To them I was just Tom Smith from Suffolk and that was how it would have to stay. And besides, I knew I would never be a count. I would never live in a fine house again. There would be no manservants for me. My parents were dead. France was a hostile world to me. I was a street performer in London. Any airs above that station would only lead to trouble.
I had duly paid my first two weeks’ lodgings by the following Tuesday. And from that moment on, I was an equal in the cottage, and part of the family. I felt, in short, like I belonged, and I tried my best to ignore the future and the problems that might come. While singing a madrigal to a large pre-theatre crowd or watching Rose’s cheeks bloom with colour, mid-laugh, I could imagine that I was happy.
Grace wanted to learn how to play the lute so one night I began giving her lessons. Her hand hung over the strings like a spider dangling from a roof. I repositioned it, so her fingers were parallel with the length of the instrument.
She wanted to learn how to play ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘The Sweet and Merry Month of May’, two of her favourites. I was a bit worried about teaching her ‘Greensleeves’. As with much of the popular music throughout history, ‘Greensleeves’ was a wildly inappropriate tune for a child to know. I wasn’t that worldly wise at that time but I was wise enough to know that Lady Greensleeves was the standard insult du jour for promiscuous women. Her sleeves were green because of all that outdoor sex she was supposedly having. But still, Grace was adamant, and I didn’t want to burst her innocence in the name of protecting it, and so I obliged her with lessons. She was quite hard to teach, wanting to run before she could walk, but we persevered with each other. We played outside on midsummer’s eve and I turned to see Rose watching us from the window, smiling.
One evening, around the beginning of autumn, Rose came into my room. She was tired. She seemed different. A bit muted, a bit lost.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘A million little things. No matter.’
There was something I felt she wanted to tell me but didn’t.
She sat on the bed and asked if I could teach her to play the lute. She said if I taught her how to play she would lower the rent by five pence. I said yes. Not so much because of the rent, but because I welcomed the excuse to sit next to her a while.
She had another little mole, like the two on her cheek, between her thumb and forefinger. Her hands were stained a little from the leftover cherries she’d been eating. I imagined holding her hand. What a childish thought! Maybe my brain was still as young as my face looked.
‘It is a beautiful lute. I have never seen one like it. All the decoration,’ she said.
‘My mother received it from . . . a friend. And you see this here?’ – I pointed to the ornately crafted sound-hole, under the strings – ‘It’s called the rose.’
‘It is nothing but air.’
I laughed. ‘It is the most important part.’
I got her to play two strings, back and forth, plucking at a quickening pace, along with my heart. I touched her arm. I closed my eyes, and felt fearful of how much I felt for her.
‘Music is about time,’ I told her. ‘It is about controlling time.’
When she stopped playing, she looked thoughtful for a moment and said something like, ‘I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the market again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky . . . But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, aren’t we?’
She definitely said that last bit: We are all the strings.
Rose was too good for picking fruit. Rose was a philosopher, really. She was the wisest person I ever knew. (And I would soon know Shakespeare, so that’s saying a lot.) She talked to me as if I was her age and I loved her for that. When I was with her, everything faded away and I felt calm. She was a counterbalance. She gave me peace just by looking at her, which might explain why I looked at her for too long, and with too much intensity in my eyes. The way people never look at people any more. I wanted her in every sense. To want is to lack. That is what it means. There was an emptiness, a void, made vast and wide when my mother had drowned, which I thought was never-ending, but when I looked at Rose I started to feel solid again, as if there was something to hold on to. Steady.
‘I want you to stay, Tom.’
‘Stay?’
‘Yes. Stay. Here.’
‘Oh.’
‘I don’t want you to have to leave. Grace likes having you here. And I do too. Very much so. You are a comfort to us both. The place has felt too empty, and now it does not.’
‘Well, I like being here.’
‘Good.’
‘But one day I may have to leave.’
‘And why would that be?’
I wanted to tell her, right then. I wanted to say that I was different and strange and peculiar. That I would not grow old like other people grow old. I wanted to tell her that my mother had not been bucked off a horse and that she had drowned on the ducking stool, accused of murder by witchcraft. I wanted to tell her about William Manning. I wanted to tell her how hard it was to feel responsible for losing the person you had loved the most. To tell her the frustration of being a mystery, even to yourself. That there was some flaw in the balance of my humours. I wanted to tell her that my first name was Estienne and that my last name was Hazard, not Smith. I wanted to tell her that she had been the one true comfort I had known since Mother died. All these wants rose up, but had nowhere to go.
‘I can’t say.’
‘You are a mystery to be solved.’
A moment of stillness.
Birdsong.
‘Have you ever been kissed, Tom?’ I thought of that first night, when she had given me a small peck on my lips. ‘A proper kiss, Tom?’ Rose clarified, as if reading my mind.
My silence was the embarrassing answer.
‘A kiss,’ she said, ‘is like music. It stops time . . . I had a romance once,’ she said simply. ‘One summer. He worked in the orchard. We kissed and did merry things together but I never really felt for him. If you feel for someone, just one single kiss can stop the sparrows, they say. Do you think that can happen?’
And she placed the lute beside her on the bed and kissed me and I closed my eyes and the rest of the world faded. There was nothing else. Nothing but her. She was the stars and the heavens and the oceans. There was nothing but that single fragment of time, and this bud of love we had planted inside it. And then, at some point after it started, the kiss ended, and I stroked her hair, and the church bells rang in the distance and everything in the world was in alignment.
London, now
I am standing in front of the year nine class. Again. I am tired. Going to bed after three is not what teachers should do. Raindrops shine like jewels on the windows. Continuing from the disastrous previous lesson on immigration, I am starting to discuss the social history of late Tudor, specifically Elizabethan, England.
‘What do you know about Elizabethan England?’ I ask, while thinking, Maybe this time I should have chosen, say, Sardinia. Or to be among lemon groves in Mallorca. Or by a beach in Indonesia. Or on a palm-filled island beside turquoise waters in the Maldives. ‘Who lived there?’