The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (56 page)

She couldn’t sleep again. Before everyone she was ready, impatient for the last stage of the ride to London.

The crowded yard glared and stank. A duck in a basket honked fiercely.

Anne stood to the mounting-block. Did you invent me, too, Will? Is that why I feel so insubstantial – as if the mare will hardly notice me in the saddle? Did you make me – and, perhaps, leave me unfinished?

Complete me, then, or unmake me for ever.

I have tears, but do not know how they are to be used, yet.

*   *   *

‘Are we not to go with you?’ Agnes said: or, rather, demanded.

It was unlike her to be so stubborn and insistent, Ben thought. In truth, though, it was very like her. He just had to armour himself with patience.

‘It would scarcely be an entertainment for you, my love, nor the little ones. Master Cotton is a scholar: that is his whole life. He has brought together a library that is, they say, in a way to be the greatest in the kingdom. So, he invites me to his house as a scholar also.’ Difficult to keep down the swell of pride at that; and, after all, why should he? Modesty was for the modestly endowed. ‘The talk there will all be of the ancients, of text and line, of philosophical disquisition. The breadth and feather of poetry’s wings. You would yawn.’

‘Papa.’ Little Benjamin, with his courtly firmness, plucking at him. ‘Papa, may I say? I should like to see that great library. I’m a good scholar and bookman, aren’t I?’

‘You are, and some day you shall see it, that’s my promise,’ Ben said, kneeling, enfolding his son’s hand in his. Softening, whitening now, surely: bearing no trace of the bricklayer’s rough redness. ‘Truly, Agnes, it would be too dull. It will be a man’s occasion.’

‘If you say so. I only wish we might go out of the city before the hot weather. There’s plague about.’

‘Oh, it hasn’t crossed the river. It will flare and die down.’ Already in his mind he was settled at Connington, Robert Cotton’s country house in Huntingdonshire, combing the books and deep in disquisition. Cotton had invited William Camden too: fine company for a long symposium, a heavenly vacation of thinking … And Ben would be an honoured guest alongside his old master, poet and play-maker of renown, invited for himself. Mellow-sweet the taste of it, suffusing the honeycomb mind.

‘As long as you intend coming back,’ Agnes said.

He took her hand and kissed it. They had lived apart for a while, when he grew tired of her nagging – or she had thrown him out, interpret it as you pleased. The point was, she had begged him to come back at last: she had stood pale and longing on his mother’s doorstep. She knew how easy he found it to be a bachelor again. Too easy.

‘You,’ he said, ‘and these sweet ones,’ Benjamin’s fond pushing head at his hand, ‘you know you have all my heart.’

‘I know,’ his wife said, and with a faint smile: ‘Such as it is.’

*   *   *

Anne found a room at the Bell Inn on Carter Lane. It was full, but became less so when she gave over a shocking amount of money. The innkeeper was unabashed. In London just now everyone, it seemed, had the hardness of money-making on their faces.

For a time she sat on the bed, holding herself. Keeping herself together. Like an overpacked trunk bound with tight clasps, leather thinning and fraying. London. Dense overripe smell, light defeated and sullen from the battle with smoke and the ranks of high-shouldered roofs, an extra half-mad sharpness in the sound of dogs barking. She had never expected to come back here, never expected to allow this city into her mind and senses again, after it had taken Hamnet from her,.

But, of course, it hadn’t, and neither had Will, nor Will’s choices and her choices. She saw it now, as she sat alone and alien. The death of her son was no purposeful unfolding of a play-plot. It was just death, final and unequivocal. You died, too, or lived on.

She had brought bread and cheese wrapped in linen, and she made herself eat, feeding herself like a reluctant child. He’s in this city and he doesn’t know I am. What if he bumps into me in the street? Why, Will, how dost … Anne let out a crumbled laugh. He would think he’d imagined me, perhaps. And perhaps he did. I can’t quite remember the time before him, before the lightning-tree and the unborn calf, before his eyes stilling mine. Like one of those dreams you’re not sure you had, a night-spot on your mind in daylight, a memory of a memory, infinitely disappearing.

Edmund was lodging at the house of John Heminges, Will’s friend and partner. If she applied there it might get back to Will. She would have to send Andrew to fetch him. How find it? Ask, she told him, just ask. Remembering her own first fear of London made her snappish. They won’t eat you … Ah, but won’t they? She still half expected this place to start closing its city teeth around her, chewing. My meal, says Fate, at last.

