When it was over, Ben wrapped his coat around me and put his arm around my shoulder.
“It was an ugly death,” he said.
“It was an assassination,” I spat. “He was turned into Caesar on the Capitol steps.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t try to excuse it or lighten it or in any way alleviate it, and for that I was grateful. I was also grateful for the arm around my shoulder. In the thickening darkness, his physical presence seemed my one link to safety. I blinked back the hot prick of tears and we walked for a ways in silence. “I think”—I swallowed hard—“I think he was also Bassianus.”
“Who?”
“Lavinia’s love. His throat was slit and his body tossed into a hole in the woods before…before she was raped and mutilated.”
Ben’s grip around me tensed. “Did he—?”
“No.” But the place between my legs where his hand had groped still burned. “Where are we going?”
“I’ve put a plan in motion, Kate, and if you won’t go to the police, the best thing to do is go through with it.”
I nodded, and we walked one more block and then turned right. Ten feet up, Ben reached over and opened the iron gate to the house on the corner—a deep blue Queen Anne house with gables and turrets, roses twining around pillars, and a swing on the front porch. Still holding my arm, he led me up the path through the garden to the front door. It was ajar. We stepped inside, and Ben closed it behind us; it locked with a click.
The house was dark, save one dim Chinese vase lamp in the hall, but Ben drew me unerringly across Oriental carpets, past a steep staircase, through a dining room, and into the kitchen at the back of the house.
“I take it you know the owners?”
“Not home at present.” Setting the two books on the kitchen table, he switched on a light. “Sit down,” he said, and I sat. “I’m going to the sink.” It was the first time he’d lost contact with me since he’d plucked me from the bushes. I watched him as if he might disappear.
Looking through some drawers, he found a clean towel and began wetting it down in the sink.
I forced the panic downward. “People just leave their houses when you want them? Leave them open?”
He looked back with a smile. “Depends on how good your connections are. But, no, not easily. It’s part of what I’ve been pulling every string I could think of to arrange for the past hour.”
Hunched at the kitchen table, I unclenched my fist. The paper I’d been holding slipped from my hand; the object inside it fell to the table with a clunk. A black brooch painted with delicate flowers. The original of the one pinned to my shirt. Was it still there? I fumbled at my shoulder.
It was there.
On the table, the paper, spotted with blood already turned brown, caught my eye. It was a letter, dated 1932, but the handwriting was a spidery copperplate that belonged to an earlier era. The signature was Ophelia’s.
One phrase, underlined twice in the center of the page, leapt out from the rest.
Miss Bacon was Right, Ophelia had written. Right piled upon Right.
The floor seemed to drop away beneath me. If Delia Bacon was right, William Shakespeare of Stratford did not write the plays.
“Oh, dear God,” someone said, and I realized the voice was mine.
INTERLUDE
May 3, 1606
ON THE WEST side of St. Paul’s, beneath the crumbling statues of prophets, a woman gazed up at two men seated in the wooden stands on the other side of the scaffold. Beyond, the jagged remains of the cathedral spire, shattered in a lightning storm half a century earlier, gnawed at the morning sky.
Covering her gown with a plain dun-colored cloak, the hood drawn up to hide the gloss of her black hair, she had followed the pair, unnoticed, all the way from Shakespeare’s house to the cathedral perched on its hill. The streets were so crowded that it had not been as hard to keep up as she had feared, though her quarry was mounted and she was afoot.
If she had wished, she could also have had a place in those stands so hastily knocked together to lift spectators of rank and wealth above the fray. She had chosen, instead, to stand among the day laborers, apprentices, stray children and dogs, maidservants, and licensed beggars thronging in the open space between, jostling for a decent view of the spectacle. The churchyard was so full that the only places left had obstructed views of the scaffold, but she did not mind. She had not come to watch the execution. She had come to watch the spectators. Two of them, to be precise.
