License to Quill (41 page)

The cunning folk were right, Shakespeare realized. They would never leave these lands. They could not. They were the British Isles. They were the moss that covers Roman walls. Their place was everywhere. Their face could be anyone's.

Realizing the futility of his efforts and the devastation he coauthored, the bard collapsed helplessly to his knees.

“William!”

Shakespeare turned his head to see Walsingham racing toward him.

The cunning girl started running.

“What are you waiting for! Kill her!” the spymaster shouted. He fired a pistol at her but missed. “Will! We can end this! We have her cornered! Get up!”

“I can't,” Shakespeare groaned. He buried his face against Bianca's hands and wept.

Walsingham looked down in anger but then softened at the sorry sight. By the time he turned back to the cunning girl, she was gone.

Defeated, the spymaster hung his head and then bent down to one knee. “I am so sorry, Will.”

There was no response.

Bonfire Night was over.

 

Chapter LII

[Exit Playwright]

Thomas Walsingham did not let Shakespeare out of his sight. Although he had a city to rebuild and a nightmare to erase, the spymaster was also human—or at least he liked to think that he still was. In private, Thomas had always admired Shakespeare first and foremost as a playwright. All the same, W was not ready to lose both him and Marlowe in the same evening. The Double-O needed at least one of its greatest agents alive and well.

The two were atop the Tower of London, officially to inspect the damage. In actuality, they were waiting. Waiting for a sign of hope that would never come.

Dead ravens littered the Tower roof like broken tiles.

The spymaster puffed his pipe and walked toward the playwright, who was staring aimlessly over the misty city. “When Bacon first brought me here,” shared Walsingham, “he said that we could count on a thousand ravens throughout the city. Do you know how many I've counted so for this morning?”

The bard was unresponsive.

“Will?”

“How many?” the playwright croaked in an aching voice.

The spymaster sighed as he looked down at his dying pipe. “Six. Six ravens. It looks like all the rest were dead before the dawn.”

“Did they die, or quit?” Shakespeare pondered aloud.

Walsingham snorted in restrained frustration. “I don't think Bacon trained them to retire.”

The bard turned away from the dreary landscape. “Thomas, why do you still have me here? What more do I have to do before you're finished?”

The spymaster raised his eyebrows. “With you?”

“No, with everything. What does it take for a man like
you
to quit? When would you consider your work complete?”

Thomas pursed his lips, but then shook his head. “The world doesn't work that way, Will. In real life, the world's a stage you only exit when you're dead.”

“Or when you're killed,” the bard retorted, looking once more over the blood-strewn, rain-washed city. “Or carried off.”

Walsingham pocketed his spent pipe and stepped closer. “I had my men look all over the Tower. There is no sign of Bianca's child. For all you know, the infant is still alive.”

Shakespeare scowled. “I don't know what living is anymore, Thomas. Everything I've been through since you brought me back; all the lying and conspiring … You call it living. I call it dying.”

“We are all dying. Every day. All our friends, and all our loved ones.” The spymaster's gaze fell to the bloodstained Tower Green, where the bard's gray eyes were staring. “It's a shame she did not survive,” Thomas continued, “but she was never going to. We are all mortals, Will. And all the echoes of our footfalls upon this world will disappear.”

“Then why continue?” the playwright asked scornfully. “Why press on?”

Walsingham stepped closer. “Because the more we learn about the world, the more we learn about ourselves. Pursuing that knowledge is a noble purpose. It is a life worth fighting for.”

“And what did you gain from all this madness? What prize was worth the sacrifice?”

W looked over the city's silent skies. “Bacon came to me this morning with a new theory he and John Dee developed. They think the witches do not control the elements at all; they can only predict them. It is a remarkable talent, but everything else they add to it is pageantry. It's theater, Will. They're actors. And just like you, their plays can topple kingdoms.”

“I slew the two women who haunted England. Why should the cunning folk be any more concern of mine?”

“Because I don't think we've seen the last of them. Will, you've been to the Double-O. I'm sure you've seen the projects Bacon is working on.”

“I saw weapons of war and torture.”

“There are also projects on how to predict the future, as the witches do.” W checked behind his back before continuing. “Bacon believes that a comet, a reoccurring comet, is expected to return to the skies next year. It is the same comet that appeared when William conquered England. That comet is the reason I rehired you. It wasn't because of Fawkes. I share Bacon's fears that the cunning folk have something even worse in store for us once this comet comes.”

“How much worse can this world get?”

W glanced around once more for security. “One of our watchers reported that a traitor ignited the demonic flames around London Wall.”

Shakespeare turned his head. “So?”

“The witches could have destroyed the entire city last night. This Tower holds the gunpowder stores for the entire army and navy. That same traitor with his same flame could have leveled all of London.”

The bard's eyes awakened. “Why didn't they destroy the city?”

Walsingham shrugged. “What good is a performance without an audience? They're actors, Will, and I have no doubt that last night convinced everyone in the city of their powers.”

Shakespeare's thoughts turned to the screaming crowds fleeing the Globe. “When is the comet expected to reappear?”

