The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  She seemed quite to like that. But then the wolf grew in her face. ‘Are you making a dream of me, when I’m not by? Don’t do that, Will. Don’t dare turn me into one of your dreams.’

  He faced the wolf: you couldn’t, after all, outrun it. ‘Why, what else are you but a dream of your own, Isabelle? And Monsieur Berger, did you dream him too? Last week you told me he died ten years ago. Yesterday it turned into five years. Now, you do not forget a thing like that.’

  She burst out laughing, as if the conversation had taken a joyful, high-spirited turn. ‘But you don’t understand at all. That is precisely the sort of thing I would forget. Monsieur Berger? Why, even when his prick was in me I used to forget about him. It was the only way. Ever felt a man press you down, indifferent, as the fishmonger does with the eel to chop off its head?’

  He set down his wine. ‘I didn’t mean to doubt you. Isabelle—’

  She slapped his cheek, not very hard: enough. ‘Your pardon, Will, but that was meant to give you pain, therefore to stop you feeling sorry for me, which is intolerable to me. Now this.’ She took his hand and slipped it inside her bodice, and he felt her nipple strong and dry against his palm. His face ached, his mouth was full of stone. ‘Now,’ she gave him back his hand, ‘we part.’

  ‘For ever?’ Feeling hope and terror hellishly combined, a basilisk emotion.

  ‘What? Never for ever. Sweet fool, don’t you see this is how I ensure it?’

  The walk away from the house in Hay Passage, into St Martin-le-grand, was blindingly familiar, every cobble and doorpost, in sun and shade (but it was always in shade). Every step of it was irradiated with his anguish, like the glow of decay he had seen on broken dead fish at Tower Wharf. And everything he saw, every footfall resounded with a thump in his brain of resolution: no more, no more. Go back no more.

  It was, after all, such a simple thing not to do.

  * * *

  Will sacrifices a pawn.

  ‘Is it generally known, Ben?’

  ‘What?’ Jonson pulls his mind from the chess problem. ‘About you and the woman? No. Rumoured more than known. In truth I made a lucky hit. Come, every man in the theatre has his amours talked of. And even if there are none, it takes very little wit-work to invent some, just to pass the time, you know—’

  ‘If you walk backwards any faster you’ll fall over.’

  ‘Look now. I’ve heard you have a woman tucked away somewhere. What do you fear? It will be reported to your wife, a hundred miles off? And even in that unlikely event, what does she suppose? That you live an anchorite in London? Why, if my wife didn’t suspect me of straying, she would think there was something wrong with me.’

  Does he fear it getting to Anne? Perhaps. More truthfully, it’s Anne thinking of him as faithless. Their love may have decamped, but there is still something precious on the grey field.

  ‘What did I say? Last night, when you spoke of my – of this mistress?’

  ‘When we quarrelled? Well: you said that you don’t have to buy love. You said the difference between us is you don’t even have to try.’ Lips set, Jonson moves his queen or, rather, propels her in his meaty fist. ‘Check. A pretty exchange of insults.’

  ‘Yes … Let us forget it.’

  ‘You won’t, though. You never forget anything, do you?’ Beaming now, Jonson gives a rough chuckle. ‘You should learn the art, Will. As I’ve said before.’

  * * *

  Playing parts and shifting identities, they both moved easily there. It was where their shadows touched. Will remembered Anne’s stepbrother, stamping in grim fun. Treading on your shadow. Play was no play, he knew that: Isabelle too. Common ground. And lust: which he could hardly recognise for what it was, because he did not think her beautiful or attractive. The lust was more like pain, or burning or freezing, or some unknown form of extremity, miserably first-discovered by him.

  Will stares at the black, the white of the chessboard. Demanding a move. Insisting on choice. How he hates choice, and its burden.

  Playing at the Globe one afternoon – was this real? Black Burbage was kneeling sorrowfully, looking into the poisoned well of innocence, and Will was watching from his noble Venetian role. So often he played nobles and dukes and kings, eminences pained and withdrawn and powerless: chess-kings. And then he saw her. Not in the galleries, her usual place, but at the rear of the pit where the whores congregated, where they could prop themselves against the bulks and watch the play while they received exploring hands, sometimes tongues. And that was what Isabelle was doing. An old man was pawing her, and Will saw his tongue like a little snake flicking at her smiling lips. Isabelle is looking at and for Will. Who, after his heart goes up on a pulley, carries on acting. So, he supposes, does she.

