Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard Read online

  MR.

  SHAKESPEARE’S

  A novel

  RICHARD B. WRIGHT

  For my wife, Phyllis,

  and for our newest grandchild, Nathan

  My father, methinks I see my father.

  O! where, my lord?

  In my mind’s eye, Horatio.

  HAMLET [I, ii]

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  EASTON HOUSE 1658

  CHAPTER 1

  MAM’S STORY

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  MY STORY

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  ENVOIE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  COPYRIGHT

  About the Publisher

  EASTON HOUSE

  1658

  CHAPTER 1

  CHARLOTTE LEFT FOR OXFORD this morning. This was irritating because she had promised that today she would begin to take down my words. The pen and inkhorn and the book with its ivory-coloured blank pages and marbled cover, Charlotte’s Christmas present to me, are on the writing table in the library. I put them there myself yesterday morning in anticipation. So I was short with her as she said goodbye today, bending to kiss my cheek as I sat at breakfast. As usual, she was late and in a hurry, the hired coach already waiting in the courtyard. It was barely light and our new serving girl, Emily, was taking the baggage outdoors and looking none too pleased about it either. But then, she is already showing signs of insolence. I have to think about this, but I may soon give her notice.

  “It’s only a week, Linny,” Charlotte whispered. “I’ll begin your story when I return. I promise.”

  But she has promised many times before, and always it seems there is something to distract her: tea at a neighbour’s house, a meeting with her church group, a gathering for cards. Now an engagement broken off, yet again; a friend in Oxford is in distress and must be consoled. Charlotte heard the news only yesterday. Surely I could understand how she was needed in the circumstances? I didn’t say as much, but I would have been more sympathetic had this not been the third or perhaps even the fourth time her friend’s engagement has been called off, either by the young lady or by the unfortunate young man who may have to spend the rest of his life in her company. My own feeling is that matters will be mended yet again within a fortnight. For the moment, however, there is drama in the lives of Charlotte and her friend, with tears and muffins and tea and endless pillow chatter in the night. I pity the young woman’s mother more than anyone.

  This dependence on Charlotte is maddening. Despite my years of hard work, she can yet prove unreliable; even now in her twenty-fourth year she can behave like a schoolgirl. At Christmastime she told me that in the spring she would set aside the mornings for me until we finished what I have to say about my father, the poet Shakespeare: how he entered my mother’s life and later my own. Now it is April and so far I have nothing but her empty promises.

  Even as she left this morning she promised, “We shall get to it next week, Linny. I owe it to you—I really do—and I’m looking forward to hearing it all.”

  She does owe me, too, because I have raised her from the moment the midwife pulled her from her dying mother. Still, always something gets in the way.

  I would, of course, transcribe all this myself, but I have left it too late and this cursed membrane across my eyes has set me adrift in a world of wavering cloudiness that blurs faces and familiar objects: the edges of tables now snag my hips and chair legs bruise my shins. I have to be mindful on stairs. As for words on a page, they are but clusters of letters swimming before my eyes. A lifetime of reading by candlelight must now be paid for, and if I am to live much longer, I expect I shall end my days as blind as justice.

  Yet not for a moment do I regret those years of reading. I have read nearly all my life. In my fifth year I could recite the letters of the alphabet from my hornbook. Then I began to see how these letters could be put together to form words that could name the plants and creatures of this world and describe our very thoughts and feelings. Soon I was reading Aesop’s fables and the Book of Ancient Riddles, The Hundred Merry Tales and others like them. Reading was important, for it meant we could become acquainted early with the word of God. Mam and I lived with her brother and his wife, Uncle Jack and Aunt Sarah, and they were pious folk, my aunt especially disdainful of pleasure in any form. In our house was not a top to spin nor hobbyhorse to ride, and as I grew older my reading was confined to religious books. Before I was seven, I could write the words of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments. By then I was also absorbed by the gruesome deaths of Protestants as recorded in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs; I knew by heart passages from the big Geneva Bible which sat on the sideboard in the dining room of our house in Worsley. I loved the copperplate illustrations of Jonah in the whale’s belly and Daniel in the lion’s den. But it was the words with their magical power to put pictures inside my head that truly excited me.

  After my mother’s death and my time in London, the details of which I shall duly relate, I returned to Oxfordshire and was interviewed here at Easton House for a position as nursemaid. It was arranged by my uncle, a draper by trade, well known for his probity and goodwill. I was then in my fifteenth year and Mrs. Easton was carrying her first child, Walter. Sometimes when I look now at Mr. Walter coming into the house from the fields or the markets at Woodstock or Oxford and sitting down to his dinner, I find it hard to believe that he was once a little boy perched on the window seat of the nursery listening to one of my tales.

