Ill Met by Moonlight (2 page)

Though wooden shutters were fitted over both windows, and the door firmly closed,
this
was no cause for alarm. These days this was the normal condition of John Shakespeare’s glover shop. No doubt, Will’s father would be hiding in his room, muttering about those who wished to catch him and make him pay his debts, though—that anyone knew—despite his ruined business, his slackening enthusiasm for work, he had no outstanding debts and no one pursued him.

Will took a sharp turn left, to the almost vertical stairway at the corner of the room, and hurried up it, his feet accommodating themselves to the narrow steps by long habit.

The entrance to the top floor was a mere square hole in the planks at the top of the staircase and, through this hole, Will pushed his upper body into the top floor. The word “Nan” started but died on his lips.

Unlike the upper floor of the house next door, which had been partitioned into rooms to hold a large family, this one lacked any dividing walls to obstruct the view. Will could see the entire space at a glance, bathed in hazy light coming in through cracks in the wooden shutters that covered the three windows. Once, those windows had been covered by shutters made of lead and tiny panels of glass, but such luxuries had long been absent from the Shakespeare household.

The cheap woolen covers had been pulled neat and tight over the mattress of the good oak bed against the wall. On the bed, the fat black-and-white tomcat that Nan had brought with her from Hewlands, woke and stretched his paws in front of him, digging his claws into the bed covers. He looked at Will with an inquisitive eye and gave a little questioning
murr
. Beside him lay something, and, for a moment, Will thought he saw Nan, reclining there. He started to smile, when he noticed it was not Nan, not even anything close to Nan’s size, but a small twig, broken from a bush, with green leaves still on it. What it was doing on his bed, he couldn’t understand.

Will took a deep breath. The dread he’d felt in the garden returned, like a horse to an accustomed stable.

Slower, he climbed the rest of the way into the upper floor. On a peg on the wall hung Nan’s good shirt and bodice and her embroidered kirtle, the clothing she wore to church on Sunday. His own good, black breeches and doublet hung on the other peg. Everything looked reassuring and accustomed, and yet the air felt heavy, impregnated with an odd floral scent.

Will nodded to the cat as to a respected acquaintance, while he went around to look in Susannah’s cradle, beside the bed.

No sound came from the ancient rocking cradle, which had belonged to Will and each of his siblings in turn. Not the soft mewling of Susannah’s cry, not even the sound of her breathing.

For a moment, in the darkness, he thought that Susannah was indeed in the cradle, though so immobile that his heart skipped a beat while a noose of panic tightened around it.

But as he reached into the small bed, he touched not the soft velvet of his daughter’s skin, but something rough and harsh. Throwing the blankets back, he pulled the object out: a piece of a tree branch of sizable girth on which some wit had carved a rounded top and painted eyes and a nose and a mouth, all of it so crude it might well have been executed by one of Will’s five-year-old pupils. It did not look like Susannah at all and, even in the dim light, Will could not imagine how he’d ever come to mistake it for her.

Puzzled, he turned the wood over in his hands, blinking in wonder. Who had done this? And what was this thing? It wasn’t even a doll. What was it doing in Susannah’s cradle? If a joke, it was a poor one. Had Nan played it? Why would she do such a thing?

Sometimes, in their scant six months together, Nan had hid herself in a far corner of the house when he got home, and made him hunt for her like a madman, until he brought her to ground in her hideout, desire and laughter interlacing in their embrace. But she’d never done it since Susannah had been born. And she’d never taken her joke to the point of leaving the fire unlit and a mannequin in his daughter’s bed.

Worry rounded on Will like a hunting mastiff, nipping at his heels, trying to make him take flight. But his sluggish brain lagged, turning round and round, like a blindfolded beggar within a circle of mocking villagers. Hemmed in by worry, it spun over the puzzle of Nan’s absence, and knew not what answer to fetch.

His hands, working of their own accord, laid the mannequin back in Susannah’s cradle and adjusted the small blanket over it, tenderly, as though it were Susannah herself. Why was Nan gone? And for how long? Could she have left Will for good?

