Mistress Shakespeare (16 page)

Will did just that. He oft used the Forest of Arden, and he put the name John Somerville in one of his earliest plays,
Henry VI, Part 3.
Will gave Somerville but three lines, in which he told an earl, a man far above his rank, he’d misjudged something and was mistaken.

Now I nodded as he took my hand. John Somerville had managed to hang himself in prison before he had to face his torment and execution, but his parboiled, tarred head was still to be placed with other traitors’ on the bridge’s south end.

The current took us faster as it flowed toward London Bridge, for the water was forced between the arches there. Only skilled, licensed men called bridge shooters could take a craft as small as ours through the churning water of high tide. But our oarsman pulled hard to keep us far enough away from the cauldron of the current. Holding hands, we looked up to see the three new heads on pikes, gory and gruesome, their features drooped in agony and yet recognizable—Arden, Somerville and the priest Hall. They weren’t alone, for at least a dozen other heads in various stages of decay seemed to stare down at us.

I thought I would be ill, but forced the bile back in my throat to help Will bear up.

“I feel my past is dead,” he said, “and yet I shall build on all I know and all I am to make it live again.” His deep voice resounded over the current and the noise from the street and shops up on the bridge. “I have seen the worst this city has to give but I want to see the best, and I vow I will be back for it—and to see you.”

A sad and strange place for a vow, I thought as the boat bucked and we gazed up at the remains of mortal men so crudely displayed. Worse, I actually believed Will once again, and yet it took him more than four years thereafter to make his words and his future begin to come true. And in that time, I became almost another person.

CHAPTER NINE

I counted the days
waiting for Will to come to London to make his fortune and his future. I was certain he could outact and outwrite even the best of London’s new breed of young, brash dramatists. Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele and, especially, Christopher Marlowe had the love—and entry fees—of the masses. They were the men who wrote for the Queen’s Players and other theatre companies, when it should have been Will.

And what would I be to Will when he came? An encourager, a friend, a lover? I still felt betrayed in my deepest woman’s heart. I still held his other marriage against him. Perhaps I would be his enemy.

I put off a wealthy, handsome suitor, Nicholas Clere, one of John’s wine buyers, who lived both in England and France. He promised to take me to Paris and give me the world. But like a Bedlamite, I waited for word of Will. Besides, I believed I would be committing bigamy if I wed someone else. And was that the real reason Will had kept our union a secret? Not for my sake, but for his? In my darkest moments when I still missed him, I cursed myself for loving him yet.

When Will did not arrive, I considered visiting Stratford, now that the purge of midland plotters seemed to have passed. I was wild to know if he was ill or had changed his mind about his destiny. But then, an entire year after the execution of Edward Arden—just before Christmas, it was—I saw Richard Field among the bookstalls at St. Paul’s, and what he told me turned my world topsyturvy again.

“What news from home?” I asked after we chatted of the cold weather, the threat of Spanish invasion and the latest plays.

“You have carriers in and out of Stratford each week and you ask me that?” He went back to rearranging a pile of finely bound books; I assumed he had printed them.

“Yes, I ask you that. I don’t want gossip, and I know Will writes to you. I am just praying that the ruination of the Ardens has not made it worse for his people and kept him from his destiny here.”

He looked up at me. “A heartfelt hope, so I will tell you. I told him I would not play go-between for the two of you, but since our lives seem intertwined—the three of us—here it is.”

He cleared his throat. “Will was ready to leave Stratford twice, but once his parents prevailed upon him to stay a bit longer, for they are deep in debt—and his wife is big with child again.”

I put my hand on the edge of the wooden stall to steady myself. I felt sick to the very reaches of my soul. If he still bedded with her, did he love her? Another child! Would he stay home for them? I’d missed my father sorely when he was away. I did not wish Will’s loss on them—and yet, I still wanted him here—so that I could kill him not for one betrayal but now for two!

My blood beat hot through my veins. I sucked in sharp breaths.

“So big with child,” he went on, when I said naught, “’tis thought she’s carrying twins. I’m sorry, Anne—for you, for me even—and certainly for Will. He’s promised his wife he’ll help her through the next few years.”

