Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard Page 17

  One of the carriers told her to shut her mouth. They were rough fellows, those carriers, though kind enough to me, and one said, “We carry no pestilence. The girl is not used to the horse, so leave off, you’re waking the neighbourhood.” This brought laughter from some, but yet the woman continued to shriek about pestilence.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw faces staring down and the hag still yelling until a man fetched her a clout and she was quiet. All this I saw from the paving stones in my first moments in London. One of the carriers then summoned a carter and I was lifted into his wagon with the baggage piled in beside me. As my aunt and Marion moved off through the streets, I followed in the cart, listening to the voices nearby: “Is she dead, then? Was it a fever?”

  I remember the creaking axle and the grinding wheels of that cart and a jarring that could loosen the teeth in your head, and on I went, past the cries of hawkers and around me the restless surge of the poor appealing for alms or offering prayers. Opening my eyes, I looked up and for a few precious moments saw between the overhanging roofs a patch of sky and three kites circling, wishing with all my heart that I was such a creature unbound from this earth by flight.

  I was trundled then along a busy street—Cheapside, as I would soon discover—and some time on, when the carter stopped, I opened my eyes to the sign of a yellow hat. My aunt beckoned the carter to draw me down the laneway to the rear entrance, and the man carried me up narrow stairs to a room on the third floor, where he placed me on a truckle bed and left. A servant girl undressed me, her hand passing over my brow in search of fever, then reaching under the covers to feel my pubis for swelling. Later she brought me soup, but I had little appetite; I lay there listening to the voices of passersby in the laneway, watching the evening light fade into darkness, and then I slept.

  In the night I awoke with a start, fearful that I had wet the bed, and I must have cried aloud, because the servant girl, Jenny by name, came in with a taper and, sniffing the air, muttered, “I know what’s wrong with you.” Drawing back the blanket, she whispered, “Oh Lord, what a mess you’ve made.”

  Not the kindest-hearted creature, she wiped me with a rag, and roughly enough too, and then pulled the soiled sheet from beneath me, grumbling about the nuisance of it all. A big, round-faced buxom girl of sixteen or so, this Jenny, and as bold in aspect and manner as poor Margaret Brown had been meek in both. When Jenny showed me the bedclothes by candlelight, I could see I had neither pox nor pestilence, but only my first courses. As the girl put it with her sour laugh, I was now of breeding age.

  For some days thereafter I felt vaguely unwell, as though I were still on that horse counting the milestones to London; I lay in bed vowing that I would return to Oxfordshire on foot before ever I rode a horse again.

  On the third or fourth day, however, I was up and approached my aunt in the parlour, told her how sorry I was about the bedclothes.

  She was embroidering lacework and, looking up at me, said only, “I hope you realize what all this means now, Aerlene.”

  “I do, Aunt,” I said. “My mother told me of what can now happen.”

  Returning to her needlepoint, Aunt Eliza said, “Much good the knowledge did her.”

  Then a man’s voice in the room. “That will do, Eliza. There is no need to be unkind.”

  I hadn’t noticed Philip Boyer, who was sitting at a desk in the corner writing something. I was embarrassed to have mentioned my condition in his presence, though it didn’t appear to bother him. He was small in stature with a moustache, his dark hair now greying, and he was precise and handsome in his dress.

  He got up from the desk and said, “I am your uncle Philip, and you are Elizabeth’s daughter.”

  “I am, sir,” I said.

  Aunt Eliza said she must speak to the servants and left. Even then I felt a coldness between husband and wife.

  Philip Boyer said, “I was fond of your mother. An interesting woman. Not like most English women. I enjoyed talking to her. She had unusual ideas.”

  I was uncertain what he meant by that and had no wish to pursue the subject; I still felt embarrassed in his presence.

  “When you are feeling more yourself,” he said, “I will show you some of this city where I have made my living these past thirty years. At first London is a confusion, so you will need guidance. Later we will put you to work in the back of the shop with the apprentices. You must earn your way in this city and it will do you good to occupy yourself. Idle hands make work for the devil. Is that not what you English say?”

