London 1579
Before she became the celebrated Long Meg and the muse of Will Shakespeare, little Meg Macdougall lived in a narrow house on Addle Street between Aldersgate and Cripplegate in London. Her mother, Jane, was a long, thin broomstick of a woman with strong, ropy arms. Meg’s father, Jack, was a giant of a man who could lay a thousand or more bricks a day and drink a kilderkin of ale by night. Meg hardly seemed to belong to them. Her arms were puny, her knees knobby, her legs wayward as a baby fawn’s. At mealtime her parents ate great quantities of meat as if filling the hollowness within their long bodies, while Meg was content to nibble a leg of a peahen or a crust of bread. But though she looked too frail to thrive, her eyes shone brightly in her thin face surrounded by hair the color of spun gold.
It was a happy household except when it was not. Jack Macdougall drank too much and Jane begrudged the waste of their meager resources. Their boisterous quarrels sent Meg scurrying to avoid the hurled brick or hot iron. Plaster crumbled from the walls and the very beams creaked and shifted. All that kept the house from collapsing were the houses abutting it on either side, whose occupants shouted for quiet, only adding to the uproar. One night the constable came, and he would have arrested Meg’s parents were it not for her earnest promise: “I will put them into their bed anon.” When they had fallen asleep Meg poured out the rest of her father’s ale and hid her mother’s iron.
But Meg could no more cure her parents’ failings than she could prevent the sun from shining or misfortune from striking. One night Jack was staggering home from an alehouse when he fell asleep in the street, and the next morning a cart rolled over his legs. Cruelly, the cart was filled with bricks. Lame and unable to work, he became a beggar, hobbling away every morning on crutches and returning with a few pennies, barely enough for bread. Jane worked day and night, bending over a boiling vat. All Meg saw of her was a cloud of frizzled hair and a pair of dye-stained arms. She ceased her labors only when the priest from St. Alphage came to bring a few coins of charity and teach her the scriptures. In his black robe, with his sharp, tiny eyes, he reminded Meg of a rat. She was glad her mother sent her away on those days with a bundle of wet laundry. In the fields outside the city gates, she would spread the clothes out to dry and play leapfrog with the other children or chase stray dogs. When the sun had bleached the linen to a blinding whiteness, she folded it and brought it home again.
On one such day it began to rain, and Meg gathered up the linens and ran home early. On the way she met her father leaning heavily on his crutches, a bloody bruise on his head. His cloak and every coin in his pocket had been stolen. They turned onto Addle Street and Meg followed him into the house, clutching the mud-spattered linens, afraid of her mother’s scolding. It was her father, roaring with rage, who thrust her out of doors again, but not before she caught a glimpse of the priest’s hairy buttocks and her mother’s surprised face.
“Harlot!” shouted Jack.
The priest scurried past Meg, clutching his black robe to hide his nakedness. A Bible flew out after him and struck his head.
“What was I to do?” Meg heard her mother cry. “He would not give me a penny of charity otherwise. O Jack, forgive me!”
Meg did not know what her mother had done, only that it was something wicked that shamed her father too. He left the house and did not return that night. Meg lay awake hoping he would forgive her mother, for surely whatever had happened was the priest’s fault, not hers. But her father did not return the next day, and on the third day they learned he was in the Wood Street jail. He had been arrested for vagrancy because he could not produce a begging license.
Meg’s mother stood outside the church and shouted at the priest, “You whited sepulchre! I’ll never take your charity again!” The parishioners stared at her in alarm while Meg pleaded with her to return home.
“What is a sepulchre?” Meg asked her mother that night.
“A sheet that wraps a dead man,” Jane replied dully. She heated up her iron and pounded the wrinkles out of a piece of linen until it became scorched. “A pox upon my boozing beggar of a husband and that skanderbag priest!”
Meg feared her mother was preparing a whited sepulchre and that the priest was as good as dead. But he did not come to Addle Street again, and Meg and her mother no longer attended services at St. Alphage.
As Jane would not relent toward Jack, it was Meg who took her father scraps of food in prison. Because she lacked the penny to bribe the jailer, she could only thrust the food through the iron grate at street level and try in vain to touch her father’s hand. She could dimly see how gaunt and begrimed he was. He shivered, for someone had taken his only blanket. But he was ever hopeful that his release would come soon.
A week later, on a morning after a night when the ditches and puddles turned to ice, Meg arrived at the prison with a cake, a blanket, and a penny for the jailer, only to learn that her father was dead.
When she told her mother, something in Jane broke. She became like an unlatched door swinging in the wind. She beat her forehead with her fists, crying, “I am the vilest of evildoers!” Such words alarmed Meg. She wondered if grief had addled her mother’s mind.
Her own grief was of the silent sort. She dreamed of her father as a hearty bricklayer lifting her into his arms. When she awoke she hoped it was true and waited for him to come home. When he did not, tears slipped from her eyes. How could he leave her forever?
It was her mother’s fault, Meg decided. “If you had gone to the jail and made them release Father, he would still be alive,” she said, though she had no idea what the laws were and how justice was dealt.
Jane threw herself on her bed and drew her feet beneath her. “See, the flood waters rise around me!” The unlatched door of her mind now hung by a single hinge.
