Will propped his feet on the bench before the fire while Susanna showed Judith how to sew the braids of ivy into swags to hang over the windows and the door, and Hamnet stole fallen leaves with which to tease Anne’s calico cat. The cat, fat with winter mousing, purred and flattened her whiskers smugly, but she couldn’t be bothered to extend a claw after the leaves.

Will, watching, covered his mouth and smiled into his sleeve. Still weary with the brutal coach ride, he must have dozed before the fire, because a knock on the door startled him awake.

“That will be your brother Edmund,” Anne said, crossing in a sweep of skirts. “He’s come to take Hamnet to fetch the Yule log”

“Uncle Edmund!” The boy bounced up even as Will dropped his feet on the floor. His youngest brother a mere twice seven years shook snow off his cloak and hefted an axe. “Ready to go out and slog through the snow with the men, puppy Will!”

“Ted.” Will stood, a broad grin stretching his cheeks. “You’ve grown.”

“You re home.” Edmund looked him up and down. He was already almost Will’s height, and his shoulders half filled the doorway.

“Well, get your boots on, then.” Hamnet bounced on his toes. Will looked at Annie. Annie didn’t quite nod, that would have been too much like permission but she smiled.

“Bring more ivy if you find it, or bay,” she said. “Christmas eve supper shall be at your father’s house; the girls and I will meet you. I promised to help cook.”

The sun turned the western horizon to flame-colored taffeta while the three of them, Hamnet, Edmund, and Will, leaned into the traces and sledged an enormous log through ankle-deep snow. Or, in fairness, Will and Edmund sledged. Hamnet ran rings around them, the winter sunlight glimmering on his hair, now a hare, now a hound, now ‘Uncle Edmund, look!’ a lumbering bear.

Edmund looked, and laughed, and Will looked at Edmund and understood, with a moment of bitterness he didn’t deserve, who was raising his son. Will covered the hurt with a player’s smile, and caught Edmund’s eye before he ducked under the traces to chase his bear-cub down the lane, growling like a hound. They floundered through a snowdrift and into a deserted pasturage, Will half a step behind the boy.

“Run, bear cub! The hounds are on you!”

Hamnet turned at bay against a hurdle, and Will drew up.

“I’m Sackerson, the boy growled. The strongest bear in Britain! I’ll eat up any hound that comes after me!”

Will laughed and crouched down, hands spread, watching his boy coil to leap at him. That Hamnet would trust Will to catch him cracked his grin to show his teeth in more than mockery of a hunting dog’s snarl.

“Hounds are smarter than bears.” He gasped as something took him, as if the snowy grass under his feet were yanked like a carpet, and he found himself flat on his back with Hamnet crouched over him, small fists clenched on the neck of his jerkin, roaring triumphantly.

“Lad,” Will coughed. “Off!” Hamnet jumped back, and suddenly Edmund’s hands were on him, the Yule log abandoned in the lane, a worried brother brushing snow from his collar and hair, pulling him to his feet. “What happened?”

“Fell”, Will said, and shoved his right hand into the slit in his jerkin and the pocket beneath so Edmund wouldn’t see it shake. He wouldn’t say more in front of Hamnet, but Edmund’s lips pursed and he kept a hand on Will’s elbow until they were back in the lane, and did the lion’s share of the drawing.

Another half-hour’s labor brought them through the festive streets of Stratford to the front door of Will’s childhood home. Edmund pushed the door open to the parlor where the great bed stood, halloing unnecessarily as the whole family: Joan; her husband, Will; Gilbert; Richard and guests turned with applause.

The rich smell of brawn roasting and bread baking, of mince pie and fruit pie and plum porridge, was almost as sustaining as food itself. There would be no cold pottage in the Shakespeare house tonight.

In the hall, where the hearth roared in readiness for their burden, some of the guests were playing at snapdragon, picking raisins from a bowl of flaming brandy. Will saw one man dressed in almost Puritan severity quench scorched fingers in his mouth.

Will dropped the traces and kicked snow from his boots against the threshold before stepping over onto rushes scattering the blue limestone floor. He and Edmund dragged the log in with Hamnet’s interference. Then Will left it to his brother’s labor, turning away from the precipitous stair on the left and into the hall, with its walls hung in holly and painted cloth. He could hear Hamnet and Edmund untying the Yule log, and he realized suddenly that they’d forgotten the ivy or bay and then his father’s arms were around him, John Shakespeare stumping forward on a bentwood cane and wrapping his oldest son in palsied arms, leaning as much as embracing, clinging to his boy gone to London and mouthing words about Will come home, in velvet and silk taffeta like a fine gentleman. His father’s words were slurred, one running into the other, and Will knew from the stern, proud look on his mother Mary’s face that he was not to remark on it. The cousins close and distant huddled in a room hot with their bodies and the leaping flames of the hearth, among them men and women Will had never seen.

“Bring it in, bring it in,” John Shakespeare said. “The feast is upon us.”

Mary waited for her husband to step back before she came forward and looked up at Will. Her eyes were blue: she had the aristocratic cheekbones and the high brow she’d willed to all her children, the living and the dead. Will saw her noticing the snow and the earth staining his cloak and the knees of his breeches, but she met his eyes and held out a tankard of mulled cider, and only smiled. “Welcome home, Will.”

“Mother,” he said, and took the wine, searching the crowd for Annie and Susanna.

“Judith would be with the younger children. God bless you.” Her kiss was roses and homecoming, and he let it drive the memory of balance lost and a lurch into a snowdrift away.

“How is Father?” An undertone, mumbled around his cider.

“Not much worse,” she said, and shrugged. “And you?”

“My plays have been performed before the Queen,” he answered, as he had imagined himself answering, and accepted her gasp and smile and delighted outcry as his due.

Annie found him before he finished the cider, and drew him through a low timbered archway into the crowded hall by a warm arm around his waist.

“The brawn is almost ready,” she said.

He breathed deep: cloves and crackling and the rich aroma of roasting pork.

“Annie,” he said. “Something happened today.”

“Not to Hamnet?” She crouched by the fire in the big bricked hearth, tucking her skirts in close as she ladled dripping over the roast. She wore neither bumroll nor farthingale, but a broad country skirt under her apron, and Will bit his tongue at the way those skirts draped between her haunches.

Three children, and still I fell,” he said. “I think.”

“Fell?” She set the battered copper ladle aside and stood, turned, frowning. She took his wrists and drew his hands forward, glowering down at them: broad knuckles, long fingers, the last digit of the middle finger on the right one calloused on the inner edge and warped sideways from the pressure of the quill. The right one trembled.

“Oh, Will.”

“Years yet,” he said. “I swear I’ll come home to you.”

“Broken and old so I can nurse thee through thy dotage? What good will you be to me then?” Her voice low, the bitterness hidden under the commonplace tone of wife to husband. “Pray it pass.”

“Hamnet by, Annie, hush you.”

“There’s a priest here tonight,” she said suddenly, interrupting. “For Christ’s birth. After the neighbors leave, there will be a midnight Mass.”

A priest. She meant a Catholic priest. A Catholic Mass. A hanging affair. Will swallowed dryness. “Annie, you must not tell me such things.”