The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman Read Free Page A

Father?’
    â€˜I lent your friend Ned Forrest’s father five guineas to buy seed for his fields next year. I charged him two guineas interest, to be paid when his harvest is brought in next year. Someone must have heard our bargain, for now my five guineas is given back to me.’
    Father stared at the flames. ‘Sin sows a bitter harvest. Farmer Forrest has no money to buy seed for the next sowing, and I must find twice the loan and pay it as a fine, or go to prison.’
    Ten guineas? Even our schoolmaster only made four guineas a year. Surely you would need to be the Queen herself to pay ten guineas! ‘Father, I don’t want you to go to prison!’
    My father tried to smile. ‘We will manage. I will sell the fields your mother brought as dowry. In a good year they might bring forty guineas. This year they should give us ten at least.’
    I ventured, ‘Why did you break the law, Father?’ Father never put a wrong stitch in a glove, nor broke a Lenten fast. He’d even had the papist murals in the guildhall painted over when he was high bailiff.
    Father looked at me steadily now. ‘Where does your bread come from, William?’
    â€˜From the baker, sir,’ I told him. At eight years old I knew it all.
    â€˜And the flour to make the bread?’
    â€˜From the wheat that grows on the farms, sir.’
    â€˜And if the rain rots the harvest on those farms? If the damp hayricks catch alight, as if to give the heat the sun refuses to share? Where does flour for our bread come from then?’
    â€˜I . . . I do not know, Father.’
    â€˜It comes from other counties, other countries, which is why a penny loaf today is only a quarter of the size it was last year. How many loaves do you eat each day, William?’
    â€˜One before school, sir, and another four at dinner, then one for supper.’
    â€˜Sixpence a day for bread for one small boy, and more pennies for your brother and sister, your mother and father, even Mary, for maids must eat as well. A man must feed his family. How must knaves like me find the money?’
    â€˜You make gloves, sir.’
    I looked at the gloves and tools with which we shared our lives. Strong woollen gloves for farmers, mittens for woodcutters, jewelled silk gloves in bags of doeskin andparchment, though no one had ordered silken or jewelled gloves for more than a year.
    â€˜If men use all their pennies to buy bread, they have none to spare for gloves,’ my father said. ‘So I broke the law to make money on our savings instead of spending them. And now both my savings and the sinful interest on them are lost.’
    â€˜Will we be poor?’ I tried to stop my voice trembling.
    Being poor was almost as bad as being a leper and ringing a bell so no one came close enough to catch your disease. Though even leprosy wasn’t as bad as catching the plague. If you caught the plague, you were dead. The poor lived on cobnuts from the hedges, ate nettles instead of turnip greens and lettuces, and ground acorns as flour to make their bread. Poor boys wound rags about their feet instead of wearing shoes, and picked stones from farmers’ fields for a penny a day.
    Today at school I had read two whole pages of the myths of Greece and Rome. I was as drunk on words as a ploughboy full of cider at the harvest feast. I did not want to leave my books to pick up stones!
    My father smiled. My soul filled with warmth again. ‘We will manage,’ he repeated. ‘I have invested in a ship sailing for Venice. When it returns with silks and Venetian glass, our money will be returned in full and more.’ He looked at the flames again. ‘All will be made right. I am quite sure.’
    Of course all would be right. When I was eight, I trusted my father’s word more than I trusted the fickle sun to rise. I wondered what Venice was like, this city of silk and glass that would give our fortune back. Then I realised.