Mistress Shakespeare (10 page)

“Had—did Will know he was to be—a father?” I managed to ask, leaning in the open doorway.

“Only now,” Sandells said. “And if’n he knows what’s good for him, he’ll do his Christian duty.”

Mrs. Birkstead, a widow from down the way, hurried along the road and called to me, “Anne, not bad news? Your father or Stephen not been hurt?”

“All’s well, goodwife,” Fulk Sandells answered for me and waved her off. It was a good thing, for I’m sure, as they took their leave, I’d lost my voice and my senses.

The crushing weight of the old longing nearly suffocated me. Those years Will and I had been friends, then forced apart . . . it had happened all over again. I was deluded to think I could ever have him. I’d been deceived by the only man I’d ever loved. Whether he’d known his other Anne was with child or not, he’d managed to have us both. He’d never told me about her, and of a certain, she’d known naught of me—or had she? No matter, I told myself, for I detested Will Shakespeare whether she had known of me or not. Perhaps the poor woman was just another distraction for him while he awaited his great glory as an actor far away from here, the lying, rutting cur.

Despite my dizziness from hitting my head, I wanted to break every piece of pottery I owned over his head, to stab him with my cutting knife and drown him in the rushing waters that had taken Kat from me, because her love had let her down, selfish sot that he was—that all men must be.

My head pounding, I lay flat on the floor and kicked and beat the ground with my fists as if I were a child in a tantrum, cursing Will, and, though I damned him to the lowest depths of hell, still loving him.

 

 

 

After I regained control
of myself, I was terrified of what my father would do when I had to tell him what had befallen me. I reckoned he would storm into Stratford to take on Will and his father this time, maybe with Stephen to back him up. I vowed to myself I would go with them and curse Will before them all.

But I never had to tell my father, for he returned from that trip with a raging fever and stomach pains that doubled him over on his horse. The sight of him made the headache that still raged behind my eyes suddenly seem nothing.

Stephen had brought him straight home and helped me get him off the horse while the other carriers took the pack train into Stratford to be unloaded.

“It came on fast, like a hectic in the blood,” Stephen told me as we got my father into his bed. “Maybe something he ate—or caught in London—don’t know. I’ll go into town to fetch the physician.”

I mouthed a “thank you” to him, but the words would not come out. I’d planned to scream at the man, tell him he was a spy and a traitor and I’d hate him ’til the day I died for what he did. But what was the use of that now? Will had ruined us on his own.

Before they’d left, the two messengers of doom that were Anne Hathaway’s friends had told me that she was twenty-six years of age—twenty-six! Eight years older than Will! Those words came back to me now that my spleen had abated a bit. So had she set her cap for him, seduced him? No good to face spinsterhood when there was a handsome, clever lad about ripe for the plucking. With the innocent babe involved, I would never try to stop their union, however I longed to. Children needed their parents, mother and father too, I knew that only too well.

But now all that was momentarily thrust aside as I desperately tended my father. He lay in the same bed in which my mother had died of fever. Since he’d been in London where the summer visitations of the plague sometimes closed the playhouses and sent the actors’ companies to the shires, I prayed it was not that, but Dr. Wentworth said not.

“Hardly ever plague or pox in the winter,” he told me after he’d smelled his breath and bled him. “He’s a strong man. My herbs and curatives will restore him. This is a fine elixir for fever with a touch of gold in it, and the chamomile will soothe his stomach and his nerves and, God willing, put his bodily humors back in balance.”

It was true that my father’s nerves needed soothing, for he raved on and on in his delirium after the doctor rode back to Stratford. Stephen knocked on the door after dark to see if he could help.

“No, you’ve done enough,” I told him, frowning. “Now leave us—especially me—alone.”

“I heard in town your swain’s to wed the Hathaway girl and that she’s carrying his child. Anne, I only wanted you to be free of him, the double-dealer.”

“Thank you for taking care of my father. Now leave before I say things to you I do not want a suffering man to overhear.”

