Will Read online

  ‘And faileth.’

  As I do now.

  As did my first sisters, Joan and Margaret, heaven rest them now. Joan was born in the last months of bitter Mary’s reign and lived for a brief space of days as an Elizabethan. Conceived when bleak December’s bareness was on the Stratford elms. Born when they burned like torches through September mists. Suffered in the returning bareness, a winter infant, when the torches smiled and froze. Died in savage April, just as my glad mother was seeing if she could place her foot on nine daisies at once and sing that spring had come to save her baby, her firstborn. The daisies were sparse that year, she said, calling them days’ eyes, according to her way. Not enough to make a daisy chain for the child in its coffin. Its first ever. Its last before the sudden frost. Its last ever. The baby girl never had time to find her feet and was soon under the spartan grass of that bitter spring – and her mother another Rachel, weeping for her child. There are many Rachels crying in that wilderness of infants.

  ‘And always were.’

  So nobody noticed when an old air started up from Henley Street: Mary Arden, down on her hunkers in the dust, bubbling and snivelling and singing her song. A wordless ballad that all mothers sing for a dead child. They know it by heart throughout the world, that raw crying. It’s the coldest air in the universe. It never wakens the dead.

  Never never never never never.

  It was four years till my mother gave birth again. A new vicar tried his prentice hand at the new-fangled sacrament, a Protestant baptism. The new religion was starting to bite. The government called it true religion. Master John Bretchgirdle sprinkled the Holy Trinity font water, half frozen, over that second duckdown head. It was the second day of December in the year 1562. The following year, on the last day of April, he was scattering the first dry dust of the new season over her small corpse. My mother, childless again, put a daisy-chain about that slender neck. She wasn’t five months old – and April was yet once more a cold month to the Shakespeares. It was not to be the last. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Seems pointless, doesn’t it?

  ‘I’m a lawyer, not a priest, Will.’

  But you’re meant to grovel in reverential dread and wonder at the sheer incomprehensibility of it and mutter Blessed be the name of the Lord, as if you’re ready for any amount of this arbitrary insanity.

  ‘A hard act to applaud.’

  It’s impossible. The pleasure of a night’s coupling has produced that sudden miracle, the fruit of the womb – a little person. With tiny toes and fingers, organs, sensations, capabilities, the acorn brain, every-thing in place, but on a small and infinitely delicate scale. Wherever she plays and prattles, a dark corner of the house brightens. She is a pearl in your oyster morning, brought in by a special tide, not in the shipman’s card. But all’s too weak, too short. A bitter business, those brief mornings that slip through your fingers when pearls turn back to daisies in the grass: the long grasses of the churchyard where my sisters lie, anonymous among crowflowers and nettles in unmarked graves. Pearl-blossom and apple-flower fly from the bough like white smoke. Deadly heralds of early death in the annals of the Shakespeare blood. Where Aprils tolled like bells.

  ‘Ah, the bells.’

  Bells in the blood. Yes, I must have heard them soon after I was born, the bells of the Guild Chapel tolling for the plague dead, summoning me from infancy to eternity, to follow my sisters. I didn’t answer the call, though my mother said the owl kept screeching in the elm just outside our house: the fatal bellman that gives the sternest goodnight. She panicked. She’d lost two pretty chickens already and the signs for the third were not good. I was born on a Sunday, you see, and should have been baptised by the Tuesday. But the 25th was an unlucky date in April, April again, St Mark the Evangelist’s Day, when all the altars and crosses were hung with black.

  ‘Scary stuff.’

  Black Crosses, they called that day – and through the churchyards there glimmered the ghostly gatherings of those doomed to die in the coming year. Old Agnes Arden had seen the grisly sight up at Aston Cantlow. Call it a woman’s story at a winter’s fire, but strange truths sometimes quiver in these old birds’ throats when their tongues catch fire. The graveyard had swarmed with ill-starred infants thronging the moonbeams. And the old folk too – they manifested themselves as mourners, their astral apparitions going a ghastly progress through the moon-mouldered tombs, while their bodies slept soundly in their beds, unaware of their own terrible fetches that crowded the watery beams.

