He tweaks the letter from the child’s grip. ‘For me?’ he says, sliding his fingers into his purse and extracting a coin. ‘And for you.’ He flips the coin into the air between them. Instantly, the child is animated, his scrawny body leaping into life.
He laughs, turning on his heel, pulling at the red seal, stamped slightly off-centre with his family’s insignia. He registers his sister’s hand before he lifts his head. Onstage, the young lad is pacing stiffly towards the older actor, edging around the rim of the dais, as if the floor beneath were awash with boiling lead.
‘Good God,’ he roars, his voice stretching at the wooden struts, the skin of plaster on the walls. He knows how to throw his voice, how to expand it so it becomes the sound of a giant. The actors freeze, mouths agape. ‘We have only a few hours before this hall will be filled with the good people of Kent. Are you meaning to give them a circus? Do we intend to make them laugh or are we putting on a tragedy? Look to it or we won’t be eating tomorrow.’
He cracks the page he is holding against the air, stares at them a moment longer, for effect. It seems to have worked. The young lad looks to be on the verge of tears, twisting his fingers into his costume. He turns, to hide his smile, then glances down at the letter.
‘Dear brother,’ he sees. And ‘verie sick’， and ‘your daughter’。 ‘Plea?e come bak to us,’ it says: ‘not manie hours left to her.’
It seems hard to breathe, suddenly. The air in the hall is as hot as a furnace, with particles of chaff. He feels his chest labouring in and out, but no air seems to be reaching him. He stares at the page, reading the words once, twice. The whiteness of the paper seems to pulse, stark and glaring, one moment, then recede behind the black strokes of the letters. He sees for a moment his daughter, her face lifted up to look at him, her hands clasped together, her eyes fixed on his. He wants to loosen his clothes; he wants to tear off his fastenings. He must get out, he must leave this building.
With the letter gripped in his fist, he rushes at the door, pushes his weight against it. Outside, the colours accost his eyes: the glancing lapis sky, the virulent green of the verge, the creamy blossoms of a tree, the pink kirtle of a woman leading a nag along the road. On either side of the animal’s flanks are woven baskets. It is immediately obvious to him that one basket is much heavier than the other: the baskets are uneven, dragging down on one side.
Even up that load, he wants to yell at her, much as he just yelled at the players inside the hall. But he doesn’t have the breath. His lungs are still heaving in and out, his heart hammering now in his ribcage, hammering, hesitating, hammering once more. His vision seems to shimmer at its edges, the pale tree blossoms wavering, as if seen through a fire’s heat.
Verie sick, he thinks, not manie hours left.
He wants to tear down the sky, he wants to rip every blossom from that tree, he wishes to take a burning branch and drive that pink-clad girl and her nag over a cliff, just to be rid of them, to clear them all out of his way. So many miles, so much road stands between him and his child, and so few hours left.
He is conscious of a hand on his shoulder, a face near his, another hand gripping his arm. Two of his friends are there, saying, What, what is the matter, what has happened? One of them, Heminge, is trying to take the letter from his hand, peeling back his fingers, and he will not let it go, he will not. For someone else to read those words might make them true, make them come to pass. He is shrugging the men off, both of them, all of them, because here are more of them, his players, crowding round him, but somehow he feels the gritted ground under his knees and the voice of his friend, Heminge, is reading the words of the letter aloud. Hands are patting his shoulders now; he is being assisted to his feet. Someone is telling someone else to run for a horse, any horse, that they must get him to Stratford as soon as possible. Go, Heminge is urging the young boy who was, not so long ago, nervous of the drop at the edge of the stage, go and fetch a horse. The young boy takes off down the road, dirt flying up from his heels, his costume – a ridiculous thing of brocade and velvet, made to cast the illusion of a woman on the form of a lad – flapping about him.
He watches him go, peering through the thicket of legs surrounding him.
owards the end of Agnes’s second pregnancy, Mary is watchful. She doesn’t let Agnes alone for long. She has noticed her daughter-in-law’s middle getting larger and larger, rounder than seems possible. She has seen Agnes secreting certain items in a sack under the table: cloths, scissors, twine, packets of herbs and dried rinds. Her appearance is astonishing, as if she is smuggling pumpkins inside her gown. I don’t know how she’s still walking, John mumbled one night, as they lay, curtained tight inside their bed. How does she stay standing?