Karen Harper Read online

  “It’s just a play, my lord, employing the past and hardly predicting the future.” I saw where he was going now but had no notion of how best to navigate the dangers. “Indeed, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were paid a goodly sum for performing it,” I continued. “They had no political statement to make, but simply needed the money, forty pieces of silver, so—”

  “It should have been thirty pieces of silver!” he exploded, smacking his palm on his table, making it jump and shudder. “They are Judases, as much favor as Her Grace has shown them! And, yes, mistress, I hear you repeat the name of the Lord Chamberlain, as they bear the queen’s cousin’s name as patron. But,” he said thrusting up both hands when he saw me ready to protest, “I know Will Shakespeare’s bread is buttered on the other side too, for he’s been cozy with Southampton for years, and the Shakespeare family has a convoluted, questionable past as Catholics and rebels!”

  I was dumbfounded. He knew about Will’s beginnings, family connections, his life from the earliest days. Then he could ruin Will with this—ruin me too.

  “All I can tell you of my Warwickshire friend Will Shakespeare in all this,” I said, fighting again to control my voice, “is that he prays that your lordship and Her Gracious Majesty will spare the life of his friend and sponsor the Earl of Southampton. He merely did a favor for him and for the needed money. He meant no political statement.”

  I was lying and I felt myself begin a fiery blush from the tip of my ears to my throat. I could only pray that the tawny hue of my skin hid that. And here I was fighting for Will when I could have strangled him with my bare hands but three days ago.

  “Both earls’ coming trials will decide all that,” Cecil said, “but we can hardly claim that poets and playwrights are above such political frays, can we? Praying we forgive Southampton, that’s what he’s been up to, eh? More like, London’s favorite playwright has been writing something else to stir up sedition. Ben Jonson went to the Marshalsea prison five years ago for a slanderous play,” he went on, jabbing a finger at me like a scolding schoolmaster. “Thomas Kyd was questioned under extreme duress and, sadly, died soon after. Christopher Marlowe—”

  “Was supposedly accidentally stabbed in a tavern brawl,” I dared to interrupt. My Italian blood was up; I could not help myself. At least he seemed not to know of my past with Southampton or Marlowe either. “And,” I plunged on, “it was said Marlowe was an informer for Sir Francis Walsingham, so I’m not sure what it behooves one to be an informer, as it’s whispered his demise could have been an assassination and not an accident!”

  “Ah,” he said, and his mouth crimped in either annoyance or amusement. “The beauty does have hidden fangs as well as a clever brain.”

  We stared at each other in a stalemate but hardly, I thought, a truce. Air from an unseen source shifted a battle banner behind his head. One of Jaques’ lines from As You Like It leaped through my mind to taunt me: “The worst fault you have is to be in love.”

  With a shudder up my spine, I realized then what I said in the next few moments could save Will or damn him to torture, imprisonment or even death.

  “But tell me,” Cecil said, leaning on his elbows and steepling his long-fingered hands before his mouth, “before we go on, exactly what is William Shakespeare to you? Here you are, an exotic woman, a tempting vixen, when he has a wife and family back in Stratford-Upon-the-Avon. Tell me true, Mistress Anne Whateley, what is the man to you?”

  That, I thought, was the question. For nearly two decades, since even before the day he’d publicly, legally wed Anne Hathaway, I’d not only loved but loathed William Shakespeare to the very breadth and depth of my being. What was he to me and I to him? God’s truth, in my pierced and patched heart, I, Anne Rosaline Whateley, was above all else, the first Mistress Shakespeare, Will’s other wife.

  THE HISTORY OF ANNE ROSALINE WHATELEY

  I would not have anyone believe I am untutored nor ignorant of how one’s life’s story is commonly constructed. I admit the previous scene of dialogue with Robert Cecil in London is not truly a prologue, for much of what I will write next came before. After all, an old adage says, “What’s past is prologue.”

  But you see, that confrontation with Cecil caused me to search my soul to record my life. What, indeed, am I to Will and to others? What and who am I to myself?

