Mistress Shakespeare (14 page)

“Will has not a thing to do with this—with me or with whatever the Arden son-in-law has done,” I insisted, but I knew that could be a lie. I’d heard Will speak against the queen, and that’s evidently just what the son-in-law had done.
The Tower . . . gathering evidence here and there . . . doomed souls in Stratford.

“I pray it’s not a possibility that any of the carriers
are
hiding contraband,” I told him.

“Not a chance, or I’d know it. But you know what I think?” he said, leaning his big shoulder against the wooden wall. “I think, ’less you’re still mooning for the man—and I don’t mean Mercer,” he added with a lopsided grin and a hiccough—“here’s your big chance to bring the smug Shakespeares down for what they done to you. ’Sides, if there’s no Will, distant, sure, but still desired, you’d wed with me, wouldn’t you, Anne Whateley?”

“No, I would not, and I’m through with William Shakespeare,” I spit out.

At least, the fact he was suggesting I take revenge made me believe he had not done so. And I cursed myself for having thought exactly the mean-minded things he had just suggested. As for Mercer, if he were a spy and knew my past, perhaps that’s even why he thought I might try to implicate the Shakespeares.

I have no idea what else I said to Stephen that day, but to wish him well when he set out with the pack train on the morrow. I was grateful he was going, though that would make my quest even more difficult and rushed.

I might be mad in risking much, but, whatever it cost me, I was going to warn the Shakespeares that they were in deadly danger.

 

 

 

I told the Davenants
that I was going to visit friends at home; I know they assumed I was going with my own pack train. But before they were out of bed the next morn, with my hair pinned up and wearing secondhand breeches, shirt and jerkin, I hurried up Wood Street to the White Hinde Inn and hired two boys and three horses. Since I knew my own pack train would leave at dawn, we rode fast to be sure we were ahead of them and then pounded toward Stratford. We slept a few hours in the common rooms of inns along the way, then were off again. At least the roads were frozen mud and not mire. In just two days, exhausted, we rode across the Clopton Bridge and into Stratford.

My first impulse was to take my gown from my saddle packs, but I was in too much of a hurry for that. Though the pack train had to be nearly two days behind us, I had no notion of when more “tariff takers,” as Mr. Mercer had dubbed himself, could be arriving here.

I sent my hired companions to the Thorn Bush Inn, for I was even fearful to trust the Burbages at their more familiar establishment. Will might hang about there and, as James and Richard Burbage of the Queen’s Men served as spies for Walsingham, it was best to completely avoid the Burbages’ inn now.

This time of day, I expected to find Will either at the lawyer’s or in the glovery. Pulling my cap over my forehead and screwing my courage to the sticking point, I tied my horse in front of my cousin’s house a few doors down and strode straight for the Shakespeare house. The last time I’d worn boy’s garb, Will had saved me. I prayed that now I might save him.

I glanced in the glovery window. Will’s father had his back to me. I cast a shadow and Will, bent over stretched cloth with a knife tracing around a wooden pattern, looked up. His hand with the knife jerked; he stood, wide-eyed, before he lifted his other hand. I saw he’d cut himself, though he paid it no heed and kept staring at me as though he’d seen a ghost. I rushed inside.

Strangely, there were no greetings; we began to converse as if we’d never been apart.

“Despite all that,” Will said, gesturing at my cap and garb, “I knew it was you from the tilt of your head and slant of your cheek. But why are you clad like a boy? What’s amiss? Are you back from London?”

“We’ve no time for all that. I’ve come to warn you and your family.”

At first John Shakespeare just gaped at us, turning his head back and forth. Then, just before I blurted out about the Ardens, he interrupted, “Will, is this who I think it is?”

I pulled off my cap and let the bounty of the hair I’d pinned up in the crown of it sweep free. Whether or not Will had confided in his father all the truth about us, I did not know. I opened my mouth to explain everything when someone filled the doorway that linked the shop to the house.

“Will,” a brown-haired woman said, “Susannah just sat up all on her own. You must come and see.”

