The Conscience of the King

The Priory was a warren of a building. Shakespeare was renting rooms over the east gate. They had left The House by a back entrance, disguised as masons in rough jerkins and with hammer, mallet and chisel carried around their belts. It was a good disguise. A hammer was a handy weapon. Strapped across his back, hidden under the jerkin in a special harness made of the finest Spanish leather, Gresham had strapped a sword, with a dagger positioned just above each ankle. He had not bothered to ask what weapons Mannion deemed suitable for the outing.

Jane was dressed as a housewife. It was always a worry how to disguise her. Even the worst clothes did little to hide the bloom and leanness of her figure, and the high cheekbones, sparkling eyes and lift to the chin made her a beauty however much soot was rubbed into her face.

Gresham and Mannion followed immediately behind Jane. Two of their men were stationed in front, two at either side and two to the rear. It was easier to train men to kill than to train them to accompany and guard their master and mistress without seeming to do so. It required intense concentration, as well as the ability to appear nonchalant when every nerve was straining.

Blackfriars was down The Strand and along Fleet Street, then over the stench of human and animal sludge that had once been the Fleet river. There was not one London, but several. A man who fitted into the hectic bustle of Fleet Street would be out of place among the weavers and cobblers of St Giles in Cripplegate, or the whores of Cheapside. Masons, however, went everywhere there was stone to chip, carve and repair.

The noise and bustle was immense. Everywhere the dust rose and clogged nostrils, put little icicles into eyes and caused the well-bred to walk with a handkerchief across their faces.

Everywhere there were people trying to sell things, shouting out the value of their wares. Everywhere was the incessant building that seemed to be going on across all of London. The wooden scaffolding jutted out into the streets, where wagons, coaches and horses vied for what little space there was. Its own people filled its» medieval walkways to overflowing, yet there was always more. London's teeming thousands needed feeding, and with every month that went by the city seemed to suck in more and more farm carts.

Mannion went to check with his look-out, who had alerted him that Shakespeare had been seen entering his rooms an hour earlier. 'He's still there,' said Mannion.

Hie gatekeeper was an old man, half asleep after his dinner. He woke to full consciousness with a start as Mannion banged on the half open door to his tiny lodge.

'We're 'ere to see Master Shakespeare. Master William Shakespeare. Some'at about some stone work he needs doin' up.'

'What you got that there with you for?' enquired the gateman, leering at Jane. She had rubbed her eyes hard and placed fresh spring water in them a few moments ago, blinking it out and over her cheeks. She looked as if she had been crying hard.

'Why, that hussy!' said Mannion, with feeling. 'If you'd a' seen where I had to drag 'er out from, you'd know why she ain't getting out my sight 'til I get her home! It's a trial in times like these, bein' a father and with no mother alive to keep her in order, I tell you!'

'Goin' to spank her, are you, when you gets 'er 'ome?' said the gateman, licking his lips and grinning like an aged satyr, at Jane. 'Thrash her, are you? With a belt, an' all?'

Mannion was nearly knocked off his stride. His glance caught Gresham, who was frantically trying to contain the laughter threat' ening to explode inside him.

'Oh, sir, he will, an' that!' Jane's accent was an excellent imitation of Middlesex, "e's so cruel to me, he is, so cruel… he beats me, he does, somethin' rotten.' She let her voice drain off into a pathetic snivel.

Good God, thought Gresham. Who needs to pay to go to the theatre? Let's just hope she doesn't start to strip off and show him her bruises…

'Ay, right then, up you go. Good luck to you. No time for these actors, me. Satan's chapel, that's what these theatres are. Satan's chapel.' The old man subsided into grumbling, though not without his gaze lingering lovingly on Jane's rear as they walked up the stairs.

They knocked on the heavy panelled door that Mannion had already established was Shakespeare's. There was silence. They knocked again, louder. A faint scrabbling could be heard from within. Gresham and Mannion exchanged a brief look, stepped back and in perfect unison drove with their feet at the place on the door that held the lock. It sprung open with a mighty crash.

When Gresham had first met him, Shakespeare, or William Hall, had been nondescript — medium height, medium build, medium everything. It was no bad thing for a spy to pass unnoticed. Even now, kneeling on the floor, hands raised in supplication, he was entirely forgettable. A bald pate with brown hair straggling on the side, a middle-aged paunch, the archetypal ageing prosperous merchant. How could the mind that wrote his plays be housed in a body of such drab normality?