Few years . . . few years, those words echoed in my head. Looking back at his precious books again, Dick chatted on. Were all men so blind, so stupid? Did he not see I was dying?

“He’s beside himself,” he said, now edging slowly away from me. “When he was here, he said he was desperate to leave—to live here.

Desperate and determined. It’s tearing him apart. He’s a very moral man, you know.”

I gave an inelegant snort. It was all I could manage, or I was going to scream aloud in pain. Or perhaps beat Dick into the dust to murder the messenger.

“Moral at least,” he went on “compared to the iconoclasts and free thinkers today, many of whom are writers. I swear, Anne, some Londoners have their minds in the sewers—even at court. ’Tis enough to turn one to a Puritan.”

Ignoring his desperate attempt to switch subjects, I found my voice at last, though it didn’t sound like mine. It was hard, cold, bitter. “Perhaps the Puritans have a point to hate the plays and players and condemn them. And, no doubt, books like these you have helped to publish.”

He looked up again, surprise on his face. At that moment, I hated and wanted to hurt Dick, Will and every man jack of their species that went by in the street or had ever trod the earth. Thank God, Will was not coming to London, for he would have been a marked man with me.

Dick took a step back, a kind of awe or fear upon his face. Perhaps he finally realized how I had taken his matter-of-factly delivered news, for he tried to fill the space between us with words.

“Yes, I guess that’s—that’s t-true,” he said, stammering now. “I feel torn too, Anne, perhaps a human condition, eh? They say even the q-queen is wrenched apart about whether to sign the death warrant for her conniving cousin, the Scots queen, but I say Queen Mary should pay the price for her treachery.”

An even better try at a new topic, for I loved news of the queen, but I said only, “Someone always pays the price for treachery.”

“Anne, I know I have no right to invoke Kat’s name, but you would not do something desperate, would you? Over Will? I mean like—”

“Like throw myself into the Thames? No, not that.” Then, not wanting him to think I meant to ride hell-bent to Stratford to murder Will—for he knew I’d gone last year to save him—I added, “I shall throw myself into life. There are things I want to do here which I haven’t. It’s as if—as if I’ve been waiting for the main character to make another entrance to the stage in the play of my life. I’ve lived like a nun in a cloister and for what? Should our once mutual friend in the midlands ever inquire about me, say I am writing poetry and perhaps I shall try my hand at a play. Now, did you print those books you have there?” I added, desperate to think of something besides Will and fearful I never would again.

“I did,” he said with a nod and sigh of relief as he showed me the embossed spine of one. Poor man, he had no idea I was still so angry with mankind in general that I could have burned all his damned books and him and Will with them. “I’m in the last year of my apprenticeship. Look you, Sir Philip Sidney’s verses,
Arcadia
, though the bookbinder has put the price too dear.”

My hands still shaking, I opened the book he handed me to a random page and read, “My true-love hath my heart, and I have his, / But just exchange one for the other given . . .”

“I’ll take a copy, dear or not,” I declared, silently vowing that nothing the world had to offer—especially love—would be denied me now—if and when I wanted it. Although I could not kill Will Shakespeare as I longed to do upon this moment, he was henceforth dead to me, and that was that.

 

 

 

Still that was not that.
I ranted and raved, pacing the floor at night. I broke things. I was ill-tempered to men, even to poor, placid John Davenant. I became the highest order of malcontent. Although I longed to escape Will’s hold over me, I could not bring myself to accept a betrothal from Nicholas Clere. His pride punctured, he went back to France in a huff, and I could only hope he would not halt his imports for John’s business because of me.

I tried to force myself back to the loving person I had once been. I strove to cherish my two best friends, Jennet and Maud, for at first I vowed to need no man. Jennet had cruelly lost yet a fourth infant, this one because its birthing cord was wrapped around his neck and had strangled the little mite. Through it all, I held her hands and wiped her brow, then went with John to bury the tiny coffin on top of three others, because Jennet could not bear to.

