Page 47 of Love, Will

“It raised many memories, some I did not even know I still held,” he said wistfully.

“Indeed.” I nodded.

A heaviness pressed in the air, as if those walls, everything we had lived together was pushing us towards each other. So we did nothing but look into one another’s eyes and obey, stepping closer and closer until we stood only a few inches away.

Henry curved his lips, a sad, heavy smile, burdened with all that had happened and would be no more.

I returned the same melancholic smile.

We both knew this was the end and we could only remain there in silence, gazing at one another, remembering how happy we once were. Henry sighed and slowly, so gently, pressed his lips on mine for a fraction of a second. I barely felt the velvet of his mouth before it abruptly disappeared.

“Goodbye, Will,” he said while smiling once more, then turned and made his way onto the staircase.

“Goodbye, my love,” I breathed, watching him leave.

Henry and I did not speak for the following four years. Our lives developed separately and there was no opportunity or will to have a conversation or write to one another. I understood his desire to forget what we once had and even though it pained me; I accepted his request and did not contact him.

From the news I sporadically received, sometimes coming from theatre gossip and sometimes from court, where he was absent on all the occasions we travelled for the King’s entertainment, I learnt he had been assigned with travelling on colonial business. The King dispatched him as a trial to set a new empire in the Americas with the Virginia Company and that he fathered another two children, a boy and a girl. His fortune and good will returned to him and whenever he did not act as an emissary he would host dinner parties in Titchfield and entertain the King.

I myself had a celebratory moment in life, due to the marriage of my eldest daughter Susanna to a doctor and the birth of my granddaughter, Elizabeth. Using my good fortune I gifted my daughter land for her dowry and was present at the naming of the smallest member of the family, but as life is, it gives with one hand and takes with another. In exchange for a new life in the Shakespeare family it took both my brother Edmund and my mother, losses that weighted terribly on Anne and I.

Richard came to Stratford to visit me after mother’s burial and brought news from London. We talked about theatre and proposed another business offer: to buy another small location in Blackfriars. While we spent the evening drinking and talking coin in my study, Richard suddenly remembered that he did not pass congratulations for my new publishing.

“My what?” I asked with confusion, thinking he was playing a prank on me.

“Your sonnets,” he said. “The ones Fields is working on.”

“What sonnets? I haven't written a sonnet in over a decade?” I asked, humoured.

“I met with Fields at The Crown and he was buying drinks for everyone who passed through the door to celebrate his new Shakespeare book. You are the only Shakespeare I know...so I am guessing it is you?”

I frowned and did not think further about it.

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