The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (52 page)

And he talked of an old proud king, dividing his kingdom between two daughters with flattering tongues. For the daughter who spoke truth, nothing but banishment. Anne couldn’t recall seeing the play, but thought she had heard a tale like that told when she was a girl. She saw the fire and smelt wood and felt herself blinking and imagining being the truthful girl, whom she pictured with pale cheeks and straight hair. And then, wasn’t there an enchanter, magic…? But no: Will in his light, clear voice, which came through the bedstead as a vibration to the blood, spoke tentative horrors. He conjured a lord of this court, similarly mistook in the virtues of his sons, who comes to grief as the old king does. His eyes are put out, and he is turned out to wander blind – though less blind than he has been. And the old king is turned out on the blasted heath, ragged and friendless …

‘And the other daughter,’ Anne said, sitting upright, ‘the good daughter, she returns, and restores him, yes?’

‘That’s the old play. Not this one. I see her killed, and the old king bearing her body, mad with grief. Yes, that’s how it must be: only can be.’

Anne pushed back the bed-curtains, wishing for a light. Light in darkness. ‘I think it will not work, Will.’

‘Why?’

‘Because such horrors will not be believed.’

‘Oh, you don’t know, my dear,’ he said; and turned from her.

Turned into stillness and silence. Not sleeping: somewhere else.
My dear.
Never that before. It seemed to say everything but
wife.

On the roof was the vivid percussive sound of night-rain.

Her smarting eyes measured the space between their bodies. You could fit someone in it.

You don’t know.
Oh, I do know, now.

*   *   *

So, she did a thing that was bad: because she had to know.

Bad, in that it was double, hollow, not straight and true – she could hardly find an image for its equivocal quality. Bartholomew would probably have scoffed at the notion of its being bad at all. But Anne wore her decision like a hair-shirt. She would never have done it if she had not been driven, urged, lashed by the thing that was awake and would not sleep now. Not until there was knowledge, one way or another.

*   *   *

‘Edmund,’ she said, ‘I will speak to him.’

Edmund was chopping wood in the yard at Henley Street. As she spoke his scalp lifted, the hatchet dropped from his hands: his eyes shone at her. He could not disguise his happiness and hope. He could never disguise anything. So unlike his brother in that, she thought.

So, to do it. The prickly, queasy, wrong feeling came also from the fact that she did not doubt she would succeed. Edmund’s one aim and joy was to follow Will and be a player. More than once he had come straight out with it, and more than once Will had temporised, saying the times were not propitious for players, they must think on it … Edmund went on desperately hoping. But hoping on nothing. She knew Will didn’t think him cut out for the player’s life, and that he would go on setting his face against it for ever. And Edmund loved Will too much to press, demand, make a drag of himself on his brother’s mind.

Only one thing could change it.

Very hesitantly, Edmund had asked Anne before if she might put in a word for him – just a word. But he blushed in asking – not wanting, she thought, to come between them, and not wanting Anne to think any the worse of him, because he adored her. Such knots they tied themselves in. Yet how easy to cut through, once she had decided.

‘Will, Edmund is sorely grieved.’

He was mending a pen. He came out from wherever he went. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, you must know. He has not spoke of it this time – but in that silence you can surely read. I can read it. How he longs for you to say yes.’

‘Oh, that. Well, yes, he hasn’t asked, so I supposed he had let it fall.’

‘No, you didn’t.’ She put a hand on his arm, and he jumped as if at a bailiff’s arrest. ‘You’ve set yourself against it. Because – well, there I wonder, what? You think he will not thrive as you did?’

Will shrugged. ‘I fear he has not the temper.’

‘As Matthew does?’

‘We are not there again, I hope.’

‘No,’ she said, pressing against the stony look, ‘but you tell me Matthew, for all his talents, has a young man’s unsteadiness. Edmund is three-and-twenty, dost think he is in worse case? When it’s what he longs for above everything beneath the sun?’

‘Matt was raised to it from a boy. Edmund has lived so different … I fear me he will not bear the knocks, and be hurt.’

‘Thou wert not raised to it, Will.’

‘Edmund isn’t me,’ he said, with pale finality.

