Free The Secret Life of William Shakespeare by Jude Morgan Page A

love, will tip it all over like a drunkard with an inn-table, devoted to that dreaming fire in the head.
    But before the gift there was Lammas-feast: perhaps it began then. Bartholomew invited Will to it, after he had escorted her home from the play. ‘My thanks, Master Shakespeare. We hold Lammas-feast tomorrow, come join us.’ It was thrown out in absently genial mood. Later, across the tumult of the supper-table, she intercepted a speculative look from him. ‘So, Anne,’ he said. But soon he was diverted by Bella: pregnant, and not eating hugely enough for his liking. Though she hardly shows, he is always touching and caressing her belly lately: as if he wants to hatch it. He is convinced it will be a son. For Bartholomew the past is of no interest at all, and the present an impatience: he lives in the future, of which he is amazingly unafraid.
    And lately he has also been making some changes, like the disposing of the last of their father’s clothes as gifts to the farm servants. Good and right. She is bored by her own grief, its slow circularity, the windmill creak of it.
    Lammas-feast, then. Bartholomew is one of the few farmers to keep it up: some call it popish. ‘If they work hard, let them have a little play,’ is how Bartholomew sees it. Trestles in the barn, a hogshead of ale, flitches of bacon; the farmhands at ease with him as he trades jokes and matches them pint for pint. When Will comes in she realises she has been waiting for this: not simply his arrival but how he will look against this background.
    Bartholomew beckons him to the seat by his side, sets before him a heaped trencher. Her brother’s white teeth crunch away at onions and crackling as if noise is half the pleasure of eating.
    Will – he eats too, converses, he doesn’t look out of place. But again Anne notices this about him: while many people sprawl in the world as if it is their own fireside, to see him is to think of a traveller at an inn, making a temporary separate comfort with wrapped cloak, the corner of a settle, his thoughts.
    Evening squeezes its juicy light through the high slit windows, an incredible gold: the pewter dish in front of her glitters like a precious artefact. Resentfully she seeks and avoids Will’s eye. Why, she thinks, do you come to destroy my peace?
    Bartholomew is on his feet and seizing Nathaniel, the shepherd’s lad, by the shoulder. Hauling him up.
    ‘Now hark ye, good people, I heard a tale about friend Nathaniel here, as you have likewise perhaps. A tale of a man and a maid, or shall we say a maid unmade?’ Bartholomew’s arm grips Nathaniel’s neck, not letting go. ‘How old are you, my buck? Eighteen? We’ll say a man, then. Certain you’ve played a man’s part with little Alice Barr, and now she’s not so little neither. Where is she? Come, Alice, now’s not the time to be shy…’
    Everyone is laughing as Bartholomew marches the lad over to staring blushing Alice.
    ‘Come, clasp hands. There’s a picture. Tell me, now, if I’m mistook, for it’s no small matter. Eh, Alice? Not small, was it?’ Bartholomew’s grin is broad and hard. ‘What I surmise is, you were both thinking so much of your marrying day that your thoughts ran clean away with you. Well, as long as you fix the day now, my friends, I’ve naught to say against it. I’ll even give you a bridal present. To the church in the morning, Nathaniel, to pray the banns, hey? Yes or no?’
    It is admirable how he sets these things straight. Loud claps and cheers as he pushes the pair into a kiss. No bastards on the parish. On the way back to his seat he slips his arms around Bella and again caresses her belly. Teeming wombs and proper households. Anne rises to her feet, feeling sere and light, as if a breeze would bowl the husk of her across the threshing-floor.
    She has to get away from this, but conscience will allow only an escape to duty. Her stepmother’s chamber. Before her apoplexy, Stepmother would have been on