Mistress Shakespeare (43 page)

“Everything changes and yet nothing does,” I whispered, more to myself than to them. “All is true.”

“I know you told the truth,” Jennet told me, and I did not correct her for hearing me amiss.

We walked toward the inn where we’d stayed last night and left our horses. In one hand I held the note for Will and in the other clutched the signet ring he’d given me when we’d exchanged our wedding vows. It had been one of the world’s strangest marriages, but if I could have him no other way, I was content. I breathed in the summer air and pulled off my hat and shook my hair free.

My dear Kate linked her arm through mine. The beautiful young woman Will and I had helped bring into the world had her whole life ahead of her, and, despite my past griefs, I would wish her no less depth and breadth of love than had been mine.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

If anyone wondered
why Will went back and forth to London in the last years of his life, one could say it was partly for business and partly for pleasure to see friends and his plays performed. But it was mostly to enjoy our waning days together in our sunny gatehouse.

Sadly, if Susannah’s trial had not given him enough grief, his younger daughter, Judith, Hamnet’s twin, gave her father fits when she became betrothed to a highly unsuitable Stratford man. Suffice it to say that her Thomas Quiney not only had hardly a penny to his name and chose Judith when her father settled some money on her, but also got another young woman, to whom he’d promised marriage first, pregnant.

Will hardly scolded the girl—how could he after the mess he’d made of his early life with women?—but he was very disappointed to see family history repeat itself. Poor Anne Hathaway blamed him for being away so much and ranted day and night, he said, over what her daughters had done to besmirch her reputation. All that fretted him, kept him awake at all hours and aged him.

“But didn’t Anne ever rant over what I’ve done to her?” I asked him.

“That’s one topic she knows not to broach after how you’ve helped us—and her—more than once, the one topic that would break the agreement between her and me.”

Will sat in his favorite chair before the eastern window of the gatehouse. Mine was right next to it, though I perched on his knees now. We were going to the rebuilt Globe tonight to see
Romeo and Juliet
, though I was hardly in the mood for family feuds and the deaths of young lovers.

“It would break the agreement between her and me,” he went on, repeating himself as he sometimes did these days. “Her big house and a fine living in exchange for letting me have my London life—my real life, and yet Stratford lures me and calls me home. Anne, if we could only go back to that first day I was walking out of town and you asked to come along . . .” He sighed. “And come along you did with me, all the way, thank God!” he added and hugged me hard.

“All the way and farther yet to go.”

“If I close my eyes, I can see the meadows and flowers we passed that day, I can feel them from years later under my naked knees and elbows when we made love on them, crushing their fragrance . . . and yet they will grow and bloom again when we are gone.”

“I used to dance across those flowered leas. ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,’” I recited some of his beautiful words from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, “‘where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, / Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine / With sweet muskroses and with eglantine . . .’”

He went on, “‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact . . .’”

Two old but always new dreamers, we could have lived all day with our memories enchanted, but we kissed instead.

In the spring of 1616,
I was in Temple Grafton, for Will had taken ill on a trip home, and I had come to be nearer to him. Dr. Hall, who was caring for him, stopped by my house whenever he could to keep me apprised of his condition: his phlegmatic humors were out of balance, and he was being treated with bloodletting and poultices of sack and sliced radishes. I knew Will’s health was bad, but I expected him to rally as he ever had from whatever mental or physical ills assailed him. He was fifty-two and had made out his will.

As a knock sounded on my front door mid-morning, I jerked from pacing before my low-burning hearth. Expecting Dr. Hall, I rushed to answer. Susannah stood there, just as she had years before with a cloak wrapped around her shoulders. I gasped when I saw her solemn face.

“No—he’s not,” she said in a rush. “He’s rallied a bit, but he tells me and John he longs to see you. I volunteered to tell you, to bring you to the place on the Avon he insists John take him. I pray you trust me.”

