“But this is treasonable, my lady. This is like a razor in the hands of an infant that will surely cut. Do you not know how dangerous this is?”
“And now you have seen it, what will you do as a loyal Englishman and subject of the crown? Will you have my head chopped off?” Penelope Rich looked at him. “I know you understand the power of these things-that they are not to be treated lightly. That is why this chart is important. It is the wherewithal to save us all. It is telling us the date so that we know there is no time to lose. It is a gift from God, instructing us to act without delay to ensure the English succession. And to do so, we need every man of oak. This is your duty.”
Shakespeare could not take his gaze from the horoscope. She called it a gift from God, but he thought it more like a death warrant from the Devil.
She read his thoughts and shrugged her delicate shoulders. “I see this unnerves you.” Casually she tossed the parchment into the fragrant fire of herbs. The flames leaped up and devoured it. “There, it is gone.”
“It is better thus,” he said. But within his heart, he was cursing. He could have used that chart; it would have been the evidence Cecil sought and might have saved his brother.
“But we still know what it said. And that brings us back to you-for I now need to know your answer, John Shakespeare. Are you with us or are you against us? She is about to enter her sixtieth year. What few teeth she has are blackened stumps. Her face is held together by paint and her body is a trillibub that the slaughterman would not rate fit for pies. She cannot live long. Everyone knows that, the whole world. The chart but proves it. Would you have a strong English king or a stranger on the throne? Would you have a man who would fight the Spanish with every last drop of his blood, or be ruled by a Scotch toad and a craven cripple who would faint at a cut finger?”
“An English king?”
“My brother, Mr. Shakespeare.” She looked at him searchingly. One of her fine eyebrows lifted and the corners of her mouth turned up. “Are you really so shocked? Can you think of a finer monarch for this great realm?”
“Your brother is noble, but he is not of the blood royal.”
“Is he not? Do you not think Great Henry’s blood runs through our veins?” Penelope laughed and touched the front of his breeches again. “You seem quite deflated. Do not worry about my brother’s entitlement. All will become clear. Now decide: for us, or against us. There is no middle way.”
He went down on one knee and bowed his head low in obeisance. Then he raised his face, took her hand in his, and kissed it. “I am with you, my lady. I humbly accept the position you have so graciously offered me.”
She bent and took his face between her soft white hands again and kissed him, long and deep. He wanted very much to put his hands inside her long embroidered gown, to slip his fingers between her legs, to throw her on the great black-draped bed and take her with more urgency than he had ever known, but he could not do it. His mind was willing, so was his body-almost more than he could bear-yet his soul held him back, as sure as an iron fetter keeps a man chained to a wall.
Playfully she pushed him away. “You are a married man and I am a married woman, John Shakespeare. Do you wish to ruin me?”
He bowed his head.
“I jest. It is the forbidden spice that makes love so piquant. Devotion without lust is like wine without sugar. Come to me in Staffordshire. My mother and I go to Blithfield and Chartley on the morrow. You will find us there until autumn, idling the days away in the gardens. Come to me by night, John, and we will instruct each other in country matters. I will show you pleasures you have never dreamed of. For the present, you must follow my brother, who is gone to court. There is much to be done.”
Chapter 32
S IMON FORMAN KNEW FOR A CERTAINTY THAT HE had the plague. But he knew, too, that it was the so-called red pest, which he believed to be not quite as deadly as the black disease.
It had come on the previous day. He had lacked energy as he halek ed a rich mercer’s mistress and she had complained mightily over his poor performance.
“I come to you because my master is otherwise engaged, Dr. Forman, and you can scarce keep your prick hard for me, nor attend to my needs. I had expected better of you, sir.”
“Forgive me, I am not myself this morning, mistress.”
She saw how distressed he was and softened toward him. “No matter, Dr. Forman. I am sure it is a passing thing, for I know your instrument to be like a broom handle.”
