Mistress Shakespeare (41 page)

Pressed in and pushed, we fought our way down to the first floor and bucked the exodus of the last of the shoving groundlings. The two wooden pillars that guarded the stage were burning partway down, and the curtain and railing of the musicians’ gallery were aroar with orange flames. Pieces of charred or flaming thatch rained down as we ran for the stage. The players had the tiring room door wide open. That created a sucking draft that fanned the flames, but they were carrying armloads of costumes out the back of the theatre.

“I’ll help them!” I shouted to Will.

“Go!”

In the increasing, choking smoke, I lugged out armloads of heavy court costumes. At least the actors were attired in some of the best today, if they weren’t ruined by flying cinders. Backstage boys carried out thrones, tables, a cloud, a ship. The roar of the flames soaring skyward made speaking nearly impossible. Everyone dripped sweat; faces were so darkened with roiling smoke we looked like blackamoors.

The Globe, our beautiful Globe, was dying. Gasping for fresh air, I fell to my knees near the house where Will used to write. I saw John Fletcher in tears. Yes, everyone else seemed accounted for—but for Will, I thought, scanning the crowd. Surely, he had not gone into this house or down to the river, for a bucketful of water would be futile.

“Richard!” I screamed to Burbage and leaped up to pull at his arm as he stalked back and forth tearing his hair. “Where’s Will? Did you see Will?”

“I saw him with you!”

“He told me to help. I haven’t seen him since.”

“We saved the playbooks and rolls from the tiring room . . .” he got out before we both stared at each other, wide-eyed. Will kept copies of everything he’d written under the stage, accessed only through the trapdoor. He’d intended to have it all published as his sonnets had finally been, but he’d been so busy . . .

“I’m going in!” I screamed.

“No! It’s an inferno!”

He seized my wrist; I yanked and scratched at him to get free. I was out of his grasp and tearing toward the tiring room door before I had time to fear. I sucked in one last breath and plunged inside.

The entire interior seemed one huge bonfire. Heated air belched at me. Flaming timbers thudded into the pit and even onto the stage, and smoke blinded and suffocated me. I wished my skirts weren’t so full, for they suddenly seemed like ropes around my legs, and I feared they would catch fire.

But the trapdoor to what the players called hell was only a short run away. Hell—to be trapped in hell and to die there.

I stumbled about at first, fearful I’d missed it. It had an iron ring recessed in the floor. I learned if I crawled on the boards, the smoke was a bit lighter. What if Will went down there and—

Where was that ring, that door?

“Anne! Anne!”

Burbage’s voice, not Will’s. My lungs were bursting to breathe, and I dared not answer him, or I’d suck in more smoke.

I bumped into a huge wooden chair—the king’s throne, one that had been moved but not carried out to save it . . . save it . . .

Yes, it rested on the trapdoor, and if Will had gone down there, the weight could keep the door closed.

I began to cough and gag, but I heard and felt pounding on the door below me. I shoved the chair away and reached for the iron ring. It burned my hand. I screamed, sucking in more hot air and choking on the stench of burning wood and straw, the curtains, the sweet-scented cushions . . . Hacking, I wrapped my skirt hem around the ring, and then Richard appeared on his knees beside me to help lift it.

The door slammed up as Will shoved at it from the inside. He had been trapped in hell. How the players would joke of that—if we made it out. Richard reached to help Will up, but he thrust out the big leather box of what he’d almost died to save.

My eyes streaming tears, I lifted the box, and Richard pulled Will up. As we ran in the direction we thought was the tiring room door, the entire flaming musicians’ gallery crashed behind us. Staggering like blind King Lear, we found the open door by the shouts of those outside. My hair was singed and my skirts on fire, but the players put it out by wrapping me in King Henry’s heavy velvet cape. Will and I half crawled, half fell into each other’s arms, not caring who saw us together or sobbing.

And then, like the others—and a growing crowd that came across the river—we simply stared at the destruction. The playhouse we’d saved and hauled across the river nearly fifteen years ago on that cold, cold day became a gigantic torch in the evening sky.

