The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (4 page)

Hempen sheets or linen, it didn’t matter.

So he turned to the next page of the Bible. He was not devout – except about reading, and this was the only book in the house. Books were precious and expensive. The parish clerk kept his locked up in a trunk in the schoolroom. Ben might have had one to borrow – but you had to get the clerk’s favour, usually extended to delicate, sweet boys, and Ben was plain. One day, he assured himself, he would have books. He would live among them night and day. It was all his desire. And though the clerk did not like his looks, he admitted that Ben was the best scholar he had ever taught.

And there Ben hungered for his future, beyond this dense drab slice of Westminster, where brew-houses smoked and fishmongers kept their heads down over the bloody slab. Hereabouts, his stepfather stood pretty high, being a master bricklayer. Beyond Charing Cross, where blaring London rose, lords and rich citizens alike were putting up houses in new, luxurious brick, and Robert Brett was busy in their service. He had an apprentice. The last had turned out bad, run off, become a handler of stolen goods, and ended up hanged; but the new one promised well, took his beatings, and would surely become a master himself when his seven years were out.

And after that, of course, there was a natural successor in the family.

Never – please, God, never. Ben had to make good his escape. Learning, learning, learning. He urged himself on. And the winter after he saw the empty giggling girl, grace descended. The clerk came home with him to see his mother, when his stepfather was at work.

‘Westminster School?’

‘Madam, you must have thought of it. To speak truth, he knows everything I do. And there is nowhere superior in the kingdom. My lord Burghley oversees it; the Queen has a special care for it. You cannot do better by him.’

Ben sat quiet. Neither looked at him: the clerk because he found him unattractive, his mother because she was not thinking of him but of someone else.

‘The cost,’ she said.

‘Being so near, you have an advantage. He can live at home instead of boarding. Yes, you will have to find him in writing-gear and books and candles. It is an expense, but surely a worthy one. And after a year, he’s eligible for a scholarship.’ The clerk sniffed. ‘It would make a vast difference to his prospects, madam. Even the universities might lie at the end of it.’

His mother sat and thought. Ben slipped away, to be sick in a corner of the yard, sick with wanting.

He was not quite sure how his mother did it. When she first told him he was to go to Westminster School, she said that a clerical connection of his dead father’s had provided the funds, in his memory. Certainly his stepfather would not have spared the money. He shook his head over the scheme; could not see the use in it. But, then, he could not see the use in Ben at all – until he was of prentice age.

As for his mother, Ben thought: I can forgive her anything, for this.

Now the world begins.
Such was the solemnity with which Ben first entered the long schoolroom. It was crowded and noisy and stank to the rafters, and he was down among the lowliest, the Oppidans, local-dwelling day boys, conscious of his rough shoes and frayed bands; and the headmaster lashed and thrashed. But he knew he was going to enjoy everything. Latin he already loved: now came stranger Greek to baffle and beguile.

‘Many boys find Greek difficult at first.’ Master Camden smiled. ‘But I’ve never known any find the difficulty gratifying before.’

With William Camden, the undermaster, perfect understanding and even intimacy. Nothing of the parish clerk: he was a long-nosed, abstracted young man, whose brown eyes were untreacherous and without desire. Patiently he supervised forty Queen’s Scholars in their noisome dormitory before retiring to his chamber above and studying until dawn put out his taper.

‘The history of ourselves.’ That was his passion. ‘Britain, land and legend and truth. The Romans walked here, Benjamin, and many a farmer turns up their coins with his plough; and there are in our western shires giant circles of stones put up by human hands of which we know nothing. The ancients took pride in their history, and we still learn from them. Perhaps we in turn may be a pattern to future ages. So my studies. I’m not so vain as to think they matter now. But if I can lay a small stone in the path of posterity—’

‘I want to do the same,’ Ben burst out.

Master Camden smiled again. ‘Well, now, leave me my scholar’s field, at least.’

‘Not the same. I don’t mean that. What I want—’ Could he say it? Yes, to this man he could; this man obliterated all thought of the whistling strap and the fat neck. ‘I want to be the most learned man in the kingdom.’

And Master Camden paused only a moment, eyebrows up, before nodding. ‘A commendable aim. But what is it you would seek to do with your learning?’

