Mistress Shakespeare (7 page)

“So you were a friend of the deceased—
sub rosa
, secretly so,” the bailiff began as I stood before their table.

“We both had household duties but enjoyed each other’s company when we had the time.”

“Not quite what I asked, but I see.”

He didn’t see, but I didn’t say so. I reckoned he’d bring up Will and Dick being part of the whole thing next, but he didn’t. I wondered if Will’s father still held sway with his old fellows, since he’d served Stratford so well before his financial problems.

“And you had a conversation with the deceased on the riverbank but an hour or so before she must have drowned.”

“Yes, before she must have slipped in. As you know, the riverbanks were frozen mud and ice. I found the footing very slippery so—”

“Simply answer the questions put to you, Mistress Whateley. I want you to have it clear that we are here trying to determine if this death was
per infortunium,
that is, by accident, or
felo de se
, committed wittingly—a suicide,” he said as he rose to his full height behind the table and walked around it to look down on me.

I wanted to give ground but I did not. “I understand that, Master Bailiff.”

“How would you adjudge Katherine Hamlett’s state of mind at your last meeting then?”

“She was a bit agitated about her coming nuptials but was preparing for them. She gave me a little smile as she left and said I’d see her again,” I expounded, grateful that those statements were true. “She was headed to see her betrothed and was going to bring back some flour to her mother in her pail.”

“A pail which was found upside down on the bank with her gloves folded neatly atop it as though, with clear aforethought, she didn’t want them to get wet,” he said, glancing at my hands I had gripped before me. Slowly, I lowered them to my sides, telling myself to keep calm.

“I warrant she didn’t want them wet or the pail either, if she was to fetch flour in it,” I said. “She no doubt put the pail and the gloves down to look into the ice like a mirror to see that she looked well enough before she approached the mill. You probably would not know, Master Bailiff, but it’s easier to arrange one’s hair properly without gloves on.”

I was rolling along now, seeing a scene I knew in my heart had never happened. But I didn’t care what these people—all but Will and my father—thought of me. It was wrong that the church declared someone who took her own life should be banned from a proper burial. Yes, suicide was even more wrong, for God had given that life. But the judgment and punishment belonged to Him and not to such as this man. I wanted to declaim all that in the loudest voice, but somehow I managed to rein in my temper.

“Mistress Whateley, do you not think if Mistress Hamlett had leaned over the ice to peer at her image and had accidentally fallen in, the ice at that spot would have been broken through?” he said with a knuckle knock on the wooden table that startled me.

“I do not know how fast it might have healed itself on that cold day. I recall it took several men to break through”—I dared to rap on the table too—“to pull her body out. If she slipped on the ice, she could have skidded into the center current or that eddy and could have found herself wedged under the ice by accident, indeed
per infortunium
.”

The man looked like a beached fish gasping for air that I’d used the Latin back to him. In my line of vision behind his broad shoulders I saw Will, who had obviously been told not to so much as look at me, try to smother his broad smile with his hands.

The bailiff was not to be put off. “Mistress Whateley,” he said, his voice taking on a sharper tone, “since it was so cold a day, was it not highly irregular that Mistress Hamlett was going such a distance—and tarrying to talk to you—in merely a shawl instead of a cape or something warmer?”

“I warrant, your honor, you’ve never been in love and heading to see your betrothed. ’Tis said it heats the blood. Though she did not mention it, perhaps Kat hoped that Guiles Willoughby would notice and give her a hug or even offer to take her back home on his horse. But, now, so sad to say, she’ll never go home again . . .”

My voice caught and I nearly burst into tears, and it was not playacting either. My shoulders shaking, I cried silently for Kat’s loss of Dick and of her young life. For my looming loss of Will I saw coming. My brave words to Kat about bearing up at the loss of Dick, my bold speech about the battle between desire and duty but that we must keep marching on all seemed now so like dancing on empty air.

“That will be all, Mistress Whateley,” the bailiff said, strutting back to his place at the table. “And we would ask you to wait outside.”

