The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (35 page)

He has been stalking books in St Paul’s Churchyard, though a poor day’s hunt, and is thinking besides of a new narrative poem now that
Venus
is out and the Earl of Southampton has accepted his dedication. He has sent Will also a gracious note and a promise, this is not all, come to Southampton House next quarter, so things in the offing but a feeling of not yet, and now
Venus
is seen through the press I should go home surely, for a space at least, but not yet. What’s keeping me in London when pullulating plague places its heavy lock on the playhouse doors and lays its bar across my future? God knows where I should be.

Out of sorts also from supping last night with Richard and Jacqueline Field. Of course he must think of her by that name and not, which she hasn’t been for ages, Madame Vautrollier. Yet so she is still in your memories and those irresponsible dreams you would pluck out if they were splinters in the flesh. But they occur as they please: the mind is not our own. The soul is borrowed of God, they say, but what then of the mind, when it moves in ways we don’t control, who does that belong to, when it turns loose in dreams or drink, like the fairies turning the milk and plaiting manes? Madame Vautrollier, no, Jacqueline, has a way of leaving a great deal of space around him at table, after supper when they have the lute, or he reads aloud, making a physical detour as if he is a great fat man, a man obtruding into her life-space. He turns down another alley off St Martin-le-grand, frowns at the dense crowd. What Jacqueline seems to be saying:
noli me tangere,
touch me not, for Caesar’s I am. But not of herself: of him. Is that me? Not to be touched?

It dawns on him that the crowd is not a fortuitous one but a gathering. Prentices again. Kicking a bladder, shoving and shouting. The young in a mass. Instinctively he hates it, though he plays on it, of course, when he acts and when he writes, get them all in a net, thinking and feeling as one. Terribly, wolfishly handsome, the young: their profuse hair, strong teeth, beautiful shallow eyes. Some men with them, though, old enough to know better. They have some broadsheets, he sees, and they are pressing them on people – one on him. Crudely copied, smeared, stale stuff about the foreigners among us: he barely glances, throws it down. But finds he is being assessed for that.

It begins like most of these things, in messy confusion. The prentices jostle and trip an old man – was it intended, an accident? Hard to tell, but they give him a good look over as he struggles up unaided among them, put their faces close to his (face grows to face). ‘You ought to leave an honest Englishman be,’ he cries, lusty-voiced and accusing. ‘I’m one of the last hereabouts, it’s naught but those fuckers in every house. I’ve watched them come and crowd us out one by one.’ They like that. Victim to victor. Will was all ready to go to the old man’s aid. He turns. ‘And there’s one for you.’

A woman, stepping out of a porched doorway, looking up at the overcast sky, putting hands to her hood, shaking out her skirts, doing all the little things we’re allowed, that drive the prentices to fury. She does look somehow foreign, meaning she draws a second glance.

Will moves with them. But not
with
them, never with any group; he feels uneasy if his stride happens to fall into step with another’s, like with Southampton one day after hawking, when they went on a walk about the estate … They make a ring around her, leaving a space, roughly the space of another body.
Noli me tangere.
And she does what Will can see and sense is the very worst thing at this moment: she hardly notices them.

‘Hoy!’ One young brute edges into the space, seeming half afraid of himself. ‘Madam French, are you?’

Occupied with fitting her gloves neatly to her fingers, she frowns up, shakes her head, wants to go past them. Youngish, rather than young, dark, slight. Will struggles through them, with a flash of memory: his hands burning. Afraid for her because again she is doing the worst thing, just being dismissive of them, of their surge and bristle. They start to chant – unison voices, the surrender of the human: ‘Madam French, Madam French…’

‘What? Yes, I came from France, what then?’

No accent at all that he can hear, unless a certain crispness of utterance, like Jacqueline. Now she is really looking at them and, dear God, they hate that too, for instead of glancing over a nuisance like a puddle in the street her turning eyes take them in, contemptuously. ‘Yes,
messieurs
?’

Will is already pushing through, hand on sword-hilt. Brave of her, or mad. Or furious: he reads it in her look,
I thought men not rats
 … They’re not going to let her go. When she makes a brisk, exasperated stalk forward they don’t touch her – they just rearrange their insensate selves, a shuffling, staring dance, blocking her way.

