Mistress Shakespeare (4 page)

When my father and his men—he had four laborers now and a dozen horses for his own pack train—finished delivering their last load of victuals to the castle, he left the animals guarded by two men and found us a place along the road where the queen would pass before entering the huge, redbrick edifice of the castle.

I noted well the whispers from the crowd as we waited, pressed in together like cod in brine: “Leicester wouldn’t have this grand place to entertain her if she hadn’t given it to him—and his title . . . His family’s full of upstarts . . . Maybe murdered his wife so he could court the queen . . . Leicester’s father a traitor . . . beheaded . . . rumors afoot that the Catholics in the area will turn their backs on the queen or try to do away with Leicester, her watchdog here’bouts . . .”

All I knew was I’d never seen the likes of Kenilworth Castle. Massive, with many fine towers guarding its stalwart flanks and rows of banners fluttering from its ramparts, it sprawled between a spring-fed lake and a vast hunt park full of deer. On the lake, I saw a man-made floating island, which, ’twas whispered, was to be part of the queen’s welcome. If I squinted, I could see a woman on the wooden platform, gowned in white silk, her hair golden in the sinking sun. Oh, if that could only be my place in this vast, shoving array of folk, for I could barely see from here. Lord Leicester had ordered an arched bridge built over the water for a special entry, and I had to get close to that to be sure I could espy that lady all in white greet Her Majesty.

And then I spotted Will, or rather his father, who had already uncapped. The bald spot on the back of John Shakespeare’s head shone in the sun. They stood not far from us, but closer to the road in the second row behind the many local men of import in their blue velvet Leicester tunics embossed with the chained-bear symbol of his coat-of-arms.

“Can I edge closer?” I asked my father. “I won’t go far.”

“All right, but don’t lose sight of me,” he ordered, craning to look down the road in the direction from which the procession would come.

I didn’t tell him it was the Shakespeares I saw, for between the Greenaways and my father, Silas, there was bad blood. Despite being offered more money to stay with the Shakespeare-supported carriers, my father had formed his own company and, by underpricing the Greenaways, was off to a sound start. Will and I never broached the subject, but so we wouldn’t be seen together, we now met under Clopton Bridge to take our rare walks. When our companions, Dick and Kat, went out to the country with us for a stolen afternoon, they knew to meet there too.

At last the buzz of the crowd changed from murmurs and mutterings to shouts. “Hey, ho! Huzzah! She’s coming! Uncap there, knaves! Stand back, get back! Make way! Make way for the queen’s majesty!”

I wedged myself in the press of people one body away from Will, but he saw me leaning out to look. He reached over to squeeze the hand I held out to him. I was surprised he spoke to me with his sire so close, but the noise of the crowd covered his words.

“That’s Edward Arden, the head of my mother’s family, in the first row,” he said, pointing at a thin, glowering man, garbed all in black. He stood out like a harbinger of doom amidst the bright colors, especially in the row of Leicester livery.

“Did he forget his tunic?” I asked, for a man as important as Edward Arden in this area owed direct allegiance to Leicester.

He shook his head and leaned closer. “More like, he’s foregone it. Leicester’s been as mean as that bear on the tunics. He pesters and prosecutes recusants, and Cousin Edward’s spleen is up over it. But in this crowd, Her Majesty won’t notice.”

Recusants were those with Catholic loyalties or leanings. They were recorded and fined if they didn’t attend the Protestant church. In the early days of her reign, the queen had commanded that everyone could keep his conscience private, but since several attempted Catholic plots and rebellions, she’d let her advisors convince her to change her policy.

But none of that mattered to me now, only glimpsing the great and glorious queen of England. Menfolk tossed their caps into the air. I had to remember to breathe as the parade came in sight. Guards on horseback, prancing steeds of the nobility raised a great cloud of dust, for it was said, a hundred courtiers and four hundred servants traveled with her. I grew dizzy in the press of people as the scarlet-and-gold-clad yeomen guards rotated past, each ahorse, each holding his ceremonial halberd upright from a stirrup. Then someone shouted, “The earl! Lord Leicester!” and I saw a handsome bearded man in peacock blue, mounted on a huge black horse and the queen in white beside him on a pure white steed with gold saddle stitching that gleamed in the sun.

