The Lambs of London (4 page)

“Ah yes. The Fates. The sisters. Hail, Atropos!” Charles finished the drink, and looked around for the waiter. He was always known as “Uncle,” a solemn old man who still wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings. “Your finest, Uncle, when you are free.”

“Anon, sir. Anon.”

“That will be put on his gravestone,” Charles murmured to the others. “Anon, sir. Anon. God will give up on him.”

The three sat drinking for an hour or more. They would not have been able to remember what they said. It was the experience of talking together that enlivened and reassured them, the linking of voice with voice, the call and the response, the sympathy of feeling. Charles had forgotten that he was supposed to meet William Ireland that evening. Eventually he left them at the corner of Moorgate, where they walked north towards Islington; he turned towards Holborn and home.

Then suddenly he was struck with a savage blow on the neck. “What have you got? Give it to me.” He heard the voice and turned, but he was struck again. He staggered against the wall, and felt someone rifling through his pockets. His watch was ripped from its chain and his purse lifted quickly, almost impatiently; then he heard the thief running away, his footsteps echoing down the tall sides of Ironmonger Lane. He leaned against the wall by the corner and, with a sigh, sat down upon the stones. He reached for his watch, and then remembered that it had been taken; he realised that he had suffered no serious injury, but suddenly he was very tired. He was exhausted. He had become one of the whole host who had been assaulted on the same spot—the corner of Ironmonger Lane and Cheapside—and who had decided to sit upon the ground. The echo of footsteps, running from the scene, could still be heard.

chapter three

W
ILLIAM IRELAND SAT WITH
his father in the dining-room above the bookshop. Samuel Ireland’s companion, Rosa Ponting, sat with them. “That was a nice bit of perch,” she said. “Very soft with the butter.” She dipped her bread into the last remnants of the butter sauce. “I do believe it will rain. Sammy dear, will you pass me that potato? Did you know they came from Peru?”

She had lived in this house for as long as William could remember; she was now in middle age, and had acquired an extra chin, but she had preserved her youthful manner. She had once been what was known as a “charmer,” and still exercised all her claims to that title. “You never will guess who stopped me in the street this morning. Why, it was Miss Morrison! I hadn’t seen her for an age, you know. And I swear it was the same bonnet. I really do.” Samuel Ireland was staring ahead of him, lost in some troubled thought. His son could barely conceal his impatience. “She invited me to tea on Tuesday week.” She sounded defiant. She had a right to speak, did she not? “Now, William, I see you wish to leave the table. Please do.”

He looked at his father, who made no sign. “May I go now, Father?”

“What? Yes. By all means.”

“I have something to show you.”

“What is it?”

“A surprise.” William rose from the table. “On the shelves.” By this he meant the shop beneath them, although he had learned never to use that particular word in his father’s presence. “It is a gift. Something you have greatly desired.”

“Desire is a beast, William. Never desire too much.”

“But I presume this will be acceptable to you.”

“Some volume?” Samuel Ireland glanced at Rosa Ponting, who was not interested in such matters, and muttered, “I leave you to your potato, Rosa.”

He followed his son down the plain deal staircase separating the bookshop from the house.

William took a parchment from one of the shelves and laid it upon the wooden counter. He was looking at it with evident delight. “What is it, do you think?”

Samuel Ireland stroked the paper with the tip of his finger. “A deed. From the time of the first James, at a guess.”

“Look more closely, Father.”

“Look at what, in particular?”

“The witnesses might interest you.”

Samuel Ireland took a pair of reading spectacles from the pocket of his jacket. “No. It cannot be.”

“It is.”

“Where did you find this?”

“In the curiosity shop off Grosvenor Square. It was tied with other deeds. I broke the string, and this fell upon the floor. As soon as I retrieved it, I noticed the signature.”

“How much was it?” He asked the question very quickly.

“A shilling.”

“A shilling well spent.”

“It is yours, Father. It is a gift.”

“It is a thing I have dreamed of.” He took off his spectacles and wiped them with his handkerchief. “The name and hand of William Shakespeare. It is the most remarkable document I have ever seen.”

“There can be no doubt about it?”

“No doubt at all. I have seen Shakespeare’s own will in the library of the Rolls Chapel. Do you see the sweeping stroke through the tail of the ‘p,’ with its added stroke to be read as ‘per’? Do you see the imperfect ‘k,’ and the ‘e’ with the reversed loop? It is the genuine article.”

