Mistress Shakespeare (2 page)

I’d adored Elizabeth of England from the first moment I’d seen her, gorgeously gowned, on a white horse, when I was but eleven and she’d come to visit her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, near my home in Warwickshire.

The boy led me round the corner into an alcove hidden from the street. He knocked thrice upon it.

“Do you serve Her Majesty?” I asked while we waited.

“I serve those who serve her,” he said only.

I meant to question him further, but the door creaked open and an old woman with face wrinkles like cobwebs stood there with her sleeves rolled up. She wore a broadcloth apron as if she were tending a kitchen. “Follow me,” she said, not waiting for introduction or comment. The boy did not enter with us but closed the door behind me. It thudded nearly as loud as the beating of my heart, which I told myself was only from our quick pace and my excitement to see this place.

“Farthingales here. Watch your head,” the old woman muttered.

I trailed her through a narrow alleyway of swinging metal hoops, like lonely bird cages, over which the queen’s elaborate kirtles and petticoats would be draped. We plunged down an alley of sweet-smelling sleeves arranged by color, though the limited lantern light made the rich tawny, ruby and ivory hues all seem dusky. Boned bodices came next, then an aisle of fur-edged capes and robes. Of a sudden, the sweet scent of lime and lavender from the garments changed to some sharp smell that made me sneeze.

“Camphor to keep out moths,” my guide said.

I jammed a finger under my nose to halt a torrent of sneezes. The maze deepened: swags of green and white Tudor bunting lined the way, then dusty, draped flags and battle banners. Suddenly, my stomach clenched with foreboding. Why would not the garments to be given me simply be ready at the door? We seemed to have passed from attire to military materials. As we rounded the next corner, my worst fears leaped at me from the shadows.

Within a dimly lit grotto of garments, behind a small portable table sat a man simply but finely attired all in black; his amber eyes shone flatly, like an adder’s. It took me but a moment to realize I knew him—that is, I knew who he was. I had glimpsed him at court the time the players had taken me with them. His hunchback form was unmistakable. For months, the whole city had talked of naught but the bloodless battles between this man and the Earl of Essex. If he was here to see me—or I to see him—I dreaded to know why.

Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, the queen’s closest councillor and chief secretary, was the avowed enemy of Elizabeth’s former favored courtier, Robert Devereaux, Lord Essex, and his compatriot the Earl of Southampton, the men who had led the rebellion against her. It was through Cecil that the two earls had been arrested and rightly so. It was through Cecil that Will’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, was being held prisoner in the Tower under the same terrible charges as his friend Essex.

“That is all,” Cecil spoke to the woman, who scurried away.

I remembered to curtsy. I was pleased it was quite a steady one because my legs were starting to shake. I saw we were not alone; two men—guards or secretaries?—sat at another table off to my left side. Had I been snared in a trap baited with the promise of royal garments only to be summoned to an inquisition?

“I do indeed have the pieces of cast-off wardrobe for the players you were promised, Mistress Whateley,” Cecil said as if he’d read my mind. “I do not speak untruths or half-truths, and I pray you will not either. I must inform you that, since Her Majesty much enjoys the talents of the Globe’s players, I can only hope they will be able to remain at large to put the royal items to good use as costumes in their dramas.”

After that initial assault, I could scarce catch my air. The memory of my dear, doomed girlhood friend Kat leaped into my mind’s eye, for I felt like that—trapped, floating face up, exposed, bereft of help, hope or even breath.

“Fetch a seat for Mistress Whateley, Thompson,” Cecil said, and a man jumped to obey. It was some sort of folding camp stool. I perched poised on the edge, telling myself to sit erect and to show calm and confidence no matter what befell. Oh, yes, I could be a player too. And I was not such a country maid that I did not know this was to be a war of wits, and that this one the rabble called
Robertus Diabolus
—Robert the Devil—had the upper hand.

I tried to buck myself up: however much at odds Will and I were now, had I not been so close to him and the players that I was well armed with clever turns of phrase? I knew how to listen well for cues before responding. Yet this was the man who had inherited Sir Francis Walsingham’s dreaded web of intelligencers, who had brought down the lofty likes of Essex and Southampton and had made mincemeat of lesser men and women like Will’s kin.

“Thank you for your consideration, my lord,” I said before he could speak again. The words, too many, I warrant, tumbled from my mouth. “For the seat, I mean, but I am also grateful for the gift of Her Majesty’s cast-off garments to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, not only for them but for myself—to be able to merely care for them. We all honor our queen.”

“Do we all?” he parried. “Mistress, I need straight answers from you. I have not hauled in the players themselves—yet—because I cannot abide prevarications or histrionics offstage. I have it on good authority you are forthright and have spoken your mind to the Globe’s actors. And I will have you speak plainly here.”

“Of course, my lord, but I cannot see why we must meet in such a place, away from others—”

“I did not think,” he interrupted, “knowing Will Shakespeare as intimately as you do, a covert meeting was something new to you.”

My insides lurched. He knew about me and Will. How much did he know, from how far back? He must be punning upon the word
knowing
in the biblical sense and be aware that Will and I had met secretly off and on for years. And worse, that I had been questioned once before by someone from Her Majesty’s government about where Will Shakespeare’s loyalties lay.

I fought to compose my features. Our eyes met and held. His face was not uncomely, but he was so misshapen in bodily form it was said the queen called him her Pygmy. I knew of nicknames that could sting, for I was of half-Italian blood and had oft been called Gypsy or Egyptian.

