Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard (2 page)

That was unusual, but I could tell that he had something to say to me, and was having difficulty. No surprise in that, for he does not like dealing with situations which may involve personal feelings. It is well known that he has no difficulty in matters of business and is reputed to be a shrewd trader in cattle, sheep and grain. In personal matters, however, he is uneasy, though amiable and kind-hearted to a
fault, those last two qualities inherited from his mother, a woman as well-natured and benevolent as you would find on this earth, as different from the old squire as cheese to chalk. I guessed on Christmas Day that Mr. Walter wanted to discuss my position as housekeeper at Easton House, but I didn’t say anything at first. Early on, I discovered that in service you must never presume to know what your employer is thinking; you must constantly feign ignorance and say little unless asked. So I sipped the brandy and waited. I had drunk two glasses of ale with my dinner and so was feeling merry enough, though watchful all the same.

Mr. Walter stared out the window at the bare trees and the grey sky. He may have remarked on the possibility of snow by nightfall and I may have replied that I thought it too cold to snow, but I don’t really remember. At length, however, he said quite unexpectedly that I was never to worry about a place to stay. “Your home will always be here, Linny,” he said. “Don’t ever fret about that.” The truth is I never
had
fretted about it, had never entertained the idea of the Eastons putting me out on the road after my long years of service. I have known such things to happen and in this very shire, but not, I believed, in the house of Walter Easton. It was comforting, however, to hear his words, and I smiled and thanked him. Then he asked me how I was feeling. Charlotte, it seems, had mentioned my failing eyesight.

“We are all getting up there,” he said, and laughed as if our aging was some coarse jest played upon us by Providence, which for all I know may be true. I often think so with certainty when I suffer pains from the gravel in my kidneys. But I told Mr. Walter my health was tolerable, though far from what it once was. It might soon be time to rest from my labours. He seemed pleased to hear it.

“Good, good, good,” he said, and offered more brandy, which I took. We both sat back in quiet and looked out upon the grey afternoon, content enough in our own ways. What I gathered from this meeting was that plans were afoot to replace me, but that I would have my room and small comforts and remain with the family. This to me was the best course, for in truth Easton House itself now seems exhausted in spirit, and I am no longer much interested in setting tasks for girls like Emily Backhurst. I feel I am entitled to some rest in my seventieth year.

At one time there were thirteen of us living under this roof, and in those days I earned every penny of my wages. When the first four children were young, and the squire and Mrs. Easton alive, there were eight of us in service to the family: the housekeeper at the time, a Mrs. Smith; the cook who preceded Mrs. Sproule and a cook’s maid; a manservant, Harvey; two housemaids; a gardener; and myself, nursemaid to the children in those early days. That makes fourteen, but the gardener lived in one of the labourers’
cottages. There were parties and dances, Christmas masques and harvest festivals. Noise and laughter and tears in darkened corners with the girls in love; in brief, the clamour and confusion and sometimes gaiety of life itself. And then, within a few years, it all came asunder.

The two girls, Mary and Catherine, born two years apart after Mr. Walter, and inseparable, were taken from us by a pair of gospellers, the Lawford brothers, Cyrus and John, who came up from Bristol in the summer of 1629 to stay with a well-to-do aunt in Oxford. The story was they were seeking money from her to pay expenses for travel and settlement in America, where they hoped to go the following spring on an expedition organized by one John Winslow. He and his followers were discontented with religious life in England at the time, and hoped to build a more zealous community of believers in the New World. That, at least, is what the brothers always talked about when they visited Easton House. The girls had met them at a religious meeting in Oxford, possibly at the aunt’s house, I am not certain. But the four young people were soon courting, and it became clear that both girls were smitten by these pious fellows with their plain black dress and severe manner. They were handsome enough, I suppose, if your taste runs to tall, sallow-skinned young men with bushy eyebrows mouthing Scripture a good deal of the time. I didn’t much like them, but then, I could see
how they were going to take the girls from us. I could understand their appeal for Mary, who had always been serious-minded, but Catherine? Such a gay, lighthearted girl who had always loved dancing and parties. Yet what do we truly know of even those who are close to us?

