Mistress Shakespeare (28 page)

I hurried on, praying that the old man at the inn had told me true. Other plague houses loomed ahead of me. From some of them came unworldly keening or shrieking that seemed to echo in the streets and in my skull. Those sounds followed me like disembodied voices. I felt I was fleeing hell, and there was only one way out.

I saw a three-story house being blatantly ransacked. From the upper windows, a man was throwing down bolsters, curtains and clothes to four louts below who gathered them up into huge bundles and dragged them to a nearby close. Thieves called anglers made an illegal living by snatching things through open windows at night with pinch-poles, but these looked like regular citizens gone mad.

Sir Walter Raleigh’s grand Durham House loomed large as I passed it in the row of vast noble mansions, all with unlit windows. Surely, the so-called School of Night was not meeting during the plague. Had Dr. Dee or Kit told the others of the tricks played on both of them?

I gasped to see light pearling the cup of sky. Could I have judged amiss the time it would take me? I could only hope that some nobles wanted out of the city this late in the contagion and that I would have the strength to rush through the gates to freedom and safety.

South of St. Paul’s—I could see the top of it from here, standing as silent sentinel over its suffering city—I heard voices singing. I pressed myself against a building as four men lurched down the street, bellowing a lusty, obscene song. Unfortunately, one of them spotted me and staggered over.

“Eh, then, lad! Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die! Eh, wha’s ’at yer toting? Got any food on you then?”

I prayed they were just drunk and not in the throes of the plague. From under my jerkin, I seized the wine bottle and thrust it at him, then, as he reached for it, ducked under his arm and fled.

As I neared the entrance to the bridge, the stitch in my side almost crippled me. I cut down Bridge Street; the wind from the river, which had been at my back, cooled my perspiring face. It felt bracing and smelled fresh somehow. I recalled the times I’d strolled the bridge’s shops that hung out over the water with their living quarters perched above that. Surely, I could move faster this morning without the usual crowd pushing to buy fripperies and fashions. Who cared one whit for such when people were dying, when the entire city seemed doomed?

I gasped and broke into tears: the drawbridge at this end of the bridge was up, not down, making it inaccessible.

“Ho there!” I shouted, swiping at my tears and trying to pitch my voice low but still shout up over the tall wooden barrier to where someone must be able to work the lifting mechanism. “I need to cross!”

No answer. My heart pounded harder than it had on my run. The old man at the inn had lied or been ignorant of what he said, or else everyone who wanted out had gone. “Help!” I screamed. “Help me!”

The buildings atop the bridge stood three to seven stories high. It was a little city unto itself with a chapel, constable and guilds, besides the stores and houses. If there was only some safe way to go up and over this barrier, out along the backs of the buildings perhaps. But I’d heard people had tumbled to their deaths from there, battered and drowned by the raging waters pouring through the supports. I could recall the cascading rapids the day Will and I had been rowed out to see Edward Arden’s head on a pole at the other end.

I had no choice but to wait here, hoping someone would open the bridge on this side in time for me to race to the other end. Perhaps if someone peered out or down, he would open for a comely woman rather than a boy.

As the child who had been taunted as “Gypsy” and “Egyptian,” I had finally come to accept that I was an exotic beauty, and all that was enhanced by the mania for all things Italian these days. For that, but mostly through Will’s love, I had come into my own. So I took my hat off, loosed my hair and shook it free. If I judged it best to be a lad, I’d stuff it back up under my hat; if a woman’s role would serve, that’s what I’d be.

“I’m an actor too, Will,” I whispered.

But I couldn’t keep from crying again. Forlorn and bereft, I sat on a stone post that held the cable chains for the drawbridge, hoping, praying for it to be put down. Thinking I heard such a rumble, I vaulted up and stared at the top of it, but nothing moved.

Then I realized the sound came from behind: a coach drawn by four fine horses clattered across the cobbles toward me. I stepped aside as some sort of horn sounded, from the coach or bridge I was not sure.

