Shakespeare's Sword

by Alan Judd

  I had to move aside because Stephanie did not step back to make room for me. She often stands too close to people, unaware of the conventions of distance. This time her abstracted but concentrated gaze at the blank screen indicated that she was thinking about something. She could be upset if roused too abruptly from such states. I waited a few more seconds, then said gently, ‘Come on now, Steph, time for bed.’

  ‘He rang.’ Her eyes were still on the keyboard.

  ‘Who rang?’

  ‘The man.’

  It was important to proceed gently. Any hint of impatience could reduce her to stammering incoherence, with trembling lips and wide, frightened eyes. And no answer. ‘Did he? That’s interesting. Which man was it? Can you remember?’

  ‘The man who was here.’ She paused. ‘With the lady.’

  Two or three couples had been in since the Coombses but they were the only ones likely to have rung. ‘What did he say?’ No answer. ‘Have a think, see if you can remember.’

  ‘He wants the desk.’

  ‘The desk that was in the window? The one he’s bought?’

  ‘Back. He wants you to bring it back.’

  ‘Thank you, Steph, that’s very helpful. I’ll ring him. Did he leave his name – did he say who he was?’

  She turned from the screen and faced me now. ‘The man with the lady, the lady you like.’

  That was typical of Stephanie. Great swathes of life pass her by, people, places, episodes flow unnoticed around her, but then she picks on some detail, some remark or, as in this case, some inclination I was unaware I had betrayed. She had returned to the shop as the Coombses were leaving, had given no sign of having noticed them at all, I wasn’t sure I’d even spoken to them in her hearing, unless on the phone to Mrs Coombs; but something about me, something of my manner, had told her. She couldn’t have described the desk, the transaction, the Coombses themselves but, like Archilochus’ hedgehog, she knew one big thing.

  When I rang them the next morning I got Mrs Coombs, who cut me off before I had finished introducing myself. ‘Yes, hello, yes, I’ll get him, he’s just here.’ There was a pause which became an interlude until eventually the muffled voices ceased and she returned. ‘He’s going to come in and see you this morning.’

  ‘Is there a problem with the desk, anything I can—’

  ‘Gerald will see you. He wants to see you. Lovely to speak. Bye.’

  The morning was otherwise uneventful. It was raining and there were few shoppers about, not even any pretended window-shoppers seeking shelter. I dealt with a few online enquiries and otherwise spent more time than I should have standing just back from the window with coffee cup and saucer, watching the rain on the cobbles. I find rain refreshing rather than depressing, perhaps because there’s something happening. I had set Stephanie to polishing some of the silver pieces in the back room. She likes tasks like that, albeit she’s very slow and you can’t trust her not to lose smaller pieces, so I’m careful with what I give her. As for weather, I don’t think she notices it at all. Left to herself, her dress takes no account of it and I often have to choose for her or suggest to her. I’m not particularly good at women’s clothes and I suspect she may seem oddly dressed to most people; but, then, she is odd. She notices bright colours, though, and would go on wearing the same pink, red or blue thing forever if I didn’t intervene. Whatever goes on inside her head – there’s always something going on – must be wholly absorbing, rendering her oblivious to the myriad distractions most of us are prey to.

  It was lunchtime and I was about to suggest she went upstairs and put some bread in the toaster when Gerald Coombs arrived. He must have walked briskly from around the corner because I had no warning until the doorway was filled by a great black umbrella. He managed to open the door but struggled to collapse the umbrella completely, showering rain onto my polished oak floorboards. When he did finally collapse it he brought it down like a sabre-swipe from a raised position, this time showering me as I reached to close the door. His cheeks were red with effort and indignation.

  ‘There you are!’ he almost shouted. ‘The man I wanted. I’ve come to see you.’ He strode into the middle of the shop and turned to face me. His umbrella began a small puddle and he seemed oblivious of the raindrops on his heavy black spectacles. ‘It’s no good, it won’t do! I can’t part with my inheritance just like that, even if it was brought in and not passed down. I don’t know what you were thinking of, what you take me for. I can’t dump my inheritance like so much junk, it’s part of me, what I am. I’d be betraying them all, all my ancestors, my family, if I got rid of it. I must have it back. D’you see? D’you see that, eh?’

