Best of all was a face he had never seen in life. An auburn-haired girl, whose picture he carried near his heart for years, hidden inside his massive crucifix.
What would the bishop make of that? Laughter burbled up through him, though it sounded more like retching. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” he had cried once in anger. Those might be the bishop’s words.
But he had been wrong. He had long since learned that. Love was never a waste. Love is not love that bends with the remover to remove….
She floated up once again, smiling, and he felt his heart flutter and leap into a gallop.
“But who is she?” he heard his young voice ask.
“She is herself,” answered another. “Beauty’s Rose.”
And the rest was silence.
ACT V
46
FIVE MONTHS AFTER Roz’s death, on a cold evening in December, I was back at the Globe, much sooner than expected, rehearsing Hamlet.
The theater had been restored to its former glory. Come June, even greater glory would return to it, when the first performance of Cardenio in almost four centuries was set to open—on the twenty-ninth, no less. The powers that be had asked me to direct.
Athenaide had decided that Hamlet must go up first, however. But the only time that Jason Pierce was free to play the melancholy prince was in December. I’d thought the notion of opening a show at the Globe in midwinter was entirely lunatic, but Athenaide disagreed. “Elizabethans went to plays all year round,” she’d said. “Why can’t we? How soft do you think we’ve gone?” And then she’d written a check, backing the show in memory of Roz. She’d been right, too, at least as far as tickets were concerned. The entire run had already sold out, and we were still ten days from opening.
As the actors filed off the stage at the end of rehearsal, I seized a precious moment alone in the theater. In December, sunset comes early in London. Barely afternoon, by the clock. Late light slanted over the thatched roof, dazzling my eyes, and I put up a hand to shield them. Pious tradition had it that in Shakespeare’s day, plays in the outdoor theaters had been performed in the afternoon, ending well before dusk. Gazing up at the stage, I was not so sure. Take the Pillars of Hercules: In the noonday sun, they strutted forth in shameless scarlet. Under gray skies, they darkened to the horse colors of chestnut and red bay, chilly with the distant hauteur of aristocrats—or, if you were hopelessly cynical, of two marbled pillars of steak. It was at sunset, though, winter as well as summer, when I admired them most. When they—and the whole Globe around them—seemed most truly Shakespearean. Or Biblical. Or both: when shadows thickened like muttering demons, and the Pillars of Hercules sparked into rivers of blood streaked with fire.
I shivered and pulled my coat tighter around me, remembering.
Sir Henry had been found a week after he died. A little ways down the canyon, half hidden under some rubble, they found pieces of the saddlebag, but all its contents were gone.
He’d achieved, in the end, almost exactly what he wanted. He’d brought the lost play to light, but destroyed whatever evidence the letter might have contained against Shakespeare. For that, he had sacrificed his life.
And the lives of six others. Maxine, Dr. Sanderson, Mrs. Quigley, Graciela, Matthew—and Roz.
Athenaide had dedicated Hamlet to Roz’s memory, but I had decided that Cardenio would be my memorial to her. In the meantime, I still had not quite forgiven her for toying with me. More than that, said a small voice, for dying. In my pocket, I fingered the copy of Ophelia’s brooch that I carried with me always, like a talisman. Let it go, Maxine had said of my tangled anger and regret. Let her go.
Slowly, I stepped down from the gallery into the yard, facing the empty stage. “Good night, sweet prince,” I said aloud. I didn’t quite know who or what I was talking to. Maybe the stage itself. “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
The sound of applause pierced the quiet, and I spun toward the noise. Someone was leaning nonchalantly against the wall by the doors, clapping. So much for a moment alone.
The intrusion was exasperating. Once or twice a week, a tourist assumed that the “Do not disturb, rehearsal in progress” signs were aimed at everyone but himself and found some way to slip the nets of the ushers and guards to find a way inside. Aloud I said, “You missed your cue. The actors have gone.”
