His Dark Lady

by Victoria Lamb

  Two

  SEATED AT HIS workshop bench, clad in an old sheepskin jacket and woollen cap, his father looked up blankly as Will ducked his head through the low doorway, glad to get out of the rain which had been falling mistily all morning.

  John Shakespeare did not recognize his son.

  ‘How may I serve you, sir?’ he asked politely, setting aside the rectangle of kidskin he had been stretching over the wooden shaper.

  The cramped workshop was just as it had been when Will had left it, the stink of new hides soaking in buckets in the passageway, fine skins hanging from the ceiling, ready to be cut and shaped, a rack of ready-made gloves for sale on the front counter, his father’s workbench cluttered with tacks, pins, several lengths of gold lace and bobbins of gold thread to match. On a separate shelf near the wall were his glovers’ tools, a confusing array of knives, clippers, shapers, moulds, wooden patterns, and the curved steel needles he used for threading rough cowmens’ mittens in the cold season. Will remembered picking up each of these curious implements with interest, when forced to work there as a boy, and asking what they were for. Now he looked on them with nostalgia, so very different from the tools he used in the theatre, the ramshackle chests of properties and costumes, the torn script rolls and the blunted knives they used for stage fights.

  ‘Hello, Father.’ He threw down his pack and stooped to embrace John Shakespeare. ‘Your grey hair’s turning white. Have I been away that long? Master Burbage swears by the liberal application of coal dust to ward off grey hairs. Though it never seems to work for him.’

  ‘Will!’ His father held him close. ‘Yes, I’ve an old man’s head these days. But at least it’s still on my shoulders. Let me look at you, son. I did not recognize you at first, standing there in your fine clothes like a stranger from the city. I see your chest is broader … and you seem to have more height.’

  ‘Perhaps I am becoming a man at last,’ Will said drily.

  ‘With three children to your name, I would have hoped you were already a man,’ his father remarked, getting to his feet, a sour note to his voice.

  ‘How is Anne?’ Will enquired idly, picking up one of the half-made gloves on the workbench and examining it. Will could see it would be a ladies’ glove, to be embroidered with gold thread and jewels, and stitched finely with thick gold lace at the cuff. It might fetch as much as twenty-five shillings from a noble buyer. ‘And my children?’

  ‘Much as they were when you were last in Stratford. The twins were crawling when you left, were they not? Yes, well, now they can both walk,’ John Shakespeare told him grimly as he plucked the soft kid glove from his hands, placing it carefully back on his workbench alongside its unstitched twin. ‘They create havoc wherever they go. Hamnet no longer wakes in the night though, Lord be praised. The sound of his cry through the walls … I swear, some nights it was all I could do not to strangle my own grandson.’

  ‘Hamnet has been unwell?’ Will asked, at once uneasy.

  ‘Not unwell, but missing his father.’ John turned, a quick smile on his lips as a slender, solemn-eyed child came to the door and stood nervously staring up at Will. ‘Ah, Susanna! See who it is? Your father has come home at last. Go fetch your mother.’ He threw out his arm as she turned to obey. ‘No, wait. Kiss your father first. He has travelled a long way and will be glad of a kiss from his eldest daughter, I’m sure.’

  Susanna came forward hesitantly, looking up at Will as though he might suddenly disappear again.

  ‘Papa?’

  Will went down on one knee to embrace his daughter, and felt her thin body quiver against his, narrow as a willow wand. Her wispy hair tickled his chin like feathers. There was nothing to the child but air, he thought. She was so fragile, he could have snapped her in two with his bare hands. But of course she was still only three years old.

  Three years and two months.

  Was it so short a time since her birth? It seemed like for ever since that hot summer’s day when his mother had come to the top of the stairs with a whimpering bundle in her arms. Indeed, this whole town was a faraway world he had half-forgotten in the noise and rumble of London.

  ‘I have missed you so much, Susanna. I left a child wailing at the door. But now I see you have grown into a beautiful and brave young lady,’ he whispered in her ear, then looked into her face. ‘Can you find your mother for me?’

  She nodded, then turned and ran out of the workshop, her reedy voice lisping, ‘Mama! Mama!’

