“He was allowed to lay aside his Jesuit vows in favor of the Franciscan order. And in 1626, he was sent to New Spain—to Santa Fe—with Fray Alonso de Benavides. He disappeared and was presumed martyred by the Indians on a journey into the wilderness southwest of Santa Fe.”
My stomach did a small flip.
“We have a book, though, that once belonged to Father Shelton,” said the rector. “Not many people know about it, but I think perhaps you should see it.” Walking to a far corner, he pulled out a tall book bound in red calf, opened it, and handed it to me.
“Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies,” I read. “Published according to the True Originall Copies.” Below those lines was the pale duck’s-egg head of Shakespeare floating on the platter of his ruff. I was holding a First Folio.
“The Jacobean magnum opus,” said Ben with a low whistle.
The rector reached over and closed the book. I looked up anxiously. Is that all he would let me see?
“I thought you might be interested in the cover,” he said.
Sir Henry and Ben crowded around me. The leather had been stamped in gilt with the figure of an eagle with a child in its talons. In my hands, the book suddenly seemed to vibrate, as if I’d set my palms on the soundboard of a piano.
“You know the crest?” asked the rector.
“Derby,” I whispered.
“Derby,” he repeated. “It was sent to Father Shelton by the earl of Derby.”
“The sixth earl,” I said. “His name was William too.”
In the silence that followed, the room seemed to stretch, the books on their shelves leaning in, listening.
“My name is Will,” murmured Ben.
“William Stanley,” I specified.
“Stanley?” said Sir Henry in disbelief. “As in—”
“As in W. S.,” said Ben.
There was a knock at the door, and I jumped. “Come,” said the rector. A young priest poked his head into the room. “You have a phone call, Monsignor.”
“Take a message.”
“It’s from His Grace, the archbishop of Westminster.”
The rector rumbled with annoyance and excused himself.
“I don’t like this,” said Ben as the door closed. “Do what you must and we’re leaving.”
There was an old copier in the corner. I switched it on and it hummed into life. As it warmed up, I opened the Folio.
“Stanley?” Sir Henry asked again, glaring at me.
“No relation,” I said shortly, flipping through the book, looking for markings—marginalia, doodles, underlines, signatures—anything added by hand.
“To you, or to Shakespeare?” persisted Sir Henry. “Feel free to say both.”
I reached the end of the book but found nothing. The only mark of interest was Derby’s crest on the cover. “To me,” I answered in vexation. “I can’t help it if Derby’s a dark-horse candidate for Shakespeare…. You asked,” I added, as Sir Henry swore.
I paged through the book again, this time more slowly, explaining Derby’s candidacy as I went. Educated, athletic, and aristocratic, William Stanley, sixth earl of Derby, was a perfect fit for the man who should have written Shakespeare’s works. His father and older brother both kept famous companies of players, so he grew up with theater quite literally in the house. Though he was nominally Protestant, his family’s power base in Lancashire was a bastion of the old Catholic religion. He was a fine musician and a devotee of hunting and hawking. He spent lavishly, knew a bit about the law, and traveled in Europe. He married the earl of Oxford’s eldest daughter, and then, under the influence of a malicious lieutenant, very nearly let jealousy tear his young marriage apart. He was a patron and disciple of John Dee, the historical magus behind the figure of Shakespeare’s great magician, Prospero.
“On top of all that,” I finished, “he wrote plays. At least, we have the word of a Jesuit spy to say so.”
“Jesuit spy?” protested Sir Henry, incredulous.
“He was sent to assess Derby as a candidate to head a Catholic rebellion. He reported back that the earl wouldn’t be of much use, seeing as he was ‘busy penning comedies for the common players.’”
“Christ,” said Ben. “Have you read any of them?”
I shook my head. “They’ve disappeared. Ironic, seeing as the spy’s letter was intercepted and carefully preserved in government files.”
“So Derby’s candidacy sounds about like Oxford’s,” said Ben.
“Better, in some ways.”