“They were superb,” answered a British voice I knew. A voice of chocolate and bronze. “But the applause isn’t for them. It’s for you.” Ben pushed off from the wall, standing up straight.
I stood staring at him, as if at a ghost.
“Sorry about slipping in early,” he said. “But I’ve never seen a director at work before, and I was curious.” He walked toward me, limping slightly. “You wouldn’t by any chance fancy a drink, would you, Professor?”
“Bastard,” I said with a smile. “Does it ever occur to you to call before showing up for a meeting?”
“Damn,” he said equably. “I’ve brought a very nice bottle of champagne. Suitable for a date. Overkill, really, for a meeting.” He brushed past me, heading up the stairs to the stage. Easing himself to a seat on the top step, he pulled out two flutes and a bottle and began easing out the cork.
I followed him up the stairs. “If you’re going to feed me champagne, you can call this encounter whatever you like.”
The bottle opened with a quiet pop, and Ben poured the pale wine into the flutes. “Cheers,” he said, handing me a glass.
“What are we celebrating?”
He smiled. “Meeting?”
I nodded and took a sip. It was steely and delicious.
“How are you, Kate?”
I blinked. He’d been in rehab for five months, and he was asking how I was? I had no idea where to start, actually. The hours after Sir Henry’s death had begun with a whir of helicopter blades and shouting, of held breath and lights flaring in the dark until Ben had been pulled alive from the cave. The day after that, they’d hauled Matthew’s remains back to the surface.
Much later, with the Jiménezes’s blessing, I’d returned to the cave with a field agent from U.S. Fish and Wildlife (interested in the Mexican free-tailed bats), five archeologists—two from the University of Arizona and one each from Mexico City, London, and Salamanca (all interested in the colonial Spanish and Jacobean English find), and a speleologist from the Arizona State Parks system. The cairns in the dry cavern were what I had thought: the graves of five Spanish colonial soldiers.
The sixth, uncovered body proved to be a Franciscan. Hidden inside his crucifix was a Hilliard miniature, an exquisite portrait of an auburn-haired girl, ringed with lacy gold writing that seemed to tie it to the Folger’s Hilliard: But thy eternal summer shall not fade. There were no other clues to the man’s identity, but the only English priest known to have been lost in this part of the world was William Shelton.
Heading into the cave by the lower entrance, we’d found our way past the bats and back into the living cavern that was Jem’s tomb. He had been carrying papers—but they had rotted into an unreadable moldy lump. It had seemed a pity, in the echoing glory of that place, to grudge the disappearance of a few sheets of paper.
The Jiménezes announced the discovery of the manuscript at a press conference, and overnight I found myself in the sudden glare of celebrity. A maelstrom of shouting rose around us—but the world—or most of it—soon accepted that the priest was an Englishman-turned-Spanish-priest named William Shelton, and that he was carrying the volume of Quixote and the manuscript of Shakespeare’s long-lost play. As yet, Ophelia’s diaries remained in limbo, caught in quiet negotiations between Athenaide and the Church of England. The Wilton House letters had not come to light.
With Athenaide’s advice, the Jiménezes sold the manuscript play at a private auction for an untold sum that raised wild speculations (a disappointment at ten million dollars? a forgery that garnered half a billion?). As usual, the truth lay somewhere in between. It went, in joint custod
y, to the British Library and the Folger, in an arrangement that sent it shuttling, like poor Persephone, between its two new homes in alternate years.
The stolen First Folios were found in Sir Henry’s library and returned to the Globe and Harvard, though Harvard’s was found to be missing one page from Titus Andronicus. The page I’d been carrying around in my pocket made it whole again. In Valladolid, the rector of the Royal College mulled over what to do with the Folio that Derby had sent to William Shelton.
The thrills, though, were backed with deep shadows. The deaths of Sir Henry Lee and Professor Matthew Morris so soon after Roz’s sent shock waves through the Shakespearean community. The official line on the murders, as explained by Sinclair in a news conference televised around the world, increased that clamor to a howling tempest. Sir Henry and Matthew had conspired in five murders; Sir Henry had then killed Matthew. Sir Henry’s death, Sinclair stated firmly, had been an accident.
