Ruled Britannia (6 page)

“And the house was full?” Widow Kendall persisted.

“Near enough.” Shakespeare smiled and made a leg at her, as if she were a pretty young noblewoman, not a frowzy, gray-haired tallowchandler's widow. “Never fear. I'll have no trouble with the month's rent.”

She giggled and simpered like a young girl, too. But when she said,
“That I'm glad to hear,” her voice held nothing but truth. A lodger without his rent became in short order a former lodger out on the street. Still, he'd pleased her, for she went on, “There's new-brewed ale in the kitchen. Take a mug, if you care to.”

“That I will, and right gladly.” Shakespeare fitted action to word. The widow made good ale. Hopped beer, these days, was commoner than the older drink, for it soured much more slowly. He savored the mug, and, when his landlady continued to look benign, took another. Nicely warmed, he said, “Now I'm to the ordinary for supper.”

She nodded. “Don't forget the hour and keep scribbling till past curfew,” she warned.

“I shan't.”
I hope I shan't
, Shakespeare thought.
Or do I?
The eatery made a better place to work than the lodging house. On nights when ideas seemed to flow straight from his mind onto the page, he could and sometimes did lose track of time. He'd ducked home past patrols more than once.

From the chest by his bed, he took his second-best spoon—pewter—a couple of quills, a knife to trim them, ink, and three sheets of paper. He sometimes wished he followed a less expensive calling; each sheet cost more than a loaf of bread. He locked the chest once more, then hurried off to the ordinary around the corner. He sat down at the table with the biggest, fattest candle on it: he wanted the best light he could find for writing.

A serving woman came up to him. “Good even, Master Will. What'll you have?”

“Hello, Kate. What's the threepenny tonight?”

“Kidney pie, and monstrous good,” she said. He nodded. She brought it to him, with a mug of beer. He dug in with the spoon, eating quickly. When he was through, he spread out his papers and got to work.
Love's Labour's Won
wasn't going so well as he wished it would. He couldn't lose himself in it, and had no trouble recalling when curfew neared. After he went back to the lodging house, he got a candle of his own from his trunk—Jack Street was already snoring in the bed next to his—lit it at the hearth, and set it on a table. Then he started writing again, and kept at it till he could hold his eyes open no more. He had his story from Boccaccio, but this labor, won or lost, reminded him of the difference between a story and a finished play.

The next day, he performed again at the Theatre. He almost forgot he had a supper engagement that evening, and had to grab his best
spoon—silver—and rush from his lodging house. To his relief, Christopher Marlowe and his mysterious friend hadn't got there yet. Shakespeare ordered a mug of beer and waited for them.

They came in perhaps a quarter of an hour later. The other man was no one Shakespeare had seen before: a skinny little fellow in his forties, with dark blond hair going gray and a lighter beard that didn't cover all his pockmarks. He wore spectacles, but still squinted nearsightedly. Marlowe introduced him as Thomas Phelippes. Shakespeare got up from his stool and bowed. “Your servant, sir.”

“No, yours.” Phelippes had a high, thin, fussily precise voice.

They all shared a roast capon and bread and butter. Phelippes had little small talk. He seemed content to listen to Shakespeare and Marlowe's theatre gossip. After a while, once no one sat close enough to overhear, Shakespeare spoke directly to him: “Kit says you may have somewhat of business for me. Of what sort is't?”

“Why, the business of England's salvation, of course,” Thomas Phelippes told him.

 

“W
ELL
, E
NRIQUE, WHAT
does Captain Guzmán want to see me about today?” Lope de Vega asked.

“I think it has something to do with your report on
If You Like It
,” Guzmán's servant answered. “Just what, though, I cannot tell you.
Lo siento mucho
.” He spread his hands in apology, adding, “Myself, I thought the report very interesting. This Shakespeare is a remarkable man, is he not?”

“No.” Lope spoke with a writer's precision. “As a
man
, he is anything but remarkable. He drinks beer, he makes foolish jokes, he looks at pretty girls—he has a wife out in the provinces somewhere, and children, but I do not think it troubles him much here in London. Ordinary, as I say. But put a pen in his hand, and all at once it is as though God and half the saints were whispering in his ear. As a
playwright
, ‘remarkable' is too small a word for him.”

Guzmán's door was open. Enrique went in first, to let him know de Vega had arrived. Lope waited in the hallway till Enrique called, “His Excellency will see you now, Lieutenant.”

Lope strode into his superior's office. He and Baltasar Guzmán exchanged bows and pleasantries. His report on his latest trip to the Theatre
lay on his superior's desk. He saw that Guzmán, in the style of King Philip, had written comments in the margins. He gave a small, silent sigh; he enjoyed being edited no more than most writers.

