She hit her again. Arbella cried out but said not a word.
“Now go. Get out of my sight. Your meals will be brought to you in the classroom every day for the next month. You will not venture out.”
Bess clapped her hands and a governess in Puritan black appeared. “Take her to the classroom, Mistress Beacon. Keep her at her studies until dusk. Then begin again at dawn, without respite.”
When her granddaughter had gone, Bess at last sat down. She sighed heavily and shook her head. “Come, Mr. Shakespeare, let us drink some sweet wine and talk a little and see how we may all survive this.”
“First I would speak with the tutor, Morley. Would you allow that?”
“Very well, but I pledge that he will not be a tutor here by this day’s end.”
C HRISTOPHER MORLEY was not about to be cowed by Bess of Hardwick or John Shakespeare. He felt sure of the power he wielded. He stood in the center of the room, seeming to take more interest in the cut of his ink-stained fingernails than in the other people present.
“Do not think for a moment that Essex will protect you, even if he could,” Shakespeare said, bridling at his lack of concern.
Morley looked up nonchalantly. “I do not need Essex, Mr. Shakespeare. I can fend for myself in this matter, for I have the letters and verses, safe in a place where you will never find them. And I will use them-believe me, I will use them.”
“For what? To put a noose around your own neck, Morley?”
Morley snorted his derision. “Sir Robert Cecil will thank me for bringing them to him, for they will be just the proof he needs. He will give me a pension.”
“Cecil already knows you work for Essex.”
Morley surveyed Shakespeare with disdain. “I had thought you an intelligencer, Mr. Shakespeare. It is a curious word for one of such inferior wit. Yet it will be a great sadness to see your brother carved like pork belly at Tyburn. His Henry the Sixth afforded me much pleasure at The Rose this spring last.”
“If I kill you now, Mr. Morley, Sir Robert will thank me for disposing of a traitor.”
Morley laughed. “You do not have the stomach, Mr. Shakespeare. More pertinently, you do not have the letters and odes your brother wrote in his fine hand. Nor will you find them, for they are not here. Do you think I would leave such stuff lying about?”
Bess was having none of it. She clapped her hands again and a liveried butler entered the room, bowing low. “Mr. Jolyon, you will take two footmen and search Mr. Morley’s quarters-every inch and beneath every floorboard. Bring all papers, correspondence, and documents to me within the hour. You will have two more men do the same in the chamber of the lady Arbella. And see that they are thorough.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“So, then,” Bess said, looking first at Shakespeare and then at Morley, “we shall wait here and see what turns up.”
Shakespeare looked at Morley’s yawning, reptilian face. He was a strange creature. His expression betrayed nothing. Why had Walsingham sent him here to coach a royal heiress? Shakespeare wondered. Such a position was offered to only the most outstanding scholars. This was the sort of man Mr. Secretary used, but never trusted. It had been a most curious misjudgment.
“I know the way Walsingham worked. He paid you to spy on the lady Arbella,” Shakespeare said.
Morley affected a careless shrug of his rather sloping shoulders. “I may have passed him the odd tidbit of interest.”
“And then, on his death, you transferred your allegiance to the Earl of Essex.”
“He was the coming man. Why should I not assist him? No one is closer to Her Majesty, and I know that he is carrying on Mr. Secretary’s excellent work in the war of secrets. Is it treason to make oneself of use to the Queen’s most trusted courtier?”
Shakespeare’s anger erupted. “If you knew what Essex was about, you are guilty of treason. If you did not, you are a swill-witted fool. Why did you not think to approach the Privy Council for approval? There is more to this, Morley. You had another motive.”
Morley kept his silky composure. “I was doing Walsingham’s bidding, nothing more. He put me here. When he died, I became Essex’s man because he took on Walsingham’s duties.”
“But you went much further. Passing secret love poems to the lady Arbella-do you think Mr. Secretary would have approved of that?”
“Who knows? Who could ever tell the workings of Mr. Secretary’s labyrinthine mind?”
“What did Essex offer you? A knighthood? He likes to hand out knighthoods, I do believe. Or gold?”