That October the two couples were married in St. Cuthbert’s and left at once for Bristol, where they spent the winter, returning to Easton House in March for a brief visit before travelling down to Southampton and embarking for Massachusetts Bay. By then Catherine was pregnant and Mrs. Easton already stricken by thoughts of all she would miss in her daughters’ lives. I remember the day they left, Catherine saying at the front door, “We’ll meet again in Heaven, Mother.” And poor Mrs. Easton in tears. Then they were gone, the coach disappearing down the avenue between the elm trees to the Oxford road.

Nicholas was only fifteen at the time, and how he missed his sisters. But the genuine loss was Mrs. Easton’s, who despite the prospect of a reunion in Heaven seemed broken in body and spirit by the loss of her girls. With the passing weeks [it seemed to rain most days, as I recall] she grew increasingly forlorn and an ague took hold of her and would not let go. The doctor bled her, to no good effect, and she continued to weaken. I myself attended to her chills and fevers, but by the end of April she too was gone. She had
been a sweet, accommodating presence in the household and a woman who, I believe, gave quiet counsel to her husband and kept him on a steady course.

The squire took his wife’s death badly and for a long while succumbed to drink. Mr. Walter, only then in his twenties, had to manage the estate mostly on his own: collect the rents, plan the seeding and harvesting, oversee the labourers, buy and sell animals. But he learned, and quickly too. Those were hard times for him, with indifferent crops and falling prices, saddled with a father who was often drunk by the noon-hour bell; and there were older men at the markets eager to outwit the young man. I give Mr. Walter full credit, for he never lost his head, though I am sure that firm but kind temperament he had drawn from his mother was sorely tested.

In time the squire came to his senses and we were all grateful to see him sober and working again alongside his eldest son. Then, to our surprise and chagrin, he did something entirely foolish for a man of fifty-eight years. A case can be made that a well-to-do widower like Henry Easton needed a wife; men like him need women to keep their feet on solid ground—though I doubted he would ever again find one as strong and capable as his first. And in fact he made an imprudent choice. Or should I say his loins and not his head made the choice—for he began to court a Miss Pentworth from Islip who was visiting friends near Woodstock. He met
her at a neighbour’s wedding, where I was told by one in service to the household that the young woman in a sky blue taffeta gown was radiance itself, all blonde curls and blue eyes, a pale golden beauty and no argument from anyone about that. But she was barely twenty years old. Some said she claimed to be a year or two older, but this same person in the household told me that Anne Pentworth was barely nineteen.

The squire was enchanted by her beauty, though as far as I could see she had nothing else to offer. A high, prancing laugh accompanied her everywhere and she seemed happiest while talking and giggling among her young friends about gowns and shoes. Or so I observed when she visited Easton House. I think the girl’s father was behind it all, eyeing the squire’s lands even as he walked about with his hands behind him, smiling at old Henry, who looked as attentive as a schoolboy with his master. A sight to behold, for this man Pentworth, who would become the squire’s father-in-law, was at least ten years younger. Nor do I believe Abel Pentworth had anything but promissory notes to his name. I was told he ran a small shop in Islip, but to me he had the furtive look of a man forever in debt. It was ludicrous; the squire was clearly not in his right mind, though it would have been folly to approach him about a change in course. He was under the spell of that young woman’s beauty, a state described by my father in
A Midsummer-Night’s Dream
when he puts into the mouth of Theseus the best description of lovesickness in the language:

My father, of course, was referring to the young lovers in a forest near Athens. But how graver the malady when it afflicts an older man with a much younger woman. As poor Nicholas said to me on the eve of the wedding. “Dear God, Linny, she’s only a year or two older than I am—and must I now address this witless young thing as ‘Mother’?”

Within the year the squire got a child upon her, but the poor woman was small and the birth difficult. I remember her yet being worn down by those long, effortful hours, her light hair splayed across the pillow, the sweat on her upper lip, the desperate howling as I helped the midwife work the child from her mother’s exhausted body. Anne held her daughter but briefly, then closed her eyes forever. The squire was below, but his young wife’s cries had driven him to the brandy again, and he could only pace about and curse.

When I went down with the news, he was staring into the fire and asked me if the child would live. I said she would if we got in a wet nurse, a woman in one of the cottages would do, and the maidservant had already gone to fetch
her. The old man’s back was to me and when I asked him for a name he waved me away. “You give the child a name, Aerlene,” he said, and so I did and called her Charlotte Anne. Two days later we buried her mother in the churchyard of St. Cuthbert’s.

