I heard a slight grinding, and Graciela appeared, hulking like a troll, just inside the massive fireplace. Behind her, where the back of the fireplace had been, I glimpsed yawning darkness. She pointed at our feet. “Los zapatos,” she demanded. “Dámelos.”
To my surprise, Ben kicked off his shoes, picked them up, and held them out to her. I followed suit, and she disappeared back into the darkness.
Ben stepped forward.
“Wait,” said Athenaide. “She’ll be back momentarily.”
Outside, the sound of the helicopter grew louder.
Ben bent to examine the hole in the soot-stained back wall. “Bloody ingenious,” he said.
“The original was made to hide priests,” said Athenaide.
“A priest-hole?” I’d seen one or two priest-holes before, cramped spaces tucked behind stairways or into rafters, all of them open, on static display behind Plexiglas in old English houses. But I’d never seen one in action.
In Shakespeare’s day, England had been Protestant by royal command; it had been counted high treason for Englishmen to become Catholic priests, and for English families to harbor them. Early in her reign, Elizabeth had pleaded with both sides for tolerance, but her ministers feared that the Catholics were out to kill the queen. When a few were caught trying, the wolves of Elizabeth began hunting down the men they held responsible: the priests. In turn, English Catholics took to hiding their holy men in hollowed walls and odd filled-in crannies, as Pharaoh’s daughter had hidden Moses among the bulrushes.
“The best of them you cannot find by listening for hollows or feeling for cracks. You just have to know where they are and how the doors open. And I modeled this on one of the best,” said Athenaide. “The original is so well insulated that you can light a roaring fire without risking roast priest.”
“And this one?” asked Ben.
“We have never had to try. Yet.”
“Have you done this before,” he asked, “or is it all improvisation?”
“Theme and variations,” said Athenaide.
Graciela reappeared just as the sputtering growl outside cut into ominous silence. “Síganme,” she commanded. You did not need Spanish to know that she’d said, “Follow me.”
“Au revoir,” said Athenaide.
We ducked inside, and the door ground closed behind us. For a moment we stood in utter darkness. Then a yellow light silently flared off to one side and Graciela sped down the tunnel. For her size, she was surprisingly nimble. I had to trot to keep up.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting—maybe not quite bats, spiders, slime, and chains clanking on the walls—but I didn’t expect what I found either: a well-swept narrow corridor of stone, tall enough for Ben to walk upright. The corridor’s lights were on motion sensors, coming on just ahead of us, and fading as we passed, so that if it hadn’t been for the doors that punctuated the stone walls here and there, I’d have thought we were rushing in place.
On and on we walked, passing identical doors on both sides. The passage dipped down for a ways and then rose again in a series of shallow steps. After a while, it curved to the right. We must have gone a quarter of a mile when we came to the end of the tunnel, with a door set into it. It was unmarked, save for a keypad on the wall.
Graciela punched in a code, and the door slid open.
I stood blinking in the blinding line of light. “Adelante,” said Graciela, pushing us forward. We slipped through the crack between the door and the wall. “Adios,” she said. And before we could move, the door was closing, a boulder slipping back into place.
I shielded my eyes, squinting in the bright light. We seemed to be in a shallow dry wash, standing on a stone ledge backed with large boulders. The bank, only a few feet high, was lined with mesquites. At the edge of the ledge sat two pairs of shoes. Ben’s and mine. And next to that, Ben’s pistol.
Just then we heard the drone of a car engine.
Grabbing our shoes, we scrambled up the bank and took cover in the mesquites, throwing ourselves on the ground. A bronze SUV with tinted windows ground into view, churning slowly in four-wheel drive. As it lurched into the wash and drew aside the rock ledge, I saw it was a Cadillac Escalade.
The driver’s-side window slid down.
“Ollie, ollie, in come free,” sang out Athenaide.
A few minutes later, we’d jolted up onto pavement and were driving through a dusty neighborhood of manufactured homes and faded plastic shrines to the Virgin and St. Francis.
