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

highest form at Lammas-feast: the overflowing hostess, dancing, joking, ladling, rapping knuckles. A little better today, she completes a turn of the room on Anne’s arm; her speech is clearer. One day soon, she mews, as Anne settles her, she wants to come downstairs.
    ‘You will.’ Anne has no doubt of that. She’s strong, determined: she’ll take her place as chatelaine again. ‘I want…’ She tucks the pillow behind her stepmother’s neck. ‘I want a world where nothing is cheap.’
    At the foot of the staircase Anne finds him waiting for her.
    ‘I wondered – I thought you unwell, perhaps.’
    ‘No. I wanted to be, just for a little, without company.’
    That comes out harsher than she intends it – but, no, she is angry. Angry at herself, for the vertical spider-ascent of her heart when she saw his face. Angry at him, for the fear he prompts in her – the fear that he does not mean it. If he does not mean it, then—
    ‘I’m not company,’ he says. ‘I can be, if you like. Otherwise I can be nothing.’
    ‘No one can be nothing,’ she says, thinking: Oh, yes, yes, they can.
    ‘Just the creak of the board under your foot, then. The fly on that windowpane. That feeling in the air, when there’s feasting, of something unsatisfactory that makes you want to smash through it all. You feel it, I know.’
    His smile, his eyes are bright and fierce: a glitter from the bottom of a deep well of unhappiness. But, then, perhaps Bartholomew has been plying him with too much drink.
    ‘Really, you know nothing of me,’ she says, ready to pass him.
    ‘Certain, for I know nothing of myself, and I have lived with myself these eighteen years. But what’s knowing? You know what clouds look like. Lie on your back and gaze at a cloud until you feel yourself turning into it. Still you wouldn’t know its twin next day.’ From the barn comes the squeaking of a rebec. ‘They’re dancing.’
    ‘Then go dance.’
    ‘I don’t know whether to say how afraid of you I am. It might make you pity me, which would be something.’
    Oh, drunk, nonsensical. ‘You make a game of me.’
    He only touches her arm to detain her, but when she shakes off his hand he seems still to be holding her. ‘Never,’ he says. ‘Never, that’s all.’
    ‘I’ve heard about men and their never, sir. Never will I forsake and never will I this and that—’
    ‘I am not men. Nor Stratford man nor Englishman nor young man, I hate that, damnation on all flocks and herds,’ he says, breathing hard. ‘Am I allowed to fall in love with you, yes or no?’
    ‘No,’ she says, all fear now: because now it is as if a fay sits in the corner of your chamber, and says, yes, all the tales were true, we’re real, and so let us bargain.
    ‘Not even hopelessly?’
    He has drawn a smile from her before she knows it; but with everything he says she has a sense of trying feverishly to catch him up.
    She says: ‘You’re very young.’
    ‘I shave, I’m breeched. And you, are you a grandam disguised? If my youth is the only fence I must climb, then tell me. There’s hope in that.’ The music rises. ‘That’s a branle. Dance it with me. Then I’ll ask nothing more.’
    ‘Until the next time.’ She realises that this is a kind of yes. Was this the moment? ‘You can’t – you can’t truly be afraid of me.’
    He thinks. Then answers, reasonably: ‘What else is love?’
    *   *   *
    A gift of gloves.
    When he was stitching them, he tried to think beyond the deadness of kid and thread to the living hand, all the things it did, gesturing, touching, lying curled and defenceless in sleep. The beauty beyond.
    Sometimes he asked himself what he was doing. And he had no answer. With Anne, with this beauty, he had been shown something: something for which there were no available responses. As if an old friend had taken you to his stable and there shown you, with a shrug and a smile, a unicorn quietly feeding.
    Sometimes he took out Richard’s