They called me to the bedside.
‘Come and see your sister, Will, before she goes away. Come and say goodbye.’
I dragged my angry awkward adolescent limbs heavily over to the sheeted statue lying on display in the best bed. She’d been moved there for the important occasion of her dying. Sick at heart, I remembered the day she’d first come to us out of nowhere, a little white seabird that had just flown in and was fluttering on my mother’s breast, filling the shorelines of the sheets with alien sounds. A curiosity that gradually grew into a sister, my bright little bird, Anne. It had never occurred to me that she would one day stop singing. But that day had now come and had taken away all her sound and motion, even her shape – a white hump in the bed, dead seabird, a snowdrift in the silence of the room. Such a cold white silence. And that blind unseeing face. Blind eyes of the newly born, the newly dead. What had the seven years in between actually meant? What had they been for? I kissed the ice-cold cheek of my dead, marble sister. ‘Go on, Will, say something to her, you’ll never see her again, speak now.’
Alas, she’s cold. Her blood is settled and her joints are stiff. Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field. Cold, cold, my girl.
I went with Gilbert and Joan and our parents to bury her. It was the fourth day of April and the sky a sudden bright blue, the grass sparked with daisies. The gravedigger had made a black hole in the ground where he said that the tiny bones of Margaret and the first Joan lay, dead in infancy twenty years ago. Anne went in beside them. How small a hole it was that contained all three. The churlish priest said very little to lay her to rest. I said it for him, inside my head.
Lay her in the earth. And from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring.
We came up to the grave’s edge with our flowers. The rain started again, whipped up by the wind, a vicious little squall, and the shivering vicar grumbled at us to hurry.
I tell thee, churlish priest, a ministering angel shall my sister be when thou liest howling.
‘Quickly, Will, quickly – sweets to the sweet. Make haste.’
So we threw in our primroses while our mother wept.
Sweets to the sweet, farewell. I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, and not have strewed thy grave.
The first plunging drops struck my sister’s shroud like daggers tearing apart the delicate scattering of primroses. In a single moment the rain increased to a waterfall and the shroud clung to the wasted little body, showing its oblivious contours, heightening its blind face. The already damp soil of Holy Trinity, too close to the Avon, couldn’t hold the sudden volume of water. The grave started to flood. A wind tore down the long line of limes. A few steps from where we stood, a procession of swans sailed stiffly past, like silver barges down the river, proud heads bowed slightly into the wind, white sails ruffled by the storm. Fare thee well at once. We left them hurriedly, three sisters dead in earth, divided by two decades, together in eternity. Goodnight ladies, goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, goodnight.
‘A thousand times farewell.’
Francis gave his benediction, between mouthfuls of beer and veal.
Just after Christmas the following year Granny Arden died and went under a shroud of snow up at Aston Cantlow where her two long-shrouded spouses lay and waited for her – Robert Arden for twenty-four years and old Hill himself more than thirty years in the ground. But what did the number matter to those now hidden in death’s dateless night?
‘Hard ground up here’ – that was more to the quick of the matter for the grumbling gravedigger, not quite ready for us – ‘and fucking worse at this time of the year, let me tell you. What a time to die, eh? There’s a time to be born and a time to die and right now I’d rather be a priest than a sexton. What a time to have a man digging graves! Fuck me! Whoever arranges dates up there doesn’t handle a spade! Angel of fucking death, eh?’
Asbies Agnes would have given the surly old bugger one of her mouthfuls if her ears hadn’t gone deaf. But they were past hearing – and the chattering mouth that had rippled with gossip and brimmed with stories and ladled so much lore into me was stopped in the snow. A single iron flake had landed on her lips and she had ceased to care. It was 1580.
That was also the year that Kate Hamlet, maddened in her mind, drowned herself in the Avon.
‘Felo de se, was it?’
Yes, she committed suicide. But Henry Rogers, who conducted the inquest, found that she had met with an accident.
‘Per infortunium. That was a humane conclusion, and typical of him. I partly knew the man.’
It was a Sunday morning and we were all at home when Wedgewood brought the news. He was hopping from house to house to be the first bearer of bad tidings and was eager to be on his way, to outrun the wildfire pace that a tragic word always achieves. But we held him back, made him sit down with us and drink some small beer, and he succumbed easily to be the cynosure to the gallery of round mouths and eyes and the sensation of being set on a black and muffled stage, speaking of something terrible.
‘Who found her, Robert?’
‘Ah well, I’d be the first, you see, to have come across her.’
This was later discovered to be a typical Wedgewood lie. It was Ruth Wedgewood, his second wife, who’d seen the body floating near the banks and she’d hurried home and told him where and when and all the circumstance.
There is a willow grows aslant a brook, that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream…
‘She’s drowned, Robert, really drowned?’
‘Drowned, drowned.’
