Ruled Britannia (23 page)

“Nay, the jests seemed to please him well enough,” Shakespeare answered. “But he hath . . . misgivings . . . in aid of . . . certain other matters.”

Someone clapped him on the shoulder. He jumped; he hadn't heard anybody come up behind him. Will Kemp's elastic features leered at him. Cackling with mad glee, the clown said, “What better time than the new year for a drawing and quartering? Or would you liefer rout out winter's chill with a burning? I'll stake you would.”

“Go to!” Shakespeare exclaimed. “Get hence!”

“And wherefore should I?” Kemp replied. “I know as much as doth Dick here.” Before Shakespeare could deny that, the clown continued, “I know enough to hang us all, than the which what could be more?”

Put so, he had a point. Burbage said, “The object is not to let others know enough to hang us all—
others
now including a certain gentleman (marry, a very certain gentleman he is, too) who all too easily can confound us.”

“Knew you not that Geoff Martin hath his nose in the Pope of Rome's arsehole?” Kemp said with another mocking smile.

“ 'Steeth, Will—soft, soft!” Shakespeare hissed, the ice outside having nothing to do with the chill that ran through him. “He need but cock his head hither and he'll hear you.”

“He's right, man,” Burbage said. “D'you
want
your neck stretched or your bowels cut out or the flesh roasted from your bones? Talk too free and you'll win your heart's desire.”

“O ye of little faith!” Kemp jeered. “Dear Geoff's prompter and book-keeper. He hath before him a new play—so new, belike the ink's still damp. What'll he do? Plunge his beak into its liver, like the vulture with Prometheus. A cannon could sound beside him without his hearing't.”

Burbage looked thoughtful. “He may have reason,” he said to Shakespeare.

“He may be right,” Shakespeare said. “Right or wrong, reason hath he none. Where's the reason in a man who will hazard his life for nothing but to hear his own chatter? God deliver me from being subject to the breath of every fool, whose sense no more can feel but his own fancies.”

“Doth thy other mouth call me?” Will Kemp retorted. He strode away, then stopped, bent, and spoke loudly with his other mouth.

“Whoreson beetle-headed, flap-eared knave,” Shakespeare burst out—but quietly. He remembered all too well that, if he angered Kemp, the clown could betray him, too.

“A bacon-fed knave, very voluble,” Burbage agreed, “but when have you known a clown who was otherwise?” He too spoke in a low voice. After a moment, he went on, “And what, think you, may we do about Martin?”

“In sooth, I know not,” Shakespeare said miserably. “Would we could just sack him, but the company'd rise in revolt—and with reason (that word again!), did we try it without good cause.”

Burbage nodded. “True. Every word of't true.”

“But this business cannot go forward without him, nor with him in opposition,” Shakespeare said.

“Look you to your part of't,” Burbage told him. “Write the words that needs must be writ. Think on that, for none else can do't. As for the other—haply you misread Martin's mind and purpose.”

“That I did not,” Shakespeare declared.

“Well, as may be,” Burbage said with a shrug. “But I say this further: we are embarked here on no small enterprise, is't not so?” After waiting for Shakespeare to nod, he went on, “We may be sure, then, we are not alone embarked. We need not, unaided, solve all conundrums attached hereto.”

“It could be,” Shakespeare said after some thought. “Ay, it could be. But, an we solve them not, who shall?”

“That is hidden from mine eyes, and so should it be, for what I know not, no inquisitor can tear from me,” Burbage said. Shakespeare nodded again, a little more heartily; he'd had the same thought. Smiling, Burbage continued, “But to say it is hidden from mine eyes is not to say it hath no existence. Others, knowing little of the parts we play, will be charged with shifting such burthens as an o'erstubborn prompter. Is
that
not so?”

“It is,” Shakespeare said. “Or rather, it must be. But would I knew it for a truth, not for an article of faith.”

