Nothing Like the Sun, Page 4

  This marriage would, touching his father's foundering fortunes, have been salvation. Whateley would settle a fair dowry. And yet there rose, mocking from its darkness the sweet lover's words, prelude to all that was permitted (chaste kisses, no more), that tough demanding Adam, that inflamed and chastening rod. It will not be long, wait, wait. Till the spring only.

  Ah, we are all damned. There is truly evil lying coiled in good; did not God create Lucifer and foreknow the colour and heat of the light he was to bear? So desire is part of love, and desire unacted is evil, therefore enact that desire -- away, hid, indifferent, secret -- and cleanse love as a well is cleansed. 'Tis but an easy operation. Wait, indeed, for love in the spring (it is her parents' careful pleasure, this long betrothal), but go now to Hewlands Farm -- not straight and upright, though: peer about and skulk till she come forth to gather roses. And she came forth, that other Anne. It was an August evening. They lay in dry moss under an oak, WS feeling himself still but a boy and she all woman, and she would have this boy stripped to his very pelt, the sun to stare shocked at the white moving buttocks before going under for his night's journey in terra incognita, the while she lay demure from the waist up in her flowery gown. And, at the moment from which there was no turning back, for his seed had signed its conveyance, he was sure he saw faces peering and grinning from the hedgerow. But that was not all. Lightning wrote his name -- Wlm Shaxpr -- in the clear heavens of a sudden, all unannounced, and then thunder thudded like the stamping of a seal. She smiled, this one that would be both succuba and incuba on common land but (why had he not seen it before?) more comfortably on an indentured bed. And, crown of these prodigies, he felt his spurt of seed somehow enfolded within her and put at once to growth. If he had had any of the old religion of the Ardens in him he would have crossed himself then.

  'Anne Anne,' chimed the clock, 'Anne Anne Anne,' the rooks scrawked. It was to pure Anne, sweet Anne that he rode almost daily, the pure cooled lover. But he felt (he had strange and frightening dreams) that they could not delay till spring. They must be married before Advent.

  'Now what is this?' asked Whateley. 'What have you twain been doing that makes such haste your theme? For if you have done what I fear you have done, then by God I will take my whip to you both.'

  'Ah no no no, nothing of that.' WS could afford, in his innocence, to smile faintly. 'It is that I would fain have her my wife ere the fates can stop me. For I dream of nothing but disasters.'

  'Tut, lad, that is but phantoms of the mind, not to be trusted. Wait, then. Keep your blood cold and your heart warm. It is but a matter of some few months.'

  And so he was still riding to Temple Grafton in cold November, winter's first harbingers biting. Hoofs rang frosty on the road. Hard by Shottery two men stopped him. They addressed him by name and bade him dismount.

  'No. I am late. What do you want of me?' They were round-faced men, rough in gesture, much alike, yeomen, spade-bearded, dressed in leather against the chill.

  'It is less what we want than what she wants and what honour wants. As for late, you are very late. I,' said this witty talker, 'am Fulk Sandells. This is Master John Richardson. We are kinsmen of Mistress Hathaway.'

  'How does she?' said WS in his foolish manner. 'It is many a week since I -- Is she well?'

  'She is well,' said John Richardson. His left cheek twitched as though a fly tickled it. 'She is big and well and grows daily bigger.'

  'Late,' said Fulk Sandells. 'Late is very good. You are late in asking, but better late than never. She awaits you now. She will chide you for your lateness, but there is no doubt she will say aye at the end.'

  'Many a week, quotha,' said John Richardson. 'That is very good also. Many a month, he would say. Time enow for that pudding to grow kicking feet.'

  'Let us have no riddles,' said WS, though his falling heart knew the meaning all too plain. 'Say what you will say and then let me pass.' Fulk Sandells held the horse's bridle; Brown Harry did not like this man's smell and shook his head, whinnying. Sandells held fast to the curb strap, saying, 'There there, old nag as thou art.'

  'Come your ways,' said Richardson. 'You are to ask that you may appear as the lawful father of your unlawful child. You are to dismount and walk with us. You have walked that way often ere now.'

  'That is untrue,' said WS.

  'Once or twice will be enough,' said Sandells, trying to hold Brown Harry's unquiet head in stillness. 'One August eve will be enough, under an oak-tree.' Of a sudden WS pricked Brown Harry's flanks hard. He rose on his hinder legs and, with a great shake as to say: 'Nay, thou shalt not', he freed his head from that constraining clutch of dirty fingers. And off galloped WS and left their waving fists and shouted threats behind, though their foul words were all too clear in that cold air.

