My wife has just come in rain-wet and chilly-fingered from our dairy after checking that the cheeses be turned. The maids are pickling pears and making apple jelly and quince paste, and Judith is visiting her sister, I suspect to escape straining jelly and cutting the quince cores. The house smells sweet, but sticky. And I to this room, with a good fire and spiced ale to ward off autumn’s breath, to live awhile in memory.
Ned’s father sold his son at ten years old. I was eighteen before my father sold me, but that evening at the guildhall play was the last I spent as a schoolboy.
The four winters since Ned had left had been hard too. Another year of blight, then a winter so cold and long the snow did not melt till June. The wheat ripened on short stems, enough to fill our bellies, but not long enough to make straw for thatchers. Roofs leaked like kitchen sieves, and tempers grew short as beds grew damp, and such a crop of mould as if to mock the fields that harvested so little.
Plague’s bony fingers shut the London theatres twice more. Corpses lay rotting, no one daring to bring them out. Dogs’ bodies were piled in every street, as carriers of the plague. Rats grew fat on dead men’s flesh, free from teeth of Terriers. Once it visited our town too, though with quarantine crosses set upon the two houses that harboured it and their doors hammered closed, none died but the families shut up in them. The houses were later burnt to make sure no evil humours lasted. There are trees grown now where once there were black embers, but as I pass them I still wonder who died of starvation in those homes rather than of plague, for none would even take a basket of bread to plague-crossed doors.
Our household seemed prosperous. The ship from Venice did come back with silks and glassware, and a goodly price received. Father showed me the accounts, for a businessman’s learning does not come only at school with its grammar and Greek and Latin. All was invested in another ship, off to the Indies this time, to bring back spices worth ten times what the Venetian ship had brought. For four more years, Father dreamt of buying a family crest, of setting up his carriage, of buying a new house with many chimneys and glass at its windows. And Mother dreamt, I suppose, of what most women do: happiness for her children, full bellies and bright eyes.
For four years between the boy of eight and youth of twelve, I dreamt I would go to university after I left the grammar school at fourteen. And after that? Perchance a university scholar if I won a fellowship, or a parson. I might find a place at court.
But dreams must end. When I was twelve I woke, as sudden as the rooster grabbed sleeping on his perch, to feel the axe upon his neck to make him dinner.
My execution fell when Father sat me by the fire in the hall while the women were in the kitchen-house, the children helping them. Father picked up a glove, made but not embroidered, and sorted through embroidery threads. I thought he was going to show me a new decoration. Little did I know he would murder all my dreams, and let me embroider what new life I could.
‘I should be at school,’ I said.
The master taught us older boys. He could be angry if we were late. But he knew me, knew my love of learning. He had even arranged for a scrivener to teach me how to form my letters easily. If I said my father had kept me, the master would believe me.
‘You are fond of school,’ said Father heavily.
‘Yes, sir.’
I had shown the master some of my poems just the day before: one in Greek about a tempest and a shipwreck, which did not scan; and two in English, which he had praised. The master lent me his own books now, knowing he would get them back not just unmarked but their covers freshly rubbed with neat’s-foot oil, and with an apple tart or cherry fritter from my mother as thanks for notice of her son.
‘The ship has sunk,’ my father said.
For a moment I thought the master had spoken about my shipwreck poem to Father. Then I realised it was the spice ship that was gone, and all our hopes with it, sunk in sand-strewn darkness far beneath the sea.
‘I can make it right,’ said Father quickly. ‘I can borrow money, invest again. But I must resign from the council till our fortunes are made good. Until that day . . . William, you must leave school.’
The school had no fees, but paper and quills cost money, as did the fee for the scrivener, nor, it seemed, could our house support a son who did not work.
‘What shall I do, sir?’
Perhaps Father had found a position for me in the squire’s household, or even a merchant’s, doing accounts and writing letters.
He did not meet my eye. ‘There is no money for an apprentice fee for any other trade. I am sorry. You must be my apprentice. I have no influence now to find you any more.’
My dreams vanished like mist sucked by the sun. Oxford, Paris, Wurtemberg, a life beyond a craftsman’s tools — all were lost to me. Instead of barren acres, ours were barren ships. For the first time, I judged my father. I saw his ships as such that dreams are made of, no more likely to bring us fortune than an apple tart to fly. I had lived my father’s dream for twelve years. Now I must be what I had always been meant to be: a glover’s son, a glover’s apprentice.
