Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard

by Richard B. Wright

  There she told me about wandering in Oxford market and happening upon the bookstalls—and what did I think she saw there? I told her perhaps a storybook that might please me, but she only smiled and took my hands and briefly held them.

  “Your twelfth birthday is only a fortnight off,” she said, “so there is no good reason now to wait, for truly I cannot keep this to myself another minute.” And with that she withdrew from beneath her apron a copy of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. I read those very words on the title page.

  “A storybook, then?” I asked. “Or poems?”

  “A playbook,” said Mam, “already enacted in a London playhouse. The bookseller told me it’s only lately printed. And this play was written by your father, Aerlene.”

  I believe that at the time I was as puzzled as I was pleased. “But how would you come to know a man who writes plays?” I asked.

  “He was only young when I knew him,” Mam said. “An apprentice player living in London. In a place called Shoreditch. A country person like myself. He always said he wanted to write poetry. I will tell you how we came to meet in good time. But look now, I have another by him.” And she showed me a copy of Romeo and Juliet.

  “But his name is not on this,” I said. “How do you know he wrote it?”

  “The bookseller told me,” she said. “A kind man and a great reader of poetry by the sound of him. He told me this Romeo and Juliet is a good tale, if a sad one, with fine verses in it. Mr. Shakespeare, he said, has written many plays. The bookseller hasn’t seen them performed on the stage, but he has read them and he said I would enjoy this Romeo and Juliet as well as A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, because Mr. Shakespeare is now accounted the finest playwright in London. His plays, he believed, have even been performed before the Queen. I got both plays for ten pence, for the Romeo and Juliet has been used, but A Midsummer-Night’s Dream is new. I scanned it at the bookstall. It takes place in a forest with fairy folk and lovers and fine descriptions of flowers. We used to talk about the countryside, your father and I. He was homesick for it then, poor fellow. And now a gentleman and poet. I am so happy for him.”

  “Calm yourself, Mam,” I said. “Your face is on fire.”

  “Well, what of that?” she said, squeezing my hand. “This is your father’s work, Aerlene. Your father was no idle porter. No, nor ploughman neither, though many hereabouts believe so.” And drawing nearer she said, “But listen to me, child. These books must be our secret. If your aunt finds out there’ll be the devil to pay, for she accounts such books wicked and she will not have them in her house. In London, I recall your father saying how the Puritans were always trying to close down the playhouses. Will—your father—used to make sport of their long faces and sombre dress.”

  My father, a poet and a gentleman? Was that not worth waiting for all those years? I wanted to know more about him, but Mam said, “I’m tired, Aerlene. All that traipsing about this morning and now this news. I should lie down for a bit. We’ll read these plays, you and I. I like the sound of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream and you can read the other. And then we’ll exchange. I know you’ll read yours half again as fast as I will mine, so be patient with me. And keep your copy well hidden from your aunt. You must promise me.”

  And so I have done until now, some eight and fifty years.

  CHAPTER 3

  AT LAST WE HAVE begun. On Saturday afternoon Charlotte returned from Oxford and yesterday following church she told me that she was ready to begin today. And so she has, sitting at the escritoire this morning dipping quill into inkhorn and transcribing my words, as alert and attentive as I could hope for. Since returning from Oxford, Charlotte has been exceedingly good-humoured, and I think I know the cause of her cheer.

  After we finished this morning, she told me she had met the new rector of St. Cuthbert’s, Mr. Thwaites, at a gathering in Oxford which she attended with her friend, who seems to have a wide circle of acquaintanceship there. I would let Charlotte go no further without an inquiry about her poor friend’s broken engagement, but she only smiled brightly. “Oh, that’s quite mended now, Linny.”

  I told her I was relieved to hear it, but she was too eager to talk about Mr. Thwaites to notice my admittedly regrettable snideness.

  “We had a most pleasant conversation, Mr. Thwaites and I,” she said. “He is no Puritan, Linny, but a fine-tempered man and well educated too. His college was St. John’s. We spoke together a full hour. He said at one point that he had noticed me at his first service at St. Cuthbert’s.” And with that she blushed, which I thought becoming.