  I told him I had often heard the expression, but guessed it could apply to the inhabitants of any country who saw value in work and mischief in indolence. He laughed and told me I might be right.

  “I can see you are a clever little thing,” he added. “I will show you London and then set you to work during your stay with us.”

  Over the next few weeks Philip Boyer was as good as his word in acquainting me with at least parts of the city, for London has so many neighbourhoods one could hardly know them all in a lifetime. On Sunday afternoons we would set out westward from Threadneedle Street, walking to St. Paul’s and along Cheapside to Holborn or the Strand, since Boyer favoured the rich and their mansions; the vast majority of Londoners did not interest him and I never saw him give a penny to the poor. As we walked, I was excited to be in the city where my father lived, and I wondered if he was now rich enough to live in one of those grand houses by the river.

  Boyer was forever going on about the success of French Protestants in London. “We are good at business,” he liked to say, “and we work hard. Harder than Englishmen, if you will forgive a criticism of your countrymen.” It had taken him thirty years, but he had succeeded; he had a good trade with the ladies at Court and with gallants from the Inns and with those from the countryside who came into the city to be outfitted for the Christmas season. He had long ago paid his denization fee and was as good as any Englishman alive. He told me that it hadn’t always been like this. In his first year in London as a Huguenot refugee, he had found it difficult, “for Londoners have never taken kindly to ‘strangers,’ as we foreign-born are called.” He told me of one night when he was foolish enough to be out after dark and lost his way. When he asked for directions at a tavern door in his bad English, he was set upon by half a dozen bluecoats.

  “They gave me a terrible beating, those young apprentices. And when they finished kicking me and I was lying in the street, I wondered how I would ever survive in this city. But I couldn’t go back to France. I thought of returning to Italy, but there too thugs resent strangers. So I said to myself, I will work hard and learn their language, and one day I will be rich and it will not matter what accent I speak with, for they will have to listen. Lying on that street I promised myself that I would be careful. I would obey the authorities and one day have my own business. And I have done so.”

  Philip Boyer was a boaster, but I didn’t mind and anyway I felt he was entitled to brag a little, as he had done so well.

  One day we walked past Goldsmith’s Hall to the liberty of St. Martin le Grand, where he first settled after fleeing the massacre of Protestants in Paris thirty years before. There he had found friendship and safety among other refugees, Italians and Flemish and fellow Frenchmen.

  Another day we walked by the river and Boyer pointed to the cranes near Queenhithe. “There now, you see,” he said, “that is where the wine barges carrying our good Bordeaux are unloaded. And across the river,” he added, pointing again, “are the pits for the bears and bulls that are tormented by the dogs. You hear great shouting from there in the afternoons. It seems barbarous to me, but you English appear to enjoy such things.”

  “Not all English, Uncle,” I said. “I myself, for example, have no wish to see a bear or bull tormented by dogs.”

  “Yes, yes, perhaps,” he said, “but most do. I’m talking of the common people.”

  I could see that he had no wish to be unanchored from the generality of his observation
s about England and its people.

  “And those big buildings beyond,” he said, “are playhouses. I have never been to one myself, but many of my customers enjoy such entertainments. Even some of the ladies, I am told, like the comedies.”

  So that, I thought, was where my father’s plays were performed. In those very buildings across the river. Perhaps one of his plays was being enacted that afternoon. But how could I find out? There was so much to learn about London, but that day Boyer was also remembering my mother, looking at me sideways from time to time.

  “You’re not as comely as your mother, Aerlene, but you have a ready wit, as you English like to say. Elizabeth was very pretty, but she was also gentle. I used to think that there was about her an air of tender.”

  “Tender? Tenderness, the noun,” I said.

  “Tenderness, yes. Exactly. A kindness in her. Rare in a pretty woman. They are usually so vain. I see it every day in my business. But vanity after all is my bread and butter. Is that not an English saying?”

