Ink and Steel

Will dropped the traces and kicked snow from his boots against the threshold before stepping over onto rushes scattering the blue limestone floor. He and Edmund dragged the log in with Hamnet’s interference. Then Will left it to his brother’s labor, turning away from the precipitous stair on the left and into the hall, with its walls hung in holly and painted cloth. He could hear Hamnet and Edmund untying the Yule log, and he realized suddenly that they’d forgotten the ivy or bay and then his father’s arms were around him, John Shakespeare stumping forward on a bentwood cane and wrapping his oldest son in palsied arms, leaning as much as embracing, clinging to his boy gone to London and mouthing words about Will come home, in velvet and silk taffeta like a fine gentleman. His father’s words were slurred, one running into the other, and Will knew from the stern, proud look on his mother Mary’s face that he was not to remark on it. The cousins close and distant huddled in a room hot with their bodies and the leaping flames of the hearth, among them men and women Will had never seen.

“Bring it in, bring it in,” John Shakespeare said. “The feast is upon us.”

Mary waited for her husband to step back before she came forward and looked up at Will. Her eyes were blue: she had the aristocratic cheekbones and the high brow she’d willed to all her children, the living and the dead. Will saw her noticing the snow and the earth staining his cloak and the knees of his breeches, but she met his eyes and held out a tankard of mulled cider, and only smiled. “Welcome home, Will.”

“Mother,” he said, and took the wine, searching the crowd for Annie and Susanna.

“Judith would be with the younger children. God bless you.” Her kiss was roses and homecoming, and he let it drive the memory of balance lost and a lurch into a snowdrift away.

“How is Father?” An undertone, mumbled around his cider.

“Not much worse,” she said, and shrugged. “And you?”

“My plays have been performed before the Queen,” he answered, as he had imagined himself answering, and accepted her gasp and smile and delighted outcry as his due.

Annie found him before he finished the cider, and drew him through a low timbered archway into the crowded hall by a warm arm around his waist.

“The brawn is almost ready,” she said.

He breathed deep: cloves and crackling and the rich aroma of roasting pork.

“Annie,” he said. “Something happened today.”

“Not to Hamnet?” She crouched by the fire in the big bricked hearth, tucking her skirts in close as she ladled dripping over the roast. She wore neither bumroll nor farthingale, but a broad country skirt under her apron, and Will bit his tongue at the way those skirts draped between her haunches.

Three children, and still I fell,” he said. “I think.”

“Fell?” She set the battered copper ladle aside and stood, turned, frowning. She took his wrists and drew his hands forward, glowering down at them: broad knuckles, long fingers, the last digit of the middle finger on the right one calloused on the inner edge and warped sideways from the pressure of the quill. The right one trembled.

“Oh, Will.”

“Years yet,” he said. “I swear I’ll come home to you.”

“Broken and old so I can nurse thee through thy dotage? What good will you be to me then?” Her voice low, the bitterness hidden under the commonplace tone of wife to husband. “Pray it pass.”

“Hamnet by, Annie, hush you.”

“There’s a priest here tonight,” she said suddenly, interrupting. “For Christ’s birth. After the neighbors leave, there will be a midnight Mass.”

A priest. She meant a Catholic priest. A Catholic Mass. A hanging affair. Will swallowed dryness. “Annie, you must not tell me such things.”

“Will You were raised to it.”

He knew. He met her pale eyes and shook his head, tasting salt and sour like a reminder.

“Anne. Wife. I’m a Queen’s Man now. Do you know what that is?”

She shook her head. “No.”

He drew a stool out from the table and sat, gesturing her to the bench.

“Hast ever seen a Tyburn hanging, Annie?” She blanched.

“No. Not seen, perhaps. But heard.”

“It is as well.” If I have my will, he thought, you never shall see one. Especially mine.“

“I’ll take Judith and Hamnet home after supper,” he said. “You and Susanna may stay.” She did not argue.

   Act II, scene ix

Fourscore is but a girl’s age, love is sweet:

My’veins are withered, and my sinews dry,

Why do I think of love now I should die?

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Dido, Queen of Carthage

In the ten days or fortnight it took for Kit to sort out the social order of the low tables, he learned many things that had escaped his notice when he sat by Murchaud’s side. The talk was freer, although his Kit’s presence was greeted with sidelong glances at first. But when Murchaud left court, and Morgan was not seen, and Kit traded his green and violet and silver for the black velvet he truthfully preferred, the conversation flowed more free. Especially as he was seen in the company of the Mebd’s Bard and her Puck, or sitting alone.