Today be St Hilda’s Day, proclaimed by our late Queen as a holiday forever to mark her coronation, and still kept. Our servants visit, or sleep, or sport. It is an inconvenience to be servantless all day, but a glad one. I count myself most blessed that I met Her Majesty, and my wit had blade enough to please her.
Winter begins to shut us in, edging away the smiling face of day as we pass into the gloomy realm of the year’s night. But we do well at New Place. My wife has ordered apple wood to scent the air, and keeps the fires well stoked. Today she checked the butts of strong beer to see us through the winter. Her face still be misshapen, but the pain has eased.
I walked down to see that the hothouses were closed upon the asparagus and cauliflowers, mint, tansy, sorrel, celery, endives and cardoons to give us plenty for the winter, for though Stratford be rich in markets, those markets have wealth in wool and mutton only; not like London, where a man may buy a lemon or basket of potatoes or a butt of Rhenish wine. Yet our plenty reminded me of what I do not have, and makes me long for London; not just the wine, but wit and women and laughter with good friends.
But friends will come from there for Christmas Eve and Day, and I back to London with them till Twelfth Night. Till then I must content myself with neat hothouses of fat cauliflowers, apple-wood fires and this, my book of words.
And memories.
Thus Judyth and I began, and thus continued, day upon day, kiss upon kiss, poem upon poem, each word climbing to heights I had never seen, much less aspired to reach; until the hour I fell into the sea of those green eyes and asked her, ‘Will you be my wife?’
The world hung still, as if the winds had left it. Would she tell me yea, or nay? My heart no longer beat.
She took my hand, my calloused glover’s hand with its thick ridges from the knife, scissors and needles, in her soft one, calloused only on one finger from the pen, like mine.
‘Of course,’ she said.
The larks sang and the sun danced and every leaf about us whispered, ‘Love!’
We were young to marry, but not too young to plan it. True, I had not even my journeyman’s papers, nor money to support a wife. But I was the eldest son, and my wife would live in my family house, which I must inherit. And Judyth had her dowry. The three fields were in her brother’s name, but she would have their rent for all her life; a matter of six pounds a year. It would not raise her family’s estate to marry me — a glover is a poor match for a merchant’s daughter — but it would be no great disgrace.
‘I will tell my brother I will marry no other,’ she said, her face so fierce with love that I believed even the wind would bow to her. ‘Not if a prince come riding by, or Mark Antony himself to woo me.’
‘I wish I were a Mark Antony or Caesar, to be worthy of a wife as you. You would really marry an apprentice glover?’
‘I would marry a poet,’ she said softly. ‘Who else could I marry but one like you?’ She smiled. ‘You do not realise the miracle you are, Will Shakespeare. For you are not only a poet, but a man who will listen to a woman’s poems too. How could I marry a man who wanted me only to ornament his table and his bed, to bear his children?’
I flushed at the word ‘bed’. We had kissed, but not lain together. I would not profane our love by more. But to be married, to lie flesh to flesh each night . . .
‘We will be poets together,’ said Judyth. ‘One day perhaps a book may bear our names: Poems From a Lover to His Loved, and From Her to Him.’
‘You truly think your brother will agree if I ask him for your hand?’
‘Arnold is a good man. He will need persuading, but he will agree at last if it makes me happy.’ She hesitated. ‘Your family will welcome me?’
I kissed her hand. ‘How could they not?’
How could they not indeed? My parents must delight that I had found such a wife, young, beautiful, so well connected. And surely they would be glad to add a son’s wife to the household too. Our servant, Mary, was almost a crone now and toothless; nearly fifty — still less than the years I now bear. But mine are borne on a strong back, with not a day’s sickness except a weakness sometimes of the bowels, and good teeth. Since I became a player I scrubbed them with orris root each night, and none have failed me but one at the back, broken.
My pen begins to prattle . . . I was speaking of my Judyth. I could see our married life together as clearly as my hand. Judyth would take Mary’s place in our household, helping my mother. As my parents aged, and my brothers and sister grew up and left home, Judyth would cosset and comfort them in their old age. (My father was then eight years younger than I am now, but I thought him Methuselah.)
