Mistress Shakespeare (19 page)

 

Devil take the man! He’d tricked me into forgiving him once before with one of his love sonnets. But how did I know they were not written for his other Anne? The note was signed, “I beseech, your Will.”

It was a clever signature and an outrageous message after all he’d done. A poet must be a skilled seducer of emotion; a playwright must be a master manipulator of character and plot. William Shakespeare was both and more. At least he had not berated me for going off with Kit. He certainly knew the man and his reputation, for he was acting in his play. So then, perhaps he didn’t care—and yet . . .

I was lost in mental mazes with only dead ends. I had to fight him. I could not rush back to his arms as I had done once before with disastrous results. And yet, a little voice inside me insisted that I was his wife and his helpmeet. I had wed him before his other Anne, and if it had not been for one child—and now three . . .

With a sob, I sailed the note across the room. I lifted the tray off my lap, spilling the posset onto the bread. Rushing weak-legged to my window that overlooked the alley, I stuck my head out and looked down from the overhang of my top story.

I saw him, head down, shoulders slumped, turn the corner out of the alley into the street. He looked totally dejected and defeated.

I thought to scream his name. I could run downstairs after him, even in my night rail, no matter what the customers in John’s wine shop thought when I tore through. But I just held hard to the window ledge, sucking in deep breaths of warm summer air and telling myself I was much better off without my Will.

 

 

 

That next week
Stephen Dench brought me word that Father Berowne had died. Though he had already been buried in St. Andrew’s churchyard not far from my parents’ graves, I went home to mourn them all—and mourn for myself. I spent a week wandering the fields and forests near Temple Grafton, many of which Will and I had walked and used for a bed in our happy days. I saw him wherever I looked, beckoning from darkening woodland shadows, on the broad brow of a hill, sprawled amidst wild thyme, musk roses and woodbine.

I leased the cottage to a young couple who I thought would keep it up, for I could not bear to sell it. I did not go into Stratford but once at sunrise to put flowers on Kat’s grave just before meeting my men to return to London.

The graveyard did not haunt me, but the Avon and that bridge did. Waiting for my pack train, I glanced toward Henley Street, wondering how things were there. Had Will’s wife come to believe in him and set him free to try to make his name? Did she value his genius and try to tend it rather than rend it?

The day after I returned to London, everyone was abuzz with news the queen and her retinue would go by river from Greenwich Palace, where she had spent part of the summer, to her city palace of Whitehall. Although upon occasion I had seen her pass in a coach or royal barge, I longed to see the water pageant, as Jennet called it. Since my friend was due to deliver her fifth child in a few weeks, I went alone, walking through the beautiful Blackfriars area to stake out a space along Puddle Dock. It was the site Will had vowed he’d wait for me after dawn each day, but this was nearly noon.

I walked along the wharf, trying to find a good spot, avoiding the loud wherrymen, several, I saw, who sported Maud’s cushions even on their craft’s finely padded seats. They were calling for people to go out on their boats to catch a closer glimpse of queen and court, but I hadn’t thought to bring coins.

Music from one of Her Majesty’s gaily bedecked barges heralded the approach of the water parade. I saw yeomen guards filled the first barge. In the second, musicians wailed away on their sackbuts, crumhorns, fydels and the softer lutes. Barges farther back were packed with courtiers. Bright colors, the glint of sun on halberds, blowing bunting and flapping banners blurred past.

The queen’s barge of state came third, all awash in green and white Tudor silks and draped cloth of gold. And Gloriana herself in a gown of cloth of silver that shimmered in the sun. She was smiling and waving—yes, waving my way!

I waved back wildly. Tears blurred my vision as always when I beheld her, a woman in a man’s world, a bold woman. I felt she could have risen from her carved chair and walked upon the water.

“It reminds me of that time we saw her and the Lady of the Lake at Kenilworth,” a voice behind me said.

The entire scene on the river shrank to nothing. I thought I might topple into the water. I fought to keep my voice calm. “It’s not ‘just after dawn,’ you know,” I said, not looking at him.

“Ah, then you did read my heartfelt letter to you. Perhaps I have been here ever since, just pining for you.”