  “You should come to service to hear him, Linny. His homilies are moderate and well argued. He is no Littlejohn.” So at least she remembered Obadiah Littlejohn, who had delivered his stormy admonitions across the pulpit of St. Cuthbert’s for fifty years—a hate-filled gospeller who called Mam a fornicator and would not deliver her funeral rites in the church. I was in my thirteenth year, and though I would continue to attend church for some years thereafter, I paid little heed to the preacher’s words. LittleJohn’s successor, Hainsworth, was another firebrand, but now we have Mr. Thwaites, who according to Charlotte is a vast improvement. Perhaps—but it is of no interest to me, beyond my observing the new rector’s effect on Charlotte. It struck me listening to her this morning that she may be taken with him. Then, just as I was absorbing that notion, she said something that truly made me start.

  “Mr. Thwaites,” she said, “is a great admirer of Shakespeare’s plays.”

  “Charlotte,” I said, “please assure me that in your conversation with Mr. Thwaites last week you did not mention anything about me and what we are about in this room. Please assure me of that.” The tone of my remarks drained some colour from her face.

  “Oh no, Linny,” she cried. “No, no, no. It just arose in conversation. We were talking of reading. Mr. Thwaites, it turns out, is a great one for reading. Far greater than I. He told me he is an admirer of good poetry and cited Shakespeare as an example of his taste.”

  “And you are certain that you didn’t mention what we are about here?”

  “No, certainly not. This is our secret.” Still, I thought I could detect, if only faintly, the quaver in a nervous liar’s voice.

  “I’ll not be mocked for this, Charlotte,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Of course I do.”

  But I could see Charlotte rushing headlong into conversation with the rector, and in her giddy fashion blurting something that might prove novel to his ears and make her more interesting.

  “Why, yes, Mr. Thwaites. Speaking of Shakespeare, our ancient housekeeper, Miss Ward, is his daughter born out of wedlock, and in her dotage she has asked me to record an account of how her mother met the poet in London.”

  Or worse. “Speaking of Shakespeare, our ancient housekeeper, Miss Ward, poor old soul, claims to be Shakespeare’s daughter born out of wedlock, and in her dotage she has asked me to…” and et cetera.

  I have wondered from time to time whether Charlotte believes me. When I first told her about my father at Christmas I thought I saw in her smile a trace of doubt. I imagined her wanting to say, even if she didn’t, Why, goodness me, Linny. The poet Shakespeare, your father? That is indeed a story. Why, it must be your best one yet. At the time it made me wonder if I might well be paying for a lifetime of telling stories to the Easton children. Like the boy who cried wolf, had I, as family storyteller, become one who is never truly believed?

  CHAPTER 4

  FROM MY FIRST READING on that warm summer evening in the year 1600 I loved Romeo and Juliet, though I wished Juliet had fallen in love with Mercutio, who seemed to me less pallid and far wittier than Romeo. I was excited too that like me, Juliet was born on Lammas Eve, and I saw in that a good omen, though of what I couldn’t say. Mam was ever in search of omens, so when I told her, I expected her to be pleased. Instead she only scoffed.

  “There is many a child brought forth on Lammas Eve,” said Mam, who didn’t care
for the play. Some very pretty verses, she said, but the story was too sad. “I could not abide the scene where the girl awakens from the friar’s potion to find her lover dead. I’ll not look at it again, nor have it read to me either. I want you to read the other to me in the evenings, as I don’t feel well and have need of distraction.” Mam was then at the beginning of her long decline and often out of sorts. I vowed to be patient in her distress, but didn’t always succeed.

  Then one afternoon she said, “It is time for me to tell you things, Aerlene, but you must try hard not to think ill of your mother. I have brought suffering and shame to this house and this parish, and your aunt has good reason to despise me. Your uncle’s good heart has been our blessing. Without him, you and I would long ago have been out on the roads among the poor and wretched of the earth. And God alone knows what might have become of us. So always remember our debt to him.”

