Then someone shifted, and she saw the white hair and lean face of Lord Northampton. His eyes met hers, and with a smile full of malice, he nodded. Then his eyes slid down to the girl.
An eye for an eye was the code that he lived by. A priest for a priest. A daughter for a daughter.
She grasped her daughter’s hand. “We are leaving.”
“But, Mama—” the girl shrilled.
“We are leaving.”
ACT IV
38
THE BOX ATHENAIDE had set in my lap was Victorian, of burled wood with mother-of-pearl and ebony inlay. “I don’t understand,” I said in confusion.
“Everything under the sun is for sale,” answered Athenaide, more with regret than pride. “Alarm codes, church keys, even policemen. We made good use of money last night.”
Inside the box lay a small book bound in black leather. A diary. I reached for it, but Athenaide set her hand over mine. “I’ve caught Matthew up as far as I could. But you must bring us both up to date with what you know, first.”
Impatiently, I told them about Westminster Abbey, Wilton House, and Valladolid, but I was still reluctant to talk about the brooch pinned to the inside of my jacket. Without knowing quite why, I glossed over it. Athenaide watched me narrowly. I had the feeling that she knew I’d been less than transparent. Even so, when I finished, she withdrew her hand and nodded.
Lifting out the book, I opened it. May 1881, it was dated, in a fine script I had come to know. Ophelia Granville’s.
“Her memoir,” said Athenaide, as I bent to read.
Next to me, Matthew shifted impatiently. “I can get you through the first ten years in two minutes. Her mother died when she was very young; her father was a doctor who kept a private asylum for ladies in the small town of Henley-in-Arden. Their ‘guests,’ as Dr. Fayrer referred to his patients, had one wing of a large old manor house. He and his daughter shared the other.”
“Not an ideal situation for a child,” observed Athenaide. “So she was taken to nearby Stratford as often as her father could manage, to play with the vicar’s children.”
“The Reverend Granville J. Granville’s children,” said Matthew.
“Granville?” I asked.
“She didn’t care much for the reverend’s daughters,” said Matthew. “There was an older son up at Oxford, but Jeremy was her favorite.”
“Jem Granville was the son of the Stratford vicar?”
“So it would seem,” said Athenaide. “One Sunday when Ophelia was ten, the vicar had another guest to lunch along with the Fayrers. A tall, blue-eyed American lady whose black hair was streaked with gray. ‘Fey like the Irish,’ Ophelia described her. ‘Like a selkie, or the fair folk who ride in and out of doors in the hills.’ The moment she arrived, she took command of the drawing room, entrancing the whole party with her talk of a brilliant system of practical philosophy concealed within Shakespeare’s plays. The greatest minds of the Elizabethan age had hammered it out under cover of entertainment, she said, to shape men into worthy receptacles for higher learning, to abhor tyranny and strive for freedom.”
“Delia Bacon,” I said. “It had to be.”
“‘The Shakespeare Lady,’ Jem and Ophelia christened her,” said Matthew.
So Ophelia had met Delia. Outside, rain splintered against the car windows. We’d left Stratford behind, and were speeding past dark fields. Athenaide picked up the story again. “The man from Stratford, Miss Bacon proclaimed, was a fraud, a carnival mask donned by the true authors, lest they draw the ire of autocratic sovereigns. But the time had come, she said, to reveal the Truth. As if to reveal a great secret, she then drew the party close. The evil that men do lives on, she whispered. The good is oft interred with their bones.”
“But that’s the same quotation I saw in the Valladolid Folio,” I said. “The same quotation Ophelia used in her letter to Mrs. Folger.”
Paging forward through the diary, Athenaide pointed to a passage:
The Truth lay hidden, whispered Miss Bacon, in documents stashed in a hollow space beneath the gravestone of their chosen vessel—Shakespeare of Stratford. She had found certain proof of this inSir Francis Bacon’s letters—his poetic letters, she said with a wink. “My names be buried where my body is.”
