Mistress Shakespeare (37 page)

“In my head, but wait until you see the couplet, telling . . .”

“I am not your mistress or your housemaid—I am your wife. I don’t care what anyone thinks or knows or hears!” I shouted. He rose hastily with his index finger to his lips to shush me. “You don’t believe in love, if you ever did!” I shouted, darting away from him. “All your love poems are lies! You’ve changed, you don’t value me anymore—that is, except as something you can buy in the marketplace. Go and be hanged, William Shakespeare—go find someone else to be your muse and warm your bed. Get away from me!”

I had ducked under his arm, run into the other room, slammed the door in his face and wedged a chair under the knob. He rattled the door, pounded on it, but in the end had to crawl out the bedroom window. I wouldn’t let him in the locked door so he probably had to go to the Burbages for help.

Even as I stopped by the print shop to pick up the
Metamorphoses,
I told myself that I only did it so that I could go to the Globe and throw it in his face and tell him I was undergoing a change just like all the characters in Ovid’s tales. I also planned to give him back the betrothal ring he’d given me years before, which I oft wore on a neck chain, hidden in my bodice. I’d find another man who didn’t call me shrew, who didn’t write poems about my dark eyes and dark skin and black hair like wires and . . .

Now, seething, heading at a good clip for the print shop at St. Paul’s, I rehearsed my little speech, ignoring all else. Ah, I understood now why Prince Hamlet wanted revenge, and no one had killed my father and married my mother! My own inner chaos soon echoed that of the streets—or was that a loud hue and cry from somewhere up ahead?

A woman came running at me, holding a young child in one arm and pulling another by the hand.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s amiss?”

“Essex and his rabble,” she gasped out. “He’s on foot—armed—lots of men, trying to raise troops to take the palace—take the queen prisoner.”

She ran into a house and slammed the door. That sound, over the shouts from the next street, echoed in my soul. What if this rebellion put Will in danger?

I ran north toward Temple Bar and passed through it. A mob was coming, but it was too late to retreat, for, behind me, others shoved through that entry to the city. I heard the big bar itself slam down. I could see the mob meant to smash it apart, though even monarchs traditionally stopped and asked permission to enter here.

“Warn the palace!” someone shouted from the other side of the bar. “Have them put wagons across the road by Charing Cross so they don’t get through! Warn the palace!”

Pressing myself close to the buildings to get past the mob milling before Temple Bar, I saw Essex and Southampton. Both looked feverish with eyes glowing as if from within. Neither wore armor, though they swung their swords over their heads and screamed encouragement to their men.

“A plot has been laid for my life!” Essex shouted. “Men of London, lovers of justice, to me, to me! Follow me for justice against all tyranny!”

I pulled up my hood to cover my face and hair just as when I first came to London and feared I’d be accosted for my exotic appearance. I’d become confident and proud of my looks—at least until I’d glimpsed that wretched sonnet Will was writing. But despite all that, my instincts said to warn him—to get to him and his fellow players to tell them the rebellion was on and they must be wary, perhaps even flee. I did not believe for one moment that these brutish men who still passed by would succeed in overthrowing the last Tudor, not the queen I’d seen and admired. But still, Cecil might be out for blood.

“To me, citizens of London!” Essex screamed as Southampton madly waved a banner with his coat-of-arms. I thought of that first day I’d seen the earl as a youth at the memorial service for the clown Tarlton so long ago. So young, so sweet and shy. I thought of how he’d rescued me from plague London. Could anything save him now? He was nearly twenty-eight years of age and Essex thirty-four, both fully responsible for this madness. Perhaps they loved themselves entirely too much, and pride had been their tragic, fatal flaw. But I must not let them take Will down with them in this true-life tragedy.

Finally, the rebellious mob turned back from Temple Bar, evidently deciding to go another way. They surged down Fleet Street toward St. Paul’s. Wedged in where I was, even I could tell that recruits did not appear. People hung from their windows, gaping and cursing, even shaking their fists. Someone kept shouting, “God save the queen!” Men they tried to drag into their mob fought and fled. The horde of rebels seemed to shrink, not swell.

