The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (7 page)

‘Nothing: nothing you don’t want. I know you don’t wish to be bound prentice to him. But there are other bonds, natural bonds, and to go against nature … Oh, Will, sometimes you are a little frightening. I don’t mean there is anything to fear from you. Only that sometimes – I see you go so far away.’

He shook his head, trying to smile. He thought that no one could be more frightening than her, when it came to it.

‘I’ve mended matters with Father, or I mean to. And—’

‘Oh, Will, it’s what I wish to hear. Thank you.’ She got up. ‘Make a proper peace. Don’t defy him any more.’ Her smile was bright and cool as she looked down and it chilled him. ‘Make up your mind to it, Will.’

*   *   *

It was Joan who took the question out of their hands: Joan who was not yet fourteen in years but twenty in her buxom, bustling figure and twenty more, any age, all woman in her worldly-wise equality to anything. Lately, when the maid had had toothache and fought shy of the barber-surgeon, Joan had borrowed a pair of pliers from the blacksmith and efficiently pulled the tooth herself, drowning the cries with lusty singing.

Will adored her. He sometimes suspected that his father was a little afraid of her. Joan loved light and was a great thrower-open of shutters, and when her guts were disordered she would say so and warn everyone against the privy. Contrast their mother, whose characteristic, muffling phrase was
Let’s not speak of it
– especially when John Shakespeare gazed into ale-cup or memory and saw grievance at the bottom. Suspicion, indeed, that Joan was quite capable of saying,
No, let’s speak of it, let’s open the shutters on it.

‘Father, the players are here and I have never seen them yet. Can I go?’

‘Hm. A year or two older, Joan, and then we may speak of it.’

Joan would have none of that judicious rumbling. ‘Bess Quiney goes. She’s younger than me, and the Quineys lose no reputation by it. And Mistress Sturley was
married
at fourteen. She was telling me of it.’

Will caught a glance from his father that said,
Your doing?
But since dawn he had been making a full, dull, dutiful inventory of the Henley Street premises. And, besides, Joan would not be evaded.

‘I don’t often ask a boon, Father. Many a girl is forever pestering for trinkets and baubles. But you always find me plain and sober, I hope. Do I disgrace you with trumpery ribbons and bracelets? Lord, I pray not.’

‘That is a different question.’

But the question was already lost. Joan was not to be refused what was granted to Alderman Quiney’s daughter. She could not, of course, go alone.

So it fell out. Will looked at it as if it were a coin found in the street. Keep it, spend it: still it was not really yours, just a tainted chance. And only a fool would live the rest of his life looking for money on the ground.

*   *   *

Impossible, of course, not to feel it as they shuffled into the Guildhall and the warm wave of babbling sweaty expectancy broke over them. But Will tried to take his cue from Gilbert, who had come along because, as he said, it was better than swatting flies: Gilbert who, at sixteen, had suddenly become a lank, long yawner, wholly phlegmatic in humour, seemingly preparing himself for a lifetime of being unimpressed.

Still Will’s senses roared, and at a twitch of the tiring-house curtain his mind went furiously questing like an unmuzzled dog – would there be rhymes and how would they use them? Stamp on them flat-footed or touch them in flight, like a squirrel leaping from branch to branch? Beware. Muzzle, muzzle. Will brought back the picture of himself running frantically towards an unreal horizon, in all its self-pitying absurdity. That did it.

‘What a crush,’ Joan was saying cheerfully. ‘Have a care for your purse: I see low, knavish faces. Brummagem faces, I’d venture. Day to you, day to you. Lord,
she
’s aged. Shouldn’t we push forward? However will we hear?’

‘The players’ voices carry,’ Will said.

‘You mean they shout? I shan’t care for two hours’ shouting.’

‘No. Or only the worst. It’s different…’

As he turned, the face turned, like a page in a book trying to bring the next with it.

She was ten feet away. For some stilled, carved moments they looked at each other. Nothing of greeting or recognition. It was as if the look came in the middle of a deep discourse, at the posing of an unanswerable question.

Joan prodded him. ‘What are you staring at?’ She followed Will’s gaze. ‘Oh, her.’

‘Mistress Hathaway. From Shottery,’ he heard himself say.