  So what was to be done was to be done quickly now, before Advent set in with its snows. Mad importunacy might help (I perish of desire, I cannot wait to hold thee, my naked wife, in mine arms) if it were but a matter of Anne, for what woman will willing put off a wedding? It was through the mother that finally he had his way. He cried, he near-swooned. Her smile was soft. In bed that night she must, on his behalf, have prevailed. He rode (thanks be to God, if there be a God) to Worcester on the twenty-seventh of November, there to procure a marriage licence. All was set down fair in the bishop's register. Rain set in. He lay that night at Evesham satisfied. In the Waterside inn, drinking ale, he was found by Fulk Sandells and John Richardson. They both said 'Ah' in greeting, shaking their dripping cloaks. They too sought shelter.

  'So,' said Sandells, 'tomorrow we seek one reading of the banns, not three. We have forty pounds for a bond. All will go butter-smooth.'

  'It is against the sanguinity,' said Richardson with pride. 'It is to condemnify the bishop.'

  'I am but newly come from Worcester,' smiled WS. 'And you are going to Worcester too late.'

  'How he harps on "late",' said Sandells. 'You must learn of the law, lad, and how the law is enforced.' He made a yeoman's brawny nief in threat.

  'It is all writ down on a paper,' said Richardson. 'William Shagspere and----'

  'Shakespeare.'

  'Shakespeare, Shagspere, it is all one. And Anne Hathaway in the diocese of Worcester, maiden.'

  'As maiden as your mother is,' said WS, hot. Richardson was nief-ready too at that, but he perceived his lack of reason. He said:

  'Aye aye aye, that is the nub of it all. But thou hast made her what she is not.'

  'So then,' said Sandells. 'Forty pounds is no trifle. It is no child's pocket-jingle to buy kickshawses withal. No matter of law shall hinder the wedding, nor no matter neither that is outside the pale of the law.'

  'She is a good lass,' said Richardson. 'Something stringy, but enow to grasp a hold of. She is not so young as she was but hath a light hand with a pasty. For her bedwork you yourself shall best speak.'

  'Enough of that,' said Sandells. 'We are selling him no goods, not now. He did his buying in high summer. Now it is but a matter of the delivering.'

  'That is the right word,' said Richardson. 'It will be a spring babe.'

  'And if I say a fig,' said WS, 'and spit on your poxy noses?'

  Sandells shook his head in calm regret. 'Oh,' he said at last, 'there is many a dog with a stone round's neck in a river. As it might be here. Oh, there is a many a bag of kittens in the millpond. Knives draw blood when they are sharp. You cannot scape your your your----'

  'Destiny?' said WS, ever a word-boy.

  'Aye, destiny. That is what you may call her.'

  VI

  ANOTHER little drop. Delicious. Well, then.

  AFTER THE WRANGLINGS, family tears and rages, Anne Whateley's swoons and sending-off to kinsfolk in Banbury (Master Bustin and his daughter), after first tongues' then eyes' reproachments, he climbed to his old bed with his new bride. How doth WS the married man? He had but half of that bed now, and the familiar rest he sought, in so great need, so worn, was less than one quarter of what it had formerly
been. He moved not forth, nor had any great desire to, to a new world of his own sheets and kettles; rather to his boyhood's home was admitted a fresh female conspirator, well-armed with the vinegar ladyship of his mother. The two old women, indeed, recognized kinship and later kissed night and morning. The household's lack of an Anne Shakespeare was thus proved but temporary. For the rest, his father, disappointed in a dowry, continued morose and merry-cheeked and went little, for fear of creditors, abroad; Edmund vomited on the floor amid the rushes, sick infant Moses; Richard was pushed much in mire and cried home limping: Joan grew greasier and sharper; Gilbert saw more of God and God gave him the falling-sickness.

  Soon to his boyhood's chamber was imported from Shottery a great bed apt for the spacious galloping of four bare legs, or five. And, near up to the May-birth of Susanna (begotten in lust), there was galloping, trotting, cavorting enough. Nor was it all in bed. She had great gifts, that one. Hate was a sharp sauce to the part of WS in the games she devised. There was no tenderness for there was no love.

