Shakespeare's Scribe

by Gary Blackwood

  I waited for Mistress MacGregor to go on. Instead she gazed expectantly at me, as a player will at another whose turn it is to speak. Then the import of what she had said struck me so soundly that I seemed suddenly unable to catch my breath. Finally, I managed to respond. “You mean to say that … that the child was me? But—but how can you be sure? You must have taken in dozens of orphans whose mothers died in the poorhouse.”

  “Aye, but—” She tapped the worn record book that lay open on her desk. “I’ve checked me records for that year—it was the year that Polly was first hired on at the poorhouse—and there were only two such cases. And in only one of them did the mother die afore she could even give the bairn a name.”

  The room fell silent save for the ticking of a clock on the mantel and the far-off sound of children’s voices. I felt curiously displaced, detached and dreamlike, much the way I felt when I was playing a role upon the stage. With fingers that seemed not to belong to me I turned the crucifix over in my palm. On the reverse side someone had scratched some words, doubtless with the point of a knife. I had to wipe my eyes on my sleeve before I could make them out:. FOR SARAH.

  “Was that … was that her name, then? Sarah?”

  “Aye. That was your mother.”

  “Me mother.” I whispered the words, trying them out upon my tongue. “Me mother. After all this time.” I raised my eyes beseechingly to Mistress MacGregor. “Did this Polly tell you aught about her, then? What she was like? What she looked like, even?”

  Mistress MacGregor shook her head regretfully. “When they found your mother on the doorstep, she was near dead already; apparently she never spoke a single word. I had no chance to question Polly any further; not long after she gave me that cross, she drew her last paiching breath—without even being shriven by a priest.” Mistress MacGregor learned toward me, as though to disclose some dire secret. “She was a Catholic.”

  “Me mother?” I said.

  “Nay, I meant Polly. Though for all I ken your mother was as well. They’re the ones as go in for the fancy crosses, mostly.”

  “A Catholic,” I said. I knew little about Catholics, save that the Queen did not like them. Our enemy, Spain, was, after all, peopled by Catholics. So far as I knew, I had never met a Catholic. But then an allegiance to the Old Church was not, I gathered, the sort of thing one would confess at the drop of a hat.

  “I only say she may have been. I canna say for certain. I did ask the other folk at the poorhouse if they minded your mother, but none had worked there more than a few years. I went through their records for that month and year, too, but they told me nothing, not even her name.”

  “Would there not be a grave?” I asked.

  “Aye, but ’twould be a pauper’s grave, all unmarked. I’m sorry.”

  I felt a pain in my hand, and realized I had been gripping the crucifix so tightly that Christ’s crown of thorns had pierced my palm. I stared down at the drops of blood that welled from the wound and wondered if my mother, too, had clutched this cross for comfort as she lay dying—and giving birth to me. I wiped the crucifix on my breeches; traces of the blood remained in the deep scratches that made up her name. It was a pity that whoever had engraved the message had not seen fit to add her surname. It would have given me a stronger clue to her identity—and, after fifteen years of being known only as Widge, I would have had a real name at last, or half a one, at any rate.

  “An she was a local lass,” said Mistress MacGregor, “there must be someone here who kenned her.”

  “Aye,” I said, a dell of hope rising up within me. “That’s so. There must be someone who would recognize this cross, if I but kenned where to look.”

  “Well … an she did belong to the Old Church, then you might seek out others of that faith. Folk do say they stick together.” She leaned forward again, with one hand alongside her mouth, for all the world like an actor signaling that he is about to reveal something slightly scandalous. “They also say that the Catholics are fonder of their drink than most. If I was you, I’d begin looking in the taverns.”

  14

  The town’s drinking establishments were easy enough to find. Whereas a tavern in London could be identified by the ivy or red lattice by its entrance, here in the north the sure sign was a large painted hand made of wood, projecting on a pole from the window. I started with the Hog’s Head in Coney Street. No one in the place found the crucifix familiar, and the only Sarah any of them knew was a lady of ill repute who was very much alive. The story was the same at the next tavern and the next.

  As I emerged from the Raven, I glanced at the clock on the steeple of the town hall. The afternoon’s performance was but a little over an hour away, and I was expected to lend a hand with prompting and costume changes and the like. I dared not shirk my duties, lest the sharers decide they could do without me altogether.

  I had begun to suspect that my quest was a hopeless one. Still, I reasoned, it could do no harm to ask about in one or two more taverns, so I walked on to an unnamed alehouse that occupied the ground floor of a run-down house. Folk sometimes call the main room of a tippling house the “dark parlor”; this one certainly lived up to its name. It was so dim within that I had to stand inside the entrance for several minutes before I could see properly.

  The benches that flanked the half-dozen trestle tables were mostly empty; clearly this was not one of the city’s more popular drinking spots. I could see why. The rushes on the floor looked as though they’d not been changed since the Queen took the throne; the tops of the tables were chipped and gouged from years of being used as a sticking place for daggers; and the chinks in the wood had filled in with a putty composed of food remnants and dried-up puddles of ale.

