The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (13 page)

‘But none of us are going to say that to him, are we?’ This is the youngest of them, Lionel Cooke, principal woman-player, usually bashful as any maiden, now bold with the wine. ‘Because we’re afraid to.’

‘Afraid of Knell?’ Towne, feet against the table edge, thrusts his chair back with a squeal. ‘Great God, I should hope not.’ He looks at the cup in his hand as if someone has just pissed in it. ‘Knell has many qualities, but beshrew me if ever I begin to fear him.’

‘Oh, you know what I mean, everyone’s afraid of the
noise,
’ Cooke says. ‘It’s less tiring just to let him be.’

‘As for doing without him,’ Robert Wilson says carefully, ‘to be sure, we wouldn’t want to. But when he was laid low with a quinsy last season, John Dutton took his parts to admiration – and no, man, I’m not just saying that because you’re here. The company must come first.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ bursts out Towne, cradling his own face. ‘I know what it is now. I know what it’s all about.’

*   *   *

Stale and broken loaves, like days you lived and can’t remember living. Hamnet Sadler, charitable and prosperous enough to be so, gives the last of them away to an old poor woman. Will, change in his purse, lingers with the midsummer light, helping Sadler put up the hinged shop-front, talking. Since his marriage he has grown close to Sadler, who stood godfather to his son. The baker is a big, curly-haired man who carries his flesh gracefully, like a dancer. Tender-hearted, he will weep at a sad tale or a song, and is known for it. Tearful Sadler, they say: ‘Oh, go stuff yourself,’ he will reply amiably. He blinks at the world in perplexity, but always with profound interest.

‘Master Eames, over to Clopton, you know him? They say he’s taken to wearing a hair-shirt and scourging himself night and morn. Can you understand that, now?’

‘The same impulse that makes you drink strong ale,’ Will says.

‘Ah, but that I enjoy.’

‘Has the ale never given thee a thick head as penance?’

‘Well, I’ll grant thee that. It’s a wonder, though, what wild things men will do.’

‘And never lack a reason for them.’ Guilt, Will thinks, is the real garment underneath that hair-shirt.

‘Little ones thriving? Judith suspicioned another for us, but it was just the full moon putting her out of order. Women are curious made, aren’t they? I never cease to wonder.’ Like Will he had married young. His wife is a pretty, high-coloured woman with a taste for finery and a formidable temper. Occasionally Sadler seems on the brink of saying something to Will about – well, about marriage, but though they are close enough friends to use
thee,
that step is never taken. Will wonders if there is something about himself that discourages it.

Sadler sniffs the air as the light dies of its own redness. ‘A sweet summer. Pray God it stays.’

‘We’re owed a good harvest.’ Yes, he can do this; he can keep this part of himself working for a long time. ‘Well, best go.’

‘Aye, they’ll be sending after you, lest you’ve been stole away.’

Will laughs at that. The laugh sounds a little wrong in the empty street.

*   *   *

‘I know what it is,’ Towne says, snapping his fingers. ‘Damn, it was my fault. It was when we were running over
Famous Victories
this morning. John Cobbler saying farewell to his wife to go to the wars, and Dericke says—’

‘“Fie, what a kissing and crying is here,”’ says Tarlton, softly. ‘“Zounds, do you think he will never come again?”’

‘Damn. And I made a jest to Knell about it. Just one of those things you throw out.’ Towne glances over at Knell, going out on slightly unsteady legs to the close-stool. ‘I said something about leaving a young wife at home, and how she would never lack consolation.’

‘Ah.’ Tarlton grimaces, nodding. ‘And what did he say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘That is ominous.’

‘Will someone please tell me what you’re talking about?’ young Cooke cries, looking as if he might soon be sick.

Wilson says: ‘Knell’s new wife, sweetling. Only – what is she? Sixteen?’

‘Fifteen,’ Towne says. ‘And now left behind in a fine house in London to sew and sing psalms.’

‘She might,’ Tarlton says. ‘She might be doing exactly that.’

‘Not what one hears, though,’ Wilson says.

‘Oh, you’ve heard it too?’ says Towne. ‘Shit. I didn’t entirely mean it – it was just one of those jests you make.’

‘One of those jests
you
make, certainly,’ says Wilson. ‘Look you, we must put him in a good humour somehow. He mustn’t think we’re ever talking of him.’