I frowned. This quote, too, had appeared in the Valladolid Folio, but it was not from Francis Bacon. It was a misquotation—names plural rather than a singular name—and it was from Shakespeare, from one of the sonnets. But then, Delia had believed that Sir Francis was Shakespeare.
“The vicar granted Delia permission to open the grave,” said Matthew. A week later, on a crisp night in September, she had gone to the church to carry out her mission, but she had not been alone. Scenting adventure, Jem and Ophelia crept from their beds and into the church to hide in the pews before she arrived. They had watched her.
Delia had appeared in an eddy of cold wind and fallen leaves. Holding her lantern aloft in the dark chancel, she’d read the curse on the gravestone aloud. Then she’d opened a carpetbag, spread a rug on the floor before the grave, and knelt down. Pulling a chisel from her bag, she’d raised it over her head like a dagger. Hidden in the pews, Ophelia had cowered.
But nothing happened. Delia froze—one hand pressed to her heart, wrote Ophelia, the other brandishing the chisel like the cherubim guarding the entrance to Paradise with his flaming sword. She remained in that position until the church bell tolled ten. As if released from a spell, she dropped her arm and rose. A wild laugh blew through her, dying away to nothingness. “‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate,” she’d cried, “and would not stay for answer.” Leaving her bag where it lay, she walked swiftly back through the church and fled into the night.
“But if Delia didn’t open the grave,” I asked, “who did?”
“The children,” said Athenaide.
Ophelia and Jem.
“Using Delia’s tools,” said Matthew, turning another page. He read aloud:
A breath of stale air puffed out. There were no bones. No carved effigy. No strongbox of papers or gold. No fire of Truth. Not so much as the dried husk of a maggot, or the carcass of a blowfly. Nothing, save a layerof empty space and below that, another smooth stone slab. No—a line, a shape faintly carved into the stone. While Jem held up the grave slab, I made a rubbing with paper and pencil that Miss Bacon had left behind.
Onto the opposite page, Ophelia had pasted a loose sheet of paper covered in graphite. Faint white lines traced out a design I had seen once before: the long neck and head of a swan, eagle’s wings that became boar’s heads, and a baby clutched in one talon and a spear in the other. “The chimerical beast,” I said.
“It’s still there,” said Athenaide with bright eyes.
“You saw it?”
Matthew nodded. “They couldn’t decipher it,” he said. “Jem’s tutor identified it as a chimera, at least, but he’d never seen one with that particular configuration of parts. When told they’d found it in a church, he said that perhaps it was a sign of Satan.”
A month later, when Delia was brought to the asylum in Henley, Ophelia had shown her the rubbing. Delia had grown agitated, rocking back and forth. “Cursed be he that moves my bones,” she’d muttered, over and over. “Cursed be he….” A few weeks later, her nephew had come and taken her home to America.
On her next visit to Stratford, Ophelia told Jem she’d grown afraid of the curse and wanted to put the rubbing back. But Jem had refused to help. “You will end up as mad as Miss Bacon,” he’d said coldly.
“Little prig,” said Athenaide. “He was probably as frightened as she was.”
It was the last time Ophelia saw him for nearly a decade. Jem had gone up to Oxford, and then, through the offices of friends, he’d become tutor to the young earl of Pembroke.
“At Wilton House,” I said.
The boy earl, Matthew continued, had recently inherited title and house from an uncle who’d lived abroad and died without passing on much of the
family lore. There’d been hints of Shakespearean traces in the house, but that was all.
“Did Jem find the letters?” I asked, my hands tightening on the diary.
Matthew smiled. “It was the chimerical beast that sent him running back to Ophelia.”
Together, Ophelia and Jem had matched the heraldry of the Sweetest Swan’s letter to the figure in Ophelia’s rubbing. And then Jem had matched them to people: Lady Pembroke’s swan, Bacon’s boar, Shakespeare’s falcon and spear, and the earl of Derby’s eagle and child. The only one he had missed was Oxford, the second boar.
