Will

by Christopher Rush

  He was wise enough to keep his head down – but all the same she didn’t miss him and hit the wall. Still my father had a great talent for remaining on good terms with his friends, even though they sometimes let him down badly, betraying his better nature. Richard Hathaway was one of those whose debt was never recovered yet he and John Shakespeare stayed thick in their cups. By that time Hathaway’s first wife was long in her grave and he had four sons and three daughters. Unlike my father before me I didn’t go for the youngest. As things turned out she had eight years on me – and you’d be tempted to conclude that she just sucked me in and blew me out in bubbles. But you’d be wrong. There was more to our meeting than that old story and she wasn’t exactly on the shelf, though things might have looked that way.

  Let me come to her then as I did many a time and oft – are you listening, Francis? Are you in there – somewhere inside all that slumbering blubber?

  Snort snort – and a grumbled answer of sorts, blown up in spouts. A whale on siesta, breaching the truckle-bed. Ah well, half a hearer is better than none.

  Anne Hathaway.

  I was eighteen when I set eyes on her, having seen her hundreds of times as a child without ever really looking at her. Saw her now – for the first time – as a woman.

  1582 threw up sudden and strong reasons for this change in my perception. Since leaving the King’s School the following alterations had occurred to my person: voice gone gravelly, armpits gritty, face turned to pigskin, legs gangling like a newborn calf’s, and my moods swinging wildly from inspired to suicidal. I spoke only to the mirror, despised my parents, and half the time wanted to kill my siblings. At first I attributed these upheavals to the loss of Ovid, an ingredient essential to the diet of a growing boy. But when a forest-fire of hair suddenly broke out on my groin and raged around my balls, I began to realise that something more serious was afoot. I woke up one morning to find a cannon in my crutch, trained on the world, banishing my lightfoot laddishness forever. Nights were worse – the penis swayed like a poplar, lifting the sheets like clouds. I woke up from wet dreams of my mother to find myself sticky with guilt and horror. I was a freak, a prodigy, a monster. And that’s when I first saw Anne Hathaway, in the fullness of the flesh as it were, and saw that she was fair.

  It was on one of my father’s visits to the twelve-roomed house at Hewlands on the edge of the forest of Arden. A brilliant spring morning, when birds do sing, hey ding-a-ding-ding. The two fathers sat down at a bare board, and at a shout from Richard Hathaway a girl in green appeared and set down pewter between them with a hard clatter, as if she disapproved of setting them up for this early morning swigging. She had tits like unripe crab apples and as she left the room I noticed her fresh young bum, equally unripe. There was a hardness and tightness about both buttocks and breasts that troubled my prick not one whit. A curious disappointment, this Richard Hathaway creation, courtesy of his second wife, so I supposed. He looked at me from over the white moustache of beer-froth he’d suddenly grown, licked his lips, and winked at my father.

  ‘Dull stuff, Will, for a red-blooded boy, listening to two old buffers babbling about business – why don’t you go down to the buttery instead and spend some time with my daughter? There’s more matter there for a May morning and she’d be glad of a hand. You might even get some haunch for breakfast!’

  They winked and grinned and I went off, balancing the relief of leaving them against the prospect of an uninvited and uninviting interview with Miss Tight-Tits down in the buttery. But when I finally got there at a constipated snail’s pace and glared through the open doorway, I received a pleasant surprise followed by a violent hard-on. The female standing by the churn, also wearing green, was bending so low that her face was hidden by her long fair hair, but it was perfectly obvious that it wasn’t Brick-Bum. Not that her rear was in evidence – she was facing the door – but the generous percentage of tit afforded by her bending décolletage made it instantly apparent that Tight-Arse and the buttery-girl were not one and the same. These, Francis, were tits to give an angel an erection and make all heaven wet. My eyeballs came right out on double-threaded beams and disappeared down her dress as far as they could go, scrabbling like mad for the just unseeable nipples. Double curses.

  ‘What’s the matter – can’t you find the cherries on the cake?’

  She’d barely flicked an eyelash at me and carried on working, sleeves rolled right up, splashed to the elbows with rich white cream. Her wit was lost on me – I was lost in the valley of the tits.

