Mistress Shakespeare (13 page)

And one crisp autumn day, I decided to go find Dick Field—though I’d not forgiven him for deserting Kat—at the print shop near St. Paul’s Churchyard where he was an apprentice. I realize that perhaps, looking back, I was just desperate for news of home, even of Will, and I never got a bit of that from Stephen. He’d become sulky and sullen when I’d turned his offer of marriage down again last month. He’d muttered curses against both me and Will.

The only thing, it seemed to me, he’d delighted in telling about Will and the Shakespeares was that Will now had a daughter named Susannah, born in May, and that the family seemed to be in increasingly dire financial straits. That, he had gleaned from the fact Will’s father had appeared in debtors’ court and gossip that Will’s wife had borrowed money. I didn’t ask Stephen, but could the glovery still be doing so poorly and Will’s work as a lawyer’s scrivener be so unprofitable? Of course, there were now eight mouths to feed in the family packed into the Henley Street house.

Dick Field was easy enough to find, for I recalled that the letter Will had sent him about coming back for Kat was addressed to the sign of the White Greyhound in Paul’s Walk. I only inquired once and was sent straight to it. As I went in the shop door, though I saw no one at first, I heard the rattle of type being returned to its trays along the back wall. Drying printed pages were draped over dowels clear to the ceiling; the smell of paper and ink was sharp and good. From books, both shelved and stacked, emanated the rich smell of vellum or leather, which added to the compelling aroma. How Will would have loved this shop—and I did too.

I closed the door noisily and a man emerged from behind the press. It was Dick; he stopped dead in his tracks. Like other London apprentices of any trade, he wore a flat, round cap over close-cropped hair. His traditional blue gown was calf length and contrasted with his white cloth stockings, however smudged those were. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost—perhaps he was seeing Kat instead of me.

“As I live and breathe,” he said.

“You do, some don’t,” I cracked out when I’d meant to just extend a greeting.

Dick frowned and wiped his hands on his big canvas apron. He had much filled out with muscle. His hands and face were more smeared with ink than I’d ever seen Will’s. Turning away, he poked his head into a back room.

“Master Vautrollier, the title page is done and ready for proofing. I mean to step outside a moment.”

I heard no reply, but Dick walked past me, opened the front door and gestured me outside ahead of him. We leaned our hips against an empty hitching rail in the slant of autumn sun. The large copper beech down the way wafted its leaves at our feet as we spoke.

“Will said I should look you up,” Dick said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Hell’s gates, I wrote him to leave well enough alone.”

“I wager that is your life’s creed,” I told him. “It’s a good one, if you think what happened to Kat was ‘well enough,’ what happened to Will and me was ‘well enough.’”

He hung his head. “I’ve suffered over it all too, Anne, truly I have. I can’t help what Kat did. I rue the day I heard of it. And I rue that my friend Will is wed to a woman he did not choose and cannot love.”

My head jerked around, and my insides leaped. “He writes his thoughts to you. But he—they—have a daughter now. I have heard the glovery and his scrivener work doesn’t bring in enough to—”

“Hang it, do you think he should be doing scrivener work?” Dick interrupted, thrusting himself away from the rail to round on me. “He’s dying there, just as surely as Kat died there, only it’s taking him longer! I suppose that makes you feel better!” he accused, glaring at me. “If you want revenge, you have it.”

“You dare not attack me just to make yourself feel less guilty!” I shouted at him, turning to face him down.

“Did you come here to berate me, Anne? Leave me alone, then. I’m just trying to get on, day by day, learn my trade, make a living and a life.”

“Yes, I know. I have a friend here in London who is doing the same with her regrets . . .” I squared my shoulders. Kat would not have wanted me to detest Dick so. “Then, good fortune and health to you, Dick Field,” I said as I turned away. Why had I come? To glean news of Will? Nothing now could help Kat.

“He should have wed you, Anne!” he burst out. I turned back. Perhaps that was what I had wanted to hear, not that Will regretted his marriage or that Dick thought Will and I were suited, but that Will still kept our secret, as I had. Evidently, Will had not even told Dick that we’d handfasted, a legal marriage. I’d told both Jennet and Maud some of my story, but not that I had wed Will or that I believed I was really Will’s wife and not that other Anne who had his name and his child.

