Interred with Their Bones

  “Isn’t that cheating?”

  “You’d think so. But the line says it’s not supposed to be exact. It almost tells his name. So ‘Eyword Vere’ is almost ‘Edward Vere.’…”

  “Very clever.”

  “Sure, if you’re willing to ignore the same sonnet’s grand finale—its last four words.”

  “Which are?”

  “My name is Will.”

  “You’re joking.”

  I shook my head.

  “So how do the Oxfordians get around that?”

  “By saying that ‘Will’ was one of Oxford’s nicknames.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “That sonnet, mostly.”

  “But that’s circular reasoning.”

  “Reason spiraling into a black hole of delusion, more like. Not that Oxford’s skeptics don’t have their own whirlpools of sentimentality. I have to say, one reason I have trouble with him is that he was not a good person: neither honorable, nor trustworthy, nor kind. It’s possible to be a genius, and to be irascible and even cruel, of course. Picasso and Beethoven weren’t exactly teddy bears. Still, I’d like to think that the person who dreamed up Juliet, Hamlet, and Lear was someone great of heart.

  “But Oxford’s real drawback is his death. Athenaide can say that dates are rickety till she’s blue in the face, but she’s wrong. For a single play here and there—sure, the dates might be off by a year or two or five. But Shakespeare’s whole oeuvre off by a decade and more? No way.”

  “Why not?”

  The cabin lights dimmed, and I pulled a blanket around me. Drawing the brooch out from inside my shirt, I twirled it this way and that on its chain. “Four hundred years from now, if someone listened to every surviving track of rock music, do you think that they could mistake the Beatles’ whole output by a decade? That they could take the arc from ‘Love Me Do’ to the acid swaying of ‘Come Together,’ and move it back to the doo-wop fifties with a wave of the hand, saying dates are rickety? Especially if they knew, also, the context of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, the Stones, Cream, the Doors, and the Who? If they knew even a little about the psychic divide between the fifties and the sixties? You think they could still mistake the Beatles for a fifties band?”

  “Are you saying that ignorance is bliss?”

  I laughed aloud. “I’m saying that most anti-Strats go rooting around in Renaissance culture looking for a particular answer, and they miss the forest for the sake of one imaginary tree.”

  “So what do you believe?” asked Ben.

  I smiled. “Dickens once wrote to a friend something like ‘It is a great comfort that so little is known concerning Shakespeare. He’s a fine mystery; and I tremble every day lest something should come out.’…I think I’m with Dickens.”

  “And if something does come out? You think we’ll ever know the truth?”

  The brooch twirled hypnotically this way and that. “A whole constellation of facts might come out. If they’re out there to be had, they ought to come out; I don’t believe in hiding facts, or hiding from them. But facts are something different from truth, especially when it comes to imagination and the heart. I don’t think Dickens needs to roll in his grave worrying that a fact or two—or two thousand—will erase the mystery of a mind that could write Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Lear.”

  The chain on which the brooch hung snapped, and the brooch slid to the floor. We both bent to retrieve it, and Ben’s cheek brushed against mine. Before I knew what I was doing, I turned in and kissed him. His eyes lit with surprise, and then he kissed me back. Realizing what was happening, I sat up sharply.

  He was still bent over, a look of puzzlement on his face. Slowly, his fingers closed over the brooch and he sat back up.

  I could feel a flush creeping hotly across chest and cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not,” he said, setting the brooch back in my hand with a look of bemusement. “Rather interesting, to be kissed by a boy. My first.”

  My eyes widened in panic. I’d forgotten about that.

  “Try to remember,” he said with a smile.

  I nodded, groaning silently. Rather interesting? To make things worse, I’d promised not to leave his sight. And even if I hadn’t tethered myself to him, the seat-belt sign was on. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom. Though the only place I could imagine I’d like to go was the baggage compartment, where I might curl up by myself in a box.