She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Oh, true, he’d not offered her a prosperous abode, nor did his earnings—halved as they must be with his parents’ household—support Nan as he would like to support her. But then, Nan had known of his penury when she married him, had even known of it almost a year ago, when, sweet and laughing, she’d lain in the riverside fields with him, awaiting no sanction of parents, or law, or church.

Yet Nan was gone and Susannah with her. How to explain it?

Had Will’s mother been right, when she’d talked of Nan’s receiving visitors? Of velvet-suited dandies skulking around the garden paths?

Will couldn’t credit it.

He thought of Nan as she’d been just the night before: Nan by the fire, Nan cooking supper, Nan warm and gentle in his bed. She couldn’t have left. Not Nan. Not unless those gentlemen had taken her with them by force, and who would do that? Who would kidnap a poor man’s wife and his little daughter? The shadowy persecutors of his father’s fancy?

Will grinned despite his misery. These fears of his, these fantasies of doom, were like a plot hatched from his father’s nightmares, his mother’s fancy.

No, no. The world was a reasonable place, not populated by old wives’ fears, old men’s fancies, nor by the dreams of poets or the nightmares of philosophers. In this rational place, there had to be some good reason for Nan’s absence.

Will’s feet sought out the steps by feel as he made his way downstairs. Perforce, Nan’s absence must have a cause as solid as the wood under his feet.

Before he reached the bottom floor, his frantic, searching brain had found one. Nan’s sister-in-law, her brother Bartholomew’s wife, was due to deliver any day. How foolish of him not to have thought of this before. Nan’s kin would have come from Shottery to request her help.

Someone, probably Bartholomew himself, would have come from Hewlands Farm to fetch Nan, and he’d have brought his children, Nan’s older nieces, to get them out from underfoot in the house. This thing in Susanna’s cradle would be one of the children’s toys, probably made by the child’s own hand, which explained its crude imitation of human features.

Will smiled in the dark, musty workshop and sighed in relief. His mystery was solved, to his mind’s content. Now he must go to Shottery and fetch his Nan. At Shottery, his kin by marriage would give him food and ale, and he could stay the night with Nan, or walk Nan home.

True, his legs were tired, and this walk would take away from his well-merited rest. But he’d rather put himself to the trouble of walking to Shottery and there spend the night with Nan than spend the night here, alone, in his cold bed.

Will closed the front-hall door behind himself, and squared his shoulders. After all, though only nineteen, he was a married man and married men had responsibilities. His wife would depend on him to come to her.

When Will stepped outside his kitchen door, the sun had fully set, its panoply of color hidden beyond the edge of the Earth. The sky spread over Stratford like a blanket: a deep, cloudless, blue dome with pinpoints of stars. Will blinked up at it. It looked like the velvet gown the Queen had worn when she’d come for the pageant the Earl of Leicester had put on for her at Kenilworth, when Will was less than eleven years old. Will had gone to see the pageant with his parents.

In his mind, Will saw again the shows for the Queen: the dancers, the plays, and, best of all, the dolphin, surmounted by the merman, navigating slowly down the river. That dolphin and merman, had fallen on young Will’s credulous eyes like supernatural manifestations, and remained in his mind as a promise of a magical world that had never come true. The true world meant debts and hard work and short-lived pleasure purchased by long-lasting toil. He would never see the like of such wonders again.

An owl hooted from the barns at the other end of the Shakespeare backyard and Will jumped, startled. His foreboding returned, called by the ill-omened bird.

Along the garden path, a dark shape approached, an ominous shape, like a man with two heads.

Will swallowed and his breath halted, suspended, before the shape moved closer and a soft giggle revealed the imagined monster for a woman carrying a child.

“Nan, thank God,” he said, before he realized that the woman was too short to be Nan.

The shape giggled again, the childish giggle of Will’s sister, Joan, and, as it approached, the shadow revealed Joan’s still round features, obscured by her unkempt curly hair.

“Goose,” she said. “Your Nan is gone. Neither hide nor hair of her have we seen all day.”

“She’s gone to Shottery,” he said, speaking his wish as reality. “To help her sister at her labor.”

Joan stopped on the path, a little to the side, allowing Will to walk by her. As he went past, his brother Edmund, on Joan’s hip, three years old and weighing down fourteen-year-old Joan, stretched out his hand to Will’s arm. Will caressed Edmund’s chubby face, glancingly, as he walked past.

