of Greek dramas. Still, I liked the way the four main characters exchanged banter and danced and sang.
But if I’d written those parts, I would have the actors at least making speeches about foraging for food or getting rescued. That seemed to be of no concern to them at all. A silly play, I thought, especially because the players made broad, set gestures to demonstrate particular emotions. They declaimed even fear and awe in bellowing voices and fell too suddenly in love and planned a double wedding out of the blue. Too happy and too fantastical to suit me.
Still, I loved the jig at the end. I kept glancing over at Will, for I could see his profile. He was, I guess, much enamored of it all, the dog-hearted popinjay.
After the upheaval when Kat drowned, my father had declared I was old enough to stay in our cottage at Temple Grafton when he was away instead of being boarded with our Stratford kin. And so, in exile just as surely as if I were shipwrecked alone, I kept house and tended the two horses the Whateley carriers left behind on each run. I kept all the records and made out reckoning slips for how much people owed us. On occasion, I went afoot to Shottery or Stratford to collect our due.
And sometimes I lingered by the banks of the Avon where I had once met with Will or where Kat and I had spoken that last day, even the spot by the eddy where she’d drowned. I made coronets of posies and cast them in as a memorial to her or sailed leaf boats toward Stratford with the tiny initials A.W. to W.S. punched in them with a hairpin. I pretended Will would find them and know they were from me. More than once, I invented elaborate scenes in my head with witty dialogue and long, heart-wrenching soliloquies of how I had missed him. I knew such plots were as fantastical as the Queen’s Men’s play.
But I cursed Will too, for he had evidently been cowed by his parents’ decree not to seek me out. That last moment, by Kat’s corpse before the others came upon us, we should have vowed we’d meet in secret at least at certain times. What about that finger-pricking blood oath we’d taken years ago? He had evidently abandoned it and me as completely as Dick had left Kat.
The years slipped by and my warm memories of him grew colder, until they barely moved—like a torrent turned to ice in the frigid river.
CHAPTER FOUR
As I had feared, Stephen Dench, the best of my father’s carriers, bided his time, yet wanted to court me with a vengeance. He was broad-faced and brawny, kind enough but loud and untutored in social graces as well as learning. I knew he watched me with hungry eyes, which did not scare me half so much as it intrigued me. But I still said no and wrenched a promise from my father to give me more time. Because Stephen could not read or write and my father trusted no one else with his records, he spoiled me and gave me my way.
“For one more year,” he said, shaking a finger at me when I turned seventeen. “Stephen would be a good match for both of us—for the business. He’s as hardworking as we are, and you could grow to love him if you’d but give him his chance. You’ve still got your head in the clouds, missy.”
“Maybe after I’ve seen London. You said I could go with you to see London.”
“Someday, I said. But I repack and turn right round, you know that. You’d have no time—”
“Just once, you could give me time. You could stay a few days. Da,” I wheedled, using my old pet name for him that sometimes softened him up, “I know there’s so much to see and do there. I could go to a real play at that place—the playhouse—”
“Heard tell there’s three of them now,” he said, when I fumbled for its name. He drew in a breath from his pipe, then blew a wreath of smoke into the air. “No, girl, London’s not a place for you. But if you was to wed with Stephen, I could see it clear to give the both of you a week or so there between runs. Aye, I could do a run or two without him, and someone would be there to be certain you are safe.