The Playmakers (36 page)

“He may have been a little man,” Marlowe
added, pointing skyward in a jabbing motion. “You made sure of
that, God. But he will leave a giant hole in our hearts.”

And as Samuel Davidson turned and trudged
slowly across the stones towards the camp, clasping the body of his
dearest friend to his chest, he realised that the sickness that had
been debilitating him for all these months, had now overwhelmed
him.

Truly, it was time to go home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

At first William Shakespeare thought he
vaguely recognised the woman standing in the doorway. The red,
glowering, complexion, the crinkled face, the cheap black dress
trimmed in white, the big forearms folded aggressively.

He had seen her before, a long time ago, but
where? Rapidly he tried to sift through the portfolio of faces his
memory had collected over the years.

Under which category was it filed? Around the
theatre traps, maybe? Among the many thousands that had filled the
seats at Uncle Percy’s? On the road with the travelling mummers?
Perhaps as far back as growing up in Stratford?

His efforts to remember were not helped by
the fact that he was standing before the stranger totally nude.

He had jumped out of bed when he had heard
the commotion at the door, and was now frantically fumbling around
in the half-light of the early morning for his pants, a shirt, a
cape, anything, to cover his nakedness.

Meanwhile Mr Mullins, in nightshirt, was
standing behind the stranger, apologetically declaring, “I’m sorry
Mr William. She just burst through the door of the tavern and
insisted on seeing you. I couldn’t do anything about it, what with
the horrible noise waking up half of London.”

“Noise?” said Shakespeare, hastily concluding
the best camouflage he could find was a silk ruff and holding it
strategically in front of him. “You mean the knocking on the
door?”

“Er, not exactly,” said Mr Mullins, tilting
his head towards that of the stranger.

“So!” the woman spat out, “this is where you
have been holed up for all these years.”

As soon as the first ear-shattering bark
blistered across the room, William’s memory kicked into life and
rapidly brought up a face and name.

He knew that voice - sounding not unlike a
blacksmith’s hammer against an anvil - anywhere.

Mr Mullins gave a little shrug of the
shoulders as if to say, “Told you so” and sauntered off down the
hallway to go back to bed, while the memories came flooding back to
William.

“P-P-P-Polly?” said William. “Is that you? I
mean, there is no doubt it is you, is there?”

He moved to extend a hand of greeting, but in
doing so, dropped the ruff on the floor. He looked down to see
there was nothing covering him again, hastily scooped up the
fragment of cloth and returned to his original pose.

“Hmmm, not bad, not bad at all,” said
Polly.

“Oh, well,” said Shakespeare, turning red,
“there’s never been any complaints over the years.”

“I don’t mean the size of your turnip, you
idiot,” barked Polly, looking around the room, “I mean this place.
Certainly better than what you left your wife stuck in, back in
Stratford.”

And it was, too. After Rasa and most of the
troupe had left to go abroad with Monsieur Le Doux, William and
Sarah had used some of the profits from the tavern performances to
renovate the top floor, merging three of the tiny bedrooms, to make
their own well-appointed love-nest. At one end of the long, narrow
room was a giant carved Blackwood wardrobe, with a highly polished
mirror edged in gilt. A small table along one wall supported a vase
of fresh flowers. The walls were painted a brilliant white, and on
the polished floor was a large hand-woven rug featuring some sort
of desert motif. Hanging from the ceiling was the largest
wrought-iron candelabra Polly had seen in her life.

At the other end of the room was a huge
double bed, also made of the polished Blackwood, with a canopy of
cream-colored silk draped from four, thick, carved ceiling-high
posts.

In the gloom, among the drapes of the canopy,
Polly could just make out another figure in the bed.

“And I see that you’re not exactly missing
your wife, either,” said Polly.

A voice emanated sleepily from behind the
silk canopy. “What? What’s going on? William, what’s
happening?”

“Nothing, darling, nothing,” said William,
half-turning toward her, “go back to sleep.”

The figure obediently rolled over, as
William, now rousing to anger, brushed past Polly, went to the
other end of the room, withdrew a robe from the big wardrobe and
hurriedly pulled it on. “What’s this all about?” he snarled.

“I have something to tell you, it’s
important!” Polly said, without stepping back a pace.

Shakespeare looked at the face of the
intrusive messenger. It had been many years since he had seen her,
and the memories came flooding back. Of how Polly had been Anne’s
best friend, had been her matron of honour at their
hastily-arranged wedding, and one of the sourest participants in
their miserable excuse for a reception. She had been around through
the small amount of good times, just about all of the bad times,
and at the birth of the three children.

Throughout it all, she had certainly been a
good friend of Anne. And an unrelenting, harsh critic of him.

He could see now from the look on her face
that this situation had not changed, and if anything, had only
magnified since his departure from Stratford for, what? How long
was it now? More than ten years?

“We’ll go downstairs,” said Shakespeare,
pointing toward the door.

Polly turned to go, but not before she had
one more glance at the figure in the bed, observing that the
sleeping woman was heavily pregnant.

William ushered Polly down the stairs and
into the performers’ dressing room at the side of the tavern
stage.

She looked surprised for a second, but could
see William was comfortable with this. This was the room where he
and Budsby had had some of their most private conversations over
the years, had made some of their biggest decisions, devised some
of their most successful plans, told each other their most
important news.

But William was not prepared for this
revelation.

“It’s Hamnet,” Polly said.

“Hamnet?” said Shakespeare, looking
puzzled.

“Your son, you fool. He’s dying.”

