License to Quill (20 page)

For seven days and six nights, the bard closely followed his distant targets. He stalked their tracks, monitored their movements, and disappeared into the same towns where they rested. The bard never betrayed his position, nor did he observe any suspicious activity. Quite the contrary, the most extraordinary aspect of this cross-country endeavor was how ordinary it appeared on both ends of Bacon's telescope. Shakespeare and Aston encountered no difficulties for nearly the full length of their trip. The weather was cold, but not unbearable; the two were well equipped for the winter. Their ride was unhindered by wolves, which had long ago been eradicated from England. Also, the countless bodies they found frozen to gibbets gave Shakespeare confidence that the local marshals were keeping the peace. The playwright's raven was quiet, and Aston appeared to be in good spirits. As such, it should not be too surprising that the horse and rider became quite chatty by the tail end of their travel.

The discourse started while the two rode through Buckinghamshire en route to what the bard imagined was Aylesbury. They were in the Chilterns—or at least what remained of them. Many of the region's beech forests had been cut down in recent years to deny them to thieves. When the conspirators accidently veered into this impassable wall of tree stumps, the bard took Aston behind the veil of what little forest remained. Seeing this would take a while, the playwright dismounted and patted his partner. However, something unexpected happened. For the first time into their journey, the silver stallion flinched at Shakespeare's touch. “What is it, cousin?” the bard asked with surprise. He slipped off his leather glove and felt under the horse's winter fleece. Aston's neck was not too terribly knotted, but the magnificent creature cringed when Shakespeare ran his hand over the animal's inflamed croup. “Oh, Aston…” the playwright chided. “You shouldn't keep these things to yourself!” Shakespeare removed Aston's saddle and rummaged through the kit Bacon had given him for repairs.

Inside, Shakespeare found two wooden mallets and Bacon's codex on equine anatomy, which the bard no longer looked upon as a painful reminder of Bentley. The playwright flipped through the indexed ailments and compared them with the book's detailed drawings, which he mentally projected onto his injured companion. Shakespeare set the book on a large stump and he traced his fingers along both sides of Aston's spine. Once he came to the animal's lower vertebrae, he put his hands together and gave Aston a hard shove with his palms. There was an audible
pop
as the vertebrae properly realigned. He then tapped the sore spot with his mallets—to Aston's delight, the playwright gathered—and then semicircled the shining creature to finish things in the front.

Shakespeare gently stretched Aston's neck to the left and the right, and then threw his arms around the animal in an almost loving embrace. The bard locked his fingers together just behind Aston's ears and gave him two hard, quick yanks. This time, the forest filled with even louder cracks than before. “Better now?” the playwright asked even though he knew the answer was yes. After giving Aston a few more therapeutic taps, the bard patted his partner and packed his kit. “See? This is why you should tell me everything!” Once he was back in the saddle, the playwright treated his gracious companion to a one-man performance of
Much Ado About Nothing
.

And then
Richard III
.

And then, so long as Aston appeared interested, the bard decided to go through the rest of his repertoire:
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
,
The Taming of the Shrew
, the three Henry plays,
Titus Andronicus
, and so on. The playwright recited them line by line, play by play in the order that they were written, including
Love's Labour's Won
but with the understandable omission of
Sir Thomas More
. It was not as good as a performance from the King's Men—the bard was working with just one costume—but it was nevertheless a cathartic reading after months of pent-up aggression. Every theater in London had been closed for months due to the plague, and the Globe was no exception. “A plague…” the playwright seethed halfway into
Romeo and Juliet
. “They have made worms' meat of me!” It was the most exhaustive performance of English drama in history, and the bard would not have shared it with any other horse. Only Aston.

Overhead, the playwright's stately raven continued to monitor the duo.

