Stepping back, she motioned me to the table. “Read, please. Aloud.”
The writing was delicate as spiders’ legs skittering across the page. “A lady’s hand,” I said, looking up. Ben, too, had drawn near. Athenaide nodded.
I began to read.
20 May 1881
The Savoy, London
My dearest Jem,
I paused. “Jem” was an old British nickname for Jeremy. The only men a Victorian lady would address by a nursery nickname, in such terms of endearment, were brothers, sons, and husbands.
Now that the day nears when we shall once again behold one another, trepidation coils about me like some luxuriant and smothering vine of the deepest Congo….
The imagery was rank with the oblique, twining sensuality of the Victorians. Jem wasn’t a brother or a son, then. A husband?
I have—as you instructed—come up to London to ferret out what connexions there may be between Somerset and the Howard family. I think you will find, as I have, that the results are most intriguing—tho’ unhappily sordid. I shall make my lady’s pen so bold as to write of them as frankly as a man might—in order to impart information—and expect that you will read them in that spirit.
At first, I took “Somerset” to mean the county, which led nowhere but to Plateaux of Frustration quite as barren as Arctic Ice. A chance remark from a librarian, however, sent me scurrying to Debrett’s and a survey of the peerage. There, I learned that in the time of King James there was an Earldom of Somerset, and the Earl of Somerset’s family name was Carr—a name that could not help but catch my curiosity.
“Carr,” purred Athenaide. “Cardenio.” She looked at me owlishly. “Curious indeed.” I pressed on. The liberal underlining gave the prose a giddy quality.
Furthermore—what do you think? His countess was born a Howard!! Frances was the poor lady’s given name—She was the sister of the last but not insignificant person in this chain—Theophilus, Lord Howard de Walden, to whom the first English translation of Quixote was dedicated.
“Quixote,” breathed Ben. “Is that right?”
I nodded, skimming ahead, summarizing as I went. The story of Frances Howard and the earl of Somerset was sordid as promised, and in the main, Jem’s correspondent got it right.
Frances Howard had been a blond beauty, the proud and petted daughter of one of the proudest, most rapacious families in English history. When Robert Carr began to woo her, she was the countess of Essex by a marriage of six years’ standing to the earl of Essex. Carr, too, was blond and beautiful, but he’d been no better than an impoverished Scottish squire until he came to the king’s notice by falling from a horse and breaking his leg. The king had fallen in love, loading Carr with titles and riches, and fawning on him as a lady might fawn on a lapdog.
“So what happened when the king discovered his lover’s interest in the countess?” asked Ben.
“He wasn’t jealous of women,” I said. “King James actually encouraged his favorites to marry. So when he learned of Carr’s fancy for Frances, the king decided that his beloved Carr must have what he wanted, no matter what it might take. What it took was an annulment of Frances’s first marriage; Frances and her family insisted on that. The king rigged the investigating commission, but still he had to badger them. As soon as the annulment was granted, he elevated Carr’s title from a mere viscountship to the earldom of Somerset, so that Frances would suffer no drop in rank. The wedding that followed was little short of royal. And the king,” I said, adding a detail the writer had left out, “is said to have joined the newlyweds in their bed the following morning.”
“History to be proud of, that,” said Ben. “Think of all the trouble Henry the Eighth could have saved, if he’d just married Anne Boleyn off and then joined his mistress and her husband for a three-way romp whenever he pleased.”
“Henry needed heirs,” said Athenaide. “James didn’t.”
“The king was lucky he didn’t get in Frances’s way,” I said. “So was Essex. Carr—by then the earl of Somerset—had another lover who did, or tried to. Frances arranged by devious means for her rival to be sent to the Tower of London, and then, in a show of sympathy, she sent him a basket of jelly tarts.”
“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,” Ben chanted lightly.
“And laced them with poison,” I said. “The poor man died in agony. Frances pleaded guilty to murder before the House of Lords; Somerset pleaded innocent and was convicted. They were sentenced to death, but the king commuted both sentences to life in prison. It was the greatest scandal of the Jacobean age.”
“Jolly old England,” said Ben. “And these are the people Granville wanted the writer to investigate? Do they have some connection to Shakespeare?”
“Not that I know of. But they’re connected to Don Quixote, and therefore to the story of Cardenio, so maybe.”
“Go on with the letter,” said Athenaide.
What looks promising for our work, I hope you will agree, is the curious geometry of their Love Triangle with Essex.
Athenaide touched my arm. “Is Cardenio the story of a love triangle?”
Reluctantly, I met her eyes. “Yes.”
“Doesn’t it make sense, then, that Cardenio stands for Carr, earl of Somerset, and his triangular history with Essex and his countess?”
“No.” It came out more bluntly than I meant. I tried to explain. “If the king’s boy toy of the moment is called Carr, and you were foolhardy enough to want to shadow him on the stage, ‘Cardenio’ would be the last name you’d pick. It’s obvious. And that means dangerous.”
“You think Shakespeare was a man to fear danger?”
