Will Read online

  ‘You’re wandering, master Shakespeare. This is going to be a long day.’

  A long line, though doubtless less dramatic than I invent. There was an Adam of Oldeditch once, my father told me. His son was royally rewarded for war service and he changed his name to Shakespeare to reflect his valour and the dauntless temper of his mind. And so there we were – heroes, self-named.

  ‘Well, it’s your descendants that matter now. And your survivors – not your ancestors.’

  They were a motley lot, the Shakespeares. I’m talking about the real-life ones. But they were bound to the earth, from which I was determined to escape.

  ‘We all go back to it, Will.’

  Thank you for that. Most gladly would I have forgotten it.

  ‘I’m here to remind you. And not only me, remember. Doctor and priest due in today.’

  Out on you, owls! Nothing but songs of death. And no priest! What was I telling you about?

  ‘Your ancestors.’

  They swarmed out of the Plantagenet times and bred about the heart of the country, oh, two centuries ago. After Bosworth – so it ran from my father’s tongue – Welsh Richmond, newly come to power as Henry Seven, and with his claim in his codpiece for all old England knew, making it none too big a claim at that, gave lands in Warwickshire to my great-grandfather.

  ‘A curious lie of the land – and lucrative, if only you’d known where.’

  And nobody ever did show me where exactly these lands were supposed to lie. Very likely they did lie, because if the story were true, wouldn’t my grandfather have been called Henry, after the jumped-up jack-in-office, by the grateful receiver of the new king’s bounty? Whereas my grandfather’s name was none other than Richard, after the Tudor upstart’s beaten enemy, the much maligned monster of the Yorkists, Crookback Dick. Anyway, they did their bit, the falcons of my folk-line, later to be handed a spear by the College of Heralds to shake and bristle, and so illustrate their name and valour, warlike then, the birds of my blood. And with phallic fancies too. Shake spear better than Fall staff, don’t you think?

  ‘Worthy of the name.’

  I can tell you more.

  ‘I can tell you’re going to.’

  Oh, but they were the strangest of folk, those ancestors. I could see them sometimes on summer nights, drifting in like milk-fog over the fields, anxious or angry in the late sunsets. Sometimes they were a cloud of gnats, human atomies dancing in the air; they were a rising steam, emanating from the early morning earth; a bubbling in the blood, a prickling in the marrow of the bones. I could hear them calling out to me, from out of the black belfries of all those ruined choirs –

  ‘Where late the sweet birds sang.’

  You steal my lines Francis. Stick to the numbers that become you! They turned over in their graves like beasts on a spit and made the earth’s bedcover rumple and hiss. They fell like rain from a dank drizzling sky, all one long November’s day, drowning me in their requiem for themselves. The whole world teemed with them and they rattled the shutters and trickled in at the slats.

  ‘That’s weird, Will.’

  Weird is the word. I’m telling you how it was. I was fated, haunted. Anyway it was years ago. Now I lie here shivering in this freezing March –

  ‘It’s warm enough, Will.’

  And what does it matter to me that I’m master of the best house in Stratford? The logs are piled high on the hearth. The blaze in my bones has gone out. Somebody’s stone head lies white and heavy in my hands, laved by flames. I can barely feel them at all now, but I know that they died and that once they too must have lived, those Shakespeares of old.

  ‘Old, Will? What’s old?’

  Old is poor and poor is starving, my mother used to say. My father’s father was so old I never even saw him. He went under the Snitterfield snows, having come up there in old Henry the Eighth’s time, and he’d pushed up four springloads of Snitterfield daisies before I arrived on the scene. He didn’t starve, though. As tall a man as any in Warwickshire, he was a husbandman, our Richard, a yeoman with an ox-team and a hundred acres round about a peasant roof.

  ‘He must have sweated, though.’

  For duty, not for mead. You know how it goes. He tilled the leas, sowed his hops, white and red, bread-corn and drink-corn, wheat and rye, oats and barley, made his beer and cider, pastured his beasts, sheared and slaughtered – and kept his Catholic thoughts to himself.

  ‘You took after him there, Will.’