  ‘You want your desk back, sir?’ It was a lame response but he was in such a lather that I felt it necessary to be very precise, in case he was confused as well.

  ‘Of course I do, what else would I be talking about? Don’t know what came over me to think of getting rid of it. It was her influence, she hates it all, hates me, has no feeling for any of it. Wouldn’t have come near this wretched place if it wasn’t for her. Would I, eh?’

  That wasn’t at all how I recalled it but the priority was to humour him. As ill-luck would have it, a thirty-something couple were hovering outside as if about to enter. ‘The desk went to the auction house, as you may recall, Mr Coombs. I’ll ring and see if they still have it. Their auction was today but I don’t know whether it reached them in time to enter, or if it did whether it sold. I put a sensible reserve on it.’

  ‘Bloody well better not have sold! Bloody well not!’ He banged his umbrella on the floor, causing another shower of drops. His cheeks went from red to white to red again.

  I feared he might be about to have a heart attack or stroke. An inconvenience in the shop, although it would at least remove the problem. ‘I’ll ring them now, Mr Coombs.’

  ‘You do that, Mr Gold!’ he bellowed. ‘You do that!’

  The thirty-something couple opened the door. They were both wearing Barbours and matching hats and they stopped as if Gerald Coombs’s shouting had hit them in the face.

  I’ve long suspected there’s something missing in me. On the fortunately rare occasions when people get angry, justified or not, I become colder and calmer. Instead of sparking an equal and opposite reaction, which might be more honest and which the situation might merit, their yielding to the atavistic joy of anger makes me curious as to what else must be going on inside them to provoke such a reaction. Of course, I understand the temptation to anger, the pleasure of giving way, telling oneself that one couldn’t help it and is therefore not responsible. But I can’t share it. The more someone loses control, the more of a sinking iceberg I become, showing less and less of myself. I once caused great offence – purple-faced, apoplectic, table-thumping rage followed by a chair-overturning exit – by simply asking, ‘Is that all?’ after someone had unburdened himself of a litany of my offences. I had meant it no more than literally, in that if there was anything else, he might as well have said it then, but it obviously came across as insolence. The row was ostensibly about the division of a restaurant bill but of course there was more than that behind it. When he and I met again, years later, we resumed friendly terms as if nothing had happened.

  I said nothing more to Gerald Coombs but walked to the phone and rang the auction house, making eye-contact on the way with the thirty-somethings, nodding and smiling and waving them in. They left.

  Gerald remained planted in the middle of the shop like a great sulky bear that was unsure what to do next. When I’d finished the call I came around my desk and walked up to him, within striking range had he wished. I was still wondering whether his outburst was in part a genetic inheritance, remembering that his seventeenth-century ancestor (assuming he was one) William Combe, Thomas’s elder brother, was notorious for his splenetic outbursts. ‘We’re in luck, Mr Coombs. Your desk was in the auction but unsold because it failed to make the reserve I put on it. I’ll arrange for it to be recovered and delive
red to you. Presumably you won’t now be needing the roll-top?’

  I half-wished he would take a swipe at me with his umbrella. I wanted him to go too far so that retribution – I had no idea in what form – would be justified. Or at least feel justified.

  But he merely stood, blinking behind his glasses, his jowls no longer red with rage. Then he spoke softly, almost absent-mindedly, as if reminded of some minor detail. ‘Yes, yes, fine. No, shan’t be wanting the roll-top. Kind of you, very kind.’ Then he turned and left the shop, leaving only his puddle. I never saw the thirty-something couple again.

  Within a couple of days he had his father’s desk and the roll-top was back in the shop. I could, of course, have billed him for my costs but, apart from wishing to maintain my reputation for goodwill, I wanted him – them – to feel morally in my debt. It didn’t always work like that; some people are blithely unaware of unstated social obligations, while others are aware but selfishly determined to ignore them. Others again quietly exploit them, which I suppose is what I was trying to do.

