The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

by Jude Morgan

  As he does it – as he thrusts through them, drawing his sword – he is aware that this has a flavour of the stage about it, except on stage there would be parley or fencing, swift to a resolution; also he realises he is a little afraid and hopes, with a ridiculous strength of apprehension, that the Frenchwoman does not perceive it.

  ‘Threaten a woman?’ he cries, with a voice he knows how to pitch so that it carries over heads. ‘Oh, brave crew, threatening a lone woman going about her business. Get home to your masters, and thank your stars if you’re not brought before the magistrates, for they’ll know you, lads, they’ll assuredly know you…’

  A mild disgust at himself, as he takes his ground, for this calculated rhetorical mixture: oh, not wholly brave, Will. Then, as he sees the prentices back slowly but steadily away, grumbling and sighing, he is struck with another realisation. He is older than them, near thirty, and looks it: looks, no doubt, the picture of drear, dispiriting, authoritative age. More cold water than hero.

  Still, he does believe in what he has done, the essence behind it; and that’s rare enough. The prentices straggle away, begin kicking the bladder again. He sheathes, turns and offers the Frenchwoman his left arm, sword-arm still free.

  ‘May I go with you?’

  She looks at his arm: briefly, all over him. She has a heart-shaped face and rather sallow skin and appears as gentle and neat as a cat. Just for a moment you can imagine the mouse thinking so. ‘Where?’

  ‘Wherever you were going. They’ – he nods at the lumpish figures funnelling themselves into the next alley – ‘will be about for a time yet.’

  ‘I was going marketing, I thought.’ The black crown of her head is just above his mouth. ‘Not with any great need, I confess. But I had better go, when you have done such a great thing for me – had I not? But what do you say, sir? Whither should I go?’

  Sweat shines on her long upper lip. She has an indoor smell, like burning pastilles and beeswax and sun on boards. A lump of mud is shied, half-heartedly, not reaching them.

  ‘Well. This way, whatever you choose.’

  ‘I choose this way. And now my thanks, for which you have waited long enough.’ She studies his face. Will has an intense consciousness of what she sees there: fingers tracing the map of him. ‘You’re not French? Hollander? So. Disinterested goodness, then.’ She sets her mouth as if taking medicine. ‘I must try to believe in it.’

  ‘Most Englishmen would do the same,’ he says.

  ‘Except those forty Englishmen. Shall I tell you what I wanted to say when you came along? “At last, a man with a cock.” Well, it was in my mind. I would have had to have had a great deal of courage. Yes, hear me manage your terrible English tenses, though French-born.’

  ‘Like a native. When did you come to England?’

  ‘Oh, as a child.’ She pronounces the word with distaste, as of some dishonourable past. ‘You’re doing that, are you? Working up an interest in me? Well, I can go along with it, if you like. My name, Isabelle Berger. Protestant French. Lodging at the sign of the Compasses, Hay Passage. Twenty-six years old. Widow. Will that do?’

  Almost hostile. But he senses something that he recognises very well: dislike of being beholden.

  ‘Madame Berger. Your servant.’ Bland unction is one of his best selves, a cloak for all weathers. ‘William Shakespeare, of this city.’

  ‘Shakespeare.’ She tries it over. ‘Chaque-espère. Every-hope. It nearly works. This way, if you please.’

  Aldersgate. No gangs of prentices here: some shops and stalls, presumably her destination. The moment to make a leg and go, he supposes, and doesn’t know why he doesn’t. It was only her situation that aroused a feeling in him: nothing else, nothing.

  But she stops at the entrance to a courtyard with an ornate gateway, shadowy tall house, porter hovering.

  ‘Here. I have work to do here. I’m a seamstress, sir – though don’t think you can ask me to mend your shirts. The lady of this house pays me well and kisses me when I go. What say you to that?’

  He can’t remember anyone being so awkward on so short an acquaintance. He bows. ‘I’m happy for you.’

  ‘I don’t see why, it can’t contribute to your happiness. You wonder why I lied. About where I was going.’ He is about to say he is not wholly fascinated by everything about her, but she forestalls him by touching his arm and smiling sweetly, as if they are having a charming chat. ‘Well, after all, what is life without lying and pretending? You should know that. I remember you now. A player, I’ve seen you act. Not as good as Alleyn.’

