Love Disguised (2 page)

When she told her mother, something in Jane broke. She became like an unlatched door swinging in the wind. She beat her forehead with her fists, crying, “I am the vilest of evildoers!” Such words alarmed Meg. She wondered if grief had addled her mother's mind.

Her own grief was of the silent sort. She dreamed of her father as a hearty bricklayer lifting her into his arms. When she awoke she hoped it was true and waited for him to come home. When he did not, tears slipped from her eyes. How could he leave her forever?

It was her mother's fault, Meg decided. “If you had gone to the jail and made them release Father, he would still be alive,” she said, though she had no idea what the laws were and how justice was dealt.

Jane threw herself on her bed and drew her feet beneath
her. “See, the flood waters rise around me!” The unlatched door of her mind now hung by a single hinge.

The next morning Meg awoke to find herself alone in the house. Rain dribbled through the thatched roof and formed puddles on the floor. A feeling of dread enveloped her like a fog. Dressing quickly she left the house, hastened along Addle Street and down Wood Street, crossed Cheapside, and followed Bow Lane to Garlick Hill. The gutters in the middle of the street overflowed with garbage rushing downhill toward the river. Meg slipped in the mire but got up again. She searched along Thames Street, where warehouses opened onto the wharves and cranes stood like scaffolds for hanging criminals. At the end of a lane where steps led down to the water, Meg saw a pair of shoes. Her mother's shoes, neatly placed side by side as if she had just stepped out of them to bathe her feet.

“Mother!” shouted Meg. She gazed downriver to where the water surged beneath the arches of the great bridge. She called to the laborers operating a crane. “Did you see a woman go into the river?”

They shrugged and shook their heads.

Meg waited at the steps for her mother to return. The dread within her deepened into something with no name. Hours later, wet and bone-cold, Meg returned home to the house that sagged like a sorrowful face and leaked water like tears. She climbed into her parents' flea-infested bed. All night her eyes stayed open to aid her ears in listening for her mother's steps.

When she heard excited voices in the street she thought,
There is news of my mother
. She jumped out of bed and went
outside but could not bring herself to question anyone and put her terrible fears into words.

At the grocer's stall in Wood Street she paid a farthing for some apples, hoping the grocer would tell her the news, but he turned away to help another customer.

The barber's son, a little magpie with bare feet and ragged feathers, ran up to her.

“Did you hear what happened last night? It makes me shudder to think of it!”

Meg hugged the apples close in her apron and dumbly shook her head.

“You don't know?” he said. “For an apple, I'll tell you.”

Meg's hand shook as she gave him the fruit. “Did they pull someone from the river?”

The boy bit into the apple. He was going to make Meg wait.

“Tell me, was she dead or alive?”

“Dead,” he said. “Murdered in his bed last night!”

His
bed? “Who was murdered?” she asked.

“The priest at St. Alphage. His head was beaten in. I saw him wrapped in a sheet.”

Meg stood, stunned.
A whited sepulchre
. She thought of her mother bearing down upon the linen sheet with her hot iron. Throwing the iron against the wall in anger.

“How did it happen?” she whispered.

“It was a strong arm that did it and a heavy weapon the murderer took away with him.”

“Did anyone see … the killer?”

“Nay, he escaped before anyone saw him,” the boy said, disappointed.

Meg's heart was beating wildly. She ran back home on
legs barely able to hold her up. Apples dropped from her skirt and rolled away. Once inside the house, she glanced toward the hook by the hearth where her mother kept the iron. It was gone.

“My mother—a murderess?” The horrible word slipped from her lips. She saw her mother rising at night and carrying the iron through the dark streets. But she could not imagine her beating the priest with it. Even in her bitterest fury, Jane had never struck Meg's father with the iron. But then she had never been so maddened and desperate as in the weeks since his death.

Now Meg understood that her mother had walked into the river with the iron, letting the bloody weapon drag her underwater. Grief and guilt over her deed drove her to kill herself. Her mother was a murderess twice over! Her father, a beggar who died in prison. How had it come to pass that she, Meg, was the daughter of shame and sinful sorrow and now alone in the world?

“I am no longer myself,” she said, not knowing quite what she meant. She went to bed and slept for a long, long time, because there was no one to wake her up.

No one from the parish came to take Meg to the hospital where orphans were cared for. To keep from starving, she nipped food from the market vendors and ran away so fast, no one could catch her. The Fleet River provided fish; orchards yielded fruit into her hands. Meg began to thrive like a flower sprung from winter's withered stalks. Her hair became tangled and she cut it off. Her bodice was tight, so she filched
some clothes she found drying on a bush. They turned out to be a boy's shirt and trousers. They proved comfortable and easier to run in than a skirt; thus she took to wearing them all the time.

Meg spent her aimless days in Moorfield, London's playground, watching the boys compete at stoolball and wrestling until they let her join their games. She gave her name as Mack. Soon she could strike the ball and fight as well as any of them. Davy Dapper and Peter Flick were the leaders, strong and unruly boys a few years older than Meg who seemed, like her, to have no parents. They never guessed she was a girl, not even when she emerged from a wrestling match with tears on her cheeks. She was not injured, but her chest ached with the longing to be embraced, however roughly. She threw herself into the next match and the one after that.

One day the landlord forced his way into the house to demand payment of the overdue rent. Finding the penniless orphan only stirred up his rage. He thrust his whelk-studded nose in Meg's face and shouted, “Give me three crowns, you puny maltworm, or I'll have you thrown in the clink!”

