He’d been more or less retired from the stage for a decade. Drying out, said some. Pickling himself, said others. Whichever it was, he’d got bored doing it, and now he was coming back. He’d refused the larger roles of Claudius—the villain—and Polonius—the fool—for the smaller role of Hamlet’s father, loved and lost. In short order, he’d move on to Prospero and Lear, under directors as august as he was. But he’d chosen to appear as the ghost in my show first, as a way to wet his feet in the role of an elder statesman. A choice that still astonished me.
The Cleopatra straightened and rose to skim the surface of the water. I took another look back at the stairs. No one was there, and the rowboat was once again tied up against the wall. Had I dreamed that it moved?
In the gap in the wall up at the top of the stairs, the silhouette of a man slid into view. A knot tightened in my belly. There had been someone there. But who? And why?
Behind me, a deep groan split the night, and I spun to see the Globe disappear in a cloud of steam on the far bank. When I glanced back at the receding shore, the man of shadows had melted back into the night.
3
ALMOST OF ITS own accord, my right hand drifted to my pocket. Roz’s gift was still there. I shivered, though the wind gusted hotter as we sped closer to the southern bank. Smoke and steam were pouring down across the water in a thick fog. In my mind’s eye, the Globe shone bright as ever, a small white cottage curved around on itself like a swan asleep on the bank. Absurd, I knew, never mind the fire. The building was big enough to hold a crowd of sixteen hundred. To some minds, though, its faux antiquity seemed kitsch rather than quaint. Ye Olde Tea Shoppe Shakespeare, Roz called it; until this afternoon, she’d scorned to set foot in the place.
When it came to Shakespeare, Roz was wrong in very little, but she was wrong in this. Like it or not, the Globe possessed a strange magic; words were alive there with peculiar strength.
We chugged in toward the pier. Mist eddied and roiled, revealing Cyril Manningham, the artistic director, pacing the dock like some long-legged, ill-tempered bird. “Lost,” he croaked as we scrambled onto the dock. “All lost.” Ahead of me, Sir Henry stilled, and in my own chest, I felt hope splinter and crack. The mist swirled again, and I saw a fire chief, with his red helmet and heavy blue jacket traced with reflective stripes. “Not as bad as all that,” he grunted. “Though I shan’t pretend the news is good. Come and see.”
We sped up the bank in his wake. In the darkness, my thoughts strayed to the building above. The designers of the new Globe had hewn as closely as possible to Shakespeare’s original, literally building the theater around the stage, which was a large platform at one end of an octagonal, open-air courtyard. Ringing the yard were the galleries, open on the inner side like a narrow three-story dollhouse; each floor was filled with tiers of polished oak benches that peered over balconies back down into the yard.
All this had been crafted with a simplicity that might have pleased the Shakers—except for the stage. There, every inch of exposed wood and plaster was painted to masquerade as marble, jasper, and porphyry, carved into caryatids and heroes, glittering with gilt. Above this peacock splendor, a ramadalike roof painted with stars guarded the actors from sun and rain. Norse legend had an ash tree holding up the sky; for some reason it had always pleased me that Shakespeare’s heavens rested on the trunks of two massive English oaks. Not that they remotely resembled trees any longer. Christened the Pillars of Hercules, carved and painted to pass for red marble, they looked more like columns from Persepolis before Alexander the Great burned it.
What would the theater look like now?
At the far end of a maze of police barriers and command tents, we came at last to a wide set of double doors. I frowned. They looked like the main doors to the theater. “Had to sacrifice everything else,” said the fire chief, running a hand along the wood almost as a builder would caress a building of his making. “Admin. building, ticket lobby, restaurant—the whole lot.” He looked back at us, weary pride stretched thin across a ruddy face. “But I think we’ve saved the Globe.”
Saved it?
Pulling the doors open just wide enough to admit us one at a time, the chief gave me a nod. “Courage,” said Sir Henry, squeezing my shoulder. Slipping inside, I walked through the entryway into the yard—and stopped as if I’d run into glass. I’d braced myself for wreckage; what I found was unearthly beauty.
