Ruled Britannia

right to stand in our way.' The cavalrymen nodded, staring avidly-wolfishly-at the house upon which they advanced.

Pale English faces stared out of them through the windows, whose small glass panes were held together by strips of lead. Before de Vega and GuzmA?n reached the door, it opened. A frightened-looking but well-dressed servant bowed to them. 'What would ye, gentles?' he asked. 'Why come ye hither with such a host at your backs?'

'We require the person of Senor-of Master-Anthony Bacon, he to be required to give answer to certain charges laid against him,' Lope answered. He quickly translated for Captain Guzman.

His superior nodded approval, then turned and rapped out an order to the cavalrymen: 'Surround the place. Let no one leave.'

As the troopers hurried to obey, the house servant said, 'Bide here a moment, my masters. I'll return presently, with one who'll tell ye more than I can.' He ducked into the house, but did not presume to close the door.

'Can they hide him in there?' Lope asked.

'Not from us.' Guzman spoke with great conviction. 'And I'll tear the place down around their ears if I think that's what they're trying.'

The servant was as good as his word, coming back almost at once. Behind him strode a man made several inches taller by a high-crowned, wide-brimmed hat. The newcomer's enormous, fancy ruff and velvet doublet proclaimed him a person of consequence. So did his manner; though no bigger than Lope (apart from that hat), he contrived to look down his nose at him. When he spoke, it was in elegant Latin:

'What do you desire?'

So much for my translating, de Vega thought. 'I desire to know who you are, to begin with,' Captain Guzman replied, also in Latin.

'I? I am Francis Bacon,' the Englishman replied. He was in his late thirties-not far from Lope's age-with a long face, handsome but for a rather tuberous nose; a pale complexion; dark beard and eyebrows, the latter formidably expressive; and the air of a man certain he was talking to his inferiors. It made de Vega want to bristle.

It put Baltasar Guzman's back up, too. 'You are the younger brother of Anthony Bacon?' he snapped.

'I have that honor, yes. Who are you, and why do you wish to know?'

GuzmA?n quivered with anger. 'I am an officer of his Most Catholic Majesty, Philip II of Spain, and I have come to arrest your brother, sir, for the abominable crime of sodomy. So much for your honor.

Now where is he? Speak, or be sorry for your silence.'

Francis Bacon had nerve. He eyed GuzmA?n as if the captain were something noxious he'd found floating in a mud puddle. 'You may be an officer of the King of Spain, but this is England. Show me your warrant, or else get hence. For the house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his defense against injury and violence as for his repose.'

Guzman's rapier cleared the scabbard with a wheep! Lope also drew his sword, backing his superior's play. The troopers with pistols behind them pointed their weapons at Bacon's face. 'Damnation to you and damnation to your castle, sir,' the dapper little noble ground out. 'Here is my warrant. Obey it or die.

The choice is yours.'

For a moment, Lope thought Francis Bacon would let himself be killed on the spot. But then, very visibly, the Englishman crumpled. 'I beseech your Lordships to be merciful to a broken reed,' he said. 'Ask. I will answer.'

In Spanish, Captain Guzman said to Lope, 'You see? Fear of death makes cowards of them all.'

'Yes, your Excellency,' de Vega answered in the same language. Watching Bacon's face, he added,

'Have a care, sir. I think he understands this tongue, whether he cares to speak it or not.'

'Thank you. I will note it, I promise you.' GuzmA?n returned to Latin as he gave his attention back to the Englishman: 'So. You are the brother of the abominable sodomite, Anthony Bacon.'

'I-' Francis Bacon bit his lip. 'I am Anthony Bacon's brother, yes. I said so.'

'Where is your brother?'

'He is not here.'

The point of Guzman's rapier leaped out and caressed Bacon's throat just above his ruff, just below his beard. 'That is not what I asked, Englishman. One more time: where is he?'

'I–I-I do not know. You may take my life, but before God it is the truth. I do not know. Day before yesterday, he left this house. He did not say whither he was bound. I have not seen him since.'

'Tipped off?' Lope wondered aloud.

'By whom?' Captain Guzman demanded. 'What Spaniard would do such a wicked, treacherous thing?'

'Perhaps another sodomite, a secret one,' de Vega said.

GuzmA?n grimaced and grunted. 'Yes, damn it, that could be. Or it could be that SeA ±or Home-is-his-castle here is lying through his teeth. He'll be sorry if he is, but it could be. We'll find out, by God.' He turned and called over his shoulder to the cavalrymen at his back: 'Now we take the place apart.' The troopers whooped with glee.

One of the first things they found, in the front hall, was, not Anthony Bacon himself, but a painting of him.

He was even paler than his brother, with a longer, wispier, more pointed beard and with a long, thin, straight nose rather than a lumpy one. But for their noses, the resemblance between the two of them was striking.

Pointing to the portrait, Lope told the cavalrymen, 'Here is the wretch we seek. Whoever finds him will have a reward.' He jingled coins in his belt pouch. The troopers grinned and nudged one another. With a grin of his own, de Vega said, 'Go on, my hounds. Hunt down this rabbit for us.'

The Spaniards went through the Bacons' home with a methodical ferocity that said they would have done well as robbers-and that might have said some of them had more than a little practice at the trade. They examined every space that might possibly have held a man, from the cellars to the kitchens to the attic.

They knocked holes in several walls: some Protestants' houses had 'preacher holes' concealed with marvelous cunning. A couple of troopers went out onto the roof; Lope listened to their boots clumping above his head.

They did not find Anthony Bacon.

His brother Francis asked, 'How much of my own will they leave me?' By the way the troopers' pouches got fatter and fatter as time went by, the question seemed reasonable.

But Captain Guzman was not inclined to listen to reason. His hand dropped to the hilt of his rapier once more. 'You will cease your whining,' he said in a soft, deadly voice. 'Otherwise, I shall start inquiring amongst the younger servants here about your habits.'

If he had any evidence that Francis Bacon liked boys, too, he hadn't mentioned it to Lope. But if that was a shot in the dark, it proved an inspired one. The younger Bacon sucked in a horrified breath and went even whiter than the portrait of his brother.

With more clumping, the cavalrymen on the roof came down. The ones who'd gone through the house returned to the front hall. 'No luck, your Excellencies,' their sergeant said. 'Not a slice of this Bacon did we find.' Now he was making de Vega's joke.

Lope did his best to look on the bright side. 'We'll run him down.'

Baltasar Guzman nodded. 'We'll run him down, or we'll run him out of the kingdom. Let him play the bugger in France or Denmark. They deserve him. Let's go.' He led Lope and the troop of cavalrymen out of the house. Francis Bacon stared after them, but said not another word.

As Lope mounted his horse and started riding back to London, he thought, Nobody would dare call GuzmA?n a maricA?n now, not after the way he's hunted Anthony Bacon. The troop had almost got back to the barracks before something else along those lines occurred to him. No one would dare call Captain Guzman a marican now, but does that really prove he isn't one? He worried at that the rest of the day, but found no answer to it.

The expression Will Kemp aimed at Shakespeare lay halfway between a leer and a glower.

'Well, Master Poet, what have you done with Tom?'