“Your lucky day.”
“Thanks.”
There was a quick BWAR from the patrol car. Monday glanced over his shoulder.
“You know why we pulled you over, right?” said Monday, handing Willie back his ID. Willie shook his head.
“You were driving too slow. Usually means a stoner. Be careful out there, okay?” Monday said as he headed back to the patrol car.
Willie, flustered, said, “Okay, thanks. You, too.”
“Good night, sweet prince,” Officer Monday said as he got into the squad car and closed the door. Officer Anthony fired up the siren and roared out onto the highway, lights flashing. Somewhere out there was something more dangerous than a college kid doing forty-five mph on the freeway.
Willie got into his dad’s car and drove — at exactly fifty-eight mph — toward the Renaissance Faire. In the sixteenth century, Willie hoped, everything would be less complicated.
Chapter Twenty-seven
What biographical influences set Shakespeare apart from not only all who came before him, but from contemporaries such as Munday and Marlowe? Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that writer of such opium-fueled Romantic poetry as Kubla Khan, spoke famously of Shakespeare’s “wonderful philosophic impartiality,” his seeming ability to fully and without judgment inhabit the mind, body, and soul of princes and cutpurses, of heroes and traitors, even — one might argue especially — of women, and reveal their essential humanity. Whence came this peculiar ability of Shakespeare’s to find oneness with “the other”?
William had class to teach on Wednesday. His students seemed to sense something distrait in their normally sharp magister, and were quiet. Even class clown Richard Wheeler was glum, matching the grey, overcast sky, still heavy and drizzly from the previous day’s rain.
After school, William went straight to Philip Rogers’s shop. Nothing odd in that: it was on William’s way home, and he often stopped in for a chat. But he still found himself looking around before he entered, to make sure there was no one he knew on the High Street. He saw only Hamlet Sadler, shuffling up toward Henley Street, taking no notice. William ducked into the shop.
He was hit by a hundred different scents at once. Myrrh, sulfur, mustard, rotting cod liver. Green earthenware jars lined the shelves. Boxes and bladders and skins were everywhere, filled with tinctures, salves, seeds, and decoctions. A stuffed alligator hung proudly over the rear door. And sitting at a cluttered table, wielding a tortoise shell as a paperweight, was Philip Rogers. Rogers looked at William as though he’d never seen him before. His eyes were black holes that seemed not even to reflect the flickering light cast by the single candle on the table.
He held in his hand a metallic pipe that looked of exotic origin. A thick smoke emanated from it, and from his mouth and nostrils.
William had never seen such a thing. “What devilry does our true apothecary conjure now? The eating of smoke and fire?”
“Ah, William,” he said at last. “About to close up shop, I was. Merely tasting of a most exalted medicine, purchased direct from a sailor in the service of Sir Francis Drake himself. Tobecka, ’tis called, fresh from the New World, and inhaled to the lungs, as the primitives there teach, by burning to a smoke, thence to course through body, mind, and spirit. Only a few noblemen and sailors practice it. Forsooth, methinks they share not the knowledge with the masses for fear of losing their stores of the weed, it is that pleasurable.”
And here he leaned forward and spoke conspiratorially, with what William thought a mad glint in the eye. “I have created my own recipe, mixing the weed with dried and crushed blossoms of our own local hemp, and yet a third leaf, very rare, from the southern climes of the New World and much beloved of the natives there. Together they produce a most immediate effect: a godlike energy suffused with a most peaceful calm — and a most stimulating numbing of the tongue. Will you try?”
He held out the pipe to William.
“Nay, though it sounds illuminating,” said William. “I seek not drugs for myself, though to my benefit.”
William explained the situation: a girl, nay a woman, with child, and was there a way to unmake what God and man hath made?
Philip Rogers considered, and took a long draw of smoke from the pipe into his lungs. “I have not the physic you seek,” he said, “but there is one who, if the stars will have it so, may accomplish your desire. I will take you to her.” He set down his pipe, snuffed out the candle, and took his cloak from a hook.
