“Westminster Abbey.”
For a moment we gaped at each other across the table. “Poets’ Corner,” said Ben. “What does he point at?”
“A book, maybe. Or a scroll. I’m not sure.”
Ben put his cup down. “If that’s what you want, I’ll get you to London. We were going through Heathrow, anyway, to reach Henley. But the police may have figured Poets’ Corner for another target, in which case there’ll be a guard.”
He leaned toward me intently. “I have to tell you, though, if you go to the police now, they’ll see pretty clearly that you’re a victim. You can tell them everything you know and let them run down the killer. But if you go on running, they’ll have little choice but to suspect that you are, at a minimum, in league with him. Or her.”
I jumped up and began pacing the room. “Who’s already got an hour head start, which will stretch into days.”
“Not necessarily,” said Ben. “He left the letter.”
I stopped in my tracks. “What are you suggesting?”
“Maybe the killer doesn’t want Granville’s discovery found. Maybe he wants the search stopped altogether.”
I spun back into pacing as my mind whirled around this idea. “There are lots of people who’d hate to see Shakespeare toppled from his pedestal.”
“Forget the authorship issue. We didn’t know about it till this letter. Up to now we’ve been chasing the play.” His voice darkened. “Who does not want Cardenio found?”
“Why should anyone not—?” I stopped midsentence. “The Oxfordians,” I said raggedly. “Athenaide.”
“Dates are such rickety things,” she had said earlier, looking down across the neo-Jacobean splendor of the reading room. But they aren’t, really. If we were to find Cardenio, then her man, the secret jewel built right into the heart of her castle, the earl of Oxford, was out.
The added twist in the quest—that Delia might have been right—would matter not a whit to her. Delia had believed Sir Francis Bacon to be the mind behind Shakespeare’s mask. And if you’d kill to protect your man against proof that William Shakespeare of Stratford had done what the printers said he’d done, then why would you cavil at killing to protect your man against Sir Francis?
No—Athenaide made sense, insofar as such brutality could ever make sense. No one else knew about the search for Cardenio, beyond the three of us. I hadn’t even told Sir Henry yet. Roz had known, and she was dead. Maxine had known of a trail that led to Athenaide’s house, and she was dead.
Athenaide had told me that Dr. Sanderson wanted to meet me at the Capitol—but she could just as well have orchestrated that meeting, giving him the same message from me. When Sinclair came close to stopping me, Athenaide had ensured that I’d get there.
“Dr. Sanderson was right to warn you off her. Not because she’s Oxfordian. But because whatever else she is, Kate, she’s not aboveboard. No one carves that much secret space between their walls for the sake of historical whimsy. Especially in that part of the world, fifty miles from the Mexican border. She’s running drugs or running people, or both.”
I sat down. How could I have been such a fool?
Athenaide made sense, but for one detail. The hand groping downward. “It was a man who attacked me,” I said with a shudder. “Here, and in Widener.”
“Roz hired me,” observed Ben.
Women hire men, in other words. For some reason, I heard Matthew’s voice. “Your protégé hasn’t shown.” Wesley North. Athenaide’s man.
“But he left the letter,” I said, still kicking against Ben’s theory. “If the aim was to stop me—to stop everybody—why not take the letter?”
“You might have scared him off.”
“Or you might have.”
He shrugged. “Or maybe you were meant to find it.”
I jerked back a little. “But you just suggested he was trying to stop me. He tried to kill me.”
“But he didn’t.”
“Are you suggesting he failed on purpose?”
“If you need to stop someone, there are easier and surer ways of going about it. A single, silenced shot to the head…a quick twist of the neck. If he’d really wanted you dead, you’d have been gone before I reached you. But you weren’t. So I ask myself, why not? Why are these killings so showy? And why have you escaped—not once now, but twice?” He shrugged. “One distinct possibility is that they’re showy precisely because they’re a show, aimed at swaying an audience…a very particular audience.”
“Me?”
