The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (8 page)

‘Come now, let’s kiss,’ she said, on a plain tender note. The boy clung to her passionately for a moment, then pulled away, pointing at Will.

‘Make him dead now.’

She straightened, glancing at Will’s shadow on the grass, then at his face.

‘No need,’ he said. ‘You’ve already killed me.’

‘No, she hasn’t.’ The boy groaned impatiently. ‘Here, I’ll do it.’ That gave a little space, in which what Will had said could reverberate. He wondered at himself for having said it: not with regret – though that might come – but with a giant amaze, for suddenly it seemed possible that he could say anything.

Anne shook her head slightly; a slight smile likewise. He felt she would always temper the sharpness of the negative. ‘No, I think you are living yet.’

She turned to walk on. To her mind he had said, perhaps, one of those things that were not real.

He followed. It was not far to Hewlands Farm now, but it didn’t matter: now, with his heart clanging rough music to break an age of silence, it didn’t matter how far he had to go.

3

The Triumph of Beauty (1582)

A gift of gloves.

Is this, Anne wonders, the moment?

When he presents them to her they are outside, naturally. Outside is their indoors, the wood their closed chamber. (
Not the house,
she told him, when they first began to meet.) Summer holds fast. Woodbine and dog-rose grow in tangles, in aromatic and sticky tunnels. Butterflies stumble along winding lanes of hot air. Too warm for gloves, but these are a gift, made by him.

A silent signal. She extends her right hand. With infinite care he draws the glove on to it, though his own hands are slightly trembling. Perhaps that is the moment: observing that tremble, and how it elevates her, so that the fallen trunk she sits on sheds its moss and fungus, and turns throne.

The limp kid fingers fill and stiffen. He inches the cuff up her wrist, past a million thrilling pinpoints.

And surely this should be the moment – if she is certain of her throne, certain of him at her feet. She doesn’t shrink from anything in him: looking on the dark waving crown of hair, broad brow, long-lashed salt-grey eyes, she is invited and beguiled. His youth, of which he is so conscious, seems to her a zenith, not a falling short; hard to imagine him burning any brighter than this.

‘It’s beautiful making,’ she says, flexing her hand, as a wand of sunlight conjures the intricate tracery of beads.

He shrugs. ‘An attempt. I wanted to put myself into every stitch.’ He laughs nervously. ‘And then I wanted to take myself out. To make the making better … No matter. Next to your skin it can only be a snarl and a cobble.’

Anne accepts the gift of gloves. But beyond that lies another acceptance, and there she still shrinks. Because now she knows something terrifying about herself: that her
yes
is not a word but a shout; that you can set the world before her and she, for the right thing, for the right love, will tip it all over like a drunkard with an inn-table, devoted to that dreaming fire in the head.

But before the gift there was Lammas-feast: perhaps it began then. Bartholomew invited Will to it, after he had escorted her home from the play. ‘My thanks, Master Shakespeare. We hold Lammas-feast tomorrow, come join us.’ It was thrown out in absently genial mood. Later, across the tumult of the supper-table, she intercepted a speculative look from him. ‘So, Anne,’ he said. But soon he was diverted by Bella: pregnant, and not eating hugely enough for his liking. Though she hardly shows, he is always touching and caressing her belly lately: as if he wants to hatch it. He is convinced it will be a son. For Bartholomew the past is of no interest at all, and the present an impatience: he lives in the future, of which he is amazingly unafraid.

And lately he has also been making some changes, like the disposing of the last of their father’s clothes as gifts to the farm servants. Good and right. She is bored by her own grief, its slow circularity, the windmill creak of it.

Lammas-feast, then. Bartholomew is one of the few farmers to keep it up: some call it popish. ‘If they work hard, let them have a little play,’ is how Bartholomew sees it. Trestles in the barn, a hogshead of ale, flitches of bacon; the farmhands at ease with him as he trades jokes and matches them pint for pint. When Will comes in she realises she has been waiting for this: not simply his arrival but how he will look against this background.

Bartholomew beckons him to the seat by his side, sets before him a heaped trencher. Her brother’s white teeth crunch away at onions and crackling as if noise is half the pleasure of eating.

Will – he eats too, converses, he doesn’t look out of place. But again Anne notices this about him: while many people sprawl in the world as if it is their own fireside, to see him is to think of a traveller at an inn, making a temporary separate comfort with wrapped cloak, the corner of a settle, his thoughts.