What does a man owe his father? I love thee according to thy bond, no more nor less. ’Twas I who wrote those words.
Back then, I said, ‘If making gloves has made you the father I know, I will gladly make them too.’
Father embraced me then, with tears in his eyes.
I did not go to school that day, nor any other, except on Sunday afternoons to visit the master, and borrow books from him or return them, and to talk for a few hours of Greece and Rome and all the rest of Italy. The master held all the world in his bookshelves, I thought back then.
The rest of the week, I stitched gloves, until it became obvious that the hands that could not write neatly for all the scrivener’s coaching could not stitch neatly either, nor even cut a pattern with a true hand. The only gloves I managed were worker’s mittens, with no fingers for me to wrinkle like a dog’s hind leg. I was put instead to stretching and scraping leather with my younger brothers to make it soft, soaking it in the barrels of urine we kept out the back to make it hold the colour well, mixing the dyes, ensuring that black mourning gloves would not turn red with too much rain or sunlight, nor a lady’s chalk-white gloves turn grey.
Year after year I tried to cut and stitch, but for all Father’s coaxing I had no craft in me. I could not make a pair of gloves whose thumbs were the same size, much less design embroidery to captivate a lady; nor could I weave a glove of silk that did not look as if a cat had made its bed on it. Apprentice I might be, but never would I be a master craftsman. A glover does not make woollen mittens for his master’s piece. My father might in kindness want to make me a full glover, but he had not the power to do so. A master craftsman must be judged by his peers.
Six more years passed and I was still an apprentice, wearing apprentice blue, smelling of wool and new cured leather. My world shrank like boiled wool, to the prison of a craftsman’s hall, the company only of apprentices, with no more wit or knowledge than a fly. Yet still I wrote, at night when my younger brothers snored in our big bed. And even though I had seen my dreams shattered like a mirror cast upon the floor, more dreams came to me each time I held my quill — of a land beyond glove-making and Stratford markets, bound not by time or roads but stretching to the farthest reaches a mind can travel.
Father dreamt as well; dreams of our house and home, which would be no longer a craftsman’s but a gentleman’s. Sometimes he had me read to him from the schoolmaster’s books as he stitched, and my younger brothers scraped the leather soft, and my mother and sister worked on the embroidery. At times he sang, great lusty verses, and from them I learnt the tune that words can have, even bereft of music. My father gave me a love of life and words. He gave beyond his bond, so later I was bound to repay that bond to him.
As for the rest — his speculations in land, his borrowings, his mortgages, his sinful usury, his fondness for being a fine burgess of our town — was his ambition for himself, or for his family, that we should have more than the life to which we had been born?
I sit here the gentleman that he wished, even if my path to it was not what he had planned. He did his best, and no more can be said of any man. The noble Brutus hath said that Caesar was ambitious; and if so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar paid for it.
My father paid. And I, my father’s son, I paid his penance too. I still pay now. All this I know. All this I do forgive.
This morning I did a message to my page to arrange the redigging of our sinks, for in this wet year they do not empty as they should, and to have our thatch checked against winter leaks.
Dinner: the squire and his son to dine with us, and Judith and Bertram carefully looking in any direction but at each other. It is obvious they do not suit, nor can I be sorry not to have the squire as my daughter’s father-in-law and so often at my table, or I at his, despite his estate, for the man’s dogs have more wit than he.
We ate roast kid, well fatted (I pay the fine for our house to eat meat on the week’s fast days); green goose; late artichokes from our hothouses; skirret and celery salletting; cheese cakes; blancmange of chicory and almonds; small gilded cakes; apple tart. Second course: saddle of mutton; beef steaks with quince sauce (of which I did not eat); pigeons, stuffed; eel pie; pear tarts with cheese; a gingerbread with caraway and preserved apricots from our own trees; marzipan fancies made by my wife in the shape of a deer and boar, in honour of the squire’s love of the hunt, though boor would be as fitting; our own beer below the salt, with claret wine for the squire and myself.
Bowels: unmoving, like the squire’s wit. Waters clear.