“Any sensible person would fear the vindictiveness of a Renaissance king,” I retorted. “The bigger problem with your suggestion is that not all triangles are alike. The story’s triangle makes Cardenio the lady’s first and true lover, pitting him against a treacherous interloper. History, on the other hand, made Frances Howard’s first husband an impotent prig who refused either to love her or let her go. Carr was the Johnny-come-lately, rescuing her from a marriage that was little better than a barren prison.”
“Essex was impotent?” asked Ben.
“Who knows? But the earl who headed the Howard clan—Frances’s uncle or great-uncle, I can’t keep them all straight—called Essex ‘my lord the gelding.’”
Athenaide narrowed her eyes. “You came here hoping to find something out about Cardenio, and a theory presents itself. Why be so quick to dismiss it?”
“Not about Cardenio.”
She looked from me to Ben and back. “Come again?”
I could feel Ben’s disapproval piling up against me in cold drifts, but I needed Athenaide’s approval more. “We didn’t come to find out something about the play. We came to find the play itself. Granville claimed to have had a manuscript copy.”
There was a short, stunned silence. A little crease cut Athenaide’s brow. “And you think you can find it?” The force of her greed was almost palpable.
“Roz thought she could.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But not by trying to trace some connection with the Howards. I’m pretty sure that’s irrelevant, or Granville wouldn’t be trying to work it out after he’d found the play.”
Athenaide cocked her head, thinking. Then she blinked and stepped back. “Finish the letter.”
I am rather pleased with myself for winkling out this first set of connexions. It dulls, at least, the sting of having to report that I have failed utterly at the second. I cannot work out how there could have been any imaginable family relationship between the Earl and the Poet. I do wish you would tell me what set you to wondering that.
So do I, I thought.
“Granville thought they were related?” asked Ben. “Shakespeare and the poisonous Howards?”
“That’s not all,” I said, skimming forward. “He seems to have suggested that there was also some connection with a priest. A Catholic prie
st.”
“That was playing with fire, wasn’t it?” asked Ben.
I nodded. “For consorting with priests, you could lose everything—livelihood, lands, everything you owned, even custody of your children. If they thought you were in league with the Jesuits against the queen, you could be hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason. Still, the writer says the priest makes sense, by comparison with the Howards.”
Ben leaned over my shoulder. “How do we know that Granville wasn’t a complete nutter?”
“He convinced Professor Child. Listen to this:”
Perhaps Professor Child will be able to enlighten you further. I must admit I am surprised by his eagerness to visit you—tho’ also encouraged. Surely he would not go to such trouble if he did not entertain serious thoughts that your discovery might be genuine.
The professor—not exactly an excitable flibbertigibbet—had planned to visit Granville in person. In Tombstone. From Massachusetts. Not a journey you’d undertake lightly in 1881.
I skimmed through to the end, but the rest was insignificant chatter. The writer ended with Shakespeare, underlined twice.
Journeys end in lovers meeting, every wise man’s son doth know.
Your letters I treasure as sent from my dearest jewel,
Ophelia Fayrer Granville
Ophelia, I thought with a pang.
“Ophelias are multiplying like sodding rabbits,” said Ben.
“Not this one,” said Athenaide. “Poor woman. Her lover never came home.”
“Her husband,” said Ben. “She signs herself Granville.”
“She kept his letters,” I said. “That’s what matters. The trail back to Jeremy Granville runs through Ophelia.”
“So we need to find her,” said Athenaide.
“And those letters,” I answered.
“You think they still exist?” asked Ben.
“I think Roz thought so.”
He fingered the envelope. “It’s not just the stamp that’s British,” he said. “So is her spelling. And her tone. She just sounds British.”
“She wrote from the Savoy,” I mused. “So she wasn’t a Londoner. She had money, but not a lot of London connections, or she’d have stayed in somebody’s house.” I shook my head. That wasn’t much to go on.
“There’s a postscript on the back,” said Athenaide.
I turned the letter over. Ophelia had added two sentences in haste, apparently after folding the letter for the post:
I have just received permission from the Bacon family in Connecticut to look through Miss Bacon’s papers on my way out to join you!! Write and tell me exactly what you wish me to search for.
Athenaide was gazing up at the Millais over the mantelpiece with a small smile on her face. “I take it you recognize the reference to Miss Bacon.”
Ben looked back and forth between us. “Who’s Miss Bacon?”
“Delia Bacon,” I said, pressing my head into my hands. “A nineteenth-century scholar whose obsession with Shakespeare drove her to madness.”
“What was her obsession?” asked Ben.
It was Athenaide who answered, pulling her eyes from the painting to rest on me. “That William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write the plays that bear his name.”
There was a long silence.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Ben. When neither of us spoke he added, “Isn’t it?”
“Not ridiculous,” I said quietly. “Delia Bacon was brilliant. In an era when unwed women of a certain class were consigned to the nursery as governesses, she made a name for herself as a scholar. She supported herself on the lecture circuit around New York and New England, talking about history and literature to sold-out crowds. But her passion was Shakespeare, and she gave up her hard-won career to study his plays.”
