Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard

C
HARLOTTE LEFT FOR
O
XFORD
this morning. This was irritating because she had promised that today she would begin to take down my words. The pen and inkhorn and the book with its ivory-coloured blank pages and marbled cover, Charlotte’s Christmas present to me, are on the writing table in the library. I put them there myself yesterday morning in anticipation. So I was short with her as she said goodbye today, bending to kiss my cheek as I sat at breakfast. As usual, she was late and in a hurry, the hired coach already waiting in the courtyard. It was barely light and our new serving girl, Emily, was taking the baggage outdoors and looking none too pleased about it either. But then, she is already showing signs of insolence. I have to think about this, but I may soon give her notice.

“It’s only a week, Linny,” Charlotte whispered. “I’ll begin your story when I return. I promise.”

But she has promised many times before, and always it seems there is something to distract her: tea at a neighbour’s house, a meeting with her church group, a gathering for cards. Now an engagement broken off, yet again; a friend in Oxford is in distress and must be consoled. Charlotte heard the news only yesterday. Surely I could understand how she was needed in the circumstances? I didn’t say as much, but I would have been more sympathetic had this not been the third or perhaps even the fourth time her friend’s engagement has been called off, either by the young lady or by the unfortunate young man who may have to spend the rest of his life in her company. My own feeling is that matters will be mended yet again within a fortnight. For the moment, however, there is drama in the lives of Charlotte and her friend, with tears and muffins and tea and endless pillow chatter in the night. I pity the young woman’s mother more than anyone.

This dependence on Charlotte is maddening. Despite my years of hard work, she can yet prove unreliable; even now in her twenty-fourth year she can behave like a schoolgirl. At Christmastime she told me that in the spring she would set aside the mornings for me until we finished what I have to say about my father, the poet Shakespeare: how he entered my mother’s life and later my own. Now it is April and so far I have nothing but her empty promises.

Even as she left this morning she promised, “We shall get to it next week, Linny. I owe it to you—I really do—and I’m looking forward to hearing it all.”

She does owe me, too, because I have raised her from the moment the midwife pulled her from her dying mother. Still, always something gets in the way.

I would, of course, transcribe all this myself, but I have left it too late and this cursed membrane across my eyes has set me adrift in a world of wavering cloudiness that blurs faces and familiar objects: the edges of tables now snag my hips and chair legs bruise my shins. I have to be mindful on stairs. As for words on a page, they are but clusters of letters swimming before my eyes. A lifetime of reading by candlelight must now be paid for, and if I am to live much longer, I expect I shall end my days as blind as justice.

Yet not for a moment do I regret those years of reading. I have read nearly all my life. In my fifth year I could recite the letters of the alphabet from my hornbook. Then I began to see how these letters could be put together to form words that could name the plants and creatures of this world and describe our very thoughts and feelings. Soon I was reading Aesop’s fables and the
Book of Ancient Riddles, The Hundred Merry Tales
and others like them. Reading was important, for it meant we could become acquainted early with the word of God. Mam and I lived with her brother and his wife, Uncle Jack and Aunt Sarah, and they were
pious folk, my aunt especially disdainful of pleasure in any form. In our house was not a top to spin nor hobbyhorse to ride, and as I grew older my reading was confined to religious books. Before I was seven, I could write the words of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. By then I was also absorbed by the gruesome deaths of Protestants as recorded in Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs;
I knew by heart passages from the big Geneva Bible which sat on the sideboard in the dining room of our house in Worsley. I loved the copperplate illustrations of Jonah in the whale’s belly and Daniel in the lion’s den. But it was the words with their magical power to put pictures inside my head that truly excited me.

After my mother’s death and my time in London, the details of which I shall duly relate, I returned to Oxfordshire and was interviewed here at Easton House for a position as nursemaid. It was arranged by my uncle, a draper by trade, well known for his probity and goodwill. I was then in my fifteenth year and Mrs. Easton was carrying her first child, Walter. Sometimes when I look now at Mr. Walter coming into the house from the fields or the markets at Woodstock or Oxford and sitting down to his dinner, I find it hard to believe that he was once a little boy perched on the window seat of the nursery listening to one of my tales.

For a long time Easton House has been a quiet place, and now with Charlotte away, the house seems even quieter and emptier. After a long and brutal winter, it is milder and
below stairs Emily is cleaning the fire grates. I told her to be sure to open the windows to freshen the air in the rooms as she worked. I have to tell her everything, go through each step of a particular job or she will not do it properly. It is irksome, and though I like the girl well enough, she taxes what little patience I now have left. She is not so much lazy as indifferent, her manner suggesting that she would just as leave be somewhere else. No doubt she is waiting for a young man to claim her, take her away from the drudgery of dirty fire grates and cobwebbed ceiling corners, though I am equally certain that she lacks the imagination to foresee another kind of tedium within the staleness of married life. Still, she is a plump little morsel and I dare say already knows a thing or two about the ways of the young in darkened hallways or leafy bowers. Men must find appealing the merry enticement in those soft brown eyes that always seek forgiveness when you remind her of something she has forgotten to do. Now she is rattling those grates and raking out the ashes, eager, I am sure, to be done with it and sit down in the kitchen with a cup of tea and tell Mrs. Sproule the latest village gossip. There will be dust on the furniture and Emily will forget unless I remind her, but then I too may forget, and of course I can no longer see dust as well as I used to.