  The few patrons in the place turned hostile stares upon me, as did the tavern keeper, who was emerging from the taproom with a pint mug in each hand, the contents slopping over rims. “Good afternoon,” I ventured. He gave me not so much as a nod in reply. I approached him, dangling the crucifix before me like some talisman to ward off danger. “I wonder if you’ve ever seen a cross of this sort before.”

  The tippler gave it a cursory glance, shook his head brusquely, and plunked the mugs down before his paltry pair of customers. One of them was a small, gnomelike fellow with but half an ear on one side—the rest of it had, I suspected, been clipped off as a punishment for thieving. He reached out one grimy hand and drew the crucifix nearer, to squint at it with rheumy eyes. Then he, too, shook his head and retreated with his drink into the dark recesses of the alehouse.

  I tried to show the cross to the second man, but he waved me off. With a sigh, I sat down on the end of a bench, meaning to rest a few moments before heading back to our inn. “An you don’t drink,” said the tippler, “you don’t sit.”

  I would, in truth, have welcomed a pint of ale, for I’d had neither drink nor food since early in the day. But I had only two shillings to my name and no notion of how long they’d have to last me. In any case, I would have been reluctant to drink a drop from any vessel in this unsanitary place.

  Wearily, I got to my feet and headed for the door. Just as my hand fell upon the latch, a commanding voice from the gloomy depths at the rear of the room called out, as sharp and sudden as a cannon shot, “Hold!”

  I was accustomed to doing as I was bid. I stopped in my tracks. “Come here, boy!” ordered the voice.

  I turned slowly. “Me?”

  “Of course, you. Do you see any other boys about?”

  I moved hesitantly toward the rear of the room. The wight with half an ear sat at a table there, but I did not think his was the voice that had called me. “Come, come,” said the voice, more kindly. “I’ll not bite you.” It came from a figure sitting in a dark alcove formed where the fireplace jutted into the room. “Sit down,” the man said, and gestured to a bench that faced the fireplace. Once more I did as I was told. “Roger!” called the man, whose face I still could not see clearly. “A pint of ale for my young friend, if you please.�
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  “Who’s going to pay for ‘t?” asked the tippler.

  “Ah, Roger,” said the man reproachfully, “you know I’m good for it.”

  “I can’t pay me bills wi’ promises,” grumbled the tippler, but he brought the pint all the same and thrust it into my hands.

  “Fair ‘chieve you,” said the stranger, and clinked his mug against mine. “Drink up.”

  Obediently I put the earthenware mug to my mouth and did my best to drink without actually touching my lips to the vessel. Over its rim I studied my drinking companion as well as I could, given the little light that reached into the alcove.

  The first thing that struck me about him was that he did not seem to belong here, in these shabby surroundings. Unlike the other patrons of the place, whose tattered and soiled tunics marked them as members of the laboring class—or, more likely, the thieving class—this fellow wore a gentleman’s attire, a doublet and breeches that were, if not exactly new or stylish, at least presentable.

  He leaned forward and, with a pair of tongs, fished a glowing ember from a clay pot on the hearth to light his long-stemmed clay pipe, giving me a better look at his features. He was about of an age with Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Burbage—that is, thirty-five or so. His ginger-colored hair was unusually close-cropped. With the exception of Sal Pavy we prentices wore our hair short, finding it more convenient and comfortable when we donned the wigs that transformed us into women. But this man’s hair was shorter still, and his beard was trimmed to within a quarter inch of his face. His long nose showed definite signs of having been broken, perhaps more than once. These features, plus his rather stiff-backed posture, put me in mind of a military man and, as I shortly learned, I had read him right.

  The man puffed on his pipe and blew forth a billow of tobacco smoke that choked me. He laughed. “They say this weed is beneficial to the lungs—once you get used to it.” After another few puffs, he added, “Forgive me for being so abrupt with you a moment ago. I was once a soldier, and have not yet lost the old habit of ordering folk about.”

  “What do you want?” I asked, impatient to be off to the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall.

  “I overheard you asking the others about a certain cross, and it piqued my curiosity.” His speech, too, was more like that of a gentleman than of an ordinary workingman, and bore little trace of Yorkshire. “Might I have a look at it?”

  I drew the crucifix from my wallet and held it by the chain before him. He bent forward, a bit awkwardly, as though the movement pained him, and laid the cross on his palm. I heard a sharp intake of breath, then he said softly, “By my fay! It’s the very same!”

  “Wh-what do you mean?” I asked, my voice suddenly shaky. “Do you recognize this?”

  He let the cross go and glanced up at me, his eyes wide, their pupils like dark pools without a bottom. “Recognize it?” he said. “It’s mine—or once was.”

  “Yours? Nay! How can that be? It belonged to me mother!”

  He stared at me for a moment, with an expression I could not read. “It was I who gave it to her, and it was I who engraved the message on the back.”

  “The—the message?”

  He nodded. “‘For Sarah.”’

  I was stunned. He had not turned the cross over and, even had he done so, he could not have read the faint letters in this dim light. It took me a moment to respond. “You kenned her, then?”

