Mistress Shakespeare (30 page)

Each time he mentioned his son, he became misty-eyed, but the moment we were hidden from the house, he seized me and I him. His embrace was so fierce he hurt me, but I only hugged and kissed him back harder.

“There,” he said, setting me away at arm’s length. “It won’t do to have you go in all swollen-lipped with rosy beard-burn on your cheeks and chin. Would that—would that make either of your companions jealous?”

“If you are worried about the earl, think again. He’s been a perfect host.”

“Perfect? A high compliment. And Florio at your private lessons in the language of love?”

“Who says so?” I demanded, pulling back slightly from his strong hands. “The French think they speak the language of love.”

“Don’t try to change the subject, though I imagine your old swain the wine merchant would be willing to tutor you in that tongue too. Actually, Southampton made a jest of Florio teaching you with an ‘agile’ tongue.”

“Southampton’s jests are sometimes wide of the mark, and Florio calls all languages tongues.”

“I can’t wait to meet him. Quite cozy here, is it not, despite the scope and size of this place? Anne—forgive me, you’ve saved my hide again, and I am ever grateful, but I’d prefer to be a pauper rather than have you bargain too much away.”

I yanked free of him. “Pretty words, but an insult to me nonetheless. I’ll not have you go all green-eyed again as you did over Kit. Kit Marlowe is a different breed from these men.”

“Ah. Then let me only say one more thing of that.” We began to stroll back toward the house. “Lord Southampton praised my plays but asked me for just two lines from my long poem, which I told him was the story of the seduction of a handsome young man by a skilled temptress, an older woman. So, from
Venus and Adonis
, I chose, ‘Rosecheeked Adonis with his amber tresses / Fair fire-hot Venus charming him to love her . . .’”

“I still mislike the tenor of your quote and your implications, Will Shakespeare. And to think I longed for you, thought only of you during the plague and these days here.”

“To quote my new patron again, ‘Ha!’ But let’s go in for dinner.”

If Will was seething at the meal, I could not have cared less for so was I. It panicked me that John seemed to see beneath our pretence of politeness at the lavish meal. Afterward, the four of us took turns reading from
Venus and Adonis
and the death scenes from
Romeo and Juliet
. Southampton seemed thrilled that Will had named one of the feuding families the Montagues, for, as well as the Ardens, he had relations with that surname. I surmised that his lordship would be seeing many an allusion to his kith and kin in future works by William Shakespeare.

I excused myself early and left the three men talking literary pursuits. Though I had worthy observations and opinions, I was tiring of acting as if all was fine between me and friend Shakespeare. I swear, if London had not been a deadly place right now or if I had a home to retreat to in Temple Grafton, I would ride out of here—wolves in the woods or not—at first dawn. It also annoyed me that I could hear the earl’s boisterous laughter clear up the grand staircase to the second floor.

Men! We women sometimes arranged the world for them, and they only looked askance and cursed us too, thinking they had contrived their own good fortune. But this country had a female monarch, one who moved men about like chess pieces as she had her numerous foreign suitors—no doubt the way she handled Southampton and his dear friend Lord Essex too. Whatever the earl, Will and the whole world might think of Elizabeth Regina, at least in how she handled men, I wanted to be just like her!

 

 

 

“He studies you,”
Will whispered the next afternoon as he and I retreated to a wainscotted withdrawing room to prepare to read a scene from his play in progress,
The Taming of the Shrew.
The earl thought it would be amusing to have me take the woman’s part instead of a boy.

“The truth is,” I hissed back, “Southampton has eyes only for himself.”

“’S bones, I mean John Florio.”

“Like you, he studies all things.”

“Ah, then he is like me? Is that true in other ways too, such as an unslakable passion for you?”

“I weary of your empty, ill-informed accusations, both direct and deviously indirect.”

