His Dark Lady (10 page)

‘I’d better find somewhere quiet to learn my lines and cues.’

‘I’ll send a boy for you when the court’s assembled and we’re ready to start. We have a prompt, in case you forget your part, but I’d rather you were not for ever stuttering and staring before the Queen. She’s had the toothache this past month, they say, and her mood is bitter. So learn your part well.’

With a nod, Will took his play roll away down the narrow corridor. He wandered aimlessly for a moment before finding an opening in the wall that led out into a small enclosed garden. There was nobody about. It was chilly and already growing dark, but Will knew he would rather get cold outside than try to read by the light of a spitting torch in some smoky antechamber.

He found a stone seat under a willow and settled himself there to read the play roll, peering at the cues in the semi-darkness to make sure he knew each one. The lines themselves took only a few moments to commit to memory. It was always the cues he had trouble remembering.

Will could hear the sounds of the city outside the walls, still humming with life even at dusk: street sellers packing up their wares for the night, women laughing somewhere nearby, the constant rumble of carts and, a little further away, the haunting cries of the watermen, drumming up night trade or just calling to each other across the broad expanse of the River Thames.

Cursing, he wiped his hands on his too-loose trousers. Why was he so nervous?

Will knew the play well enough – he had seen it performed twice before, at Warwick and Coventry – and he had a good memory for lines. He could only assume it was being in the rarefied courtly air of Whitehall that was making his palms sweat.

That, and the knowledge that if Burbage heard of him taking a part in another man’s company, even just for this one night, he could lose all hope of future work in that quarter. Burbage didn’t like his men to play for anyone else. It was a matter of honour with him, of loyalty to the company. But then, Burbage didn’t have to scrape a living from a few shillings a week, sending home as much as he could to a wife and child he had not seen in months.

Above, shutters were thrown back noisily and a light shone from an open balcony window. Inside he caught a glint of gold and heard the whisper of women’s voices, then a rustle of stiff silk.

Shrinking into the shadows – was he even allowed to be here, in this private garden overlooked by what must be the Queen’s own apartments? – Will sat perfectly still and gazed up at the woman who had come out on to the narrow balcony.

The woman was turned away from him, looking back into the
room
. She was wearing a broad-skirted white and black gown decorated with pearls, her bearing very erect. The gloved hand that clutched the stone rail of the balcony bore a large ruby ring. Even in the gloom of dusk he could see that she was tall, stately even.

One of the Queen’s ladies, he guessed, judging by the richness of the pearls glinting in her dark hair and on the bodice of her gown.

Then the noblewoman turned to look down into the garden, and he saw her face for the first time.

A shudder ran through him.
Lucy Morgan!

Will stared hungrily up at the dark face he remembered, beautifully drawn by the hand of Nature with the high cheekbones and full lips of the African. He had seen her at the Cross Keys Inn, and now here she was again. His whole body shivered. He had chosen to come to court for this night’s work, knowing he might see her again in the Queen’s company of ladies. But this chance meeting …

Not chance, but the hand of God. It had to be fate that Lucy Morgan had come to this very window and looked out over the garden in which he had chosen to sit. What else could she represent but his destiny, clothed in human flesh – and a gorgeous black flesh, at that?

Lucy shifted slightly, and noticed his still figure under the willow tree.

Fixed by the intensity of her dark, brooding gaze, Will found himself unable to move or speak. Perhaps she would think him a statue.

‘Who’s there?’ she demanded, shattering the illusion. When he did not respond, she drew herself up angrily, staring straight at him. ‘Speak, or I shall summon the guards.’

Had she always been so tall?

Will frowned, looking again at the black hair that framed her face, bound in a silver net and gleaming with tiny seeded pearls. Pearls were the Queen’s favourite adornment, too, a symbol of chastity, of untried virginity. Yet surely an exotic beauty like Lucy Morgan could not still be unmarried? Though perhaps, in the service of the Queen, she had little choice but to remain a virgin too, as her mistress claimed to have done.

He was not tongue-tied, but dazzled. He revelled in being able to say her name for the first time in years. ‘Lucy Morgan.’

