involved, I would never try to stop their union, however I longed to. Children needed their parents, mother and father too, I knew that only too well.
But now all that was momentarily thrust aside as I desperately tended my father. He lay in the same bed in which my mother had died of fever. Since he’d been in London where the summer visitations of the plague sometimes closed the playhouses and sent the actors’ companies to the shires, I prayed it was not that, but Dr. Wentworth said not.
“Hardly ever plague or pox in the winter,” he told me after he’d smelled his breath and bled him. “He’s a strong man. My herbs and curatives will restore him. This is a fine elixir for fever with a touch of gold in it, and the chamomile will soothe his stomach and his nerves and, God willing, put his bodily humors back in balance.”
It was true that my father’s nerves needed soothing, for he raved on and on in his delirium after the doctor rode back to Stratford. Stephen knocked on the door after dark to see if he could help.
“No, you’ve done enough,” I told him, frowning. “Now leave us—especially me—alone.”
“I heard in town your swain’s to wed the Hathaway girl and that she’s carrying his child. Anne, I only wanted you to be free of him, the double-dealer.”
“Thank you for taking care of my father. Now leave before I say things to you I do not want a suffering man to overhear.”
“You’ll see things different when he’s better. My offers to you still stand, Anne. I—”
I was so exhausted and bereft—and furious with Stephen, with Will, with the world—that I slammed the door in his face and rushed back to the sickbed.
“Ah, there you are,” Da said, his eyes glassy, his gaze darting and distracted. Yet I felt some relief as he seemed to be in his own mind. He wasn’t ranting and raving about prices and lame horses, at least. Dipping a cloth in rosemary water, I wiped his ashen face again, realizing I should have asked the doctor for something for my persistent headache. Da’s bedclothes were drenched with sweat; I longed to change them, but was loath to move him.
“Yes, I’m here,” I whispered. “Just rest.”
“Will you not come to bed, my Anna?”
My hand froze. He thought I was my mother.
“Are you still longing for London?” he asked. “Or even for your people yet? I told you I’d make it up to you, be everything to you. It’s just—I had to leave to make ends meet. In the summers, the sun here’s like in Italy’s winters, aye? I told you it would be so. Can you not feel it, so warm even now? You forgive me and still love me, say you do . . .”
I had not cried after I’d learned of Will and the other Anne, but it seemed now my father in his delirium spoke words Will would want to say to me. “Are you still longing for London. . . . You forgive me and still love me, say you do . . .” Only this time, I could not want him back, could not forgive. Nor could I bear to live in a place where I could come upon him—or her and their child.
I jolted when my father, who had been weak and limp as a babe, grasped my wrist so hard he hurt me.
“Say you forgive me, Anna, that you love me!”
“Da, I’m Anne,” I choked out.
“I can’t die in peace if I don’t know you forgive me!” he shrieked so shrilly that it turned my blood cold.
“Yes—yes, I love you and forgive you,” I said. “Now, rest, please rest. You need your strength.”
But he evidently only needed to know those things from my long-dead mother, for he loosed his grip on me and died.
At my father’s funeral in the bitterly cold shadows of St. Andrew’s, I thought I would go mad. Father Berowne managed to jumble a marriage ceremony with a funeral’s final words. If I had not been so utterly bereft of emotion and dead inside, I would have laughed and cried at once, especially when I saw that I still wore Will’s ring. I had been in such a dazed state that I had not yet taken it off. I’m sure he wished he had it now for his other Anne, but I had no intention of taking it off or sending it back. I’d hide or bury