The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (28 page)

And at some point, Anne could see, Hamnet Sadler was no longer following him. She found it difficult herself, but since their courtship she had grown used to hurrying after the cart-tail of Will’s thoughts and jumping up on it when she could. Sadler didn’t look resentful: only as if a draught had come in, or a good fire lost its cheer.

Judith Sadler didn’t seem to notice anything. But just the mention of London was enough for her: different, exciting, far removed from the business of child-bearing and child-losing that left her permanently weary.

‘Well, but he won’t live for ever,’ she had said to Anne not long ago, when Father John was being especially awkward. ‘Brute in me to say so, but true. You’re in the right place, Anne Shakespeare. Your three beauties growing up strong around you. What would you more?’

True. She took the truth like communion bread: unrefusable, without relish or savour.

He was here, and yet not here. He entered into it all, being in Stratford, being neighbour and goodman, admiring the Smarts’ new pigsty, shaking his head over the story of the poor serving-girl who took washing down to the river in winter flood and was drowned. He watched with her the blackbirds’ nest, built in a crook of rambler just below their bedchamber window. The parent birds were raising their second brood. Anne had watched the first grow, fill the nest, fly. Will was with her the day the second brood took to the air – all but one. It squatted in the down-lined bowl, teetered up, squatted again. From the outhouse roof the parent birds made little screeches, like chipping on slate.

‘What will happen if he doesn’t fly?’ Anne said. ‘Would they leave him?’

‘They always fly in the end,’ Will said.

‘But if they didn’t?’ Anne pressed her cheek against the diamond panes.

‘He’ll fly,’ Will said. ‘Or she. No telling at that age.’

And at last the fledgling did. It made a desperate plunge, landed on a rambler twig a few feet down, and then after a twitching agony of hesitation launched itself at the outhouse. Rose petals scattered. Ungainly, puddingy, losing height, it got there.

‘See?’ He looked gratified. And she was pleased because, after all, if the bird didn’t fly it would die. But she felt a change in his certainty. They always fly in the end … He never used to be so happy with the inevitable, which was her horror.

And Stratford, too, was adjusting to Will. It was standing back and screwing up one eye and nodding, yes: placing him as one of those men who went away to work, sending money home, planning for a slow, broad-wheeled future. Becoming one of a recognisable sort. Anne preferred him, them, unplaceable. She supposed she was being unrealistic. But, then, with Will she had always supposed that was allowed too.

There was a box, now, instead of the cairn of stones. A small strongbox with leathern clasps, brought from London. When he opened it, she could not help sniffing: absurd, but that was London air inside.

‘I’m becoming known,’ he said. ‘I’m worth my hire. I’m not rich by it, Anne, but I’m saving, and if I can rise to become a sharer in a company, then I – well, you take a share in the profits of every enterprise. And then if I can sell a play of my own—’

‘Oh, I’m sure you can.’ She didn’t doubt him: not in that way.

The box was for the money he saved. The money was to get them a house of their own. He seemed to want her to be more excited by the box than she could find it in her heart to be. She ought, perhaps, to shake it delightedly, or run her hands through the coins. Like a miser in a play.

‘I’m glad,’ she said, as something more seemed to need saying.

Gilbert was doing well in London too. Will brought a full account of him from his master in St Bride’s. His father listened devotedly, actually sitting still for it; a rarity now, when he was restlessly moving about for most of the day, leg twitching or foot tapping, making sudden dives to pick up threads or crumbs from the floor, going a long, muttering way to dispose of them.

‘And you, Will?’ Joan said. ‘Now you are quite the London player, will you perform at Court next, do you think? The Queen loves her plays, they say. What a thought, our Will acting before the Queen! Or wait, is that only the Queen’s Men who can do that?’

But his father did not stay for this. Could not. There were pointless things that needed doing.

‘No, any company may be summoned to play at Court, if it pleases her,’ Will said. Anne watched his face as his father grumbled out of the room. It did not exactly change: it was like seeing water with a passing reflection in it.

Joan was bright and merry and full of the questions that Anne, perhaps, should have asked. But later, in the kitchen, a mist came over her eyes and she put her hands on Anne’s arm.

‘Reprove my folly,’ Joan said, with a sigh, eyes closed, ‘but don’t leave me, will you? Not yet.’