The bridge entrance on which I stood shuddered as the chains grated and the drawbridge started down. I was so exhausted I wasn’t sure I could race across the bridge and wondered if I could grab on to the back of the coach and ride as a footman. Two men drove it but no one stood at the back post. With dawn in my face, holding my hat in my hand, uncertain whether to put it back on or not, I gawked at the windows of the coach, covered with rolled, embossed leather flaps.

It was such a fine black coach-and-four that I wondered if I could be dreaming again, wishing for all the world that Will was in it and had come to rescue me.

Someone was looking out; a pale woman, I thought at first. No, it was a man with long blond hair. He swept the curtain open wide and peered at me from the depths. I smelled onions and recalled that, in my haste, I’d forgotten to wear mine.

“Dare I say I’ve found the lady with the mask and fan from a young boy’s dreams? The Italian countess, I always pretended,” a cultured voice said as the man with long blond tresses stuck his head farther out.

“Milord,” came a stern voice from above as the young man and I gaped at each other, “you vowed not to so much as look out ’til we were clear of the city. Your lady mother will be much displeased—”

“Oh, hang my lady mother and you too. You are a servant to drive the coach and that’s all, Rollins, though I warrant you are to spy for my mother. But, Mistress,” he addressed me now, “do you recall the Earl of Southampton from the clown Tarlton’s memorial? I’ve seen you in the theatre many times in far better dress than your present attire, but I shall not inquire why such a glorious woman would be garbed like a rude lad in plague London.”

Southampton! A delivering angel come to snatch me from the jaws of death if I played my cards right.

“Of course, I remember you, my lord, and have well noted your lordship too, on and off the stage. I swear to you, Lord Southampton, I am not ill but cannot abide this city one more moment and in this guise it was easier to flee.”

He gestured for me to come closer. My mind’s eye lit with the terrible scene of that trickster tumbler from Kenilworth years ago: I had merely bent down to look into his tent and he drew me in where I was assaulted until Will rescued me. But this young and charming earl, the wealthy patron of poets Will coveted, was hardly some cheap Italian tumbler. And then I saw there was another in the coach with him, an older dark-haired and bearded man.

“Alas, I am not at all a countess and only half Italian, my lord,” I said as the drawbridge thudded into place to jolt me and rattle the trappings of his coach. “But I believe I can display the best of both worlds.”

I could not let him leave me behind. Flirting was the last thing in the world I cared to do, but dire necessity made me bold. I would fall to my knees to beg if I must to escape plague London.

“What a coincidence that I speak half Italian, half English,” Southampton said with a little laugh. “May I present to you my friend and Italian tutor, John Florio? And may I offer you a ride and respite from this cursed city at my country home, New Place at Titchfield? Have you not noted that we who are full-blooded English are fascinated by all things Italian?”

Despite mutterings from his driver, Southampton swept open the door to his coach and extended his hand. Flooded with relief, I took it to climb up and in.

Act Four

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I slept with the Earl
of Southampton and with John Florio too—that is, we all soon enough fell asleep as the coach lumbered away from plague London. However hard I tried to stay awake, the next three days blurred by.

I do recall the earl told me that, though the plague raged within the nearby city walls, his mother had prevailed upon him to stay with her in their nearby rural home. Southampton House lay not along the Strand as did most of the dwellings of other powerful nobles but in Holborn beyond Tyburn Hill and Lincoln Inn Fields.

Yet, despite studying Italian with John Florio, the young earl had become restive and bored. He’d longed to return to his hawks and hounds, hunting in the great deer park at New Place, his Hampshire estate southwest of London. But for Warwickshire, I was woefully ignorant of the lay of English land and was astounded to learn we had a three-day coach journey ahead of us. As I had nowhere else to go and hoped to convince Lord Southampton to become Will’s patron, how could I protest being handed my salvation, and on a silver platter?

By day we bounced along roads so rutted they rattled our teeth. At night we stayed in sprawling country inns where the earl purchased some plain female garb for me, paid for my room and kept John Florio in his.

