Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard

by Richard B. Wright

  Nicholas was only fifteen at the time, and how he missed his sisters. But the genuine loss was Mrs. Easton’s, who despite the prospect of a reunion in Heaven seemed broken in body and spirit by the loss of her girls. With the passing weeks [it seemed to rain most days, as I recall] she grew increasingly forlorn and an ague took hold of her and would not let go. The doctor bled her, to no good effect, and she continued to weaken. I myself attended to her chills and fevers, but by the end of April she too was gone. She had been a sweet, accommodating presence in the household and a woman who, I believe, gave quiet counsel to her husband and kept him on a steady course.

  The squire took his wife’s death badly and for a long while succumbed to drink. Mr. Walter, only then in his twenties, had to manage the estate mostly on his own: collect the rents, plan the seeding and harvesting, oversee the labourers, buy and sell animals. But he learned, and quickly too. Those were hard times for him, with indifferent crops and falling prices, saddled with a father who was often drunk by the noon-hour bell; and there were older men at the markets eager to outwit the young man. I give Mr. Walter full credit, for he never lost his head, though I am sure that firm but kind temperament he had drawn from his mother was sorely tested.

  In time the squire came to his senses and we were all grateful to see him sober and working again alongside his eldest son. Then, to our surprise and chagrin, he did something entirely foolish for a man of fifty-eight years. A case can be made that a well-to-do widower like Henry Easton needed a wife; men like him need women to keep their feet on solid ground—though I doubted he would ever again find one as strong and capable as his first. And in fact he made an imprudent choice. Or should I say his loins and not his head made the choice—for he began to court a Miss Pentworth from Islip who was visiting friends near Woodstock. He met her at a neighbour’s wedding, where I was told by one in service to the household that the young woman in a sky blue taffeta gown was radiance itself, all blonde curls and blue eyes, a pale golden beauty and no argument from anyone about that. But she was barely twenty years old. Some said she claimed to be a year or two older, but this same person in the household told me that Anne Pentworth was barely nineteen.

  The squire was enchanted by her beauty, though as far as I could see she had nothing else to offer. A high, prancing laugh accompanied her everywhere and she seemed happiest while talking and giggling among her young friends about gowns and shoes. Or so I observed when she visited Easton House. I think the girl’s father was behind it all, eyeing the squire’s lands even as he walked about with his hands behind him, smiling at old Henry, who looked as attentive as a schoolboy with his master. A sight to behold, for this man Pentworth, who would become the squire’s father-in-law, was at least ten years younger. Nor do I believe Abel Pentworth had anything but promissory notes to his name. I was told he ran a small shop in Islip, but to me he had the furtive look of a man forever in debt. It was ludicrous; the squire was clearly not in his right mind, though it would have been folly to approach him about a change in course. He was under the spell of that young woman’s beauty, a state described by my father in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream when he puts into the mouth of Theseus the best description of lovesickness in the language:

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

  More than cool reason ever comprehends.

  My father, of course, was referring to the young lovers in a forest near Athens. But how graver the malady when it afflicts an older man with a much younger woman. As poor Nicholas said to me on the eve of the wedding. “Dear God, Linny, she’s only a year or two older than I am—and must I now address this witless young thing as ‘Mother’?”

  Within the year the squire got a child upon her, but the poor woman was small and the birth difficult. I remember her yet being worn down by those long, effortful hours, her light hair splayed across the pillow, the sweat on her upper lip, the desperate howling as I helped the midwife work the child from her mother’s exhausted body. Anne held her daughter but briefly, then closed her eyes forever. The squire was below, but his young wife’s cries had driven him to the brandy again, and he could only pace about and curse.

  When I went down with the news, he was staring into the fire and asked me if the child would live. I said she would if we got in a wet nurse, a woman in one of the cottages would do, and the maidservant had already gone to fetch her. The old man’s back was to me and when I asked him for a name he waved me away. “You give the child a name, Aerlene,” he said, and so I did and called her Charlotte Anne. Two days later we buried her mother in the churchyard of St. Cuthbert’s.