“Of course, I do. Just one moment.” I ran into my bedchamber and seized my cloak, for the brisk wind chilled the sun today. “Sally,” I called out the back door to where she was spreading laundered sheets on the bushes, “I’m going for a walk.”

We hurried along the road to town unspeaking for a little ways before Susannah blurted, “Despite the note I sent you, thanking you for standing up for me at the trial, despite how I had treated you, I want to say it to your face. Now that I have John, partly thanks to you, I can see what you mean to him—to my father, I mean. Now I can see past things my mother fed me with her mother’s milk.”

Tears blurred my vision of her, but I steadied my voice. “It is often a burden to see our parents through adult eyes, but we must love them yet.”

She kept up the furious pace we had set, but turned her head to me. “Did you help him write his plays?”

That question surprised me, but I told her truthfully, “I wrote down some of them from his dictation when he had hand spasms. He tells me that my habits—a tart tongue, a stubborn nature and the like—inspired several of the heroines, and—”

“And somehow, you are the Dark Lady of his sonnets,” she interrupted. “I’ve read them, though Mother doesn’t know.”

“Here,” I told her, cutting off the path toward the river. “There’s a crosscut this way to the Avon.”

“But how do you know where he said to meet him?”

“Susannah, I know.”

Dr. Hall was waiting for us, but I didn’t see Will at first, only a horse with no one on it. Fear and foreboding leaned on me hard again. But John Hall smiled and waved to me and, to my surprise, before Susannah, who did not blink an eye, bent to kiss my cheek. He took her hand and pulled her down the path away from us, tugging the horse after him.

Then I saw Will on the very spot where Kat, Dick and I used to meet him when we were young. I was appalled to see the change in him these last ten days. His pallor was not white but gray, his cheeks sunken, his eyes fever-bright. He sat on a blanket on the grass in the sun but out of the wind and patted the spot beside him.

I steadied myself not to show alarm, not to . . . to make a scene. I forced a smile and sat down, then turned to embrace him, to hold him to me. He felt shrunken in his frame. My heart fell.

“It looks much the same,” he said when we finally shifted slightly apart, “our Avon, even swollen in the spring, so different from the mighty Thames. I wish that we could walk its entire length today, just setting out upstream together . . .”

“Yes, my love. I too!”

“But I shall not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds—not even death.”

“Don’t speak of that.”

“Anne, my dearest, I must. It comes to all of us, and I feel it in me. But, oh, what a dance we danced together, what things we have seen and done, what people we have met. Let’s cherish those memories into eternity, not what might have been.”

Blinking back tears, I nodded and clung to him again.

“I could not have done it without you,” he whispered, stroking my hair, “not a bit of it, my muse, my love, my wife.”

“And I’ve written my life story telling much the same, Will. I was going to show you—read it to you, but, after you thought the Worcester chancellor’s poems so poor, I hesitated—”

“I can tell without reading one word it is wonderful, clever, bright—and honest. I wish not that you had read it to me but that we could act out all the scenes, even the tragic ones, for that too is life, my Anne—my life . . .”

We sat silent for a moment, our feelings precious yet painful, far beyond speech. I believe we thought that if we stayed very still, barely breathing, time would stand still too. But the wind whistled and the river rattled on and time fled too.

As we yet held to each other, he whispered so close in my ear that his breath stirred the tendrils of silver hair at my temple, “My Anne, I cannot tell you how desperately I missed you when we were apart. Forgive me for my jealous rages, for you have ever been true to me, but I felt so helpless that I could not make you truly mine. I blamed myself, and then I took it out on you.”

“Forgotten and forgiven. You know, if I could pick one day here at Stratford, I’d choose the one where you passed my cottage to deliver gloves to old Father Berowne, and my heart thrilled to see you.”

“Though you gave me a devil of a time . . .”

“Until you recited that sonnet about languishing . . .”

“‘But when she saw my woeful state, / Straight in her heart did mercy come . . .’”

“Yes, I remember, my beloved,” I whispered, holding both his hands in mine, our foreheads pressed together.

