The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (12 page)

‘No,’ he agreed, ‘it makes no sense.’

Master Camden’s great history was published.
Britannia.
Tremblingly Ben turned over the great folio leaves in the master’s study. Not appropriate for him, a non-Queen’s Scholar, to be here, but it didn’t much matter now, as he was leaving Westminster School.

‘But this is magnificent. It must make your fame.’

Master Camden frowned in modesty. ‘It has attracted favourable notice. My lord Burghley has been especially kind. All I can see now are its imperfections.’

Ben shook his head. ‘There has never been anything writ like it. Yet you’re staying here.’

‘Schoolmastering, yes. Does that surprise you?’

‘No, because you are the best of teachers. Yes, because – well…’ He was going to say
if it was me.
If it was me presenting my great work to the public, I would not carry on quietly teaching grammar in an old monk’s cell, I would shout to the skies. ‘There’s a world out there.’

‘Which I may visit a little during the vacations, and which may very well soon tire of me. Meanwhile I will hope to teach other such pupils as you.’

‘Ah, but to what end?’ Ben closed the volume and rested his hands on the panelled calf cover. Books, he had noticed, were warmer than any other inanimate objects. ‘Never fear, that’s the last of my self-pity.’

‘You need never stop learning, Benjamin. As long as you can read, as long as you can lay your hand on a book. Which reminds me. These are for you.’

Half a dozen volumes, ready bound in a satchel. The names shimmered and danced for him:Virgil, Plautus. ‘I can’t take those.’

‘No? It would please me. Call them borrowed, if you prefer. As I said, I am staying at Westminster, and your apprenticeship will doubtless keep you hereabout. We shall still, I hope, be friends.’

‘So I hope,’ Ben said, and smiled, and accepted the books. And thought: The kingdom’s finest historical scholar, and Ben Jonson the bricklayer, friends. Very pretty. Very unlikely. He saw Master Camden’s eye stray to the fresh heap of correspondence on his desk, sealing-wax clustering and drooping, erudite fruit. He did not exactly want Ben to go, but once he did go there would be much to occupy him, he would turn brightly to it, necessarily forgetting. And somehow it was this that made Ben say: ‘I don’t regret it, you know. The way I faced the examiners. They looked haughty on me, yet I knew almost as much Latin as they did. I wouldn’t bend. And I never will bend, you see, when I know I’m in the right.’

Master Camden seemed about to say something, then shook his head, and smiled sadly. Probably the sad smile meant:
You will change.
But Master Camden, though Ben esteemed him more than anyone in the world, did not really know him. No one did, which Ben found acceptable enough: he knew himself. And that was the first principle, after all, behind all the greatest thinking of the ancients: know thyself. Strange, he thought, that so few people could manage it.

‘Spare me all that stuff about teaching me the art and mystery of thy trade,’ Ben said to his stepfather, on the first day. ‘Just show me what I have to do.’ He looked up at the long ladders, the scaffolding, and realised he had no fear of falling.

*   *   *

Consider the events of a single day – no, much less. About as much time as it takes to roast a fowl on a spit.

Time enough to change a man – and, perhaps, the world.

The place: well, two places, fifty miles apart, linked by consequence. One is the Oxfordshire market town of Thame, amply straddling the London road, a wool-rich burgher town, prepared to lay out good money if it gets good value – as it did earlier this day with a performance by the most estimable of touring theatre troupes, the Queen’s Men.

They pitched up in White Hound Close, and to a large, appreciative crowd played
The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth,
and now at the Spread Eagle they feed, drink and tally. They have bespoken the whole supper-room for themselves: no rowsy ragged rabblement these, they are the Queen’s Men, put together from the choicest players of several companies to bear Her Majesty’s name about the country and to play before her at the Court. The Queen, when cares of state are laid aside, dearly loves a play, and is proud to own it: a blow, then, to the Puritan haters of the stage, though not a silencing one.

‘Sweet sound.’ The Dutton brothers, red-bearded and foxy, tip the jingling contents of the box on to the table. William Knell, tall and florid, masterful player of kings, watches. Not happy. Snatches up a coin. Bites, bends.

‘Bastards. Bloody cheating bumpkins.’

‘Hush, man, you’re not on stage now,’ says Jack Towne. His fair, long-limbed handsomeness is still notable: a groove between the brows, though, as if it can only be maintained with effort. ‘Mine host will hear you.’

‘Pox on him. And on thieving Thame. The men are clods. The women all ugly.’