In the aftermath of grief, as I had learned the day I lost Kat, wise words could not help, but my simply being with Jennet was some solace—to her and to me. Though I wished to cheer her, I found myself telling her my entire sad tale of Will, the first time I’d admitted our handfast marriage to anyone. Somehow our mutual losses and longing bonded Jennet and me closer. When Stephen Dench—who, thank the Lord, had wed a London tavern maid—told me that the Shakespeares had twins, a boy and girl named Hamnet and Judith, Jennet and I both cried for our own reasons, but we cried together.

Though I wrote my own poems and began a play or two—surely not good enough to ever see the light of day—I also became more bored, bitter and reckless. Fed up with men trifling with me on the street or even accosting me, I began to go to plays garbed as a boy. It worked well enough; only Maud and Jennet knew, though Jennet did not know I ventured to the two theatres in the tawdry section called Shoreditch a mile north of the city and a far hue and cry from the more reputable Bishopsgate neighborhood.

Sometimes Maud went with me, also garbed as a youth. She was much filled out and better dressed now, since my acting as agent for her sweet herbs had prospered her. Tired of sitting on hard gallery seats at the Theatre and the Curtain in Shoreditch, I hatched a plan for Maud and me to sell scented cushions to those playhouse managers. Enough herb girls clustered about the doors selling sachets and themselves, but we would top them all.

“I hope you’re not going to see that horrid new drama by Christopher Marlowe,” Jennet muttered as I headed out the back door where Maud was waiting in breeches, shirt and doublet. It was an unusually warm early February day, I recall, in 1587.

“I am. It’s being performed by the Queen’s Men, and they are great actors. Since it’s a company that performs under Her Majesty’s aegis, I’m certain the play is quite respectable.”

Jennet snorted and shook her head as if I was a lost soul heading for Hades. “’Tis said Marlowe’s an atheist, you know, mad and bad.”

I went back to hug her. “I promise I shall not let his words convert me to the Moslem religion his hero espouses,” I told her, with a little pinch to let her know I was jesting. “But his play is all the fashion. I must hear how his heroic verse sounds, when mere ruffians in the street are not butchering their favorite lines from his plays.”

“They say he’s a sodomite and drunkard too!” she protested as I made for the door again. I turned back to face her. Even as she said that, she held gripped to her bosom the tiny flask she had used to tell me was cough elixir.

She fidgeted as our gazes snagged and held. I walked slowly to her and took the flask, though she tugged it back for a moment. I knew she could easily get more of the garnet-hued claret she kept close. Indeed, hidden bottles of it were about the shop and house.

“Jennet, I know that calms you, but if you and John yet hope for a child—”

“A living child, you mean.”

“Yes. Then perhaps drinking less of this might make a difference.”

“The Lord knows something must change!” she declared, smacking her hands on her skirts. “But I never drank a drop of anything but ale and small beer before I lost the second babe. I swear—as with the Black Death”—like many Londoners she lowered her voice when she spoke those two dreaded words—“it must be the unhealthsome night air of the city that makes me a bad breeder. After all, your Will’s country wife has just had two more and—Oh, Anne, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

“It’s all right. It doesn’t matter,” I lied, for however much I ran about and tried to keep occupied, it truly did. “I’m off now, and we’ll talk later. I mean to find the manager of the playhouse afterward and propose Maud sew him scented seat cushions for his gallery guests. Then, when I make my fortune, I shall help you and John buy a country inn you’ve been dreaming of, and I shall visit you each summer.” I waved jauntily and went out, depositing her flask in a pile of refuse down the alley.

But later that afternoon, as I stood openmouthed among the groundlings in the Theatre, I realized Jennet had been right about something. Christopher Marlowe must be one of those free thinkers Dick Field had disparaged. His hero was pompous, brutal, cruel and unrepentant. The Tartar conqueror Tamburlaine slaughtered virgins by the score, but did love his wife Zenocrate, the daughter of an Egyptian sultan, no less. Still, he murdered his own son Calyphas, because he was a coward.

Everything in the play seemed outrageous, big and brazen. The lead role was played by a tall, commanding actor named Edward Alleyn, whose voice boomed out the mesmerizing lines with broad gestures and whose mere presence ruled the stage. Despite the shocking content of the words, the language itself, called unrhymed iambic pentameter, was so bold, so heroic of its own accord, that it was surely the center of the performance: