On the Twelfth Night

 

5th of January, 1610

 

MISTRESS ANNE SHAKESPEARE—fifty-five and careworn, long accustomed to the cost, in all its forms, of solitude—was standing alone in her garden on the day when he came home.

She was not waiting, at least not exactly, for she had received no word of his return and she harboured no particular expectation or desire for that event. Even had she had known of it in advance, had she suspected, she never would have gone deliberately out to greet him. She would never have been before their house on purpose in anticipation of his homecoming, like some honour guard providing a formal welcome. Although the gentleman had assuredly done right by her and by the children—at least, had done so in material terms, in those grand, beneficent gestures which, like this house and its expansive garden, were visible to society at large, she had endured his absence, both physical and emotional, for long enough now to have decided that he did not deserve such tender treatment, that, in all major respects, he had become unworthy of her love and had placed himself beyond the boundaries of their marriage.

She had, of course, heard the rumours. Folks tried their best to shelter her from the worst of it but she had caught wind of enough—the love affairs (conducted, humiliatingly, in public), the boys (plentiful and diverse and not especially discreet), the liquor, the carousing, the gambling and that plethora of whores—to understand that his betrayal of their vows had been quite rigorous in its totality. When such stories came her way, she felt not shock of any kind or even dismay, for she had long known, almost since the start, of his darker, hidden nature, of his insistent lusts and his destructive hungers. Rather she felt at these revelations—overheard at market or whispered as she passed by in the street—a kind of hollowness and disappointment at the enthusiasm of his capitulation, together with a stifled despair, held in for decorum’s sake and for that of her two daughters.

Yet it was there all the same, visible in the flash of her eyes when her husband’s plays were lauded in her presence, there in the defiant tilt of her chin when gossip was bandied about concerning the objects of those sickly and much-repeated sonnets, there too in her pregnant silence when she was asked when exactly it was that William was ever going to come home for good. Indeed, it was with her always, her quiet rage. It was her burden and, in some obscure way, so long had she lived with it, her friend.

So it was not planned, none of it was meant or intended. But this, all the same, was how it happened.

It was dusk, that depressive hour, and Anne was alone—Susanna long having since married and moved away and little Judith soon set to do the same—breathing in cold winter air, remembering the past and, for all her material circumstances, considering also the nature of her losses.

At first, when she saw the figure in the distance, she took it to belong to some stranger, some trickster or gipsy and in all three of these things she was not so very incorrect.

But as the person draw nearer and she saw that it was a man something rose up within her, something like trepidation and something like hope.

Eventually, the silhouette resolved itself into the known and there, unmistakably, to her surprise but not, of course, to any who are schooled in the arts of narrative, was Master William Shakespeare himself, a good few years older than when she had seen him last, dressed in unfamiliar clothes, in all of his London finery which had become just a little ragged at the edges, a trifle battered and stained from his long journey.

He carried nothing with him at all and there was in his gait and in the steady and cautious manner of his approach, much of the penitent and of the prodigal.

Very briefly she thought she saw—and it must, it can only have been—an illusion generated by the drained and fitful nature of the light—a child, a small boy, walking by her bad husband’s side. But this trick, this piece of optical wish fulfilment, vanished quickly so that all which was left was Shakespeare.

He raised his hand, in solemn greeting although Anne did not respond believing him, given his conduct, to have forfeited all but the most essential civilities with her.

Yet as he came nearer, she considered how uncared for he seemed, how messy was his beard, how exposed the dome of his pate.

There were some, she thought, who might imagine William to be returning in triumph, wreathed with his manifold successes, plumpened by his grand connections, strutting after his life of urban glamour. Yet as he walked to the garden gate, his face filled, she saw, with dolour and with reflective ruefulness, an old truth would be quite plain to any who witnessed his approach—that no man on earth is ever a hero to his wife.

He opened the gate and walked into the garden, his movements methodical and patient. He reached her side and for a long while neither of them spoke at all until at last, tentatively but with every motion of it filled with sincerity, he reached out and took Anne’s hand in his.

“I am sorry,” he said. “My God. I am so sorry.”

She looked up at him and nodded once as the distance between them started to dissolve. “Come inside,” she said, more softly and with greater gentleness than she had perhaps intended. “You must be tired. You must be hungry.”

“Thank you,” he said simply, his gratitude evidently unfeigned.

And this would have been enough—it would have been more than enough for so difficult a homecoming—but then, without quite knowing why, Anne took his other hand and she drew her husband to her and she leaned up and she kissed him once upon the lips, with unexpected passion and forgiveness.

Afterwards, they went inside and they sat by the fire and they talked of the life that was left to them, and for a little while, they thought not of the past at all, but only of the future.

That night, uncomprehendingly, Anne dreamed of the lattice of worlds, of the Scotsman’s knife, of the implacable void. She dreamed of poor lost Hamnet and of history. She dreamed of possibilities and variation and change, of choices made and those not made, of those branching tributaries which hide in of every hour and in every day.

And, although the image was to her most curious and most strange, hailing as it did from some quite different time and place, on just this one occasion only she dreamed also of you.