checkmate. We’re friends once more, yes? Out of that, then, I ask: what are you going to do about the woman?’

‘Do?’

‘Aye, do. Because knowing you, seeing your face last night, today, you will have to do something. You can’t simply go on.’

With a flick Will knocks his king over. It rolls a little and lies still.

14

Revenger’s Tragedy (1603)

‘He’s no Alleyn,’ Henslowe grunted.

They were watching Matthew run through a second-man comedy part for the Admiral’s Men. Matt, Will saw, was trying to broaden his gestures. Containment was one of the first things you learned when playing women. Now, hoping to get work as a man, he had to unlearn it.

‘Well, there’s only one Alleyn,’ Will said: not meaning flattery, though Henslowe plainly took it so. He generally viewed his son-in-law as a sort of Christ to his own deity. ‘But Matthew has spirit, wit, boldness—’

‘And not much of a voice yet. How long broke? A pretty fellow, mind. Oh, they’ll take him, as hired-man, for now. Your word would have been enough.’ Henslowe sniffed, disliking the admission.

‘How goes it here?’ They stood in the pit of the Fortune, the newest of theatres, Henslowe’s latest venture. ‘You don’t think there are too many theatres in London now?’

‘You sound like a Cheapside Puritan.’

‘No, a man of business.’

‘What – is the Globe suffering, then?’ Henslowe asked, suddenly hungry.

‘No. And the Chamberlain’s Men have hopes of becoming the King’s. Sorry.’

Henslowe shrugged. ‘Nay, trust me, we have not seen the end of play-fever yet. Why, we can fill this place to the rafters with cold drizzle falling and a mere indifferent comedy.’

‘Which reminds me,’ Will said, ‘who wrote this?’

‘Let’s see, at least half is Dekker’s, the rest a sharp, sour young fellow called Middleton. Know him? You should. Says he wants to excel Master Shakespeare.’

‘Good for him.’ Will watched Matthew take an inexpert fall: another consequence of woman-playing. ‘You know it won’t last for ever. This. We’ll tire, or the public will, or something will. Well? Why else do you and Alleyn keep hold of your bear-baiting yards?’

Henslowe did not quite smile. He looked as if he had spotted a coin on the ground and was trying not to pick it up. ‘Aye, sounder than gold, my friend. When is spilled blood ever out of fashion?’

The sun shone brilliantly on a square, a white square; and a boy was taken, ripped, sacrificed, and the pooled blood looked black in the dazzle.

‘Never.’ The player with Matthew had his hand on his shoulder and was nodding: he was in. Matthew turned to flash a smile at Will, from across the stage, from across a score of years. ‘I’m going home tomorrow. A short visit only. I must be here, with the coronation coming.’ The only reason? No, I am flying thither, probably to fly back at once. An uncaged bird. ‘Will you keep a watch on Matthew, where you can?’

‘Needs watching, hey?’

Will shook his head. ‘A good lad, an excellent lad. But everything excites. He has to see the bottom of the tankard before he believes it empty.’

‘I’ll watch,’ Henslowe said. Not benign. Why should he be? These were his investments, his ships and vineyards.

As Will went to leave, he found Henslowe’s manservant, the size and build of a bull, his arm against the jamb of the tiring-house door, denying someone access.

‘No, sir,’ he was saying, in a sorrowful growl, ‘no, sir, I think not.’

‘But look you, I come to tell him I
can
pay him. Not pay him
now,
but soon, very soon…’

A lightly frantic voice. The bull-man glanced back at Will, shifted enough to let him through. ‘Your pardon, sir.’

Will edged past, and found himself chest to chest, eyes meeting, with Jack Towne.

Jack – surely not? – looking somehow as of old. Yet he must be, like Will, approaching forty. The flabbiness was gone, the long bones back (hunger?) and the fairness too. Ah, yes. He must have been on the tramp by the play-wagon a long season to be sunstruck so fair. Prominent cheekbones and brows. ‘Jack.’ Like turning a corner and bumping into your old self, that most unreachable of lost things. Marlowe spoke, grinning again, old ghost.

‘Will.’ Jack Towne looked at him as if he had asked him a bleak fateful question: as if they met on a dire heath. ‘You thrive. Glad of it. Always glad.’

Will nudged the manservant. It was like nudging a wall. ‘Let this man by. Master Henslowe will see him. Yes, yes, I will answer for it.’

Towne edged in. His shirt was worn away at the neck: you could see the clean straight line of his collarbone. His eyes made wild, unavailing stabs at Will’s face.

‘Here.’ Will pressed his purse into Towne’s hand. He looked grubby. He smelt like yesterday. ‘And Jack, if you – if you need—’

Towne stopped him with a touch, eyes averted. ‘Thanks, heart. But don’t make it worse, hey?’

He went in, head low. He was abashed. Will was too grand for him now. The time ever out of joint.

Damn time, and we might open heaven.

*   *   *

Anne knew: as much as she had ever known anything.

Admittedly, that in itself made it incomplete. She was not great in knowledge. All she had to work on was this, her feeling, her sense: her conviction.