“Because of his name?” scoffed Sir Henry. “Every fifth boy in England is named William.”
“There’s also geography,” I said. “Derby’s from the right part of the country to explain the plays’ dialect; Oxford isn’t. Derby’s more likable than Oxford, too. He never seems to have fingered his friends as traitors, at any rate. Most of all, his life span’s right. Unlike Oxford, he was alive through the whole period when the plays were written.”
“If Derby’s so perfect, why dismiss him as a dark horse?” asked Ben.
Again, I had reached the end of the Folio, having found nothing. Frustrated, I closed it. “He’s got everything going for him except the one thing that matters: a clear link to Shakespeare.”
“Until now,” said Ben.
I looked at the Derby crest of the eagle and child stamped on the Folio’s cover. It was a link, all right. It was evidence. But of what?
The copier beeped its readiness. With a sigh, I set the book facedown on the glass and pushed the button.
The machine’s light was sweeping across the book when the door flew open and the rector stalked back inside. Swatting the door closed, he stood with his hands crossed before him like a warrior monk from the Middle Ages, equally at home with a sword as with a crucifix. From the corner of my eye, I saw Ben easing toward the door.
“You have not been altogether honest with me,” said the rector, holding out one hand for the book. “The archbishop reports that someone is burning Folios across two continents,” he went on. “And killing to get at them.”
Reluctantly I returned the Folio. “Someone is burning and killing,” I said quietly. “But it’s not us.”
His eyes flicked to the copier. “No. You are just copying, without permission. Which amounts to stealing. What are you looking for?”
“Shakespeare,” I answered. That much was true.
“In this book?”
“Through it,” said Sir Henry.
“Then you’ve deciphered the inscription, have you?”
I looked up. By the door, Ben paused. “What inscription?” I asked. What had I missed?
Monsignor Armstrong looked at each of us in turn. “If I show you,” he said with distaste, “you will inform me of anything you may learn about Father Shelton.” He was not asking, I realized; he was setting a price.
“If I understand what I see,” I said tightly.
For a moment, his gaze rested on me; I could feel him weighing distrust against curiosity. With a curt nod, he walked back to the table, set down the book, and opened it. He peeled back the inside front cover, and I realized that, at some point, a protective layer had been pasted over the original.
On the page beneath was a drawing in ink faded to brown. A monstrous creature with the long neck and head of a swan, outspread eagle’s wings that became boar’s heads, and the talons and tail feathers of an eagle. One talon gripped a child in a basket; the other held a spear.
I sat down heavily.
“The chimerical beast,” said Sir Henry, awed.
“The eagle, the swan, the boar, and the hog,” said Ben. “The earl of Derby—Will. Lady Pembroke, the sweetest swan. The earl of Oxford, the boar, and Francis Bacon, the hog.”
“And one more,” I said quietly, pointing to the talons. “The one on the right, with the child—you’re right, that’s the Derby eagle. But the other, with the spear—I think it’s meant to be a falcon.”
“Shakespeare’s crest
,” said Sir Henry. “The falcon with the lance.”
Miss Bacon was right. Right piled upon right…. As if someone were twisting a kaleidoscope, the pattern of what I thought I knew shimmered and shifted; the picture that began to emerge wasn’t one that I was sure I wanted to see. “They were all in on it,” I said slowly.
“In on what?” asked the rector.
“The making of this book,” said Sir Henry.
I shook my head. What was it that Will had written? “Something of the cloud castles—the toys and trifles—which our chimerical beast conjured up should not altogether melt into the shadows of devouring night.” Had they come together to commission the plays, and then to publish them? Or had they done something more?
Beneath the chimerical beast, someone had written some lines from a sonnet in fine script. Sir Henry read it aloud:
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.
The hand was the same that had written the letter to the Sweetest Swan, and signed his name “Will.”
At the bottom of the page, scrawled in less careful lettering, was another sentence: The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
“Julius Caesar,” said Ben.