Morley was silent. He glared at Shakespeare through narrow eyes. Bess of Hardwick looked on, intrigued.
“Or perchance it was silence.”
Morley almost seemed to hiss. His teeth rubbed together and made an unpleasant scratching sound. Shakespeare pushed his right fist hard into the tutor’s sneering mouth, then gripped his throat with his left hand. Blood seeped from Morley’s torn lip onto Shakespeare’s hand.
He held Morley against the wall. Their eyes met and held, Morley’s not quite so assured now. Shakespeare punched him in the guts, then kneed him. Morley groaned and crumpled.
Shakespeare let him fall. He lay on the ground, whimpering.
“Well, Mr. Morley?”
Morley said nothing.
Shakespeare unsheathed his sword. He pulled Morley’s hair up and wrenched his head to one side, then gently slid the sword’s sharp edge against his neck.
Morley was shaking. “I have nothing to say. Kill me.”
Shakespeare laughed. “Oh no, Mr. Morley, I won’t kill you. I will leave that to Skevington’s irons. You will be taken to the Tower, where Mr. Skevington’s engine will bend you double, so contorting your body that blood will spurt from every hole in your miserable carcass until you talk-or die. My lady…”
Taking the cue, Bess clapped her hands. A servant appeared. “Have Mr. Morley taken away under guard. He is to be held in close confinement until arrangements are made to transfer him to the Tower.”
Shakespeare pulled his sword away and resheathed it. “Thank you, my lady.”
The servant was a powerfully built man. He took Morley by the collar and dragged him to his feet.
“Wait,” Morley said, scrabbling against the footman’s grip.
“Take him away.”
“No, I’ll talk.”
Bess nodded to the servant, who dropped Morley, then retreated from the room.
“Well, Mr. Morley?” Shakespeare demanded again.
“A plague of Satan’s vomit and ten thousand hells on you, Shakespeare. I think you know exactly why I had to do their bidding.”
“McGunn.”
“Of course McGunn. And his demon acolytes Jaggard and Slyguff. They lure you in and trap you.”
“You have secrets…”
“ ‘Here is Master Smith,’ they say. ‘Is he not a fine lad?’ And he was a fine lad, the most golden boy I ever saw. And then comes Master Abel, a slender eleven years with the knowing ways of one twice his age. ‘He is an even finer lad, with Moorish tricks to please you,’ they say. On and on they come-three, four, five, six of them to my chamber over days and weeks, and I am in very heaven.” He sighed and shook his head. “They were beautiful, oh, they were beautiful. But they were rotten, every one. Decayed to the core-like apples that are juicy red on the outside but corrupt within, all eaten by worms.” He uttered a dry, sardonic laugh. “And the law was the least of their threats. McGunn is the Devil. He sees men’s weaknesses and buys their souls. Once bought, you are his forever.”
There was a knock at the library door. The butler entered, a jewel-encrusted box held across his outstretched arms. He placed it on the table in front of Bess, then bowed and retreated.
“I wonder what we have here,” she said, lifting the hinged lid.
Chapter 40
S HAKESPEARE RECOGNIZED HIS BROTHER’S HAND straightway. He was aghast as he looked at the array of verses and letters; in the wrong hands it amounted to a
death sentence for Will.
“Where did you find these, Mr. Jolyon?”
“In a little-used closet in the music room, my lady. The chest was concealed under jute sacking behind a box of viol strings.”
“Fetch a lighted taper, Mr. Jolyon.”
He bowed low and left the room.
Bess laid the papers out over the floor. There were at least twenty letters and a dozen odes. And though they were signed off with the mark of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, each one bore the indelible imprint of Will’s quill.
The three people in this light, airy room, with its soaring shelves of volumes of priceless books, many of them hand-scribed on vellum, stood in a triangle around the parchments. Sir Robert Cecil wanted these verses and letters. They would give him power over Essex, but both Shakespeare and Bess had another thought: these papers must be destroyed. Whatever their differences, they shared this common cause.
