Shakespeare's Rebel (54 page)

He would be certain. That he knew as he hurried down the stairs and across the snowy gardens to the wharf. A question needed to be asked in Southwark, an answer given. When the tide turned.

XL

Proposals

The brewer, Matthew, told him that Tess was not at the Spoon but gone to the playhouse. Which seemed strange. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men would have played for the last time there that season the previous day, Shrove Tuesday, before the Lenten closure. Unless they’d played at the palace again, as they had two years before – a night John remembered all too well. But no, the Queen was at Greenwich. And he doubted that she would sport on the eve of a day that would commence in such sorrow.

The Globe was not empty; indeed, it was abuzz. Labourers swarmed everywhere – thatchers upon the roof, patching; plasterers filling and smoothing the daub; painters on scaffolding, revitalising the faux marble of the columns. Coming through the main doors, seeing it, John felt an ache in his stomach. They were preparing at season’s end for the next season. Wonders would be enacted there, men and women transported by words and actions. Tragedy would unfold, princes would fall, lovers would die. Comedy would make three thousand people laugh as one, buffeting the players with their raw breath. And he could have no part of it.

He looked from the gods to the pit – and there, standing in the very midst of it, hands on hips and staring up, was William Shakespeare.

John moved up beside him, settled, did not speak. The playwright’s lips were moving. Even without a quill in his hand, his friend was always writing and John would not disturb him.

After a moment, the man muttered something, looked down, then glanced to his side. When he saw who was there, his eyes went wide, filling with joy. ‘John!’ he cried, reaching, pulling him into his arms. ‘By Jesu, man! Ned told us that you were safe but then . . . you disappeared, as is your wont. When did you return?’

‘A few days since. I have been . . . engaged.’

‘Upon this other business?’ Will’s smile passed. ‘The one concluded this morning?’

‘E’en so.’

‘Ah.’ His friend’s hands upon his arms squeezed. ‘And all’s well?’

‘Well enough.’ John slapped the other’s arm. ‘But what make you here, William? Are you not taking your season’s triumphs on the road, to gull the dull and half-witted in the provinces from their silver?’

Will laughed. ‘The company – and your son with them – set out this morning for Northampton. Though most lay in the wagons and groaned after the closing revelries of yestere’en. I remain behind to supervise this’ – he gestured at the business around him – ‘and to finish my play.’

‘Which one?’

‘I think you know.’ He whistled between his teeth. ‘It is said that an Afric elephant takes twice as long to give birth as any woman. Well, I have been an elephant with this one, sure.’

‘’Tis your reworking of
Hamlet
still?’

‘Aye.’

‘And it is not yet done?’

‘Near. ’Twill be in time to open our new season next month.’

John considered. ‘And do you play in it too?’

‘I think this time I will. I think I will play . . . the father.’

John frowned. ‘The ghost?’

‘Aye.’

‘I see. And your own father? You said he was ill.’

‘Still lives.’ Will looked away, up to the sky. ‘Not for much longer, by report.’

Darkness had replaced the light that the reunion had brought. It was John who now took his friend’s arm. ‘You have been careful, William?’ he asked softly.

‘Regarding what?’

‘This play. Its themes. The times are tender yet and it is only a month since you were called before the Privy Council to answer for
Richard the Second
.’ He lowered his voice still further. ‘They let you off with a warning, I heard. You do not want to test that now.’

‘This is different.’

‘Indeed? As I recall the piece, it still features regicide, rebellion, usurpation . . .’

‘All themes well established in
Hamlet
.’ Shakespeare looked at the activity around him. ‘I do but rework an old piece, truly.’

John looked into his friend’s eyes. ‘And ghosts, Will?’

‘They have always been in the story too.’

‘Not your own.’

The playwright looked sharply up. ‘I do not know what you mean.’

‘The night Ned and I found you . . . distraught. You spoke of fathers . . . of sons . . .’

‘My father is dying,’ Will said shortly.

‘I know,’ John replied, then lowered his voice. ‘Will you have a Mass said for his soul?’

Shakespeare stared at him for a long moment, then spoke, loudly. ‘Why would I do that, John Lawley? Our Church in England does not sanction it. And we are its loyal children, are we not?’