“No,” I said impatiently. “Ophelia. Jem’s Ophelia,” I explained to the confused faces gathered around me. “Not Hamlet’s. She quoted the same line, in her letter to Mrs. Folger.” Professor Child, she’d said, had warned her against silence. And she had kept her promise, by inverting those lines. How had she put it? I write to you…that the good that we do might live after us, while the evil lies interred with our bones.
On the subject of Shakespeare pointing, Ophelia Granville had been literal, in the underhanded way of the witches in Macbeth. What if she’d also been literal about interment? What had she buried with her bones?
In a flash, I understood. Not with her bones.
Miss Bacon was Right. Right piled upon Right. That made for two rights. Not one. First and foremost, Delia Bacon had believed that the works of Shakespeare were written by Sir Francis Bacon, at the head of a secret cabal. But she had also believed that the truth of the author’s identity was buried in Shakespeare’s grave.
I pointed at the sonnet inscribed in Derby’s book: My name be buried where my body is. “Delia Bacon believed that,” I said. “She tried to prove it.”
“Tried?” bristled Sir Henry, who’d been explaining the story to the rector. “What do you mean ‘tried’?”
“She got permission to open the grave, in Trinity Church, in Stratford. She held vigil alone in the church one night, meaning to pry it open, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to do it. At least, that’s what she wrote to her friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
But by that time, Delia was fast sinking into madness. What if she had opened the grave? And found something? What would have happened to what she knew?
It would have gone with her, babbling and wailing, to a madhouse in the Forest of Arden, where lived a young girl named Ophelia. The daughter of Delia’s doctor.
What else had Ophelia said? I reeled through the note in my head. That she and Jem had sinned against both God and man, but she’d returned all she could to its rightful place.
I avoided Ben’s and Sir Henry’s eyes. Shakespeare’s grave was what the three of us were thinking. Stratford. But no one dared say it.
“We must go,” said Sir Henry.
“I think that is all I wish to know at present,” said the rector, suddenly prim. He swept up the book, and I half rose, afraid that he would whisk it away, and none of us would ever see it again. To my surprise, he went to the copier and xeroxed the chimerical beast. Gathering up the still-warm page with the copy I’d made of the cover, he handed them both to me.
“Thank you,” I said, stunned.
“If you find any trace of the priest, let me know.”
I nodded. We had made a bargain; I would keep it.
“Now then,” he said briskly, “I agree with Sir Henry. You should go.” He led us quickly back to the front door, his black robe trimmed in red swishing against the tile. “God grant you safe journeys and peaceful days,” he said as we stepped back out into the bright Spanish sun and hailed a taxi. I had one last glimpse of him silhouetted in the doorway, holding the book before him like a shield, and then we were speeding back up the hill toward the airport.
I stared at the xeroxed pages in my lap. My name be buried where my body is.
No one spoke. We all knew where we were headed, and why. It seemed likely to be neither safe nor peaceful.
36
“IS THERE A First Folio in Stratford?” asked Ben as the plane lifted from the runway, heading back for the U.K.
“Not an original. Stratford’s more about houses than books. There’s at least one fine copy of the Folio, though.”
“Where?”
“New Place—the house Shakespeare bought for himself once he’d made it big. Or at Nash’s House, right next door, at any rate. New Place was the second-best house in town when Shakespeare bought it, but it was torn down long ago. It’s a garden, now. Nash’s House, next door, was his granddaughter’s home. There’s a whole exhibition of Shakespeare in print there, with a big section on the First Folio.”
Ben swore. “There’ll be thick security at Nash’s place, then. And probably the Birthplace too. Sinclair will be taking no chances.”
“All that matters is the church,” said Sir Henry. “There wasn’t a guard at Westminster Abbey.”
“I wouldn’t count on it at Stratford,” said Ben. “Not after Wilton House.”
The sodding bastard who burned a national monument on my watch, Sinclair had said. I want him. From what I knew of DCI Sinclair, he wouldn’t stop till he’d found his quarry—which would be fine, if he hadn’t confused the killer with me.
