Mistress Shakespeare (33 page)

The dreadful day began when I went to the bustling Maiden Head Inn to welcome my pack train from Stratford. Stephen Dench, after being greeted by his wife and three young sons, pushed past them and came to me.

“How are things in Stratford?” I asked, but I quickly sensed something was wrong. He wore a frown as severe as what I used to see from him when I’d turned down his wooing. We’d managed a good working relationship for years—I believe he thought I could not abide any man—but I feared what he had to say.

He drew from his money pouch a sealed piece of parchment he’d evidently folded in fourths to fit there. “A missive for you,” he said, “given me by John Shakespeare.”

That made no sense. Why would Will’s father write to me? Never in all these fourteen years I’d lived in London had anyone in his family tried to contact me, and they’d always sent word to Will through my rival carriers, the Greenaways. Perhaps Will had mentioned to him I’d paid for his portrait. Or had he heard I was still in his son’s life and wanted to warn me off?

“Thank you, Stephen. I appreciate all you do.”

“It’s not good news.”

“Tell me, if you know.”

He shook his head. “I’ll let it be. Someone’s died, that’s it, and he thinks you should know.”

I nodded and hurried away toward Davenants’. Little Kate thrived and they had a newborn son, but were yet packing to move to Oxford, though no one had bought their business yet. But I could not bear the suspense any longer and broke the seal in the back alley. Trembling, I opened the parchment and read.

Will’s son Hamnet dead at age eleven! His only son, the son I knew he missed. He loved Hamnet and his own youngest brother Edmund best of all those he’d left behind. Hamnet, who Will said drew pictures of the portrait I sent them, Hamnet had died and was buried while his twin sister Judith, Will’s daughters and Anne Hathaway yet lived . . . Will’s only son . . .

I did not even go in the house but, clutching the note, headed for Shoreditch where I’d find Will. The trip there was one I cannot recall; I walked as if in a trance, trying to choose the words, the gestures that might not break Will’s heart. He’d been working hard on his play
The Merchant of Venice.
Another popular Italian setting, more strong, clever women characters, but a harsh play despite some merry jests, disguises, clowning and romance. I felt—and Will had admitted to me—it was hardly the comedy he’d promised his fellows and the queen’s Master of Revels, Tilney, who had kept a watchful eye on him for years.

A watchful eye on Will for years . . . I had done that, and his father sensed it . . . He knew Will still saw me, cared for me.

I cared desperately for Will, and now this burden was mine. The son Will and I could never have together was dead, and I was the bearer of the dreadful news.

I had actually hoped to find him in a somber, thoughtful mood, but to my dismay, I found him backstage at the Theatre, jesting with Kemp, who was to play the clown Launcelot Gobbo, described in the
Merchant
as a “wit-snapper” and “merry devil.”

“My clever friend,” Kemp was saying to Will, who had his back to me, “you may have a skull full of hair-raising words, but you’re losing your hair atop that skull. What’s that line from
A Comedy of Errors
you tried to make us believe, you bare-pated churl?”

“Ah, let’s see, my base-wit clown. I believe it was, ‘What the Lord hath scanted men in hair, he hath given me in wit.’”

“Hey, then, ’tis the one behind you has all the wit I’d need to keep her company,” Kemp said and swept me a bow fit for the queen.

“Anne?” Will said, turning and standing. “What goes? Have John and Jennet sold then? This varlet has been teasing me about my rising hairline, but he is a fool indeed if he can’t sense my choler is rising at him too. Look, I’ve bought a gold earring to take everyone’s eyes off my rising forehead.”

He did indeed flaunt a small gold hoop in his left ear, for that pirate fashion was all the rage. It blurred to two hoops as tears filled my eyes.

Kemp rattled something else off in a sort of pig-Latin he sometimes used and darted away. I sat down on the bench where Will had been writing because my legs were shaking so. I was loath to ruin not only his soaring mood but his day, his year—his life.

“What’s that?” he said, seizing the note from me. So it was decided, I thought, that I was too much the coward to tell him. Still, if there was just some way I could break it to him.

“It’s from your father—” I blurted.

“But to you. Dear Lord in Heaven, I pray my mother hasn’t died, and he trusts you to tell me.”

So close but yet so far. I almost burst into tears. I wanted to cower behind a curtain and not have to say the words.

“Will,” I told him, reaching over to put a hand on his arm as he sat down beside me to read the rest of the note, “Hamnet caught a lung fever and—”

“—and they want me home, and your carriers came before the Greenaways.”

I shook my head as he skimmed the note. He sat back, dumbstruck, like a statue carved from stone.

“It—can’t be,” he whispered. “Died and I not there . . . hardly ever there.”

I thought of things to say about how he needed to make his fortune here for the sake of his family, including his son, how his great gift to write would be stifled back in Stratford. But I said nothing. I had learned the day I’d tried to insist things could work out well for Kat that just being near—being there—was best. I clasped both hands over his, trembling on the note he had crumpled so hard the paper rattled. We sat like that awhile, and when I saw he could take no action, I knew I must do so.

“I’ll go with you to get a horse and to pack your things to go home. Will, I am so deeply sorry.”

He looked up at me. I was terrified to see his face blank—no emotions, nothing, as if he stared into space, into emptiness. Dry-eyed, distracted, he mumbled something. I realized later he must have quoted his own lines from the sad scene in the first part of
King Henry VI,
where the English hero Talbot holds his dying son in his arms, a scene that had always made even the stoutest louts among the groundlings cry:

 

What scared me most was that in the play the bereaved father then dies of a broken heart; it’s as if he killed himself. But not Will—not Will, lost like Kat!

“Will,” I said, “I’m going to hire us two horses and a guard to get you home. You need to go to your family, but I’ll take you there.”

