The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (6 page)

‘Go fuck your mother.’ The clown yawned, sitting up and scratching.

‘For him, that’s wit exceptional,’ said Towne, tapping Will’s knee. Will refused himself the sight of that long-boned and expressive hand. Rations only, remember, short commons: shrink the appetite. ‘I’m right, though, am I not? Oh, to be sure, you can live without beauty – live like a pig in a sty, that is. Life as a long, heavy, drunken sleep with no dreams.’

‘Sounds perfection,’ the clown said, belching long and musically. ‘Who’s this?’

‘This,’ Towne said, clapping Will’s shoulder, ‘is my excellent friend Will, of Stratford. Will … No, don’t prompt me, damn it, I have a memory. Will Shakespeare, the glover’s son.’ He turned on Will a slightly anxious smile of triumph. ‘Yes? Or is it the shoemaker?’

‘No, you have it right,’ Will said, firm and dry: the words in his mouth like the heel of a loaf. He prepared to jump down from the cart. ‘That’s who I am.’

*   *   *

He slipped out that evening, while his father nodded by the fire. When he chose, Will could wipe himself from the room like chalk from a slate.

Not that this was choice. He couldn’t help himself.

*   *   *

‘I can’t believe you remember so much of the piece.
Devil’s Brother,
the mouldiest thing, full of ranting.’ Jack Towne stretched his rangy arms and looked appraisingly at the tankard Will set before him. ‘Rots the guts, your rustic brew. Heady, though, agreeable heady.’

‘Not the piece so much as what you made of it,’ Will said. ‘It held so tight. I remember I could hardly believe it was over. Two hours gone in an instant. I had to stamp and pinch myself.’ Two hours, like a minute full of everything. All along his body and mind there had been a fine humming, as if the play had plucked him like a bowstring.

‘Well, it suited the crowd well enough. Mind, your country John-a-Noakes hardly knows what he claps his great paws for. Not you, though, not you.’ Suddenly he ruffled Will’s hair from brow to nape. It felt curiously as if all his clothes had been taken off. ‘You feed on it, don’t you? Feed, gorge, devour.’

‘It eats me,’ Will said.

‘So. Confide.’ Towne stretched out his leg to the hearth: it seemed to go on for ever. He was very fair, fine-boned, full-lipped; when he gazed into the fire the robber’s bride flickered into life – yet a shift, and you saw the line of stubble under his jaw. It was dazzling and queasy. ‘What are you, Will? What do you do between our visitations? I notice you don’t stand toes in and chuckle like most of them. Belong to some noble’s house hereabouts? Say yes, I pray, you might put me in his favour.’

‘Nothing of that. I live with my father. Lately burgess and alderman of Stratford – also bailiff.’ Curious that he should now be making much of his father’s lost eminence.

‘Pretty. And are you eldest? Ah, there must be a tidy property waiting for you.’

Will stared into his untouched ale. A worm of candlelight wriggled in it. ‘My father is – still a man of some substance. But his fortunes are decayed of late.’

He struggled with something unsaid, but Jack Towne had flung his long legs out with a sharp laugh. ‘Not so bad.
My
father left me naught but whipping-scars. See.’ He faced his narrow back to Will and clawed the shirt off his shoulder. Dull pink strokes sulked across the luminous fair skin. Will seemed to feel heat on his face. ‘Well, I call him my father. Only God and my mother know who he truly was – but he had the run of my hide every night for five years. How I wept at his plague-bed. I couldn’t believe such access of joy possible.’

Towne shrugged his shirt back, and Will thought of his own father: thought of him dying. Or, rather, sprang away scalded from the thought.

‘They say it’s wrong to be a player,’ he burst out, lunging at his drink.

‘Aye, they do that, and what, I wish to know, can they mean? We only game and booze, and have no settled place or station, and die in want when we’re cast off.’ Drunk – yet not as Will was used to seeing men drunk – Towne seized Will’s hand, an urgent reinforcement to the scrambling words. ‘You know this ranting godly fellow fastened on me at Banbury – Sudbury – some pisshole – and consigned me to his hell because I was an invitation to sodomy. I could only answer that it was not an invitation I would ever extend to him.’ He laughed loudly, but the sound was anger diverted. ‘Well,
you
surely don’t think it wrong, or you wouldn’t be keeping company with us.’