“I fear I may have some little summer sweat, mistress.” But even as he said the words, he knew the truth. He had the pestilence. He knew, too, that the cause was twofold-firstly, the adverse position of Mars, and secondly, retribution for all his manifold sins, not least of which was lust. But he was not downhearted, for he had devised a cure, and who better to try it on than himself?
He bade her good-day and promised to make certain of her satisfaction the next time she came, then returned to his rumpled bed.
The first appearance of the pestilence was already there by afternoon: swellings in the pits of his arms and lower down, close to his member and stones. When these swellings increased, with great purple boils, then the red lumps, it would be time for him to act. He must take a clean, sharp kitchen knife, or a dagger honed and tempered in the flame, then cut into the pustules, releasing the evil humors. The resulting raw wounds would have to be washed with boiled water, then dressed with clean muslin, tied firmly into place and changed every day. It would help, too, he was sure, to indulge in a little blood-letting. It would be an uncomfortable few days for him, with none of the customary fleshly pleasures in which he delighted, but he did not fear he would die, for he was in robust health.
He heard a hammering at the door downstairs and his spirits rose. It would be Mistress Annis Noke. She would nurse him through this, bringing him broth and electuaries as and when he required.
S HAKESPEARE WAS in a hurry. This was to be his last task before collecting his court attire and riding west toward the castle of Sudeley in the county of Gloucestershire, where the Queen was also heading for the fourth anniversary celebration of England’s victory over the Spanish Armada.
His impatient hammering at Simon Forman’s door went unanswered. At last he turned the latch and pushed. It was unlocked.
He heard a distant voice.
“Mistress Noke. I am in bed with the sweat. Will you not bring me a little spiced wine?”
Shakespeare ascended the stairs of Stone House to the second floor. In the front chamber he found the astrologer-physician stretched out naked on his mess of a bed.
“Simon Forman?”
The man opened his eyes with a start at Shakespeare’s voice. He sat upright and pulled his bedding around him as though it would protect him from the stab of a blade.
“I am not here to hurt you, Dr. Forman. My name is Marvell. John Marvell. I am here about an astrological chart.”
Forman’s shock subsided. “Do you just walk into a gentleman’s bedchamber?”
Shakespeare looked about him nonchalantly. It was a comfortable room in a sizeable house; clearly Forman must be doing well from his potions and charts. “The door was open. No one answered. Do I find you unwell?”
“A slight summer sweat. Nothing of consequence.”
Shakespeare kept his distance. “Well, I am sure you will cure yourself.”
Forman bridled at Shakespeare’s tone. “You sound the skeptic, Mr. Marvell. Fear not. I shall cure myself. I can cure cankers and consumptions, sir, and a hundred other evils besides.”
“I care nothing for your physic. It is your casting of horoscopes that concerns me.”
“Mr. Marvell, look at me. I am a sick man. I cannot go about casting charts for you at present. Come back in a fortnight, sir, and I shall see what I may do for you.”
“I am here as an agent of the Privy Council, in particular Sir Robert Cecil. It has come to the Council’s attention that you did recently cast a chart requested of you by a
great lady.”
The look on Forman’s face could not have undergone a greater transformation if he had been hit dead center by a crossbow bolt. The blood drained. For a man who a moment ago was laughing at the reaper’s meager efforts to kill him off with his filthy pestilence, he suddenly seemed to realize he was staring into the gaping jaws of death itself.
“You appear to have lost your power of speech, Dr. Forman. I am here with orders to seize copies of this chart. If you refuse, you will be taken to Newgate and will be arraigned in the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Do you understand?”
“Mr. Marvell, forgive me, I know not what you say. I am a humble physician. I can help you with the ague, I can even divine a chart to help you find the woman you should marry and tell you the best date and time to conceive a child. But who is this great lady you speak of-and what is this chart?”
Shakespeare eyed his quarry and saw he had him. “You know very well what chart I speak of, Forman. I have seen it. It is a chart that will sever your head from your body and your entrails from their housing if you do not cooperate with me as fully as required by law. I know you understand this.”
