Today Thomas Quiney was sentenced by the Bawdy Court for whoredom and uncleanliness, for lying with Mary Wheeler and fathering her child. He must pay a five-shilling fine and appear at church in a white sheet for three Sundays.
A slight penance indeed for a lost girl and bastard child, but the sentence was given in kindness to our house, that he does not shame us further.
My daughter stays in the Chapel Lane cottage, so as not to tempt the gossips’ eager tongues.
‘You must go to her,’ my wife said to me at dinner.
I looked at her surprised; both at the suggestion — I would as soon visit the pigs in mud as Thomas Quiney — and that she should tell her husband so. This was not like my wife.
‘If my daughter would speak with me, she must come here.’
‘She says she cannot if you condemn her husband so.’
‘Condemn him! Do not all righteous men condemn him? Am I to have a fornicator, a man who marries my daughter while another is his bastard child’s mother, visit my house!’
‘Judith swears that he is innocent. The babe must be another’s.’
Ay, as she swore that she was innocent, pretended duty as a daughter. ‘It was the mother’s dying testimony.’ I heard my voice grate, like an old man’s. ‘A dying oath cannot be forsworn.’
‘And yet your daughter says the girl lied. Her husband has done no ill.’
‘This man who is excommunicated, and brings my daughter to that too! This man who lay with her in sin, so that she must marry him.’
My wife’s hands sat in her lap. ‘Indeed,’ she said softly, ‘once you thought that worth the doing, and for love.’
I had no words to give her; or rather, not ones that were wise. I came up to my book so I may write them here. For my wife has the right of it. My own sin — done for good intent and at my father’s will — has come to haunt me.
I told myself it was no sin, and hurt no one but myself. But sin it was: deception, calumny, fornication. For that sin, Judyth died, though I did not own it then; for had she been my wife, she would have been at my side in London or where else we might have been.
For that sin, I have no heir that bears my name. When I am dust, the name Shakespeare must crumble into earth beside my bones.
When sin has been put loose into the world, there is no net strong enough to haul it back. And now I meet that sin again, it having sped across the world on Ariel’s wings then back to me, and see it settle upon my daughter. Poor, foolish girl, taken in by such a rogue; a rogue such as her father was.
But I cannot go to her. For if I do, I give countenance to Thomas Quiney, and by doing that lose our family’s good name.
Dinner: a turbot, boiled, with currant sauce; macaroni pudding with almond milk; a dish of turnips; pottage of peas and greens; but none of this house had much appetite.
Bowels: unsteady still.