The Playmakers

by Graeme Johnstone

  She would fondly recollect the time she dramatically unwrapped herself from the curtain that hid their little bed from the living area, to present herself stark naked to him. And how his eyes had nearly popped out his head, not to mention something else out of his trousers, and how their once-passionate love, borne out of days bouncing in the haystack, had been rekindled until the next pregnancy came along.

  Pregnancy.

  Babies.

  Ah yes, the children. They hadn’t really helped the situation. Susanna, arriving but a few months after their hastily contrived marriage, and the twins in 1585, born on the fateful day he just up and left.

  He had always made it clear to her that he felt he was too immature for all that domesticity, too young to be a father, too naive to be caged into parenthood.

  “I don’t understand babies,” he would say. The situation was never helped when she would retort, “Oh, really? You used to chase one…”

  Yes, yes, yes, Anne Shakespeare thought, therein lies the real nub of the matter.

  She knew that deep down in his heart, William had always been pining - or lusting, more likely - for the other Anne. The dead Anne. The tiny, young Anne Whateley, with her pretty face, bell-like laugh, and minuscule waist, that had sent him cross-eyed with love from the first time he saw her and whom he had publicly declared he was going to marry until, until, until ...

  Well, Anne Shakespeare often thought, is it my fault he knocked me up in the haystack, thus ruining his plans to marry Anne Whateley? No. It’s not. Then a little smile would crease her tight lips and she would conclude, Not entirely, anyway …

  She had been certain that during their tumultuous marriage, there were times when they had been making love that, in his mind, he was not loving her, but loving the other Anne. She had heard, via the gossip of Polly and the other ladies down at the market, that men do that sometimes - that they imagine they are with someone else, the one they really want to be with, to maintain their excitement and, well, get the job done.

  It was a spooky feeling having three under the blankets - her, William, and the spirit of Anne Whateley.

  But there was never any proof of this.

  “What a pity her name was Anne, also,” she confided in Polly one day. “If he had called out ‘Ohh, Frances,’ or ‘Ohh, Maria’ or whatever, in the moment of conjugal bliss, instead of ‘Ohh, Anne,’ then I would have known who he really was thinking of.” And, she vowed, she could have then crossed her legs, squeezed his balls between her farm-girl horse-riding thighs like a pair of nuts between a nutcracker.

  “At least he never cried out, ‘Oh, Frank, or Oh, Joseph,’” Polly said, crinkling her ruddy face, and they burst into laughter.

  Whatever it was - the arrival of the twins, their daily struggle, her rural handsomeness as compared to Anne Whateley’s appealing beauty, maybe the fact she was much older than him - whatever the reason, his departure had been sudden, swift, unexpected.

  The memory of that morning was still clearly etched in her brain. He had staggered up the stairs of their little above-shop rooms, filthy, hung-over, aggressive - and late for the birth of his own child. Which, as it turned out to be, had become two.

  It was typical of his uncaring ways, Anne thought. There I was, having his babies, another two mouths to feed, and he was out getting drunk with his cronies.

  But when the pot flew across the room and hit him - this time, thrown by his mother - it was the final straw. He up and left.

  Now, after all these years, was it so bad that just occasionally she thought about him, wanted to know where he was?

  Oh, she had heard some interesting tales along the gossip trail. How he had joined some sort of acting troupe or other, and travelled all over England. How he had done very well out of that, to the point that the troupe had moved on to London. How in the big city he was achieving fame as a writer, a situation she simply could never comprehend, seeing as throughout their time together William Shakespeare could do little more than put a few rudimentary words down on paper in a spidery hand.

  Someone came back to Stratford one day and said they had spotted him going through Taunton, carrying a sign, promoting the show, behind a dwarf.

  “That’d be right,” she said. “That’s our William - always let someone else go in front and cop the reaction, first.”

  “Ugly as sin it was,” the witness told Anne. “Funny looking thing with a head like wot you see poking off the corner of a church.”

  “Are we talking about the dwarf or William?”

  “Get away with you. There was your William struttin’ along behind him with a sign, pitchin’ like, telling the people how great the show was.”

  “Pitching?”

  “Pretty good he was at it, and all. The show was packed out, and he seemed to be well-rewarded by the owner, a fat fellow with a big voice.”

  When she heard ‘well-rewarded’ she had pricked up her ears. Perhaps a reward would come her way after all. Maybe at the end of the line she would get something significant in return for all the effort she had put in. Not the least of which was the constant care of Hamnet - and the money she had borrowed to try and cure his illness.

  From the day he was born, the male of the twins never really got a firm foothold on the rocky cliff-face of life. He had cried for months on end as baby, refusing her milk, bringing up food, coughing and spluttering. His brown eyes were always lacking spark, his thin jowls pasty coloured, his little legs and arms without strength. His hair was always lank and dank.

  When he screamed through the night, Anne used to wish she had someone with her that she could hand him over to, just for five minutes so she get away from him and try and get some rest. Then, she used to think that maybe it was better that William was, in fact, not around to hear it, and complain, and perhaps even get violent like some of the other fathers did when an ailing baby moaned all night.