  For a long time Easton House has been a quiet place, and now with Charlotte away, the house seems even quieter and emptier. After a long and brutal winter, it is milder and below stairs Emily is cleaning the fire grates. I told her to be sure to open the windows to freshen the air in the rooms as she worked. I have to tell her everything, go through each step of a particular job or she will not do it properly. It is irksome, and though I like the girl well enough, she taxes what little patience I now have left. She is not so much lazy as indifferent, her manner suggesting that she would just as leave be somewhere else. No doubt she is waiting for a young man to claim her, take her away from the drudgery of dirty fire grates and cobwebbed ceiling corners, though I am equally certain that she lacks the imagination to foresee another kind of tedium within the staleness of married life. Still, she is a plump little morsel and I dare say already knows a thing or two about the ways of the young in darkened hallways or leafy bowers. Men must find appealing the merry enticement in those soft brown eyes that always seek forgiveness when you remind her of something she has forgotten to do. Now she is rattling those grates and raking out the ashes, eager, I am sure, to be done with it and sit down in the kitchen with a cup of tea and tell Mrs. Sproule the latest village gossip. There will be dust on the furniture and Emily will forget unless I remind her, but then I too may forget, and of course I can no longer see dust as well as I used to.

  Mr. Walter seldom notices anything in the house, let alone dust on a table or chair. He could as easily eat his meals on an overturned box in the stables, so little regard has he for the niceties of household living. This has grown on him over the years and now his mind is ever on the price o
f oats or hay or barley, or the weather and its uncertainties. And there’s no wife to complicate his single-minded way of thinking. But he is a kind man and a good farmer, well regarded in the shire. His reputation for honesty and fair dealing saved us from ruin in the late civil war. I am certain of it. The Eastons and those of us in their service supported the King’s party, and while other like-minded people had their fields trampled and goods looted by Cromwell’s armies, they left us alone.

  I recall an evening a few weeks before the war began. A friend and neighbour, Mr. Murdoch, visited Easton House to talk with Mr. Walter. They discussed the weather and their crops, but as Murdoch was leaving, they stopped at the front door, and I overheard their parting words, for I was behind an open doorway.

  Murdoch said, “And when the time comes, Walter, how will you be placed?”

  Mr. Walter replied, “Conscience binds me to the King, Zachary.”

  “And I to Parliament, Walter,” Murdoch said.

  “I know that,” said Mr. Walter, “and I pray to God we may remain friends whatever happens.”

  “I pray so too, Walter,” said Murdoch, and I watched them shake hands by the front door.

  After the war, the Easton lands were not sequestered, and I am sure that it was Murdoch’s doing, for he had influential friends in Parliament. Then too we lost our precious Nicky at the Battle of Naseby, and there was sympathy throughout the shire for Mr. Walter and Charlotte, since Nicky was well liked with many friends on both sides of that war. It will be thirteen years this June 14 since we lost him, and Charlotte will have a difficult day as she always does; she was only eleven when her stepbrother was killed and she was deeply affected, loving him as only a young girl can love an older brother, which is to say purely and with complete adulation. I remember how she lay in bed for weeks, thin and pale and sick at heart. In her misery one day she told me that she had taken a vow never to love another. Of course, over time her grief has abated, but the fourteenth of June will forever remain a sad day in her life.

  The racket Emily is making with those grates is getting on my nerves and I can imagine the dust she is raising. Upon her return, Charlotte may notice it and she will enact a little scene by looking down on a side table and writing in the dust “Oh dear!” or some other pale expression of reproach. Then she will call for Emily, who will look at the words and break forth in tears. Charlotte will comfort her and Emily will promise to do better, because she wants to please Miss Charlotte, who is a lady and dresses beautifully. All this is really my responsibility and if I did my job properly, I wouldn’t have to endure these needlessly melodramatic displays of remonstrance and forgiveness. But the truth is I am well past it now and I expect I will feel relief only when I am told as much.

  I am fairly certain there has already been talk about this between Charlotte and Mr. Walter. On Christmas Day, he asked to see me in the hall. Charlotte had gone to the library to write her annual letters to her two half-sisters, who have lived in America these twenty-eight years past. Charlotte, of course, has never laid eyes on them, but they are still her sisters and she likes to let them know what is going on at Easton House. They in turn write about their lives in Massachusetts, a place I can scarcely bring myself to imagine, though both Mary and Catherine and their husbands and children seem to have made prosperous and happy lives for themselves out there. I can hardly recall now what they looked like. They will always be two young women who left us with their new husbands, and I suppose I will always see them as two girls whom I told stories to and minded forty years ago. They always reply to Charlotte’s letters and tell her of life in the New World. So while Charlotte was in the library, Mr. Walter sat by the fire with a glass of brandy, which he seldom touches, preferring, as I do, ale. I told myself that it was Christmas and so he felt like a glass of brandy, though I was not sure that together with the heavy meal it would necessarily agree with him. He has gout now, and brandy is no friend to gout. Besides, his colour was high and he had undone the buttons of his waistcoat. Mr. Walter is a large man and hefty in both front and beam, no longer young at fifty-five. And that day he looked ill at ease, though I thought at the time that unless he was unwell, there was no need to be discomfited, for while beyond the window it was bitter cold, we were well placed, warm by the fire with a good dinner inside us. I had cleared the dishes for Mrs. Sproule, another old party who no longer moves as sprightly as she once did, and as she constantly reminds me, “I am the cook and not a maidservant.” This is true. It is not her job to serve. Where was Emily? We must have given her—yes, I remember now—we had given her Christmas Day to be with her family. She had told me her mother was ill and this could well have been untrue, but what does it matter anyway. I had served the dinner to Mr. Walter and Charlotte and it was then that Mr. Walter asked me to share a glass of brandy with him.

