She definitely said that last bit: We are all the strings.
Rose was too good for picking fruit. Rose was a philosopher, really. She was the wisest person I ever knew. (And I would soon know Shakespeare, so that’s saying a lot.) She talked to me as if I was her age and I loved her for that. When I was with her, everything faded away and I felt calm. She was a counterbalance. She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people any more. I wanted her in every sense. To want is to lack. That is what it means. There was an emptiness, a void, made vast and wide when my mother had drowned, which I thought was never-ending, but when I looked at Rose I started to feel solid again, as if there was something to hold on to. Steady.
‘I want you to stay, Tom.’
‘Stay?’
‘Yes. Stay. Here.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t want you to have to leave. Grace likes having you here. And I do too. Very much so. You are a comfort to us both. The place has felt too empty, and now it does not.’
‘Well, I like being here.’
‘Good.’
‘But one day I may have to leave.’
‘And why would that be?’
I wanted to tell her, right then. I wanted to say that I was different and strange and peculiar. That I would not grow old like other people grow old. I wanted to tell her that my mother had not been bucked off a horse and that she had drowned on the ducking stool, accused of murder by witchcraft. I wanted to tell her about William Manning. I wanted to tell her how hard it was to feel responsible for losing the person you had loved the most. To tell her the frustration of being a mystery, even to yourself. That there was some flaw in the balance of my humours. I wanted to tell her that my first name was Estienne and that my last name was Hazard, not Smith. I wanted to tell her that she had been the one true comfort I had known since Mother died. All these wants rose up, but had nowhere to go.
‘I can’t say.’
‘You are a mystery to be solved.’
A moment of stillness.
Birdsong.
‘Have you ever been kissed, Tom?’ I thought of that first night, when she had given me a small peck on my lips. ‘A proper kiss, Tom?’ Rose clarified, as if reading my mind.
My silence was the embarrassing answer.
‘A kiss,’ she said, ‘is like music. It stops time . . . I had a romance once,’ she said simply. ‘One summer. He worked in the orchard. We kissed and did merry things together but I never really felt for him. If you feel for someone, just one single kiss can stop the sparrows, they say. Do you think that can happen?’
And she placed the lute beside her on the bed and kissed me and I closed my eyes and the rest of the world faded. There was nothing else. Nothing but her. She was the stars and the heavens and the oceans. There was nothing but that single fragment of time, and this bud of love we had planted inside it. And then, at some point after it started, the kiss ended, and I stroked her hair, and the church bells rang in the distance and everything in the world was in alignment.
London, now
I am standing in front of the year nine class. Again. I am tired. Going to bed after three is not what teachers should do. Raindrops shine like jewels on the windows. Continuing from the disastrous previous lesson on immigration, I am starting to discuss the social history of late Tudor, specifically Elizabethan, England.
‘What do you know about Elizabethan England?’ I ask, while thinking, Maybe this time I should have chosen, say, Sardinia. Or to be among lemon groves in Mallorca. Or by a beach in Indonesia. Or on a palm-filled island beside turquoise waters in the Maldives. ‘Who lived there?’
A girl puts her hand up. ‘People who’re dead now.’
‘Thanks, Lauren.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘People with no Snapchat.’
‘True, Nina.’
‘Sir Francis Someone.’
I nod. ‘Drake and Bacon. Take your pick. But who now do we think of as the person who defined that era in England?’
For decades and decades and decades I have bemoaned people who say they feel old, but I now realise it is perfectly possible for anyone to feel old. All they need to do is become a teacher.
And then my eyes rest on the one person I am surprised to see here.
‘Anton? Do you know anyone from Elizabethan times?’
Anton looks at me timidly. He is scared. Guilty. ‘Shakespeare,’ he says, almost like an apology.
‘Yes! It was the age of Shakespeare. Now, what do you know about Shakespeare, Anton?’
Lauren obliged. ‘He’s dead, sir.’
‘I’m detecting a theme, Lauren.’
‘Happy to help, sir.’
‘Romeo and Juliet,’ says Anton, his voice quiet, hoping he is making things all right. ‘And Henry the Fourth Part One. We’re studying it in English.’
I hold his gaze, enough for him to look down at his desk in shame.
‘What do you think he was like? How do you think he lived?’
Anton doesn’t answer.
‘The thing I want to get across, though, is that Shakespeare was a person. I mean, he lived. He was a man. He was an actual man. Not just a writer, but a businessman, a networker, a producer. A man who walked real streets in real rain and drank ale and ate real oysters. A man who wore an earring and smoked and breathed and slept and went to the toilet. A man with hands and feet and bad breath.’
‘But,’ says Lauren, coiling her hair around a finger, ‘how do you know what his breath smelled like, sir?’
And I think for a moment how nice it would be if they could know. But of course I just smile and say something about a lack of toothpaste and get on with the lesson.
London, 1599
I had been playing the lute in Southwark all summer and into autumn. I often worked late, till after they closed the city gates, and had to walk the long way home, which could take over an hour.
Now, the weather had turned and the crowds were thinning out. I went around all the inns, asking for work, but they didn’t have any room for me. Being an inn musician was seen as a far better thing to be than a random street performer. I was part of a dying and undesirable breed, I realised. The trouble was, though, that there was a band of musicians – Pembroke’s Men – who had the market pretty much sewn up.
And having heard I was after a job, one of them – a giant bearded fiddler known locally as ‘Wolstan the Tree’ on account of his size and, possibly, the fact that his wild hair looked a bit like foliage in a storm – came up to me outside the Cardinal’s Hat just as it was getting dark.
He grabbed me by the neck and slammed me hard against a wall.
‘Leave him be,’ said Elsa, a friendly flame-haired prostitute I always spoke to on the way home.
‘Shut up, wench.’ Then he turned to me. His teeth were rotten, just a random row of brown pebbles. It was hard to tell if the smell of shit was coming from him or the tanners next door. ‘You ain’t playin’ music in any inn this side of Bishopsgate, lad. Especially not round Bankside. Not alive, you ain’t. This is ours. Ain’t no place for lamb-faced boys like you.’
I spat in his face.
He grabbed the neck of the lute.
‘Get off that!’
‘I’m going to break this first, and then your fingers.’
‘Give it me back, you thieving—’
Elsa was over at him now. ‘Ho, Wolstan! Give it him back!’
He swung the lute high behind him, ready to swing it and smash it against the wall.
Then came a voice, a grand, deep theatrical kind of voice.