  By the time of the jig she is no longer down with the bared breasts. She is in the gallery opposite him, seated, demure.

  ‘You thought you saw that. But did you?’ She met him afterwards at the back of the tiring-house. He wanted to pick her up and throw her. He wanted to see her tongue. ‘I don’t know why I laugh. You don’t provoke laughter in me, Will. Your face is too sombre and beautiful, also your hands, and the space betwixt your shoulder-blades, as I picture it. Touch it before I sleep. I’m ill, I’m bad. It’s one of those days. I must go home now.’

  * * *

  Usually it was him going to her: attending on her, waiting on her. Treading a strange half-sideways path to her, like the knight erring across the chessboard. But sometimes he found her waiting for him outside the house in Silver Street, perhaps cold or wet: like a lover. And she would tell him how she had been thinking of him all day, and weep. Once she put her hands up to him, there in the street, and he wanted to swipe them away, but held them and kissed her ticking wrists. He moaned: ‘An end, an end.’

  ‘A thousand pities about us,’ she said. ‘You know, it isn’t only that you have a wife.’ And she glinted at him from behind a dark knowledge, an eclipse of him. And the knowledge pressed smothering over him when alone he put out the light, and then put out the light.

  And then a young man came to see him at Silver Street. Mistress Mountjoy, instead of sending the servant, came up to his rooms herself and said in her anxious pretty head-tilting way: ‘I’d not disturb you, Master Shakespeare. I don’t know the lad. But he won’t be told. He says over and over that you’ll want to see him.’

  Matt, he thought, heart jerking – he didn’t know why, pleased surprise, perhaps, for Matt never came here. It was always Will seeking him out: natural, of course. (And sometimes Matt could not conceal a little teeth-grin of impatience at seeing Will again but that was natural too, in loco parentis.) So, let the lad come up.

  And when the dark youth, smallish, black-clad, swept into his rooms he experienced a moment of peculiar fear. He didn’t know him – or did he? For some reason he remembered the last time he had seen Marlowe on the street, hyena-mouthed, full of himself; and afterwards Marlowe dead in a crammed room, in the crammed room of Will’s imagination, where he had seen the dagger go in a thousand times.

  The youth presented a narrow back to him, warming small hands at the fire.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Oh, sir, good Master Shakespeare—’ husky, almost sobbing ‘– I am come to beg you, won’t you make me one of your boy-girls? It is all I’ve lived for … I have talents, sir, I have uncommon talents, and that’s what’s wanted, is it not?’

  The youth turned. Will looked into Isabelle’s eyes. It was as if he had touched spring leaves and found them painted green and pinned to the tree.

  It was she who looked away first, her laugh of triumph choking off.

  ‘I thought it a pretty jest. Also I thought that this way – how else, then? – I might surprise you into love.’

  ‘God knows what you mean by love,’ he said, going breathless to fling open the window. Stifled, suddenly. She had never come up to his rooms before.

  ‘I doubt God does, which is one of the reasons I have parted with hi
m. Do you? Do you know all of love?’ She sat down on the hearth, crossing and embracing her legs. ‘Is it one rule for all? I wonder. Now when you see the grass, you call its colour green, and so do all, they learned it as babes, see, my chick, see the green grass. But perhaps what you see and call green, I see as blue or pink. Or black, black. Who can tell? Another mortal’s mind is the one place we cannot go. The solitary sanctuary. I rattle on and can’t you see I’m afraid? I don’t do well in strange places. And this is strange to me.’ She looked round with a shiver. ‘Foreign, even.’

  He gave her a cup of wine, uncut. She had a stronger head than any of his boozing acquaintance. Marlowe again. He realised something about Marlowe: he had had a weak head for liquor in truth. How young we were.

  ‘I make a good boy, don’t I? Perhaps good isn’t the word. I throw it to you, see what you can do with it. Oh, man made of words.’

  She made it sound like ‘man of straw’. She didn’t really make a good boy, yet there was something refreshing in the awkwardness the breeches and doublet gave her. She made her own gowns, beautifully, and he was always irritated by their elegant delicacy, their difference. Wanted to tear them, perhaps. But also she looked something other than a woman, even as she snatched off the close cap and let her wiry hair fall. Some half-glimpse, perhaps, of that true self he was always trying to grasp.

