The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (50 page)

‘Well, and now I see your lodging, at last.’ Her amused, scornful look formed. ‘But where are you in it? It might be any room in the world.’

True, perhaps, compared to her place, with the mad caged bird, the virginal that gave off soft, musical creaks even when untouched, the wooden-soled shoes kicked off so you could picture her in them, fill up her stance. But somehow he did not like leaving traces.

‘A man’s lodging, perhaps. Sufficient for me. I’m sorry I can give you no better chair.’

‘I make you apologetic, Will. I turn you all to thinking naught of yourself.’

‘No. It doesn’t need you for that, mistress.’

‘Good wine, good Rhenish. You’re growing rich, I think.’ She held the cup out to him, made him draw near to take it. Her breath was hot with the wine. ‘Will, are we not insects? That’s why I love you, you see. Because I suspect you know that is all we are, yet you carry on trying to climb the mountainous pebble.’

‘You don’t love me.’

She shrugged. ‘Yet something lies or stirs betwixt us, else why would I come here? You have a guilty look, Will Shakespeare, and yet I can’t conceive what you have done wrong. Ever.’

‘Another man said that to me once.’

‘Another?’

He allowed the smile. ‘Kit Marlowe. He was not unlike you, perhaps.’

She stood and looked down at her legs, the shape of the calf in stockings. ‘How odd this feels. You men go much more uncovered in the world than women. No hiding. Well, you do, certes, but that’s in the lovely groves up there.’ She reached up to touch his brow. Her fingers traced the megrim-groove that wouldn’t go, now; then she turned abruptly to his writing-table. ‘What are you working on?’

He snatched up the papers.

‘Why not let me see? It will be spoke in front of hundreds of people, after all: many fools like me.’

‘Then it’s different.’ He laid the papers in his trunk. ‘It’s a black piece. That’s all I’ll say.’

‘The best kind. Do you think I could pass for my brother?’

‘I could fancy your brother looking thus, perhaps.’ Her stare surprised him. ‘Is that wrong?’

She barely shook her head. ‘Is that more wine there? Give me, please. I’ve had dreams lately. And I do not allow dreams, sir. I made an order against them, long ago, when I found they made me more tired in sleep than eased. So I stopped them. Anyone can, with enough will. And yet now they come again, defying me, and I blame you. Because you make me think and feel. Because you stop me being alone in the world as I want.’

She swallowed two cups of wine.

‘Alone?’ he said. ‘No. There must be someone, somewhere. In a place, in a past, in a vision. They’re all one. It’s the only thing I believe. We live our course by a star. But no knowing when we saw the star or if we will recognise it when we see it again.’

‘Can stars be black?’ She tapped at her breast, like someone sounding for a weak place. ‘You’ve heard, I know, of the massacre in France. St Bartholomew’s Day, the year ’seventy-two.’

‘Marlowe wrote a play on it.’

‘This is not about a play. This is not a play matter. I was there. I was a girl. I was seven. Now you know my age.’ She sank to her knees on the hearth. Her eyes looked blindly heavy, like a child’s on the brink of sleep. ‘Let me repeat, I was a girl. My family was from Bordeaux. Not Paris. Perhaps here, with your plays, you think of the matter, the massacre, as in Paris only. Well, we thought that way too at first. Paris was where the fighting and the trouble happened, and the nobles coming to blows over the faith that was ours, making it a matter of power, but we – we were small, a simple Protestant family, small people pecking up their grain in the quiet farmyard.’ She stirred. ‘Tell me, what do you know of it? I would not weary you.’

‘The papists in France turned on the Protestants and massacred them. Thousands of them. That’s how I heard it as a boy. There were sermons on it. I remember Master Field, Richard’s father, said it proved the Pope was Antichrist.’

‘I didn’t see the Pope there. I saw people, mind, and he’s one, is he not? We all have that doubtful honour of humanity. It started in Paris. We heard of all this great contention on high about the Protestant question. I never thought of myself as a question. Nor my father, nor my mother, nor my brother. Huguenots, yes, that was a word, but I never thought it was a bad word. We didn’t go to the same church, we didn’t celebrate mass. Things we didn’t do – along with all the other common things we did, like eating and drinking and sending the laundry down to the stream. We were a different kind of flower in the meadow, I thought. Some red, some blue. They blow, they nod their hour in the sun. To be sure, we heard – being Huguenot – of burnings, of what the popish wanted to do to us. And there was the Queen Mother at the top, they said, the Medici witch, wanting flames, wanting an end. But still there was the harvest, and the wine, and the murrain on the sheep, and so many things in the world that saying mass was just one of many. Lost in the multitude. And it wouldn’t change because Monsieur François, who was papist, owed money to Monsieur Tourreil the butcher, who was Protestant, and Monsieur Carette, the Protestant weaver, did work for Monsieur Pellerin, the papist merchant. It was all so tangled, how could you unpick it? Tangled, that was good, I thought. I was not a very thinking girl, I believe. I liked sweetmeats and dressing my baby and listening to Grandmama’s stories. I liked being in life, I found it a good place.