A workman, passing close with a timber upon his shoulder, glanced at them. John knew his friend spoke for other ears. He kept his own voice low. ‘And if not for your father, what of Hamnet’s soul?’

Will looked around. Labourers were still close. When he spoke again, his voice too was gentle. ‘The play is called
The Tragedy of Hamlet
, John. Hamlet. Different father, different son. It is, in the end, but a play.’ A smile came again. ‘And one that could use you. I had thought, if you returned to us in time, to offer you a role. There is a scene where a certain gravedigger opines on fate and the world. I thought of you when I wrote it.’ He looked more closely. ‘Come, John, where is your delight? You ever have pressed me about joining us again upon the scaffold.’

Two thoughts jabbed him, equally keen: the lure of a return to his old life, with all its joys, dangled before him now; and the one that was conjured by his friend’s last word. He felt them both, jostling in his guts. He took a breath, another, then shook his head. ‘Nay. I thank you for it, truly. But my life . . . has changed. I have to change it further. And yet . . .’ Words had passed upon that other scaffold. They came back to him now. ‘And yet I would help you in this – I would set the fight for you, one last time. I have . . . an idea for it.’

‘What idea?’

‘Nay, let me show you when the players return. It is something you will desire, I think. It is . . . in keeping with the times.’ John smiled. ‘And as a parting gift, I will not even seek a wage for it. I will give you my labours for free.’

Shakespeare laughed. ‘Well, Burbage would be thrilled at that. All this’ – he nodded at the work around them – ‘is expensive. Consider yourself hired. I will pay you in whisky.’

‘No, my friend,’ he replied softly, ‘you will not.’

The two friends stared at each other for a moment. Then John remembered why he had come. ‘I heard Tess was here.’

‘Aye. She is in the tiring house. She insisted on sewing Ned’s new costumes herself.’ He shook his head. ‘I know not what you did to him, but he is changed. As a boy. As a player. And your lady now makes for him a garb fit for madness.’

‘Then, with your leave, I will to her.’ John reached and took his friend’s hand. ‘I have more news for you, William. But it must await the hour.’ He looked to the stage. The exit upon it led to the tiring house. ‘And the event.’

‘Find me later at my lodgings.’ Will smiled. ‘Good fortune, fellow.’

John left the playwright to his stares, climbed upon the platform, walked to the door, looked in. The room was filled with seamstresses, chattering, sewing. It took a moment to spot her, because she was almost hidden in a far corner, and silent.

He crossed to her. ‘A word, lady, if you will.’

She looked up, and he was pleased to see that same relief in finding him safe, usually present after an absence, still there; pleased more that it did not fleet as fast as it had before. ‘John,’ she said, slipping the needle into the material she worked on, laying it down. She stood, still smiling, and stepped towards him – stopping when she noted that every noise in the room had ceased and all the seamstresses regarded them.

John stepped back. ‘Come, lady – shall we walk?’

They did, out on to Maiden Lane, between the Globe and the bear pit – the mastiffs howling as they passed by – and thence into Paris Gardens. The bowling lawns were covered in fresh snow and no man sported there. The fall had ceased, though clouds still loured, yet with the wind abated, they were warm enough as they made fresh tracks across the virgin white, crossing to the river in slow and squeaking steps. She took his arm, and he was content with that, and with the silence. Grateful indeed, for he was not sure how to begin.

So she did. ‘Where were you since the fall of the house?’

‘I thought it best to disappear. I went to Stepfather Lawley, in Shropshire.’

‘Ah. And you returned . . . ?’

‘Two days since. I would have anyway but I was summoned. By . . . by my lord of Essex.’

She halted them. ‘You were with him?’

‘Even unto the end.’

He said it, staring across the water. She pulled his arm tighter. ‘I am sorry for it.’

‘And I. Yet, truly, it could not have ended any other way. It was his fate. He found it in the end.’

‘Found it?’ She stared to the north bank too, as unseeing. ‘Was it chosen for him by God, or did he choose for himself?’

‘I do not know. Both perhaps? Neither?’ He sighed. ‘I will leave that to the priests and the playwrights to wrestle out between them.’

‘Indeed, John? Put a bottle of whisky on the table and I reckon you will out-expound any priest, out-soliloquise any scribbler.’