‘I don’t know,’ Will said. ‘I don’t know what I think.’ He meant it as a general statement. He spent most of his time thinking, but thought was a current on which he drifted: he didn’t steer.

‘You’re scared of your honest alderman father, no doubt,’ Towne said, yawning. ‘God’s blood, Will, only look at those great baboons.’ Across the tap-room two of the players, Knell the king-player and a red-haired gangler, who was drinking sack by the pint, had drawn their swords and were lumbering at each other. ‘It’s play, good sir, only play,’ he called out to the innkeeper, who came sweating and muttering. ‘They’re running over the last scene of
Alphonsus of Lincoln.
Every stroke planned, sir, like the steps of a galliard. Or should be,’ he added to Will. ‘Knell is so very apt to forget himself.’

‘A most desirable thing,’ Will said, feeling the drink quicken and sorrow him all at once.

‘But there you have it,’ Towne said excitedly, ‘exactly what your virtuous, godly citizens do not see. Oh, it’s wrong to be a player, they declare. But what do they do when they wake up in the morning? Straight be themselves? No: they remind themselves who they are. They have to. Ah, yes, let me see, I am Goodman Bollockchops, esteemed burgher of Hole-in-the-Road, and yonder lies my wife, whom I choose not to see is faithless, and though I have just dreamed of running naked in the fields with a set of wild lads and lasses, I would see all whores and gypsies and players whipped at the cart-tail and I am grave, deep … They have to, because otherwise they’re walking on ice and it’s cracking. Ever been to London? Well, to be sure, no.’ The pitying look was meant, no doubt, to be kind. ‘Some winters the Thames freezes clean over. River turns to road. Everyone goes on it – they set up a fair on it and roast chestnuts and tell fortunes, all pretending they’re not walking on water—’

‘Dear God, don’t.’

‘Ah, there, you’ve broken my image. It was about to be mighty profound, I think. I’m drunk, though.’ He emptied his tankard, then leaned on Will’s shoulder. His breath was unnervingly sweet, like a child’s. ‘Got a yearning for London, hey? Well, I can understand it. I’ll tell you what it is, Will, it’s the worst place to starve in. Hereabouts you can lay your bones down by a stream and drink the clear water and, I don’t know, perhaps catch a coney, or the old goodwife who’s known you since you were a tacker will help you. London, no such matter.’ He touched Will’s cheek with a gentle, even timid finger. ‘What are you looking for, then? It helps if you know where it’s to be found first of all.’

‘I – I don’t know if it’s been made yet.’

Behind him a dropped sword skittered on the flagstones. Knell heaped curses on his weak wrist. Towne sat up and raised his tankard to him, catching Knell’s eye with a smile that seemed prepared: unpacked from a box.

‘Now watch him bluster,’ he said, between his teeth.

Knell stalked over. ‘Well, now, Master Will, what tales has this stripling been telling you? All lies, whatever they are.’

‘We’re players,’ Towne said, wagging his empty tankard. ‘Lies are our business.’

‘Another pint? That means he’ll be singing “Willow, willow” next. Then declaring his love for all the world. Then challenging all the world to a fight. Then he weeps and sleeps together. All pat without a prompt, for once.’

‘Chatter on, old man, while you’ve still got the teeth for it,’ Towne said amiably. ‘Will’s in love, you know. But the object of his love doesn’t exist. What is he to do?’

Will said:

‘“You do me wrong to take my guileless words

And free them to the world, like caged birds

That ne’er have op’d their wings beneath the sun

Nor learnt the eagle and the hawk to shun.”’

‘God. I remember that,’ Knell said. ‘What is it,
Fountain of Ardena
?’

‘Devil’s Brother.’
Towne watched Will. ‘How does it go on?’

‘“For when my heart misgives me, straight my tongue

Must give it ease, as we the – something stone

That galls the tender sole, unthinking shake

From forth our shoe, though – something…”

‘No, it’s gone.’

‘Villainous stuff.’ Knell groaned. ‘A beautiful maiden hopping about with a stone in her shoe.’

‘Errant stone,’ Towne said. ‘Yes, a feeble figure. Still…’ He gazed at Will, half drowsy, half penetrating. ‘Where do you keep it, Will?’

‘Why, man, here,’ Knell said, rapping on Will’s head. ‘You can tell he’s no country dull-wit. He admires us for one thing. I only wish you had such a memory.’

‘I keep it here,’ Will said, after a moment, and touched the space beside him, gently, as if another Will sat there, preferring not to be disturbed.

