Will

by Christopher Rush

  ‘So you hated them, Will.’

  The very name’s a lie. Puritan. To the Puritan all things were impure. They could find no good in man, nor any god in man, and they lashed man himself and his eternal companion and corrupter, woman, for all evils. Even the queen was not spared. And Puritan Stubbes, who pamphleteered against her, had his offending hand cut off. But in all their accusations they never accused themselves, though within their snow-broth blood there bubbled the same old cauldron of unholy appetites. Your Puritan wants to fuck the thing he fears and then to kill the thing he fucks – or, if he cannot have it, he must kill it to ease his fury. What was he really? At best he was a boil on the bum, spoiling your seat in the theatre: at worst a wild beast in the bowels. The ultimate revenge is to put him in the play, show him sick of self-love and laugh him to scorn – or stop the laughter and make the people hate him for what he is: ambassador of death, killer of laughter, a syphilis in the soul, a negation of all that is human and lovely and of good report.

  ‘And graven images – ?’

  Are what we want – and what the players give us. We long for imitation. We long to be happy. Only the gods are bored. And the Puritans wanted us to be as gods. So I gave them instead unregenerate man, incapable of their Jesus: the poor wild Bedlam who ate the old rat in the fury of his heart, and the darkness that was Caliban. I gave them not their strait and narrow gateway to God, but the broad primrose way, the playhouse way. For the theatre was the only place in London you could go to outside the ale-house to hear an honest comment on our lives, uncoloured by fear of God or the grave. Here the players were indeed the only men. Their theatres were islands of art rising out of the crude sea of corruption that surrounded them on all sides. They were the clear bright bells of London, beating loudly and sweetly over the sodden city.

  24

  ‘Will, Will, Will…’

  Had I three ears I’d hear thee. What is it, Francis?

  ‘The day is wearing late – and I stay for supper.’

  Supper?

  ‘While you were in London, my boy, little Alison came up – and there’s talk of a great pie. Before we get to it I’d like to draw together the last remaining threads.’

  Threads?

  ‘Your will, old lad, remember?’

  Not unlike a great pie – many an item to be got right and many to be fed from it. But why the pie, may I ask?

  ‘Dr Hall’s orders. He’s sent word you’re to be taken off that gruel – and for three days you’re to be fed like a fighting cock.’

  I feel better already. I remember a nice piece of pie in Wood Street once.

  ‘Don’t start that.’

  A French pie too. Remember Henry Field, the tanner, and his family? Henry’s long gone now, his tanned and battered carcass well into decomposition even for a man in his line of work. He used to say that a tanner would last you nine years in the earth before he rotted, his hide being so tanned with his trade that he’d keep out water a great while. ‘Water’s the bugger,’ he’d mutter. ‘Your water’s a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body. Once that’s in, you’re buggered for sure. It’s rainwater kills a corpse, not worms. You ask old Tom, the sexton, he’ll tell you.’

  Well, old Henry may well have kept out the rain for nine years for all I know. When he heard I was headed for the capital, he had asked me to take a letter to his son, asking for money and news.

  ‘Richard Field?’

  Three years ahead of me at school, left Stratford eight years before.

  ‘A bright bony sort of boy?’

  That’s him. Always with an eye and a tongue on London – it was his dream. Didn’t care for tanning and signed up for seven years with a London printer, George Bishop, who arranged for him to see out his first six years at another printing shop, run by Thomas Vautrollier at Blackfriars.

  ‘Ah, the French pie.’

  Not exactly. Not him. Field was still with Vautrollier when I arrived in London – lots of staying power, young Richard, and the patience of a cat. And so, carrying his father’s letter, I re-crossed the bridge and made my way westwards to Blackfriars, looking for the sign of the Splayed Eagle on Wood Street. And it was in Wood Street, at the sign of the Splayed Eagle, that I fell under the spell – and between the splayed thighs –

  ‘Of the French pie?’

  Jacqueline Vautrollier.

  ‘What about our pie?’