Shakespeare had almost finished opening a hidden door in the heavy panels of the far wall as they burst in, an expression of sheer panic across his face. 'There's nothing I can do!' he shrieked now. '1 can't please you all! I don't have the papers!'

The gateman would be here any moment, calling out the watch. Jane stepped forward, knelt down beside the distraught man.

'Please,' she said quietly, 'we're here to help you. Not to harm you. Believe me. And send the gateman away when he comes.'

Gresham's heart went out to her. Most of the men he had worked with would not have recognised the danger the gateman posed without being told. Hardly any of them would have had the initiative to do something about it. Surely enough, clumping, urgent footsteps could be heard on the stairs outside.

Shakespeare looked into the most startling pair of dark eyes he had ever seen, housed in a face of such handsome proportions that it was guaranteed to take any man's breath away. 'No harm?' he asked pathetically. 'No threats?'

'No harm,' said Jane calmly. 'No threats.'

Shakespeare got up. 'It's all right, Ben,' he called out as the wheezing figure of the old man rounded the stairhead. 'Just a misunderstanding. These are… friends of mine.'

Ben looked suspiciously at the group.

'Well, I 'ope as 'ow they're better "friends" than some of those others you've 'ad comin' round 'ere these times. You sure? You don't need no 'elp?'

'I'm sure. Thanleyou. I'm sure.'

Ben left the way he had come, grumbling. Interesting, Gresham thought. The old man cared for Shakespeare, in his way. Servants — and particularly grizzled, perverted, cantankerous and liver-frazzled servants like Ben — cared for a very few people. Shakespeare must have something to command a residue of affection.

Shakespeare forced himself to look at Mannion. He is frightened he has made the wrong call, thought Gresham. This is a very scared man. Mannion saw the scrutiny coming. He stepped back, raised his arms, palms outwards. No weapons. No threat. It was a universal language.

The beating pulse in Shakespeare's neck began to subside. His doublet was of rich satin and velvet, copiously slashed. 'Do you close doors, as well as smash them to pieces?' he asked Mannion. Good, thought Gresham. There's wit there, at least, and a quick recovery. Gresham looked at the man's eyes. They were hooded, dark, as if a shutter was permanently closed over them. Normally Gresham gained a feeling for a person within minutes of their first meeting. Was there some strange smell, some ghostly aura invisible to the eye that passed between people? With Shakespeare he felt nothing. No sense of personality, no feel at all for what lay behind the exterior.

It was time for Shakespeare to know to whom he should talk.

'He does what I tell him,' said Gresham, 'usually. But he's no good unless he can smash something, sleep with it, eat it or drink it.*

'Then all he can do with me is the first. I doubt I'm his type in bed, and about the only thing no one's threatened to do to me recently is eat or drink me. God knows, they've tried everything else.' That wit again, with more than a note of tired resignation in Shakespeare's voice. He got up with Jane's assistance, and allowed her to help him to a chair. It was an expensive item, Gresham noted. Seasoned oak, with a high back and arms. A chair Robert Cecil would have been proud of. A rich man's chair. Even better, thought Gresham. The more a man had to lose, the more pressure could be brought to bear on him.

Shakespeare's beard and moustache were reasonably full, without being luxuriant. He wore a fashionably starched yellow collar, with two laces hanging down from it. Thickish nose, eyes quite wide-set. A drinker, Gresham thought — what actor wasn't? — with the veins just starting to go in the nose and cheeks. And those hands, with long, bony fingers. Why on earth did someone his age wear the earring in his left ear? It was the mark of a young dandy, not an ageing actor.

'So would you mind explaining why two… masons… need to smash down my door to see me?' Shakespeare reached for the goblet on the paper-strewn table. Jane, long practised with Ben Jonson, had the jug pouring the wine before he realised what was happening. He took a huge swig of the fluid.

He is outwardly quite relaxed, thought Gresham, but there was the faintest, most distant something in the air. Mannion looked at Gresham. Yes, they had both sensed as much as smelled it. Human fear. The smell both of them knew so well.

'May we sit down?' asked Gresham politely. There was another beautiful high-backed chair to match the one Shakespeare was seated on, and four or five stools.

'Be my guest,' said their host, his eyes not managing to stay on Gresham but flickering between him, Mannion and Jane. %

'My name is Henry Gresham.'

'Sir Henry Gresham. I know your name,' said Shakespeare. 'I remember you from a past it seems I'm not going to be allowed to forget. My name is William Shakespeare now. Not William Hall. And how is Sir Walter?'