I wandered home, seeing her cheeks in every rosehip, hearing her laugh in every stroking of the breeze.
My father sat in the sunlight on the bench outside our hall, peering at the stitching on the fingers of a glove, which needs to be so fine it will not show a seam and spoil the line.
He looked up at me. ‘Well, son?’
I grinned at him, the man I trusted above all else, in wisdom and in love. ‘Very well indeed, Father. May I bring you some new ale?’
He blinked at me. His eyes were clouding even then from so much close work. ‘You may. Bring one for yourself too.’
I fetched the ale from the kitchen. We sat together, gazing at the young cabbages and leeks and turnips.
‘Whose glove is it?’ I asked. I hadn’t known we’d had new orders.
‘No one’s, nor like to be.’
I noticed he had left the fingers open at the ends, and the glove’s sides too. This glove could fit many a hand if a customer should come. I supposed he worked to keep his hands busy.
I put my mug of ale down, and took my courage in my hands. ‘Father, I would marry.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘I have been thinking the same, my son.’
My hopes leapt like a spring deer. ‘Her name is Judyth, Mistress Marchmant. Father, she is the most lovely, most gentle of girls —’
He held up his hand to stop my bubbling words. ‘I know the girl. Most beautiful indeed. I know her family too.’
‘They are above us in station, but she cares naught for that. She will tell her brother that we love each other —’
Once more Father held up his hand. ‘Love,’ he said, ‘does not put bread upon the table. Does she have a dowry?’
‘Three fields, Father, that bring in six pounds a year.’
He looked at me sharply. ‘Fields owned in her own right, or owned by her brother?’
‘By her brother. She but gets the rent.’
‘I see.’ Father finished the ale before he looked at me again. He wiped the foam from his lip and beard. ‘In what house will you put this wife of yours?’
‘Why here, Father.’
He did not meet my eyes. ‘This house is mortgaged.’
I stared at him. I knew of the loss of Mother’s fields, sold to meet his debts. I had not known of this.
‘If we do not make payment by the quarter-day, we lose it all.’
It says much for my father’s care that he had never let us know how bad our affairs had become. But I sat as if the whole of winter’s snows had descended and frozen the world and my heart too. How could this be: the family of a man who had been high bailiff become homeless, no roof above our heads?
If we lost this house, what else might we be? My mother had no sisters living; my father had no brothers to take us in. Back in the old King’s day, the Abbey would have sheltered us. The sisters would have set our women to needlework, we men to tend their fields. We would not have starved, nor frozen in winter. But now or then to be homeless meant there would never be the hope of home for us again. For if we had no house, no gloves could be stitched. Gloves need an air-room to stretch the leather and dry it so it keeps its shape; a warm room so the glover’s fingers are nimble enough to make the stitches; a room with windows enough to give good light.
We would have all the light we needed under the green trees. Till winter came, and the leaves were gone, and we, as beggars, froze as well. It was impossible. Yet, looking at my father’s face, I knew it to be true.
I said, still trusting him, ‘Father, what can we do?’
He did not look at me but in his empty tankard. ‘You, my son, must marry.’
‘But, Father —’
He held up his hand. ‘Mistress Marchmant is a small, fair girl, and six pounds a year is a small, fair dowry. But it will take more than a small dowry now. It would be different if she had the fields to sell, but rent . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Six pounds would not tickle the stomach of my debt. You must woo yourself an heiress, lad, to save us all.’
And that was how my father sought to sell me; not at age ten, but at eighteen.
Dinner: a haunch of veal, cold, as the servants are holidaying; a pigeon pie, made yesterday; cheese cakes; almond biscuits; prunes; raisins of the sun; a damson cheese. My wife spiced cider to warm our stomachs with the cold meal. Supper: a brawn of kid; pickled mushrooms; butter with oatcakes, as no bread was baked today; apples and cheese tarts.
Bowels this afternoon a trifle queasy from cold meats and oatcakes, but waters remain clear.