For the first time in living memory, Harvard was without a tenured Shakespearean; the consequent rustling of resumes sounded as if every forest in North America and Britain were suddenly on the move. I’d counted myself lucky to work with Sir Henry, but the discreet inquiries about whom I might consider to fill his void in Hamlet came from names known in the bright lights across the globe. It seemed that the role of the ghost was widely seen as an audition for the role of Quixote.
Where should I start, with all that? “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine, thanks.”
Ben smiled. “Bit simplistic, I’m sure, but I’m glad to hear it.”
“And you? How are you?”
For a moment he watched the bubbles streaming upward through his glass. “I’ve found something, Kate.”
I did a double take. Roz’s words. “Not funny.”
“It’s not meant to be.” He looked up at me. “It’s meant to be true.”
I stared at him. The whole time he’d been in the hospital and then in rehab, he’d refused visits, though we’d spoken a few times on the phone. Within days, the papers from Houghton and Wilton House—the letters from Jem to Professor Child, and from Will to the Sweetest Swan—had found their separate ways home, no questions asked—at least till I asked them. All I learned, though, was that during the chaos at Elsinore, Ben had lifted the volume of Chambers from Sir Henry, stashing it and its illicit collection of letters somewhere in the house. How he managed to retrieve it, he would not say. He’d asked me for the brooch with its hidden miniature, though, and he’d insisted so vehemently that I’d agreed. That, too, quickly wound its way home, arriving at the Folger in the company of Ophelia’s letter to Mrs. Folger.
The last time we’d spoken had been just before I started rehearsals, six weeks ago. I’d called him again, excited, when I’d unearthed a connection between the Howards and the earl of Derby.
He’d sounded tired, but he perked up at that. “What kind of connection?”
“The old-fashioned kind. Marriage. Derby’s daughter married a cousin of Somerset’s.”
“You’re joking.”
“Another Robert Carr, in fact, only this one insisted on the Scottish spelling. Kerr, with a K. It happened in 1621, a year before the countess of Somerset was released from the Tower. Two years before the Folio was published.”
She is family now, the Wilton House letter had said.
“That about does it, then, doesn’t it? Pins Derby to the plays?”
I’d disagreed. “The marriage proves only that he was connected to the Howards. We already knew from the Folio at Valladolid that he knew William Shelton. And we knew from the Wilton House letter that he had some relationship with Shakespeare. But none of that makes him the writer of the plays. He could still just as well have been a patron.”
“What else do you need?”
“Something explicit.”
He’d groaned. “Where would one look?”
“Somewhere no one else has for the last four hundred years, for starters.”
“Any ideas?”
I thought about it. “At the fringes of the story. For gossip, maybe. But not about the plays. That’ll all have been picked over.”
“Gossip about what, then?”
“The King James Bible, maybe.”
He’d let out a long, slow breath. “The signature in the Psalms.”
“There might be something out there about who worked on the translations, especially Psalm Forty-six.”
“We don’t know? You don’t know?”
“No. The translators kept their individual contributions quiet. Deliberately, it seems. To the point of burning their records. The Bible is God’s work, their reasoning went. Not men’s. And certainly not one man’s. Still, some reference might have slipped through, and survived.”
“I’m on it,” he’d said. He wasn’t very mobile, and he didn’t read Jacobean handwriting, so I wasn’t too sanguine about his chances. But if he needed something to keep him from going stir-crazy, fine.
But now he was sitting on the edge of the stage saying he’d found something. I set down my glass. “What is it?”
He handed over a Xerox copy of a letter. I looked up. It was in Secretary Hand.
Ben smiled. “The Folger was disposed to be helpful, after getting their stuff back. Even taught me how to read Jacobean handwriting.”
“Is that where you found this?”
