The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman (16 page)

And so to dinner: forcing myself to smile, smile, each smile bled from a cracking heart. I looked at my father, mumbling contentedly into his wine. You did this, old man, I thought. I looked at my mother, who now confused her grandchildren's names, with a servant to help her to the meats her trembling hand could not reach. My family had cleaved me from her more sharply than an executioner's axe.

Yet I said nothing. What was there to say?

The servants had just borne in the roasted partridges when we heard the church bell. One stroke for a man's death. Two for a woman's.

The bell cried twice. And then the pause before the tolling out of years.

We all of us were silent as we counted them. Let the bell toll three score and ten, I prayed. An old woman richly gathered in her years.

Ten, eleven, twelve . . .

I tried to see her as she had last been in church. But all I saw was her young face under the leaves, her green eyes as I bent to kiss her.

Twenty, twenty-one . . .

Would she have married if I had never kissed her? Had eight children now, a household of her own, with no barred smallpox door?

Twenty-eight, twenty-nine . . .

The bell stopped.

‘It cannot be Mistress Haggerty who has the white flux,' my wife said, ‘for she is four and twenty. Nor Mistress Rose Beguire who has the dropsy.'

Hamnet's face was white. ‘It might be George's aunt.'

It could be a serving maid, I thought. It could be anyone in Stratford or the villages who is nine and twenty. How many women of that age must there be in our parish? The church bell tolls for all; no reason that it must be her.

She was no more than two miles away, yet I was further from her than if I was closeted in a Venetian palace. Was ever there a story of more woe, of one who longed to hold his love, yet had not the right to go?

My hand trembled. I put my cup of wine down. And suddenly my mind crashed open, like a ship broke on the rocks, spilling forth both agony and treasure. And I saw a play, almost as if it had been writ.

It would be for her.

Dinner: a pike, stuffed; mussels, leeks and Virginia potatoes baked in almond milk; oyster stew; rice pudding with raisins of the sun and spices; Lombard custard made with almond milk, most fine; little cabbages preserved in vinegar; turnips with chestnuts and sage; figs in spice wine; a tart of sweet Canada potatoes, all most good.

It is clear that my wife and daughter wish to make me in good humour. And so I praised the dinner and those who cooked and ordered it.

Bowels: reluctant.

No snow, but ice upon each surface. Come midday, you can hear it crack. The sheep be gathered in and all the cattle too, and so the fields are empty but for dirt and ice. Even the river has turned to solid, its happy ducks long flown for warmer climes. I wish I had wings to balance on the wintery air until it tastes of southern sunlight and green leaves' delight.

Yesterday I sent a message to my lawyer, Master Francis Collins, and today he came to put my affairs in order and make provision for my daughter Judith. He dined with us, which meant at least there was conversation, for I will not have my daughter speak of the man she weds nor of her nuptials either, nor my wife to speak of them.

Grey the day and grey the matters that Master Collins and I had to speak of. I would as happily have a dirty dishcloth for a son as that man Quiney, who has bewitched my daughter and my wife to think he plies her with love, not greed for what he imagines he can gather of my estate. I'll see him bound with nothing. He may have my daughter, but of my sovereigns he'll have none. My daughter's dower shall be what she has now: the Chapel Lane cottage and no more than that.

Not that Quiney knows my true estate. Even good Dr Hall knows only the properties I hold in Stratford and the Blackfriars lease. My coin is closeted with goldsmiths in the city, divided among several lest one should fail. If blight takes all the harvest once again, our household like a storm-tossed boat can safely make for shore.

And all this wealth Judyth gave to me.

When I heard that bell toll a woman's death, I spent that night penning a play:
The Tragical History of Romeo and Juliet.
It was our story, as it should have been but that my cowardice made it not. The words came tripping, so fast my hand almost had not speed to write them, as if they came not from my mind but from some heaven-sent angels to me. By morning it was written.

When at last in London I read it to Richard and the crew, their faces turned to the blankness of men who would not show their tears; and tears in plenty we choked upon practising to play it.

A girl's play, a girl of fire and spirit; a girl of words. A girl who would choose her own lover, or none. I wrote of Judyth's life and of her death. Or so I thought back then.

But I was wrong. Wrong in Judyth's death, and in her choices too. The first I learnt of when I woke late that afternoon — my family, now used to my writing, had let me sleep the day away — my wife informed me as if it mattered little that yesterday's bell had tolled not for Judyth Marchmant but for Mistress Pettiflower, who was taken by a quinsy fever, not the pox.

