On the Fifth Night

 

29th of December, 1601

 

“MY DEAR? MIGHT we come in?”

What is meant, you think, by this sudden rush of visitors to your door? What significance is there in this strange profusion of thresholds, of arrivals and departures, of the interruptions of one little world by another? And what is there also in the question of the progress of time which seems to you to be no longer smoothly continuous, no longer a ceaseless procession of incident, but rather to have taken on some more discriminating quality; as if you are experiencing only particular elements and individual scenes, as though your life is like the sea, your experience a pebble that skims upon the surface of it and that you are present—truly present—only at those moments when stone brushes against water.

Had you not been born several hundred years before the invention of the movie camera, the effect would almost certainly have struck you as cinematic. Existing as you do, however, at the tip of the seventeenth century, your nearest point of reference belongs to another of life’s threads, one which has also come lately to preoccupy your thoughts. This, you realise—all of this—is somehow very like a dream.

“My dear? I am so sorry. This is, I hope, no serious interruption?”

Standing upon your doorstep are two women, both of about your age, both dressed with a sombre propriety which is perhaps just a trifle overstated. The rain having stopped, there persists all the same the sense that the respectable pair have been washed up by the storm.

You have known them for a long time, the span of your acquaintanceship equalling the duration of your marriage, and there exists between the three of you that particular brand of envy, competitiveness and mild despondency which often characterises relationships that are not themselves selected but which are rather brought about by your choice of spouse.

“Mistress Quincey,” you say, “and Mistress Lock.”

Your tone is studiedly polite, but just sufficiently frosty to make plain your true feelings at this unexpected visit. “How delightful to see you both.”

Quincey who is, by some months, the elder of the two, stouter and more matronly in aspect, has with her a wicker basket, covered over with white cloth. Lock, still a little girlish in her manner, gestures in mock-excitement to this receptacle and, with wide-eyed faux-naivety, declares: “Eggs! We’ve brought you eggs, Mistress Shakespeare. Eggs for our dear Anne and for her beautiful family.”

“Or, at least,” interjects the other woman, “at least, for whatever is left of it.”

Your smile grows more brittle and your eyes turn colder still. “How kind,” you say. “How very kind of you both. But ’tis all, of course, quite unnecessary.”

You consider whether it might be possible to simply take their sorry basket from them and despatch the smiling harridans straightaway without having to invite either of them in. You even start to reach out one hand to facilitate the gambit. Before you can succeed, however, Quincey steps unbidden into your home, Lock upon her heels.

“Is William not here?” says one.

“My dear,” confides the other. “We’ve heard the most disquieting rumours. And we have both been so very concerned. Oh my, yes; yes, we have.”

You set your face in an expression of grim courtesy. “Ladies,” you say as if their arrival had been your idea from the start. “Please, won’t you tarry? I should, after all, like little more than to sit awhile and talk to you.” You pause, allowing just a little of your real feelings to inflect the final line. “To sit and gossip.”

 

 

A SMALLER SHIFT this time, mere minutes, the change discernible but not so dislocating.

You are in the parlour, with your guests, the chairs arranged in a triangle. Upon a table before you is the basket, now unveiled, in which six creamy eggs lie exposed, positioned as though at the outset of a magic trick, the centrepiece of some illusion, conjured by some mountebank or street sorcerer. Indeed, it will shortly emerge that this apparently fanciful assessment does not lie so very far from the truth.

“We were so worried,” one of the women—the elder—is saying.

Lock nods in delighted agreement. “For four days. Four days! In which he has not been seen at all.”

“And William. Our own dear William. Normally so industrious.”

“Usually so visible.”

“And... forever... such a devoted man to his family.”

Mistress Quincey pouts, and arches her eyebrows. There is something feline in the pose. “Although, of course, we say forever... We lay such stress upon his eternal fidelity. And yet. And yet... Dear me, but my memory isn’t at all what it used to be. But wasn’t there something once... long ago... when the children were oh, so very young? A brief period, the tiniest of sojourns when, I suppose, the best and most proper word would be, would it not, he enjoyed a... flirtation?”

You breathe in slowly and your try to think of other things, telling yourself that your cage is being rattled with such sly art only out of boredom on their part, and frustration and spite, because these women’s lives are stale and repetitive and, from all that you know of them, largely without love. Although, of course, within you are thinking what you have thought from the moment of his abrupt and unheralded exit—“William, oh, William, where are you, William, and when are you coming home?”—you manage to smile at their words, as if perceiving some innocent confusion or perplexity upon their part.

“Oh, but my husband has always been faithful.”

“But of course,” sighs Mistress Lock.

“There have been no stolen kisses for William,” you say. “No wandering eyes. No unfaithful caresses. There has been, ladies, pray take my word on this, no need for him to spill his seed in anyone but me.”

“Naturally,” croons Mistress Quincey, unshocked. “That was not for a moment what was intended. That was not what was meant. No, my only implication... My sole allusion was to that rather ticklish, though faraway and now all but forgotten episode in which your beloved seemed to allow himself to venture into temptation in matters of... the theatre.”

“Oh,” you say, the memory long-buried, the mention of it bringing an unexpected surge and tang. “But that was a very long time ago. He made his choice. And he made the right choice.”

“But as I remember he was tempted, my dear. Was he not? By the players. The glamour of them. By their vulgar artistry.”

You try your best to appear wholly noncommittal. “A young man’s folly. Nothing more. The most transient and passing of fancies.”

Mistress Quincey bares her teeth. “Oh, but as I recall, the temptation was a deal more serious than that. He wanted to act, did he not? To write, too. Even, perhaps, one day, to go to London.”

“He may have said so,” you allow, “when at his dreamiest or when in his cups. But he could never truly have done so. He would always have chosen his family.”

“I wonder about that, dear. I really do...”

“So you understand,” says Mistress Lock, “when we first heard rumours of your husband’s absence now, why we became concerned that... the old temptation might just have come back.”

At last, you let your irritation show. “You believe him to have run away, then? To the players? To the playhouses? Is that what you mean? For shame, mistress. For shame!”

One or other of the women seems about to reply—one or other or both, perhaps, in some squawking, echoing chorus of self-importance—when, in the gap between your speech, you all hear something unexpected.

A slender cracking. A brittle tremor.

The eggs, you realise. The sound is coming from one of the eggs.

“Oh, my,” says Mistress Lock. “Oh, by the saints.”

And you all lean forwards and you watch with a queasy sort of incredulity as the shell is pushed open from within and something small and dark and bloody pushes its way into the world and looses a shrill, pathetic cry, full of anguish and foreboding.

It breaks free, this pitiful thing, its feathers slick with slime. There is something about it that seems utterly wrong, something freakish and broken. It stumbles on tiny, viscous legs. It totters, it rights itself, it stumbles again before it falls forward and gives up its tiny life. It jerks once before it lies still. Only then does your mind accept the truth of what it is that you are seeing—that this little creature possesses some grotesque deformity, that it has come here not whole but disastrously and horrifyingly warped.

The other women yelp and cry, but your thoughts are far away, far even from this nightmarish intervention—from this, the worst of all possible omens, out in the dark spaces of the universe, in the gaps between the stars, searching and searching for your lost love.