Smoke writhed in streamers across the stage. At the front, the Pillars of Hercules gleamed black with soot. On the ground before me lay a thin sheet of water. Overhead, sparks shimmered down like a slow rain of fiery petals. Far from a wreck, the theater had become a weirdly gorgeous temple to dark majesty. A place fitting for Druids, for bloodshed, and for ghosts.
A bit of burning paper floated by and I grabbed it—a half-eaten page from my working script. Not a good sign. I ran up the stairs into the lower gallery, toward my table. It had been knocked on its side, my books and notebooks heaped in piles around it; a spark must have drifted down and caught at them, because they were half-eaten with fire. The notebook that held my working script lay on the ground, its rings torn open. Pages fluttered out, skimming through the wind, landing in the water. I knelt, gathering what I could. Other papers trailed behind the table. I followed this path around and stopped with a sharp intake of breath.
On the floor lay a wide-brimmed white hat scattered with crimson silk peonies like splashes of blood. A little ways down, I saw someone curled on the ground under a bench. She might have been asleep, except that her eyes were open. A statue’s eyes, empty and fierce at the same time, except that they weren’t white marble. They were green, beneath a boyish fringe of dark hair.
“Roz,” I gasped.
Sir Henry appeared at my elbow; behind him was Cyril. Squeezing past me, Sir Henry laid two fingers on her neck; after a moment, he sat back and shook his head, wordless for once.
She was dead.
4
A BREATH THAT was half sob, half laugh spilled out of me. That afternoon, it had startled me to realize that I was taller than Roz. For years, she’d loomed gigantic in my imagination. In death, she looked small, almost like a child. How could she be dead?
I was drawn gently but firmly away. “Kate,” said Sir Henry, and I realized that he’d said it three times. I found myself sitting on the steps up from the yard to the stage, head in hands and trembling despite my jacket. Another had been draped over my shoulders.
“Drink this,” said Sir Henry, thrusting a silver flask into my hands. Whiskey burned down my throat, and my vision slowly cleared. Across the yard, a white sheet had been drawn around death. The lower gallery was swarming with paramedics, firefighters, and police. Two figures detached from this crowd, heading for us, their footsteps splashing across the thin sheet of water still clinging to the ground. Cyril, by the way he was flapping, and a man I didn’t know, lithe and intense, with the cinnamon skin of the West Indies, a smooth-shaven head, and eyebrows peaked like waves scrawled in black ink. He was ticking things off on a clipboard.
“Katharine J. Stanley,” he said as they stopped at the foot of the stairs. It was a statement, not a question.
I nodded.
“Detective Chief Inspector Francis Sinclair,” he said by way of introduction. His voice was a light, cold baritone, his accent BBC swaying faintly with the Caribbean pulse and defiance of Brixton. He went back to his clipboard. “You are currently directing Hamlet on this stage, and you discovered the body approximately twenty minutes ago, while looking through your papers.”
“I found Roz, yes.”
Sinclair flipped through his pages. “The deceased came to see you this afternoon.”
“She saw me,” I said flatly. “We talked. I assumed she’d come to see Sir Henry. I didn’t know she’d stayed.”
He looked up, and his eyes widened for an instant as he recognized Sir Henry beside me. Then he turned back to me. “Did you know her well?”
“Yes. No. I don’
t know.” I swallowed. “That is, I used to. But I hadn’t seen her for three years till this afternoon. What happened to her?”
“Not the fire. That much we’re sure of. Probably a heart attack, or maybe a stroke. She seems to have died instantly, certainly well before the fire broke out. It is an unusual coincidence, and we’ll investigate, of course. But it looks straightforward enough.” He returned to his scribbling.
My fingers tightened around the flask. “It wasn’t a coincidence.”
Sir Henry and Cyril dropped the argument they’d begun off to the side, swiveling to stare. Sinclair’s pen stopped on the page, but he didn’t look up. “What makes you say that?”
