Ruled Britannia

'As you wish, of course.' Lope hoped his own Latin would meet the test. He read it well, but he was no clergyman, and so did not often speak it. 'I am at your service in every way.'

'Good.' Cardinal Parsons looked down at some notes on his desk and nodded to himself. 'I am told you are the Spanish officer most concerned with sniffing out treason in the English theatre.'

'Yes, your Eminence, I believe that to be true,' Lope answered, pleased he'd remembered to use the infinitive.

'This is because'-the Archbishop of Canterbury checked his notes again-'you are yourself an aspiring dramatist?'

'Yes, your Eminence,' de Vega repeated, wondering if the English churchman would take him to task for it.

But Parsons only said, 'I am glad to hear it, Lieutenant. For treason is afoot in that sphere, and you, being familiar with its devices, are less likely to let yourself be cozened than would someone uninitiated in its mysteries.'

Lope had to think before he answered. The cardinal's Latin was so fluent, so confident, he might have been whisked by a sorcerer from the days of Julius Caesar to this modern age. He made no concessions to Lope's weaker Latinity; Lope got the idea Parsons made few concessions to anyone, save possibly the Pope.

'Your Eminence, I go to the theatre more to watch the audience than to watch the actors,' de Vega said.

'Many of them I know well, and they have not shown themselves disloyal to Queen Isabella and King Albert.'

Robert Parsons snorted like a horse. Lope needed a moment to realize that was intended for laughter.

Parsons said, 'And how likely is it that they would declare their treason before an officer of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain?'

'You make me out to be a fool, a child,' Lope said angrily.

'By no means, Lieutenant.' The Archbishop of Canterbury's smile was cold as winter along the Scottish border. 'With your own words, you make yourself out to be such.'

Without his intending it, de Vega's hand moved a couple of inches toward the hilt of his rapier. He arrested the motion. Even if he was insulted, drawing sword on a prelate would certainly send him to gaol, and probably to hell. He gave the cardinal a stiff bow. 'If you will excuse me, your Eminence-'

'I will not.' Parsons' voice came sharp as a whipcrack. 'I tell you there is treason amongst these men, and you will be God's instrument in flensing it out.'

'But, your Eminence'-Lope spread his hands-'if they do not show it to me, how can I find it? There is no treason in plays that are performed. The Master of the Revels sees and approves them before a play reaches the stage. Sir Edmund Tilney is the one who will know if the poets plan sedition-indeed, he has arrested some for trying to say what must not be said.'

Like Parsons' face, his fingers were long and thin and pale. When he drummed them on the desktop, they reminded de Vega of a spider's legs. 'Again, you speak of overt treason,' Parsons said. 'The enemies of God and Spain, like Satan their patron, are more subtle than that. They skulk. They conspire. They-'

'With whom?' Lope broke in.

'I shall tell you with whom: with the English nobles who still dream of setting at liberty that murderous heretic jade, Elizabeth their former Queen.' Parsons' eyes flashed. 'King Philip was too merciful by half in not burning her when first she was seized, and again in not slaying more of the men who served her and upheld her while she ruled.'

He had, Lope remembered, spent more than twenty years in exile from his native land. When he spoke of skulking and conspiring, he spoke of what he knew. Cautiously, de Vega asked, 'Have you anyone in particular in mind?'

He expected the Archbishop of Canterbury to name Christopher Marlowe-everyone seemed to put Marlowe at the head of his list of troublemakers-or George Chapman or Robert Greene (though Greene, he'd heard, was ill unto death after eating of a bad dish of pickled herring). But Parsons, after an abrupt nod, replied, 'Yes. A slanderous villain by the name of William Shakespeare.'

'Shakespeare?' Lope said in surprise. 'I pray your Eminence to forgive me, but you must be mistaken. I know Shakespeare well. He is a man of good temper-of better temper than most poets, I would say.'

'What of the friends of poets?' Cardinal Parsons asked.

