Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard (16 page)

It was my trump card and it won, because as he bent down to kiss me, he whispered, “If I do bring you one of these playbooks, you must be careful with your aunt. This must be our secret. And you must find a secure place where she will not find it or we’ll never hear the end of it.”

I turned and, opening my eyes, put my arms around his neck and kissed him. “It is our secret, Uncle,” I said, “and I shall be careful.” And so I was and so was he.

That spring and summer I read
Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, The Merchant of Venice
and
Henry IV,
Parts 1 & 2.
All these bore my father’s name on their title pages, but as the bookseller Gladwell came to know my uncle he told him that he was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and that there were earlier plays and poetry in print that did not bear his name but were surely of his making. And that is how I came also to read
Richard III
and
Henry V,
though the latter was a poor version of the play I would read in the Folio years later.

All this confirmed that my father was still alive and writing and it heartened me; I had a reason now to live and to dream of going to London one day to meet him. In the meantime I had no need of others, for now I lived in the company of new acquaintances: Falstaff and Prince Hal, Beatrice and Benedict, Richard Crookback and Lady Anne. In my room, I performed the plays, taking all the parts, and reading with wonder and pride the words my father put into the mouths of these characters. I knew it went against my uncle’s beliefs to bring these books into the house, and sometimes as he handed me another, he would express his dismay, saying something like “I sometimes wonder what will become of you, Aerlene, with your head crammed with such stuff.” Yet he was happy enough to see how much improved I was in body and spirit.

By my thirteenth birthday I felt well enough to ask another favour of him. Even such good company as I had been keeping in my imagination cannot over time
replace real life, and I was growing tired of my room and Aunt Sarah asking how I occupied myself by being alone so much. I feared her discovery of my pastimes and there were close calls when she would appear suddenly at my bedroom door.

One day I asked Uncle Jack if I could help in his shop. He thought about it and talked to Aunt Sarah, who disapproved of the idea, arguing that a bastard child would not be good for trade. She wanted to place me in service and intended to do so when I came of age at fourteen. Very well, I said, but could I not do something until then in the back of the shop? This was agreed upon and my uncle told me to make myself useful to his only apprentice, Tom Bradley, a quiet boy with a clubfoot who was a year or two older than I. His father was a gamekeeper in the Royal Park where the Queen had once been held prisoner in the palace by her Papist sister, Mary.

Tom’s lameness made an outcast of him in the eyes of most; he was seen as a changeling with the devil’s footprint in his clumsy gait. He said he’d heard of me; was I not the base-born child of a man who had lived in the woods and had no tongue? Such were the tales that surrounded me in my youth, and so embedded were they in people’s minds that there was nothing to be gained by contradicting them.

On that first day, I said to Tom that we were then a
likely pair, a clubfoot and a bastard, best hidden from the eyes of the innocent.

At first he seemed perplexed by this, but then he laughed. “Why, yes,” he said, “that’s right enough, though it seems odd to hear it put that way.”

In no time we were good friends. He showed me how to measure cloth with the yardstick and how to cut a straight line with the shears. I swept up the cuttings for him and put away things in boxes. There was really not that much to do, but I tried to keep busy. Tom was easy to talk to, and we shared our bread and cheese and cup of ale at eleven o’clock; he told me stories of his father chasing poachers in the park. Tom said that he loved living in the park and, but for his leg, would have followed his father into gamekeeping, for he preferred animals to humans and enjoyed the quiet rustle of forest life. I was soon telling him stories about magical creatures who lived in the woods and how the little people travelled by moonlight and lodged in people’s ears, where they fashioned dreams. Borrowing shamelessly from my father’s playbooks, I took on as my own the stories of Richard Crookback and the young lovers of Verona and the fat knight who once beguiled a future king of England. Tom listened like a child asking endless questions. “Who told you such things?” “Is what you say true or not?” “Where is this forest with the magical creatures?”

