Ink and Steel

I am grateful. Will would have tipped the coachman—another man’s servant, after all but John clucked to his horses, gentling them into the twilight as if he hadn’t seen Will’s outreached hand. It was a measure of the trust of the horses that the coachman never reached for the whip, and they went willing though their hides heaved like bellows. Their clatter receding, Will turned toward the thatched and half-timbered cottage as swaying exhausted as if he had run from Kent on his own two legs. The door was latched, painted wood tight against timbers set in stucco that gleamed a soft pink-gray, stained with ochre earths. Anne had let the flowers by the doorstep die. Will tugged twice to free the latch, although he knew before the door opened that his house was empty: no smoke rose from the chimney, and he could smell cold ash. Twilight streamed down from the loft. Annie had left the windows under the eaves unshuttered.

He fumbled his habitual shilling as he stepped inside, the glass-smooth coin ringing on the door stone. He crouched to retrieve it, feeling among the rushes strewing the floor, and suddenly found he had not the strength to stand. Cold silver between his fingers, he crouched on the threshold in the open doorway and buried his facein his hands. It was Edmund who found him. Will had curled forward, his knees drawn up against his forehead and his back pressed to the timber. He heard the footsteps up the walk and looked up, blinking in the twilight, scrubbing a hand across his face although his eyes stayed dry.

“Will. You should have written you were coming.”

“I got here faster than a letter would have,” Will said, and covered his mouth as he coughed. “From Kent. We only stopped to rest the horses. Where is Annie?”

“With Mother. Are you … ?” Edmund’s voice trailed off. Will pushed himself to one knee and stood.

“No, I’m not well. How did you know to find me?”

Edmund took Will’s elbow as Will hid his shaking hand in his sleeve, the shilling folded tight inside his palm.

“Bill the landlord had it from your driver. He sent his boy. Come.” Both men pretended it was exhaustion alone that left Will leaning on his brother’s strong young arm. “Let’s go home.”

He dreaded Anne. Feared anything she might be speaking, unspeaking. Eyes black with weeping. Eyes cold with consideration. Was there anything I could have done? If I had been here, surely’t were something I could have done.

She sat by the fire when he came into his parents house, her dress overdyed drab in black that would fade as one might expect mourning to fade: eventually. One expected to lose babies. Or young children to the flush of their illnesses, the measles and the scarlet fevers and the great and smallpox. Will’s parents had lost three girls before Will, one of them the first Joan of two at nearly Hamnet’s age. Children of schooling age, however, an only and an eldest son …Will didn’t notice if Edmund came through the door with him. His father might already be abed; Susanna and Judith were nowhere in sight. Will’s mother left her darning in a pile on the board and came around it, past Annie, who looked up, but no more than that. Mary Shakespeare squeezed her own child’s shoulders and leaned her forehead briefly on his neck. She kissed the cornerof his mouth. “Oh, Will”

Her voice broke and he clutched her tight for a moment, then set her back the length of his arms.

“Thank you.”

She nodded and ducked away, knuckling her eye, a hasty clatter on the stairs telling her passage. Will went to his wife. Annie’s hands were white on her skirts. She crouched on a three-legged stool as if warming herself before the fire, but Will knew her chill would take more melting than that. He knelt down before her. The stool wobbled under her when he took her hands, the one leg shorter than the other that his father hadn’t mended in fifteen years gone past. He opened his mouth; she closed it with a look.

“You came,” she said. She leaned forward, her unbound fair hair falling around him, tangled with her lack of care.

“Would you doubt it?” Her look was answer enough.

“Annie, what happened?” She lifted her shoulders and shrugged. The hasty dye at her collar had rubbed off onto the linen of her smock. Her palms were calloused enough to rasp his skin, no lady’s white soft hands.

“Fffuh,” she started, and her throat must have closed on the words. Will heard the front door latched; no one spoke. A stealthy creak that was Edmund climbing the stairs to bed. Saving candles, Will wondered, or too weary still with grief to face a long evening in company? He held his peace and held Annie’s hands, and she neither flinched nor closed her eyes.

“Fell,” she said again, more clearly, leaning back on her stool until only his grip held her upright, their arms taut between them like a rigging. “Fell from an oak. Dashed his brains upon a stone.”

“Annie.”