“What, now?” asked William, but Philip Rogers was already striding at an unusually brisk pace through the door.
William followed.
The cloud and drizzle had given way to a brisk wind, and ragged clouds were clearing. There was a waxing moon low in the sky as they hurried up High Street, passed the Shakespeare home in Henley Street, and continued on to the crossroads marked by the One Elm, dark against evening stars. They neither went straight on toward Henley-in-Arden nor right toward Clopton, but turned left, onto a narrow footpath that dove into the forest. After a half hour or so they came upon a clearing, and in the clearing was a single small cottage, surrounded by a sprawling but well-tended garden. A light burned in the window.
William knew the place. It was the home of Goody Hall, a widow, a midwife, and therefore by definition a witch. If Philip Rogers’s shop was a crypt of dead herbs, desiccated by wind and heat, crushed by mortar and pestle, then Goody Hall’s garden was their lush and living incarnation. Her garden was dense with deadly nightshade, mandrake and mugwort, pennyroyal and hemp, wormwood and hemlock.
When the door opened to Philip Rogers’s signature knock — bam bam bam bam . . . bam bam — it revealed a woman so young and comely that William was taken aback. Surely, he thought, she is a crone, under some spell of unnatural youth. She smiled at seeing Philip.
“Philip Rogers, by the sun and moon! You are most welcome,” then with a wink to William, “for ever does he bring me good commerce!” Introductions were made, and with water from a pitcher Goody Hall washed her hands that had been at work over a bubbling cauldron in the fire on the hearth. William sat and looked about. In contrast to Philip Rogers’s apothecary shop, her house was tidy and inconspicuous. She put out a goodly amount of cheese, and took down three mugs and filled them with ale from a large pitcher. William took his mug and sniffed the contents.
She answered his momentary hesitation with a smile. “Strictly barley, hops, yeast, and water, I assure you. Now, what brings the glover’s son and assistant schoolmaster to the witch’s wood?” she said, and sat, taking a sip of ale and a bite of cheese.
William explained again his situation, and she asked before he had finished, “To the child’s birth does the woman say ay or nay? For if she would say ay, then not by me will she be gainsaid. If nay, then why are two men here on her behalf, but not herself?”
William answered, “As the woman and I have not spoken since the news became known to me, I know not her disposition. Mayhap she has simply lured me to warm an empty bed, or, misled by my father’s former station, to fill an empty purse. But I think not. There was, I think, a fire that burned true enough; but which has for a long autumn gone untended. Whether an ember still glows upon that hearth I know not. Of her desire or lack thereof to bear children, in sooth, I know not.”
The witch smiled. “I see well how a maid might be seduced by your sugared words. Indeed, a cunning tongue may do much for a maid, both for good and for ill.”
William shifted uncomfortably, unable to stop thinking that beneath this lithe young woman — she could not be more than Anne’s age — was a gnarled old woman trying somehow to seduce him.
Almost as if she heard his thoughts, she continued, “But I am a witch, am I not, Philip? And witches, ’tis said, may see men as they are; and what I see before me is a truthful man.”
She went to a shelf and took down a wooden box, and from the box pulled out a vial.
“Take then this vial. And if she be not imbalanced of the humours, or
under other fit of madness, and if she well and truly — by all the saints and martyrs, and by God and Jesus and Mary and Joseph and Jove and Cupid and the Sun and Moon and Sky, and all the houses of all the heavens that now or ever rule her fate — wishes to end a life not yet begun, then and only then, this distilled liquor let her drink off. Mark you, the potion is most powerful when drunk at the stroke of midnight under a full moon, and if she will she should then remove her blouse and run thrice around the house where the child was got. And if it is meant to be, she shall swoon, and bleed, and the unborn remain so.”
William took the small vial and put it in his pouch.
“That,” said Goody Hall, sitting down again to her ale, “is ten shillings. But as you’ve made the journey to my cot, would you have aught else of me? I may augur your future in love or in commerce. I also cast spells and make other potions of love, for growing, healing, for increase of potency — ”
“Love, growing, and potency I have in surfeit; power I desire not,” said William, taking a small coin purse from his belt and opening it.