As he does it – as he thrusts through them, drawing his sword – he is aware that this has a flavour of the stage about it, except on stage there would be parley or fencing, swift to a resolution; also he realises he is a little afraid and hopes, with a ridiculous strength of apprehension, that the Frenchwoman does not perceive it.

‘Threaten a woman?’ he cries, with a voice he knows how to pitch so that it carries over heads. ‘Oh, brave crew, threatening a lone woman going about her business. Get home to your masters, and thank your stars if you’re not brought before the magistrates, for they’ll know you, lads, they’ll assuredly know you…’

A mild disgust at himself, as he takes his ground, for this calculated rhetorical mixture: oh, not wholly brave, Will. Then, as he sees the prentices back slowly but steadily away, grumbling and sighing, he is struck with another realisation. He is older than them, near thirty, and looks it: looks, no doubt, the picture of drear, dispiriting, authoritative age. More cold water than hero.

Still, he does believe in what he has done, the essence behind it; and that’s rare enough. The prentices straggle away, begin kicking the bladder again. He sheathes, turns and offers the Frenchwoman his left arm, sword-arm still free.

‘May I go with you?’

She looks at his arm: briefly, all over him. She has a heart-shaped face and rather sallow skin and appears as gentle and neat as a cat. Just for a moment you can imagine the mouse thinking so. ‘Where?’

‘Wherever you were going. They’ – he nods at the lumpish figures funnelling themselves into the next alley – ‘will be about for a time yet.’

‘I was going marketing, I thought.’ The black crown of her head is just above his mouth. ‘Not with any great need, I confess. But I had better go, when you have done such a great thing for me – had I not? But what do you say, sir? Whither should I go?’

Sweat shines on her long upper lip. She has an indoor smell, like burning pastilles and beeswax and sun on boards. A lump of mud is shied, half-heartedly, not reaching them.

‘Well. This way, whatever you choose.’

‘I choose this way. And now my thanks, for which you have waited long enough.’ She studies his face. Will has an intense consciousness of what she sees there: fingers tracing the map of him. ‘You’re not French? Hollander? So. Disinterested goodness, then.’ She sets her mouth as if taking medicine. ‘I must try to believe in it.’

‘Most Englishmen would do the same,’ he says.

‘Except those forty Englishmen. Shall I tell you what I wanted to say when you came along? “At last, a man with a cock.” Well, it was in my mind. I would have had to have had a great deal of courage. Yes, hear me manage your terrible English tenses, though French-born.’

‘Like a native. When did you come to England?’

‘Oh, as a child.’ She pronounces the word with distaste, as of some dishonourable past. ‘You’re doing that, are you? Working up an interest in me? Well, I can go along with it, if you like. My name, Isabelle Berger. Protestant French. Lodging at the sign of the Compasses, Hay Passage. Twenty-six years old. Widow. Will that do?’

Almost hostile. But he senses something that he recognises very well: dislike of being beholden.

‘Madame Berger. Your servant.’ Bland unction is one of his best selves, a cloak for all weathers. ‘William Shakespeare, of this city.’

‘Shakespeare.’ She tries it over. ‘
Chaque-espère.
Every-hope. It nearly works. This way, if you please.’

Aldersgate. No gangs of prentices here: some shops and stalls, presumably her destination. The moment to make a leg and go, he supposes, and doesn’t know why he doesn’t. It was only her situation that aroused a feeling in him: nothing else, nothing.

But she stops at the entrance to a courtyard with an ornate gateway, shadowy tall house, porter hovering.

‘Here. I have work to do here. I’m a seamstress, sir – though don’t think you can ask me to mend your shirts. The lady of this house pays me well and kisses me when I go. What say you to that?’

He can’t remember anyone being so awkward on so short an acquaintance. He bows. ‘I’m happy for you.’

‘I don’t see why, it can’t contribute to your happiness. You wonder why I lied. About where I was going.’ He is about to say he is not wholly fascinated by everything about her, but she forestalls him by touching his arm and smiling sweetly, as if they are having a charming chat. ‘Well, after all, what is life without lying and pretending? You should know that. I remember you now. A player, I’ve seen you act. Not as good as Alleyn.’

‘Yes, I thought of using those words as my epitaph.’ He bows again. But she detains him with her grip on his arm: hurts, a little.

‘I’ll show you what I mean by pretending,’ she says. ‘Stay here, don’t come near.’

