That did not make him Shakespeare.
But it was a link. Fragile as a single filament of spider’s web, and as strong.
The chimerical beast was another story.
The eagle, the swan, the boar, and the hog, the falcon brandishing his lance: Set next to the letter from Will to the Sweetest Swan, the drawing in the Folio suggested that they were all in on the creation of Shakespeare. But how?
There are infinite configurations of collaboration. Perhaps Derby, Lady Pembroke, Bacon, and Oxford had come together to support the playwright. Maybe they saw to it that trouble did not shadow Mr. Shakespeare, and that he had, in Virginia Woolf’s words, five hundred a year and a room of his own—including a share in the King’s Men and their theater, the Globe. A formidable backing, that would have been.
But maybe it went farther. Maybe now and again, one of them suggested a story line, or rather pointedly lent a book—Take a look at this tale, I think you’ll like it. Maybe they’d received, in return, a chance to vet his work early, to suggest a phrase here or there, or a name. Maybe they’d each had a pet project or two—Bacon and The Merry Wives, Lady Pembroke and Antony, Oxford and Hamlet, Derby and The Tempest. At the other end of the spectrum—was it possible that the members of the beast had written everything themselves, collectively or individually, and had merely employed William Shakespeare as messenger and mask?
The door opened and Ben walked in, damp with rain, carrying an athletic bag that looked as if it held something heavier than running shoes. “The town’s crawling with coppers. Sinclair’s hand, no doubt. But they’re mostly concentrated around the Birthplace and Nash’s House, with its book exhibit. New Place, next door, has either armed its gardeners or acquired some not-very-undercover agents. On the bright side, all that’s left over for the church is one constable patrolling the perimeter.”
Sir Henry leaned forward, suddenly bright-eyed. “How do we get in?”
“And stay in long enough to pry open a grave?” I added.
“We ask the sexton nicely,” said Ben, “when he makes his evening rounds at eleven o’clock to check lights and locks.” He dismissed my doubtful glance with impatience. “I’ll get you in. You worry about what to do once we’re there.”
A waiter arrived with a trayful of dishes, and Sir Henry and Ben tucked into roast beef, bright peas, and Yorkshire pudding. I shook my head. I couldn’t eat. I went to the window and flung it open, watching people step from lighted doorways and hurry through the rain. The nightly exodus from the restaurants toward the theaters had begun.
Right around 1593, Shakespeare had experienced a sudden blossoming not only in sheer fertility, but in tone, in interest, and in sophistication. In the space of six or seven years, two and sometimes three masterpieces a year had poured from his pen, before he scaled back down to one a year. Quite possibly, Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and King John had all come into being within the space of a year and a half. Most writers would kill for that kind of quality in quantity across six decades, never mind six years.
The only way to explain that run was a bright, inexplicable flowering of genius. But what if five minds had fed that flowering, instead of one? Was it possible that this sudden fecundity marked the making of a little academy, the fivefold chimerical beast?
Of all of his fellows, Derby was the most likely to have to have “discovered” Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford. Could the northern earl’s son and the Warwickshire glover’s son have met at a play in Stratford, Coventry, or Chester—or even at Knowsley Hall or Lathom Park, the northern palaces of the earls of Derby? The theater was unruly ground where different ranks mingled. Had the two W. S.’s somehow hit it off? Measured one another up, each finding the other amusing, or at least useful? Had Shakespeare ridden out of Stratford and into London as a member of the Earl of Derby’s Men?
This was crazy. I was turning into Delia. Miss Bacon had imagined that Bacon was Shakespeare; Ms. Stanley was beginning to imagine Stanley in his place. Delia had wanted to open Shakespeare’s grave; I intended to open it again that very night.
Delia was Right. Right piled upon Right.
Delia was mad.
Grabbing the volume of Chambers, I shook out all the papers I’d stashed in its pages. The letters fluttered out like dead moth’s wings, falling in a dry heap on the carpet. I knelt and sorted through them, barely aware of Ben and Sir Henry gaping at me from the table.