“She came to tell me that she’d found something,” I added. “And to ask for my help.”
Once again, Sinclair lifted his eyes to mine. “Found what?”
In my pocket, the box seemed to wake. An adventure, Roz had said. And also a secret.
He can’t have it, I thought with sudden ferocity.
The inspector leaned in toward me. “Found what, Ms. Stanley?”
“I don’t know.” The lie just popped out; I hoped I didn’t look as startled as I felt. All I wanted, I told myself, was the chance to unwrap Roz’s gift in private, to have one more moment alone with her. To honor her secret. If it were anything important, I’d hand it over. Of course I would. But not yet.
Pulling both my jacket and Sir Henry’s tighter around my shoulders, I camouflaged the lie in a thin wrapping of truth. “She promised to tell me tonight. Told me to meet her up on Parliament Hill, but she never arrived…. I saw the smoke from up there and raced back.”
Sinclair’s eyes darkened. “So Professor Howard told you that she’d found something—you have no idea what—but you think it might have had something to do with her death.”
“That’s preposterous,” exploded Cyril.
“Shut it,” Sir Henry growled at him.
I kept my eyes on Sinclair. “It might.”
He checked his notes. “She was a professor of literature, no? Not biotech or nuclear physics.”
“That’s right.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but whatever she found, it’s hardly likely to have been a motive for murder.”
“People are killed for spare change and hubcaps every day,” I said tightly.
“In the States, Ms. Stanley. Not in Southwark.”
“And not at the Globe,” sniffed Cyril.
“The Globe burned once before,” I said.
“That was a long time ago,” said the inspector.
“It was 1613. But it was also June twenty-ninth.”
Sinclair looked up.
“Tuesday, June twenty-ninth,” I specified.
There was a pause. “Today is Tuesday, June twenty-ninth,” said Sir Henry in a small, squeezed voice.
Something flared briefly in the inspector’s eyes but was quickly controlled. “The date, if it is correct, will be of great interest to an arson investigation.”
“Not just arson,” I insisted. “In that last fire, all but one person got out.”
Sinclair let the clipboard fall to his side, looking at me with a mix of pity and consternation. “You’ve had quite a shock this evening, Ms. Stanley. You should go home and get some sleep.” He nodded once to Sir Henry and then strode back toward the grim white tent, Cyril scurrying after him.
I stood up, pulling away from Sir Henry’s kindly embrace. I didn’t want to surrender Roz’s gift, but I couldn’t let the cops just brush her death aside as some mundane tale of worn-out parts, the “where” and “when” mildly curious, but not the “why.” My voice grated in my throat. “You have a body.”
Halfway across the yard Sinclair stopped. Reflections rippled in the water at his feet. “That does not mean I have a murder. If there is anything to find—anything at all—you may be sure that we will find it.”
Sir Henry escorted me down the steps into the yard. Sinclair had dismissed us, but plenty of others now clamored for a turn. From all sides, they descended toward the stage like ravens, wheeling and turning in a cyclone of noise. The fire chief reached us first, eager to explain things in more detail. The blaze had started in the administration building, he said; his crew had saved the Globe itself only by imploding the roofs over the rest of the complex and drenching the theater’s thatch.
I stopped listening. Roz was dead, I had lied to the police, and all I wanted was to get away, curl up alone, and open the cursed box. Mounting hysteria must have shown on my face, because Sir Henry suddenly disentangled me from the crowd. We were nearing the exit, when the caterwauling faded, and I heard my name ring out through the silence. Ignoring it, I quickened my pace, when two men in the neon-yellow vests of the Metropolitan Police stepped before the double doors, leaving me nothing to do but turn.
At the other end of the walkway stood DCI Sinclair. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I do have a few more questions before you go.” His tone was blandly pleasant, but it was not a request. It was a summons.
Reluctantly, Sir Henry and I followed him back into the theater and up into one of the ground-floor galleries near the stage. A young lackey met us with tea in Styrofoam cups. I forced down a few lukewarm, milky sips that tasted more like chalk than tea. “Perhaps you could tell us more about your encounter with Professor Howard this afternoon,” suggested Sinclair.
