Mistress Shakespeare (12 page)

Most amazing of all was that noisy, smelly horse fairs were held in the very nave of the church. Called Paul’s Walk, the nave was an expansion of the Cheapside Market, where we walked with our hoods pulled tight about our heads, not only to avoid the wind but people’s stares and the unwelcome remarks.

“They see you are a beauty,” I whispered to Jennet as we walked on. From time to time she sipped from a small brass flask of cough elixir, for she said she’d had the winter blains.

“Open your country eyes, my friend, for they are speaking to you also,” she insisted. “Dare I say you draw even more attention than I, for you are much more intriguing than a winter-pale face that hides a broken heart.”

“But you bear up so well.”

“What choice have I? To cast myself off the parapet of St. Paul’s or throw myself in the Thames?”

I started visibly when she said that. My dear Kat’s face staring up at me through the river ice jumped into my mind as if she were newly drowned. Jennet pulled me into the recessed doorway of an apothecary shop with its sign of an extended tongue with a lozenge on it.

“Anne,” she said, gripping both my arms, “I mean not to affront you, but I am terrified to conceive another child. Yet we desperately desire one, and I will risk all for that—and for John.”

Tears sprang to my eyes, and I nodded. Only today the onset of my monthly flux had proved I was not carrying Will’s child. I praised the Lord for that, and yet, I mourned too. His other Anne had tied him to her that way, and I—I had nothing but memories, no doubt as flimsy and fleeting to Will as the breeze. And, of course, thanks to the knave, my battered heart.

“There’s more, isn’t there?” Jennet asked, most unexpectedly. “More than the sudden death of your father? You’ve lost someone else, and I just wondered if you too—not a child, of course, but . . . Oh, please do not take my prating, prying tongue amiss!”

“It’s all right. Yes—I lost someone I loved to another, so to speak.”

“So to speak? Then I shall speak of it no more unless you choose to share it someday. Come on, then, my sister of sorrows. We’ve much to see and do, and, if we do it fast and furious enough, perhaps we shall brace ourselves to face another day. Getting through each hour, each day—that’s the victory.”

The Thames was choppy with a big breeze blowing, but we walked down to see it. We stood staring at varied watercraft struggling against the current and the white-capped waves. Its vast width made the Avon seem so small and distant. Why could Will not seem that way to me? After what he’d done, why did he not shrink in my memory?

“I’ve never seen boats with both canopies and seat cushions,” I told her to break our solemn silence.

“Wait ’til you see the queen’s royal barges all tricked out with green and white Tudor flags and cloth-of-gold bunting. But those are wherries for hire. Quite comfortable. In warm weather you’ll oft hear the oarsmen singing too. It carries over the water just like their calls of Eastward or Westward Ho.”

“More are going across the river than up and down it.”

“Nothing keeps Londoners from their pleasures and vices. That rural south bank is called Southwark or just plain Bankside. Can you make out the bear- and bull-baiting gardens?” she asked, pointing at large, oval buildings. “But it’s unruly and even dangerous over there.”

“Pickpockets?”

“The least of one’s worries. Besides men and whores flocking there for animal baiting, there are stews and prisons—King’s Bench, the Marshalsea and the Clink. It’s a vile sanctuary for rogues and lawbreakers too. Since Bankside is out of the city limits, it’s also out of the reach of the men who control England’s pastimes, with their license fees, inspectors and censors.”

“But the theatres—where are they?”

“Of the freestanding ones, two are about a mile north of the city at Shoreditch and one a mile south of London Bridge at Newington Butts in Lambeth. But instead of that, I shall take you someday to the plays given in the large carriage inns at St. Helen’s Bishopsgate where even the Queen’s Players perform.”

“The Queen’s Players,” I echoed. “I would like to see them, indeed.”

“Then we shall go next time John can spare me.”

But a ship that had braved the winter seas from France brought new wine to the shop: sweet Osney, Rochelles, Gascoignes and rich clarets that needed unpacking and recording. And, I saw, though Jennet kept the bottle hidden from her husband, for sampling. So I went one sunny, cold afternoon to see the Queen’s Men on my own.