'Imprisoned, having lost most of his estates. Locked up on a false charge laid by a scum of a man with no morals except his own best interest. And he's still very angry. As indeed am I.' The menace in Gresham's voice was palpable. Shakespeare had begun to relax, but Gresham's speech caused him to bolt upright.

'You promised no violence!'

'Nor will I deliver any. Not yet,' replied an icy Gresham. Shakespeare blinked, and spoke again.

'You come to the theatre. You're the one they attacked in the riot at The Globe. All the company have done since is talk about you. You work for the King, don't you? Has the King ordered you to kill me?' The tension crackled out in Shakespeare's voice. It was nondescript, a slight trace of Stratford, country-boy burr, not unattractive. The accent of rural England.

Now why on earth would a playmaker think the King of all England and Scotland would be bothered enough to have him killed?

'No one's ordered me to kill you,' said Gresham.

'Then what do you want?' asked Shakespeare. His voice was like footsteps treading on ice, fearful that it might give way at any moment.

'To talk to you,' said Gresham. 'And, please, if you could manage to spare some of that wine for my body servant here, it would stop his gaze boring into the back of my head like someone turning a screw.'

'Would you mind, Lady Gresham?' said Shakespeare, inviting her to fill a tankard for Mannion. He slurped away at it, happily.

A ladies' man, Master Shakespeare, thought Gresham, noting the brilliance of the artificial smile he flung at Jane. Full of contrasts. The wild smile of the actor, the drinker, the philanderer, the man with every mask at his disposal but no mask to call his own. The signs of dissipated living, the veins about to burst out. Yet at the same time the prosperity, the room with its fine chair, the fine hangings on the wall, the expensive goblet, all signs of worldly, rather than artistic, success. And hardly any books, just one chest with two or three volumes and some desultory papers! No pen, no paper! And no stains of ink on those long, bony fingers.

There was silence. Shakespeare looked away under the scrutiny of Gresham's gaze. 'What is it you want to talk about?' he finally asked. i was invited to investigate the loss of certain papers by Lord Cecil of unlamented memory, Sir Edward Coke and, I suppose, Sir Thomas Overbury.' At which name had Shakespeare started? He was trembling so much it was difficult to see. i now know much more than I did. I know, for example, that Kit Marlowe is back here in England and hell-bent on a killing spree.'

Shakespeare's hand gave a spasmodic jerk. His goblet flew off the table and rolled across the floor. There! That had made a crack in the wall! Shakespeare was not fat, at least not grossly so, but there were too many layers of softness over the bones that smoothed out his features. His gut wobbled as he jerked. A good few evenings in the tavern were stored there, thought Gresham.

'What I don't know is where a set of manuscripts relating to the work of Master William Shakespeare fit into this very complicated figure. And I would very much like you to tell me.'

'Will you kill me? Torture me?' Shakespeare's voice was plaintive now, almost as if he had been through this conversation before. Was it acting? Was it real? Or had this man lost the ability to distinguish between fiction and reality?

'If it appears you've betrayed me, or placed myself and my family at risk, I'll have no compunction in doing both. If you tell me the truth, then I'll do neither.' There was a certainty in Gresham's voice that was unanswerable. Jane remembered the spy of Cecil's infiltrated into their household years ago, held over a stinking pit that led to a deep, stone-walled chamber full of water, a chamber from which there was no escape. He had told the truth, eventually. They had then carefully broken his legs, as a reminder. No one betrays Henry Gresham. Jane shuddered at the memory. How was it possible to know so much and yet so little about a man?

'How simple life must seem as a spy!' barked Shakespeare. Another part, another role for the actor to play. The superior, angry man. Yet not played well, Gresham noted. He stopped short of making a true impact, like a punch pulled at the last minute. Shakespeare looked fully at Gresham now, into his eyes. 'You'll not torture and kill me if I tell you the truth, or so you say. Yet there are others who'll most certainly do both if I tell you what I know.'

This man, thought Gresham, is about to break up. He flings different personalities at me, each one less convincing, each one more fragile, each one less revealing of the man within. Whatever is happening to him, it has gone too far for him to be able to cope. Any moment now his heart will stop, or something will crack inside that bald pate. He is caught between a rock and a hard place.

'Is it Marlowe who's threatening you?' asked Gresham gently.

