“There’s no way out for you, Cooper. Drop your weapon and I pledge you will be safe. We can follow you all day, if needs must.”
The door behind Boltfoot swung open. A woman with an empty basket, all done up in her pynner and light worsted cape as if she was going to market, stepped out and stopped, looking with astonishment at Boltfoot.
He struggled up and, bent double, pushed past her into the house. A shot exploded behind him and took the basket clean from the woman’s hand, tossing it thirty feet along the street. She stood frozen, mouth agape. Behind her, the door was slammed shut by Boltfoot. He pushed home the heavy bolt, locking her outside.
Boltfoot found himself in the spacious stone-flagged anteroom of a solidly built new-brick merchant’s house. He took in his options at a glance. There were two doors leading further into the building. Take the wrong one and he might be trapped. He took the one on the left and found himself in a kitchen. A young, scar-faced malkin dropped the copper pot she was scouring and it clattered to the floor at her feet. Boltfoot sidestepped past her.
“Is there a postern door?”
Wide-eyed, she pointed behind her to another door from the kitchen. Boltfoot went toward it. From the front of the building, he could hear the smashing of glass. They were stoving in a window to get into the house.
He pushed on through the door into a buttery. There were shelves of preserved fruits, baskets of eggs, kegs of ale, and a churn for butter. There was another door, wide open, leading to a large backyard. He plunged through it without hesitation.
The yard was enclosed by a brick wall. At one end there was a chicken coop, where half a dozen fowl clucked and pecked at seeds. A goat was tethered in the middle of a grassy area in the center of the yard; it looked up at Boltfoot with soulful, disinterested eyes, then returned to munching grass. It seemed to Boltfoot he was trapped.
He went back inside. The malkin cowered in terror, holding the copper pot in front of her as a weapon of defense.
“Is there a way out?”
He heard a loud crash from the front of the house. Through the open doorway to the anteroom, he could see that they had a mallet and were beating down the mullion and transom of the window.
The malkin could not-or would not-speak. With the copper pot, she gestured once more to the yard, as though desperate to get this man out of her kitchen at any cost. Boltfoot went out into the yard once more. His eyes lighted on the chicken coop again. It might just take his weight.
He slung his caliver across his back, then dragged himself over the low picket fence that kept the birds enclosed. They scattered in a wild panic of feathers and clucking. Awkwardly he clambered onto the roof of the coop. It was rickety and certainly not built to take a man’s weight, but it held and gave him enough height to reach the top of the brick wall. Sweat poured from his bandaged head into his eyes. His hands were slippery, yet he managed to get a grip at the top of the wall and, with every remaining ounce of strength, pulled himself up and swung his good leg, his right leg, over the top. For a moment, he hung there precariously, trying to get back his breath. Then, with a mighty effort, he pulled his left foot up and over and fell in a clatter of weapons on the far side of the wall, suppressing a yelp of pain as the hilt of his sheathed cutlass dug into his hip bone.
He was in the great court of the Steelyard Hall. Above him, a hundred feet or more high, was the stone-built tower where a constant watch was kept for returning trade ships as they made their slow tack up the Thames from all the distant shores of the world, bringing with them fortunes or disappointment.
“Here, you!” an artisan called out to him, anger in his voice.
Boltfoot rose painfully to his feet, unslung his caliver, and leveled it at the man in warning. The man took one look at it and hurried away, around the side of the hall. Boltfoot limped on across the court, past the great watchtower and toward the Windgoose Lane gateway. He heard a noise and turned to see that his pursuers were clambering over the wall from the hen coop, the man from outside the school first. Boltfoot loosed off a shot from his caliver. The man screamed and fell, clutching at his shattered shinbone.
Smoke rose lazily from the weapon. Boltfoot slung it over his back and slipped through the gateway, looking about him. At the northern end of the street, he saw her at the prearranged spot: Eleanor Dare, mounted on a bay gelding, holding the reins of a second horse at her side. Boltfoot called to her and she saw him and urged the horses into a trot toward him.
“Quick,” he said. “He is right behind me.”