  Having inspired characters in Will’s plays and worked closely with him in many ways—ah, both of us love to rhyme—I have decided to arrange the events of my story as if it were a five-act play, that is, divided into the major parts of my life and story. As Will wrote for a play last year, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.” And since I have the London playhouses and their people in my blood as fiercely as does he, I shall relate my narrative in such a pattern.

  This tale will reveal not only my life but Will’s, so entwined are our plots, so to speak. Sometimes I fear his rivals will consign his work to oblivion, or that theatrical tastes may shift yet again and judge him of no account, or that plague or the prating Puritans will shut down the playhouses permanently. If so, I pray this account will let others know him and his work even better—and justify my part in his life too.

  The rendering of my thoughts, emotions and experiences is part comedy and part tragedy as well as history, for life is such a mingling. And so, I write this report of the woman born Anne Rosaline Whateley, she who both detested and adored a man named William Shakespeare.

  Act One

  CHAPTER ONE

  My entrance to this world was in the same year as Will’s, 1564, though he made an appearance in the spring and I in the autumn. Looking back, I can say that the most startling discovery of my early life was how gentle and lovely lay the land where I was reared but how fierce and brutal the blows of life that soon assailed me.

  Among other local children, I always knew that I was different. In the heart of the sweet countryside of central England, where most folk were blue- or green-eyed, fair-skinned and light-haired, I had snapping dark eyes under brows of inky arches, a tawny complexion and a thick, unruly mane of raven-black hair. Yet I believe I was comely in an exotic way, like some rare bird the winds have blown off course. How could I be else with an Italian mother? She was, of course, Catholic born and bred, which she kept quiet in Gloriana’s Protestant England. I yet possess my mother’s violet-tinted glass rosary beads from Venice; I pretend they are a crystal necklace she bequeathed me, but these dangerous days, I wear it only with my night rail in my bedchamber.

  Odd too in the very heart of rural England where few strangers, as foreigners are called, abided, was that my mother had not been a milkmaid or a tradesman’s daughter but a ropedancer my father found in London.

  In my mind’s eye, I catch glimpses of Anna Rosalina de Verona only through a veil, for she died of the sweat when I was but four. Of all the people I have known, I have met only one other who had a country English father and an Italian mother, and that Will’s friend, the playwright John Marston. But Marston’s mother was the daughter of a learned Italian physician, not that of a traveling tumbler.

  So I treasure only haunted memories of my mother. I can summon up the sound of her silver laughter, her lithe body, how she held my hand as we danced through flowered fields when Da was away. She was, I pried out of him one time, “light on her feet and quick to caper.” Though I heard him once whisper to her in the night that she was his “cloud dancer,” he’d made her swear that she would never mount a taut rope again to dart along it as if she walked on wind.

  She vowed she would never more dance even upon the ground for groats and ha’pennies under the avid stares of other men. So sad that someone who had seen sunny Italy and famous France and most of England, someone so graceful and ethereal, should die burning up with fever, twisting in sodden sheets in a tiny, earthbound bed.

  The day she was buried in the graveyard at old St. Andrew’s in our village of Temple Grafton, outside Stratford-Upon-the-Avon, was the only time I saw Da
cry. I hear he bedded with another woman after, but I’m sure he never loved but once. For my down-to-earth da to call anyone a cloud dancer, he must have loved her desperately.

  “Won’t you tell me more of her, Da?” I’d ask off and on.

  “Naught more to tell,” he’d mutter, frowning as smoke from his tobacco pipe curled around his head.

  He was about our timber and plaster cottage but a few days now and then and, when he was away, I was shifted off to distant cousins in Stratford. Da owned four packhorses and worked for the Greenaways who, with up to twenty sturdy carriers, took goods back and forth from Stratford to London every fortnight.

  Pack trains were goodly sized, for robbers still lurked on the roads near Bloxham and High Wycombe. Cheese and lambskins, linseed oil, woolen shirts and hose and Will’s da’s fine gloves made the trip from Stratford to markets in Londontown. After more than a week away—the plodding trip took three days and two nights one way—the pack train returned with fineries like sugar, rice, dates, figs, raisins, almonds and special orders for Stratford folk.