For the first time in ages, I cared how I looked, for I wanted Will to see me as prosperous and proper. Thank heavens I’d attired myself a bit better than usual, almost as if the queen could see me as I did her. I wore a starched ruff today and the bodice of my willow green gown was finely embroidered. My scalloped petticoat hems showed fashionably beneath my newly shortened skirt, which came just to the top of my red leather, cork-soled shoes.

Gritting my teeth so I would not erupt in tears, I swung about to face him. His eyes raked me head to hem. A pox on him, but he looked handsome. He was not finely garbed, but wore the new style of full, loose breeches called venetians with black stockings and a sleeveless leather jerkin, which contrasted with his white shirt, open at the neck. The brimmed hat he held in his hands was not a stylish beaver one, and it boasted a single white goose feather instead of the burst of plumes the gallants wore—and then I saw he’d stuck a quill pen there.

But beyond how he was dressed, Will emanated a strength more than his physical impact on me. True, he was a bit pale—but tall and as regal in bearing as if he’d been on the queen’s barge with her courtiers. Despite what a fine presence he’d made on the stage, until I was this close to him again, I’d forgotten how broad his shoulders were and how rich the hazel hue of his eyes, which now seemed to swim with gold flecks in the sun. His mustached mouth looked both sweet and sensual. All this I took in as a moment fled before I forced myself to speak.

“Have you been in more of Kit’s plays?” I asked, fishing by misdirection for how much he might know about Marlowe and me.

“But for his brilliant work, I don’t give a fig for the man as long as you truly don’t. Besides, however comely a lad you make, once Kit got down to it, he must have discovered a woman and lost his—his interest. Anne,” he rushed on as his eyes searched my face, then thoroughly examined me—again—throat to shoe tips, “I keep looking for you in the audience, as male or female. But has not your bosom friend Kit told you I had an argument with him?”

“Over . . .”

He dared to laugh. “Perhaps over how I shall surpass him as London’s premier playwright someday. Surely the new actor and scribbler from the country would not have dared to challenge him over you.”

“How nice you are in such a fine mood.”

“If I am, it’s only the heady joy of seeing you, breathing your air and—”

“Reeky Thames air, more like. Are you still in love with London?”

“Are you giving me an opening to talk of what and who I am in love with?”

I shrugged elaborately. “I must be going.” I had to flee him, flee that old feeling that always came upon me when I was near him—and when I was not. “By the by, how is your Stratford Anne?” I added over my shoulder as I pushed past him in the crowd still craning to see the queen. Surely a mention of that would make him back off. Faith, I was not going to throw myself into his arms again. When he had needed me during the Arden disaster, that was different, but now . . . and since he had bedded her after that . . .

“She is furious with me,” he said, keeping up.

“Ah, that makes two of us.”

“But you have always urged me to come here to make my way, to write.”

Men
, I thought.
They are so thickheaded, for that was not what I meant at all
.

“I’ve been working day and night,” he went on, “acting, yes, but making contacts to sell my work. Philip Henslowe, who buys and then agents many plays, is interested. I’ve begun several, a history, a revenge tragedy set in Rome, and one a comedy that you have insp—”

“If they are performed, do not bother to send me tickets you cannot afford,” I said and kept going down the wharf. He walked with me easily, his long legs matching my flight. I slowed so he would not think I was as panicked as I felt. “I’ve been writing only tragedy,” I told him. “And some love poems, though not as clever ones as yours.”

“You have?” he asked, either not catching or, more like, ignoring my subtle cuts. “But I don’t want to be clever,” he added, pulling me around to face him. “I want to be good. I want to be versatile. I want to be rich. I want to be—if not loved—appreciated and admired.”

“Not by me, I hope.”

He gave me a little shake. His grip hurt me, but I was entranced by his passion. My own long-smothered feelings for him burst within me but I beat them down. “Anne, when I went back to Stratford from London, my father was in debtor’s prison—prison! With the Arden terrors, I wasn’t sure if Leicester’s long arm had snared him too, but his earlier contacts and service to Stratford freed him. Then I learned my wife had borrowed forty shillings from a shepherd while I was gone! A shepherd was more solvent than the Shakespeares!”

“So you quickly got her with child and had more mouths to feed!”

