Mistress Shakespeare (25 page)

“A clever shift of subjects, Mistress Whateley. But if so, you have given him the gunpowder to do such, haven’t you? All we need is for him to discover the truth of us and spread it around. It would do me in—especially damn any hope I have of attracting a powerful personal patron for my plays or poetry.”

“A pox on the man! He’s tampered with Jennet’s opinion of me and now yours. I fear I’ll have to face him down.”

“Alone? In his hovel of a place with that leering portrait of him on the wall perhaps?”

“You’ve been in Kit’s place?”

“Sat on the very bed you’ve been in.”

“Will, that was a mistake, I grant you that—”

“That he’s had you?”

“It’s not true!” I cried, stamping my feet and clenching my fists. I could have pounded his chest in my frustration and fury. “I mean, yes, I was there, but only since he got me drunk on that poison they call dragon’s milk, because I was angry with you.”

“Ah, I see. It was my fault you ended up in his bed.”

“After all we’ve been to each other, I—I can’t fathom you believe that blackguard.”

“All right then, let me mention someone I do believe. I believe,” he went on, maddening me more each moment, “I recall a letter from Dick Field when I was still stuck in Stratford that you told him you were ‘tired of living like a nun in a cloister and for what’ here in London. Yes, according to him, I believe those were your exact words.”

“How dare you shift this off on me! You are the one who wed elsewhere—after,” I lowered my voice now, “you wed with me. I believe your work is addling your brain, making you jealous and for naught. What is that line in
Two Gentlemen of Verona
? ‘For love, thou knowest, is full of jealousy.’”

“I swear, woman, but you can quote anything to suit your cause. I am not each character I create and—”

But I was past being seduced by his pretty words and ready lines. “If you cannot trust me after all these years, I want no part of you,” I insisted. “A pox on you as well as Marlowe! Devil take you! Your hand is better now that I’ve been doing all your writing and copying, so just write out all the plays yourself!” I screeched and left him standing there.

It was only one of our battles royal, and our making up was always sweet. But I should have realized not to curse people by saying “Devil take you!” or “A pox on you!” for all too soon, I was facing both.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I did come to see
Kit Marlowe as the very devil. He dared to send me a note via Jennet, telling me that his lips would be forever sealed about my tumble in his bed would I but meet him elsewhere—dressed again as a lad. Now, wouldn’t that be a pretty lime trap for a little bird, I thought. I tore up the note and stamped on it.

I was tempted to send Kit a note back, hinting that I’d overheard him and Mr. Mercer talking about spying, but I feared he’d have Mercer get rid of me or do it himself. Finally, one day when I was tending little Kate for Jennet so she could take a nap—she was newly pregnant again—I found a way to at least put one over on Kit.

From my room one floor up where I was tending Kate, who had finally outgrown her leading strings, I heard Jennet scream.

“Mama crying?” the child asked as I scooped her up and took the stairs down as carefully but as quickly as I could. Jennet’s crying out like that dragged me back to the dreadful day of Kate’s birth, but this new pregnancy was barely showing yet. She’d never lost a babe this early.

“Jennet, what?” I cried as I rushed into her room. I could hear men’s voices below in the shop. John must not have heard.

She was sitting bolt upright on her bed with the counterpane clutched around her. “Jennet, where does it hurt?” I asked. “I can take Kate down to the maids and be right back so—”

“I—it was a nightmare—that I lost this one,” she said, looking more shaken than I’d seen her in months. She laid her hands over her still-flat stomach. “It was so real.”

“I’m not lost, Mama,” Kate declared.

“Here then,” I said and boosted the child up onto the bed and perched on the edge myself.

“It reminded me though,” Jennet said, hugging Kate to her with one arm, but reaching out to take my hand with the other, “how good you’ve been to me, even when you have had your own pains. And I’ve been a dreadful shrew about—about the claret.”

“Auntie Anne have hurts?” Kate asked, looking at me.

“No, I’m fine,” I assured my godchild. She was fair and blond like her mother, so different from me and yet I loved and tended her as my own.