Presently, the captain nodded to Enrique and said, “You may go now. Shut the door on the way out,
por favor
.”

“As you say, your Excellency.” Guzmán's servant sounded reproachful, which, as usual, did him no good. Lope wondered if he would slam the door to show his annoyance, but Enrique had more subtlety than that. He shut it with exaggerated care, so it made no noise at all.

Captain Guzmán noticed that, too. Chuckling, he said, “He's got his nose out of joint again. Because he's clever, he thinks he ought to be important, too.”

“Better a clever servant than a dolt like my Diego, who'd forget his own name if people didn't shout it at him all the time,” de Vega said.

“Oh, no doubt, no doubt, but Enrique
will
make too much of himself.” Tapping the report with his forefinger, Guzmán got down to business: “Overall, this is a good piece of work, Lieutenant. Still, I need to remind you again that you visit the Theatre as his Majesty's spy,
not
as his drama critic.”

“I'm very sorry, your Excellency,” Lope lied.

Guzmán laughed again. “A likely story. You're a lucky man, to be able to enjoy yourself so much at your work.”

“I would enjoy myself even more if the benighted English let women take the stage,” Lope said.

“Indeed. It frightens me, Lieutenant, to think how much you might enjoy yourself then.” Baltasar Guzmán tapped the report again. His fingernails were elegantly manicured. He looked across the desk at de Vega. “I note that you met this Marlowe back in the tiring room after the presentation.”

“Yes, your Excellency.” Lope nodded. “He was talking shop with Shakespeare. A good bit of the time, he was telling him how he would have done things differently—and, in his opinion, better. This is, you understand, sir, something playwrights do.”

“No doubt you would know better than I,” Guzmán said. “But Christopher Marlowe is a dangerous character. He knows too many of the wrong people. Knowing so many rogues makes him likely a rogue himself. I am given to understand the Inquisition has taken several long, hard looks at him. They do not investigate a man merely for their amusement.”

“While I was there, he and Shakespeare spoke of nothing but their craft.”

Guzmán ticked off points on his fingers. “First, Lieutenant, you do not know this for a fact. They could have hidden any number of coded meanings in their talk, and you would have been none the wiser. Second, who knows what they said
after
you left the Theatre? They do, and God does, and no one else. You do not.”

That he was right made his supercilious manner no less annoying: more so, if anything. Lope protested: “Say what you will of Marlowe, but Shakespeare has always stayed with the stage and fought shy of politics.”

But his superior shook his head. “Not necessarily. At the recent auto de fe, one of the men relaxed to the Inquisition for punishment—a notorious sorcerer and counterfeiter—saw Shakespeare in the crowd and called out for him to testify to his good character. This fellow, a certain Kelley, was also an intimate of Christopher Marlowe's. So Shakespeare is not above suspicion. No man is above suspicion,” he added, sounding as certain as if he were reciting the Athanasian Creed.

Though the news shook Lope, he did his best not to show it. He said, “A drowning man will clutch at any straw.”

“True,” Captain Guzmán agreed. “Or it may be true. But I find it interesting that this Kelley should reckon Shakespeare a straw worth clutching.” Without giving de Vega a chance to answer, he rolled up the report, wrote something on the outside, and tied it with a green ribbon. Holding it out, he said, “I want you to take this to Westminster, to an Englishman there who has worked closely with us for a long time. He already knows of the business with the sorcerer, and he is well suited to judge just how important this meeting between Shakespeare and Marlowe may be.”

“Very well, your Excellency.” Lope took the report. “An Englishman, you say? Am I going to have to translate my work here? I would want a secretary's help with that. I speak English well enough, but I cannot say I write it.”

Captain Guzmán shook his head. “No need for that. He's fluent in Spanish. As I say, he's been with us since Isabella became Queen.”

“All right. Good. That makes things simpler. This is the fellow's name here?”

“That's right. Get a horse from the stables and take it over to him right away.
Vaya con Dios
.” The farewell was also a dismissal.

A wan English sun, amazingly low in the southern sky, dodged in and out from behind rolling clouds as Lope de Vega rode through London toward Westminster. When he went past St. Paul's cathedral, he scratched his head, wondering as he always did why the otherwise magnificent edifice should be spoiled by the strange, square, flat-topped steeple.
Not so much as a cross up there
, he thought, and clucked reproachfully at the folly of the English.

The horse, a bay gelding, was no more energetic than it had to be. It ambled up Ludgate Hill and out through the wall at Ludgate. London proper didn't stop at the wall; de Vega rode west along Fleet Street past St. Bridget's, St. Dunstan's in the West, and the New Temple, the church of the Knights Templars before the crusading order was suppressed. They all lay in the ward of Farringdon Without the Wall.

