I wondered if she was listening to all this, for she had the faraway gaze of the child in a classroom who is alone in a world of her own devising. But yes, Charlotte was listening, indeed she was, for at once she said, “How odd, because the other day Simon told me something very like what you say. He enjoys poetry and novels, and he was commenting on some character in a book, remarking on the soundness of this person’s views. And I said, ‘But he is only a character in a book, Simon. He doesn’t really exist, does he?’ And he said something about the character existing within the words on the page.” Charlotte laughed. “Am I not getting a little too philosophical, Linny?”
I said I hoped not, adding, “But is your Mr. Thwaites not an estimable man? Should I not therefore fetch something from the decanter and ale cask so that before dinner we might both drink to his good health?”
So we did, both of us greatly heartened and with no more questions raised.
CHAPTER 10
ON THAT SATURDAY EVENING in late September 1587, Mam went to the Dolphin as arranged and found Mary Pinder at a table by herself looking ill-tempered. The tavern was filled with song and laughter, and there was this great solemn presence by herself at a corner table. As Mam sat down, Mary was already ordering another glass of sack and said, “And how are things in the haberdashery with those Puritan relatives of yours? Still turning a profitable trade, I trust.”
Mary was in a dangerous humour that evening, Mam told me, glaring around the crowded, smoky room as though seeking out someone to quarrel with. “I didn’t know what to say to her. And where was this young man from Warwickshire who wanted to meet me?”
“Mary then turned and said, ‘I’m talking to a green girl, am I not? A simple soul from,—what is it?—Worsley?’
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Worsley under Woodstock. You know that now, Mary.’
“The barmaid brought her wine and I said I would have nothing, for to tell the truth I thought of leaving.
“Mary said, ‘I don’t imagine, however, that you’re not so simple as to know what I’m about. Sometimes I fancy you look at me with the face of a churchwarden.’
“‘I do no such thing,’ I said, and I must have shown some colour, for Mary shrugged.
“‘Well, perhaps not. But I’m sure by now you’ve guessed that I don’t sell bonnets for a living.’ She laughed. ‘Look at you now. Your face is a beetroot, girl.’
“‘It doesn’t matter, Mary,’ I said, and she gave me another glare. Mocked my voice.
“‘It doesn’t matter, Mary. My, aren’t you the generous little gospeller! Do you pray every Sunday morning for my salvation, Elizabeth?’
“‘You’re too quarrelsome tonight,’ I said. ‘We’ll meet another time, when you are better humoured.’ I was so confused and disappointed. I was dressed as smartly as I could be to meet this fellow she had so praised. And where was he? I was angry and said to her, ‘It’s nothing to me what you do. I haven’t the right to call anyone to account, because I have done things myself that merit little praise. I am in London on sufferance, and you are the only person who has troubled herself to befriend me. If you have changed your mind, so be it. I’ll take my leave.’
“But Mary had grasped my wrist by then and was close to tears. ‘As God is my witness, Elizabeth, I’m sorry. I’ve had too much wine and it’s soured me. You take what you get in this trade, but I had a nasty one this afternoon. Some like it rough, and I’m all for that if they pay well. But this one. A devil out of nature and I didn’t at all take to his inclinations. Then didn’t he quibble over payment and laugh about it? Slumming in Shoreditch, he said. Out for an afternoon with his friends and he’d heard I was good sport.’ She looked away. ‘I promised him a clout if he didn’t pay as we agreed and he said I could swing for my threat. I had to shake the coins from his breeches and his friends were laughing at him while he cursed me. I may not have seen the last of that arsewipe.’
“Our faces were close while she confided this to me and therefore we didn’t notice the figure above us until he said, ‘I fear I am late and I offer apologies to you both.’
“We looked up and there was your father standing above us looking grave and polite.
“I wondered if he’d overheard Mary’s last sentence, but if so he didn’t let on.