He shook his head. “Private collection,” he said vaguely. “It’s from Lancelot Andrewes, dean of Westminster and bishop of Chichester, to a friend, written in November 1607. Unlikely name for a bishop—Lancelot—but then he doesn’t sound like your average prelate.”
He said no more, so I bent to read the letter. Mostly, it was about the Catholic problem in Warwickshire. But there was one paragraph that caught my attention, about Laurence Chaderton, master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the newly finished Book of Psalms in the king’s Bible. He had been one of the few Puritan-leaning divines to work on the project; the Psalms had been assigned to his committee.
According to the bishop, Chaderton had written a blistering letter complaining that the king had taken their committee’s careful translation of the Psalms and given it to a passel of poets. To polish, the bishop reported Chaderton thundering—as if poetical polish were several rungs below masturbation, sodomy, and witchcraft on the scale of Levitical abominations. In response, the bishop had tried to be soothing. The poets would not be allowed to muck up the translation—but as for rhythm and sound, well, in his view the king was right. The psalms were supposed to be songs, but they sounded like sermons. Dull sermons, he’d specified. Like the king, the bishop was all for correctness, but there was no reason correctness couldn’t also be pleasing to the ear.
But Chaderton had refused to be soothed. He’d made another accusation: They have signed their work.
That, wrote the bishop, would indeed be blasphemy if it were true, but he himself had combed through the entire Book of Psalms and had found no sign of a signature. Chaderton, he sighed to his friend, would do better to worry about the books still to be translated, rather than shouting nonsense about those already completed. If the irksome man couldn’t be discreet, he’d have the king snapping at their heels, and doing the polishing himself. At least with the poets, the good bishop could reject anything really awful.
Unfortunately, unlike Chaderton, the bishop was the soul of discretion. He mentioned no names.
A smile rolled across Ben’s face as I finished. “You think Shakespeare could have been one of those poets?”
“He could have. But then who were the others? No one’s ever found any trace of another signature.”
“Has anyone looked?”
I laughed. “Probably not.”
“So what’s wrong?”
I wriggled. “It’s the date that bothers me. The old explanation is that the Psalm was finished in 1610, when Shakespeare was forty-six—a sort of teasing key to the puzzle. But the bishop dated his letter 1607.”
“Does it have to be a birt
hday present to self?”
“No. But then why Psalm Forty-six? Why do it at all, without some kind of signal to others, to look?”
“Do you think it really mattered to him, that others knew he’d done it? Maybe he did it for himself, because it struck him that he could, in a psalm jabbering on about shaking and spears.”
“Maybe.” I frowned. Birthday present to self.
Hopping off the stage, I scuttled across to the table in the gallery where I kept my notebooks, and came back with three folded pages, which I laid in front of Ben. Printouts from the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The entries for William Stanley, sixth earl of Derby, Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke, and Sir Francis Bacon.
“The chimerical beast,” said Ben. “Or most of it.”
“Birthday present to self,” I prompted.
Ben glanced through the entries and looked back up. “They were all born in 1561.”
“Which means that in 1607, when the Psalms were finished, they were—”
He whistled. “They were all forty-six.”
We sipped in silence for a moment, at the silent heart of Shakespeare’s world, the deepening sapphire of the sky beyond giving the impression that we were floating in a wintry dream.
“You know that Derby was the last of the chimerical beast to survive?” I mused. “Lady Pembroke died of smallpox in 1621, just a few weeks before Derby’s daughter married the other Kerr, and Bacon died of pneumonia in the spring of 1626, following an experiment to preserve meat by stuffing a chicken with snow. But Derby survived to the opening shots of the English Civil War.”
“Killed in action?” asked Ben.
“No. He was wrapped up with his beloved books up in Chester, and besides that, he was eighty-one years old. But in September of 1642, after the king fled London, the Puritans in Parliament at last got their hands on the theaters they’d abhorred for so long and closed them with a bang on September the second. They would stay closed for almost twenty years….”
“Not a fun-loving lot, the Puritans. Glad most of them sailed west, in the end.”
Interred with Their Bones Page 39