When the bird stopped the monk was so exhausted with delight and gratefulness that he sat quite still in the dark for a little while, calming his heart. Then he hurried back to the church.
He saw the Abbot and went up to him. 'Father,' he said simply, 'I have heard the nightingale--'
'Who are you?' broke in the Abbot crossly.
The monk looked closely at the Abbot in the gloom. He did not recognise him. It was a new Abbot. But how could that be?
'I do not understand,' he said. 'I went out into the night and I sat a moment under a willow and listened to the nightingale. Oh, Father, it was so beautiful I have no words for it. I wished that moment could have lasted for ever.'
The Abbot seized his arm and stared into his eyes. 'Are you telling the truth?' he demanded.
'Of course I am telling the truth,' said the monk. 'The nightingale sang--'
'I know nothing of the nightingale,' said the Abbot, 'but a hundred years ago a monk went out from this church into the night - it is written in the records of the monastery - and he never came back again. The Abbot of the time searched and searched, and the monks searched, but the man was never found. It was thought that he had fled away because he was a bad man.'
'I am not a good monk,' said the monk, 'and I would not claim to be a good man, but if I was a bad man I do not think I would have heard the nightingale.'
And then there was only dust in the Abbot's hands. For in listening so attentively to the song of the nightingale the little monk had heard a moment in eternity - which may take a hundred years of time.
This, as I say, was William Shakespeare's favourite from among the many stories told by the midwife Gertrude.
She was a woman too much given to allicholly and musing. Tiny, rather plump, voluble, and obliging, with grey hair and a narrow mouth, she wore eyeglasses and a black hat pulled square across her forehead. She used to sing to herself a lot. 'Oh tennis,' she sang, 'oh tennis is the finest game and boy and girl believe / The game they love is just the same that Adam played with Eve.' This woman spoke often to William Shakespeare also of crickets - with results that you may see in Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 4, line 63, and in Cymbeline, Act II, Scene 2, line 11, and in Pericles where at the start of the third Act Mr Shakespeare announces that he has taken over the writing from Mr Wilkins by having Gower speak of how crickets sing at the oven's mouth. There is also a good bit about being as merry as crickets in the first part of King Henry IV, and in The Winter's Tale where Mamillius promises Hermione and the ladies a tale of sprites and goblins and goes on thus:
There was a man ...
Dwelt by a churchyard. I will tell it softly;
Yond crickets shall not hear it.
But the best line of all with crickets in it was given to me, of course, in my role as Lady Macbeth. Which fateful play, should you be interested, was actually written in Scotland and then first performed there - but I'll be coming to that when it's time for it.
I cannot believe that the midwife Gertrude knew as much about crickets as Dr Walter Warner. From him I learnt that the wings of crickets when folded form long, thin filaments, giving the appearance of a bifid tail, while in the male they are provided with a stridulating apparatus by which the well-known chirping sound is produced. The abdomen of the female ends in a long thin ovipositor. House crickets are greyish yellow marked with brown. Field crickets are bigger and darker. It burrows in the ground, the cricket, and in the evening the male cricket is to be seen sitting at the mouth of its hole noisily stridulating until a female approaches, when the louder notes are succeeded by a more subdued tone, whilst the successful musician caresses with his antennae the mate he has won. The cricket's musical apparatus consists of upwards of 130 transverse ridges on the under side of one of the nervures of the wing cover, which are rapidly scraped over a smooth projecting nervure on the opposite wing. The mole cricket is different. Its front legs are like hands.
The midwife Gertrude had a soft, animal nature. She loved to be happy like a sheep in the sun. And to do her justice, she liked also to see others happy, like more sheep in the sun.
Chapter Twenty-Eight Of little WS and the cauldron of inspiration and science
Some say that in the corner of Mary Shakespeare's kitchen there stood a cauldron of inspiration and science. It was a giant cauldron and the brew it contained was dark and thick. Those who believe this say that as soon as the boy William was strong enough his mother set him the task of stirring the contents of her cauldron for a year and a day.
Bretchgirdle died, and Brownsword went back to Macclesfield. But Mary had learnt from the fat vicar before he died most of the magical virtues and vices of the flowers and ferns that grew in the fields about Stratford and in that green forest which bore her maiden name.
For instance, she knew of the heart-shaped wood-sorrel which warms the blood, and of moonwort which waxes and wanes with the moon and turns mercury into silver and will unshoe any horse that treads upon it. And she knew of the yellow juice of the celandine which will cure jaundice, and of liver-wort which is good for the liver. Also, you can take it that Shakespeare's mother was familiar with polypody which grows on old oaks and stops the whooping cough rather more effectively than the slug-slimed brown sugar Bretchgirdle had favoured. Certainly she would have known that the simple marigold is sovereign against melancholy, and that herb-dragon (speckled like a dragon) is the perfect antidote to adder bites.
Some of these plants, and many others that were stranger, went into the giant cauldron. Those who believe that Mary Shakespeare was a witch report that often she would be away from the house on Henley Street for weeks on end, searching in far and desolate places for rare herbs - for cassia out of Egypt, to the Transylvanian mountains for the purple-flowered hellebore, or getting aloes from Zocotora.
Was Mary Shakespeare a witch, then?
I do not know. I do not care to think so. Yet Mr John Shakespeare - in his cups, in London, that only time I met him - spoke darkly of a woman he knew well who had only to whistle for the wind to rise, and only to sigh for it to fall again. However, he did not say this woman was his wife. He implied that she was young, so he might have meant Mrs Anne Shakespeare, his daughter-in-law. Assuredly there was something witchy about her. But then so there was about all the women I ever met who were in any way close to the late Mr Shakespeare. Lucy Negro once claimed she could keep lightning in a bottle. Mr Shakespeare's sister Joan was invariably surrounded by black cats. And I admit that on that delicious occasion when Mr Shakespeare's widow drove me (dressed in her petticoats) from New Place, she clapped her hands thrice and a star fell out of the sky.
I prefer not to dwell on such things.
And stars fall down anyway.
Back to the cauldron, then. Those who believe in it say that Mary Shakespeare knew that when the brew in it had boiled for a year and a day then three precious drops of Inspiration from it would be sufficient to make her daughter Joan a poet. Joan was ugly and stupid and Mary had resolved, therefore, to confer poetry upon the new-born child, so that her wit and wisdom would gain her honour, and make up for her lack of grace.
As for the boy William, it is said that he never meant to taste the magic brew himself. It was an accident that he did. This is how it happened.
On the very last day, the day of the year and a day that the cauldron had to be kept boiling in the Henley Street kitchen, he was at work early, as usual, stirring with the huge wooden ladle. Perhaps he was excited by the thought that the moment had nearly come when the brew would be ready, according to his mother, perfected, for whatever reason, and his long labours ended. Perhaps he was just worn out by his mother's attentions.