Mistress Shakespeare (3 page)

In my mind’s eye, I catch glimpses of Anna Rosalina de Verona only through a veil, for she died of the sweat when I was but four. Of all the people I have known, I have met only one other who had a country English father and an Italian mother, and that Will’s friend, the playwright John Marston. But Marston’s mother was the daughter of a learned Italian physician, not that of a traveling tumbler.

So I treasure only haunted memories of my mother. I can summon up the sound of her silver laughter, her lithe body, how she held my hand as we danced through flowered fields when Da was away. She was, I pried out of him one time, “light on her feet and quick to caper.” Though I heard him once whisper to her in the night that she was his “cloud dancer,” he’d made her swear that she would never mount a taut rope again to dart along it as if she walked on wind.

She vowed she would never more dance even upon the ground for groats and ha’pennies under the avid stares of other men. So sad that someone who had seen sunny Italy and famous France and most of England, someone so graceful and ethereal, should die burning up with fever, twisting in sodden sheets in a tiny, earthbound bed.

The day she was buried in the graveyard at old St. Andrew’s in our village of Temple Grafton, outside Stratford-Upon-the-Avon, was the only time I saw Da cry. I hear he bedded with another woman after, but I’m sure he never loved but once. For my down-to-earth da to call anyone a cloud dancer, he must have loved her desperately.

“Won’t you tell me more of her, Da?” I’d ask off and on.

“Naught more to tell,” he’d mutter, frowning as smoke from his tobacco pipe curled around his head.

He was about our timber and plaster cottage but a few days now and then and, when he was away, I was shifted off to distant cousins in Stratford. Da owned four packhorses and worked for the Greenaways who, with up to twenty sturdy carriers, took goods back and forth from Stratford to London every fortnight.

Pack trains were goodly sized, for robbers still lurked on the roads near Bloxham and High Wycombe. Cheese and lambskins, linseed oil, woolen shirts and hose and Will’s da’s fine gloves made the trip from Stratford to markets in Londontown. After more than a week away—the plodding trip took three days and two nights one way—the pack train returned with fineries like sugar, rice, dates, figs, raisins, almonds and special orders for Stratford folk.

The packers unloaded the horses near Market Cross, down the way from the Shakespeare house and not far from where I stayed. I recall the thrill of hearing the pack train was back in town, of running with the other children to see what would be unloaded and to hug my da. Having seen naught of the world, I thought the market town of Stratford was the big city, especially compared to the clumps of cottages huddled about the old church in Temple Grafton. Even when I squeezed descriptions of London out of Da, I could not fathom how fat and full a place it was.

“But tell me again about when you first saw my mother in London,” I urged him many times. He stayed bent over his bread and cheese, which I delighted to serve him in her stead.

“’Twas in the churchyard of St. Paul’s there,” he would say, speaking slowly. “Packed with people, it was too.”

Da was not quick with words or movement nor could he sign his name but always made his mark with a cross. Since he’d lost my mother, who had somewhere learned to read, write and do simple sums, he’d paid an old former priest to teach me those skills, else I’d have stayed illiterate. In the gentry class and the gentles above them, most women could read and write, but Da had barely dragged us off the bottom rung of England’s ladder of ranks and rights. His dream was for us to keep our own accounts for our own pack train to London.

“Got to keep good records,” he told me. “We’ll not prosper on our own if you can’t keep writ down the count of what goods we send and bring back. Else, no need for you to have no fancy learning.”

“But you said, if I get even better at learning words you will bring me a book or two to read. Da, you promised!”

“Aye, I said so, and I’ll bring it from the very stalls in Paul’s Churchyard where I first saw your beautiful bird of a mother tiptoeing across the very air and knew she must be mine.”

So he had not forgotten that I asked him about my mother. And when he talked like that, I knew my da had a poet’s heart, and I wanted to have one too.

 

 

 

I’d like to create
some wondrous, bejeweled day when I first exchanged words with William Shakespeare, but, since I’m telling true, I must admit it was this way: Will was walking past my cousin George Whateley’s wool drapery shop one gray-sky day the April when I was still eight and he was newly nine. He was on his way to deliver a pair of fine calfskin, wool-lined gloves, and I brazenly fell into step beside him. He had auburn hair and bright hazel eyes so alert in his pale face. Even then he was taller than me by a head.