  ‘Yes, I thought of using those words as my epitaph.’ He bows again. But she detains him with her grip on his arm: hurts, a little.

  ‘I’ll show you what I mean by pretending,’ she says. ‘Stay here, don’t come near.’

  A little past the gateway, in a swept stable-entrance, she wraps her hood and cloak about her and drops herself down. Lies there, motionless, face turned away. He finds his heart striking hard even though he has been warned. He waits. One man, stout and sober, glances and carries on by. And Will understands that: don’t get involved, preserve thoughts and self. A lot of him, more than he cares to think, walks on with that man. The next is a plain young woman, servant perhaps or goodwife, hard to tell. She sees, draws closer. ‘Mistress? Mistress, are you sick?’ Not very loud, though, nor the touch on the Frenchwoman’s shoulder very heavy. She glances round: Will keeps himself out of sight. The Frenchwoman’s left hand (Isabelle, her name is Isabelle Berger, but this is nothing to him, like Jacqueline Vautrollier, an exotic name that stimulates his love of words, that’s all) is outstretched, and two rings wink against the olive skin.

  The young woman goes for them. So hurriedly that it’s as if she wants to catch herself unawares as much as her victim. Grab, tug, do it quick, and then it won’t have happened: Will is there with her too, alas. When the Frenchwoman leaps up, pouncing at her, she screams and runs. She pounds past Will, flashing her plain red face up at him, and he sees she is going to cry.

  The Frenchwoman is brushing down her skirts and laughing quietly to herself. At least, he presumes it is to herself.

  ‘I think,’ he says, approaching her all glowing like that, white of smile, harsh, perhaps mad, ‘you hardly need protection.’

  ‘No,’ she says, with satisfaction, and curtsies him goodbye. ‘But I think you do.’

  * * *

  ‘Isabelle Berger, to be sure, I know her,’ says Jacqueline Field, untenderly wiping her son’s bubbling nose. ‘Her husband was a silk-weaver, from Lyon. Left her pretty well, but she does fancywork for ladies besides. She is a good creature, an excellent creature.’ But Jacqueline Field says that about almost everybody. Possibly even about him.

  * * *

  Just the once, then: so Will promises or threatens himself, as he picks a muddy way along St Martin-le-grand in search of Hay Passage and the sign of the Compasses. Rain is falling, the only sort of rain this plague season offers: fat, humid, seemingly dirty before it hits the ground.

  Here it is, the doorway with the shell-hood porch. He is pointed to Madame Berger’s staircase by a prentice – a seemly, gentle-mannered youth, impossible to imagine him rampaging through the streets and accosting foreigners. Though perhaps they are all like that, taken singly.

  At her door he holds his fist-bunched hand suspended as notes of music spike the air. The virginal: as if a dandelion-clock of sound has been blown.

  He listens, not recognising the piece, yet feeling he has heard its acid melancholy before. On this threshold, something unreal. The narrow stair-turning with its warped casement looking out on rain-wet leads, that’s real enough, and so is he standing here with uplifted hand and outrageous heart, but not their existence together. It is as if someone is dreaming him here, and he might vanish like wind-caught leaves when the dreamer stirs.

  Suddenly the music is silent and the door swings open.

  ‘Master Shakespeare,’ Isabelle says, without surprise.

/>   ‘Madame Berger. I came to assure myself all was well with you, after the trouble the other day…’ This is what he told himself to say: the commonplace things. But in front of Isabelle he acts this part very badly – so her look seems to say.

  ‘Well, come and look.’ She walks ahead of him, into a room curiously close and overheated, though he sees no fire. A table with a green brocade cloth: on it sewing, a silver goblet. The virginal is of the spinet kind, inlaid with tortoiseshell: the lid bears the motto Nil magnum nisi bonum. Nothing is great unless good. A bird hops back and forth in a hanging cage, back and forth, with pendulum regularity. ‘What do you think? Does all seem well, or ill?’

