Susanna came to visit this morning. She and her sister talk of a visit to Shottery to see my wife’s brother’s family as if it were a visit to snow-clad Elsinore, or Venice with its sun-kissed canals and gondolas. Cramped, damped, confined we squat in our small Stratford world. And trapped, like a bee in the honey pot, and I a gentleman within it.
But I still have my memories.
I did not tell my father what Judyth had proposed. Her way would mean I could live and eat and marry, and maybe one day come to fine prosperity. But my tutor’s wage would save me, yet leave my family beggars.
She thought I had a choice. But I had none.
I lay awake that night and no words came to give her. The next morn I heard the church bell toll out twelve. My heart longed to run to the beech tree. My feet were bound by duty. I sat by the window in our hall and stretched at the leather for a glove that no one had yet ordered. I could not go to her, kiss her, talk of love to her, if I could not honourably ask her to be my wife. Judyth Marchmant was no kitchen maid, no farrier’s widow, to be kissed and left. Yet my very bones and every thought ached for her.
Another night, and then another.
My dreams shipwrecked my sleep. I saw myself declaiming verse while all around me a crowd watched, as if we were all trapped in amber awe. I saw a portrait of an older, balder self with beard and the fine clothes that said ‘gentleman’, and before him a small crowd and a voice that said, ‘Here is the portrait of Shakespeare, poet.’
I woke and thought, that could be me, if I have the courage to follow Judyth’s words. Perhaps if I had a tutor’s position I might take a loan to pay the quarter’s owing on our house; or whoever my father had borrowed from might extend the loan to me if I had the means coming to pay it off. In the meantime, my mother had earrings my father could sell . . .
On the first stroke of twelve I ran to our beech tree, and lifted up its curtain. She was not there. Had she been there the last two days, waiting, waiting, and I did not come?
And then I saw a ribbon, tucked into the first fork of the tree. I reached for it and found it tied a parchment. I rolled it out.
I had thought perhaps to have a declaration of her love again; a promise she would wait; a reproach that I had abandoned her . . . I do not know exactly what I thought I’d find. I had not expected this.
Small writing, each loop furled as evenly as the sail of a great ship blown by the most kind of winds. Even my old schoolmaster could not write like this.
And then I read the words:
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends if ever to remove.
Love never dies, as frail flesh proves.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the heaven’s star, the tree’s firm bark,
Once love is given, it cannot be taken.
I sat upon the ground, and wondered. Then I cried.
Dinner: minced collops, for my wife has the toothache again and can eat nothing but pap; chicken blancmange; mashed turnips and green pottage; stewed rhubarb with Spanish cream.
‘We will fast in Advent soon enough! A man in his prime must have proper meat, wife,’ I told her, when the servants had left the room. ‘Except on fast days when I choose not to pay the meat fine, it is meet that I have meat!’
She did not see the joke.
Bowels: improved.