Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard (5 page)

“On an afternoon when I ventured out again, I met him. He was out walking and dressed in Sunday clothes after church. I think he was looking for me. I couldn’t say for certain, but there he was smiling at me as I came around the pathway where I often used to hide when I saw him with his brothers. And that afternoon, I unclothed the boy just as I had done in fantasies. Removed his clothes there in a glade far off the path where I had led him by the hand without resistance. Henry had never been touched by a woman in the way of lovemaking, had never been kissed, for I asked him later and he shook his head. Imagine this strong young man with feelings never expressed. And so I took him into my arms and taught him how to love me there in that sunlit glade with the trees above us and the wind in their branches throwing dappled light across his skin, his arms brown to the elbow and then his body so white. So I taught him how to love me, though not all at once, for such things take time and patience. As Goody Figgs used to say, ‘You can’t heat a pot with one strike of the flint.’ You need to build the fire, and so it is with lovemaking, Aerlene, and I hope you are fortunate enough to learn this from a good man one day. With Henry I had to be patient, for he was like a child with a new plaything and had to be taught. But in time he learned and then it seemed we could scarcely keep our hands and lips from each other. Lust is a form of madness and the preachers may be right to rail
against it, much good it may do them, for I don’t believe we can stop what other animals do by nature, which is to mate.

“I didn’t even care whether I had a child by Henry Chapman, so much had that madness overcome me, though looking back, no doubt I believed that with all my problems after Wilkes, I couldn’t bring forth a child, so I was content to let that boy pour his seed into me. And so he did, and I was borne away with pleasure as we met in our glade in the evenings of late summer or on Sunday afternoons, twenty minutes after your aunt had finished her prayer of thanksgiving for another dinner sent from God. This boy, this farmhand from the Easton estate, was all I could think of day and night. In your uncle’s shop through the week, as I measured or cut lengths from the bolts of cloth, in church on Sunday mornings, only hours away from meeting him, hearing but not listening to the preacher’s words, God save me, thinking only of Henry’s weight upon me and him deep inside me, the smell of his sweat. His breath was sweet, for he chewed parsley. He brought handfuls of it in his smock for us, bless him.” She stopped for a moment. “I heard it said once that Henry now lives up near Chipping Norton. He married a widow with children of her own. It must be ten years ago I heard that.”

I listened to all this as if it were a story from some book. I wanted to know then how she was found out, because people are always found out in such tales.

“Well, you get careless, Aerlene,” Mam said. “When you are in love, nothing matters but being with the one you love. Your father wrote about that in his
Romeo and Juliet
and it cost those two young people their lives. As I’ve said, I couldn’t bear the ending of that play, but I suppose there was truth in it. Nothing else matters when you are in love except being with the one you love,” she repeated. “As you will find out one day.” She gave me an absent-minded hug as though she only half-believed her words. “At least I hope you will, my little imp,” she added.

Mam was always using such redundant endearments with me, and she never seemed to understand how much I hated them. How much I hated to be reminded by her how little space I took up in the world. How little of me there was, and how small and unimportant and ugly I felt. How tired I was of always looking up at others.

So to change the subject, I asked again, “So how
were
you found out?”

“Someone saw us,” Mam said. “Who can say? Wandering children? A couple courting and out for a Sunday walk? Oh, to this day to think of others looking upon us at our ardent lovemaking. The cries I made. Yes, yes, we were careless, as are all lovers from time to time. And so the mischievous tongues began to wag. ‘There was Lizzie Ward, naked and lying in the woods with that simpleton Henry Chapman. Can you believe it?’ It’s how most folks are, isn’t it? By
nightfall it was all over the village and into the ears of your aunt and uncle. Poor Jack. After that business with Wilkes he must have thought I was cured of the lovesickness, and now here I was again with a man who for all Jack knew had no more sense than a child. And I a grown woman. What was I thinking? Well, I
wasn’t
thinking. Thinking had nothing to do with it. Some can be denied and others can’t and that’s the truth, Aerlene, and I was one who couldn’t. ‘A weak vessel,’ as your aunt called me more than once. True enough. I couldn’t deny it. How can you help the way you are? Prayer, as my brother and his wife suggested? Perhaps. Prayers seem to work for some, but not for me, though I knew it was wrong and I felt sorry for Jack. I had put him to so much trouble, poor fellow.

