The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (58 page)

In fever, Jack floundered up: half out of fever, he sat on the edge of the bed with his white sad feet long-boned on the boards, beseeching comfort, so Will sat beside holding.

‘Is this true, Will?’ Jack Towne’s voice rasped, its tone gone. ‘Is this – at last?’

‘No. But it was true once, somewhere. Or will be, somewhere, in mind or dream. Or flesh, perhaps.’

‘Aye, perhaps. That’s the random chance.’ Jack held Will’s hand. Their legs inclined quiescent together. ‘There we missed, and perhaps it was meant so.’

‘Still it’s true, in that all that is loving is true.’

‘I loved thee better than thou know’st,’ Jack said, drawing away, lying down. ‘Because I didn’t seek to love thee. Thou wert set aside for something else, heart.’

‘Someone?’ Will said. ‘Or something?’

Throaty, Jack laughed on the doorstep of sleep. ‘Ah, it’s you, old word-lover.’

Will saw him through the crisis. Not plague: a fever drawn out by hunger and hardship. The player’s life, he thought, the other side. He hoped Edmund wouldn’t call, and see.

Waking, deep-breathed, the sweat dried from his face, Jack reached and gripped Will’s shoulder where he sat at the bedside half aware. ‘You’ve saved me. Am I worth it, Will? Tell.’

‘Saving, saving is all, heart. I’ve done enough of throwing away.’ Will thrust himself into saying it – past the hesitation, the mistrust. Trust needed no firm grounds, trust had no provisos. It was a leap into darkness. It was necessary like breath, to be renewed every moment, else no life.

Then the door opened, and he looked up to see her, as if he had created her from wanting – saw her momentary, gone.

*   *   *

Anne found that Edmund caught her easily enough. So much for the heroic strength. She had only run a couple of streets, blindly running and weeping, before her breath shrank and her burning footsteps slowed and Edmund’s hand brought her swinging and fighting to a stop.

‘Anne, for God’s sake, are you mad? What are you running from?’ People swore, ducking round them, for rain was slanting down on a wind of mild thunder. ‘The man in Will’s room, is that it?’

‘You call him a man, you players, is that how you call him? Or a boy-girl?’ She shook his hand off. ‘It’s Matthew.’

Edmund’s face hung dull with incomprehension. ‘You mean Matthew Hollingbery?’ he said at last, frowning. ‘No, it’s not him. Why on earth— Matthew’s deep in work, he’s playing at the Rose. I saw him go to rehearsal this morning. What in God’s name did you think…?’

Anne allowed it to curl round her. The snake of realisation. ‘Nothing.’ She blinked, moved aside for a beruffed old dame carrying a dog in her arms – no lap-dog, a great thing with lolling legs. Life kept kicking you with surprises, at the back of your knees. That was the feel of life. ‘I thought nothing. I shall never think anything again. Well, you were in the right, after all, Edmund.’ She searched a way through the crowd. ‘I should never have come here.’

‘No. I think it was meant, perhaps. Come.’

‘Where?’

‘Your husband.’

She tugged against him. ‘No husband.’

‘No? Change it, then. Define it. Something. We shall, Anne. Else I need not have lived.’

*   *   *

‘Mistress Shakespeare. You may not remember me. We met long ago in dear Stafford. Damn it, Stratford.’ The fair man had shrugged some clothes around him, and was sitting on the edge of Will’s bed. A dull, plain lodging, Anne thought, clean enough, but still. A place for work. ‘Where the Queen’s Men came to play, years since, and we stayed to take your husband away to his – his beautiful destiny. His second beautiful destiny.’ The fair man, Jack Towne, bowed as he sat: he could do that easily. His nose was too short, his cheekbones too broad; but there was something about him. Anne couldn’t recall him, and yet she felt she knew him. ‘And he has flourished mightily since, praise be. I, less so. We loved each other well in those days.’ Towne threw a blue glance at Will, standing reserved, wrapped, curiously tall by the door. ‘And you know, mistress, that true love of whatever sort always endures. I speak not of perfect love, for that don’t exist.’ Towne smiled crookedly. ‘I have been living somewhat reduced of late, and Will has been good enough to tender me the hand that Fate has been loath to extend for so long.’ He coughed round a smile. ‘Never fear this sound, mistress, it’s the last whimper of the departing devil. An ague that bade fair to finish me, had Will not brought me home, given me his bed, brought in the doctor, and stayed by to hear me – no doubt – cursing like an alewife on fair-day, hey?’

Will smiled. ‘Something like, but not so bad, Jack.’

Not that beautiful voice of his. I am proof against his look, but not that voice – the voice that lies, that he has employed with her in the little hot room of art. Storm shook itself wetly at the window.