“Welcome to Lordsburg Municipal Airport,” said Athenaide as she turned into a gate in a chain-link fence. “Charles Lindbergh landed here. The place is older than JFK and O’Hare.”
“Growth rate’s been a little slower,” said Ben.
“It’s mostly served the Cessnas of local ranchers and private pilots airport-hopping across the country,” said Athenaide. “Until this past year, at any rate.”
We came to a stop next to a runway, and I saw Athenaide’s plane. It was a full-sized jet—a Gulfstream V, Ben said in my ear—and its engines were already spinning into a roar.
“The runways needed lengthening,” yelled Athenaide happily.
In the jet’s main compartment, Athenaide set the folder with Granville’s letter down on the conference table. Piled in a basket attached to the table, I found my books. The first thing I did was to flip through Chambers. Roz’s card, Granville’s letter to Child, and the xeroxes of the newspaper articles were all still there.
Even a large jet takes four hours to fly to D.C. from New Mexico. Ben read through the Cardenio story in Don Quixote, and then he went to sleep. I showed Athenaide how to pull up Double Falsehood on her laptop; when Ben was finished, she traded it for Don Quixote.
The volume of Chambers perched on my lap, I looked out the window and fidgeted. Delia Bacon had been little more than a footnote to my dissertation, but what little I’d learned intrigued me. When I told Roz that I wanted to write Delia’s biography, Roz had headed me off with a serious talk about career arcs. There was a difference between au courant and merely crazy, she’d said, and people would begin to wonder whether I was as questionable as my subjects.
Why had she driven me away from Delia, only to pounce on the topic herself? And how long ago had she done it? Down that path lay a bog of seething green rancor; I could feel it shimmering in the near distance. Concentrate on Ophelia, I told myself.
Short of tossing darts at an atlas, though, there was nothing I could do about locating Ophelia and her stash of Granville’s letters—please let them still exist—until we reached the Folger.
What about the Howards? I’d told Athenaide that the Howard story was irrelevant—and it was, so far as finding the play went. But when we found it…if we found it…what then?
If the play was good, it wouldn’t matter a hoot why it was written, or for whom. It would be silly, cruel, or beautiful, all on its own. If it wasn’t so good, though—even if it was Double Falsehood bad—links to lurid history might still make a poorly told tale interesting.
I read both letters—Granville’s to Child and Ophelia’s to Granville—again. Together, they were pretty clear. Jeremy Granville had found a manuscript of Cardenio, and something about that manuscript made him think that the play was linked to the Howards and the earl of Somerset. He also thought the playwright was linked to “the countess”—a lady whom Ophelia Fayrer Granville assumed to be Frances Howard, countess of Somerset.
Shakespeare had been one of the greatest dreamers of dreams ever to walk under the sun, yet we knew next to nothing about him. Not as a dreamer, at any rate. Not as a teller of tales. Four centuries of searching had revealed only that he was born, that he married in a hurry, sired three children on a wife he rarely saw, invested in real estate, evaded taxes, sued and was sued by his neighbors, and then died. Somewhere in there, he had published well over thirty plays—a handful of them among the best ever written, in any language, at any time—and some exquisite poetry.
But the writing, for all i
ts power, was curiously impersonal, as if the author had deliberately drawn a dark, occasionally teasing veil between his public and private dreams. You could see general connections, of course: an arc of interest moving from stories of young love early on, to stories of betrayal and bitterness in middle age, culminating in stories of fathers and daughters, redemption and recovery, as he neared the end of his life. Piles of articles and books drew connections between Hamlet and the deaths of Shakespeare’s young son Hamnet, his father, and the queen who had ruled England since before his birth. Still more claimed that the Sonnets’ triangle of a poet, a dark lady, and a golden youth traced the outlines of bittersweet experience. But it was all speculation. If art, as Hamlet said, was a mirror held up to nature, Shakespeare’s writing flashed his own reflection dimly at best.
But what if Granville’s manuscript preserved more than just a lost play? What if the manuscript gave us a glimpse of the man?