“Mary brightened at the sight of him. ‘Ah, Will from Warwickshire. I’d almost forgotten about you, but your arrival is timely, as I am to leave. But first let me introduce you to our young widow from Oxfordshire, Elizabeth Ward. And this young man, Elizabeth, is Will Shakespeare, late of Stratford, now resident in Shoreditch and a player with the Queen’s company.’
“‘Apprentice player,’ he corrected.
“‘Gainfully employed, at any rate,’ said Mary, standing and towering over him. ‘I will pay my reckoning and be off now. And you two can become acquainted. I wish you both well.’ Then she was gone, shouldering her way through others near the door.”
As I listened, I was trying to summon up the scene in my mind’s eye: Mam as a young woman sitting in that crowded inn with the man who would be my father amid the tobacco smoke and laughter and loud talk. I remember asking Mam endless questions: How did he seem at first? Was he handsome? What height and form? How did he talk? He must have had a good wit, for look at all the plays he composed. Did she see that gift in him then?
Poor Mam. Putting up with all my chattering as she grew more haggard each day from the sickness that was consuming her. My uncle had called in a doctor, a churlish fellow from Woodstock who examined her and said the sickness was caused from an impostume in her parts. Mam laughed when she told me this. “I may tell you, Aerlene, that he had his hand in there long enough.” Mam was duly bled, much good that did her, for already she was grey as wood ash. Only my reading from the Dream each night could soothe her into sleep.
But in the afternoons for an hour or two, she was yet strong enough to tell me what happened to her in London. As for her first meeting with my father, she could only laugh at all my sifting.
“Goodness, Aerlene,” she said, “I can no longer remember what we talked about that first meeting. Very likely where we came from, as we both loved the countryside. And since you asked about his looks, I can say he was of moderate height. I wouldn’t have called him handsome, but he had a pleasing aspect, was of good proportion, his brow impressive.”
“Like my own,” I said.
She smiled. “Yes, yes, very like your own, I suppose. He had good legs, your father. I had noticed them before he sat down. And later, when we knew each other, I was bold enough to compliment him, and he was pleased because there was vanity in him. Not huge conceit like many others, but he liked to think well of himself. He told me he had done a great deal of dancing as part of his trade, and he was well practised in the galliard and the pavan. He was graceful on his feet, and once danced for me in his room to prove his worth.”
She thought further on it and said, “We must have talked that first time about how we came to London, because that’s what you did if you were newcomers to the city. I told him about Worsley, and he talked about his childhood in Stratford and how he liked to get out into the countryside. He said he had been with the company since early summer, when they had passed through his town and he heard they were short a man, killed, he said, in a brawl. The troupe then spent the summer touring in the south. Will had seen Canterbury Cathedral and Hythe and Rochester, and the cliffs of Dover, which had amazed him. He told me about the samphire gatherers perched on the cliffside high above the sea, and wondered at the time how a man or woman could work at such a dreadful trade. So he had been in London only since July’s ending. He liked the city well enough, though he found it noisome and clamorous and often longed for the quiet of the country. We soon learned that we both loved walking in the woods and meadows, and I remember how he spoke knowingly of herbs and flowers and all manner of plant life: of wild thyme and cowslips and musk roses and woodbine. He knew such things and I thought it strange knowledge in a youn
g man who was not a farmer’s son, for he’d told me that his father was a glover. But his feelings for nature were delicate and I found that attractive in him. Aerlene, you remember Oberon’s speech about the riverbank in the Dream, the one that begins, I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, / Where oxslips and the nodding violet grows?”
“Of course I know it,” I said. “Haven’t I read it to you enough times?”
Mam was scarcely listening, so rapt was she now in her memories. “I love that speech,” she said. “And it’s true, I have seen the woodland violets nodding their little heads in an April breeze. And sometimes when I am trying to find sleep in the middle of the night, I tell myself that I once knew the man who wrote those words and I had his child. It is still a great wonder to me by times.”