She heard a commotion behind her, and a somber beating of drums. Catcalls and jeers rose into cacophony. A ways to the left, the throng parted and three horses walking abreast paced into the circle, drawing a wicker hurdle behind them, a man strapped upon it.
Father Henry Garnet, superior of the Jesuit Order in England. The priest the government had singled out as the scapegoat for the Powder Treason, the diabolical plan to blow up the new king, the Royal Family, the Houses of Lords and of Commons, and untold innocent bystanders as the king opened a new session of Parliament the previous November. Had it succeeded, the blast would have laid waste much of Westminster. It might well have brought England to its knees.
The woman scanned the faces in the stands—young and old, curious and eager and anxious above their neat satins and velvets. Men who would have died in a firestorm of blood and agony, had the plotters managed to ignite the gunpowder they’d squirreled away in the cellars beneath Parliament. She counted judges, privy councilors, lords, and a bishop or two. Scattered among them were others of less exalted rank but enough wealth to earn them a place of respect. Lawyers and merchants, landowners and ministers. Even the occasional poet. The Howards, she noted, were there in force, the earl of Northampton at their head, the earl of Suffolk and his son, the young Lord Howard de Walden, in tow, surrounded by servants in yellow livery.
Dragged from the hurdle, the priest asked for a quiet place to pray. In response, a black-suited official of the crown began berating him, demanding the satisfaction of a confession. Calmly, the priest denied that he had anything to confess.
She let the squabbling pass over her. Across the way, Will was caught in the spell of the priest’s gentle voice. Watching apprehension and awe quiver across his face, she hardly noticed as the crowd’s jeering and hooting dwindled and then fell away altogether.
Then she found she had to look. At the foot of the gallows, the priest helped the executioner disrobe him down to his shirt, its long tails sewn together in a pitiful attempt at modesty. With the meekness of a child, he accepted the noose around his neck, but when another minister came forward to offer Protestant prayers, the Jesuit adamantly refused him. The drums keeping time to his steps, he climbed the ladder.
At the top, he prayed briefly in Latin. The drumbeats quickened into a roll. By now, some who had earlier been screaming for blood were openly weeping. The priest crossed his arms across his breast. The king’s representative nodded. The drums cut, the executioner jerked the ladder away, and the priest plummeted downward.
On the ground, the crowd surged forward, taking the woman with them. Some forced the hangman backward, crying, “Hold! Hold!” Others pulled mercifully on the priest’s legs. He was supposed to be cut down alive, but by the time the king’s guards had muscled through to the prisoner, using bullwhips and the flats of their swords, he was dead.
The crowd drew back in eerie silence as the butchers went to work. With the hot, murky scent of a slaughterhouse welling in her nostrils, the woman swayed and closed her eyes. Wearily, she opened them again, forcing herself back to her purpose.
Up in the stands, the earl of Northampton watched the disemboweling with meticulous interest. The arguments the prosecution had used to damn Father Garnet had been his. As soon as this bloody business was over, he would return to his task of reiterating them for publication.
Father Garnet had admitted that he’d known of the powder plot and yet had done nothing to stop it. He could not, the priest had maintai
ned; he had learned of it under the seal of the confessional. The earl had dismissed that defense out of hand. Father Garnet, he’d insisted, had planned the whole disaster.
The charge was not true; the earl knew that. But it had been necessary to say so, and say so convincingly, to demonstrate his own loyalty in the face of insistent whispers that he was both a Catholic and a Spanish sympathizer. The country had needed to slake its thirst for revenge, and lest people begin to peer with suspicion at the Howards or their allies among the old Catholic families, he had given them someone else to blame.
Father Garnet was being sacrificed to save others. He, of all people, would understand that.
The earl sniffed. He’d done his job well. Pity that the organizers of this spectacle couldn’t do theirs. He had warned them against letting the priest speak.
At the block, the executioner stirred. His fist flew upward, brandishing the priest’s heart aloft, and a spray of blood arced over the crowd. In the stands opposite, a young man with golden hair put up his arm to shield his face, and a single drop fell, shining, on the lace of his sleeve. The youth went white.