Mr. Walter seldom notices anything in the house, let alone dust on a table or chair. He could as easily eat his meals on an overturned box in the stables, so little regard
has he for the niceties of household living. This has grown on him over the years and now his mind is ever on the price of oats or hay or barley, or the weather and its uncertainties. And there’s no wife to complicate his single-minded way of thinking. But he is a kind man and a good farmer, well regarded in the shire. His reputation for honesty and fair dealing saved us from ruin in the late civil war. I am certain of it. The Eastons and those of us in their service supported the King’s party, and while other like-minded people had their fields trampled and goods looted by Cromwell’s armies, they left us alone.

I recall an evening a few weeks before the war began. A friend and neighbour, Mr. Murdoch, visited Easton House to talk with Mr. Walter. They discussed the weather and their crops, but as Murdoch was leaving, they stopped at the front door, and I overheard their parting words, for I was behind an open doorway.

Murdoch said, “And when the time comes, Walter, how will you be placed?”

Mr. Walter replied, “Conscience binds me to the King, Zachary.”

“And I to Parliament, Walter,” Murdoch said.

“I know that,” said Mr. Walter, “and I pray to God we may remain friends whatever happens.”

“I pray so too, Walter,” said Murdoch, and I watched them shake hands by the front door.

After the war, the Easton lands were not sequestered, and I am sure that it was Murdoch’s doing, for he had influential friends in Parliament. Then too we lost our precious Nicky at the Battle of Naseby, and there was sympathy throughout the shire for Mr. Walter and Charlotte, since Nicky was well liked with many friends on both sides of that war. It will be thirteen years this June 14 since we lost him, and Charlotte will have a difficult day as she always does; she was only eleven when her stepbrother was killed and she was deeply affected, loving him as only a young girl can love an older brother, which is to say purely and with complete adulation. I remember how she lay in bed for weeks, thin and pale and sick at heart. In her misery one day she told me that she had taken a vow never to love another. Of course, over time her grief has abated, but the fourteenth of June will forever remain a sad day in her life.

The racket Emily is making with those grates is getting on my nerves and I can imagine the dust she is raising. Upon her return, Charlotte may notice it and she will enact a little scene by looking down on a side table and writing in the dust “Oh dear!” or some other pale expression of reproach. Then she will call for Emily, who will look at the words and break forth in tears. Charlotte will comfort her and Emily will promise to do better, because she wants to please Miss Charlotte, who is a lady and dresses beautifully. All this is really my responsibility and if I did my job
properly, I wouldn’t have to endure these needlessly melodramatic displays of remonstrance and forgiveness. But the truth is I am well past it now and I expect I will feel relief only when I am told as much.

I am fairly certain there has already been talk about this between Charlotte and Mr. Walter. On Christmas Day, he asked to see me in the hall. Charlotte had gone to the library to write her annual letters to her two half-sisters, who have lived in America these twenty-eight years past. Charlotte, of course, has never laid eyes on them, but they are still her sisters and she likes to let them know what is going on at Easton House. They in turn write about their lives in Massachusetts, a place I can scarcely bring myself to imagine, though both Mary and Catherine and their husbands and children seem to have made prosperous and happy lives for themselves out there. I can hardly recall now what they looked like. They will always be two young women who left us with their new husbands, and I suppose I will always see them as two girls whom I told stories to and minded forty years ago. They always reply to Charlotte’s letters and tell her of life in the New World. So while Charlotte was in the library, Mr. Walter sat by the fire with a glass of brandy, which he seldom touches, preferring, as I do, ale. I told myself that it was Christmas and so he felt like a glass of brandy, though I was not sure that together with the heavy meal it would necessarily agree with him.
He has gout now, and brandy is no friend to gout. Besides, his colour was high and he had undone the buttons of his waistcoat. Mr. Walter is a large man and hefty in both front and beam, no longer young at fifty-five. And that day he looked ill at ease, though I thought at the time that unless he was unwell, there was no need to be discomfited, for while beyond the window it was bitter cold, we were well placed, warm by the fire with a good dinner inside us. I had cleared the dishes for Mrs. Sproule, another old party who no longer moves as sprightly as she once did, and as she constantly reminds me, “I am the cook and not a maidservant.” This is true. It is not her job to serve. Where was Emily? We must have given her—yes, I remember now—we had given her Christmas Day to be with her family. She had told me her mother was ill and this could well have been untrue, but what does it matter anyway. I had served the dinner to Mr. Walter and Charlotte and it was then that Mr. Walter asked me to share a glass of brandy with him.