  Will frowned, glancing out of the workshop door and along the echoing passageway into the backyard. It struck him that the place seemed curiously empty. Vats and half-barrels had been stacked against the whitewashed wall, narrowing the passage into the yard so that only a handcart could have been dragged through. A cap and leather apron hung from a peg just under the lip of the thatch, beyond which a fine autumn drizzle was beginning to darken the soil of the vegetable plot. A brown-speckled house spider had spun its web across the top of the wooden peg and was sitting in the middle of it, dancing occasionally as the breeze plucked at each gossamer thread. The yard was empty, and although he could hear voices from inside the adjoining house, they were all high-pitched female ones.

  ‘Father, where is your apprentice?’ he asked, thinking of the sullen-faced youth who had watched him with such resentment on his last few visits home. ‘What was the lad’s name?’

  ‘Edward Bowden,’ his father supplied quietly. Having covered his work tools with a cloth, he wound the unused length of expensive gold lace about his hand, pinned it carefully through the middle, then slipped the bundle into a wicker casket on the workbench. ‘He had to leave. Decided being a glover wasn’t for him.’

  Will’s eyes narrowed. ‘After all but three years served? He won’t find many master craftsmen willing to take him on if that’s how he behaves.’

  He felt an agonizing twist of jealousy and wondered again if the lad had enjoyed dealings with Anne while he was safely out of town.

  Surely, though, his father would have written to him at once if that had been the case?

  But perhaps he would have sent young Edward packing and said nothing, not wishing to disrupt their home any further by bearing tales of adultery to Will.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ John Shakespeare muttered, without any heat in his voice, and shut the lid of the wicker casket. ‘The lad changed his mind and chose to break his apprenticeship. I pressed no charges, nor asked for compensation, but let him go at once. Where would have been the sense in trying to stop him? Besides, I still hope to see one of my own boys here in the workshop alongside me. But so far not one of you has shown any inclination to enter the gloving trade. Even though life would be much easier for us all if you would only abandon this idle dream of companies and penny plays.’

  Will smiled reluctantly. ‘I’m sorry, Father. I’m a disappointment to you, I know. But once I’ve made enough to become a sharer in one of the new London companies, you’ll see it was worth the past few years of hardship.’

  ‘Shall we go through to the house?’ His father hung up his apron. ‘I can hear Anne on her way. Your mother will be fussing, too, for we were to have a simple supper tonight and now it must be the fatted calf.’

  Crossing the passageway into the main house, Will was brought up short by the sight of an even smaller child in a dirty smock sitting cross-legged in the doorway and chewing on a piece of rag. A dark curly head turned enquiringly in his direction, and a husky voice chanted, ‘Ba-ba! Ba-ba!’

  Will crouched, coming to his level. ‘Master Hamnet?’ He picked the boy up in his arms and laughed as the dark eyes glared at his face in brooding accusation. ‘You look just like your mother, about to demand why I’ve been away so long!’

  ‘And why have you been away so long?’ his wife asked, standing behind the boy.

  He looked at her, suddenly as deeply in love with her as ever, drinking in the upward curve of her brows, her pale delicate skin. Anne’s hands and apron were stained with reddis
h-black marks, and her face was thinner than he remembered, but she looked remarkably beautiful for a woman caught at her cooking.

  ‘Because I am a fool,’ Will said simply, and leaned forward to kiss her.

  The child between them screamed in indignation. ‘Ba-ba! Ba-ba!’ and rocked violently.

  Anne disengaged quickly from his kiss. She bent her head to tend to Hamnet instead, hushing the child with a few muttered words.

  Her cheeks seemed flushed as she straightened. ‘I’m glad you’re back, Will. But I can’t talk now. I was just making some blackberry and apple dumplings and cannot leave them to spoil. Excuse me, Father,’ she murmured, addressing John Shakespeare, then turned away and disappeared back into the house.

  Hamnet screamed again as soon as his mother was gone, his cheeks damp with tears, his fat lower lip trembling.