She too stared at me, then at Will. “Father,” she said, as if she could no longer speak directly to her husband—for I knew this was not Will’s sister Joan—“why is
she
here—like this?”

And so, though I never wanted to so much as be in the same city as the other Mistress Anne Shakespeare and was shocked to know she knew me, I ignored her and said to Will, “I’ve just come from London where I have learned that Edward Arden’s son-in-law has been arrested and taken to the Tower of London for proclaiming his plans to kill the queen.”

Will gasped. His father muttered, “By all the saints! John Somerville? He’s unhinged half the time, and now he’ll take us all down with him!”

“Somerville is his name,” I said. “And anyone who is kin to the Ardens are suspect and may have their houses searched and perhaps be questioned too.”

“But why would
you
know all this?” Will’s wife asked. Her voice was not only petulant but shrill, much more so than the lads who played women’s parts on the stage.

I faced her at last. “In London, my head carrier and I were both questioned about whether our pack train carried covert Catholic books or letters of plotting from the Ardens or their kin.”

John Shakespeare took charge then, locking the shop door and hustling all of us into the back of the house where he barred that door too. Despite my fears for them all—even for myself—I took a good look around. Imagine, I was Will’s first love and first wife, yet I’d never stepped inside his house.

It seemed spacious in comparison to the Davenants’ narrow town house, and a palace next to my old cottage at Temple Grafton. The floors were stone-flagged and covered with rushes; the walls clean-looking with their contrast of dark timbers and whitewashed plaster. A worn Turkey carpet covered the long table, and faded hangings of biblical scenes covered two walls. The furniture was oak and heavily carved, though it seemed this sturdy house was now shaken by a fearful wind.

Anne scooped up their daughter from a rug near the hearth as if I’d harm her, though she was probably just panicked to keep the child safe. Little Susannah began to fuss, then cry. I tried not to look at Will, who had wrapped a cloth around his cut finger. It was the same one, I noted erratically, that Dick Field had pricked on all four of us the day we vowed a blood oath.

John Shakespeare gave me a warm mug of cider and sat me down on a stool before the hearth; he and Will took the bench facing me. “Mary,” John said over his shoulder to his hovering wife, who kept wringing her hands, “send Joan for Gilbert and tell her to be quick about it. Anne, go tend the child upstairs if she’s going to cry, and take Richard and Edmund with you,” he added, referring to Will’s two younger brothers, aged nine and three, who hung about staring at me.

“I want to stay here,” Anne protested. “This concerns me too, really concerns me.”

I gave her a slant-eyed look. Anne Hathaway Shakespeare was well favored enough with milky skin and a spray of freckles across her nose. Her eyes were blue-gray and her hair pale brown. Her eyebrows were over-thick for a woman and straight across, which made her look perpetually indignant. She was hardly thick-headed for she’d made a clever pun on the meaning of the word
concern
. But did Will trade couplets with her? Did she read to him and listen to his dreams in the depths of their bed?

Despite her protest, when Will glared at her, she flounced off with the baby and the two youngsters while the three of us sat before the hearth.

“We are grateful for the warning,” John said. “You know of our close ties to the Ardens, I warrant, having been Will’s friend, and still his friend now.”

My gaze collided with Will’s. As if no one else were in the room, as if no one’s safety or life was at stake, we just stared. I know not what I thought or felt then. Love, anger, jealousy, fear, even fury. I suppose only a moment passed, but it might as well have been eternity.

“Yes,” I said, tearing my gaze away, back to his father. “And, like many, I observed a public clash between Edward Arden and the Earl of Leicester, even before the queen herself. I fear this might give the earl an excuse to settle with the Ardens too, and since Will’s been there to borrow books . . .”

“I trust Anne implicitly, Father,” Will said. “If you are thinking she’s here to try to glean information for our enemies, you think wrong.”

In my haste and panic, I had not even considered that. Will always did see all sides of an issue, all sides of a character, and I rejoiced silently that he had stood up for mine.

When the entire family was gathered but before plans were made, Will led me out the back door so that I could get to my horse in a roundabout fashion. I saw his wife standing at a back window, holding her baby, watching as he walked me through the kitchen herb garden and along the edge of their duck pond and paused a moment.

