Mistress Shakespeare by Karen Harper

Author:Karen Harper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: 1561?-1600?, Historical - General, , Biographical, Whateley, 1564-1616, Fiction, Romance, Literary, William, Shakespeare, Historical, American Historical Fiction, Anne, General, Children's Books - Young Adult Fiction, Fiction - Historical
ISBN: 9780399155451
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2009-02-10T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I saw our love as dangerous, though not forbidden. I came to think of the Stratford Anne as Will’s other wife, for I had married him first. Will and I were legally registered to wed in our shire. We had been united in a church by a holy man we both trusted and honored, one Will’s father honored too. Granted, Will and I both should have had parental consent, but we were convinced that without his seduction by Anne Hathaway and the connivance and coercion of her neighbors, we would have won over both his father and mine. As for Will’s children, somehow that seemed a separate thing: he loved them, and I envied him that love.

Teeming, busy London seemed so far from little Stratford that it was easy to live in a world of our own. Discovery or shame seemed as distant as the Avon. Our love was heedless and headstrong, heightened by the aphrodisiac of the sales of Will’s first two plays. We were together! Success was on the horizon!

Our problem was, however, that we could not be seen together by the world—even our London world—as lovers or certainly not as spouses, or it would mean my humiliation and his ruination. Our time alone as well as places for trysts were scarce. Will refused to let me come to his tiny room on Holywell in Shoreditch. The name Holywell invoked a pretty, peaceful location, but it was a raucous place packed with people, many in the theatre trade, including most of his fellow actors. However wicked people might be themselves, reputations mattered, especially if Will was to prosper and find a patron from the nobility.

Honoring our friends the Davenants as we did, neither could we bring ourselves to steal away to my chamber. I had a privy staircase, but my room was accessible from their lower floors and their bedchamber lay directly under mine. Rather, when Will was not acting or writing and the weather was warm enough, we took walks into the countryside, though the autumn days were turning crisp and cold. We lay together as we had once under Stratford’s open sky, only now to the north of the great city beyond Moor Fields where laundresses dried their linens and men practiced shooting at the butts.

I would say more, but I believe such ecstatic memories are privy and sacred. I hope you have your own youthful obsessions and passions and that you think of them, and then you will know how we loved. Why I did not catch a child from him, I know not, but I always thought that for the best. Why, I might have had to marry the wine merchant Nicholas Clere, who still called on me when he visited the Davenants. But I must share one time, a special memory.

Will and I were walking through Blackfriars after seeing our old friend Dick Field in the mid-autumn of the year Will sold his first plays to Henslowe, the very month, I believe

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