The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read Online Free PDF Page B

cure in the country and has given Richard a fortnight’s indulgence. At supper they drank small beer, but Richard has a secreted bottle of something fine from London, on the table now alongside his very different treasure.
    ‘I would have brought more.’ Richard is smallish and dark and compact, little different from when they were at school. As if he has made a decision about growing. Will’s knees graze on church pews, and nothing fits him. ‘But I could only carry so much in my pack. Now, that one’s faint, the whole batch of ink turned villainous – we thought of selling it but there’s reputation, you know. That one hung on our hands. It’s pretty but no one bought. That one, I don’t know what happened. There was a sort of ripple when it was pressed, and so you have to fill in the words in the middle of every line. It’s—’
    ‘That’s what I’m doing,’ says Will, greedy, abstracted: rude as a child. A princely gift, these loose sheets from the printer’s workshop, spoiled or unsold. A Jest for Prentices. Rough, deckle-edged paper, as communicative to the touch as skin. Will has read everything in Stratford: all the books borrowed of the schoolmaster, ballads and broadsides bought on fair-days. The Mirror of True Repentance. The paper smells, he fancies, of London, dense and hot. The Play of the Pardoner. He looks up, dizzy. ‘Your master prints plays?’
    ‘Some few. He esteems them trash for the most part. Now try this wine. Madame Vautrollier made me a present of it.’
    ‘Oho.’
    ‘Not oho. No oho about it.’ Richard pours: the liquid pearls bobble. ‘Mind, she is a magnificent creature. Your Frenchwoman, Will, is a different breed altogether – the way she carries herself … Savour it, man, don’t swallow it down.’
    ‘Latin.’ Will is still turning pages, wading in and out of the stream of words. ‘Damn, I’m rusty. What case is that?’
    ‘Ablative.’ Richard coughs. ‘Well, look, I’ve kept it up because we print a deal of Latin. Also you’re soused. Master Vautrollier has just got a patent to print Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Do you remember? Beautiful.’
    ‘I remember.’ The words on the page fade, and instead Will sees his last day at Stratford Grammar School: jokes, hand-shakings, little orations. The schoolmaster on his dais grave and saying nothing. My father needs me at home, sir. No one saying, indeed, that something has gone wrong – that Will who always outpaced everyone should be leaving now, when he might surely … ‘How old is she? Your Madame Vautrollier?’
    ‘She’s not my Madame Vautrollier. I don’t know. Older. A woman.’ Richard sips his wine, then reaches out and puts his arm round Will’s neck. ‘Pardon, Will. About school. Cess and piss on that, what happened, shame on it.’
    They would often touch like this, back then – lie while reading propped against each other, in long grass. Now the gesture seems to fall short. Will pats Richard’s narrow back. ‘No matter. I do very well.’ Smiling painfully they disengage – Richard sitting back into London, Will into Stratford. ‘What became of your lute?’
    Startled, Richard shakes his head. ‘Upstairs somewhere. I didn’t take it to London. No place for that in a day’s business, Will: at the press cockcrow to curfew, three hundred sheets a day else Master Vautrollier swears the devil out of hell. And then I take a taper and study till midnight. Is your heart bleeding?’
    ‘A drop. Go fetch it.’
    ‘We’ll wake the old ones.’
    ‘Then we’ll go out. There’s a moon. Down by the bridge – remember?’
    So, with lute and bottle and flagon, they bundle out a little breathless and hilarious – though a last sobriety plucks Richard: ‘It will mean leaving the door unbarred—’
    ‘You forget you’re in Stratford now, not the great wicked city,’ Will says. ‘We don’t have thieves and murderers here. Only hypocrites.’
    Exhilaration of being abroad in soft night, of