We knew nothing, after all, about whom he had loved, or how he had wooed them. What he had laughed about with his friends. What had angered him, or pricked his eyes with tears, or sent a honeyed glow of happiness through his veins. In the brilliant, bumptious world of Elizabethan London, Shakespeare had somehow achieved fame while remaining damned near invisible. To find a play that wove him into one of his era’s most lurid sex and murder scandals—and not only as observer, but as participant, however minor—would be to spark a sudden burst of fireworks on a moonless night.
It was not possible.
Was it?
I must have dozed off, because I woke to Athenaide shaking me gently by the shoulders. It was time to change, she said. Which was when I discovered that she’d somehow spirited from car to plane not only our books, but our luggage, and that I not only had clean clothes but a bedroom in which to change.
Laid out neatly across the top section of my suitcase, I found a black skirt and a crisp white top. At the bottom of the bag were some low sling-back heels I thought I could manage. Changing clothes, I pulled my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck, pinned Roz’s brooch at my shoulder, and headed back out to the main cabin.
“Lorenzo,” said Athenaide, “is expecting two additions to his catering crew this evening. A daughter of friends, and her boyfriend, I told him. Susan Quinn and Jude Hall.”
I snickered.
“What?” asked Ben. He had changed into black trousers and a white shirt.
“Shakespeare’s daughters,” I said. “Susanna and Judith—Susan and Jude. Susanna married Dr. Hall, and Judith married a Mr. Quiney. Thus Hall and Quinn. At least she reversed the last names.”
“Not a good idea,” said Ben.
“Have a sense of humor, Mr. Pearl,” chided Athenaide. “The connection didn’t leap to your eye.”
“It leapt to Kate’s.”
“The only person who’ll check Lorenzo’s list of names will be the guard at the back door.”
“Who will more than likely be FBI,” snapped Ben.
“In that case, your faces present more of a problem than your names. Especially Katharine’s.”
“This is not a game,” said Ben tightly.
“Perhaps not,” said Athenaide. “But laughter in the face of danger is a mark of courage.”
“Gravity has a better rate of survival,” said Ben.
A few minutes later, we were on the ground at Dulles, where a black limo was waiting for us. After New Mexico, D.C. looked green enough to be the Emerald City. The air, though, was unpleasantly thick, and the horizon seemed to be made of damp gray-white cotton piled claustrophobically close. Only a small circle of blue sky was visible, straight overhead.
Forty-five minutes later, we were dropped off at the catering company’s kitchens. I had to leave my books with Athenaide. “I’ll take care of them,” she promised. “You just worry about getting inside.”
The caterer was a sturdy man with salt-and-pepper hair, a neat mustache, and an operatic laugh. Handing us white coats, he introduced us to the rest of the crew, and we all piled into a large van. A little while later, we rolled up to the Art Deco shoe-box of the Folger Shakespeare Library, its white marble front lightly etched with scenes from the plays. Gliding around the building, we pulled into a drive along the back.
Unloading the van, I took the back end of a tall tray cart, guiding it backward through a utilitarian service entrance. The guard saw little more of me than a white coat and the back of my head. He checked off my name—Susan Quinn—without so much as a blink. A moment later, I heard him check off Jude Hall. We were in.
25
THE BACK DOOR led into a basement floor. Ben had put the main Reading Room absolutely off limits, on the grounds that the FBI would have planted agents among the scholars. We had arranged, instead, to meet Athenaide in the Founders’ Room, a small haven in a back corner of the main floor. She would arrange, she’d said airily, to use it as a private office that afternoon.
The chaos of preparing to serve a formal dinner to 150 of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars and patrons made it easy to slip unnoticed from the kitchen. Rounding a corner, we unbuttoned our white coats and shoved them to the bottom of a laundry cart. Then we hurried down the corridor and up the stairs to the main hallway. Near the end of the day on Friday, it was deserted. At the far end, the door to the Founders’ Room was open.
A little ways down from the stairwell lay the small office that led into the Reading Room. Just inside the open door, another gatekeeper sat at a desk. Ben held me back until we heard someone emerge from the Reading Room and turn in their exit card—not much of a distraction, but all we were likely to get. Ben nodded, and I stepped out of the stairwell, walking as casually as possible past the gatekeeper’s door, down the hall, and into the Founders’ Room.
