did just that. He oft used the Forest of Arden, and he put the name John Somerville in one of his earliest plays, Henry VI, Part 3. Will gave Somerville but three lines, in which he told an earl, a man far above his rank, he’d misjudged something and was mistaken.
Now I nodded as he took my hand. John Somerville had managed to hang himself in prison before he had to face his torment and execution, but his parboiled, tarred head was still to be placed with other traitors’ on the bridge’s south end.
The current took us faster as it flowed toward London Bridge, for the water was forced between the arches there. Only skilled, licensed men called bridge shooters could take a craft as small as ours through the churning water of high tide. But our oarsman pulled hard to keep us far enough away from the cauldron of the current. Holding hands, we looked up to see the three new heads on pikes, gory and gruesome, their features drooped in agony and yet recognizable—Arden, Somerville and the priest Hall. They weren’t alone, for at least a dozen other heads in various stages of decay seemed to stare down at us.
I thought I would be ill, but forced the bile back in my throat to help Will bear up.
“I feel my past is dead,” he said, “and yet I shall build on all I know and all I am to make it live again.” His deep voice resounded over the current and the noise from the street and shops up on the bridge. “I have seen the worst this city has to give but I want to see the best, and I vow I will be back for it—and to see you.”
A sad and strange place for a vow, I thought as the boat bucked and we gazed up at the remains of mortal men so crudely displayed. Worse, I actually believed Will once again, and yet it took him more than four years thereafter to make his words and his future begin to come true. And in that time, I became almost another person.
Act Three
CHAPTER NINE
I counted the days waiting for Will to come to London to make his fortune and his future. I was certain he could outact and outwrite even the best of London’s new breed of young, brash dramatists. Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele and, especially, Christopher Marlowe had the love—and entry fees—of the masses. They were the men who wrote for the Queen’s Players and other theatre companies, when it should have been Will.
And what would I be to Will when he came? An encourager, a friend, a lover? I still felt betrayed in my deepest woman’s heart. I still held his other marriage against him. Perhaps I would be his enemy.
I put off a wealthy, handsome suitor, Nicholas Clere, one of John’s wine buyers, who lived both in England and France. He promised to take me to Paris and give me the world. But like a Bedlamite, I waited for word of Will. Besides, I believed I would be committing bigamy if I wed someone else. And was that the real reason Will had kept our union a secret? Not for my sake, but for his? In my darkest moments when I still missed him, I cursed myself for loving him yet.
When Will did not arrive, I considered visiting Stratford, now that the purge of midland plotters seemed to have passed. I was wild to know if he was ill or had changed his mind about his destiny. But then, an entire year after the execution of Edward Arden—just before Christmas, it was—I saw Richard Field among the bookstalls at St. Paul’s, and what he told me turned my world topsyturvy again.
“What news from home?” I asked after we chatted of the cold weather, the threat of Spanish invasion and the latest plays.
“You have carriers in and out of Stratford each week and you ask me that?” He went back to rearranging a pile of finely bound books; I assumed he had printed them.
“Yes, I ask you that. I don’t want gossip, and I know Will writes to you. I am just praying that the ruination of the Ardens has not made it worse for his people and kept him from his destiny here.”
He looked up at me. “A heartfelt hope, so I will tell you. I told him I would not play go-between for the two of you, but