He gave her ten shillings.
She took it, and as their hands touched for an instant, she looked at William intensely, then quizzically to Philip Rogers. She turned back to William, and her lips lifted at the corners. “I can also, if you will, show you the gateway to the spirit world, and beyond.”
William wasn’t expecting this. He shook his head. But there was something in her voice, and he found himself wondering just what she meant. The spirit world. He was surprised to hear himself ask, “Is it safe?”
The witch turned to Philip Rogers, and asked, “Is it safe?”
Rogers shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “Safe? Houses they say are safe, yet poor Richard Coombs was killed by a falling bedroom timber, was he not? So what is safe? Nothing.”
William looked into the witch’s eyes. They didn’t scare him. Much. What did he have to lose, besides a life suddenly not his own?
“Eamus,” he said, and set his entire purse of coins on the table. “Let it be so.”
For twenty minutes William watched as Goody Hall added ingredients to the brew in her pot. Herbs, a toad, a dried bat, several roots that William didn’t recognize, and finally a handful of toadstools that would be Psilocybe semilanceata to later scientists. She walked over to the front door. There, lodged securely in a hook, was a broom. She pulled it from its place.
“Are you ready to fly?”
William said nothing as Goody Hall glided across the room to the cauldron. She spun the broom upside down as expertly as Little John might a quarterstaff. She raised the broomstick ceremonially over the cauldron, dipped the broomstick handle, and stirred the green, oily decoction. As she did she spoke an incantation, something in Welsh, which William knew bits of but not in this dialect.
As she chanted, Philip leaned over to William and whispered, “This is a great honor, William. Few are those pricked, who are chosen by a witch to share in the mysteries of the coven. Join at your peril, your pleasure, and your pain, but know that it does change you. You will not be what once you were.”
“I wish not to be what I am now.”
“Drop your breeches,” Goody Hall said, and William did.
She took a bottle from a shelf and poured a generous amount of oil into her hands, then rubbed them quickly together to warm it. “Now drop to all fours and make like a stretching dog, palms outstretched as if in supplication, arse heavenward.”
William obeyed, and she quickly and expertly spread the lubricant.
Goody Hall lifted the broomstick from the cauldron. “Prepare,” she said, “to ride the broomstick to the place where witches meet.”
“Try to be at your ease,” said Philip Rogers. “It only hurts at first.”
It did, but the lubricant did its job: the spongelike rectal tissue absorbed the witch’s brew and sent it spinning through William’s bloodstream, and his flesh began to tingle. After a few minutes, he watched with fascination as “Philip Rogers” melted and reformed itself endlessly, as “Goody Hall” transformed into the very crone he had imagined and then back into a girl, but not the same girl. First she was Rosaline, and she was naked and shining and tossing her curls and laughing. Then she melted again and re-formed as his mother, but it was his mother’s head on Rosaline’s shining body, and he hid his eyes at seeing her belly and her bush. Then she melted and came back as Anne Hathaway, soberly and hugely pregnant by a window, looking out at a grey misty day while knitting socks, four socks over and over again in a display of infinity that had William confused about exactly what he was seeing. Then finally she transformed one last time into his sister Joan, but it was Anne’s hugely pregnant body, or so it seemed, and then she, too, melted away into nothing but a skeleton, and that blew away in a wind. The wind grew, until it blew away the table, and the cottage, and “Philip Rogers,” and finally himself, and suddenly the wind was all around him and he was flying — or something that he thought must be him was flying, but it couldn’t be him because his body had been blown away, had it not? He was a living ghost, a specter, a soul disembodied, as he soared over mountains, through clouds. He passed a tree-thicketed hilltop, and of his will, and yet not, he swooped around its far side, through the canopy of a forest and into a large clearing, where a coven of witches, naked, chanted as they stood and ground their nether lips against the broomsticks held between their legs like hobbyhorses, and they all as one stopped and looked up at his passing, and as he circled, they began at once to wildly ululate and raise and shake their brooms, and his spirit fled up again through the clouds, and then raced downward, through fog and mist, and when he emerged from the fog he was still flying, flying low, with the wind around him, but now it was a hot wind, and fast wind, a faster wind than he’d ever known, over a low hard path of some kind of stone, but stone such as he’d never seen, charcoal gray and smooth, and painted with eerily symmetrical lines, white and yellow, some continuous, some broken, and flashes like gems reflecting firelight spaced regularly in between so he couldn’t help but count them, one, two, three, four — he got to twenty-five in moments, and they seemed to stretch off into infinity. And his mind’s eye looked down to see his hands, his own hands and yet not, resting on a curve of shining leather — cheap leather, the shred of him that was still a glover’s son noted — and lights and numbers that made no sense to him, a glowing half-clock dial with a hand pointing to a time that seemed to be 58; but he had the feeling he was in a room or a hutch of some sort, or maybe it was a metal cage, with windows, bright clear windows. Finally he thought he saw, outside the moving cage, the outlines of a village, nestled in a forest shadowed against the sky, a strangely bright sky.
