The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  Bartholomew delicately danced again. ‘There, draw back, Anne, let her lick it. See. She’ll tire. Phoo, stinks. Well, look, it couldn’t live.’

  Anne was on her knees. The folded, soft-limbed shape did not stir. She tried not to weep. Thunder sullenly slammed doors and stamped about overhead.

  ‘So, so … She’s bleeding a little – only a little. She’ll heal, God willing. I’ll send to the farrier in the morning. Damn you, beast, be quiet now, you’ve dropped and it’s done.’ Bartholomew squatted on his haunches beside Anne: a glance. ‘Ever the lady. I’ll be sworn, no one would suppose you’d been bred up on a farm.’

  ‘It ought to be horrible.’ She fought with her voice. ‘But look. It’s beautiful.’

  Her brother shook his head. ‘Beautiful. Well, I never do understand it when you say that. Look now, she’s standing away. They don’t lack all sense. Never fear, beast, we shall bring the bull to you and you shall have another. Now, I want a piece of sacking – the thing will be slippery.’

  ‘What will you do with it?’

  ‘Get what I can for it. Nothing like the value of a grown calf, but the skin is something worth. Morts, they call them, fine gloves made out of unborn skins. I’ve known them come out of Ireland.’ He examined her a moment. ‘Why, is it worse than a skin from slaughter?’

  ‘No. No, to be sure. Only – Bartholomew, don’t hang it up by its heels.’

  He hesitated, then shrugged. ‘Aye, I dare say it’s a thought grim. Besides, the crows might get at it.’

  Rain pounded and puddled as they crossed the yard, Bartholomew carrying the wrapped burden, Anne the lantern. She set it down in the kitchen and lit another rushlight from it, then another. She smothered a strange wish to make the whole house ablaze with light.

  ‘I’ve laid it in the buttery. Cooler.’ Bartholomew came in, shaking the rain from his hair. ‘Lord, what a night. Clove the old oak like an axe. Well, we must send to the fellmonger tomorrow as well as the farrier. Curse on cattle, they’re all trouble.’

  ‘Surely not the fellmonger. Father used to sell his hides to Master Shakespeare at Stratford. The glover—’

  ‘Oh, him.’ Bartholomew made a face. ‘No, they say he’s a queer, awkward fellow to deal with nowadays. There was all that ticklish matter of him trading in wool, and going before the court for it. And now I hear he never stirs abroad. Half mad, or popish. Cut me a slice of the brawn, will you?’

  Anne wielded the knife. The meat sighed and flopped. ‘He was Father’s friend.’

  ‘Yes, but Father isn’t here any more.’ Bartholomew reached for the platter she offered him. Then his eye fell on the table, their father’s cup and dish set out. He looked at them for a long time.

  ‘Brawn,’ Anne said, holding out the platter stiffly.

  ‘Dear God.’ Bartholomew sat, tipping his head back, looking at her as if he had caught her stealing from him and was earnestly trying to work out why. ‘Dear God, Anne. Anyone would think you are his widow.’

  Instead of her stepmother, half blind and sickly in her chamber. Once mighty-fleshed, she had been stricken, suddenly, like the lightning tree, two years since. Just as if everything Anne had wished on her, when first her father brought her falsely blushing home, had finally come true. As it happened, Anne need not have feared. She had lost no love. She was still first, until—

  ‘No. It’s only that I have to do the remembering for both of us.’ The anger, tainted with guilt, came on her foul and shocking, as if she had croaked blasphemy or soiled herself.

  Bartholomew stabbed a knife into the brawn, chewed noisily. His cheeks were a little red. ‘What sad work you make of life. You should have married George Godden. There’ll not be many such chances. The years, Anne, the years. Well, after all, you’re not contented here, are you? What is it? Is it Bella? I’d hoped you might rub along well enough.’

  Anne thought of Bartholomew’s wife, her mild, smiling plumpness, the way she could talk comfortably on damsons, on the ailments of children, on the water boiling in the pan: on and on. She didn’t dislike her. She rather envied her. And sometimes she wanted to flee from her to the furthest horizon.

  ‘I am contented. Bartholomew, I’m sorry for what I just said.’

