The Conscience of the King

"How could you leave the college with no guard? On your own?' Jane was incandescent. He had never seen fury like it. To her, a vision of him slumped like a broken doll at the foot of the college, the sheer madness of his going out to meet Marlowe, felt like a betrayal of their love. 'Do you think your wife and children want to live without you? Are we so little to you that you can throw basic caution to the wind? How would you have spoken to me if I'd run off into the night with your children, on the word of a drunken informer, because in the final count excitement mattered more to me than my love!'

She was right. That made him even more angry. Mannion was no help. He had said nothing about Gresham rushing off into the night, but he looked mournful and reproachful, like a vast cow that had not been milked or a dog whose owner had suddenly ceased to walk or feed it.

The letters, the damned, cursed letters, had been there in Marlowe's satchel, in lascivious detail, the hand presumably that of the King himself.

'Well? Will you give the letters to your Bishop, as he asked?' said Jane. Was her anger subsiding, or did she merely have it under her control?

'Probably. Possibly. I'll think on it.' He was trying to show his hurt at her failure to understand why he had had to go out into the darkness and confront Marlowe. So often there was only the one chance!

Why are men such children7, thought Jane. If a child's tantrum is ignored it loses its power. So she would ignore his tantrum. With a massive effort she reined in her anger.

'Are the other papers useful?' He had shown them to her so she was in a position to make her own judgement. By asking him for his thoughts she placed herself below him. Well, God had made the first mistake in creating women second. Who was she to deny God? Except that by a subtle use of her second place she might still lead this damned fool of a man into thinking he had made the right decision on his own.

Useful? They were two play manuscripts. Both, apparently, the text of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, but in two different hands. Neither bore even a passing resemblance to the hand of Bacon, or of Andrewes. Gresham's interest had waned.

'No. Not useful,' he had confided. 'Confusing. Yet Marlowe kept these papers alongside those that damn the King of all England and Scotland as a lusting sodomite. They must have some value I don't know of. I need to meet Shakespeare. In some way I don't understand, he's a key to the sub-plot of this whole business.'

'He's renting rooms in the old Dominican Priory, at Blackfriars.' It was Mannion. 'And he's back there. I heard, yesterday. Just after you'd gone into your feast. There's talk he's trying to buy them. Quite the little property magnate, our Master Shakespeare. You know he's been buying up half of Stratford?'

Gresham didn't know.

'There's too much we don't know.' Jane and Mannion noted the use of the conciliatory 'we". Perhaps the storm was over. 'What I do know is that I want to meet Master William Shakespeare again.'