cooperate with me as fully as required by law. I know you understand this.”
He saw real fear in Forman’s eyes. He could also tell that he was ill. Very ill. Most probably the plague.
“Mr. Marvell, please, I beg of you. Have mercy, for I have been slandered. I know the law and I have drawn up no chart that might be considered unlawful.”
Shakespeare did not speak for a few moments. Then he turned on his heel and strode to the door, only stopping momentarily to look at the hairy, stumpy, scared figure cowering behind his blankets.
“I shall find it myself, then, Dr. Forman.”
There was a door from the chamber. He went through it into another room and from there into the hall, where he found the stuff of Forman’s work: his jars and vials of herbs and unspeakable alchemical substances, his charts and books and scratched papers with drawings and coded Latin notes.
Forman was close behind him, having dragged his aching body from the sickbed. “Please, Mr. Marvell, do not rummage here. This is my life’s work, sir.”
Shakespeare picked up a horoscope and examined it. “Tell me what this is?”
“It is the chart of a goodwife from East Cheap, sir. It tells her she must have her husband occupy her on the fifteenth day of her month, following the onset of the flowers, and that she will conceive a healthy boy-child. It is innocent enough, Mr. Marvell, as are all my charts.”
Shakespeare tossed it carelessly to the floor. He picked up another chart. “And this?”
“That tells a young courtier when he might find a suitable wife, sir.”
“And how much faith do your customers place in these charts, Dr. Forman?”
“They have complete faith, Mr. Marvell.” Suddenly, Forman’s voice strengthened. “Why should they not? Why, even the worthless College of Physicians understands that the silent movement of the stars is not to be mocked, sir. The stars are never wrong, Mr. Marvell-never. Any fault must lie in man’s interpretation of them. And I am not a man to make mistakes, which is why the wealthiest of merchants, the greatest of the gentry and nobility, come to my humble abode and rely on me. I am, sir, the foremost exponent of this science in the modern world.”
Shakespeare screwed the chart into a ball and dropped it behind him, then moved on. He took a vial from a shelf. He read the label. “Ash of little green frogs, Dr. Forman? What is this?”
“It is as it says, sir. I beg you to be careful with it, for it is most valuable for the easing of pain in the teeth.”
Shakespeare took out the glass stopper and tipped the ash upon the carpeted floor.
Forman clutched his chest, then sank onto a settle, breathing heavily, his mouth open and his eyes closed.
“So where is the chart I require, Dr. Forman? Produce it for me and I vouch that I will not use it against you. I pledge, likewise, that if you do not give it to me, then I most certainly will hold you responsible for it. What have we here?” He picked up another vial. “Italian theriac, Devil’s venom for the falling sickness…”
Forman was gasping for breath. “Mr. Marvell, that did cost me three sovereigns to bring from the city of Milan, sir.”
Shakespeare took out the stopper and began to pour out the thick treacle. Forman tried to stay his hand, but Shakespeare pulled away from his contagious touch. “Please, Mr. Marvell,” Forman managed to say. “I will do as you wish. But I need time. A few days, for I must redraw the chart for you and I am not well.”
“Then I will send the plague men around. This house should be closed up and crossed so that none enter.”
“I beg of you, I plead with you, sir. I will do whatever you require, but keep the plague men away. It is naught but a summer sweat. I am a physician, sir, I know these things. And I will do what you require. Just a little time.”
Shakespeare put the stopper back in the vial. Although he knew he had Forman on the rack, he knew, too, that this man was as slippery as a water serpent. “I will be back, Dr. Forman. You have this one chance to save your miserable skin. If you are alive when I return, and if you do not have that which I require, I will summon pursuivants to break this house apart, destroy all your love philters, burn all your books, and hoist you off to the lowest dungeon in Newgate. If you fail to cooperate, it will be the worst move ever you make, for you will create an enemy of Sir Robert Cecil, the one man who might take your part against the College of Physicians.”
Whether it was the word
Forman folded his arms across his chest and shivered though his face and forehead dripped with sweat.
“You really are not a well man, Dr. Forman.”
“No, indeed, sir, I am not. But you were correct when you said in jest that I would cure myself, for I do know the way…”
“I wish you fortune. Now tell me, what is this other matter of which you speak?”
“The matter is this,” he said with a resigned air. “I was asked to cast a second chart, sir. By the same great lady.”
“Another death chart?”
“No, sir, a nuptial chart, to find the most propitious date for a wedding. It is for a man born on November the tenth in the year 1567 and a young lady brought into this world on October the fifteenth, 1575.”
The birth dates of twenty-four-year-old Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the sixteen-year-old Lady Arbella Stuart. So Cecil was right. There was to be a wedding, and one that could only be construed as rebellion and high treason. It could end in only one way: open warfare and bloodshed in the snatching of a crown.
“I will need a copy of that chart, too, Dr. Forman. But tell me this: what date did the stars decide on for this wedding?”
“September the fourteenth, sir. Four days from now.”
The date, so close, hit him with the force of a gale. He did not wait to hear Forman’s whimpered pleadings a moment longer but ran from the house and drove his gray mare hard through the stifling streets to Dowgate. He had to fetch his court attire and ride west to find Essex-and inform Cecil-with not a moment’s delay. Four days. He had just four days to prevent a wedding that could bring England to insurrection.
But in his worst nightmares, nothing could have prepared him for what he was about to find.
Chapter 33
T HE BODY OF JACK BUTLER WAS STRETCHED OUT, macabre and obscene, in the school courtyard where, until recently, boys had played in their recesses from class and where they had suffered the birch when the fancy took Rumsey Blade.
Butler had been a big man and somehow his height and great barrel of a chest added outrage to the dreadful things that had been done to him.
His injuries matched those inflicted on the murder victim Shakespeare had seen in the Searcher of the Dead’s crypt at St. Paul’s, except worse. Butler’s face was coated in rust-dried blood; his hands were like talons, red and bloody and sliced with some vicious implement. His toes, too, had been mutilated. A tanner’s shears? Was that what had done this? His head was near severed and his abdomen had a gaping wound.
But there was nothing military about this death. This killing had not been done in the heat of battle. This was murder in cold blood. And not just murder but torture, for Butler’s hands and feet had been sliced along the crucial weblike muscle between the digits. By the look of the coat of blood that masked the face around the mouth, the tongue had been sliced out, too.
There was something else. Cecil’s code book,