  That seemed to irritate him. He pushed the platter away. ‘Oh, we’ll send to Master Shakespeare if you will, Anne. Doubtless you see it as carrying out Father’s wishes. But you can make that mean anything, you know, because he’s in the grave and can’t answer for himself. I remember him right enough. He was a good man in the main, an honest man: too indulgent and soft sometimes, and I fear both his wives led him a dance, but there, he was mortal like the rest of us.’ He rose and stretched. ‘I’m going back to bed. You’d best do the same. I don’t know why you must creep about of a night.’ He picked up their father’s cup and put it on the shelf. ‘Not all men are like Father, Anne, and that’s the way of it.’

  I know that, she thought, but it went down into the great vault of the unsaid.

  When he was gone she stood at the door, watching the rain, breathing its freshness. Then she walked out in it. She wanted to see the lightning tree. She wanted to give that calf life. The rain drenched her: her hair straggled round her face, her clothes clung to her body, their touch heavy and insistent. For a moment she longed to be a witch, to work a spell and see the calf stir. She stood beneath the stricken oak. It looked crippled yet everlasting. She remembered climbing it once, as a girl – just the once. It was simply not the sort of thing she did. She saw her father smiling anxiously as she struggled down. ‘Ah, you were not meant for a hoyden,’ he said. He was right. But, oh, just for once, that exhilarating terror of being stranded up there, far from earth, and thinking: I did this, and it is wrong and perilous, but I am living.

  * * *

  When the message came, Will was at work paring a skin in the yard. He noticed that when the knife caught and snagged, he winced just as if he were shaving himself. Was it time to go bearded or moustached, like some of his old schoolfellows? Too often, though, the whisker was a poor ill-nourished thing, like a rafter cobweb twirled on a maid’s broom.

  You must learn what it is to be a man.

  The message was from a farm at Shottery. A stillbirth hide, rare, delicate. ‘There’s little call for such fine goods hereabouts,’ his father said, looking over Will’s shoulder. His beard was the same shape as the paring-knife. ‘Still, go see. Say sixpence or nothing.’ This meant he could go up to ninepence. ‘Present my compliments to Master Hathaway. I loved his father well. Ah, Richard Hathaway, now, there was a good man, weigh it how you will.’ Often now he had this dogged, injured tone, as if someone were contradicting him.

  At the stable door Will was caught by Edmund, the youngest of his brothers. Two years old, strong, loudly undeniable, Edmund clung to his leg and howled. ‘Hush, I’m coming back,’ Will soothed. As it grew less likely that the child would die, Will was allowing himself to grow fond of him. But on his side, Edmund was passionate and exclusive. ‘Coming back, coming back.’ The boy’s skirts were dabbled with dung.

  Joan came bustling and sighing. ‘Now see that muck. Mother will scold. You shouldn’t let him.’

  ‘Coming back, hush … I tried to slip away.’

  ‘Here, monkey.’ Joan prised Edmund away, hoisted him. ‘Such tears! Now you’re all besnotted. Look, look at the pretty chicks a-running…’ She frowned at Will over the bristly tumultuous head. ‘Lord, I swear, whenever you go out it’s as if he thinks he’ll never see you more.’

  ‘And yet I always come back,’ Will said, touching Edmund’s wet hot cheek, ‘don’t I?’

  As he set his foot to the mounting-block, he thought he heard Edmund, borne back into the house, say with an odd adult resignation, ‘No.’

  The mare twitched and tossed and sidestepped out of the yard, hating Will on her back. When Gilbert rode her she was peaceable. The wisdom of animals and infants. Will, no rider, managed her as he managed life. Things he loathed and had no
aptitude for, he had learned to deal with in this way: he had learned to be good at them.

  Last night’s storm had swelled the gutters to overflowing, and the top of Rother Street was six inches under water. Three yelling boys were playing football with a bloated toad.

  ‘Will! Good news!’

  Master Field, the tanner, leading his laden donkey. Their faces were of a length. Will reined in.

  ‘Richard’s home. God be praised. Late last night, when we’d given him up. Five nights on fearful roads.’

  ‘God be praised.’ For once Will meant it.

  ‘He’s sleeping yet. Later you must come see him. His mother’s in a pother over his looks. Says London’s turned him yellow as parchment. But he prospers. Through labour he prospers. Idleness,’ Master Field said, aiming his switch at one of the shrieking boys, ‘see what it begets. The council should do something. They’re too lax. Prentices running around after curfew, shouting and fighting. When’s your father going to come back to meetings? Backbone, that’s what’s wanting.’