“It caused a fuss in the village, I can tell you that. The story grew with each telling: Henry and me lying in ditches. Running around the woods naked with flowers in our hair. Goody Figgs was behind it all. She was instructing me in witchcraft. We were practising sorcery on a simple-minded young man who didn’t know any better. Oh, the names I was called, Aerlene, are not fit to repeat. I couldn’t show my face in your uncle’s shop again because all of Woodstock knew the story too, and your aunt wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Who would buy a spool of thread from the likes of her?’ she would say to your uncle at dinner. I was suffered to eat at her table, but she wouldn’t look at me and she wouldn’t
speak to me. ‘You put her back in that shop, Jack,’ she said, ‘and trade will go elsewhere. You mark my words.’

“You know yourself, Aerlene, what a sweet, obliging fellow your uncle is and always has been, and he loved me dearly and couldn’t help it, God bless him, but he could not go past his wife’s words. He knew she was right about the shop. They had to make their livelihood, and their business would surely suffer as long as I was behind the counter. Lying in bed at night I felt entirely undone by everything, and over and over again I wondered why I had lain with that poor boy. Given myself over to pleasure like that with scarcely a thought for others. I knew such things never last and always bear a cost, yet I hadn’t stopped until we were found out. In the early morning hours of sleeplessness you always think the worst, and sometimes I wondered if perhaps what some said of me was true after all; perhaps Goody Figgs, who often read my hands or sold me potions for a penny, had cast a spell over me. Perhaps I myself was now a witch ensnaring young, innocent men like Henry Chapman. At such times I thought of throwing myself in the river, for I knew a pool where the water lay still and deep beneath the willow trees. Yet I knew it was a grievous sin even to think about that and it frightened me whenever I walked by that pool in the river. I thought too of running away—but where would I go? I had little money, for Jack paid me no wages, only a few pennies now and then to spend
on myself at Christmas and other festive times. He called it ‘holiday money,’ but it wasn’t much. But even had I money, where would I go? How long would a woman last by herself on the road among the company she would meet there?

“You may well believe, Aerlene, that there were many in the village who wished me gone. Wanted me turned out like that to consort with vagrants. There were so many about in those days, rufflers and masterless men, many not right in their heads, pilfering what they could find, stealing onions from gardens and bedding left out to dry on hedgerows. And women with them too, thin and ragged with shifty eyes, beaten and treated little better than dogs. I often saw such people passing through the village, escorted by the constable and cursing him as they left, turning in the road to laugh at him and dancing a jig, making filthy signs with their hands. I once saw a man open his breeches and wave his soldier in mockery as he left. And I would then be among such fellows. Better off in the river, I used to think.

“For a while after Henry and I were discovered, young men would come from the taverns and throw stones at the house, making sounds like tomcats in heat. ‘Come out, then, Lizzie, we’ll away to the woods,’ or ‘They say you’re the devil’s maid, Lizzie. Will you come forth and seduce us? We’ve plenty here for you.’ My aunt would soon be at the door, unafraid and facing them in her nightdress. I could hear her below on the front doorstep and see the dark figures
scattering away and laughing. Sometimes, when I walked towards the river or the woods, children would follow, calling me names and throwing stones. But I could soon outwit them in the woods, and they were too frightened of Goody to venture far.

“I went to her hut one day and she was waiting as though expecting me. Nothing ever surprised her or changed the features of her strange old face. She had heard about me and Henry Chapman. She said nothing about it, but I could tell she knew. She invited me in and served me some concoction, which made me feel light-headed. Then she read my left hand, tracing the lines in my palm with her gnarled fingers. She told me I was going on a journey, but couldn’t say where—only that it would happen if I was patient. I was not to worry but to wait, and I would find a new life somewhere else. Where that was she couldn’t say, but I would go within the year.