In black trousers and a loose black jacket over a sapphire-blue crew-neck shirt, the inspector would have stood out from a mile off in Boston as unspeakably cool; in London, he was just hip enough to blend into the crowd. For all that, he gave off the sense of a bright light carefully shielded. He would not be easy to fool, I suspected, and it would probably be dangerous to try.
I was the idiot who’d been pushing for more questions. All the same, I faced him with apprehension. “Where should I start?”
“The beginning would be helpful.”
5
EARLIER THAT AFTERNOON, my laughter had sliced through the shade of the lower gallery. “Think Stephen King, people,” I’d chided. “Not Steve McQueen. We’re in a ghost story, for Christ’s sake.”
Up onstage everyone froze. Jason Pierce, the Aussie action-film star making a bid for dramatic legitimacy in the role of Hamlet, wiped sweat from his forehead. “In this goddamn sun?”
He had a point. In the glare of noon on a summer day that felt more African than English, the stage glinted crimson and gold, brazen as a Victorian brothel. “What sun?” I demanded. Heads swiveled to where I was sitting in the gloom of the gallery. “We’re on the windswept battlements of Elsinore, Mr. Pierce. Looking out over snowfields and a narrow icy sea, toward enemy Sweden. At midnight.” I slid out from behind my table and thudded down the three short steps into the yard. “The very hour that an apparition has, for the last three nights, set battle-hardened men trembling in their boots. And whatever the hell they’ve seen—spirit or demon—your best friend has just told you that it looks like your dead father.” At the bottom of the steps, I stopped, hands on hips, and looked across at Jason. “Now make me believe it.”
Off to the right, Sir Henry stirred on the throne where he’d been dozing. “Ah,” he murmured. “A challenge.”
Jason’s eyes flicked to Sir Henry and back to me, a sly smile curving across his face. “You try it,” he said, and with both hands drove the point of his sword into the stage floor.
“Counter-challenge,” crowed Sir Henry with undisguised glee.
For a director to run through an actor’s part was one of theater’s cardinal sins. I was old enough to know I should ignore him, but I was also young enough to think, This will be fun.
I knew the scene well enough. I could run through every step in my sleep, as a specter armed like Hamlet’s father lures the prince away from his friend Horatio and into a wild sprint along icy ramparts to the very brink of hell. I’d choreographed an awesome chase across the whole theater: the stage and its balcony overhead, bare yard below, and all three encircli
ng galleries piled one atop another to the peaked roof.
At least, it might have been awesome, if Jason had ever bothered to take his part seriously. I’d cast him in the first place not only because the mere mention of his name would sell out the show in four minutes flat, but because he had a rare talent for mixing explosive anger with brooding charm. Unfortunately, for the past few weeks he’d been skimming over the top of his lines, mocking his part, the play, and Shakespeare in general. If I couldn’t prod Jason into some semblance of a real emotion soon, the whole show would disintegrate into parody.
I strode across the yard and ran up the short flight of stairs onto the stage, sweeping my hair back into a ponytail as I went. The sword was still swinging above its point, center stage; when I gripped the hilt, it quivered like a tuning fork in my hands. “Shakespeare should feel dangerous,” I said quietly, pulling the blade smoothly from the floor.
“Scare me,” countered Jason with a smirk.
“Play Horatio to my Hamlet.”
Around us, the rest of the cast whistled and whooped. Jason reddened, but when someone tossed him a sword, he caught it and nodded. I’d accepted his dare; he could hardly shirk mine.
I glanced at my stage manager, who barked, “At your convenience, Sir Henry.”
Sir Henry rose and disappeared backstage. Overhead, a bell began to toll. With a small burst of air, the wide doors at the back of the stage opened. Slowly, I turned. In the doorway stood Sir Henry as the ghost-king, cloaked and hooded in midnight. “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us,” I whispered. Crossing myself, I leapt toward the apparition; Jason followed.