Free The Secret Life of William Shakespeare by Jude Morgan

‘There, Anne. I treaded on your shadow, that means you’re dead.’
    ‘Trod, not treaded.’
    ‘Treaded and deaded. Treaded and deaded…’
    ‘All that rhyming has got into his wits,’ she murmured, without approval. The boy sang it over and over, wildly stamping.
    ‘You’re dead, you’re dead, and that’s good…’ He rasped his tongue, dancing backwards. Suddenly there was fury in her face and she was after him.
    ‘For shame – shame on you, to say that…’
    Will wanted to call her back, to say it was only childish silliness. But there was, after all, something grim about it. And when she caught up with the squealing boy she did not collar him or hit him. Her blue, crackling-blue, eyes were all she needed to hold him still. Hitching her skirts she jumped neatly on his shadow.
    ‘Now you’re dead,’ she said. ‘Is that good?’
    The boy pouted, big face half stricken, half mutinous. Will saw the resemblance to the farmer. He seemed to see other things, in vanishing glimpses.
    ‘Come now, let’s kiss,’ she said, on a plain tender note. The boy clung to her passionately for a moment, then pulled away, pointing at Will.
    ‘Make him dead now.’
    She straightened, glancing at Will’s shadow on the grass, then at his face.
    ‘No need,’ he said. ‘You’ve already killed me.’
    ‘No, she hasn’t.’ The boy groaned impatiently. ‘Here, I’ll do it.’ That gave a little space, in which what Will had said could reverberate. He wondered at himself for having said it: not with regret – though that might come – but with a giant amaze, for suddenly it seemed possible that he could say anything.
    Anne shook her head slightly; a slight smile likewise. He felt she would always temper the sharpness of the negative. ‘No, I think you are living yet.’
    She turned to walk on. To her mind he had said, perhaps, one of those things that were not real.
    He followed. It was not far to Hewlands Farm now, but it didn’t matter: now, with his heart clanging rough music to break an age of silence, it didn’t matter how far he had to go.

3
    The Triumph of Beauty (1582)
    A gift of gloves.
    Is this, Anne wonders, the moment?
    When he presents them to her they are outside, naturally. Outside is their indoors, the wood their closed chamber. ( Not the house, she told him, when they first began to meet.) Summer holds fast. Woodbine and dog-rose grow in tangles, in aromatic and sticky tunnels. Butterflies stumble along winding lanes of hot air. Too warm for gloves, but these are a gift, made by him.
    A silent signal. She extends her right hand. With infinite care he draws the glove on to it, though his own hands are slightly trembling. Perhaps that is the moment: observing that tremble, and how it elevates her, so that the fallen trunk she sits on sheds its moss and fungus, and turns throne.
    The limp kid fingers fill and stiffen. He inches the cuff up her wrist, past a million thrilling pinpoints.
    And surely this should be the moment – if she is certain of her throne, certain of him at her feet. She doesn’t shrink from anything in him: looking on the dark waving crown of hair, broad brow, long-lashed salt-grey eyes, she is invited and beguiled. His youth, of which he is so conscious, seems to her a zenith, not a falling short; hard to imagine him burning any brighter than this.
    ‘It’s beautiful making,’ she says, flexing her hand, as a wand of sunlight conjures the intricate tracery of beads.
    He shrugs. ‘An attempt. I wanted to put myself into every stitch.’ He laughs nervously. ‘And then I wanted to take myself out. To make the making better … No matter. Next to your skin it can only be a snarl and a cobble.’
    Anne accepts the gift of gloves. But beyond that lies another acceptance, and there she still shrinks. Because now she knows something terrifying about herself: that her yes is not a word but a shout; that you can set the world before her and she, for the right thing, for the right