The Playmakers (33 page)

She would fondly recollect the time she
dramatically unwrapped herself from the curtain that hid their
little bed from the living area, to present herself stark naked to
him. And how his eyes had nearly popped out his head, not to
mention something else out of his trousers, and how their
once-passionate love, borne out of days bouncing in the haystack,
had been rekindled until the next pregnancy came along.

Pregnancy.

Babies.

Ah yes, the children. They hadn’t really
helped the situation. Susanna, arriving but a few months after
their hastily contrived marriage, and the twins in 1585, born on
the fateful day he just up and left.

He had always made it clear to her that he
felt he was too immature for all that domesticity, too young to be
a father, too naive to be caged into parenthood.

“I don’t understand babies,” he would say.
The situation was never helped when she would retort, “Oh, really?
You used to chase one…”

Yes, yes, yes,
Anne
Shakespeare thought,
therein lies the real nub of
the matter.

She knew that deep down in his heart, William
had always been pining - or lusting, more likely - for the other
Anne. The dead Anne. The tiny, young Anne Whateley, with her pretty
face, bell-like laugh, and minuscule waist, that had sent him
cross-eyed with love from the first time he saw her and whom he had
publicly declared he was going to marry until, until, until ...

Well,
Anne
Shakespeare often thought,
is it my fault he
knocked me up in the haystack, thus ruining his plans to marry Anne
Whateley? No. It’s not.
Then a little smile would crease her
tight lips and she would conclude,
Not entirely,
anyway …

She had been certain that during their
tumultuous marriage, there were times when they had been making
love that, in his mind, he was not loving her, but loving the other
Anne. She had heard, via the gossip of Polly and the other ladies
down at the market, that men do that sometimes - that they imagine
they are with someone else, the one they really want to be with, to
maintain their excitement and, well, get the job done.

It was a spooky feeling having three under
the blankets - her, William, and the spirit of Anne Whateley.

But there was never any proof of this.

“What a pity her name was Anne, also,” she
confided in Polly one day. “If he had called out ‘Ohh, Frances,’ or
‘Ohh, Maria’ or whatever, in the moment of conjugal bliss, instead
of ‘Ohh, Anne,’ then I would have known who he really was thinking
of.” And, she vowed, she could have then crossed her legs, squeezed
his balls between her farm-girl horse-riding thighs like a pair of
nuts between a nutcracker.

“At least he never cried out, ‘Oh, Frank, or
Oh, Joseph,’” Polly said, crinkling her ruddy face, and they burst
into laughter.

Whatever it was - the arrival of the twins,
their daily struggle, her rural handsomeness as compared to Anne
Whateley’s appealing beauty, maybe the fact she was much older than
him - whatever the reason, his departure had been sudden, swift,
unexpected.

The memory of that morning was still clearly
etched in her brain. He had staggered up the stairs of their little
above-shop rooms, filthy, hung-over, aggressive - and late for the
birth of his own child. Which, as it turned out to be, had become
two.

It was typical of his
uncaring ways,
Anne thought.
There I was,
having his babies, another two mouths to feed, and he was out
getting drunk with his cronies.

But when the pot flew across the room and hit
him - this time, thrown by his mother - it was the final straw. He
up and left.

Now, after all these years, was it so bad
that just occasionally she thought about him, wanted to know where
he was?

Oh, she had heard some interesting tales
along the gossip trail. How he had joined some sort of acting
troupe or other, and travelled all over England. How he had done
very well out of that, to the point that the troupe had moved on to
London. How in the big city he was achieving fame as a writer, a
situation she simply could never comprehend, seeing as throughout
their time together William Shakespeare could do little more than
put a few rudimentary words down on paper in a spidery hand.

Someone came back to Stratford one day and
said they had spotted him going through Taunton, carrying a sign,
promoting the show, behind a dwarf.

“That’d be right,” she said. “That’s our
William - always let someone else go in front and cop the reaction,
first.”

“Ugly as sin it was,” the witness told Anne.
“Funny looking thing with a head like wot you see poking off the
corner of a church.”

“Are we talking about the dwarf or
William?”

“Get away with you. There was your William
struttin’ along behind him with a sign, pitchin’ like, telling the
people how great the show was.”

“Pitching?”

“Pretty good he was at it, and all. The show
was packed out, and he seemed to be well-rewarded by the owner, a
fat fellow with a big voice.”

When she heard ‘well-rewarded’ she had
pricked up her ears. Perhaps a reward would come her way after all.
Maybe at the end of the line she would get something significant in
return for all the effort she had put in. Not the least of which
was the constant care of Hamnet - and the money she had borrowed to
try and cure his illness.

From the day he was born, the male of the
twins never really got a firm foothold on the rocky cliff-face of
life. He had cried for months on end as baby, refusing her milk,
bringing up food, coughing and spluttering. His brown eyes were
always lacking spark, his thin jowls pasty coloured, his little
legs and arms without strength. His hair was always lank and
dank.

When he screamed through the night, Anne used
to wish she had someone with her that she could hand him over to,
just for five minutes so she get away from him and try and get some
rest. Then, she used to think that maybe it was better that William
was, in fact, not around to hear it, and complain, and perhaps even
get violent like some of the other fathers did when an ailing baby
moaned all night.

“He’s a sickly child,” she used to tell her
mother-in-law, Mary Shakespeare, when she came to visit. “I don’t
know what to do about him. The doctors say they can’t find
anything. But what would they know? People drop dead like flies
from the Plague, and they have not a clue what to do about it.”

“He’ll grow out of it,” Mary would say, but
never with any real conviction in her voice.

