Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard (10 page)

“‘She was so unhappy in that brewer’s house. She wanted to go back to Coxton because she was finding it hard to keep that boy’s hands off her and she feared he would try to board her one day while she was cleaning his room. She was in mortal terror of having a child by him and being put out on the street, and she’d tell me all this as we lay abed. And one night I took her in my arms and kissed her so that we lay together, and she enjoyed that and afterwards I vowed to her that if that boy laid a hand on her, I would break him in two, and she just cried like a child in my arms until she slept. And that night is the sweetest memory of my life and I’ll say no more about it.’

“Mary sounded angry, as if warning me or anyone to deny the truth of her statement, and again I could see this strange mix of tenderness and threat in her nature. But her story had caught me up and I asked her where Sally was now. Were they still together?

“You know, Aerlene, how I enjoy a tale that ends well, though I know in my heart that most true ones don’t. And so it was with Mary’s. She told me that one night Sally left. ‘Just like that,’ said Mary, snapping a thumb and finger. ‘And not a word to me about it, and that was hurtful. Before leaving, she took some silverware. She might
have settled for something lighter, linen or jewels, but I suppose she was fearful and in a hurry to be away. So she was going to walk back to Coxton with a bundle of stolen silverware on her back, poor little mutt.

“‘Needless to say, she was soon caught and taken to Bridewell. I visited her there. Brought her food and what little money I could spare, but she was never sturdy and already looked little else but skin and bones, her eyes so large and dark. They’d flogged her too, with all the fishwives jeering, and that took the heart out of her. I don’t think she was interested in living after that, and she wasn’t nearly strong enough for a place like Bridewell. I should have stolen something myself and gone in there to look after her, but I didn’t, and I never saw her again. When I went back, they told me she had taken a fever and left in a winding sheet. Already in the ground and no one could tell me where. London has plenty of stories like that, Elizabeth. This city can break you easily enough if you have no money or friends.’

“I didn’t need to be reminded, for by then I was worried about overstaying in that tavern. I was sure the streets were dark by now and the Boyers would be waiting for me.

“As if reading my mind, Mary said, ‘You’d better be on your way soon. Your Puritan keepers will be wondering where you are.’

“Just then, a man stopped at our table. He wore a fine doublet and white silk stockings. Bending down, he kissed
Mary’s cheek. ‘As my life is my own, it’s Mary the Great. I haven’t seen you in weeks. How are you faring, my dear?’

“‘Well enough, Tom,’ she said, and praised the man for a recent performance. ‘Best I’ve ever seen you do.’

“He preened. ‘Kind of you to say so, but it was a trifle only. A mere few minutes in a man’s lifetime.’

“‘Even so,’ said Mary, ‘you were good, Tom. Praise paid where praise is owing.’

“‘Bless you, Mary.’ He bent again to kiss her. ‘I intend a visit soon. Perhaps next week.’

“‘Send a boy ahead with your time.’

“‘You may depend on it.’

“After he left us, Mary said, ‘That fellow is in Marley’s
Tamburlaine
and he was good. I told no lie. They are all good and especially Ned Alleyn. Would you like to see it, Elizabeth?’

“‘I would,’ I said. ‘I have Wednesday and Sunday afternoons to myself.’

“Mary startled me and others around by smacking the table with one big fist. ‘Done, then. We’ll go this Wednesday. Meet me at St. Magnus Church at noon. Now listen,’ she added, leaning forward. ‘At first you may not recognize me but don’t alarm yourself, because I will speak my name.’ When I asked her why I wouldn’t recognize her, she only shrugged. ‘Let’s get you back to your quarters. I have an engagement, but I’ve arranged for a boy to see you home.’

“When I told her about my first experience with street urchins, she said, ‘Well, you were just off the pack train, so what did you expect? But that carrier should have known better. This boy will do what I tell him and he’s been paid, so give him nothing. He’s strong too and will see that you come to no harm.’”

Mam told me then she was worried walking back with the boy. “I knew I had overstayed my time allowed, and I feared Eliza’s tongue. But after the boy delivered me to the shop and I knocked, Philip himself came to the door in his shirtsleeves. He let me in and nothing was said, and that was that. I can’t tell you how relieved I felt.”

The following Wednesday Mam walked to St. Magnus Corner, wondering, so she told me, if Mary Pinder earned her living in a house of sale. All week she had thought about the man who had stopped at their table in the Dolphin on Saturday night, and then about Mary telling her later that she had an appointment. Mam asked, did I know what she was talking about? I said I thought I did. I knew a girl in the village a year or two older than me, dull-witted but comely enough, who, it was said, allowed boys to put their things into her down by the riverbank for a groat or an apple core. Was it not something like that? I asked, and she said it was, though in London men paid more than a groat or an apple core. I told her I couldn’t imagine having boys or men poking their things into me, and she said I was well advised to hold to that opinion.