  Anyway, it worked with the Coombses. Some days after the desk-reversal Mrs Coombs rang. She sounded nervous and spoke more rapidly than usual. ‘Mr Gold, I’m so sorry we haven’t been in today. We intended to but we’ve been so busy and everything’s so – and Gerald has not been well.’

  ‘Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Thank you, that’s most kind. It’s a chesty thing, he’s vulnerable to them but nearly over it now. No, we were wondering – you’re quite well, I hope?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, fingers crossed. And you?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, thank you, I’m always – it’s only Gerald who – well, with one thing and another. No, but we were wondering if you were – if you weren’t doing anything else but I expect you’re terribly busy with the shop and everything and Stephanie. It must be nonstop, isn’t it?’

  I assured her that things had been pleasantly quiet and under control recently. That meant, of course, that I had sold nothing and was losing money but I doubted that would occur to her.

  ‘Oh good, good, it’s so important to rest while you can, isn’t it? Yes, yes.’ She sounded as if she were agreeing to something else I’d said and was waiting for me to go on. I let her wait. ‘And so, yes,’ she continued eventually, ‘we were – Gerald and I – we were wondering if you’d . . . you’d . . . be free to come to dinner on Saturday?’

  I pretended to consult my diary and said I’d be delighted. She then immediately apologised for the occasion, belittling it in advance – just a few friends, local people, nobody very – but nice people, a kitchen supper really, nothing special, they’d got out of the habit of big dinner parties, she hoped it wouldn’t be too boring for me. She seemed unable to bring the conversation to a close until I helped her out by asking after the desk. ‘I hope Mr Coombs is happy to have it back, is he?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes, that was so kind of you. I don’t know what came over him, he blows hot and cold over these family things. One day he’s all for getting rid of everything and the next he’s saying how nothing must go, how important it is to preserve things, and then the day after he’s complaining about the burden of it all. Makes it almost impossible for anyone to do the right thing. Me included.’ She laughed another high tinkling laugh, but she sounded more fluent and confident now. ‘I hope he wasn’t rude to you? He can be rude. He doesn’t mean it.’

  ‘He was clearly very concerned.’

  ‘He gets rather worked up, I’m afraid, overwrought sometimes. But he’s very grateful for what you did, getting the old one back. I asked him about the family name, by the way. He said that it did used to be Combe but that it changed around the turn of the nineteenth century, no one knows why. And the swords, yes, they’re all family swords.’

  ‘All of them or just the ones on the wall?’

  ‘All, he said, so I suppose he means the poker one as well.’

  Chapter Three

  During the days and nights before Saturday I barely ceased thinking or dreaming about the sword. Frustratingly, my memory of it became fuzzier the more I tried to recall detail: was the blade really triangular in cross-section with a single hollow-ground ridge or were there two ridges which would make it squared? How long was it, what pattern was the guard, did it look like a fashionable French, Italian or Spanish design or was it a plainer Germanic or English piece and, if the latter, what was the difference? I determined to find out more about swords before Saturday, though I doubted I would get much time to examine it.

  It wasn’t only the sword itself that occupied – I almost said obsessed – me. I also thought constantly of its original owner. If I was right that he got it with his coat of arms, did he buy it off the shelf or have it made, and if so by whom and where? How much would that have cost? Or might he already have owned it? After all, swords were commonly used by actors in stage fights – there are stage directions for fights or duels in over a dozen of his plays and they were popular with audiences, many of whom might have been similarly armed themselves. It was not unknown for there to be spontaneous audience participation in stage fights. Acting troupes would have owned swords and some actors were well known as good swordsmen – one of the great comedians, Richard Tarleton, was a Master of Fencing. Shakespeare is said to have learned to fence at the Blackfriars theatre, to which his business partner and leading actor, Richard Burbage, had annexed a fencing school, in which Shakespeare was also partner. Academics, I read, had counted 437 references to swords in the Shakespearian canon, and five to duels.

  It is thus perfectly possible that Shakespeare acquired his sword from the company he part-owned. But I suspect he would have wanted something special to signify his new status and would have been prepared to pay for it. Rapiers in particular were not cheap – in Hamlet the King wagers six Barbary horses against six French rapiers and poignards, with girdles and hangers and so on. The kind of sword you wore was as much a mark of status as of your willingness and ability to defend yourself.