‘Naturally they are. You’re not drunk enough.’ Tarlton, the snub-nosed clown, pours. ‘Wine, the transformer. A glass, and you’ll be commending the men’s wit and the women’s beauty. Another glass, and you’ll be commending t’other way round.’

Jack Towne’s eyes narrow at that. Not perhaps in mirth. But Knell rounds on him. ‘Don’t you smirk. Never mind mine host hearing, Towne, look to your damned audience. Your voice failed. By the end, nothing but croaking.’ He rasps in scornful imitation. ‘“Why then belike, all that I have here is yours.” Pitiful. Not piteous.’ The bumper of wine goes down, gulp. ‘Give me more.’

Tarlton pours. ‘When you play the flatterer you quite turn my head. Water with it?’

‘Save your jester turn for the Court.’

‘What in God’s name is wrong with you?’ John Dutton stacks coins. ‘They liked us. Takings twice what we got in Beaconsfield. Why so foul?’

‘I need some air.’ Knell gets up from the table, goes to open the single window. It yields reluctantly, squeaking and grinding. The room sucks in a little scented summer. ‘Bloody town. Did you mark it? Church here. Grammar school next. Dunghill there. And so with every dreary hole we have to drag ourselves to ’twixt now and September.’ He throws a backward glance. Bloodshot eye falls on Towne. ‘Well, why do you stare? You’re always the first to mourn when we leave London gates.’

‘That’s why I stare. I am usurped. Take away a man’s cherished miseries, and what do you leave him?’

‘Come, come, friends, at least we have a proper equipage. When I was first with Leicester’s men, we made the tour with a villainous old cart and worse mule.’ This is Robert Wilson, wit and scholar of the company: elegant, watering his wine, acute grey eyes taking in everybody, everything. ‘Laid bets on which would founder first. Singer, you were with Leicester’s then, weren’t you?’

Anecdote springs up all round the table. Towne slips away from it to join Knell at the window.

‘Come, Knell, what cheer?’ Tentatively he pats the big shoulder turned to him. ‘You can tell me. All the years betwixt us, now companions, now not. Storms and havens. Hast heart-pain? Share. Trust me, I can deal wisdom to beat any gammer winking over her turf fire.’

‘Go your ways, Towne,’ he growls.

Towne shrugs, walks back to the table, pours a drink. Tarlton calls for another bottle, Wilson for pasties; the Duttons scoop the money into pouches; a moth as big as a field mouse blunders in and flirts dangerously with the candles, and in less than an hour there will be a dead man.

And fifty miles away, over the Oxfordshire border into Warwickshire, in another town of church and grammar-school and dunghills, another moth flutters around the weak smoky flame of a rushlight, until a pair of white hands closes about it.

‘Why will they destroy themselves?’ Anne says, carrying the little dusty pulse to the parlour window. ‘No other creature does it.’

‘Except for man,’ says her father-in-law, smiling from the shadowed chimney-corner. Though the midsummer evening breathes as warm here as at Thame, a small fire burns: John Shakespeare has a fire every night. It is one of his things.

‘Tut, none of your gloomy thoughts,’ Anne says, freeing the moth, clapping the window to. ‘Will you take something hot for supper?’

‘Not for me alone. Where’s Will?’

‘Down to Sadlers’, to see if they can change that crown. He’ll not eat late, you know that.’

‘I will,’ yawns Gilbert, lifting propped tousled head. ‘What’s for cooking?’

‘He ought to eat more. He’s all bones,’ John Shakespeare grumbles.

‘You were the same at his age,’ says his wife, holding her needlework up to the light, squinting. ‘Lean and spare, it’s in the blood. Who gave the crown?’

‘I forget. Lord’ – rising, Anne listens – ‘never say that’s the twins waking?’

‘Cats fighting,’ chuckles Gilbert. ‘An easy mistake.’

‘Master Steels, at Snitterfield, for the belts and purses,’ John Shakespeare says. ‘No fear for the goodness of the coin. I knew his father well.’

‘Cats. Dear heaven, daughter, you should know your children’s cry,’ her mother-in-law says, wetting thread in scarcely smiling lips. ‘We want no hot eating at this late hour, I think. The kitchen fire will be out, besides.’

‘Not so late, surely. Is Joan not back from the Quineys’ yet?’ her father-in-law cries, stirring.

‘Those field mushrooms.’ Gilbert sighs reminiscently. ‘Broiled with leeks. I shall wake brother Richard before cockcrow, go find some more. That black juice.’