“This has been looming for years,” he said. “We’ve been holding our breath. I can’t thank you enough, Anne—especially, considering our . . . our mutual hardships.”

I had no reply to that. I wanted to say so much, but this was hardly the time or place.

“How is it, then, life in London?” he asked, his voice wistful as I frowned out over the pond, for I could not bear—and did not dare—to look into his eyes again.

“Busy and exciting. The theatres call for you, Will. They call for Will and ever will,” I rhymed and walked away from him as fast as I could.

 

 

 

I dared not
even visit old Father Berowne at my cottage, for, though I stood on the fringes of Will’s life, I did not know how thorough a search would be made or when it would begin, or what the old former priest would recall or babble about our secret wedding. Midland families had been heavily fined in the past for housing former priests, but the penalty could be worse now, for all I knew.

I fed my two London lads well at the Thorn Bush where the innkeeper let us sleep by the hearth all night. Thus we rested our horses and headed back toward London the next morn, passing my pack train heading the opposite direction that afternoon near Oxford. Stephen and the men looked half asleep in their saddles and, as I had gambled, hardly looked at three fast-riding lads.

I was in a sweat until my carriers came back to London almost a week later, for I’d only heard rumors of what could be happening in Stratford. It had been noised about London that John Somerville of Edstone, near Stratford, who had “extreme views,” had claimed the queen was morally corrupt and that the Earl of Leicester was an adulterer and an upstart. Somerville had vowed that our queen’s Catholic cousin, Mary of Scots, would make a far better ruler and he would like to see it so.

“Ha!” John Davenant spit out when he heard that much from a customer. “Mary of Scots goes from husband to husband, helped kill one of them and was ravished by her lover before she wedded him as her third!” It was the most animated I’d ever seen him. If a placid man like John could erupt like that, I knew the city itself must be like a tinderbox.

I also gathered that this Somerville was going to be questioned under duress—torture—to see who else he would implicate. But when my carriers came back, I heard the rest.

On October 31, the very day Mr. Mercer had spoken with both Stephen and me, a warrant had been issued for the apprehension of—Stephen had asked our bookkeeper in Stratford to write it down for me—“such as shall be in any way kin to all touched, and to search their houses.” On the second of November, a clerk of the queen’s Privy Council, a Thomas Wilkes, had arrived at the house of a local and very well-to-do justice of the peace, Thomas Lucy, just outside Stratford to make that his base of operation. The Ardens’ home had been raided and Edward’s wife, Mary, their daughter-in-law and a former priest whom Edward Arden had passed off as his gardener—whom I knew, but had not realized was a father—were arrested and sent for questioning and trial in London. Other homes in the area were to be searched also. Edward Arden himself had been arrested at the home of the Earl of Southampton here in London.

“Keep safe, Will,” I whispered as I went to bed that night. “Keep safe.” It worried me too that I’d chatted with that priest the Ardens had kept on in disguise there and that he knew of Will’s many trips to Park Hall.

The news for the Ardens grew worse from that day on. Edward Arden was put to the rack, and a trial date was set for him, his wife and their son-in-law. With their gardener-priest, Hugh Hall, they were to be tried at the London Guild Hall on November the sixteenth.

All London was abuzz with both reports and rumors, and which was which I was not sure. I knew I did not dare to go near the accused and yet I was eager to know the outcome. And so was Will, for he showed up on the Davenants’ doorstep the day before the trial.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I—can’t believe he’s here!”
I said breathlessly, gripping my hands together when John told me I had a gentleman caller from the midlands and I peeked through the doorway to see it was Will. John had also said my visitor looked like a ruffian, and indeed he did. But he spoke like a gentleman, John had added—one with a midlands accent as broad as the one I had intentionally lost since I’d been here.

Praying Will did not look so unkempt and was here in London because he was hiding out, I hurried to him.

“What now? Will, I—”

He gripped my hands in his and spoke in a rush, his voice a mere whisper. His face was dirty; he’d pulled his hair forward and wore worker’s clothes as if he were a ruffian indeed.