  ‘You’re scaring the shit out of me. Stop it.’

  ‘Don’t baptise the boy on St Mark’s Day,’Agnes entreated my parents, ‘unless you want to lose him too. He’ll join the girls, poor souls, you mark my word. Are you going to drop every fruit you bear straight into the grave? No, wait till the Wednesday and it’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

  ‘And so they did?’

  They waited the extra day. Bretchgirdle scooped a cold glimmer of God over my head and the parish clerk scratched in the register Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere –

  ‘A poor Latinist. That should have been Johannis.’

  The day being, in deference to the quaking Agnes, the twenty-sixth day of April. It was a Wednesday and the year was sixty-four, just on the cusp of challenge and change. The game was afoot. The fruit of Mary Arden’s womb had dropped healthily into a sick and lethal world, the bloom of original sin had been washed by holy water clean from my skin. I was the apple of my mother’s eye and the flag-bearer of my father’s name. Adam’s core was stuck in my throat but I had been inspected and approved by the church. Whatever happened to me now, I would not at least end up in limbo. Gift of God or accident of nature, I had made it.

  ‘Phew!’

  I know, I’m a miracle. But my mother trusted neither nature nor God. And when poor Oliver Gunne, my father’s apprentice, departed this life she began to worry in earnest. He was buried on the very same day he died, the eleventh day of July, the reason for the haste being all too obvious to anyone looking over the parish clerk’s shoulder that day as he scribbled again in the register, this time the chilling words, Hic incepit pestis. From the scratching of that sinister sentence until the close of the year there fell the time of horror, dreaded by those of all degree. Least of all by the poor, who had least to lose in losing life and most to gain in a recompensing eternity – but not even the poor man wanted to quit existence through that particular door. It was daubed with a bloody cross and opened onto unbelievable agonies, till death came as a friend. Such was the plague – carried to Stratford on this occasion by the soldiers of the Earl of Warwick coming home from the siege of Le Havre through the stricken streets of London.

  ‘How you survived London…’

  That’s another miracle. But it didn’t take long in ’64 for a state of emergency to be called in sweltering Stratford. The almanac had been correct in predicting a hot summer – the plague’s favourite habitat. Richard Symons, the town clerk, lost two sons and a daughter. In our own street the miller, Roger Green, buried four, same side of the street, just a few doors down. My father was a burgess then. He sat with the Council in the garden of the Guild Chapel, free among the fragrances of apple boughs and pears from the contagious confines of the Hall; and under the tall skies of August he and his fellow townsmen debated the question of relief for the stricken. They also formulated the only cure they could think of: fines for the keepers of muck-middens in which the plague bred with wicked swiftness right in front of folks’ doors. Fine the fuckers! Fine them! The cry went up from the terrified townsmen.

  They’ll kill us all! My father had been fined himself a dozen years earlier for that very reason, in a Stratford which at that time had worried about the mere possibility of plague. He agreed that fines would be effective. He was wrong. The most frightening aspect of the plague, when it comes, is its complete unpredictability, the absence of all logic. That’s what really terrifies.

  While they talked my mother acted. I was
stuffed into a small basket on a bed of rose-petals and lavendered linen, and in this aromatic ark I was stashed away like Moses, farmed out among the uncles and aunts and old folks of Ingon and Asbies: good tough sensible stock who didn’t fall victim to plagues. I was kept in the country till the pestilence went off with the December cold. By that time it had visited two hundred Stratford souls and had ushered them into that eternity, Francis, that is the only known release from a disease so virulent and so unforgiving it is beyond any possible cure.

  Of that interim evacuation to the farms I naturally recall nothing. I babbled and crapped among green fields, while Stratford, under attack, attacked its dung heaps and my father imposed fines. I was well versed later by Granny Arden, who lived till I was sixteen. And by Uncle Henry, that unkillable old ox – I’d written a dozen plays before he finally fell down. Henry was a crusty bugger and that was his charm.