  Anne would be all above love or hate, acting the queen. In her wedding finery she would stalk the chamber, bid WS lick her shoe, walk on him as on the carpet of her triumph, order his instant beheading. Then, so the grim sport went, he was to seize her by force, she protesting in a royal voice (though subdued, for there were others sleeping near by) and crying out out treason, the while he growled, 'By God's body I have you, Your Majesty, and now I call you thou and thee like a sloven and will wreak my dirty will all over your finery.' (So was he called Dirty Will.) Then he disrobed her in great difficulty, for she scratched and fought, and he was fain to desist from such fatiguing play. But once she said she would call in some other to help with the holding her down an he lacked force to do it alone; nay, even Dickon and poor Gilbert -- in default of one lusty man -- should be waked from their thin boys' snores in the neighbour room to assist at this treasonous rape. And then, aghast at the mere conceit of the counter-rape of innocence, he struck her a damned blow in the chaps and went hard at it, so that she cried both aye aye aye and her fear of harm that might chance to the child in her belly.

  Often she said, when the queenly mood was on her, that this act of laesa maiestas showed to poor advantage in that small bare bedchamber. There should be her court all about her -- her great men of state and chamberlains and maids of honour and even, as at some progress, the base commons -- to witness the gross defilement of beauty and majesty by the meanest and most despised of all her subjects. And sometimes, in the approach of her dying scream, she would talk of their clipping naked at the window in full day and view.

  She would act the queen otherwise. She would be the descending goddess to woo one who would feign to wish none of her (was it feigning?) WS must be adamant in his nays and pout, a lovely boy. She would have his beardkin off, she said, and eke all the hairs of his body saving his auburn crown. Then she would be at him with goddess strength, big-bellied naked.

  After Susanna's birth -- and she bore Susanna as easy as any sow -- she was restored to her slenderness. Then it was her fancy to be herself a lovely boy and, with Susanna crowing in the cradle, to steal Dickon's clothes from the press (they were much of a size) while the two unlovely boys, side by side in the spring night, entertained their innocent dreams. Then, decked as a pretty page, she would taunt him and simper before him and say: 'Take me, master, in whatever way you have a mind to.' This would fill his whole head with beating blood, so that he was blind and went for her blindly. She was, he saw, hunting out corners of corruption in his soul which he had hardly guessed at before. She would even make for him, grinning, with a dildo or penis succedaneus, and he was shocked to know she had such a thing in her chest of stored belongings.

  How could all this expense be supported, work to be done, his eyes heavy and limbs drooping in the morning, head dropping to the bench two hours before dinner? She, meantime, remained fresh and singing over her pans, bidding his mother rest, she had had a hard life, here was come a new daughter to halve all her burdens. Bless thee, Anne, thou art a good lass. Besides his work, he had the duty of teaching dull and godly Gilbert the glover's craft, and Gilbert would cut his hand and drop foaming at the sight of blood or else cry loudly on his brother for the strictness of his rule and say, 'I have spoke to God of thy naughtiness.' And WS would reply, 'Well then, ask God to teach thee of tranks and gussets, for, by God, I have had enough of it,' and then Gilbert would fall, going hud hud hud, and near upset the workbench. To be added to the agents of discontent was the antiphonal wailing of Susanna and her nuncle Edmund.

  But most was his wife's scolding, for she more than murmured of his untimely tiredness when it came to the time for climbing to their creaking and bouncing Shottery bed. He would say:

  'Not this night. The day has been hard and hot. One night's holiday will not harm.'

  'So,' she would reply, 'thou callest it work, then, that thou callest not doing of it a holiday. Thou wert ready enough that August night of my undoing.' And then she would prate of his effeminate unmanliness and take it beyond the confines of love to the manner of their life, how she would never at this gait rule her own hearth nor have fine gowns like Mistress Whatyoucall an he did not seek some better mode of employ than boy to a poor gloveman. 'Thou art weak, thou art all water, I have married but a poor thing, I, that could have had great Worcester merchants for the asking but took pity on one that seemed, with strong wifely help, like to promise fair. Thou wilt, I see it, become like thy father, a mewling shrode, naught of the ambition that should be in a man at all in thee.' There was no ho with her, so he would escape, crying creak, to his slumbers. But one hot night, in that bedchamber, he took quill and paper to set down some lines that had come all unbidden that day at his work; he had said them over and over in his head and now would see them in some more sempiternal form:

  Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,

  And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust.