“Athenaide may want you to do exactly what you’re doing: to stay on the trail with a fire of vengeance under your feet. It’s possible that she’s following you, rather than racing ahead. She may be clearing the trail around you, Kate, and pushing you forward.”
I frowned. “Why? You’re the one who said she didn’t want Granville’s discovery found.”
“Maybe a better way to say it would be that she doesn’t want it to come to light. Ever. But the only way to do that is to destroy it. And to destroy it, you have to find it. You may be alive because she needs you.”
“To find Cardenio. And if I do?”
“She’ll destroy you both. And whatever else Granville found.”
I paced the kitchen again. “I can’t. I can’t believe it.”
Ben reached into his jacket pocket and set something across the table. A small silver frame. I drew closer, though still keeping my distance. As if it might bite.
The photo inside was black and white, its composition the stark, graceful lines of an Avedon photograph. A wasp-waisted woman stood in that curious concave stance of models c. 1955, the era of Roman Holiday and Rear Window. It was Athenaide. Younger, beautiful, exquisite. Nearby, a girl gazed up at her in awe. Her face still had the pliable features of childhood, but she was, quite unmistakably, a young Rosalind Howard.
For all that, it was Athenaide’s hat that was most arresting. A white hat with a wide brim and roses the size of peonies, the blacker-than-black that only one color could produce in black-and-white film: red. Deep scarlet red.
I had seen that hat before, but in full Technicolor. Next to Roz’s body.
I looked up, my breath coming short and shallow. “Where did you find this?”
“On her plane,” said Ben.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t sure what it meant.”
This is big, said Roz’s voice. Bigger than Hamlet? my own voice answered. Bigger…
You must follow where it leads, she’d said.
So far it had led to two more deaths. “This is my fault,” I said hollowly, a whiff of guilt fast thickening to conviction. “I’m the one who led Athenaide to Dr. Sanderson. And Maxine Tom.”
Setting both hands on my shoulders, Ben gave me a little shake. “Listen to me: It doesn’t matter who’s following whom. This is not your fault.”
Clinging to his words, my guilt gave way to anger. Ben was right: It didn’t matter whether I was chasing or being chased; my decision was the same. I had to reach the end of the trail before the killer did. “Westminster Abbey,” I said hoarsely.
“One rule,” said Ben. “You never go out of my sight. Not to pray, not to pee. Never.”
“Fine.”
“Promise.”
“I promise. Just get me to London.”
He pulled something else from his pocket. It was a small booklet, dark blue, with an eagle traced in gold on the front. A passport. I opened it. There I was, looking back at myself. At least, it was my face. But the hair was short and dark, and the name on the passport was a boy’s: Johnson, William, date of birth: 23 April 1982.
“You’ll have to dye your hair and let me cut it. Unless you want to cut it yourself.”
“Why a boy?”
“That was a gruesome murder, Kate. And there’ve been enough of them, weird enough, to qualify as serial killing. The net around the airports will already be tight, and drawing tighter. Besides, every Shakespearean heroine should dr
ess up like a boy at least once.”
“You think this’ll work?”
“Do you have any better suggestions?”
“Give me the dye.”
Rummaging through some plastic grocery bags on the counter, he handed me a bottle and showed me the way to a bathroom. I glanced at the familiar auburn sheen of my hair in the mirror. The dye promised to be temporary; stepping into the shower, I hoped tightly that it was.
With my hair wet and newly near black, Ben quickly cut it short. When he finished, the face I saw in the mirror might have been boy, might have been girl. Hard to say. Though if I wore the only clothing I had—the black skirt and heels—that would pretty definitively swing the answer.
Ben laughed at that notion. In the hallway stood two small rectangular rolling bags. He handed one to me. “Looks suspicious to head to Europe without luggage,” he said. “And you needed a few things, anyway. Though they may be the last you get for a while, so try not to play rough.” In it, I found loose trousers, a long-sleeve button-down shirt, a loose jacket, socks, and some shoes. The fit wasn’t as good as Sir Henry’s guesses, but it was close enough. At the last moment, I found Matthew’s card in my skirt pocket, and transferred it to my jacket.