  ‘Come, Hamnet,’ John said drily, and stooped to take the child’s grubby hand. ‘Let’s see if we can find your grandmother. She may have a slice of apple for you, or a piece of bread to chew. Would you like that?’

  Will stood a while on the dim, draughty threshold where Anne had spurned him, unable to bring himself to enter the house. He felt like a child, a boy again, not sure what to do or say, lost and bewildered by Anne’s cold demeanour.

  Anne could not possibly know of his infidelity with Lucy Morgan. So what was this distance between them? Had Anne truly grown closer to his father’s apprentice than she ought to have done?

  The thought was like a knife to his groin. It had been one thing to suspect such doings in London, when she was hundreds of miles away in Warwickshire. But here she was only a few yards away in the house, close enough to be questioned, for the truth to be seen in her face. He did not want to believe it of Anne, to imagine her in bed with another man. But it would explain why John Shakespeare had sent Edward Bowden away before he had finished serving out his apprenticeship.

  Will groaned and leaned his forehead against the rough wall of the passageway. He felt sick. He began to question why he could see his wife’s eyes in his son’s face, yet nothing of himself, and surprised a terrible anger building inside. In a moment of madness, he considered how it might feel to take Anne’s slender neck between his fingers and tighten his grip until the light died in her eyes. He knew men for whom such a punishment would be just, perhaps even tacitly applauded. A man might stray from the marriage bed, and frequently did, but never a wife. Not if the woman valued her life. Yet was that how he wished this to end? For him, William Shakespeare, to lose his temper and murder his wife for her adultery? For that crime would surely follow if he allowed this seething rage to escape the confines of his mind.

  His father came back. ‘What is it? Are you unwell?’

  He could not tell his father what was in his heart, but kept his face averted. ‘I’m tired, that’s all,’ he lied. ‘Perhaps after a sleep—’

  ‘Talk to her,’ his father advised him, never slow at understanding. He put a hand on Will’s shoulder and squeezed. ‘Tell Anne how much you love her and have missed her. Women are always cold after a long absence. She’ll come around.’

  ‘Is that all it is?’

  His father shrugged, and now he could not lift his eyes to Will’s face.

  He knows the truth, Will realized. His rage began to ebb away, faced with his father’s calm reason. A memory came to him of a passage in Ovid, the death of the unfortunate Actaeon, transformed into a stag for spying on the goddess Diana and torn apart by his own hunting dogs. The divine madness of love’s jealousy had touched him today, but he would not become a beast. He was still a man, with reason and forgiveness at his disposal, and he would act like one.

  ‘Just talk to her,’ his father repeated, adding reluctantly, ‘Don’t try to sort this out in the bedroom.’

  ‘Father!’

  They both laughed, then John Shakespeare peered out under the low-hanging thatch. ‘Look, the rain has almost stopped now. Take a walk along the river with her towards Shottery, like you did when you were courting, and ask Anne to speak her mind where no one but you and God can hear. That is what a woman needs most when she is troubled. A space in which to make peace with her heart.’

  The River Avon was as beautiful as ever that autumn, greyish-white and swollen by rain, each overgrown clump of weeds streaming away in the fast-running current like green pennants under the water. Will and Anne walked along the river bank for half a mile in silence, not touching, though a few times her hand brushed his by accident and was instantly snatched away.

  Don’t try to sort this out in the bedroom, his father had told him. What had he meant by that? If Will had taken Anne straight upstairs to bed, as he had done on every previous visit home, would she have refused to grant him his conjugal rights? The thought chafed at him, and he stole little glances at her sideways as they walked, trying to gauge the depth of her disinterest.

  He still wanted her. The tug of his body on seeing her again had been proof enough of that. But would he have to force Anne to lie with him tonight? And if he did, what icy and resentful looks would tomorrow hold?

  The ground was sodden, so they sat to rest on a fallen trunk a little way from the ford. They had sat there before, though never in such poor weather. The sky was grey and unpromising, suggestive of more rain yet to come that evening. In the pasture opposite, they could hear the high, staccato whistle of the herdsman, who had come with his dogs to move the sheep; the animals were huddled together under the vast canopy of a chestnut, their hooves churning up the mud and debris of split conker shells as the two dogs hemmed them in, driving them down towards the ford for watering.