Jolyon returned with the flame. Bess took it and dismissed him from their presence. Shakespeare was already busy screwing the papers into balls and throwing them into the fire grate. Bess touched them with the tip of the taper, and the dry papers went up in a brilliant conflagration, the flames leaping into the chimney flue. Within two minutes, they were all gone, turned to black ash. Will was safe.
“Mr. Morley,” Shakespeare said, “remove your doublet.”
Morley folded his arms across his chest.
“Or would you wish me to do it for you?” Shakespeare unsheathed his dagger.
Morley unhooked the front of his doublet and threw it wide open. Papers fell out onto the floor. Shakespeare scooped them up and placed them in the fire.
“You still cannot harm me. I still have the testimony of my voice,” the tutor said.
“We will take our chances on that.”
Morley was silent.
“What were you planning to do with these papers? Sell them?”
“There are those that would pay good money for them. Essex, Cecil…”
“Topcliffe?”
“Oh yes, Mr. Topcliffe would pay very well to do for you and your brother. He would happily take you on a hurdle to the scaffold, Mr. Shakespeare. Perhaps he already has some of the verses…”
Bess shook her head. “I have heard quite enough, Mr. Morley. You are dismissed from my service, without pension or recommendation. Nor do Mr. Shakespeare or I have the slightest interest in your boys. That is between you and God. Good-day to you, sir.” She summoned her butler once more. “Mr. Jolyon, see that Mr. Morley is gone from this house within the half hour. First strip off his clothes and search him thoroughly, then give him new attire and a horse, one fit for the knacker. Do not let him take any belongings, not even a book. They will be sent on later when they have been thoroughly searched. He is never to be admitted again.”
“One last thing, my lady,” Shakespeare said once Morley had been marched from the room. “I must send a message to Sir Robert Cecil. He is most likely on his way to Oxford by now. Might I use the services of two or three of your most trusted retainers to deliver it safely?”
Bess looked doubtful. “What exactly were you thinking of saying in this message?”
Shakespeare held up his right hand. “Nothing that would in any way reflect ill on your ladyship or the lady Arbella. I merely wish to tell him that there will be no wedding. All else is clear to him. You may read it before I seal it.”
“Why not take it yourself, Mr. Shakespeare?”
“Because, my lady, I have urgent business in the north.”
T HE RAIN HAD STOPPED but the September sky was still a dark gray. Shakespeare reined in his mount at the crossroads where the long track from Hardwick Hall intersected the great south-north road. There was nothing more he could do. Cecil would put a ring of impenetrable iron and steel around the Queen. If she were to die on September the eighteenth, as predicted by Dr. Forman’s death chart, it would have to be by God’s hand, not man’s.
He looked both ways, then turned left. Duty could wait.
The journey north, a hundred miles, might be possible in a day if ridden hard. But the gray mare had already suffered harsh treatment on the way to Hardwick from Sudeley, and so he took it more easily, stopping the night at a comfortable wayside tavern where he and the horse received good accommodation and fine food-oats and water for her, roast beef, fieldfare puddings, and ale for him.
He left at dawn. By mid-afternoon he was drawing near to Masham in Wensley Dale, a lush valley in the north of the vast county of Yorkshire. He could scarcely move his horse along for sheep. Great flocks of them crowded the road and the grass banks on either side, all being driven in the same direction. An ancient shepherd laughed and said they were all going to the town’s sheep fair. “Seventy thousand sheep,” he said. “Count that if you please, master. That’ll get you off to sleep.”
Black sheep, filthy mud-arsed sheep, shorn sheep, milk-heavy ewes, and ragged rams. Everywhere you looked there was a sea of sheep. The old shepherd told him there used to be a lot more, perhaps a hundred thousand head in the old days before Henry tore down the great abbeys of Jervaulx and Fountains. “My father used to shepherd them for the silent white monks at Jervaulx. When he and I brought the sheep to the fair, it was proper mayhem, like all the clouds had fallen from the sky and landed on the grass.”