Anne smiled, without in the least feeling like smiling. ‘Where would I go?’

‘Oh, you and Will are aiming at your own household, aren’t you? No, he hasn’t said anything. I just supposed. You’d be mad else. Only don’t do it yet. It will throw such attention on me, and they have too much room for attention already, those two. God bless them and I love them, but…’ Joan took a cup of uncut wine from the tray they were preparing, drank it off, wiped it, all in one go. Anne suspected she did this quite often: not too often. Enough. ‘They should have been a king and queen or something like, you see. Nothing short of being a king, all its great duties and grand doings, would give Father enough to occupy him. And being a queen would furnish Mother with the chance she needs to be good, good, good.’ Joan took a breath-comfit from her girdle and popped it into her mouth. ‘I can’t make you stay, I know. But if you go I shall have to hurry and get married, and I’ve seen no man I care for yet.’

‘You needn’t hurry,’ Anne said, unsure why she said it with such a bitter snap, like biting on a clove.

Four days before he was due to ride home, Susannah came tiptoeing to their bed at cockcrow, begged their pardon for disturbing them, and said she felt something queer before being sick and fainting.

‘A tertian ague. A sickly season, I warrant you. The afflatus is not encouraging. But she sweats well, that’s good.’ The surgeon changed his mind every minute. Damn it, Will said, it was high time they had a better doctor in this benighted place …

‘It was a good enough place to raise you,’ his father said.

Anne thought, God, they’re going to go at it while Susannah lies dying betwixt them. The thought rose like a boiling pan in her head, overflowed. Will heard her soft wail, saw, understood. He gripped her hand as they sat by Susannah’s bedside and gave careful, respectful answers to his father, who would scarcely leave the sickroom. Joan was right: his officiousness needed a kingdom. But he was genuinely attached to his grandchildren, wanted to share the night watches, seemed indeed to do good with his big tenderness, his oak whispers: ‘Buck up, my chick, wilt soon be skipping again.’ For Anne there was no time or room for anything but the love and fear, keeping her at a perfect tip of wakeful concentration. Sleep was one of many irrelevancies beside this pallor, this sweat-sticky fringe, this little backward baby-cry with which Susannah woke herself up in ashamed surprise.

Then the fever broke. Susannah sat up and drank her cordial in her ladylike way, putting up a hand to catch the drips. Will hugged her, then Anne: then it was all three. Susannah looked very slightly uncomfortable.

‘Sleep now, love,’ Will said.

‘No,’ Anne said, because she didn’t need to, and because nothing mattered now; but as things didn’t matter she lay down on the floor by Susannah’s bed and fell into good darkness. When she woke the light had changed, Susannah was just coming hungry out of a doze, and her father-in-law was sitting by the bed.

‘Hungry, hey? Well, thou shalt have the best white meat, my pretty, but only a little at first, for thy stomach will be tender yet. Mammy’s sleeping by, heart, and thy father has just gone down to wash his head at the pump, for he’s been watching long and long. Aye, he’ll be back, heart. Never fear, he’s here – and he won’t leave thee again.’

For Anne, relief was still too vast and overwhelming for anything else to qualify as a feeling. She merely thought, as she roused herself: He’s saying that as a thing to soothe a sick child. That’s all. He won’t
make
anything of it.

Even when Will came back, wet-haired, weary-eyed, unmistakably happy, and Father John cocked his head at him with that flint-and-steel catch in his eyes, Anne didn’t believe he would go on.

‘I was just telling this little gillyflower of ours,’ her father-in-law said, ‘that she needn’t fear. Her father’s here, and here he will stay, hm?’ He smiled down at Susannah, twitched and smoothed the coverlet. ‘I was asking yon doctor, and he was of my mind, that it does a little child no good to be forever lacking a parent, wondering when she’ll see him more; that it injures the health, and makes them liable to pining and sickliness.’

And Will did not rise. Will did not rise by even so much as a sharp breath or a clenched fist, while his father repeated it, rephrased it, went on using his child’s illness as a versatile weapon, now the flat, now the blade, to beat him with. Perhaps he was feeling like her, relief making him invulnerable. But she didn’t think so, and that was why she continued to entertain the quiet belief – courteous unobtrusive guest it was – that she was losing him.

