The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  ‘And now, try to leave me.’ She spoke with easy, murmurous security. She had on only his shirt, and sat on the bed with a crook of dull-gold thigh and calf turned to him, and hair heavily down. ‘Though yes, to be sure, you will try.’

  ‘Is that what you suppose?’ Stripped he sat on the harsh boards, cooling hands clasped around his thinness. ‘Just this, and then an end to appetite?’

  ‘What – are you so different from other men?’ She chuckled, was briefly thoughtful, then raised crystal new-amused eyes to him. ‘Let me tell you, Will, you are not.’

  ‘Give me my shirt, Isabelle.’

  ‘Take it.’

  ‘Hm. If I refuse, if I go without it, what then? Will you die, again?’

  She yawned, stretching back. ‘Any of us may die at any moment, don’t you know that? There’s plague creeping in at Southwark, so I hear, ready to jump across the river. You’re too foolish fond about a mere thing like life, Will.’ She sat up and folded her hands deep in her lap, the taut arrowing triangle of his shirt pointing down. ‘You’ll come back.’

  ‘Will I? What’s left in the box?’

  ‘You’re bold now because your cock’s soft. Just like a man getting up from a banquet who says he’ll never fancy eating again.’

  ‘You’re no banquet, Isabelle.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, yawning. ‘I’m poison. How you moaned when I bit your teats, and how hard and high you were. Jesu.’ She smiled hazily to herself, then clawed off his shirt and tossed it to him. ‘Here, take. You’ll look foolish without.’

  * * *

  Outside he breathed in puffs of sharp, painful air, as if woken from bad dreaming. For a few moments he could hardly stir, had to lean against the wall; as if the hatred of self that occupied the centre of his being had, literally, unbalanced him. He got moving. Saw people ahead: a beggar with a crutch, an alewife, two gallants pretty-legged, earringed, fox-faced. Somehow he couldn’t bear for them to see him. He ducked back into the alleyway, and collided with a cloaked figure.

  Edmund.

  ‘Dear God. What are you doing here?’

  Edmund equipped himself with a smile, ahead of words. ‘I hardly know, brother. I’m all out of knowledge in London still. I was seeking … How’s it called – Aldersgate?’ He licked his lips.

  Will pointed. There was a fungal taste in his mouth. At his feet the refuse of the kennel seemed to call to him, speak with muddy moving tongues.

  ‘Ah, there. Do you go that way, no? Very well.’ Edmund clapped a hand to his arm. He looked young and fresh and somehow exposed, needing some carapace against the world. ‘I love thee, Will, and naught on earth can ever change that.’

  An echo of their old joke whenever he came home. Yes, try to think of it as a joke. If any subject of thinking could be bearable now, like home, love, truth. Suddenly they were lopped ruins; pick your way among them, look for something, something left.

  * * *

  The letter: it comes with Greenaway on a day when they are entertaining at New Place a new arrival.

  Stratford has a much-needed physician: Dr John Hall, young, well trained, sober and industrious. Beautifully pale, square face, intense black hair and beard – a face as arresting and finished as superior portrait. A fine catch for the town in all ways, as the matrons of Stratford must be thinking. And Susannah, plainly, is much taken with him.

  He with her? Difficult to tell: he is so grave, no lover’s simper. They say purges and glysters are all his love. Anne watches her daughter pouring his beer, seating herself modestly at a distance. That upward flash of her eyes in admiration, especially when he drops into Latin. Anne thinks: Have a care. Not that she would say it. Even now she does not think of herself as entitled to give advice in that way. Doesn’t feel, somehow, old enough. At the Quineys’ there has been a deal of gossip about a widow from Drayton who has married again at the age of forty-five. Fancy, thinks Anne, but there, she must know what she’s about at that age – figuring the widow as much older than her. Somehow she lacks the confidence to feel forty-seven: if she did, she would be conscious of a fraud. Perhaps that is the great separation in the world, between those who know they are frauds, and those who happily go on pretending not to be.

  But, please, Susannah, have a care. Make the right choice. Or, rather, recognise a choice when it comes along. That’s what we miss, so often. That road? I saw only one road.