  In a world where even silence could attract an inquisition and send the executioner’s hand reaching deep into your bowels to feed a Tyburn fire. That was Richard – and within the book and volume of my young brain that was old, for sure. By the time I was born, Richard Shakespeare had become landscape, that’s all, something between the skyline and the mind’s eye. He’d been young once, but now he’d become weather.

  ‘Hard to picture that.’

  Follow me, then. Stand on the whalebacks of the hills that swim blindly eastwards to Warwick – and you see what Richard Shakespeare saw before he left Budbroke, 1529 it was, to beget John, my father: continents of clouds, that’s what, clouds like camels and weasels and whales, rolling endlessly over the earth’s green quilt. Twitch it aside for a minute. It covers the hundreds of earlier Shakespeares, the unknowns, all those yeomen who’d made up that bed for generations, season after season, then turned in quietly and gone to sleep. Farming folk. The flocks cropped the grasses over their dead heads that had been wetted only yesterday in the stone fonts at Snitterfield and Rowington. Stone fonts, stone heads – everything petrifies. They lit up like dandelions and were blown out when I told the time, the Shakespeare heads, like moons that fade with morning, like spent stars, cosmic seeds, dust-worlds drifting into oblivion.

  ‘That’s poetical.’

  It’s natural.

  ‘All that lives must die?’

  He faded in his turn, passing through nature to eternity.

  ‘You make it sound easy.’

  Like most folk he worked his passage. Life doesn’t come free, as God advised Adam at a moment of truth – and work is the curse. Richard farmed the land and rented the property of Robert Arden of Wilmcote: a man of some consequence.

  For the record, Francis Collins yawned at this point. Hath he so long held out with me untired, and stops he now for breath? But he had an early start from Warwick, and will be missing his breakfast.

  Very well then, permit Richard’s brief star to twinkle till 1561. Follow him, linger your patience awhile, listen again. On your imaginary forces work. What do you hear? A thousand doves crooned in the great stone cot of the Ardens: providing meat for pies, feathers for mattresses, wings for letters, and cooing companions for the eight girls of Robert Arden, the youngest of whom was Mary. For decades the two men, Richard and Robert, lived and worked as tenant and owner, united and divided by the same farmland, little dreaming that the firstling and lastling of their respective loins would meet and mate and make them grandfathers in common. But that’s how things can happen – the forked fates of divers folk fused by offspring into one family, for richer for poorer, for better for worse, often in sickness, sometimes in health, but unexpectedly, inextricably knit. What do you think?

  ‘As a lawyer I’ve seen it happen.’

  Richard Shakespeare changed his sky to Snitterfield, bright with lady-smocks and marigolds, where his sons were welcomed with holy water into a Catholic world and ushered out of it with bell and burial into the infant eternity of an unknown next. The turf heaves over them like the sea. No headstones, gentles, over bones as soft as buttercups. Shrouds, yes, sealed with a loving stitch. They didn’t run to coffins then for shoals of small fry. The wind in the grass provides a plain enough song for much of the year. Rain is their requiem, no lack of it, the bluebell and the bee attendant angels in spring and summer.

  ‘Very pretty, master poet. Very poignant.’

  I do deaths, you see. And I can do the deaths of children. Their lips were fou
r red roses on a stalk, which in their summer beauty kissed each other – that sort of thing. A few yards from where they lie, the parishioners of St James the Great file in, following the fashions of the liturgical year that ebb and flow by moon or monarch. The unending altered altar-going people. My father John and his brothers Henry and Thomas survived to join the queue. They were also spared the sterner stroke of schooling and never crept unwillingly like snail along Snitterfield High Street where Richard kept his house. There was no school there to dim their shining morning faces.

  ‘Jesus, Will, don’t remind me of school! God made buttocks for the sole purpose of impressing the Latin language on otherwise recalcitrant boys.’

