Crawling Between Heaven and Earth

The Green Bay Tree

While doing research for my novel Ill Met By Moonlight, I came across everything that was happening around the time this story is set. The biographer was sympathetic to Judith and her strange marriage, but I started wondering how all of it made her straight-laced sister Susannah feel. In fact, how would Susannah, married to the very religious Doctor Hall feel about her eccentric family life?

Susannah Hall stood in her spacious, oak lined front hall, and looked through the little, thick glass squares amid the lead panes.

Her husband, Dr. John Hall, was late from his round of visiting his patients around Stratford. Susannah had given dinner to their daughter, five year old Elizabeth, and sent her to bed, and she’d set the mutton joint in the kitchen, close enough to the fire to keep it warm. Jane, the kitchen wench, had gone to bed, also.

Blurred through the window, Susannah saw the square building of the Guild Chapel, stark and dark-looking, under the grey sky of late March. Just out of sight, out of the corner of her eye, to the left, she saw a glimmer of light, no doubt from the many tapers lighting up the hall of New Place and shining through the big windows onto the street.

When Susannah had been a child, she and her brother and sister had lived, with their mother, in a much more modest house, in Henley street, and made their own tapers of mutton grease. Her father had lived in London, and who knew how or in what conditions. The only joy the little house had known came with her father’s sporadic visits, his stories of London, of the theater.

Now, Hall Croft, where Doctor Hall had brought Susannah when he married her was yet a different type of house—large and spacious, but sparely ornamented. No painted cloths on the walls, such as had graced her parents’ home. No colorful cushions. Only, everything cleaned and polished and right, beauty coming from a preservation of order and Spartan organization, rather than from that excess her father’s house now displayed.

Susannah looked at the light, and thought why it must be so, that her father would only come back to Stratford when it was too late, when she’d already grown up fatherless. Now, he’d come and be the gentleman of New Place, and draw everyone’s eyes in Stratford to his magnificence.

But Susannah remembered a childhood of much-mended skirts, of bare feet in cold weather, of scant food, of darkened rooms and, always, always, of longing for her father’s visits, for his presence.

She took her hand to her hair, the hair so much like her father’s had been—those thick, dark curls—only hers confined in a bun and worn beneath a proper bonnet, as befit a doctor’s wife.

Her attire was also what a doctor’s wife should wear—thick, clean, dark bodice and skirt over a high necked, long-sleeved shirt—and it molded her still-slender, spare figure gracefully enough, but modestly, bespeaking at once both her station in life and her husband’s strong puritan beliefs.

Coming from a house where religion had never been underscored, Susannah had to learn her husband’s ways, learn to accommodate to his manner of thinking. And perhaps that was right. Surely, that was why her father had encouraged her to marry doctor Hall, eight years her senior.

Her own parents were mismatched in age the other way, and where had that led? At least…. Susannah wrinkled her brow at the pouring rain outside, at the deserted street. At least her mother didn’t seem to mind his absences, but she was happy enough to have him near her now.

Just as Susannah was happy with John Hall. At that moment she caught a glimpse of him, the sound of hooves in the rainy street outside, and then of John dismounting by their garden gate up front, and John leading the horse around the side of the house to the stables and the stable boy who would attend to it.

Presently, John came in through the front door, into the dark-paneled hall of Hall Croft, where nothing but the well-made oak trunks and the two nicely crafted benches proclaimed the distinction of the inhabitants.

He removed his hat to reveal his short salt-and-pepper hair, that matched his chest-length beard, and hung from the wall peg the broad cloak that had protected his black suit.

Looking at Susannah, his blue eyes seemed to grow harder, more focused. This was ever the way, as he examined her, head to toe for a sign of the disarray, the madness, as John called it, that her family had carried and given to her. Drunk with her mother’s milk, John said, that slovenliness, that natural untidiness.