When they moved en masse, at first I was swept along in their fringe, but I managed to duck into an alley and dart through it to Water Street and thence to the river. Others were escaping, not toward the insurrection but away from it. The two rebel earls had badly miscalculated. I ran along the wharves to Bridewell where, out of breath and terrified, I caught a wherry for Southwark.

“Aye, then, guess ’is lordship’s gonna take Whitehall for ’is own,” the boatman said. “Time for a change, either wi’ Essex or Scots King Jamie, a man back on the throne after the old king’s girls, Bloody Mary and Virgin Bess, eh? Get a man ruling, things won’t be ruined like lately.”

If I had not been in the middle of the wintry Thames, I would have told this dolt that it was a man who was ruining my life, ruining the calm of this city and the queen’s day to boot.

I turned away, even though I had to face the cutting western wind. Tears stung my eyes. A rebellion in the streets and in my heart. Oh, I’d warn Will and the players, but then I must get on with my life. How stupid—how sinful—I had been to think I could keep a man who was not wholly mine, maybe never mine at all.

The Globe came in view with its flag flapping, a drawing of Atlas shouldering the world. How I had loved that theatre and its people. How I had loved Will, almost as far back as I could remember. I could go to live in my fine new place only a few miles from Anne Hathaway’s New Place. But, though I loved to visit there, especially in the summer, my heart and home were here. I must decide what to do with my life away from Will, who obviously had cooled toward me. Love “is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. . . . If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved”—horse dung! Damn that devil with the bewitching words!

I paid the boatman and nearly tripped when I disembarked on the Paris Garden wharf. Holding up my skirts, watching for slick spots on the path, I hurried toward the Globe. I went in the back way, through the tiring room door, for I knew they were presenting
The Merchant of Venice
, but surely they must be nearly done.

I came in on the first scene of Act V, where the lovers Jessica and Lorenzo banter sarcastically—more of Will’s true nature coming out, I fumed. I stopped backstage between the rows of hanging swords in scabbards as the pair of speeches struck me.

 

It was too much. In truth, the malcontents in Will’s plays, even his comedies, spoke for him. He loved me not, but had only needed me in his difficult days—need, his own definition of love. Now, with fame and fortune, it was all over. For him, love was only a theme in a play, a joke, a vow of faith to steal a woman’s soul . . .

Will and his fellows had made their bed with Essex and Southampton by choice, and that was that. As far as I was concerned, Will Shakespeare would never make his bed with me again.

Blinded by tears, I staggered to the back door and let myself out. As I rounded the building, I saw a late-paying customer slip inside the Globe, though the ticket boy tried to tell him the play was nearly over. Mr. Mercer, come to see but the last few scenes of an old play? While Essex and Southampton staged a rebellion across the river?

Feeling as deserted and defeated as they must be, I wiped my tears away and hurried back to the wharf.

 

 

 

As I first conveyed to you
in this, my life drama, it was but three days later that I found myself fetched by a boy to the building that housed the queen’s wardrobe where I faced Robert Cecil in a war of wits and words. He made it clear that my answers would affect the fate of the Globe’s players, especially Will. Then he posed the inquiry that made me decide to write this
memoir
, to use the French word for a probing of personal memories. Quite simply, the queen’s Secretary Cecil asked what I myself had been asking for years, especially now that things seemed so bad between Will and me.

We stared at each other in a stalemate but hardly, I thought, a truce. Air from an unseen source shifted a battle banner behind his head. With a shudder up my spine, I realized what I said in the next few moments could save Will or damn him to death. I’d been so angry with him lately, cursing his callous behavior, but now, in place of that, fear flooded in. Fear for him, for me and all we’d worked for.