  The first thing I saw through the open door of the Splayed Eagle was the gangling Richard Field standing at his master’s press, a large inkstain on his right cheekbone and both hands smudged front and back. A freshly printed quarto sheet trembled between clean fingertips and those well-remembered blue eyes were boring into the page. It took some time for him to notice that I was standing there, a Stratford silhouette in a London doorway, and another second or two for him to switch his mind from printing to tanning, with all its home-based thoughts. Then it registered. Spreading his arms wide with a bony grin and lankily avoiding the edge of a workbench as he strode to the door, he embraced me vigorously but with great precision so as not to mark my clothes or crumple the precious page.

  ‘Will!’ he shouted. ‘Will Shakespeare!’

  I could feel his elbows dug sharp in my ribs. He smelled of the press, the fresh, suddenly exciting smell of new books. His shout produced a shuffling sound in the adjoining chamber and a short paunchy little man stared in at us with sad brown eyes. Some spikes of pepper and salt still sprouted from the side of his head but he’d gone almost bald on top – the crown looked greasy and garlicky. He was breathing heavily and something rattled in his chest.

  ‘Monsieur?’ he inquired of me politely, holding out his hand.

  This was Thomas Vautrollier.

  Richard Field exuded the hot odour of the press, the scent of dangerous metaphors and forbidden phrases. He smelled of the book, its promise and fascination. But here the trail went dead. With Monsieur Vautrollier the writer seemed suddenly extinct.

  Maybe I’d like to dip into De Beau Chesne? (he said dopily) or perhaps into Baildon’s Book Containing Divers Sorts of Hands? Failing which, there were many other accomplished productions stacked under the spreading wings of the Splayed Eagle, mind-improving folios. Clearly Vautrollier handled the heaviest of printing assignments and prided himself on doing justice to serious and large-scale works, real hectoring stuff. I didn’t smell Ovid here, or the open air. And certainly there was not one whiff of woman.

  Or so I thought.

  ‘What do you do for sport?’ I asked Field when his employer had shuffled off to find me a copy of the newest version of the Mirror For Magistrates.

  ‘Wait till supper,’ Field whispered.

  I waited.

  I had just taken my first gulp of Bordeaux when she entered the room. When I say my first I’m being exact – it was my first taste of Bordeaux. I was just downing my first mouthful of this French drench when she appeared. I suppose I must have caught my breath. I certainly had little reason to expect that the sad little printer, this French egghead whose shelves were heavy with legal and moral instruction, could have been the owner of such a shapely and elegant volume.

  Francis, she was beyond the dreams of desire. I breathed in my gobful and doubled up on my stool, choking and spluttering, the tears standing blind in my eyes and the wine dribbling down my chin and spraying from mouth and nostrils. Monsieur rose puffily to give my back the heel of his hand, while toothy Field creased himself quietly, his face split from huge ear to even bigger ear (he was a little lop-sided). She knitted her forehead, pursed her lips and made sympathetic little clucking noises with her tongue, interspersed with a staccato commentary of concern in her own language. ‘O, ma foi! le pauvre homme! O, quelle dommage, c’est tant pis, nous avons tué le pauvre garçon!’ I expect I must have seemed little more than a garçon to her. And yet she wasn’t old enough to be my mother, though she looked half a generation out of step with the dozy printer.

  ‘Jacqueline Vautrollier.’
r />   The very name still sends shudders up the ancient seam of my scrotum. Jacqueline Vautrollier. She was dark but fair, for the suns of France had looked on her, but so had Venus. She was desirable beyond anything I’d ever seen or imagined – gone forever was the golden-skinned Anne Hathaway and the Marians of freckled Warwickshire. This woman was of another breed. She had come from the lions’ dens and the mountains of the leopards and her armpits were dark with lust, her secret clefts barbaric with black wild hair. Somebody had given me the fatal draught and I wanted to drink from those lips, drink hard, drink long, drink well.

  ‘Dreenk, Weel?’

  Drink, Will? Jesu. Oui, Madame. Her dress rustled against my leg as she stood beside me and poured. Jug jug. Her husband and Field were discussing Tottel’s Miscellany, published thirty years ago to the very day, so the master printer mused.