She stared down at him through the darkness. Her voice was
hesitant
. Perhaps she feared he was a courtier who would be offended by her questions.

‘Who are you, sir? These are the Queen’s apartments and you are standing in her Privy Garden. I don’t know how you came to be there. But if you are seen, you will be arrested.’

He let the play roll drop and came swiftly to the foot of the wall. The balcony on which she stood was two floors up, but there was a young sycamore tree immediately below it, and a high ledge to one side that he could probably stand on to speak to her. He gazed up, assessing the height. As a boy in Warwickshire, he had been for ever in and out of trees ten times the size of this. Leaving the stinking cloak behind him on the grass, Will scrabbled up into the tree, balanced along one of its slender branches – which bobbed and danced beneath his weight like an unbroken pony – and pulled himself painstakingly up on to the stone ledge.

Flattened against the wall, Will turned his head to see Lucy hanging over the balcony, staring down at him. God, she was a beauty. He felt himself harden with desire and was shocked into silence. What had he told Laneham? That he was a happily married man?

Since coming to London, he had seen women running about half-dressed in the streets, and had had young whores sit in his lap, offering him their bodies for little more than fourpence, and had not been moved.

Lucy Morgan was different.

She was shocked that he knew her name, that he had climbed up like a boy to speak to her. It was in her eyes, the way her hands gripped the stone rail of the balcony. Was she Lucy Morgan? Could he have been mistaken? No, hers was the same dark face he remembered, the beautiful woman of his dreams.

‘You don’t recognize me, Lucy?’

She frowned. ‘You’re … the player from the Cross Keys.’

She did not remember him. Why should she? He had been nothing to her at Kenilworth. Just a local boy. He must make a fresh start with her, make her see him as a man.

‘You must look further back than that.’

From the start, Will had been desperate to conceal his rural origins from the London players, renting a more costly room than he could afford, packing away his frieze suits for a more fashionable
doublet
with slashed sleeves and coloured hose, even shedding his embarrassing country accent. To be thought a country bumpkin had been his constant fear.

Now, though, he made no attempt to hide the soft brogue of his Warwickshire burr, hoping to remind her of the past. ‘Eight years back, to a boy who had lost his father in the hurly-burly of a great country castle welcoming its queen.’

She looked at him properly for the first time. Her stiff court dignity fell away. For a moment, she was almost the old Lucy, her voice rising like a girl’s. ‘Will? Is … Is it truly you? Young Will Shakespeare?’

‘The very same.’ Will bowed as best he could, balanced on the narrow ledge. ‘Though not so young any more. I shall be twenty years of age in April. It is good to see you again, Mistress Morgan.’

She was shaking her head, her eyes still wide. ‘I can’t believe it.’ She stared at his face, then at his clothes. ‘You look so different.’

‘I’m a player now. I’ve come to play before the Queen tonight.’

‘You’re with the Queen’s Men?’

He wanted to say yes, to impress her. But it would be a simple enough lie to expose. ‘For tonight only,’ he admitted. ‘I am not attached to any company, I work where I am paid to work. They were a man short tonight. But I would like to join them, yes. If they will have me.’

Her gaze moved to the play roll, lying forgotten beside the bench. ‘You were learning your part?’

‘Yes.’

Someone called her name in the brightly lit room behind her, and Lucy straightened, something like fear in her face. ‘You’d better go before they come out here to find me,’ she told him hurriedly, and glanced over her shoulder. ‘The Queen must be leaving her chamber. I have to accompany her downstairs with the other ladies.’

‘You’ll be at the play?’

She turned back, and now she seemed to be smiling. ‘Of course,’ she whispered. ‘But you must go, Will. If you’re seen here, you might be mistaken for a spy.’

That was no exaggeration, he thought wryly. The company had been closely searched tonight on entering the palace, their play chests thrown open for scrutiny, even their carts turned over. On the
streets
of London, the muttered talk on everyone’s lips was the continuing ferment of Catholics in England, and the threat of a war with Spain. People were nervous. And in such times, for him to be caught climbing a wall in the Queen’s Privy Garden would be tantamount to treason.

