The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  He shrugged. ‘If you like. I’ll not be looked for.’

  At supper, and after, they talked easily and without intermission. With so much common ground between them, you could always light on something that brought a smile, a nod: a quickening. And so they stayed, talking, after the girls had taken their candles and gone upstairs.

  ‘You’ll be marrying them soon,’ Hamnet said. ‘The Quineys will take an interest, I’ll wager.’

  ‘Your own children marrying: Lord, what a thought.’

  ‘Not a good one?’

  She trimmed a smoking candle, proffered the ale-jug. ‘Drink about. A good thought? Yes, if they are happy. But no. Because it means you must know yourself old.’

  Hamnet laughed low. ‘Old? Look in your glass, Anne.’

  Afterwards she wondered whether she would have done it without that remark. Was it the hinge on which decision turned? Yet something had already prompted her to ask him to supper: that waking something, perhaps, or its malign shadow. She stood to trim the candle again, and her skirts brushed his leg, and she left it so instead of twitching away. The candle-flame glared at her like a merciless sun. What was Hamnet seeing? An old friend grown odd and whimsical? A discontented wife daring an intrigue?

  ‘It’s not a looking matter, Hamnet.’ She drained her cup. ‘It’s feeling.’

  She had called him Hamnet, simply, unthinkingly; but it was an acknowledgement that Hamnet Sadler was the only living one, the name had reverted to his sole use. Lost was the other Hamnet, and the loss had brought her to this precipice. My good went then, she thought, leaving an old nest of heart for scavengers to move into. Scavengers and suspicions, hates and revenges. Hamnet, of all names to murmur in adultery: but no, very well, for everything now had a dark, freakish aptness.

  ‘How does Judith?’

  He grimaced. ‘You know well.’

  ‘She’s happy, in truth. Not content. But happy.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘If not, she should be.’ She spoke firmly, but into the dark. Her motives were blind formless things like new-born kittens. No good examining them for features. She sat down closer to him. She wondered what his bare legs were like, his weight, how harsh his beard. She had only the one experience of a man, and that was all broken on rocks. That man was elsewhere, love-embedded and separate: in her mind at least, probably in reality. Anne hid a sob and made her face cool. ‘Let’s not talk of her. Or any others, let them go. We should be ourselves alone, shouldn’t we, and do only as our selves prompt?’

  He gazed at her, looking quite young, and almost helpless with indirection: where would this go? ‘Life,’ he said heavily, ‘life so seldom allows.’

  ‘Life, the old jade, must learn to do better.’ Was this real? Or was the room a painting, Hamnet a scarecrow set moving, her slow approaching body a dream of her self?

  They began, so tentatively, with holding hands. Glances in the suffocating candlelight.

  ‘I’m so alone.’

  ‘Aye, so. I know what it is to be alone, Anne.’

  ‘And folk would not believe it of either of us.’

  ‘Aye, so.’ Hamnet not quite listening. ‘Thou art a beauty, dost know?’

  Hands mapping, laboriously invading new places. Anne was not without pleasure, but she wished she could jump forward to when they would lie cooling apart in bed. To when she would be a woman who had achieved it, and claimed the far shore of revenge for her own.

  Hamnet, gentle, sincere – but still not without opportunism, she realised. Kissing her, he mumbled about respect for Will and not changing things, but it was words. Everyone, she thought, as his hand kneaded her breast, was essentially furtive: walking in the daylit street, they stalked behind themselves.

  ‘Art sure, heart? To go on?’ As he spoke he lifted her skirts. ‘It will be sweet. Promise thee.’

  Yes, sure. No, not sure. His tongue and teeth claimed her world; they were too strong, there was too much of them. Breeches open, he put her hand to his standing cock: she touched and it seemed a strange hard fat clammy thing, not something that should be out in the air.

  He drew his face back. Briefly scanned her. ‘Are you afraid of Will?’

  ‘No. Not afraid—’

  ‘He doesn’t beat you?’

  She shrugged, and it was a shrugging him off, and he must have seen that.

  ‘You know, Anne, he won’t get to hear of it.’

  Ah, true: and that was just it. Why else go through with it? To satisfy something in her? But it wasn’t in her, she touched only vacancy, an echo. No thrilling note of vindication rang out.

  She put down her skirts.

