Love's Will Read Online Free Page B

William.
    “Quite right,” said Anne. “Pass the wine.”
    Instead, he took her cup and refilled it. Putting the cup into her hand, folding her fingers around it, he said, “That was rather well put, don’t you think? The summer’s lease bit?”
    Half asleep from wine and sun Anne said, “Very well put. Poetical. But what do you know about leases?”
    “Quite a lot now from tending Father’s business matters for him and clerking for the local lawyer. Writing letters, doing accounts, juggling mortgages, avoiding creditors. Mind you, it’s better than making gloves. I might work that summer’s lease bit into the play. Tactfully.”
    The note in his voice made her open her eyes and smile at him. “They’re really not very good, are they, the local mummers.”
    “Better than nothing, though.”
    “Poor Will.”
    “It’d be Poor Will and no mistake if I hadn’t you to talk to.”
    “And to introduce you to Davy Jones’s players, despite their shabby standard.”
    “Not only for that.”
    “Because I read what you write?”
    And he could write. All summer he’d been bringing Anne bits of plays and even poems. Laughing, she had protested that she was no judge. She had learnt to read, because her father had admired the learned Queen Elizabeth and thought that in changing times it did no harm for all his children to have some literacy (her stepmother disagreed, to the point where Anne’s two books had to be hidden, smuggled out of the house when she came to tend her ancient cousin) and she had seen some plays, by those troupes William’s father and the Stratford council had paid, but that was all. Surely, she had said, he could find someone more fit to read his efforts? No he couldn’t, he said, and continued to bring her whatever he wrote.
    Now he said, with an odd intensity, “It’s not only because you introduced me to Davy Jones, or read my work. I like you, Anne, I like your company.”
    “But one day you’ll go away to London.”
    “Years from now. I was to have gone to university, Anne. Both my parents wanted it. But Father’s had such money troubles it’s impossible.”
    “I’m sorry. But at least you can plan such a future. For me, a woman, it’s marriage or helping rear my half-brothers and half-sisters and dwindling into an old maid who’s never been five miles from where she was born. Or an old housewife who’s never been away.”
    “Why aren’t you married? Are all the local men blind? Or stupid?”
    Anne knew she should have told him he was impertinent, or that she was unimpressed by boyish flattery, but he’d spoken so matter-of-factly. And she was flattered.
    “I’ve had offers, but none of them appealed. My father was a little choosy on my behalf; he died only last year, you see. My stepmother had one of her Puritan friends lined up for me, a pig-farmer, and I refused. That’s why she’s angry with me.”
    She glanced across at the old lady sleeping so peacefully in her cushioned chair in the sun. “I let my stepmother think I don’t like being here, that it’s close to a penance, but I love my cousin and no one could be less demanding, so it’s a holiday for me here.” One old lady, even a half-crippled and frail one, and a three-room cottage, after a ten-roomed house, three maids, a stepmother, four children under twelve, five farmhands, harvest, all the work of a busy household and a farm… “A holiday,” she repeated.
    “Holiday for me too, coming here.” William grinned and poured them both another glass of wine.
    “But summer’s lease, as you just said… Autumn soon, then winter, and I’ll have to go home when my cousin’s daughter returns.”
    “Something will turn up.” He leaned back comfortably against her bench, his head close to her knees. Roses surrounded this tiny garden, their scent heavy as smoke on the air. All the other flowers of summer, the lazy humming of bees, the occasional chatter of birds, the purling of the stream not far away, an