'Threatening me? He's tried to kill me once — and on stage! Good God! Some people really do take the theatre too seriously! If only it were that simple!' Shakespeare had slumped back in his chair and started to cry, a wailing, keening noise, racking sobs near lifting his plump body off the seat, his head held in his hands.

Gresham made a decision. 'Jane,' he said to his mistress. 'Would you please be nice to Master Shakespeare for a while, and talk about how bad you think some of Ben Jonson's writing is? You, Mannion, take Master Shakespeare's wine into a corner, after you've given him some of his own drink, and if he tries to run, kill him.' Gresham smiled at Shakespeare. 'I can't stand the smell of that bread through the window any more. We could all do with a bite to eat. I'll be back in a while.'

Gresham remembered the moment of communication with Andrewes, the single, fleeting meeting of minds in a strange com-, munion. There would be no such meeting with this man. Every signal skittered off the face of his personality, tumbling, falling, never hooking in to anything permanent.

Gresham went down the stairs and greeted his men, who drew themselves up as he made his exit. He took four of them with him, leaving the others to guard the gatehouse. First stop was the bakery, where the soft, pungent aroma of freshly baking bread was taunting passers-by with its promise. Then rough-cut country cheese and butter from a farm wagon, and fresh smoked meats from a stall. Then to the tavern, a respectable-enough looking place, to explore the wine on offer. They haggled and, whistling, Gresham took his wine, picked up his men and went back to the gatehouse.

Jane was seated by Shakespeare on a stool, prattling away as if she had known him all her life. A storm of light flashed from her eyes as he entered, warning him off.

'And while I thought Volpone and The Alchemist were brilliant — and I told him so -1 thought Sejanus was awful. Told him that, too, and he threw a chair out of the window. Fortunately, it was open…'

Underneath it all, her heart is bursting with worry — for me, for herself, for her children, thought Gresham. She hates the world I live in, and lives in it simply for me. Not so long ago she was fighting for her life and manning a boat like an Amazon. Now she's sitting here, chattering away as if she is a stage-struck girl hardly out of swaddling clothes. In a minute she'll tell me something I was too stupid to spot, and, God willing, by the time. the night's over she'll have been a bed-mate for me and a true mother to her children. How many minds did God give this girl?

'I didn't think Sejanus was that bad…' said Shakespeare generously. Then he stopped. His eye had been caught by Gresham laying out a simple supper, two bottles of wine still under his arm. He was humming a tune to himself as he did so, Tom Campion's 'My Sweetest Lesbia'. The change from avenging fiend to table servant had startled Shakespeare. It had been meant to.

'But tell me about your plays, Master Shakespeare,' said Jane. 'I mean, I know he wants me to calm you down and soften you up so that you'll let out more information than you want to Shakespeare's eyes opened even wider. Well, thought Gresham, there's nothing like a dose of the truth to make things work. He had tried the tough way and lost. Let Jane do her worst. 'But I really, really do like your plays. And so, by the way, does he. More than that, in fact. He loves what you write almost as much as he hates the man who writes them.'

Why was this line of conversation seeming to make the man panic again? Gresham thought. i think you must be an amazing person, to write those comedies and then move on to histories and tragedies. If it was anyone else, they'd have stayed with one style, like Jonson has, and made it their speciality. Your plays — you seem to do each style better than anyone else and then move on! It's extraordinary.'

'Yes, isn't it?' said Shakespeare distractedly, as if he was trying to pass a large and sharp stone from his bottom. 'Actually, I prefer to talk about my poems, you know. The plays are how I earn my keep. The poems are where 1 feel I can write…' He wanted to talk about his Rape ofLucrece.

He babbled on, genuinely happier now he was off the subject of plays.

Gresham moved around the table. Shakespeare had only been renting these rooms for a month or so, Mannion had said. An old Dominican Priory, withmore bolt holes and secret passages than a Catholic household, Gresham guessed. The water was only a few paces away, down St Andrew's Hill to Puddle Wharf. Had he moved here so he could run when danger threatened? If you looked carefully you could see where the door in the panelling opened up, but the carpentry was superb and it could only be seen as a door if one knew where to examine. There were no bookcases, Gresham saw with surprise, no sign of a library. Not even copies of his own plays, those that had been published. Only three books. Venus and Adonis. The Rape of Lucrece. His poems. And there were his sonnets, of course. Brilliant. Gresham, who had published his own sonnets under a false name, had felt the sharp sting of envy when he had read Shakespeare's work, always the sign of real power in another writer. It was a pirate edition, with the famous acknowledgement to 'Mr W.H.' as the 'only begetter' of the sonnets. In any event, the book was there, stuffed carelessly along with the others, in a chest with its lid open, a chest stuffed otherwise with printed pamphlets and broadsheets. One of them caught Gresham's eye. It had been torn out of something. To our English Terence, Mr Will. Shakes'Speare.