  ‘Fucking bad time of year anyway for you to poke your snout into the world,’ he grumbled at me. ‘April? I’ve shit better Aprils than you see them days. I’ve shit better primroses. Been no sun in the sky for fucking months, and your mother carrying you with a winter diet in her belly. Stupid time to pop your pod. What they go fucking one another in summer for? Ought to know April’s the killing time for the Shakespeares. Then on top of that comes the fucking plague. Jesus. It killed Bretchgirdle quick enough, though.’

  When was that, uncle?

  ‘Can’t you tell that? Any fool can tell that. Very year you were born, hard after he baptised you, gathered to his God right fucking fast. The plague don’t hang about, you know. He should’ve drunk down some of that holy water went over your noodle. They say a bloody good draught of holy water keeps out the pest – right from the fucking font!’

  Granny Arden says pigeons are best.

  ‘She would. They’re over their feet in pigeon shit down Asbies way. Fucking pigeons. Need fifty of the fuckers to fill a decent pie. One pig feeds an army. But they do say a pigeon can take away the poison sometimes if you clip its feathers behind and lay it right square on the sore, make your plague-boil kiss its arse – and then out goes your illness, up the bird’s behind and you’re saved from the plague-pit.’

  Can you eat the pigeon after?

  ‘How the fuck do I know? Old wives’ tales, like their scripture. Bretch girdle, Butcher, Heycroft – hang ’em, I’ve shit ’em all I tell you, I’ve shit ’em! I got my own God anyhow up here in Ingon, where you’re a fucking sight closer to heaven. Just look at them clouds on Snitterfield – so close you could reach one down and blow your nose on it if you cared to. Or needed to – you’re dribbling again, you little bugger. Come on, Will.’

  ‘Will, Will…’ Francis was bringing me back gently, sternly, as always.

  He called me Will, my uncle, old Henry, who taught me how to swear and could swear Marlowe under the table if they met somewhere in the next world. Heaven seems unlikely for either, and hell’s a fable. Call me Will, then, if it pleases you. Bretchgirdle called me William in God’s hearing but my mother especially willed me to endure, to outlast angry April, to survive summer stenches and the plague-bitten butt-end of the year. I rode it all out. Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

  ‘And you were the first child to stay the course.’

  And five followed after. Let me become a register then, a book of death, let me tell you the days, the names, the years.

  ‘I’d rather you make some bequests.’

  Joan and Margaret were tiny white sticks in the earth, known only unto God and the worms. Little Margaret lived out her few brief days in the year that brought Gorboduc to a still birth on the stage.

  ‘Gorboduc! Jesus, I remember that – just.’

  Not that you’d want to. I was born, baptised, and lived, Robert Dudley was made Earl of Leicester, and that brave new word – Puritanism – was born in folks’ mouths.

  ‘And came out of arseholes.’

  It did not sound well.

  ‘Not worth a fart!’

  After me came Gilbert, named for Gilbert Bradley in our street.

  ‘Was that the glover?’

  A friend of my father’s. And that was in the October of ’66, when Essex and Ed Alleyn and the future King James all saw the light of day too.

  ‘In perfect health and memory, did we say? Well, I grant you the memory, Will. You would have made a good lawyer.’

  I nearly did. Gilbert died four years back – he was only forty-four. After him came the second Joan, in the middle of April; ’69 as I recall.

  ‘Greasy Joan.’

  Doth keel the pot. Plenty of that from our sensible Joan. She married Hatter Hart, who lives still.

  ‘Only just.’

  While Joan looks set to outlast the pyramids.

  ‘Fit to fell them first, I’d say.’

  Greasy Joan. She used up all the family strength, it all went her way. Little Anne had no strength at all, poor lamb. She came in ’72 when I was nearly eight and she lived on palely for a time. She was about to be eight herself when she left us. I remember the eight pennies my father paid for bell and pall. Eightpence. A penny for each of her years. Richard came after her in ’74 and died the year after Gilbert, three years gone by. Anne died in April.

  ‘April again.’