It was empty. Ben shut the door behind us and locked it.
Originally built as a private retreat for the library’s founders, Henry and Emily Folger, the room resembled an Elizabethan withdrawing room or parlor, with rectangular paneling in dark oak, a beamed ceiling, polished hardwood floors, and blind leaded windows filled with opaque glass. In the middle stretched a long carved table surrounded by chairs a little too delicate for the rest of the room. Presiding over the whole was a magnificent portrait of Queen Elizabeth I.
There was no sign of Athenaide.
While Ben slid around the room’s perimeter, I gazed up at the queen. Her gown of red velvet and padded ivory satin worked in gold and pearls set off a fair complexion, deep red curls, and black eyes. In one hand, she held a sieve, symbol of her persona as the Virgin Queen. The painter had given her a face capable of both greatness and cruelty.
Ben was checking a set of paneled doors sealing off a stone archway, when we heard a bang in the back left corner. Both of us turned.
Through a door tucked into a nook, Dr. Nicholas Sanderson, the Folger librarian, bolted into the room, holding a loosely bound sheaf of typescript. “This had better be—” he began. And then he stopped cold on the other side of the table, looking from Ben to me. “Dr. Stanley,” he said in a strangled wheeze.
A dapper Southern gentleman in size small, he had a light Virginian accent, dark, soft eyes like a deer’s, and a sharply pointed nose. His skin was nut-brown and polished like a river stone, and curly gray hair ringed his head in a middle-aged tonsure not unlike Shakespeare’s. He was an aficionado of bow ties—that afternoon’s was red paisley—and he favored shiny shoes that clicked on hard floors.
“They—the FBI—said you might come. How did you get past them?”
“I walked.”
“I’m not sure they’ll be glad to hear that,” he said dryly.
“I’d rather they didn’t. I came to ask for your help, Dr. Sanderson.”
He put both hands behind his back, considering me. “You will understand my reluctance. As I understand it, Dr. Stanley, wherever you have appeared in the past few days, Folios have shown a marked tendency to burst into flame along with the buildings that house them.”
&nbs
p; “The Folios at the Globe and Harvard didn’t burn,” I said calmly. “They were stolen.”
“What?”
“Seventy-nine,” said Ben. “That’s the number you own, isn’t it?”
Dr. Sanderson turned to him. “And you are?”
“Hall,” answered Ben, before I could introduce him. “Jude Hall.”
I winced, but no flicker of recognition crossed Dr. Sanderson’s face. Then again, he hadn’t heard it paired with Susan Quinn. “That’s correct, Mr. Hall,” said Dr. Sanderson, his indignation reinforcing his drawl. “It is a number that comes with a certain burden of responsibility.”
“Have you counted them recently?” I asked.
He bristled. “If you are suggesting that one might have disappeared without our knowing, I must tell you that we’re a mite finicky about who handles them, even in the best of circumstances.”
“So were Harvard and the Globe,” I said.
“On top of our normal security,” Dr. Sanderson went on, “the FBI has been here for two days.”
“We got in,” said Ben.
“You may find you have a harder time getting out again,” Dr. Sanderson retorted. “But I take your point. If you’ll excuse me, perhaps I’ll make a count myself.”
“Wait,” I said, as Ben stepped between Dr. Sanderson and the door in the corner.
“Why stop me?” asked Dr. Sanderson, looking from Ben to me. “If, as you have implied, you care about the Folger and the safety of our Folios?”
“I need to look at the Bacon papers.”
“Then I take it that this is not for Mrs. Preston, after all.” Stepping forward, he set the catalog he was holding on the table.
Delia Bacon, it read. Papers.
“Unfortunately, the Reading Room is now closed for the conference, and if you’re asking for access to the vault, the answer is no. Senior staff only.”
“You’re senior staff.”
“Are you asking me to conduct research for you? Now?” Exasperation crackled through him. “As you’ve just made abundantly clear, what I need to be doing is counting Folios.”
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