“Behold the heart!” cried the executioner—the signal for a roar of satisfaction from the crowd. But no roar came. Watching the young man staring in horror at the blood on his sleeve, the crowd muttered darkly among themselves.
The earl looked closer. He recognized the face next to the young man, of course, but he thought he also recognized the youth. A Shelton, surely, though he could not remember the fellow’s first name. As a Shelton, though, he was by rights a Howard man. The earl bent to speak to his great-nephew, Theophilus, and one of the other Sheltons began threading his way through the stands toward his brother.
Meanwhile, Northampton rose into the ominous silence. “Behold the heart!” he cried, his voice flapping like a flag in the spring wind. Gravity carved on his face, he stared straight at the youth.
In penance for the sacrifice of Father Garnet, he had privately sworn to offer substitution. If one priest had to die by his machinations, he would see to it that another took orders. A priest for a priest. What better substitution than a young man marked by the blood of the martyr?
On the ground, the dark-haired woman also saw the blood splatter Will’s sleeve, saw the horror spread across his face. Then she saw movement. Another golden head weaving through the stands. One of Will’s brothers, wearing Howard yellow.
She began to push forward. But the brother reached Will first and bent to speak in his ear. In Will’s face, a spark kindled and grew, engulfing the horror in a blaze of rapture. Rising to face Northampton, holding his sleeve out before him, Will met the earl’s gaze. “Behold the heart!” he echoed hoarsely.
In that instant, she knew she had lost him. She halted.
Beside Will, Shakespeare’s eyes met hers.
They had both lost him.
She turned aside, retching. Above her, a shoving match erupted. Jostled and off-balance, she slipped to one knee. A kick hit her back, and another very nearly struck her head.
Then strong arms lifted her back to her feet. “If ye canna thole the sight o’ justice,” said a kindly Scottish voice, “better to have stayed at home.”
The sight of justice! Agony and death, present and future, were all she had seen. But it wasn’t death that made her vomit. It was new life.
She was with child. Whose child, she did not know. Two loves I have, of comfort and despair….
Wrapping the hood around her face, she stumbled away into the street.
ACT III
28
IN THE KITCHEN on Capitol Hill, I scrutinized the paper lying before me on the table and read the underlined sentence again: Miss Bacon was Right—Right piled upon Right.
I seemed, briefly, to be floating numbly around the ceiling. Because Ophelia thought Delia right doesn’t make her so, I thought in a whoosh of tangled excitement and alarm.
“Read the letter,” said Ben.
It was not easy reading. It had been newly crumpled and spotted with blood already drying to brown. And long before tonight, some nameless spattering of rain or wine or tears had smudged some of the words into blanks.
“Because Ophelia thought Delia was right doesn’t mean she was.” This time I said it aloud.
At the sink, Ben squeezed out the towel. “She thought she had evidence,” he said. “Or at least she thought Jem Granville had evidence.” Crossing back to me, Ben knelt down and began dabbing gently at my face. “A bruise or two, a few scrapes. Nothing too unpresentable. You’re a hardheaded woman, Kate Stanley.”
I caught his wrist. “We have to find it. Whatever it was that Granville found. We have to find it.”
His face was very close to mine. Nodding gravely, he pushed himself up to sit in the chair next to me. “Right, then. What do we know?” He skimmed quickly through the letter. “Ophelia and Jem Granville went looking for Cardenio; Jem found it. He may also have found evidence that Shakespeare was not Shakespeare. Jem dies; exit evidence, Ophelia switched to mute. Later, she put everything back, but we don’t know what she had taken in the first place, or from where. What she couldn’t return, she buried in her garden. Presumably in Henley-in-Arden.”
“Where she must have heard Delia raving—though if she was alive in 1932, she would have been very young, no more than a child, when Delia was there. The late 1850s, that must have been. Seventy-five years or so earlier.”
