The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (57 page)

Master Cotton keeps an excellent cellar, and Ben does as full a justice to it as to the library with its busts of Caesars crowning each case. He does not remember going to bed but, then, he scarcely ever does – the retiring hour is to him as occult and mysterious as being born. You know it must have happened, because here you are. Here he is, waking in a strange bed with a strident need to pee, and no certainty of where he can do it.

Country house. Huntingdonshire. Library. His mind puts it clumsily together while he hops in his nightshirt, desperate. A pot placed? Where? He ought to mark these things before falling asleep. A rectangle of glimmer signals a window. He fumbles it open, hoists himself on tiptoes and pounds relief into the country night.

Relief, yet not relief: something besides his bladder woke him and tugs uncomfortably at him still. Something he did. He sinks down on the bed and interrogates the thinning darkness.
Go away from me.
That was it. Little Benjamin at his side, while he worked at his desk. Little hand plucking at his sleeve while he struggled with the recalcitrant demons of composition. Father, Father. And he shook him off and growled,
Go away from me,
and off the poor little fellow slunk. Didn’t mean it, the irritation, the growl: it is just that writing, art, is such a serious business, even when comedy it is very serious, and he takes it with the proper degree of solemnity, and his concentration is so easily broke … Shame on him, though. He will make it up to the lad. And now the last illusions of sleep lift from him and he realises or remembers: that was a dream.

Yes, sweating here and no doubt snoring, he had a dream of shrugging his son off in just that way. So vivid – as, of course, so many dreams are. And with no element of reality, surely. Smacking dry lips, he consults memory, quickly cons its index. No, he loves the boy this side of idolatry, and while he always gives proper discipline, he has never lost temper with his Benjamin in that pettish way. Surely … Let it then be a remembrance, never to do so.

He sleeps again.

Sleeps again, and wakes to another day worth the savouring, and with the intention of looking up the inconsistencies in Alfred’s translation of Orosius’s
Historia Universalis.
Another walk with Master Camden in the morning cool: talk of their host’s collections, of setting up a library for the nation, an academy. Oh, yes, an academy, there Ben is fiercely eager: an academy to tame the unruly English tongue, give its wayward mongrel habits a standard and a purpose.

And then the return to the house, and the manservant looking out, waiting: a letter.

From Agnes: he recognises the script at once. Competent penwoman, if haphazard in her spelling, as too many are, even the learned: Will Shakespeare is one, making words fit his hand according to his mood. An academy, that’s what’s needed. Fix and purify. Why are his hands shaking? Perhaps because of last night, too much good wine, and also because he and Agnes do not often write each other letters; theirs is not that kind of marriage. It would have to be exceptional, for this. An exceptional event.

There is food set out on the table in the great hall. Master Cotton’s generous and sensible habit – take a bite when you fancy it, in between study. Master Camden, after a glance at Ben’s face, goes in and carves a slice or two of meat on a platter. Sets it down, and returns, seagull slow of step, face enquiring and kind as when Ben sat before him at Westminster School and longed to know more, more.

But this – this must be the end of knowledge. Ben grips the crackling letter and summons philosophy, ranges swiftly across his world of learning, and he finds nothing. Nothing of use. Great God.

Him, most of all.

‘My friend.’ Master Camden touches his arm. ‘My friend, what is it?’

What is it? A terrible injustice, a flagrant injustice meted out to him – how could it be? – just when he has begun to garner the rewards of talent and industry, and is in a way to become the most learned man in England … Ben gasps. Masters himself. ‘My son.’ The words scald the tongue, now that he has no son. ‘He took the plague…’ Master Camden grips his arm: was he about to fall? Perhaps.

What Agnes has written: she wrote, first,
his sufferings were not great
and then crossed out
great
and replaced it with
long. His sufferings were not long I thank God.
Oh, revealing emendation. This is a text beyond exegesis. Ben hears himself moan. Master Camden urges him to a chair.

‘Sit. sit. My good friend, I have no words. Is it—’

‘He has gone. He died on Tuesday night. It was swift, there was no time to summon me.’ Ben finds himself lifting up his hands. ‘What more?’