  The squire didn’t take to the child. It was unnatural and unfair, but I believe he couldn’t help himself. Perhaps he had truly loved that young woman and this child’s life was a constant reproach to him. Whatever the reason, he became a silent and disappointed old man, watchful and suspicious, his mind often muddled with drink, scarcely bothering to look upon his child in her cradle. He soon gave up on everything, and Charlotte was barely a year old when Henry Easton died in his sleep. I found him early one morning slumped in his chair in the drawing room, where he had been all night drinking brandy.

  Charlotte has no memory of her father and when as a child she used to ask about him, I embroidered my tale for her benefit, relating how much her father had fussed over her as a baby. His death, I told her, had been in bed, where he had quietly gone to sleep.

  So for the past several years, there have been just Charlotte and Mr. Walter and Mrs. Sproule and myself living in Easton House. Emily lives in the village and comes and goes each day; the gardener, Johnson, son of old John who was here when I first arrived, lives in the cottage his father once inhabited. As I have said, the two older girls, Mary and Catherine, live in Massachusetts and send us their Christmas letters each year. Both have prospered in their new circumstances and I marvel as I read their accounts of life in America. In the early days, I pictured them living on the edge of vast forests amid savages, but in their letters over the years they write of fine homes on streets with shops and churches and the general pleasantries of town living. Boston, it seems, is much like London, though I gather not nearly as large. Mary’s husband, Cyrus Lawford, died a few years ago and she is remarried to a clergyman. But reading their letters is like receiving news from another planet and the girls I once told stories to and whose tears I used to dry with my apron now seem like strangers. Their long-ago journey, thousands of miles across the ocean, seems almost unimaginable to those of us here in Worsley, where people seldom stray farther than Oxford, nine miles away. The well-to-do may go as far as Bath or Bristol and sometimes to London, but most of us stay put.

  My mother was hardly well-to-do but she went to London once, and there she met my father, and next week when my little amanuensis returns, I hope to record as best I can what Mam told me about her life.

  I must first, however, amend an error in my foregoing account of Easton House and its history. The amendment came to me in the midst of one of my thrice-nightly pisses. The man who led that expedition to America, the voyage that carried our girls away from us forever, was not called Winslow. His name was Winthrop. John Winthrop. Is it not strange how a word or a name, snagged on some impediment beneath the current of our memories, becomes unloosed and rises to the surface, where we reclaim it? And this may happen at the oddest times. At three o’clock in the morning, for instance, crouched over a chamber pot.

  MAM’S STORY

  CHAPTER 2

  FROM AN EARLY AGE I wondered who my father was. Other children had fathers. Who and where was mine? Mam and I lived in Worsley with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Jack, who owned a draper’s shop in Woodstock, a mile away. He walked there to his work each weekday and Mam walked with him, for she measured and sewed linen in the back of his shop behind a curtain. As a small child, I waved goodbye to them each morning as they set forth. At first I thought Uncle Jack was my father, for unlike his wife, who was cold
and distant, Uncle Jack treated me kindly and sometimes brought home treats, making me swear not to tell Aunt Sarah.

  One day when I was likely no more than three, I watched Mam leave with my uncle and then asked Aunt Sarah if Mam was married to Uncle Jack and if he was my father. And if that were so, why did I call him “Uncle” and how did Aunt Sarah come by her name? My aunt was a tall, spare woman, handsome in her own severe way. When I think of it, she could, at least in looks, have been a sister to the Lawford brothers. I don’t believe I ever saw her smile above once or twice in her life. Her entire recreation was preparing for Heaven; she read her Bible aloud each day—the raising of Lazarus was a favourite—and I can still recite that passage from John’s gospel word for word, since I listened to it so often as a child. When, however, I asked my questions that particular day, I remember how her face grew dark with anger. She told me that Uncle Jack was most certainly not my father and it was foolish of me to think so. She and my uncle had not been blessed with children and had taken Mam and me into their house out of Christian charity. As for me, I was, as she put it, base-born. I don’t recall being especially upset by these revelations, nor did I bother even to ask after the meaning of base-born. I imagine I was far too young to be anything other than puzzled by it all. Still, I carried the memory of how my questions that day had somehow offended Aunt Sarah, making her face grow dark, and so I was careful thereafter not to broach the subject of my father again.