Though he nodded, he still seemed to look straight through me. We were halfway home to Stratford the next day before his great, gasping sobs started. They shook him so hard I had to have him ride with me as he had once held me, devastated, on his horse so long ago.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Aye, I’ll be able
to get it all thatched afore winter sets in,” the man I’d hired assured me. “Just so’s the carpenters and plasterers get out o’ my way on time.”

“They’ve promised me they will,” I told him. “I’ve hired an overseer for the rebuilding, and he’ll take care of all that.”

We stood at the front gate, surveying my small Temple Grafton cottage I had now reclaimed and meant to make into my country home. How tiny it looked after living in London all these years, though I’d soon be in a small place there without the run of the Davenants’ spacious home. They had sold their shop and house—unfortunately, to my old suitor, wine merchant Nicholas Clere, and his new French wife, so I knew I could not stay on.

I had hurried back to London to lease two ground-floor chambers from Will’s friends the Burbages in the Blackfriars precinct; they had bought the old three-story refectory building there to live in and to turn into an indoor theatre. Besides my view of the mews with horses going in and out, I could see two mansion houses and the gatehouse I still coveted.

The once familiar Warwickshire accent of my visitor drew my thoughts back to Temple Grafton. “You give me a bit o’ the money now to buy my reeds and get my scythe sharpened,” the thatcher told me, “and all’s well.”

As I went in to get him some coins, I wondered if all would ever be truly well in my life again. I had not seen Will since we had parted at Clopton Bridge the day I’d brought him, laid low by grief and guilt over his son’s death, back to Stratford, nigh on a month ago. Now I must head back to London yet again to bid farewell to my friends and to move my earthly goods to my new place. Yet Warwickshire drew me for the first time in years and not just because Will was near, if unseen.

Compared to London, the countryside seemed so serene and safe. I’d walked the woods and meadows and laid bouquets of late-blooming flowers on the graves of my parents, Father Berowne and Kat. I had sneaked into the unused church where Will and I had said our vows and stood there, lost in thought. Despite our separations and our sorrows, I did not regret I’d committed my life to loving him. Somehow, at the age of thirty-two, well into my middle years, I’d made peace with my past.

In short, I had restored my soul, but for feeling so deeply again my loss of Will, who yet remained within the bosom of his family as if he’d never again return to the stage—or to me. I tried to come to terms with that possibility but such eluded me.

Now, even after I’d paid the thatcher and he’d headed back toward Stratford, I leaned against my stone fence in the autumn breeze and let my mind’s eye picture how the cottage would look when I saw it next spring. I was having it extended out the back and the east side to add a spacious solar with hearth and big bay window; a large pantry and kitchen with an open hearth and a fine bedchamber with a third fireplace, so a trio of chimney pots would sprout from the new roof. I would hire a maid to live here, someone to cook when I was in residence but tend the place when I was gone, especially the herbs and flowers.

I thought of Maud again, lost in her delirium, talking of her sweet-smelling herbs at the end. How I wish I could have brought her here. Perhaps Jennet would visit or let Kate come to me when she was older, and—hopefully—had even more siblings than little Johnny.

Indeed, I had lost my three best women friends, two to death and Jennet to her move to Oxford with my darling, eight-year-old Kate, who was like a daughter to me. I feared it would never be the same for us, though I had vowed to see them on my trips between Temple Grafton and London.

And between me and Will? I could not finish the thought.

I went inside to store some other things away for the rebuilding; I was leaving with the pack train on the morrow. Again, I walked through the place, surveying the small rooms where my mother had danced and sung, where my da had laid his plans to have his own pack train. And where, thank the good Lord, he had said I must learn to read and write. If only—

I jumped at a knock on the door. Could Will be here to tell me how things were with him, Will here . . .

I rushed to open the door, staring at the height his head would be, but a thin young girl stood there, her expression pinched, a blue cloak pulled tight around her shoulders. Looking into her eyes, I realized who she was, though I had seen her only once and that years ago when she was but a babe. I was certain it was Will’s eldest girl, Susannah, thirteen years old now.

My insides leaped to think she’d come with dire news, for it had been exactly here I’d faced down those two neighbors of her mother’s who told me Will was lost to me for good. Will—what if he was ill or had hurt himself in his despair?

“I know you are Mistress Whateley,” she said, her freckled face hard and her voice harder.

“And I know you are Mistress Susannah Shakespeare,” I said, obviously surprising her. “What may I do for you? Would you like to come in?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” she said, surprising me in turn. She stepped in, all curious, trying to take in the room and me without swiveling her head. She was at that graceless, gangly stage between childhood and womanhood I recalled all too well. I indicated she should sit, but she shook her head. I gripped my hands tightly in the folds of my skirt. Surely, Will had not sent her.

“They don’t know I’m here,” she said in a burst of words, “but I know about you, and I want you to stay away from my father.”

“I haven’t seen your father since I’ve been here, Susannah, but we have been friends for years, since we were younger than you. Has someone sent you?”

“I said they don’t know I’m here. They don’t know I overheard them arguing either. That’s all they do now, ’stead of not talking, now that Hamnet’s gone.”

“I am very sorry for the loss of your brother.”

“At least it’s been good to have him back—Father, I mean.”

“I can understand that. My father was often gone to London when I was growing up, and I missed him sorely, though he had to do it to support his family.”

“Well, yes. My father has promised grandfather he will help him get our coat-of-arms and promised Mother he will buy us a fine house in town too, but he says he has to leave to do that. I’d rather live—even live here in this little cot, if he’d but stay—so you just stay away! Grandfather sticks up for you, and that’s bad too!”

“You are very brave to come here, and I thank you for your visit if not your harsh words. If you’ve come out all alone today, best I walk you back to town, at least a ways.”