The next morning Meg awoke to find herself alone in the house. Rain dribbled through the thatched roof and formed puddles on the floor. A feeling of dread enveloped her like a fog. Dressing quickly she left the house, hastened along Addle Street and down Wood Street, crossed Cheapside, and followed Bow Lane to Garlick Hill. The gutters in the middle of the street overflowed with garbage rushing downhill toward the river. Meg slipped in the mire but got up again. She searched along Thames Street, where warehouses opened onto the wharves and cranes stood like scaffolds for hanging criminals. At the end of a lane where steps led down to the water, Meg saw a pair of shoes. Her mother’s shoes, neatly placed side by side as if she had just stepped out of them to bathe her feet.
“Mother!” shouted Meg. She gazed downriver to where the water surged beneath the arches of the great bridge. She called to the laborers operating a crane. “Did you see a woman go into the river?”
They shrugged and shook their heads.
Meg waited at the steps for her mother to return. The dread within her deepened into something with no name. Hours later, wet and bone-cold, Meg returned home to the house that sagged like a sorrowful face and leaked water like tears. She climbed into her parents’ flea-infested bed. All night her eyes stayed open to aid her ears in listening for her mother’s steps.
When she heard excited voices in the street she thought, There is news of my mother. She jumped out of bed and went outside but could not bring herself to question anyone and put her terrible fears into words.
At the grocer’s stall in Wood Street she paid a farthing for some apples, hoping the grocer would tell her the news, but he turned away to help another customer.
The barber’s son, a little magpie with bare feet and ragged feathers, ran up to her.
“Did you hear what happened last night? It makes me shudder to think of it!”
Meg hugged the apples close in her apron and dumbly shook her head.
“You don’t know?” he said. “For an apple, I’ll tell you.”
Meg’s hand shook as she gave him the fruit. “Did they pull someone from the river?”
The boy bit into the apple. He was going to make Meg wait.
“Tell me, was she dead or alive?”
“Dead,” he said. “Murdered in his bed last night!”
His bed? “Who was murdered?” she asked.
“The priest at St. Alphage. His head was beaten in. I saw him wrapped in a sheet.”
Meg stood, stunned. A whited sepulchre. She thought of her mother bearing down upon the linen sheet with her hot iron. Throwing the iron against the wall in anger.
“How did it happen?” she whispered.
“It was a strong arm that did it and a heavy weapon the murderer took away with him.”
“Did anyone see … the killer?”
“Nay, he escaped before anyone saw him,” the boy said, disappointed.
Meg’s heart was beating wildly. She ran back home on legs barely able to hold her up. Apples dropped from her skirt and rolled away. Once inside the house, she glanced toward the hook by the hearth where her mother kept the iron. It was gone.
“My mother—a murderess?” The horrible word slipped from her lips. She saw her mother rising at night and carrying the iron through the dark streets. But she could not imagine her beating the priest with it. Even in her bitterest fury, Jane had never struck Meg’s father with the iron. But then she had never been so maddened and desperate as in the weeks since his death.
Now Meg understood that her mother had walked into the river with the iron, letting the bloody weapon drag her underwater. Grief and guilt over her deed drove her to kill herself. Her mother was a murderess twice over! Her father, a beggar who died in prison. How had it come to pass that she, Meg, was the daughter of shame and sinful sorrow and now alone in the world?
“I am no longer myself,” she said, not knowing quite what she meant. She went to bed and slept for a long, long time, because there was no one to wake her up.
No one from the parish came to take Meg to the hospital where orphans were cared for. To keep from starving, she nipped food from the market vendors and ran away so fast, no one could catch her. The Fleet River provided fish; orchards yielded fruit into her hands. Meg began to thrive like a flower sprung from winter’s withered stalks. Her hair became tangled and she cut it off. Her bodice was tight, so she filched some clothes she found drying on a bush. They turned out to be a boy’s shirt and trousers. They proved comfortable and easier to run in than a skirt; thus she took to wearing them all the time.
Meg spent her aimless days in Moorfield, London’s playground, watching the boys compete at stoolball and wrestling until they let her join their games. She gave her name as Mack. Soon she could strike the ball and fight as well as any of them. Davy Dapper and Peter Flick were the leaders, strong and unruly boys a few years older than Meg who seemed, like her, to have no parents. They never guessed she was a girl, not even when she emerged from a wrestling match with tears on her cheeks. She was not injured, but her chest ached with the longing to be embraced, however roughly. She threw herself into the next match and the one after that.
One day the landlord forced his way into the house to demand payment of the overdue rent. Finding the penniless orphan only stirred up his rage. He thrust his whelk-studded nose in Meg’s face and shouted, “Give me three crowns, you puny maltworm, or I’ll have you thrown in the clink!”
“I’ll give you a crown—of bruises!” Meg grabbed a broken table leg and struck the landlord above his ear. “Now get out of here, you reeking pig’s kidney!” She was learning new insults daily from her friends Davy and Peter.
“Surly boy, you deserve to die in prison like your father!” shouted the landlord, holding his head in his hands as he staggered away.
Meg sank to the floor and began to cry, at first without a sound and then with loud sobs. There was not a person in the world to comfort her, so it was some time before she was able to stop. She stared at her hands still clutching the table leg. It had felt so good to strike the landlord. Her own strength surprised her. Now she could imagine her mother beating the priest. Had she meant to kill him? Had Meg meant to kill the landlord?
She threw the table leg aside as if it were on fire.
Soon the landlord would return and fulfill his threats. Meg knew she had to leave at once. Her heart thudding, she packed a bundle of clothes and trifles to remind her of her parents: a button from her father’s jerkin, a coif her mother wore to bed. On the stoop she hesitated, then threw the bundle aside. Empty-handed, she left the crooked, sorry house on Addle Street for good.
Or rather, for ill.