And she hated it. Because it put her in Judith Sadler’s world of winking gloomy wisdom (not that she said anything to her – great God, no). It was knowing what they would say, in that world. With acid resignation. Aye, a woman can always tell. Lips pursed at the fireside, pursed at the drear old tale of men and perfidy.

‘You’ve had a lot of your megrims.’ She touched his forehead. He slightly withdrew.

‘No. About the same.’ He smelt different or, rather, had no scent, as if scrubbed.

Oh, you can tell. And once she thought perhaps she wouldn’t have cared. Or cared less, cared without this ache and challenge. Because something was awake in Anne. A sense of herself, partly. ‘You do know,’ Bartholomew had said, ‘that when he’s away, you are head of the Shakespeare family?’ Nonsense. But then it wouldn’t be denied. Once you made that affrighting leap, outside yourself to the place others stood in, looking at you. Mistress of New Place. In her way, a woman of the world.

Ask yourself: am I worthy of Will Shakespeare’s love? I verily believe I am, and so I must ask whether he is worthy of mine. Yes, something was awake: even if it was only suspicion that he had followed the path of otherness all the way. I know he has always pursued that path, the snaking words, the art of dream, the thickets of thought, where sometimes I can hardly see him. But how if he has followed it and found instead someone else there, amid the dapple – to be loved? For if it is so, I cannot have it so. I am not resigned. Who could live to be resigned, even at a hundred?

Head of the family – how so, when she was a woman and there were men? But Anne didn’t feel fenced by womanhood, as even lively Joan seemed to now that she was wed. And even though William Hart gazed moonstruck still and did everything she told him, quickly. Still Joan seemed somehow rather less herself, rather more generalised woman. Anne didn’t feel so: she felt an independent creature, with her own borders and laws. Forty-seven years old. What does it mean? How you look, how you feel? Some people didn’t know how old they were: even Will was unsure of his birthday.

Imagine, as Anne did when she dared the mirror, growing old in content. The warm side of resignation, if you liked: glowing and rounded and buttery. She knew that was how she could go – it was in her looks: she was still fair, soft-skinned, dew-fed, in that reflection in the mirror – except when you fell into those eyes. But it was a choice, a possible future, to be that woman: mother to her tall flowerlike daughters, aunt and relative to all, and as for her husband … Well, the buttery matron would chuckle drily: ‘Oh, him, a good provider. He’ll retire to the country at last, and then we’ll see enough and more of each other, Lord knows.’

And the men of the family? Gilbert had settled back in Stratford, haberdasher, dealer, they said, in other things. An uneasy, secretive man who liked to catch people out. ‘I caught him finely,’ he would say of a good bargain, ‘like a tickled fish.’ She suspected him of an unhappiness too big for his narrow personality. Richard had taken his father’s place in the shop, but with none of his father’s assertion. And then there was her mother-in-law, who had taken age to her heart like a long desire. She was islanded in it: silver-haired, shadowy. ‘Just a little,’ she would say to the cold beef: ‘just a little,’ if the fire needed stirring. ‘Less and less, my wants.’

But Anne, no, more and more my wants. Something was awake.

Will’s was a short visit home, no time to do some things, to visit all old acquaintances. And when he packed his bag for the morrow journey, he was suddenly stricken.

‘I haven’t been to Hamnet’s grave.’

‘Neither have I. He’s not there, now. For a time, he was, but no more.’ And that’s as it should be, isn’t it? Something in her wanted to say that, and for a moment she wondered if she had. The unspoken was so much a part of their conversation, it was hard to tell if it had slipped into the garment of speech.

She should have followed this with something. She was trying to say – what? That her heart moved and changed, without loss of love? That they did not stand as they had in the black aftermath of Hamnet’s dying, when white was gone from the world? But how say it? They would have to lay the naked sword of their marriage on the table between them, instead of Susannah’s dowry and the repairs to the outhouse roof. Easy things to take your attention.

Besides, her breath was stopped, her tongue pinched by suspicion. Freezing, binding suspicion.

How did he appear? Will at New Place, bony, dark-browed, abstracted. Soft words for Judith, who was in sulking mood. Yet you knew that voice could fill a theatre. He had it under control. Never gave much away. His expression at the fireside did not belong here. Like a fox in a kennel.

One notable night of his stay he did something he never did; and she wasn’t sure if she had prompted him. He spoke of his work, what he was writing. Haltingly, in dry fragments, as if he feared to put life into it. But as they lay in the unsleeping awkwardness that nothing could fill or hasten, he talked of a tragedy in mind.

‘Are you done with comedies?’

‘Of a sort. I can’t see my way quite to laughter. It’s up aloft but no roads run all the way. Tragedy is lit. I can move there.’

‘Isn’t it more popular also?’

‘Perhaps.’ His smile was a faint dark movement on the pillow. ‘Jonson would damn me for following the crowd. Yet I don’t have to think in that way somehow: what people want. It merely happens. There’s the old play of
Leir
I acted in years past. I see it in different colours.’