“But tell me,” Cecil said, leaning on his elbows and steepling his long-fingered hands before his mouth, “before we go on, exactly what is William Shakespeare to you? Here you are, an exotic woman, a tempting vixen, when I believe I’ve heard he has a wife and family back in Stratford-Upon-the-Avon. Tell me true, Mistress Anne Whateley, what is the man to you?”

If he’d asked me that on the day of the Essex rebellion, who knows what I might have said. But now the emotions—yes, the need, as Will had said—the long-buried love I had borne him from our childhoods on rushed back to nearly overwhelm me. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds . . .” I believed those words at all costs. I believed Will had once meant those words and could mean them again. Though I’d as good as thrown him out of my life, I yet slept in his best bed.

“Mistress?” Cecil prompted as if I had missed my cue. For one moment I nearly broke into wild laughter. It was as if he had inquired if I were Will’s mistress, but he was simply prodding me to answer him.

“I am trying to find the words to explain, my lord. I rather reckon it is like your relationship to and love for the queen.”

“How so?” he demanded, sitting up stiffly and frowning.

“Will Shakespeare, sir, is a genius at what he does, much as is the queen in her realm. But they need helpers, do they not, guardian angels of a sort? She is a woman in a man’s world where some want to harm her, a woman whom you, as your father before you, have honored and served. And Will is a rural poet at heart trying to make his way in London where I lived before he came. So you and I are much alike in our admiration—and our love—for those we have chosen to care for.”

“Yes, but Her Majesty is far above my star, whereas you and Shakespeare—”

“But,” I dared to interrupt him, on a sure path now, “the queen’s God-given destiny is to rule the English people. My friend Will’s is to write for her people and for the queen herself, who has shown him much generous favor. Yet they both need protection and prompting to be their best, is that not so?”

I could tell he was shocked by my answer, perhaps suspicious and skeptical too. I had probably overdone the histrionics he’d wanted to avoid if he’d dragged the players in here. But I could not help it. I held my breath, praying he had not had Mr. Mercer or some other spy dig up the fact that Will and I were registered to be wed in a public record book in Worcester.

He cleared his throat. “So you are his friend and his—his muse, as it were?”

“Exactly and succinctly said, my lord, for I know I rambled on a bit.”

“A friend to his family then?”

“I am not much in Stratford, but I believe if you inquired of his father, he would say so.”

“Well, then to business,” he said, looking relieved but not half as much as I felt. “You have claimed that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played
Richard II
for Essex, Southampton and their ilk because they needed the money. Even if I grant you that, I have it on good authority that the way Essex conducted himself during the play was shameful and provocative.”

That
was
Mr. Mercer in the audience
, I thought. My, but he was getting to be a supporter of Will’s plays lately.

“He did, my lord, and I can tell you how appalled the players were, especially Will. I must admit I was there backstage and can tell you he looked sick to his stomach at the way the Earl of Essex carried on, and not just because he was cavorting about to draw attention from the players. Why, Essex even pretended he was a chicken with his head cut off, which entirely mocked the solemnity of the history being presented, not to mention—”

“I see,” he intoned, holding up both hands. “We shall let it rest at that, Mistress Whateley. As for heads being cut off, that will be the sad fate of Lord Essex and perhaps Southampton too—”

“He’s so young and impressionable, Lord Southampton, I mean, at least he seems that way from a distance. Thank heavens your father took him in when he lost his own father so early. Essex has deluded him, my lord, calling himself an older brother. I fear he has greatly misled the younger man in several serious matters, after your sire, no doubt, did a fine job counseling him when Southampton was his ward.”

There, I thought. Essex was no doubt doomed, but perhaps what I’d blurted out just now could help to save Will’s patron’s life. I would never forget that, whatever his shame and sins now, Southampton had been generous not only to Will but to me.

“Mistress Whateley,” Cecil said, half rising, then sitting again, “you are dismissed with my thanks and the queen’s wardrobe pieces, which Thompson here will carry for you as far as the door. After all, your receiving such was all you were here for today. You saw someone in charge whose name you did not catch, took the garments and went home.”