She sat on the bed and asked if I could teach her to play the lute. She said if I taught her how to play she would lower the rent by five pence. I said yes. Not so much because of the rent, but because I welcomed the excuse to sit next to her a while.
She had another little mole, like the two on her cheek, between her thumb and forefinger. Her hands were stained a little from the leftover cherries she’d been eating. I imagined holding her hand. What a childish thought! Maybe my brain was still as young as my face looked.
‘It is a beautiful lute. I have never seen one like it. All the decoration,’ she said.
‘My mother received it from . . . a friend. And you see this here?’ – I pointed to the ornately crafted sound-hole, under the strings – ‘It’s called the rose.’
‘It is nothing but air.’
I laughed. ‘It is the most important part.’
I got her to play two strings, back and forth, plucking at a quickening pace, along with my heart. I touched her arm. I closed my eyes, and felt fearful of how much I felt for her.
‘Music is about time,’ I told her. ‘It is about controlling time.’
When she stopped playing, she looked thoughtful for a moment and said something like, ‘I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the market again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky . . . But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, aren’t we?’
She definitely said that last bit: We are all the strings.
Rose was too good for picking fruit. Rose was a philosopher, really. She was the wisest person I ever knew. (And I would soon know Shakespeare, so that’s saying a lot.) She talked to me as if I was her age and I loved her for that. When I was with her, everything faded away and I felt calm. She was a counterbalance. She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people any more. I wanted her in every sense. To want is to lack. That is what it means. There was an emptiness, a void, made vast and wide when my mother had drowned, which I thought was never-ending, but when I looked at Rose I started to feel solid again, as if there was something to hold on to. Steady.
‘I want you to stay, Tom.’
‘Stay?’
‘Yes. Stay. Here.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t want you to have to leave. Grace likes having you here. And I do too. Very much so. You are a comfort to us both. The place has felt too empty, and now it does not.’
‘Well, I like being here.’
‘Good.’
‘But one day I may have to leave.’
‘And why would that be?’
I wanted to tell her, right then. I wanted to say that I was different and strange and peculiar. That I would not grow old like other people grow old. I wanted to tell her that my mother had not been bucked off a horse and that she had drowned on the ducking stool, accused of murder by witchcraft. I wanted to tell her about William Manning. I wanted to tell her how hard it was to feel responsible for losing the person you had loved the most. To tell her the frustration of being a mystery, even to yourself. That there was some flaw in the balance of my humours. I wanted to tell her that my first name was Estienne and that my last name was Hazard, not Smith. I wanted to tell her that she had been the one true comfort I had known since Mother died. All these wants rose up, but had nowhere to go.
‘I can’t say.’
‘You are a mystery to be solved.’
A moment of stillness.
Birdsong.
‘Have you ever been kissed, Tom?’ I thought of that first night, when she had given me a small peck on my lips. ‘A proper kiss, Tom?’ Rose clarified, as if reading my mind.
My silence was the embarrassing answer.
‘A kiss,’ she said, ‘is like music. It stops time . . . I had a romance once,’ she said simply. ‘One summer. He worked in the orchard. We kissed and did merry things together but I never really felt for him. If you feel for someone, just one single kiss can stop the sparrows, they say. Do you think that can happen?’
And she placed the lute beside her on the bed and kissed me and I closed my eyes and the rest of the world faded. There was nothing else. Nothing but her. She was the stars and the heavens and the oceans. There was nothing but that single fragment of time, and this bud of love we had planted inside it. And then, at some point after it started, the kiss ended, and I stroked her hair, and the church bells rang in the distance and everything in the world was in alignment.
London, now
I am standing in front of the year nine class. Again. I am tired. Going to bed after three is not what teachers should do. Raindrops shine like jewels on the windows. Continuing from the disastrous previous lesson on immigration, I am starting to discuss the social history of late Tudor, specifically Elizabethan, England.