The spymaster locked eyes with William Shakespeare. “All Hallows' Eve.”

The bard turned his head in disbelief.

Walsingham waited. He wanted the danger to sink in. “Will, I have no idea what the cunning folk are planning. You may have stopped those two last night, but if that girl of theirs returns,
anything
worse than last night is too much for me to handle.”

The bard choked with shock. “Is there anyone you can hire in my place?”

W shook his head. “Alas, your replacement died last night.”

The playwright froze. “No…” he groaned. “Not Kit!”

Thomas nodded with the unhappy news. “Marlowe is dead. England needs you now more than ever, Will. What do you say?”

The bard turned his eyes and once more looked over the city Marlowe and Bianca died defending. As he contemplated his decision, he could hear an infant crying in the distance. Shakespeare hardened his writing hand into a fist, but then relaxed it, letting life return to his ink-stained finger. “I am sorry,” he put to Walsingham in a clear voice, “but I am just a playwright.”

The spymaster accepted this with a single bow and turned away. “For how much longer?” he put to Shakespeare.

“For all time.”

 

Epilogue

For All Time

On November 5, 1664, the fifty-ninth anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, a thirty-one-year-old navy clerk named Samuel Pepys went about his morning no differently than any other. We know this because, unlike most young men in London at the time, Samuel kept a detailed diary about his seemingly uneventful life.

5th. Up and to the office, where all the morning, at noon to the 'Change, and thence home to dinner …
*

Although Samuel did not know it, “the office,” the Navy Board, was the same Seething Lane mansion the great Sir Francis Walsingham used during his war years. Sir Thomas bequeathed it to the English government when he died in 1630, at which point a certain silver-haired secretary disappeared from history.

The apartment Samuel and his wife shared within the complex was the same that Lady Percy and Christopher Marlowe conceived their first and only child in.

 … and so with my wife to the Duke's house to a play, “Macbeth,” a pretty good play, but admirably acted.

Forty-eight years had passed since the death of William Shakespeare, a man hailed by his friends as “not of an age, but for all time.”
*
His wife, Anne; his daughters, Susanna and Judith; and all his fellow players were departed as well.

After recording this timely performance of
Macbeth
in his diary, Samuel continued:

 … Thence home; the coach being forced to go round by London Wall home, because of the bonefires; the day being mightily observed in the City.

Fifty-eight years had passed since the first Bonfire Night, an event suspiciously absent from the English annals of history. And if a certain fifty-eight-year-old woman with Bianca's eyes caught Samuel's gaze as he passed, he left her off his pages as well. Only the six ravens atop the Tower noticed her, along with the older and younger women standing alongside her. The elder wore a weathered, wrinkled face mask and had a pouch tied around her neck. The purse contained forty pieces of silver. The younger woman held a crucible.

As this cunning youth opened her vessel, no fires came from it. No smoke. Just a single starving rat to mingle with the local population.

One month later, a spectacular comet appeared over the city.
†
And then another.
*
1664 passed and the New Year dawned with all of London wondering what these strange stars foreshadowed.

The plague returned in 1665, killing more than 100,000 Londoners. The next year, the Great Fire consumed eighty percent of the city.

To this day, William Shakespeare's
Macbeth
is considered a haunted play.

 

For further reading …

Ágoston, Gábor, and Bruce Masters.
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Allen, Stephen.
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. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2001.

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. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1903.

Bouwsma, William J.
Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation
. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968.

Brandon, David.
Stand and Deliver!: A History of Highway Robbery
. Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2001.

Brooke, Nicholas, ed.
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Macbeth
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Budiansky, Stephen.
Her Majesty's Spymaster: Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Birth of Modern Espionage
. New York: Plume, 2006.

Chambers, David, and Brian Pullan, eds.
Venice: A Documentary History, 1450–1630
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Cooper, John.
The Queen's Agent: Sir Francis Walsingham and the Rise of Espionage in Elizabethan England
. New York: Pegasus Books, 2013.

Crompton, Louis.
Homosexuality and Civilization
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

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Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth
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Crystal, David, and Ben Crystal.
Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion
. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Ditchfield, P. H., ed.
Memorials of Old London
. 2 vols. London: Bemrose & Sons, 1908.

Doody, Margaret.
Tropic of Venice
. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

Dursteler, Eric R.
Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean
. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Fraser, Antonia.
Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot.
New York: Anchor Books, 1996.

Frye, Roland Mushat.
Shakespeare: The Art of the Dramatist
. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1982.

Geikie, Sir Archibald.
The Birds of Shakespeare
. Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1916.

Hogge, Alice.
God's Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot
. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

Honan, Park.
Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Johnson, James H.
Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic
. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011.

King, Ross.
Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling
. New York: Bloomsbury, 2003.

Levack, Brian P., ed.
The Witchcraft Sourcebook
. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Marzluff, John M., and Tony Angell.
In the Company of Crows and Ravens
. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Nicholl, Charles.
The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street
. New York: Penguin, 2008.

______
.
The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe
. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Noyer, Paul du.
In the City: A Celebration of London Music
. London: Virgin Books, 2009.

Packer, Tina.
Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare's Plays.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.