For a long time William stared blankly into
the ruddy face of Polly Rogers, unsure how to handle this, not
convinced of what he should say. Not clear, even, on what he was
expected to say.

Yes, Hamnet was his son. His boy. His own
flesh and blood. One of the twins.

But, wait a moment,
thought Shakespeare,
let us put this into
perspective. How many times have I seen him? Once. How many times
have I held him? None. What had happened on the day he and his
sister were born? A pot was thrown at me and I walked out of the
place. Whose fault was that? Let’s not get into that …

He stared into Polly’s eyes.

Hmmm, maybe she had been
the one behind the idea of calling him Hamnet. What sort of a name
is Hamnet? My God, a man walks down the road to get a breath of
fresh air, to put a bit of space between himself and a minor
domestic trauma, and before you know it, they have named his son
and heir Hamnet. Thank God, I kept walking that day and met Mr
Budsby by the side of that icy stream. Thank God that he took me on
board and that he taught me everything I know as we toured around
the counties with our brave little gang of performers. Thank God
that we came to London and achieved success beyond our wildest
expectations.

Thank the Lord, no wait,
praise the Lord, that I met Sarah, and that she is now upstairs
carrying my baby. Our baby! A baby to be born out of our enduring,
joyous relationship. A relationship based on love and trust, a
relationship that has taken years to evolve out of the wreckage of
the disaster that was my marriage, a relationship that has finally
washed away the pain and misery of the death of Anne
Whateley.

Why as God is my witness,
I see Sarah for herself, and herself only. And when I am loving
her, I am truly loving her, and not some phantom image of Anne
Whateley that use to loom as clear as day in my mind when I was
loving, for want of a better term, Anne my wife.

He narrowed his eyelids and continued to
stare at Polly before finally giving his heartfelt response.

“So?” he said calmly.

“So!” shrieked Polly, the hammering voice
making the curtains on the wardrobes flutter. “Is that all you can
say when I tell you your son is dying? So? Is that it? So?”

“Yes. So. What do you expect of me?”

“I expect, your wife expects, any normal
person would expect, that you would show some concern, some feeling
of sadness, some interest in the situation, some indication that
you might go back to Stratford to see how can you help.”

“I am not wanted in Stratford, I was thrown
out of Stratford.”

“You left Stratford, William. Left it. It’s a
different thing.”

There was silence.

“What is wrong with him?” said Shakespeare
eventually.

“I don’t know.”

“So, you come all the way to London to tell
me that my son is dying, and you don’t know what is wrong with
him?”

“No one knows! All we know is that he has
never been a strong child, always sickly, never been able to handle
illness.”

“So, if he has been sick for so long, what is
suddenly different in his condition this time to indicate that he
might be dying?”

“This time, a mother knows.”

“You are not his mother.”

“I’m speaking on behalf of his mother. She
asked me - no, wait, I volunteered - to come here and tell you,
that he is nearing death. Perhaps you would at least have the
decency to send some money to help with the doctor’s bills.”

There was another long silence as the enemies
eyed each other.

Enemies, yes, that is what
we are,
concluded William.
Enemies. She
may well have been my wife’s best friend at the time, but she never
liked me, for reasons I never knew. And I have never really liked
her.

“It is no business of mine,” he said
firmly.

A look of shock came over Polly’s face. “No
business? In heaven’s name, you are his father.”

“I am his father in name only. I was never
really given the opportunity to be his father.”

“Well, then I will give you the
opportunity.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just you see, Mr Producer and Writer, just
you see,” sneered Polly. Her voice lower, but still contained the
metal harshness. “Unless you come to Stratford, or some financial
arrangement is forthcoming, then Anne and her children, including
her near-to-death son, will come up to London and tell the whole
world what an unfaithful, lying ne’er-do-well you are. See how you
promote that event, Mr Theatre.”

She brushed past him, made her way through
the empty tavern area, and stormed out the front door.

As the front door banged, and William
hesitantly walked out of the changing room, a rumbling voice echoed
across the tavern.

“Good heavens,” said the voice, “and to think
that we missed securing the services of such a talent as that!”

“Talent?”

“Yes, my boy. I can hear you pitching it up
now. ‘Come, Ladies and Gentlemen, be amazed by the sounds of The
Woman With The Voice That Shatters Glass. You will not believe what
you hear when she opens her mouth and emits a sound, a noise that
makes the banshee wail of the condemned sinner in the burning pyre
of hell resemble a mother singing a lullaby to her suckling baby.
Enter the tent at your own peril, a penny a listen, small children
are advised to block their ears with wax …’”

And he laughed his mighty laugh, and William
Shakespeare’s face broke into something approaching a grin.

“Ah, that is better, young man,” continued
Budsby, as he reached the bottom of the stairs. “The smile is what
we like to see. And you have plenty of things to smile about, have
you not?”

“I guess so.”

“There’s no guessing about it all, young
William. Let us consider the situation. In the three and a half
years since young master Marlowe met his, shall we say, unfortunate
demise, and I use that word advisedly, the name of William
Shakespeare has ascended to the stellar heavens as The Writer of
all England, has it not?”

“Yes, but …”

“It has,” interrupted Budsby, “because of
your wonderful ability to produce the scripts in your name upon
their arrival from France, or Italy, or wherever our late lamented
writer is at the time.”

“Yes, but …”

“No buts. And haven’t you had tremendous
success with some of these - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
for example? Richard the Second, and that gripping
thing about the Jew wanting his pound of flesh, what was it called
again?”