  “I suppose it is, Uncle,” I said.

  “Yes,” he continued, “your mother was une femme douce.”

  “Well, Uncle,” I said, “I will never be as pretty as Mam. When I was younger they called me an elf.”

  Philip Boyer laughed. “Une elf. But that’s so unkind. Who would say such a thing?”

  “Other children in the village.”

  “Well, those are unpleasant memories you must put away.”

  “My head was too big for my body,” I said. “Of course, I have grown since those days.”

  “Of course. And you have a fine head on your shoulders. It’s a great storehouse for your wit. Aerlene is a pretty name, too.”

  “Do you know what it means, Uncle?” I asked.

  “I do not,” he said.

  “It was my mother who named me,” I said. “Aerlene means ‘elf’ in some old storybook.”

  He put his arm around my shoulder. “My little niece, the elf.” He laughed, and so did I.

  One morning three weeks or so into that September, Boyer showed me the stockroom at the back of the shop, where his two apprentices were at their workbenches. I had seen them coming and going with material to display for customers, but had spoken to neither. The older one, Corbet, was perhaps eighteen, fair and handsome, though his manner was disdainful; the other, Prew, was dark and small, his skin blemished by pox marks that put me in mind of poor Tom Bradley in my uncle’s workshop. Prew was shy and kept his head bowed, his eyes on the needle and ribbons he was attaching to bonnets.

  Both boys were born in London, but their parents were French and they considered themselves French like their master. Corbet, for instance, soon corrected me on the pronunciation of his name; the ending, he said, rhymed with say, not set. Prew’s name was originally Proulx. When together alone, the boys conversed quietly in French, and if I came upon them they would stop at once. Jenny, who was often coming and going, didn’t appear to mind this, but I found it unsettling.

  I was put to work unpacking the crates delivered by the draymen to the rear entrance off the laneway. That first day Corbet showed me how to use an iron bar with a claw at one end to open the crates. Uncle Jack had taken me once to see the brilliantly coloured peafowl strutting in the royal park at Woodstock, but never had I seen such glorious plumage as the feathers that lay beneath the straw in those crates: the pink of flamingoes and the blue of egrets, the pure white livery of ostriches and swans from Africa. There were soft grey lambskin gloves from Spain and France and multicoloured ribbons from Milan, cotton fabric to be knitted into nightcaps for elderly men and bolts of wool to make boys’ caps, as Boyer had a contract with a nearby chapel school.

  Since it is not in my disposition to remain silent long, I asked questions of Corbet and Prew, but neither seemed inclined to talk. I had better fortune with the draymen and was soon trading wits with those hearty fellows in their leather aprons, their ale-and-onion breath. At eleven o’clock Jenny brought in a tray of bread and cheese, and for each of us a tankard of weak beer. Prew always finished his meal quickly and returned to work, but Corbet took his time, eating slowly, even scrupulously, I thought, as I watched him pick the last crumbs of cheese from the trencher.

  At the end of the day, I swept the floor of cuttings and began to feel the onset of dread at the long evening awaiting me, for there were no books in the household save two large Bibles, one in English and one in French.

  After supper I would go to my room and watch the darkness filling the window, trying to summon up my bedroom in Worsley and the sounds of village life when the air itself seemed to breathe in the darkness; and reading my father’s words, I would listen to the cries of a nightjar or the hooting of an owl, or hear my uncle snoring from along the hallway. In my room in London, I heard faintly the voices of people on Threadneedle Street, and now and then I would be drawn to the window to look down at the laneway. In the room next to me Jenny might be moving about, coughing or farting or muttering to herself. She often went to bed early because she had to prepare Boyer’s breakfast and he liked his bread and hot chocolate at first light. Other times I heard the murmuring of the two apprentices in the room above me. Lying there I would write to my uncle telling him of my life in the city, but the words remained in my head, for I had no money to post a letter.

