Interred with Their Bones

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  “Have you given up on the letter?” asked Sir Henry, settling into our most comfortable chair.

  “They’re related,” I said. “I know it. I just can’t figure out how.”

  But thy eternal summer shall not fade, read the gold lettering. To the Greater Glory of God.

  What did this have to do with the letter we’d just found? They might not be directly related, but Ophelia had indicated that the painting and the letter were different roads to the same truth, so they must belong to the same little world.

  Roz had always insisted that meaning came from context. What kind of context did the miniature give to the letter? Or the letter to the miniature?

  The miniature, with its crucifix, was clearly Catholic. The letter appeared to be about the First Folio. What could they have to do with each other?

  “There’s a connection,” I said in frustration. “But I’m not enough of a religious historian to see it.”

  “Perhaps it’s time to call on someone who is,” said Sir Henry.

  “I don’t know one,” I said.

  “Seems to me you could use someone up on both religious history and Shakespeare,” said Ben. He was watching me with interest, and I thought I knew why. We’d both seen the title to Matthew’s paper in the Folger brochure. Shakespeare and the Fires of Secret Catholicism.

  “I don’t want to ask him for help,” I said hotly.

  Sir Henry perked up. “Ask whom?”

  “Matthew,” I said. “Professor Matthew Morris.”

  “He’s eager enough to give it,” said Ben.

  “Ah,” said Sir Henry, “I begin to see. Has the poor man done anything more heinous than express interest in you?”

  “He annoys me,” I said lamely. “He annoyed Roz too.”

  “Occasionally, my dear,” said Sir Henry, “you are a Class-A prig.” He held out his phone. “If he can solve our problem, call the man.”

  “Use mine,” said Ben. “Much harder to trace.”

  “Roz would hate it,” I groused.

  “She’d hate it more if her killer gets hold of her quarry,” said Ben. He set his BlackBerry to speakerphone, and I pulled Matthew’s card from my pocket and dialed the number.

  Matthew answered at the second ring. “Kate,” he said groggily. And then I heard him sit up. “Kate? Where are you? Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. What can you tell me about the phrase Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam?”

  His voice split. “You’re on the run, and you want me for Latin?”

  “I can do the Latin. For the Greater Glory of God. But I still don’t know what it means.”

  “Are you going to tell me what this is about?”

  “You said to call if I needed your help. And I’m calling.”

  There was a little silence. “It’s the motto of the Jesuits.”

  I started and stopped myself. The Roman Catholic soldiers of Christ. Devout and often zealous priests intent on bringing England back to the Catholic fold.

  Matthew went on. “The bugbears of the Cecils and pretty much all the rest of Elizabeth’s and James’s councilors, who branded them traitors. An uncomfortable label they carried with the patience of saints. Literally. I think about ten of them are saints, after being hanged, drawn, and quartered for their faith.”

  “Jesus,” I breathed.

  “Exactly,” said Matthew. “The Society of Jesus.”

  On the table, the flames in the painting flickered and lapped at the young man.

  “In the context of that phrase,” I said with what I hoped sounded like calm, “what would you make of this sentence?” I read the words looping and curving in ink faded to brown: I take upon myself the duetie of writing to excuse this our silence to St. Alban.

  “Normally I’d think of Bacon,” he said. “But connected to the Jesuit motto, I’d have to consider Valladolid.”

  “Spain?”

  “Yes, Spain.” Matthew yawned and fell into lecture mode. “Valladolid’s the old capital of Castile. Home of the Royal English College, founded in the 1580s by Spain’s king Philip the Second in order to train Englishmen in the Catholic priesthood. Most of the priests took Jesuit orders and were sent covertly back to England, to minister to the faithful in secret. According to the English government, they were also sent to lure loyal English subjects into plotting violence against their Protestant sovereigns, to take by force what they could not win by sweet persuasion. The English government regarded the place as a training ground for religious terrorists.”

  “Why St. Alban?”

  “Its full name is the Royal English College of St. Alban.”

  For a moment, no one moved. Crossing to the phone, I switched it off speaker mode. “I owe you, Matthew.”