And yet Judyth was not safe. For three weeks after that, I prayed and waited and listened for the bell. It did not toll for her, nor for her nephew. Three weeks, and no deaths in the Marchmant house. They must be recovered now.

When the forty days of quarantine ended, I smiled, my heart lightened. I had Jem pack my box to leave for London on the morrow. I would leave a portion of my play in the tree for Judyth, in a waxed cloth to keep off the rain till she be well enough to find it, the part where Romeo speaks to Juliet on the balcony, knowing his words were mine to her.

But that afternoon, Jem came to fetch me. A maid from the Marchmant household had come. She wished to speak to me.

She has come for work, I thought. The Marchmants have lost trade with their household quarantined so long and have let the girl go. My wife should deal with this. But my wife perhaps would say we had no need of maids. I was minded to do the girl a kindness, as one of Judyth's household. Indeed, perhaps Judyth had sent her here for me to do exactly that.

‘Show her to me,' I said.

I waited for a girl. I saw a woman, near old age. Perhaps she had been my Judyth's nurse.

She gave me a good curtsey. ‘Sir, I am Elise Butterfield, who was my lady's nurse, and am now her maid.'

Surely now, of all times, Judyth would wish her maid to stay with her? ‘You wish a place in my household, Mistress Butterfield?'

‘No, sir. I am most content to keep the place I have.'

I waited, puzzled. Had she brought a message from Hamnet's friend? Even as I thought it, Mistress Butterfield held out a sealed note.

‘This is from my master, sir, to ask if you would let your son visit his household, to amuse his son till he be strong again. It does assure you that all danger of contagion is long past.'

‘I thank you. I will surely read it, and advise my son.'

Mistress Butterfield hesitated, glancing at the door as if to see that we were not overheard. ‘When my mistress took ill,' she said at last, ‘she said she had remembrances of yours that she wished me to return, if I should live and she were to die. These remembrances, sir, take you again.' She reached into her sleeve and drew out parchments tied together to make one bundle.

My poems, I thought. She must have kept them secret, and thought to keep them secret if she died, to save her reputation and, perchance, mine.

‘But now your mistress is recovered, does she not want to keep that which I gave her?'

The woman stared at me. ‘These are not what you gave her, sir, but what she would give to you.' She added hurriedly, ‘I know my mistress does leave messages for you.' She smiled, but her eyes were smudged with tears. These last months must have been hard for a nurse who had loved her mistress as baby, child, girl and woman. ‘She asked me to tell you that she is not able to leave messages again.'

‘Is she so weakened?' I asked, in some alarm.

‘No, sir. She gains in strength every day. But it was the smallpox, sir.' She saw I did not understand. ‘It has marked her, sir. When the lad did have the fever, she prayed that it should all go to her, not him. And the angels must have carried up her prayers, for he is quite unmarked. But she . . .' The old nurse's voice choked, as if the words would not be spoken. At last she whispered, ‘She will not show her face, sir, nor her hands. She says that even a veil is not enough to stop all gentle souls recoiling at the sight of her. She says that the fever has burnt her poetry from her as well. She says she is another
now, not woman, lover nor poet, and wishes the last tokens of what she once was gone.'

Her words gone? I would sooner lose my fingers or my heart. Nay, if I lost my words my brief heart would have winked away like a cloud covers a star.

I sat. I did not reach for Judyth's poems. Though they be only parchment yet their weight would be more than I could bear. I wanted to scream my grief away, howl as a wolf that has lost its mate. I longed to run to her, to tell her that ‘To the marriage of true minds let there be no impediment. I did not love thee for thy looks alone.'

And if I did? It would ruin her reputation and my own to see her now.

And what if I should see her and shrink from her? For that first repulsion is an impulse impossible to cure; I had seen beggars torn by smallpox on London streets, not just pockmarks on their skin but their whole visage stretched about by scars. If I could not embrace her at first sight . . .

But that choice was not mine to make, nor hers to take. Even if I saw her and could embrace her, I could not say, ‘Come with me to London. Be my mistress. I will buy a house for you. In London such affairs are winked at. You would be treated by my friends just as my wife. Even the Queen might receive you, for she prizes great intelligence and wit.'