‘Aye, I know her. Well, we’ve often passed the time of day at the butter market. Her name is Anne,’ Joan said loftily. ‘Let’s give her good day, then. Lord, I wonder men ever come to know anyone.’

True enough, thought Will, as Joan accosted Mistress Hathaway with easy nothings, joining the parties together. Such heat! Aye, but then the season – aye, so … The big boy was with her, round-eyed and damp-fringed. ‘My stepbrother,’ he heard her say – just: her voice was the very opposite of carrying, a leaf swept away by the swollen stream of noise.

‘Sweet chick. Never been at a play before, heart? No more have I. We shall look to each other.’ Joan took Will and Gilbert by the arm. ‘Now, these great burdens are
my
brothers. Was ever woman attended by two such loobies? Like overgrowing beans, and me the stick.’

Anne smiled. Her name – ‘Mistress Hathaway, I pray you well’ – her name is Anne. She acknowledged his bow. That smile. It touched like the waking from a nightmare – the realisation of the beauty of reality, which never lasted as long as it should. Anne.

On the stage the clown burst out, cutting a flaccid caper: Jack Towne was right. But the audience rippled and quieted and gathered its attention. Anne among them: her long, tight-sleeved arm gathered the boy in front of her as they faced the stage. Two hand breadth of white neck between collar and coif-netted hair – like caged honey – presented itself to Will’s fidgeting eye. But what then? This: everything about her was beautiful. It made that lazy, spoiled word do its work at last, and he had known that when he had stood boyish before her at Hewlands Farm, but what then? It was nothing to do with him. Will glanced around. Townsfolk standing at ease, country folk craning, still smutted with the dust of their journey. Children perching on shoulders, clapping uncertainly. The clown, teetering on the edge of the stage, was yelling back at a fist-shaking woman. ‘You want to cuff me, did you say, sweetling? Cuff me? Spell it backwards, that’s what you truly want.’ He mimed it with fat thrustings, feeling himself through his parti-coloured breeches.

That smile. It didn’t last as long as it should. It seemed to Will that to coax and tend that smile, to bring it into the world, would be something worth.

The clown waddled off, the play began. ‘
The Right Tragical History of Darius King of Persia,
as it has been acted before Her Majesty the Queen…’ The King hurried to the edge of the stage to tell them urgently of the fate that hung over him. It was William Knell yet not so: all king now, no player.

The rafters of the Guildhall became the arches of Babylon. A shift, a change. You couldn’t be aware of it any more than you could pinpoint the moment when you fell asleep. Joan threw herself into it, Will saw with pleasure, gasping at every cruelty, hands flying to her cheeks in pity: as if everything were really happening in a room that she happened to be in. As it should be.

But for the first time Will’s attention was split. He kept watching Anne’s face, almost as if it were part of the play. Judging the tragedy by the lights and shades it drew on that face. It seemed to him that other faces were like blank leaves compared to hers, where a whole busy page of text invited the eye to read.

Meanwhile two vast young women at her side, sharing a cider-jug that they passed to each other like an infant to be nursed, grew larger with drink and self-love and began crowding her out. They wanted to be reproved, so they could enjoy a quarrel or shouting-match. But Anne simply coiled her stepbrother closer and took up less room. He saw not shyness, not absence of will, but a pure refusal of contention: so pure it stretched out for ever, an infinite quiet denial of the stupid and ugly. He moved.

‘Mistress, come this side of me, there’s more room.’

He made the space, and preserved it with taut back and stiff elbows. Her lips moved, perhaps thanks. He preferred none. As the play neared its catastrophe, he observed her – as Joan was – shifting her weight from one foot to the other: the boy was sitting on the ground at her feet. A play was a long time standing unless you were, like him, insane about it.

‘Will! What are you doing?’

‘Offering comfort,’ he said to Joan, on his knees. He had sometimes seen men do this for their womenfolk at the play, as two hours turned into three. Young men often propped each other up back to back. ‘Lean on me. Do it, please.’ He did not quite turn his head. ‘Mistress Hathaway – if you will.’

Joan, giggling, leaned her weight on his shoulder at once. In Anne’s short hesitation he found time for a surmise that he had mortally, everlastingly, offended her; and to wonder what that meant to him. When she laid her hand on his shoulder everything else, thought, emotion, gave way to sensation. The breathing weight and warmth of her astonished him. It was as if he had never touched a human being before. Eighteen years old: eighteen years’ worth of living, and now it seemed a long, fusty drowse before a proper waking.