“She searched the Bacon papers for Granville in—what—1881? Could she have taken some, intending to put them back later—only to find that the papers were now closely guarded in a library? Could the doors closed against her be the doors of the Folger?”
I shook my head. “It wouldn’t be hard to add papers to a collection. You’d just slip them in. What’s risky is to remove them—at least, most people find it risky.” Ben’s mouth sketched a quick rueful grin; his eyes remained thoughtful. “In any case,” I went on, “the Folger didn’t acquire Delia’s papers—or most of them—till the 1960s. It’s possible, though, that Ophelia asked for access to the family papers again, intending to put things back, but was denied.”
“So she got out the garden shovel.”
A small half-laugh hiccoughed out of me. “Leaving us to dig up people’s dahlias all over Henley.”
“Unless we take one of the other roads toward the truth.”
Our Jacobean magnum opus, c———1623, Ophelia had written. I pulled out the catalog card Roz had tucked into the golden box, along with the brooch. It was as I remembered—in borrowing the phrase, Roz had filled in that blank to “circa”—and then abbreviated it again, to “c.” I held the letter up to the light. The i after the first c was faintly visible, and the next letter looked like an r. So her expansion made good editorial sense—but then, Roz had never allowed wishful thinking to cloud her scholarship. Only her relationships. At least we knew, now, where she’d got that infuriating phrase. But why “our”? Could Ophelia possibly have owned a Folio? It seemed unlikely. Did she have a relationship with some institution that did?
That Shakespeare pointed at the truth seemed even more useless. Shakespeare can be made to point anywhere and everywhere, as the anti-Stratfordians and avant-garde directors often demonstrate.
“Tea,” said Ben, as if that were the answer to all the world’s woes. Rising, he crossed to the stove and lit the fire under the kettle. “Let’s think about this logically,” he said, rattling through cupboards until he found mugs and a shelf full of twenty kinds of tea. “Ophelia announces that many roads lead to Truth, and then she mentions the Jacobean magnum opus. Road number one, in other words: the First Folio. Shakespeare’s complete works.”
The kettle whistled, and he poured the tea. “In the very next sentence, she tells us—or Mrs. Folger—that Shakespeare points to ‘another.’ Another what? Another road, presumably. But if the Folio points one way, why would Shakespeare, meaning his collective works, point another way in the very next sentence?” Handing me a mug, he answer
ed his own question. “They’re pretty much the same thing. Unless the second Shakespeare isn’t collective.”
“Unless the second Shakespeare isn’t the works, but the man?”
He nodded and took a sip of tea. “Think literally. Where does Shakespeare point?”
Letting the steam from my mug rise like a warm veil over my face, I thought through all the images I could remember. Not the engraved portrait in the Folio: no hands. Not the Chandos Portrait—the oil painting designated NPG 1, the foundation portrait of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. That canvas was a portrait of wary, intelligent eyes, more than anything else. The only other features I could remember were a modest lawn collar and the glint of a simple gold earring. Again, no hands. There were other, more dubious portraits whose receding hairlines were balanced by fancier clothes—slashed scarlet satin with silver buttons or dark brocade threaded with silver and gold. But they were all images of men from the shoulders—or at most, the elbows—up. None of them pointed anywhere.
“What about statues?” asked Ben.
I shook my head. The only near-contemporary statue was the one on the funerary monument in Stratford. I’d seen a copy of that just that afternoon, from across the Folger Reading Room. A face nearly as round as Charlie Brown’s, and an expression tending toward jolly or smug, depending on the viewer’s willingness to be pleased. He held pen and blank paper at ready, resting on a pillow. But ready for what? He looked more like a clerk primed for dictation than a genius awaiting inspiration.
“At least he has hands,” said Ben.
“But they don’t point anywhere.”
“Does the image have to be contemporary?”
I sat back. I’d just assumed…but of course, it only had to be old enough for Ophelia and probably Jem to have seen it. What other statues of him were there? A blurred, gray-and-white image stirred in my mind. White marble, gray background…
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