  Ben settled back; I could just see his eyes shining in the dark. “Good night, Professor,” he said, and then he fell quickly asleep.

  Pinning the brooch carefully to the inside of my jacket, I reclined my seat as far as it would go. A little later, Ben stretched and shifted, and his leg rested against mine. For a long time, I sat awake in the darkened cabin, rhythmic with soft snores, aware of his warmth. As I drifted off, I heard Roz’s voice saying, “There are many roads to Truth.” Ophelia’s words, I thought with irritation. Not Roz’s.

  30

  IN FRANKFURT we went through passport control and collected our luggage. “Give me your passport,” Ben said as we cleared customs.

  I handed it over. “What now? Do we walk?”

  “We eat,” he said, winding through the airport to a small bright café with granite-topped tables, where he ordered coffee and pastries in German that sounded fluent.

  “How many languages do you speak?” I asked with more than a little shade of envy.

  He shrugged. “I started with English and Spanish. Took me a while to figure out they were different languages. Since then others have come easily to me. Like some people can play music after they’ve heard it once or twice.”

  “Some people can plink out ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’” I retorted. “Nobody masters Beethoven or Mahler symphonies on one hearing.”

  “‘Two coffees, please, and an apple strudel’ is probably more like ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ than Mahler. But I guess in language, as in geography, I’m more or less at home everywhere and nowhere. To borrow a phrase.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “The language or the geography?”

  “Both.”

  He leaned back and smiled. In a wash of heat, I remembered kissing him and looked away. “Polyglot parents, for the first,” he said. “My mother speaks four languages. She didn’t think her children should slide backward down the curve of learning, as she put it. An inability to sit still, for the second. In a family of bankers, the only respectable way out of banking, law, and medicine is soldiering.” He shrugged. “It’s one way to see the world.”

  “And the respectable antidote for soldiering?”

  “If there is one, I haven’t found it.” Swallowing the last of his coffee, he took my passport out of his breast pocket and handed it back. “Exhibit A of corruption.”

  I went to put it away, but he said, “I’d check that if I were you.”

  It was a different passport. My picture was the same. But the name had shifted from William Johnson to William Turner, and the country stamps, too, were different. There were more of them, for one thing. Apparently, Turner had been wandering around Europe for most of the summer. The German stamp showed that I’d been there for a week.

  “In case the D.C.-to-London routes are being watched,” he said.

  “How many of these do you have?”

  “Let’s hope this one gets you where you need to go.”

  If the D.C.-to-London routes were being watched, the Frankfurt-to-London routes were not—at least not for one William Turner. We landed at Heathrow at about three o’clock in the afternoon. Ben disappeared into the “U.K. and E.E.A. Passports” line; after shuffling impatiently through the line for “All Others,” I was waved through into Britain by a cheerful man in a Sikh turban. Ben had already collected our bags. No one glanced at us as we rolled through customs. Outside, Sir Henry’s Bentley was waiting.

  “Good Lord,” said Sir Henry, doing a double take as I slipped in beside him in the near seat. “You mak
e quite a beautiful boy, Kate.”

  “William,” I said haughtily. “William Turner.”

  “Where to, then, Mr. Turner?”

  “Westminster Abbey,” said Ben, sliding in behind me. In the driver’s seat, Barnes nodded.

  “And you must be Mr. Useful,” said Sir Henry to Ben. “I trust Kate has been industrious in discovering what exactly those uses are.”

  As the car pulled out from the curb, I scowled and introduced Ben to Sir Henry. Leaning forward, Sir Henry pressed the button that raised the glass between the driver’s seat and the back. Then turned back to me. “I’ve tracked down the poison that killed Roz.”

  I went cold.

  “It was potassium. So much for the mysterious ‘juice of cursed hebona in a vial.’ Nothing more than a simple solution of potassium, injected into her neck. Easily found, easily used, quickly fatal, and virtually untraceable.”

  “How’d you trace it, then?” asked Ben.