I’d seen Will about the Henley Street neighborhood before, usually running errands for his father or setting out for high adventures with his best friend, Dick Field, a cooper’s son, but I’d never really been alone with Will. I spent most of my free time with Katherine Hamlett, called Kat, the haberdasher’s eldest daughter, but she was working in her family’s shop that day. I loved Kat and liked Will and Dick well enough because they’d never made sport of my dark skin nor called me anything but Anne.

When my da was away and I stayed in town, my cousin by marriage Mrs. Whateley ordered me about a good deal, but never watched me overmuch if I went outside. A bit bored and in full knowledge that Will was the eldest of the Shakespeare brood and that his father had been master chief alderman, bailiff and ale taster—quite a well-respected man—I asked Will, “May I go along then?”

“I don’t mind,” he said with wide eyes and an exaggerated shrug. “If you won’t be missed.”

“I won’t be missed.”

“My mother would smack me good for just walking off without a word.”

“I don’t have a mother, and Mrs. Whateley pays me little heed.”

“She should,” he said, picking up his pace.

I thought him a bit of a nitpick, but looking back, I wonder if he didn’t mean I was worth something and should be better watched. Freedom was fine with me. I was on the brink of turning hoyden and liked nothing more, when not doing household chores, to dance about to made-up verses or venture on walks away from Henley Street and even out of town.

I entertained Will with songs and dances most of the way, despite the fact that the week before Da had caught me skipping and whirling along a grapevine I’d laid out like a rope on the grass. He’d boxed my ears ’til they rang. Smiling, then laughing, Will matched me back, rhyme for silly rhyme. He showed me the finely stitched pair of men’s gloves but put them back straightaway in their packet of parchment paper.

I’d not fathomed he was going so far that day, nigh on a half hour’s walk to a gate in the hedge hard by the southeast edge of the Forest of Arden. There, by a big oak, in a meadow of bobbing wildflowers, he met a finely garbed and mounted servant of one of his distant Arden kin. Will’s mother was an Arden, an honorable name, stretching far back. The Ardens were possessed of many properties. Will told me that plain enough and more than once. I’d heard the whispers that Will’s da had “married up” and come into goods and fine, fertile land through his wife’s handsome dowry.

I reckoned our two sets of parents were about as far apart as the earth and the moon. My little village of Temple Grafton was nicknamed Hungry Grafton for the poverty of its soil, though the fields produced stone and lime. Sadly, its claim to once belonging to the heroic Knights Templar was a sham as the land had been held by the humble Knights Hospitallers before Great Harry, the queen’s father, overthrew the Catholic Church in England. I told Will my tutor had said my cottage was on land once bestowed on Henry de Grafton by King Henry I, which I thought was so wonderful.

“Imagine,” I said with a sigh, “the very land on which I live was once the gift of a king! And that same Henry de Grafton then gave some of it to Simon de Arden, one of your ancestors, that’s what my tutor said.”

He sobered even more when I told him I could read and write, even if I admitted I needed much practice yet. “But the Shakespeares are related to the Ardens, and you aren’t kin to Henry de Grafton, are you?” he asked, kindly enough, though that burst my bubble. Still, he didn’t call me Gypsy or Little Egypt as some of the other Henley Street children did.

“And what’s this about a tutor?” he demanded. “My best friend, Dick, and I attend grammar school in Church Lane, but we have no tutor.”

“It’s old Father Berowne from up by Knowle, then he used to pastor St. Andrew’s,” I told him. “Besides paying him a shilling now and then, Da brings him things from London to pay the fee and lets him sit at supper with us too.”

“School keeps me busy,” he said, “and I’m always getting spastic hand from learning to stitch gloves and control a quill. I keep snapping off the nibs of the pens and pluck our poor goose until it’s nearly naked. I’m learning Latin and Greek, though it would truly suit me to stay with our own mother tongue. There are enough words in it and more to be made just like cobbling up a shoe, but Master Hunt caned me at grammar school when he heard I’d said that about both of those old, honored languages.”