*   *   *

He was hurrying home, a piece of the night.

Above the roofs the stars swooped with him, and no dogs barked because his feet only skimmed the ground here and there. In his mind a wonderful handiwork was going on. Yes, he had promised his father he would have no more to do with the players, but his father need not know, and even if he did, perhaps he could be brought to understand what was so remarkable about them, the way they conjured something new out of nothing, through craft and wit: that they were makers.

Perhaps that was the true lesson of the day: everything was possible. He had felt it so in the White Hart tonight, as the talk grew wilder, exciting him even more when understanding ceased. The world was a vast and wonderful thing, and it was also an apple just within reach, heavy for the tug and pluck.

He slipped in through the door of the back kitchen, where the serving-girl slept on a pallet and the old hound on the floor. When the dog stirred he rubbed its jowls and hushed it back down: the beast never realised how much he loathed it.

He got to the foot of the stairs, and there was his father. Will was never sure if he had come out of the parlour, or had simply been standing there all the time, taper in hand.

What he could be sure of, alas, was his own face: how, taken by surprise, he had been unable to hide his expression. His father must have seen it – how weary Will was of him, and how he wished he was not his father.

It was there, in his distant, hurt eyes.

‘You needn’t lie,’ his father said. ‘I know where you were. I sent a lad to look.’

‘Father … I know you don’t approve it, but still it can’t be so very bad—’

‘It’s how you make me feel.’ Spoken strong and plain, as if to emphasise that Will would not evade this with a great flourish of words. ‘It is not the matter itself. When you go against me, it is how you make me feel.’

A quiver on the last word; and Will wanted to cry out,
Do you suppose I don’t understand that?

Understanding was easy. He had understood it when Master Ridley’s great grown half-witted boy had laughed at the little child that got mangled under the wheels of the soil-cart: it had been a blaze in that dun, damp mind. Will didn’t like or dislike this capacity for picking up feelings; it was like being able to read, you simply couldn’t undo it.

And I know how you feel, Father: how life is a barbed sharpness in you like the hook in a fish’s mouth. They talk of you behind the hand, pityingly; and Mother is so loyal she will never permit herself the merest whisper of reproach, and so your ears strain and strain in terror of hearing it. And if your own son should turn against you, what deeps of failure are left?

‘I’m sorry, Father.’

A shrug. ‘I dare say you are, for this moment.’ That was acute. He glanced about as if for somewhere to sit down, or to lie: lay himself down for ever. ‘And then you go your own way. It’s hard, Will. Not merely that you won’t be my prentice: that’s only the surface. The poison’s beneath.’

He turned and groped for the banister, and Will saw that he still bore his stick; and his knuckles as he gripped it were white as the bone beneath.

*   *   *

His mother, soft-spoken and gentle and steely as a cat’s paw, came to his room, somehow knowing he was still awake. She sat on his bed.

‘I can’t bear discord. I know it’s wrong of me, because it will always come in life. And I know what the quarrel was about, and I shan’t speak on that, Will. Only I hate to see you so … so bitter.’ She spoke judiciously. His mother handled words like needles and knives.

He sat up. ‘What makes you suppose that?’

‘I’m wife and mother, I have a hundred eyes and ears. Your father is not always an easy man, I know that well.’ She took his hand. Her fingers explored as if to discover a palmed coin. ‘But try to understand him. He made his fortune – aye, it didn’t come from what I brought him when we wed, though there were folk aplenty saying I stooped to marry him and my portion would soon be lost.’ Mary Arden she had been, kin and heiress to the highest folk of the district. ‘He made himself, and I was proud. I was proud when he stood highest in the town. I was proud still when his troubles came on him. And when my property was lost, then too. It is the germ and kernel of a man that matters, and there my love is fixed, and my pride, and I would have yours too.’

‘Yes,’ Will said, restive, ‘I see it, but we are what we do, surely.’

His mother’s silences were not like his father’s. They made room for you on the soft couch of second thoughts.

‘Let’s not talk of this,’ he said. ‘It’s as you say, we want no more discord.’

‘You look weary. I’m keeping you from rest … But do you know what your father said when he took me to wife? “I feel myself a king.” I hope I had more sense than to let my head be turned by it. But he is proud as any king, Will. And a king must have a prince.’

She had got hold of his hand in both of hers now. Her grip was tight.

‘What would you have me do?’