  “I didn’t,” said Sir Henry. “Inspector Grimmest did—he turns out to be as ingenious as he is grim. I doubt if he himself leaks even enough to piss more than once a year on his birthday, but his staff is more human. Here’s what I learned: After death, every cell in your body discharges potassium. Its presence in quantity is therefore natural in a corpse. But potassium, it turns out, is not just a symptom of death—it’s also a cause. The healthy heart walks a tightrope: too little potassium—cardiac arrest. Too much—same problem. So that an injection of potassium solution into the jugular, say, might work like Hamlet’s hebona.” His voice deepened. “That leperous distilment whose effect holds such an enmity with blood of man that swift as quicksilver it courses through…the body, and with a sudden vigor…curdles the thin and wholesome blood.”

  It made sense. Maxine and Dr. Sanderson had also died—quickly, too, without the struggling you’d expect from a woman being drowned or a man being stabbed in fairly public places. Which would make sense if they were already dead or dying when their roles were…what was the word for it? cast? costumed? arranged? Anger shot through me. “The killer didn’t stop with Roz.”

  “I gathered as much,” said Sir Henry. “I’m sorry. If you can bear it, though, I’d love to hear what you know.”

  As London thickened around us, I brought Sir Henry up to date, letter by letter, death by death, up to Dr. Sanderson’s.

  “Caesar,” he said quietly.

  “This was in his hand.” I handed him Ophelia’s letter to Mrs. Folger and watched him read, his face chiseled with deepening distaste.

  “Miss Bacon was right?” he looked up, brittle with disbelief. “Right piled upon right?”

  “Ophelia thought so.”

  “Rot piled upon rot,” he retorted. “You don’t mean to tell me that you’re taking her seriously?”

  “Three people are dead, and I’ve been attacked twice. I’m taking that seriously.”

  Sir Henry was instantly contrite. “Of course. Quite right. Forgive me.”

  “She sent this to Mrs. Folger, along with the letter.” I handed him the brooch that Dr. Sanderson had clutched as he died.

  He frowned. “Just like the one Roz gave you, surely?”

  I nodded. “It’s the original. She must have bought one of the copies for sale in the Folger gift shop, presumably as a trail back to the letter. We know she saw it—it seems to be where she got the phrase Jacobean magnum opus.”

  He looked at the brooch closely and then turned it over, lifting his glasses up onto his forehead and holding the brooch up close. “This is the one that you found in Dr. Sanderson’s hand?”

  I nodded.

  “Might I see the one that Roz gave you?”

  The jewel was warm from resting against my body. Reluctantly, I opened my jacket and unpinned it. Returning the original, Sir Henry held the copy up to the same scrutiny.

  “Yes, I thought I remembered these,” he said after a moment. He lowered the brooch and looked at me. “Either you’ve mixed them up, or our Roz helped herself to something that wasn’t hers. Look.” He pointed out a row of several tiny marks stamped into the gold on the back. “Hallmarks. In Britain, all gold pieces this heavy require them. One of these—the three sheaves of corn—is the lovely little mark of Chester’s assay office. But that office closed down a long time ago—before you were born, I should think. As I told you when you first unwrapped it, this piece is quite possibly Victorian.” He handed it back. “Not faux Victorian or neo-Victorian, mind you. Victorian.” He sniffed. “The other is a modern trinket. No hallmarks at all—so either not British or not gold. Probably neither.”

  I stared at the two brooches, Roz’s in my left hand and Dr. Sanderson’s in my right.

  “But why would she take it?”

  “For all her claims of living outside the rules, theft doesn’t sound quite like the good professor, does it? Let’s have another look at that last letter.”

  The three of us bent over it together in the backseat. The voice was essentially the same as Ophelia’s much earlier letter to Jem, though less breathless, as if the giddiness had somehow been burned out of her. We sinned against both God and man. What had happened?

