The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (17 page)

‘“As when the fountains fail, and men bemoan

Who yesterday full cups threw in the dust—”’

‘Text, text. You’re making it up.’

‘Making it better,’ Wilson said narrowly. Tarlton’s jug was suspended. Stratford faces peered at the smeared window: what’s afoot? ‘Go on.’

Towne touched his fingers.

‘“Well, Skalliger, for thy kind advice herein,

I will not be ungrateful, if I live…”’

Will made out the word
Exit
on the shaking page. Shaking because he was shaking, because from nowhere had come this chance, mad and unmissable, as if old and dozing stiff-jointed by the ashes you found a fairy before you saying,
Be young.
He blinked the slouching words upright. Short soliloquy, make it count.

“‘Go, viperous woman, shame to all thy sex:

The heavens, no doubt, will punish thee for this:

And me a villain, that to curry favour…’”

What?
Have given the daughter counsel ’gainst the father.
God, writ with a ham fist. ‘“Have blown her daughter’s hate, unnatural kindled—”’

‘Text—’

‘Bugger the text, listen.’

‘Constrain, Will, don’t saw the air,’ Towne whispered. Will put the book down, drew closer to his audience. He was not Will, he was Skalliger, counsellor to an ancient princess: he was someone else; never had he been so entirely, freely himself. He turned out his palms, levelled his voice. For this to happen, a man had had to die, and so he must be glad of that. A lesson.

‘“But us the world doth this experience give,

That he that cannot flatter, cannot live.”’

Towne glanced at Tarlton. ‘Pitched well, hey?’

A man had died; what else must happen? Frightening, this huge acceptance. Write your name with the proffered pen of fire, knowing that once done, something far off in place or years was being prepared for you; hear, perhaps, the faint chunk and clink of it. The Queen’s Men were whispering, heads down. The craning heads at the window blotted the everyday sun.

‘And this experience shows, there’s nothing made, Without some other thing is sore betrayed,’ Will said.

‘What?’ Dutton tossed down the playbook. ‘You invent too much.’

‘How is that possible?’ he enquired politely; then thought, No, don’t. Step back. ‘Your pardon. I – gentle sirs, you know I will do, I will be, anything. I will…’ And suddenly you find you have said it: the real last line.

*   *   *

He told his father first, in the workshop: it seemed natural.

John Shakespeare roamed back and forth, stared at Will’s face and then at the door. He had nowhere to go but outrage, and even there he found precious little room. He could only repeat himself: ‘They are players.’

‘They are the Queen’s Men. They act under royal patent. They are everywhere assured success. If I were offered a place in any other trade that prospered so—’

‘It is not a trade.’ His father’s voice was dull with shock. ‘They are players.’

‘Call it a profession, then, or what you will. No, call it this: a living. They have need, and I have ability, I have readiness, I have – inclination, a very great inclination. Father, here is opportunity. Their travels end in London, where there are theatres, permanent theatres, being new-built all the time, and a man following the player’s trade will never lack employment. It’s a prosperous chance, just like Richard Field going to London to be a printer.’

‘Richard went as prentice, bound by seven years’ articles to a guild trade. There’s no Worshipful Company of Players, I think?’

No: thank God. Will tried to keep the thought from showing on his face.

‘And you say they will take you only as a hired-man. Not a company member – such as it is. Will…’ His father gestured helplessly: his capable hands couldn’t hold or shape this. ‘This is speculation, of the wildest sort.’

Again Will thought behind the screen of his face: not like speculation in wool, with the courts watching you. ‘Father, to this profession – to these people, I am worth something. What am I worth here? Aye, I turn my hand to your business, but there’s Gilbert working for you too, and Richard likely to be handier than either of us. In the fattest year, this shop couldn’t support three grown sons. And, besides, I have—’

‘You have a wife and three children,’ his father said, with a faint smile, like someone answering a riddle.

‘All the more reason to make something of myself. On my own account.’

The screen must have shifted, for his father said, with sudden violence: ‘It would have been better, more honest, simply to run away one night, surely. If escape is all you want.’

Will turned away from him and breathed deep while thinking: I could kill you, Father, for saying that. I truly find it possible and palatable in the imagining … But, then, he had never had any trouble imagining anything. It was the living part that was problematic.