*   *   *

Edmund arrived, full of brightness and wonder. ‘But I didn’t know, I had no notion you were coming! Will said naught. Where is he?’

‘Will doesn’t know I’m here.’ They faced each other. Edmund looked away first. ‘Edmund, it was your letter that brought me here.’

‘Alone? You shouldn’t have done it.’

‘I have Andrew.’

Edmund shook his head. He had, she thought, that London sallowness, as if he were best seen by candlelight. ‘I mean you shouldn’t have come like this.’

‘Why? Is it best not to know?’

‘I told you, I wrote you, there is nothing to know.’ He jumped violently when she took his hand, as if she burned him.

‘You lied. You lie now. I know why, I think: it’s to do with love, for Will and for me, and how you imagine us. And I know I should stay at home and count my blessings, live content in ignorance, as many a woman would. Think of your purse and your luck, and cultivate peace … But I have no peace, brother, and it’s my own fault, doubtless, but there it is. That’s the way I’m made. The way you’re made. It brought you here, did it not?’

He still would not or could not look at her, but he nodded, fingers quiescent in hers.

‘Well, then. Show me, Edmund. Take me to her. Do me the kindness.’

*   *   *

‘All I know is he comes here. That’s known. He visits here. But what’s that, after all? Naught. There is a woman lives here, a Frenchwoman, but what’s that?’ The words were jerked out of Edmund, as if he were hiccuping or sobbing, though his face was dry and composed, faintly annoyed. But, then, he was an actor now.

She stood in the shadowy passage looking about her, as if something familiar might leap out from the stones. There was a door with a shell-hood porch. There was a window up there, slightly ajar. A trickle of damp. A pigeon roosting.

‘How often?’

‘I don’t know. It’s – say, now and then. I’ve followed him here, seen him go in. Only because you told me to. I hated it.’ His voice now had the hidden bray of a boy sadly blustering. ‘They are not seen about together, never in my belief, so it’s not a matter of—’

‘Being flagrant about his mistress.’

‘I don’t know. What goes on. I don’t want to. Can you understand that?

She tried to soften it with a half-smile. ‘Edmund, I don’t have to.’

‘He’s my brother.’

‘My husband.’

‘Love – love bears all—’

‘In silence?’

He swallowed, scrubbed his face with his hands. ‘What do you mean to do?’

Ah, the great question. She didn’t know. This seemed as great a brink, verge, and entry into darkness as death itself. She stepped under the porch and lifted her hand. ‘See.’

*   *   *

‘No.’ The Frenchwoman shook her head. There seemed a perpetual suppressed yawn about her, as of a person staying up too late and almost past going to bed. ‘No, I still can’t quite comprehend it. Why you should come.’

‘Better to see you than imagine you, perhaps,’ Anne said. ‘May I sit?’

The Frenchwoman shrugged. She took up some sewing and held it to the light, or such light as there was in here. Somehow, though the shutters were back, the room, with its hangings and tapestries and crowded lustrous furniture, seemed to shut out the day. Outside it was noon, but in here it was any time.

‘Does he know you’ve come?’

‘No.’

‘Resourceful in you.’

‘Not what you expected of Will’s wife?’

The Frenchwoman sat back and seemed to think, almost neutrally, about the question. ‘I don’t know that I ever expected anything, in truth. You were just – the distant wife.’ Her dark eyes swept over Anne. In spite of the light, you felt she saw incredibly keenly, that the eyes struck like an eagle’s on a furred movement. ‘How old are you?’

‘Turned forty-seven.’

‘You look younger.’

A million times more strange and dreamlike than she could have imagined, this meeting: sitting with the woman with whom Will had betrayed her and being, if you liked, complimented by her and feeling – God, her head was going to explode – feeling a little awkward that she could not return the compliment because she thought the Frenchwoman a brown, harsh-featured creature for all her trim figure …

‘Does he beat you?’ the woman said abruptly.

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Oh, there must be something behind that look. You surely can’t tell me you’re a loving wife.’

‘Why? What would that do to you?’

The Frenchwoman stood up and went to a table with silver wine-jug and goblets. The cloth on the table was fringed and embroidered in a way Anne had never seen and the silver was chased and unusual too. Everything about her had this elaborated quality, even to her hair, her expression: as if she had to go about life as a work of art. Somehow it irritated Anne; and the irritation managed to exist alongside the wild, mad anger and pain and disbelief.