“You’ll have to chase off every queen in England,” said Ben, as I emerged from the bathroom. He handed me a long chain necklace. “For the brooch,” he said. So once again I pinned it onto a chain around my neck. But this time, I let it hang hidden inside my shirt.
Ten minutes later, we were in a cab headed for Dulles.
Once again, we found tickets waiting in our names. Once again, they were for the wrong destination. But this time, we boarded the plane for the wrong city.
We left, at midnight, for Frankfurt.
29
WE WERE FLYING economy for once. Service, said Ben, has its drawbacks when you just want to be part of the faceless crowd. As the plane leveled off in the air, I felt for the volume of Chambers tucked into the seat pocket in front of me.
“You’ve checked it three times in ten minutes,” said Ben. “I’m pretty sure it’s still there.”
“Maybe it’ll sprout legs and run off like the fork with the spoon,” I retorted. “You never know.”
A little later, the carts with dinner and drinks trundled up, closing us in, and for a while we turned to the business of liberating dinner from plastic.
“So explain to me,” said Ben, hunched over soggy lasagna, “why someone might think Shakespeare didn’t write the plays. Someone not delusional,” he added.
Miss Bacon was Right. Right piled upon Right.
I took a sip of wine. “Much as I hate to admit it, Athenaide has a point. The writer that the plays require doesn’t match the man that history gives us. Stratfordians say the mismatch is an optical illusion—a problem of evidence eroded by the normal wear and tear of time—and they write stories that connect the Stratford man to the plays. The anti-Stratfordians, on the other hand, say the mismatch is real—the result of two different people using the same name: an actor from Stratford who lent or sold his name to a shy playwright for use as a mask. And they write stories that keep the actor distinct from the writer.
“Both sides lay claim to Truth. They label their stories as history and biography, and hurl abuse at their opponents as fools, madmen, and liars—you heard Athenaide. They’ve even taken on the language of religion, of orthodoxy and heresy.”
“They?” asked Ben. “Are you standing outside of it all like a god, watching the children squabble?”
“If I were so godlike, I’d have a pat answer. But the truth is, we don’t know who wrote the plays. Not like we know that water is two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, or that all human beings will die.” Dr. Sanderson’s face floated through my memory, and a lump rose in my throat. I battled it down. “The preponderance of evidence points to the actor from Stratford. But the gaps in that story are deep and wide enough to be troubling—in a criminal trial, I doubt you could make the plays stick to the actor by the standard of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’”
Reaching below my tray table, I fished around in the seat pocket. “The link between the player and the plays really all comes down to Ben Jonson, who knew the actor, and the First Folio, which Jonson probably edited.” I pulled the paperback facsimile out and opened it to the eggheaded portrait.
“The Folio fingers the man from Stratford. On the other hand, everything Jonson has to say about both the author and his picture sounds coy and possibly ironic. So was Jonson being ‘honest Ben’ Jonson? Or was he being ironic, witty Ben Jonson? I mean, look at the dedicatory poem, just before his absurd engraved portrait:
Reader, looke
Not on his Picture, but his Booke.
“Sensible recommendation, given the hideousness of that picture.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t take too much twisting to make the whole poem a sly witness that the picture is not really Shakespeare. Besides, as a publishing event, the Folio seems to have appeared with a whisper, if not a whimper. When Jonson published his own folio of collected works, in 1616, something like thirty well-known poets and literary men supplied sonnets of triumphant praise. For Shakespeare, Jonson was the only one who could or would. The rest—and there were only three—were third-rate, if you could call them rated at all.”
“So if it wasn’t Shakespeare, who was it?”
I raised my hands in helplessness. “There’s the rub. First of all, who would bother with secrecy in the first place? A nobleman, possibly—the stage would be a smirch on the family name. A woman of almost any rank, certainly. And then there are the readers who think they see secret messages encoded in the plays—usually Freemason, Rosicrucian, or Jesuit philosophy, or claims that the writer—usually Bacon—was the son of the queen. For them, the mask looks like a necessary safety precaution.