  I said I would and it wasn’t difficult, for I dearly loved Uncle Jack.

  Mam then said, “From the beginning I had terrible judgment in men. I admit that freely. Even with your father I was heedless, though I thought at the time I was barren.” She laughed, but it sounded more scornful than pleasant. “What a jest on me when I found myself with child.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, for after all, was I not what remained of the “jest”? But I let it pass, for I knew her rough way with feelings.

  Mam told me she was pretty but headstrong, and when she was eighteen she fell in love with one Richard Wilkes, a porter, who was ten years older, a dissolute, shiftless, untrustworthy widower whose wife, it was said, had been worn away from ill treatment at his hands.

  “Oh, I was warned by many,” Mam said, “but there was no telling me anything at eighteen. I loved Wilkes and that’s all there was to it. Your uncle begged me not to marry him, but it was all in vain. I was in love, and what do the young know of love? I will tell you, Aerlene, for who knows—one day you may be struck yourself. To the young, love is just a word for wanting to touch another’s flesh and have yours touched in turn. That’s all love is to the young.”

  I listened attentively while she told me how she used to look out the unshuttered window of her brother’s shop on a Saturday morning and watch this handsome rogue lounging about the market square with other idlers. He worked once at the Freeman’s Inn but was let go for quarrelling with a patron. So they courted, Mam and Wilkes, and she foolishly allowed him entry and was soon missing her courses. When she announced her condition, Uncle Jack and Aunt Sarah were unsurprisingly appalled, but there was nothing for it but marriage. She loved him, she said. She would make a better man of him. Nobody but she knew how really good he was beneath the swagger and the drink. On the morning of her wedding, Uncle Jack sat at the dining room table and cried piteously.

  “There was Jack,” Mam said, “as I came down the stairs in my wedding dress. He was weeping while Aunt Sarah stood by him and pointed her finger at me.

  “‘The village is laughing at you,’ she said, ‘and you will rue this day, Missy.’

  “‘I do not think so,’ I said. ‘Richard loves me and has promised to look after me. He is a changed man.’

  “‘A changed man, is he?’ said Aunt Sarah. ‘I wonder if his poor wife once thought likewise before he beat her half to death each night.’”

  What happened next was a change not in Wilkes’s character but in his fortune. Scarcely a fortnight after the wedding, Wilkes, who had barely drawn a sober breath since the ceremony, was killed in a drunken quarrel in a laneway behind the Three Crows on the Woodstock road, his head crushed by a large stone. The assailant, a stranger, fled into the night, never to be seen again. A week after Wilkes was in the ground, Mam miscarried. But never was a miscarriage greeted with more rejoicing in a Christian household. Uncle Jack killed a capon and roasted it himself in honour of there being no longer a remnant of Richard Wilkes on this earth. He fed his young sister spoonfuls of chicken broth to strengthen her while his wife offered prayers of thanksgiving. Even neighbours felt happy for them; after all, the Wards were good, respectable people and the poor girl had been spared a life of misfortune, freed from a scoundrel by the blow of a stranger in the night. There were some pious souls, Mam said, who believed the stranger had been an agent of the Almighty Himself.

  After Wilkes’s death, Mam told me, that she suffered through weeks of her sister-in-law’s ministrations, scoldings and calls to prayer for guidance in leading a pure life. Mam told me all this with a little smile, which I took to mean that her heart was not really attuned to piety. Yet she did her best. “I became,” she said, “quite God-fearing in my own way. At least to all appearances. I did try. I am no heathen despite what you may think.” (I told her I had never considered her a heathen.) But neither could she find God in St. Cuthbert’s with its whitewashed walls covering the images of the old religion, austere now with its plain windows and English prayer books.

  “So,” she said, “I continued to look for Him in the trees and in the passing clouds and in the dark night wind when I walked. He is supposed to be everywhere, isn’t He?”