  He gave a small, rather rueful smile. “Better than anyone, I think. We would have wed, had not her family stood in our way.” Again he took up the crucifix, which was twisting slowly about as it dangled from my trembling hand, and gently traced the ornate design with one finger, as though looking at it called up my mother’s face. “My family were Catholics, hers Protestants. Though they forbade her to see me, we carried on a courtship for many months, at night, in secret. I would have wed her in secret, too, but she could not bring herself to defy her parents that far. So …” He shrugged. “So I became a soldier and went off to Ulster to fight Tyrone. When I returned from Ireland, I could find no trace of her or her family. Eventually I learned that her parents had died of the plague. I could only assume that she had met the same fate.”

  “Nay, she did not,” I whispered. “She died i’ the poor-house … after giving birth to me.”

  When I was a child in the orphanage, I was convinced, like many of my fellow orphans, that a mistake had been made, that I had only been separated somehow from my mother and father. I felt certain that one day they would come for me, and I imagined our tearful reunion so clearly that it seemed inconceivable it would not come to pass.

  Now, at last, it had, and it was nothing like I had imagined. We did not cry, we did not embrace, we did not even speak for some time. We only sat in silence, linked by the cross in his hand and the chain in mine. Finally he sat back, took a deep draught from his mug, and wiped his mouth. “Well. I don’t often find myself at a loss for words.” He laughed uncertainly and spread his hands. “What do we do now, then? Introduce ourselves?”

  I gave a weak and awkward laugh as well. “It would be a start, I suppose.”

  He held out a large hand with short, broad fingers. “I’m Jamie Redshaw, lately of Her Majesty’s musketeers.”

  Like an actor playing his part by rote I reached out and shook his hand. “And I’m Widge. Or at least that’s what they call me. Me mother didn’t live long enough to give me a proper name.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know what had become of her. I didn’t even know she was with child. My child.” He took another long drink, then sat gazing at me over the rim of his mug, appraising me as I had earlier been appraising him. “You must be thirteen or fourteen, then.”

  “Fifteen,” I said.

  He shook his head and ran a hand through his bristly hair. “It’s been that long? It’s difficult to believe. You’ve spent all those years here, in the orphanage?”

  “Nay, I was apprenticed to Dr. Bright of Berwick for a time, then I went to London, and for the past year I’ve been a prentice wi’ the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “The Chamberlain’s Men, is it? You’ve done well for yourself.”

  “You ken the company?”

  “Of course. I saw them perform Twelfth Night only yesterday. I don’t recall seeing you, though.”

  “Well, I looked rather different in me wig and makeup.” I gasped then, and leaped to my feet. “Oh, gis! I nearly forgot! They’ll be starting the performance! I ha’ to leave!” I turned toward the door, then turned abruptly back again. “But—but I can’t leave! There’s so much … We haven’t even …” I waved my hands in frustration, torn between my duty to the company and my desire to learn everything at once about a mother and father who had so suddenly and unexpectedly materialized.

  Laughing, Jamie Redshaw rose to his feet and clapped me on the back, so soundly that it stung. “Don’t fret, Widge. I’m not going to disappear. Why don’t I come with you, and we can talk further after the performance.”

  “Oh, aye!” I said gratefully, and we made for the door.

  “You’ve not paid for your drinks!” the scowling tippler reminded us.

  Jamie Redshaw waved to him as blithely as though the man had wished us good fortune. “In due time, Roger. All in due time.”

  15

  As we headed for the Merchant Adventurers’ Hall, I glanced furtively at Jamie Redshaw again and again, trying to get my mind around the notion that this was my father walking next to me. It was difficult. As far as I could tell, our looks were as unlike as could be. My hair was dark; his was fair. My eyes were blue, his brown. My frame was small and slight; his was large and stout.

  My mind was a mingle-mangle of thoughts and questions, each fighting to be spoken first. Some I had been wondering about for years; others had occurred to me but a moment before. Some were so trivial and foolish that I thrust them aside; others were so difficult that I felt I dared not put them to him just yet.
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  I began with the ones that had been with me longest. “Can you … can you tell me what me mother looked like?”

  At first I thought he had not heard me, for he looked lost in his thoughts, too. Finally he raised his head, gazed at me a long moment, and then said, “Like you.”

  “And what was her surname?”

  He scratched his short beard thoughtfully. “Hmm. It’s been a long time; give me a moment. Rogers, that’s it.”

  “Has she no kin left here?”

  He shook his head. “None. If she had, I would have found them.”

  “Would you?” I said, more bitterly than I meant to. “You failed to find me.”

  He turned to me with a look that was half angry, half reproachful. “I had no idea you existed,” he said.

  We walked on in silence. Despite the fact that I was a head shorter, I found myself having to slow my pace so as not to get ahead of him. He did not limp, exactly; he seemed merely to favor his left side a little, to hesitate slightly each time he brought his left leg forward. Though he carried an impressive hardwood walking stick with a carving of a snarling lion’s head on the handle, he did not lean on it but walked along rigidly upright, swinging the stick at his side.

  “I’m sorry to slow you down,” he said. “I’ve a wound that gives me a twinge now and again.”