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Nan hasn’t seen her husband since a week before Easter, and is startled when he strolls in the front door of his parents’ house as Nan and Mary are getting ready to put dinner on the table. Just as if he hadn’t been gone at all, she thinks, while the whole family is exclaiming and making much of him.
He’s brought gifts for the children. New dolls for the girls, who have mostly grown out of dolls, and Aesop’s Fables for Hamnet, who is as yet rather indifferent to books. Susanna, however, pounces on it and has to be reminded not to bring it to the table. At least someone is happy.
It’s Thursday, which means Will’s youngest brother Ned doesn’t have to go back to school after dinner. Mary shoos all four of the children out to the garden to weed it. They don’t seem to be doing much in the way of weeding; they’re up the trees, on the fence, dodging back and forth between the vegetable-beds. A fine lesson in prepositions, Will says. No matter. It buys Nan and Will a little privacy.
They have two rooms to themselves one upstairs and one downstairs, at the side of John and Mary’s house. They’d come furnished; a fine wedding-gift for a young couple with a baby already on the way. It had seemed like plenty of space in those days. Now, it’s a rare luxury to have it all to themselves for a little while.
Will has brought money. A little more than usual, more than Nan has made from her brewing. She takes the coins and slips them into their hiding-place, the one that John and Mary don’t know about. Will mistrusts his father’s judgment when it comes to money.
He’s brought spices, too. Nutmegs, grains of paradise, and a little packet of something that looks like peppercorns but has a very different smell, a bit like cassia and cloves together.
“What’s this?”
“Something new. John and Rebecca say it’s from the West Indies. It’s called allspice and you can use it in all sorts of dishes, sweet and savory.”
“Since when do you know anything about cookery?”
He shrugs. “I’m just telling you what they told me. I’m sure you’ll find a way to use it; you’re so good at working out that sort of thing.”
“I hope you didn’t spend too much on this.” She realizes too late how churlish that sounds, when he surely thought long and hard about what sort of gift would please her.
His mood isn’t dashed by her tone. “John knocked a bit off the price. Anyway, I can afford it. Things are going well.”
“I don’t understand how. Isn’t there a plague in London?”
“You’ll see. I’ve got something else I want to show you.” A sly smile plays about his lips, the sort of smile Nan remembers from their courtship. Back in those days it had been for her. Well, perhaps it’s still for her now. Whatever his news is, he’s plainly looking forward to telling her; but he doesn’t say anything more right now, just strips off his shirt and begins to wash at the basin.
Nan waits a minute or two, watching, and then goes to him. It has been so long. She wraps her arms around his bare chest and kisses him deeply, though she knows she had better not, unless....
“He-ey,” he says in surprise, and then, “Can we?” He’s already beginning to undo the laces of her bodice and twine them about his fingers.
“Are you staying?”
“Until Monday morning,” he says, “on and off. We play in Warwick tomorrow afternoon, and Saturday also – I want you all to come to the play on Saturday, and then I’ll ride back with you, and lie here over Sunday.”
This is not the answer she was hoping for, although she supposes it’s more than she has any right to expect. She does some quick calculations. “Wait till Monday morning,” she says. “Safer then.”
She’d told him, long ago, that she wasn’t giving him any more children if he was going to keep running off to London and leaving her to bring them into the world alone. She hadn’t been expecting him to agree to that bargain.
He nods, but goes on unlacing her. Perhaps they are both disappointed, but no matter. They are experts, by now, in everything that hands and mouths and thighs can do.
* * *
He asks about the children’s schooling, afterward. He always does.
“Susanna writes as fair a hand as any boy, I’m thinking. You were right that she ought to be taught how. And Hamnet’s nearly ready to start at the grammar school.”
“And Judith?”
Nan sighs. “She sings well enough, and she can sew when she can be bothered to keep still. She’s not doing so well with her reading. The letters keep dancing, she says.”
“Do they really? How pretty. Don’t let my father punish her for having fancies.”