I had evidence, damn it. Roz’s catalog card. Jeremy Granville’s letter to Professor Child. Ophelia’s letter to Jem. Her much later letter to Emily Folger. The countess of Pembroke’s letter to her son—We have the man Shakespeare with us. Will’s letter to the Sweetest Swan. The inscription in Derby’s Folio. And last, and by far the most beautiful, the miniature of the young man against a background of flames, hidden inside Ophelia’s brooch.
What did we know? Really know?
Shakespeare had written a play based on the Cardenio tale in Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote—and the play seemed to have echoed a lurid bit of Howard history. The Globe burned and the play disappeared.
Years later, Will—probably Derby—wrote to “the Sweetest Swan”—probably the countess of Pembroke—to say that he did not mind the notion of a Folio of collected works, so long as Cardenio was left out—and he would explain things to someone at the Royal College of St. Alban, in Valladolid. Whatever else Derby might have sent to Spain, he certainly sent a fine copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, stamped with his crest, to a certain Father William Shelton—brother of Cervantes’s English translator, if not the translator himself.
Leaving the book behind in the college library, Father Shelton went to New Spain and died among the Indians, somewhere southwest of Santa Fe, no one knew where.
Unless Jem Granville had found him.
How had Jem known where to look?
He had a connection to Ophelia Fayrer, who had a connection to Delia Bacon, who had believed that Shakespeare’s grave held secret information about the poet.
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
Ophelia believed she and Jem had sinned against man and God; she had done her best to atone for it by putting things back.
My name be buried where my body is, Derby had written.
It was what Delia had believed about Shakespeare’s grave in the church in Stratford: that it hid the true identity of the genius she so obsessively worshipped.
Was it mad to follow in the steps of a madwoman?
37
NIGHT FELL WITH agonizing slowness. The rain thinned to fine mist. By ten o’clock, the cobalt blue sky had darkened to an ink-washed black. At ten thirty, I gave in to Barnes’s keeping the Folio facsimile and Widener’s volume of The Elizabethan Stage thick with our collection of letters, and then Ben, Sir Henry, and I left on foot. Sir Henry took his own path. Carrying the athletic bag, Ben followed ten paces behind me.
Headlights glistened in the damp night. People ran from doorways to waiting cars. Two buildings up, we came to the heavy night-scent of wisteria filling the garden on the corner where Shakespeare’s house, the second-best residence in town, had once stood. Shoulders hunched against what was left of the rain, I turned left and headed down Chapel Lane, empty at this hour. If the armed gardeners were still there, I never saw them, and they paid no mind to a lone dark-haired boy.
At the bottom of the lane, we came to the Swan—the Victorian end of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, where a few playgoers still dawdled after the show, probably hoping for a glimpse of the actors. Turning right, Ben caught up to me, and we followed the road as it hugged the river in its slow course, our footsteps sounding loud in the empty night. Past the Dirty Duck on our right, its patio bedraggled and forlorn on such a wet evening, its patrons all crowded into the pub’s tiny rooms, past the rope ferry and the boat rental dock on our left, past the park that widened out between the road and the river.
The clouds overhead had d
evoured the moon. Rounding a bend, we saw the churchyard up ahead and Ben halted. From the park at our left, Sir Henry materialized out of the night. Motioning us to stay put, Ben walked on ahead, pausing before a board with notices, as if he were reading the service schedule. After a moment, his hand flicked out, beckoning us forward.
Inside the gate, a flagstoned avenue of brutally pollarded lime trees led toward the church, hunched in the gloom up ahead. Lanterns seemed to float in the mist, bathing the path in a spectral glow. On either side of the avenue, darkness gathered thickly. I could just make out gravestones tilting and leering among long grass.
We slipped out of the light, crouching behind a pair of tall gravestones. I heard footsteps on the flagstone, and whistling, and then a second, softer pair of footsteps in the grass.