T
AKE HIM ALL
in all,” he had once told his son as they sat together after breakfast. “He is our true parent. Chaucer is the father of our poetry, but Shakespeare is the father of our stage. No one truly fell in love before Romeo and Juliet. No one understood jealousy before Othello. Hamlet, too, is a great original.” He got up from his chair and strode over to the chimney-piece in the dining-room, where there was a small bust of Shakespeare carved out of mulberry wood. He had bought it in Stratford-upon-Avon, six months before. “Yet the people of his uncultivated time never understood his genius. The plays were not fully published until after his death, and the texts themselves are so corrupted that many passages make no sense whatever. Some plays have simply disappeared.”

“Disappeared? Where?”

“Into the vast backward and abysm of time, as the bard would say.
Cardenio. Vortigern. Love’s Labour’s Won
. All gone.”

In the evenings, after supper, Samuel Ireland would sometimes read Shakespeare to his son. William could still recall the sensation of fog, or rain falling, just beyond the bay window of the shop-front. His father would sit with the oil lamp on the table behind him, casting the shadow of his head upon the open book as he intoned the words. “‘
How often when men are at the point of death they have been merry! Their keepers call it lightning before death
.’ How do you find that, Will? Magnificent!”

“He often mentions lightning. There is that line in
Romeo and Juliet
—”

His father was not listening to him. He was already searching for another passage with which to impress his son. He loved to recite the drama. He believed that he had a powerful voice, but to William it often sounded hollow and uncertain.

They had once travelled to Stratford “in pursuit of the bard,” as Samuel Ireland had put it. William knew that his father relished the opportunity of travelling away from home; in a temporary separation from the bookshop, and from the watchful presence of Rosa Ponting, he could occupy a more distinguished position in the world. One traveller in the Stratford coach had ventured to enquire, “In what business are you engaged, sir?” Samuel Ireland had looked at him for a moment. “I am engaged, sir, in the business of
living
.”

They had stayed that evening at the Swan Inn, Stratford, and on the following morning they had called upon Mr. Hart, the butcher who shared Shakespeare’s descent through the female line and who still lived on Henley Street in Shakespeare’s own house. The scholar, Edmond Malone, had given Samuel Ireland a letter of introduction. Outside the old dwelling itself was a sign in black point. “William Shakespeare was Born in this House. NB: a Horse and Taxed Cart to Let.”

“It is an honour, sir,” Hart had said when they entered the narrow passage of the house.

“The honour is mine, sir. To meet one of the family in these surroundings. My son, sir. William.” William shook his hand, which was warm and powerful. He imagined it around the neck of a hare or chicken. Ralph Hart was a short, bald man, of very pale complexion.

“I have no literary gifts, Mr. Ireland. I am merely a tradesman.”

“But an honourable trade.” Samuel Ireland was very gracious. “Was not the bard’s father a butcher?”

“It is disputed. Some say he was a glover. But he kept cattle. Come into the parlour. Some like to call it the hall.” Hart seemed to William to be a composed and determined man; he was sure that he ran a thriving business. “A dish of tea? I have no wife, but a very good housemaid.”

“Invaluable, sir, I am sure.”

It was for William Ireland the strangest sensation—to be in the house where William Shakespeare was reputed to be born, to be sitting in a room through which he had walked a thousand times, to see in the face of this butcher some lineaments of his illustrious family. And yet to feel nothing, to sense no familiar presence, to be stripped of all enchantment—that was most mysterious of all. He blamed his own incapacity. A more sensitive person would no doubt have thrived in this redolent atmosphere. A finer spirit would have been stirred, as if by a trumpet. But he registered nothing. The house was empty.

“You have heard of our latest discovery, Mr. Ireland? His father’s will was found hidden behind a rafter in this house. In the attic, where I keep my old pans.” William looked up, and noticed that the cross-beams of the parlour still displayed hooks for the haunches of meat.

“This is John Shakespeare’s papist will, is it not?” Samuel Ireland lowered his voice slightly on the word “papist.”

“Indeed it is.”

“Yet surely there must be some doubt, Mr. Hart? Might it not possibly be forged by some fanatic?”

“Our friend, Mr. Malone, believes it to be genuine. It is to be published in the
Gentleman’s Magazine
.”

William noticed a faint flush in the butcher’s pale face, and found himself addressing his father. “Why should it be a forgery, Father?”

“There are some people, William, who might like to claim the father of the bard as one of their own.”

“I am too plain, I suspect.” Ralph Hart helped his guests to more tea. “I believe what I see.”

William Ireland laughed. “I see what I believe.”