  The packers unloaded the horses near Market Cross, down the way from the Shakespeare house and not far from where I stayed. I recall the thrill of hearing the pack train was back in town, of running with the other children to see what would be unloaded and to hug my da. Having seen naught of the world, I thought the market town of Stratford was the big city, especially compared to the clumps of cottages huddled about the old church in Temple Grafton. Even when I squeezed descriptions of London out of Da, I could not fathom how fat and full a place it was.

  “But tell me again about when you first saw my mother in London,” I urged him many times. He stayed bent over his bread and cheese, which I delighted to serve him in her stead.

  “’Twas in the churchyard of St. Paul’s there,” he would say, speaking slowly. “Packed with people, it was too.”

  Da was not quick with words or movement nor could he sign his name but always made his mark with a cross. Since he’d lost my mother, who had somewhere learned to read, write and do simple sums, he’d paid an old former priest to teach me those skills, else I’d have stayed illiterate. In the gentry class and the gentles above them, most women could read and write, but Da had barely dragged us off the bottom rung of England’s ladder of ranks and rights. His dream was for us to keep our own accounts for our own pack train to London.

  “Got to keep good records,” he told me. “We’ll not prosper on our own if you can’t keep writ down the count of what goods we send and bring back. Else, no need for you to have no fancy learning.”

  “But you said, if I get even better at learning words you will bring me a book or two to read. Da, you promised!”

  “Aye, I said so, and I’ll bring it from the very stalls in Paul’s Churchyard where I first saw your beautiful bird of a mother tiptoeing across the very air and knew she must be mine.”

  So he had not forgotten that I asked him about my mother. And when he talked like that, I knew my da had a poet’s heart, and I wanted to have one too.

  I’d like to create some wondrous, bejeweled day when I first exchanged words with William Shakespeare, but, since I’m telling true, I must admit it was this way: Will was walking past my cousin George Whateley’s wool drapery shop one gray-sky day the April when I was still eight and he was newly nine. He was on his way to deliver a pair of fine calfskin, wool-lined gloves, and I brazenly fell into step beside him. He had auburn hair and bright hazel eyes so alert in his pale face. Even then he was taller than me by a head.

  I’d seen Will about the Henley Street neighborhood before, usually running errands for his father or setting out for high adventures with his best friend, Dick Field, a cooper’s son, but I’d never really been alone with Will. I spent most of my free time with Katherine Hamlett, called Kat, the haberdasher’s eldest daughter, but she was working in her family’s shop that day. I loved Kat and liked Will and Dick well enough because they’d never made sport of my dark skin nor called me anything but Anne.

  When my da was away and I stayed in town, my cousin by marriage Mrs. Whateley ordered me about a good deal, but never watched me overmuch if I went outside. A bit bored and in full knowledge that Will was the eldest of the Shakespeare brood and that his father had been master chief alderman, bailiff and ale taster—quite a well-respected man—I asked Will, “May I go along then?”

  “I don’t mind,” he said with wide eyes and an exaggerated shrug. “If you won’t be missed.”

  “I won’t be missed.”

  “My mother would smack me good for just walking off without a word.”

  “I don’t have a mother, and Mrs. Whateley pays me little heed.”

  “She should,” he said, picking up his pace.

  I thought him a bit of a nitpick, but looking back, I wonder if he didn’t mean I was worth something and should be better watched. Freedom was fine with me. I was on the brink of turning hoyden and liked nothing more, when not doing household chores, to dance about to made-up verses or venture on walks away from Henley Street and even out of town.

  I entertained Will with songs and dances most of the way, despite the fact that the week before Da had caught me skipping and whirling along a grapevine I’d laid out like a rope on the grass. He’d boxed my ears ’til they rang. Smiling, then laughing, Will matched me back, rhyme for silly rhyme. He showed me the finely stitched pair of men’s gloves but put them back straightaway in their packet of parchment paper.