Usually, after John inspected her that way, his eyes would soften, and he would say something kind. Not this time. Having looked Susannah over, head to toe, he turned in silence, and closed the door upon the pouring rain, before looking at her again and asking, “Have you dinner for me?”

Susannah, confused, scared, wondering what she could have done to displease, mentally reviewed her clothing. It was clean and new, and she’d put her hair back so that not the smallest corkscrew of curl escaped the dark bonnet. She didn’t dare run her hands around the bonnet to verify its arrangement, and she didn’t dare, likewise, examine her other clothing.

Instead, she bowed and said, “By the fire. Take you a seat by the table, and I’ll serve you.”

Serve him she did and sat down in the dining room, across the dark, polished oak table from John’s patriarchal splendor. While he said grace upon his meal, he looked so like the gods depicted in the books her father probably shouldn’t have shown her—it probably wasn’t good for her soul—but had shown her, anyway, when she was just a child. Powerful, strong, protective. Like that god, it was with the thunderbolts.

He ate in silence, slicing his meat with his knife, and taking the ale when she refilled his cup.

He did not talk, until the food had been consumed and the table cleared, and then he sat, his broad, generous lips pursed in distaste.

“Have I done ought to displease?” Susannah asked, her voice trembling.

At that John sighed, and his eyes did soften for a moment. His strong, square hands clenched, one on the other, on the polished, dark oak table. “Your family,” he said.

He was silent a while, while she waited for the word of condemnation or reprieve. She had been so lucky to marry John. Oh, her father had money, but no more. That a man like John should have condescended to marry the daughter of a lowly actor and play maker. And yet, sometimes she felt as if her family were like a sword hung upon her head, ever ready to fall and destroy her marriage.

“Your sister’s unfortunate marriage,” John said, the word echoing off Susannah’s thoughts. “To a tavern keeper, and yet that isn’t all….”

Susannah’s heart clenched and she lowered her head to look at the pattern of the grain within the oak of the table. Judith’s marriage had been a point of contention for the two weeks since Judith had taken the liberty of marrying a tavern keeper seven years her junior and marrying him during Lent with no special dispensation. Thomas, Judith’s new husband, had got excommunicated for it, and would have had to fulfill painful penance indeed, safe his new father-in-law had intervened and paid a heavy fine on his behalf.

Such it always was, of course. Since Hamnet, the favored son, had died at eleven, Judith, his twin, had stepped into the void and received all of the affection. While Susannah, well-behaved Susannah got very little attention from her father, very little praise for her pains—as much, indeed, as the prodigal’s brother had ever got from his stern father.

If Susannah had run off and married a tavern keeper, she’d have been disowned faster than thought could turn upon the word.

She saw John look at her clenched hands, and shook her head, then raised properly penitent eyes to her husband. “Is there worse?” she asked. “About my poor sister and her unfortunate match?” Susannah herself had avoided going out into the market for these two weeks, and her stern look had stopped any gossip on the serving wench’s lips.

John nodded. “There’s the babe.”

“The babe?” Had Judith delivered herself of a babe only two weeks after marriage? Susannah felt her cheeks color. Well she knew that she, herself, had been born only five months after her parents marriage. Well she knew what was on John’s mind, even when he didn’t mention it. But must Judith bring it home to her, now, the shame of her birth? She stared at John feeling as if the house, with its broad architrave, its dark paneled walls, the clean rushes on the floor, the broad hearths, as if all of it might come crashing down around her head, any moment.

“Margaret Wheeler’s babe. The poor wretch died giving birth to it, and she accused your new brother in law, Thomas, as the father.”

“Oh,” Susannah said, unable to say more. She felt cold, polluted. There had never been such dealings in the Hall family. Would John set her aside as unworthy, tainted with her sister’s crime?

Susannah looked at John’s blue eyes, his salt-and-pepper hair, his well-trimmed beard, his strong features. She didn’t think she could bear it, if he left her.