 

 

 

At four of the clock
nearly a week after I came to London, I saw my first play. I had walked eastward to the neighborhood of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate and followed John Davenant’s directions to the Black Bull Inn where the Queen’s Men were playing. It was not the only galleried, tiered inn where companies performed, but it was the only one then with a permanent stage.

The place was packed with more men, but women were there too; I was soon wedged in like a fish in a brine barrel. The mingled smells of garlic, onions, stale beer and even sweat, despite the chill and the extra layers of clothing, assailed me. No wonder several herb girls stood outside selling sweet bags, pomanders and tussie-mussies. I saw a few of the better-dressed women on the balconies above held such to their noses. But it was the heady scent of anticipation and excitement that made my head spin.

For today’s play was to be a stirring drama of the English victory at Agincourt more than two centuries ago. Drummers in the streets had announced the play. Drumming up business, I heard it called; they evidently heralded each performance that way. Those drummers as well as trumpeters and pikemen now lined the bare wooden platform soon to be transformed into a battlefield.

Though I had come early to get a good view, I made the mistake of getting jostled clear to the front where I had to crane my neck to look up. Yet I didn’t care. Was this not revenge against Will, for I was where he longed to be and he—he was at home with his pregnant wife, or punching a needle through calfskin, or copying someone else’s writing.

“Jus’ come to see the clown Tarlton,” a big lout behind me told his companion. “He’ll have us rollin’.”

“Oh, aye. Hear tell the queen loves ’im too. Told ’im to get off the stage and outa her sight once so her sides wouldn’t split from laughin’.”

“Heard the Earl of Leicester found him just tending swine, and he’s been tending to London’s swine e’er since,” someone else put in as they dissolved in mirth.

I’d seen Richard Tarlton in Stratford once, so I knew whereof they spoke. What I remembered best was the rogue’s skill at jigs and how he capered about to put all the Guild Hall in a roar. I needed that, I thought. I needed to learn to let go and laugh again.

Soon words and sounds transformed the small stage to the vast battlefield of Agincourt where the outnumbered forces of the English king Henry V and the huge force of the pompous French monarch Charles VI met with their armies. I knew the basic story; I warrant all Englishmen did. I had heard Will recount it more than once from some book he’d borrowed at Edward Arden’s house. Encased in armor, the frog-eaters used old feudal tactics of lance and sword, but our cloth-clad yeomen relied on their quick-shooting longbows and won the day.

I thought the players did a splendid job with battle cries, trumpet blasts, distant drumming and the clash of swords on shields. Battle banners were carried back and forth through the melee. Somehow fewer than twenty players reenacted two armies. The actors were adept at swordplay, even in armor, though they merely mimed shooting their bows. Men cried out and fell with blooming bursts of blood they cleverly exploded—so Will had said once—from pigs’ bladders. Horses snorted in the distance; I think it was men whinnying behind the stage. But through it all, despite grand speeches from the deep-voiced James Burbage as England’s king, it truly was the clown Tarlton who won everyone’s hearts, however much it seemed he intended to make tatters of the play.

He entered as a common English soldier but soon tripped over his sheathed sword, then could not wrench it from its scabbard. And when he got it out, despite the fray all around him, he pretended to pare his fingernails with it. I was astounded to see the tricks he pulled and expressions he made even in the most serious of scenes. It seemed he worked against the impact of the play, and yet the audience adored it, cheering him on just as they did the actors playing the heroic roles.

Squint-eyed and flat-nosed with an unkempt mustache, Tarlton played the country innocent, even trying to stuff a French battle banner in the back of his breeches where it stuck out like a tail. Wherever he went onstage, his russet costume and buttoned cap amid helmets and hats cried,
Look at me!
—and we all did.

During the final scene, a wedding feast for the French king’s daughter and the English king, Tarlton sat on the edge of the stage, pretending to eat a drummer’s drumstick rather than the meat ones the actors devoured. All the while, the clown swung his feet and bantered with the groundlings. It felt so good to laugh, to be unable to catch my breath from guffawing with the others instead of from sobbing into my pillow alone. But then, to my amazement and dismay, Tarlton’s eyes fastened on me. Too late, I realized my hood had slid back and I was bareheaded.

“Ah,” the clown declared as he pointed the drumstick at me, “now there’s the one I’d fight for—not some princess of France, treaty or not, especially since our fair princess is actually a boy player, eh?”