  Instead I went to Mam and from time to time pestered her with questions. Who was my father? How had she met him? Why had he not married her and lived with us like other fathers? Was he still living or was he looking down on us from Heaven?

  In those early years Mam was not direct with me and would often say one thing and then another. My father had been a soldier but was killed fighting the Spanish, who were threatening the Queen’s realm. How I liked the sound of that phrase, the Queen’s realm! I had no idea where Mam found it, most likely from a storybook, for it didn’t sound in the least like her. Then some weeks later, I would ask again and she would have forgotten her story about the soldier and launch a tale in which my father was a seaman who had sailed with Drake against the Armada in the very year I was born, and had died later in a shipwreck off the Canaries. Making up such stories was of a piece with Mam’s oddness. As I would learn in time, she was seen by others not only as an unwed mother who sewed in her brother’s shop, but also as a woman who kept to herself. Mam believed in all manner of fanciful things: imps and fairies, changelings and hobgoblins. As a child I would watch her tap a forefinger three times against the side of her nose at the sight of a pied-coloured horse, or upon hearing the first clap of thunder from an oncoming storm. Not that unusual among country people, you might think, but with Mam it was like a religion, a way of seeing into the world. At the same time she was a believing Christian. But she could not resist the enchantment she found in the natural world. Walking in the woods and meadows on the edge of the village she talked sometimes to birds and hedgehogs, voles and coneys; she sought the whereabouts of the little people near the roots of oak trees or under toadstools. In all its phases, the moon was both everlasting mystery and companion.

  When I was very young and walked along beside her, I myself thought these things quite wondrous and asked endless questions about the pixies and fairy folk. But as I grew older I began to see it all as nonsense. Yet Mam persisted in believing in the efficacy of spells and magic, and she was conversant about trees and flowers. It is little wonder that she loved A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and had me read it to her six times during the final year of her life. She told me that the sixth reading was a good omen, six being the double of three, which itself, she said, is a number possessed of magical properties. I was twelve years old then and, as she said, twelve is the double of six, another good sign that she might recover. But nothing, neither simples nor signs, could change her wasting away that awful year.

  I have an image of my mother which I will carry to my own deathbed. I could not have been four years old and she had taken me with her to visit Goody Figgs, an old woman who lived in a hut in the woods near the river where she drew water each day for her potions. I was frightened of her and on my only visit stood at the doorway of her dark little home, peering in at the plants and herbs hanging from the rafters, the small fire in the grate, the hides of animals drying on benches. I would go no farther and Mam could not persuade me otherwise. Many accounted Goody Figgs a witch, though others found her useful, especially unmarried women whose courses had run dry. Years later, Goody’s hut was burned to the ground by young men drunk on May Day ale and bravado. I have always believed they were inflamed by the sermons of Obadiah Littlejohn, the rector of St. Cuthbert’s at the time. Fortunately, the old woman was not at home. She vanished into the woods, never to be seen in the neighbourhood again. Some said later she was living in the Royal Park at Woodstock, but I always doubted the story, as I never believed the gamekeepers would allow it. But Mam was fascinated by Goody Figgs, and on the day I went with her, I played alone and watched them together on the edge of a wood gathering simples, a pretty woman and an old hag. I remember my mother rising from the grass now and then to stretch her back, and holding her hand to shield her eyes against the sunlight as she looked for me. Then she would wave and I would wave back. A warm-hearted creature, Mam, but innocent in the ways of the world and far too trusting.

  She called me Aerlene, a name no one in the village, including my aunt and uncle, had ever heard. Mam told me she got the name from an old book of Anglo-Saxon tales which she had read as a child. Aerlene means elf-like and she called me so because at birth I was early and small with a large head covered with black hair. “You reminded me of a little elf as soon as I saw you,” she said. Apparently my birth had been more than the usual ordeal for new mothers. “What a time I had bringing you into this world,” Mam used to say. And more than once, especially when she was vexed with me, “That head of yours nearly tore me apart. I could have perished from the pain.” As if it were my fault!

