The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Page 16

  ‘Madam, your servant.’

  ‘Sir. You are very welcome. Please be easy, and pardon me one minute…’

  The tour of England had made him a connoisseur of accents, but he had heard nothing as fascinating as this. French, of course. The Vautrolliers were Huguenots – numerous in London now. ‘Too numerous,’ grumbled the fat cat-faced landlady of his Shoreditch lodging as she supped her almond-milk, ‘naught but foreigners coming in and taking up all the trade, and no doubt papists to boot…’

  ‘They’re Protestant,’ he said, ‘that’s why they seek refuge with us.’

  But he had had nothing to do with them yet. Madame Vautrollier was the first, and she was all unplaceable difference, like that resinous fire: very dark, yet with something waxen about her skin; about thirty, he guessed, wide-hipped, round-armed, yet not at all matronly, her mouth a sad bow as she held up a paper to the tactful light.

  ‘I have written it again,’ she said to Richard, ‘to end so: “As for the debt, I have had much ado to recover it, and trust in your patience. Yours in Christ, Jacqueline Vautrollier.”’

  And that was when Will first heard her pronounce it: that exquisite mixture of liquid and guttural. It came not from France, he felt, but from somewhere he had dreamed or fancied in a broken midnight.

  Richard took the paper, glancing over it. Madame Vautrollier watched him, and Will watched them both.

  ‘Yes.’ The jowls were back. ‘Yes, this will do very well. Brief is best. If you say too much, you look unsure of your position.’

  ‘I know my position well, Richard.’ She sighed. ‘I am a poor widow, and so they all try to take advantage of me.’

  Poor widow – well, the widow he had guessed, and poor could not be taken literally, not in this room, and with those jewels in her hair.

  The wry smile she turned on Will seemed to acknowledge it. ‘You must forgive us talking business, sir. It’s three months since my husband died. There is so much to do. All this now belongs to me. But I don’t belong to it. I know that is not good English, but it is good truth. Thank God for Richard.’ Returning her pen to the inkstand, she grimaced and showed her inky fingers. Richard brought ewer and finger-bowl. The spout of the ewer was shaped like a lion’s mouth. Will watched in fascination as Richard washed Madame Vautrollier’s fingers and patted them dry. Something of the humble servant, but intimate too; and something of the officious parent besides. How people lived. The infinite detail of it sometimes made him reel a little to think of, especially here in London, with another world behind each and every door. Fascination, but unease too: an intensified version of a curious feeling often lurking in Will that he shouldn’t be here. Here meaning anywhere; that he really ought to make his excuses and go, and the world was waiting, fidgeting for him to do so.

  ‘So, Richard, how long is it since you and Master Shakespeare met? Faith, so long? And yet you stand there as if it’s a usual day. Wine, fetch wine. Drink to such a friendship, mark it. Lord, you men.’ But the sidelong look she gave seemed to mean not men but Richard.

  They drank, and Madame Vautrollier asked about their schooldays together; but even to Will that felt stale and artificial stuff, here amid the invoices and money-pouches with the creak and boom of the press coming from the shop. Soon enough they were talking of business again, in tones that Will knew already, from a few weeks in London: everything depended hugely, everything stood at a moment of crisis, and there had never been such times. Meanwhile Madame Vautrollier stretched out her slender stockinged feet towards the fire, flexing them, seeming to look critically on the shape of her ankles. She caught Will looking too, and he wondered if he was supposed to: Richard, deep in the threat of Spain and the price of paper, did not seem to notice. Will wondered what one would do if the news came that the Spanish had landed and all was lost. Run indulgent riot? (Those books. Those ankles.) Or finish one’s wine and sigh at the inevitability of things? He wondered when Richard and Madame Vautrollier would marry.

