Hamnet(96)

She doesn’t know what she expected but it wasn’t this: such austerity, such plainness. It is a monk’s cell, a scholar’s study. There is a strong sense in the air, to her, that no one else ever comes here, that no one else ever sees this room. How can the man who owns the largest house in Stratford, and much land besides, be living here?

Agnes touches her hand to the jerkin, the pillow on the bed. She turns around, to take it all in. She walks towards the desk and bends over the sheet of paper, the blood hammering at her head. At the top, she sees the words:

My dear one –

She almost rears back, as if burnt, then she sees, on the next line:

Agnes

There is nothing more, just four words, then a blank.

What would he have written to her? She presses her fingers to the empty space on the page, as if trying to glean what he might have said, had he been able. She feels the grain of the paper, the sun-warmed wood of the table; she runs her thumb across the letters forming her name, feeling the minute indentations of his quill.

She is startled by a call, a cry. She straightens up, lifting her hand from the page. It is Bartholomew, shouting her name.

She crosses the room, she moves through the door, and descends the stairs. Her brother is waiting for her at the open door. He says that the woman in the house over the street has told him they won’t find Agnes’s husband at home, that he won’t be back until nightfall.

Agnes glances over at the woman, who is still leaning against her doorframe. She shakes her head at Agnes. ‘You won’t find him here, I tell you. Look for him at the playhouse, if you want him.’ She points with her arm. ‘Over the river. Yonder. That’s where he’ll be.’

She ducks back inside her house and bangs the door.

Agnes and Bartholomew regard each other for a moment. Then Bartholomew goes to fetch the horses.

The neighbour in the doorway is right: he is, as she predicted, at the playhouse.

He is standing in the tiring house, just behind the musicians’ gallery, at a small opening that gives out over the whole theatre. The other actors know this habit of his and never store their costumes or props there, never take up the space around that window.

They think he stands there to watch the people as they arrive. They believe he likes to assess how many are coming, how big the audience will be, how much the takings.

But that is not why. To him, it is the best place to be, before a performance: the stage below him, the audience filling the circular hollow in a steady trickle, and the other players behind him, transforming themselves from men to sprites or princes or soldiers or ladies or monsters. It is the only place to be alone in such a crowd. He feels like a bird, above the ground, resting on nothing but air. He is not of this place but above it, apart from it, observing it. It brings to mind, for him, the wind-hovering kestrel his wife used to keep, and the way it would hold itself in high currents, far above the tree tops, wings outstretched, looking down on all around it.

He waits, with both hands on the lintel. Beneath him, far beneath him, people are gathering. He can hear their calls, their murmurings, the shouts, the greetings, demands for nuts or sweetmeats, arguments that brew up quickly, then die away.

From behind him comes a crash, a curse, a burst of laughter. Someone has tripped on someone else’s feet. There is a ribald joke about falling, about maidenheads. More laughter. Someone else comes running up the stairs, asking, Has anyone seen my sword, I’ve lost my sword, which of you whoreson dogs have taken it?

Soon, he will need to disrobe, to take off the clothes of daily life, of the street, of ordinariness, and put on his costume. He will need to confront his image in a glass and make it into something else. He will take a paste of chalk and lime and spread it over his cheeks, his nose, his beard. Charcoal to darken the eye sockets and the brows. Armour to strap to his chest, a helmet to slot over his head, a winding sheet to place about his shoulders. And then he will wait, listening, following the lines, until he hears his cue, and then he will step out, into the light, to inhabit the form of another; he will inhale; he will say his words.

He cannot tell, as he stands there, whether or not this new play is good. Sometimes, as he listens to his company speak the lines, he thinks he has come close to what he wanted it to be; other times, he feels he has entirely missed the mark. It is good, it is bad, it is somewhere in between. How does a person ever tell? All he can do is inscribe strokes on a page – for weeks and weeks, this was all he did, barely leaving his room, barely eating, never speaking to anyone else – and hope that at least some of these arrows will hit their targets. The play, the complete length of it, fills his head. It balances there, like a laden platter on a single fingertip. It moves through him – this one, more than any other he has ever written – as blood through his veins.

The river is casting its frail net of mist. He can scent it on the breeze, its dank and weed-filled fumes wafting towards him.

Perhaps it is this fog, this river-heavy air, he doesn’t know, but the day feels ill to him. He is filled with an unease, a slight foreboding, as if something is coming for him. Is it the performance? Does he feel something will be amiss with it? He frowns, thinking, running over in his head any moments that might feel un-rehearsed or ill-prepared. There is not one. They are ready and waiting. He knows this because he himself pushed them through it, over and over again.

What is it, then? Why does he have this feeling that something approaches him, that some kind of reckoning awaits him, so that he must be constantly glancing over his shoulder?