Ill Met by Moonlight (18 page)

Slowly, carefully Will closed the door and stepped gently into the front room, careful to avoid making the floorboards creak. He needn’t have worried. Any noise he might have made lost itself in the shrieking of his siblings and other noise from the kitchen. His mother’s voice was raised in upbraiding—from the sound of it—Gilbert, Will’s eighteen-year-old brother: “And if you think you’ll be a Latin scholar—”

Will shuddered and tiptoed across the room.

One of the painted cloths represented Judith driving the tent stake into Holofernes’s brain. The other one detailed, in vivid realism, the dance-flushed Salome holding up the gory head of John the Baptist.

By the stairs, on the way up, a painted cloth, lovingly lifelike, showed the massacre of innocents, with red-handed soldiers striking off the heads of wailing infants.

These cloths and their painted mayhem had riveted Will’s eye and imagination as a child. When he was very young, he’d feared walking down the steep stairs in the night, lest the painted Judith or the realistic Salome should step down from her cloth and kill him.

Now he gave them but a cursory look, and their images spoke to him only of pointless death and violence, and of turmoil much like that which submerged his life.

He started up the stairs. Though the top of the stairs was the same as in the house where Will now lived—a mere square cut out of the top floor’s boards—when walking into the upper floor, Will found himself in quite a different place. The space into which he emerged was barely large enough to hold a standing adult and on each side from there, a door opened, and a wooden wall extended, dividing the space into three chambers: Will’s parents’, his sister’s room, and the boys’ room.

The air smelled heavy with human waste. Will wrinkled his nose. His mother had neglected to empty the chamber pots, again, and, from the heavy, sour smell, for more than a day. The last few years that Will had lived in the house, he’d often done it himself, in the evening, carrying the waste to the outhouse so he didn’t have to smell it all night long.

The door to the left led to his parents’ room and Will opened the door and stepped into a roughly square bedroom. Its walls met at the slightly crooked angles that betrayed the work of an inexpert carpenter. The chamber’s exiguous space barely compassed a bed and a shabby pine trunk. Shutters closed the one small window to all but the scant light and little air that filtered between their imperfectly joined boards.

On the bed sat John Shakespeare, fully dressed, in a russet suit, shabbier even, and more outmoded, than his son’s. He turned toward the door as it opened and stared at Will, amazed, as if he’d never seen such a creature as his oldest son, and didn’t know what to make of this wondrous apparition.

“Blessing, Father,” Will said, and bowed his head.

“Will!” his father said, in great wonder, as if Will had been traveling, and long gone, and had now come back to regale his family with the tales of his unbelievable adventures. “Will. How are you, boy? How do you fare?”

“Well, and well enough, Father,” Will answered. His father looked much like Will himself and, as such, stood before Will as a warning of what the ravaging years would do to his smooth pale skin, his proud, jet-black curls. His father’s hair had deserted the front of his head, leaving his forehead high and unprotected, a vast, domed expanse that met with a receding line of curly hair gone more grey than black and more white than either. He’d lost weight since Will had last seen him, and his gaunt, pale face, covered in lines, looked like much creased and erased vellum that will neither look even, nor lie flat. His mouth, once firm and proud, had softened and drooped and even now, as he looked at Will, John’s lips sagged and seemed to tremble, as though in constant terror.

“Does your mother not tell me that your wife has left you, boy?” his father asked. And, in a sudden animation of gaze, an almost smile of his slack mouth, he added, “Are you coming back home, to live with us? I told you, you should learn my business—the shop needs tending and I cannot . . .” His voice dwindled away to inaudibility.

Will shook his head, not answering either question. “Father, your creditors, they are not human, are they?”

His father’s eyes turned up to meet Will’s. Darker than Will’s, a chocolate-brown, John Shakespeare’s eyes resembled the eyes of a loyal mastiff, a good hunting dog, faithful to his master and ever ready to fetch whatever quarry the master had uncovered. Right then, staring at Will, John’s eyes looked like those of a dog whose master has kicked him for no reason. “Creditors?” he asked.