  And each afternoon as she had promised Aunt Sarah, she opened the big Bible, and sitting at the dining room table, just as in time I myself would, she turned the pages and stared at the words. “I found it arduous,” she said, “all those names. I kept getting them confused, and if I must speak truth, I didn’t care all that much about the tribulations of the Israelites and their constant quarrels with neighbours. The stories about Jesus were more interesting, but I couldn’t abide St. Paul with his scolding of the Ephesians and the Thessalonians, whoever they were.”

  In time Mam returned to her brother’s shop and sold drapery and linens, ignoring the whispers of women but offering bashful smiles to their husbands. She simply could not resist the smile of a well-formed man. Yet now she was forbidden them. Her marriage to Wilkes had ruined her prospects for another husband. Many young men in the village may have dreamt of her naked and in heat with them, but there would be no question of marrying, because she had already displayed her poor judgment. She told me then how lonely she was in those years when she was in her twenties, ripe and full of yearning. How on her walks through Worsley woods she would imagine things. “I longed,” she told me, “for a man’s touch on my skin. I could not help myself. An embrace. A kiss. Sometimes I would press my lips against the inner flesh of my arm, just above the wrist. I would imagine a man doing this to me. Oh, don’t think ill of me, child.”

  I didn’t think ill of her and told her so. On the contrary, I was fascinated by her story, by her willingness to share longings that I myself felt stirring within. In my mind I could see Mam walking along those lanes or seeking out a glade in which to lie upon her back, holding a hand across her eyes against the sunlight, touching herself and dreaming of a lover. I knew by then it was only nature, and one day I too would feel that way.

  “I felt all this commotion within,” she told me, “so I would walk out into the night and find comfort in the darkness with the sound of the wind in the trees. I was never afraid, though I could hear small animals about, badgers and hedgehogs. Sometimes I came upon Goody Figgs, but I was used to her secret ways and she to mine. Goody seemed to like me, or at least she tolerated me, for she was a strange and quiet old woman.

  “And so the years passed,” she said, “and then I got into trouble with another man. I should have known better, for I was no longer a young girl but in my twenties when I met Henry Chapman one evening along the pathway on the edge of Worsley woods. I saw him walking towards me,” said Mam, smiling at the recollection of what became a happy but brief interlude in her life. Henry was a farm labourer and he had been working that day in a field. He was coming towards her with a mattock on his shoulder, and he was whistling. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, she said, a fine-looking boy. “I had seen him a few times in the village on Saturdays with his father and brothers, looking at the cattle or sheep. Henry was the youngest of a large family that
worked on the Easton estate, and he was thought to be simple-minded. I soon came to understand, however, that he was not hindered in intelligence, but merely dumb. That is to say he had no language whatsoever and had been so affected since birth. Yet he understood things well enough, and when we became acquainted, we found ways to understand each other. He would listen to my words, for there was nothing wrong with his hearing, and he would nod in assent or shake his head in disagreement. A sweet, sweet young man, Henry, and his only misfortune was shyness around strangers because he couldn’t speak.

  “That first evening as he passed, he touched his cap in greeting, affecting not the least surprise at seeing me on that woodland path. But a few paces on I turned to watch him stop and pick a bellflower daisy, which he then brought back to me. I must have smiled as I took it, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world to be handed a flower by this young man, whom I knew by name only. And not a word between us as he touched his cap again and, turning, went on his way with that mattock over his shoulder. He had the deepest blue eyes of any man I had ever seen, and in recollection it seems only yesterday evening that I saw Henry Chapman for the first time on that path.

  “And so each day after supper I went out walking, hoping he would appear. And sometimes he did and other times he didn’t, depending on the field he was working. He mostly worked alone, chopping at weeds, but now and then he would work alongside one or two of his brothers and I would see them coming along together, and then I would crouch behind a tree. I think he sensed that I was watching him, because he was always looking about and smiling. Sometimes people like Henry are taken for mad because they smile for what seems to be no reason, yet perhaps they notice pleasing things that others don’t. I believe we were playing a kind of lovers’ game with each other, a game without words that both of us had fashioned.