The squire didn’t take to the child. It was unnatural and unfair, but I believe he couldn’t help himself. Perhaps he had truly loved that young woman and this child’s life was a constant reproach to him. Whatever the reason, he became a silent and disappointed old man, watchful and suspicious, his mind often muddled with drink, scarcely bothering to look upon his child in her cradle. He soon gave up on everything, and Charlotte was barely a year old when Henry Easton died in his sleep. I found him early one morning slumped in his chair in the drawing room, where he had been all night drinking brandy.

Charlotte has no memory of her father and when as a child she used to ask about him, I embroidered my tale for her benefit, relating how much her father had fussed over her as a baby. His death, I told her, had been in bed, where he had quietly gone to sleep.

So for the past several years, there have been just Charlotte and Mr. Walter and Mrs. Sproule and myself living in Easton House. Emily lives in the village and comes and goes each day; the gardener, Johnson, son of old John who was here when I first arrived, lives in the cottage his
father once inhabited. As I have said, the two older girls, Mary and Catherine, live in Massachusetts and send us their Christmas letters each year. Both have prospered in their new circumstances and I marvel as I read their accounts of life in America. In the early days, I pictured them living on the edge of vast forests amid savages, but in their letters over the years they write of fine homes on streets with shops and churches and the general pleasantries of town living. Boston, it seems, is much like London, though I gather not nearly as large. Mary’s husband, Cyrus Lawford, died a few years ago and she is remarried to a clergyman. But reading their letters is like receiving news from another planet and the girls I once told stories to and whose tears I used to dry with my apron now seem like strangers. Their long-ago journey, thousands of miles across the ocean, seems almost unimaginable to those of us here in Worsley, where people seldom stray farther than Oxford, nine miles away. The well-to-do may go as far as Bath or Bristol and sometimes to London, but most of us stay put.

My mother was hardly well-to-do but she went to London once, and there she met my father, and next week when my little amanuensis returns, I hope to record as best I can what Mam told me about her life.

I must first, however, amend an error in my foregoing account of Easton House and its history. The amendment came to me in the midst of one of my thrice-nightly pisses.
The man who led that expedition to America, the voyage that carried our girls away from us forever, was not called Winslow. His name was Winthrop. John Winthrop. Is it not strange how a word or a name, snagged on some impediment beneath the current of our memories, becomes unloosed and rises to the surface, where we reclaim it? And this may happen at the oddest times. At three o’clock in the morning, for instance, crouched over a chamber pot.

F
ROM AN EARLY AGE
I wondered who my father was. Other children had fathers. Who and where was mine? Mam and I lived in Worsley with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Jack, who owned a draper’s shop in Woodstock, a mile away. He walked there to his work each weekday and Mam walked with him, for she measured and sewed linen in the back of his shop behind a curtain. As a small child, I waved goodbye to them each morning as they set forth. At first I thought Uncle Jack was my father, for unlike his wife, who was cold and distant, Uncle Jack treated me kindly and sometimes brought home treats, making me swear not to tell Aunt Sarah.

One day when I was likely no more than three, I watched Mam leave with my uncle and then asked Aunt Sarah if Mam was married to Uncle Jack and if he was my father. And if that were so, why did I call him “Uncle” and how did Aunt Sarah come by her name? My aunt was a tall,
spare woman, handsome in her own severe way. When I think of it, she could, at least in looks, have been a sister to the Lawford brothers. I don’t believe I ever saw her smile above once or twice in her life. Her entire recreation was preparing for Heaven; she read her Bible aloud each day—the raising of Lazarus was a favourite—and I can still recite that passage from John’s gospel word for word, since I listened to it so often as a child. When, however, I asked my questions that particular day, I remember how her face grew dark with anger. She told me that Uncle Jack was most certainly not my father and it was foolish of me to think so. She and my uncle had not been blessed with children and had taken Mam and me into their house out of Christian charity. As for me, I was, as she put it, base-born. I don’t recall being especially upset by these revelations, nor did I bother even to ask after the meaning of
base-born.
I imagine I was far too young to be anything other than puzzled by it all. Still, I carried the memory of how my questions that day had somehow offended Aunt Sarah, making her face grow dark, and so I was careful thereafter not to broach the subject of my father again.