Nan is sure that it isn’t a fancy; she doesn’t understand what Judith means either, but she’s sure that the child is speaking no more and no less than her truth. Nan suspects something is genuinely the matter with her. She decides not to trouble Will with this. Their younger daughter is quick enough in other ways, and it can make little difference whether she ever learns to read well or not. There are no grammar-schools for girls, no universities.
“What was the thing you wanted to tell me about?”
“Ah!” He reaches for his cloak-bag and takes a book from it. VENUS AND ADONIS, reads the title page in big letters, and below that is some Latin that Nan cannot decipher, apart from the single word Apollo. Beneath that –
“Oh,” says Nan, understanding now why she is expected to be interested in Venus and Adonis. “Richard Field printed this. How nice.” Richard Field was their neighbor once: another Stratford boy gone to London to make his fortune. There are so many of them. So many wives and mothers left at home to wait for news and fret.
“Look inside,” says Will.
Oh. He’s done it, he’s published a book of his poetry, he did the thing that he went to London almost six years ago to do. He can come home now.
He hasn’t said he’s coming home. He didn’t say it, for sure, when Nan asked are you staying? A question that could have been answered with a simple yes instead of until Monday morning.
When she has finished reading the dedication, she asks rather tartly, “And what’s the Earl of Southampton to you, or you to the Earl of Southampton?”
He shrugs. “You need a patron to get on as a poet. It’s like being a player. He was pleased enough to give me an advance on the next one – whether with the poem or the flattery, I’ve not the least idea. Anyway, this one is selling well. Enough to cover the printing costs and then some.”
“The next one?”
“A tale from Roman history. In praise of virtuous wives, the kind who are patient and industrious while their husbands are away.” He drops a kiss on the top of her head.
Nan doesn’t know much about ancient Rome, bus she supposes something very bad must have happened to the patient and industrious wife, or the historians would never have taken much interest in her.
* * *
After supper, the whole family passes around the book and marvels at Will’s name in print and listens to him read from the poem.
“That’s mighty fine,” says John, Nan’s father-in-law. “Nearly as good as that ‘Earth upon earth’ poem that used to be painted in the guild chapel, I’m thinking.” And then he insists on reciting “Earth upon earth” to them before they go to bed. It is the only poem John knows, and he has it by heart.
* * *
Susanna, who usually sleeps with Nan when her father isn’t at home, has been exiled to the truckle-bed with the twins. It’s too small for three children growing as fast as they are, and there is a great deal of poking and squealing and complaining, which Nan does her best to ignore. She draws the bed-curtains, shutting herself and her husband into their private world.
This used to be John and Mary’s second-best bed. Her in-laws dismantled it and rebuilt it here when Will and Nan married, keeping the third-best for themselves. They are generous people. Nan has no complaints, but for all that, she and Will want a house of their own. It’s one of the things they’ve been saving for.
She snuggles up against him and fights sleep, waiting for the children to go quiet. Time with her husband is too precious to waste. She’s spent these last few months fearing she’d lose him to the plague in London, and now that he is here, well and hearty and full of enthusiasm about the new book, she worries that his horse will stumble on the road to Warwick in the morning. Life isn’t safe, that’s what she takes away from that poem of his. If even a goddess can’t protect her lover, what is a mortal woman supposed to do?
* * *
Will leaves right after breakfast in the morning, leaving Nan to spend the long day alone. In the afternoon she grinds some allspice and makes a short-cake with it, distributing a slice into each eager pair of child-hands. She and Mary sit down to taste it, discussing the flavor and what else might be done with this new spice. Nan has more ideas than Mary does. Her mother-in-law has never been very inventive when it comes to cookery, having grown up in a home where that sort of thing was left to servants.
She might try it in an ale, she supposes, although there isn’t enough to brew more than one batch. But people will pay a premium if they know there’ll only be the one, and every little bit of money helps.