Ben ran his eyes over his schoolfellows: the stupid talking loudly, the ugly mocking themselves to make the handsome laugh. Alliances and need. He heard a farthing rolling on floorboards.

‘Make people better,’ he said.

2

The Malcontent (1582)

‘Now I’m alive again,’ Will says, turning the pages. He does not want to laugh or to cry, not exactly: he feels on the edge of some third expression, surpassing either of them.

They are in the bare, swept, godly parlour of the Field house, a little drunk but not as drunk as they mean to be. Will has supped here and now godly, black-clad Master and Mistress Field have gone, climbing the stairs to their unthinkable bed, cautioning about candles, leaving them to it. Allowing that Will and Richard still have much to talk of.

Schoolfriends, they have been separated these three years since Richard went to London as a printer’s apprentice. His master is taking a cure in the country and has given Richard a fortnight’s indulgence. At supper they drank small beer, but Richard has a secreted bottle of something fine from London, on the table now alongside his very different treasure.

‘I would have brought more.’ Richard is smallish and dark and compact, little different from when they were at school. As if he has made a decision about growing. Will’s knees graze on church pews, and nothing fits him. ‘But I could only carry so much in my pack. Now, that one’s faint, the whole batch of ink turned villainous – we thought of selling it but there’s reputation, you know. That one hung on our hands. It’s pretty but no one bought.
That
one, I don’t know what happened. There was a sort of ripple when it was pressed, and so you have to fill in the words in the middle of every line. It’s—’

‘That’s what I’m doing,’ says Will, greedy, abstracted: rude as a child. A princely gift, these loose sheets from the printer’s workshop, spoiled or unsold.
A Jest for Prentices.
Rough, deckle-edged paper, as communicative to the touch as skin. Will has read everything in Stratford: all the books borrowed of the schoolmaster, ballads and broadsides bought on fair-days.
The Mirror of True Repentance.
The paper smells, he fancies, of London, dense and hot.
The Play of the Pardoner.
He looks up, dizzy. ‘Your master prints plays?’

‘Some few. He esteems them trash for the most part. Now try this wine. Madame Vautrollier made me a present of it.’

‘Oho.’

‘Not oho. No oho about it.’ Richard pours: the liquid pearls bobble. ‘Mind, she is a magnificent creature. Your Frenchwoman, Will, is a different breed altogether – the way she carries herself … Savour it, man, don’t swallow it down.’

‘Latin.’ Will is still turning pages, wading in and out of the stream of words. ‘Damn, I’m rusty. What case is that?’

‘Ablative.’ Richard coughs. ‘Well, look, I’ve kept it up because we print a deal of Latin. Also you’re soused. Master Vautrollier has just got a patent to print Ovid. The
Metamorphoses.
Do you remember? Beautiful.’

‘I remember.’ The words on the page fade, and instead Will sees his last day at Stratford Grammar School: jokes, hand-shakings, little orations. The schoolmaster on his dais grave and saying nothing.
My father needs me at home, sir.
No one saying, indeed, that something has gone wrong – that Will who always outpaced everyone should be leaving now, when he might surely … ‘How old is she? Your Madame Vautrollier?’

‘She’s not my Madame Vautrollier. I don’t know. Older. A woman.’ Richard sips his wine, then reaches out and puts his arm round Will’s neck. ‘Pardon, Will. About school. Cess and piss on that, what happened, shame on it.’

They would often touch like this, back then – lie while reading propped against each other, in long grass. Now the gesture seems to fall short. Will pats Richard’s narrow back. ‘No matter. I do very well.’ Smiling painfully they disengage – Richard sitting back into London, Will into Stratford. ‘What became of your lute?’

Startled, Richard shakes his head. ‘Upstairs somewhere. I didn’t take it to London. No place for that in a day’s business, Will: at the press cockcrow to curfew, three hundred sheets a day else Master Vautrollier swears the devil out of hell. And then I take a taper and study till midnight. Is your heart bleeding?’

‘A drop. Go fetch it.’

‘We’ll wake the old ones.’

‘Then we’ll go out. There’s a moon. Down by the bridge – remember?’

So, with lute and bottle and flagon, they bundle out a little breathless and hilarious – though a last sobriety plucks Richard: ‘It will mean leaving the door unbarred—’

‘You forget you’re in Stratford now, not the great wicked city,’ Will says. ‘We don’t have thieves and murderers here. Only hypocrites.’