“But how in the hell was such a secret kept under wraps? Say it’s true, and somebody else did write the plays. Even if he didn’t know who did it, Ben Jonson had to know that the actor didn’t, and so did most of the King’s Men. That’s a lot of people to keep quiet, especially in a gossipy age.”
“It would explain Jonson’s schizophrenic remarks on Shakespeare,” said Ben.
“Yes, but not the fact that nobody really disputed Shakespeare as the author during his lifetime or long after. Second and more seriously, nobody else really fits. The anti-Strats have a fairly decent argument that the fellow from Stratford seems unlikely to have done it—more decent than most academics will admit. But no one’s ever been able to dish up anyone else with a convincing combination of means, motive, and opportunity.”
I ran a hand behind my neck; my head still felt strangely light beneath my newly shorn hair. “Bacon was Delia’s choice.”
“Bacon for Bacon,” mused Ben. “Bit close to home, isn’t it? Like nepotism in reverse.”
I grinned. “No relation. Delia drove herself mad trying to prove that Sir Francis wrote Shakespeare’s plays, but I’d swear on my soul before the devil that he didn’t. Sir Francis was a brilliant man, the chief lawyer for the crown under King James. He certainly had the right education and the writing habit. He’s one of the great prose writers in English. But his writing doesn’t sound remotely like Shakespeare. It would be like—oh, I don’t know—like arguing that the same mind could produce the work of William F. Buckley Jr. and Steven Spielberg. One awesomely erudite—political, philosophical, and encyclopedic—the other an epic adventurer through every major genre of narrative drama.”
The flight attendant picked up our trays, and I stretched and shifted. “Though Delia did make a convert of Mark Twain.”
“Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Mark Twain?” asked Ben.
I was enjoying this. “He read her book while piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. Near the end of his life, he wrote a hilarious antibiography of the Stratford man called ‘Is Shakespeare Dead?’ You should look it up online some time.”
“What about Oxford? Athenaide’s man?” br />
“He’s the favorite alternative son at the moment. Unfortunately for him, his first major backer was a man named Looney.”
Ben snorted with laughter.
“It’s pronounced ‘Loney,’ but it’s done Oxfordians no favors. Though his book did convince Freud, among others. Oxford does have some things going for him, though. As Athenaide pointed out, Hamlet strangely echoes parts of his life.”
“She pointed out that you pointed that out. Just to be precise,” he said with a smirk.
“I also pointed out that echoes don’t make the plays autobiography. The earl did, on the other hand, have the right education and experiences. He’s also known to have written plays, though they’ve all been lost. Some of his poems survive, though—fairly good, and written in the uncommon Shakespearean rhyme scheme, some of them. Most intriguing of all, you can find references to Vere in the writings. Or ‘Ver,’ as the earl often spelled it.”
“Like Vero nihil verius?”
“Yes, but in English. Puns on ever and never and truth. My favorite’s the title of a preface to the play Troilus and Cressida: ‘A Never Writer to a Never Reader.’ Slide some letters around, and that becomes ‘An Ever Writer to an Ever Reader.’ Which then becomes ‘An E. Ver Writer to an E. Ver Reader.’”
“Cool.”
“Context,” I said sourly. “Look at context. Do you have any idea how many times Shakespeare used the word ever? In the realm of six hundred. I’ve looked. And every shows up another five hundred. Add in never and you get a thousand more. Add in the English translations of true and truth, and you’ve got in the neighborhood of three thousand words to play with in Shakespeare’s writing. At that frequency, it’s not surprising that a couple of instances can be wrestled into some other meaning. But if you meant that other meaning, and you liked coy puzzles, don’t you think it’d show up more than once or twice out of three thousand times?”
“It’s still pretty cool.”
“If you like that one, then you’ll love ‘Every word doth almost tell my name,’ from the Sonnets. Take the ‘ver’ out of Every and move it to the end of the phrase, and Every word becomes ‘Eyword Ver.’ Change the y to a d, and you’ve got ‘Edword Ver.’”