Then he noticed that his father was looking oddly at him. He had somehow managed to say the wrong thing, and he felt abashed. He would do anything to please his father. He felt that in some way he had disappointed him, and that he must make amends. How he had disappointed him, he was not sure. It was some general failure. He worked in his father’s business; he was his companion on various bookish expeditions. Yet sometimes he found his father looking at him in surprise, precisely as he had done in Mr. Hart’s parlour, as if he had just discovered that he was part of the household. William Ireland had never known his mother. His father had once told him that she had died when he was quite a baby, but nothing more was said. It was a subject not to be discussed. Rosa Ponting had shared his father’s bed for many years, but William treated her with neither affection nor intimacy. His love was reserved for his father.

S
O IT IS REAL
, Father? It is genuine?” They were standing over the small parchment, peering at the scrawled signature.

“It is an authentic deed of the time. There can be no doubt about it.”

“Then if you have no doubts, I beg you to accept it as a gift from son to father.”

“Will you take nothing in return, Will? Here is my key.

Have any volume you desire.”

“No, sir. I can accept nothing. It would taint the purity of the gift.”

“Of course this is not to be sold.” The idea of selling the document had never occurred to William. “You should go back to that curiosity shop. Look in its corners. Summon forth its mysteries.”

They could hear Rosa Ponting coming down the stairs. “Whatever are you two boys scheming? I’m sure I’ll be the last to know.” It was her custom to consider Samuel Ireland still a “boy.”

He looked warily at her as she entered the shop. “Nothing whatever, dear.”

William could not bear to see her among the books and parchments. “Father, I must deliver
Pandosto
before it grows too late.” He had already described Charles Lamb’s purchase to his father.

“Leaving the house at this hour, William?” Rosa tapped her nose. “I hope she is worth the effort.”

He had wrapped the volume in coarse brown paper, and now he took it down from the shelf as if he were using it as a shield against her; he left the shop quickly, muttering “good night” into the air.

L
AYSTALL STREET WAS
only a short distance from the shop in Holborn Passage. And so, a few minutes later, Mary Lamb opened the door to him.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Lamb.” He was afraid that he had sounded too fierce, and took a step backwards.

“Forgive my intrusion.”

“Do you mean Charles? Charles is not here.”

Her face was in shadow, the oil lamp in the hall shining behind her, but William was drawn to the sweetness of her voice. “I have brought a book for him.” On an impulse he held it out to her. “He purchased it this morning.”

“What is it?”

“Pandosto.”

“Greene’s
Pandosto
? Oh do come in.” He hesitated on the threshold. “My parents are with me in the drawing-room.” He followed her through the hall, and noticed the rich bronze of her untidy hair. Then he found himself in a small over-heated room, where an old couple were looking up at him in surprise. The man was eating toast, and there was butter on his chin. “My name,” he said, “is Ireland. William Henry Ireland.”

They said nothing. They stared at him so strangely that he might have come from the Sahara or the Antarctic wastes.

“Mr. Ireland has brought Charles a book, Pa.”

Mr. Lamb waved his toast at him and laughed. Mrs. Lamb was not so merry. She did not like surprises of any kind, let alone one in the shape of a red-haired young man bearing books at eight o’clock in the evening. “Charles is not with us, Mr. Ireland. He is engaged.”

“Yet he asked me to bring him this.”

“Do let me look.” Mary took the parcel from him, and unwrapped it.

“The secret is in the inscription, Miss.”

She opened the book at its frontispiece, and repeated the words silently to herself. It was then he noticed the scars upon her face; the pits and ridges of her cheeks were caught in the candle-light. He looked away, and seemed to be studying the miniatures and cameos displayed on the walls of the little room.

“Why, this is a treasure, Mr. Ireland. It was once owned by William Shakespeare, Ma.”

“That was a very long time ago, Mary.” So her name was Mary. “I wonder at your brother buying such things when he has scarcely money enough for a pair of boots.” Mrs. Lamb turned back to the toast now burning on the fork.

“Did my brother promise to pay you this evening, Mr. Ireland?” She asked him this in a low voice so that her mother could not hear, and for an instant there was collusion between them.

“It was not much—”

“How much?”

“He owes two guineas only. One has been paid.”

“Would you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Ireland?”

As Mary left the room Mrs. Lamb looked at William intently. “Has Charles purchased this book from you, Mr. Ireland? Come back to the fireside, Mr. Lamb.” Her husband had wandered over to William, and was brushing the dust and detritus from his jacket.

“Not exactly.” William hesitated, confused by Mr. Lamb’s attentions. “We agreed—”

“Then I would be obliged if you would take this book away with you.”

“Oh no.” Mary hurried back into the room. “This is a sacred book, Ma. Shakespeare himself turned its pages. Will you not sit with us for a moment, Mr. Ireland?” She came up to him, and slipped two guinea coins into his hand. “Will you take something with us?”