Crying, coughing, the players, the playwrights, the others—even most of the audience that had stayed—stood silently, many arm in arm, and watched the remains of the Globe crash to a seething skeleton.

Then we stood too, in honor of it all. With the rescued box of his work at his feet, Will held me tight to him, shaking like he had the ague. Finally, our legs gave out, and we sat down on the ground as the burned bones of the Globe tumbled to its brick foundation. As night came and some neighbors moved among us with food and drink, we watched the crimson flames mute to a golden glow.

Finally, sometime later, Richard Burbage cried in a loud voice, “We will rebuild. We will rebuild! The Globe is gone, but not our dreams nor our determination.”

“A fine speech,” Will whispered to me, his voice hoarse with smoke and tears. “So many fine speeches here . . .”

We were glad when it started to rain because it washed us. The final embers of what had made Will’s fame and could have marked his funeral pyre hissed out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

But that same year
in which fire took the Globe, Will gave me the most glorious gift. The Blackfriars Gatehouse had come up for sale, and he bought it for me, though he put it in a friend’s name so that no one would know it was mine—ours—and so that, should he die, it would not go to his wife.

“I can’t believe it’s ours. I can’t believe it!” I cried. We danced in it as we had once before, a pavane and a gay galliard, though we were soon out of breath in the latter.

“Ah, I fear my wild dancing days are over!” he told me as we leaned in the very corner where we’d once risked making love. “But not my dancing days between the sheets once we get that big bed in here.”

Holding hands, we rushed from room to room, ecstatic, looking out every window, planning where our furniture would go. Ah, if only we had owned this place for all the years we’d been in London, I thought, then scolded myself for that. After all, the first time we saw this place together, Will had three pounds to his name and look at him now: in fame, fortune and influence, he’d outdone every other force in the English theatre.

“And we’ll be close to the Blackfriars Theatre here,” I rattled on, “to the Burbages, to Richard Field too. I can’t wait to get Kate here to show her this place . . .” Then it struck me that our dear godchild was twenty-five years old and betrothed. Where had the years gone? Where had it all gone?

No matter, I told myself, thrusting those thoughts away. Anne Whateley now had a home every bit as grand as Anne Hathaway’s New Place in Stratford, and much more to my liking. It would be our London house, for we were both back and forth to Warwickshire more than ever. It would be our safe haven, our—

We startled at a knock on the door. Things had been so up and down this year that we both froze, for, despite our joy, we feared the worst. Will’s last living brother had recently died, so, of his seven siblings, only his sister Joan remained. All these years I’d been an only child, but which was worse—to be alone or to have so many to lose?

Will opened the door. The head of my pack train, Stephen Dench, stood there, grizzled and slightly stooped, a grandfather of nine already. If there was any reminder of years flying past, the people around us were that, for somehow Will and I never changed to each other.

“Heard at your place you’d be here,” Stephen said. “Burbage told me.”

“Some problem with orders?” I asked as I stepped forward and held out my hand for the paper in his hand.

He shook his head. “For Master Shakespeare, from home. His daughter, the doctor’s wife, sent it with me ’cause our pack train left right away, thinking if I found you, I’d find him.”

“I see,” I said and handed the sealed piece of parchment to Will, as Stephen tipped his cap and thudded down the stairs.

Will stared at the epistle as if it were a poisonous snake. Since it was from Susannah, what if Anne Hathaway were—were ill?

He broke the seal and frowned when he read the letter. “Susannah’s suing that man who gave her such trouble in public, Rafe Smith,” he said as I stood there breathless, clasping my hands.

“For defamation—the things he implied?” I prompted.

“Now he claims she committed adultery with him and gave him the running of the reynes, and she’s begging me to ask you to testify on her behalf in court.”

“Adultery with the likes of him! And that she gave that bawdy beef-wit gonorrhea? He’ll ruin her and John Hall!”

“And the Shakespeares, at least in Stratford. It’s outrageous, an attempt to bring her—and her mother—down.”

“That it is. But me to testify? Back in Stratford? Last time I stood up for Kat in court there I—we—lost so much, each other for too many years, and we don’t have too many years anymore.”