  ‘Don’t just stand there, Will Shakespeare, you’re gaping wider than the door!’

  How could she know my name?

  ‘Come closer, why don’t you? You’ll see more of me, I reckon, from over here.’

  It must have been obvious that I was staring all the way down her dell. My erection must have been equally obvious, I thought, as I accompanied it gingerly over the splashed flagstones to stand beside her. Just as I did so, she unbent, stretching, from the churn, arms uplifted, flung back her head and rubbed a nostril with the back of her hand, wriggling her nose vigorously. A single drop of cream fell from her fingers and landed on a tit.

  And that was the moment.

  When I fell too.

  ‘Arse over tit.’ Francis shook off Morpheus.

  God save us, the man’s alive and hearing – and you can always count on a lawyer to find the right phrase.

  He soon fell away again, though, rumbling and grumbling through my tale.

  Head over heels. Just as you say, sweet sleeper – let’s clean it up a bit. But it wasn’t the tit that did the damage – it was the nose. And what’s in a nose? The way Anne Hathaway wriggled hers that morning won me to her in a twinkling, turned my knees to jelly and my prick to iron. All previous erections were now classed as dress rehearsals, if not dry-runs. My balls blew up like pumpkins. I could feel the seeds bursting. Jesu. Even so quickly may one catch the plague? Even so quickly, I assure you, but I wasn’t just plague-stricken, I was dumbfounded, couldn’t find my tongue, just stood there and gawped at her like a glazed fish. She laughed.

  ‘Well, what do you think, Will? Is it not well done?’

  Excellent well done, every inch of her – but I had to find a compliment subtler than that. I racked my dazed brain and Ovid came to the rescue.

  ’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on.

  Had I said that? Or just thought it?

  ‘Oh, now that is well done! Well said, anyway.’

  Obviously I’d spoken. Thank God.

  ‘Poetic – and accurate too, since God did all. It’ll endure wind and weather, Will. But you’re staring! Is it a list you’d like? Item, two eyes, item, two lips, item, two breasts. Shall I make you out an inventory?’

  Make me a willow cabin at your gate and call upon my soul within the house. Write loyal cantons of contemned love and sing them loud even in the dead of night. (Look to your throne, Ovid.) Halloo your name to the reverberate hills and make the babbling gossip of the air cry out—

  ‘Cry out? Ooh, my name. You don’t remember me, do you, Will Shakespeare?’

  I admitted she had me at a disadvantage.

  ‘Anne Hathaway.’

  I looked hard at her. She wasn’t unlike my mother, who looked young for her age. And a voice came up out of the wilderness of the bible, whispering in my inner ear. Can a man enter his mother’s womb a second time? What was that old serpent up to now, I wondered. Anne Hathaway’s voice broke in on it, bringing me out of my strange and sudden lusts.

  ‘So what do you think then, Will – shall I die a maid? Or shall I sleep naked on St Andrew’s Eve and see my future husband in a dream?’

  It was hard to know what lay beneath the laughter that played around her lips. A deep longing? a controlled sadness? frustration? pain? Naturally I concluded that whatever it was, she’d been waiting all her life for me to walk through the open door, throw her over my shoulder and stride
off with her into the dawn – and now here I was.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you won’t die a maid. I don’t think you’ll live a maid either. Not for much longer anyway, if only you throw hate away, Anne Hathaway.’

  ‘You’re clever with your answers, young man. But I wonder – do poets make good lovers?’

  ‘They make the best lovers – because only true lovers can make true poems.’

  ‘But,’ said Anne Hathaway, the laughter on her lips again, ‘the trouble is that both poets and lovers are liars.’

  ‘Sometimes they die for their lies.’

  ‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them – but not for love. Men were deceivers ever.’

  ‘Then sigh not so, but let them go – and be you blithe and bonny.’

  ‘A good case against you,’ she said (glancing at my groin) ‘though not against me. But if you think different, Will Shakespeare, why don’t you come anon and tell me about it?’

  A genuine smile. And sweet.

  ‘There is one thing you can do for me, though, before you go. If you’d be so kind.’