“You’ll see things different when he’s better. My offers to you still stand, Anne. I—”

I was so exhausted and bereft—and furious with Stephen, with Will, with the world—that I slammed the door in his face and rushed back to the sickbed.

“Ah, there you are,” Da said, his eyes glassy, his gaze darting and distracted. Yet I felt some relief as he seemed to be in his own mind. He wasn’t ranting and raving about prices and lame horses, at least. Dipping a cloth in rosemary water, I wiped his ashen face again, realizing I should have asked the doctor for something for my persistent headache. Da’s bedclothes were drenched with sweat; I longed to change them, but was loath to move him.

“Yes, I’m here,” I whispered. “Just rest.”

“Will you not come to bed, my Anna?”

My hand froze. He thought I was my mother.

“Are you still longing for London?” he asked. “Or even for your people yet? I told you I’d make it up to you, be everything to you. It’s just—I had to leave to make ends meet. In the summers, the sun here’s like in Italy’s winters, aye? I told you it would be so. Can you not feel it, so warm even now? You forgive me and still love me, say you do . . .”

I had not cried after I’d learned of Will and the other Anne, but it seemed now my father in his delirium spoke words Will would want to say to me. “Are you still longing for London. . . . You forgive me and still love me, say you do . . .” Only this time, I could not want him back, could not forgive. Nor could I bear to live in a place where I could come upon him—or her and their child.

I jolted when my father, who had been weak and limp as a babe, grasped my wrist so hard he hurt me.

“Say you forgive me, Anna, that you love me!”

“Da, I’m Anne,” I choked out.

“I can’t die in peace if I don’t know you forgive me!” he shrieked so shrilly that it turned my blood cold.

“Yes—yes, I love you and forgive you,” I said. “Now, rest, please rest. You need your strength.”

But he evidently only needed to know those things from my long-dead mother, for he loosed his grip on me and died.

 

 

 

At my father’s funeral
in the bitterly cold shadows of St. Andrew’s, I thought I would go mad. Father Berowne managed to jumble a marriage ceremony with a funeral’s final words. If I had not been so utterly bereft of emotion and dead inside, I would have laughed and cried at once, especially when I saw that I still wore Will’s ring. I had been in such a dazed state that I had not yet taken it off. I’m sure he wished he had it now for his other Anne, but I had no intention of taking it off or sending it back. I’d hide or bury it somewhere—another sort of funeral.

Stephen, who stood behind me with the five other carriers, tried to take my arm, but I shook him off and walked back to the cottage alone. Widow Birkstead and three other neighbor women had laid out a cold repast for us. I thanked them repeatedly, for I could no more have fed even myself than I could have flown. This was Will’s wedding day, and his father was at a wedding feast. How I would have loved to ruin it all, running through their house, shrieking like a banshee, cursing them all and throwing their fine feast in their faces.

Though I was doing little thinking then, as I write this years later, I am reminded of Prince Hamlet’s rant that the wedding feast for his mother, Queen Gertrude, could have been furnished from the leftover funeral meal of her dead husband, King Claudius. No matter: all that was in my brain the day I buried Da was the sonnet Will had written me. Years later, though it was one of the first poems he ever wrote, it was published with his other sonnets as Number 145.

There was a line in it about “gentle day / Doth follow night, who, like a fiend, from heaven to hell is flown away . . .”

I guess that’s the closest thing I had to a thought after we buried Da. Everlasting night had come for me like a fiend. Once in heaven, now flown to hell . . . If I felt anything at all, that was it.

It was dark when the couriers and neighbors left me with kindly words. Stephen lingered. “I know you are distraught and grieving, Anne,” he began.

I forced my eyes to focus on him but did not speak.

“When you’re done mourning that—your da and . . . the other—I pray you will recall now how much your father wanted us to be together—to keep the business going—so I could take care of you. I hope you will come to your senses later.”

“I’m not good at coming to my senses,” I whispered.