No mistake. The froth shining wetly on his lips. The knowledge of it shining in his Delphic eyes. We all stared into them, trying to see what he had seen, trying to imagine the unimaginable, a young girl whom we all knew, sixteen years old, my own age, her eyes and mouth filled with the Avon, dead to the watery world while Stratford woke up to its Sunday. The young man she had been in love with – we all knew him too, also my age – had let her down. Had he bolted out of the affair when she missed her first monthly? Had he left her in the belly lurch? Was there an infant lying drowned in her womb’s watery tomb while she drifted quietly in the silvery graveyard of the Avon? Whatever the reason, accident was unlikely in the circumstances and a verdict of suicide would be reached. And as the Everlasting had fixed his canon against self-slaughter, she was not only drowned but damned, said Wedgewood. There would be no mercy in the next world for Kate Hamlet.
I ran down to the place that Wedgewood had identified for us. The grasses were trampled by the many curious feet that had gathered there. For folk to conjecture and to stare. I waited till everybody had gone home and stood alone on the tragic spot, stood and stared for a long time at that part of the river in which her body had been found, face up, floating free, lips slightly parted to let in the Avon, unseeing eyes reflecting the sky. There was the very willow, slanting the glassy stream – just there.
There with fantastic garlands did she come, of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples that liberal shepherds give a grosser name, but our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
Was it a Wedgewood invention? No, his tailor’s brain was too threadbare to have thought up such a scene. It made perfect sense to me. She’d been left naked in her youth, stripped of love, so she’d covered herself with the beauty of the world and come down to the Avon, decked for death.
Naturally it was a kindness on the part of certain gentle souls to picture it differently.
There on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke, when down her weedy trophies and herself fell in the weeping brook.
But it didn’t happen like that, did it? She’d walked down to this bank and shoal of time, had slipped into the river and had simply drawn it over herself like a bedcover, like a glassy shroud, comfortably, coolly, putting out the pain of the world. How strange, I thought, that the river remained unmarked, that it carried no imprint of he
r agony, only weeds and water, nothing to commemorate her sad pastoral. But I could see it all with desperate clarity, how her clothes filled up, spread wide.
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up, which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature native and indued unto that element.
Such was her swan-song, while the swans themselves sailed by like kings and queens to the sound of her singing.
But long it could not be till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death.
And muddy death was to the point according to my old nightmare friend, the sexton, who was digging her grave – ‘Mud up her crutch, poor bitch, and bream buggering her all the way from backside to kingdom come. She didn’t go down the Avon like no swan. No bugger does.’
He was digging in the consecrated part of the graveyard, much to the displeasure of the priest who’d bury her. The family had pleaded the ambiguity of her end, beseeching the benefit of the doubt, and the town council had prevailed. Her death was doubtful, muttered the priest – and the doubt should have been sufficient to consign her to the crossroads.
And but that great command o’ersways the order, she should in ground unsanctified have lodged till the last trumpet. For charitable prayers, shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her. Yet here she is allowed her virgin crants, her maiden strewments, and the bringing home of bell and burial.
But that was all she got. Even though her brother, wild with grief, begged for melody for the sister that had loved to sing. ‘Must there no more be done?’
No more be done! The church was outraged. ‘We should profane the service of the dead to sing sage requiem and such rest to her as to peace-parted souls. Now pile the earth on, master sexton!’ And he closed the ceremony. ‘Nunc dimittis. Go back home, all of you.’ Fuck off.
Another churlish priest. Like the one who buried my sister. Yet once more then, say it again. Lay her in the earth. And from her fair and unpolluted flesh may violets spring.
But the gravedigger wasn’t interested in violets. He was holding up one of the flowers Kate Hamlet had died clutching. It was a long purple. The leering old devil put his hand inside the arrow-shaped leaf that cupped the flower and stroked the purple phallus with a salacious chuckle. I was just waiting for him to fart.
‘Fancy killing yourself for that, now! Look around, lad – there are hundreds of them to be had for the plucking. And it’s the same with pricks – plenty on offer and never out of season either, and all because one of them let her down.’
And he threw the flower into the grave. It landed in Kate Hamlet’s lap. A last long purple for a dubious virgin.
Long purples then. Lords-and-ladies, if you’re calling them by their polite name, though it comes to the same thing. Dead men’s fingers, in the mouths of our chaste maids.
‘Are you a scholar of the species?’
A cuckoo-pint is the flower in question. On the lips of the older folk like Agnes, Asbies way, they were cows-and-calves, Jack-in-the-pulpit. The ancient name was starchwort. But liberal shepherds and coarse-tongued sextons were alike in their gross libelling of these hedgerow vulgarities, calling them also tongues-in-tails. Or, if you prefer it no holds barred and with a lecherous sneer, pricks-in-pussies.
13
‘Talking about flowers now, are you?’
There she was, in the room, frowning over us, standing in the echoes, the tangible traces of our maleness, and the two glasses set there on the table, filled up in guilt.
‘Er, yes, I’m drinking for him though,’ said Francis, taking a generous swig from my glass, not without relish, and setting it down away from me, well out of my reach.
‘But it was sisters we were talking about, wasn’t it, Will?’