  ‘Anything.’

  She came up so close I could feel the folds of the green dress brushing my quaking knees. She was still holding her arms in the air and she jiggled her fingers, flicking white droplets into my eyes.

  ‘One of my sleeves has come unrolled – would you care to fix it for me?’

  I did so, looking into her eyes. Which never left mine.

  ‘Thank you. Now bring your hand to the buttery-bar and let it drink.’

  My reward.

  I was being granted a feel. I’d never been greatly intimate with any female, not since Marian’s moon-tits had swum into my ken all those years ago. But that infantile experience didn’t count. Dazed and dreaming I watched my right arm reach out slowly and slide down into the open dress to clasp an Anne Hathaway breast in five buzzing fingers. Jesu! How long did I stand there like that – two minutes? two seconds? – the strangely fluid flesh cool against the paddling palm? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that there was I, Will Shakespeare, standing in the buttery with a pretty woman’s tit in my hand and my groin on fire with desire, while her talk washed over me like Ovidian metre come true.

  ‘You need practice, Will. A working girl like me knows just what to do with her fingers. I like to rise early to be up with the cock and put out my hand to work with him, just as he stretches his red comb to greet the sunrise. I milked those cows myself this morning. A sweet milk-press makes the milk taste all the sweeter, you know, and I can handle the hive too, so subtly that the bee thinks I’m his queen and works off his honey bags to please me. That makes the thickest stickiest honey, believe me, and the sweetest. But I suppose the best I can hope for this springtime is to die unmarried and get me a good store of flowers stuck on my winding sheet to bewail my virginity. What a waste, eh, Will? What do you think?’

  I couldn’t say what I thought. I was dumb as a door and frantic with lust. Was she really a virgin? She was decked out in innocent green, not in the spoils of the silkworm but had some worm been at her already? Had some clodhopping spotted Hewlands Dick buried his bone-head between those magnificent mammaries and got in his thick dick where mine feared to tread? Already I was mad with mistrust and jealous rage. I’d just walked through the door three minutes ago and she’d let me grope her. Invited me, for Venus’ sake. Milkmaid? She could be the Great Cow of Shottery for all I knew.

  ‘What are you thinking, Will?’

  ‘I’m thinking I’ll come to Shottery.’

  I withdrew my hand as I spoke, sensing the incongruity, to say the least, of carrying on a polite conversation with my arm at an awkward angle and this tit stuck firmly in my sweaty mitt.

  She smiled in reply.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, as if we were discussing the weather, ‘I’ll walk out this way one evening.’

  Another smile.

  ‘Then I’ll look for your coming.’

  And she bent back to her work.

  And that was it.

  Anne Hathaway, buttery-bar girl, Hewlands farm girl, unmarried maid of Shottery parish, Anne Hathaway, milkmaid, ripe for plucking, bewailing her virginity and as good as handed it to me on the spot. Jesus, I’d felt like fucking her on the flagstones right there and then and adding to the spilt milk. And yes, yes, Will was hopelessly, uselessly in love for the first time in his circumscribed little life. And the very thought of this sudden object of my adoration lying dead in her winding sheet (a fate most incident to maids) all for lack of a lover – it was too much for me and I was struck so to the soul that I proclaimed my guilty secret aloud to the stars that same night. I love her, I want her, I want to lie with her, in her, on her, under her, and by God I will marry her!

  I can. I will.

  So it was not the Virgin Mary that brought me to Shottery, but the Virgin Anne, if maid she was. Not the Scavenger’s Daughter I longed to lie with, but Richard Hathaway’s. And by the time I was deep in Anne, Campion and Cottam and Debdale were dead. But I was made of flesh, not soul, and my flesh was for loving with, not for being slit open on the scaffold, and torn apart. The martyrs were to be pitied. But so was Anne, so close to her virgin’s shroud. And my trust was not in Campion but in Cupid.

  14

  Only it wasn’t Anne Hathaway’s shroud that got stuck with yew that year – it was her father’s. My father said that Richard Hathaway hadn’t been well for nearly a year and had dwelt on death quite blithely when they’d had their last little chinwag. That was the day I’d been sent down to the buttery to meet my marital destiny, sealed by a feel and by a single longing note that was the undercurrent to everything she’d said.