‘God have mercy on his soul. Drink this. You need it, the shock. You can have had no suspicion—’

‘No.’ He sees Agnes’s rueful, hopeless expression, damp with summer: if we might just leave the city … ‘No. A shock, yet not wholly … I had a vision last night. I saw him. My Benjamin. Not little as he is, but grown, as he will appear at Judgment-seat, and on his forehead there was a scarlet cross.’ Did he dream this? Surely he did, for it appears so vividly to him now, and it makes more sense than the other dream; this one comes surely from deeper springs of prophetic imagination, and it is more bearable, somehow, to think of … ‘What could it signify? God marked out my boy to punish me? To remind me of him? What?’

‘Such things are beyond us. The vision, if vision it was. Sometimes the mind sports without our will, devises its own devices. Providence will not be questioned, Ben. We shall have our answer in the end, in fullness. Be comforted, my friend. I know it is grievous sore…’

Master Camden is kind, and Master Cotton too, when he joins them. Ben will not wish to stay, Ben will want to go home at once, naturally … But Ben is not sure: he can hardly face the prospect of going into that house and no Benjamin there. No, no, it is beyond bearing. And retreating to his room he is, for a long time, not comforted, not philosophical. Not even, in the worst of his grief, Christian. (And to go into that house will mean looking into Agnes’s face. No, no.) The supernal vision haunts him, growing stronger, until it almost overlays the reality: little Benjamin dying of plague, in pain and fear. The vision is masterly and reproving as the glance of the Redeemer himself. Look to your crime, Ben Jonson.

At last, panting, half blind, he sits down with pen and ink and prepares to write back to Agnes. There’s no sense in rushing home to that aching vacant house. Just some words, some words from the heart to soothe a little their mutual wound of grief. But nothing will come. Nothing that does not seem to invite terrible pelting answers from a sky of retribution. At last his pen moves. Rhyme hums a quiet note, reason puts on the firm armour of metre. His breath ceases to be ragged and whistling. Shape from storm.

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.

He sits back. It will be a long process, for composition does not come smoothly to him. It will be a long process, to find his way back to life; but the bricklayer’s boy did not come this far for nothing, surely, and is not to be defeated even by such a loss as this.
Rest in quiet peace.
No, the verse ripples too much.
Rest in soft peace,
better. Soft is a word blotted by a tear, as this one is. From somewhere in his heart Ben puts forth thankfulness, for this: oh, experience, the great true father of art.

*   *   *

‘I told you it were best not done,’ Edmund said, hurrying at her side through St Mary Aldermanbury. ‘Now will you be satisfied?’

Anne stopped, for a moment. Fixed him with a look, for a moment. ‘Satisfied? Brother, how satisfied, please tell?’

‘You’ve seen her. Well, have you? Spoke with her?’

‘Aye, so. I have spoke with her, and then—’

‘And then it profits nothing, surely.’

‘You know very little, Edmund. Even about your own brother.’ A little incidental cruelty didn’t seem to matter, in this world in which it is king and law.

‘I know he never meant to wrong you.’

She hurried on. No feeling of hurry, though; she seemed to forge, glide through the toiling streets. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because he could not, not if he were in his right mind.’

‘This is wishing, not thinking.’ And too close to her own habit of mind: she put its friendly hand away from her.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To Will’s lodging. Silver Street, that is northward of Cheapside, yes?’ Strange, for now the fear of London had dropped away from her. New eyes saw the infinite glitter of diamond panes, forest of hanging signs, sky-lattice of washing, lumbering carts, barrels and ladders and tottering towers of baskets. She felt she owned it as these people did, pattened, loud-swearing, shoving for the wall, faces fixed on far deeds.

Edmund said: ‘I’ll come with you.’

It seemed an indifferent matter, unless he were to be disabused as she was: it surely wouldn’t break him as it would her.

‘I don’t know what the woman said,’ Edmund went on, ‘but I wish you might consider it – nothing. If she spoke saucy, impudent, remember she is really naught to you and I verily believe to Will also—’

‘She?’ Anne dragged her mind back. ‘Oh, God, yes. She’s naught. It isn’t that, now.’

What it must be to have this energy all the time, this strength. She felt as if she had been a long time convalescent, supping at a light diet of life, peeping over the covers at the shut-out day. Ahead of her two unmuzzled dogs savaged each other in circles. A blackamoor balanced a hod of tiles on a huge shoulder.