For if once Judyth might have thrown away her reputation to live with me and be my love, scorning virtue and her brother's name, how could she live there, her face hidden? Her brother's house was her only refuge now. Her brother, whom she had not shamed by ever asking me, ‘Take me to London, where I am not known. I will take another name and live there
with thee, even if you cannot offer marriage.' And I, so wrapped up in my success and London life, had not even thought to offer it.

Now too late.

I stood. I took the rolls of parchment, and did not stagger with their weight.

I said, ‘I thank you, Mistress Butterfield.' I unlocked my box, took out three gold coins and gave them to her. ‘Please tell your master I will talk with my son about a visit to your household.' In the sun, on the grass, I thought, somewhere young George could be carried to, not in the house itself in case the contagion did linger in the tapestries or cushions. ‘Please tell your mistress that . . . as a comfort for your household's sad times, I would give the lad a copy of my latest play, that it might amuse him and his household to read.'

I met the nurse's eye. ‘It is a work of two lovers, parted by their families' estate.' And who had more courage in their love, I thought, than did I. I wrote it, but did not have the stomach to live it. ‘I have written a clear copy. I will give it to you now.' I rang the bell for Jem.

And thus the play might come to her, I thought, if her brother had sympathy enough for the sister who longed to read. For surely she would still read, even if she would not write? Or would my words hurt more than they haled, for showing her what she had lost? I did not know. But if I had not my words to give, I had nothing.

Jem fetched the play down from the library where I write these words now. The nurse curtseyed again, and then she left.

My wife came in before I had thought to hide the rolls of parchment. ‘What did the woman wish? To give you those?'

‘From her master, Arnold Marchmant,' I had the wit to say. ‘We are doing business. Men's affairs. And an invitation to our son, to visit his young friend who has been ill.'

‘If Dr Hall will say the contagion has left the house, then Hamnet must enjoy it,' said she, most pleasant. ‘Will you take a brace of ducks for dinner, husband? And there is a fine hare, hung well.'

‘Yes, excellent,' I said. ‘You will excuse me, madam.' I held up the papers. ‘I need to see to these.'

She smiled as pleasantly as before and left.

I knew all the poems Judyth had given me by heart, kept them in my trunk too. Would these truly be the last that she would send? I lifted the parchments. They smelt of violets and Judyth.

My eye caught a word, and then another. I looked again. What words . . .

O that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on't! Ah, fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. It cannot come to good.

But break my heart, for I, as woman,

I must hold my tongue.

How could a woman's hand, or any hand, write that? I lifted another poem, read that, and then another, and another still. My eyes could not stop devouring what had such power in it.

To be, or not to be? That is the question —

Whether 'tis nobler in my mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of a woman's fortune,

Or, like a man, take arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep —

No more — and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there's the rub!

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil?

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The pangs of despis'd love, a long day's sad delay,

When she herself might her quietus make?

I had thought her death would be a tragedy. I had not known that her true calamity had been her life.

I put the pages in my sleeves, left my gentleman's house, walked to the beech tree and sat down. I read her words till the lines danced within my mind and their paper might have turned to air, and still I read them.

So this was my sin — the sin I never knew. Not just that I did not marry Judyth, nor even ask her to be my love in London, but that I left her, a poet imprisoned in a woman's body, with none but me to share the truth about herself. And then I vanished too. I left her with only a beech tree for an audience, and for companionship in poetry — none.

I thought of my barren years, my poems unseen, no friendship for my wit, before I met with Richard in that turnip field. I admit now, to this book and to myself, that my days are barren once again, except the days I spend in London. Will Shakespeare, gentleman. But was that ever
truly my will? William Shakespeare, gentleman, is my father's son; the idea of being a gentleman is his will, not mine. Today I would shed it all, to be with her and young and on the road again.

I have held her words close to my heart for all these years. Have placed them in my plays, so that even as a woman her words are heard and heard again, even if the world regards me as their author.

And Judyth's play that came to me that night? That
Romeo and Juliet
? It
made me rich, far beyond the accumulation of pennies and threepences that had made
my family comfortable before. There has been no year since when it has not been
played in London or by small players in village inns. Audiences so clamoured for it
that we did two performances, playing it as well as new work. And each time I played
the Prince and said, ‘
For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and
her Romeo
,' I remembered, and knew I spoke of her.

I weep for thee, and yet no cause I have;

For why thou leftst me nothing in thy will;

And yet thou leftst me more than I did crave,