  I often wondered what else the two fathers had yapped about that day. Had they mentioned his will – which Hathaway had made out the previous September, as it turned out? Doubtless they’d discussed unmarried Anne and how to see her set on her feet once the old man had turned up his toes. And certainly I’d been a pawn in their game. Or not so much a pawn as a prince, and one more than ready to serve his queen. And to be checked and mated.

  Even so in later life that thought kept on recurring – and rankling too. Money-borrowing Richard Hathaway, non-deliverer of debts, begging his old indulgent friend for one last favour before he quit this earthly scene – ah, never to return, old lad, never to return! That’s it, squeeze another tear out of maudlin John, the Stratford soak, then carry on. To the unpaid forty pounds – and what’s that to a man trembling on the edge of eternity? – add your eldest son: only eighteen but a bachelor and a handsome stripling too, a fine match for the spirited and intelligent Anne, who may turn out to be something of a shrew in the end but that’s no bad thing, is it? Something of a dreamer, after all, is our young Will, in need of a hard-nosed lass to keep his feet planted in the muck and pluck his skull out of the stars. And it’s not as if our Anne doesn’t offer certain compensating qualities, eh? Well, have another drink, old man! Indeed, quite a bedful there and never once been put to it, though in long standing need of it, women have needs as well as us, just look at her, you can feel it from her eyes, wet for a man, she is. And sure she’ll let him have his end away but she’ll have her will in the end, for Anne hath a way, as we say in this family, eh? Said I well, John? What do you say, old boon companion? Old drunken crony? Let’s further think on’t.

  And so the plot was hatched.

  Easy with his money, my father. Easy with his offspring. Easy with his old friends. Not that Anne would have seemed all that bad a catch for a young man’s family, even though old Hathaway left her nothing special to take to a husband, just the usual ten marks to be paid out on her wedding day. Oh, and one other item believe it or not – a sheep! Lest the bride failed to satisfy, so the old joke ran – and they’d be spluttering it into their ale no doubt.

  These tedious old fools.

  Nothing else? Well, there was the house at Hewlands but Anne’s eldest brother Bartholomew had been instructed to take ch
arge of that – as of the Hathaway widow, once she was no longer a wife. So in the end old Hathaway had done the Shakespeares no great favours. And why should he? Considering that John Shakespeare was never the kind to shit in a ditch and find the turd gold-plated the following day. Life went the other way for him, that was the tendency, time turning his treasures to turds. On the other hand the Hathaways were a good family and from the Shakespeare viewpoint a potential prop to my father’s ailing assets. I dare say it made sense enough at the time, especially with a sweetener of beer slipped under the skin. As for the Hathaways, they might have seen the Shakespeare name as a sound one in spite of our problems, and myself as a shapely enough lad, on the verge of inheriting a shop in Stratford and a business behind it that might well be recouped, with a strong woman running the show. And a youthful husband too, with a stack of years ahead of him for the maturing daughter who, if she hadn’t ought to have been married by now, could scarcely afford to let too much more time go by before she did. Finally there was a certain sympathy in religion. No need for me to say any more on that score, at least none too loudly. I’ve said enough already. And pitchers have ears – eh, Francis?

  Silence and sleep, the whale in the sea of time, floating free of care.

  As for the gap between the ages, family friendship would more than fill the breach and make that up. Anyway, once between the sheets, who’d be counting? Certainly not Anne. You forget your arithmetic when the lamp goes out – even the date of her last flow. As many a poor bungler has discovered to his cost, and hers. And if the same should happen to Anne and Will, well, that has been the way of it since time began, and they’ll not be the last. Green grow the acres. And so on and so forth. Went it not so?

  To the self-same tune and words, but with more policy and less wit, I shouldn’t wonder. At such a time I’ll loose my daughter to him. Be you and I behind an arras then. Mark the encounter. If he love her not, let me be no assistant to your state but keep a farm and carters, Hewlands Farm, and carters to Shottery. And down goes the buttery boy.