Miss Bacon had believed that Shakespeare was a conspiracy, Jem had told Ophelia—and he’d come to believe she was right. His reasoning echoed Delia’s: “My names be buried where my bodies are.” The proof, he urged, would lie in the graves. Shakespeare’s was marked with the chimerical beast, he’d noted; he believed that all of them would be.
But Lady Pembroke’s grave had long ago been sealed beneath some steps in Salisbury Cathedral. As for Bacon’s, his monument was in a parish church in St. Albans, but his actual grave had long since gone missing. And even if Jem had known about Oxford, I thought, it wouldn’t have helped. The church Oxford had been buried in was razed in the eighteenth century, and the earl’s final resting place had been lost.
That left Derby’s grave, up in Lancashire.
A week later, Ophelia and Jem had eloped.
The ancient crypt of the earls of Derby lay in Ormskirk, a market town on a low plain with hills at its back and the sea before it, away to the west. “The name means ‘Worm’s Church,’” Jem had explained. “The Church of the Dragon, in the old Viking tongue.” In the old parish church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, he’d ushered Ophelia into a corner chapel, empty save for two marble figures, much decayed, of a knight and his lady. In the center, a trapdoor opened onto a stair leading steeply downward.
Hushing Matthew, I read for myself:
…a scent of bones and dust, of cold stone and the bitterness of the envious and crumbling dead. There were about thirty coffins stacked in shelves around the walls. The center of the crypt was cluttered withmonuments topped by stone effigies. A few were ladies in long gowns, but most were men, some in periwigs, others in armor, and three in doublet and hose. One of these held in his hands a small stone coffer. On it was carved the chimera.
With one swing of his crowbar, Jem smashed it open.
“You’ll have to stop there,” said Athenaide, and I looked up, blinking.
We were no longer among dark fields. In the distance, I saw large industrial buildings, a bright glare of lights, and a long expanse of pavement. I became aware of a loud hum, and then the car turned, pulling right up to Athenaide’s jet.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To find Jem’s treasure,” said Athenaide.
On board, I did not wait for the plane to take off, but opened the diary as soon as I was strapped into my seat.
Within the splintered box on the tomb, Jem and Ophelia had found a painting. A miniature portrait of a young man with golden hair and beard, standing against a background of flames.
The Hilliard. About to reach for it, I stilled, aware of Athenaide’s eyes. What had the miniature been doing in a box on Derby’s tomb?
“There were letters,” said Matthew restively.
I looked back at the diary. Two letters, to be exact. Written in Latin, from Valladolid. Jem had quickly translated them for Ophelia. The first was a letter of thanks for a manuscript and a book. The book was magnificent, said the writer—too magnificent. He was glad to have seen it, but he would not be able to take it with him. He would keep the manuscript with him always, though. The play had turned out better than he’d expected. It made him laugh out loud, and he would have need of that, where he was going.
“Cardenio,” said Athenaide.
“And the Valladolid Folio,” said Matthew.
It all fit, I had to admit that. Still, it wasn’t proof positive. The writer hadn’t actually named the book.
The second letter was also from Valladolid, but later, and not from the same man. In a strangely exultant apology, it reported that William Shelton had set out from Santa Fe, in New Spain, with a party of exploration, intending to lead souls to glory, but he had never returned. In a skirmish with savages, he had been lost and was presumed martyred.
There had been details of geography, Ophelia said, but she had forgotten them. For at that moment, their fathers had arrived.
Papa charged down the stairs, his eyes flashing with fury, but when he saw me, his anger melted, and he stood before me an old man. Tho’ I had resolved a thousand times to be firm, I left Jem’s side and went to him. Striding past us, the Vicar halted before Jem, walloping him across the cheek with such force that he spun once and collapsed on the broken tomb.
Their clandestine marriage, it turned out, was not valid, since Ophelia was still under the age of consent. “They were married again the next day,” Athenaide said quietly, “this time with both fathers standing witness. But Ophelia was not to be allowed to live with Jem as a wife until he’d earned enough of a fortune to support her.”