I was a terrible chatterbox, but I enjoyed myself, and sometimes Tom would look up from his bench and say, “How can I work with you jabbering on so? Your uncle will scorch me if this stitching isn’t done within the hour.” But not a minute later, as I watched his long clever fingers at their work, he would mutter, “So what happened next?”

I think I must have loved Tom Bradley a little, for one day I asked him to step behind a rack of wall hangings and there I kissed him full on the mouth. Tom had pock scars from childhood—just a few—and you could never call him handsome, but his smile was so pleasant and he had a pretty mouth. He was shy at first, for he feared my uncle coming upon us, but soon he was enjoying our innocent little games behind those tapestries. Then he said that I was the strangest little creature ever he had known, but that he wouldn’t trade me for another.

At the end of the workday, Uncle Jack and I walked down the long hill from Woodstock to Worsley and I would get him talking about all manner of things. Away from his wife and the worries of his trade, he answered my questions about his family and how Mam came into his life. He had been the first-born, a healthy son for his mother and father, but then ill fortune struck their household as child after child died before reaching the second year. He said his parents felt cursed until Mam was born. By then my uncle was ten or eleven and he told me how he
marvelled at his baby sister, at the tiny perfection of her hands and feet. Even then he vowed he would protect her as best he could.

“Your mother, Aerlene,” he said, “was a little miracle for my parents and me.”

On those early evening walks I asked him too how he came to meet Aunt Sarah, and he told me that he was apprenticed to a mercer in Burford, and he saw her one day with her sister at church. They sat across from him and he used to steal glances, as did many other young men, for the sisters were much sought after.

He told me that the greatest pleasure of his week was going to service on Sunday mornings for a glimpse of Sarah. Sometimes he worried that God would punish him for these thoughts, which strayed far from the preacher’s text. I wondered about that. How do you keep an impure thought from straying into your mind when you are looking at someone you desire? I myself already had “impure thoughts” of Tom Bradley, imagining him undressing me in a forest glade. But I never asked my uncle such a question because he would have said only that those playbooks were corrupting me.

To hear Uncle Jack speak with such feeling about my aunt was instructive, since youth often has difficulty in imagining passions that might once have burned in their elders. I thought my aunt still a handsome woman, though a lifetime of frowning and reproach had pinched her features
into a disagreeable wryness. Yet once she had been desirable enough to capture hearts, and this was worth remembering. These walks home with my uncle were a great pleasure at the end of the day, and they continued through the late summer of that year and into autumn and on to winter, when we had to pull our cloaks about us against the northerly wind that often struck the brow of the hill leading down to our village.

Then one evening towards the end of that winter, the walks abruptly ended. The day itself had been peculiar from the beginning, because when I first arrived Tom Bradley wasn’t there, though a few minutes later I heard his voice at the front of the shop. No customers had yet arrived and he was talking to my uncle, and I could also hear a woman’s voice. When Tom came into the back, he wouldn’t look at me but went straight to his bench and tied on his apron. My “good morning” was greeted only with a murmur as he fell to his sewing. All week he had been talking with exuberance of the Lenten preacher who was giving sermons each night at St. Mary’s Church. He told me these sermons were so good that one could not help but rejoice in the Lord. I was not much interested in such things, but always I kept that to myself and listened. Until that morning, when he arrived so silent and morose. Nor did he say anything the whole day, and even my jests, which usually met with laughter, were turned aside with a
shake of the head. There was scarcely any point in thinking of kisses.

I thought about him all day and was doubtless still wondering on the walk home with my uncle. He too was so quiet that I was moved finally to ask, “Is there something the matter, Uncle? You seem in an ill humour.”

We were nearly to the village and he stopped. “Yes, Aerlene,” he said, “something is the matter and I must ask you not to return to the shop from this day forward.”

“And why is that, Uncle?” I asked.

“I spoke this morning to Tom Bradley and his mother,” he said. “Tom is a good lad and he has been attending the Lenten preacher’s services at St. Mary’s this week, and so was moved to tell his mother of what’s been going on between you and him in the back of the shop.”