  ‘You are too good a man, Hamnet, for this.’

  He gave her a long regard, and let out a long sigh. Hitching up his breeches, he seemed to review acres of reflection, expectation, debate. ‘I see it. Well, if I’m too good, I wish I might be otherwise. I wish I might be a bad man.’ His glance flashed cold a moment, and she knew his was the power: whatever happened. ‘I still might.’

  ‘You won’t, though.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head, wry, caught out in his unavoidable humanity.

  ‘You’re free to hate me, Hamnet.’

  His look was kind and grey. ‘No. It doesn’t go that deep, my dear.’

  And that finished it. He put on his doublet, drained the last of the beer, took his leave, with no haste: why haste, after all? Meanwhile she stared at the small orbit of her burning world, the candle, her lap, a moth, a dribble of spilled beer on the board, her shame.

  When he was gone, and she was alone, and she had finished silently weeping and digging her fingernails into her scalp until blood seeped, she sat in subsiding shudders and thought about things. She thought of Will. Chiefly with hatred, for his betrayal. Also, for making her helpless – or, rather, for his success where she failed. Look at him: he could play every part in life, and she could not even play the cheap adulteress for one night.

  * * *

  Susannah stood in the bedchamber doorway. Unlike Judith, who would have gasped or shouted, she thought for a moment before speaking, even though she must have been startled.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Packing.’ Anne’s eyes felt gritty from the sleepless night, and the light of morning was in them like bright sand. ‘For London.’

  ‘Are we all to go?’

  She shook her head. The white shift folded itself in her hands, submissive ghost. ‘Your father writes me. It’s an exceptional season. The new King, the coronation, favours to be granted. So all public men are fetching their wives to London, for we mustn’t miss it.’

  ‘But you hate London.’ Susannah said it, then let it hang while she thought about it. She was subtle, and at ease in the presence of the unsaid. ‘Wives, and not daughters.’ She smiled.

  ‘The house needs a mistress. You’re a woman now. Andrew will ride with me. If you have need of anything, go to Uncle Richard.’

  ‘How if I have need of you?’ Susannah said; but she looked as if she did not expect an answer, or need one.

  * * *

  They were all deedily about it, writing for the King – Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, the others – all deep in loyal addresses and odes and pageants. And Will tried, seriously, because he believed that a poet must write upon any occasion, and build with what clay came to his hands.

  But he couldn’t. He was all shrunk to the pinhead of the personal, and he hated it, perching there. It was one of the many things, indeed, that he hated about his inclination to Isabelle: the way it turned him into an artist of the mirror, colouring everything with the hue of inescapable self. He longed to write outside. But the new King didn’t do it.

  And then came hope. She was abstracted one evening, and even the dance of cruelty seemed to bore her.

  ‘Come to sup with me tomorrow, Will, and we’ll make an end.’ She frowned at his look, which must have been high disbelief. ‘No, I am in earnest, and I’ll tell you why. My funds are low, and wh
en I went marketing I couldn’t get credit today, which frightened me. I can’t live frugal – so I think I must marry again: and I can’t do that while you and I are swyving. So, best end it. Hey?’

  Looking at her, he could see no layers: just the top, the impatience. It seemed real. ‘Very well. I will believe you are in earnest.’

  ‘I’ve never been anything else,’ she said, dead-voiced, taking up her sewing.

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought it possible she might drop him as easily as she had picked him up. She wouldn’t want him, he thought, to draw any meaning from their association: that would be her worst failure.

  ‘Be damned to the King, God save him,’ Burbage said, when he asked what Will was working on. ‘Come, he’ll not lack addresses. A play, man. Something to catch his Scots fancy. If we can but become the King’s Men, why, then, we’re fitted. By the by, seen Henslowe of late? He’s after your young Hollingbery’s blood. He advanced him money, seemingly, on condition the sprig would be ready to play at the Rose on Monday. First leading part. But he hasn’t been to rehearsals, and his landlord says he didn’t come home last night. Drink, doxies, I don’t know. But he’ll fail, Will, in short order.’

  ‘A pity,’ Heminges said. ‘He has the talent, if he could master the temper. He could learn from your brother there. My wife says she never knew a soberer man.’

