Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard (21 page)

Uncle Jack’s room was only one floor above the tavern and I could hear faintly the voices and laughter from the patrons. I found my uncle in a curious state, nervously excited, pacing back and forth. It was unlike him, but there he was, walking to and fro, his hands behind his back,
pausing now and then to peer out the window at the dark street like a man in search of answers to life’s most difficult questions.

Sitting on the bed, I waited for him to speak his mind, and finally he said, “I have news, Aerlene, and it affects your situation.”

“Yes, Uncle?”

“I heard not an hour past in the taproom below that John Trethwick is dead.”

I said nothing but felt such a welling of relief that it cannot be described; to rejoice in another’s death is not laudable in anyone, but there I was—happy enough to hear it.

“How did it happen, Uncle?” I said, only half-listening. John Trethwick was dead. What did I care how it happened? I would not have to live in his house; I could scarcely be expected to look after his lunatic sister alone. Had I been able, I would have danced a jig—yes, a proper jig for this news. But of course I just sat there, quite likely frowning lest I be thought callous.

“The man died in his sleep of an apoplexy,” my uncle said. “They say his features were all grimaced as though the devil himself had laid hands upon him. But here is a terrible thing too. It all happened earlier in the week, possibly on the night of the storm. The sister had been going into his room each morning to wake him, and hadn’t the wit to see
he was gone until today. When he was turning in colour and smell, she ran from the house. It’s a dreadful story, is it not?”

“It is, Uncle,” I said. “A dreadful story.”

“Merciful Heaven, what an end,” he said, shaking his head. “Neighbours saw that poor distracted creature wandering and wailing along Hensington Road and took her back to the house, where they found Trethwick in his bed, his face all twisted and dark. I never liked the man, but I couldn’t wish such an end on anyone. Three days dead and not attended. They say the storm on Monday may have put him off his head. He was seen in a terrible temper that afternoon, for most of his corn was spoiled and he was cursing the heavens. It may have provoked the apoplexy. Whatever happened we’ll never know, but it touches on your situation, Aerlene. The sister will have to be put away. You can’t live in that house with her. I won’t hear of it and I don’t expect your aunt to press the matter, though she knows nothing of this yet and I’ll not tell her until her mind settles. I am trying to brighten her with my plans for the new house, but it will take some time.

“I have arranged for rooms at Oswald Thompson’s until the new house is at least walled in and roofed. There is no room for you at Thompson’s, nor would your aunt be comfortable in the same house. I am sorry to say it, but it’s the truth. In the morning I intend to talk to her sister about taking you to London until the new house is ready. You have worked for me and could be useful to Boyer in
his shop. Your mother always spoke well of the Frenchman and said he was decent enough and always kind, even in her circumstances. But I have to persuade Eliza. I can’t see that she’s overly fond of you, and her daughter and you have had your differences too. But I will talk to her in the morning about this, for they are leaving the next day, so time is short. If Eliza agrees to this, I shall have to rent a horse for you and get you some new clothes. It must all be arranged by tomorrow. Now, remember you must be more willing to take instruction and curb this obstinacy of yours. Eliza will not brook insolence, nor should you think of offering it. Meanwhile, do not say a word of this to Marion until I have talked to her mother.”

Insolence? I would call upon the bear to stop my mouth before ever I uttered a single word that might offend; I would practise obedience, with an air of humility and gratitude befitting a convent girl in Papist Spain.
Forbearance
would be my watchword. That much I vowed to myself before leaving my uncle’s room that night.

After a long talk with my aunt, Uncle Jack told me the next morning that they had come to an agreement; to this day I believe that money changed hands, though I never asked and was never told. Marion took my news with good humour, telling me I would have much to learn about life in the city, a remark that I took to mean she would be only too eager to reprove me for my ignorance. But what did I care? I
was free of John Trethwick and his sister and was now going to London, where my father lived and worked. Perhaps one day I would see a play of his enacted? When Mam was in London, he was only three and twenty. That would put him now in his middle years, an established and successful man. How could I meet him? It was an enticing question I would ask myself many times over the next few weeks.