Lope couldn't tell exactly where that ward ended and the suburbs of the city began. He had thought Madrid a grand place, and so it was, but London dwarfed it. He wouldn't have been surprised if the English capital held a quarter of a million people. If that didn't make it the biggest city in the world, it surely came close.

Westminster, which lay at a bend in the Thames, was a separate, though much smaller, city in its own right, divided into twelve wards. The apparatus of government dominated it much more than London proper. Isabella and Albert dwelt in one of the several castles there. Parliament—Lope thought of it as the equivalent of the Cortes of Castile, though it was even fussier about its privileges than the Cortes of Navarre—met there. Westminster Abbey was an ecclesiastical center, though the senior archbishop of England, for no good reason de Vega could see, presided at Canterbury, fifty miles away. And the clerks and secretaries and scribes who served the higher functionaries also performed their offices in Westminster.

By the time he finally found the man he was looking for, Lope felt as if he'd navigated the labyrinth of the Minotaur. He'd spent most of an hour and most of his temper making his way through the maze before he knocked on the right door: one in the offices of the men who served Don Diego Flores de Valdés, the commandant of the Spanish soldiers stationed in England.

“Come in,” a voice called in English.

Lope de Vega did. The fellow behind the desk was unprepossessing: small, thin, pale, pockmarked, bespectacled. As de Vega walked in, he flipped a paper over so the newcomer wouldn't be able to read it. Lope
caught a brief glimpse of pothooks and hieroglyphs—some sort of cipher. Maybe the man made up in brains what he lacked in looks. Peering down at the report, Lope said, “You are Thomas . . . Phelippes?” He'd never seen the name spelled that way before—but then, the vagaries of English spelling could drive any Spaniard mad.

“I am,” Phelippes said in English, and then switched to good Spanish: “You have the advantage of me,
señor
. Would you sooner use your own tongue or mine?”

“Either will do,” Lope replied, speaking English himself. After giving his name, he went on, “My superior, Captain Baltasar Guzmán, ordered me to bring you my report on possible suspicious business at the Theatre the other day, and so I give it you.” He held it out as if it were a baton.

Phelippes took it. “I thank you. I am acquainted with Captain Guzmán. A good man, sly as a serpent.” Lope wouldn't have used that as praise, but the Englishman plainly intended it so. He also spoke of the Spanish nobleman as an equal or an inferior.
How important are you?
Lope knew he couldn't ask. Phelippes went on, “Is there anything he desires me to look for in especial?”

“Yes—he desires your opinion of the trustiness of the two poets, Marlowe and Shakespeare,” de Vega said.

“I had liefer put my hand in the wolf his jaws than put my trust in Christopher Marlowe,” Phelippes said at once. “He companies with all manner of cozeners and knaves, and revels in the doing of't. I fear me he'll come to a bad end, and never know why. Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs die in earnest.”

Lope smiled. “You are a man of learning, I see, to bring Plutarch forth at need. Now, what of Shakespeare?”

Feature for feature, Thomas Phelippes' face was in no way remarkable. Somehow, though, he managed a sneer any aristocrat might have envied. “Shakespeare? He knows no more than a puling babe of great affairs, and cares no more, either. All that matters to him is his company of players, and the plays he writes for 'em.”

“This was also my thought.” Lope did his best not to show his relief. “And I'd not have mentioned his name, save only that Captain Guzmán noted a certain Edward Kelley had called out to him on his way to the Inquisition's cleansing fire.”

“Ah, Kelley. There was rubbish that wanted burning, in sooth,” Phelippes said with another fine sneer. “But he was no intimate of
Shakespeare's: that I know for a fact. Only a wretch seeking succor with none to be had.” The Englishman proved to own a nasty chuckle, too. “I misdoubt he affrighted Master Will like to stop his heart.”

“I should say so!” De Vega wouldn't have wanted an inquisitor noting
his
connection to a man about to die. He inclined his head to Phelippes. “You do set my mind at ease, for which I thank you. I'll take your word back to Captain Guzmán.”

“Your servant, sir.” Phelippes tapped the report with a fingernail, much as Guzmán had done. “And I'll put this in brief for Don Diego. You know the tale, I'm sure: the greater the man, the less time hath he wherein to read.”

“Not always,” Lope said. “There is the King.”

“What? Albert? I would not disagree with a new acquaintance,
señor
, but—”

“No, not Albert,” de Vega said impatiently. “Philip.
The
King, God preserve him.” He crossed himself.

So did Phelippes. The way he did it told Lope he hadn't been doing it all his life. “Amen,” he said. “But what hear you of his health? The last news I had was not good.”

“Nor mine,” Lope admitted. “He hath now his threescore and ten. He is in God's hands.” He made the sign of the cross again.

“He always was, and so are we all.” Phelippes signed himself again, too, no more smoothly than he had before.