Terence. The classical author.

Light exploded in Gresham's head. Of course! The explanation! It had to be! What a fool he had been!

'I'm sorry, Master Shakespeare,' Gresham said charmingly. None of the revelation in his mind showed. Shakespeare had paused in his explanation of Venus and Adonis to Gresham's own Venus. 'I really should have asked if you wanted to eat before I set your table. May I ask you to sit and sup of this very humble fare?'

Humble it might have been, but the way Shakespeare attacked the food after his initial hesitation confirmed what Gresham had thought. Master Shakespeare, who looked as if he had the capacity to be a good trencherman, had been feeding as Well as drinking out of the bottle in recent weeks.

The wine was good. Not excellent, but good. Gresham treated himself to two glasses. Shakespeare had adapted with some ease to his attackers becoming his dinner guests. Actors, thought Gresham, do not live by any known codes. They are outsiders, perhaps even outcasts. They make their own rules. Shakespeare had insisted on moving to the next room — Mannion had moved casually to the door to make sure another priest's escape route was not being utilised — and bringing back four exquisite glasses, clearly Venetian. In Mannion's paw the vessel looked like a new-born babe in the hands of a devil. Just pray he doesn't smash it, thought Gresham. And that Shakespeare doesn't drop one, as he had dropped the goblet, when I tell him what I now know.

There are moments when humanity thinks history is made, when a great battle is fought or a mighty coronation observed. Yet there are other moments, hidden in the warp and weave of everyday conversation, masquerading as normality, that change lives and sometimes even the world. Moments which expose or hide a truth for ever more, that write a new version of human history. Moments based on the chance of a particular pamphlet lying at the top of a pile, and the chance of a particular man seeing it there at a particular moment when two glasses of wine had been drunk just ever so slightly too fast.

Gresham let Shakespeare finish his meal. He would need all the strength he could muster. He waited until the man, garrulous by now, was telling Jane about his plans for a new sonnet sequence. It was as if the room shivered before him. It was an extraordinary sensation, one he had never experienced. He had dealt with kings and queens! He had held their fate in his hands! He had kept secrets the world would have shuddered for! So why now, with the plump and drunk figure of a nobody in front of him, did he feel that something inexplicably important for the future was taking place in this room? He shook his head to rid it of this nonsense. He must have drunk, more wine than he had thought. Then, in a pause while the actor reached for yet another glass, Gresham spoke.

'You didn't write your plays, did you, Master Shakespeare? You wrote your poems, I'm sure, but your plays — the work you've become famous for — you didn't write them, did you?'

Shakespeare looked at Gresham with an expression of such appalled horror that for a moment Gresham felt the most intense and cutting pity for the wreck of a man in front of him. Was he going to throw up the first food he had eaten in days? Or would he make it to speech first?

'I… how could you? Are you some devil incarnate?' There, it was out. And it was the truth, Gresham noted. If it were otherwise, the man would have denied it in his shock.

'No, no devil, as far as I know,' said Gresham. 'But I observe, and I listen. Manuscripts of plays are stolen, manuscripts pre-* sumably in the handwriting of their author. There's panic in the corridors of power. With the Catholics banished to hell for ever more after the gunpowder plot, there's a new power in the land. The Puritans. They get their Bible. They rail against the corrup' tion of King and Court. And they hate the theatre above all else! They call it Satan's chapel, and the actors the spawn of Lucifer.'

'So?' said Shakespeare violently, rallying. 'We've endured their vilification for years. And not just them. We're vilified by the people who use us most, just like a whore! What of it?' There was a pathetic braggadocio to the man. Or perhaps a trace of real courage. Would Gresham have been happy to fight alongside this man? he wondered. Strangely, against all reason, perhaps he might have been/Providing, of course, he had been able to pour a bottle of wine down him first. Dismissing the thought, he bored in to Shakespeare.