Will huffed, an impatient sound. In his last years in grammar school, when his father’s fortunes had already started declining, and his presence in the shop was a sometime thing, but while the old man still retained his pride and standing, Will and John had often argued—long, barbed, hopeless arguments. The young rooster trying to oust the old, his mother had called it, responding to their discord with an indulgent laugh and a shrug.

Will, in the surety of his grammar education, had found his near-illiterate father, who but knew his letters and not that well, an encumbrance and a shame. Again and again, despairingly, he had argued with his father about his archaic beliefs, his hopelessly limited vocabulary, his narrow view of the world, and his deference to those he called his betters.

Over the last two years Will had repented of those arguments. Feeling the weight of having to earn a living crush his young shoulders, he had, for the first time, understood why his father lacked the interest or the energy to learn Latin or study philosophy.

But now, looking at John’s slack mouth, his empty, injured eyes, Will felt his impatience return, and impatience animated his voice as he said, “Father, someone just told me you owed no man anything, but he said it as though he meant you owed something to someone who was not a man.”

“A man?” John’s gaze traveled, helpless and hopeless, the length of Will’s gesturing arm, then returned to Will’s face, and looked at it in measuring wonder.

Will walked closer to his father, put his hands on the old man’s shoulders but refrained from shaking him. “The people of the hill, Father, what did you do for them? Do you know anything of a magic dagger and what it was used for?” Thinking it might help, tired of his father’s dull, unwitting look, as vague and as blank as a babe’s, Will brought his dagger out and displayed it in front of his father’s eyes.

John’s slack mouth opened and let out a long scream, like the wail of a man pierced through the heart. He clambered fully up on the bed and away from Will and the dagger.

“He promised that he would protect me,” Will’s father said. “He swore he would keep me safe and nothing would happen, but night after night their ghosts come, and in my dreams they walk and demand vengeance.” The words came out in a gibbering torrent, and John covered his face with his hands and rocked back and forth on his worn mattress. “The Queen Titania and King Oberon, or so he said their names were, and not mortal, for sure not mortal, nor would I have slain mortal blood, mindful I am of my immortal soul, but these creatures are not mortal nor do they have a soul, so he said, but they haunt me, and soulless though they might be, their shades walk, mourning and pitiful, and demand that I avenge them or free them, and he said he can do nothing for it, nothing, though he arranged for the dagger, and had it bespelled, with the words and the mystic symbols of his people, upon primeval iron, but he said that he couldn’t keep me safe, should I show myself and he—”

“Who, Father, who?” And Will leaned forward, dagger still in hand, trying to get sense from his father’s gibbering mouth, his scared, searching eyes.

“Unnatural son.” His mother’s voice sounded behind Will, from the door into the room, and, before Will could turn around to face her, he felt her hand on his shoulder and, off balance, found himself spun around and pushed against a wall.

“Unnatural son,” his mother wailed. Her hair, which had been very pale blonde and was now white, had been for some time confined in a braid at her back, but now escaped in a halo of straggles and wisps that surrounded her face like a hedge of thorns. And, despite privations, she had remained round and soft, like fermented dough, her spherical face looking like a fine doughy pudding with plums for eyes. “Unnatural son, would you kill your father?”

Off balance when he was grabbed and pushed, Will slammed into the wall with full force, and struggled to catch his breath. Kill his father? Remembering the dagger in his hand, he brought it up and looked at it, before mastering a pale smile. “No, Mother. I would just know where this dagger comes from.”

But his mother had started speaking at the same time: “If it’s for your inheritance, I must tell you there is none to be had, for we have used the last of our money to bring you up and make you such a fine lord that now you disdain—”

“Mother,” Will said, annoyed by her misunderstanding him, by her insisting on speaking as though he, of all people, didn’t know very well that there was no inheritance to be hoped for here.

“Do not you interrupt me. Our money has made you a fine learned gentleman, hasn’t it? And fool enough to marry the Shottery wench.” Her doughy cheeks trembled. “And fool enough, now to attempt—”

“Mother, I never attempted against my father’s life. I only wanted to know where he got this dagger.” He lifted the weapon for his mother’s inspection.

This produced a wondrous effect. Never before had Will seen his mother speechless.