Evening squeezes its juicy light through the high slit windows, an incredible gold: the pewter dish in front of her glitters like a precious artefact. Resentfully she seeks and avoids Will’s eye.
Why,
she thinks,
do you come to destroy my peace?

Bartholomew is on his feet and seizing Nathaniel, the shepherd’s lad, by the shoulder. Hauling him up.

‘Now hark ye, good people, I heard a tale about friend Nathaniel here, as you have likewise perhaps. A tale of a man and a maid, or shall we say a maid unmade?’ Bartholomew’s arm grips Nathaniel’s neck, not letting go. ‘How old are you, my buck? Eighteen? We’ll say a man, then. Certain you’ve played a man’s part with little Alice Barr, and now she’s not so little neither. Where is she? Come, Alice, now’s not the time to be shy…’

Everyone is laughing as Bartholomew marches the lad over to staring blushing Alice.

‘Come, clasp hands. There’s a picture. Tell me, now, if I’m mistook, for it’s no small matter. Eh, Alice? Not small, was it?’ Bartholomew’s grin is broad and hard. ‘What I surmise is, you were both thinking so much of your marrying day that your thoughts ran clean away with you. Well, as long as you fix the day now, my friends, I’ve naught to say against it. I’ll even give you a bridal present. To the church in the morning, Nathaniel, to pray the banns, hey? Yes or no?’

It is admirable how he sets these things straight. Loud claps and cheers as he pushes the pair into a kiss. No bastards on the parish. On the way back to his seat he slips his arms around Bella and again caresses her belly. Teeming wombs and proper households. Anne rises to her feet, feeling sere and light, as if a breeze would bowl the husk of her across the threshing-floor.

She has to get away from this, but conscience will allow only an escape to duty. Her stepmother’s chamber. Before her apoplexy, Stepmother would have been on highest form at Lammas-feast: the overflowing hostess, dancing, joking, ladling, rapping knuckles. A little better today, she completes a turn of the room on Anne’s arm; her speech is clearer. One day soon, she mews, as Anne settles her, she wants to come downstairs.

‘You will.’ Anne has no doubt of that. She’s strong, determined: she’ll take her place as chatelaine again. ‘I want…’ She tucks the pillow behind her stepmother’s neck. ‘I want a world where nothing is cheap.’

At the foot of the staircase Anne finds him waiting for her.

‘I wondered – I thought you unwell, perhaps.’

‘No. I wanted to be, just for a little, without company.’

That comes out harsher than she intends it – but, no, she is angry. Angry at herself, for the vertical spider-ascent of her heart when she saw his face. Angry at him, for the fear he prompts in her – the fear that he does not mean it. If he does not mean it, then—

‘I’m not company,’ he says. ‘I can be, if you like. Otherwise I can be nothing.’

‘No one can be nothing,’ she says, thinking: Oh, yes, yes, they can.

‘Just the creak of the board under your foot, then. The fly on that windowpane. That feeling in the air, when there’s feasting, of something unsatisfactory that makes you want to smash through it all. You feel it, I know.’

His smile, his eyes are bright and fierce: a glitter from the bottom of a deep well of unhappiness. But, then, perhaps Bartholomew has been plying him with too much drink.

‘Really, you know nothing of me,’ she says, ready to pass him.

‘Certain, for I know nothing of myself, and I have lived with myself these eighteen years. But what’s knowing? You know what clouds look like. Lie on your back and gaze at a cloud until you feel yourself turning into it. Still you wouldn’t know its twin next day.’ From the barn comes the squeaking of a rebec. ‘They’re dancing.’

‘Then go dance.’

‘I don’t know whether to say how afraid of you I am. It might make you pity me, which would be something.’

Oh, drunk, nonsensical. ‘You make a game of me.’

He only touches her arm to detain her, but when she shakes off his hand he seems still to be holding her. ‘Never,’ he says. ‘Never, that’s all.’

‘I’ve heard about men and their
never,
sir. Never will I forsake and never will I this and that—’

‘I am not
men.
Nor Stratford man nor Englishman nor young man, I hate that, damnation on all flocks and herds,’ he says, breathing hard. ‘Am I allowed to fall in love with you, yes or no?’

‘No,’ she says, all fear now: because now it is as if a fay sits in the corner of your chamber, and says, yes, all the tales were true, we’re real, and so let us bargain.

‘Not even hopelessly?’

