On the Second Night

 

26th of December, 1601

 

YOU WAKE, JUDGING from the quality of the light, towards the middle of the morning, hours later than you would by choice or custom rise. You are alone in your bed. William has gone.

You feel within you a rush of something very like panic. It is a sensation that you have not felt since the children were young: that this household, your little kingdom, is no longer entirely under your control. Some new element has entered the realm, you think, some rank, malignant humour.

At the moment when it occurs to you that you have absolutely no memory whatsoever of returning from the threshold to your bed last night you hear from somewhere below you the sounds of lively conversation. You listen and are able to distinguish three voices. The first—querulous; modestly argumentative; bemused—is recognisable at once as that of your husband, at the moment, experienced from time to time in any marriage, when he is confronted by some disagreeable truth. The second and third voices are not known to you, but they are riven with drama and alarm. The entire scene seems to you to be utterly wrong, an interruption in the way in which the world ought to work. It is as though your quiet and unvaried life has been by stealth and artfulness overrun by something rich and strange.

You rise swiftly, you wrap your gown about you once again and you hurry down to greet your uninvited guests.

As you approach the door that leads to the room in which the three conspirators are met—and how odd it is, you think, the speed and insistence with which that word, that description, has presented itself—you hear a phrase that serves only to exacerbate the rising unease in your breast, the sick certainty that some disaster lies just a little beyond the horizon.

“The knife which has no business being here is held now by the Scot.”

The oddity of those words in that order, the icy casualness with which they are spoken, not by your husband but by one of these strangers, one of those interlopers, causes you to stop quite still, arresting your progress as fear and the knowledge of your own mortality and that of your children, surges to the forefront of your imagination.

You breathe quietly, trying to recover your equilibrium. The conversation in the chamber falls silent.

Swift footsteps, and the door is opened.

Standing before you, dishevelled and afraid, no longer the plump picture of contentment that he was mere hours ago, stands the figure of your husband.

Behind him, you see standing upon either side of the fire like sentries, the two visitors, both unknown to you but both curiously familiar also. Both are bearded, both well dressed. One has the quality of a clown, the other that of a sage. Yet you are afforded but the briefest of glimpses. Your husband closes the door hurriedly behind him, runs a hand through his thinning hair, a gesture of anxiety which you have not witnessed in him since Hamnet’s long illness the year before last, and says: “My love, I fear I have grave tidings.”

He always speaks in this heightened manner when he is afraid, as though he is seeking consolation in the floridness of his expression.

“There are momentous events afoot, my love. Events which shake us all to the very core.”

“What do you mean?” you ask, a little exasperated. “What is happening, William? Who are these men and what do they want with us?”

“They are...” He stops, breathes in, collects himself, wipes sweat from his brow. “They are allies.”

You ask him what he means by this, but your husband merely shakes his head. “More than that I cannot say. They have sworn me to secrecy. I have given my oath.”

“Do you know them, darling? Have you some bond with them?”

“We are acquainted, yes. We are linked. And we are linked profoundly. Although I had not seen them before today.”

“Then what is it... What is it that they want? Do they have some manner of hold over you?”

“My love, I must away.”

“What? You have to leave? Why? With them?”

“I do.”

“With these strangers?”

“They are not quite strangers. As I say. Not quite.”

“Wherever are you going? And when shall you return?”

“I cannot say. I have no answer to either of those questions.”

“But you must... No... You cannot be abandoning us in so sudden a manner.”

“This is no abandonment, my love. I pray you to accept my word. On the contrary, what I do now is to be done in your name, dear Anne, and in our children’s name, in Susanna’s and Judith’s and Hamnet’s. There is a great battle to be fought and I have... well, I have been enlisted.”

At this hideous and unexpected news you feel your eyes sting with tears.

“But you are no soldier, my darling. You cannot wield a blade. You would survive a moment in the killing ground.”

“There are other kinds of battlefields. Other sorts of wars.”

“You have to go? Truly?”

“I must. For the security of all that we have built together I have to go. Please. Please, will you not trust me? Have I ever given you cause not to do so?”

“No,” you say. “No. Of course you have not. I have always been the most fortunate of women.”

“Thank you.”

“But... your clothes... I must get you some vittles for the journey...”

“No time, my love. There is no time left.” William leans forward and he kisses you full upon the lips with a quiet, sincere passion that he has not exhibited for years and, at this action, you feel, once again, the unquestionable force of his love.

When he draws away you do your utmost to understand.

“There was a man,” you say. “Last night upon the threshold. He spoke of some disaster. Something dreadful approaching. He... he was a part of this design, was he not?”

Your husband looks surprised at this—surprised, you realised, but not shocked. He understands, you think; he knows at least something of these strange events and far more, for sure, than he is telling you.

“William, what are these storm clouds? What crisis is upon us?”

“Hush,” your husband says. “Hush now.” And he kisses you again, in part to silence you, in part, you think, to seek succour and encouragement for his enigmatic quest.

Afterwards, he locks his gaze upon yours. “Everything will yet be well,” he says. “The Guild shall be victorious. The battle will be won. And the catastrophe which threatens us all, it shall be averted.”

And as he speaks you see the rising panic in his eyes and you understand, without the least uncertainty, that he is surely lying to you.