On the Seventh Night

 

31st of December, 1601

 

THE FIRE IS smoking a little once again and the night is now velvety and quiet. This ought by rights to be the happiest of times, with the family all gathered together, enfolded with care and love, everything illuminated by the soft and comforting aura of the known. Instead, as this old year dies, you sit a little apart from your children, your head full of William (still missing; still missed) and of all those troubling and uncanny portents which, since Christmas, have come to punctuate your life.

It is late and much wine has been drunk. The twins sit side by side, dozing. Once eager to see the birth of the new year, they are now both close to submitting to sleep. Susanna is sitting closer than propriety might allow to her betrothed and—you are almost certain—already her lover, John; a man of indifferent looks and no discernible intellect who seems, nonetheless, to have embarked upon a path that will lead eventually to his becoming a physician. William always thought it a good match, whilst you were always less certain, wondering whether his patient affection will ever prove equal to that passion and fire which you know resides within your daughter and which (how Mistress Quincey and Mistress Lock might have arched their eyebrows in delighted scandal at the admission) reminds you so much of yourself, your own reckless heart, your happy lusts, your willingness to be unabashed.

Such thoughts, tinged with a kind of fond and tender melancholy, are banished as the doctor-in-waiting, the square-faced swain, wriggles upright in his chair and reaches for his glass.

Wearily, it occurs to you that in the absence of your husband, this pup thinks himself to have become the de facto man of the house and believes, with that stolid self-importance which is amongst his defining characteristics, that it behoves him now to make a toast. Inwardly, you sigh.

“I do believe,” says John, not quite managing to hide his pleasure, “that in the regrettable absence of dear Master Shakespeare, it behoves me now to propose a toast.”

You smile without the slightest enthusiasm. The twins stir, blink, sit to attention and try to pretend that they have been nothing less than fully conscious since supper.

Susanna squeezes her lover’s arm in a gesture of encouragement which, you suspect, she shall often have cause to deploy in the years of dutiful marriage that lie in wait for her.

John lifts his glass higher. “To the absent Master Shakespeare,” he says. “To his speedy return and to all the good things that the year to come will surely bring.”

You murmur some polite agreement and there follows clinking of glasses and many expressions of optimism and good cheer. Susanna seems happy enough and the twins are at least momentarily distracted by the lack of their father, although you cannot hide that disquiet which still is rising in your chest like bile, like a black and evil thing which yearns to be let loose.

And as the scene unfolds you are become a mere spectator, your every imagining filled up with fears of disaster.

You think of William, of that strange voice in the forest, of the men who took your husband away, of that half-imagined prophet whose arrival and disappearance seemed to herald these events. And as you watch your daughter plant a kiss upon the face of her unworthy beau and as you see the twins embrace, each seeking comfort in the other, you seem to hear within yourself these words, spoken by your husband, as clearly as if he is with you now by your side and not lost in some other, faraway place.

“The lattice.”

This is what you hear, understanding without any need for evidence at all that this is a message—perhaps the most important of your life.

“The lattice, my sweet.” It is him! It is surely him! “The lattice is burning. The knife has splintered the world. And the void is even now approaching.”