  He was quiet. “You know what I want.”

  “I do,” I said. Give me a chance, he had said. “God knows you deserve it,” I added as I hung up.

  I tossed the phone back to Ben, who had stretched himself out on the bed and was staring up at the ceiling with a knowing smile I found vaguely irritating.

  “You think that’s it?” asked Sir Henry. “Valladolid? Seems dicey to me.”

  I sat down at the desk, feeling suddenly exhausted. “The Royal English College has other connections to Shakespeare. Two of them. What do you want first, plausible or implausible?”

  “I vote we start with crazed and work back toward sane,” said Ben folding his hands behind his head.

  “Marlowe, then,” I said, running a hand through my too-short hair. “The godless, gay bad-boy rock star of Elizabethan England. Darling of the theaters before Shakespeare.”

  “Stabbed in the eye in a tavern brawl,” said Ben.

  I nodded. “In 1593, just when Shakespeare was coming into his own. Yes. That one. Only, the stabbing might not have been a simple brawl—because Marlowe was also a spy. Sent to the Netherlands, among other assignments, to infiltrate groups of exiled English Catholics thought to be plotting rebellion…. There’s decent evidence that his companions at that tavern were also spies, and that the tavern was a safe house.”

  “Not so safe for Marlowe,” said Ben.

  I put my feet up on the desk. “There’s dubious evidence that he didn’t die that afternoon. That he escaped—or was sent abroad. To Spain.”

  “Pah!” exclaimed Sir Henry from the armchair.

  Ben was quieter. “To Valladolid?”

  I nodded. “In 1599, the college’s register shows that a man named alternatively John Matthews or Christopher Morley entered the college…. Morley’s a variant of Marlowe that the playwright used on occasion, and John Matthews was a common—though not very clever—priestly alias, drawn from the Gospels.” I shook my head. “Whoever he was, this priest took orders in 1603 and went back to England, where he was caught and clapped into prison. The weird thing is that in an era when prisoners had to pay for their own keep—or starve on a vermin-infested floor—Robert Cecil, King James’s chief minister of state, personally paid Morley’s bill. Which makes him look like a government agent.

  “The simplest way to explain the Valladolid Morley is to say that both the man’s names were aliases—one borrowed from the Gospels and one from a dead man—possibly because the priest was an English spy.”

  “The straight line between two points,” said Ben. “Let’s hear the—how did you put it for Athenaide?—the tangled wanderings—”

  “Of a drunken June bug,” I chimed in. “There are those who believe that the reason no one can prove Shakespeare wrote anything before 1593 is that before 1593 he was writing under his real name: Christopher Marlowe.”

  Hooting with derision, Sir Henry leapt from the chair and went wheeling around the room.

  “I told you it was crazy,” I said. “In this scenario, part of the deal of his disappearance was that Cecil would see to it that his plays were still produced in London.”

  “So ‘Shakespeare’ goes to Valladolid,” said Ben. He was fiddling with his phone, surfing the Net as we talked.
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br />   “Exactly.”

  “What’s the other connection?” asked Sir Henry, still pacing.

  “Cervantes.”

  Sir Henry stopped in his tracks.

  “Maybe he wrote Shakespeare’s plays,” said Ben with a straight face.

  I scowled at him. “There are people who think so. And others who believe Shakespeare wrote Don Quixote.”

  “And others, no doubt, who think he came back as Einstein and wrote the general theory of relativity,” retorted Sir Henry. “Why not give him War and Peace and The Iliad and the Bible, while we’re at it?”

  “Let’s stick with Shakespeare as Shakespeare for a minute,” I began.

  “How novel,” said Sir Henry.

  “We’ve more or less forgotten about the play, but Cardenio’s still part of this story,” I went on. “And Cardenio, you might say, was birthed in Valladolid. When King Philip the Third moved the entire Spanish court from Madrid to Valladolid, Cervantes went with them. It was in Valladolid in 1604 that he readied the first part of Don Quixote for print and finished writing the second part.”