By the last legs of their journey, the curtain fell on
A Midsummer Night's Dream
as the conversation shifted with the scenery to something serious. The two finally crossed into Warwickshire on February the twenty-seventh a little less than an hour after departing Banbury. The timing of their entry revealed the conspirators' plans to the playwright: they were less than a day's ride from Warwick, which was precisely where their carriage pulled in for the evening. After crossing the Avon on Aston, Shakespeare rented a room under an alias and monitored the conspirators from across the street where they slept. Once their windows went dark, the bard went to bed convinced where they would be riding in the morning. They were north of the River Avon, they still had at least a day's travel ahead of them, and his targets planned to meet with the cunning folk. Their final destination had to be the Forest of Arden.

It was.

After waking somewhat later than the bard expected, the conspirators returned to their coach and rode north five miles into Kenilworth. The men rested and lunched, swapped their horses for sturdier mounts, and continued north until bending with Finham Brook in a northwesterly direction. Shakespeare watched through his spyglass as the carriage crossed the frozen River Blythe and journeyed deeper into the winter's heart of the Hemlingford Hundred. With Aston and their resting raven awaiting their next move, the bard shouldered his telescope and ventured forward into the barren north-northwest.

The Hemlingford Hundred was a wide, sweeping landscape that had also been home to extensive forests before falling to English axes. It was the ancient edge of the Arden, a vast wilderness so unknown and unexplored that even the Romans avoided it. The Arden was a mysterious place with no definite borders, especially with so much of the woodlands disappearing every day. There were still a few lonely trees scattered across Hemlingford like twigs, but otherwise, these icy fields served as a graveyard to the native lands that ancient Britons revered as “Albion” in dead tongues.

The conspirators rolled westward in their wagon over the Arden's frozen shores while freezing rain beat down on the playwright behind them. As they passed Bickenhill and Solihull, the towns became fewer and the clumps of trees increased dramatically. The wind was rustling and the skies darkening when the carriage at last approached the wooded halls of the Arden. From Shakespeare's viewpoint on the very edge of the Hundred, both the conspirators and the forest in front of them were silhouetted in the setting sun. The bard tried to observe through his telescope, but the cylinder was stuck shut with frost. By the time he opened the contraption, his distant targets were already swallowed up by the veil of trees. Alarmed, the playwright shouldered his spyglass, scanned the woodlands left and right, and charged Aston across the ice before he lost the conspirators completely.

Once the two were inside the frozen fortress of Arden, Shakespeare slowed Aston to a trot while his raven perched atop a branch. There was no sight or sound of the conspirators to follow. “These are an ancient wood,” the playwright whispered to his partner. “A mystic place. A living link to a distant past my grandparents used to tell me about. Lighthearted stories and dark deeds have taken place in here. The woodland welcomes children with laughter, but by nature is made for rapes and murders.” An owl hooted, and the playwright's observant raven turned its head. “Such is the Forest of Arden, my dear Aston. It is ruthless, vast, and gloomy. Such is the dark heart of Warwickshire, my home.”

With these words, the bard's raven swooped down and screamed. Two cloaked figures stepped in front of the bard from behind the trees.

As a startled Shakespeare reared his whinnying mount, his shrieking raven raked a red line across the faces of both bandits. The injury caused one villain to drop his knife and double over in pain while the other looked up and swung his sword at the violent bird. Alarmed, Shakespeare turned Aston to flee the forest only to find a third man blocking their escape. The cheery figure was brightly dressed and wore a hideously repulsive mask.

The bard reached for his rapier but fumbled desperately. The stubborn sword would not draw! Frustrated, he looked down only to realize that his frosted blade was stuck in its scabbard.

His grinning adversary, however, was more familiar with the effect of weather on weapons. With a single swipe from his sword, the villain slew the playwright's raven.

Severed from the outside world, Shakespeare and Aston were trapped inside the Arden.

 

Chapter XXII

The Hobgoblin

“Fee-fie-fo, fellow English! What fortune finds you alone? You sing so sweet of your homeland, yet you are
so
far from home!”

The grinning figure swaggered forward across the blood-splattered stage; his tall boots crushing the feathers of the playwright's fallen raven. The villain carried himself with a joie de vivre of an almost theatrical nature, bending low like an actor proudly addressing his groundlings. He curled his fingers in intricate gestures like a mime as he walked. His short cape was jet-black with an inner lining of gold and black diamonds. He wore a thick, rumpled ruff atop a decorative doublet flamboyantly checkered in a harlequin pattern of colors. And crowning it all was a black velvet cap with a long feather and a gold medallion that Shakespeare imagined was stolen.