She was smiling now. He was not as he turned to her. ‘Lady, you know I do not seek that distillation all the time, though it oft calls to me. I think . . . I think it is this place that makes me answer. The playhouse. The taverns. Perhaps away from it I will find solace in other things.’

Her eyebrows – no longer plucked to a line, he noticed – rose. ‘You are thinking of leaving Southwark? I thought you had coin down on a plot in the corner of St Mary Overies?’

‘If I stay, I think it will be my bed soon enough.’

‘But the Globe? I cannot believe you would forsake the stage. It is the life you love.’

‘Once.’ He looked away, downriver. He could just make out, over the gables of the bridge, the pennants atop the White Tower. ‘But I have seen another life, ended on a different kind of platform. Look here!’ he cried, squeezing his doublet where red stains besmirched it. ‘I do not think . . . I would not find it . . . so
easy
to play again.’ Tears came, flooding his eyes in the instant, running in hot streams down his cheeks. ‘Sweet Christ!’

‘Oh John, John.’ She stepped close, took him into her arms.

He leaned on her and she held him up. He had not wept in decades. Perhaps that was why the reservoir was so full.

At last he subsided, gently shrugged free of her, stepped away. When he looked again, she had an eyebrow raised, a slight smile on her face. ‘I thought it was the woman’s role to woo with tears. Yet you have mastered it.’

He wiped an edge of cloak across his face. ‘I do not woo. Not that way.’

‘What way then?’

He hesitated. ‘None,’ he said at last.

‘Ah, you would woo by seeming not to?’

‘Nay, Tess.’ He reached, took her hand. ‘I know not seeming. A year in the Tower, a minute on a scaffold, it has taken all my seeming away. Everything else is false.’

‘You think so now. You will think differently in two weeks when Will offers you a run of roles.’

‘He offered me one, not one bell since. I turned him down.’ He shook his head. ‘It hurts me to say it. But I am done with it. That life is over.’

‘Truly? Then you will need another position.’ She looked keenly into his eyes. ‘What say you then, sir, to assuming the role of protector of the most popular inn within the Bishop of Winchester’s Liberty of Southwark?’

Now he laughed. ‘Tess? Are you offering me a job? In a tavern? Me?’

‘It is not a tavern, sirrah. It is the finest of inns, as well you know.’ Her smile left. ‘And I think . . . I think I am offering you more than that.’

‘Tess . . .’

‘Nay, sir, do not speak. Let me have my say.’ She glanced upstream, her brow creased. ‘We spoke before of fate. What is governed, what is chosen. I wonder now at Sir Samuel’s fate, to die over there at Essex House that day. His death saving me from . . . well, not just being his second wife while the first yet lived . . .’ She looked at him, went on a little more sharply. ‘Yes, sir, I found that out when I went to claim the body and found it being claimed before me – something you chose not to send me word of!’

‘I knew you’d discover it,’ he protested. ‘The news from me would have seemed . . . opportunistic.’

‘Well.’ She settled. ‘His fate saved me from mine, at least. The one I’d certainly chosen. To be a
lady
? I do not think I could return to being a lady now.’ She laughed. ‘To speak truth, I do not think I was much of a lady even when I thought I was. My precipitous surrender to you would seem to show that.’ She looked skywards, to flakes falling gently again. ‘But to be married to a man universally known as Despair? God a mercy!’ She shuddered. ‘In Finchley?’ Her gaze returned from the skies, to him. ‘When the man I love lives in Southwark?’

Her eyelashes had snowflakes on them. He didn’t think he had seen anything more beautiful. ‘Tess . . .’

He stepped to her. But she raised a palm to him, held him off. ‘Nay, sir. A moment more and then you may put my lips to a better use – if you still desire to. For you may wish to run instead.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I know there is risk in you being the landlord of an inn. But if you fall . . . well, at least you will fall close by. And when you stand – which is, as you say, most of the time – well then, sir, you will stand by me.’ She nodded, then added, briskly, ‘There, sir. I am done. What say you?’

Her hand dropped, no longer resisting him. Yet he did not enter in. ‘Lady, are you proposing to me?’

She reached, took his hand. ‘Do you know, sir – I believe I am. If you will have me.’

Then he did step in. ‘Before I say aye or nay, there is something I have to tell you. However, since you have decided you can no longer be a lady, I give you leave to retract your offer. There were no witnesses to our hand-fasting.’