“You are a wonder,” says Mary, when Nan floats this idea past her. “What we’d do without you, I don’t know.” She gives Nan a sly look, as if hoping for assurance that she and Will haven’t been plotting to make Mary do without them. Nan thinks of their little hoard of coins, and feels a twinge of guilt – though, surely, they wouldn’t be looking to move very far off.
* * *
The next day is Saturday, another half-day at Ned’s school. As soon as he comes home, they all set out for Warwick, taking a cold dinner to eat on the road. They arrive at the Great Hall just in time for the play. It’s a comedy called The Taming of the Shrew, a title that Nan does not find over-promising.
Several of Will’s cousins have come along; the whole clan takes up a full bench and more. Nan and her children find themselves behind Will’s parents and siblings, next to Ellen Burbage and her two daughters – Nan knows this because Will makes some hasty introductions before disappearing. They are the mother and sisters of Will’s friend Dick, about whom she has heard a great deal.
The Burbage women have seen this play many times before, and talk mainly about the technical challenges of staging it in this particular hall, a conversation that Nan finds hard to follow. Their conversation is sprinkled with theatrical terms, and they are all quite bold-spoken, swearing freely. Nan doesn’t look forward to explaining to her own daughters why they aren’t allowed to do that.
Will is playing a drunken tinker, in the broadest of Warwickshire accents, and Nan feels a twinge of embarrassment on John and Mary’s behalf. They didn’t work hard and sacrifice for so many years, they didn’t bring their children up in hopes of being gentlemen, so that their eldest son could beclown himself like this.
The audience, however, is loving it. They might not take mockery from a Londoner, but Will is one of their own, and every mention of Burton Heath or the fat ale-wife of Wincot or Cicely Hackett brings a ripple of laughter, regardless of whether it’s attached to a joke or not. They know these names. They find it even funnier when one of the boy players has been dressed up in women’s clothes and instructed on how to play a dutiful wife – and Will, beguiled into believing he is her lord and husband indeed, demands that she come at once to bed. He’s put off with the promise of seeing a comedy instead, although he affects not to know what that is.
Nan understands that this play is of his own making, although he hasn’t said so.
* * *
She doesn’t notice when Will and the boy Bartholomew disappear from their places at the edge of the scaffold that has been set up at one end of the Great Hall. She only realizes that they are gone, that one layer of fiction has melted away, when they reappear as two of Petruchio’s household servants.
* * *
I say it is the moon.
I know it is the moon.
Nay, then you lie; it is the blessed sun.
Then, God be thanked, it is the blessed sun.
But sun it is not, when you say it is not,
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it named, even that it is,
And so it shall be so for Katherine.
Ellen Burbage is a woman of fifty or so, but half those years seem to melt off of her as she watches this scene. “That’s what it was like,” she whispers. “The day I met James. I’d seen traveling players before, but I’d never seen one who could turn day into night just by saying so. I would have followed him anywhere.”
And Nan sees that this play is not really about taming a shrew, as it seems to be. It’s about playing a part, all manner of parts, and about remaking the world with your words. She sees, also, that Will is spellbound by that sort of thing, and that is why he won’t linger in Warwickshire any longer than his company does.
Would she follow him anywhere? She is none too sure. Is that a fault in her? She’s been to London once, before her marriage. She remembers the pestilent smells, mostly, and being jostled in the streets and stared at by strange men and feeling afraid all the time.
* * *
Come, Kate, we’ll to bed.
We three are married, but you two are sped.
‘Twas I won the wager, though you hit the white,
And, being a winner, God give you good night.
Kate makes a grab for the purse of money. Petruchio holds it away from her. Teasing, or otherwise? Does she get the money in the end? Those questions are never answered. Kate chases him down from the scaffold, out the side door of the hall, into the world. A fine lesson in prepositions, Nan thinks. This play seems to have expanded its boundaries, even as it comes to an end on the stage. Where on earth did Will and the other boy actor go, when they stopped being Christopher Sly and Bartholomew? (They are back now: the boy as a widow, and Will as one of the wedding-guests left to dance after the lead actors have left the stage.)