‘What do you know about Elizabethan England?’ I ask, while thinking, Maybe this time I should have chosen, say, Sardinia. Or to be among lemon groves in Mallorca. Or by a beach in Indonesia. Or on a palm-filled island beside turquoise waters in the Maldives. ‘Who lived there?’
A girl puts her hand up. ‘People who’re dead now.’
‘Thanks, Lauren.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘People with no Snapchat.’
‘True, Nina.’
‘Sir Francis Someone.’
I nod. ‘Drake and Bacon. Take your pick. But who now do we think of as the person who defined that era in England?’
For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.
And then my eyes rest on the one person I am surprised to see here.
‘Anton? Do you know anyone from Elizabethan times?’
Anton looks at me timidly. He is scared. Guilty. ‘Shakespeare,’ he says, almost like an apology.
‘Yes! It was the age of Shakespeare. Now, what do you know about Shakespeare, Anton?’
Lauren obliged. ‘He’s dead, sir.’
‘I’m detecting a theme, Lauren.’
‘Happy to help, sir.’
‘Romeo and Juliet,’ says Anton, his voice quiet, hoping he is making things all right. ‘And Henry the Fourth Part One. We’re studying it in English.’
I hold his gaze, enough for him to look down at his desk in shame.
‘What do you think he was like? How do you think he lived?’
Anton doesn’t answer.
‘The thing I want to get across, though, is that Shakespeare was a person. I mean, he lived. He was a man. He was an actual man. Not just a writer, but a businessman, a networker, a producer. A man who walked real streets in real rain and drank ale and ate real oysters. A man who wore an earring and smoked and breathed and slept and went to the toilet. A man with hands and feet and bad breath.’
‘But,’ says Lauren, coiling her hair around a finger, ‘how do you know what his breath smelled like, sir?’
And I think for a moment how nice it would be if they could know. But of course I just smile and say something about a lack of toothpaste and get on with the lesson.
London, 1599
I had been playing the lute in Southwark all summer and into autumn. I often worked late, till after they closed the city gates, and had to walk the long way home, which could take over an hour.
Now, the weather had turned and the crowds were thinning out. I went around all the inns, asking for work, but they didn’t have any room for me. Being an inn musician was seen as a far better thing to be than a random street performer. I was part of a dying and undesirable breed, I realised. The trouble was, though, that there was a band of musicians – Pembroke’s Men – who had the market pretty much sewn up.
And having heard I was after a job, one of them – a giant bearded fiddler known locally as ‘
Wolstan the Tree’ on account of his size and, possibly, the fact that his wild hair looked a bit like foliage in a storm – came up to me outside the Cardinal’s Hat just as it was getting dark.
He grabbed me by the neck and slammed me hard against a wall.
‘Leave him be,’ said Elsa, a friendly flame-haired prostitute I always spoke to on the way home.
‘Shut up, wench.’ Then he turned to me. His teeth were rotten, just a random row of brown pebbles. It was hard to tell if the smell of shit was coming from him or the tanners next door. ‘You ain’t playin’ music in any inn this side of Bishopsgate, lad. Especially not round Bankside. Not alive, you ain’t. This is ours. Ain’t no place for lamb-faced boys like you.’
I spat in his face.
He grabbed the neck of the lute.
‘Get off that!’
‘I’m going to break this first, and then your fingers.’
‘Give it me back, you thieving—’
Elsa was over at him now. ‘Ho, Wolstan! Give it him back!’
He swung the lute high behind him, ready to swing it and smash it against the wall.
Then came a voice, a grand, deep theatrical kind of voice.
‘Stop there, Wolstan.’
Wolstan turned to see the three men who had just appeared on the path behind him.
‘Oh my,’ said Elsa, suddenly excited – or, very possibly, feigning it – as she smoothed the creases in her dress with strokes as slow as cat licks. The whole area was theatre. On or off the stage. ‘It’s Richard the Third himself.’
