Read The Playmakers for Free Online Page B

rugs.
    Next to the bed stood the mid-wife, and next
to her stood his father and his mother.
    All staring at him, silently.
    “I’m … er …I’m sorry, I …” he mumbled,
staring at the floor.
    But this time, there were no screams of abuse
from the viper, no yells of contempt from the harridan. Nothing he
could even retort to, or maybe mount a defence against, with his
own invective and shouting.
    This time there was silence.
    A silence that shamed him as he stood there
hung-over, dirty and smelling.
    But then, almost right on schedule, a pot
flew across the room, glancing off the unwounded side of his head,
and clattering to the floor.
    And this time, he knew he had no other choice
but to go downstairs, grab the remainder of the cash from the
business, and walk out into the street and on to a new life.
    Because this time the pot had been thrown by
his mother.

 
    CHAPTER THREE

    The water was cold. Damn cold. Rightly or
wrongly, William Shakespeare had walked away from his family, his
village, his life.
    But doing it on a February afternoon in
England, he soon discovered, was not the wisest of decisions in
terms of escapee comfort. Especially so when he splashed water on
his face from the tiny creek to try and clean off the mud, the
blood, the cow-shit, the memories of his drunken night, and the
awful follow-up. Even though it was now mid-afternoon, and the
feeble winter sun was endeavouring to vainly signal its existence
from behind a bank of dull cloud, there was still a thin crust of
ice near the bank, extending nearly a yard out into the rocky
stream.
    There was no choice. He would have to break
this with his fist so he could get at the freezing, almost still
water underneath.
    It had to be done. He was filthy and he knew
it.
    He knew it from the way the townsfolk and the
farmers had stared at him as he had marched angrily out of
Stratford earlier that day and up the main road, south-west towards
Bristol, anywhere, just to get away from a marriage that he had
never wanted in the first place and which had now gone horribly
wrong.
    To get away from
Her, he kept thinking, as he struck out at a vigorous pace. And that child.
    No, wait, the word was
children now! Twins had arrived, would you believe? My God, from
one to three children in one leap. Is that possible? What are you
doing to me, Lord? What did I do to deserve this?
    I’m better off out of
there, he thought, as the miles and the hours passed.
    Better off.
    Better off.
    I’m better off out of
there.
    The phrase had been running through his mind
all day, and now it positively bounced around his head as he
splashed the freezing water on his face, arms and chest.
    Better off. I’m better
off, he thought, as the snap-cold water peeled away the
grime and cleaned the blood from the wound on his temple.
    Better off. I’m better
off, he thought, as he held a piece of the ice to his
forehead, stimulating a shocking but brief surge of pain which,
when it faded, mercifully took away the thumping headache of his
hangover.
    “I’m better off! I’m better off without you
all,” he shouted, the words bouncing across the water and echoing
through the thin poplars adjoining the creek. “Better off, do you
hear? Better off!”
    There was silence.
    He looked back into the still water to see
the reflection of William Shakespeare.
    The New William
Shakespeare!
    Yes! The New Shakespeare,
now freed from the tentacles of that harridan; now marching down a
different and exciting road on the journey of life; for the first
time, taking the route decided by him, and not decreed by others.
Or determined by circumstance. Or engineered by
trickery.
    Why, he thought, even his mother had given up on him
now.
    And for the first time in the day he felt
acutely sad.
    She had been his only supporter. She had
backed him through the shock of Anne Hathaway’s declaration of her
pregnancy, through the tragedy of Anne Whateley’s suicide, through
the grim facade of a wedding ceremony and