Anne's death and Edmund's birth, in the circumstances, would have been enough, I think, to make young William restless.
But then, to cap it all, there was an earthquake.
It was only a small earthquake, as befits England, as we know, but all the same the good earth moved and trembled. On the evening of Easter Wednesday, 1580, in that very month when his brother Edmund was hatched, the solid Warwickshire countryside threatened to dissolve beneath the feet of William Shakespeare.
Such things do more in the mind of a poet than they do to the world as a whole.
Of that earthquake's physical effects in Stratford-upon-Avon there is report only of chimneystacks twisted anti-clockwise, and the like. There was one fatality - a stone fell from one of the arches in the south transept of Holy Trinity Church, killing a field-mouse.
But who can say what that small earthquake did to Shakespeare?
Consider, reader.
We know, from Romeo and Juliet, that he never forgot it. We know, indeed, as I pointed out in my seventh chapter, that like the Nurse in that play, he even measured the years from the date of it. So the earthquake was plainly of some importance in his life. How could it not be? An intimation - however slight or minor - that the world might end, that the world will end, that the fabric of the earth can crack and perish, could hardly fail to make a lasting impression on anyone who suffers it. It is one thing to think (as young poets do) of identifying yourself with the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. It is quite another to feel the spear of your own being shaken by it.
There is a little wind before an earthquake.
Everyone knows that, even Pickleherring who was never in one.
There is always a little wind before an earthquake. (God knows why.)
The late Mr Shakespeare spoke more than once to me about that wind. But of the earthquake itself, the 'quake' of which he felt beneath his own feet, he said little and that little belittling, even disparaging.
He said he had been sitting by a dove-house in his mother's garden, and that the earthquake was no more than the shaking of the dove-house as the doves prepare to fly. In its homeliness, as in its precision, the image tells us much of the shock of the tremor. In all this, of course, his experience matches that which he gives to Juliet's nurse.
What else happened?
A mirror cracked from top to bottom in the hatter's shop of young William Hart, just starting to make his way in Mere Street; some copies of Lyly's Grammar were spilt from a shelf in the King's New School; six bricks fell down the chimney and into the men's dormitory at the poorhouse.
A small earthquake, but sufficient.
Sufficient, that is, to make William Shakespeare shake the familiar dust of Stratford from his shoes once the earth stopped shaking under them.
Chapter Forty-Five Pickleherring's peep-hole
I've this hole in the floor of my room. I'm not complaining. I cover it with my Ovid, so no one knows. That's not the Ovid that Mr Shakespeare gave me, with his signature on the flyleaf. Just Golding's English translation, you understand.
The hole's not big, but it's big enough to see through. I have a perfect view of the bedroom below.
I like watching the whores through my peep-hole.
My greatest interest is not to watch them being fucked, but to watch them dressing. I like to see their tricks before the mirror. It's all their little secrets I want to know - the faces they turn on themselves, not the faces they make up for others. Their primping, their pricking, their painting, that's what I enjoy.
I snuff out my candle and I settle down to watch them. The hole's half-hidden by a rafter. They don't suspect a thing.
There's one girl in particular I like watching. She's the one who fetched me up the speckled egg. She has long, dark hair and a little snub nose like a button. She's not beautiful at all, though her figure's good and slender. Small white bubbies, nicely rounded, very firm, like those eggs hard-boiled and warm with the shells just peeled off and a sort of dew upon them.
This dark one's my favourite. I think that she's new to the game. She's very young, and sweet. If I press my nose into the hole I can almost smell her perfume. But I don't do that much. I prefer to look.
Why I think she's new to the game is not just because she's so young. Some of these girls start very early - before they're fifteen. I'd not be surprised if this little tart is about the same age that I was when I jumped down off that wall to meet Mr Shakespeare. But, as I say, it's not only youth that makes her seem innocent. There's this awkwardness about the way she moves. She's much more shy and tentative than the others.
When I watch her at work on her face in the glass, my favourite, you can see her trying to imagine what she does to men. She turns her head this way and that, and pulls and twists her hair across her cheeks. She throws her head back, and gives little gasps. She's showing herself what she looks like when they fuck her. Sometimes, her mouth made up, she kisses her own image in the mirror, leaving a carmine smear and a cloud of breath. She likes to flirt with the girl in the glass, hiding her eyes with a fan or with her fingers and then peeping. It's all very provocative, I can tell you; not least because she's like a little girl trying on her mother's things.
There's something that maddens my senses about this one girl. I don't know what it is, but she seems shy and gentle. She has little blue veins just over each temple. Her nostrils are like those of an animal that finds its way by scent. I'd love to press my thumbs to her eyes when they're shut tight, just to feel her heart beating and the secret thoughts that leap there. But I don't want to hurt her. I would never hurt my beauty. There's something exquisitely virginal about her, although she is a whore. Like Marina in the brothel in Pericles.
Last night I saw her strip off her clothes to look at herself in the mirror. She was all alone, so she thought, but old Pickleherring was watching. She looked at herself in the mirror, my little egg girl. It was plain she is in love with what she sees.
Why not? Who could blame her?
She played with her own nipples. I watched them harden. They pricked out from her bubbies like tiny pink thorns. You'd think a whore would be weary of hands on her breasts, but not this girl. She smiled at herself in the glass, and she sighed with self-enchantment.
Some whores will wear their night-rails in the street. Not my little favourite. Last night she tried gown after gown just to see what best suited her mood.
I knelt in a trance of delight, my eye pressed to the peep-hole. I saw her dress herself in silks and damasks, thin tiffanies, newfangled cobweb lawns. I watched her take each garment off again. I could hear the crisp crackle of some of them, as she put them on, as she took them off, and the soft swish of others.
Nothing satisfied her, quite, when she consulted the effect of it in her pier glass.
My favourite's final choice was a boisterous foamy farthingale. It made her look for all the world like a little mermaid coming up from the depths of the sea. She rose up and down on the balls of her feet, though, once she'd got it on, and trotted about to listen to it rustle on the floor-boards.
She looked perfectly adorable in that.
Her dress on, my girl goes and changes her stockings. She's always a goose-brain, doing silly things like this, back-to-front things, all draggle-tail arsy-versy. But, of course, I adore her the more for such ways. And it was delicious seeing her legs with that dress rucked up.
She sat down on the side of the bed to adjust her black garters. Then, with a squeal of vexation, the vixen tore them off. I was pleased to see her go and select a white pair from her drawer. And my pleasure was complete when she stretched out each leg in turn to draw them on up her plump little thighs, smoothing her sheer silk stockings as she did so, patting and pampering the garters in place, with a thrilling little wriggle of her haunches.