I couldn’t sit still, telling her story. I got up and walked around the room, running my hand along the tapestries so that they rippled as I passed. “Delia thought she detected a profound philosophy threaded deep through all Shakespeare’s works. Chasing it, she became convinced that the man from Stratford couldn’t have written anything so sublime. She sailed to England and spent a decade alone in cramped, cold rooms, writing the book that would prove her theory.”
The New Mexican morning spilled through one of the arched windows, splashing the floor in front of me with bright sun. “When her masterpiece finally came out, she expected applause. What she got was silence, and then jeering. Her mind cracked under the strain. She was carted off to an asylum and died two years later in a madhouse, without reading or hearing a single phrase of her beloved plays again; her brother forbade so much as the name of Shakespeare to be spoken in her presence.”
“Not ridiculous,” said Ben. “I take that back. Tragic.”
“It’s not Delia’s madness that matters,” said Athenaide briskly. “It’s her papers. If Ophelia wrote requesting to see them, then—”
“Then we should look for Ophelia—and what she was searching for—among the Bacon papers,” I finished.
“I take it you know where they are?” asked Ben.
“At the Folger Shakespeare Library,” I said. “Just off the Mall in Washington, D.C.” Housed in white marble, the Folger possesses the largest collection of Shakespeareana on earth—one of the wonders built from the proceeds of the black gold that once flowed through Standard Oil. If it has to do with Shakespeare, the Folger wants it—and what the Folger wants, one way or another it usually gets. The library had acquired Delia’s papers sometime in the 1960s.
Athenaide’s china-blue eyes blazed. “How fortunate that I am headed to a conference at the Folger this afternoon.”
“That is not a coincidence, is it?” I asked.
“That you phoned about the Granville letter last night?” Athenaide shrugged. “Yes. That I invited you down to see it before I left? No. I meant, if things turned out well, to ask you to join me. It had occurred to me that the road to Ophelia might go through the Bacon papers. But I am a collector, Katharine. Not a scholar. I could use your help.”
“Does the Folger have a First Folio?” Ben asked sharply.
“A Folio?” snorted Athenaide. “No, Mr. Pearl. The Folger has seventy-nine. Roughly a third of all the First Folios that survive, which makes it by far the largest collection in the world. Japan’s Meisei University trails in second—a very distant second—with twelve, and that more than doubles the British Library’s five. The Folger is ground zero for the Folio.”
“Then it’s the first place that Sinclair and the FBI will think of to bait a trap.”
“They’ll have their work cut out for them,” said Athenaide. “Seeing as a major conference opens there tonight. At which several of the Folios will be out on display. It may interest you to know, Katharine, that the keynote speaker was to be Professor Howard. Her topic was to be Delia Bacon.”
I sat down suddenly.
Ben walked over to stand in front of me. “Going to the Folger is madness. Her offer could be a trap,” he added quietly.
“If I’d wanted to trap you,” Athenaide cut in from across the room, “the police would already be here. I am offering you a way out, to exactly the place you want to go. And I can get you in.”
We both turned to her. “How?”
“There’s a champagne reception in the Reading Room tonight, followed by dinner in the Great Hall. As I am underwriting this conference, they’re using my caterers. I am sure I can convince Lorenzo that he could use two more servers.” She toyed with the gun still sitting on the table before her. “I do a lot of business in D.C. I am a very good client.”
“We have to get there, to get in,” said Ben. “Airport security—”
“Lucky for you there is no airport security. Not at Lordsburg Municipal. Not much of an airport either. Just a runway and some hangars.”
“Why should you do this?” I asked.
She put the letter back in its folder and rose. “I am as interested as you are to find what Mr. Granville found.”
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“Walk away, Kate,” urged Ben.
Somewhere in the distance, I heard the sputtering of a chain saw. It grew louder, and its syncopated rhythm grew more distinct. Suddenly I recognized the sound. It was a helicopter.
“I expect that’s the law.” Athenaide went to one of the windows. “I am afraid the time for walking is over. There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of your life is bound in shallows and in miseries…. What’s your choice, Katharine?”
It was Roz’s favorite phrase.
I met Ben’s eyes. “The Folger,” I said.
24
“WE’LL NEED YOUR shoes,” said Athenaide.
“Why?”
“A little game of charades,” she answered. “The helicopter suggests that the police are not just dropping in for a chat. I imagine they suspect that I’m being visited by a killer from Utah. If the FBI has gotten wind of it and linked Maxine’s death to the Shakespearean fires, they may even have your names. In any case, it will be obvious that somebody’s been here. Your car’s here, for starters, though I’ve taken the liberty of having it emptied of your possessions.”
The books, I thought with a start.
“You’ll get them back,” she said dryly. “We’ll report some suspicious trespassers,” she went on, “and the police will find tracks leading off into the desert, heading for a place where coyotes are known to pick up illegals. With luck, it will keep the search local, at least for a while.”
“And meanwhile, we just walk out the front door?” asked Ben.
“My house has many doors, Mr. Pearl,” said Athenaide with an arch smile.
Interred with Their Bones Page 18