Chapter 9

BOLTFOOT AND JANE LOOKED AN ILL-ASSORTED couple as they entered the school refectory. He dragged his foot, while she waddled, her distended belly pushed forward proudly in her thirty-fifth week of pregnancy. Shakespeare, sitting alone at an early evening supper after the ride back from Theobalds, smiled at the sight and called them to him.

“Jane,” he said, “I imagine you have had enough of this ugly old ruffler getting under your feet.”

Jane laughed. “He is worse than useless, Master Shakespeare. He thinks I am made of glass and as breakable, and will scarce let me do my work. Please find him some task away from here. It will bring us all peace of mind, I am certain.”

“A fine thought, Jane. I will do that.”

Jane and Boltfoot had been married five years. She was young still—perhaps twenty-two—while Boltfoot was in his late thirties and looked older; his short, grizzled body had been carved and battered by harsh years at sea. Yet this disparate pair suited each other; their mutual devotion was there for all to see. Sometimes, Shakespeare caught them looking at each other with unabashed affection. If only his own marriage were in such good repair.

Boltfoot appeared disconsolate. He treasured Jane above pearls and was worried about the baby that swelled her belly. He could not bear the thought of losing this one. Yet he felt helpless to do anything except be with her. Fighting Spaniards and savages was easy compared to this. He blamed himself for the loss of the first child, as if somehow the boy had inherited his bad blood, just as he had taken on the sins of his own father and forefathers in his clubfoot.

“What say you, Boltfoot? Will you undertake a task for me? Can you bear to be parted from Jane’s side for five minutes?”

Boltfoot hunched into his shoulders, his face a picture of gloom. “You are the master, Mr. Shakespeare,” he said in a low voice that betrayed his reluctance to be anywhere but with his wife.

“So I am, Boltfoot. And I have a simple but intriguing mission for you. I wish you to go to all your old shipyard haunts—the taprooms, taverns, chandleries, and wharves of Southwark, Deptford, Blackwall, and beyond—and there talk to whomsoever you may about Roanoke and the New World.”

Boltfoot grunted, which Shakespeare took to be a yes.

“Find me a mariner who has been there, one from the very first voyage when the colonists were carried to their new home, if you can. Or listen for tales. Discover what is being said, what the seafarers believe happened to the souls now lost. Are they dead or alive? If dead, how did they die? If alive, where might they be? I want to know the conditions out there, how they might have survived. Most of all, I wish to know whether any of the colonists might somehow have returned to England.”

Boltfoot looked at Jane, as if hoping she might tell his master that he could not possibly go on such a mission because he was needed here, to look out for her in these last few weeks.

“Thank you, Master Shakespeare,” Jane said. “I am sure it is useful work and it will do us both a world of good. He needs something else to think on.”

“Good. Well, that’s settled. I will talk with you alone regarding the details, Boltfoot.” Shakespeare turned back to Jane. His voice softened and he hesitated, unsure. “Pray tell me, Jane, do you know where Mistress Shakespeare is this afternoon?”

Jane could not meet her master’s eyes. Her mistress had clearly said she had no wish to speak with her husband. “I do not think she is herself today, master. She says she wishes to be alone. She is with Mary.”

Shakespeare accepted the situation with a smile. “Thank you, Jane. When you see Mistress Shakespeare, please tell her that my thoughts are with her and that I understand. I must go to Essex House but I would see her later, should she wish it.”

“Yes, master,” Jane said, her gaze still averted, then hurried away as fast as her swollen belly would allow.

The sun was dipping and the sky had a hue of golds and reds. Tomorrow would be another hot day. “Let me finish my meats and then we will share a quart of ale, Boltfoot,” Shakespeare said. “I will tell you more of this Roanoke inquiry. It seems we are to go intelligencing again, my friend. You will have to dust down your caliver and hone your cutlass for the fray.” As he spoke, Shakespeare thought he saw a sparkle in the eye of his old copesmate. Perhaps Boltfoot would be happier away from the cares of impending fatherhood after all.

SHAKESPEARE HAD NEVER seen a woman more lovely. His first sight of her was at a distance, in profile, along the evening-shadowed long gallery of Essex House, and he was transfixed. The room had fine elm-wood paneling and frescoed walls with pictures of nymphs and satyrs in woodland scenes. She was laughing and her fair hair fell back across the soft skin of her nape and shoulder blades. Her neck was adorned by three strings of precious stones that looked to him like diamonds and rubies.

He was a married man and Catherine was to him the loveliest of God’s creations. And yet he could not take his eyes off this fair woman.