“Anne,” Jennet went on, “I know Kit Marlowe’s been your cross to bear—well, one of them anyway—so I’ve decided to tell you—to ask for your help and give mine to you if we can manage. He’s doing the same thing to me, threatening to tell John lies. He’s given me an ultimatum. Ah, Marta,” she said as her housemaid knocked and stuck her head in the door, “take Kate downstairs for a treat, will you now?”

At the magic word
treat
, Kate slid off the bed onto the mounting stool without a fuss and when we two were alone again, Jennet said, “I should have listened to you. I swear that man is Satan’s henchman.”

“He is the very devil, and I’d like to be rid of him, whatever loss it would be to London’s stages. Will knows not to trust him, but he always takes Kit’s bait—again and again. And that strange streak of jealousy that rises in him when I’ve given him no reason to—well, a pox on Kit Marlowe.”

“Will’s so good at probing everyone else’s motives in his plays or in life, but Kit’s got his goat, all right. It’s because he loves you so, yet cannot really claim or protect you without risking everything you both hold dear.”

“But what ultimatum from Kit to you?”

“Not a fate worse than death, at least. He says I have a face like an angel and he wants me to help him fool some old man who believes angels appear to him when he gazes in some sort of celestial mirror.”

I snapped my fingers. “Dr. John Dee.”

“Who?”

“Her Majesty’s advisor in many things, not a medical doctor, but a learned man. Penelope Henslowe says that under Queen Mary Tudor he was accused of witchcraft because he rigged stage machinery so it seemed that the classical gods could fly in from the heavens to end the plays—a
deus ex machina
.”

“I know you and Will understand all that stagecraft, but was this Dr. Dee persecuted for dealing with demons or the devil?” she asked, her eyes as wide as dinner plates.

“All false accusations. He ended up befriending his jailer and proving how silly the charges were.”

“Well, I say, with your help, maybe Will’s too, we can warn this Dr. Dee and ruin Kit’s plans—put him in his place. He’d dare not tell John this babe I carry is his, which is what he’s hinted he would do. I’d hire someone to kill him first!”

“Jennet!” I said, appalled at her vehemence, but had I not just said much the same thing? “Yet,” I had to add, “I know how you feel about the man. I have another idea, one that will shame Kit so that—perhaps—he will learn not to toy with you, me and Will, if Will will help us. And mayhap John too. Are you game?”

“Oh, yes! Say on.”

 

 

 

Despite the fact
the Bible teaches, “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” the night the four of us—John and Will too—set Kit Marlowe back on his heels was one I shall not forget. Our intent was deadly serious, yet it brought all of us closer. We enjoyed it immensely, despite the dangers. Best of all, Will learned that Kit Marlowe was taunting Jennet as well as me, and he knew full well, however much Kit plied her with drink, she would not betray John.

So, I think, though he came by that knowledge the hard way, he finally learned that I had not lain with Kit Marlowe. What I had learned by now was that, despite Will’s intellect and oft calm and analytic persona, he could be a raving fool when eaten by jealousy. I suppose it served him well years later when he created Othello, his love Desdemona and the lying villain Iago. As he wrote in
The Comedy of Errors,
“How many fond fools serve mad jealousy!” That night, though we were perhaps foolish, we served not jealousy, but revenge on Kit Marlowe and had such fun doing so.

It turned out that Kit had arranged a private demonstration for Dr. Dee in the very second-floor chamber wherein Kit’s portrait hung. According to Jennet, Kit had also hung a curtain there—of course, I knew right where the painting and curtain were. She said Kit had duped Dr. Dee out of twenty pounds for the purchase of a new “cosmic and celestial” mirror, which was in truth the bottom of a polished copper kettle. Therein, an angel was to appear when Marlowe tried to summon it, in a practice Dr. Dee called scrying.

Having crawled under the curtain from her hiding place beneath Kit’s bed, then rising from behind the mirror, the ethereal Jennet was to stun the brilliant man until Kit revealed all and made a mockery of the old man’s fervent if foolish beliefs. And then, I supposed, Kit could blackmail or taunt Dee as he loved to do others.

But our plan went like this:

“John,” Will said, “be sure to pull the ladder away once we’ve climbed inside, but be prepared to get it back to us when you see Anne at the window.”

“Both of you keep a good eye on Jennet,” John insisted. “That blackguard tries to get the coins back he gave her, and I’ll ram each one down his throat.”