The two women had soldiered on together,
forging a practical bond out of the otherwise difficult
circumstances surrounding their links with Our William, as his
mother would call him. Mary may well have been distressed and
disgusted that their courting in the haystack had led to the
unwanted pregnancy and rushed marriage. But she never mentioned it,
nor, even if she may have preferred the other Anne as her
daughter-in-law, did she ever display any malice.

Instead, Mary Shakespeare, mother of eight of
her own children, simply, “Got on with it”, doing the best she
could to ensure that her grandchildren and their mother had the
best support she could muster.

She knew what it was all about. Her last
child, Edmund, had been born in 1580, more than twenty-two years
since her first, Joan, meaning that Uncle Eddy was barely three
years older than William and Anne’s oldest, Susanna.

“Children are like that,” Mary said to her
one day, as she gently surveyed the pale, sickly countenance of
Hamnet and stroked his lank hair. “You bring them into this world,
you do your best, some are taken by God before they are due, some
go on to make you proud, and there’s always one …”

“Yes?”

“One child, my dear Anne, that just simply
breaks your heart.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Samuel Davidson couldn’t understand it.

Here he was, a grown man, a strong man, a man
who had been able for years to thrill audiences with his feats of
amazing power. And before that, as a guard who could endure hours
of monotonous standing on his feet, mixed with moments of intense
physical action fighting off interlopers. Never once had he
flagged, nor felt below par. With muscle, sinew, sword and
crossbow, he had always served his masters well.

But, for weeks now, now he had been feeling
sick.

A gnawing feeling had wormed its way into his
stomach. His once awe-inspiring appetite had all but disappeared.
His mind continually wandered. His energy reserves had dimmed to
the point where carrying the massive ebony and gold spear had now
become a tiresome chore, and spinning it around between thumb and
forefinger to astonish the populace an almost impossible
challenge.

He had never felt such a feeling of
unwellness like this before, even when his skills had been put to
the ultimate test and he had emerged from battle covered in the
blood of the vanquished.

And now, as he stood ramrod straight and
silent, in the great hall of the castle of the Baronet Luigi
Grigoletto, grand master of the northern Italian city-state of
Padua, it finally dawned on Samuel Davidson what was wrong.

He was homesick. Enough was enough!

Traversing France and Italy made-up in black
theatrical paint to play the role of the silent, indestructible
guard in the astonishing travelling entourage of the fabled Queen
Rasa of Nubia was all very well, but he’d had his fill of it.

Now he wanted to go home. Back to
England.

The word ‘fabled’ suited the situation best,
because he knew Rasa was no more a royal than his little friend
Soho was a physician. Not all that long ago he had been carrying
her around the streets of London, flaunting herself as a near-naked
slave-girl. But her anxious European hosts had been led to believe
she was a Queen deserving of royal treatment, and so they were
honouring her thus without question.

As the months had rolled by, Samuel had
become more and more amazed at the way the integrity, dignity and
believability of the travelling caravan had solidified, even
multiplied, as it moved inexorably across the countryside. When the
camel-led extravaganza had disembarked on the south-west coast of
France, and arrived at their first point of call, at the home of a
minor duke, they had been greeted with elements of surprise, a
degree of warmth, and layers of suspicion.

But once the self-styled Queen had won these
first hosts over with her mystique, her beauty, and her
intelligence, supported by the witty conversation of her charming,
almost cheeky, private secretary, Monsieur Le Doux, the door had
been suddenly flung open to the rest of the world. The rumour mill
had begun rolling, and the story had flashed around the cities and
villages like wildfire about the exotic royal from Africa who was
heading through Europe, apparently with the intention of reaching
Constantinople, although they seemed to be zigzagging all over the
place with no obvious target in mind, often swapping back between
Italy and France.

The thrust of the story was that anyone with
a bit of political clout who could manage to secure her as a
household guest was indeed a lucky man.

The situation was pre-empted and made all the
more believable by the appearance of an advance diplomat at the
walls, bearing a flag of peace, and insisting on seeing the city’s
master.

“Tell him I have special news of the Queen of
Nubia who is travelling these lands,” he would say. Once inside the
inner sanctum the well-dressed, cultured young Ambassador To The
Court of the Queen of Nubia - in fact, a Budsby group actor, “One
of the better graduates of Will’s acting classes,” as the big
fellow once described him - would go into action.

In eloquent tones, and working to a
well-tried script, he would pass on titbits of information to whet
the appetite of the duke, earl, tribal chief, king, warlord,
marquis, or whoever it was that ran the fiefdom. “Her beauty is
unparalleled,” he would declare to the intrigued ruler and his
assembled courtiers.

“Good sir,” he would add, approaching the
seat of the potentate, “I have seen many women in my time, but she
cannot be surpassed. Her skin is of the most flawless ebony, her
eyes are of the most engaging deep brown that makes a man’s heart
flutter when she gazes upon you, her cheekbones ride high. Her lips
are as full as the ripest, fattest grape waiting to be plucked, and
when she smiles and bursts into a most delectable laugh, the
brilliance radiates for a good half mile.

“And, Master,” - and it was here that the
actor, having surveyed the boss’ physical stature, knew which way
to shape the words to ensure a warm feeling of expectation would be
generated - “I have it on the best of authority from my most
trusted of observers that she favours a man such as yourself. The
stocky, well-rounded person, that is, and of a height she would not
find challenging … A man whose endowments are spoken of in hushed
tones in every corner of the earth. A man from every pore of which
there exudes masculinity, strength and power, even from those pores
that once were hosts to that much over-emphasised cranial
accoutrement known as hair…”