“One evening a couple came to the door. I saw them from my window walking towards our house dressed in their Sunday clothes, looking ill at ease, the man large like Henry but with a worn face on him, and his wife small with sharp features. I didn’t of course know who they were until after they knocked at the door and I heard the words they spoke to my aunt. The words that burned my face as I listened by the open window above them. ‘Shame on her. A grown woman and a widow. Carrying on like that
in the woods with a boy who is not right in the head and doesn’t know any better. She should be stocked. I intend a word with the constable.’ I couldn’t hear it all. I think I may have clapped my hands across my ears. I gathered, however, that they were looking for money. Your aunt and uncle were shop owners. We weren’t poor and I suppose the Chapmans thought they could be recompensed for the damage to their son’s reputation. But your aunt was having none of it. Say what you like about Sarah, she was not one easily to be threatened; she would stand up to anyone and anything, fearless as a Tartar if you inflamed her. So she soon put the run to the poor Chapmans. Told them they had no business with her and her husband. Looking down I could see as I listened how the poor old man had snatched the cap from his head as soon as his wife had knocked upon the door. And then, listening to Sarah’s words flail him and his wife, he looked as if he wanted to be anywhere else but there. I could see the slouch in his shoulders as the words took hold. ‘Keep your feeble-minded son at home, where he won’t bother others. Now be off with you or I’ll see the constable and have him charge you with trespass.’ They looked bewildered and somehow shrunken in those ill-fitting Sunday clothes. Words like
trespass
strike fear in the hearts of the poor, who want as little as possible to do with the law. I shall never forget standing at my window that evening watching the old couple retreat along the
road, the woman turning to her husband and waving her arms at him. Scolding him for saying nothing. The poor man was still carrying his cap, fearful, I imagine, that they would get into trouble with the squire over this. I could see Henry’s walk in his father and I remember thinking how much trouble I had caused so many because of my foolish longings. I wanted only to hide in my room and forget about living.

“Over that autumn and winter, I moved like a ghost through this house trying to avoid your aunt, enduring the silent meals. I found in a drawer—God alone knows how it got there in this house—an old, musty-smelling book of Anglo-Saxon tales. I judge it might once have belonged to Jack as a child. And I read those tales over and over. In one of the stories was a young girl called Aerlene, and she had many adventures and married a Norse chieftain and settled strife in this land long ago, and that is where I got your name.

“I fell into a melancholy, adrift in my mind, no longer caring one way or another what happened to me, eating little. I wouldn’t go downstairs for meals and I grew weak with an ague, dreaming in my fevers of lying with tavern ruffians and other meaner sorts of men, sleeping in ditches, chased from towns and villages. Your uncle attended to me when he came home in the evenings, bringing me soup and stewed medlars. He nursed me back from my sickness, did
Jack, and all this time not a word of Christian comfort from your aunt, who never set foot in my room. I remember telling Jack that I was only a stranger in our house now and I wanted to die and leave them at peace, and he told me to stop such thoughts. He said, ‘Lizzie, you must pray to God, Who will forgive you. You are always in my prayers and Sarah prays for you too but she is too proud to admit it. She will come around in time. You must give her time, for she is not as we are.’

“Perhaps he was right, for unbeknownst to me, Sarah had written her sister in London. And one day in late March of the following year, your uncle came to my room and he was holding a letter and smiling. Tapping the letter against my arm, he said, ‘We have news, Lizzie. News from London, and it concerns you.’

“‘Me?’ I said. ‘What have I to do with a place like London?’

“He told me the letter was from Sarah’s younger sister, Eliza. She lived in London with her husband, Philip Boyer, who owned a milliner’s shop and was accounted prosperous. Boyer was a Protestant Frenchman, a Huguenot as they are called, who had fled Paris some fifteen years before, following a massacre of Protestants by the Papists. Jack had brought me a cup of warm sweet wine. ‘Drink this now,’ he said, ‘and get well, for the letter has wonderful news. Your sister-in-law wrote to them some weeks ago about finding
a position for you in their shop. She didn’t show me that letter, but I don’t imagine she mentioned your recent troubles, only your widowhood and need for work. I am sure she wrote of how well you tended the counter of our shop. And so here is her reply. Lizzie, her husband has a fine business not far from the great cathedral of St. Paul’s, which I saw once as a child forty years ago and have never forgotten. It is a chance for you to begin again. I will be sorry to see you go, but I know it must be done. You will make a living there and find your way. It’s all for the best. Now drink this and read the letter.’