I had no notion that Hampshire was so wild, compared to my well-tended home shire. We plunged through deep forests where wolves still howled. More than once a big-tusked boar charged across the road. Upon occasion we emerged in clearings or hamlets where people stared or cheered us on. Some roads plunged through trees so thick they looked like tunnels. Erratic dirt tracks led from the main road into mazes of thickets. Giant oaks loomed overhead as we passed deep banks of spiny, yellow-flowered furze where the faint smell of wood smoke from remote, invisible chimneys or campfires wafted on the air.

Maud’s death clung to me like that smoke or the reek of onions, though they had thrown them out of the coach the first day. Yet I felt I was in a foreign land, and London—even Will—seemed to slip farther away.

“I apologize,” Southampton had told me the first day in the coach, “but I assumed you would know some Italian. I regret we two have been chattering on in it while you gazed out the window, but I thought you were merely melancholy and exhausted.”

“Then at least,” I told him with a small smile, “you were not saying something at my expense. You see, my Italian mother died when I was quite young, and my English father hardly spoke a word of it, though I’ve longed to learn.”

“Then you shall!” my young benefactor declared with a glance at his more staid friend. I had come to learn that his lordship was as explosive as John Florio was pensive and as fashionable as his friend was modest, though the Italian tutor was handsome in an unruffled, austere way.

“I shall call you
Contessa
rather than Anne,” he plunged on, his bright blue eyes alight with plans, “and shall share my tutor with you. John, we shall be her Pygmalion and bring to life our Galatea, our Italian
bellissima contessa,
though we have no need of Aphrodite to breathe life into her,
si
?”

“I’m game,” John said, straightening from his slouched posture on the leather-tufted seat next to me, while the earl rode facing forward in the other seat. “My lord, you can fetch us venison from your huge hunt park on your own,” John told him. “Hunting deer is not for me—and naught else either, so no goading in either language that I am after other game.”

“Ha!” Southampton declared, and slapped John’s knee. His teasing that I needed no Aphrodite to bring me to life brought to mind Will’s poem
Venus and Adonis.
I’d meant to ask the earl if he could take on one more poet, a brilliant Pygmalion who brought his characters to life, a playwright he was already familiar with to whom he was distantly related through the Ardens. But I did not want him to think I had set him up for such, or that I was greedy for more boons when he had showered me with kindnesses already.

But late on the third day of our journey, when I finally worked myself up to broaching the subject, he cried out, “Here we are!” and, like the boy he still was in so many ways, yanked back the leather curtain. The most beautiful place I’d ever seen, including Lord Leicester’s Kenilworth or the queen’s Whitehall Palace, arose before my eyes, and my well-rehearsed mention of Will went right out that window.

 

 

 

After a sumptuous dinner
that evening, at which I confess I continued to eat like a field hand—powdered beef and porpoise in mustard sauce, I recall—the earl gave me a tour of his ancestral home, a large, fortified mansion called New Place with vast grounds surrounding it near the town of Titchfield.

“I must admit that my grandfather built all this from church lands confiscated under King Henry VIII,” he told me, looking not a whit rueful for that. “The gatehouse sits in the middle of what was the old church.” He pointed and turned me with a light touch on the small of my back. He had loaned—given me, he insisted—the most beautiful clothing I’d ever worn, left here by one of his cousins who wouldn’t miss it, he’d said. The tawny taffeta gown crinkled when he touched me or I walked, and I worried I’d soil my cork-soled, ivory-hued slippers on the grass or gravel.

“The great hall,” he went on, “was once the monastic refectory, and the old cloisters beyond became the central courtyard. The two wings comprised the rest of the church. But let’s go round to the back. I want to show you what we call the Wilderness.”

With my hand on his proffered arm, as if we were lord and lady of this great pile, we strolled through knot gardens surrounding a splashing fountain and out into the stretch of tall, leafy bushes and tree-topped bowers that were let run riot in a natural state.

“I’m going hunting at dawn on the morrow, so I will leave you to John’s tender mercies to begin your Italian lessons,” he told me as our feet crunched along a gravel path. This was, I thought, the perfect place for a seduction, but I felt armed with several excuses, should it come to that. Somehow his youth, nearly a decade younger than my age, usually kept me from thinking of him that way, but perhaps men were men.