Slyguff walked a step ahead of him, his hand gripped on the hilt of a dagger that was thrust in the belt buckled tight about his narrow, wiry waist.

Only at the last moment, as they came near, did Shakespeare avert his gaze from the woman and see that she was with Charlie McGunn, deep in conversation.

The woman looked up with nonchalant curiosity at Shakespeare’s approach. Her eyes were black, like still, dark water. She raised an eyebrow questioningly. McGunn turned to him, too, and a grin broke across his fleshy, bald face. “Ah, Mr. Shakespeare, I believe you have seen sense. Welcome to the fold.”

“Thank you.”

“I hope you will introduce us, Mr. McGunn,” the woman said.

“My apologies, Lady Rich. This is Mr. Shakespeare. Mr. John Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare bowed. “My lady.” Of course, he had seen her portrait. Penelope Rich, sister of the Earl of Essex, was said to be the most beautiful woman at court, if not in the whole of England. It was an assessment that Shakespeare could not dispute.

“Mr. Shakespeare,” she said, “you must be brother to the other Mr. Shakespeare, the Earl of Southampton’s poet, for I can see that there is a little family likeness in your eyes and brow, though you are taller.”

“Indeed, my lady. And I am a little older, too.”

McGunn clasped his arm around Shakespeare’s shoulders. Too tight for friendship. Shakespeare winced at the memory of his viselike hand taking him by the throat. “Mr. Shakespeare has agreed to join our great enterprise of all the talents, Lady Penelope. He is to seek out and find the mysterious lost colonist, if one such really exists.”

“Oh, I am sure she exists, Mr. McGunn. It is an intriguing tale. Do find her, Mr. Shakespeare. I should so like to hear what she has to say for herself, about the perils she has endured in the New World and how she came to make her crossing of the ocean home to England. It will be the talk of the court. And, of course, it is certain to discomfit Ralegh, which will be most amusing.”

“I will do my utmost.”

She smiled the sweetest smile he had ever seen. “And I want you here tomorrow evening for the summer revels. Do say you will come.”

“Well, my lady …” He thought of Catherine, back home, turning from him, not even admitting him to her presence. How long was it since he had seen her smile at him like that?

McGunn’s grip about his shoulders tightened. “He’ll be there, Lady Rich. I’ll vouch for him.”

“That will be wonderful. I believe you were an intelligencer for Mr. Secretary Walsingham and saved Drake from some Spanish hellhound. I want to hear all about it from your own lips, Mr. Shakespeare. But for the moment, I am afraid I have to leave you.” She reached out and touched his face with the fingertips of her gloved right hand. “The She-wolf summons me and I must obey …”

He watched her move away from him along the hall. She wore a dress of gold and deep burgundy, almost brown in its intensity, with full embroidered sleeves and a sharply pointed bodice. From behind she seemed to glide, like a slender royal craft upon the Thames.

McGunn loosened his grip, then slapped him playfully on both sides of his face. It stung. “Watch yourself, Shakespeare. You’re a married man and she’s a married woman, and no good can come of it.”

“You do Lady Rich a disservice.”

McGunn laughed aloud. “But then, you don’t know the Devereux women, do you? It’s not for nothing that she calls her mother the She-wolf.”

“I heard it was Her Majesty the Queen that gave her the name.”

“Yes, but it was the She-wolf herself who earned it. Except that she hunts and eats men, not lambs in the field. And her daughters are no different.”

“I am astonished at your temerity, Mr. McGunn, to speak of the Earl of Essex’s mother and sisters so.”

“Would you have me kiss their feet?”

Who exactly was McGunn that he could display such disrespect and familiarity to Essex himself and to the ladies of his house? Shakespeare wondered. And how would the lady Lettice take it if she heard this man and her own daughter refer to her as the “She-wolf”?

McGunn opened a purse of soft leather and took out coins, which he handed to Shakespeare. “Here, fifteen marks in gold. Now, come with me. I run things for Essex and I have something to show you.”

Shakespeare took the coins, though he felt unclean in doing so. “Are you his steward? His factor?”

“What do you think, Slyguff? Is ‘steward’ the word for what I do for Essex?”

Slyguff said nothing.

“Ah, call me what you like, Shakespeare, I care nothing for titles. But a little warning before we proceed: never cross me. Never. For I always repay a slight. But if you are a good fellow, you will find me the truest friend a man ever had.” He grinned broadly, as though he had never made the threat. “Come. I will arrange letters-patent in my lord of Essex’s name. That will grant you access wherever you require it in your inquiries.”