I was not to hear what Will would say, if he was to testify at all. Not trusting my voice, I nodded. My father, forever turning his cap in his hands, rose to go out with me. At the last moment, I saw Kat’s mother, teary-eyed, nod either her thanks or encouragement to me.

Outside, when the door closed behind us, in the vast hammer-beamed Guild Hall, a man stood to face us. It was Fulk Sandells, the Shottery farmer who had first found Kat’s body. Perhaps he had testified before I had arrived and was to wait out here for the verdict too.

“I’ve a message for you from John Shakespeare,” he said, looking only at my father. “He wants your daughter to stay clear of his son Will, and the boy has vowed the same. Nothing good can come of it.”

“I spoke to her,” my father told the man as if I were not able to speak for myself after testifying a moment ago, “and she says they were but honest friends. The Shakespeares and their business fellows, the Greenaways, have no right—”

“This has naught to do with that. Will Shakespeare’s not of age to be going off with womenfolk of no acquaintance with his family.”

Of no account to his family
, I thought I heard the silent accusation echo. I had known that it would come to this. My entire being wanted to rebel, to scream at this man and them all that Will and I were special, that we were of like mind in many things—and, though I would never say so and Will might not realize it—that we were in love.

 

 

 

At least I had
one brave victory amidst my losses, for the bailiff and crowner ruled Kat could be interred in hallowed ground. They buried her in the far corner of the churchyard of Holy Trinity, barely inside the wall, but it was enough for me. I took flowers to her grave whenever I could and still do.

Mrs. Whateley told me that town gossip said the bailiff was vexed that I’d been “upstart and sassy” when I testified. Yet in gratitude for what I’d done, Kat’s parents sent me two gifts I will ever cherish. One was a long-handled fan with ostrich feathers that they had bought for her wedding. The other was an emerald green velvet, white-plumed hat that, in all but color, reminded me of the one I’d seen the queen wear at Kenilworth.

Though I partly blamed the Hamletts for Kat’s demise, I accepted both gifts graciously in memoriam of my friend. I dreamed almost nightly of her, about the four of us walking and dancing together, happy dreams, not nightmares, for those came with my waking when I realized Kat was gone forever.

As for Will, I locked away my memories of him tight in my head and heart. However much I missed William Shakespeare, for no man would I languish and die—at least, that’s what I thought then.

But for distant, hurried glimpses, I was not near Will until a year later, the afternoon the Queen’s Men performed in the Stratford Guild Hall, where our time together had ended. A pox on him, but Will waved and smiled at me, took his seat with his father and stared only at the stage. Afterward Will went off with the players to the Burbages’ Red Hart Inn on Bridge Street. I know because I walked that way—the long route back home to Temple Grafton.

I’d come into Stratford on my own to see
The Fantastical Floating Island of Atlantis
, if I recall the name of the play aright. I heard it was by “Anonymous,” whom Will had once jested was the most prolific English playwright of the day. He’d said if he ever wrote a poem or play, he’d be proud enough of it that he’d put his name upon it.

The title of the drama reminded me of that wonderful time Will and I had seen the Lady of the Lake greet Her Majesty at Kenilworth Castle. But this was a romance about strange seas with soft sand shores and an enchanted cavern where a party of four fine folk was shipwrecked. The only characters, but for a few flitting sea creatures and the gods Poseidon and Neptune, were two men and two women, though the females were, of course, played by painted, gowned and bewigged boys, just as they had been in the days of Greek dramas. Still, I liked the way the four main characters exchanged banter and danced and sang.

But if I’d written those parts, I would have the actors at least making speeches about foraging for food or getting rescued. That seemed to be of no concern to them at all. A silly play, I thought, especially because the players made broad, set gestures to demonstrate particular emotions. They declaimed even fear and awe in bellowing voices and fell too suddenly in love and planned a double wedding out of the blue.
Too
happy and
too
fantastical to suit me.

Still, I loved the jig at the end. I kept glancing over at Will, for I could see his profile. He was, I guess, much enamored of it all, the dog-hearted popinjay.