  ‘Come any time,’ Richard said, at the street-door, when Will left. He winced at the openness of that, as if he had walked into a bad bargain, then relented and shook Will’s hand. ‘Any time. Ask young Maarten to place you a chair in the shop if I’m not about. I know you’ll love the books. I look to expand, go beyond Monsieur Vautrollier’s limits. His list was strongly devotional – oh, all honour to him for it – but I want to bring in more poetry, languages, grammars.’ He lowered his voice. ‘It’s understood, you see, though we haven’t spoken of it publicly yet. Madame Vautrollier can’t manage the business alone. Indeed she doesn’t want to. I fancy even Monsieur Vautrollier, in his last illness, had it in mind…’ Really? thought Will. Really? But, then, who was he to question the power of wanting to believe? It moved worlds. ‘We think to marry when six months’ mourning is up, perhaps. Though there are plenty who’ll do it after three months…’ Richard wagged his head in a generalised way, indicating a moral question he had no time to go into. ‘Madame Vautrollier is an excellent creature, Will, as you have seen. And I believe the matrimonial state is the best, the most natural for a man in this world, if he wants to apply himself. Well, you must know that.’

  Later, in his cold lodging, Will sat and watched his taper dwindle and listened to the mice pattering behind the panels. He thought he was very stupid, or bad, and could not decide which was worse. When his taper was gone he thought he might go and seek Jack Towne, who had said he was lodging at the sign of the Dolphin in Bishopsgate, though when Will had gone there last, they had never heard of him, and he had wondered if he had the right Dolphin. Every street had so many of these damned signs: how would you ever know? How…?

  He sat on after the taper went out. At some point, in the darkness, he put his face in his hands.

  * * *

  A starveling winter set in. If I can survive this, Will told himself, I can survive anything; but that did not mean he could survive this. Money, money. The Queen’s Men, reorganising from top to bottom, no longer needed him. Well, there were other troupes, there were the Admiral’s and Leicester’s and Lord Strange’s, and there were the theatres – look, another one was growing up on the south bank of the Thames, its timbers putting on flesh even as Will’s ribs began to protrude, Master Henslowe’s splendid new Rose. All this, and he could not get enough work. His talents, such as they were, did not stand out here. He was a goodish player with not much experience and a turn for improvising. So nearly handsome, as one veteran player remarked, waving him away. Persistence got him hired here and there, usually when a player was sick. For a fortnight with Leicester’s Men he stood in as book-holder, giving the prompts, a job he excelled at, for he quickly had virtually the whole play memorised and did not have to leaf and search. Then the regular got out of debtors’ prison, and that was an end. The excitement of appearing on the stage of a true theatre turned fitful at best: aye, a brave sight, an astonishing sight, when he slipped on to mouth his few dull lines, and all round and up and down except for a topmost slice of sky was people, a great roaring ring of them; yet they were as indifferent as they were many – you couldn’t thrill or tickle them as you could the willing gazers in the country inn-yard. They were impatient for novelty; and in the tiring-house he was brushed aside because the hero’s entrance was due, and the groundlings were hissing, and tomorrow was another harsh, brash new day, in which he might or might not exist.

  Once he sat down and began to write a letter to Stratford for money. But if to Anne, someone would have to read it to her; and if to his father … To finish the letter, besides, would be to finish this. If he had been acting, he might have crumpled the paper with a fierce motion. But paper was expensive, and he used it for writing something else.

  Forty yards down the street from Will’s lodging, a man sleeping on the bulks froze to death one night just before Christmas. The shopkeeper, opening his shutters in the morning, saw him there and gave him a shove with a stick, and he thumped to the ground like a rolled log. Someone added that his fing
ers snapped off like twigs, but Will doubted that part.

  ‘Within a week there’ll be twenty people ready to swear they saw it with their own eyes,’ as Richard Tarlton said. He was the one who helped Will avoid a similar fate. A boy came running after Will in Shoreditch that iron-hard afternoon, said that Master Tarlton wanted to speak to him, and escorted him back to a roomy house hard by St Leonard’s, where the clown was sitting in the window-seat, smoking tobacco and drinking sherris-sack. He had seen Will go by. ‘Or half of you. What happened? Are you ill?’

  ‘No. Just – under-employed.’

  ‘Jesus. Philip, run down to the kitchen, chick, have the girl bring up bread, meat, whatever’s there. Bless thee. My son,’ he said, as the boy scurried off. ‘The best thing, the only truly good thing I ever did. His mother was a trull, so I must take all the credit. Is that your best cloak?’

  ‘Only cloak.’

  ‘God save us. You have to dress well, man. It’s how they judge you first, the looks, the port. Ever thought of an earring? To be sure, it’s money. Sit, sit. Why didn’t you come to see me? Didn’t I say come and see me?’