  The letter crackles in the pocket of her gown while Dr Hall makes his grave farewells. Though she is not good at discerning between hands, she is sure the writing on the direction is not Will’s but Edmund’s.

  If so, she hopes to God there are no testing words in it, for this – she is sure – is not a letter that can be shown. Whichever way it falls.

  But why a letter? She exacted Edmund’s promise, in a last red-faced whisper before his departure, that he would come home, when he could, and tell her face to face. Perhaps he can’t: work, money. Perhaps he has found the whole suggestion so absurd that a scribble is all that’s needed: sister, you’re a fool, be easy. Perhaps she should open the letter.

  ‘His smell mislikes me, it is thorough distasteful,’ Judith is saying. Judith, eighteen, still pimpled and gangling, her menses a torment. Passing through the gates of growing is grim for her. Hamnet would have been eighteen too: how would it have been for him? But then how can one imagine troubles for the dead?

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Susannah yawningly asks.

  ‘He savours of deathbeds and poultices. I should be sick to have him much about me.’

  ‘Well, you need not fear that, sister.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Peace, peace,’ Anne cries. ‘My head aches with it.’

  ‘Best fetch Sir Doctor back then.’ Judith stamps out, pleased with herself.

  Susannah draws close. ‘What’s amiss, Mother?’

  ‘Nothing, heart. Say, are there wasps in at the north chamber window again? I swear there must be a nest somewhere in the eaves.’

  At last, alone, by candlelight, Anne opens the letter.

  Dearest sister, accept my word that there is naught, naught of what you suspected. No one. I wish you had not put this upon me, for the love I bear you both. Let us forget, in love, and be to one another as we were. Edmund.

  A short, quivering declaration, meandering down the middle of the page. Oh, Edmund, she thinks, as her legs buckle and take her clumsily down to the solitary bed. Oh, Will is right: you are really not a good actor. You might as well have written her name.

  * * *

  ‘What ails you, man? You’re long in the tooth for green-sickness.’ Ben spoke briskly, but his heart misgave him, seeing Will so pale and lean, so heavy-eyed. He had marked several plague-crosses since coming back to London from Northamptonshire. Sometimes the sickness worked slow …

  ‘I’m at work on a tragedy,’ Will said. ‘Didst ever see a man in such case skip at the heels?’

  A light of a sort appeared in Will’s face, and Ben allowed himself to be reassured. ‘Why, it needn’t be so. See friend Dekker, he looks the same vacant dolt whatever he’s writing.’

  ‘Why do you let him do it?’ That was the young dark fellow, Middleton, lately taken on to write for Henslowe. All great solemn watchful eyes. Mordant tongue. Something in him, Ben thought warily.

  ‘What – make myself an easy target?’ Dekker said readily. ‘Why, with Jonson’s poor loose aim, what other kind can he hit?’

  ‘Well, let’s have more drinks, and be easy,’ said Will, ever the peacemaker. He couldn’t get out of it now, Ben thought: these fellows began actually to act themselves, at last. ‘And tell us of your triumph in the country.’

  He told; though he doubted even Will, the choicest spirit there, could truly take it in. The genial splendour of Althorp and its proprietor, Sir John Spencer, stout and plain and true as his avenue of oaks: loyal to the memory of his wife; all that a country gentleman should be. And then the Queen being entertained there – a true queen to B
en, lovely fair and gracious star of the north, Anne of Denmark, and her enchanting son, the young Prince Henry, already with all the spirit and address of a true Prince of Wales. Ben thanked his God that he had never esteemed a lord merely for being a lord: no, what impressed him here was true grace and elegance mixed with the good salt of domestic virtue. Cultured, too; the entertainment he devised for her called on all the resources of his fancy, learning and wit. They had set it in the wooded grounds, where fairies and satyrs danced in the dapple and hailed the delighted Queen in rhyme. Perfection of artifice married to the natural … And then such a crowd of nobility on the day of her departure, when Ben’s farewell address was read on the terrace to the sound of trumpets, a piece so full of sweet turns and charming conceits that diverse among them were moved to ask who was this poet raising Helicon by slow Nene-side?

  ‘How,’ Dekker put in, ‘did any of them hear it, what with the crowd and the trumpeting?’