  No one moved. I smoothed a hand across the letter. St. Alban.

  “That same spring, the new king James sent an embassy to Spain to sign a peace treaty. The earl of Nottingham—a Howard—brought to Valladolid a retinue of four hundred Englishmen, among them young gentlemen who took a deep interest in all things Catholic, and learned to take an equally deep interest in all things Spanish. Including theater and literature. And religion. It was feared, in some quarters, that the Jesuits would corrupt them, and that the young men might one day try to return in circumstances the English would find less laudable.”

  In the painting, the young man held up his crucifix, a dare in his eyes. Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam.

  “If the golden youth went to Valladolid intending to take Jesuit orders, either then or later, he would have had opportunity to bring Cervantes’s tale of Cardenio to Shakespeare’s attention. Or to one of his patrons’ attention. Maybe the Howards’. It would make sense of ‘Will’ writing to explain why the Spanish play would not be in the Folio.”

  On the bed, Ben sat up. “It might also explain how a manuscript of an English play got to the Arizona–New Mexico border.”

  I twisted around to look at him.

  “In the seventeenth century, that area of the U.S. was the far northern fringe of New Spain. Ruled and explored by Spanish conquistadors.”

  “Who were accompanied by Spanish priests,” I said.

  “Or, at any rate, priests from Spain.”

  “Perhaps one was English,” said Sir Henry.

  Behind the golden-haired man, the painted flames swirled. I thought of words scrawled in faded ink along the page of a letter: I take upon myself the duetie of writing to excuse this our silence to St. Alban.

  Ben looked up from his BlackBerry. “Ryanair has two direct flights a day. London to Valladolid.”

  We booked three seats on the morning flight.

  35

  “I’VE SPOKEN WITH His Grace, the archbishop of Westminster,” Sir Henry announced as he arrived back at our door the next morning. “The rector of St. Alban will see me at eleven.”

  “Just you?” I asked.

  “I believe I may have forgotten to mention that I am traveling with companions,” said Sir Henry. “I trust the rector is a flexible man.”

  At Stansted Airport, northeast of London, no one looked twice at my passport, despite its growing collection of wrinkles and water stains. Sir Henry got one double take, but after a wink, the guard managed to be discreet. No one else recognized him. He walked through the airport like a tired old man, and people gave him hardly a glance. The three of us crowded together into the eye-popping yellow and blue of a Ryanair jet, and then we were in the air.

  I watched out the window as we flew over the Pyrenees and descended over the brown Castilian plain, striped at wide intervals with meandering green rivers. On the ground, we piled into a taxi and sped down a long hill toward Valladolid. On either side rose flat-topped hills like mesas, covered with tan grass and dotted with solitary trees. The conquistadors must have faced the stark aridity of northern Mexico and the southwestern U.S. with nostalgia. It would have looked like home.

  The city came upon us suddenly—a smattering of warehouses and new buildings, a bridge over a smooth, slow river, and then we were swallowed by old Europe. Houses with tall windows and graceful balconies shaded the streets. People sipped drinks at sidewalk cafés and strolled under trees or through market stalls and fountain-studded plazas. We pulled up along a long brick wall. Just peeping over the top, I could see a white dome.

  “El Real Colegio de Ingleses,” announced our taxi driver.

  Stepping into the street, I blinked in the Spanish sunlight, thin and sharp as a stiletto. The large double doors to the church were firmly shut. A little ways down was a smaller entry, set back from the street. We rang the bell and waited.

  It was opened, a few minutes later, by the rector himself. Monsignor Michael Armstrong, rector of the Royal College of St. Alban, was a barrel-chested man with gray hair and a long, thin nose like that of a Byzantine saint; he wore a black cassock tied with a red sash. He introduced himself with a stiff politeness that had all the welcoming cheer of granite.

  Ushering us into the echoing entry hall, he led us swiftly through white corridors tiled in terra-cotta. I was expecting an office, but we stepped into the quiet dimness of a church. “The students are gone and the staff reduced to a skeleton for the summer,” said the rector. “We’re making use of the emptiness to paint the offices and replace all the windows. For the time being, this is the best place to speak.”