  Through another door he glimpses hanging clothes, bed-curtains. That bird, he thinks, would send him mad. He shouldn’t have come, but he knew that. ‘Your pardon. I intrude.’ Already bowing out. ‘I only thought – those prentice gangs are still about—’

  ‘I know, they were making a great noise in Round Court last night. I stayed indoors, I couldn’t rely on a gallant player to come to my rescue.’ She laughs, picks up the goblet and drinks from it. Her voice has a peculiar monotone quality, as if one should play on only two keys of the virginal. ‘Let them enjoy it while they can. They’re all going to die, like you and me; and will the memory of splitting someone’s head make up for it, when they lie and blink at the last light fading on their eyes? Ah, at least I did for that shitten Frenchie, now hey-ho for hell.’

  ‘Some of them, yes, I fear that’s how it will be.’

  ‘Fie, misanthrope. Or are you just indulging my mood? I have wine here, but I would prefer to have it all for myself.’

  ‘I would prefer that too. Madame Berger, it turns out we have a common acquaintance – Mistress Field, who used to be Madame Vautrollier.’

  ‘Dear Jacqueline, she’s a wonder, isn’t she?’ She doesn’t say what kind of wonder. She goes over to the cage: the bird, blissfully for Will, freezes into stillness as she looks in. ‘So, you will have been asking about me. Furnishing yourself with knowledge.’

  ‘No. Why should you think that?’ He should never have come, the woman is intolerable, and so he may as well deal in her own hostility before he goes.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her eyes mist: he wonders if she is drunk – now, habitually. Yet her movements are so contained. ‘Perhaps because I’m not accustomed to people being kind to me.’

  ‘It’s a bitter shame that you cannot walk the streets without—’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean that. Naught to do with being a foreigner. Or an alien, as they say, which is a better word, I think, don’t you? You have to make a grimace to say it. Well.’ She sits down at the table abruptly, stretches out her feet, and gives a little pleasurable yawn, like a bite from a cake. ‘We don’t have to keep playing, do we? I dare say we both have things to do.’ The bird resumes its clockwork hops as absently, with faint weariness, she begins unlacing her bodice. ‘Naturally you want the reward of your gallantry.’

  ‘You have the art of the insult,’ he says, as temperately as he can, and gets out of there, thanking God, as he fumbles and stumbles down the stairs, or the lucky stars he doesn’t deserve, that this was revealed to him so immediately; that something has ended and not begun.

  * * *

  But in those jammed hot streets what began with muttering and gathering is suddenly transformed. Suddenly hate speaks in the most exciting language of all: the language of the theatre.

  It appears overnight, like a late frost or a crop of fungus. Pasted to the wall of the Dutch church in Broad-street, where the foreigners go to worship. Another of those inflammatory libels – but what an example. It’s like a great speech from a play. In thirty lines of heroic measure it exhorts the suffering true-born Englishmen – read apprentices – of London to rise up against the alien presences who are draining their lifeblood. Rise up and strike, burn, kill. Allusions to Marlowe’s work sow its fierce length; and it is signed TAMBURLAINE.

  ‘Not a bad piece of work,’ says Nashe judiciously. ‘Lacks something in finish, no doubt, but then it was written to order, as ’twere, and there one always finds faults.’

  ‘But it can’t have been Marlowe,’ says Will. Cold sweats have been sweeping over him ever since he heard. He keeps imagining not Tamburlaine at the foot of it but his own name.

  ‘Oh to be sure. Still, it does a good job of evoking him, I think, which I dare say it’s meant to do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Who knows, when it comes to that? I don’t understand half his dealings with the great. They say he’s intimate with Raleigh now, and Raleigh is at odds with my lord Essex. Interpose in a Cornish-wrestle of giants, and you’re like to get crushed even as you squeak to them for peace. Then there’s this school-of-night name attaching to Raleigh’s circle—’

  Will can’t help his bleak laughter. ‘What do they do? Hold black masses?’

  ‘Philosophy, I think. Than which there is nothing more dangerous, you will allow. God and not-God.’

  ‘Where is Marlowe, do you know?’

  ‘Staying with the Walsinghams is what I hear. I don’t enter his confidence much lately.’

  ‘He’ll be safe then, surely, from any association with this.’

  ‘You would think so. Yet somehow I can’t put the word safe together with Kit. Like mingling Greek and Latin.’

  The libel is torn down, but not before its phrases have established themselves on the lips of the angry delighted – the manipulated? Who knows, and who knows who is manipulating them? The streets seethe anew. Calling at Blackfriars, Will finds new bars on the door. A friend of Jacqueline’s was set upon in the dark, beaten – but it might have been normal London malice, not something special. Will sees the lustre of brown eyes in powdery shadow, the little covered yawn of scorn. Tastes something, like some forgotten treat of childhood, piercingly sweet.