  ‘Those that have ears will always hear, no matter how loud the donkeys bray,’ Ben snapped. In his mind he was feeling Sir John’s hand on his shoulder as they walked in the park and talked companionably of planting and prospects, timber and taste, as man and man. And gone was his stepfather, the bricklayers’ tools, the narrow lanes and yards of Westminster, the boy who strove and burned for the university and fell with charred wings: gone, under the benevolent sun and among those generous acres, where Ben Jonson the poet was an honoured guest, where he brought verses for a queen, scrupulous and perfect in their learning. This was, if anything sublunary could be, content. He turned to Will.

  ‘You should take up such a commission. There will be many such with the coronation, you know. The new Queen has a great taste for shows and masking, and an open purse. The old Court grew stiff in the joints. A new age comes.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Will said, his eyes everywhere. ‘I am a play-maker first, and the Globe has first claim on me.’

  ‘Your first love?’ Middleton asked: seriously, and wanting to know.

  Will smiled, a little shielding smile. ‘Ah, who can remember that?’

  ‘Something must have drawn you to the business of play-making.’

  Will inclined his head. ‘As you also, good sir.’

  ‘Yes: you, in part,’ Middleton said, still fixing Will with his eyes, as if suspecting an illusion. ‘Kyd, Marlowe also, but your pieces were ever my especial study. You’ll find, as you know me better, that I don’t incline to flattery. I speak truth only. I learned from you, sir; and I would learn more.’ Middleton gave a smile that was like dry pickles. ‘I mean to write everything that will advance me as a poet, be it play or pamphlet, or jigging masque for an idle court.’

  Will faintly pursed his lips. ‘This is good, admirable.’

  ‘Yet I mean to write well for all that. I have,’ Middleton said, drink untouched, ‘perfection of art in my eye.’

  ‘Pray you, cut it out,’ Will said. ‘It will blind you.’

  Middleton would not be put off. ‘Whence your inspiration, Master Shakespeare?’ He was black and avid. ‘A muse?’

  ‘Do you need inspiration to dress of a morning?’ Will said.

  Middleton seemed to put that away, stow it in his skull, but went on. ‘This is pretty – but it is not an answer, or not a full answer. Do you mean—’

  ‘Learning,’ put in Ben, for the younker was far too fond of his own voice, ‘learning and long study, that’s what you need, young sir, look no further. Now, did I tell you of the little princess-in-arms?’

  Another glance at Will as he talked: fellow still looked haunted. Was it that mistress of his? They could be rapacious creatures, especially when there was wealth like Will Shakespeare’s to batten on. Ben thought: Advice? But, no, Will never took it. Listened, but followed his own path.

  When Ben left the tavern Middleton was still examining Will’s every word. Looking for the measure of that self.

  But what if there were none? No depth, no width to assess? The thought hit him and winded him in the street. Those sonnets he had seen. Strange, tortured stuff, not a success, he thought: the reader didn’t know how to take them. Who are these people shimmering in and out of the verse? Ben stood looking back at the windows of the Mermaid, shapes moving against the lemon light. Who are you there?

  ‘But when I try to be myself,’ Will had said once, when Ben took him to task for hiding in his work, ‘I can only create a self. I have to see it standing there, like someone on the stage, before I can believe in it. The real does not convince. Come, whoever looked in the mirror and believed that picture was truly him? We all discern the fraud.’

  ‘I never look in the mirror,’ Ben had said. ‘I know myself without.’

  But now, in the middle of the straining muddy street, he stood against the jostling and let his thoughts free to terrify him, just for a moment. Shapes in the window, indeterminate. How if indeterminacy is Will’s essence? But it can’t be – because if he is nothing, how can he be what he so magnificently is?

  The sun was sinking behind the roofs with a palpable withdrawal of warmth, like the shutting of a stove. Ben shook himself and plunged on. If it made no sense, he could not let it in. He refreshed himself with a memory of avenued oaks, park walls, limits and borders.

  * * *

  Under summer heat, under hot self-hate like packed straw in an overhead loft, about to catch and smoulder, Will enacted it.