Exhilaration of being abroad in soft night, of slithering down the turfy slope by the last buttress of Clopton Bridge. Life in the dark: frogs creak like hinges, a moth blunders against his hand. Setting his back against the cool stone, Will is content for a moment just to cradle the lute: to feel its speaking shape. It came from Richard’s great-uncle, once steward in a lord’s household; he had taught Richard, who had taught Will, so that between them they could manage a dozen songs, all full of tears and cruel mistresses. His fingers search the strings for memory. He thinks suddenly of the woman at Hewlands Farm, of the upright set of her head on the slender neck: of swans and silver goblets and things perfectly made.

‘Tune it, for God’s sake, tune it.’ Richard groans. ‘The second course is all out. And the chanterelle. Sounds like a sow in farrow. Better.’

‘“If pity do not move your heart,

These tears of mine behold…”

‘How does it go on?’

‘“That ever thus do burn and smart.”’

‘“In fire I waste, whiles you are cold…” Damn. I sound like ten sows. I used to know this song backwards.’

‘You’re out of practice. And I told you, man, you’re piss-eyed.’

Will stills the strings. ‘So is it like that, Richard? The sighing and burning and wanting to die at her feet?’

‘Why ask me?’ A laugh, but moonlight finds a flash of alarm in his eyes.

‘You’re a Londoner now. It must be different. There must be – there must be women, many women—’

‘A great many women, of every condition, aye. And one sees, and often admires. But I’m a prentice, and I mean to do well. I must live cleanly. And I may not marry till my time is out. So.’

‘To be sure … but how if the killing dart strikes you – if a glance smites you with a wound there is no healing.’

‘That only belongs in songs and sonnets.’ Richard grunts. ‘Besides, in London the wound there’s no healing is likelier to strike you in your cods.’ A laugh, but Will realises he has touched the Puritan in him. Here comes the return. ‘Will, have you not bound yourself prentice to your father?’

‘No. But I live, God knows, cleanly as any prentice.’

‘I didn’t mean that. People – people wonder about him. Father says he still doesn’t come to council meetings. Some say he fears arrest for debt. They even excused him the poor-rate last session. Yet he can’t have lost so much, surely? He still trades—’

‘Well, you know as much as me, it seems. Do you suppose he takes me into his confidence?’ Will lays the lute down on the grass, with a momentary picture of himself lifting it on high and smashing it. Not a good thing to do: but clear-cut, at least. ‘Two years since, he sold off the last of my mother’s property. No doubt the shades of her old Arden kinsfolk wailed at it, but I think most of his creditors were satisfied. What happened? I don’t know.’ And that would be the worst shame of all for my father, Will thinks, if I were to know. ‘I believe he overreached. He had risen so high and it was all so golden – he even made application to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms. John Shakespeare, gentleman. Then suddenly he stopped talking of it. I know he burned his fingers trading wool. Perhaps there were other misadventures … Richard, do you think it possible that a man may be doomed to ill-fortune? Nature and circumstance meeting in him, so potently, with such black perfection, that there is no escape?’ Another moth comes and alights on his sleeve: he cups it in his hand. ‘He may do what he will. There is no escape.’

‘A pagan notion. Will, there are whispers that your father cleaves to the old religion.’

‘Only whispers? Come, this is Stratford, where we bawl our innuendoes over the fish-slab.’ Will lets the moth go.

‘Will – is he papist? Aye, I know, I shouldn’t ask. And I honour him still, whatever the truth, and so does my father, though we’re so differently affected. Only I fear for you.’

Will breaks into such a shout of laughter that Richard jumps. ‘Sorry. Oh, you needn’t fear that. Trust me.’ The old religion? Perhaps. His mother sometimes swears by Our Lady, and occasionally she and his father pray privately together. And this suspicion is much in the air lately: Will has heard of these shadowy men landing from Rome with their pockets full of Catholic writings, moving about the country, moving from house to house. Not difficult to imagine his father warming to it. In the days of his glory he was a public man, doing for the Queen public and Protestant things. Now, an outsider, he may well seek to wrap himself in all the outsider’s bitter comforts. Every man’s hand is against me – and, if not, I shall make it so.