Ruled Britannia

declared that 1600 will be a year of jubilee, but 1598?' He shrugged. 'To me, it seems a year among years.'

'Not so.' His superior waved the paper again. Lope was getting tired of seeing it without being able to read it. GuzmA?n went on, 'Ash Wednesday, this year, is the fourth of February, and Easter the twenty-second of March.'

'They're early,' Lope remarked. 'Is that enough to make it special?'

'As a matter of fact, yes,' GuzmA?n answered. 'It is, it says here, as early as Easter can come.' He waved that damned paper one more time. 'This is, of course, the twenty-second of March by the calendar Pope Gregory ordained fifteen years ago.'

'Yes, ten days earlier by the old calendar the heretics still love,' Lope agreed. 'But Easter isn't like Christmas-we don't have one day and they another.'

'Ah, but this year, we do,' Captain Guzman said. 'By their calendar, what we call the paschal full moon falls before the vernal equinox. They will count the Sunday after the next full moon as Easter-April the twenty-sixth by our reckoning, the sixteenth by theirs. Now do you understand?'

After a moment, de Vega nodded. 'I think so. If their Easter is later, their Lent will begin later, too, and-'

'And they will find it no sin to eat meat during the first part of our Lent,' GuzmA?n broke in. 'They either have to keep the fast an extra month to make themselves both safe and what they call holy, or-'

Lope interrupted in turn: 'Or break the law of God and the fast. I see it now, your Excellency. You're right- this is a special year.' He wouldn't have wanted to keep the Lenten fast for more than two months, and he doubted whether many stubbornly Protestant Englishmen would, either.

Baltasar GuzmA?n nodded. 'We can smoke out a lot of heretics who've hidden from us since the Armada landed. The sooner we get rid of the last of them, the sooner we'll have peace in the kingdom.'

'Peace.' Lope sighed. 'It seems like one of those mirages that fool travelers lost in the desert. You follow the mirage, and what looks like water recedes before you. If we had peace here, maybe one day I could go home to Spain. I wonder if I would recognize Madrid. After so long here, I'd probably think it was beastly hot.'

'One thing is certain, though,' Captain Guzman said. 'As long as there are still Protestants in England, we'll have no peace. This kingdom has to follow the holy Catholic faith. All the world, one day, will follow the holy Catholic faith. Then, truly, peace will come.' He crossed himself. His eyes glowed with a Crusader's vision.

'Yes.' De Vega crossed himself, too. But then, incautiously, he said, 'We've fought the Portuguese and the French, and they're Catholic, too-after a fashion.'

GuzmA?n waved that aside. 'When all the world is Catholic, there will be peace,' he declared, as if challenging Lope to argue with him. Lope didn't. He might not have been so passionately certain of that as Guzman was, but he believed it, too.

'Is there anything else, your Excellency?' he asked.

To his surprise and disappointment, Guzman nodded. 'Yes. What do you make of the murder of, ah, Geoffrey Martin?' He made heavy going of the dead man's Christian name.

'A robber, I suppose,' Lope answered with a shrug. 'I hear his purse was empty when the constables found his body.'

'Robbery, perhaps, but what else?' his superior persisted. 'He was a good Catholic, and now he's dead.

We might have learned a great deal from him.'

'Had someone approached him?' Lope asked. 'If anyone had, I never knew it.'

'Nor I,' Guzman said. 'But that does not necessarily signify. He could have been talking to the English Inquisition with us none the wiser. The inquisitors always hold their cards close to their chests-sometimes too close to play them, I think, but they are not anxious for my opinion.'

'Losing the prompter is a blow to the company,' Lope said. 'They will have to replace him as soon as they can.'

'And with whom they replace him may be interesting.' Captain Guzman eyed de Vega. 'If Shakespeare is as much an innocent as you think, he certainly has odd things happen around him.'

'And if you think Shakespeare a footpad, your Excellency, you prove you do not know the man at all,' de Vega replied.

'That is not what I said, Senior Lieutenant,' Guzman said, a distinct chill in his voice. 'Please think about what I did say. You are dismissed.' To show how very dismissed he was, his superior bent his head to his paperwork with him still in the office.

Seething, Lope gave Guzman a salute whose perfection was an act of mockery. 'Good day, your Excellency,' he snarled sweetly. His about-face might almost have been a dance. He neither slammed Guzman's door on walking out nor shut it silently, as Enrique had. Instead, he left it open. The captain's exasperated sigh and the scrape of his chair on the wood floor as he pushed it back so he could get up and close the door himself were music to de Vega's ears.

He knew nothing but thanks at escaping the barracks-thanks and cold, for snowflakes fluttered on the northwesterly breeze. It's January. It could be snowing in Madrid, too, he told himself. It was true. He knew it was true. It didn't help. When he thought of Madrid, he thought of a place where the vine and the olive flourished. He tried to imagine grapes and olives growing in London, and laughed at himself. Not even a poet's imagination stretched so far.

In the street outside the barracks, a Spanish soldier and a skinny Englishwoman were striking a bargain.

He gave her a coin. She led him away. Before long, he would get relief. Lope didn't know whether to envy or pity him for being satisfied so easily.

'I'd sooner be a monk than buy a nasty counterfeit for love,' he muttered. That didn't mean he enjoyed living like a monk. He had, though, ever since his two mistresses were so inconsiderate as to run into each other outside the Southwark bear garden. Goodbye, Nell. Farewell, Martha. High time I found someone new.

He wouldn't do it by the barracks. He knew that. The Spanish soldiers stationed there drew trulls as a lodestone drew iron. De Vega didn't want women of easy virtue. He wanted women who would fall in love with him, and whom he would love. for a while.

He wandered down towards the Thames, past the church of St. Lawrence Poultney in Candlewick Street. Not far from the church, a woman with a wicker basket called, 'Whelks and mussels! Cockles and clams! Fresh today. Whelks and mussels.!'

Maybe they were fresh today, maybe they weren't. In this weather, even shellfish stayed good for a while- one of its few virtues Lope could think of. He eyed the woman selling them. She was a few years younger than he, wrapped in a wool cloak she would have thrown out two years before if she could have afforded to replace it. The worried look on her face told how hard life could be.

'Whelks or mussels, sir?' she said, feeling his eye on her. 'Clams? Cockles? Good for dinner, good for supper, good for soup, good for stew.' She all but sang the desperate little jingle.

'Cockles, I think,' Lope answered, 'though I should be pleased to buy anything from so lovely a creature.'

Her weary sigh sent fog swirling from her mouth. 'I sell that not,' she said, voice hard and flat.

'God forbid I meant any such thing!' Lope exclaimed, though he had, at least to test her. He swept off his hat, bowed, and told her his name, then gave her his most open, friendly smile and asked hers.

'I oughtn't to tell it you,' she said.

'And why not?' He affected indignation. 'What shall I do with it? Make witchcraft against you? They'd burn me, none less than the which I'd deserve. Nay, sweet lady, I want it only for to write it on the doorposts of mine heart. My heart?' He couldn't remember which was right.

The girl with the basket of shellfish didn't enlighten him. A tiny smile did lift the corners of her mouth for a moment, though. She said, 'There's a deal of foolery in you, is't not so?'

'I know not whereof you speak,' Lope said, donning a comically droll expression.

That smile was like a shy wild thing he had to lure from hiding. He felt rewarded when he saw it. 'I'm Lucy Watkins, sir,' she said.

'My lady!' Lope bowed again. She wasn't his lady. Maybe she never would be. But he intended to make trial of that.