“Mother says Nan is gone with the gentlemen as call on her while you’re at work,” Joan said.

Will turned back. “Mother is like a witch poring over her cauldron, brewing lies and plots around Nan.”

With it said, he wished it unsaid, and bit his tongue in belated reproach. What manner of son called his mother a liar and a witch? Truly, the Bible warned of ungrateful children, their tongues sharper than serpent’s teeth. But on the subject of Nan, Will’s mother didn’t speak as a dutiful wife and mother, but as a raving hag, a lunatic spouting infamy. She claimed that Nan had entrapped Will into an ill-thought marriage that was as ruinous to him as disgraceful to Nan herself, and more, that Nan cavorted with others while Will was away.

“Mother says she saw Nan go early morning, before the sun came up, amid a large company, with twinkling lights all around,” Joan said, behind him. “No Shottery people, for certain.”

“Mother knows not what she says,” Will yelled over his shoulder, and ran across the garden toward the gate, taking a shortcut through the rosebushes. The bushes prickled his skin and snagged his clothes, but he did not care.

At the gate, a last, fugitive look over his shoulder showed Will his sister still in the middle of the garden. Though the distance didn’t allow it, he fancied he saw her amazed expression, wide-open mouth, eyes round in shock. She’d be wondering why he ran. As though husbands should stand quietly and listen to slander heaped on their wives’ names.

And where had Joan come from, with Edmund, after nightfall? At any other time, Will would have gone back and scolded the little girl, but now his Nan waited him. The thought of her enveloping arms and warm body beckoned him on. The thought of her warm voice, calming his fears, called to him like water to a parched traveler.

Will found his way through the alley to the path that crossed the forest of Arden, the path he knew much too well from his courting days when he had taken it every evening for a year, as much to bask in Nan’s sweet presence as to escape the closed-in, vile atmosphere of home: his father with his fears, his mother with her fancies.

If only Will’s father had stayed the course he’d first set. When Will had been very young, and John Shakespeare’s business had thrived, John himself had been an alderman, an important man in the community.

Will walked the narrow path that countless generations of feet had beaten amid towering elms and sprawling oaks, and thought of his life and his family and the obligations that bound him. At nineteen, he was a married man, with a daughter. He’d married a woman with no dowry to speak of, and he had wed himself to an arduous, ill-paying career. He reproached his father for his father’s mistakes, yet how could he hope to give Susannah a better start in life?

From behind him he heard the distant sounds of Stratford: the occasional cry of a baby, a woman calling for her son. From her voice, the woman would be Mistress Whateley. And, knowing the Whateley brat, Will suspected the boy was as likely as not to be out of the reach of even that shrill a call.

From farther away came the voice of a man, worse for drink, singing a mournful church song of papist times. Will caught the words
Dies Irae
—in fulsome, rounded Latin. That would be the owner of the Bear, the tavern where Catholics gathered to mourn the past.

Stratford was the only town Will had ever known, and he knew it well. Its embrace could be comforting and safe like a mother’s arms, but, like Will’s mother, perhaps it held on too tightly and crushed that which it would preserve.

Perhaps Will should take Nan and Susannah to London and there attempt to find a trade that would bring him a better chance of fortune. But what trade? He had a good, logical mind, but a meager education, and what could a mind alone do for a man of no fortune?

When John had been prosperous, there had been talk of Will’s attending university or one of the Inns of Court. With his precise mind Will could have made short work of university learning. Had he but done that, he could have become a real schoolmaster, not a petty schoolmaster, teaching older children their Latin, not the little ones their letters. He could have made enough money, then, to support a large family. Or perhaps he would have become a honey-tongued barrister, swift at unraveling legal knots. He could have supported his Nan, his sweet Nan, in style.

And even his mother would have been unable to spin stories about Nan’s consorting with mysterious gentlemen in velvet and jewels.

Little by little, the city sounds receded, as the forest surrounded Will. Human voices became fainter, replaced by the hoots and scrapings of things scurrying and flying amid the old oaks that remained of a forest that, in the distant times of Arthur, had covered all of Britain.