  School isn’t forever. There are other rainclouds to dowse the fires of youth. A life yoked to the land doesn’t suit everybody. It suited my Uncle Henry all right, limb of lion and soul of bull, and he farmed Snitterfield to the end of his days. It had suited Richard, who died worth forty pounds, not at all bad for a clodhopper. It didn’t suit my father, though. Year by year the routine waves went over him: Snitterfield under the plough; Snitterfield pregnant with seed; Snitterfield green and gold; Snitterfield burnished, burnt-out, black; Snitterfield under snow. These waves break with painful slowness and an absence of music. They break over the land, they break over people, they break people, break hearts and backs, banish hopes, bow heads. Faces are forced into the dirt, and eyes lose the habit of the upward glance, even for the gentle rain. A man submits to what comes, whatever drops on his head. The grass keeps on growing and the earth never tires of swallowing. In time it swallows all aspiration. Life, the man concludes, doesn’t go anywhere, it’s just something that happens. With crushing monotony. And stops happening. With suddenness, time, unpredictability – and terrifying certainty. My father grew tired of seasons, grew tired of driving an eight-ox team under the Snitterfield skies. So he looked instead at the daughters of his employer, his father’s old landlord, little lordly Robert Arden, and saw that they were fair. Fast married too, most of them – but not all. He looked hardest at the youngest of the clutch whom he’d known since her childhood, her father’s favourite and ten years my father’s junior at sweet seventeen.

  ‘Sounds tempting – with respect to your mother, Will.’

  There was something almost scriptural in what he saw. Eight offspring from the good old Catholic Arden loins and another four from Master Robert’s second spouse, Agnes – making Mary the youngest of the twelve tribes of Israel and bearing the name of the ancient forest itself, mystical Arden. And though my old man was not the sort of stuff as dreams are made on, he must have had a dream at least once in his life.

  ‘Even a wet one, eh? Saving his spirit.’

  He ran on ambition, not imagination. Still, I’m going to credit him with a vision. Don’t think for a moment that he told me anything of this, or even implied it. I’m doing his thinking for him – and his feeling. Not strong on feeling, my father. He looked at Mary and her prospects and saw land and love neatly yoked. The promised land was called Asbies and the milk and honey were in place, quite literally. So was everything else: malt in the quern, water in the pump, and bread baking in the ovens. Flagged floors, oak-beamed ceilings, a comfortable berth. Its leaded windows looked out across Asbies land, its fields bright with birdsong, where the bulls bugled and spurted and the cows crapped and called. The bells of St John the Baptist called too, from Aston Cantlow, called on John Shakespeare to take the lady by the hand and sweep her off to church.

  ‘You always did tell a great story.’

  He must have weighed it up. Was he standing or sitting when he came to a decision? I have him standing – and alone. He looked over his shoulder four miles to the south-west across gorse-golden fields, where the setting sun drenched Stratford, and looked again at Mary, milking her father’s ewes, not poor, but not exactly happy. She was aristocratic enough on the rustic scale and well used to work. The well-placed wench was unassailable to a mere creature of the clods, a bran bumpkin. He had that much wit. He looked at her strong working fingers, unringed as yet, her rosy cheek, unfurrowed by that old bastard, time. O, that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!

  ‘Ah, and there he had it!’

  A glove, yes. A glove upon that hand could touch that heart.

  And a glove that pointed to three owned houses in Stratford might touch the pride and purse of Robert Arden for a daughter and a dowry. A favourite daughter, a fancy dowry. He was no fool, my father. Don’t kiss the feet of the lofty folk, he told me – kiss their hands instead, with fine white kid gloves. And go for the youngest girl, where a father’s heart is fondest.

  So he did what his father Richard had done before him, and changed his sky. To Stratford he turned, and to gloves.

  ‘And he was so right!’

  You would know, will-maker. When old Arden lay dying in the sere and yellow leaf of 1556, he bequeathed his soul to God and the Virgin Mary, a mere ten marks to his second spouse Agnes (and that not without conditions), and all his wealth in Wilmcote to the other Mary (also a virgin, I would warrant), the child of his age on whom he doted. Fifty or sixty acres were there and more in wait at Snitterfield, a hundred and fifty in all, if not more: the crop on the ground, tilled and sown as it was; houses and halls, hearts of oaks, barns and barley, bullocks and bees, bacon in the rafters, pewter on the dressers, painted cloths on the walls – not to leave out of the reckoning the beds and bedding, brass pots and ploughs, milk-churns and candlesticks, the pigs and the poultry, horses and cattle, corn in the bins, fruit on the bough and logs in the yard. Some billet, don’t you think?