With supreme effort, he launched himself at his mount and pulled himself into the saddle. They wheeled, kicked their heels into the animals’ sides, and broke into a canter northward. A volley of shots broke the silence behind them, but by then they were beyond the range of McGunn’s petronels and were gone, into the maze of alleyways that crowded this part of London city.
I N THE EARLY EVENING LULL, Shakespeare retired to the room that Starling had offered him. It was small but convenient, being in the main part of the house-at great expense to Mr. Watts, no doubt-where Shakespeare would not be far from Essex, and could monitor his movements closely.
On his way to the room, he had tried to see Sir Robert Cecil, but Clarkson had told him the meeting would have to wait; Sir Robert was in a session of Privy Council and would then attend upon the Queen.
In Shakespeare’s little chamber, which was cluttered with luggage boxes and rails of gowns, Starling had had a mattress and blankets put out for him on the floor beneath the window. He lay down, intending to steal an hour’s rest before the evening madness began, but fell into a deep sleep.
It was dark when he awoke. From below the window came the roar of laughter, the din of loud music, wild cheering and stamping of feet. Quickly he dressed in his ancient court attire and made his way down to the teeming central courtyard, which was alight with pitch torches and blazing cressets of oil against all the walls. More light, from hundreds of candles, spilled out through the tall windows of the great hall, where revelers drank heavily and danced the volta with abandon.
Weaving his way through the crowd and into the hall, he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see the smiling face of Frances, the Countess of Essex. “Mr. Shakespeare, I thought that was you. I saw you at the baiting this afternoon.”
He bowed. “My lady.”
“Oh, don’t be so formal, Mr. Shakespeare. And before you ask, I am feeling quite myself again, thank you. The Queen’s own physicians have been treating me for my little illness. They are so attentive to me. I believe Sir Robert Cecil has even forbidden me to depart from court, so careful is he of my health.”
“I am delighted to hear it.” More delighted, Shakespeare thought, than she would ever know. “And have the tiny flying things gone?”
She frowned. “What flying things, Mr. Shakespeare?”
He laughed. “Pay me no heed, my lady. I have supped too much claret.”
As he spoke, his gaze drifted off across the hall to where her husband, Essex, was talking to McGunn’s man Slyguff. As he watched, Slyguff took a paper from his doublet and showed it to Essex. The Earl broke the seal and read it, then looked up. Slyguff indicated Shakespeare with an incline of his thin face. Essex followed his gaze.
Shakespeare felt a chill in his bones.
“Ah, look, there is my husband,” the Countess said, as if spotting an old friend she had not seen in months. Her voice turned more melancholy. “You know, Mr. Shakespeare, although Sir Robert keeps me at court, still my lord of Essex seems very distant. He has not spoken more than ten words to me these past days.”
Shakespeare did not know what to say; he could think of no crumb of comfort to offer this woman, who had wed two of the greatest heroes of England-first the tragic warrior-poet Sir Philip Sidney and now Essex-but had never won either of their hearts. The world knew that Sidney’s great love had been Penelope Rich-the Stella of his poem Astrophel and Stella -and that, on Sidney’s death, Essex had married Frances mer
ely for the heroic associations in taking on a brother officer’s widow.
“He is with Mr. Slyguff,” she continued. “Do you not think that Irishman a most curious, cold fellow, Mr. Shakespeare? He never seems to speak a word. Perchance he is dumb.”
The Countess drifted off into the throng, then a drum roll, like distant thunder, silenced the talk and laughter in the hall. The Master of the Revels took to the stage and clapped hands for attention. Shakespeare saw that the Queen had taken the prime seat up in the gallery. She was surrounded by her favorites-Heneage, old Burghley, Drake, Howard of Effingham. Essex walked away from Slyguff and ascended the gallery steps to join the royal party, kissing the Queen’s hand with an excessive show of ardor. He took the seat on her right. Sir Robert Cecil was on the other side, at the far end of the row, small and unassuming in his dark and sober attire. The contrast between him and the flamboyant, domineering Essex could not have been more marked.