Lope needed a heartbeat to notice he'd put the feminine ending on friends. Well, Baltasar GuzmA?n had warned not much got past the cardinal, and he was right. 'Your Eminence!' Lope said reproachfully.

'Let it go. Let it go. Forget I said it,' Parsons told him. 'But I warn you, Lieutenant, there is more to that man than meets the eye. He has been seen in homes where a man of his station has no fit occasion to call, and he keeps company no honest man would keep, or want to keep.'

'He knows Marlowe well,' Lope said. 'Knowing Marlowe, he will also know Marlowe's acquaintances.

Many of them, I fear, are men such as you describe.'

'There is more to it than that,' Cardinal Parsons insisted. 'I do not know how much more. That, I charge you to uncover. But I tell you, Lieutenant, there is more to find.' His nostrils quivered, like those of a hunting hound straining to take a scent.

Captain GuzmA?n had dark suspicions about Shakespeare, too. Lope had dismissed those: who ever thinks his immediate superior knows anything? But if Robert Parsons and GuzmA?n had the same idea, perhaps there was something to it. 'I shall do everything I can to aid the cause of Spain, your Eminence,'

de Vega said.

Chill disapproval in his voice, Parsons answered, 'It is not merely the cause of Spain. It is the cause of God.' But then he softened: 'I do take your point, Lieutenant. Work hard. And work quickly. My latest news is that his Most Catholic Majesty does not improve, but draws closer day by day to his eternal reward. With his crisis, very likely, will come the crisis of our holy Catholic faith here in England. No less than the inquisitors, you defend against heresy. Go forth, knowing God is with you.'

'Yes, your Eminence. Thank you, your Eminence.' Lope kissed Cardinal Parsons' ring once more. He left the cardinal's study, left St. Paul's, as fast as his legs would take him. No doubt Parsons had intended a compliment in comparing him to an inquisitor. But what he'd intended and what Lope felt were very different things.

The Inquisition was necessary. Of that de Vega had no doubt. But there was also a difference between what was necessary and what was to be admired. Vultures and flies are necessary. Without them, the ground would be littered with dead beasts, he thought. No one invites them to dinner, though, and no one ever will.

Shakespeare knelt in the confessional. 'Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,' he said. The priest in the other side of the booth murmured a question he hardly heard. He confessed his adultery with the serving woman at the ordinary, his rage at Will Kemp (though not all his reasons for it), his jealousy over Christopher Marlowe's latest tragedy, and such other sins as came to mind. and as could safely be told to a Catholic priest.

As Shakespeare had conformed to Protestant worship during Elizabeth's reign, so he conformed to Romish ritual now that Isabella and Albert sat on the English throne and Philip of Spain stood behind them. More often than not, conforming came easy. The Catholic Church's rituals had a grandeur, a glamour, missing from Protestantism. Had Shakespeare been able to choose faiths on his own, he might well have chosen Rome's. His father had quietly stayed Catholic all through Elizabeth's reign. But having invaders impose his creed on him galled Shakespeare, as it galled many Englishmen.

The priest gave him his penance, and then, with a low-voiced, 'Go, and sin no more,' sent him on his way. He went up toward the altar in the small parish church of St. Ethelberge the Virgin-the church closest to his lodgings-knelt in a pew, and began to say off the Ave Maria s and Pater Noster s the priest had assigned him. By the time he finished, he did feel cleansed of sin, although, being a man, he knew he would soon stumble into it again.

Nine years of conforming to Catholic ways was also long enough to leave him full of guilt about what he hadn't confessed. Despite the sanctity of the confessional, any mention of his meeting with Lord Burghley would have gone straight to the English Inquisition, and no doubt to the secular authorities as well. He was as sure of that as he was of his own name. Even so, he raised his eyes to the heavens as he finished his last Ave Maria. The priest wouldn't know what he kept to himself, but God would.

Crossing himself-another gesture that had grown close to automatic since the coming of the Armada-he got