  Accustomed to thinking two questions ahead, Will dodged this one easily. ‘Father will be glad to hear Richard’s safe arrived. He often speaks of him. Have you come by the Shottery road? Is it fair?’

  Richard back. Riding on, Will cautiously allowed the thought to shine on him. Last winter he had come across a hedgehog sleeping in a briar tangle behind the midden. The midden was warm with the liveliness of rot and the hedgehog was warm too: he had managed to touch it, using his open palm. He knew about soft prickles. He knew about choosing his times to stir and live.

  Now summer, and the players would soon be here. Mud from the storm splashed up to his calves but the sky was all high blue contrition, temper-fit gone; the meadows brimmed with light and the trees were heavy, nodding drunken with leaf, and everything he saw and smelt said the players, time for the players to rattle their tinker’s cart of seduction over Stratford Bridge. Time to wake.

  But his father wanted that promise from him, and a promise of deeds not just words. And the handiwork of stitching his two selves together was getting beyond his dexterity. He could feel tugging and tearing.

  He passed Two Elms, the mare splashing disdainfully between muckhill floaters, and struck the Shottery road.

  This is Will, as you might see him if you were one of Stratford’s two thousand citizens, chandler or seamstress, glancing from panel-dark interior through grid of window to bright summer outside. Master Shakespeare’s eldest, mounted – the horse a poor nag but lucky to keep it after those money troubles. William, Will to most, brother of Gilbert, Joan, Richard and Edmund; eighteen years old, bony, back as long as a stoat’s. Some of his father’s good looks, but not so square and strong: a longish face, clear-cut nose, and chin that makes the lips look a little indrawn. A good manner – indeed a gracious youth, as all will agree: it is not only the Puritans in the town, like Master Field, who lament the ways of the swearing, boozing, disrespectful young. The odd lapse, but a credit to his father, all in all; hasn’t bound himself prentice to him, but works hard in the trade. No trouble about him.

  And then, probably, you look away.

  * * *

  ‘What? Oh, that. You’re prompt.’ Master Hathaway gave Will a distracted attention. In the big kitchen of Hewlands Farm it was like a fair-day: a dozen people there, or going in and out. Big voices. Master Hathaway big too, fair, hair growing out of his ears as if he were stuffed with straw. A big girl was plucking at his sleeve. ‘What, Margaret? I’ve things to see to—’

  ‘John took the pie. The last piece—’

  ‘Damn you, boy, I’ve told you about stealing food. You want, you ask.’ With easy violence, in passing, Master Hathaway slapped the ducking head of a boy who began an outrageous howling, and turned to two farmhands. ‘Now where did the rain come in? And how many sacks spoiled? Well, show me, show me, then. God knows why it needed two of you to come tell me.’ He thrust the men towards the door with a big hand at each back, so they tittuped like dancers, then aimed a kick at a hen that had slipped in to peck at breakfast crumbs. There was something dispassionate about all this. The smooth fair face did not suggest a man of general ill-temper. Will caught a whiff of his sour breath and saw a night drinker for whom morning was a horrible rebirth. ‘Bella, when you find that wench, will you ask her why she has not been up to Stepmother’s room when the poor woman has been calling out this past hour?’ He turned back to Will in sudden frowning memory. ‘Sir, your pardon. A man would have to be twenty men … Anne! Anne will show you the carcass, by your leave. The notion was hers.’

  A woman came away from the fireplace. Will had been here before, a few years ago with his father, buying a hide, in the old farmer’s time. He knew young Master Hathaway to nod to at market. But the womenfolk of the large household he could not identify, and this one he had not noticed at all; perhaps because she was the only stillness there.

  Will bowed. ‘Mistress Hathaway.’

  ‘I am no mistress,’ she said.

  He hesitated on the edge of apology. But she had spoken informatively, with a touch of a smile, as if correcting a child’s mistake. She turned and led him to the buttery.

  While he examined the carcass she stood at a distance, looking out. He sensed a coldness about her, though not turned on him, not quite. While even the stone buttery was summer-warm, she seemed to inhabit winter, as if her gaze fell on frozen snow and a sky that would not lighten for long months.

  ‘The cow lived?’ he asked, replacing the sacking. He had seen animals dead, skinned, butchered since he was small: feeling was not absent, but it was mild.

  ‘Yes. That’s all we have for you.’ She made him seem greedy for more. ‘The storm last night maddened her and she dropped early. Did you hear the storm?’