  The fallen beech trunk on which Will and Anne were sitting was partially hollow, the wood rotting slowly into the ground. When Will prised loose a piece of bark, he discovered a colony of tiny creatures wiggling beneath, small black beetles and whitish grubs, red-headed ants and centipedes.

  ‘A whole civilization in miniature, lurking in darkness under a bark sky,’ he murmured, showing Anne what he had found. It was a sight he had often delighted in as a boy, digging down to uncover intricate ants’ nests in the dirt of the backyard or peering inside hollow trees forked by lightning to see what burrowing creatures might have made their homes inside. ‘A world within a world.’

  She looked disgusted. ‘Ugh. Cover it up before they get on my gown.’

  ‘Look, is that a money spider?’ The little spider crawled over his sleeve and away across the rotting bark. He kept his voice light. ‘The auspices are good, it seems. We shall be lucky in our coffers, if not in love.’

  Anne looked at him then, her arched brows level for once. ‘I wondered when you would come to the point. What has your father been saying? He’s such a busybody. Did he write to you about me?’

  ‘No.’ Very carefully, Will replaced the piece of bark, bringing a merciful darkness back to the world of beetles and grubs. He rubbed his gloved hands together to remove the dirt. ‘Should he have done? I take it you have something to confess?’

  She remained silent, her face turned away.

  ‘Though he did tell me of Edward Bowden’s departure,’ he added, watching her profile.

  ‘And can you blame me if I looked aside at times?’ Anne asked, shocking him with her sudden bluntness. ‘You are never here these days and I am lonely. Until Susanna was born, I was content to be your wife, to carry your children and help your mother with the household. But I am not made of stone, Will Shakespeare. Our marriage bed has been cold since you left for London. I may not have a man’s needs, but I do wish for love and the warmth of my husband’s body on a winter’s night!’

  He stared, seeing the flush in her cheeks. ‘So you admit it? You have slept with this boy? This apprentice?’

  Shifting on the trunk to look at him, Anne said nothing, but gripped the sides of the fallen tree with her own gloved hands as though afraid she might fall. She was breathing rapidly, her eyes fixed on his face, her mouth working silently.

  Such small, d
elicate hands, he thought, noticing the uneven stitching on the white kidskin gloves. It was not his father’s tidy work, he realized, nor his mother’s either, who often helped with the sewing in the evenings.

  ‘Did he make those for you?’

  She flushed then, and he knew it for a sign of her shame and guilt. ‘They were a parting gift from Edward, yes.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked simply. ‘Why betray me?’

  ‘I have already told you,’ she said, and he wondered at the sudden vehemence in her voice, as though Anne blamed him for her infidelity. ‘I needed to feel alive again, not shut up in that house day after day like an old widow. Edward was always there … smiling at me, listening to me. I knew what he wanted, of course, and I never meant to let him have it, I swear on my life. It was just flattering to know that a man could still want me like that. And you were so far away, sometimes I felt like I’d dreamt you.’

  ‘Did you dream our children, too?’

  She looked at him, raising her chin. ‘What will you do to me now that you know? You can’t throw me out. It would kill your father if my shame was made public. That’s why he sent Edward away, to stop the gossips talking about us in the marketplace.’

  ‘I imagine they’ll talk anyway,’ he commented, knowing what Stratford was like when a salacious story went round about one of its residents.

  She hesitated, then laid her hand on his. ‘Not if we show them we are still together.’

  Will looked down at her gloved hand, the soft white kidskin against his own coarser cowhide.

  ‘I can understand why Edward Bowden fell in love with you and why my father sent him away,’ he remarked. ‘I was only a little older than him when we were first courting, do you remember? I was so insanely in love back then. You were everything to me, Anne. When I started touring with the companies, I would think of you every night and couldn’t wait to come home to see you again, to lie against you at night. You were my rock that first year in London. I was so hotheaded too, I would have given my life to defend your honour if any man had dared to cast a slur on it.’ He laughed. ‘Me, quiet bookish Will!’