  ‘A very tidy proposal, Will. He must have been tickled down to his balls.’

  My mother was heiress to a substantial yeoman’s nest-egg and sat on imminent brood. She was, you could say, something of a catch.

  ‘You could say that – and you would not lie.’

  Not on my death-bed. Old Arden went to bed forever then, who was too old and ill to last. A shroud was stitched up for him and a bride-bed made ready for Mary. The burial party filed down from the Wilmcote hilltop, trampling the grasses for the wedding party. Their destination was the same: green fields and a small stream. A good place for a wedding. A quiet resting place for a good Catholic soul. The funeral-baked meats furnished forth the marriage tables that day – but none too coldly. Joy and woe make a nice tight weave. A virgin makes a nice tight fit. Mary stepped lightly over her father’s body in Aston Cantlow churchyard and stood at the church door with the new man from Stratford.

  She was standing on his left, signifying Eve’s godlike begetting from Adam’s left side. In nomine Patris, in nomine Filii, in nomine Spiritus Sancti, Amen. And while this was being chanted, my father was placing a circle of gold on each finger in turn from the thumb to the fourth – to be left on that one because the vein from the fourth runs directly to the heart.

  ‘I never knew that.’

  I did. But I don’t believe it. The fourth’s just a good protected finger, that’s all. Makes perfect practical sense to place it there. But the ring didn’t go over bare fingers. There were gloves on her hands, white gloves, covering the smutches of work and weather. And when she walked through the big nailed doors there was that ring on her finger. And the sound of a mass in her ears.

  ‘You don’t want a mass, do you, Will?’

  Would you have me die a papist? It was almost 1558. And another Mary had a mass in her ears. The namesake queen was about to die: that sad stubborn spinster who’d finally got laid to no avail and now lay with a whiff of syphilis in her pinched nostrils (so the wicked whisper went) – the gift of daddy of good and famous memory. Take a bow, Henry the Eighth – a murderous prick even from the grave. Oh, and a wolf in her womb. That much was true. Only cancer bred there, preparing a bed for the worms, in spite of her earnest supplications to her queen in heaven, whose fruitful womb was by contrast so blessed. Hail, Mary. Farewell, Bloody Mary.

  ‘But Mary Arden – to
return to the point.’

  Mary Arden, now Mary Shakespeare, was ripe and ready to breed.

  My mother was possessed of the usual urges and ambitions of her sex and class: hatching and houseminding. It’s what women did, it’s what they were for. Child-bearing beasts of burden, moveable chattels, items in the Warwickshire inventory, and in every other shire of England – as scratched out by those clerking Frenchies of old tight-arse himself, William of Normandy. Do you think women had come all that far since his day? They were the hand-luggage of the realm. Or they were receptacles for filth, as defined by those creepy old theologians who knew nothing of the subject beyond their dark imaginings and wet dreams. My mother was now ready as the repository of my father’s sperm. One of which I account myself. Back we all go to the stinking drop. My mother was ripe for seeding. One of eight daughters from the same belly, she was ready to go the same procreative distance herself. And did. Eight, including me, and bore my father eight thousand nights on her romping belly.

  ‘Jesus, not every night, surely?’

  And she did it in Henley Street, Stratford, among the thousand windy elms that roared and bustled to the business, providing shady lanes for the younger lovers who coupled covertly out of doors. Had my father stayed in Snitterfield he’d have married some other woman and I’d never have been. Even if I had, I’d have died unlettered in Ingon or some such parish. Boggles the brain, doesn’t it? That you could have been anyone, anywhere. Or no-one, nowhere. Never to have been at all. But eventually a man and a woman have to get down to it, and anywhere will do – any town, any street, or alley. A haycock will do. A bank where the wild thyme blows. A little patch of ground, two paces of the vilest earth – and wilderness is bliss, if the earth gives. We don’t need much to spread out on, do we? We get buried in layers and we couple the same way, where there’s still a choice as to who comes on top. As well a churchyard plot becomes a bed as half-acre tombs. And don’t believe that it’s not entirely random. The moonbeams on the sea are a golden bridge to nowhere. All flesh is Snitterfield grass. And bone of your bone is Stratford elm and nothing more, believe me. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.