He never wanted a play to end. But this was different. Of course he could not kneel for ever; but it was enough to imagine doing it, to see himself lit by the new blaze of possibility.

*   *   *

Outside the Guildhall Joan, stretching, yawning, chattering all at once, was still in command. ‘Lord, how bright it is – I feel like a mole. That clown was monstrous, was he not? He tried to fix
my
eye when he did that shocking jig, but I would have none of him. Still, I had to laugh. Pooh, don’t look, mistress, the beasts, they might wait until they get home.’ Along an alleyway beside the Guildhall a file of groaning men were emptying their bladders against the wall. ‘A pity the play brings out the low sort, for it’s a pleasant, pretty diversion after all. Does no one fetch you, Anne? Then you must have Will attend you home. No, I insist, I have only Henley Street to go to and Gilbert with me, but I can’t think of you and your chick plying the Shottery road alone, not when I’ve seen such Brummagem faces about.’

It should have been me proposing that, Will thought. He was glad to be doing it but faintly sick, queasy with doubt. Why? Perhaps because, although they took the Shottery field path at a slow enough pace, in his mind he felt himself running again full pelt, running beyond his reach.

‘Looks like a poorish harvest,’ he said, then wondered if these were her brother’s fields.

‘Does it?’ Her look was surprised, then awkward. ‘I’m never good at judging these things.’

He had an empty-handed feeling, as if he were trying to make a purchase with no money. Then he remembered the unborn calf, and thought that perhaps she could never forgive him for seeing her in extremity, and wondered if they could walk all the way to Hewlands Farm in silence. They might have, if it had not been for the boy, John. Freed from physical constriction, he was a wild thing, climbing, leaping, tumbling, rolling in mud.

‘John, come down from there – you’ll hurt yourself.’

‘I never hurt myself.’ He landed at their feet clutching a broken branch, thwacked himself across the head with it. ‘See?’ He squinted up at Will. ‘Did you like that play?’

‘Aye, did you?’

‘It went on too long.’ The boy flung the stick and hared off, flapping his arms and shrieking.

‘I can remember being like that,’ Will said, then stilled his tongue disgustedly. The remark exposed his youth; besides, it was sheer cant. He could not recall ever feeling that degree of abandon even as a child. Yielding to the moment – no, it meant losing sight of the moment before and the moment after. He needed to see all round.

‘Did you really like the play?’ she asked.

‘I like all plays. I like them better than life.’ A crude statement, but it was a relief to find himself saying something true. ‘Did you not care for it?’

‘I wonder they can remember all those speeches. It is very clever.’

‘But no more?’

Even so gentle a pressure seemed to make her withdraw, her lips biting back the words. Hers was no token blush: you were reminded that it was made of blood. He thought: Shyness? But how could you be shy, fortified by that beauty and grace? How not cry defiance from the battlements?

‘I felt it was not real,’ she said at last. ‘But perhaps I take after my brother. He says the play is idle feigning and breeds vain dreams.’

Will had not supposed Master Hathaway a Puritan; though, of course, there were many shades beside the hard crow-black piety of the Fields. ‘But he didn’t mind your going?’

She shook her head. ‘I may do as I like,’ she said. Somehow it sounded like the wretchedest of confessions.

John came back to them, leaping and stamping. ‘There, Anne. I treaded on your shadow, that means you’re dead.’

‘Trod, not treaded.’

‘Treaded and deaded. Treaded and deaded…’

‘All that rhyming has got into his wits,’ she murmured, without approval. The boy sang it over and over, wildly stamping.

‘You’re dead, you’re dead, and that’s good…’ He rasped his tongue, dancing backwards. Suddenly there was fury in her face and she was after him.

‘For shame – shame on you, to say that…’

Will wanted to call her back, to say it was only childish silliness. But there was, after all, something grim about it. And when she caught up with the squealing boy she did not collar him or hit him. Her blue, crackling-blue, eyes were all she needed to hold him still. Hitching her skirts she jumped neatly on his shadow.

‘Now you’re dead,’ she said. ‘Is that good?’

The boy pouted, big face half stricken, half mutinous. Will saw the resemblance to the farmer. He seemed to see other things, in vanishing glimpses.