‘But there were many who said that the Huguenots had too much wealth, too much power, being so few. My family was from Bordeaux, but we had moved to a village outside the city because my father had prospered as a mercer, and bought an old farmhouse and a little land and some pear-trees, and it was sweet. The high walls. The light used to sink behind them and make light-juice, I fancied, that tasted like bright pears. I made a mistake. I always thought my father loved me. He was not a man to prate of his feelings. I imagined clouds round him, like a peak. But kind, and I believed loving his daughter, though naturally his son was more important – when was it ever not so? He was the heir. In him the future lay curled. It matters so much to men, I know, the fruit of their loins, the line.’ Lifting her head she looked at him, or through him: perhaps both. ‘So we were outside the city, separate and quiet, when the news came that there were killings. Killings in Paris, well, there was always tumult there; the provinces were different. But, no, it was spreading. It wasn’t rumour. My father had friends everywhere, educated, they could write, the news was soon going round like a poison in the body. The papist French were rising up, in Paris, in Rouen, in Orléans, and they were murdering the Protestants, and it was not being stopped. It was being directed from on high, they said. Was it?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, soldiers did the killing sometimes. And priests preached sermons exhorting good papists to do the Lord’s work. But all that needed to happen, you see, was to let it happen.’ She rose and walked past him, wine-scented, stealthy, to the window overlooking Silver Street. ‘It could happen out there. A little like the time you saved me from those prentices. But with the authorities saying, instead of “Stop”, smiling, shrugging, saying, “Do as you will, good people, do as you will.”’ The window turned her voice flat and muffled. ‘Perhaps you heard the stories about the Seine being choked with the dead bodies and such. I think it was true. I think the corpses were piled about France, in those days, as the madness, or the letting go of sanity, spread. I hear they mutilated the corpses very often – though I don’t see that that matters. Death is the only mutilation.’

Will wanted wine, but his hand was too unsteady to pour from the jug.

‘We, or my parents, didn’t think it would happen in Bordeaux. We knew too many people there, it was too sensible a place. Perhaps that’s all it needs, the belief that it will not happen in this little part of the world because we are different. Which of us, after all, truly believes he will die? And my brother Robert was in Bordeaux. He was living at the house of my mother’s cousin, a silk-weaver, learning the trade. He was eleven years old, very clever, very handy. He would be a great heir to my father. He had the longest fingers I have ever seen – he could untangle anything, undo any knot. He was kind to me when we were together. I think he thought it pretty and amusing having a little sister, he who belonged so early to the man’s world. I loved him, for what that’s worth. I was a little girl, naturally I loved.

‘It was smoke that first told us. Smoke above the city. They were burning houses – perhaps, from the smell, people. It was all so sudden. And my father had his horse saddled. He was going to see … he was going to see if all was well with the Clairets, where Robert was lodging – just that, can you believe? – and bring him home if not. Such was the way he clung to innocence, but I suppose innocence is never taken gradually. It is always cut off, with blood. And then a servant came running to our house. The Clairets’ manservant. We couldn’t recognise him at first. His face was all blubbered from weeping. He looked like a great baby. Dirt too, streaks of filth. He had been hiding in the cesspit. Yes, in it. Because it was better than being found: he was Protestant too. Do you want this part? But, never mind, you must have it. It’s a long time ago. And everyone who matters in it is dead except me, possibly.

‘They were killing in Bordeaux. A priest set it off, it seems. I don’t know. I fancy it more like birds when they begin to fly south, drawing together, knowing what to do. Flocking. They dragged the Clairets out from their house and killed them in the square. A mob. A mob of their neighbours, that is. They killed them in the hot sun, it was hot, dry August, ripping them with swords and daggers. I don’t suppose it took long to do. And, yes, they ripped up my brother too. Eleven years old. He was not the youngest to die, no, there were babes at the breast, which I conceive are as easy to kill as worms or snails. Surely. Think you so?’