Much later, when Will was making up his pack for the ride back to London, she asked herself why, weighed conclusions.

Why? Because if he could endure this from his father – and his father, she knew, had the secret of hurting him with a deeper twisting than she could ever know or want to know – then he must cherish some great recompense within him. It was as if somewhere there was another box, in which he kept his contentment, unassailable and secure: contentment or joy, she couldn’t tell. Something made up for it; or someone. Anne believed that all somethings began with a someone.

But, actually, she didn’t know what to believe. In fact, if you had asked her what was the most likely thing, she would have said: that I am sleeping away a summer afternoon at Hewlands Farm, and any moment I will wake in my bedchamber to the sound of Bartholomew chopping wood – wake a maiden, wake seven years back into the real, before all this long crammed dream.

*   *   *

Settling back in London, Ben had easily leaped into his old venery – but had very soon felt himself drowning and wanting air, down in the mud and silt.

Perhaps it was the memory of that whore at Flushing, who had leaned against a stable wall and gnawed away at a ham knuckle while the men lined up for her, one shuffling and shuddering after another. Perhaps it was because the first discontented wife he picked up at the theatre permitted him every freedom in the bedchamber except a kiss:
Jesu, none of that,
she complained when he tried. It was then, perhaps, that he decided: not to get married, but that if he were to do this, it would be properly, with tenderness and respect – he was not so unrealistic as to say with love – and with, in other words, a wife. And then it all happened very swiftly, which was good, because he didn’t want to waste a lot of time on it.

He did meet her at the theatre, but she was a maid with a gorgon companion, no eye-rolling available goodwife or badwife. She was pretty, hale-looking – he could not abide a sickly woman – and for all she was virtuous, modestly clothed and chaperoned, her almost-black eyes gave off a crackle: like whipping your shirt over your head on a close day.

Ben was mannerly, careful, even after he found out the old companion was deafer than Nicol. No stealth of the predator, not with this straight-backed young woman who smelt of nothing but her own body, and who raised her eyebrows in amazement to hear a gross fellow in the next balcony swear oaths by Our Lady’s virgin arse.

She had sense. ‘Do I have it right?’ she asked after one scene. ‘The lady has fallen in love with the man, though he is the one who killed her husband? And she has done it in a few moments, because of his sweet words?’

‘You have it right.’ A poor scene, indeed: it would need a genius to make such a scene work.

‘Well, he should be careful after he has wooed and wed her, that’s all. If she can be swayed so easily, she’ll soon be swayed from him too.’

Ben bowed low.

‘What are you doing that for?’

‘I am abasing myself before you, Mistress Lewis. I’ve never known beauty united so with wisdom.’

‘Oh, pooh, that’s just fine talk,’ she said doubtfully – a little sharply: her voice was not a low one, perhaps from the deaf chaperon. Not a lover of high-flown nonsense. He thought all the better of her for it. But she had a smile for a jest. Once they were on terms, and she had allowed him to press her hand and, with misgivings, her knee, he told her the hoary joke about the citizen’s wife at the playhouse. Before they went in, the citizen told her to beware of pickpockets. ‘“Have a care for thy purse”, he insisted, “have a care for thy purse” – and then, when they left at the end of the play, what does Madam Citizeness cry but “Hullo, my purse is gone.” “Didst not feel any fellow fumbling under thy skirts?” cries he. “Oh, to be sure”, says she, “but I didn’t suppose it was
that
he was after.”’

She kept her eyes fixed on his throughout this time-worn narration – and at the climax gave such a rewarding shout of laughter, slapped his leg so hard, and alluded to that wicked merry tale so many times that day that he felt himself to be, if not in love, then comfortably placed within love’s suburbs.

This was better than lechery, he thought, in all ways. A year’s labour at the miserable craft of his stepfather had put a little money into his purse, enough for a new book, perhaps; and if he were to study again in earnest, he must give his mind to it, which he could not do when he was dancing attendance on idle-living mistresses. In Hartshorn Lane he looked thoughtfully at his mother and his stepfather over the supper-table. A dismal sort of marriage, but she always had shoes and stockings, meat on the table; he did not hit out as much nowadays, but nor did they lovebird-coo as they had once; they were used to each other, in essence.