  That was unusual, but I could tell that he had something to say to me, and was having difficulty. No surprise in that, for he does not like dealing with situations which may involve personal feelings. It is well known that he has no difficulty in matters of business and is reputed to be a shrewd trader in cattle, sheep and grain. In personal matters, however, he is uneasy, though amiable and kind-hearted to a fault, those last two qualities inherited from his mother, a woman as well-natured and benevolent as you would find on this earth, as different from the old squire as cheese to chalk. I guessed on Christmas Day that Mr. Walter wanted to discuss my position as housekeeper at Easton House, but I didn’t say anything at first. Early on, I discovered that in service you must never presume to know what your employer is thinking; you must constantly feign ignorance and say little unless asked. So I sipped the brandy and waited. I had drunk two glasses of ale with my dinner and so was feeling merry enough, though watchful all the same.

  Mr. Walter stared out the window at the bare trees and the grey sky. He may have remarked on the possibility of snow by nightfall and I may have replied that I thought it too cold to snow, but I don’t really remember. At length, however, he said quite unexpectedly that I was never to worry about a place to stay. “Your home will always be here, Linny,” he said. “Don’t ever fret about that.” The truth is I never had fretted about it, had never entertained the idea of the Eastons putting me out on the road after my long years of service. I have known such things to happen and in this very shire, but not, I believed, in the house of Walter Easton. It was comforting, however, to hear his words, and I smiled and thanked him. Then he asked me how I was feeling. Charlotte, it seems, had mentioned my failing eyesight.

  “We are all getting up there,” he said, and laughed as if our aging was some coarse jest played upon us by Providence, which for all I know may be true. I often think so with certainty when I suffer pains from the gravel in my kidneys. But I told Mr. Walter my health was tolerable, though far from what it once was. It might soon be time to rest from my labours. He seemed pleased to hear it.

  “Good, good, good,” he said, and offered more brandy, which I took. We both sat back in quiet and looked out upon the grey afternoon, content enough in our own ways. What I gathered from this meeting was that plans were afoot to replace me, but that I would have my room and small comforts and remain with the family. This to me was the best course, for in truth Easton House itself now seems exhausted in spirit, and I am no longer much interested in setting tasks for girls like Emily Backhurst. I feel I am entitled to some rest in my seventieth year.

  At one time there were thirteen of us living under this roof, and in those days I earned every penny of my wages. When the first four children were young, and the squire and Mrs. Easton alive, there were eight of us in service to the family: the housekeeper at the time, a Mrs. Smith; the cook who preceded Mrs. Sproule and a cook’s maid; a manservant, Harvey; two housemaids; a gardener; and myself, nursemaid to the children in those early days. That makes fourteen, but the gardener lived in one of the labourers’ cottages. There were parties and dances, Christmas masques and harvest festivals. Noise and laughter and tears
in darkened corners with the girls in love; in brief, the clamour and confusion and sometimes gaiety of life itself. And then, within a few years, it all came asunder.

  The two girls, Mary and Catherine, born two years apart after Mr. Walter, and inseparable, were taken from us by a pair of gospellers, the Lawford brothers, Cyrus and John, who came up from Bristol in the summer of 1629 to stay with a well-to-do aunt in Oxford. The story was they were seeking money from her to pay expenses for travel and settlement in America, where they hoped to go the following spring on an expedition organized by one John Winslow. He and his followers were discontented with religious life in England at the time, and hoped to build a more zealous community of believers in the New World. That, at least, is what the brothers always talked about when they visited Easton House. The girls had met them at a religious meeting in Oxford, possibly at the aunt’s house, I am not certain. But the four young people were soon courting, and it became clear that both girls were smitten by these pious fellows with their plain black dress and severe manner. They were handsome enough, I suppose, if your taste runs to tall, sallow-skinned young men with bushy eyebrows mouthing Scripture a good deal of the time. I didn’t much like them, but then, I could see how they were going to take the girls from us. I could understand their appeal for Mary, who had always been serious-minded, but Catherine? Such a gay, lighthearted girl who had always loved dancing and parties. Yet what do we truly know of even those who are close to us?

  That October the two couples were married in St. Cuthbert’s and left at once for Bristol, where they spent the winter, returning to Easton House in March for a brief visit before travelling down to Southampton and embarking for Massachusetts Bay. By then Catherine was pregnant and Mrs. Easton already stricken by thoughts of all she would miss in her daughters’ lives. I remember the day they left, Catherine saying at the front door, “We’ll meet again in Heaven, Mother.” And poor Mrs. Easton in tears. Then they were gone, the coach disappearing down the avenue between the elm trees to the Oxford road.