“Yes, he should have,” I said, my voice much stronger than I felt. “I would have been everything to him.”

“As he is yet to you,” he whispered so quietly it might have been the dry leaves of the tree sifting down.

I did not admit to that but glared at him and walked back to Davenants’. To my amazement and chagrin, at the wine shop a black-clad stranger awaited my return with questions that terrified me.

 

 

 

“Ah, there you are, Anne,”
John greeted me as I passed the door of his wine shop where he was conversing with a buyer. “A Master Mercer is waiting to speak with you by the hearth.”

That did not bother me unduly, for London merchants who wished to send goods to Warwickshire had called upon me before. Rather than take the stairs to my chamber, I went in through the shop to the back room that served the Davenants as dining parlor, kitchen and pantry. I had thought to find Jennet waiting with the man, but she must have gone back to bed, for she was having a difficult pregnancy. “Hard times now when I’ve sailed through before,” she’d remarked with forced cheeriness the other day. “It might mean, God willing, a different result after birth too, and I’ll have a baby live, one who will live to bury me someday.”

I hung my hooded cape by the door and approached the man who was staring into the low-burning fire on the hearth. He had a calm, kindly profile now outlined by the silver-orange coals. Before he saw me and rose, he gave a turn to the spit with a loin of mutton Jennet must be preparing for supper. He smiled broadly and gave me a half bow. I must confess I liked him instantly, more fool me.

“You wish to inquire about the Whateley pack trains to the midlands?” I asked. I could tell he was somewhat startled by, perhaps even entranced by my appearance, but I was becoming used to that. Unless I was in the Jewish area over by Bishopsgate, women the French called
brunettes
were few and far between, and then not ones with such tawny skin as I.

“In a way, mistress, for I am a tariff taker of sorts.”

“I pray I don’t owe taxes I knew nothing of,” I told him as we sat across the hearth from each other, he on his bench and I in Jennet’s favorite chair.

“No, nothing like that. Rather, I need a bit of information. I must tell you I have already spoken to your overseer Stephen Dench, but thought I would inquire of you also.”

“About what, pray?”

“I’m afraid I have reason to believe that certain parties in Warwickshire might be sending contraband to London and receiving such in return.”

“We ship nothing covertly, Master Mercer, and I keep good records you are welcome to examine.”

“I would never cast a shadow of blame on you, of course, but I cannot help but wonder if certain parties might be bribing some of your carriers to transport such things.”

“If so, I shall ferret this out immediately,” I said, gripping the chair arms and leaning toward him. “But what certain parties? And what things?”

“You grew up outside of Stratford, I believe Dench said. So perhaps you know of the Arden family who reside in nearby country at Park Hall, for the Ardens and their kin are well known in that area.”

I hesitated, hoping he thought I was only trying to place the name, but my heartbeat kicked up. Did he imply that the Ardens and perhaps their Shakespeare relations were smuggling contraband goods?

“I cannot credit that,” I said. “Aren’t the Ardens wealthy—I’ve heard tell? Why would they do such a thing?”

“Mistress, let me say this flat out. The things I fear that may be going back and forth covertly are Catholic prayer books, papist roods, crucifixes, rosary beads—and, more fearfully, perhaps plotting.”

Jagged images tumbled through my mind. My mother’s glass rosary beads upstairs in my room . . . Edward Arden loaning Will all those books . . . Arden shouting out in public at the Earl of Leicester and the queen that she was the heretic . . . Will’s family’s pride in their blood ties to the Ardens . . .

Blood ties! Men had been tortured and executed for papist plots against this queen, and her own Catholic cousin Queen Mary of Scots was imprisoned in the north even now with political intrigue swirling around her.

“I can tell you honestly, Master Mercer, that I have no knowledge of any such contraband goods or such doings.”