A little past the gateway, in a swept stable-entrance, she wraps her hood and cloak about her and drops herself down. Lies there, motionless, face turned away. He finds his heart striking hard even though he has been warned. He waits. One man, stout and sober, glances and carries on by. And Will understands that: don’t get involved, preserve thoughts and self. A lot of him, more than he cares to think, walks on with that man. The next is a plain young woman, servant perhaps or goodwife, hard to tell. She sees, draws closer. ‘Mistress? Mistress, are you sick?’ Not very loud, though, nor the touch on the Frenchwoman’s shoulder very heavy. She glances round: Will keeps himself out of sight. The Frenchwoman’s left hand (Isabelle, her name is Isabelle Berger, but this is nothing to him, like Jacqueline Vautrollier, an exotic name that stimulates his love of words, that’s all) is outstretched, and two rings wink against the olive skin.

The young woman goes for them. So hurriedly that it’s as if she wants to catch herself unawares as much as her victim. Grab, tug, do it quick, and then it won’t have happened: Will is there with her too, alas. When the Frenchwoman leaps up, pouncing at her, she screams and runs. She pounds past Will, flashing her plain red face up at him, and he sees she is going to cry.

The Frenchwoman is brushing down her skirts and laughing quietly to herself. At least, he presumes it is to herself.

‘I think,’ he says, approaching her all glowing like that, white of smile, harsh, perhaps mad, ‘you hardly need protection.’

‘No,’ she says, with satisfaction, and curtsies him goodbye. ‘But I think you do.’

*   *   *

‘Isabelle Berger, to be sure, I know her,’ says Jacqueline Field, untenderly wiping her son’s bubbling nose. ‘Her husband was a silk-weaver, from Lyon. Left her pretty well, but she does fancywork for ladies besides. She is a good creature, an excellent creature.’ But Jacqueline Field says that about almost everybody. Possibly even about him.

*   *   *

Just the once, then: so Will promises or threatens himself, as he picks a muddy way along St Martin-le-grand in search of Hay Passage and the sign of the Compasses. Rain is falling, the only sort of rain this plague season offers: fat, humid, seemingly dirty before it hits the ground.

Here it is, the doorway with the shell-hood porch. He is pointed to Madame Berger’s staircase by a prentice – a seemly, gentle-mannered youth, impossible to imagine him rampaging through the streets and accosting foreigners. Though perhaps they are all like that, taken singly.

At her door he holds his fist-bunched hand suspended as notes of music spike the air. The virginal: as if a dandelion-clock of sound has been blown.

He listens, not recognising the piece, yet feeling he has heard its acid melancholy before. On this threshold, something unreal. The narrow stair-turning with its warped casement looking out on rain-wet leads, that’s real enough, and so is he standing here with uplifted hand and outrageous heart, but not their existence together. It is as if someone is dreaming him here, and he might vanish like wind-caught leaves when the dreamer stirs.

Suddenly the music is silent and the door swings open.

‘Master Shakespeare,’ Isabelle says, without surprise.

‘Madame Berger. I came to assure myself all was well with you, after the trouble the other day…’ This is what he told himself to say: the commonplace things. But in front of Isabelle he acts this part very badly – so her look seems to say.

‘Well, come and look.’ She walks ahead of him, into a room curiously close and overheated, though he sees no fire. A table with a green brocade cloth: on it sewing, a silver goblet. The virginal is of the spinet kind, inlaid with tortoiseshell: the lid bears the motto
Nil magnum nisi bonum.
Nothing is great unless good. A bird hops back and forth in a hanging cage, back and forth, with pendulum regularity. ‘What do you think? Does all seem well, or ill?’

Through another door he glimpses hanging clothes, bed-curtains. That bird, he thinks, would send him mad. He shouldn’t have come, but he knew that. ‘Your pardon. I intrude.’ Already bowing out. ‘I only thought – those prentice gangs are still about—’

‘I know, they were making a great noise in Round Court last night. I stayed indoors, I couldn’t rely on a gallant player to come to my rescue.’ She laughs, picks up the goblet and drinks from it. Her voice has a peculiar monotone quality, as if one should play on only two keys of the virginal. ‘Let them enjoy it while they can. They’re all going to die, like you and me; and will the memory of splitting someone’s head make up for it, when they lie and blink at the last light fading on their eyes? Ah, at least I did for that shitten Frenchie, now hey-ho for hell.’