‘Thank God, I am in a way now to recover,’ Towne said, ‘and to repay, my friend, your kindness. Oh, yes. Once set up, once given a fair part to play, you may be sure every penny, every lost moment will be recompensed…’ His voice trailed: trying to convince himself, Anne thought.

She spoke. ‘Did you fear plague?’ She addressed Towne, looking at least at the lower half of his face; but it was Will, for the first time, she was talking to.

‘I felt low enough,’ Towne said, ‘to welcome its deliverance, if it was.’

‘But if it had been plague.’ Anne’s eyes moved everywhere in the room, except for the space of Will. ‘What, then, if it had been plague?’

Distinctly, Will said: ‘As Jack says.’

She risked a glance at her husband. His eyes hit her like a piece of sky; but, then, she loved him, or had loved him, and such things were to be expected.

Jack Towne stood, revealing his slender height. ‘Mistress Shakespeare, do you know – though I hope you don’t – the feeling that all, all is lost, and you cannot stir a finger to put it right?’

Her throat closed, but she overcame that. ‘Do you?’

‘Yes. Oh, yes. And then – then when hope begins faintly to come in – oh, such a feeling.’ He drew a great half-smiling breath. Will remained a shade at the door. ‘Who can describe it?’

And so, who is to answer?

*   *   *

Though he protests, they leave Jack Towne in possession of the bedchamber in Silver Street, to sleep off the remnant of his fever. Edmund takes charge of them, as neither seems to have any more volition than sheep at market.

He takes them to the Mermaid, bespeaks a supper-room, orders fowls and ale, saying they both need food in them. Food, aye, and what then? They both stare at him, like mutinous children.

‘Why, then, to you,’ Edmund says. ‘I cannot make any more than this.’

Anne feels sorry for him: sorry across the world. ‘Edmund. Forgive me. Forgive me that I tangled you in the matter. It was not well done.’

Edmund, arms crossed, studies her. ‘Yes, it was. I’m not sorry.’

‘Why?’ Bitterly she is thankful for an opportunity, to rage and assert. ‘You think we can be happy now? What is it? An enchanter from above descending at the end of the piece to make all well? I see none.’ She gestures about the little brown-panelled room. A big creaking coffin all round, set about with a few pewter plates and candlesticks. ‘Who can change this? I see none, I see none…’ She finds herself croaking it over and over, doing herself no good. Will is a streak of silence near at hand. She sees the hairs on his wrist, the sunken green twig of blood pressed in the arm’s white book.

‘Because of truth,’ Will says. ‘Truth is best.’

Oh, now you give me room, and I shall use it. She lashes at him. ‘The truth you were not going to tell me?’

And now they look at each other.

‘You’ve seen her,’ he says, quiet and ready. ‘Isabelle? And that’s why you came to London?’

‘What else would you suppose?’

‘Why, naught. The moment you stepped in, I knew.’

‘Don’t bewray your brother,’ she says, wanting to protect Edmund: wanting to avert some violence that fails to come, like the childish tumbles of thunder, the jerky peppering rain at the window. ‘I cozened him to spy upon you. It was all my doing. Set no blame on him.’

‘There is no blame.’

‘In you?’

‘In me, there’s much to blame.’

Edmund speaks: ‘I need not have done it. I’m no one’s tool, I have a mind and heart, and everything they are I owe to your example. Yes, you two. In you I’ve always seen what love can mean, and what things it can conjure from the coarse stuff of life. And so I still believe, even if it’s gone awry, for now or aye, I hope for now only, but still I’ll never forget the knowing of you two, the sweetness there was, the showing how a life can be when truly lived, each in the other on this one earth.’ He is weeping, hating it, with doglike coughs. ‘Your supper’s cooking. Eat of it, and speak with one another, in pity’s name. I’ll go. Look for me in an hour.’ Wiping his face with the back of his hand, he scowls at them. ‘You both have my love, whatever way. Split it, split me, I can divide. I can do it.’

Edmund is gone, and there is just the creaking room with them in it, and the evidence of life beyond this moment, perhaps, like a wasp’s warm nest beyond the plaster.

Will says: ‘Was she foul to you?’

‘Why? Is that what you would expect of her?’

‘In a subtle way.’

‘She told me a great lie about you. And I believed it.’

‘There are no big lies about me. Only small grubby ones.’

‘So I believe now. I don’t know if that can change aught. I’ve been there, Will. That room, where you have been, with her. She tells me it’s finished now.’

‘So it is.’

‘But it can never be, surely. Not inside. Not in that great hollow we share between us.’