‘Faith, I don’t know what you expect, mistress, coming here. Where’s the need of it, since you’ve made sure of your suspicions? Aye, I’ve had your man in my bed, for what that’s worth. What, then? Are we to rage and tear at each other like a pair of good-wives in a citizen comedy?’ She drank thirstily. ‘Or are you come to proclaim your wifely rights, and warn me off? If so, it’s folly, you have no need. Do you think I’m a species of enchanter, is that your notion? Snares and lures and toils and coils?’ She chuckled stonily. ‘My dear, I began it, true enough, because I had a fancy for him. But I soon saw I was mistook about my power. I was naught but a convenience for him. He’s an oddity, isn’t he?’ The bright look the Frenchwoman gave her then terrified Anne, somehow: she could almost have begged to be given some of that wine. She imagined its taste, complex, exotic, beyond her. ‘What he wants. What he doesn’t want. Perhaps you don’t quite understand it. Lord, I was a fool to spend so much time on him. He had me, and then when he’d had me he’d had enough of me. You know his boy-girl? The sainted Matthew?’

Anne wanted to say no – perhaps because, for the first time, in the Frenchwoman’s lifted lip of contempt, she recognised something of herself. But she couldn’t speak; and somehow the woman seemed to know her, the truth of her, agelessly, like a mother or God.

‘Certes you know Matthew. Never ceases to talk of him, does he? You must know how affected your man is to that boy-girl.’ The woman clattered the goblet down: either a little drunk, or not so nerveless as she seemed. ‘You’re in the wrong place, mistress. I’m not your rival.’ She lifted her eyes to Anne’s, and Anne seemed to catch a sharp sound from their blackness, like flint chipping. ‘Matthew boy-girl and his high prime young arse, that’s where your man fixes his desire now. And that’s where you should be looking for him. God be with you, if you have one.’ Tears – from that flint? Surely not. ‘And leave me alone for aye.’

*   *   *

At Connington, country seat of Robert Cotton, Ben walks arm in arm with Master William Camden about the knot-garden. Gravel paths entice and soothe the feet; healthful herb-primed airs blow on the gentle lowland wind.

Ben, having spent the day among his gentle host’s collections, is still marvelling. ‘That Nennius. But then the
Historia Ecclesiastica
of Bede, did you see it? And the
Homilies
of Aelfric, those, those I must beg him to lay my hands on again tomorrow. And the painted gospels. It sets a man to thinking, if this is what has survived, what more may have been lost?’

‘A great deal, assuredly. We nibble the mere orts of a great banquet.’

‘It minds us of our own responsibilities to posterity, that the flowers of our literature be not lost likewise. I shall take the greatest of care in supervising the printing of all my works.’

‘Ah, and shall they be shelved next to Bede, or Nennius?’ Camden says, with a delicate smile.

‘I wouldn’t blush to see ’em there,’ Ben says robustly. ‘But no, next to Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare. Or, let us say, just above them. And they must be safe guarded. Is the King a friend to such a collection, would you say?’

‘I believe such is Master Cotton’s hope. The late Queen had a fear of antiquaries being too inclined to hunt out precedents and meddle with policy. But His Scots Majesty is a scholar, and you know Master Cotton comes of the illustrious line of the Bruce, hm?’

‘He has not mentioned it above a dozen times.’ Ben chuckles. ‘And I honour him not a whit the less. He ought to have all his library in one place, mind, not divided betwixt here and his London house.’

‘Where would you fix?’

‘London. This is beautiful, admirable, as fine in its way as Althorp. But the country is the place for reflection. The town is the place for acting on reflection. I could never be long from it.’

No, he is a citizen at heart, and he knows it. This is balm and delight, but so will be the return, a few weeks hence, to rackety, plaguey London, with all its plays and shows, in theatre and out. This, perhaps, is the height of felicity, to enjoy the now and to look forward no less to what is to come, with no division of the self, no clawing dark guilt or futile regrets. It was the moral sanity of the ancients; and in the verdant landscape surrounding the symmetrical house, where a civilised host served honest fare washed down with deep draughts of instruction, he sees a decent likeness to a scene from classical antiquity. It helps that he is in it too.