'What if the very powers of the land, the Establishment, its aris-tocracy and nobility, have succumbed to the new power of the theatre? What if, instead of wanting their thoughts and dreams and the wild imaginings read out in private to a closed group of adoring Court ladies and fawning men, they want them played before thousands, night after night? What if they have found themselves lured into Writing plays? Plays they cannot own up to, of course. Heaven forbid that the ruling classes should stoop so low as to write a play! Yet suppose their idle brains have found amusement in so doing? What easier than to find a cipher, a nameless man of the theatre, to give his name to their offerings? What if they chose a feeble poet, a man who had proved his ability for deceit in his life as a spy, and an actor of at best limited ability, to put his name to their work?'

'What if they have?' mumbled Shakespeare, seeming to see the end of the world in the bottom of an empty wine glass.

'Well then,' said Gresham, 'what if some mischief-maker decides to expose these idle aristocrats? Expose them to the Puritans. Expose them to the people as too cowardly to own up to their own words. Expose them as liars. Expose them as deceivers. Expose them to ridiculeV

'And what if they do?' Shakespeare had looked up from his glass now. He gazed into Gresham's eyes, but did not see them. He was looking into a void, an abyss of hopelessness that not even Gresham's greatest depression had plunged him in to.

'What if they do?' continued Gresham remorselessly. 'Well, we know our rulers are liars. Machiavelli told us why they have to be. Yet look at the response when Machiavelli dared to tell people the truth. He was consigned to hell. We must not know that our rulers tell lies! But if they do want to expose the truth,' Gresham carried on remorselessly, 'then two separate forces will work on the source of the lie. On you, Master William Shakespeare. The supposed author of these plays. The man who in reality takes the manuscripts, tidies them up a bit for theatre and puts them out as his work — all for a healthy fee, of course! There'll be the force of those who desperately want their foray into the theatre kept a secret. Then there's the other party, the ones who want their genius acknowledged, who want to take the glory of their writing for themselves.'

Shakespeare's head jerked up at that. So at least one person wanted their anonymity removed, wanted to claim the credit for the play they had laundered through Shakespeare's name.

'What a mess you're in, Master William Shakespeare! One party will try to keep your secret by having you killed. The other party will try everything to keep you alive and pressure you into telling the truth. And the manuscripts, the original manuscripts of the many and varied plays by William Shakespeare, will be in the handwriting of the original authors, for all that one or two may have trusted the writing to a treasured clerk.'

Shakespeare's head shot up. A hit! Which of Shakespeare's wealthy clients had sent his manuscript in by a clerk's hand, and not his own?

'No wonder you're being torn apart,' said Jane. 'You poor, poor man. You just can't win, can you?'

'How did you guess?' asked Shakespeare, looking bleakly at Gresham.

'The pamphlet. There, in the chest. "To our English Terence, Mr Will. ShakeS 'Speare" Terence. Wasn't he the impoverished Roman writer who agreed to publish under his own name works that Roman noblemen had written but for one reason or another didn't care to acknowledge? Congratulations. Ben Jonson would be proud of you. For all your lack of classical learning, you've acted in a true classical tradition.'

'You think you know it all, don't you?' Shakespeare had gone beyond despair, into a region Gresham did not recognise.

'No,' said Gresham truthfully, i never. think I know it all. I like to find out enough to survive.'

An agony of thought passed over Shakespeare's raddled face. Finally, he came to a decision, i was a nobody! I was struggling in the company. I can't act, you know. I'm hopeless! They were going to get rid of me, a poor country boy with no talent except a way with poems. Poems never filled a house. Then this manuscript arrived. A complete play! Addressed to me, with a covering letter and a promise of money if I did what I was told. I knew it was Marlowe, from the writing, the words, the way he used language… so 1 took it. And I gave it my name. I told Hemminge and Condell. My friends, no one else. They thought it was a gold mine. The others in the company, the ones who wanted to get rid of me, looked at me with new respect. "It's good, Will," they said, patronising me, when I produced the first script under my name. "We'll put it on, for a trial, you understand. See how it goes down. See if it works." And it meant 1 could stop working for Cecil. Say goodbye to William Hall. Be William Shakespeare only.'

'Poor old Marlowe, not wanting to be dead at all,' said Gresham. 'And most of all not wanting to be a dead dramatist.' He stopped for a moment. 'So what went wrong with the system?' i don't know!' said Shakespeare. His hands were running over his bald pate, as if the hair was still there. 'Marlowe's plays stopped, ten, maybe twelve years ago. They just stopped. Until now. When he came back. Mad. Diseased. Barking.'

'Any others know?'

'Ah the bloody world and their grandma for all I care!' exploded Shakespeare. 'Lots of people have suspicions. Jonson does, I know.