“Well…. Well….” John seemed to soften at her true horror. “Don’t distress yourself with it, good wife. Your father is, even as we speak, changing his will, so that she will not get the equal portion of yours, rather a meager one. And his plate, that should have been hers, shall go to our Elizabeth.” He looked up, his gaze disturbed. “Your father is not an ill man, despite his past sins. His very prosperity is a sign of God’s favor, and God doesn’t favor the wicked. But as for Judith…. It’s just that I find it hard, sometimes, to see the wicked prosper like the green bay tree.”

Susannah nodded, feeling truly grateful for John’s compassion and understanding.

But when she retired to her room, upstairs, John did not visit her, as she half expected.

He said something about being tired, and the cold, hard rain outside and left her alone, in her narrow bed, listening to the rain falling on the thatch and thinking, thinking.

At least her parents had shared one room. When her father came from London, he shared her mother’s bed. Sometimes Susannah would hear them whisper and laugh late into the night.

But John said it wasn’t seemly that he should share her bed year around, even through her monthly emissions. John was right. Order and proper behavior were needed, if she didn’t want to recreate the riotous ways of her own family.

In the morning Susannah felt tired and barely got up in time to serve John his breakfast ale and mutton, and to accompany him to his store room, to help pack the bag with the remedies needed for the day’s round of patients.

This was a work she’d gotten used to, and in which John used her familiarity with reading and the Latin that her father had made her learn. Though he always told her this knowledge ill befit her sex and made her sign documents with her mark, yet her knowledge came in useful for reading labels of the many jars that—filled with oddly colored potions—lined the walls of his study.

“I’ll need a small flask of that cough mixture—the green one there—for widow Tremly. And some of that Galene, from that jar there—No, not that one,” he yelled, with unaccustomed alarm, as Susannah reached for a jar filled with yellow lumps in a greasy residue. “That’s phosphorus,” he said, more calmly, as she withdrew her hand, “and truly good for nothing but to poison rats when the vermin runs riot. Look you well on the label and give me the Galene from that—Yes, that jar.”

Susannah read the label on the phosphorus, anyway, curious. It was soluble in grease and the symptoms the same as those that came upon elderly who caught a chill—an embarrassment of walk and speech, a looseness of the bowels, and death shortly after.

Thus they worked, till John left, with his full bag and his mind also full of prescriptions and decisions and ideas.

As for Susannah, having seen that Elizabeth was seated and practicing her sewing upon a piece of cloth under Jane’s supervision, she put her cloak on and ventured forth, into the rain, the scant space along the road to her parents’ house next door.

Her mother was resting, so one of the serving wenches told her, when Susannah entered the well-appointed parlor crowded with silken throws and damask pillows, but her father sat in the small room at the back, the one that overlooked the garden.

Susannah thought it made for sad contemplation, for such a day, but went to the back and there she found him, indeed, gazing out at the rain and the large tree he had planted so many years ago, when he’d bought the house and before he’d started to renovate it, much less had moved into it.

Every time she saw her father, Susannah felt a shock for in her mind he was still the younger man who came from London, in clothes unseen in the neighborhood, with his dark curls and his shining dark eyes, the man with the easy jest and the ready story.

This man was old, his hair almost completely white and so receded that the front part of his head was left uncovered. He sat on a chair in this small room, and, even so, leaned forward on his cane. Nearby him stood a brazier—a metal bucket full of glowing coals—that tried in vain to infuse heat into the aged body.

He looked up a little, at Susannah’s entry, but soon his gaze returned to the falling rain outside.

“Father,” Susannah said.

He looked at her, then, out of the corner of his eye, but only for a moment. “How fare you, daughter? Well?”

Susannah sighed. “My sister, father. How could she?”

Her sigh was echoed by her father, “Your poor sister, how she must suffer.”