“I like your spirit,” Will told him. “But if we get caught, there may be hell to pay.”

“But this way,” I put in, “Kit will have hell to pay. Let’s go!”

While Kit entertained Dee and his wife, Jane, in the other half of the room before the demonstration began, Jennet had made certain the window was open for Will and me to crawl in, just as I had crawled out that other night. Will had groused that this was a daft scheme, but now a big grin of anticipation split his face. I reckoned he might use it in a play someday.

But he’d preached caution too. Though not in earshot of John, Will had wagered me that we would only end up rescuing Jennet before Kit could ravish her, however much he preferred boys. Yet the idea of the three of us besting his nemesis appealed mightily to him.

Fortunately, the buzz of voices covered any sound we made. Stealthily, Will lifted the portrait of Kit off the wall and I doctored it up with a mix of sticky salve and seacoal dust that Maud had concocted for us. Whatever we thought of Kit, we knew better than to permanently deface his fine portrait, and this stuff would wipe off well enough.

I thought again of the painting of Will I’d sent home to his children in his name and with his blessing. He’d looked so earnest in it, so clear-eyed and determined. Surely, whatever their mother told them of their sire, they would see those qualities in him someday and understand why he had to be away. At least his parents and his brothers Edmund and Richard still lived in the household with Anne Hathaway and the three children. Will had been especially close to little Edmund. I prayed his parents and siblings would say good things of Will, the family’s breadwinner.

I tilted Kit’s portrait toward Will so he could survey my handiwork. He smothered a snort at the sight. Kit Marlowe now sported horns, a heavier mustache and a pointed beard. I added a crude pitchfork in his hand, then stuck the gooey pot and brush down between Kit’s sheets where I also wiped my hand. Kit’s so-called polished mirror lay at the foot of the bed as if awaiting its cue.

“We are ready to begin, Dr. Dee,” we heard Kit intone from the other side of the curtain. That was followed by a scraping of chairs, so Will and I dove behind the bed. “Yes, face the curtain, and I shall fetch the celestial speculum, given me by a man who adored my Doctor Faustus play, a man who believes in life after death according to our just deserts.”

In the dim light from the fading day outside, I saw Will do quite a good rendition of Marlowe with his eyes crossed and his tongue hanging out as if choked by a noose around his neck. Now I had to stifle a giggle. Jennet, looking like an angel indeed, peeked out from under the bed. Her cue was to be, “See, it arises!” I wasn’t sure why Kit didn’t just bribe one of the boy actors to take this part, but then none of them could possibly approach Jennet in angelic beauty.

Kit went on, blathering to Dr. Dee about the magical powers of the mirror. I was grateful Will could be in on all this, not only so I wasn’t blamed for coming back here on my own, but so that he could hear again what a liar Kit was.

Will got in position to have the portrait replace Jennet’s appearance, which would be a mighty shock to clever Kit. I gave the high sign out the window to John to bring the ladder back. I reckoned we’d been here about a quarter of an hour and, despite our behind-the-curtain merrymaking, my stomach was knotted like a rope. The moment Will placed the portrait before the mirror, he would follow me down the ladder, while, in the confusion, Jennet would dart out the doorway to the hall. We feared not only that she wouldn’t make it down the ladder in time, but that she could fall and hurt the child she was carrying. If Kit tried to stop her escape, we—her husband included—would come charging to his door to get her out.

The scene worked as smoothly as if Will had written it instead of me. Poor Dr. Dee gasped as Jennet appeared as an angel, but he broke into huge guffaws when the devilish portrait of Kit suddenly seemed to levitate in her place as Jennet lifted it into their view. Though Kit swore a string of oaths, Jennet reported, as she ran breathless out into the street to meet us, he had no choice but to pretend he’d staged the joke.

“Let’s go,” Jennet cried, hugging John while he and Will shouldered the ladder. We were all holding our sides, sore with laughter. “However jovial it all seems,” she gasped out, “if he sees us . . .”

“If he fusses about it at all,” Will declared, “I shall write it into
The Comedy of Errors
with a topical allusion to be sure he’s the butt of the joke, and then what can he do?”