A pox on it, I was on the wrong side to see her well! Maneuvering for position, I jostled others back when they bumped me. My ears rang with the cheers, then I was screeching too, “God bless Your Majesty, God bless good Queen Bess!”

Suddenly, it happened.

The earl looked straight at Will’s father and reined in. No, not at Will’s father, but at Edward Arden, standing with his legs spread and arms clasped over his chest—with his cap on his head—three people from me.

“Sir?” the earl clipped out as if it were a question, then said in a darker tone, “Sirrah!”

The only thing that vexed me was that the earl was blocking my clear view of the queen. When she moved a bit, I saw she had a golden hat with sweeping plumes perched on her red curls. It seemed she had no eyebrows, they were so fair. Her face was narrow, her chin pointed and her skin pale as milk despite her rouged cheeks. She nodded, smiled and waved, first to one side then the other. I thought her a goddess, eternally young, though she was over forty years of age. I was hoping she would speak to the crowd, but she said only—and I had to read her cherry-red lips—“Robin, not here.”

But it was Edward Arden’s voice that rang out from the buzz of the crowd. “I’ll not wear the livery of an upstart lackey!” he cried. “A chained bear indeed! Would that it were chained and not free to harry those who are not heretics but—”

Someone seized and stifled the shouting man. It might have been Will’s father. At the same time, the earl’s boot, still in a heavily encrusted metal stirrup, gave a kick or a shove and both Edward Arden and John Shakespeare toppled back into the crowd. Folk bounced into me, and we went down like bowling pins at least four rows deep. I righted myself and leaped up before the rest, even before Will.

In that brief moment, ere the earl and the queen rode on, I stood looking eye to eye with Elizabeth of England. However fair of face, her eyes were as dark as mine. That’s why I loved her even more, from that moment on, no matter what befell.

When the queen paused on the bridge over the lake, my father and I scrambled to get a good vantage point. We heard the Lady of the Lake greet the queen from her floating island, declaring in fine words how tradition said Kenilworth was once upon a time one of King Arthur’s castles of Camelot and how the lady had stayed in the lake awaiting the arrival of the next great monarch.

The couplets of the poem carried quite well over the water, once everyone hushed. I hoped Will could hear these glorious words for, as far as I was concerned, they surpassed any in the two plays we’d seen in the Guild Hall.

“And now,” the lovely lady on the island said to the queen, still ahorse on the bridge,

 

“Is the lord indeed mine to command?” the queen’s bell-clear voice rang out. “I would prefer to win all of your hearts!”

Everyone gasped as she swept an arm toward us and then rode into the castle. I mouthed those few words over and over. Such a short speech but so full of wisdom and wit—and power over a man, over a land, over us all.

I felt giddy and hardly startled when a gunfire salute rent the air, nor later when the sky boomed to life with the shooting stars, pikes of pleasure and whirling squibs of fireworks that reflected in the water. The bridge on which the queen had entered stood empty, and when at last the sky slipped into silence, my father pulled me away to sleep on the ground with him and his carriers around a fire.

But I didn’t sleep a wink and knew there was naught else I would ever want from life now that I’d seen the queen. That is until I overheard the next morn that one of Her Majesty’s entertainments one week hence would be on the bridge, given by an Italian tumbler who was “skilled at somersaults, turnings, caperings, and, upon the thin railings above the waters, fanciful flights.”

Of course I was wild
to return to Kenilworth to see the Italian tumbler, but my father’s pack train was bound for London the next week. He forbade me to go back, even if someone would take me. So, I vowed I would go with no one. But once I was deposited with the Whateleys on Henley Street and the pack train disappeared over Clopton Bridge, I set my plans in motion to go on my own.

“I’m bound and determined to see and speak with that tumbler,” I confided to Will, Dick and Kat as we met under the bridge the next day. “I won’t tell a lie to my father, even if he asks me later if I went—”

“Which,” pretty, brown-haired Kat put in with a toss of her curls, “he probably won’t ask, because he doesn’t say much. And you said he doesn’t like to bring up anything to remind him of your mother. I should like to have a love that dear someday,” she added with a sigh and sideways glance at Dick.