As Mam told me about this part of her life, I imagined her walking along the London streets on that September afternoon. She must have felt buoyant with hope for a little happiness in her life; she was going to a playhouse with a new friend, and what did it matter if the friend did sell her favours? Mary Pinder, at least, was no street bawd. As Mam said, “I saw any number of those forsaken souls hanging about street corners, poorly dressed and looking ill used.”

As the noon bell tolled, Mam was watching out for Mary, while being jostled by others and trying to affect a knowing air, as if she did this every afternoon. “Then,” she said, “I was surprised by a gloved hand on my arm, and there in front of me was this large gentleman with a small moustache in a broad face beneath a hat.

“‘Well now, Miss,’ he said. ‘On time, I see.’ A snort then of familiar laughter. ‘Yes, Elizabeth, my dear, it’s Mary,’ and I had to laugh.

“‘So help me God, Mary,’ I said. ‘You gave me a fright. I thought I was being taken for a pickup.’

“‘Well now,’ said Mary, leaning closer, ‘were I really a man I would ask you, and since I am playing the part today, I shall. Will you along to the playhouse with me, Miss?’

“‘I will,’ I said, and Mary took my arm.

“‘And how do you fancy me, by the way?’ she asked. ‘Am I not handsome?’

“Looking at her in the velvet doublet and breeches, the stout legs in silk hose with buckled shoes, the broad feathered hat, I had to smile.

“‘Am I not in the fashion, girl? Have you ever seen better in that hat shop of yours?’

“‘I don’t believe I have,’ I laughed.

“‘There you are, then,’ she said as we made our way through the crowd, Mary parting others before us with no apology.

“‘But why those clothes?’ I asked, though Mary pressed a thick finger across my lips as we walked. To those nearby it could have been taken for nothing more than a flirting gesture.

“‘Here we are,’ said Mary, ‘crossing London Bridge on a fine afternoon. Off to see Mr. Marley’s play, a gent with his lady.’

“Mary then bent towards me as if in intimate talk, because as she said, going to the playhouse was a great occasion for courting. Gentlemen took their mistresses to the plays to better acquaint themselves.

“‘And look around, Elizabeth,’ she said. ‘It’s not only gentlemen about with their lady friends. It’s the rabble too you’re in company with, so you’re better off with a man. A woman by herself is fair game and two are not much better off unless one of them has my proportions. Look at all these unruly fellows half-filled with ale. You’re a pretty
sight, girl, and I’ve watched some of them eyeing you. In no time they’d be asking about your tariff. How much for a two-minute stand-up against an alleyway wall on the other side? If you were on your own and in the pit, they’d think nothing of standing behind you and rubbing their pricks against your backside. Having it off while your eyes are on the players. Oh yes, I have seen them at such things. But they’ll not lay a hand on you today, or they’ll get a cuff from me and it will smart where it lands. Besides,’ she added, ‘I enjoy the disguise. And men sometimes like this too, this dressing-up business. It’s part of the game, Elizabeth. Part of London.’

“And on we went as Mary parted others before us, passing apprentices in their blue jackets and cloth caps, and older, scruffier types, masterless men who had scrounged a penny for an afternoon’s escape at the playhouse or bullring. When we reached the playhouse, the pit was already filled and people were quarrelling for space. The fruit and ale vendors had scarcely room to peddle their wares, holding their baskets aloft as they made their way. ‘You couldn’t make room for an eel down there,’ said Mary, paying two pennies more for gallery seats.

“‘We’re better off up here,’ she said as she settled herself on the bench beside a gentleman whispering to his lady friend.

“Below us the groundlings were jostling one another and laughing, drinking bottled ale and cracking hazelnuts,
spitting out the shells and shouting as they stretched their necks for a better view of the stage. But even in the galleries there was much roistering and the exchange of coarse jests among the lawyers and merchants’ sons and courtiers. Mary nudged me with her elbow so I would glance at the man with his hand beneath the woman’s skirts.

“‘They like to bring their lady friends,’ Mary whispered, ‘or whoever to the playhouses. Watching the plays is supposed to influence their appetites, if you take my meaning, Elizabeth.’