  The Privy Council stirs. Doubtless it would close the theatres if plague hadn’t done so. The Dutch Church Libel, as it is soon called, manhandled the names of great lords in its muscular blank verse, suggesting in fact that they are in the foreigners’ pockets or vice versa; only the Queen is innocent, really. A blow must fall, somewhere: the lifted arm of the state is too heavy.

  ‘Kyd? Why arrest Kyd?’

  ‘Ah, perhaps that’s the idea. So we ask ourselves, why him, why not me, who next?’ Nashe is enjoying himself.

  Sedition: Kyd. Was he capable of that? Whenever Will saw him, which was seldom – he seemed to have left the theatre – he had the same pained detachment, as if trying to refine himself away: as if he wanted to change form altogether, as dragonflies did, leaving the nymph carapace, flying jewelled. Perhaps that was what being close to Marlowe did for you.

  ‘Of course, everyone connected to the theatre must be careful,’ says Richard Field. ‘But your patron sits well at court, they say, and has my lord Burghley’s interest, so that’s a useful connection. And then as to seditious views…’

  ‘Is there anyone less likely than me?’ says Will, half laughing. But what’s in the other half? A long corridor of darkness. A good place to hide, perhaps. Safe, safe. He avoids St Martin-le-grand. He imagines himself in Stratford and feels the tick of his children’s eyelashes against his cheek.

  Burbage brings Will the news.

  ‘Kyd’s out. They let him go on Wednesday, I think. Henslowe saw him. Well, Kyd went to him to beg a loan, to pay his doctor’s fees. Henslowe actually gave him the money, can you believe that? But apparently he looked so fearful it even shook old Brass-sides.’ Burbage lowers his voice. ‘He’d been before Star Chamber. Apparently they racked him. Racked him after he had talked, which seems a peculiar refinement of torture. Dear God. Let them take their eyes off the theatre, please, or just go back to calling us whoresbirds and vagabonds. Mind, you’ve half left us anyhow, haven’t you? Sir Proper Poet. No, I jest, I understand. Needs must.’

  Needs must, you do what you have to do. You survive. Do you survive at any cost? Questions in the tai
nted spring, warm as a haybox, as airless. Nashe finds out where Kyd is lodging. They go to see him, to see if – well, what? If he has said something about them, perhaps? And Will’s quiet inner voice, Keep away, don’t touch. Don’t touch Will, keep him clean. Noli me tangere. Jacqueline makes way; Isabelle looks him up and down.

  Kyd keeps his room dark. Still, you can see what’s been done to him. The best torture is supposed to leave no marks, but you can’t alter that twisted mouth: those eyes.

  ‘They searched my papers. They found things, writings. Things that weren’t mine. They were interleaved.’ He makes it sound like an obscenity, a perversion. ‘Dangerous sentiments. Atheistical sentiments. Well, in the name of dear Heaven,’ a moment’s trembling appeal, ‘you know me.’ An admission in Kyd’s lowered face that he has preferred not to be known. ‘It was him. It was all Marlowe’s writing. As I told them, we used to share chambers, and there was but one writing-desk, and so our papers were mixed up. He used to talk that kind of thing, you know, and I tried to stop him – though after a while it was best not to, because it would only make him go further. Merely for shock, I thought. The only true profane love was buggery and Our Lord Jesus Christ knew it and knew his disciple John in that way…’ Kyd utters a hoarse laugh of outrage, at hearing himself say it, perhaps. ‘Such things he would say, there were more of them, and so I told them. You see, don’t you? I had to tell them. Any seditious writings, any trouble in the state, I fear you’ll find Kit Marlowe behind them. It grieves me to say it but I’m thankful too. Thankful I’m free from his unholy spell, aye, I thank the God in whom I verily believe and who has preserved me—’

  ‘But you don’t believe Marlowe wrote the Dutch Church Libel,’ says Will.

  ‘Why should I not?’ Kyd says, wiping and wiping his brow.

  ‘Because – because it’s not well writ enough. It’s done by someone who wants to make you think broadly of Marlowe. As art—’