“But it is nothing, Uncle,” I said. “Only kisses.”

“Only kisses,” he said scornfully. “And where do kisses lead if not to embraces and then to other matters? Your mother’s troubles began with kisses.”

“What Tom and I were about was innocent enough,” I said.

“That’s not for you to judge, child. Your lovemaking was on my premises. I could dismiss that boy from his trade for this.”

“Don’t do that, Uncle, please,” I said. “It was all my doing.”

“So Tom said, but one cannot act without the other, and as he is older, he should not have taken advantage. It would appear that you are both at fault.” He began to walk on, and I hurried after him. “I will keep him on for his mother’s sake,” said my uncle, “but you must not set foot in the shop again, Aerlene. You must stay at home now and learn household matters from your aunt. You will be fourteen this summer, and she has hopes of placing you in service.”

Next day my aunt summoned me to the parlour and we sat by the window from where I could look out at the garden and the stone bench where Mam and I had spent so many afternoons together. It is difficult so many years later to convey the intensity of the dislike that poisoned the very air between Aunt Sarah and me when we found ourselves alone together. When Mam was alive, her more compliant temperament had acted as a buffer. But now I was alone and, it seems, growing more obstinate with each passing day. I admit it freely now; all those years of enduring my aunt’s hostility and righteousness had scored my spirit with a rage that I could barely suppress, and this translated into numbing silences in her presence, or brief, sarcastic answers to her questions.

That day in my aunt’s parlour, six and fifty years ago—I can see only its dim outline now, but I can imagine how we might have sounded. A late winter morning and I was probably staring out the window, annoyed at no longer
being in the shop at that time of day, disappointed by Tom Bradley’s disloyalty, pretending perhaps that I was in love and had been betrayed.

“Your uncle has told me about the boy in the shop.”

“Yes?”

“What have you to say for yourself?”

“Very little.”

“I have been wondering for some time now if your mother ever spoke to you about the changes that take place when you approach a certain age.”

“Yes, she did.”

“And what did she tell you?”

“That one day about my fourteenth year I should expect cramping in my parts and a flow of blood once a month.”

“Yes. Well …”

“Mam told me to keep a supply of cloths on hand to clean myself. I must change them each day.”

“I am glad to hear that you were told such things. And do you realize what all this means?”

“It means that if I lie with a man I could bear a child. But I didn’t lie with Tom Bradley, and anyway my courses have not yet begun. Mam told me everything about this. You do not have to speak of it.”

“And you do not have to be so insolent, Aerlene. Whatever you may think, your mother set a poor example for
you in her habits, and everyone in this village and as far as Woodstock can see where those habits got her.”

“Yes. They got her me, a bastard in your house, where neither of us was made welcome. Not by you, at least.”

“Your uncle and I took you both in out of Christian charity. We have fed and clothed and housed you all these years. We have always had your best interests at heart.”

“My gratitude knows no bounds, Aunt.”

“You are a sarcastic, impudent and ungrateful girl and deserve far worse than you have had.”

“Thank you, Aunt.”

My aunt left the room while I remained staring out the window at the stone bench. It must have been something like that.

Upon hearing of this conversation and doubtless others like it over the following weeks, my uncle finally took me aside and told me I was taxing his patience.

“You are too full of scorn and ridicule, Aerlene, and that is unbecoming in anyone but especially so in the young. You need reminding of what Scripture says about obedience.”

I expected this, for Puritans always had a ready verse to illustrate their point. In this case a quotation from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.

And he continued, “In the absence of your poor mother, your aunt and I are
in loco parentis,
which is to say we are in
her place and therefore deserving of the respect and obedience you would afford her were she here. It is God’s word, Aerlene, and you must subscribe or risk damnation.”

To please him I said I was well rebuked and would endeavour to amend my ways. Yet in my heart, I wondered if it were possible to change so.