  I’d not fathomed he was going so far that day, nigh on a half hour’s walk to a gate in the hedge hard by the southeast edge of the Forest of Arden. There, by a big oak, in a meadow of bobbing wildflowers, he met a finely garbed and mounted servant of one of his distant Arden kin. Will’s mother was an Arden, an honorable name, stretching far back. The Ardens were possessed of many properties. Will told me that plain enough and more than once. I’d heard the whispers that Will’s da had “married up” and come into goods and fine, fertile land through his wife’s handsome dowry.

  I reckoned our two sets of parents were about as far apart as the earth and the moon. My little village of Temple Grafton was nicknamed Hungry Grafton for the poverty of its soil, though the fields produced stone and lime. Sadly, its claim to once belonging to the heroic Knights Templar was a sham as the land had been held by the humble Knights Hospitallers before Great Harry, the queen’s father, overthrew the Catholic Church in England. I told Will my tutor had said my cottage was on land once bestowed on Henry de Grafton by King Henry I, which I thought was so wonderful.

  “Imagine,” I said with a sigh, “the very land on which I live was once the gift of a king! And that same Henry de Grafton then gave some of it to Simon de Arden, one of your ancestors, that’s what my tutor said.”

  He sobered even more when I told him I could read and write, even if I admitted I needed much practice yet. “But the Shakespeares are related to the Ardens, and you aren’t kin to Henry de Grafton, are you?” he asked, kindly enough, though that burst my bubble. Still, he didn’t call me Gypsy or Little Egypt as some of the other Henley Street children did.

  “And what’s this about a tutor?” he demanded. “My best friend, Dick, and I attend grammar school in Church Lane, but we have no tutor.”

  “It’s old Father Berowne from up by Knowle, then he used to pastor St. Andrew’s,” I told him. “Besides paying him a shilling now and then, Da brings him things from London to pay the fee and lets him sit at supper with us too.”

  “School keeps me busy,” he said, “and I’m always getting spastic hand from learning to stitch gloves and control a quill. I keep snapping off the nibs of the pens and pluck our poor goose until it’s nearly naked. I’m learning Latin and Greek, though it would truly suit me to stay with our own mother tongue. There are enough words in it and more to be made just like cobbling up a shoe, but Master Hunt caned me at grammar school when he heard I’d said that about both of those old, honored languages.”

  I knew not one whit
about lofty Latin or Greek. I was envious, but didn’t let on. “I have a bargain with my da,” I said, still trying to top him. “If I keep our records and sums straight, he’ll bring me a book from London once a year, one with pretty poems, maybe even sonnets. He’s soon going to have a pack train of his own. Then maybe I’ll get even more books to read.”

  “I truly covet books, and my father says he can borrow me some from Edward Arden, the head of my mother’s family. But my father won’t like your da’s rival pack train,” Will said as we tarried. We were skipping stones in the Avon, upstream from the bridge a bit where the fierce eddy always snagged things and swept them round and round. “Among other ventures, he’s put money in the Greenaway business,” he added, I suppose hinting that my da indirectly worked for his.

  “Your da’s a busy man,” I said only.

  “More like, he is hardworking and important to our town. It’s his ambition to make us worthy of the Ardens. But his livelihood is not just inherited wealth from my mother’s side with their fine coat-of-arms and vast Park Hall lands about eighteen miles from here. You know,” he added as he sat down with a sigh on the riverbank and rested his elbows on his raised knees, “the best thing is my father’s the one who signs the permits when the companies of traveling players come to perform in the Guild Hall. A troupe called the Queen’s Men are coming back soon and Lord Leicester’s Men too. You ought to see them prance about and dance jigs.”

  “Oh, they have dancing?”

  His eyes took on a distant look as if he saw things I could not. He suddenly sounded awed, and his voice fell to a mere whisper. “Even if there are supposed to be corpses on the stage, everyone gets up and dances at the end, the merriest of jigs.”