Ellen taps Nan on the arm. “Well, now,” she says, “I hope you see why we’re keeping your husband from you.”
“It’s a good play, isn’t it?” says Nan.
“Aye. And it’s not in the poetry, though to my mind he’s as good at that as any of those university fellows who fancy themselves such great wits. It’s that he knows things about people, and half the time I’m damned if I know how.”
* * *
Will, dressed in his own clothes once again, joins them as Nan is breaking up one of the endless squabbles between the twins over whether boys or girls are better. (Judith, it seems, liked the shrew better than the good sister, and Hamnet is doing his best to explain to her why she’s wrong. Hamnet has eight and a half years of experience in the ways of men and women, which is some twenty minutes more than Judith does, and he is confident that this makes him an expert.)
“Clever little disputant, isn’t he?” says Will. “It’s past time he started at the grammar school, I’m thinking.”
“Next quarter,” Nan promises.
Mary sighs. “Aye, but it seems such a pity to separate them.” This has been John and Mary’s persistent refrain about the twins; but of course they will have to be separated. Boys are meant to go out into the world; a truth that Nan has accepted ever since she was old enough to understand the difference between herself and her own brothers. She has never particularly wanted to go out into the world, anyway.
Will hands his horse over to Ned to ride back, and squeezes into the wagon with Nan and their children.
“Did you like the comedy?” he asks the children.
“Oh, yes! It was so funny,” says Hamnet, who had nearly slid off the bench laughing at the wedding scene.
“I like plays with sword fighting better,” says Judith frankly.
“Tragedy next week, my girl,” promises Will, just as if the company won’t be miles away next week.
Susanna, who has been looking abstracted, speaks up at last. “Are there really such teachers, Father? Men who will come to people’s houses and teach girls Latin and poetry and anything else they want?”
“For rich men’s daughters, aye,” he says. “Susanna, I’m a poor player, and I can’t afford –” He stops short, sensing the child’s disappointment. “Well, maybe I will, in good time. Yes, there are some such teachers in London.”
In London... This is the truth that Nan hasn’t wanted to acknowledge, that the balance of her husband’s life has tipped London-ward, that the rest of them have been weighed and found too light.
* * *
They are home at last; the children have fallen asleep with minimal squabbling, tired after a long day.
“We’ve made ourselves a clever little creature between us, don’t you think?” Will’s hand rests on the back of her neck, underneath her curls. Nan thinks there might be an are you sure you don’t want any more of them? implied, but she chooses not to hear it.
“He reads and writes well enough when Judith’s not distracting him. You’re right, it’s time he starts at the grammar-school.”
“I meant Susanna. There ought to be something we can do for her.”
Nan tenses. She has resigned herself, long since, to sending her son away when he is a few years older – all of Will’s kindred are ambitious to have an Oxford scholar in the family – but it’s never even occurred to her that he might ask her for one of the girls.
“We’re paying for her to have writing lessons with the boys, aren’t we? And I’m teaching her how to help out in the brewery. I could do with another pair of hands.”
Will finds this an unsatisfactory answer, she can tell.
“Your parents dote on her,” Nan adds. (Which they do; Susanna is the image of a little sister of Will’s who died, as Mary reminds them all at least once a week.)
By now, Will has had time to work out some of the practical difficulties for himself: what on earth would he do with a girl-child in London? Not leave her all day in his rented room, surely? The right sort of woman to be a player-poet’s wife would, no doubt, suggest pulling up stakes and moving the whole family to London, but Nan is not the right sort of woman, and the notion fills her with panic.
“So they do,” says Will after a moment, and to Nan’s relief he says nothing more. They have too little time together to waste it in arguing.
She will have him all day tomorrow, she thinks as they reach for each other in the night, and for a little while in the morning on Monday. That’s something, anyway.