On the Sixth Night

 

30th of December, 1601

 

AND THEN, LATER, after another night, after another unrestful sleep and another morning, you are back once again in that place which seems, more than any other, to symbolise your childhood and to encapsulate your life before children, before William and maturity.

The forest was ever to you a changeless place, a land which defied the endless and indefatigable ambitions of time. Yet today it seems, impossibly, a little different from before. It seems darker, somehow, and more crowded. The trees seem closer together, more tangled, more ancient. The sky is blotted out by branches, the undergrowth climbs higher around you and the atmosphere is altogether more glowering and minatory than the sylvan idyll of your early years, a realm now more shadowed and malign.

You are still only at its borders and at first you fancy yourself to be alone as you cross over towards the heart of the wood. You are unclear in your mind as to quite what it is that has brought you here in this time of crisis. It is predominantly sentiment, you suppose; that and the desire for sanctuary, the urge to find solace in the past when your present and your future both seem so very uncertain.

Then, as you walk, something in the undergrowth stirs: some small creature, startled, no doubt, by your approach. Naturally, you take no heed and you walk on, deeper through the trees. The thing that is hidden, however, now seems to follow in your wake.

You hear it scuttling, pushing through leaves and snapping twigs, keeping eerie pace with your progress. A fox, you wonder? A badger, or perhaps a skittish deer?

Yet whatever it may be it is surely not so large as that, for it is never in the least danger of becoming visible; taking pains, perhaps, not to be seen and to skulk out of sight.

You pause and it pauses with you. You walk on and, evidently, it remains by your side. These things you know not only through the scuttling sounds of it, but also because of what can be sensed. You feel its proximity, its odd intensity of purpose, its unexpected slyness.

Then with a jolt of understanding which arrives from no particular quarter, you realise that you are being tracked not by any animal or by any human but rather by one of the beings that were always said by wise women and cunning men to dwell in these woods, beings both more and less than Man, the subject of poor Hamnet’s last dream.

You call out, “Who’s there?” and as you do so, you feel foolish and exposed and gullible. “Who’s watching me?”

You do not see it—indeed, you never shall—but you hear its voice, high and sly and fluting, full of guile and intelligence.

“Oh, mistress mine,” it says and you realise that you are quite unable to discern the gender of the speaker, whether it is male or female or else some indeterminate hermaphroditic being which lies beyond all known laws of life. “Your husband is already lost to you.”

“What—” you begin, startled. “What do you know of my husband?”

“Even now your William is at war. His counterparts have been at work here for months labouring in secret. As envoys and spies and sneaks. Yet all their backroom diplomacy and cutthroat guile have availed them nothing. The knife remains at large and it is cracking the world. And so a battle is waged for the future of the lattice.”

“Who are you? What do you want?” Your aim in these words is to project fearlessness and pugnacity. The reality, you suspect, is that you sound weak and ill-prepared and beyond the limits of your experience and skill. “Of what do you speak?”

Laughter, then. A glissando of casual wickedness. “You shall see for yourself soon enough, Mistress Shakespeare. Little Miss Hathaway as was. That was what they called you once. Was it not? Before you were plucked and uprooted from this place with such gauche enthusiasm.”

“Tell me,” you say stoutly. “When will I see my husband again?”

“Soon. Soon enough. But before then...”

“Yes? What do you mean?” Although you know that such creatures lie as easily as breathing, such is your desperation to know that you press this invisible being for answers.

“Oh, but before then... the Lover is on his way. Yes, the swain is to come a-calling and his eyes, oh, his flashing eyes. And by his side strolls... destruction.”

“You speak, I think, in riddles.”

“Then permit me to be clear. Destruction is coming, mistress. The undoing, the erasure of all that you have ever held dear.”

And this thing in the undergrowth, the creature of the woods begins once more to laugh, shriller than before, higher now and madder. And so you turn and you run from that place, back towards civilisation, back to your home and your son and your daughters and you flee in clammy terror from that speaker of secrets, from the prophet of the darkness, from the treacherous spirit of Arden.