Shakespeare left the road, looking to find a better way through the meadows running parallel to the main path. He was apprehensive at the prospect of meeting Catherine’s family for the first time. He knew that her father, James, had developed a shaking palsy and was grown too frail to teach, so they now lived quietly near Masham, with a small pension from the grammar school and the dowry that Catherine’s mother, Mary, had brought to the marriage many years ago. Catherine’s brother was gone up to Cambridge on a scholarship, concealing his Catholicism as best he could.
The market square in Masham was heaving with sheep, many of them penned off but many more on the margins, being moved about in quest of a berth. In a side alley, Shakespeare saw a big lamb being held down and having its throat slit, ready for the butcher. Further along, a boy was sitting by a pot of boiling sheep fat, repeatedly dipping in a wick to make tallow candles. All around there was a mass of movement and the din of human and animal noise. The inns that opened out onto the large square were packed with smock-wearing shepherds and farmers, all quenching their thirst with great jugs of ale. Shakespeare went in the taproom of the first inn and asked a cheerful-looking ale-wench the whereabouts of the Marvell family.
She called out to the landlord. “Jeremiah, where did you say the Marvells lived?”
“Out on the Jervaulx road. Old farmhouse without a farm, on your right. Just past the milestone.”
“There you go, then, master. Northwest is the way. You’re the second stranger today looking for them. Must be a right royal revel out there. Is it christening, wedding, or funeral?”
She was about to turn away to serve another customer, but Shakespeare stayed her with his hand. “This other stranger-what was he like?”
“I don’t know. Square-shaped, strong. Looked more like a pirate than a farmer, with his pistol and sword. Not from these parts neither, from the sound of his voice.”
“A Devonshire man?”
She laughed. “Now, how would I know that? I wouldn’t know a Devon man from a Turkey man. I’ve never been out of Yoredale.”
“Well, did he have a limp, a clubfoot?”
“Can’t say as I looked. There’s hundreds here for the sheep fair, and I’m not going to spend my time staring at their feet. All I can tell you is that he had a face like a dog and gave me a drink-penny for my trouble. Now, are you after some ale, or can I move along?”
Shakespeare thanked her and left the inn, quickly mounting his mare and kicking on through the dense crowd. He prayed it really was Boltfoot arrived here.
He found the farmhouse easily. Mary, Andrew, and Grace were playing in the pathway at the front. Mary was chasing, and the older two were l
aughing as they dodged her outstretched arms. Mary saw him first and her little face creased into a smile as she ran up to his gray horse.
As he slid from the saddle and scooped her up in his arms, he felt the tension in his neck muscles ease a little and the anguish and terror of the past few days begin to recede.
T HE HOUSE WAS A SCENE of quiet domesticity. Boltfoot was holding his new baby, John, as if the little thing would break at his touch. Jane was enjoying five minutes of respite, sitting on the settle in the parlor beside her husband. She looked at him and their baby with undisguised adoration.
“Well done, Jane,” Shakespeare said. “And you, Boltfoot. It is good fortune that little John takes after his mother, not you, for indeed he is a handsome lad.”
Boltfoot took the insult as a well-meant jest and grunted. “He has perfect little feet. Perfect.”
Shakespeare, still carrying little Mary in his arms, touched his friend’s shoulder. “That is good, Boltfoot.”
“I was frighted about his feet.”
Shakespeare smiled. He handed his assistant a small pouch of tobacco. “I think I owe you that, Boltfoot.”
Boltfoot’s eyes lit up. He had not had a pipe of sotweed in many days.
“He’s brought someone with him, Master Shakespeare,” Jane said. “A woman called Eleanor Dare.”
The words brought Shakespeare up with a jolt. “You found her?”
Boltfoot grunted again. He handed the baby to Jane and began packing a pipe with his new tobacco.
Shakespeare noticed Boltfoot’s head was injured, his hair on one side cut close to reveal the scab of a healing wound. “Boltfoot, your head.”
“That cooper I told you about. He was Mistress Dare’s man. Clubbed me to the ground. But I have a hard head, so the barber-surgeon said at St. Thomas’s Hospital.”
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