Amidst the roar of the crowd, I saw heads turn my way, felt their eyes. I was tempted to pull up my hood, but I could make no retreat, hemmed in as I was. To my utter amazement as well as the approval of the crowd, I answered, “But I’d only consider it for one of your jigs!”

The crowd bellowed their approval, and I blushed to the roots of my hair when the clown dared to make an obscene gesture and retort, “I’d jig with you, my pretty, day or night!”

As he leaped up and began to dance, people turned away from me and a good thing too, for my cheeks were as hot as Jennet’s looked when she downed too much of their fine wine. I was embarrassed but not ashamed. And how I longed to tell Will what had happened, that, somehow, I’d been a part of the play. Why, if I’d but had time to consider a thing or two, I could have come up with a clever comeback that could have set Tarlton’s teeth on edge.

As I was swept out at the end of the play in the press of the crowd, a few glanced my way. Even, for a moment, a sweet-smelling, fancily garbed and very handsome man blocked my path and stared into my face with a ravenous look before he thrust a note into my hand. I saw it was directions to his house in a place called Blackfriars and wadded it up to sail it into the sewer trench in the middle of the street. And then, despite London’s noise and smells, I happened to look up into the eyes of one of the herb girls with her big basket of sweetly scented goods.

The other girls around her were screeching out their wares, including claims their nosegays were sure protection “’gainst the return of the plague.” I knew London had been repeatedly visited by this catastrophe and that the disease was borne by foul smells, so no doubt a strong-scented bag held to one’s mouth and nose could help. But why scare buyers about the Black Death on a blue-sky, sunny winter day?

Amidst the din, the thin waif stayed silent, yet, for the first time, I wanted to buy something in London. I’d bought food, of course, but had not wanted anything else, not even a book from St. Paul’s. I’d not so much as looked at any of the secondhand garments that had been displayed today when I came past Petty France where the Huguenots lived and the nearby area where the Jews had their stalls.

The young female vendor whose eyes met mine was rail thin; she wore clothes too big for her. Her hair hung stringy and greasy beneath a mobcap. Her nose was long, her face pinched, but her eyes were lavender, the hue of that sweet-scented dried herb I could smell.

A huge, crashing wave of homesickness spread over me. For my own herb and flower gardens, for my cottage, for the meadows, even for the Avon. And for myself as a young girl, somehow standing unsure at the edge of life.

“What have you here?” I asked her in a tremulous voice before I could clear my throat. I wondered for a moment if she might be deaf or dumb.

“Mistress, I’ve sweet herbs that can make the body glad but heal the mind and heart too.”

“Magic elixirs, then? Tell me all.”

I listened patiently to her recital about “virtues enveloped within the green mantles and flowers wherewith special plants are adorned.” I was amazed at how well she spoke. Besides, I was so desperate for comfort that I half believed her recital of cures for a heavy heart, indeed a malady of its own.

“This sweetbag has dried marjoram for those given to over-sighing,” she went on, displaying a small sack made from scraps of satin stitched raggedly together. “Basil can take away sorrowfulness and rosemary cures nightmares . . .”

I overpaid her for two sweetbags, which both, truth be told, smelled only of meadowsweet and lavender. But, ah, if they could only heal my heart. Before I left, I asked the girl’s name.

“Maud, mistress. ’Tis Maud Wilton.”

“Maud, you look cold but ever so bold,” I rhymed, which made me miss Will even more. “I shall trust what you say and come back when I can, and then talk to you more of my plan.”

She looked puzzled but she gifted me with a sweet smile that tilted her lavender eyes. I laid yet another coin on her rickety little stand and hurried off.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Like the great Thames
rushing under London Bridge—like the Avon at home—time slipped past. In the eleven months leading up to mid-October 1583, I kept the pack train company going, even prospering. I helped John in the shop when Jennet’s next pregnancy weighed her down. I attended plays and helped Maud Wilton buy a proper stall so she didn’t have to cart her heavy herbal baskets every day. I even got her the opportunity to make sweetbags for wherry passengers if they’d pay an extra ha’penny for their fares. I’d come up with that idea since the Thames stank like a sewer in the hottest weather.