“As I know you attend the church nearby and are loyal to the queen, I do believe you,” he assured me with a smile as he rose. “Well, these things need looking into, and they will be, especially now that the Arden son-in-law John Somerville has been arrested and taken to the Tower.”

I gasped. “For sending contraband or for secret plotting?”

“For slandering both the queen and the Earl of Leicester. But worse, for waving a pistol about and quite blatantly boasting he was on his way to London to kill Her Majesty,” he said, for once not smiling. And all the while, my inner voice was screaming,
The Tower! Only traitors are taken to the Tower!

“He was just brought in today,” the man went on, “and we will be questioning him and his family quite closely, gathering evidence on all the Arden relations here and there. It is good that you reside in London now for, I fear, the Stratford area is crawling with wayward, doomed souls.”

We made more conversation after that. I told him how I’d once seen the queen at Kenilworth and how I hoped to see her here. I spoke of how much I admired the brilliant, bold woman as ruler of our great land. Of course, I was trying to feather my own nest. But of all he had said, certain words kept catching in my mind: not only
the Tower
, but
here and there.
The government—run by the queen’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, for I knew now Mercer was no mere tariff official—was going to gather evidence here and there. Stratford, where lived
doomed souls.

The Shakespeares had never made a secret of their prideful ties to the Ardens, and Will’s visits to borrow books could implicate him. What if someone said he brought books—with plans and plots hidden in them—back into the bosom of his family?

But, my shrill inner voice cried, if Will and his wife—his parents too, who aided and abetted his marriage to Anne Hathaway—were fined or taken prisoner, what righteous revenge!

Once the man was out the door, I stood trembling with the power of the possibility of all that. John Shakespeare ruined. Will’s mother, who surely thought I was not good enough for her son, left destitute or even widowed. Will linked to Edward Arden, his high and mighty wife left with their child if he too were sent to prison, though surely not to the Tower.

I went out in the alley so that John or his guests did not come upon me, for, if they had, surely they would have seen some demon-possessed soul at that moment. I bent over double as if I would be ill; I tore at my hair, then hit the wall with both fists.

I could either warn the Shakespeares or hold my tongue and let whatever befell them happen. And it would be naught that I did to actually hurt them; I would not really be to blame, but their own stubbornness and snide superiority would ruin them.

Weak-kneed, I leaned against the back of the house. I gripped my hands between my breasts and frowned so hard my eyelids pinched tight shut.

But then I saw Will’s face and heard his voice, heard in my head his letter to me claiming,
I swear to you, I never intended to deceive you. I am most bereft and wretched. . . . 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. . . . I hope you will at some future time allow me to explain my soul-sick regrets and to give you all homage due your beauty, dreams . . .”

But now all his dreams, his talents, his very life could be destroyed by my silence. And I would be forever soul-sick too, if I let that happen. I would not, could not, revel in his destruction or that of those he loved. Did he yet love me? I longed to know. But above all, I had to bridle all my hurt and hatred to try to save him.

I did not even take time to check on Jennet or go back inside to fetch my cloak but rushed out through the back alley that led to the Maiden Head Inn. I looked behind me more than once, for what if I were followed? I sent a boy to find Stephen and bring him to me.

“Now, isn’t this a rare honor?” he said as he swaggered toward me where I waited out of the wind in a corner of the, for once, quiet courtyard. Ever since I’d firmly denied his suit last time, the man had turned snide and mulish. If he didn’t stop all that soon, I’d decided, I would have to replace him and wouldn’t that be a pretty pickle? But worse—what if he’d implied something untrue to Master Mercer about the Ardens or the Shakespeares just to get revenge on Will?

“I hear you were questioned by a tariff taker,” I said.

“Started out ’round Robin’s barn, but was looking for Stratford ties to the Ardens, far’s I could tell.”

What I could tell was that Stephen had been drinking, but what he did on the day before he turned the pack train around was his concern. His speech was slurred and he looked bleary-eyed, but his reading of Mercer had been a sober one.

“Worried for your old swain, wedded Will?” he asked with a snort. “Heaven knows, his folk’ve boasted ’bout their ties to the high and mighty Ardens.”