by Lisa Klein
To R. R.
Thou, Love, art my Muse
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Postscript
Author’s Note
For Further Reding
Also by Lisa Klein
Prologue
London, October 15, 1582
Will Shakespeare dashed into the Boar’s Head Inn, breathless and disheveled. This was the best day of his life and the worst.
“Meg, I have news. Dreadful news!” he called.
He made straight for the table in the public room where he did his best writing and dug papers and a pen from inside his jerkin. Time was not to be wasted.
“Meg? Come anon.”
There was no reply. Long Meg was neither at the tap as usual nor serving customers.
A fat man looked up from his cup and said, “Long Meg? She’s not here. And it’s her I came to see.”
“Then begone,” said Will. “She’s been known to thrash a man for gaping at her.”
Chewing the end of his pen, he searched his brain for the right words. Writing a court brief was nothing like writing a play, and the law handbook he had stolen was of little help. Will was no more cut out for the role of a lawyer than he was for that of a glovemaker, the trade he had left behind in Stratford along with the bewitching Hathaway sisters. But in escaping to London, he now saw, he had sailed from one sea of troubles into an even stormier one.
“Will, why do you look so desperate?” It was the serving wench Violetta, small and with a dark cap of hair like an acorn. She placed a cup of ale before him.
“Because my friend Mack is in prison for assaulting and robbing the notorious villain Roger Ruffneck. He’ll be hanged unless I can persuade the judge to free him.”
Violetta gave a sharp cry and turned pale. She was a fountain of feeling, able to move the most stoic of playgoers to weep with her.
“Do you know Mack?” asked Will in surprise.
“He is … Meg’s brother!”
“Yes. Therefore she must be told. Can you find her?”
The wench shook her head as if dazed.
“Well, look upstairs!” pleaded Will. “By tomorrow I must have another witness who can attest to his good character. Who knows him better than his own sister?”
Violetta nodded and scurried away.
It was fortunate that Will had stumbled upon Thomas Valentine as he was returning to the inn. The young doctor had agreed to testify against Roger Ruffneck, having seen him assault Will. London was a violent place. Why had he been so eager to come here? He was likely to be killed before he published a single play.
But the doctor alone could not prove Will’s argument. He needed another witness. Why not the timid Jane Ruffneck, who was now hiding from her cruel husband at this very inn? No, Mack had insisted, wanting to protect her. Mack, hero to the downtrodden, now himself in dire need. Who would save him? It was up to Will.
He propped his forehead on his hands, not caring that the ink staining his fingers now marked his face as well. How unjust that Mack was in prison! Will longed to share Mack’s suffering and thereby prove his true friendship. But having narrowly avoided that den of despair himself, he dreaded confinement. What did it lead to but starvation and death?—an early, tragic end to his fledgling dramatic career.
Not to mention his romantic hopes. The world of love was all before him. He thought of Anne Hathaway’s soft lips, then of Long Meg, that strong and spirited maid with her nimbus of golden hair.
O brave Meg! What would she think of him scratching with his pen and fumbling in his handbook while Mack languished in jail? She would strap on a sword, a dagger, and a pistol and lay siege to the Tower itself, if her brother were held captive there. She dealt not in words but in deeds. In all of England there was no woman like her.
Will’s thoughts were interrupted by the approach of a no longer timid Jane Ruffneck with Violetta trailing her.
“Let me help your friend,” Jane said, her eyes blazing. “I will swear my husband deserved every blow Mack dealt him. I know that monster all too well!”
“I shall be there also to weep for Mack; that must move the entire court to pity him,” said Violetta, wringing her hands.
Will groaned. It was reason, not passion, that must persuade the judge.
“I am gratified by your concern,” he said. “But leave me alone to finish this writ. My friend’s fate lies heavy upon me.”
“And upon us as well,” said Violetta.
“Why?” asked Will, puzzled, but Violetta and Jane were already hurrying away.
Alone again, Will bent over his page, which left him unable to see the black-clad figure, narrow as a shadow at sunset, creeping around the edge of the room toward his table.
A wrinkled hand reached out and touched his arm. Will jumped.
“Will Shakespeare?” said an old man’s voice.
“And who are you?”
“One who makes his living by night,” he said.
A thief! Will drew back. “Why have you come here?”
“She bade me, but I do it for the sake of my boy.”
Was the old man a lunatic? Will didn’t ask him to explain. He hoped he would vanish as suddenly as he appeared, like a ghost from the grave.
“I know something about your friend Mack,” said the thief, his voice like the rustle of dry leaves.
Will’s hopes revived. It seemed Providence had sent him a witness! He leaned closer.