I knew not one whit about lofty Latin or Greek. I was envious, but didn’t let on. “I have a bargain with my da,” I said, still trying to top him. “If I keep our records and sums straight, he’ll bring me a book from London once a year, one with pretty poems, maybe even sonnets. He’s soon going to have a pack train of his own. Then maybe I’ll get even more books to read.”

“I truly covet books, and my father says he can borrow me some from Edward Arden, the head of my mother’s family. But my father won’t like your da’s rival pack train,” Will said as we tarried. We were skipping stones in the Avon, upstream from the bridge a bit where the fierce eddy always snagged things and swept them round and round. “Among other ventures, he’s put money in the Greenaway business,” he added, I suppose hinting that my da indirectly worked for his.

“Your da’s a busy man,” I said only.

“More like, he is hardworking and important to our town. It’s his ambition to make us worthy of the Ardens. But his livelihood is not just inherited wealth from my mother’s side with their fine coat-of-arms and vast Park Hall lands about eighteen miles from here. You know,” he added as he sat down with a sigh on the riverbank and rested his elbows on his raised knees, “the best thing is my father’s the one who signs the permits when the companies of traveling players come to perform in the Guild Hall. A troupe called the Queen’s Men are coming back soon and Lord Leicester’s Men too. You ought to see them prance about and dance jigs.”

“Oh, they have dancing?”

His eyes took on a distant look as if he saw things I could not. He suddenly sounded awed, and his voice fell to a mere whisper. “Even if there are supposed to be corpses on the stage, everyone gets up and dances at the end, the merriest of jigs.”

“I’d like that better than deaths and sorrow to be left with. Do they know Her Majesty and have they seen her close?” I asked, clasping my hands against my chest. To glimpse the queen of England in the flesh was then my life’s desire.

“I warrant they do and have. ’Tis said she fancies all sorts of play and pastimes.”

“But does it cost dear to see these players?”

“Oh, aye, there’s money in it, for a certain. Standing between my father’s legs on a bench at the Guild Hall, I saw my first play when I was five. The clown made me about split my sides. Wintertime, it was when it was so cold my little brother Gilbert’s tongue stuck to a pewter cup when he licked it, and everyone was blowing on their fingers who didn’t have warm gloves, and people spoke with white puffs of air as if those tiny clouds could carry their quick words to stinging ears.”

“I shall see these players this time and hereafter, just like you,” I vowed as I tried to skip my last stone, only to see it devoured by the mouth of the eddy.

Two more things I recall after that day, besides the fact that Will never just said something plain, like the weather was cold, but always made word pictures to prove it. I worked harder than ever at my reading and writing. And, after that first day I spent with Will, I always called my sire
Father
to others and never just
Da
again.

CHAPTER TWO

The most thrilling event
of my younger years was when the queen came to visit our part of the country on what was called her summer progress. As mayor of our town and Arden kin, Will’s father took him to see her grand entry into Kenilworth Castle, the country seat of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, Her Majesty’s longtime favorite.

Kenilworth lay fifteen miles from Stratford, so I never would have been able to go on my own, though I vowed to my father I’d run away if he didn’t take me. But, God be praised, all pack trains in the area were hired to bring in supplies for the queen’s visit. After much cajoling and pleading, I was allowed to accompany my father and his men. Poor Kat, my best friend, sobbed and sobbed at not being able to go, but I vowed I’d describe every royal detail, down to the rings on her fingers and bells on her toes. Will’s father also took Will’s friend Dick Field, but my father said one wench was enough to watch with all the carters and carriers about.

Everyone knew that the earl—’twas said the queen always called him Robin—would like to seduce or coerce Her Majesty to wed him. But ever since his wife had died under mysterious circumstances, which threatened both Leicester’s and Elizabeth’s reputations, she had managed to keep him in his place while still enjoying his good company. The earl had planned a fine supper for her vast train of courtiers under a big tent at Long Itchington. After what Will called their “
al fresco
repast,” Leicester would escort Her Majesty seven miles to his castle for a visit to last at least a fortnight.