Guzman's door was open. Enrique went in first, to let him know de Vega had arrived. Lope waited in the hallway till Enrique called, 'His Excellency will see you now, Lieutenant.'
Lope strode into his superior's office. He and Baltasar Guzman exchanged bows and pleasantries. His report on his latest trip to the Theatre lay on his superior's desk. He saw that Guzman, in the style of King Philip, had written comments in the margins. He gave a small, silent sigh; he enjoyed being edited no more than most writers.
Presently, the captain nodded to Enrique and said, 'You may go now. Shut the door on the way out, por favor.'
'As you say, your Excellency.' Guzman's servant sounded reproachful, which, as usual, did him no good. Lope wondered if he would slam the door to show his annoyance, but Enrique had more subtlety than that. He shut it with exaggerated care, so it made no noise at all.
Captain Guzman noticed that, too. Chuckling, he said, 'He's got his nose out of joint again. Because he's clever, he thinks he ought to be important, too.'
'Better a clever servant than a dolt like my Diego, who'd forget his own name if people didn't shout it at him all the time,' de Vega said.
'Oh, no doubt, no doubt, but Enrique will make too much of himself.' Tapping the report with his forefinger, GuzmA?n got down to business: 'Overall, this is a good piece of work, Lieutenant. Still, I need to remind you again that you visit the Theatre as his Majesty's spy, not as his drama critic.'
'I'm very sorry, your Excellency,' Lope lied.
Guzman laughed again. 'A likely story. You're a lucky man, to be able to enjoy yourself so much at your work.'
'I would enjoy myself even more if the benighted English let women take the stage,' Lope said.
'Indeed. It frightens me, Lieutenant, to think how much you might enjoy yourself then.' Baltasar GuzmA?n tapped the report again. His fingernails were elegantly manicured. He looked across the desk at de Vega. 'I note that you met this Marlowe back in the tiring room after the presentation.'
'Yes, your Excellency.' Lope nodded. 'He was talking shop with Shakespeare. A good bit of the time, he was telling him how he would have done things differently-and, in his opinion, better. This is, you understand, sir, something playwrights do.'
'No doubt you would know better than I,' Guzman said. 'But Christopher Marlowe is a dangerous character. He knows too many of the wrong people. Knowing so many rogues makes him likely a rogue himself. I am given to understand the Inquisition has taken several long, hard looks at him. They do not investigate a man merely for their amusement.'
'While I was there, he and Shakespeare spoke of nothing but their craft.'
Guzman ticked off points on his fingers. 'First, Lieutenant, you do not know this for a fact. They could have hidden any number of coded meanings in their talk, and you would have been none the wiser.
Second, who knows what they said
You do not.'
That he was right made his supercilious manner no less annoying: more so, if anything. Lope protested:
'Say what you will of Marlowe, but Shakespeare has always stayed with the stage and fought shy of politics.'
But his superior shook his head. 'Not necessarily. At the recent auto de fe, one of the men relaxed to the Inquisition for punishment-a notorious sorcerer and counterfeiter-saw Shakespeare in the crowd and called out for him to testify to his good character. This fellow, a certain Kelley, was also an intimate of Christopher Marlowe's. So Shakespeare is not above suspicion. No man is above suspicion,' he added, sounding as certain as if he were reciting the Athanasian Creed.
Though the news shook Lope, he did his best not to show it. He said, 'A drowning man will clutch at any straw.'
'True,' Captain Guzman agreed. 'Or it may be true. But I find it interesting that this Kelley should reckon Shakespeare a straw worth clutching.' Without giving de Vega a chance to answer, he rolled up the report, wrote something on the outside, and tied it with a green ribbon. Holding it out, he said, 'I want you to take this to Westminster, to an Englishman there who has worked closely with us for a long time.
He already knows of the business with the sorcerer, and he is well suited to judge just how important this meeting between Shakespeare and Marlowe may be.'
'Very well, your Excellency.' Lope took the report. 'An Englishman, you say? Am I going to have to translate my work here? I would want a secretary's help with that. I speak English well enough, but I cannot say I write it.'
Captain Guzman shook his head. 'No need for that. He's fluent in Spanish. As I say, he's been with us since Isabella became Queen.'
'All right. Good. That makes things simpler. This is the fellow's name here?'
'That's right. Get a horse from the stables and take it over to him right away. Vaya con Dios.' The farewell was also a dismissal.
A wan English sun, amazingly low in the southern sky, dodged in and out from behind rolling clouds as Lope de Vega rode through London toward Westminster. When he went past St. Paul's cathedral, he scratched his head, wondering as he always did why the otherwise magnificent edifice should be spoiled by the strange, square, flat- topped steeple. Not so much as a cross up there, he thought, and clucked reproachfully at the folly of the English.
The horse, a bay gelding, was no more energetic than it had to be. It ambled up Ludgate Hill and out through the wall at Ludgate. London proper didn't stop at the wall; de Vega rode west along Fleet Street past St. Bridget's, St. Dunstan's in the West, and the New Temple, the church of the Knights Templars before the crusading order was suppressed. They all lay in the ward of Farringdon Without the Wall.
Lope couldn't tell exactly where that ward ended and the suburbs of the city began. He had thought Madrid a grand place, and so it was, but London dwarfed it. He wouldn't have been surprised if the English capital held a quarter of a million people. If that didn't make it the biggest city in the world, it surely came close.
Westminster, which lay at a bend in the Thames, was a separate, though much smaller, city in its own right, divided into twelve wards. The apparatus of government dominated it much more than London proper. Isabella and Albert dwelt in one of the several castles there. Parliament-Lope thought of it as the equivalent of the Cortes of Castile, though it was even fussier about its privileges than the Cortes of Navarre-met there. Westminster Abbey was an ecclesiastical center, though the senior archbishop of England, for no good reason de Vega could see, presided at Canterbury, fifty miles away. And the clerks and secretaries and scribes who served the higher functionaries also performed their offices in Westminster.
By the time he finally found the man he was looking for, Lope felt as if he'd navigated the labyrinth of the Minotaur. He'd spent most of an hour and most of his temper making his way through the maze before he knocked on the right door: one in the offices of the men who served Don Diego Flores de ValdA©s, the commandant of the Spanish soldiers stationed in England.
'Come in,' a voice called in English.
Lope de Vega did. The fellow behind the desk was unprepossessing: small, thin, pale, pockmarked, bespectacled. As de Vega walked in, he flipped a paper over so the newcomer wouldn't be able to read it. Lope caught a brief glimpse of pothooks and hieroglyphs-some sort of cipher. Maybe the man made up in brains what he lacked in looks. Peering down at the report, Lope said, 'You are Thomas. Phelippes?' He'd never seen the name spelled that way before-but then, the vagaries of English spelling could drive any Spaniard mad.
'I am,' Phelippes said in English, and then switched to good Spanish: 'You have the advantage of me,
'Either will do,' Lope replied, speaking English himself. After giving his name, he went on, 'My superior, Captain Baltasar GuzmA?n, ordered me to bring you my report on possible suspicious business at the Theatre the other day, and so I give it you.' He held it out as if it were a baton.
Phelippes took it. 'I thank you. I am acquainted with Captain GuzmA?n. A good man, sly as a serpent.'
Lope wouldn't have used that as praise, but the Englishman plainly intended it so. He also spoke of the Spanish nobleman as an equal or an inferior. How important are you? Lope knew he couldn't ask.