Of course, it wasn’t Richard the Third. It was Richard Burbage, who even I knew was the most famous actor in London. He was quite formidable-looking at that time. He was not an Errol Flynn or a Tyrone Power or a Paul Newman or a Ryan Gosling. If he was on Tinder he’d be lucky to get a single swipe right. His hair was thin and mousy and his face as lumpy and misshapen as Rembrandt’s, but he had something else, something Elizabethans recognised in a way people in the twenty-first century no longer do: an aura. Something strong and metaphysical, a soul sense, a presence, a power.
‘A splendid evening to you, Mr Burbage, sir,’ said the Tree, lowering the lute.
‘But not, it would appear, to everyone,’ said Burbage.
I noticed the other two men. One was as round as a barrel, and with an impressive beard, neater than Wolstan’s. He was sneering so dramatically I guessed he was another actor. He seemed quite drunk.
‘You frothing stream of bull’s piss, give the boy his lute back.’
The other man was slim and quite handsome, albeit with a small mouth and long hair combed back ill-advisedly. His eyes were soft and cow-like. Like the other two, he was dressed in a padded, laced and buttoned doublet; in his case gold-coloured, I think, though it was hard to tell in the fading light. A well-paid bohemian, complete with gold hooped earring. These were clearly actors, and well-paid ones. I knew they must have been members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, along with Burbage.
‘Fie . . . Look here. Look at this. Hell is empty and all the devils are here on Bankside,’ said the handsome one, in a resigned but bitter kind of way.
Elsa noticed this man. ‘Shakespeare himself.’
Shakespeare – for it was he – smiled the smallest of smiles.
Elsa turned to the man next to Shakespeare, who was as large as a barrel. ‘And I know who you are too. You’re the other Will. Will Kemp.’
Kemp nodded, and patted his stomach with pride. ‘I am he.’
‘Give me my lute,’ I told Wolstan one more time, and this time he knew the night was against him. He placed the lute in my hands and sloped off.
Elsa gave a mocking wave, waggling her little finger. ‘A pox on you, maggot-cock!’
The three actors laughed. ‘Come on, let’s head to the Queen’s for a quart,’ said Kemp.
Shakespeare frowned at his friend as if he were a headache. ‘You ale-soused old apple.’
Elsa was whispering into Richard Burbage’s ear as he was helping himself to a feel of her.
Shakespeare came over to me. ‘Wolstan is a beast.’
‘Yes, Mr Shakespeare.’
He smelled of ale and tobacco and cloves. ‘It is a shame to see the Tree being himself . . . So, lad, do you play well?’
I was still a little shook up. ‘Well?’
‘At the lute.’
‘I suppose, sir.’
He leaned in closer. ‘How old are you?’
‘Sixteen, sir,’ I said, keeping my age consistent with what Rose thought.
‘You look two years less than that. At least. But also two years more. Your face is a riddle.’
‘I have sixteen years, sir.’
‘No matter, no matter . . .’ He wobbled slightly and rested his hand on my chest, as if for support. He was as drunk as the others, I realised. But he straightened himself up.
‘We, the shareholders of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, are currently looking for musicians. I have written a new play, As You Like It, and it requires music. There are a lot of songs. And we need a lute. You see, we had a lutist but the pox has taken him.’
I stared at Shakespeare. His eyes contained two golden fires, reflecting a nearby burning torch.
Kemp, tugging Burbage away from Elsa’s attentions, was keen to speed things up, so said to me brusquely: ‘Tomorrow, the Globe, by eleven of the clock.’
Shakespeare ignored him. ‘Play now,’ he said, nodding at the lute.
‘Now?’
‘While the iron is hot.’
Elsa started singing a bawdy song I didn’t know.
‘The poor lad is still shaken,’ said Kemp, feigning sympathy. ‘Onwards.’
‘No,’ said Shakespeare. ‘Let the boy play.’
‘I don’t know what I shall play.’