After the upheaval when Kat drowned, my father had declared I was old enough to stay in our cottage at Temple Grafton when he was away instead of being boarded with our Stratford kin. And so, in exile just as surely as if I were shipwrecked alone, I kept house and tended the two horses the Whateley carriers left behind on each run. I kept all the records and made out reckoning slips for how much people owed us. On occasion, I went afoot to Shottery or Stratford to collect our due.

And sometimes I lingered by the banks of the Avon where I had once met with Will or where Kat and I had spoken that last day, even the spot by the eddy where she’d drowned. I made coronets of posies and cast them in as a memorial to her or sailed leaf boats toward Stratford with the tiny initials A.W. to W.S. punched in them with a hairpin. I pretended Will would find them and know they were from me. More than once, I invented elaborate scenes in my head with witty dialogue and long, heart-wrenching soliloquies of how I had missed him. I knew such plots were as fantastical as the Queen’s Men’s play.

But I cursed Will too, for he had evidently been cowed by his parents’ decree not to seek me out. That last moment, by Kat’s corpse before the others came upon us, we should have vowed we’d meet in secret at least at certain times. What about that finger-pricking blood oath we’d taken years ago? He had evidently abandoned it and me as completely as Dick had left Kat.

The years slipped by and my warm memories of him grew colder, until they barely moved—like a torrent turned to ice in the frigid river.

CHAPTER FOUR

As I had feared,
Stephen Dench, the best of my father’s carriers, bided his time, yet wanted to court me with a vengeance. He was broad-faced and brawny, kind enough but loud and untutored in social graces as well as learning. I knew he watched me with hungry eyes, which did not scare me half so much as it intrigued me. But I still said no and wrenched a promise from my father to give me more time. Because Stephen could not read or write and my father trusted no one else with his records, he spoiled me and gave me my way.

“For one more year,” he said, shaking a finger at me when I turned seventeen. “Stephen would be a good match for both of us—for the business. He’s as hardworking as we are, and you could grow to love him if you’d but give him his chance. You’ve still got your head in the clouds, missy.”

“Maybe after I’ve seen London. You said I could go with you to see London.”

“Someday, I said. But I repack and turn right round, you know that. You’d have no time—”

“Just once, you could give me time. You could stay a few days. Da,” I wheedled, using my old pet name for him that sometimes softened him up, “I know there’s so much to see and do there. I could go to a real play at that place—the playhouse—”

“Heard tell there’s three of them now,” he said, when I fumbled for its name. He drew in a breath from his pipe, then blew a wreath of smoke into the air. “No, girl, London’s not a place for you. But if you was to wed with Stephen, I could see it clear to give the both of you a week or so there between runs. Aye, I could do a run or two without him, and someone would be there to be certain you are safe. You could see the Maiden Head Inn where we unload. You could let a chamber from John and Jennet Davenant, who have a shop there. They live upstairs on Lilypot Lane, a fine couple, though sadly they’ve lost more than one—”

“That’s a bribe,” I interrupted. “Truly, I need more time to decide about Stephen or anyone else.”

“Talk to Father Berowne about it when he comes by. He says he loves to hear you read. You just cease that chattering about poems and plays long enough to ask him what he thinks of real life—of you and a man.”

“Father Berowne is dear but in his dotage, and the world’s changed,” I protested. “Besides, he never wed.”

“He’s known enough who did, conducted many a ceremony, including your mother’s and mine,” he muttered, pointing at me with his long pipe stem. And that was that, though I never said one thing about Stephen to the former priest.

I did ask Father Berowne, though, if he’d heard how the Shakespeares were getting on since it was whispered they were Catholic recusants, just like their Arden kin. He said only he’d heard that they were trying to keep their heads down, but it wasn’t easy since Edward Arden was so blatantly disloyal to Lord Leicester and the queen and, though in an increasingly dire financial bind, John Shakespeare bravely paid his fines rather than attend the queen’s church. I thought it strange that the English Church did not try to keep people like that out of the graveyard rather than poor distraught souls like Kat.