  ‘I never ’ad no need of Tottel at zat time,’ he sighed, ‘even wen I was wooing my fair Jackleen.’

  He wagged his bald dome into his wine, not looking up at his wife, preferring to remember a time when there was hair on his head, fire in his heart and brimstone in his liver, and his breath came not short on the gallop, night after night. Meanwhile I imagined Jacklin Vautrollier with naked foot stalking in my chamber, her loose gown from her shoulders falling as she caught me in her long dark arms, kissed me ever so sweetly, inserted her French tongue into my mouth, slipped her cool hand down my front, with fingers spread wide to take pity on the hot throbbing knob, and softly said, Dear heart –

  ‘’Ow like you thees?’

  ‘I cry you mercy, madame?’

  Madame was at my side again, this time with a large platter. Field was laughing and pointing.

  ‘Look how our partner’s rapt.’

  I stared dumbly across the table.

  ‘Give me your favour: my dull brain was wrought with things forgotten.’

  ‘Fine, but how about things French?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Angelot, at your service.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Fromage, my friend, a nice little rich one from Normandy – never passed a pair of Stratford lips, I’ll warrant. Are you going to let Madame wait on you all night? Go on, bite on experience, or go shake your ears!’

  I bit. And Madame Vautrollier withdrew her dark-downed arm and offered the platter to Field. Her husband returned broodingly to the subject of Richard Tottel, the Temple Bar printer.

  ‘Thirty years, ma foi! quand j’étais un jeune homme.’

  Vautrollier claimed to have been born along with English blank verse in 1540 (though he looked even older) and had helped Tottel in his teens at the Hand and Star, bringing out Surrey’s Aeneid in the same year as the Songes and Sonnettes. He laboured himself out of his seat again and returned breathing heavily like the sea with a thickish octavo volume which he plumped down beside my cheese rinds. It was the second edition of the Miscellany dated 31st July.

  ‘Monsieur Tottel was editing from April to August that year, ’57, mais, zee second edition ’ere, eet was done in under sixty days. C’est formidable, n’est-ce-pas?’

  To please the printer I feigned interest and leafed through the popular pages. They contained over three hundred love lyrics, smelling of a stilted generation, the failures of Wyatt, and the insecurities of a court living in constant fear of being farted on by Henry the Eighth.

  ‘And I’d give forty shillings a song if I could only ’ave back again one single night of wot I was then.’

  Madame Vautrollier caught my eye and the flush deepened under her dark throat.

  ‘Now I ’ave no need of love songs, mon Dieu, zere are other lines in zere to send me on my way.’

  Too right there were. The printer wasn’t giving up. I caught sight of Lord Vaux’s sombre numbers and started to recite an apt quatrain.

  My lusts they do me leave,

  My fancies all be fled.

  Monsieur finished the stanza for me with grim relish, his tongue tolling like a bell.

  And tracts of time begin to weave

  Gray ‘airs upon my ’ead.

  His wife rose suddenly and left the table. He looked after her sadly. I looked after her too – observing the swing of her hips. It wasn’t hard to imagine what lay beneath that French silk. It was hard, on the other hand, to picture baldie Vautrollier as a youthful lover with sexy Jacklin’s legs round the nape of his neck and her hand cupping his swinging testicles. Long time ago. In youth when they did love, did love. When Wood Street heaved like a ship, and splayed legs under the Splayed Eagle tilted ceilingwards and soared like masts going mad beneath the stars.

  But age, with his stealing steps,

  Hath clawed me in his clutch,

  And hath shipped me intil the land

  As if I had never been such.

  Vautrollier spoke like a gravedigger who’d never got used to his trade. Field just sat and grinned into his glass. His elbows and knees seemed to be everywhere at once. Nothing seemed to affect him much, not even wine or woman. So we sat on among the spluttering candles drinking and chattering and old Vautrollier regretting his shagging days and the vigour of his youth, while the tide of wine rose and fell and rose and fell and the blue chinks in the shutters darkened into night. Madame had not returned. She’d be through in the shop writing up the day’s accounts. A wonderful woman, her husband assured me, groaning as he said it, as though a blessing were synonymous with a curse. I nodded boozily and was mightily relieved when the printer finally got up to snuff out the drowning wicks bidding goodnight to all as if this were time’s last midnight. To bed, to bed, to bed.