The old thief spoke only briefly. He would not let Will question him. Nor would he be stayed. He finished his tale and slipped away. And when he had gone Will sat motionless, his brow furrowed and his jaw slack with amazement. The pen dropped from his fingers forgotten, and the handbook fell closed.
“By Jove, he speaks the truth,” Will murmured. “I was a fool not to see it before!”
Chapter 1
London 1579
Before she became the celebrated Long Meg and the muse of Will Shakespeare, little Meg Macdougall lived in a narrow house on Addle Street between Aldersgate and Cripplegate in London. Her mother, Jane, was a long, thin broomstick of a woman with strong, ropy arms. Meg’s father, Jack, was a giant of a man who could lay a thousand or more bricks a day and drink a kilderkin of ale by night. Meg hardly seemed to belong to them. Her arms were puny, her knees knobby, her legs wayward as a baby fawn’s. At mealtime her parents ate great quantities of meat as if filling the hollowness within their long bodies, while Meg was content to nibble a leg of a peahen or a crust of bread. But though she looked too frail to thrive, her eyes shone brightly in her thin face surrounded by hair the co
lor of spun gold.
It was a happy household except when it was not. Jack Macdougall drank too much and Jane begrudged the waste of their meager resources. Their boisterous quarrels sent Meg scurrying to avoid the hurled brick or hot iron. Plaster crumbled from the walls and the very beams creaked and shifted. All that kept the house from collapsing were the houses abutting it on either side, whose occupants shouted for quiet, only adding to the uproar. One night the constable came, and he would have arrested Meg’s parents were it not for her earnest promise: “I will put them into their bed anon.” When they had fallen asleep Meg poured out the rest of her father’s ale and hid her mother’s iron.
But Meg could no more cure her parents’ failings than she could prevent the sun from shining or misfortune from striking. One night Jack was staggering home from an alehouse when he fell asleep in the street, and the next morning a cart rolled over his legs. Cruelly, the cart was filled with bricks. Lame and unable to work, he became a beggar, hobbling away every morning on crutches and returning with a few pennies, barely enough for bread. Jane worked day and night, bending over a boiling vat. All Meg saw of her was a cloud of frizzled hair and a pair of dye-stained arms. She ceased her labors only when the priest from St. Alphage came to bring a few coins of charity and teach her the scriptures. In his black robe, with his sharp, tiny eyes, he reminded Meg of a rat. She was glad her mother sent her away on those days with a bundle of wet laundry. In the fields outside the city gates, she would spread the clothes out to dry and play leapfrog with the other children or chase stray dogs. When the sun had bleached the linen to a blinding whiteness, she folded it and brought it home again.
On one such day it began to rain, and Meg gathered up the linens and ran home early. On the way she met her father leaning heavily on his crutches, a bloody bruise on his head. His cloak and every coin in his pocket had been stolen. They turned onto Addle Street and Meg followed him into the house, clutching the mud-spattered linens, afraid of her mother’s scolding. It was her father, roaring with rage, who thrust her out of doors again, but not before she caught a glimpse of the priest’s hairy buttocks and her mother’s surprised face.
“Harlot!” shouted Jack.
The priest scurried past Meg, clutching his black robe to hide his nakedness. A Bible flew out after him and struck his head.
“What was I to do?” Meg heard her mother cry. “He would not give me a penny of charity otherwise. O Jack, forgive me!”
Meg did not know what her mother had done, only that it was something wicked that shamed her father too. He left the house and did not return that night. Meg lay awake hoping he would forgive her mother, for surely whatever had happened was the priest’s fault, not hers. But her father did not return the next day, and on the third day they learned he was in the Wood Street jail. He had been arrested for vagrancy because he could not produce a begging license.
Meg’s mother stood outside the church and shouted at the priest, “You whited sepulchre! I’ll never take your charity again!” The parishioners stared at her in alarm while Meg pleaded with her to return home.
“What is a sepulchre?” Meg asked her mother that night.
“A sheet that wraps a dead man,” Jane replied dully. She heated up her iron and pounded the wrinkles out of a piece of linen until it became scorched. “A pox upon my boozing beggar of a husband and that skanderbag priest!”
Meg feared her mother was preparing a whited sepulchre and that the priest was as good as dead. But he did not come to Addle Street again, and Meg and her mother no longer attended services at St. Alphage.
As Jane would not relent toward Jack, it was Meg who took her father scraps of food in prison. Because she lacked the penny to bribe the jailer, she could only thrust the food through the iron grate at street level and try in vain to touch her father’s hand. She could dimly see how gaunt and begrimed he was. He shivered, for someone had taken his only blanket. But he was ever hopeful that his release would come soon.
A week later, on a morning after a night when the ditches and puddles turned to ice, Meg arrived at the prison with a cake, a blanket, and a penny for the jailer, only to learn that her father was dead.
