The Fool's Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

box.
    ‘You should not have let him go so easily,’ he said.
    ‘Who? Tod?’
    ‘No, not him!’ Feste shook his head. ‘You’ll have a job getting rid of that one. He’ll be howling outside like a dog every night. No. I meant t’other. Master Shakespeare. He’ll pack the story up in his trunk and be away. That’s what men like him do.’
    ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ Violetta replied.
    Their meeting with him had been no accident. The man was a player. He lived hard by. Such men can never resist a performance, so they set up in his way. They had wanted a meeting and they had got it. That was good, but Violetta did not want to rush things. She was not ready to reveal their intention. Not yet.
    ‘It is not wise to be too eager.’ She went on. ‘A man like him needs to be played carefully.’ She was not at all worried. Intuition told her that he would follow the story. ‘He’s picked up the thread. He’ll be back.’
    ‘Perhaps.’ Feste frowned, head hanging down. ‘Even if the poet does come back, your idea is madder than anything I could dream up. Just the thought of it is filling my belly with seeping black melancholy. It will never work.’
    ‘I thought your job was to keep hope alive and spirits up.’
    ‘Not me, madonna. I’m not that kind of fool. But just in case your intuition is wrong – which has happened before, no point in denying it –’ Feste looked up at her, smiling now – ‘I’ve thought of another way to bring him back to us.’
    ‘What’s that?’ Violetta stood up, ready to heave the box up to the next floor. Maria and Sir Toby lived right at the top of the building in one of the penthouses that jutted so far out that they seemed to float suspended over the street.
    ‘When your young man –’ Feste said as he picked up his end.
    ‘He’s not my young man!’ Violetta objected.
    ‘When your young man,’ Feste went on as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘can think with his head instead of his other parts, he will remember the business he was about, and when he does, Master Shakespeare will find that he is in want of a clown.’

    Maria was waiting for them. She must have heard them on the stairs. She held the door wide as they carried the box the last few yards and dropped it with a rattling thump.
    Their lodgings were tiny. One room divided into two by a thin partitioning wall. From the bedchamber, where Sir Toby lay, came muffled noises. He had no strength left for roaring and raving. What they heard was more like the querulous whimpering of a frightened child left lonely in the dark.
    They had come here a week ago, directed from the Elephant and Castle. Violetta had not known what to expect, but it wasn’t the Hollander. She had been shocked to find Sir Toby and Maria living in such a poor way. There was no covering on the floor, and the walls were crumbling, wood and plaster eaten away by decay. Maria had covered the worst of it with cloths, but these were patchy and discoloured, attacked by the rot beneath. There was no real furniture except for a little three-legged stool. The table was a rough board set upon four small barrels, the chairs upturned buckets or boxes covered in sacking. Maria had tried to make the best of things, but all the proper furnishings had long since been sold to pay Sir Toby’s debts.
    When they first arrived, Feste had looked round with a wry smile. He had not been surprised at all. Sir Toby had always been a wastrel and a tosspot. Such men do not change. He’d pissed away what little money there was when he was able, now it went on doctors. Maria confirmed as much, but not in those words.
    ‘You haven’t changed one bit.’ Maria’s eyes had filled with tears when she saw the clown. ‘I remember when you first came to the house, ’prentice to Old Feste. Even then you looked like a little old man!’
    Feste had not known what to reply to that. Instead he’d taken her into his arms and executed a little dance, as he might have done once upon a time