  The prospect of having to defend your life or your purse was far from remote among the theatres, stews, bear-pits, cockpits and brothels of the South Bank, beyond the authority of the City of London. My researches among the fractious acting community revealed that the actor Gabriel Spencer, whom Ben Jonson was to kill two years later, killed James Feake in a fight in 1596, while the playwright John Day killed another, Henry Porter, with a rapier. Shakespeare would have known these men. Indeed, William Knell, an actor with the Queen’s Men, was killed in a fight in Stratford in 1587 shortly before the troupe was due to perform. Shakespeare, if he were there, must have known about that, too, as he would of many other instances when swords were drawn without fatal consequences. Thus, he might well have carried a sword for self-protection even before acquiring his gentlemanly status. It seems that the 1573 proclamation banning the wearing of swords, daggers and spurs by any who were not ‘knights and baron’s sons, and others of high degree and place’ was widely ignored in a city in which most men carried knives.

  But, unlike some of his more violence-prone colleagues, Shakespeare himself seems not to have been involved in fights, duels or any other kind of fracas apart from one curious incident in a snowstorm on 28 December 1598. This occurred when he and others of his troupe, the then Chamberlain’s Men, went in the evening armed with ‘swords, daggers, bills, axes and such like’ to dismantle their playhouse, the Theatre, and transport its timbers across the river to build what became the Globe. The landlord of the Theatre was away for Christmas and friends of his tried to stop them, vainly, though there appears to have been no violence. Subsequent legal proceedings, initiated by the landlord – he owned the land but not the building – came to nothing.

  I tried to imagine daily life with a sword. Would he have troubled with it every time he left his lodgings, donning girdle and hanger before crossing the river to Bankside by ferry (which would have cost him) or by the crowded London Bridge? It would surely have been a significant encumbrance to any
man going about his daily business, not least because the blades then were so long – like Gerald’s – that the weapon, stood on its point, was supposed to reach its owner’s shoulder. Would he have taken it off when he sat down to write? In fact, where did he write – in his lodgings before leaving for the playhouse or by candlelight when he returned? Easier and cheaper to write in daylight. Whenever he did it, he did it fast – thirty-seven plays plus sonnets and poems, as well as we know not what else. And all the time rehearsing, acting and managing. And if he didn’t carry his sword with him, where could he have kept it securely?

  Then there were his journeys out of London. John Aubrey, seventeenth-century antiquarian and marvellous recorder of gossip, wrote that Shakespeare ‘was wont to go into Warwickshire once a year’ but modern scholars think it was probably more often. His direct route, via Beaconsfield, High Wycombe, Stokenchurch, Oxford, Woodstock, Enstone and Chipping Norton, was about ninety-four miles. That meant a good three to five days’ ride, depending on weather and road conditions, through a busy agricultural landscape populated by vagrants, sturdy beggars and discharged soldiers and sailors. Sensible, perhaps, to travel armed if you could. I read how that other literary colossus, Geoffrey Chaucer, was mugged – as we would now call it – in 1390 when carrying wages from central London to Eltham Palace in Kent, in his role as Clerk of the King’s Works.

  I also read a story about Shakespeare’s sojourns at the Crown in Oxford where he was godfather to the host’s son, young William Davenant, future poet and playwright. The story is that his relations with Mrs Davenant were rumoured in the town to be such that the ‘god’ in ‘godfather’ was redundant. One who might have known the truth of this, as well as about the sword and other incidentals of Shakespeare’s life, was William Greenaway, Stratford’s main carter or carrier. His family were neighbours of the Shakespeares in Henley Street and he frequently travelled to and from London with goods, mail, messages and news. When Shakespeare journeyed back to Stratford he probably paid five shillings to hire a horse from Greenaway at the Bell Inn, near St Paul’s. They might have travelled together via either Oxford or Banbury, given that there was safety in numbers and that Greenaway would have known the routes and places to stay better than anyone. In jogging companionably together, William Greenaway could have heard more of the daily details of Shakespeare’s life than almost anyone else – certainly he’d have known whether he travelled armed – but not a word survives.