When she told her mother, something in Jane broke. She became like an unlatched door swinging in the wind. She beat her forehead with her fists, crying, “I am the vilest of evildoers!” Such words alarmed Meg. She wondered if grief had addled her mother’s mind.
Her own grief was of the silent sort. She dreamed of her father as a hearty bricklayer lifting her into his arms. When she awoke she hoped it was true and waited for him to come home. When he did not, tears slipped from her eyes. How could he leave her forever?
It was her mother’s fault, Meg decided. “If you had gone to the jail and made them release Father, he would still be alive,” she said, though she had no idea what the laws were and how justice was dealt.
Jane threw herself on her bed and drew her feet beneath her. “See, the flood waters rise around me!” The unlatched door of her mind now hung by a single hinge.
The next morning Meg awoke to find herself alone in the house. Rain dribbled through the thatched roof and formed puddles on the floor. A feeling of dread enveloped her like a fog. Dressing quickly she left the house, hastened along Addle Street and down Wood Street, crossed Cheapside, and followed Bow Lane to Garlick Hill. The gutters in the middle of the street overflowed with garbage rushing downhill toward the river. Meg slipped in the mire but got up again. She searched along Thames Street, where warehouses opened onto the wharves and cranes stood like scaffolds for hanging criminals. At the end of a lane where steps led down to the water, Meg saw a pair of shoes. Her mother’s shoes, neatly placed side by side as if she had just stepped out of them to bathe her feet.
“Mother!” shouted Meg. She gazed downriver to where the water surged beneath the arches of the great bridge. She called to the laborers operating a crane. “Did you see a woman go into the river?”
They shrugged and shook their heads.
Meg waited at the steps for her mother to return. The dread within her deepened into something with no name. Hours later, wet and bone-cold, Meg returned home to the house that sagged like a sorrowful face and leaked water like tears. She climbed into her parents’ flea-infested bed. All night her eyes stayed open to aid her ears in listening for her mother’s steps.
When she heard excited voices in the street she thought, There is news of my mother. She jumped out of bed and went outside but could not bring herself to question anyone and put her terrible fears into words.
At the grocer’s stall in Wood Street she paid a farthing for some apples, hoping the grocer would tell her the news, but he turned away to help another customer.
The barber’s son, a little magpie with bare feet and ragged feathers, ran up to her.
“Did you hear what happened last night? It makes me shudder to think of it!”
Meg hugged the apples close in her apron and dumbly shook her head.
“You don’t know?” he said. “For an apple, I’ll tell you.”
Meg’s hand shook as she gave him the fruit. “Did they pull someone from the river?”
The boy bit into the apple. He was going to make Meg wait.
“Tell me, was she dead or alive?”
“Dead,” he said. “Murdered in his bed last night!”
His bed? “Who was murdered?” she asked.
“The priest at St. Alphage. His head was beaten in. I saw him wrapped in a sheet.”
Meg stood, stunned. A whited sepulchre. She thought of her mother bearing down upon the linen sheet with her hot iron. Throwing the iron against the wall in anger.
“How did it happen?” she whispered.
“It was a strong arm that did it and a heavy weapon the murderer took away with him.”
“Did anyone see … the killer?”
“Nay, he escaped before anyone saw him,” the boy said, disappointed.
Meg’s heart was beating wildly. She ran back
home on legs barely able to hold her up. Apples dropped from her skirt and rolled away. Once inside the house, she glanced toward the hook by the hearth where her mother kept the iron. It was gone.
“My mother—a murderess?” The horrible word slipped from her lips. She saw her mother rising at night and carrying the iron through the dark streets. But she could not imagine her beating the priest with it. Even in her bitterest fury, Jane had never struck Meg’s father with the iron. But then she had never been so maddened and desperate as in the weeks since his death.
Now Meg understood that her mother had walked into the river with the iron, letting the bloody weapon drag her underwater. Grief and guilt over her deed drove her to kill herself. Her mother was a murderess twice over! Her father, a beggar who died in prison. How had it come to pass that she, Meg, was the daughter of shame and sinful sorrow and now alone in the world?
“I am no longer myself,” she said, not knowing quite what she meant. She went to bed and slept for a long, long time, because there was no one to wake her up.
No one from the parish came to take Meg to the hospital where orphans were cared for. To keep from starving, she nipped food from the market vendors and ran away so fast, no one could catch her. The Fleet River provided fish; orchards yielded fruit into her hands. Meg began to thrive like a flower sprung from winter’s withered stalks. Her hair became tangled and she cut it off. Her bodice was tight, so she filched some clothes she found drying on a bush. They turned out to be a boy’s shirt and trousers. They proved comfortable and easier to run in than a skirt; thus she took to wearing them all the time.