On stage, an entertainment with mock ships-of-war reconstructed the sinking of the Armada and made jest of King Philip of Spain. At one point, Sir Francis Drake himself jumped onto the platform and grabbed a wooden sword from one of the players and made much ado about running the King through, to great applause.
John Dowland, the lutenist, played a ballad about a shepherd and his sheep. Players dressed in shepherds’ smocks entered the stage, driving a flock of six Cotswold sheep before them. The Master of the Revels then introduced Lord Chandos, the owner of Sudeley Castle, who bowed and offered the sheep as a gift to Her Majesty, describing them as the finest wool-bearers in the county.
The Queen accepted the gift with good grace and said she would take care to protect her new pets from she-wolves, at which the audience roared with laughter. As if on cue, a player dressed as a huntsman came on stage, with a wolf straining at a leash. The wolf had been put into fine lady’s clothes, with gold and silver threads, emeralds and sapphires. It also bore a fine ruff around its collar and a lawn coif about its narrow gray head, with its ears pointing up through two slits. It panted and drooled heavily, revealing its long teeth.
The crowd gasped. Shakespeare looked toward Essex. How would he react to this undisguised mockery of his mother? Everyone in the room knew it to be a calculated insult.
His face was as dark as a storm-laden sky. He seemed to hesitate a moment, then made his decision. Without taking his leave or even bowing to his sovereign, he rose to his feet and stalked from the royal gallery. The Queen feigned indifference and continued talking with Lord Burghley on her left, but none present could have failed to note the disrespect, even contempt, that Essex had shown her by turning his back and walking away from her so. If anyone else had done such a thing, they would have been dispatched to the Tower without delay. Only Essex, with his tempestuous, hot-and-cold relationship with the monarch, could get away with such insolence.
“Well, well, well.”
Shakespeare swung around and found himself face-to-face with Richard Topcliffe.
“That should sort the sheep from the wolves.”
“Have you run short of women, children, and priests to persecute, Topcliffe?”
Topcliffe was in court clothes: a black doublet with slashed arms, showing a gold inlay, yellow-gold breeches, and black netherstocks. He exuded an unholy stink.
He sneered at Shakespeare. “And whose side are you on? Whom do you favor in the battle that lies ahead?”
“What battle, Topcliffe?”
“You are more the mooncalf than ever I had imagined.”
Topcliffe eyed him a moment with overt loathing, then pushed him in the chest, forcefully, with the palm of his right hand. Shakespeare reeled but kept his feet.
“I look forward to the day that I drain your blood, you son of a Papist. And I will see your dog-daughter drab of a wife and her runt in the grave before the year is out. You can all join your good friend Father Southwell at Paddington Green.”
Shakespeare was unarmed-no sidearms were allowed here, so close to the Queen-or he might well have killed Topcliffe. Instead he turned away, with Topcliffe’s foul laughter ringing in his ears.
He was still shaking with fury ten minutes later when Clarkson found him. The old retainer quietly ushered him toward the White Garden beneath the royal apartments, where a covered passage extended from the private chambers of the castle to the chapel. It was in this concealed space that they found Sir Robert Cecil, standing in the shadows, lit only by a single candle in a wall sconce.
Clarkson retreated to the entrance to make sure none should enter and disturb them. Shakespeare bowed. “I bring you grave news, Sir Robert,” he said. He told him of Forman’s horoscopes-the death chart that claimed Elizabeth would die on September the eighteenth and the wedding chart that suggested a suitable date for the marriage of Essex and the lady Arbella Stuart to be on the fourteenth, less than three days from now.
“Then you must stay close to Essex. Do you have his trust?”
Shakespeare thought of the look Essex had given him when he read Slyguff’s missive. McGunn and the intelligencers in the turret room must have learned all they needed to know of Shakespeare’s loyalties when Jack Butler broke under torture. He shook his head. “I think not, Sir Robert. I am no longer sure what game he plays with me.”
“What of the correspondence between the Earl and the lady Arbella?”
Shakespeare spoke carefully. “I have discovered that there was, indeed, correspondence. Love letters and odes from the Earl to the lady.”
“And who composed these verses? Essex is no Sidney or Ralegh. He is not a poet.”