They left Slyguff in the long hall and went up a narrow, twisting stairway of stone steps to a high room in a square turret at the back of the house. The room was tall-ceilinged with deep oriel windows, and lit by many candles. The three men seated there, poring over papers, looked up as they entered. Shakespeare recognized them all.

“Old friends, Mr. Shakespeare,” McGunn said. “They insisted you were the man to help us with this little task.”

The three were Francis Mills, Arthur Gregory, and Thomas Phelippes, all senior intelligencers with Walsingham in the old days. The last time they had all been together was five years since. They had been an effective if incongruous crew, each working directly for Walsingham rather than as a team.

The room was a mass of documents and books, a sort of library. What, exactly, was Essex trying to do here? Re-create Walsingham’s intelligence network?

Shakespeare looked at them each in turn. He shook Gregory by the hand but hesitated over Mills’s proffered hand, recalling the problems he had caused by being too close to Topcliffe. Phelippes did not rise to shake hands, but merely pushed his glasses up his pox-scarred nose and returned to his papers. Shakespeare thought it unlikely that either Mills or Phelippes had suggested his name to Essex or McGunn. Perhaps Arthur Gregory was the man.

“Mr. Sh-sh-shakespeare,” Gregory stammered. “It is a delight to s-s-see you once more.”

“And you, Mr. Gregory.” Shakespeare liked him. His face was as pink as a young pig’s, and he was clearly suffering in these hot days. His expertise lay in his careful hands and his uncanny ability to open a sealed letter, read it, and replace it so that the intended recipient was none the wiser. He also devised invisible inks and could easily reveal the supposedly invisible writings of others.

Mills was another matter. He and Shakespeare had been equals under Walsingham. Like Shakespeare, he was tall, but he was sticklike and more stooped than Shakespeare remembered him. He had been an interrogator, sometimes working together with Topcliffe in the Tower rack room. Mills would speak with soft, coaxing words while Topcliffe raged and foamed and turned the screws tighter on the rack and uttered unspeakable threats and obscenities. Yet this was not the sum of Mills’s abilities: he also had a cold, inquiring mind that could sift through the mass of intercepted correspondence from Spain and Rome and spot what was of importance. He was as valuable at a table of documents as he was in the tormenting chamber.

Phelippes, though, was the undisputed master of the intelligencer’s craft. His face was so pockmarked and unpleasant to look on beneath his lank yellow hair that children would shy away in fright, but his brain was as taut and beautiful as an athlete’s sinews. His talent was with ciphers and the breaking of them, be they French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Italian, or English; it was Phelippes who had enabled Walsingham to bring Mary of Scots to the headsman’s block.

“Surprised, Mr. Shakespeare?” McGunn said. “You had not expected to find these old friends here, I would happily wager.”

“Yes, ‘surprised’ is the word.”

“Well, feel free to use their expertise, for I want this woman found. My lord of Essex will allow for no failure in this. You will find much of the information you need among these papers. Come and go at will, Mr. Shakespeare, and report to me what you find. Sooner rather than later, if you will. Good evening to you.”

Shakespeare watched McGunn leave the room, then looked about him. This was Walsingham’s old library, he was certain. All his old papers were stacked here, high on shelves and over tables—a great mass of secrets that any spymaster would kill for.

“Here, Mr. Sh-shakespeare,” Arthur Gregory said. “Come, perch yourself with me, for I have gathered some information for you.”

Shakespeare sat on a bench beside him. “How have you been keeping, Mr. Gregory?”

“Scratching a living, sir. Times have not been easy since Mr. S-s-secretary passed away, but I have found gainful employment with my lord of Essex.”

“And Mr. McGunn …”

Gregory stiffened at the name. “He comes and g-goes.” He took a deep breath as if trying to relax and control his stammer; also, Shakespeare thought, to change the subject. “Anyway, take a look at these papers if you wish. They may help your inquiries into the st-st-strange case of the lost colony.”

Shakespeare was not to be fobbed off so easily. “But I would wish to know a little more about McGunn, Mr. Gregory. Who is he—and what has he to do with all this?”

Gregory glanced around him, as if fearful of prying eyes. His voice lowered. “I can tell you this much, Mr. Shakespeare. He is a dangerous man and not one to gainsay.” He moved yet closer to Shakespeare’s ear. “He had young Jaggard working for him, looking for this Eleanor Dare. Mr. McGunn says nothing, his demeanor rarely changes, yet the boy went missing and McGunn was most aggrieved. That is where you came in. Mr. McGunn wanted the best inquirer in the land. He takes a great personal interest in the matter.” He caught Mills gazing at him and stopped. “I can say no more, except that we hear the boy is dead, murdered in the woods.”