‘As we are,’ Singer says.

Knell is back, with a slight dull smile, and a stare, and a thirst.

‘Knell, we were talking of digging up old
Roister Doister
for Oxford,’ Wilson says. ‘What think you?’

‘You weren’t talking of it,’ Knell says, pouring, his glance skimming Towne, ‘but let us pretend you were.’

*   *   *

Crossing the High Street, Will finds himself imagining a hair-shirt: the feel of it riding roughly against your skin beneath your clothes. Eventually, surely, you would get used to it – which would defeat the purpose. Perhaps then you had to leave it off to feel the required discomfort. Until you got used to that. Ahead he spies and catches up with Joan, returning from the Quineys’.

‘Didn’t they send a manservant with you?’

‘I made him go back. He vexed me. He has a wen and I can’t stop looking at it.’ Joan takes his arm.

‘Not wise, after dark.’

‘Why, I trusted to my luck, and here you are.’

‘Hm. And how goes it in the kingdom of Quiney?’

‘A dull spot just now. Too much occupied with marrying people off.’

‘Dull indeed.’ With a sideways glance he measures her expression. ‘You’ve too much sense to be in a hurry for that, I think.’ To him she is bright and pleasing as a robin; but smallpox has marked her, and there’s scant chance of a dowry.

‘A deal too much sense,’ she says sharply. And for a few moments they allow something to walk silently beside them. They have this ease. Both a little out of sorts, neither has to account for it, as you have to with lover, husband, wife: that constant diagnosis of intimacy.

But, then, they were children together and, in a way, have never stopped being so. He reads it in Joan’s bemused look sometimes, when he hoists one of his own children on to his shoulders: Will a father, Will doing these great grown things? Surely not: surely this is a game of dressing-up. He thinks it himself sometimes.

‘Where is his wen?’

‘On his neck, and as big as a strawberry.’ Joan shudders. ‘And yet
he
is new-married.’

Will smiles in the darkness. Hair-shirts, wens: perhaps, indeed, you can get used to anything. Suppose you committed a murder, but were so careful or lucky that not the slightest suspicion fell on you, and no evidence pointed your way. For a long time you would hardly be able to believe it: you would be on your guard every moment, suspecting every glance, never easy in your skin. But eventually, at last, you would
have
to relax: normality would force itself on you, and no longer would you wake every morning to the thought:
I haven’t been found out yet.
As Will still does, sometimes, blinking at the folds of the bed-curtains, next to soft breathing, a tumble of hair, a white still hand like a plaster-cast.

As soon as he steps inside his mother’s face appears round the parlour door. ‘Will, you’re home.’ She seems to draw comfort from statements. ‘Anne’s seeing to supper. I said you’d want none.’ Another statement, heavier. He doubts his mother and his wife will ever be good friends. Not exactly that they are too alike, but they have the wrong similarities.

His father calls him in. ‘Any word from Ditchley?’ He half mouths it, mindful of dozing Gilbert. Secrets and stratagems. Even Will – shaking his head – doesn’t know all of it. Only that Ditchley is something to do with wool, and that his father is on the edge of unlicensed dealing again. He remembers the stored wool in the barn last time, his father urging him to dig his hands into the greasy, muttony coarseness of it, then seeming to repent of showing him.
Say nothing.

Oh, needless instruction. Saying nothing is a rare luxury in this house of two generations and thirteen people. Will relishes release into silence, cultivates the art of effacement, of being ignored, for once there, the selfish mind is like a rich fabric kept folded away from the sun. Open it out, and your eyes dazzle at the brilliant complexity of the pattern.

‘Not for me,’ he says in the kitchen, at Anne’s look, knife over bread. ‘Just a cup of ale. Phoo, there’s no air tonight.’

‘I know. The twins won’t rest, I heard them again.
Not
cats.’

‘I’ll go up. Maybe open the window a little.’

She nods. ‘Do it quietly.’

Because his mother might hear, and she believes the night air dangerous, full of poisonous humours. So they balance it.

‘I do everything quietly,’ he says. They move about the kitchen without touching, but there is something not quite empty about the spaces between them. ‘You know that.’

‘Aye, you are a very cat yourself. Save when you wake to use the pot.’ She glances at him, shakes her head. ‘No, not true.’ She picks up the tray. ‘You were long with Hamnet Sadler. What do you men find to talk of?’