“It was like being in another world sitting there with Mary Pinder. Only three months before, I had been in Worsley avoiding the eyes of neighbours and the taunts of tavern oafs inviting me out to the woods and meadows, putting up with your tedious aunt and the pitying looks of your uncle. Now I was surrounded by people who knew neither me nor what I had done; for all that, they might well have done worse. Soon I was transfixed by the blare of the trumpets announcing the beginning of the play.

“When Tamburlaine, in his crimson hose and doublet, strode on stage, leading his beautiful captive, the daughter of the Egyptian King, the crowd gasped at his magnificence, and Mary whispered in my ear, ‘That’s Ned Alleyn. Is he not a fine specimen of manhood? And listen to the tongue on him, Elizabeth!’”

Mam told me the play was noisy and colourful, with
flags flying and cannons roaring and blood-soaked men groaning as they died on battlefields, and everything governed by Tamburlaine’s ruthless will. “But,” she said, “I had trouble keeping track of all the names and the people and where they came from.”

“But was there poetry in it?” I asked. “Were there words to recall?”

She shrugged. “I suppose there were. This Tamburlaine was forever bragging about himself being once a lowly shepherd who was now conquering the world.

“And that,” said Mam, smiling, “reminded me of the old woman by the river and I began to laugh, and when Mary asked me what was so funny, I told her about the fortune teller who said I would meet a shepherd who would become a king. And there he was in front of me, a player pretending it was all true.

“Mary derided me, just as you might have done, Aerlene. ‘Of course, she told you that,’ said Mary. ‘She probably told a hundred others too for a penny a turn. She saw the play herself, or more likely heard the story, and so she knew most people wanted to see it. She took your penny for telling what many already knew. You are green as lettuce, Elizabeth, and the old fraud could see it. There’s enough like you in London to make a thousand beggars’ livelihoods.’

“She was right,” said Mam. “But I didn’t care. That
afternoon was happiness to me and I loved it all. The gentlemen and ladies in their finery, the apprentices in the pit throwing their caps in the air at the end of the play, the excitement of it all. It wasn’t the play itself so much. All that killing and blood was not to my liking. But it was everything around it that I enjoyed. This, I thought, was living.”

I remember Mam stopped and looked at me. “And since you’re wondering—and I can see from that pinched, quizzical face of yours that you
are
wondering—it was on that afternoon, on our walk back across London Bridge, that Mary Pinder first mentioned your father.”

“And what did she say about him, Mam?” I asked.

“Well, Mary told me that a week before, she had met a pleasant young man apprenticed to the Queen’s Players. ‘Now usually, Elizabeth,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t commend an apprentice player, as they’re mostly rapscallions, but this fellow seems different and I fancy myself no bad judge of men. He’s newly arrived in London, not above six weeks or more, for they were touring this summer past down in the south, Canterbury and Rye and other towns. But they were in the Dolphin last Monday celebrating someone’s birth date, and this young man was sitting at a table next to mine, looking on and not saying much. I knew many of the players and we had our usual jests one with the other and soon they fell to playing cards, and while they were at it, this young fellow asked me what part of Gloucestershire I came from,
as he recognized my speech right off—and me in London now five years!

“‘When I said Coxton, he told me he knew it, for years ago when he was just a boy he’d gone there with his father who dealt in wool at the time. They’d visited the very manor farm I’d worked at as a dairymaid. His father, he said, was a brogger. That is to say, he didn’t have a licence to deal in wool, but there was good money in it then, and some of the farmers, like our squire, looked the other way and got their price. Will said he was only eleven or twelve at the time, but he remembered the farm and the visit. He told me they had a meal at the manor house, he and his father, before they set off for home. He was so glad to meet someone from that part of the country. Oh, we must have talked above an hour on country ways, for he is from Stratford in Warwickshire. Well spoken too, and not one for carousing. He made his only tankard last the night. I asked him how he came by London, and he told me he’d joined the troupe in Stratford and they had been travelling all summer and were only now settled in London these past six weeks or so. He is working at the theatre and we talked a good deal about plays, including the very one we’ve seen this afternoon. But I could see he wanted to talk more about the countryside, which I believe he misses, for he spoke so feelingly of the woods and meadows of Warwickshire. These past few days I have been thinking, Now here is a young man well suited
for Elizabeth, who also misses her columbines and daisies. And truthfully, I don’t believe there’s any harm in this Will Shakespeare, so why shouldn’t you share some time together and see what happens? The rest lies in your own judgment. I told him about you, Elizabeth, a pretty young widow from Oxfordshire, I said, and he told me he would like to meet you. He will be at the Dolphin next Saturday about six in the evening. Now what do you say to all this?’