Not that he was so far off, I thought with a stab of bitterness, remembering Mrs. Quigley dead in Ben’s arms. Would the killer have found his way to her—or to Maxine and Dr. Sanderson—if I hadn’t led him there? It’s not your fault, Ben had said. Watching the shadow of the plane flit over the earth, I struggled to believe that.
North of the Pyrenees, clouds gathered like fleece floating on a breeze. Over the channel, they congealed into a thick gray blanket. We sank into them, thin streaks of rain striping the plane’s windows. It was pouring when we landed in London. Barnes met us at the curb, and we were soon headed west through the rain, toward Stratford.
It had been a while since I’d been there. All I could picture were gabled and half-timbered houses, jostling against each other and leaning into the crowded streets. That, and Roz’s voice.
The town had been prosperous in the Middle Ages and Renaissance but had later dwindled into a poor, sleepy place. When the fast-talking ringmaster of all humbugs, P. T. Barnum, had expressed interest in buying the Birthplace and shipping it to New York, horror had galvanized the British into protecting their heritage. A fine enough legacy for Barnum, I reflected.
Roz hadn’t agreed. She’d loathed the place even more than she loathed the Globe. At least, she’d noted darkly, the Globe didn’t claim that Shakespeare had actually played on its reconstructed boards. The Birthplace, she’d maintained, was equally make-believe, but far more damningly hypocritical. Almost as much a boondoggle as Barnum’s flea circus or his mummified mermaid. There wasn’t a single scrap of evidence that Shakespeare had actually set foot in the house worshipped by millions as his birthplace—an edifice that had been mostly reconstructed in the nineteenth century, anyway. And yet guides happily showed a sucker a minute the very bed Shakespeare was supposedly born in. The one house he had demonstrably lived in—the New Place, once Stratford’s second-best house—was now a hole in the ground.
“A garden,” I’d protested. “Not a hole.”
“A
garden where the bottom of his cellar used to be,” she’d retorted. “Wisteria winding out of his cesspit. Roses rooted in the remains of his shit.”
He had been born somewhere in Stratford, I’d argued, and more than likely on Henley Street, where records showed that his father owned houses, though I had to admit we didn’t know which ones. But it’s a damned sight easier to worship at a particular house than to stand in a street and sow your adoration across an undefined stretch of space.
“Religion,” Roz had said dismissively. “Opiate of the masses.”
“An opiate,” I’d observed, “that pays your salary.”
“If you must worship,” she’d said, “worship his words. If you must choose a church, go to the theater.”
In that, at least, I’d taken her at her word.
“Come to think of it,” she’d finished airily, “if presence is your thing, the church is the one authentically Shakespearean building in town. The man’s still there, for God’s sake.”
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Ophelia had labored to reverse that. Had she?
We were going to find out.
The car fell very quiet save for the hiss of wheels against a rain-slicked road and the quiet flicker of windshield wipers. The town rose suddenly out of green fields and hills. Winding around curved streets, we crossed a bridge over the Avon and turned down High Street.
We pulled up at Sir Henry’s favorite haunt, the Shakespeare Hotel, not far from the church. A long, authentically Tudor building in white plaster and dark timbers, steeply gabled and leaning a little with age, it was still graceful. Inside, it was frankly luxurious. Sir Henry booked a suite and ordered dinner sent up to the room. Then we drove around to the back, and I slipped discreetly inside.
Once I’d been safely installed in the room, Ben left to scout security at the church. While Sir Henry dozed in a wingback chair, I sat on one of the beds, staring at the xeroxed pages from the Valladolid Folio.
The Derby crest on the binding showed that William Stanley had owned the First Folio—not that he had written it. Even the Shakespeare quotations inside were not proof of that. The “I” of any sonnet was a loose marker—a mask that anyone could wear. What the quotation showed was that Derby knew one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, along with a snippet from Julius Caesar.
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