  ‘Well, and now I see your lodging, at last.’ Her amused, scornful look formed. ‘But where are you in it? It might be any room in the world.’

  True, perhaps, compared to her place, with the mad caged bird, the virginal that gave off soft, musical creaks even when untouched, the wooden-soled shoes kicked off so you could picture her in them, fill up her stance. But somehow he did not like leaving traces.

  ‘A man’s lodging, perhaps. Sufficient for me. I’m sorry I can give you no better chair.’

  ‘I make you apologetic, Will. I turn you all to thinking naught of yourself.’

  ‘No. It doesn’t need you for that, mistress.’

  ‘Good wine, good Rhenish. You’re growing rich, I think.’ She held the cup out to him, made him draw near to take it. Her breath was hot with the wine. ‘Will, are we not insects? That’s why I love you, you see. Because I suspect you know that is all we are, yet you carry on trying to climb the mountainous pebble.’

  ‘You don’t love me.’

  She shrugged. ‘Yet something lies or stirs betwixt us, else why would I come here? You have a guilty look, Will Shakespeare, and yet I can’t conceive what you have done wrong. Ever.’

  ‘Another man said that to me once.’

  ‘Another?’

  He allowed the smile. ‘Kit Marlowe. He was not unlike you, perhaps.’

  She stood and looked down at her legs, the shape of the calf in stockings. ‘How odd this feels. You men go much more uncovered in the world than women. No hiding. Well, you do, certes, but that’s in the lovely groves up there.’ She reached up to touch his brow. Her fingers traced the megrim-groove that wouldn’t go, now; then she turned abruptly to his writing-table. ‘What are you working on?’

  He snatched up the papers.

  ‘Why not let me see? It will be spoke in front of hundreds of people, after all: many fools like me.’

  ‘Then it’s different.’ He laid the papers in his trunk. ‘It’s a black piece. That’s all I’ll say.’

  ‘The best kind. Do you think I could pass for my brother?’

  ‘I could fancy your brother looking thus, perhaps.’ Her stare surprised him. ‘Is that wrong?’

  She barely shook her head. ‘Is that more wine there? Give me, please. I’ve had dreams lately. And I do not allow dreams, sir. I made an order against them, long ago, when I found they made me more tired in sleep than eased. So I stopped them. Anyone can, with enough will. And yet now they come again, defying me, and I blame you. Because you make me think and feel. Because you stop me being alone in the world as I want.’

  She swallowed two cups of wine.

  ‘Alone?’ he said. ‘No. There must be someone, somewhere. In a place, in a past, in a vision. They’re all one. It’s the only thing I believe. We live our course by a star. But no knowing when we saw the star or if we will recognise it when we see it again.’

  ‘Can stars be black?’ She tapped at her breast, like someone sounding for a weak place. ‘You’ve heard, I know, of the massacre in France. St Bartholomew’s Day, the year ’seventy-two.’

  ‘Marlowe wrote a play on it.’

  ‘This is not about a play. This is not a play matter. I was there. I was a girl. I was seven. Now you know my age.’ She sank to her knees on the hearth. Her eyes looked blindly heavy, like a child’s on the brink of sleep. ‘Let me repeat, I was a girl. My family was from Bordeaux. Not Paris. Perhaps here, with your plays, you think of the matter, the massacre, as in Paris only. Well, we thought that way too at first. Paris was where the fighting and the trouble happened, and the nobles coming to blows over the faith that was ours, making it a matter of power, but we – we were small, a simple Protestant family, small people pecking up their grain in the quiet farmyard.’ She stirred. ‘Tell me, what do you know of it? I would not weary you.’

  ‘The papists in France turned on the Protestants and massacred them. Thousands of them. That’s how I heard it as a boy. There were sermons on it. I remember Master Field, Richard’s father, said it proved the Pope was Antichrist.’