  ‘Yes.’ The heat of the fire was making him feel pleasantly faint and distant: not a bad way to go, if it must be … ‘I thought it one of those things a man says…’

  ‘And doesn’t mean. Lord, you must have learned a sad, worldly sort of lesson from us. Mind, I’m a changing man. I’m ill.’ Tarlton said it with a certain pride, as of some subtle accomplishment. ‘That’s why I’ve retired. I drink, but I can’t eat. And sometimes I piss blood. Oh, yes, I’ve consulted a physician. He mumbles of sol and sulphur, and Saturn in the house of life, and looks forward to a good long fee – for I seem hale enough, don’t I?’ He lifted his shrewd round snub face to the window-light, eyes sliding to Will’s. Hard to say what was different, except that the skin looked curiously soft, like a bathed child’s. ‘Well, I can let you have some money. I’ve been careful. You should be too, Will, once you’re fairly set up. Put money in your purse. Not for its own sake, but to make a fence.’ A maid brought in a tray. ‘Eat, eat it all. Keep it over there, though, the smell turns me up. Within that fence, ah, you can be yourself, safe from the wolves and the creeping woods. Have you tried Sussex’s Men? They always seem to be on the tramp now, mind.’

  Tarlton fed him, lent him enough money to buy a new cloak and to prevent his landlady throwing him out, and helped equip him for the London players’ world. He dropped an influential word here and there. He passed on hints about who to flatter and who to ignore, who was on his way up and who was drinking himself to death; likewise on the tortuous relationship between the owners and managers of the theatres and the leaders of the companies. You had to be part subtle and rarefied, part brutally assertive: spiderish. Little by little Will found himself learning to move on the great quivering web. He was grateful to Tarlton, who shrugged it off: as he did indeed seem to be dying, good works were in order.

  ‘I don’t know what it is. Who knows what goes on inside our bodies? For fifty years I’ve been a human ox. I drank and ate all I wanted and never broke a sweat; I whored and never caught a dose. Now this.’ It was not so much that he was going thin: his bones seemed to be thrusting their way to the surface of him. Looking into Tarlton’s face, Will saw his clean-picked skull at the same time. ‘I’ve left off the physic. Now I’m doctoring my soul. See, I’ve always been a tolerable good Christian, for all my little profanities. And I’ve always thought that when the time came I would properly set my wits to these great matters.’ Ensconced with high-backed chair, footstool, pillows and furs – he refused bed – Tarlton gestured to the books on the table. ‘See there. Works of devotion. Oh, I’ve tried. But you can’t stop a book and say, “Hold there, let me pursue that.” So I have divines come talk to me. Last week a good solid Queen’s Protestant who said all will be well. Yesterday a hungry Puritan who was not so sure. I think to smoke out one of those secret papists next and have him put his side of the question. You have only to send to Yorkshire or somewhere, rap on the walls of your gentleman’s manor-house – the priests are rattling about in there like old rats’ nests. What d’you think?’

  ‘I think we shouldn’t speak so.’

  ‘Oh, fuck it, man, I’m dying. If you’re popish I couldn’t give a damn, and if you’re t’other way and thinking of reporting me for a good stretching on the rack I couldn’t give a damn likewise.’ Tarlton reached shakily for his wine-cup. Will put it in his hand. The fingers felt like the blades of a fan. ‘Sorry. Years of being jovial, you know, take their toll. Besides, you … I can’t fit you in either way, Will. Tell, now. Do you fear for what may become of your soul?’

  ‘Fear?’ Will tried to think. The word itself gave him a fearful feeling, but that was words, more prompt and powerful than the sluggishness of things. He shrugged. ‘No. Not as long as it’s mine.’