‘And thou art not thy father. And wouldst not, surely, play the part he played thee so long, blocking the way, nay-saying – surely.’

A risky, or daring stroke. For a moment something seemed to mask his eyes, like the side-lids of a bird.

‘He’s asked you to do this.’

‘No. I ask, because I don’t want to see such unhappiness go on, when it might be mended. And if there is hurt, then, Will, it must be: wasn’t that the risk you took, and took gladly, when you went away with the players? Don’t we all have to live with it, or not live at all?’

And she won. Because he would not refuse both her and Edmund. And also, terribly, his giving in was another sign. If his heart had been with her, he might have contended more, spoken more: given this matter its due weight of significance between husband and wife. A thing so close trod on the skirts of love. But Will gave in, she thought, because it was easier, and it kept her sweet, and his mind was still far, fixed over there.

So it was all impure, on both sides: you couldn’t drink cleanly of it. But the waking thing drove her, the need. Jealousy? Too simple, too answerable.

She went to Henley Street while Will was going over the household accounts. A long, painstaking process. He was not particularly slow in reckoning, but he checked the numbers as if they were words, and might dance about in meaning. She asked Edmund to go a walk with her, down to the river. He came, in luminous silence. By the bridge she pressed his arm, smiled. Felt his breathlessness.

‘You’ve spoken.’ He still didn’t dare: too far to fall.

‘It’s done. You are to go back with him to London, and he will find you work as a player.’

Edmund took her hand and kissed it. She let it lie in his for a moment, looking down at the river, smelling the coolness of wet stone, weed, sweetly decaying bulrushes. Stickleback darted and teemed, like blown drifts of smoke under the water.

‘But you must do something for me,’ she said; and as the words came out she wondered if this was how actors felt, for they seemed to have been made somewhere other than her own brain. ‘I want you to find out if Will has a woman in London.’

Edmund caught his breath. She could not look at him, could only bury her sight in the draggled water, but she knew what his expression would be. ‘And – and then?’ Horror for him, who loved them both so, horror and poison. But he would taste the dish. Will’s fearful tragedy of Titus, she had read it in part, shuddering – the one where the woman’s children were baked in a pie, and she ate of the pie before the heads were revealed … But taste it. When desire drives, you taste. Edmund squeezed her hand, painfully. ‘I don’t want to, Anne.’

‘But?’

‘Yes. And then?’

‘Then come and tell me.’

And then the great cliff to face, to scale – or fall from. Then the final knowledge of self and him, and if they could ever meet more.

*   *   *

Well, Will had known this must come. Edmund had been angling for it ever since their father died. In a way it was a relief to be forced to it.

‘I shall not disgrace you,’ Edmund kept saying, on the ride to London. ‘Trust me.’ He was wholly obedient, even subservient. Will suspected that Edmund did not sleep at all during their two inn-halts on the way: that he just lay there, eyes shining in the dark at what was happening to him. It was faintly irritating.

But only faintly. Why, after all, had he resisted this so long? Because he feared his brother would be a trouble to him, an inconvenience? Or was Anne closer to the truth, when she suggested he was walking in his father’s shoes?

And it was, after all, not so bad. Edmund was too old for a true prentice, but Will found him a lodging with John Heminges. He had a decent house and was married to a pleasant, sensible woman who, Will had learned to his shock, was none other than the widow of William Knell, whose death at Jack Towne’s hands had opened his world. Some sort of circle completed, perhaps. Heminges undertook to train him up as far as he could – he was much occupied with the company finances – and they could probably get him regular work with Worcester’s Men. When he watched Edmund try out Will found him just as he had feared – stiff, over-eager, shrill – but he passed, and Will’s name alone was warrant enough.

And perhaps that was it. He said as much to Ben Jonson, over a farewell supper at the Mermaid: Jonson was setting forth for Northamptonshire, to present his masque to the new Queen.

‘I question me whether I am a fraud. I love him dearly, but I misdoubt whether his talents could advance him saving my influence. So, am I not watering down the strength of our theatre, lowering its quality?’