“I'll give you a crown—of bruises!” Meg grabbed a broken table leg and struck the landlord above his ear. “Now get out of here, you reeking pig's kidney!” She was learning new insults daily from her friends Davy and Peter.

“Surly boy, you deserve to die in prison like your father!” shouted the landlord, holding his head in his hands as he staggered away.

Meg sank to the floor and began to cry, at first without a sound and then with loud sobs. There was not a person in the world to comfort her, so it was some time before she was able
to stop. She stared at her hands still clutching the table leg. It had felt so good to strike the landlord. Her own strength surprised her. Now she
could
imagine her mother beating the priest. Had she meant to kill him? Had Meg meant to kill the landlord?

She threw the table leg aside as if it were on fire.

Soon the landlord would return and fulfill his threats. Meg knew she had to leave at once. Her heart thudding, she packed a bundle of clothes and trifles to remind her of her parents: a button from her father's jerkin, a coif her mother wore to bed. On the stoop she hesitated, then threw the bundle aside. Empty-handed, she left the crooked, sorry house on Addle Street for good.

Or rather, for ill.

Stratford 1580

Will Shakespeare was a serious-looking boy with a wide, high forehead and wavy dark hair, the eldest son of a glover, former mayor, and chief alderman of Stratford-upon-Avon. That is, his one father, John Shakespeare, was all of these. The family's house sprawled over several lots on Henley Street and was a palace compared to Meg's half-ruined house on Addle Street. Will's mother, Mary Arden, came from a proud family who had once owned the entire forest northwest of Stratford. But her wealth had passed to her husband at their marriage and then through his fingers like sand. When Will was a little boy she would kiss him and say, “You are all my riches now.” She taught him to read using a hornbook, and Will soaked up words as a field soaks up water.

While not an overly pious family, the Shakespeares sometimes graced the front pew of Holy Trinity Church. The priest there, unlike his counterpart at London's St. Alphage, did not meddle in the lives of his parishioners. But private misdeeds became public matters nonetheless. One of Will's first memories was of a woman shrouded in white and forced to stand
while the preacher denounced her sin. Thus it was in church that Will first heard the words “harlot” and “lechery.” He thought the faceless, white-clad girl with her head bowed was a ghost from beyond the grave, bound to return there after the service.

Will's family was a boisterous one, down through his brother Gilbert, sister Joan, and three younger siblings. The shouts of children playing and the clatter from the workshop filled the sturdy timber house, along with the smells of his mother's cooking and the less savory odor of animal hides soaking in urine. Every night Will knelt to receive his father's blessing and heard him say, “Remember always your duty of obedience. Revere God in heaven and your father on earth.”

A good son, young Will worshipped his father. He retained another early memory of standing on a bench watching a troupe of richly costumed actors perform in the guildhall. He danced with excitement to see them, while his father's arms about his knees kept him from falling.

“I want to be a player,” Will said in great earnest. “Everyone will look at me and clap their hands.” His father only laughed.

When he was about thirteen, Will realized that some misfortune had befallen his father. He stopped attending council meetings and no longer wore his black furred gown and alderman's thumb ring. He was sometimes drunk and his nightly blessing gave way to threats. Sometimes he beat Will or Gilbert, saying, “Remember, I am your father!” as if he himself had forgotten.

School offered Will an escape, and he gladly rose before
dawn to lose himself in studying history, ciphering, and Latin. His favorite work was Ovid's
Metamorphoses
with its tales of gods changing form and meddling with mankind. He was not often truant, save when a company of players came to nearby Warwick or Coventry. The master would duly whip him for missing his lessons, but his heart was not in it, for Will was his best student. Will himself hardly minded the punishment because the plays gave him such pleasure. He marveled how ordinary men, like Ovid's gods, could transform themselves and persuade him their feigning was truth.

As Will progressed through Stratford grammar school, the fortunes of John Shakespeare worsened. He sold some properties and mortgaged others. Creditors came to the house demanding payment, but Mary bargained with them until they went away. The bailiff delivered a summons to court, but John ignored it. He seldom left the house, and when he did Will was afraid he would be arrested. Fortunately the magistrate was an old friend of his father's and hesitated to enforce the warrants against him.

As his father declined, Will grew strong like a new shoot from a weak branch. His shoulders strained against his jerkin and his chin sprouted a few soft hairs he coaxed into the shape of a beard. He began to notice the female sex, their round and pleasing bodies. He would often recall the opening lines of Ovid's poem:

Of shapes transformed to bodies strange, I

purpose to treat;

Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they that

wrought this wondrous feat)

To further this my enterprise
.

Restlessly he longed for change of any kind; sleeping and waking he dreamed of every sort of greatness and many a shapely girl.

But dreaming could not dispel his family's troubles. Often he heard his parents quarreling behind the closed door of the shop and leaned closer to listen.

“You have also profited from my wool trading,” his father was saying.

“But I did not condone it. The first time you were fined I warned you to stop. If only you had heeded me!” His mother sounded tearful.

Will had often accompanied his father to the sheep fair. He helped with the shearing and filled the bags with fleece, enjoying the greasy softness under his fingers. There were now thirty or more bags—each weighing a tod, or twenty-eight pounds—in their barn. Will knew how profitable wool trading could be. More profitable than making gloves.

“You ask who betrayed you? Why, most likely some merchant whose honest trade you have usurped,” his mother said.

“God rot him, whoever he is! I have traded wool for fifteen years without a license. Why should the Privy Council now enforce a long-breached law? I'll raise my rents to pay the fine.”