On the Eighth Night

 

1st of January, 1602

 

THE NEXT VISITOR, in this long season of unsolicited guests, arrives without fanfare or announcement. He is, all of a sudden and without the slightest warning, simply there, as if he has flickered, shimmered into existence like a playhouse illusion, a spectre conjured by trickery and misdirection. He comes not with the storm or after nightfall, but rather in the still of early afternoon.

The children are away and you are in the garden, standing amongst plants that slumber and grasses which await renewal. You are, so far as you are concerned, alone. You breathe deeply, everything that is in you still adjusting to this long, scarce-endurable absence.

You close your eyes, seeking the quiet comfort of self-inflicted darkness, and you start to summon up a prayer for your poor lost husband. Yet something in you halts the words of your catechism before they are even half-spoken. You open your eyes once more and there he is, standing, smiling, before you on the shabby green.

He is a young man, strikingly handsome with a full head of hair and a beard of raffish elegance. He is dressed expensively and with considerable élan and he seems almost to shine with possibility.

“Hello,” he says. “Greetings to you, Anne.”

You stand your ground and you do your best to ignore that troubling combination of disquiet and desire which this stranger—who is, somehow, not quite a stranger—has in you evoked.

“Who are you, sir?” you ask. “What is your business here?”

He makes a moue, a flirtatious pout which comes to him, it is clear, without the slightest effort.

“Anne? Please don’t say that you do not recognise me? I’m not sure that my heart could stand it.”

“Sir,” you say. “I am quite certain”—and your certainty is feigned—“that I have never in my life seen you before this day.”

Infuriatingly, his smile grows only broader and more charming still. “Please,” he says and the sureness in his voice, its assumption of knowledge, causes your skin to prickle warmly, despite the gravity of recent days, and your heart to lurch in unintended excitement. “Please, my love. You know who I am. I know it.”

The truth is unfolding itself in your mind, slowly and with stealthy inevitability, but you are not yet ready to face it. A thousand objections present themselves, but in the face of this young man’s easy beauty all you can manage is a stuttering sequence of denial.

“No, I have never... it doesn’t... it can’t... Surely... entirely without sense...”

He steps closer towards you, close enough now that, if either one of you set the thing in motion, you might be able to touch, to hold, to be again in each other’s arms. You are close enough to smell his maddeningly familiar scent, sweet yet manly, redolent of the English countryside yet spiced also with the darkly beguiling tang of city experience.

“You know me,” he says again.

“But you cannot... No, you cannot be him.”

“And yet, my love...? You see it now, I think. The truth... the truth is being shown to you.”

You think again of the man who came at Christmas, of the men glimpsed in the shadows behind your husband, and so a pattern—fantastic, unbelievable, miraculous—begins to emerge. And so, at last, you simply decide to say it. You say his name.

“William...”

He smiles, but more sombrely now, as if in priestly benediction. “Not quite...” he says. “At least, I am not quite your William.”

“Tell me,” you say, suddenly greedy. “Tell me everything.”

“’Tis easier,” he says, “to show you.”

And he moves closer still and he is all but upon you now and his lips are upon your lips and all at once you see in him something like a vision, in something like a waking dream, an infinity of possibilities, a plethora of worlds, each formed by a different decision or an alternative choice. And in every one of these realities, you spy a different version of your husband—the hierophant, the plotter, the lover, your own round-bellied spouse, thousands upon thousands more. These alternatives spread themselves before you, a chain of might-have-beens.

The man who is not quite the man you married pulls away from you. “Do you see?” he asks. “Do you understand now?”

“But a glimmering,” you reply, your mind, a seventeenth-century thing, struggling to acclimatise and comprehend a system of knowledge far beyond you own. “A glimmering in the darkness. All of these possibilities, all of these worlds—”

“The lattice,” says the man insistently. “It is called the lattice of worlds. And in all of them—in every last one—there is a William. But in only one world—in this one—did he (did I, did we) never leave Stratford.”

“I don’t...” You wince as if stung. “No, I do not understand your words.” This protestation is, of course, only partly true.

“In every other realm,” says the handsome iteration, “William left this town. He went travelling with the players and came to London and wrote and was famous and conjured whole universes. I did myself. I went to our capital and, I fear to have to tell you this, I fell in love there. Many times. Only here, in this volume of reality, did he stay. And it is, I fear, because of what has happened here that this is where it will finish. It has been chosen. The knife, after all, selected it.”

“Chosen?” you ask. “Chosen for what?”

“To finish the fight. To make our final stand. For it is here that the war will end, here that we face the truth of things and make our final sacrifice.”

“Your words,” you say, “are full of portent. They prefigure no good.”

“I fear that is so, Mistress Shakespeare.”

William reaches out and takes your left hand in his. He raises it to his lips and kisses it once.

“For the lattice,” he says, “the lattice is being burned away. It is being reduced to nothing. The blankness is swallowing it whole.”

“Tell me what I can do,” you say.

“Oh, Anne. My courageous Anne. Whatever makes you think that you can do a thing? For the void is coming now. And nothing, nothing at all, can stand in its path.”

And then, in a twinkling, in the time that it takes to turn a page, he is gone.