On Friday of that first week in September 1602, Uncle Jack put us up at an inn on Cornmarket Street, and we left Oxford the next day at first light in the company of six carriers whose saddlebags were packed with goods for trade and each man leading another horse packed likewise. Marion and her mother and I rode in the middle of this procession, and so we were fifteen horses in all. The night before, I had lain awake an hour or two imagining myself upon a horse, remembering Marion and how splendid she had looked the day she arrived in Worsley. I soon found out, however, that riding a horse was not so grand as I’d imagined, for I grew tired of the narrow saddle, and the motion itself was upsetting to my stomach. The horse was docile enough, but I found the entire experience a misery and was glad when we reached Wycombe by late afternoon. There we stayed at an inn and I was sick to my stomach in the night.

Next morning it was raining and the horse’s motion as we splashed along the muddy road again brought on the
queasiness, which improved only when I closed my eyes. Thus I travelled that second day like one half-sleeping with an ague, mildly feverish, my innards unpleasantly astir, wishing only for the moment when I might stand still on my own two legs. No splendour then for me astride a horse. The rain had stopped, but at one point I heard shouting ahead between the carriers and two draymen whose cart had lost a wheel and was blocking the road. I only half-listened, but was still amazed at the range and originality of the curses they exchanged as our horses stepped carefully around the broken wagon. I have yet another memory of that day on the road. As we approached London, I heard from a distance the murmuring of a crowd and then shouting and hurrahs and the carrier behind me saying, “Another gone to hell and good riddance.” It was a hanging and probably at Tyburn, but still I kept my eyes closed until I heard the church bells, hammer blows to the brain of the sick, and then we were inside Newgate. When we stopped at the market, I fell from that damnable horse in a swoon, hearing above the sound of the bells a woman crying, “Is it the pestilence? Has she the pestilence?”

One of the carriers told her to shut her mouth. They were rough fellows, those carriers, though kind enough to me, and one said, “We carry no pestilence. The girl is not used to the horse, so leave off, you’re waking the neighbourhood.” This brought laughter from some, but yet the woman continued to shriek about pestilence.

When I opened my eyes, I saw faces staring down and the hag still yelling until a man fetched her a clout and she was quiet. All this I saw from the paving stones in my first moments in London. One of the carriers then summoned a carter and I was lifted into his wagon with the baggage piled in beside me. As my aunt and Marion moved off through the streets, I followed in the cart, listening to the voices nearby: “Is she dead, then? Was it a fever?”

I remember the creaking axle and the grinding wheels of that cart and a jarring that could loosen the teeth in your head, and on I went, past the cries of hawkers and around me the restless surge of the poor appealing for alms or offering prayers. Opening my eyes, I looked up and for a few precious moments saw between the overhanging roofs a patch of sky and three kites circling, wishing with all my heart that I was such a creature unbound from this earth by flight.

I was trundled then along a busy street—Cheapside, as I would soon discover—and some time on, when the carter stopped, I opened my eyes to the sign of a yellow hat. My aunt beckoned the carter to draw me down the laneway to the rear entrance, and the man carried me up narrow stairs to a room on the third floor, where he placed me on a truckle bed and left. A servant girl undressed me, her hand passing over my brow in search of fever, then reaching under the covers to feel my pubis for swelling. Later she brought me soup, but I had little appetite; I lay there listening to the
voices of passersby in the laneway, watching the evening light fade into darkness, and then I slept.

In the night I awoke with a start, fearful that I had wet the bed, and I must have cried aloud, because the servant girl, Jenny by name, came in with a taper and, sniffing the air, muttered, “I know what’s wrong with you.” Drawing back the blanket, she whispered, “Oh Lord, what a mess you’ve made.”

Not the kindest-hearted creature, she wiped me with a rag, and roughly enough too, and then pulled the soiled sheet from beneath me, grumbling about the nuisance of it all. A big, round-faced buxom girl of sixteen or so, this Jenny, and as bold in aspect and manner as poor Margaret Brown had been meek in both. When Jenny showed me the bedclothes by candlelight, I could see I had neither pox nor pestilence, but only my first courses. As the girl put it with her sour laugh, I was now of breeding age.