  One night I was awakened by cries that made me think of village cats, and when I hurried to the window I saw a man and woman coupling against the wall of the building opposite. He was thrusting himself at her as she cried, from happiness or pain I couldn’t say, but then above me I heard laughter too. It was hard to imagine Corbet laughing at anything, but there it was, and even more astonishingly there too was Jenny, for her giggling was unmistakable. The man and woman were perhaps too drunk to care, for they soon finished and staggered off arm in arm.

  I returned to bed thinking of Jenny with the two boys upstairs and feeling obscurely jealous; but apart from my jealousy, I was more troubled at how wrong I could be in my assumptions. How little I really knew of others. People were far more complicated than I had imagined, and what appeared to be often was not so. I lay thinking that a great writer like my father understood this; he had created Mercutio and Juliet, Beatrice and Benedict, Sir John Falstaff, and Shylock, all of whom are complicated, by turns baffling and surprising us. They were like old friends and I missed them.

  A stroke of good fortune, then, because on the following Saturday, Boyer came to my room and gave me a tester. I looked at the silver sixpence in my hand while he told me that Corbet had given good report on my work in the shop, and therefore I deserved a wage and would be paid accordingly each Saturday at noon, when our work was finished for the week. I asked him then if I might venture out by myself to St. Paul’s to visit the bookstalls, as I had lost all my books in the fire. It was only minutes away, I said, and by now I was familiar with the streets around the great church. I would be cautious. He looked doubtful.

  “I should ask your aunt about this,” he said, “but she has gone marketing with the maid.”

  I promised him I would be back within the hour, and he said he would hold me to the promise.

  “I know you love books, Aerlene,” he said, “and I see no harm in it, but you must watch your purse and your virtue in this city.”

  On that Saturday afternoon in October, I was happy, if a little nervous, to be on my own in London with a sixpence in my pocket. At St. Paul’s churchyard I marvelled at the variety of books on offer, mostly religious in content: Bibles and prayer books, anthologies of sermons, volumes of inspirational sayings and lessons on Christian living, pamphlets of Puritan zeal on the coming of Armageddon, miscellanies of prayers and devotions. But there were almanacs too, and books on travel with accounts of voyages to distant lands, some with engravings of fantastical creatures, enormous serpents, crocodiles and leviathans. Such books were costly and one vendor rebuked me as I turned a page. “No thumbprints on my wares, Miss. That book is beyond your means.”


  True enough, I thought, taking no offence, for I had already grown accustomed to the rough-and-ready manner of Londoners. But where were the books of plays? They seemed but a small part of the general trade and I was disappointed, for I had imagined my father’s playbooks would be everywhere. Then on a table I saw an old favourite from childhood, The Hundred Merry Tales, and beside it a bound copy of Richard III. It was like seeing an old if unsavoury friend, and I turned to the opening speech, where the misshapen Gloucester declares his hatred for all those of fair proportion:

  And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

  To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

  I am determined to prove a villain,

  And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

  “Are you reading, Miss, or just looking at the words?”

  Scarfe’s first words to me, framed, of course, as a sarcastic question. And what a question! Could I read? Looking up I saw watery blue eyes, a foxy grin, the unkempt hair stuffed beneath a cap, this boy of sixteen, as pale and thin as London air. I had seen dozens like him on the streets, apprentices with their insolent tongues and swagger, their caps askew.

  “I can read the words,” I said.

  “Can you, now?” he laughed. “Then read something to me so I know you’re not here to filch a book and put us out of business. How old are you, anyway?”

  “Sixteen,” I said. “Is there an age you have to be to buy a book in London?”

  He was still grinning. “Why, you don’t look above twelve.”

  “Shall we divide the difference, then, and get on with our business? How much for this copy of Shakespeare’s Richard III?” It gave me a shiver of delight to say my father’s name to another.

  “How do you know it’s by Shakespeare? His name is not upon it.”

  “I know it is his work,” I said.

  “Could you read a passage for me?” he asked.

  I handed him the book. “Select one.”

  He gave me another of his crooked smiles as he leafed through the book before handing it back. “There,” he said. “Begin there.”