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I waited for him to say something more, but he said nothing. At last, I could bear it no longer. “So, what is it?” I said in cold bluntness. “Are we or are we not?”

“That’s the question. To be, or not.” He shook his head as his lip quivered. “I’m so sorry, Hughes, but we cannot be.” He shrugged as if he were helpless, and then spoke very quickly, as if he were an actor forcing out lines in order to remove himself from the stage as quickly as possible. “I need that agony. I need that gutting pain of longing for my muse. To have what you long for is to put out the fire. With no fire, there can be no creation. It’s what the Lord requires. I don’t mean to hurt you or blame you. I am the one who was at fault. I was the one who was weak. But you and I, we can no longer be the friends you desire. It’s not right and, in truth, I don’t want it anymore.”

I could not help but to burst into tears, the sort that causes the body to shake and my breath to gasp. I wanted him to hold me again. He started to reach out but pulled himself back. His retreat made me weep harder.

When the deluge from my eyes became but a drip, he said, “I’ve hurt you so greatly, lad. I’m truly sorry. But now, you and I need to get back to ourselves—back to our places as men. Can you understand?” I nodded but remained silent. “Now go get some sleep. It will feel better as time goes on. I promise. All love means losing at some point. Of this I am certain.”

“I shall never try again,” I said through my snuffles.

“You shall. I’m sure of it. And next time it will be someone …” He did not finish his sentence but seemed to be holding himself back. Whether it was to stanch the tears, or he was stopping himself from saying something more, I did not know. “Now,” he finally began, still without looking at me. “If you wouldn’t mind,” he gestured with his hands behind him. “I really should attempt to rewrite this final scene. It appears the demons of my grief are inspiring me to write more death. Good night, Hughes. See you tomorrow.”

And so it was from that moment on. The Poet kept his word and never again invited me back to his bed, nor gave me sonnets, nor confided in me. He was always pleasant to me, like an old friend he had lost touch with, but had no time to catch up. The moralists continued to protest outside the Globe, but the Poet’s own moralism started to fade as his new play, a tragedy called Hamlet, became one of his greatest successes. He began returning to the taverns to have a laugh with the other sharers, though I never saw him with someone who had seemed either as important or consistent as Rose or myself. A few of the newer apprentices seemed to inspire him again, though less so than I had as far as I could see. What he thought of me after that I didn’t fully understand—though there were clues, being that all the roles I was given in the next few plays, including that of Ophelia, ended up dead. When he eventually returned to writing comedies with Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, they were glum mediocrities at best, lacking any real passion or fun between their lovers and moralizing that holy marriage—even to someone you despised—was more important than following your true heart.

He returned to Stratford to visit Anne and his daughters more often than before Hamnet’s death. No longer were jokes about his shrew of a wife allowed in the tiring house.

At the end of the autumn season, in a rebound of my melancholy, I asked to be released early from my contract. I lied and told him I had been made an offer to join the Lord Admiral’s Men, the company’s greatest rival. The Poet neither argued nor begged as he had done when I left for Marlowe. “Do what you must,” was all he said, and even arranged with the other sharers so they would not put up a fuss, nor charge me a penalty.

Little Goat and Alex pleaded with me not to go, as did Augustine. Even Burbage, in private, suggested it was a grand mistake, since I had been discussed as potentially being worthy of becoming a sharer one day. No one mentioned anything about the Poet wanting me to stay.

On the day of my departure, I went to bid the Poet farewell one last time. I was hoping he would at least show some remorse or once again acknowledge what we had between us. But when I went to the playhouse to say my goodbye, he wasn’t even there. They said he had left for Stratford the day before and wouldn’t be back for several days. I looked for a note, but there was none.

Forty-OneThereafter

Wherein Willy Hughes encounters an unexpected twist of the plot.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end;

Each changing place with that which goes before,

In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

—from Sonnet 60

Though I had lied about being offered a place with the Lord Admiral’s Men, word soon spread that I had been released from my obligation to the King’s Men and offers to join other companies came swiftly.