He saw real fear in Forman’s eyes. He could also tell that he was ill. Very ill. Most probably the plague.
“Mr. Marvell, please, I beg of you. Have mercy, for I have been slandered. I know the law and I have drawn up no chart that might be considered unlawful.”
Shakespeare did not speak for a few moments. Then he turned on his heel and strode to the door, only stopping momentarily to look at the hairy, stumpy, scared figure cowering behind his blankets.
“I shall find it myself, then, Dr. Forman.”
There was a door from the chamber. He went through it into another room and from there into the hall, where he found the stuff of Forman’s work: his jars and vials of herbs and unspeakable alchemical substances, his charts and books and scratched papers with drawings and coded Latin notes.
Forman was close behind him, having dragged his aching body from the sickbed. “Please, Mr. Marvell, do not rummage here. This is my life’s work, sir.”
Shakespeare picked up a horoscope and examined it. “Tell me what this is?”
“It is the chart of a goodwife from East Cheap, sir. It tells her she must have her husband occupy her on the fifteenth day of her month, following the onset of the flowers, and that she will conceive a healthy boy-child. It is innocent enough, Mr. Marvell, as are all my charts.”
Shakespeare tossed it carelessly to the floor. He picked up another chart. “And this?”
“That tells a young courtier when he might find a suitable wife, sir.”
“And how much faith do your customers place in these charts, Dr. Forman?”
“They have complete faith, Mr. Marvell.” Suddenly, Forman’s voice strengthened. “Why should they not? Why, even the worthless College of Physicians understands that the silent movement of the stars is not to be mocked, sir. The stars are never wrong, Mr. Marvell-never. Any fault must lie in man’s interpretation of them. And I am not a man to make mistakes, which is why the wealthiest of merchants, the greatest of the gentry and nobility, come to my humble abode and rely on me. I am, sir, the foremost exponent of this science in the modern world.”
Shakespeare screwed the chart into a ball and dropped it behind him, then moved on. He took a vial from a shelf. He read the label. “Ash of little green frogs, Dr. Forman? What is this?”
“It is as it says, sir. I beg you to be careful with it, for it is most valuable for the easing of pain in the teeth.”
Shakespeare took out the glass stopper and tipped the ash upon the carpeted floor.
Forman clutched his chest, then sank onto a settle, breathing heavily, his mouth open and his eyes closed.
“So where is the chart I require, Dr. Forman? Produce it for me and I vouch that I will not use it against you. I pledge, likewise, that if you do not give it to me, then I most certainly will hold you responsible for it. What have we here?” He picked up another vial. “Italian theriac, Devil’s venom for the falling sickness…”
Forman was gasping for breath. “Mr. Marvell, that did cost me three sovereigns to bring from the city of Milan, sir.”
Shakespeare took out the stopper and began to pour out the thick treacle. Forman tried to stay his hand, but Shakespeare pulled away from his contagious touch. “Please, Mr. Marvell,” Forman managed to say. “I will do as you wish. But I need time. A few days, for I must redraw the chart for you and I am not well.”
“Then I will send the plague men around. This house should be closed up and crossed so that none enter.”
“I beg of you, I plead with you, sir. I will do whatever you require, but keep the plague men away. It is naught but a summer sweat. I am a physician, sir, I know these things. And I will do what you require. Just a little time.”
Shakespeare put the stopper back in the vial. Although he knew he had Forman on the rack, he knew, too, that this man was as slippery as a water serpent. “I will be back, Dr. Forman. You have this one chance to save your miserable skin. If you are alive when I return, and if you do not have that which I require, I will summon pursuivants to break this house apart, destroy all your love philters, burn all your books, and hoist you off to the lowest dungeon in Newgate. If you fail to cooperate, it will be the worst move ever you make, for you will create an enemy of Sir Robert Cecil, the one man who might take your part against the College of Physicians.”