  These lines seemed to be part of some story which, by gentle thinking on, might be teased out. But then she said, her dress already off her dancing bosom:

  'You have time enow, oh aye, for the miowling of kitticat poetry like a struck fool, but no time at all for your wife and her lawful pleasure.' So he replied coldly:

  'For one line of verse I would trade thirty such scolds as you.'

  'Aye, thy little thing is shrunken to a nib. Dip it in ink as a tool to write withal. I will go find me a man.'

  'You will be long finding. You were so before.'

  'Your meaning?'

  'You were out to catch and it was I was caught. But I was, God help me, drunk at the time. It is a warning against drink.'

  'I could have had all I wanted.'

  'Aye, and did have, doubtless. But I was your true woodcock. Do you not say I was the first, nor even the twenty-first.'

  'It was you that did it, you.' Her dress was now fallen to her hips but he sat on, monumental, the stone poet with poet's quill. The quill, though, quivered. 'You defiled me like some drunken beast and then came back to do it again sober. I was a virgin untouched ere all that.'

  'As a Coventry cockatrice.'

  She came for him at this, her talons ready. He marked, a poet, the beauty of her white flesh, the long arms a-shiver, the breasts' bell-tolling. 'Scratching cat, wouldst thou then?' he said, seizing one near wrist. Womanlike, she saw that she would win by feigning that this was a struggle he had begun and yielding, in her own time, to him. Her panting, after but a half-minute of her seeking to free her wrists (for he had put down his pen to seize the other), became the panting of abandon, and he thought he would then, fully clothed and sweating as he was, take her naked against the wall. But hatred rose in him like black vomit, seeing that she had turned him into manner of a whoremaster, so to wish to go to it, she mother-bare and he ready to be so in some inches of hard flesh only. In her surprise (far otherwise had been her expectation) she staggered, hobbled by her down-drawn gown, and fell against the c
rib wherein Susanna lay sleeping. The child woke in deadly fright and howled loud as to rouse the town, what time this bare mother cried, 'My babe, my babe, my honey lambkin!' and plucked her up. Susanna held her breath and gaped in the candle-shadows and they both were in an instant's sweat of agony knowing not what to do, and then the child loosed all screaming hell, so that Gilbert seemed to start some exorciser's cantrip in his next-door sleep and WS heard his father cough and mother murmur. Then the babe recovered calm, soothed with Anne's lulling and rocking, then given a good suck of the pap that had been exposed earlier to a far different end, the wife and mother speaking low loving words of nonsense for this her womb-fruit but flashing toledo hate in the eyes for the seed-sower. The seed-sower? And then, for the first time, he was assaulted, the fool, by great lubberly doubt. He knew now what the bride-knot-cutter need never, kept he but his wife in reasonable bondage, know -- the cuckoo-fear that may never in no wise be resolved. Susanna might be his and then again she might not, and this, fool, he had not thought on before. The love he owed that child could not be diminished because of this doubt (indeed, it must -- through pity and the loosing of pure animal blood-ties -- be in a manner augmented), but he might justly, he saw with wretched glee, jettison all responsibility for the mother. He would not speak on this, not even, he vowed, touch on it in the course of other angers, for it would be the beating of sparrow's wings in an osier cage, the trudge of the chained bear round and round at the stake, for he could never know. Nor she neither, nor any.

  But to him it seemed right now that he should leave and re-enter, after so brief a bed-slavery, into the manumission of his old bacherlorhood. It would be wrong, in this lack of love, to live a whoredom there in his father's house; he must forsake the bed that was hers. And to leave to seek other employ would appear duty too in another sort: Gilbert could make gloves after a fashion, a fashion of infra-or supernumerary fingers, for he could not count well, and oft no thumb, as it had been bitten off, but he would learn; Joan could help too with this work, as her kitchen-helping was less than before, thanks to her new sister; even Richard, now nine years old, might be pressed into some service of limping delivery. It was right that WS go to some other town, to fatten, however thinly, the poor Shakespeare fisc. But he delayed, he delayed. There was a fascination in hate; moreover, it seemed to him that, in those shameful bedchamber antics he could not leave off, he grew, at the moment of annunciation, somehow close to that goddess he had all but neglected (there was a dark way that was shown to him, but he was fearful of entering it wholly; he knew not properly what it was but it was to do with evil). This was especially true of some of Anne's new inventions, which entailed kneeling and a show of pious prayer. So summer died and winter lashed in, and he heard that Anne Whateley had married in Banbury.