Ill Met by Moonlight Read Free Page A

yelled over his shoulder, and ran across the garden toward the gate, taking a shortcut through the rosebushes. The bushes prickled his skin and snagged his clothes, but he did not care.
    At the gate, a last, fugitive look over his shoulder showed Will his sister still in the middle of the garden. Though the distance didn’t allow it, he fancied he saw her amazed expression, wide-open mouth, eyes round in shock. She’d be wondering why he ran. As though husbands should stand quietly and listen to slander heaped on their wives’ names.
    And where had Joan come from, with Edmund, after nightfall? At any other time, Will would have gone back and scolded the little girl, but now his Nan waited him. The thought of her enveloping arms and warm body beckoned him on. The thought of her warm voice, calming his fears, called to him like water to a parched traveler.
    Will found his way through the alley to the path that crossed the forest of Arden, the path he knew much too well from his courting days when he had taken it every evening for a year, as much to bask in Nan’s sweet presence as to escape the closed-in, vile atmosphere of home: his father with his fears, his mother with her fancies.
    If only Will’s father had stayed the course he’d first set. When Will had been very young, and John Shakespeare’s business had thrived, John himself had been an alderman, an important man in the community.
    Will walked the narrow path that countless generations of feet had beaten amid towering elms and sprawling oaks, and thought of his life and his family and the obligations that bound him. At nineteen, he was a married man, with a daughter. He’d married a woman with no dowry to speak of, and he had wed himself to an arduous, ill-paying career. He reproached his father for his father’s mistakes, yet how could he hope to give Susannah a better start in life?
    From behind him he heard the distant sounds of Stratford: the occasional cry of a baby, a woman calling for her son. From her voice, the woman would be Mistress Whateley. And, knowing the Whateley brat, Will suspected the boy was as likely as not to be out of the reach of even that shrill a call.
    From farther away came the voice of a man, worse for drink, singing a mournful church song of papist times. Will caught the words Dies Irae —in fulsome, rounded Latin. That would be the owner of the Bear, the tavern where Catholics gathered to mourn the past.
    Stratford was the only town Will had ever known, and he knew it well. Its embrace could be comforting and safe like a mother’s arms, but, like Will’s mother, perhaps it held on too tightly and crushed that which it would preserve.
    Perhaps Will should take Nan and Susannah to London and there attempt to find a trade that would bring him a better chance of fortune. But what trade? He had a good, logical mind, but a meager education, and what could a mind alone do for a man of no fortune?
    When John had been prosperous, there had been talk of Will’s attending university or one of the Inns of Court. With his precise mind Will could have made short work of university learning. Had he but done that, he could have become a real schoolmaster, not a petty schoolmaster, teaching older children their Latin, not the little ones their letters. He could have made enough money, then, to support a large family. Or perhaps he would have become a honey-tongued barrister, swift at unraveling legal knots. He could have supported his Nan, his sweet Nan, in style.
    And even his mother would have been unable to spin stories about Nan’s consorting with mysterious gentlemen in velvet and jewels.
    Little by little, the city sounds receded, as the forest surrounded Will. Human voices became fainter, replaced by the hoots and scrapings of things scurrying and flying amid the old oaks that remained of a forest that, in the distant times of Arthur, had covered all of Britain.
    Every rough spot on the path, every stone, every twig, made itself felt