“As what priest or preacher hath not said?” Burbage answered with a laugh. “Write the words, Will. When the time comes, I'll say 'em. And what follows from thence . . . 'tis in God's hands, not ours.”

He was right. He was bound to be right—which went some way towards setting Shakespeare's mind at ease, but not so far as he would have liked. It did let him get through the day at the Theatre without making a fool of himself, which he might not have managed had Burbage not calmed him.

A couple of evenings later, as the poet was making his way down Shoreditch High Street towards Bishopsgate after a performance, a man stepped out of the evening shadows and said, “You're Master Shakespeare, are you not?”

“I am,” Shakespeare said cautiously. “And who, sir, are you?”

He used that
sir
from caution; had he felt more cheerful about the world and the people in it, he would have said
sirrah
. The fellow who'd asked his name looked like a mechanical, a laborer, in leather jerkin and laddered hose. When he smiled, he showed a couple of missing teeth. “Oh, you need not know my name, sir,” he said.

“Then we have no business, one with the other,” Shakespeare answered, doing his best to sound polite and firm at the same time. “Give you good den.” He started on.

“Hold!” the stranger said. As he set a hand on the hilt of his belt knife to emphasize the word, Shakespeare stopped. In grumbling tones, the fellow added, “Nick said you were a tickle 'un. There's a name for you, by God and St. George! You ken Nick Skeres?”

Skeres had led him to Sir William Cecil. “I do,” Shakespeare said reluctantly.

“Well, good on you, then.” The stranger gave him another less than reassuring smile. “Nick sent me to your honor. You've someone in your company more friendlier to the dons than an honest Englishman ought to be?”

From whom had Skeres heard about Geoffrey Martin? Burbage? Will Kemp? Someone else altogether? Or had this bruiser any true connection to Skeres at all? With such dignity as he could muster, Shakespeare said, “I treat not with a man who hath no name.”

“Damn you!” the fellow said. But he didn't draw that knife. Instead, exasperated, he flung a name—“Ingram!”—at the poet.

Christian name? Surname? Shakespeare couldn't guess. But the man
had given him some of what he wanted. Shakespeare answered him in turn: “Yes, there is such a one, Master Ingram.”

“His name's Martin, eh? Like the bird?” Ingram asked. With odd hesitation, Shakespeare nodded. So did the other man. “All right, friend.” He touched the brim of his villainous cap. “God give you good even,” he said, and vanished once more into the deepening shadows. The poet stared after him, scratching his head.

 

“S
URELY,
S
EÑOR
S
HAKESPEARE,
you know that his holiness Pope Sixtus promised King Philip a million ducats when the first Spanish soldier set foot on English soil, and that he very handsomely paid all he had promised,” Lope de Vega said. “A million gold ducats, mind you.”

“Yes, I understand,” Shakespeare replied. “A kingly sum, in sooth.”

They sat with their heads together in the tiring room at the Theatre. De Vega puffed on a pipe of tobacco. The smoke rising from it fought with that from torches, lamps, and braziers. “I am glad you follow, sir,” he said. “This needs must appear in the play on his Most Catholic Majesty's life.”

Shakespeare had been scribbling notes in a character Lope could not have deciphered had his life depended on it. Now he looked up sharply. “Wherefore?” he asked. “It doth little to advance the action, the more so as Pope and King never met to seal this bargain, it being made by underlings.”

“But it shows how beloved of his Holiness was the King,” Lope replied.

“By the King's own deeds shall I show that,” Shakespeare said, “deeds worth the showing on a stage. Here, he doth—or rather, his men do—naught but chaffer like tradesmen at the market over the sum to be paid. Were this
your
play, Master de Vega, would you such a scene include?”

After some thought, Lope spread his hands. “I yield me,” he said. He sucked at the clay pipe, hoping the smoke would calm him. Working with Shakespeare was proving harder than he'd expected. The Englishman knew what was required of him: a play celebrating and memorializing Philip II's life and victories. But he had his own ideas of what belonged in such a play and how the pieces should fit together.

