Eliza’s letter is taken by a lad from a few houses along: he was up and out, walking down Henley Street before dawn because he has been sent by his father to see to a cow in calf on the far side of the river. Mary hailed him from the window, gave him the letter, with instructions to take it to the posting inn, pressing a coin into his hands.
The boy tucks it into his sleeve, not before examining the slanted scrawl on the front. He has never learnt to read so it is meaningless to him but, all the same, he likes the loops, the shapes, the dark cross-hatchings of ink, like the marks made when branches are shaken against an iced-over windowpane.
He takes it to the inn near the bridge, then continues on to his cow, which still hasn’t calved and stares at him with large and what seem to the boy frightened eyes, jaws grinding cud. Later that morning the innkeeper hands it, with others, to a grain merchant, who is riding that day to London.
Eliza’s letter to her brother travels in the leather satchel of the grain merchant as far as Banbury. From there, it is taken by cart to Stokenchurch, and it lands at the door of the lodgings. The landlord squints at it, holding it up to the sunlight, which enters his passageway at a slant. His eyesight is poor. He sees the name of his lodger, who yesterday left for Kent. The theatres are closed, because of the plague, by order of the court, and so the lodger and his company of players have taken themselves off to tour nearby towns, places where it is permitted to gather in a crowd.
The landlord must wait for his son to come back from some business in Cheapside. When he does – grumpily, because the person he was due to meet did not arrive and it rained heavily and the son is wet to the skin – it is several hours before he gets out ink and quill, takes the letter from the mantel, and painstakingly, tongue wedged in the corner of his mouth, writes the address of the inn in Kent, where the lodger told them he would be staying.
The letter is then passed from hand to hand, to an inn in the outskirts of the city, where it waits for someone travelling to Kent – in this instance, a man pushing a cart, sat upon by a woman and a dog and a chicken.
When the letter reaches him, he – lodger, brother, husband, father and, here, player – is standing in a guildhall in a small town on the eastern fringes of Kent. The hall smells of cured meat, of boiled beets; there is a heap of farming implements and sacking in the corner; narrow blades of light enter the space from high, mildew-spotted windows.
He is leaning back, regarding these weak beams of light, reflecting on how they meet each other halfway across the hall, creating archways of light, and how they give the whole space an underwater feel, as if he and the rest of the company are fish, swimming about in the gloomy depths of a greenish pond.
A small child – a boy, he supposes – darts in, barefoot, bareheaded, ragged of smock, scrofulous of complexion, and calls out an approximation of his name, in an assertive, reedy voice, waving a letter aloft, as if it were a flag.
‘It is I,’ he says wearily, holding out his hand. It will be a demand for money, a complaint, an edict from a patron. ‘Hear this,’ he says to his colleagues, who are milling aimlessly on the raised dais, as if, he thinks, they aren’t putting on a performance in less than three hours, as if nothing in particular is happening here in this dusty hall. ‘You will need to count your paces from left to right, like so,’ he demonstrates, walking towards the shoeless child, ‘or else one of you will fall offstage and into the audience. It is smaller than we are used to, but used to it we must be.’ He comes to a halt in front of the child. Strangely colourless hair and wide-set eyes. A sore on the bottom lip. Fingernails rimmed with filth. Six or seven years of age, perhaps more.
He tweaks the letter from the child’s grip. ‘For me?’ he says, sliding his fingers into his purse and extracting a coin. ‘And for you.’ He flips the coin into the air between them. Instantly, the child is animated, his scrawny body leaping into life.
He laughs, turning on his heel, pulling at the red seal, stamped slightly offcentre with his family’s insignia. He registers his sister’s hand before he lifts his head. Onstage, the young lad is pacing stiffly towards the older actor, edging around the rim of the dais, as if the floor beneath were awash with boiling lead.
‘Good God,’ he roars, his voice stretching at the wooden struts, the skin of plaster on the walls. He knows how to throw his voice, how to expand it so it becomes the sound of a giant. The actors freeze, mouths agape. ‘We have only a few hours before this hall will be filled with the good people of Kent. Are you meaning to give them a circus? Do we intend to make them laugh or are we putting on a tragedy? Look to it or we won’t be eating tomorrow.’
He cracks the page he is holding against the air, stares at them a moment longer, for effect. It seems to have worked. The young lad looks to be on the verge of tears, twisting his fingers into his costume. He turns, to hide his smile, then glances down at the letter.
‘Dear brother,’ he sees. And ‘verie sick’, and ‘your daughter’. ‘Pleaƒe come bak to us,’ it says: ‘not manie hours left to her.’
It seems hard to breathe, suddenly. The air in the hall is as hot as a furnace, with particles of chaff. He feels his chest labouring in and out, but no air seems to be reaching him. He stares at the page, reading the words once, twice. The whiteness of the paper seems to pulse, stark and glaring, one moment, then recede behind the black strokes of the letters. He sees for a moment his daughter, her face lifted up to look at him, her hands clasped together, her eyes fixed on his. He wants to loosen his clothes; he wants to tear off his fastenings. He must get out, he must leave this building.
With the letter gripped in his fist, he rushes at the door, pushes his weight against it. Outside, the colours accost his eyes: the glancing lapis sky, the virulent green of the verge, the creamy blossoms of a tree, the pink kirtle of a woman leading a nag along the road. On either side of the animal’s flanks are woven baskets. It is immediately obvious to him that one basket is much heavier than the other: the baskets are uneven, dragging down on one side.
Even up that load, he wants to yell at her, much as he just yelled at the players inside the hall. But he doesn’t have the breath. His lungs are still heaving in and out, his heart hammering now in his ribcage, hammering, hesitating, hammering once more. His vision seems to shimmer at its edges, the pale tree blossoms wavering, as if seen through a fire’s heat.
Verie sick, he thinks, not manie hours left.
He wants to tear down the sky, he wants to rip every blossom from that tree, he wishes to take a burning branch and drive that pink-clad girl and her nag over a cliff, just to be rid of them, to clear them all out of his way. So many miles, so much road stands between him and his child, and so few hours left.
He is conscious of a hand on his shoulder, a face near his, another hand gripping his arm. Two of his friends are there, saying, What, what is the matter, what has happened? One of them, Heminge, is trying to take the letter from his hand, peeling back his fingers, and he will not let it go, he will not. For someone else to read those words might make them true, make them come to pass. He is shrugging the men off, both of them, all of them, because here are more of them, his players, crowding round him, but somehow he feels the gritted ground under his knees and the voice of his friend, Heminge, is reading the words of the letter aloud. Hands are patting his shoulders now; he is being assisted to his feet. Someone is telling someone else to run for a horse, any horse, that they must get him to Stratford as soon as possible. Go, Heminge is urging the young boy who was, not so long ago, nervous of the drop at the edge of the stage, go and fetch a horse. The young boy takes off down the road, dirt flying up from his heels, his costume – a ridiculous thing of brocade and velvet, made to cast the illusion of a woman on the form of a lad – flapping about him.
He watches him go, peering through the thicket of legs surrounding him.