For some days thereafter I felt vaguely unwell, as though I were still on that horse counting the milestones to London; I lay in bed vowing that I would return to Oxfordshire on foot before ever I rode a horse again.

On the third or fourth day, however, I was up and approached my aunt in the parlour, told her how sorry I was about the bedclothes.

She was embroidering lacework and, looking up at me, said only, “I hope you realize what all this means now, Aerlene.”

“I do, Aunt,” I said. “My mother told me of what can now happen.”

Returning to her needlepoint, Aunt Eliza said, “Much good the knowledge did her.”

Then a man’s voice in the room. “That will do, Eliza. There is no need to be unkind.”

I hadn’t noticed Philip Boyer, who was sitting at a desk in the corner writing something. I was embarrassed to have mentioned my condition in his presence, though it didn’t appear to bother him. He was small in stature with a moustache, his dark hair now greying, and he was precise and handsome in his dress.

He got up from the desk and said, “I am your uncle Philip, and you are Elizabeth’s daughter.”

“I am, sir,” I said.

Aunt Eliza said she must speak to the servants and left. Even then I felt a coldness between husband and wife.

Philip Boyer said, “I was fond of your mother. An interesting woman. Not like most English women. I enjoyed talking to her. She had unusual ideas.”

I was uncertain what he meant by that and had no wish to pursue the subject; I still felt embarrassed in his presence.

“When you are feeling more yourself,” he said, “I will show you some of this city where I have made my living these past thirty years. At first London is a confusion, so you will need guidance. Later we will put you to work in the
back of the shop with the apprentices. You must earn your way in this city and it will do you good to occupy yourself. Idle hands make work for the devil. Is that not what you English say?”

I told him I had often heard the expression, but guessed it could apply to the inhabitants of any country who saw value in work and mischief in indolence. He laughed and told me I might be right.

“I can see you are a clever little thing,” he added. “I will show you London and then set you to work during your stay with us.”

Over the next few weeks Philip Boyer was as good as his word in acquainting me with at least parts of the city, for London has so many neighbourhoods one could hardly know them all in a lifetime. On Sunday afternoons we would set out westward from Threadneedle Street, walking to St. Paul’s and along Cheapside to Holborn or the Strand, since Boyer favoured the rich and their mansions; the vast majority of Londoners did not interest him and I never saw him give a penny to the poor. As we walked, I was excited to be in the city where my father lived, and I wondered if he was now rich enough to live in one of those grand houses by the river.

Boyer was forever going on about the success of French Protestants in London. “We are good at business,” he liked to say, “and we work hard. Harder than Englishmen, if you will forgive a criticism of your countrymen.” It had taken
him thirty years, but he had succeeded; he had a good trade with the ladies at Court and with gallants from the Inns and with those from the countryside who came into the city to be outfitted for the Christmas season. He had long ago paid his denization fee and was as good as any Englishman alive. He told me that it hadn’t always been like this. In his first year in London as a Huguenot refugee, he had found it difficult, “for Londoners have never taken kindly to ‘strangers,’ as we foreign-born are called.” He told me of one night when he was foolish enough to be out after dark and lost his way. When he asked for directions at a tavern door in his bad English, he was set upon by half a dozen bluecoats.

“They gave me a terrible beating, those young apprentices. And when they finished kicking me and I was lying in the street, I wondered how I would ever survive in this city. But I couldn’t go back to France. I thought of returning to Italy, but there too thugs resent strangers. So I said to myself, I will work hard and learn their language, and one day I will be rich and it will not matter what accent I speak with, for they will have to listen. Lying on that street I promised myself that I would be careful. I would obey the authorities and one day have my own business. And I have done so.”

Philip Boyer was a boaster, but I didn’t mind and anyway I felt he was entitled to brag a little, as he had done so well.

One day we walked past Goldsmith’s Hall to the liberty of St. Martin le Grand, where he first settled after fleeing the
massacre of Protestants in Paris thirty years before. There he had found friendship and safety among other refugees, Italians and Flemish and fellow Frenchmen.