  I have returned all that I could to its rightful place, though some of the doors have been walled against me; what little remains I have buried in my garden. But there are many roads to Truth. Our Jacobean magnum opus, c———1623, is one. Shakespeare points to another.

  “Ah,” said Sir Henry. “Thus Westminster?”

  I nodded.

  “Admirably ingenious yourself.”

  “If I were all that admirable, we’d be headed up to Ophelia’s garden with shovels. Did I tell you she grew up in Henley-in-Arden, near Stratford? Her father ran the madhouse that took in Delia Bacon.”

  “Ophelia,” he said, amazement dawning across his face.

  “I know. You’d think that would seem like tempting fate, for a doctor of madness to name his daughter Ophelia. We’ve wondered whether it might be the garden in Henley she’s talking about—if it even still exists.”

  “But you’re holding it,” said Sir Henry.

  “Holding what?”

  “Her garden.” He pointed to my left hand.

  I looked down at the flowers of Roz’s brooch, delicate sprays of white, yellow, and purple against an oval background deep and dark as midnight. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts. Fennel and columbines; rue, daisies, and withered violets. Ophelia’s flowers.

  Suddenly it felt hot in my hand.

  Sir Henry gently lifted it. Turning it over, he fished in his pocket with his other hand and pulled out a tiny knife, which he unfolded. Gently, he began probing the joints in the back of the piece. With a small click, the whole back of the brooch flipped open like a locket.

  Within, I caught a glimmer of flame. Hidden inside the brooch was an exquisite miniature portrait of a young man.

  “Hilliard,” said Sir Henry in quiet awe.

  Nicholas Hilliard was to Renaissance English painting what Shakespeare was to Renaissance English plays. The painter had caught his sitter in casual undress, his loose lawn shirt with its wide lace collar as yet untied in front. The young man’s fair hair was short, his mustache and goatee finely trimmed; a ruby cross winked in his ear. His eyes were intelligent and sensitive, his brows lifted high, as if he’d just told some arch jest and wondered whether you were quick enough to follow. With one hand, he held up a trinket hung on a golden chain around his neck. In the background, the flames seemed to flicker and hiss.

  “Who is he?” I breathed.

  Sir Henry pointed to dark lacy lettering traced around the left-hand edge of the flames: But thy eternal summer shall not fade. “Do you know the line?” he asked huskily.

  I nodded. It was from one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, the one that began, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

  Sir Henry’s beautiful voice filled the car:
br />   But thy eternal summer shall not fade

  Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,

  Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

  When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

  Pausing ever so slightly, he lifted the last couplet into something like music:

  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

  So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

  “Do you think he’s Shakespeare, then?” asked Ben.

  Sir Henry shook his head. “No. William, yes. Shakespeare, no.” He cocked his head, as if listening to a distant melody. Then he quoted a different sonnet:

  Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

  And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.

  “That’s Shakespeare speaking to his mistress, about her tendency to play in double time…. The youth whom the poet pushed into her arms, you see, seems to have been another Will.” He sighed. “So not Shakespeare, no. Shakespeare’s beloved.”

  “One of them,” said Ben.

  Sir Henry shot him a look of reproach. “At a guess, we’re looking at the fair youth of Shakespeare’s sonnets, burning in the golden fires of love.”

  “But what kind of love?” I asked, pointing to letters curving down the right-hand edge.

  Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, they read. To the greater glory of God.

  I looked closer. The trinket in the youth’s hand was the one area of the painting whose fineness did not match the rest, as if it had been altered at a later date. Whatever the sitter had originally held, he now held a crucifix. A forbidden object in the England of Elizabeth and James. The Church of England held to plain crosses; the crucifix, with the figure of the suffering Christ, was a sign of Rome. Of Catholicism.

  Hilliard, an ardent Protestant who made his living by pleasing the court, had no doubt painted the fire and ice of carnal passion; later, though, a few strokes of another, rougher brush had transformed this scene to a different kind of passion entirely: the flames of martyrdom. But martyrdom for real, or merely hoped for?