‘What do you mean? It isn’t that, what, then? Anne, stop.’

‘Why? If I stop, then what do I do, brother? Consider? I am done considering.’

‘I only ask – what can come of it? A great quarrel, then – what? Live apart?’

She said nothing. We have been doing that; but there are different ways of being apart. The air was cooling under thundery cloud, but the heat of the Frenchwoman’s rooms seemed to cling to her, like cobweb twirled round a broom. ‘Which way now?’

He showed her. The place, when she came to it, was surprisingly plain and respectable, away from the theatre districts: citizens’ houses filing one orderly after another, no low taverns or stews. Another one of Will’s many sides, perhaps.
I had him in my bed.
Did you, or did you only have a shadow of him? She might ask me the same. Oh, if he can fall for that self-creating spider with her tossed hair and needlework, then he is merely like any other man, and that can be lived with.

But I cannot live with what she said, if that is what I must face. Not because it is much more gross and bawdy: because there must be behind it such a long, deep lie.

At the house in Silver Street a pretty obliging little woman greeted Edmund, looked with shy interest at Anne. She murmured a good-day back. Let us be all courtesy. A snug parlour, a narrow staircase. Yes, Master Shakespeare is home, but has company, I think—

Up the stairs ahead of Edmund, well-oiled door, not squeaking as it swung into Will’s rooms, revealing him sitting on a stool by a narrow bed: occupied, a fair male head on the pillow. Will looked up from thought, deep thought, as Anne stepped in, and saw, turned, ran.

*   *   *

How Will found him: it was that fairness.

The tavern was out of his usual way, but since breaking free of Isabelle he had sought to change all his ways, seeing the habit of her as a blight touching everything. Walk different ways, eat different meats. The tavern was a tight, glum little place in Southwark, penetrated by the smell of the bear-baiting yards. But it was not belonging to his time with her, and so he went in, and there he saw a fair head, and a certain set of the shoulders that called, Jack Towne again, and while he was putting these things together and waiting for his drink, the fair head plunged suddenly out of sight.

There was a commotion. Will elbowed his way into the tap-room where the fairness had gone down. The innkeeper was cuffing and slapping where Jack Towne lay long and knee-bony on the floor, apologising. He had slid to the ground from his stool, it appeared, whilst saying he could not pay for his dinner; and the innkeeper looked ready to slap the money from him, or slap out satisfaction at least. ‘Nay, soft,’ someone said, ‘the man’s sick, he’s yellow as a buttercup.’

‘And if he’s sick as well as a thief, why should I trouble?’ shouted the innkeeper. And that was when Will waded in, opened his purse, and said he would look to the man.

He put his arms round Jack Towne’s shoulders and lifted him. Jack blinked up at him in annoyance, then astonishment. He was all bones, all broken beauty, bits and flashes of what he might have been: human, in other words.

The man who had spoken up for Jack spoke again. ‘He ate a platter of meat. Then he turned faint. There’s plague, sir, a deal of plague. Consider if it’s plague.’

And if it is? thought Will. He got Jack up.

They tried, but Jack was lurching too much, too weak. Will persuaded a carter to carry them to Silver Street. No, it’s not plague, for all the sweat, the muttering. The Mountjoys were not there: a prayer-meeting, perhaps. He half carried Jack upstairs. His arms and hands, swinging, were long and slender as he remembered.

He got Jack Towne into the bed, yanking off his shoes and doublet, merely purposeful. Jack stank. His throat as he toppled flat looked like stripped birch. There must always be a Jack Towne, Will thought. It’s in the weave of life. It is not always given for this to happen, that’s all: for Jack to reappear. The visitation, the long, backward glance. He couldn’t express it to himself, but he thought Marlowe would understand.

He even dared to think that Anne would too. Anne who knew what life was like. Who knew that life was not ponds, but rivers. That today was a weight swinging from the chain of all other days.

Jack slept, woke to drink madly, slept and went into a fever that made Will bring the physician. Then it was the long bedside again. Plague? No, they thought not. But if so, so. It was important to stay here. He thought Anne would say so, notwithstanding everything; and what Anne thought was important.