“It isn’t like that. It’s never been like that—not with Anne Hathaway. It has always been a duty with her, not, as with you—”

“Lust?”

“Curse it, love!”

“Yes, I’d like to curse love.”

“Listen, will you? Anne thinks I’m mad and selfish in general to want to write. Why she ever wanted me, I know not, but that I was available and gullible, ripe for the picking.”

Such honesty from him today. It was a heady aphrodisiac. I wanted to hold him, to have him, but my own pain came pouring out. “An old story from a man, I fear,” I accused. “Poor me, my wife doesn’t understand me, but you do. Well, I don’t!” I pulled away and went back to walking faster up St. Andrew’s Street away from the river.

But he was not done. “I wanted to have some success—some money—before I let you know I was here this time because—”

“How long have you been here this time?”

“Two months, but I toured with the Queen’s Men in the shires before that. I would have gone with them sooner, but I caught a swollen neck disease that laid me low for nigh on a month—mumps, the doctor called it. Anne, whatever I’ve done, whatever has befallen, I’ve been bereft without you.”

“Let’s see now, maybe you could write a sonnet rhyming the word
bereft
somehow. Maybe something like ‘In Stratford, my heart was cleft / But I’m still glad my first wife left’ or . . .”

He swung me around to face him again. We must have made quite a scene, for several people stopped to stare and one or two called out encouragement to Will, which both of us ignored.

“Mock and berate—and hate—me all you will,” he cried, “but whatever success I have, the laurels will always be partly yours. But my love—far beyond the duty I owe the woman I had to marry, the mother of my children, whom I vow to support in a style befitting the Shakespeares—will be yours. Again, I say and swear it so, my love will be yours! Good day and good life, then, my Anne.”

He loosed his hold on me so quickly I almost toppled over. One man staring at us dared to clap at that speech. Evidently oblivious to everyone but me, Will started away, then turned back yet again and spoke as if there were no one else in the world but the two of us.

“And even if you do avoid my plays, promise to see or at least read
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, for without you, I’d have none of it.”

He swept me a courtly bow, more graceful, I wager, than any the Earl of Leicester ever gave his royal love. Before I could say aught else, he had disappeared into the crowd, leaving me standing under the big Blackfriars Gatehouse with a stranger applauding his exit.

’Tis widely known
that deaths come in threes, so a week or so later, when I heard that both the Earl of Leicester and the London theatre’s veteran clown, Richard Tarlton, had died, I dared hope that, counting Father Berowne’s death, that meant Jennet would not lose the child she carried.

Amazingly, Tarlton, the darling of the London masses, was mourned much more than was Leicester. And, I’m sure, in the midlands, those who still clung to the old faith were dancing one of Tarlton’s jigs over Leicester’s demise. On the other hand, John heard from someone who delivered wine to the palace that the queen had shut herself up for days to grieve the loss of her “Robin.”

Still, I knew too that Will and the Queen’s Men must be overturned for losing their patron, the Earl of Leicester. Attaining noble patronage was not just a question of financial support. In 1572 Parliament had passed an act that set down conditions for punishment of vagabonds, a term that included common players and minstrels not supported by any person of great degree in the realm. In other words, if they did not have the blessing of a great lord, they could legally be whipped and burned through the ear for loitering, so low was the esteem of playwrights and actors at that time. And, with the queen’s Warwickshire watchdog Leicester dead, would whatever funds or protection came their way for spying for Walsingham be cut off too? Will would be relieved to be out of that, at any rate.

I was glad Will had not told me where he was living, for I might have been foolish enough to seek him out. He had vowed he loved me—yet our mutual fulfillment of that love was impossible. He claimed that I was his muse—yet I stopped attending plays, afraid I would become one of those women who haunted the playhouse back doors.

Maud and I ventured to Tarlton’s memorial service, which was held several days after he was buried. Not only did I wish to pay my respects to the man who had noticed me at the first London play I ever saw, but we figured Philip Henslowe might be there. Will had mentioned him as the purchaser of plays, but we had learned he was also a buyer of anything to do with London entertainments. We were hoping that for a small fee, he might promote our scented cushions to persons we did not know and buy some for his own playhouse, the Rose, in Southwark.