  “He’s a sickly child,” she used to tell her mother-in-law, Mary Shakespeare, when she came to visit. “I don’t know what to do about him. The doctors say they can’t find anything. But what would they know? People drop dead like flies from the Plague, and they have not a clue what to do about it.”

  “He’ll grow out of it,” Mary would say, but never with any real conviction in her voice.

  The two women had soldiered on together, forging a practical bond out of the otherwise difficult circumstances surrounding their links with Our William, as his mother would call him. Mary may well have been distressed and disgusted that their courting in the haystack had led to the unwanted pregnancy and rushed marriage. But she never mentioned it, nor, even if she may have preferred the other Anne as her daughter-in-law, did she ever display any malice.

  Instead, Mary Shakespeare, mother of eight of her own children, simply, “Got on with it”, doing the best she could to ensure that her grandchildren and their mother had the best support she could muster.

  She knew what it was all about. Her last child, Edmund, had been born in 1580, more than twenty-two years since her first, Joan, meaning that Uncle Eddy was barely three years older than William and Anne’s oldest, Susanna.

  “Children are like that,” Mary said to her one day, as she gently surveyed the pale, sickly countenance of Hamnet and stroked his lank hair. “You bring them into this world, you do your best, some are taken by God before they are due, some go on to make you proud, and there’s always one …”

  “Yes?”

  “One child, my dear Anne, that just simply breaks your heart.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Samuel Davidson couldn’t understand it.

  Here he was, a grown man, a strong man, a man who had been able for years to thrill audiences with his feats of amazing power. And before that, as a guard who could endure hours of monotonous standing on his feet, mixed with moments of intense physical action fighting off interlopers. Never once had he flagged, nor felt below par. With muscle, sinew, sword and crossbow, he had always served his masters well.
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br />   But, for weeks now, now he had been feeling sick.

  A gnawing feeling had wormed its way into his stomach. His once awe-inspiring appetite had all but disappeared. His mind continually wandered. His energy reserves had dimmed to the point where carrying the massive ebony and gold spear had now become a tiresome chore, and spinning it around between thumb and forefinger to astonish the populace an almost impossible challenge.

  He had never felt such a feeling of unwellness like this before, even when his skills had been put to the ultimate test and he had emerged from battle covered in the blood of the vanquished.

  And now, as he stood ramrod straight and silent, in the great hall of the castle of the Baronet Luigi Grigoletto, grand master of the northern Italian city-state of Padua, it finally dawned on Samuel Davidson what was wrong.

  He was homesick. Enough was enough!

  Traversing France and Italy made-up in black theatrical paint to play the role of the silent, indestructible guard in the astonishing travelling entourage of the fabled Queen Rasa of Nubia was all very well, but he’d had his fill of it.

  Now he wanted to go home. Back to England.

  The word ‘fabled’ suited the situation best, because he knew Rasa was no more a royal than his little friend Soho was a physician. Not all that long ago he had been carrying her around the streets of London, flaunting herself as a near-naked slave-girl. But her anxious European hosts had been led to believe she was a Queen deserving of royal treatment, and so they were honouring her thus without question.

  As the months had rolled by, Samuel had become more and more amazed at the way the integrity, dignity and believability of the travelling caravan had solidified, even multiplied, as it moved inexorably across the countryside. When the camel-led extravaganza had disembarked on the south-west coast of France, and arrived at their first point of call, at the home of a minor duke, they had been greeted with elements of surprise, a degree of warmth, and layers of suspicion.

  But once the self-styled Queen had won these first hosts over with her mystique, her beauty, and her intelligence, supported by the witty conversation of her charming, almost cheeky, private secretary, Monsieur Le Doux, the door had been suddenly flung open to the rest of the world. The rumour mill had begun rolling, and the story had flashed around the cities and villages like wildfire about the exotic royal from Africa who was heading through Europe, apparently with the intention of reaching Constantinople, although they seemed to be zigzagging all over the place with no obvious target in mind, often swapping back between Italy and France.

  The thrust of the story was that anyone with a bit of political clout who could manage to secure her as a household guest was indeed a lucky man.

  The situation was pre-empted and made all the more believable by the appearance of an advance diplomat at the walls, bearing a flag of peace, and insisting on seeing the city’s master.

  “Tell him I have special news of the Queen of Nubia who is travelling these lands,” he would say. Once inside the inner sanctum the well-dressed, cultured young Ambassador To The Court of the Queen of Nubia - in fact, a Budsby group actor, “One of the better graduates of Will’s acting classes,” as the big fellow once described him - would go into action.

  In eloquent tones, and working to a well-tried script, he would pass on titbits of information to whet the appetite of the duke, earl, tribal chief, king, warlord, marquis, or whoever it was that ran the fiefdom. “Her beauty is unparalleled,” he would declare to the intrigued ruler and his assembled courtiers.

  “Good sir,” he would add, approaching the seat of the potentate, “I have seen many women in my time, but she cannot be surpassed. Her skin is of the most flawless ebony, her eyes are of the most engaging deep brown that makes a man’s heart flutter when she gazes upon you, her cheekbones ride high. Her lips are as full as the ripest, fattest grape waiting to be plucked, and when she smiles and bursts into a most delectable laugh, the brilliance radiates for a good half mile.