Having won his point, he could be gracious. “My thanks, sir,” he
said. “Sith the play'll bear my name, I want it to be a match for the best of my other work.”

“For your pride's sake,” Lope said.

“For my honor's sake,” Shakespeare said.

Lope sprang from his stool and bowed low, sweeping off his hat so that the plume brushed the floor. “Say no more, sir. Your fellow poets and players would think less of you, did you write below your best. This I understand to the bottom of my soul, and I, in my turn, honor you for it. I am your servant. Command me.”

“Sit, sit,” Shakespeare urged him. “I own I stand in need of your counsel on the incidents of your King's life and on how to show 'em, the which is made more harder by his seldom leaving Madrid, those in his command working for him all through the Spanish Empire.”

“Even so.” Lope returned to his seat. He eyed the English poet with considerable respect. “You have more experience bringing history to the stage than I.”

Shakespeare's smile somehow didn't quite reach his eyes. “When I put words into the mouths of Romans, I may do't without fear the Master of the Revels will think my ghosts and shadows speak of matters political.”

Lope nodded. “Certes. This is one of the uses of the distant past.” He leaned forward. “Here, though, not so distant is the past of which we speak. How thought you to portray the King's conquest of the heretic Dutchmen?”

“Why, through his kinsman, the Duke of Parma.”

“Excellent,” Lope said. “Most excellent. Parma being dead, no unsightly jealousies will to him accrue.”

They kept at it till the prompter summoned Shakespeare to sort out something or other in the new play he'd offered the company. A harried look on his face, the English poet returned a couple of minutes later to say, “Your pardon, Master de Vega, but this bids fair to eat up some little while. He hath set upon my pride a blot, catching me with my characters doing now one thing, now another quite different. Having marred it, I now needs must mend it.”

“
Qué lástima
,” Lope said, and then, in English, “What a pity.” He got to his feet. “I am wanted elsewhere anon. Shall we take up again on the morrow?”

“ 'Twere better the day following,” Shakespeare answered.

Lope nodded. “Until the day.
Hasta luego, señor
.” Shakespeare dipped his head, then hurried off. De Vega left the Theatre. He'd come
on horseback today. One of the tireman's helpers had kept an eye on the beast to make sure it would still be there when he came out. Lope gave the Englishman a halfpenny for his trouble. By the fellow's frown, he'd hoped for more, but every man's hopes miscarried now and again.

Riding through the tenements that huddled outside the city wall, Lope felt something of a conquering
caballero
. He'd seldom had that feeling afoot. Now, though, he looked down on the English.
From literally looking down on them, I do so metaphorically as well
, he thought.
A man's mind is a strange thing
.

The English knew him for a conqueror, too. That made his passage harder, not easier. They got in his way, and feigned deafness when he shouted at them. They flung curses and catcalls from every other window. They flung other things, too: stones to make his horse shy and rear, lumps of filth to foul the beast and him. He never saw his tormentors. The ones not safe inside buildings melted into the crowds on Shoreditch High Street whenever he whirled in the saddle to try to get a glimpse of them.

By the time he got back down to Bishopsgate, he was in a perfect transport of temper. One of the Irish gallowglasses at the gate, seeing his fury, asked, “Would your honor have joy of us breaking some heads for you, now?”

“No. Let it go. You cannot hope to punish the guilty,” Lope said, once he'd made sense of the heavily armed foot soldier's brogue.

With a laugh, the Irishman said, “And what difference might that make? 'Sdeath, sir, not a groat's worth. A broken head'll make you shy of tormenting a gentleman afterwards, be you guilty or no.”

But Lope repeated, “Let it go.” The gallowglasses and kerns brought over from the western island looked for excuses to fall upon the English. Considering what the English had done in Ireland over the years, they had reason for wanting revenge. But the outrage their atrocities spawned made them almost as much liability as asset for the Spaniards and for Isabella and Albert.