  Murderous brutal bastard April. And Richard in freezing February, I remember that well enough. And it was even colder when Edmund died. Last day of the year, 1607, and him only twenty-seven and still unwed, same as Richard. Seems like yesterday I saw him interred in Mary Overy.

  ‘Even such is time.’

  Seems like yesterday I saw my father standing like a fool at the font and Edmund a babe in May.

  ‘Seems like lots of yesterdays, doesn’t it?’

  Lighting fools the way to dusty death.

  ‘As one of your old actors famously said.’

  Aye, Burbage.

  ‘Hamlet?’

  Macbeth. Still, you spotted a line, old Francis. Not altogether ignorant, are you, though you profess to eschew art?’

  ‘I like to keep an eye on my clients – and their affairs.’

  And what do you think of the production?

  ‘Macbeth?’

  No, not that production – propagation, procreation, engendering, begetting.

  ‘Ah! Well, not an impressive account, is it? I’ve seen worse, much worse, but it’s not altogether wonderful, is it, the Shakespeare performance? Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Eight offspring: four girls, four boys. Only one of the surviving females takes a spouse, and only one of the males. The boys do not beget sons that know the secrets of survival. One boy buries a bastard in the Cripplegate – am I correct? – and a legitimate son lies near your first two sisters in Holy Trinity’s earth, here in Stratford. You’re right, Will, the lifespans are dismal. But cheer up, man, you’re not dead yet.’

  My days are numbered. And only one left after me. When you look back along that line of cribs and coffins, you wonder what all the toil and trouble was for. We copulate in shrouds and give birth on biers. The umbilical dangles bloodily like the hangman’s noose. We fat all creatures else to fat us –

  ‘Jesus, he’s off.’

  And we fat ourselves for maggots, and that’s the end, alas, alas. Easy to see it that way anyway.

  ‘Look at it another way – it makes the will less complicated.’

  Ah, pardon me my morbid memories. I’m chewing on gristle now.

  ‘You’re drinking too much perries.’

  Black bile and melancholy. And an old man’s mind clouds and sickens somewhat. But if you sit here just a little longer, the picture may improve, and after I’m gone you’ll be left with something softer, a mellow haze, a nice memory imprinting the air. Who knows, it may outlive my life half a year.

  ‘You’re a good man, Will, but it’s your present memory that’s at fault. I’m here for your will, remember? And a will is not exclusively about death. There may be children, grandchildren. You’ve got to get th
e old grim reaper out of your skull and think further ahead – think not of death but of birth.’

  2

  Let’s talk of worms.

  ‘No, let’s talk of wombs. You promised, remember?’

  Did I?

  ‘Yes, a solemn promise.’

  That’s a lie, then. I’d never have said that. There’s no such thing as a solemn promise, there’s just a promise. It means what it says. Words mean what they say.

  ‘Well then, forget the worms.’

  They’re coming up with the plough out there. Look at those crows. A good feeding for them in March. And after March comes April. A cold month for the Shakespeares.

  ‘So you’ve told me.’

  It’s the one door in the year my mother always dreaded passing through. April is the time of epitaphs, so she would say, the time of year for the Shakespeares to carve their names in stone.

  And there’s many a spring raindrop has ploughed through the smart new chiselled lettering of our slabs. That’s how she put it. Fear it, Will, fear it. April’s a marble month. She had a turn of phrase, my mother.

  ‘Words in the blood, is it?’

  She was a charmer, and could almost read the thoughts of people.

  ‘Let’s get back to the wombs.’

  And yet I was born in April, born on a Sunday, born to the sounds of plague-bells and crows, calling fields and folk to a harsh re-birth.

  ‘Over-poetical.’

  Virgins and primroses died unmarried –

  ‘Worse and worse.’

  Of greensickness, gales, and unknown griefs.

  ‘There’s no stopping you, is there?’

  I, William Shakespeare –

  ‘At last!’

  No, Francis, not yet. I, William Shakespeare, survived, my frail vessel escaping the cold tidal pull of April – just. My mother believed it was because I was born late in the month.

  ‘She had some sense.’