As for anyone else who knows for certain, well, you're the spy. You tell me!'

'But it didn't end with Marlowe, did it?' said Gresham, relentless. Shakespeare rocked back, hit hard. 'I knew Marlowe. I know the works he wrote under his own name. I know the plays you've written. My favourites?' Gresham was pacing around the room. 'Hamlet. King heir. Marlowe could never have written those! Marlowe's heroes never pause to worry about what other people think. Hamlet's crippled because he can think of nothing else. Leir's damned because he never listens until it's too late! Who else writes plays with your name on themV

'Oxford,' whispered Shakespeare, seeming to draw into himself as a penis will shrink and shrivel with intense cold.

'Who?' said Gresham with intense rudeness.

'Edward De Vere!' Shakespeare shouted back. 'The fucking Earl of fucking Oxford! There were lots of people who wanted to write plays back then. People who didn't dare to have it known.'

'The one who couldn't forget the fart?' said Mannion, who had been listening, engrossed, to the developing conversation.

'What?' said Gresham.

'Oxford. De Vere. The one who couldn't forget the fart.' Mannion gave a guffaw of laughter. Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, had been a fierce patron of the players. He had equipped and served on-board a ship for the Armada. Then he had farted. Before his Queen. In full assembly. He had run from the Court before a word could be said and exiled himself to Europe for years. There he had developed a fondness for the most extravagant Italian style of dress. On his return, he had presented himself before his Queen in all his finery. Whatever else she may have possessed, Queen Elizabeth had a raucous sense of humour. Faced with this extraordinary vision of Italian fashion, she had received his supplications of loyalty with regal splendour. Then she had reduced the Court to fits of suppressed laughter by her next statement.

'My lord, I had forgot the fart.'

De Vere could not now forget it. He had fled the Court a second time, permanently humiliated. He had died of the plague in 1604.

'So who were these others?' asked Gresham in a sibilant hiss.

If Shakespeare had made himself any smaller he would have vanished. 'Don't ask me any more!' he pleaded. 'You've a horde of men to protect you, against Marlowe and the rest of them! I've no one!'

'Who eke?'

'Rutland.' It was said in a very, very small voice. 'Who?'

'Rutland. Roger. Roger Manners. Fifth Earl of Rutland. He died, in May. Just after your lord and master Robert Cecil! There! You've got it now, haven't you? Marlowe. Oxford. Rutland.'

'Marlowe. Oxford. Rutland,' said Gresham thoughtfully. 'What do they want of you?'

'Marlowe wants it shouted from the rooftops that he wrote my plays. All of them. Not just the handful he sent in a manuscript for. And he wants me to get The King's Men to perform his play, The Fall of Lucifer. He's tried to kill me once. Oxford and Rutland's heirs, they demand I keep silent. They don't want their illustrious parents damned by association with the theatre, don't want them seen as cheap conspirators. They've threatened me. Serious threats. Men with knives. I'm dead if I tell the truth, as Marlowe demands. I'm dead if I hide the truth, as the others want me to do.'

There were tears in Shakespeare's eyes, Gresham noted. There would have to be. He was an actor, after all.

'Marlowe. Oxford. Rutland. Are they the only ones whose plays you put your name to?' *'Isn't that enough?' Shakespeare shot back. 'How many more do you want?'

'One of the people you name is as mad as a hatter and likely to drop down dead of the pox at any moment. I can hardly be in ignorance of him. One tends to remember anyone who's tried to skewer your wife on a crossbow bolt. The other two are dead.' 'So?*

'So I think you're only telling me the names of the people I can't talk to.'

Stalemate. Whatever Shakespeare was hiding, even his very visible fear of Gresham was not bringing it out.

'And you remained a spy, didn't you? Long enough to infiltrate the Bye Plot and place Sir Walter Raleigh in the dock?'

Shakespeare flushed. Yet he also fought back. 'I was seduced into the whole wretched business when I was too young to know better — as perhaps were you! It was exciting, wasn't it, when we were young? You were working for the greatest in the land, there was money in your pocket and you travelled as a king's messenger. And you, and Sir Walter Raleigh, greatly overestimate my part in his downfall. Sir Walter's always been his own worst enemy. Challenge him to be silent and you've a guarantee that he'll shout out loud.'

The problem was, Gresham thought, he was not far off the mark. Raleigh, one of the very few people Gresham had ever considered a hero, was too large for life. 'Your reward for Raleigh, and for acting as a front to other authors, was to have your company made The King's Men?' asked Gresham.