‘Same as women. Babes and ailments. And then the state of the crops, and the crops of the state, and the price of the north wind and whether the goose-down will fall from the sky before the Dutchmen catch the end of last year in a net with no holes.’ He adds a smile: she is watching him with that look, faintly anxious, as if he is going out of sight. ‘Let me take that.’

‘No, no. He likes it from me.’

‘You spoil him.’ And yet he is happy for her to do so, isn’t he? Anne pleases his father: does that one job he has never been able to do.

And he does so many things. Works leather, still, though at thirteen his quiet brother Richard – stocky, painstaking, father-adoring – is more adept in the shop and yard than he could ever be. Reckons accounts, chases customers for payment. Then the other work. Once a week he goes to his old grammar-school to teach handwriting, which the present master doesn’t trouble himself with. And when wanted, he earns a little more copying documents for a lawyer of Warwick, who is wealthy and rising and – so Will guesses from the things he copies and which the lawyer’s clerk is not to see – thoroughly corrupt. These are the things Will does: likewise being a husband, being a father. And he seems to belong to each of them, like a portrait that suits any frame.

Upstairs, in the room adjoining theirs, he finds three small quiet mounds. The two-year-old twins, Hamnet and Judith, have settled to awkward sleep again, arms outflung, blond fringes soaked as if after furious exercise. Four-year-old Susannah sleeps decorously as ever, dark brows lifted as if her dreams amuse and surprise. Susannah: fruit of the wild courtship, born six months into wedlock, and never giving the slightest trouble from that moment: as if her work is done. (Will and Anne created her, but just as surely she created Will and Anne – what they are together, and must be, for always.) He decides against possibly waking kisses, and inches the window open. The clattering pail and tuneless song of the maidservant emptying ashes on the midden comes in suddenly strange and distant, the note of a foreign bird in a magic wood. Violently he jumps at the little hand touching the small of his back.

‘I hushed ’em. He woke up and then that made her wake up. So I came and hushed ’em.’

Edmund, nightshirted, wriggling from one bare foot to the other, peers up through the mists of a yawn at Will’s clifftop face.

‘Thanks, ‘twas well done.’ Will ruffles his brother’s head, urges and turns him with hand between the butterfly shoulder-blades. ‘Now haste, thine own bed, else thou’lt not be astir tomorrow.’ The boy goes, drowsing, unerring, with flat slapping feet. Edmund the late child is only seven years old, and thus closer to Will and Anne’s children than to the rest of his siblings – but something more than that besides: he frequents their two rooms, their company, as if choosing a family within a family. Here he chatters; around his father he is dumb.

Before going down to check bars and shutters, Will glances again at his children; seeking assurance that they are real. From birth, they continually astonished: the fact that they did all the things they were meant to do, cutting teeth, speaking first words, seemed in itself the most brazen unlikelihood. And so his conclusion: every ordinary thing is a miracle.

Which carries its inverse: every miracle is ordinary. You can live on one, the other is killing. How to place himself between them is the question that he addresses in those rare moments when the mind-cloth is unrolled. Times when he allows himself to ask, what’s wrong, what’s right, what would I have. Unholy times, they can be: showing him horrible pictures of himself. Here are some. First married, Susannah new-born: wakened at midnight by her cry, he took the opportunity to light a taper downstairs, open his book-bundle. And then Anne appearing at the door, creamy-white, sleep-ripe:
Whatever are you doing?
Mild bewilderment: as if she had found him counting peas, or playing with a toy drum. Or worse: when little Hamnet, inquisitive, destructive, found the book-bundle, and Will came upon him in the midst of merry tearing. How terrifying he was, to the boy, to himself: the red haze, the voice he did not recognise booming curses. (Never again: absolute certainty, never that part of himself again.) And some time after, another picture, salutary: tiptoeing Will lighting another midnight taper and taking up the unbound books and finding them, simply, coming apart in his hands. Dry leaves falling.

And then that bumpy passage, that muddy little side-road to nowhere: Anne wanting to know just what this fascination was.

‘I know you are much addicted to plays and verses. Such verses you used to recite to me…’ (He thought: Did I?) ‘But I had no idea you were such a scholar.’ Pronounced with faint, dubious dismay.

‘Reading…’ he breathed back his impatience ‘… reading isn’t a matter of being a scholar. It makes – it makes a new world.’