“A good line. May I not use it for my heroine shrew, Katherina, who is ‘as brown in hue as hazel nuts . . .’ whose ‘only fault, and that is faults enough, is that she is intolerable curst and shrewd and froward.’”

“I cannot abide you. I used to think I adored you, but you are working to change that every day! If I had ended up dead from the plague and in a mass grave like my dear Maud, you would probably have been relieved, for you would not have to fret anon that I am so much as conversing with another man.”

“Ah,” Southampton said, surprising us with his entry into the room, “I cannot catch the words but the tone suggests an exciting scene for this evening. May I not have a glimpse of it now? I’ve always found it hard to wait for gifts, which reminds me, Will, I have here a purse of coins for you to get
Venus and Adonis
published, including in it several crowns far different from the one on Her Majesty’s head.”

That wasn’t very clever, I thought, but Will laughed at the jest, and I forced a smile as the fine leather purse exchanged hands. Will had told me he’d just written a flowery dedication to the earl for his prized poetic endeavor:
To the Right Honorable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield.

“Well, then, a little taste of the scene you’ve chosen from the play,” the earl prompted and perched on the edge of a chair like an expectant child.

“Will it not spoil your enjoyment of it later, my lord?” Will asked, no doubt hoping that we did not have to read this scene when we’d been bickering. Yet was that not exactly what Petruchio and Katherina were doing? Had Will again based yet another play on our own plight? This comedy sported another dusky-skinned heroine with hot Italian blood. Devil take him, the dog-hearted wretch had used me again!

I should have just stomped off in an impromptu exit and let Southampton wonder if that was in Will’s precious play, but I took the roll of my lines he handed me.

“From Act II, my lord,” Will said. “I’ve only written about half of the comedy but this will serve. On the road with the actors, there is little time or a quiet place to juggle learning new lines and writing them too.”

“Say on, both of you. A play set in Italy, is it not? I should fetch my Florio but he’s hardly a dramatic expert like I, and he’ll see it soon enough this evening. Say on, say on.”

Will pointed to a place on my roll, and I began with the shrew Katherina’s words. She was the beautiful—at least he gave me that—termagant elder daughter of a man who refused to let his charming younger daughter wed until the shrew was off his hands. So the younger sister’s suitors had recruited Petruchio, a strong, volatile man who insisted he could tame her and wed her at any cost, in fact, for a pretty purse much like the one Will still held in one hand.

 

I had always thought I would make a fine actor, that I could learn my lines and stay in my part, but this was too much. I hadn’t seen these words before, so I was reading blind, and how dare he pick this scene for us to recite before others. “Married to no man but me?” The vile wretch!

“Something I ate . . .” I lied, dropping the roll on a chair and pressing my hands to my stomach. Though I tried to look as if I was not fleeing headlong, I ran from the room.

I locked my bedchamber door behind me and threw myself on the huge bed. Sobbing into the bolster until I was almost sick indeed, I rehearsed all I’d done for Will—none of which was deserving of his bitter treatment of me, especially after I’d gotten him his precious patronage from Southampton, the wretch. I curled up into a tight ball, lying on my side, and tried to hate him as I gasped for breath. I should be wed—wed elsewhere—with children, at least three of them. I should be wife to a man, however meek, boring and dull-headed, who adored and respected me, though if he were a bit jealous of me for my beauty and brains, I could bear that. But not this! Never this!

Yet I had to admit, I had known from the first that I was different; I was meant to forge a path of my own, to dance on a high, taut wire, as it were. And so it was with me and Will. I could try to change that, try to leave him and tell him to leave me alone, but then I might just as well have thrown myself from a high wire to the pavement of St. Paul’s or into the rushing Thames. My tears finally spent themselves and, emotionally exhausted, I fell into fitful sleep.

That evening the earl sent a doctor from the nearby town of Southampton to me, but I told him I only needed sleep and would not unlock the door. In naught but my shift, I lay on my back and stared up at the lady with a unicorn elaborately embroidered on the underside of the huge canopy of my bed.