'Much more due to the latter than the former. My lord Cecil was amused to have a spy in the camp of a company of actors.'

Yes, I can see that, thought Gresham. The actors, the common players, despised of the Church, anarchic, a potential hot-bed of sedition and revolution and riot — and all the time, one of Cecil's men in a pivotal position in their midst. It would have amused Cecil, all the more so for the fact that no one would know.

'And if he was to have a spy in a company of actors, then of course it had to be the greatest, the best company of actors. Which meant we had to cease to be The Lord Chamberlain's Men and become The King's Men. And yes, Hemminge, Condell and

Burbage, they knew I was the reason. I told them. Though I didn't tell them why.'

'So William Shakespeare's plays aren't William Shakespeare's plays at all.' It was Jane, breaking a long silence. She was too old for there to be tears in her eyes. Yet the tears were there in her voice. 'Those plays that seemed so magical to me, they were nothing more than the playthings of noblemen too cowardly to admit their art, noblemen playing at writing plays, posturing beneath an adopted disguise. Well, my thanks to you, Master William Shakespeare. I used to think there was artistry and beauty and magic in the world of the theatre, even when it was stripped away from the world I actually lived in. Now I find it's just the same as everywhere else, just a little more dressed over. Thank you for educating me. Now 1 know there's no art. No magic. Only self-interest. How silly of me to need a reminder.'

She stood up and left the room, passing through the door to Shakespeare's sitting room, there presumably to commune with her own ghosts.

There were tears in Shakespeare's eyes, Gresham saw. One actually dribbled over his eyelid and fell down his cheek. It was a truism Gresham had heard countless times that a man could not counterfeit tears. His age respected emotion, not as something womanly in a man, but as a sign of genuine feeling. How good an actor was William Shakespeare? Gresham thought. Were his tears the burning mark of truth? Whatever the answer to that, Shakespeare was clearly a man who was down and out. Which, of course, was exactly the time for someone more ruthless to hit him twice as hard.

'How many plays. did Sir Francis Bacon and Bishop Lancelot Andrewes write under your name?'

It had to be that! To hell with love letters! It wasn't those that Andrewes had asked him to destroy if he found them! It was plays! Bacon was too clever ever to put down in writing his love for another man. Andrewes would sooner burn his balls off" with an altar candle than succumb to carnal temptation, if Gresham was any judge. But both men were prime candidates for the play-writing urge. They had fearsome intellects, the willingness to dare to be wise and the desire to try their hand at this new art form while knowing that their station and ambitions forbade them from so doing.

Gresham had never seen a man reduce in size before his eyes. Shakespeare seemed to wilt and shrink as he spoke his words. 'How much do you know?'

Gresham could have driven home then, taken all the advantage possible from his inspirational guesswork. Instead, remarkably, he decided to be merciful. Was it because the infinite compassion of Lancelot Andrewes had touched him to his soul? Or because he had seen his wife bid farewell to magic? Or was it because, all of a sudden, he was tired of the world, its double and treble deceptions?

'Far less than you might imagine,' he confided to Shakespeare. 'Yet I'd be willing to bet that Bacon and Andrewes were two of the men who submitted to your play-writing factory. Bacon wishes to be Attorney General. Andrewes wishes to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Neither would be helped in their ambitions by the realisation among the general public that they'd also wished to be stars at The Globe. Yet they're both writers of some brilliance. Both have minds that are incredibly active. Catch them at the right time and I doubt either could resist the chance to try their hand at this whole new world of plays. Like lambs to the slaughter, I imagine they were.'

'I…' Gresham had a sense that something had slipped in Shakespeare's mind, that at long last the truth was going to emerge. He waited, hardly daring to breathe.

There was a ferocious clatter of hooves outside and shouted orders. Jane came in almost immediately. Soldiers rushed up the stairs — the King's soldiers. Gresham's men would have been powerless. Their leader was Sir William Wade, the gruff Keeper of The Tower.

'Sir Henry. I am bidden by the King to bring you to his presence.'

To Whitehall?' enquired Gresham mildly.

'No,' said Wade. 'To the Tower of London.'

Gresham would have expected a look of exultation on Shakespeare's face as they were led out. His victors vanquished. Instead, all he caught was a look of infinite sadness. William Shakespeare and Henry Gresham had stared into the same abyss, and were doing so even now.