My insides cartwheeled with fear and the shock that I cared so deeply about that. “Did they believe you?” I asked.
“I’m not sure because the one in charge—Thomas Wilkes—looked page by page through each one. Two of them had Edward Arden’s name in them—”
“Oh, Will . . .”
“But even when Wilkes read the tiny notes Cousin Edward had made in the margins, he found nothing to incriminate me. Anne blurted out to them that my ambition was to be a poet and playwright—as if she was proud of that, when she berates me for such airy dreams all the time.”
“If you go to see the Arden trials in the Guild Hall, I will go with you,” I vowed. “And I am certain you could get a room for the time you’re here from the Davenants—”
“No, Anne! I hope to stay with Dick Field. Besides, if I stayed near you, my wife would get it out of me and scold for days and—I agree with her—I can’t be near you. I mean, here we are, but I can’t be with you at night, or in private, I swore it. She does not know we took vows, but she knows . . . I cared for you. Anne, I’m so sorry for all that’s happened between us. Those two friends of the Hathaways vowed to ruin my family if I did not comply—and it was my fault—the babe she carried.”
“And hers.”
“Be that as it may, all this too may mean the ruination of all the Shakespeares.”
He seemed so distraught that it terrified me even more. This turn of events kept all I had ever meant to say to him—scoldings, accusations, curses—at bay, at least for now. I did convince him to take a meal with us, and I believe he calmed a bit in the Davenants’ company, even when John told him he should wear a sword in the city streets not for style but for safety’s sake.
After farewells, John and Jennet went into the shop, I believe to let me walk him to the back door alone. As Will went out into the twilight city with an old sword and scabbard borrowed from John, he turned to face me again.
“Anne, I had to see you, to tell you all. But I will stay away now, so that no one can link us.”
“No one but ourselves, Andrew Whateley!” I called after him as he hurried down the darkening alley and disappeared as if I’d dreamed him. I might not, I thought, be able to go by the name of Shakespeare, but, even if in pretense, he had taken mine.
Despite the fact he’d told me to stay away, I could not bear to let Will go alone to the Guild Hall for the trial. He had gone with me when I had risked much to see that Italian tumbler so long ago. Yet I knew I often drew stares and realized Will was right that we should not be seen together and not only so his wife would not interrogate and scold him later. Just like the deranged John Somerville on trial today, who knew what senile Father Berowne would say about me if someone questioned him? And then what might Stephen do if we were seen together here?
So once again I bound my breasts and dressed in the secondhand clothes I had bought in the Jewish market. I smudged my face and knotted and pinned up my long hair and played my part in the crowd of restless groundlings outside Newgate Prison, which was actually a three-story gatehouse with rooms and cells inside. The male prisoners were brought out, loaded in drays and driven through the raucous, insulting crowd down Newgate Street and then up Milk Street to the Guild Hall.
I kept scanning the mass of Londoners for Will, though my eyes were drawn back to the three pitiful prisoners, who seemed so alone. I had not seen Edward Arden since he’d insulted Leicester before the queen at Kenilworth when I was a girl. He looked old and enfeebled, but defiant. Somerville, the man who had triggered this upheaval, did indeed look as if he belonged in Bedlam. He was twitching and crying but smiling too; he kept squinting up at the sky as if some heavenly visitation would swoop in to rescue him. The priest Hugh Hall, the kindly man I had known briefly as the Park Hall gardener, looked crooked and all bent