‘Don’t.’

Her teeth gleamed: her eyes too. ‘A question for another time perhaps. But a boy, my brother, strong, that would take a little longer. The servant heard that Robert tried to shield Madame Clairet before he was cut down, but who knows? The man was hiding at the time. Perhaps Robert wasn’t brave, perhaps he whimpered and wept as they killed him, there in the sun. There must have been a great deal of blood on the cobbles. Well, they said the rivers ran red, you know, but again one cannot be sure. You haven’t reached out to touch me, Will, and I’m glad of that, it’s so very cheap. Almost as cheap as life. I saw my father weep, for a little time. Then stop. My mother’s grief was longer, louder. She could give herself to it, perhaps. My father had to be thinking. And I – I cried too, and I wanted a little more attention for crying, for my grief, than I was getting. Because I knew exactly what I was crying for, I knew they had killed my brother. Children know a great deal. I remember a girl when I first came to London, when we shared a cramped house: she took sick with plague and said over and over, “I’m going to die,” and shook her head sadly at her mother when she said, “No, no, you’re not.” She was eight, perhaps. She died.

‘Well, we had to flee, certainly. They would soon come for us. We had to plan how to live on, while Robert’s corpse was on the heap in the town down the valley there. Someone climbed on top of the heap and sang God’s praises, I heard, but that might not be true also. The dead, though, they are real, the only reality. Robert used to embrace me sometimes, from behind, hands over my eyes, and say, “Who?” And I would say absurdities. Rodelinde de Piquemonsieur. He liked, as I said, having a sister. My father, having me, not so much. Yet still I thought … I thought I had my portion of love. So: with my mother still wailing like a rooftop cat we gathered what we could. We knew where to go. To old La Farge’s house. He was a fat, rich old merchant, who lived on the coast in a house with great gates, and he had a boat in a cove. Smuggling, they said – but La Farge had always believed this day would come and that the Protestants would have to flee France. Be ready, he always said.

‘On to the cart, then. The risk that they had got to the old man first, or that they would stop us on the road, well, it was that or wait for them to come. The servant drove. We lay under sacks. The servant kept the dirt on his face to make him look less like himself: see how life turns like a play, after all. I can remember, through my sadness and fear, feeling a little excited at bumping along the steep road hidden under sacks, and I wished Robert had been there to share it, which made me sad again. My mother moaned and moaned. I put my arms round her but it was like embracing a stone or – something dead, say. My father was quiet. So quiet. Now I’m mindful that all of us at that time were, in essence, mad with what had happened. Yes? So perhaps none of it can be said to signify. Certainly when old man La Farge saw us, his face – well, he looked a little afeared. At what he saw. But then all was quickness, urgent, doing. He had the boat ready, but there was a wait yet for a favourable tide, and so where should we wait? He said we would be safe in his house but my mother wailed that we were safe nowhere. “In France, now, no,” old man La Farge said. “I’ve seen it coming. We’ll not be the only ones fleeing.” He had friends who had already gone over to England. Where Protestants were free. The time had come, he said. And my father still said nothing. He looked like a man of chalk, as if dust would puff out from his skin. I think it was the first time I ever heard of England – yet how so? People of our faith always talked of it in those days, when there were troubles. Perhaps the word had never stood out till then, that night. They put goods on donkeys, and we went down to the cove and waited there, in the dark. I say
our faith.
I allude to something I never believed, myself, in my memory. It has always been empty, it seems. Perhaps once there was a fullness there. Here.’ Her hand hovered over her breast, stomach. ‘And then when the light came, and the tide was fair, my father spoke. He stood up, towards the shoreline, where there was still a little smoke. The donkeys were being unloaded, things thrown into a little rowboat, and the sail on the coaster was flapping and there we were, preparing to leave and flee France. Our world. It had broken that quickly. And my father picked up a bag and let it fall. Then he saw me. And he picked me up and held me up to the line of shore where the smoke was and said: “Why couldn’t you take her? Take her instead. Not my boy, not my son. I could better have spared her.” His fingers were tight and hard as they gripped me. My mother didn’t say anything. She was still weeping. Perhaps she agreed, I don’t know. After that he put me down quite softly on the sand. And then we sailed, and we were lucky, we escaped, and others followed, as you know, coming to England, and settled. Made welcome, except when hated. What a moral story. We settled at Canterbury first. That was where I first sat down, and looked at what life had shown me.’