“She? She suffer?” Susannah asked. “How about what she makes us suffer, marrying against your will, that creature….” She arrested her voice which had climbed to the shrewish tones she remembered hearing from her mother when she was very young. “You should never more permit her to your presence. Never allow her name spoken near you.”

This time the once-dark, once-laughing eyes turned fully to give her the benefit of his still-shrewd gaze. “Why daughter? At your husband’s council, haven’t I already cut her of her portion? Why this further injury?”

“Because,” Susannah felt her hands tighten on the dark stuff of her skirt. At John’s council, her father said. At John’s council. That meant that as soon as his rage passed, he would go over the will yet again and give Judith a bigger portion once more, as if she hadn’t done anything, as if her sin shouldn’t be punished. “Because she must know she did wrong. She must know you disapprove. You must show her you have authority.”

“Ah. Authority. The poor woman. She’s punished enough. I only hope her Tom makes her a decent enough husband when all is said and done. She’s a sweet girl, you know. Always was a loving child.” He looked at the rain again, and was silent for so long that Susannah thought he must have fallen asleep. But then he spoke, as if out of a dream, “Her voice was ever soft, an excellent thing in a woman.”

It took Susannah a few moments to realize that this was a quotation from one of her father’s plays—those tawdry plays that he’d made and that, in London, had led who knew how many to ruin? And he’d quote it now? And about Judith?

The wicked did indeed prosper like the green bay tree.

Flinging out of the house, Susannah made it back to her own house, where she went about her daily chores—cleaning and mending and cooking—with the quiet manner she always had. Inside, she seethed. Sentences from the Bible that John was wont to read to her in the evening, came to her mind.

Sweeping up the rushes from the kitchen floor, Susannah thought I gave her space to repent of her fornication and she repented not.

Judith would never repent, and, in time, her father would forgive her, and, more like than not, now that Judith was married she’d get New Place, and Susannah would have to watch it light up every night with tapers and the sound of parties. She’d have to watch Judith enjoy her evil marriage, her lewd fornication.

And yet Susannah’s father did nothing. As ever, Judith was his favorite.

Susannah strewed new rushes about.

His favorite ever, and nothing to it, she thought, still, much later, as she set the table. And why should Judith not be his favorite? Were not both of them sinners? He had written his sinful plays and brought evil upon London and the minds of men. And Judith gave scandal onto the community.

Susannah dressed her daughter and combed her afresh to receive her father and for dinner. And she thought, were not the wages of sin death?

John came in brimming with good cheer, though not the good cheer that come from alcohol such as sinners consumed. He talked much to Elizabeth and Susannah, both, about his cases and the treatment thereof, then, in the middle of it paused, “I hear you disturbed your father today, Susannah.”

“I?” Susannah said. Called out of her thoughts, she could only think that John would disapprove. For some reason John had always liked Susannah’s father and stood by the old reprobate. He viewed his father in law’s riches as a sign of God’s favor and believed that obeying the old man would not taint his soul. If Susannah gave it time enough her father would surely turn John from his unswerving fidelity to the word.

“Oh, I know you probably didn’t mean it,” John said. “But he’d like to make his peace with you. He’ll be coming by shortly, after his own supper. He’s on his way to the Bear, to meet with Ben Jonson who’s come from London. They’ll be working on a new play together. Make you your peace with him before he goes. You know he’s likely to be late and you to be abed long before he returns home.”

Her peace with him. And yet, he’d be going to the tavern and drinking with his old play maker friends, and getting soused and rowdy and shameful. The old reprobate, who’d never loved Susannah.

She composed her face, in meek obedience and said, “I will try.” If she hurried she could make it to the study without John’s noticing. The phosphorus was soluble in grease, and her father was much too fond of her treacle cakes, which were greasy enough. She’d give him one, as a token of her good will.

And, since the symptoms would seem natural, everyone would say that William Shakespeare had tarried too long at the Bear, with his friend Ben Jonson, and drunk too much, and had died of his excesses.