“It’s not to be in Stratford, and that’s another thing that frets me. It’s to be at Worcester Cathedral in the bishop’s Consistory Court.”

“What’s that?”

“The nearest high-ranking religious court. It deals with issues of morality and is presided over by the chancellor of the diocese. In short, it’s serious. Curse that woman for flaunting herself.”

“I can’t believe it of Susannah, so—”

“I mean Anne! She’s rubbed everyone’s noses in my money and success, so is it any wonder they resent us! I don’t believe these charges against Susannah, for she loves and respects John. Well, you will have to refuse this request, because on the stand, you must answer anything and everything they ask—”

“All is true.”

“What? If they are out to besmirch Susannah’s reputation, they will surely rejoice in ruining yours and mine. I can’t let you do this, so she will just have to find someone else to testify.”

“You may tell your daughter that you asked, and I accepted,” I told him, propping my hands on my hips.

“No, my love,” he ordered, shaking his head. “No. I’ll absolutely not allow it, and that is final.”

 

 

 

While I was waiting
in an anteroom to be called to testify before the chancellor and court, I was strangely calm, perhaps numb.

Granted, I’d never seen massive Worcester Cathedral before and was awed by it, this place where, just over three decades ago, Will and I, though still in Stratford, had been granted a marriage bond. Then too this chapter house where the trial was being heard was impressive with its wainscotted walls, tiled floors and high-vaulted courtroom that Kate and I had peeked into before anyone had arrived.

The protocol for the proceedings was complicated. I’d been told I must address the presiding judge, the robed and bewigged chancellor, either as “worshipful sir” or “sir” and must refer to the court itself as “this venerable court.” By peeking out the anteroom door, I’d seen quite a crowd go in—including our dear Kate and her parents to boost my morale—and then the procession of the chancellor and his apparitor, who carried the court’s mace and seal, followed by secretaries and aides.

As I waited for the cheese seller John Lane to testify before me, I admit I became a bit on edge. But God’s truth, I would have been more afraid to face Cecil in the depths of the queen’s wardrobe again—or at least I tried to tell myself so. After all, I had been through so much, from poverty to plague, from losses to great gains, from riots and rebellions to a catastrophic fire, so surely I could handle this.

I hoped to walk a line between helping Susannah and protecting myself and Will. In short, once again, to avoid admitting—or insisting—that I not only considered myself Will’s other wife, but his first and only wife. I had wed him in a church in the eyes of God, legally registered, and that was that.

“Mistress Whateley,” a man said as he poked his head in the door of the small room where I waited, “this venerable court is ready to hear your testimony now.”

I had dressed plainly and somberly, all in gray; my bounteous hair, now threaded with silver, was piled up and greatly hidden under a brimmed hat with one black feather. He led me in, across the parquet floor and into the vast diocese courtroom filled with rows of benches. My heels seemed to click incredibly loudly as everyone pivoted his or her head to behold me.

Will sat in front along the right side as I walked in. He was with Anne, of course, and John Hall. The Halls had a six-year-old daughter, the apple of Will’s eye, who was not present. The child was another reason I was certain Susannah would not stray from her marital vows, though I’d seen more than one London wife with a family who erred in that way.

Susannah had the Shakespeare family lawyer, Robert Whatcott, with her. They looked dwarfed by the size of the court and the height of the chancellor’s dais looming over their small table.

To my left at another table sat Rafe Smith and his lawyer. I was thoroughly annoyed to see that the defendant looked the part of a clean-shaven and well-kempt man, one with his hands folded before him, when I’d been expecting cock-of-the-walk slurs and sneers. He even managed to look sad and shy. What an outrage, I wanted to shout.

Besides guests of the two interested parties, there were a few folk I did not recognize, and I knew not why they were here. Surely the court would not let mere curious onlookers into a hearing like this.

The man who had escorted me in left me standing in the elevated, railed dock to the left side of the chancellor and moved to stand behind my little prison. At this close range, as I looked up at the chancellor, I noted he was a handsome and imposing man with gray hair showing under his white periwig and broad shoulders swelling his black and red robe. He had clear blue eyes, but they were narrowed and focused on me.