Mr. Shakespeare's Bastard by Richard B. Wright Read Free Book Online

practising sorcery on a simple-minded young man who didn’t know any better. Oh, the names I was called, Aerlene, are not fit to repeat. I couldn’t show my face in your uncle’s shop again because all of Woodstock knew the story too, and your aunt wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Who would buy a spool of thread from the likes of her?’ she would say to your uncle at dinner. I was suffered to eat at her table, but she wouldn’t look at me and she wouldn’tspeak to me. ‘You put her back in that shop, Jack,’ she said, ‘and trade will go elsewhere. You mark my words.’
    “You know yourself, Aerlene, what a sweet, obliging fellow your uncle is and always has been, and he loved me dearly and couldn’t help it, God bless him, but he could not go past his wife’s words. He knew she was right about the shop. They had to make their livelihood, and their business would surely suffer as long as I was behind the counter. Lying in bed at night I felt entirely undone by everything, and over and over again I wondered why I had lain with that poor boy. Given myself over to pleasure like that with scarcely a thought for others. I knew such things never last and always bear a cost, yet I hadn’t stopped until we were found out. In the early morning hours of sleeplessness you always think the worst, and sometimes I wondered if perhaps what some said of me was true after all; perhaps Goody Figgs, who often read my hands or sold me potions for a penny, had cast a spell over me. Perhaps I myself was now a witch ensnaring young, innocent men like Henry Chapman. At such times I thought of throwing myself in the river, for I knew a pool where the water lay still and deep beneath the willow trees. Yet I knew it was a grievous sin even to think about that and it frightened me whenever I walked by that pool in the river. I thought too of running away—but where would I go? I had little money, for Jack paid me no wages, only a few pennies now and then to spendon myself at Christmas and other festive times. He called it ‘holiday money,’ but it wasn’t much. But even had I money, where would I go? How long would a woman last by herself on the road among the company she would meet there?
    “You may well believe, Aerlene, that there were many in the village who wished me gone. Wanted me turned out like that to consort with vagrants. There were so many about in those days, rufflers and masterless men, many not right in their heads, pilfering what they could find, stealing onions from gardens and bedding left out to dry on hedgerows. And women with them too, thin and ragged with shifty eyes, beaten and treated little better than dogs. I often saw such people passing through the village, escorted by the constable and cursing him as they left, turning in the road to laugh at him and dancing a jig, making filthy signs with their hands. I once saw a man open his breeches and wave his soldier in mockery as he left. And I would then be among such fellows. Better off in the river, I used to think.
    “For a while after Henry and I were discovered, young men would come from the taverns and throw stones at the house, making sounds like tomcats in heat. ‘Come out, then, Lizzie, we’ll away to the woods,’ or ‘They say you’re the devil’s maid, Lizzie. Will you come forth and seduce us? We’ve plenty here for you.’ My aunt would soon be at the door, unafraid and facing them in her nightdress. I could hear her below on the front doorstep and see the dark figuresscattering away and laughing. Sometimes, when I walked towards the river or the woods, children would follow, calling me names and throwing stones. But I could soon outwit them in the woods, and they were too frightened of Goody to venture far.
    “I went to her hut one day and she was waiting as though expecting me. Nothing ever surprised her or changed the features of her strange old face. She had heard about me and Henry Chapman. She said nothing about it, but I could tell she knew.