The frown relaxed a little.
‘Ah, well, he has only one left. And what will she be getting, may I ask?’
Francis spread his arms.
‘Well, we hadn’t actually –’
‘Then hadn’t you better actually?’
‘Quite right, actually, Mistress Anne. Will, shouldn’t we actually settle this one now?’
Item, I give and bequeath unto my said sister Joan twenty pounds.
‘And she can have all your clothes too.’
I thought Alison gave me a pitying look, for which I felt grateful.
And all my wearing apparel, to be paid and delivered within one year after my decease.
Alison started to snivel and her mistress punched her in the back, indicating the dirty dishes.
And I do will and devise the house with the appurtenances in Stratford wherein she dwelleth, free of charge for her natural life.
‘Free of charge!’
She placed her hands on her hips in that way she had, and swivelled round on the scratching lawyer.
‘Master Collins!’
Francis raised the quill and peered at me.
‘Will?’
What’s the point? I asked myself.
Change that, Francis, to – under the yearly rent of twelve pence.
The hands came off the hips and the arms were folded, indicating displeasure but not full opposition. Francis paused, glanced both ways, weighed up the situation, and noted it down.
And also add in there, Francis, the following.
Item, I give and bequeath unto her three sons, William Hart – what’s the second one’s name, Anne?
‘Always the Ardens.’
Francis looked perplexed – diplomatically, I thought.
‘They’re Harts actually, Mistress Anne.’
She swept from the room, pushing little Alison before her.
‘You’ll have to help me here, Will. What’s the name of this second Hart son?’
Can’t remember right now. We’ll come back to him. The third one is Michael. Always the middle one, isn’t it?
‘And Michael Hart – how much?’
Five pounds apiece.
‘To be paid when?’
To be paid within one year after my decease.
‘Done!’
Francis glugged off my glass and took up his own.
‘Hey, we’re getting on now, shall we tie up some more? How about Judith?’
Judith’s complicated. We’ll come to her anon.
‘And Elizabeth Hall, your niece?’
Equally complicated.
‘Why? What’s so difficult about her?’
Nothing – in itself, that is. Explain later. But meanwhile put down Elizabeth for all my plate – except for the broad silver gilt bowl. That’s to go to Judith.
‘Item, I give and bequeath unto the said Elizabeth Hall all my plate, except my broad silver and gilt bowl, that I now have, at the date of this will. That do?’
Yes. And then, I give and bequeath to my said daughter Judith my broad silver and gilt bowl. She always liked it.
‘It’s taken care of.’
Are you sure?
‘Am I your lawyer?’
You are.
‘Then rest assured.’
Rest? How can you rest among all these women? Why have I no son?
‘You have what you have, Will. What life gave you.’
What it left me with. A clutter of females, all of them illiterate, not one of them able to read a word I wrote. Jesus, you don’t see it coming down to this when you’re eighteen years of age and you think women the wonder of the world, do you?
‘That was a long time ago, Will. You were young. You were in love.’
Was I? Ah yes, pricks-in-pussies. And there was one pussy that took in my own innocent prick and changed my life forever. An old claw-cat now, a kitten in her day.
‘Will, I’m buggered. I’m going to pull out your old trucklebed from underneath you and sleep it off. Give me half an hour will you, old man?’
Have all the time you need, Francis. I’m not going anywhere.
Snore snore.
Old friends, Francis, the Sha
kespeares and the Hathaways. Are you half hearing me? I’ll pretend you are. According to my mother, Richard Hathaway and my father used to drink Stratford dry and when these two put their heads together they forgot to unbend their elbows. Then they’d wax metaphysical about beasts and angels – their work and their religion. ‘Man delights not them,’ she’d say, ‘no, nor women neither.’ (She too had a tongue with a tang.) ‘What gets that pair going is bulls and barley, the quality of angels’ fleece, what their wings are made of, and whether God wears gloves.’
And as they drain their draughts of Rhenish down, the kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out the triumph of their pledge.
‘In their drunken dreams. Talkers are no good doers, Will. And as for drinkers – just listen to them. And bear in mind.’
A sensible woman, my mother. And if there was a sharp edge on her commonsense it was put there by what she referred to as my father’s fall, followed by his increasing inclination to alcohol. She took an even sharper view of the genial John’s readiness to prop up his poorer neighbours with loans. He’d stood surety already for Richard Hathaway and on his account had put himself smilingly into debt. This heavy-headed revel – drinking east and west as she put it in her homely country way – was no way to recover the debt. And why should she stand by and watch him helping his neighbours to his hard-earned money and to her hard-brewed beer? Not to mention helping his offspring out of their inheritance and his eldest out of a place at Oxford. ‘You’ve seen everybody all right and yourself all wrong,’ she stormed at him, making him wince by flinging his own philosophy in his face. ‘Listen to him talk! Neither a borrower nor a lender be, he says – for loan oft loses both itself and friend. And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. A great pity the old fool didn’t reck his own rede and learn a little from his own wisdom!’
Will Page 13