“Evening, George,” said a man’s voice.
“Raining stair rods earlier, wasn’t it?” said George cheerily, heading up the lime avenue toward the church. The sexton, apparently.
The constable, on the other hand, threaded toward us through the graves, his face bobbing like a will-o’-the-wisp in the dark. The instant he passed by, Ben leapt soundlessly at his back, catching the man’s throat in the crook of one arm and pulling him down behind a gravestone.
Winded, his eyes glittering with anger and fear, the constable jerked sharply. Ben leaned in, tightening his grip, and the man went limp.
Laying him down, Ben, scanned the church intently. At the door, the sexton had turned, a large bunch of keys rattling loose in his fist. For a moment he stood there, head cocked, listening. Then he shook his head and bent back to the door.
“Tie him,” said Ben, and without a second glance he left, gliding through the shadows toward the church.
Up ahead, the sexton opened the door and stepped inside. Noiselessly, Ben followed. There was nothing more to see. Ashen-faced, Sir Henry pulled some cord from the athletic bag and handed it to me. I bent over the cop. He looked dead. What had I got myself into?
Ben was back inside four minutes. We half-carried, half-dragged the constable into the church, and Ben shut the door behind us. It closed with a thud that echoed like far-off thunder, and Ben switched on a narrow flashlight. The sexton, too, was lying unconscious on the stone floor, trussed and gagged with an expertise that shook me. His key ring lay nearby. On the wall above, a tiny green light glowed steadily; he had disarmed the alarm before succumbing to Ben.
While I found the key that locked the door, Ben tightened my knots around the cop’s wrists and gagged him to match the sexton. “Your show now,” he said, handing me the flashlight. Turning abruptly away from the two men stretched on either side of the door, I headed up the nave. Ben and Sir Henry followed.
Beyond the flashlight’s beam, the darkness was absolute. The sanctuary at the far end of the church was invisible; so was the vaulted roof overhead. The place smelled of cold stone and death. Like most churches, it was laid out like a cross, with the nave taking up the long downstroke. We passed through the crossing, the tower and the church spire rising above us, past chapels leading off to the left and right, and slipped at last into the chancel. Choir stalls loomed on either side.
Ben shone the flashlight up. Its beam glinted briefly on the stained glass of the eastern window. Below, the altar glimmered with gold like a half-remembered vision of King Solomon’s Temple. But the altar wasn’t our quarry. I directed his arm left.
High on the north wall Shakespeare’s effigy hovered like a spirit at a séance, its stone hand gripping the quill more like a clerk than a poet, the smooth dome of his brow tonsured by age rather than piety. For almost four centuries, his stare had guarded its secrets well. The grave lay below, a rectangular stone slab on the other side of the jeweled chancel rail that kept that rabble away from the altar.
We climbed over the rail, gathering around the stone. It was carved with an inscription. Sir Henry read it aloud, his voice echoing around the vaulted ceiling:
Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbeare
To digg the dust encloased heare.
Blest be the man that spares these stones
And curst be he that moves my bones.
Not quite up to the standard of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. All the same, the lines were strong, in the inexplicable way of nursery rhymes or spells. A blessing, bound for all eternity to a curse.
Was there a curse? Ophelia had come to think so. What had she said? We sinned against both man and God. In the dark church, I shivered.
We pulled off our slickers and laid them around the gravestone; from the athletic bag, Ben took out chisels and crowbars, and we set carefully to work. We had to loosen the flat gravestone and lift it, without breaking it.
For a while I heard nothing but small taps of metal on stone and the quiet labor of our breathing. I sat back on my heels to give my hands a rest. Somewhere behind, a small sound scuffed the silence, and I went still. As surely as if the carved eyes of the circling saints and demons had sparked to life, we were being watched.
Slowly, I rose and turned. The darkness was as thick as ever.
A blinding light shone in my face. Sinclair, I thought in sudden panic.
“Katharine,” said a voice. Not Sinclair. Not the cops at all. Athenaide. “Step away from the grave,” she said.