  An honoured guest, I was shown into the best room in the house. And was sitting there on the edge of the bed, nursing the monster in my groin and pondering how to kill it without crackling Jacklin’s nice clean sheets, when in she walked without as much as a knock-knock.

  She was carrying a basin of water. I made to accept it and noticed that her arms were entirely bare from the shoulders down. The bodice of her gown was missing and some white sleeveless item stood out white in the candlelight, out of which the two arms stretched like swans’ necks, offering the water. Our four hands were on it and it flickered in the candleflame but I couldn’t take it, just stood there, gaping into her armpits, transfixed by the hair that sprouted in thick rich tufts, beaded with pearls of sweat. And I thought of the midnight grass down below, of the apex of that inverted arrowhead and what it pointed to: the private territory of a sepulchral little French printer. How could she go back and undress before the bulging eyes of the bald little frog that had once been her French prince?

  ‘Weel! You are speeling zee water!’

  My hands were shaking, sloshing lumps of silvery water over the edge of the basin that still brimmed between us. I steadied my grip and it reverted to a trembling net of light and shadow. We stared into it as if it were a magic circle in which we could read our future. Jacqueline Vautrollier glimmered like a ghost in the candlelight.

  ‘Jacklin,’ I said, ‘I am an English moth drawn to your French flame. I would be glad to die in you –’

  ‘Weel!’

  ‘And if it were now to die, ’twere now to be most happy.’

  ‘O, Weel, you must not tell me zees sings.’

  So we stood like two continents divided by a splash of sea, France and England facing one another, and expectation sitting once more in the air. A bird sang in her mouth.

  ‘Weel, set down zee basin, s’il te plait, set it down, ah beg of you.’

  ‘Jacklin, O sweet Jacklin, speak to me again in broken music – for your English is broken and your voice is music.’

  She smiled with white teeth. I recalled old Vautrollier’s garlicky gob, his few remaining monuments, like standing stones, broken and black, and his dog breath.

  ‘O, bon Dieu! les langues des hommes sont pleines des tromperies!’

  Oui, sweet Jacqueline, oui oui, you say right well, and yes, de tongs of de mans be full of deceits. And yet I
love you, Jacklin, I love you true, and I am on fire with desire. Wilt thou then leave me so unsatisfied?

  The dark eyes flashed.

  ‘Wot satisfaction canst thou ’ave tonight?’

  Slowly, as though we were cradling the oceans of the globe, we bent down together and placed the basin on the floor. Then we stood up, stared wildly – there was nothing between us now – and fell on one another like mad dogs.

  Little Thomas Vautrollier had long passed his horizontal dancing days and the beast with two backs was a measure he clearly hadn’t trod for many a moist moon. And under the watery stars, month by slow month, year by year, the utterly adorable Jacqueline had lain down unfurled and unfucked and had studied the knots in the ceiling, dark as Dian’s pools. And when summer nights died on her and a crowd of shadows gave way to winter’s raven wing, she closed her eyes on darkness and let her hand slide silently down her childless belly, while the sad fat little Frenchman snored and gurgled at her side, his leaden carcass rehearsing nightly for stiffening and nullity.

  He was nearly there. The question that really intrigued me was why my fellow Stratfordian had failed to oblige a lady who stood in such obvious need of an ancient service. But Dickon was a canny lad and might have been biding his time. The time, my masters, had been mine – I’d made it so – and it was not the first time in London that a William came before a Richard.

  Came. Yes, I’d come in grand style but now it was time I came out. I did so – and a little murmur of abandonment escaped the lips of fair Jacklin, followed by a pretty bark of desolation from my forlorn little French fox: the vixen with the bush so black and the wound so scarlet and her parted shanks now so be-rivered with the long strong stream of my Stratford seeds. She put her hand over the wound – O, such an admirable hand, such carved excellence of knuckles! – scooped up the blown spume and smeared it smilingly in slow circles into the hairs of my chest.