  “And, Master,” - and it was here that the actor, having surveyed the boss’ physical stature, knew which way to shape the words to ensure a warm feeling of expectation would be generated - “I have it on the best of authority from my most trusted of observers that she favours a man such as yourself. The stocky, well-rounded person, that is, and of a height she would not find challenging … A man whose endowments are spoken of in hushed tones in every corner of the earth. A man from every pore of which there exudes masculinity, strength and power, even from those pores that once were hosts to that much over-emphasised cranial accoutrement known as hair…”

  Warm smiles would start to radiate from the person sitting in the chair.

  There would be more.

  “If I may, sir,” the ambassador would inquire discreetly, “may I please have permission to step forward and privately apprise you of detail of a more, shall we say, intimate nature.”

  Having received the regal nod, he would step up and whisper in the aristocratic ear, “Sire, she is from an African tribe where it is well-known that their approach to the physical act of love is of a wild, hedonistic nature, and not subject to the constraints of our much-vaunted but, alas, restrictive society. As well, the Nubians are a remarkable people, my liege. Their history is centred on the mining, production, and use of gold. Gold, sire, gold! They live for gold, they love gold, they wear gold, they worship gold, they kill for gold, they take it to their grave with them, such is the bounteous supply they have under the expansive stretches of the otherwise inhospitable sandy desert they call home. Why, her dresses are hemmed in gold, her hair is tied in a turban edged in gold, and underneath her attire it is said that her black, luxurious locks are braided in gold.

  “And I do not just mean the hair on her head, sire, if you get my drift…”

  By now the esteemed leader would be deeply taken by all this, almost salivating at the prospect of bedding a gold-embossed super-lover, and willing to hear more.

  “And, sire,” - and here, the messenger would lower his voice even further so the remainder of the court could not hear - “even more reliable sources tell me that hanging from the nipple of her magnificent left breast is a ring of the purest gold.

  “It is said that the true sign of a most harmonious visitation, master - that is, the indicator to the host’s credentials as a real man - is to find the ring amid the bed-sheets the next morning…”

  Well, that would be enough for any self-respecting prince, potentate, or warlord.

  Even if he were short, fat and balding.

  And by the time the turret guards first sighted the entourage looming in the distance, with Soho and the strongman leading the way, the chief would be rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of seeing this vision of loveliness, having a wild night in the bed, and scoring a gold bonus at the end. Perhaps even establishing a long-term relationship, possibly even marriage, and access to all those reserves of gold resting under the sand dunes?

  But little would he know that he would have to pay, and sometimes pay dearly, to even get close to fulfilling his fantasy. To begin with, he would soon discover that an underlying notion of regality is timelessness. Royalty operates in a time frame bordering on suspended animation. And once the entourage was enthusiastically welcomed through the guarded city-state walls by the astonished populace and had settled in its rooms, events would move at a slow pace.

  Days, nights, weeks would pass.

  The Queen would be a most engaging guest - bright, charming, talkative - but able to curtail any conversation with a sudden display of the most stony, regal face. She would flirt - many a lust-ridden prince would suddenly feel the brush of a knee encased in purest silk against his under the table. But she would then calm the salivating host’s post-dinner ardour with the stoic face, and tease him with a promise.

  “When the moon,” she would whisper to in his willing ear, “is directly placed in line with your palace and my homeland, then we shall order the bed to be aligned in the same direction,
and make love to honour our two great states.

  “But not until then.”

  In the meantime, little did he know that during the dinner, he had been pumped for information by her talkative and engaging private secretary, a strange little chap named Le Doux who seemed to blunder naively into conversation about all manner of things, including the delicate power structures pervading the land.

  Many a potentate woke up with a hangover the next day, not realising the night before he had blabbed state secrets, hectored the table about old political adversaries, praised current allies, and revealed hitherto sensitive plans for attack on a neighbour, or a whole series of city-states within the region.

  Little would he realise that all this information was later being scribbled down by this pleasant young man and being sent back by courier to London.

  He was not to know that Monsieur Le Doux was in fact Christopher Marlowe, presumed-dead playwright, and skilled intelligence-gatherer for Sir Thomas Walsingham, master spy of England.

  “Why do you need all this information?” Rasa asked Christopher one night as he jotted down some final notes, before sneaking out of her chamber and down to his room.

  “It’s important, it’s what I do, it’s what Sir Thomas wants,” he said.

  “But these are all little city-states, puffed up by their own importance, wary of their neighbour down the road, committed to either Catholicism or Protestantism - they have their own little battles to fight. What importance is that to England?”

  “Ah, yes, but say, they resolved some of their differences, patched up their problems, united, and started to look outward. Isn’t there and old Arabic saying? Ah, yes, ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’”

  “So?”

  “So, the last thing England needs is a united France, or a united Italy, or somesuch, ready to take us on.”

  “But you beat the Spanish?”

  “More by good fortune than good management, my dear. History will show that the fickle stormy winds of the south-west blew their Armada to its doom as much as the cannon of Drake’s mighty fleet. God bless English weather, that’s what I say!”