John knocked later to tell me through the door that Will had read Petruchio and Southampton himself had read Kate. I told him, in quite decent Italian, I thought, that I needed time alone, for I had not taken time to mourn the death of my friend and grief had quite crept up on me.

“Which friend is dead to you now?” he asked, still speaking
sotto voce
.

I rose, went to the door and pressed my mouth to the crack. “I trust you to keep such comments to yourself, for I mislike spies.”

“His lordship thinks of Lord Essex as his elder brother. May you not think of me that way? I would have it otherwise, but I am wed even if you are not. I see the lay of the land and, despite being a linguist,
Contessa
, I know how to hold my tongue.”

“Grazie, il mio amico Giovanni
,” I told him. He bid me
buona notte
in his lilting, smooth Italian. But I was no more back in bed than he rapped on my door again.

“I need my rest now,” I called to him.

“No rest for the wicked,” came Will’s sharp voice.

My heartbeat kicked up. In her delirium, Maud had said that before she died.

“What is it, Will? I’m sorry I could not read that scene you’d set me up for to remind me of what I can never have.”

“I chose it not for that. It was the best scene for him, considering the play is still in tatters. Now open this door, or I shall pound it down, I don’t care who hears me or who rescinds his offer to support my work.”

“Go, fool!” I spit his own words from the play at him.

He hit the door once so hard it shuddered on its frame. The lunatic would ruin the door and himself. I got up, yanked the bolt open and let him in.

He closed the door none too quietly and, with a frowning glance around my bedchamber and then at how scantily I was dressed with my hair all wild, he put his hands on my shoulders and pinned me against the wall. I was angry too—furious at him. But to be so close, to feel his strength and heat almost made me crumble at his feet. He pressed closer, thighs, hips and chest. His body was as hard as the carved wood behind me.

“I was wrong to suspect you were swept away by Southampton,” he said. “It’s that honey-tongued spouter of Italian you favor. I have proof now from my own eyes.”

“As soon as the plague leaves London, you’d best report to Bedlam, for you have gone mad!” I told him, trying to shove him back. “He’s kindly tutored me—”

“In many arts, I’ll bet!”

I tried to slap his face, but my arm was snagged against his. I stepped on his foot instead. He swore but did not budge.

“I was tutored at your new patron’s insistence,” I ground out through gritted teeth, “but I was grateful for it, thrilled to get to finally learn my mother’s language. If you must know, I find Giovanni Florio,” I said, drawing his name out, “a very circumspect and kind person, unlike another of close proximity I could name.”

“I saw him leaving you, then whispering sweet good nights at your door.”

“You didn’t see him leave me, because he only spoke through the door to tell me that Southampton had read the shrew’s part. But do you know what? He’s only the second living person, thank the Lord, who has grasped how much I have loved you, how much I have given up for you. And, no doubt, what an addlepated fool I am for such stupidity.”

I cursed him and began to cry. This man did not deserve my tears, my time, my love. It was flattering perhaps, in some perverted way, that he was sometimes jealous of me, but he had no right—no right, but that I loved him and ever would, and he surely yet loved me above all safety and sanity.

I went on crying and talking. “Jennet’s the only one I ever told that we were wed, and I think Maud guessed at the very end what we mean to each other—‘my genius,’ she called you the night she died . . . and John Florio only guessed it when I asked the earl to become your patron. He’s only a wise friend, but the Lord knows I need friends, for in the plague I was so alone . . .”

“Anne, Anne, forgive me!” he cried and sank to his knees before me with his arms tight around my hips and one cheek pressed against my belly, making a fierce fluttering there. “I just cannot grasp how any man can keep his thoughts and hands off you, given but the slightest look or smile. I have let you down so, then I come back from Stratford raving about my children—my son . . . But for the other, she’s hardly speaking to me, though she spends my money well enough . . . I swear to you, we did not lie together, but forgive me for all else . . .”