  ‘Aye, he applies himself, does Master Edmund,’ Burbage said, ‘even though he hasn’t – well—’

  ‘Hasn’t a quarter of the talent,’ Will said.

  ‘Yes. Well, you did ask,’ Burbage said. ‘Oh, no, you didn’t, did you?’

  ‘The theatre needs its Edmund Shakespeares,’ Heminges said. ‘Earth, iron, jewels. It has to contain all.’

  Damn Matthew. Was this how he repaid all the work they had put into his training? What was he about? Idling away his time? Dancing attendance on a mistress, perhaps. Self-hatred compounded Will’s urgency. He roamed Matthew’s haunts, from the south bank of the river to Shoreditch. He darted into the back rooms and upper rooms of theatre taverns, flung back curtains, received oaths and stares from numerous young men who were not Matthew. All the time, bits of his past and present jutted and tripped him. Tarlton fetching him in from the street and saving him from starvation. Nashe comfortably ensconced in the Mermaid, walled in with books. Greene lurking in his pride and poverty with the grave on his breath. Jonson accosting him at Field’s shop. So much that was familiar; but in the course of the long, frustrating day he felt difference too, the way time, beyond a certain age, was a backward wave that left you in the shallows. The young he saw were cooler somehow, more knowing: they possessed life and the world as he possessed money, reach, doubt.

  ‘Very well. Have him here Monday morning, perfect in his part,’ Henslowe had said, when Will went to see him, ‘and we’ll go on. Otherwise, he’s done.’

  Now the afternoon was late, still hot, a little thundery, sunlight suddenly spilling from the clouds on to the street with as physical an effect as the unrolling of great bolts of shining fabric. Will’s legs ached, and his head throbbed, and he thought: Leave him to it. What is he to you? Not as if you’re his father.

  He went on.

  * * *

  ‘How did it happen?’

  He had found Matthew at last, hiding out at a friend’s lodging in a Westminster courtyard. He threw open the shutters. Matthew cringed on the bed.

  ‘I told you, a fall.’

  ‘A fall? You’re young for your dotage. Show.’

  Scowling, Matthew sat up and turned his face to the light. The black eye twitched. ‘I laid a beefsteak to it to draw it out. But it still looks hideous, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. But it will fade. It’s a small thing, to set beside your life as a player. You’re not indispensable, they can easily dismiss you. And then the word will go round; Matt Hollingbery is not to be relied on. Swift consequences. Also your landlady is troubled at missing you.’

  ‘She’s a good creature.’ A reminiscent smile. Oho, Will thought, possibly. Or it might be just in Matthew’s mind. ‘I didn’t want to go back there – be seen thus.’

  ‘After your fall, naturally. So, what was the fight about?’

  ‘God knows,’ Matthew said, holding his head. ‘There was drink in it, and drink is a great maker, a builder of towers from scraps … You’ve surely been drunk when young. Even you.’

  Even me. Dear heaven. Will felt himself scatter like a dropped pack of cards. There, somewhere, was the true one.

  ‘I’m not here to read you a lecture. Only to say opportunity is no deep well: it runs soon dry. So if you must carouse, then – then be like Master Jonson. He drinks himself to blankness, sleeps in a great sweat, and then rises early to study. Mix your debauches, if you can’t mix your wine. You are too good to lose. For the theatre to lose, I mean.’ He was rewarded with a half-smile. How different our rewards, our gratifications. Truly we are divided creatures. ‘Come. Action. To your landlady, and make your bows and apologise for her distresses, and then your part.’

  ‘I don’t have it. I’ve hardly looked at it.’

  ‘Where’s the copy? Your lodging? Excellent, there we shall learn it, and make you perfect in it. I’ll send a message to the Rose that you’ll be there tomorrow for rehearsal.’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘And this face?’

  ‘More beefsteak. Then, if it comes to it, paint with white lead. What’s your part? Lucius the honest knight, very well. Is he esteemed for his beauty throughout the piece? Are there long speeches about the fairness of his eyes? Why, then, it won’t be marked. Above all, remember what you do. You make the audience see what you want them to see. How else does Burbage make you see a tall, martial man, mighty-limbed?’

  Matthew’s smile faded. ‘But I can’t get the part by tomorrow.’

  ‘Not alone, no. Come.’ He gave Matthew his hand and hauled him up.