The cage in which his spirit raced through the hot wind passed a large barn, and on the barn were written two words he had never seen together before: RENAISSANCE FAIRE.
Part Three
RENAISSANCE
Chapter Twenty-eight
One can imagine few places where the issues of politics, religion, family values, and sexual morality might come together in so compelling a fashion as they must have around the Shakespeare family hearth in the fall of 1582.
It was early. Predawn. William headed home, clutching in one hand the small bottle containing the witch’s brew of drugs, brewed to force untimely from its womb his would-be child.
His bottom hurt even more than it had after the long ride to Worcester.
William didn’t remember leaving Goody Hall’s cottage in the woods, nor the return trip to Stratford. Philip Rogers had given him tea from the Spanish West Indies back at his shop; a restorative, he said. William felt sharp and clear in the front and center of his head but ragged around the edges as he padded softly and unsteadily through the half-light up to Henley Street and tried to slip, unnoticed, into the Shakespeare home. He was ravenously hungry, and tiptoed into the Great Hall to see what luck he might find in the pot. Mary emerged from the parlor looking fresh as a daisy and mightily peeved. “Good mo
rrow, William. Thought you to slip in unnoticed, arriving home thus in the cock-light?”
William tried to smile naturally. “Ay, good my mother, for I wished not to wake you.”
“Marry, I have been awake these many hours awaiting your return,” she said, and gestured him into the parlor. “Come and sit. We must needs talk.”
William followed her, trying to palm the bottle of potion into the folds of his sleeve.
William and Mary sat in hard leather chairs on either side of the fire. His father, who was rarely awake at this hour, sat quietly in a dark corner on a stool. He looked as if he hadn’t slept.
“William,” Mary Shakespeare said, “you are our son. There is naught you could do on God’s green earth to change that state nor to abate our love for you.”
“Ay, Mum.”
Mary nodded, and looked at her husband like she’d just given him a good thrashing, which she had. “Your father and I, though joined by bonds both spiritual and temporal, and surpassing strong, are not always in accord in all matters. Last night he recounted to me some small advice, cloaked in hints, which he imparted to you. Do you recall?”
William said nothing, but involuntarily fingered the bottle in his hand.
Mary waited patiently for a moment, then said, “You smell not unpleasantly of exotic herbs. Have you been to the apothecary, so early of a workday?”
“Ay, Mum, for a remedy to an affliction: I have of late, but wherefore I know not, been exceeding melancholy,” said William.
“The cause is easily found out,” Mary said. “You have had a life change thrust upon you, the surging tide of fate dashing the bark of youth and liberty most rudely upon the rocks of duty. Well might that lead to melancholy, even in the most splenetic of men.”
“Ay, mayhap that is the case.”
“William,” said Mary, and her brow furrowed, “I oft have wished to have this talk with you — ”
My Name Is Will Page 20