“I cannot say, Sir Robert.”
“Cannot-or will not?”
Shakespeare ignored the question. “I can tell you, however, that the go-between is one Morley, Christopher Morley, tutor to the lady Arbella. I believe he was placed there as an intelligencer by Mr. Secretary Walsingham, but has now passed into the hands of Essex.”
Cecil continued as though Shakespeare had not spoken. “Because you do understand why I ask you this, I hope. It is because we must find the evidence. We must have it to hold over the parties to this illegal marriage even though we stop the wedding. Essex and those who sponsor him must know that we have the wherewithal to put their heads on the block. Bring me the verses. I will settle for nothing less.”
Shakespeare understood that all too well. Most of all, he understood that it was his own brother’s neck that was in danger. He bowed to Cecil. “Indeed, Sir Robert, I will bring you evidence.”
But how, he wondered as he walked slowly back to the celebrations, would he do that and save Will? He wondered, too, why Cecil had not displayed more interest in the name Morley.
The sky was suddenly lit up by a dazzling display of fireworks, bursting above the castle like the onset of war between gods. Shakespeare stopped and looked up in awe and wonder; he had never seen their like before-specks of red and gold and silver fire, exploding like flowers in bloom, then fading and dying as they fell to earth. He shivered and wrapped his arms tight around his body. For the first time in many weeks, he felt a chill in the night air.
Out in the fields where the common people had their fairground stalls, bonfires were lit for miles around and minstrel music was played, all mixing in the night air with the finer melodies played here at the castle.
More fireworks flared up and lit the castle with their brilliance. They also lit the face of Slyguff twenty yards away, watching him unblinking with his one good eye, the other, the left one, dead and opaque.
S HAKESPEARE DID NOT sleep. He paced his room, glancing every few moments from the window, not knowing what to expect, but certain something must happen this night.
The room was bathed in shadows from the single candle he burned, casting eerie glimmers on the boxes and chests that belonged to Starling Day and the merchant venturer John Watts. For a long time, he was alert, every muscle and fiber tensed for the noise or sight that would propel him into action. But by three of the clock, he was weary and s
at down on the mattress with his back to the sill. He began to feel drowsy, his eyes heavy-lidded. At first he thought the noise he heard was part of a dream, but then he was suddenly wide awake. Somewhere, not far away, he could hear the sound of hooves and horses whinnying. He looked out of the window. It was raining, for the first time in God knew how many weeks. Cool rain, at last.
Shakespeare picked up his sword and dagger and slipped from the room and down the side staircase to the courtyard. A guard stiffened at his approach.
“Can’t sleep. Need a walk.”
The guard eyed his sword.
“There are a lot of common revelers and vagabonds out there, guardsman.”
The guard nodded sullenly, hunched against the rain, hood pulled over his head, rubbing his hands before his brazier.
Shakespeare walked quickly through the main yard toward the lesser court. He could hear what sounded like a large group of horsemen to the west, somewhere in the direction of the little Isbourne River and the town of Winchcombe. Halberdiers, wearing tangerine tabards that denoted them as Essex men, were on guard at the gatehouse. They blocked his way, but he could see past them. A band of twenty or more horsemen was saddled up, ready to ride. Their mounts trampled the ground. The rain came down in torrents.
At their head was Essex, tall and arrogant on a black stallion. He was surrounded by his closest supporters and retainers-Southampton, Danvers, Meyrick, and the rest. They carried a deadly array of armaments: wheel-locks, swords, lances, poleaxes, all glittering wet in the light of burning pitch cressets and torches. Sir Toby Le Neve was there, too; Le Neve, wanted for the murder of his own daughter and Joe Jaggard. Well, there would be no way of plucking him from this group tonight.
Essex saw Shakespeare and their eyes met through the teeming rain. The Earl held the intelligencer’s gaze for no more than two seconds, then tugged sharply at the reins and spun his mount. All his men turned their horses, too, lining up beside or behind him. Then, at a hand signal from Essex, they spurred their animals and trotted forward in a disciplined knot, kicking up splashes of mud and quickly disappearing into the darkness of the night.
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