In the end, I accepted an offer to go with the Lord Strange’s Men, which was filled with actors I knew from my days with Kit and the Earl of Pembroke’s Men. We shared marvelous memories together of bringing his plays to the stage. However, shortly after my joining, Lord Strange himself died, and whispers surfaced that the plague might be returning to London once more. How exhausted we all were from worrying about our own mortality. The company, rather than closing down, made the decision to leave town and tour the provinces just as I had done so long ago when I was first apprenticed. To leave London again in such a way was a poetic prospect that seemed the perfect solution to my devastated state. Like always, I thrived on the stage, playing roles in comedies by Dekker, Carpenter, and Johnson, of course, but most of all I was featured in the Poet’s and Kit’s most popular plays, playing the roles I had created. It was as if my two former lovers were haunting me, battling each other for my affection in the lines they had writ for me. There were times when I was speaking certain lines where I was able to recall the exact moment they had handed me the role, or changed a word for my benefit, or stolen a phrase from something we had said in bed. At those moments I’d lose my place and need to remind myself that plays are a collective creation. Once they leave the page and enter the mouths of the players, they become an entirely separate thing from the poets who write them. True, the play is the poet’s heir, but it is not him—or that’s what I had to tell myself so I would not weep while saying their words.

By the age of four and twenty, I looked even more like a fully grown man, my golden hair had darkened, and I’d proudly grown six hairs on my chin and three on each cheek. Two years later I had a true beard, which threaded itself with gold in the summers, and of which I was most proud. I easily moved into the male roles, playing the lovers of the female characters I had created. I was still regarded highly across all the counties in which we played. Ladies still waited for me outside the playhouses along with a different type of male suitor—the sort who were my age or younger and who loved a man in his prime. I was not swayed by any of these admirers until one day, after a performance of Tamburlaine in Eggesford, I recognized the broad back of a man looking at the wrong door outside the guild hall. I was flabbergasted. It was none other than my childhood love, Barnaby Stubb who had once again found me out. I looked around for his apple-cheeked wife and children, but this time he appeared to be alone.

“How now, Barnaby!” I shouted and saw him turn and smile broadly.

“What ho, Willy Hughes!” he called back, then approached and shook my hand firmly. His calloused hands were even thicker and stronger than before and pressed long and hard into the softness of my own. He still had that fit physique and black beard from when I had seen him last. Most men’s handsomeness fattens and fades after years of having a wife and children, but this was not true of Barnaby in the least. He still could have been an actor for all his good looks. Though I doubted he knew how to read and knew he lacked the arrogance one needed to tread the boards.

“God’s breath! It can’t be Mister Barnaby Stubb come to haunt me once more,” I said cheerily, though lowered my voice into a more brutish masculine tone to appeal to the sort of man I imagined he had become. “How did you come upon me this time, my man?”

“I saw ’ee name on the poster and wanted to say hello,” he answered. His voice was gentle and sweet without any need for a false sound to impress. “How are you, Willy?”

“I’m fine, Barnaby,” I answered that time in my real voice. “All is well. Where are Mary and the children?”

He looked down at his hat, his smile turning to melancholy. “I’m afraid Mary did pass about two years after we last saw ’ee. The sickness got both her and the babe.”

“God a’ mercy,” I gasped, remembering how sweet Mary was and how precious the babe. I also realized how he must’ve lost his wife and child during the same outbreak that had claimed the Poet’s poor Hamnet. “I’m truly sorry, Barnaby. Mary seemed a most good woman.”

“Thank you, Willy. She was most goodly. Mary liked ’ee well and never stopped speaking to the neighbors of how she met such a fine actor.”

I smiled at the memory he shared, for I saw how recalling his late wife brought her back for him. “So how are you doing now?” I asked. “Well, I hope. You look well. Did you find a new wife to help you with your little son? His name was William if I recall. My namesake.”