“Then let’s us be business partners for now. That’s all I ask. The Whateley carrier business is building up—you know that. I’ll keep things going, and you keep up the records.”

“Yes.”

“Good—that’s settled then. No need for a contract between the two of us, not for that. Then is it all right if I hire on another man? No one can replace Silas Whateley, but we need another.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve got goods ready to be loaded in town. I’d like to be able to take a period of proper mourning but—”

“But the play must go on.”

“What’s that?”

“Yes,” I said, standing at the table from which I hadn’t budged for hours. “Yes, get everything ready. If we lose this week’s business, it will set us back. There will be one change, though. I’m going with you.”

“To see London, you mean? But—that’s good. Change of scenery and all. It was what your father said to me more’n once and—”

“But not the way he wanted. I will see to things in London, stay on that end of it to keep the books, either for a while or—forever.”

“Stay there? But—what about here?”

“I’ll move Father Berowne into this cottage, and we’ll have to hire someone to keep the books here. I am going to London.”

The moment I said that, the pain I’d had for three days since hitting my head on the stone fence departed.

“Will you come into town to leave with us?” he asked.

“No. I’ll take one of the extra horses and meet you beyond Clopton Bridge.”

“All right. Will you want a second horse—a packhorse for your clothes or goods?”

“The saddlebags on my mount will be enough. I have little I want to take with me. Leave me now.”

Looking amazed, he hesitated as if he would say more. Then he nodded and went out.

No, there was little I wanted to take with me from my past. I vowed to start anew and somehow to bury my wretched love for William Shakespeare at least as deep as I’d buried Da.

 

 

 

A note from Will,
obviously dashed off by the looks of the careless script, came to me at dawn the next day, brought by Kat’s father, Master Hamlett, who came ahorse. I recall it was the morning of our first snow that winter. The ground was white, but the skies had cleared.

“You two done us a great favor, standing up for our Kat to get her buried proper in the churchyard,” he said as he thrust the note at me. I had packed both saddlebags and was preparing to mount my horse. “Sorry for your loss—your father’s death, I mean. This be from Will, and he prays you read it, then burn it.”

“Tell him I might burn it before I read it,” I blurted. Then, in a kinder tone—the quiet, listless drone that seemed to be my voice now—I added, “Thank you. I think oft of my dear friend Kat.”

“You put flowers on her grave sometimes, I think.”

“I do.”

“If you will do that, e’en after my wife and I are gone—” His voice cracked, and he sniffed hard.

“If and when I am in Stratford, I will, as long as I live,” I promised.

He smiled enough so I could see his crooked teeth. “I’m off then,” he said, doffing his cap to me and giving a bow as if I were a great lady before he mounted and turned his horse away.

“I’m off too,” I whispered to myself, “and in more ways than one.”

Still hurt, furious and exhausted from all that had happened, I leaned my shoulder against the horse’s flank. I was tempted to simply burn the note—or to bury it where I’d interred Will’s ring under the bare, thorny blackberry bushes behind the cottage. That way, I would cut all the ties for good—or ill.

But I looked closer at the note. It bore a blob of red wax, but no seal since I had his ring. Perhaps he would dare to ask for it back. Whatever this missive said, I must read it fast, and hie myself to meet the pack train on the far side of Clopton Bridge.

My dearest Anne,
it began.

“Bastard!” I clipped out but read on.

I had no idea Mistress Hathaway
—

“Yes, your mistress indeed, even as I was!”

“My love—my foot! But you didn’t see fit to tell me, did you?” I shook so hard, holding the paper, that it rattled. Pent-up fury poured through me like the river torrents in rain-soaked spring.

I swear to you, I never intended to deceive you. I am most bereft and wretched. I send my most heartfelt condolences for the loss of your father, especially at this difficult time. I sincerely wished to spend my life with you and now face not only your loss but a life with one I have not chosen. But for the unborn child, my parents’ good name and my own honor
. . .

“Honor! I spit upon your honor!”