I hesitated.
“Do it,” said Ben quietly.
I stepped forward, a little to the side, out of the glare of the light, and saw why. Athenaide stood in front of the choir stalls, pointing in my direction, and in her hand was a pistol with a strangely long barrel. A pistol fitted with a silencer.
“More.”
I inched out farther.
“She doesn’t have what you want,” said Sir Henry.
“I want Katharine,” said Athenaide.
“No,” said Ben stepping forward.
“Move again and I’ll shoot, Mr. Pearl.”
He went still.
“What do you want with me?” I asked as steadily as I could.
“To get you away from a pair of killers.”
“What?”
“Think, Kate,” said another voice, from the stalls on the north wall. Matthew. “Who’s been there, every time someone’s died? Who was there at the Preston Archive with you?”
“I was,” said Ben.
“That’s right,” said Matthew, his quiet tones filled with loathing. “You were.”
DCI Sinclair had suggested the same thing, and I’d pushed it away without thinking. I pushed it away again. “No.”
Matthew pressed on. “Where was he, Kate, when Dr. Sanderson died? Convenient, isn’t it, that he left you alone in the library?”
“I was attacked that night too,” I said tightly. “Ben saved my life.”
“Did he? Or did he attack you, and then step in and rescue you as well?”
I thought back to the Capitol. It had been a blur of hitting and being hit, of footsteps leaving and coming.
“Think, Kate,” said Matthew again. “Think through every killing, every attack.”
In Widener, my stalker had disappeared and Ben had shown up moments later. Could he have been the stalker? He could have circled around the shelves, peeling off dark clothing and stashing it among the books. It was possible.
It was absurd.
In Cedar City, he’d left the archive before me, heading out for sandwiches. Had he doubled back, killing Maxine as soon as I left? It was possible. Just barely. At the Capitol, he’d found me in the magnolia grove just in time to drive my attacker away. He himself had suggested the attack was staged. If your attacker had really wanted you dead, you’d have been gone before I reached you, he’d said. Had the rescue been staged as well, so that I would trust him?
No. He had rescued me.
What else? Wilton House. At Wilton, he’d been with me the entire time. “He could not have killed Mrs. Quigley,” I said, clinging to sanity.
“I will wager my soul, then,” said Athenaide, “that Sir Henry could have.”
> I frowned. Sir Henry had disappeared with Mrs. Quigley for what? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty minutes? Long enough to kill her and get back to the room next door, slashing his own cheek and falling to the floor.
A pair of killers, Athenaide had said. Were Ben and Sir Henry in this together? Was it possible? Once again, I rewound to the beginning and lumbered forward through events. At every turn, one or the other of them had gotten me out of jams—had produced clothing, transportation, money. Even passports. Ben had not just protected me, he’d broken the laws of two countries doing it.
And between them, they could have killed everyone who had died.
“Why?” I protested. “Why kill the others? And why leave me alive?”
“They need you,” said Athenaide.
It was what Ben had said of her: that she needed me to find the play. And then I would be expendable…. Had he foisted his own motives off on her?
“But someone’s trying to stop the play from being found, Athenaide. Why would Sir Henry do that?”
“He’s not trying to stop it,” she said. “He’s trying to control it. Sir Henry, I imagine, wants that play with poisonous greed. It’s my guess that he first heard of it from Roz, and since that moment he’s dreamed of making the role of Quixote his own. What finer swan song to a theatrical career than stamping a master character of both Shakespeare and Cervantes as your own? He wants that play for himself, and when Roz wouldn’t promise to share, he killed her.”
“Slandering bitch,” sputtered Sir Henry.
Athenaide ignored him, focusing on me. “But with you, he needed help. So he hired it. As Ben told you, he’s being paid. Only, by Sir Henry, instead of Roz.”
“He’s her nephew, Athenaide.”
There was a brief silence.
“Fascinating,” said Matthew. “Especially since Roz was an only child.”
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