“No easy task for the younger son of a vicar,” said Matthew.
“He was given a choice,” said Athenaide. “India or the Americas.”
“He chose America,” I said.
Athenaide nodded. “He went looking for the manuscript that the priest had promised to keep.” The plane had leveled off. Unbuckling our seatbelts, we gathered around a conference table, the diary open between us, and pushed on with the story.
This time, the separation lasted fifteen years. Far from languishing, Ophelia had engaged a tutor and learned Spanish and Latin; when she came into her own money at twenty-one, she’d journeyed to Valladolid. The college had shown her what they had—including the Folio—and then they’d sent her on to the Archive of the Indies in Seville. After an arduous search, she’d found an eyewitness report from a survivor, and with it, a primitive map. Copying them both, she’d headed back to London, where she’d bought a First Folio.
“A Jacobean magnum opus,” Matthew said with a flourish.
“She had a Folio?” I blurted.
“Not an original,” said Athenaide. “A facsimile. But a fine one.” Ophelia had inscribed her name on the blank page facing the title page with its portrait of Shakespeare. Below that, she’d written out the inscription she’d seen in the Valladolid Folio. Tucking her scholarship from Spain inside, she sent the book to Jem as a belated wedding present.
Dumbfounded, I rubbed my temples as Matthew paged forward again. “Fast-forward fifteen years,” he said. In that time, Ophelia’s father had died, but she’d stayed on in the old house in Henley, in the old Forest of Arden, though minus the madwomen. Other than that, nothing much seemed to have happened—as if she’d pricked her finger on a spindle and fallen into an enchanted sleep, I thought. Then Jem had written to say that he’d found his quarry.
He could not bring it to her, he’d said. Not right away. Instead, he wanted her to come to him—to Tombstone, in the Arizona Territory. At first, she had not believed him. Then she’d discovered that he’d also invited a Harvard professor—and that the professor had said yes.
“Enter Professor Child,” said Matthew.
Ophelia had packed her trunk and taken ship for America. The memoir finished as she sailed into New York.
On the next page, Ophelia began again. “For Jem,” she’d scrawled at the top. The ink was different, and her hand more hurried. The story, too, was different. It was the summary of a tale she’d discovered among Delia Bacon’s papers. A story about the Howards.
Frances Howard’s history, Ophelia wrote, was not one of a love triangle. “More like a dodecahedron!!” she exclaimed. In particular, before Frances had met Robert Carr, but well after she’d married Essex, her family had set her at another target: her husband’s closest friend, the prince of Wales.
For a time, the prince had been s
o entranced that rumors of a royal wedding began slithering about court even as annulment proceedings had barely begun. Then Frances had met Carr, and, without telling her family, she’d followed her heart. Some time later, alerted that the lady was less than exclusive with her affections, the prince had insulted her in public.
“The glove story,” I breathed. “I never knew the lady was Frances Howard.”
Ophelia had worked out exactly how this twist of history might bear on Cardenio. The play tells the tale of a loyal wife whose husband’s best friend—the ruler’s son—attempts to corrupt her. Understood as an allegory of Frances, Essex, and the prince, it would vindicate Frances and damn the prince.
Then the family discovered what the prince had learned: that Frances had been frolicking with Carr. “Carr—Cardenio,” said Athenaide again.
The name turned the Howards’ purpose with the play inside out. The way things were, even a blind man couldn’t help but see Carr in a tale called Cardenio, and therefore the jealous prince as well—at a time when Essex was still bound to Frances by name and by law. Far from presenting her as a loyal but wronged wife, the play would hold her up for ridicule as a woman who’d toyed with three men at once.
The play had to be stopped.
But it hadn’t been. It played at court in January of 1613, and then again at the beginning of June. That time, the King’s Men had taken it across the river, to their public stage. To the Globe.
“And two weeks later,” I said, “the Globe burned to the ground.”
“Jesus,” said Matthew, after a moment. “I’ve never put those two dates together.”