  It’s so easy to do the right thing, he thought, that we hesitate to do it: we suspect a trick. Children see no tricks. Be as a child.

  ‘I feel so melancholy sometimes,’ Matthew said, as they walked. ‘Why is that, think you, when feeling happy is so much better?’

  ‘We inherit tears. And then they dry, and we foot it across the world. And all the while the music plays, grave or gay. Have you dined? You’ll need food in the belly, then something to keep you fresh as we work. Valerian has good properties, they say. Burbage swears by an infusion of ginger for late study.’

  So, all night at Matthew’s lodging, lighting candle after candle, repeating, coaching, bullying. There were a few tears.

  ‘I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. I don’t give a hang for playing.’

  ‘Plain enough, but I do. “And yet, methinks my lover has forgot…” Go on.’

  ‘Can I not sleep a few minutes?’

  ‘No. If you sleep you won’t stir till morning.’

  ‘“And yet, methinks my lover has forgot

  Our fixed bond, and all my comfort’s lost…”’

  ‘Good. Nearly there.’

  ‘No, you’re good, too good to me,’ Matthew said impulsively, touching his hand. ‘I’m not worth it. You know, I called you an old woman to my friends the other day.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, you called me something much worse. Now, cue, “Farewell, and blessings attend thee”.’

  ‘I wish I could be like you.’

  ‘That is not the line. Nor is it true. Or a part of me only.’ He suddenly found himself imagining what Anne would think if she could see him now. It always took him by stealth, this thought: the only way, perhaps, like visioning your own death.

  He left Matthew’s lodging when first light was brushing the sky. Matt would manage a couple of hours’ sleep before going to the Rose. His landlady, for the price of a little purse, had engaged to wake him in time and march him up there if need be. All that could be done. Will’s weariness took the form of incredible clumsy stiffness, like a wooden leg taking over the body. At Silver Street
he filled a pail at the pump and doused his head deliciously and shook it till the water-drops were like a rain-shower. And in each of them he saw a face.

  And then he remembered where she should have been, last night.

  * * *

  The supper still stood on the table. It looked untouched – except that at some point she had dug into the wheel of cheese with a knife and made eyeholes and a grin, like a skull. A sated fly drowsed on a capon breast.

  Having let him in, Isabelle drooped to the hearth and knelt down there, away from him. The bare soles of her feet were pink and delicately ridged.

  ‘There’s wine, if you want it,’ she said, in a metallic voice. ‘It’s not poisoned.’

  He took up the cup. ‘Well, in a way it is.’

  ‘Why do you come now? What does it serve, to come now?’

  ‘To explain what happened. But after all, Isabelle—’

  ‘After all it was to be our last supper, yes, and I meant it so and it would have been so. But instead you choose to end it with insult.’ Her eyes flared, soft violet, lost in rage. ‘You made me feel worthless as I sat here, Master William, you made me feel that I did not deserve to exist and that you wanted me to know it.’

  ‘I meant none of that. For God’s sake, what do you think I am? I was helping a friend.’

  She laughed briefly, rocking back. ‘All night? Oh, you sad fool. Helping a friend, quotha, and all night too.’

  ‘Matthew.’ He told it briefly.

  She stared, and her teeth began to part and gleam as if she were about to bite these bare bones of narration, suck their marrow. ‘And this,’ she said at last, rising, ‘this lessens the insult, is that what you suppose? Instead of magnifying it a hundredfold? Do you know nothing, Will, of me or of yourself? Matthew. Matthew.’ She spat the name smiling. ‘Don’t you know that you’ll tire of him too, once you’ve finally fucked the whelp’s arse?’

  He turned and groped for the door-handle, but it seemed to have disappeared in a black mist, along with everything solid, everything with dimensions. ‘An end, then. You’ve said enough.’

  ‘No. Just the truth. Once you’ve had what you want, you don’t want it more: common enough for a man led by his tarse, but with you, Will, it goes further, it’s like a sickness. You might love the dead enduringly, or a dream, or an angel, but we poor mortals standing on the earth don’t have a chance at you. I wonder, should I tell your boy-girl about it – how you’ve been doing to me what you secretly want to do to him? It would be amusing. Revealing. But, no, I’ve no interest in your mumbled crumbs. Get gone.’