The maid comes in, lays a cloth, returns bringing steaming laden plates. A bob, anxious, as she goes: is all well, will she be reproved? Anne and Will interrupt each other’s looks, reassuring her.

‘I betrayed you with Isabelle.’ Will speaks harshly, with a sort of grim flourish, as if preparing to cut the throat of possibility. ‘That is the place we stand. Can it lead anywhere?’

‘If you betrayed me, then you should know that we are quits, as far as that goes.’ Anne says it first; then wonders about its quantity of truth; then realises it was right to say it, in any case; then looks for his response. ‘What say you?’

He’s an actor, used to adapting to the moment, he never flounders. Still: taste those salt eyes. ‘It hurts.’ Ah. She wishes this felt better, like worlds of pleasure, instead of a sour sip. ‘It hurts, but I won’t – I won’t say no to the pain.’

Anne smiles, or grins: she can’t tell the difference just now, hurting. ‘How much pain can you bear?’

‘I don’t know. But I’m willing to try what you may give.’

‘Me?’ Anne groans drily. ‘What am I, Will? Look you, I come here, I am full of rage and jealousy and I want to – to do something, shake the world about me, and I cannot, I cannot even hate as I would wish, and that’s because you made me, Will.’ She bats away his reaching hands. ‘I can forgive almost everything but that, for once you made me I was yours, belonging to you, and that I cannot break.’ Batting again, as if wasps surround her, or frightening fruitful bees.

‘But you made me.’ He’s pressing home. Either he means it, or you are deceived. Take hence those hands I want upon me, that scent of self, that looming of hair and head and voice. ‘From the day we met at Shottery, that was the beginning of my creation. You made Will Shakespeare, Anne. And without you there wouldn’t be a life, but the unformed shape of one, never to be.’

Pretty, yes. But she lives in the world, where pretty won’t do. She wishes otherwise. She draws on the grey, cool, straight. ‘There’s such a thing, Will, as too late,’ she says, and risks his eyes. She is aware of a single tear rapidly crossing her cheek, like some busy little creature.

‘I can only beg you not to believe that,’ he says. ‘But if you do, I’ll abide.’ As he steps away, she feels a turmoil in his stillness: the turmoil of a decisive man living with his decision. ‘I crave your pardon for failing you. It was done in selfish darkness and I convinced myself you could not care. You never had less than all my love.’

‘Ah, what does that come to?’

He nods. ‘You know.’

All at once it is on her lips to say that they have failed each other. But to say that is to take the exchange on to entirely new ground, one on which reconciliation is a possibility. And she can’t tread there, surely. The ground is sulphurous, unsteady; the light changes like a hundred days in one; you’d have to be mad or courageous or in love to enter it. She sees that fear has been a larger part of herself than she even suspected.

Suddenly he says: ‘If we are quits—’

‘Don’t speak of it.’

‘If we are quits, then may we not begin a new game?’

‘Game, or play, which? What play is this, Will? Old marriage made new? Has a good sound, I’d say a good name for a play. And will it make me laugh, or weep?’

Will sits down, wearily rubbing his cheeks. He looks right doing so: he never looks exceptional, doing anything. ‘You know me,’ he says, slightly smiling. ‘Laugh or weep, I must ever mix them. How did you come here, all alone?’

‘With Andrew. I just did it. Courage came.’

‘I want to take heart from that courage. That it meant – you had not given me quite over.’

‘You can, if you like. You don’t understand fear.’

‘Me? Pray you.’ He shakes his head. ‘I am deep in it, none deeper.’

‘What fear?’

‘Losing. Losing what I have and losing what I make. One comes from another, perhaps.’

‘What you make? You don’t even print them.’

He shrugs. ‘Let them take their chance.’

‘And is it so with our marriage? Betray it, be damned to it, let it take its chance?’ Now she is softly raging, beating at his chest, a fumbling sharp kick to his shins. Over to the other side of the room.

Not leaving the room, though. Because of what she believes, even now, in the roots of her. Because of what she saw and heard in Jack Towne, poor broken-down once-fair creature that she can see, in her mind’s eye, as he was once, in Will’s mind’s eye back then, and what he opened up. Something he opened up, but not all. More opened up when the lightning struck the tree and her life struck Will’s, when she made Will Shakespeare, believe that? Yes, somehow. Never doubted, really. And what she believes is the neverness of ending, the falsehood of finality. Yes, she would never print, too, if she wrote. She believes in the continuous, the river not the pond. She doesn’t, in fact, believe there is such a thing as too late: that is death to her creed. She believes in second chances. And third, and fourth. Because we’re frail, not made of iron with lumps of stone at heart. No perfect love, as Towne said. But true love, that endures.