Nonetheless, Will could not seem to make his feet move from the ledge. ‘Don’t go,’ he told her, and he reached up as far as his arm would stretch. ‘Not yet.’

‘I must,’ she replied. That half-smile again. Yet she did not move either, looking down at his hand near to hers, so close.

‘Lucy Morgan.’ He took pleasure in her name, willing her to reach out and touch him. ‘Please.’

Her eyes met his, pleading with him in return. ‘I can’t. If anyone should catch us …’

Will said nothing but continued to hold out his hand, his gaze locked with hers.

‘Lucy!’ the woman called shrilly from inside the room. Her voice was angry now, insistent. ‘Her Majesty is waiting! What are you doing out there?’

Lucy leaned perilously far over the balcony. She was tall and must have been standing on tiptoe; even so it was a stretch. Her hand met his for a second, just a brush of gloved fingertips across his. Then she was gone.

The balcony was empty.

Will dropped lightly to the grass, resettled the filthy player’s cloak about his shoulders and hurried to retrieve the abandoned play roll. How much time had passed up there on the balcony ledge? His eyes skimmed the lines, but his mind could not seem to take them in. He was so on edge after that strange meeting. Lucy Morgan. The object of his secret desire for most of his boyhood. And he had met her again here in London, still beautiful, still bewitching. Too bewitching for a married man, he thought.

‘Master Shakespeare?’

Startled, he looked up from studying his part. But it was only one of the play boys, calling his name up and down the cloisters. He gestured to the boy and quickly rolled up the lines, sticking them under his arm.

Of course, the Queen must have descended by now, which meant the play would be starting. He had no speech until at least fifteen minutes in, but it would be best to get himself behind the screen that would serve as their backstage area in the Queen’s audience hall.

Will slipped out of the Privy Garden as quietly as he had gone in. He knew his part. Just as well, too, for all he seemed able to think about was Lucy Morgan, her gaze meeting his as they touched fingertips.

Guiltily, he thought for a moment of his wife. Quiet, slender, pale-skinned Anne.

He had left her back at his father’s home in Stratford, nursing their child at the breast and helping his mother run the household. It was not a happy remembrance. Anne had been furious when he’d told her he must leave, that London was where he had to live if he wished to make his fortune. She could not be made to understand that he had no desire to follow his father into the glover’s trade. Whenever Will thought of his father’s house in Stratford, he remembered the stench of leathers soaking in lidded buckets along the outside passage or in the back yard, and his nose twitched in disgust.

That was no life for him, a life of tanning and stretching skins. Not when he could live like this instead, paid to step out on the boards and perform to a lively audience day after day. To laugh at the heckles of the crowd and sometimes do a little jig at the end for ha’pennies. He was even paid to copy out and improve the plays from the play chest, for he was no mean copyist and had soon learned a trick or two from watching so many performances himself. One day he would no longer be a jobbing player, working where he could, but a full member of a noble company like the Queen’s Men. Perhaps, like James Burbage, he might even be master of his own company.

Leaving Stratford, he had promised Anne he would not lie with the whores and the slatterns, but keep himself clean and faithful only to her. And he had never once been tempted. Not even by the merchants’ wives who hung about the theatre doors after the plays finished, disguised with veils or hoods, eager to take players into their beds. The wives were clean and pretty enough, it was true, though faithless to their husbands. He had to confess he had looked
once
or twice at the younger ones with interest, even if he had never gone with them.

Lucy Morgan was no whore. Yes, she was one of the Queen’s ladies now, and some of them were of easy virtue. Will was certain though that Lucy had never played the games that ladies loved at court, lewd games they called Gentlemen’s Fingers or Hunt the Lady’s Purse back in Warwickshire.

How he desired her! But would a court beauty like Lucy ever consider taking a rough country player as her lover?

Will listened for his cue behind the wooden screen, trying not to think of his absent wife, Anne Hathaway. His conscience pricked him. What of his marriage vows made before God, did they mean nothing?

With difficulty, he pushed Anne’s face to the back of his mind. His wife was half a world away in Warwickshire, and he had kept his word to her until now. He still loved Anne. But he was in London now, and what she did not know could not hurt her.