And then there was his face. Or more specifically, his mask.

Staring back at the bard was the same twisted visage that every English traveler in the countryside dreaded. What did the mask look like? In one word: grotesque. Stories about the mask varied from person to person, but every single one of them could attest to its ugliness. You would know it when you saw it, particularly if its wearer was leering at you from the forest. Under such circumstances, perhaps you could turn tail and flee before his toadies, Snell and Shorthouse, shot you full with their crossbows. However, if you were instead riding peacefully until an owl hooted at an odd time of the day, as Shakespeare was, then it was already too late. You just walked into a trap set by men who lived in the forest drinking nothing but beer and eating nothing but old meat and toadstools. Such a dangerous lifestyle has a toxic effect on the mind, which was why these particular highwaymen had an overactive imagination with their hapless victims.

If you found yourself trapped between the masked man and his toadies, you were theirs. All of you. Every part of your body was now their puppet to play with. They once forced a Cambridge scholar to give a lecture with a puukko knife held to his neck. Another time, they forced one of Shakespeare's own actors to perform a scene from
Hamlet
in the nude. No one knew what to expect from these outlaws or their twisted ringleader, save for that one detail: it was a truly grotesque mask, as Shakespeare now knew for himself. Such was the legacy of Gamaliel Ratsey, the former nobleman now feared throughout England as “the Hobgoblin.”

The playwright narrowed his eyes and shook his head at the villain. “Do you spend your days practicing on little birds, Ratsey?”

“Little birds and little boys! With little throats and little toys.”

Shakespeare smirked with skepticism while one henchman wailed madly behind him. The bard's fallen raven had taken out one of the highwayman's eyes.

“How be thee, matey?”
the Hobgoblin asked Snell.

Enraged, the bloodied henchman rushed over to the raven's remains, screaming “Thou demon!” as he slashed the slain bird with his sword. “That beast took my eye!”

The Hobgoblin turned away as bloodied bits of pink snow stained his costume.
“I would weep for you, brother, but you still have another.”
The maestro wiped a red tear from his eye as he returned to the bard.
“As you see, the cruel Fates be unkind to my friend. Perhaps kindness from you will make his sorrows end.”

“You must be jesting,” the playwright replied.

“Ah! I may laugh, I may leap, I make merry; it's true! But to think me a jester? Such a joke is on
you
!”
The Hobgoblin pointed at Shakespeare with a devilish leer. He then looked to Shorthouse and said:
“Bind his hands, brother.”

“What do you want from me?” the bard grumbled while tightening his grip on his reins.

“Nothing of consequence. Just your silver, of course. And your gold and your garb. Maybe even that horse.”

Shorthouse threatened Shakespeare with his crossbow since Aston would not let the bandit approach. “Unhorse you'self,” he ordered while the silver steed stomped his hooves.

“I suggest you stand back,” the dramatist cautioned. The more Aston bucked, the less control he appeared to have over him.

Shorthouse looked to his leader for the go-ahead to kill Shakespeare. Instead, the entertained Hobgoblin cackled with laughter.
“You persist and resist! I must say, my dear brothers; this one fights with more boister than Ralph Roister Doister!”

“Do you have the courage to say that to me face to face?” asked the bard, who was beginning to see flaws in Gamaliel Ratsey's act.

“With a smile and guile!”
The masked bandit raised his sword and stepped closer.
“Now, would you kindly—”

Aston reared onto his hind legs, kicking Gamaliel flat onto his back. The blow knocked the Hobgoblin's mask off, revealing the villain's surprisingly handsome face underneath. The bard spun his mount and tried to flee, but instead had to pull on his reins. Snell was done mutilating the bard's raven and had a crossbow aimed at Aston. “Dismount!” the toady screamed with blood and eye fluid dripping down his face.