‘Never mind Joan, she will do very well.’ Wetted thread into needle: now stab, and yank and tug, as if administering just deserts. ‘My daughter knows right from wrong. I thank heaven.’

‘Aye, those mushrooms are good eating. And yet Will won’t even touch them.’ John Shakespeare looks across at his daughter-in-law. ‘Was there ever such a curiosity, my dear, as your husband?’

She smiles back at him. ‘We shall win him over, one day.’

Anne’s favourite time, the supper-hour. In summer the shadows seem to roll across to your feet like mild purple waves. With every trundle and creak, bolts and shutters create a soft castle about you. The Henley Street house is not like Hewlands Farm, where she was only alive at night. Here she moves round the household day as comfortably and steadily as the hour hand of a clock.

In the kitchen Anne cuts bread and, after a glance at the hanging flitch and a mental calculation, a wedge of cheese. It is not that they are poor here, but money always matters: you feel it pressing and rubbing like a tight shoe. She has tried to help with innovations, like saving the old floor-rushes to light the fires. Her mother-in-law goes along with them, while seeming to find them faintly distasteful.

But with her father-in-law, she is a favourite, has been since the first morning she woke up here as a bride, five years ago. She can see where he gets his reputation for being difficult; yet to her he is seldom less than tenderly chivalrous. A kind of alliance, even, has formed between them: an alliance about Will; slight yet strong, knitted together from frayed ends of suspicion, jealousy, fear. Sometimes Anne allows the thought: Will’s father likes me because I pin Will down, to this house, this trade, this town. And sometimes she looks at the thought properly, all round, its shape and shadows. Then Bartholomew’s jest on the day of their wedding shouts through the muffling of the years:
Well, Anne, you caught him in time.

But not for long, she does not allow it for long, because of what she has. Look, feel, so real and tangible: the husband, the children, the intense life she lives with them. Children beautiful and infinitely surprising; husband who is, still, husband, revealing no vice or foulness, unestranged … Well, go no further. She remembers her father teaching her, when a small girl, the rudiments of arithmetic. He counted fat plums into her stretching hands. And three more: ‘Now how many have you?’

All she could say, in greedy surprise: ‘Oh, I’ve got lots.’

No, she can see nothing to regret in her sole act of rebellion – giving herself to young Will Shakespeare: not when it has led to this. Perhaps in fact that rebellion was a necessary part of her. Whereas Will seems to have laid his by, like a trifling pastime once taken up. The Will she lives and works and lies beside is more phlegmatic than she could have imagined: pliable, measured, the least noticeable person in the brimming household. A swift maturity, perhaps, from marrying so young, fathering three children. Making him different from most men of – of what? Twenty-three? Yes. Somehow she always has difficulty naming his exact age. There is something elusive about it.

And about him? No, no, her hands are filled with fruit, she has abundance, and she need not consider the question of whether she knows him less now than she did five years ago. Nor why, when Joan or Gilbert casually asks, ‘Where’s Will?’ she has an impulse to say he might be underground or in the roof or in the air all around them or anywhere, anywhere, for all they know.

*   *   *

‘Knell was drinking before the performance,’ says Robert Wilson, in a low voice.

‘Well, don’t we all?’ shrugs John Singer: spindle-shanked, easy comedian, faintly mad eyes.

‘Ale, ale, to moisten. This was strong liquor. Missed a couple of cues.’

‘Towne thinks it’s all come about since he married that young piece in London,’ says Lawrence Dutton – too loudly: quickly they burble of new subjects, while Knell, solitary chair drawn up to the cold hearth, neatly stabs mutton slices with his knife.

‘He won’t even take a jest now,’ Tarlton sighs at last.

‘Not even funny ones? To be sure, you wouldn’t know about that,’ says Singer.

‘He’s absolutely indispensable, you know,’ says Jack Towne, at the table-end, drawing in spilled drink with his finger. ‘The
sine qua non
of our enterprise, Knell. Can’t do without him, as he is good enough to remind us. That’s why he carries it so high.’

Glances pass and bounce round them. Tarlton waves the swooping moth away, frowning. He is the most acclaimed clown of the day, he has property in London, and, as long as he doesn’t go too far, is the favoured fool of the Queen herself; but he started out as a troupe player and still believes in it, the group, the way they hold together. ‘Nobody can claim that,’ he says. ‘Not in the Queen’s Men, nor in the poorest hedgerow company.’