“Hell’s gates, leave off!” he declared, using one of the oaths he’d picked up when he delivered new-made tuns, kegs and firkins to the Burbages’ inn on Bridge Street. “Let’s just cut to the quick. How’s Anne going to get to Kenilworth and back without being caught?”

“And without being harmed,” Will added. He kept twisting his new seal ring his father had bought him. It bore some decorations and his initials W
.
S. in reverse so the blob of wax into which he pressed it would be readable. He prized it above all else, yet, it seemed to me, the ring made him feel as anxious as important.

“Anne,” he said, “you saw the hangers-on round the castle precincts. You may be yet young, but you are a fetching maid, and someone could give you trouble.”

Our gazes snagged. His face flushed, and something strange and unspoken leaped between us before he looked away. It was the first moment I felt more for Will than gratitude or envy, somehow all mixed up with other emotions I could not name.

“But the tumbler is to entertain at midday,” I argued. “If I go at first light on one of my father’s horses he’s left behind to rest in our stable back of our cottage, I could see the show and return before dark.”

“But you can’t ride,” Will protested. “And it’s not as easy as it looks, especially sidesaddle, which ladies always ride.”

“Do you think I’m a lady, Will Shakespeare?” I demanded, hands on my skinny hips. “Oh, I’d like to be, but never will. I’m going to tell Mrs. Whateley I need to walk to Temple Grafton to get something I forgot. I’ll dress like a lad, take one of the mounts and ride to see the tumbler and that’s that. Only, please, no matter what anyone asks of you, my friends, don’t let them know what I’ve done.”

I could tell Will was in a wretched mood. He’d hardly been able to enjoy anything since catastrophe had befallen the Ardens the day the queen arrived at Kenilworth. Edward Arden had been heavily fined by Lord Leicester and told privily to stay away from the earl’s august presence or he’d find his “Arden arse in prison.” But today, mayhap my crisis distracted Will.

We all swore secrecy and friendship forever. Dick pricked a fingertip of each of us so we could mingle blood to seal the vow. It hurt, and I know Kat and I flinched a bit, though both Will and Dick took the tiny cut with manly pride. Amazing how much that small wound bled so red as we touched fingers, holding our hands out and moving in a circle as if we were spokes in a turning wheel. More amazing, how many times I thought of that silly little rite over the years, and then how the pain was not on a crimson fingertip but deep in my heart.

Five days later, at dawn when I arrived at my father’s stables, Will was waiting with two horses saddled and a spare set of his clothes laid out for me in the straw.

When we arrived at Kenilworth,
I saw that people had set up temporary camps along the roads, forest edge and lake, hoping for another glimpse of the queen. ’Twas said she ventured out almost daily, sometimes to hunt in the forested chase, sometimes to walk the bridge and wave to the crowds. It was hard for me to believe that in one week I’d become so intent on seeing the Italian tumbler that Elizabeth Tudor had become of secondary import to me.

Perhaps because we both led big, sturdy horses or because we looked like lads waiting for their masters to arrive, people let us through to a good place to view the bridge.

“My mother used to dance upon a mere cord, thin as a cobweb,” I told Will, craning my neck to look up and out at the narrow railing.

“Pretty words,” he muttered, twisting his seal ring. “Yet tales become more fantastical with time and the telling, you know.”

Ordinarily I would have been vexed at him for throwing cold water on my fancies, but I was so grateful he’d come along. Since I was garbed like a lad, he’d even given me hints about riding astride. My thighs were so sore I could barely walk steadily, but I tried not to let on. I knew Will could get in terrible trouble for this. He was always worried about letting his father down, and I shuddered to think what his mother would do if she’d known the Shakespeare heir had ridden off for the day with the Whateley wench. Will’s sister Joan had called me that, and of a certain she didn’t hear it from Will.

The queen and her courtiers evidently strode out upon the bridge, for the crowd farther up the banks of the lake let loose a mighty cheer. Our angle of sight was bad to watch Her Majesty but good to see the tumbler when he began to tiptoe upon the narrow railing high above the lake as if he had not a care in the world.