‘I don’t want to escape,’ he said at last. ‘Though escape is at least an action, and so has a little of bold spirit about it, hey?’ He glanced around the shop, as if estimating its dimensions. ‘Unlike hiding, hiding for the rest of your days.’

‘You’ll come back. You’ll crawl back in patches with nothing.’ His father’s face was suffused with blood, livid like a hanged man’s. ‘That’s what I dread to see, Will. Your humiliation. If I say I forbid it, it’s because of that—’

‘Forbid? How? For God’s sake, I’m a man grown, husband and father myself. You’re in no place to forbid.’

‘Aye, so.’ All at once his father was calmer: soft, almost playful. Almost. ‘You are husband and father, as you say, and there lies your responsibility. And if your wife should say nay, it’s a different matter. Yes?’

Yes: Will didn’t have to say it.

*   *   *

‘I don’t understand,’ said Anne. ‘These players want you to go with them? They asked you?’

‘I asked them. They have need … I have need.’

‘How long would you be gone? What do you— Will, what does it mean?’

She listened to him explaining, while she picked up after the twins. Never Susannah, always neat.
The north of the country, then the east coast … Lodging and eating together.
Hamnet’s old teething-ring: needed throwing out, but he was perversely attached to it. An emotional child, quick to trouble.
Then London. Anne, you know I have always loved the play, and it seems I have aptitude enough
 … I ought to be more surprised. Oh, I’m shocked and sick and wondering and angry and terrified, but there’s this at the centre: call it unsurprise. It was never – it was never
likely,
was it, this happiness?
Once in London, if I can establish myself … then when I return
 … She picked up the wooden toys he had carved, the doll, the horse. He had put so much detail into them it was almost excessive: the children had been frightened of them at first.
With luck – with good fortune – I should be able to send home money—

‘And our marriage?’ she said. How flat her own voice sounded, as if she were reminding him to bring firewood. But the fire was in her.

‘Anne, it’s sudden, I know.’ He reached for her hand: she got hold of his and tossed it aside, like something slimy crawling.

‘No, Will. Nothing of that, I thank you. I just want to know – which marriage is this? The one I thought I had, against all the odds, the sweet one top-full of worth and truth? Or the one the gossips rubbed their hands over – the one you were forced into, the bitter one, the one folk said you’d
rue
?’

He stood hollow-eyed and handsome, holding out weakly beseeching hands to her, and he was every man craving indulgence of his folly before every woman fuming with hands on hips, and nothing was unique or valuable any more, and she ran from him. Out of the house.

The Shottery field path. Well, whatever hidden part of her heart impelled her here, it wasn’t that she was seeking the old home. No, she had only one home, ever: it was with him, alas. Across the gold day, across the fields moved one of those summer rain-showers that you can see whole, like a net trawling the land. She was wetted, then dry in moments, except her face.

Will caught up with her. ‘I love you. It isn’t about love.’ He panted, holding the stitch in his side. ‘And when I come back—’

‘What for?’ She wanted to lash and sting, though any weapon she took up would only rip and lacerate her own hands. ‘Come back, what for?’

‘This is where I began and this is where I begin and end, with you. Give me a pin.’

‘What?’

Pale, deft, he took one from her waist. The touch was still familiar and beautiful and therefore a screaming insult to her pain. He waded through long grass into tree-shade, knelt down, and plucked up a little bare patch of soil.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Blood. Call it heart’s blood.’ He had driven the pin deep into his thumb and left it there, obscenely protruding, while he squeezed the rich dribbling redness on to the earth. ‘Wherever I go, I will still be here.’ He began scraping together stones over the spot, heaping them up into a little cairn. Soon his hands were red.

She said weakly: ‘Don’t.’

He shrugged as he worked, his face long and white. ‘It’s blood. Not words, or not just words. I know you don’t trust those. When I come back, I’ll find this.’

‘It’s a show. It doesn’t mean anything.’

He rose. Tugged the pin from his thumb, looked at it, dropped it on the ground. ‘Perhaps not.’

‘I always thought—’ She struggled with her voice, which seemed about to go wildly out of control – to shrill like a gale or growl deep as a bear. ‘I was sure, always I was sure that if you were unhappy, I would be able to tell.’

His glance was briefly puzzled, as if she had posed him a quick sum. ‘Oh! Unhappiness. That would be different. There’s a cure for that.’