‘Play from the heart. Pretend we are not here. To thine own self be true.’
He hushed Elsa.
Eight eyes watched me.
So I closed mine and played a tune I had recently been playing, and thought of Rose as I did so.
All the day the sun that lends me shine
By frowns do cause me pine
And feeds me with delay;
Her smiles, my springs that makes my joys to grow,
Her frowns the Winters of my woe.
When I stopped singing I looked at the four faces staring silently at me.
‘Ale!’ shouted Kemp. ‘Lord, give me ale!’
‘The boy’s good,’ said Burbage, ‘if you ignore the song.’
‘And the singing,’ said Elsa.
‘You play well,’ said Shakespeare. ‘Be at the Globe Theatre tomorrow. Eleven o’clock. Twelve shillings a week.’
‘Thank you, Mr Shakespeare.’
‘Twelve shillings a week?’
Rose couldn’t believe it. It was morning. We were out fetching water before work. Rose had to stop and place the bucket of water down. I placed mine down too. The water – for cleaning, not drinking – was from the well at the end of the lane, nearly a mile north of Oat Barn and the orchards, so we needed the rest. The morning sky blushed an ominous pink.
‘Yes. Twelve shillings a week.’
‘Working for Mr Shakespeare?’
‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Yes.’
‘Tom, that is joy.’
She hugged me. Like a sister. More than a sister.
And then a cloud of sadness fell across her face as she picked up her bucket again.
‘What?’
‘I expect we won’t be seeing much more of you then.’
‘I will walk home each evening just the same. Around the walls or through.’
‘That was not my meaning.’
‘So, what is your meaning?’
‘Your life will be too colourful for a dull market girl.’
‘You are not dull, Rose.’
‘A blade of grass is not dull until you see a flower.’
‘It is. A blade of grass is always dull. You are not a blade of grass.?
??
‘And you are not a stayer, Tom. You ran from France. And you ran from Suffolk. You will run from here. You do not settle. Since we kissed even your eyes fear settling on mine.’
‘Rose, if ever I flee it will not be because of you.’
‘So when you flee why will it be, Tom? Why will it be?’
And that I couldn’t answer.
The water was heavy but we were nearly home. We had reached the stables now, and saw a row of horses, like lords in a gallery watching a play they had already seen, staring at us. Rose fell silent. I felt guilty for the lie I had told about my mother’s death. I needed to tell her the truth about me. At some point, I would surely have to.
Just as we were reaching the cottage, we saw two women in the street. One of the women was Old Mrs Adams. She was shouting at another. Hell-turding away.
Rose knew the other woman from Whitechapel Market. Mary Peters.
She was a quiet woman, with a sad look about her. She was probably forty. Which, back then, was an age you could not take for granted you would reach. She wore widow’s black all the time.
Old Mrs Adams was leaning in, spitting mad words at her, but Mary turned to stare her down with such a silent fury the old lady backed away like a cat suddenly scared of its prey.
Then Mary kept on walking down Well Lane towards us.
She didn’t seem the least bit disturbed by her encounter with Old Mrs Adams. Rose, I noted, seemed to tighten a little at the sight of Mary.
‘Good morrow, Mary.’
Mary smiled briefly. She looked at me. ‘Is this your Tom?’
Your Tom.
It felt embarrassingly good. To know Rose had spoken of me. To feel as if I belonged to her. It made me feel solid, real, as if the space I occupied was meant to be occupied by me.
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’ Rose blushed a little. Faint pink, like the morning clouds.
Mary nodded. Took it in. ‘He’s not there today. You and Grace will be pleased to hear this.’
‘Really?’ Rose seemed relieved.
‘He has a fever. Let’s hope it is the pox, eh?’
I was confused. ‘Who are we talking about?’
Mary shrank back a little, as if she had said something she shouldn’t have.
‘Just Mr Willow,’ Rose said. ‘The warden from the market.’