Revenger

Shakespeare saw the way this was going. “But something happened to make you change your mind.”

His brother nodded. “By chance, I discovered for whom they were intended. I was in the picture gallery at Essex House with my lord of Southampton. There were others about, including my lady Rich. She had with her one of my odes, sealed and ready to dispatch. She waved the paper in front of my face and said mischievously that my honeyed words would lure any maid to a man’s bed, but when her messenger appeared and took the missive, he said to her, ‘Another one for Mr. Morley at Shrewsbury House, is it, my lady?’ She looked at him as though she would happily cut the pizzle from his person and thrust it down his throat to silence him. I affected not to have heard a thing.”

Shakespeare was thunderstruck.

“Have you nothing to say, John? You must realize which young lady resides at Shrewsbury House?” Will lowered his voice yet more, to an urgent whisper, and moved closer to his brother’s ear. “A young lady with royal pretensions, even named by some as first in line.”

“I am quite aware who lives at Shrewsbury House, Will. I cannot believe you have got involved in such a thing as this.”

“I told you, I thought it but bawdy sauce.”

“You have no idea how perilous this is.” Shakespeare was angry now, and desperately concerned for his brother’s safety. He had written verses for Essex to woo Lady Arbella Stuart. It was tantamount to treason. It did not seem too great a leap to believe this Morley might be the spy that Walsingham had put in Arbella’s company to watch her. If so, then he had now transferred his allegiance to Essex’s intelligence group, and was passing his letters of passion to the impressionable girl.

“Of course I know the danger,” Will said, sounding as annoyed. “That is why I have told you of it. You must extricate yourself from this circle, as I am doing. And I must tell you that I know this Christopher Morley who receives the letters from Essex. He has been at Southampton House, making cow eyes at my lord there. John, this man Morley is poison. Pure poison. He fancies himself a poet, but he is less than that. Every instinct tells me he is not to be trusted. You would never know which side he was on.”

Shakespeare gritted his teeth. He had met many such men in his years with Walsingham. They were staple fare in the intelligencers’ world: men who sold secrets to both sides and owed loyalty to none. But what had Will got into here, treating with such people? He was not equipped to be embroiled with doubledealers. “God’s blood,” was all he said.

“John?”

“Will, do not fret for me, think of yourself. You do not know this world. What if Mr. Morley has your verses? What if he decides to use them to his own ends? Worse-what if Arbella is found in possession of them? These loving words of yours could bring you to the scaffold. You are the one in danger. You must tell no one else of this. Nor must you let anyone of Essex’s circle realize that you understood what was said. Affect ignorance. Your life may well depend on it.”

J ACK BUTLER WAS a strong man, yet the bonds that held him to the chair were stronger. In the distance, he heard the call of seabirds and the barking of dogs, but no human voices to comfort him. He had no notion of how long he had been here in this forlorn, forgotten place. The hours had drifted into days and the pain into a numb nothingness.

He looked down at the bloody, throbbing mounds that had once been his hands. As he gazed at them, they seemed to be no longer part of him.

When the men had seized him, not far from Dowgate, on his return from Sir Robert Cecil, they had asked him one thing only. “Who gave you the letter?” Nothing else. They had said it once and never again. Then they had brought him here, tightly bound in the back of a cart, and started their diabolical work.

How long, he wondered, before they came to him again-Slyguff with his shears and McGunn with his sword of Spanish steel? “Your twinkly toes next, Butler,” McGunn had said, laughing.

Butler shuddered. His throat was parched. He could not even shout out.

How long before he told them what they wanted to know, that the encrypted message he was bringing to Shakespeare had come from Sir Robert Cecil? Only his silence had kept him alive this long. He knew he would die here and he wished he could endure the pain. But he could not. No man could. He would tell them what they wished to hear, even though the telling would hasten his own death.

S HAKESPEARE RAN through the streets down to the river, where he pushed to the front of the queue for a wherry with the call “Queen’s business! Queen’s business here!”

The watermen who took his fare were a sour-tempered pair of middle-aged men who went about their rowing like reluctant donkeys at the turn-mill.

“Row faster, wherryman,” Shakespeare demanded of the senior of the two, a gray-haired curmudgeon with a mouth that turned down as if eternal winter had arrived.

“If you want faster, it’ll cost you double. What’s the hurry? We’ll all be dead of the pestilence by summer’s end.”

“Aye,” said his mate. “All but the nobility and gentry and merchants, God curse their lily-white livers. They’re all off to their country estates and palaces to dine on dainty dishes and finger each other’s wives.”

It was the best part of three-quarters of an hour, accompanied by a dunghill of complaints about the plight of London and the deceit of foreigners, before the grand edifice of Shrewsbury House finally emerged from the heat haze on the north side of the river.

Shakespeare noted immediately that all the great windows that fronted the Thames were shuttered. He gave the watermen their due but no tip-which caused yet more grumbling-then strode around to the postern gate where he had entered before. The guard recognized him. “Ah, good-day, Master Marvell,” he said. “I am afraid you have missed her ladyship. She departed in haste at midday yesterday.”

“Gone where?”

“To Derbyshire, sir. Hardwick Hall.”

“And is the lady Arbella with her?”

“Indeed, yes, master.”

“And the countess’s staff and tutors?”

“Why, yes, most everyone. The train follows piecemeal. They will go by stages.”

“Is Mr. Morley with them? Christopher Morley, one of her tutors?”

The guard turned to a sheaf of papers and ran his finger down a list with scores of names, reading them out loud with difficulty. “Jas. P, Thom. L, Matt. P… here you are, Mr. Marvell”-he handed the manifest to Shakespeare-“Chris. M, tutor.”

Something jangled in Shakespeare’s brain. Chris. M? And then it clicked into place, like a key into a lock. The warning Catherine had told him about, the one from Anne Bellamy, the embittered woman who had connived in the trap set for Father Southwell: “You will all drown in chrism.” It had meant nothing at the time, but then, that was perhaps the intent. Was it just a grotesque little riddle, the sort of crass humor Richard Topcliffe delighted in? If so, it meant Topcliffe knew something: something, perhaps, that he had learned from an informer inside Southampton House.

Shakespeare walked away. It was clear his brother was hopelessly compromised. Shakespeare breathed deeply. He must steel himself and return to Essex House. He had an appointment with Lady Rich. It was a meeting that filled him with trepidation, for he knew he would have to lie, conceal, and lie yet more to delve into the corrupt heart of the Essex circle so that he might watch the magnificently flawed Earl as closely as one of Sir Robert Cecil’s hawks. And somehow find some kind of evidence against Essex-evidence that would not implicate his own brother and take him to the scaffold.

Chapter 31

P ENELOPE RICH WAS AT HER ABLUTIONS IN HER PRIVATE chamber. She stood naked in front of a copper