She stared at the dagger and at Will, and her hand went up in reflexive habit and traced the sign of the cross again and again on her forehead. “You found that, then,” she said, her voice strangled. “You found it, then. We should have buried it, but I was afraid it would call the attention of the good neighbors to us.”

“The good neighbors?” Will asked. All their neighbors were good. Well, excepting maybe Wedgwood, and perhaps the Whateleys, although his mother certainly wouldn’t object to the Whateleys’s priestly connections. “The good neighbors, Mother?”

She crossed herself again and her bow-shaped mouth quivered. “The people under the hill.”

Will’s father whimpered from the shadows on the other side of the bed.

“They came to your father and offered him good luck forever if he should only kill their tyrannical rulers. And your father . . .” Mary cast a pitying look at her husband. “Your father, fool that he was, took the offer, thinking that he wouldn’t be slaying a Christian thing and no harm could come to him.” She crossed herself once more. “I told him not to involve himself in such dealings, with such creatures, but there, he did it, and now they haunt him and he fears their revenge night and day.” She turned to Will and her expression changed from fear to anger. “And now you, unlucky child, unchancy whelp, have to come and show your father that dagger, and attract the eyes of the creatures to our home.”

“Nan was taken by them,” Will said, hearing his voice but not believing he said this, even as the words resounded clear if flat in his own ears. “By them she was taken and by them held captive.” He slid the dagger back in its sheath as he spoke.

His mother stared for a moment, her dark eyes uncomprehending. Then she cackled in gloating laughter. “So, that’s who took her. I’ve been wondering. Well, they’re welcome to her and good riddance. That whelp of hers, you’ll find, was theirs and none of ours. A witch she is and a slut, and has had commerce with them before, you’ll find.” As she spoke, in a half-whispered, malicious current, Mary grabbed Will’s arm, guided him to the door of the room, and half shoved him toward the stairs while she closed the door behind them. “Leave her be there, and do not get yourself enmeshed with those creatures. You come back and live with us, Will, and be the man of the house, and look after your brothers and sisters. Your father cannot do it. Your poor father . . .”

Will started down the steps, ahead of Mary, moving faster than he would normally have, seeking to evade her sermon, her pleas, seeking to be alone so he could think.

But she followed him close and fast and, at the bottom of the stairs, before he could head out through the front door, she had clutched his wrist. “Your poor father lives in fear of the creatures’ vengeance. But he has said he will teach you the glover’s art. Surely you remember enough from when you helped him, as a boy. You’ll need only those refinements requisite to becoming a master in it.”

He shook his head, and tried to escape toward the door, but his mother pulled him toward the hallway. “Well, and you were always a stubborn one, but you know you’ll come to it, you know. You’ll come back home and stay with us, and live with us again. Yes, you will and you know it.” She pulled him down the hallway. “And meanwhile, you’ll need food. I’ll wager you haven’t even eaten yet, have you? Come, child, come and eat. How can you survive without a woman to keep house for you?”

To tell his mother that she couldn’t keep house for herself would be unkind and unfilial, but even so, Will had to bite his tongue to prevent himself saying it.

She pulled him all the way into the kitchen with its odors of soot and old cooking.

Will’s brother Gilbert, a sullen eighteen-year-old, sat at the table, with his well-worn book of Latin grammar spread open in front of him, working steadily by the meager light of the guttering mutton-grease taper set in a candleholder in the middle of the stained and scarred oak table. Beside him, Richard, barely nine, worked steadily on a pair of wax tables, drawing numbers and letters on the flat sheets of wax with a wooden stylus. Joan sat by the smoking fireplace, mending some dark wool garment. Edmund ran hither and thither, glad of his own two legs and the freedom that walking on them gave him. He ran toward Will, and grabbed hold of his legs, and looked up at his brother with a radiant smile.

On the wall hung another one of Mary Shakespeare’s precious painted cloths. This one, blackened by soot and disfigured from hanging in the damp kitchen, showed the prodigal son coming home to the arms of his old, long suffering father. In his childhood, this had been Will’s favorite painted cloth, but now he was glad of the smoke and dirt that obscured the images on it.