  ‘Tut tut, it belongs to God,’ Tarlton intoned, in a preacher’s reproachful voice. Mock, but not quite. He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I’m from the country too, did you know? Shropshire. People have odd ways in the country. When I was very young I saw a shepherd’s lad put his prick up a sheep. The beast just carried on grazing while he pounded away. Not a bad preparation for married life, in truth.’ His eyes sprang open, but their gaze was distant. ‘In the village over the hill the churchyard was flooded. The ground fell apart like cake and there, in a fantastic tumble and tangle, were these bones. The sexton heaped them up, skulls atop and smiling. It became a favourite of young lovers courting thereabouts, to go see the bones: she would get the shivers and he would lay a comforting arm about her. When I saw the bones like that, I thought: Very well, sir, very well, I have you.’ Tarlton lifted the cup to his lips, using both hands, in sudden sardonic communion. ‘Now you want some pat conclusion like, “And so I became a clown.” Naught so neat. Though I’m sure I did think that making a jest is, at least, making something.’

  Will grinned, then felt his face fall. ‘And so is making an enemy.’

  ‘Ah, hast been foiled again? I’ve told thee, it’s like fencing, parry, forte to foible, you’ll come back the stronger.’

  ‘No, no, nothing so bad. Pembroke’s have paid me for another fortnight. Only I heard that Robert Wilson had spoke against me to them, and I puzzle me why. He sits high and secure with the Queen’s, wherefore do I threat him?’

  ‘Why, man, he’s jealous. Look you, he’s an excellent pretty actor, but he would be more. He’s fitted up several broken-backed old plays, and writ two more of his own devising. Lord, how he laboured over every line! I remember him soaking linen in cold water to press on his poor bursting head as he wrote. Then you come along, and you can swell out the blank verse extempore when your memory’s out, or patch in a few comic lines to please the locals, and you don’t even seem to think. It just comes. That’s why.’

  ‘A strange thing to hate a man for.’ So Will thought: but he thought more on it.

  * * *

  Until his fortunes turned with the year, Will did not go often to the printing-house in prosperous Blackfriars. Too shabby, too conscious of his growling stomach.

  And it wasn’t because of Richard, or not chiefly. It was Madame Vautrollier. Perfectly pleasant, hospitable, even kind. Yet somehow not a person you cared to see you at a disadvantage.

  ‘We never see you, William.’ It was nearly Guillaume as she pronounced it: not quite. Betwixt and between, like her eyes, almost blue, almost violet. And who she was: sombre widow yet young, mother of the black-clad little boy, who occasionally appeared in the scented parlour to make an obedient bow, yet how narrow the waist she liked to smooth with hands that seemed appreciative, or reminiscent, or something else. ‘You ought to sup with us. Richard would like it. I would too.’

  ‘Thanks. In the evenings I often have to study parts, and so—’

  ‘You could do that here – no? We could help you. It would be diverting.’ She sighed. ‘We are often dull, these winter evenings.’

 
And yet they were to marry. It was made public now: in six weeks Richard Field was to marry his old master’s widow – the apprentice’s ultimate dream – and take possession of her fair body and business. We are dull in the evenings. Revealing – too revealing. Will told himself not to go, but he did it, once: took his newest part along to supper and ran through it with them. Richard was interested, though godly disapproval kept crossing his face like dyspepsia.

  ‘This isn’t the full playbook, surely.’

  ‘No, just my lines, and the cues. It looks difficult to get a sense of, I know. But there are plots pegged up in the tiring-house – story outlines, so you know where you are.’

  ‘And do you?’ Richard said. ‘I should have thought you would half forget what’s real and what’s fancy, sometimes.’

  No: never. Will had a highly developed sense of the real; he was alert to its hovering like a chicken with a kite. Madame Vautrollier took charge of the paper. Will tried to recite rather than act, for some reason. The part was an old fond foolish lord. He was good at old, apparently. Madame Vautrollier’s hand beat time as he spoke, following the blank verse rhythm, which surprised him, since he understood the rhythms of French were entirely different.

  ‘Well,’ she said, when he had finished, ‘you are perfect.’

  The food was excellent and almost made him dizzy with its richness; or the wine, perhaps, or something else. She wrapped some cheese and cold stuffed mutton for him to take home with him. ‘A gift,’ she said, in a faintly warning tone. Walking back to his lodging – absurd to say ‘home’ – he was nudged by the aroma of cloves, nutmeg, verjuice. He had a curious sensation, as he lit a taper to reveal his room in all its worm-eaten nullity, of having been followed.

  * * *

  ‘Soon I shall be Mistress Field. A strange thing, William, to be a woman. We change our names and become someone else. As a man you can hardly think of this. You simply stay who you are, all the time.’