Grey rain, a grey day, clouds like an old man’s beard covering the sky. If angels weep, it would be thus.
Pah! I do not write for lords and princes now, nor for commoners who like to think they can follow lordly wit, but for no eyes but mine. If angels wept, their tears would not fall in our earthly sphere; nor would they rain as miserably as this. No tempest, no growling winds, just rain, and rain again.
The squire’s son looks as miserable as his horse. (Their noses have some similarity as well.) But he comes most dutifully to see how his father’s new gates grow. I could have told my Romeo it is no use trying to meet Juliet today, for no maid will even go to the baker’s. The bread would be sodden before they could fetch it home.
He mounted his horse again, both wetter than when they came, and I sit here by my good fire, and gaze at the greyness out the window, my words which once flashed faster than a torrent now hesitant from my pen. I must write of Anne now. And yet it worries me a little to do discourtesy to her, who has been a most dutiful and pleasant wife for over one score years and ten. Ay, there’s the rub. Anne has been most pleasant. But naught more.
I did not know if I wished my father’s plan to be possible, or to prove so Herculean a task as to leave me, at the quarter’s end, forced to do anyway what Judyth had suggested: seek employment as a tutor, so my wages might give my family a roof and bread, even if that roof was but a humble hut.
Stratford was not overly endowed with heiresses, and surely none for a young man with a mortgaged home and still apprenticed at eighteen. There were but two: Rosamund, daughter of the squire, and far above my touch; and aunt of the young lout I see sighing for young Bess. The other . . .
‘Mistress Anne Hathaway,’ said my father, staring at the fire.
‘Bartholomew’s older sister, that lives near Shottery?’
‘Ay. That’s the one.’
‘But she must be thirty at least, Father.’
‘Twenty-six,’ said my father shortly.
An heiress? How could that be? I had known Bartholomew at school, though but slightly, for he was five years ahead of me and stayed for two more years at school. He was married now, with two young sons. His father had died the year before. His stepmother still lived with them. It was a good farm, nearly one hundred acres and prosperous. But it was Bartholomew’s, and not his sister’s.
‘What fortune does she have?’ I asked my father.
‘Six pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence, the value of two fields under her father’s will, to be paid on her marriage,’ he said calmly. ‘But her two godfathers will give forty pounds between them to guarantee there be no impediment to her marriage, those forty pounds to come to her husband when she has been wed. The girl cared for them during their illnesses and did them kindnesses. Neither has children of his own, nor is likely to, and both wish her to be established.’
Only last year I gave three hundred pounds to each of my daughters’ estates, beyond their other interest in my fortune when I shuffle off this mortal coil; but for me then, forty-six pounds was — almost — a fortune.
‘Is forty-six pounds enough?’ I asked.
‘It will serve.’ My father looked at the fire again, as if he hoped the flames might show him the future. ‘If the next harvest is good, and people buy gloves once more, and if the winter storms do not take the Silver Hind, then our fortunes will be quite restored.’
I thought: you sell my life, as you sold my mother’s fields then mortgaged our house, to invest in the cargo of this Silver Hind, upon an ‘if’. But this man was my father. I was sure he loved me.
Had Farmer Forrest loved Ned too?
Father met my eyes. He said gently, ‘Anne is a pleasant girl, one most suited to be your wife. She has kept house since her mother’s death, a comfort to her father, and stayed unmarried out of duty to care for him until his death. Mistress Marchmant is used to servants waiting upon her, and a housekeeper to make all right. With Anne, we need keep no maid; a saving not just in wages but in food and drink. Her cheese is the best in all Shottery, her ale sweet. It says much for her godfathers’ esteem that they will give so much to see her settled, now her father is not with us in this world.’
A pleasant wife, good tempered, who made fine cheese. A year ago I might have been content, even with one so many years older than myself.
I wanted to ask, ‘How much exactly do you owe?’ But I would get no plain dealing; nor perhaps was there plainness to be had if my father’s borrowings were many. But forty-six pounds, thirteen shillings and fourpence would pay our mortgage, it seemed. It was my father’s price for me, and for the bond I owed to him.
Dinner: pigeons, the Italian way, which I do favour; a savoury veal pie; green sauce with wheat leaves; a pupton of apples; half-dried peas with butter; mutton steaks seethed with a wine sauce; parsnip fritters; a dish of turnips, mashed; cheese cake and pippin jelly pie; to drink, warmed claret wine with cinnamon and sugar. A roast of beef at supper, my wife following my request for meat.
Bowels: comfortable. My very life is comfortable, like a lark’s within a lady’s cage.