  ‘I watched it all.’

  She turned then, with a dubious look, as if he were hiding something behind his back. Her beauty came to him piecemeal. He was too shy to dwell on it, for she was a woman, and beyond him. With girls you exchanged frank rolling eyes, all the while aware that, like you, they knew nothing. With her he stood at the foot of a vast flight of steps. But his mind dared to put some elements of her by: the shape of that face, its strength one with its fineness and fragility; the translucent soft skin at the nape of her neck, and the way all the skin he could see was like that.

  ‘What will you give for the – for the calf?’

  I am no mistress. But empowered to make the bargain, it seemed. He said, ‘Ninepence.’

  She inclined her head and, when he had put the money into her hand, left him. Her tread was quite silent. Passing through the place where she had stood he found faintly a scented stir: the air felt impressed, like a pillow from which a head has lately risen.

  In the yard he fastened the bundle to the mare’s saddle. The mare, sensing something about her burden, twitched and tugged as he led her out through the gate.

  Halfway down the farm track he heard a cry.

  ‘Wait. Please.’ She was flushed from running: from something else. Will found his hand seized, the coins pressed hard into it. ‘Here. I’ve changed my mind. Don’t take it.’

  For a moment he thought this some odd refinement of haggling. ‘Truly, you’ll get no better price, if—’

  ‘I don’t care for that.’ She put up a trembling hand to brush back loose gold strands from her temples. ‘It’s the fitness of it, and somehow this – this is not fit. When my brother last killed the pig I caught the blood in a pail. I cured the meat and dressed it and I ate of it. It was in the course of things. But that calf – it’s something that never was. It’s wrong and wry to make something of it.’ A sob caught her: she turned from him, sagged, looked as if she would fall. ‘I wish it undone, that’s all. Everything. It’s so hot, it’s the heat, no more. Pray you, don’t look at me.’

  ‘It’s fearful hot, and you’ll take sick. Come. Step into the shade.’ Pity made him bold. He took her arm and led her under a tree and tethered the mare to a low branch.


  ‘This isn’t the one,’ she said, as if to herself, back against the bole, looking up. Green tinged her wet, distracted face. ‘Dear God, but if I bring it back my brother will think I’m a fool. As I am, a great fool. I don’t know what to do.’

  It was not so much the tears. It was the knowledge that she must hate his seeing them, hate it like death, that spurred him to speech. Words could do and undo. ‘The beast was stillborn, yes, before its time,’ he said quickly. ‘And so, certainly, a thing that never was. But everything that never was is also a thing that might have been – and such a thing has more existence than you or I, for it has a thousand potential existences, and we have only the one we were born to. And of all those possibilities, what could be more fantastical a transformation? Not mere gloves. The gloves from such a skin are so fine, they say, you can fold them into a nutshell. Who could suppose from poor sad dead flesh a creation so airy? A fairy’s dream of gloves. You wouldn’t – you couldn’t wear them to warm your hands. No, no, you would slip them on in the dog-days, to make your hands feel cooler.’

  He held her gaze – a test for him, because he could never look anyone in the eye for long: it always overwhelmed him.

  After a moment she shook her head. ‘Your pardon,’ she said distantly. ‘I never thought … I know nothing of these matters.’ But her eyes were dry.

  ‘Take the money. It’s a fair purchase,’ he said, and offered her the coins on his open palm. Now words took him by surprise. ‘Why did you say you are no mistress?’

  She looked up at him. He was half a head taller but she seemed to be looking down, and his youth shivered over him, as if he found himself standing ribbed and shirtless.

  ‘I spoke without thinking,’ she said. She picked the coins from his hands without touching his skin. ‘Do you never do that?’

  ‘Let me think about that question.’

  She did not smile; but he saw the smile as, at least, one of those thousand possibilities of unborn things. ‘I’m not the mistress of Hewlands Farm. That’s my stepmother. Or my brother’s wife, while she’s sick. That’s all I meant. I am – how does it go? – a woman at my own government.’ She shook out her skirts, looked blinking and shrewd around her, like someone arrived from a long journey. Sister, then, not wife to the strawy farmer. That fairness. It changed nothing, of course. She was still a woman, and he felt her using it against him, like a carter bunching his muscles at the reins. ‘I’ve been a great fool over the calf. Please forget all about it.’