  She told this story so many times that I grew weary of it and said to her once—I might have been six at the time—“I don’t know why you bother to put little in front of elf. Are not all elves little by their very nature?”

  “Oh,” she said, “haven’t we become a smarty boots?”

  “And what if I have?” I said. “Have you not made me so with words and reading?”

  She laughed at that, for she was never angry long. Mam herself seldom read anything; she merely encouraged it in me because she thought I was plain and unlikely to find a mate. When she first taught me my letters, she was quick to tell me why. “You will never be a beauty, little elf,” she said, “and so you must learn, and reading books will help you.” What a thing to say to a child! And I thought as much even then. Like many handsome people, Mam lacked discernment regarding the feelings of those less favoured by nature in appearance. And, of course, she had long forgotten my little lesson in redundancy.

  But it is true that my head is large and my brow imposing, which some claim betokens intelligence. When I was in my fifteenth year and first laid eyes upon my father on Silver Street in London, I took note at once of the brow I had inherited, though in fairness I must say that it suited a grown man’s countenance better than a young girl’s. As a child I was often mocked. Not only for being a bastard, but also for my appearance. But I soon learned to give as good as I received. When other children out of spite hurled stones at me, I sprayed them with words I found in little books Aunt Sarah bought from peddlers with titles such as News Out of Heaven, A Potation for Lent, The Sick Man’s Salve. Words were my weapons and they sometimes discouraged jeering. Children called me Little Miss Big Tongue. So childhood—those years the elderly mistakenly recall most fondly—seemed to me only a time to pass through as quickly as possible.

  At the beginning of my twelfth year, Mam promised to unfold the truth about my father but said I must wait for my birthday, for by then I woul
d be old enough to understand. An entire year! I thought. How cruel. And I think I must have sulked a good deal in the ensuing months. I had always been an inward-looking child interested only in words on a page, though by then I was tired of reading accounts of Protestants roasted to death by Queen Mary’s Papists, or tracts promoting wholesome habits that would ensure an afterlife. So my sulking and ill humour that year often led to encounters with Aunt Sarah, who had always despaired of my salvation. And these led to thrashings, mostly when Mam was away at my uncle’s shop. I never mentioned them to her and I took particular pride in enduring those leather-strap beatings without tears. I was a hard little nut to crack and no mistake.

  At the same time, I was worried about my mother, and that may have contributed to my surliness. There was something wrong with her that summer. It was not easily discernible; you had to look for it, and I was looking for it, observing with the passing weeks a thinning out of colour in her face, a sharpening of her features. One morning on her way to work she suddenly fell to the ground in a faint there on the flagstone pathway from the front door. I saw the collapse, her head narrowly missing a stone when she fell. Uncle Jack carried her indoors and upstairs to bed. She soon recovered and made a fuss about not wanting a doctor, laughing away her clumsiness. That evening, I overheard my aunt telling Uncle Jack that his sister’s problems were merely vaporous; she had reached that time when the parts are undergoing change in accordance with God’s design for women in this life. Perhaps so, I thought, for Mam at the time was about forty years in age.

  Then, a fortnight before my twelfth birthday, a Saturday in July, Mam returned with Uncle Jack from Oxford. It was my uncle’s habit to visit Oxford market every other Saturday to inspect the linen goods on display and enjoy the gossip of his trade with fellow vendors. He always took Mam along; he saw it, I suppose, as an outing for his sister. While my uncle had a pint of ale with friends in the Hounds and Hare, Mam was free to roam about, perhaps attending to an errand for my aunt or looking for a trinket for me. On her return that Saturday, however, her gaunt face was flushed; she seemed agitated, but pleasantly so, and eagerly drawing me aside, she whispered that we should go to the stone bench in the garden, where we talked often together safely out of Aunt Sarah’s hearing.