  All that was wrong in the earth was in it, and in him. But still he rose and took his morning draught at the sign of the Ram across the way, and wrote, and then sat awhile with Mistress Mountjoy to commiserate her troubles in getting her daughter happily married, and met Burbage and Heminges to talk business, share prices and the cost of candles, and what the Admiral’s Men were planning for the Fortune and the new proclamation against plays from the city, and took supper at the Ram or at the Mermaid with backbiting Dekker and Jonson, and often Middleton now with his burnished attention. And then he went to Isabelle and flung himself on the stones of passion.

  And neither of these things drove the other out or brought it down. He had never expected evil to be so accommodating.

  No doubting that it was evil, and that it came from him. You could call up images of spider and web and fly, and they came all too readily; but they meant nothing.

  ‘Oh, it’s a wicked world, Will,’ she said to him once, pinning him down, laughing.

  No, it isn’t, he thought. It’s the people in it.

  Once she cut herself in the forearm with a knife, moderate deep, after he had put her away from him saying, no more, an end.

  Once she lay under him absolutely unmoving, staring past his shoulder.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just thinking what’s in your brain.’

  The next night she screamed and blasphemed and said she wanted to bathe in him.

  Will thought of killing her or himself, both perhaps. But it didn’t seem to solve the problem, or even approach it.

  And meanwhile the city filled for the forthcoming coronation, swarming hot about the coming of a king. London lawyers and country gentlemen sniffed the air in city gardens and bowling-greens, outstaring each other: plague slashed red on doors, plague-bodies were trestled away in the humid afterglow when clothes felt like a rind. Food prices shot up. Loyal addresses and banners barely stirred in the no-air. Citizens grew used to the sound of Scots accents, and looked thoughtfully at the spare room, wondering how many mattresses it would take. (A Scots play, Middleton urged Will, that’s what a man should think of in these times.) And in Hay Passage Will returned to the sudden persecutions of Isabelle’s passion, in the room where no bird moved now: only the ticking ghost of its madness in the cage.

  * * *

  At New Place the wasps’ nest in the eaves had become an insistent presence. It bulged out the plaster in the corner of the north bedchamber, the guest room where sometimes on market-day Bartholomew slept off his unhappy booze-fill.

  Warm to the touch, this neigh
bouring nest: Susannah shrieked the first time she laid her hand against it, though Judith went back in fascination to that concentrated, intimate humming: full of subtle movement like a pregnant woman’s belly.

  ‘I’ll send Hamnet to look at it,’ Judith Sadler said. ‘He’ll know what to do. He contrived to rid my mother’s outhouse of a nest, God knows how. Doesn’t feel the stings, I vow. No sense, no feeling.’ This was relatively warm for her. She made a home with hatred: every day wrapped in the familiar. Reassuring. After all, with love, how do you know where you are?

  Hamnet came after the day’s business was over at the bakery: the time of shutters, cook-fires being lit, water scattered to lay the dust before the householder’s door, and the sun held like a bleeding ball by the roofs and chimneys of the town. He came broad and a little bowed, with his skin like a fair youth’s against cropped silvery hair. He looked, as he was, a good, conscientious, slightly beaten man. The Sadlers had lost money to the great fires; and then there was the spirit, or heart … His upper lip dipped in the centre. All fourteen babies, living and dead, had that mouth. You could imagine him, Anne thought, suddenly striking out on a road, choosing to be alone with his neglected self, going off to ports and star-chased seas.

  ‘Aye, you must needs do something. Sizeable. It might fall through in the end, with the weight of it.’ He laid big tender hands against the waspy roof-belly. ‘Then the swarm’s in your house, maddened. Boiling water or tar will do it, late at night when they’re still. I’ll come help tomorrow night, if you will: have your Andrew keep a big fire all day.’

  ‘Thank you. Do you think such small creatures feel when they die?’

  ‘Perhaps they do.’ He smiled sadly. ‘But you’d go mad to keep thinking of it.’

  ‘Oh, I shall think of some other foolish thing soon enough.’ She laughed. ‘Have you supped? Then stay, we have good roast ham. And Susannah has made quince tartlets.’

  ‘Not to be refused. My thanks.’

  ‘Shall I have Andrew go tell Judith you’re staying?’