Scene 5
A road running along the Thames River. On the other side of the river, the impressive mansions of the nobility line up in impressive display, their stone facades vying to outdo each other in grandeur and architectural ornament. On the nearer side, only a few houses, hovels, and decaying warehouses cluster. Amid them, a small shop remains open, a lantern burning over the sign that advertises used clothes for resale. Will Shakespeare enters the shop, where clothes hang from the ceiling and lie in neat piles upon the two tables that take up most of the scant interior space. An old man sits at the back, by a small table at which a wavering oil lamp burns. Two other, younger men argue with him.
“Not worth three pennies.” The old man turned a dark red velvet doublet over and over in his dried-up clawlike hands. He squinted at the fabric and squeezed his lips together, multiplying the wrinkles on his already wrinkled face.
“I need five pennies, please, master,” a tall man in his twenties, obviously the owner of the doublet, said. “I must have five pennies to pay my gaming debt.”
“Three pennies,” the man said. “And I’m being too generous. I’ll ruin myself this way.”
He waved the tall man aside, saying, “Think it over.”
The blond youth, no more than sixteen or so, pushed a folded dark suit at the man.
The boy looked scared and his anxiety mounted as the old man picked at seams, and turned sleeves, and made smacking sounds with his mouth.
Will Shakespeare held on tightly to his best suit, of much-washed black velvet, and waited his turn.
His suit had been new ten years ago when he’d married Nan. It was not, Will knew, nearly as well made as the tall man’s wine-colored doublet.
And yet Will had to have ten pence for the suit.
It wouldn’t pay Will’s rent, but it would—if he husbanded it right—feed Will through the days it would take him to walk home.
But what were his chances of getting that much when the much-better doublet was held so cheap?
Will watched the old man purse his lips with finality and look at the young man. “Poor quality,” he told the boy. “Poor quality. I don’t think I can—”
On those words he checked and arrested.
The young man had started quivering, like a leaf upon a tree in high wind.
He stumbled, gave a strangled cry, and fell toward Will.
“What’s this, what’s this?” the shopkeeper said.
To save himself from being toppled, Will dropped his suit and put his hands out, easing the tall, thick-boned youth onto the beaten-dirt floor of the shop.
“He’ll be drunk,” the tall man said. “Drunk or hungry. It’s hard days in the country and many young bucks come to town searching for work and food. As if we had it to give.”
Will shook his head. He’d come to town in search of work, but no one would call him a young buck.
He knelt beside the young man on the floor. He looked like a farmhand and he smelled neither of ale or wine. Will lay his hand on the youth’s forehead, as he would have on Hamnet’s, back in Stratford. It was hot enough to feel burning to the touch.
“He’s ill,” Will said. He fumbled with the man’s shirt, trying to open it, to give him air.
But as Will pulled, the worn-through shirt ripped, exposing the man’s underarm, and the huge, pulsing growth beneath it.
“Jesu,” the seller said. He got up and bent over the youth, staring at the growth. “Jesu. It’s the plague.” The old man’s lips quivered. His hand went to his forehead, tracing the papist sign of the cross in atavistic exorcism. “My shop will be closed now. What will become of my grandchildren?”
“How long have you been ill, good man?” Will asked. He wanted to ask where the man had been, where he might have contracted this illness, whether in London or the countryside.
For a moment he thought the man was too far gone to answer. His pale blue country-boy eyes looked at Will uncomprehending.
But then he cleared his throat and coughed, and whispered, “Faith, I’ve not been ill. It was just now, this pain . . . . I’ve not been ill. Tell my mother—” He stopped, and coughed again, and his body convulsed, in a long shudder. “Mother,” he said and he was still.
Will saw that breath didn’t rise in the broad chest.
Dead, the boy was dead. And he’d said he was well till just now, till that pain beneath his arm.
It could not be true. It could not be true. Even the plague took time to kill people.
Yet something told Will that this was true. He remembered the boy walking down the street, ahead of Will. He’d walked like a healthy man.
Trembling, Will stood up. Trembling, he wiped his hands to his pants.
Mercy, let him not catch the plague. Oh, mercy, not so far from his wife and children. How horrible it would be, dying here all alone and being buried without name or care. His sense of his mortality, awakened, beat afraid and agitated wings against his reason. Oh, fool he was to have left those he loved and for the sake of an illusory dream of poetry to have come so far to so dangerous a city.
“Out,” the old man said. “Out. I’ll not be buying any clothes for a long time.” With fumbling urgency, he pushed Will and the tall man with the wine red doublet from his shop.
Will could but stop and pick up his suit on the way, as he was being pushed out.
Outside, the cold air allowed Will to think more clearly, despite the bitter complaints of his empty stomach.
The plague. In truth, it was that—the growth beneath the arm that sapped a man’s vital humors.
But the plague came on slowly, took days to come on.
What strange plague was this that killed so quickly?
A strange plague, like a curse, like a supernatural miasma.
Will wiped his hands on his breeches again, one at a time, and he shoved his suit under his arm.
Oh, let him not catch the plague.
And yet, he thought, his despair mounting as he looked back at the closed shop, let him catch it, for the plague, this fast plague, would kill Will faster than starvation, and starvation was his only other choice now. He knew there were other used clothing shops in London, but this had been the most accessible, the one that catered to the poorer people who might indeed wish to buy Will’s cast-offs. All other shops would sneer at Will’s velvet suit.
Outside the shop, Will stood on the narrow road beside the Thames, with his nose full of the stink of the great river that served London as well, sink and sewer.
The Thames looked oily dark in the moonlight, like the River Styx flowing through a realm of the dead.
Along its dark waters, barges slid.
On the nearest barge, upon a chair like a throne, a creature sat, who, as the barge neared, Will discerned to be the golden majesty of the Queen of England: Elizabeth, just over sixty years old and still ruling the country with unfaltering hand.
From this far away, she looked young and majestic, easily as young as twenty years ago, when Will had seen her in Coventry, where she’d come for a pageant put on by the Duke of Leicester.
Will frowned at the barge and at the Queen, and at the gentlemen in attendance to them, all of them unaware of, uncaring about the starving English subjects, threatened by the plague.
How much of this majesty was true? It was said that the Queen wore makeup thick with lead, hard with egg white, glazed with the perfumes and lacquers of Araby.
The Queen and London were one, the Queen and London alike. This glistening London to which Will had come in search of fame and fortune had proved itself a pit full of villains, into which Will’s energy and fortune vanished.
London was naught, Will thought, like the Queen might be naught beneath her grand clothes, her makeup.
A plague-eaten naught where he would die alone.
Will’s dream had died. He’d never be a poet.
That had been a dream. A dream and nothing more.