  It was a small basilica in the Spanish baroque style. Painted green and red, and stacked with gilded saints, the High Altar struck me as very like the stage at the Globe. In the center stood the Virgin Vulnerata that English sailors had mangled in the raid of Cádiz in 1596, and which her Catholic countrymen had venerated ever since. Mary, Queen of Heaven. Her nose was gone, and both her arms. Lavinia, I thought suddenly, looking away from her scarred face.

  “I’ve been told, Sir Henry, that you’re after Shakespeare.” The rector’s accent was broad northern English. Yorkshire, maybe. “You are not the first, I’m afraid. We’ve looked time and again.” He spread his hands in helpless dismay, but the set of his mouth was stern. “You’ll not find him here, nor Marlowe either. If you wish, I can show you the Marlowe—or Morley—entry in the college register. It is quite clearly marked as an alias.” He smiled coldly. “In the time of the persecutions, dead men’s names were useful masks to protect the living.”

  “Lucky for us, then, that we’re not looking for Marlowe,” said Sir Henry. “It’s true that we’re looking for Shakespeare, but we don’t expect to find him here.”

  Surprise played faintly around Monsignor Armstrong’s eyes. “Whom were you hoping to find?”

  “Someone who may have known him,” said Sir Henry.

  “Here? You think Shakespeare may have had a connection to this college?”

  I pulled out the brooch and opened the little hinge on the back, holding it out so that he could see the portrait of the young man with his crucifix. “We’re looking for him.”

  Monsignor Armstrong’s severity mellowed. “Exquisite,” he breathed. “Is it a Hilliard?”

  “We hope so,” said Sir Henry.

  “It’s certainly a martyrdom portrait,” said the rector. “I have heard of these, but never seen one…. What was his name?”

  “William,” said Sir Henry with a sly smile. “But not Shakespeare.”

  Monsignor Armstrong chuckled. “Are my suspicions so transparent? You would not believe the odd, insistent questions we get…. Do you have a surname?”

  “No,” I said.

  “A date?”

  “Not very exact. He must have been here by 1621, though. We suspect that he did not go back to England.”

  “God’s work can be done in many plac
es.”

  “He might have gone to the New World. To New Spain,” said Ben.

  “That would have been unusual, for an Englishman.” He looked back down at the miniature. “Especially for a Jesuit, which is what this motto suggests…. The old college register may be of use, after all. Come with me.”

  He led us out of the church and back through the maze of tiled corridors, past a courtyard of olive trees drenched in sun. Presently we stopped before a locked door. He opened it, and I saw a pale green library, lined with books in leather and gilt, stretching away on the other side of the door.

  From one of the shelves, the rector pulled down a heavy blue book. A printed edition, not the original. It looked to be in Latin. He skimmed through the pages until he came to 1621, and then with one thick finger he roved slowly down through the entries. He stopped briefly, went on, and came back. “I thought so. There’s only one man who fits your description. His name was William Shelton.”

  I knew that name. “It was a Shelton who first translated Don Quixote into English,” I said.

  “You’ve done your homework,” said the rector approvingly. “That would be William’s brother Thomas. Though there’s a persistent tradition that William made the translation, allowing it to be passed off as his brother’s so that it might be published. As a Jesuit, you know, William was persona non grata in England. It was certainly William, though, who had easy access to the Quixote. And who spoke Spanish.”

  “Did he have any connection with the Howards?” asked Ben.

  “The earl of Northampton helped him get here and stood guarantee for him. It was necessary then, with so many spies about.”

  “A Howard helped him to get here?”

  “Is that important?”

  “Possibly. Did he leave any papers or letters?”

  Monsignor Armstrong shook his head. “They kept their own letters, I’m afraid. We’ve nothing like that.” He looked at me, gimlet-eyed. “Give us a little credit. If we had a note from Shakespeare, I fancy we’d know it.”

  “If the note was clearly from him,” I countered. “Surely your correspondents used aliases, as much as your priests did. Where did Shelton go?”