“Edmund,” Will said, meaning to invite the youth to a tavern where, over mutton and wine, they might speak, like father to errant son and—with the medicine of Edmund’s good repentance—minister the spreading blight that threatened to consume their friendship.
Edmund looked up. “Look here, Will,” he said. In the shining pallor of his face, his golden eyes burned with something like fire. “Look here, Will. Look at this boot.”
Speaking thus, he waved under Will’s eyes the very worn sole of a boot, with a finger-thick hole starting at the center.
Will blinked. He pushed the boot away. “I gave you new boots, Edmund. Less than a fortnight ago,” he said. “Why not wear those?”
Edmund cackled like a mad man, attracting the gazes of the nearest actors. “I am wearing them, brother. Your fine gift. You never give me aught that’s not near worn through, do you?”
“They were new.” Will looked around at the staring actors, his gaze making each one avert his own gaze.
But he knew they looked back again, as Edmund yelled, “They looked new. I’ll grant you that. But unless they were rotten they would not have worn through in two weeks, would they Will? Not in two weeks, of walking home and to the Theater and nowhere else.”
Will felt the pressure of the actors’ gazes on his back. He could almost hear them begging Will to put the young pup in his place. The young pup who was an actor only on Will’s fiat.
That pressure made Will speak. “But you walk elsewhere, do you not, brother?” Will asked, his voice severe. “To what brothels, what houses of assignation, what drinking holes do those boots carry you, brother, that you come in here late, always late, and always having forgotten your lines, and always looking like death tottering upon its own skeleton?”
Edmund opened his mouth. His golden eyes stared in surprised shock. He roared, an indistinct sound. “Curse your moralizing and your vanity,” he said. He stomped his newly-shod foot upon the theater boards and trembled. “Now that your daughter is marrying a puritan, will you be a puritan too?
I wasn’t so young that I don’t remember how big bellied your Nan was when she married you. You had your fun too, when you were young, did you not? Why must I be a saint? Wouldst you see me still in my tomb before my time?” He glowered at Will, who glowered back.
Will remembered his mad youth all too well. But remembering it, he remembered other things: his consorting with the elves in the forest of Arden hard by Stratford-upon-Avon.
Worse, Will remembered Kit Marlowe, that brittle genius who’d taught Will the ways of poetry.
Kit Marlowe had fallen in love with an elf, when little younger than Edmund. And that love, unrequited, for a creature who could requite lust but never warm human feelings, had been Marlowe’s undoing. He’d pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy he’d sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief till his reason gave away and his mad plots killed him.
There was an air of Marlowe about Edmund, an impatience for joy which life did not give.
Will remembered Edmund as a little boy, with curls, playing in the backyard of their parents house.
Behind him the actors muttered of shame and lack of respect.
Will sighed. He must be firm. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! Away, away!”
Edmund looked astonished for a moment, hands on either side of him, slightly drawn, his whole body tensed for a response, a gesture that would quell Will’s responding words.
Then he laughed again. The cold ripple of his laughter shook the ice on the makeshift roofs over the best seats.
“You quote your own words at me, do you?” he said, and laughed. “Your own words that you got from the gospel? Ah, Will. You say my own poems are never good enough and that my poetry is trite. But I’ve never stolen so much from the commonplace, everyday prayers and psalms as you have.” He trembled visibly, and a tide of color ascended to his cheeks, then receded again, leaving them paler. “Maybe that is why you always tell me my poetry is no good, Will. Maybe because it’s better than yours.”
Will could not answer that. Edmund’s poetry, such as it was, had all the fire and power that Will’s own words had possessed at twenty. But he lacked the calm of tutored thought, the quiet of reflected experience. Thus much had Will told him, ever. Thus much and naught more.
He’d always encouraged Edmund, had he not? Did he, in some corner of his being, fear this boy who reminded him so of Marlowe’s greatness?
Before Will could reel in his thought, before he could respond to Edmund, Edmund smiled, a triumphant smile as if having proved his point, and turned on his heel, and headed for the door.
“You did well,” Will Kemp said in a stage whisper. “You did well. Someone needs to rein in that boy, for his own good.”
But Will watched his brother walk away in a stumbling, shambling walk, and thought he’d not done well at all.
The boy looked ill.
Will was at that age when his friends died, one after the other. Sometimes it seemed that all his acquaintance and everyone he remembered were mere ghosts, crowding around him with memoried affection but no living presence.
Old Mr. Pope, the actor, had died only two years ago. And this year Augustin Phillips, another actor, had died. Elizabeth, the great Queen in whose reign Will had been born, had died years ago, and before her brave, thundering Essex, her erstwhile favorite, who had for a while seemed to bestride the Earth and make the skies shake.
And Marlowe, great Marlowe whose words had taught Shakespeare’s speech to sing, had lain ten years a-moldering in his anonymous grave in a Deptford cemetery.
It was as though Will had started a trip in this one coach, with coachmen and fellow-travelers, and one by one they’d all dropped off, leaving him alone and afraid.
But Edmund… Edmund had come into the coach long after the trip had started—he’d come into the world well enough after Will that he could have been Will’s own son.
Will watched Edmund trip and right himself slowly, in the hesitant movements of the infirm or old.
Edmund could not be allowed to dissipate himself until he died of it.
Children should not die before their parents, Will thought, despite the daily evidence of his eyes, despite the example of his own family.
Will, himself, would die, sure, but he’d leave behind himself this brother who was like a son and who’d continue Will’s own path.
Not knowing which he feared more: That Edmund’s distracted mind betrayed illness or that the boy was consorting with fairyland, Will sighed.
He was an old man. Old men had sick fancies and turns of the spirit that bode no good. It meant nothing.
“Your brother is ill, Master Shakespeare,” Edmund’s landlady said.
She stood at the door to Will Shakespeare’s Black Friar’s house, a disreputable woman with a flying untidiness of hair. Her garments, rough homespun inexpertly dyed black, stood out in this upper middle class neighborhood. She spoke with a decided French accent.
“He’s so ill he could not get up from his bed this morning.” As she spoke, she twisted a disreputable, frayed handkerchief in her hand. “He told me to tell you that he’d not be at rehearsal.”
And at this woman who, no doubt, consorted daily with actors and lived cheek to jowl with brothels, sniffed, a sniff of disapproval, at the theater and all the workings thereof.
Will nodded. What else could he do? He nodded and he searched the purse at his waist for two coins, which he handed the woman, and he spoke in the soft, cultivated voice he’d learned to use ever since his wealth, his name had set him above the normal run of actors. “I will be along, shortly, madam.”