“You threw onions at me, but since then, you have showered me with the blessings of your love . . .”

He began to cough, then slumped against me, out of breath, out of strength, I prayed, not out of life.

Though I wanted to keep Will all to myself, to just lie on the grass with him in the sun and warm him, to stay with him whatever befell, I knew he was fading. Hoping John could help, I stood and summoned the Halls back. The three of us put him up on the horse, and John mounted behind to hold him there.

Despite the appearance of collapse, Will slitted his eyes open and his gaze burned into mine. Strange, but then I felt that old swift surge of desire he had always stoked in me. An ill, dying man, and me of an age where all such passions should have passed, and I felt the power of our need for each other again. Love is a need, he’d said once, and I’d argued with him, but it was true. Like water, food and air, love was a need.

“We will keep you informed,” John said.

“Yes,” Susannah told me, squeezing my arm, “no matter what, I promise.”

Will’s eyes were feverish, clouded, but his lips lifted in a slight smile of fond farewell. I clasped his right hand in both of mine until Susannah led the horse away and his cold fingers slipped from mine. I could not bear,
I could not bear
to let him go or see him go. It was as if my life, my story, were ended too.

 

 

 

William Shakespeare lived
but three more days. I suppose his effort to see me hastened his death, but I would have done the same to see him once more. He was buried two days after his passing, not in the churchyard, but in a crypt below the floor stones of Holy Trinity as befitting a Stratford man of means. And he left word that Anne Hathaway was not to be interred with his bones.

I did not attend the funeral, but walked the spring meadows that day and many thereafter, sometimes alone, sometimes with Kate—even once in a while with Susannah—but always pretending Will was with me, for, in a way, he was.

The first time I went to visit his tomb, where the Halls were going to erect a fine stone bust of him with an inscription, I somehow lost my betrothal ring from off its broken chain. I searched for hours, more than once, with Sally and Kate, around Kat’s grave, along my path to town. I checked for it every time I went to put flowers on Kat’s grave or stood inside the dim, cool church to try to talk to Will.

But I soon realized the places to find him were down on the Avon or in our favorite under-the-sky places, even in our Blackfriars Gatehouse, where I stayed when I went to the theatres in London and where I heard him speak to me from the words of his plays. As for the ring, I pretended he’d taken it with him, that he’d wanted it back as a remembrance of me.

Indeed, more than anything, I can find Will in the pages of what I have written too. I believe these five acts of my life I will entrust to my dear goddaughter Kate are a loving, living memorial from his other wife, the wife not of his hearth but of his heart.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The third biggest mystery about William Shakespeare (after endless arguments on who really wrote the plays and what he did during the “lost years” between the time he left grammar school and first began to act in London) concerns whom he married. It’s accepted by most historians that he wed “Anne Hathway [
sic
] of Stratford in the dioces [
sic
] of Worcester maiden.” (All of the entries are originally in Latin.) But the same official record, which is kept in the Worcestershire Record Office today, is documentary proof that, on the previous day, he was issued a marriage license, called a marriage bond, to wed “Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton.”

Many have tried to shuffle off Anne Whateley as a mistake of the pen or the ear, but they conveniently ignore that the recorder in Worcester (both entries are in the same handwriting) also mistook the words
Temple Grafton
for
Stratford
and failed to cross out or correct the previous day’s “error” of the Anne Whateley/Wm Shaxpere entry when William Shagspere/Anne Hathway was written in. The Shakespeare name is “misspelled” in both cases, so that can’t weigh in on one side or the other; the Elizabethans cared little for standardized spelling. Shakespeare signed his own name various ways, including the two mentioned.

Besides unstandardized Elizabethan spellings, there are other challenges to Elizabethan-era research. Dates are always a problem since the Julian calendar was used until 1582, when the switch was made to the Gregorian, which dropped ten days from the previous records. But more confusing is that their new year began on Lady Day (March 25), despite the fact they also called January 1 New Year’s Day. So, dual dating for events can occur.