Blood beaded and dripped from his hand. Anne reached into the neck of her smock and tore off a length of lace. ‘Give me.’ They looked at each other while she tightly bound his thumb. ‘Money, you say. Is that what you want? Money, fame?’

‘You’ve spoiled your lace … I dare say I would like them. If I can get them, I will. For us. For our – well, our name.’

She shook her head. ‘No. It’s not that.’ She felt herself scowling. A little shudder of warm raindrops fell from the leaves above, and for a moment she imagined it blood. ‘And you could never speak to me of this. This wanting. Because I can’t read, perhaps, because I can’t understand? God knows. It must have been so strong, all the time, and I never felt it. I wonder what else I missed.’

‘Thou hast only to speak the word, Anne.’ Suddenly his voice and look came from somewhere different, from a place of high, resounding challenge, like the wedding-altar. ‘Dost know? Only speak it.’

‘And thou’lt stay?’

‘And I’ll stay.’

They walked back in step, in two different kinds of silence.

*   *   *

The Queen’s Men performed
The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth
at Stratford Guildhall that day. It was only a moderate success. Even with a cut text, the shortage of an actor left them straining. Once Robert Wilson rushed off and rushed on again with such an obvious hasty change of wig that the audience laughed when they should have been thrilled; and it was hard to win them back after that.

‘Aye, aye, let’s say you’re right, then.’ Lawrence Dutton: who had held out to the last against recruiting Will Shakespeare, and been grumblingly outvoted. ‘But, look you, it’s an expedient only, so the tour don’t disgrace us. Once in London, he goes his own way.’

*   *   *

‘You can forbid it, you know.’

Her father-in-law had sought her out in the kitchen. The quietest place in the house just now: since finding out last night that Will was going away Edmund had been unmanageable, which in turn had affected the children. Anne stirred the broth. ‘How?’ she said.

‘He won’t stand against both of us. Alone I can’t move him.’ He took her elbow and turned her to him. ‘But you, Anne, you have the power.’

She studied his eyes, so like Will’s eyes, except for those lines around them, rays of irritable weariness. ‘To change him?’

‘Damn it, to bring him back to his senses. He’s always been a dreamer. But this is the worst.’

A dreamer – yes, Anne thought, and he had the true hardness of the dreamer. And on this matter of joining the players he was diamond-hard, glittering, resolved. Yet her father-in-law was right. She was the one who could tie up all her anger and grief and bewilderment and place it neatly before him as: no. As my husband, as father to our children, you do wrong. No. She did indeed have the power – such power. It was like being a giant, hesitating where to set down your great killing foot. How horrible, to be a giant.

‘Did he invite you to meet them? These players?’ her father-in-law went on, as she turned away.

‘Yes. The Queen’s Men. I said no – though I don’t doubt, as the Queen’s own company, they are of a decent seemly sort.’

‘Now thou art the dreamer, daughter,’ he said gently. ‘Why dost think they need another man, hm?’

‘Will told me. One died while they travelled.’

‘Died how, I wonder. Shriven, peacefully settling to last sleep? Dost think?’

‘I don’t know.’ She put her hands to her temples. ‘It’s not that I fear.’

‘Ah.’

‘I don’t want to change him. I don’t want to bend him and turn him against his will. There’s no loving in that.’

He snorted. ‘Oh, yes, there is.’

‘But there is more,’ she said carefully, ‘in a wife’s loyalty to a man, no matter what befalls.’ Daring: his flush showed he took the point. Daring, for could she rely on John Shakespeare’s goodwill any more? After all, she had failed to tie Will down as he had hoped.

‘My dear,’ her father-in-law sighed, sitting heavily on a stool, ‘don’t you see that if he pursues this folly, it will change him? Change him beyond all your power?’

She thought of that. And, yes, there was terror in it. Again she pictured him a player, walking beside the painted cart, stepping on a distant stage, speaking and acting as though he were someone else and not her Will at all. It was dreadfully easy to picture, she found.

And yet was this a diversion from the journey that had begun with green passion in the wood, or the journey continued?
You made me,
he had said once.
Your love, it made me.
Last night or, rather, on the brink of dawn, they had talked, kissed, fought, wept. And he said again,
You made me. This me.