“And to me as well, Mam,” I said.
“I may say that I remember your father’s hands from that first meeting,” she continued. “He had fine hands, not large but shapely, though it surprised me to see that the palms were as callused as a wagoner’s. Some weeks later I asked if I might read his hand, which made him laugh and he asked me did I really believe in such things and called me his pretty witch. I asked him then how he came by such hard hands, and he said it was from practice with the foils. ‘All players must master fencing,’ he said.
“That first night he saw me back to Threadneedle Street. I remember that. We walked along the dark streets and he told me about his father and mother. He expressed a great affection for his mother and called her an excellent, quiet woman of deep faith. And his father, he said, was a good man who had suffered some misfortunes in business, but I can’t recall him saying much more about him at that time. Your father seemed a bit lonely and homesick, and I believe he could see that I was not like most women who hung by the players in those taverns in Shoreditch. Your father, Aerlene, was not one for trugging-houses and debauchery. He was a quiet and thoughtful young man who wanted to better himself. I noticed how favourably he looked upon the address and shop of the Boyers.”
“So,” I said, “he liked you well enough at your first meeting, Mam?”
“Oh, he liked me well enough,” she laughed. “He may have talked of country fairs and nodding violets, but he could scarcely take his eyes off my bosom. We agreed to meet the next morning after service, for Sundays were the only days free to him. They worked apprentices hard in those playhouses. Sometimes we met on a Saturday evening at a tavern, where he would sit a full two hours over a tankard of ale, for he can’t have had much money then. I understood that and I always paid for my own wine and he didn’t resist.
“In the autumn there was great demand for Boyer’s wares with masques at court and dances in guildhalls and the lawyers’ inns. Philip and Eliza were often so occupied at week’s end with their money counting and ledgers that my free time was not as severely governed.
“A walk costs nothing but shoe leather and soon your father and I were discovering the city together on Sunday mornings with all those bells ringing around us. Sometimes we almost had to shout at each other and then we’d laugh. What curiosity he had! I see that in you too, Aerlene. Always asking questions about this and that, puzzling over how things came to be. Casting looks at passersby and imagining how their lives were lived. He took so much into himself, your father, but he was good company for all that, even if he sometimes wore me thin with his questions and observations. We might be walking eastward by the Tower with him surmising who might lie within and what privations and what tortures awaited him, what thoughts might course through a man’s restless mind the night before the scaffold or the block. Or we might walk westward to gape at the great houses near Whitehall. And then he might be wondering what they were eating for dinner that day. Or how many servants it took to dress the lady of the house.
“One day he asked about my husband and how he died. Oh, your father was a great one for talking about death. A favourite subject, and no mistaking that. So I told him some things about Wilkes, but not others, dwelt at length on his brutish nature, and said he died of a fever, so ashamed was I of his brawling end. Another day I could not help myself and mentioned Henry Chapman and how kind and gentle a man he was, though he had no words to speak. This affected your father greatly and he stopped there on the street.
“‘Tell me about him,’ he said. ‘No words at all, this fellow, and yet right enough in his mind?’ He seemed astonished.
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘But he could hear? He could hear words?’
“‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was strange. A defect at birth, perhaps.’
“He couldn’t get over such an affliction. ‘Not to be able to use words,’ he kept saying. ‘To hear them and not be able to shape a response with words. How horrible!’
“Another time we were in Finsbury Fields near the archery butts, and some gallants and their lady friends had gathered nearby. They looked to have been carousing all night, and they were still drinking wine and singing bawdy songs. One young man was standing behind a girl showing her how to hold a bow and draw the string to guide the arrow to the target. Both could barely stand with their drunkenness, and your father said something about fools and wine being poor bedfellows, and we took care to walk to one side of them, advancing perhaps fifty paces. Then, didn’t an arrow pass not ten feet in front of us, followed by a great roar of laughter? When we looked, we saw that the drunkards had fallen forward and were on the grass laughing. The arrow had gone astray with their falling, and they found it amusement itself. And not a word of apology from any of them.