  ‘I didn’t see the Pope there. I saw people, mind, and he’s one, is he not? We all have that doubtful honour of humanity. It started in Paris. We heard of all this great contention on high about the Protestant question. I never thought of myself as a question. Nor my father, nor my mother, nor my brother. Huguenots, yes, that was a word, but I never thought it was a bad word. We didn’t go to the same church, we didn’t celebrate mass. Things we didn’t do – along with all the other common things we did, like eating and drinking and sending the laundry down to the stream. We were a different kind of flower in the meadow, I thought. Some red, some blue. They blow, they nod their hour in the sun. To be sure, we heard – being Huguenot – of burnings, of what the popish wanted to do to us. And there was the Queen Mother at the top, they said, the Medici witch, wanting flames, wanting an end. But still there was the harvest, and the wine, and the murrain on the sheep, and so many things in the world that saying mass was just one of many. Lost in the multitude. And it wouldn’t change because Monsieur François, who was papist, owed money to Monsieur Tourreil the butcher, who was Protestant, and Monsieur Carette, the Protestant weaver, did work for Monsieur Pellerin, the papist merchant. It was all so tangled, how could you unpick it? Tangled, that was good, I thought. I was not a very thinking girl, I believe. I liked sweetmeats and dressing my baby and listening to Grandmama’s stories. I liked being in life, I found it a good place.

  ‘But there were many who said that the Huguenots had too much wealth, too much power, being so few. My family was from Bordeaux, but we had moved to a village outside the city because my father had prospered as a mercer, and bought an old farmhouse and a little land and some pear-trees, and it was sweet. The high walls. The light used to sink behind them and make light-juice, I fancied, that tasted like bright pears. I made a mistake. I always thought my father loved me. He was not a man to prate of his feelings. I imagined clouds round him, like a peak. But kind, and I believed loving his daughter, though naturally his son was more important – when was it ever not so? He was the heir. In him the future lay curled. It matters so much to men, I know, the fruit of their loins, the line.’ Lifting her head she looked at him, or through him: perhaps both. ‘So we were outside the city, separate and quiet, when the news came that there were killings. Killings in Paris, well, there was always tumult there; the provinces were different. But, no, it was spreading. It wasn’t rumour. My father had friends everywhere, educated, they could write, the news was soon going round like a poison in the body. The papist French were rising up, in Paris, in Rouen, in Orléans, and they were murdering the Pro
testants, and it was not being stopped. It was being directed from on high, they said. Was it?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, soldiers did the killing sometimes. And priests preached sermons exhorting good papists to do the Lord’s work. But all that needed to happen, you see, was to let it happen.’ She rose and walked past him, wine-scented, stealthy, to the window overlooking Silver Street. ‘It could happen out there. A little like the time you saved me from those prentices. But with the authorities saying, instead of “Stop”, smiling, shrugging, saying, “Do as you will, good people, do as you will.”’ The window turned her voice flat and muffled. ‘Perhaps you heard the stories about the Seine being choked with the dead bodies and such. I think it was true. I think the corpses were piled about France, in those days, as the madness, or the letting go of sanity, spread. I hear they mutilated the corpses very often – though I don’t see that that matters. Death is the only mutilation.’

  Will wanted wine, but his hand was too unsteady to pour from the jug.

  ‘We, or my parents, didn’t think it would happen in Bordeaux. We knew too many people there, it was too sensible a place. Perhaps that’s all it needs, the belief that it will not happen in this little part of the world because we are different. Which of us, after all, truly believes he will die? And my brother Robert was in Bordeaux. He was living at the house of my mother’s cousin, a silk-weaver, learning the trade. He was eleven years old, very clever, very handy. He would be a great heir to my father. He had the longest fingers I have ever seen – he could untangle anything, undo any knot. He was kind to me when we were together. I think he thought it pretty and amusing having a little sister, he who belonged so early to the man’s world. I loved him, for what that’s worth. I was a little girl, naturally I loved.

  ‘It was smoke that first told us. Smoke above the city. They were burning houses – perhaps, from the smell, people. It was all so sudden. And my father had his horse saddled. He was going to see … he was going to see if all was well with the Clairets, where Robert was lodging – just that, can you believe? – and bring him home if not. Such was the way he clung to innocence, but I suppose innocence is never taken gradually. It is always cut off, with blood. And then a servant came running to our house. The Clairets’ manservant. We couldn’t recognise him at first. His face was all blubbered from weeping. He looked like a great baby. Dirt too, streaks of filth. He had been hiding in the cesspit. Yes, in it. Because it was better than being found: he was Protestant too. Do you want this part? But, never mind, you must have it. It’s a long time ago. And everyone who matters in it is dead except me, possibly.