Whether it was the word Newgate or Cecil that made Forman falter, Shakespeare was not sure, but suddenly his attitude changed. “Mr. Marvell, sir,” he began, his voice unctuous and cajoling. “Mr. Marvell, there is one other matter it is my duty to tell you, a matter which I believe might be of great interest to Sir Robert.”
Forman folded his arms across his chest and shivered though his face and forehead dripped with sweat.
“You really are not a well man, Dr. Forman.”
“No, indeed, sir, I am not. But you were correct when you said in jest that I would cure myself, for I do know the way…”
“I wish you fortune. Now tell me, what is this other matter of which you speak?”
“The matter is this,” he said with a resigned air. “I was asked to cast a second chart, sir. By the same great lady.”
“Another death chart?”
“No, sir, a nuptial chart, to find the most propitious date for a wedding. It is for a man born on November the tenth in the year 1567 and a young lady brought into this world on October the fifteenth, 1575.”
The birth dates of twenty-four-year-old Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the sixteen-year-old Lady Arbella Stuart. So Cecil was right. There was to be a wedding, and one that could only be construed as rebellion and high treason. It could end in only one way: open warfare and bloodshed in the snatching of a crown.
“I will need a copy of that chart, too, Dr. Forman. But tell me this: what date did the stars decide on for this wedding?”
“September the fourteenth, sir. Four days from now.”
The date, so close, hit him with the force of a gale. He did not wait to hear Forman’s whimpered pleadings a moment longer but ran from the house and drove his gray mare hard through the stifling streets to Dowgate. He had to fetch his court attire and ride west to find Essex-and inform Cecil-with not a moment’s delay. Four days. He had just four days to prevent a wedding that could bring England to insurrection.
But in his worst nightmares, nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to find.
Chapter 33
T HE BODY OF JACK BUTLER WAS STRETCHED OUT, macabre and obscene, in the school courtyard where, until recently, boys had played in their recesses from class and where they had suffered the birch when the fancy took Rumsey Blade.
Butler had been a big man and somehow his height and great barrel of a chest added outrage to the dreadful things that had been done to him.
His injuries matched those inflicted on the murder victim Shakespeare had seen in the S
earcher of the Dead’s crypt at St. Paul’s, except worse. Butler’s face was coated in rust-dried blood; his hands were like talons, red and bloody and sliced with some vicious implement. His toes, too, had been mutilated. A tanner’s shears? Was that what had done this? His head was near severed and his abdomen had a gaping wound. Hew and punch. Those were the words the searcher, Joshua Peace, used. Hew and punch-a military method of dispatching an enemy in quick order without blunting the blade or leaving any margin for error. First a slash at the neck, then the sword driven hard into the abdomen.
But there was nothing military about this death. This killing had not been done in the heat of battle. This was murder in cold blood. And not just murder but torture, for Butler’s hands and feet had been sliced along the crucial weblike muscle between the digits. By the look of the coat of blood that masked the face around the mouth, the tongue had been sliced out, too.
There was something else. Cecil’s code book, The Profitable Art of Gardening, lay on Jack’s chest, pinned to him by a long thin dagger thrust through the center of the cover and pages and through his flesh, deep into his dead heart.
Shakespeare sank to his knees before the body of his servant. He wanted to weep for him, for he had been a good man. A quiet man, but stout and loyal. He had given five years of dutiful service without a word of complaint. Shakespeare put his hands together, closed his eyes, and said the Lord’s Prayer. Our Father…
He touched Jack Butler’s cold face and rose again to his feet. What was McGunn’s true purpose in all this? Shakespeare did not believe for a moment that McGunn was protecting the Earl of Essex. The Irishman looked out for one man alone-himself.
He walked out to the stables. The groom was there. Shakespeare was in no mood for explanations. “Get the constable here straightway, Sidesman.”
“Yes, Master Shakespeare.” Perkin Sidesman scurried away. Shakespeare went back to the school. He found a blanket and put it over Butler’s body, then went to collect his court clothes and some gold coin. By the time he returned to the yard, the constable was there. The groom held back.
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