“We walked on, but your father was brooding on the event. He was very good at brooding, your father, and it could get on your nerves, all those dark thoughts of his. When finally we sat upon the grass near the windmills, he said, ‘Just think on it, Elizabeth. Had our pace been swifter by a step or two, or had we set out a few moments earlier, that arrow might have struck one of us. And all because those rich young fools were playing drunken games.’ That set him off. ‘It’s all a matter of chance, is it not?’ he said. ‘Imagine you pass down a street where a madman awaits, his head filled with voices. Or there is a horse alarmed suddenly by the sting of a bee and it rears above you as you pass, those hoofs coming down upon your eyes. Or an arrow carelessly released flies through the air and into your throat. A welling of blood in your mouth and in an instant all is gone, the morning’s bright air, the grass, the blue sky above these milling blades. All gone forever. Are we then not simply at the mercy of fortune’s wheel?’
“I told him I could not see life that way: walking about as if forever on the brink of untimely events. Besides, I said, there were charms enough to ward off misadventure—old sayings and rituals that kept you from peril by reminding the spirit world of your innocence. ‘Perhaps God in his wisdom is behind it all.’
“‘But,’ he said, ‘what of those innocent souls who are still waylaid by chance?’
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘there must be a reason behind all things—and there’s an end to it, as I don’t care to dwell on talk like this on such a fine day.’
“He could tell I was angry and said nothing more about it on that autumn morning. But it was like your father to hold such forebodings. The more I got to know him the more I saw …”
She paused as though trying to fasten her memory of him firmly in her mind so that she might encompass him by a single feature of his character. In her illness, Mam seemed determined to tell me of my father’s essence as she saw it, and this was not like her, for usually she preferred to skim across the surface of things like a water fly; anything too deep was troublesome to her nature. But perhaps, nearing her end, she wanted to discover for herself a stronger impression of the man who had fathered her child.
“Aerlene, your father was a cautious young man, watchful not only of misplaced arrows or lanes where madmen lurked with knives and voices in their heads; he apprehended danger everywhere. I have seen him push away a plate of oysters that another might eat heartily, and he was careful
in boisterous company. Now and then we dined with fellow players on a Saturday night and your father was merry enough; he could trade a jest with anyone, but always I sensed his discomfort when others got drunk and quarrelsome. He used to say that our wits weaken in drunkenness and a misplaced word can lead to blows and blows to sword-play or cudgels and thence to severed hands or broken heads. Do not misunderstand me. Your father was no coward, but he was careful at all times, measuring the consequences of an action.”
“Prudence is a virtue, is it not?” I said.
“It is.”
“But my father was good company, Mam?”
“Excellent company, as I have already told you,” she said. “Pay attention, Aerlene, please.”
Mam’s pain often put her out of patience with me and my questions, and I felt bad for upsetting her, but I couldn’t seem to help myself, so eager was I to learn more about my father.
“I have already told you how curious he was about everything,” Mam said. “How filled with strange facts and stories. Your father read a great deal, and he was delighted when he discovered that I too could read. He hadn’t expected it of me.”
“And how did he discover that?” I asked.
“You are old enough now to know that we must have lain together to have you, so it was on one occasion at his room in Holywell Lane, which he shared with two others. And this was not long after that Sunday morning in Finsbury Fields. Indeed, a part of me thinks it might have been that very day. The other fellows were at the playhouse working on the properties for the next day’s performance.
“The room he shared was poor and barely furnished. Only a pair of truckle beds and an old dresser and chair. A chest and a small shelf of books. I had picked up a book from this little shelf—there were only five or six—and I said, ‘Who is Ovid and what is the meaning of the title?’
“And your father said, ‘Why, you can read, Elizabeth!’
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