Cecil’s enemies called him simply the Hunchback, and during the rebellion, someone had scrawled on his front door, in a near quote from Will’s description of the hunchback King Richard III, HERE LIES THE TOAD! I well knew that playwrights had been imprisoned, tortured and killed for slanders stuck on doors in London.

“Let me speak plain, mistress,” he said when I did not flinch under his gaze and did not respond again. “It is well known that Shakespeare and his fellow players performed
The Tragedy of King Richard II,
at the behest of the Earl of Essex and his dear friend-in-arms Southampton, just before the recent rebellion. I am certain I need not tell such a
devoted
friend of the playwright that scenes are in that drama that advocate the overthrow of a sitting monarch by a favorite of the English crowds.”

“It’s just a play, my lord, employing the past and hardly predicting the future.” I saw where he was going now but had no notion of how best to navigate the dangers. “Indeed, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were paid a goodly sum for performing it,” I continued. “They had no political statement to make, but simply needed the money, forty pieces of silver, so—”

“It should have been thirty pieces of silver!” he exploded, smacking his palm on his table, making it jump and shudder. “They are Judases, as much favor as Her Grace has shown them! And, yes, mistress, I hear you repeat the name of the Lord Chamberlain, as they bear the queen’s cousin’s name as patron. But,” he said thrusting up both hands when he saw me ready to protest, “I know Will Shakespeare’s bread is buttered on the other side too, for he’s been cozy with Southampton for years, and the Shakespeare family has a convoluted, questionable past as Catholics and rebels!”

I was dumbfounded. He knew about Will’s beginnings, family connections, his life from the earliest days. Then he could ruin Will with this—ruin me too.

“All I can tell you of my Warwickshire friend Will Shakespeare in all this,” I said, fighting again to control my voice, “is that he prays that your lordship and Her Gracious Majesty will spare the life of his friend and sponsor the Earl of Southampton. He merely did a favor for him and for the needed money. He meant no political statement.”

I was lying and I felt myself begin a fiery blush from the tip of my ears to my throat. I could only pray that the tawny hue of my skin hid that. And here I was fighting for Will when I could have strangled him with my bare hands but three days ago.

“Both earls’ coming trials will decide all that,” Cecil said, “but we can hardly claim that poets and playwrights are above such political frays, can we? Praying we forgive Southampton, that’s what he’s been up to, eh? More like, London’s favorite playwright has been writing something else to stir up sedition. Ben Jonson went to the Marshalsea prison five years ago for a slanderous play,” he went on, jabbing a finger at me like a scolding schoolmaster. “Thomas Kyd was questioned under extreme duress and, sadly, died soon after. Christopher Marlowe—”

“Was supposedly accidentally stabbed in a tavern brawl,” I dared to interrupt. My Italian blood was up; I could not help myself. At least he seemed not to know of my past with Southampton or Marlowe either. “And,” I plunged on, “it was said Marlowe was an informer for Sir Francis Walsingham, so I’m not sure what it behooves one to be an informer, as it’s whispered his demise could have been an assassination and not an accident!”

“Ah,” he said, and his mouth crimped in either annoyance or amusement. “The beauty does have hidden fangs as well as a clever brain.”

We stared at each other in a stalemate but hardly, I thought, a truce. Air from an unseen source shifted a battle banner behind his head. One of Jaques’ lines from
As You Like It
leaped through my mind to taunt me: “The worst fault you have is to be in love.”

With a shudder up my spine, I realized then what I said in the next few moments could save Will or damn him to torture, imprisonment or even death.

“But tell me,” Cecil said, leaning on his elbows and steepling his long-fingered hands before his mouth, “before we go on, exactly what is William Shakespeare to you? Here you are, an exotic woman, a tempting vixen, when he has a wife and family back in Stratford-Upon-the-Avon. Tell me true, Mistress Anne Whateley, what is the man to you?”

That, I thought, was the question. For nearly two decades, since even before the day he’d publicly, legally wed Anne Hathaway, I’d not only loved but loathed William Shakespeare to the very breadth and depth of my being. What was he to me and I to him? God’s truth, in my pierced and patched heart, I, Anne Rosaline Whateley, was above all else, the first Mistress Shakespeare, Will’s other wife.

Act One

CHAPTER ONE

My entrance to this world
was in the same year as Will’s, 1564, though he made an appearance in the spring and I in the autumn. Looking back, I can say that the most startling discovery of my early life was how gentle and lovely lay the land where I was reared but how fierce and brutal the blows of life that soon assailed me.

Among other local children, I always knew that I was different. In the heart of the sweet countryside of central England, where most folk were blue- or green-eyed, fair-skinned and light-haired, I had snapping dark eyes under brows of inky arches, a tawny complexion and a thick, unruly mane of raven-black hair. Yet I believe I was comely in an exotic way, like some rare bird the winds have blown off course. How could I be else with an Italian mother? She was, of course, Catholic born and bred, which she kept quiet in Gloriana’s Protestant England. I yet possess my mother’s violet-tinted glass rosary beads from Venice; I pretend they are a crystal necklace she bequeathed me, but these dangerous days, I wear it only with my night rail in my bedchamber.

Odd too in the very heart of rural England where few strangers, as foreigners are called, abided, was that my mother had not been a milkmaid or a tradesman’s daughter but a ropedancer my father found in London.