He has drawn a smile from her before she knows it; but with everything he says she has a sense of trying feverishly to catch him up.

She says: ‘You’re very young.’

‘I shave, I’m breeched. And you, are you a grandam disguised? If my youth is the only fence I must climb, then tell me. There’s hope in that.’ The music rises. ‘That’s a branle. Dance it with me. Then I’ll ask nothing more.’

‘Until the next time.’ She realises that this is a kind of yes. Was this the moment? ‘You can’t – you can’t truly be afraid of me.’

He thinks. Then answers, reasonably: ‘What else is love?’

*   *   *

A gift of gloves.

When he was stitching them, he tried to think beyond the deadness of kid and thread to the living hand, all the things it did, gesturing, touching, lying curled and defenceless in sleep. The beauty beyond.

Sometimes he asked himself what he was doing. And he had no answer. With Anne, with this beauty, he had been shown something: something for which there were no available responses. As if an old friend had taken you to his stable and there shown you, with a shrug and a smile, a unicorn quietly feeding.

Sometimes he took out Richard’s bundle of print and read over again the set of love-verses, as if they might help him. But often the poet seemed in love with love, which made him uncomfortable. And the hopelessness was excessive. The poet didn’t even aim to win the fair mistress. And Will, though he might doubt his reach, was certain of his aim.

*   *   *

A Queen’s Scholarship: Ben aimed at it with every dram of will.

The Queen’s Scholars had their whole education paid for by the Crown: no more niggling guilt about the cost of his schooling. Then, once a Queen’s Scholar, you could compete for a further scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge. Ben had never been further than Tottenham Fields, but he knew those universities as places of the mind, and mightily beautiful places they were. He dreamed of them often as he grew out of the first form, out of three pairs of shoes, out of all intimidation – his large hands, he found, made superb fists. The dreams were all the more exquisite compared with the reality of his stepfather spitting into the fire and grumbling about the dearness of the times. Oh, Ben was on the right road, and grateful – a hundred times grateful. He had to assure himself of that when he first met disappointment, the stinking hairy beast.

‘They don’t judge only on your abilities as a scholar,’ Master Camden said afterwards. ‘If it were simply that, then … Look here, I’ll say this and trust you never to repeat it. If it were only learning and aptness, Benjamin, you would have no competition, anywhere.’

‘Thank you,’ Ben said whitely.

‘I’m not looking for thanks. I’m trying to explain. They must take into account other things. There may be boys of promise – perhaps not promise like yours – who have no friends at all to help them. No mothers, fathers, perhaps. Whereas you—’

‘Whereas I have a stepfather in a respectable line of trade,’ Ben said dully.

They were walking in the old cloister, and Master Camden seemed in two minds about whether or not to put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. It suggested, of course, commiseration, and he was trying to avoid admitting there was anything for which to commiserate. Ben was mentally engaged in going over it again: his examination before the seven reverend gentlemen, the gowned scholars of Oxford and Cambridge, close caps tight on their skulls, as if bandaging their throbbing minds. He had been conscious of nothing but exhilaration at being asked questions; and a certain whooping surprise at how easy those questions were. Really they might have thought of something more original. Asked to decline
amicus,
he did it backwards, to liven it up.

‘It’s a pity, but you will still be here, and I will still be here,’ Master Camden said. ‘Whatever I can do for you, I will, trust me. The scholarship is not all.’

Alas, untrue.

Well: here it was. Failure. Ben shed some tears – so privately, in such violent solitude, that he reckoned God himself could hardly see their blotted sparkle – but, after studying himself, did not anticipate more. For one thing, he knew he was the best, whether it was recognised or not. For another – well, what sort of person did he wish to be? Looking about him in Westminster’s tight, toiling streets, he seemed to see so many people who were resigned to life. Not him. The best way to wake up in the morning, he felt, was with the thought: Right – today I get my revenge.

The scholarship vanished, but Master Camden remained, and he devoted as much time as he could to Ben. ‘If I can leave one classical scholar behind me,’ he said, ‘it will more than make up for my poor broken-backed history.’ He spoke of it always in these terms; but in his lodging Ben saw the pages of manuscript growing, and letters came to him from scholars all over Europe. In Latin, language of the civilised man from Scotland to Sicily. ‘English will do for a bill of lading, a ballad or tale perhaps,’ Master Camden said, ‘but it is still not a fit instrument for higher literature.’