‘You’re too particular, man. The lad is green, but will learn from good masters. And it is besides a proper part of your position to advance your family and friends: how else does the world wag, from the Court to the stage? What – would you rather he stay slumbering by the Avon?’

‘Shrewd in you. For I look within and see something of that. Perhaps I wanted to discover whether it was possible, after all: to stay, to stay as I did not, and be yet happy.’

‘No one can live life for you,’ Jonson said.

‘No? Dear God, how I wish it.’

But all in all it was not so bad. Edmund set himself devoutly to learning his lines and his trade, listened respectfully to everyone involved, called on Will infrequently. He did not seem drawn to the taverns and gaming-dens, as Matthew was: Heminges reported him sober and domestic. It was as if he woke each morning to the miracle of his achieved wish, and resolved to do nothing to endanger it, ever.

To be sure, that might not last. Will considered his brother every bit as susceptible as – well, as himself? But for now there was health in it: straightforward affection between brothers, doing the expected thing. Not that sickness which he saw, now, was in his other, dark and incidental, life. Isabelle.

He could pity her, though he knew she would turn and rend at the first sign of any such thing: pity her for that naked pulsing past, for what it had made of her spirit. But he could see, also – was it the short visit home that did it, the light blue touch of eyes that would not reach him? – that there was no good for either of them in their continued game of fascination. Only pain could result. Destruction. It grew round them, like mould growing round the surface of a fruit.

Yet it went on. It flowed on, turbulently, casting up vivid fragments of memory when he lay down at night.

The first visit to her on his return to London, the visit meant to be the end. He meant absolutely to break it. But her bird had died. It had died the day before, and still lay on the bottom of the cage. Will found he missed that infuriating ticking.

‘I am not a delicate woman, Will. As you well know. Why then can I not move it? Because once you do that, it’s dead, dead – isn’t it?’

She wouldn’t let him see her weep. Still he felt it, the weeping inside her, as one felt rather than heard bees in a hive.

He found a patch of soil in the yard behind the house, and dug a hole for the bird with a piece of wood. It seemed incredibly laborious: sweat fell from his eyebrows. He remembered blood dripping into Stratford earth: was suddenly appalled by age, its very existence. Stop time, stop it.

He stayed with her an hour, after.

For how could he break with her now? And, after all, what if, in her strange way, she did love him?

But then that meant nothing. He was married, although his wife was dead to him – or, rather, love was dead to him, that was all. All and everything. Still, he did not want to see Isabelle hurt. Previously he would have thought it impossible, but since her confession to him – so he figured it – he had revised all his thoughts of her.

But those thoughts must be crushed. Because of Anne. Not what they were to each other now, but what they had been, and might have been. In Stratford he had felt the presence of that other Will, whose shape had indented the mattress, whose hands when small had grasped the banister of his father’s staircase that shone from its thousands of touchings. He was there, like the dead, like dead Marlowe (whom he would not have been surprised to see hailing him from across the inn-yard). He was there like the imagined, like old Lear, whose proud breaking accents were beginning to intrude on his mind. He was real, like the people you avoided being.

Yes, he was a hypocrite. He could not be the true gentle Master Shakespeare, just as Jonson had hinted. But I do not have to be this man, he told himself, caught up in a species of attraction that was like lust turned cold and slow. As if a man without appetite found himself compelled to eat until he was sick, and then to eat to make that emptiness better …

The next time, he would tell her. And if this turned out to be another lie to himself, then self-hate must come to a new and killing pitch. Already he woke up couched in his skin with mistrust: oh, it’s you, me, is it? His own mind a cutpurse, smiling, stealing away from him.

*   *   *

‘I tell you, I’m not in the vein for talk this even.’ Isabelle picked at chords on the virginal like someone picking at a scab. She threw him a look, fiercely weighted. ‘Mark me well.’

‘None of your prohibitions,’ he said. ‘No more of that, Isabelle. I speak as I would speak to anyone, as I should have spoken long before. No play, no game. I’m here to say farewell. Declare an end.’ He fixed his eyes on her stilled hands: saw the lifted defensive posture of a caught crab. ‘I do wrong to see you. You do wrong to continue our – our mutual trouble.’