“But why?” Athenaide fretted. “Why should Shakespeare have put Cardenio on at the Globe? Why risk the wrath of the Howards?”
“Why write it in the first place?” I objected. “It doesn’t make sense. What I said before still holds: Allegory wasn’t his thing. Besides, so far as I know, he had no reason to do favors for the Howards.”
“Maybe he wasn’t aiming to flatter them,” said Athenaide slowly. “Maybe it was quite the reverse. You said it was a Howard who sent William Shelton to become a priest in Valladolid. If that’s true, maybe what Shakespeare wanted was revenge.”
But thy eternal summer shall not fade. Aware of the brooch brushing against me from the inside of my jacket, I remembered Sir Henry saying that line. “We have to find that play,” I said tightly.
Matthew turned the page. The ink altered yet again, along with the date. August 1881, it read at the top.
My dear Francis,
You begged me to finish my story, and that promise, at least, I will keep.
“Francis?” I said. “Who’s Francis?”
Matthew skimmed ahead. Ophelia had reached Tombstone that summer only to find that Jem had been missing for a month. All he had left her was a short note:
If I could, I would move mountains to reach you. You must know that. If you are reading this, the mountains have proved beyond my strength.
Ps. Lest you doubt me, in my Jacobean magnum opus, I have ciphered the location—1623, the signature page.
“That’s why the First Folio’s so important,” said Matthew. “Jem ciphered the whereabouts of his treasure into it.”
I leaned forward. “Athenaide. The ranchers you bought Ophelia’s letter from…did they have any books? Any books at all?”
Her eyes transferred to me. “They did.”
“Was there a First Folio?”
“Not an original. An early facsimile.”
The Folio Ophelia had sent him, surely. It had to be. “You saw it?”
“I bought it.”
I jumped up. “You own it? You own it? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I told you he had books,” said Athenaide shortly. “But you asked for his papers, so I showed you the one paper I had.” She folded her hands fastidiously before her. “I am a collector, Katharine. In such matters, I err on the side of caution. But I also make good my mistakes. We are flying toward it as fast as we can.”
“Finish the story, Kate,” said Matthew.
I picked up the book, pacing around the cabin as I read. Ophelia had been near hysteria, demanding to be taken to Jem’s house, but no one would take her there, or even say where it was. In the end, the woman who ran the boardinghouse where she was staying sent a man to fetch Jem’s things.
He returned with books. Ophelia had shut herself in the sitting room, holding the signature page of the Folio over a candle flame, when a woman with yellow hair, a French accent, and décolletage suitable nowhere but a formal winter ball stormed in. Demanding the return of her property, she swept the books on the table into her arms. But Ophelia refused to hand over the Folio, showing the woman her signature on the flyleaf—Ophelia Fayrer Granville.
“He may have given you his name,” said the blond woman, “but his love he gave to me.”
In an instant, Ophelia’s world crumbled. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she walked from the house into the back garden, stopping beneath an arbor thick with the deep green foliage of a rose tree. It was long past bloom, but small white flowers still clung, dried, among the leaves.
“Allow me to bring you some female companionship,” a voice had said.
At first I thought you were some sort of sprite, hidden in the rose. And then I saw, for the first time, the kindness of your face beneath the white beard. “Make her go,” I said, and you bowed and withdrew.
“She has gone,” you said, upon returning. I do not remember what else you said that evening in the garden, except this only—that the Lady Banks rose will withstand heat and cold and thirst that will kill most other roses. And yet it blooms faithfully, every year, with sweet abandon.
“Francis,” I said suddenly. “The sprite under the rose tree was Francis Child.”
“Child Library Child?” asked Matthew.
“His two passions in life were roses and Shakespeare,” I said. My dear Francis, Ophelia had called him.
Across the next few days, they had pored over Jem’s Folio together, but found nothing. In the end, at a loss about what else to do, they had hired horses and an escort of four well-armed men, and they had ridden out into the hills to investigate Jem’s mining claims.
“It makes sense, don’t you think?” Matthew asked eagerly. “Whatever he found, he’d have put some kind of claim to it.”
It did make sense. I have found something, Jem had written to Professor Child. Gold does not always glitter, he’d added.
But Athenaide shook her head. “I’ve been to them all,” she said. “Every last one. There’s nothing to find. No shafts. No graves. No buildings. Nothing to show where you might find the hidden stash of a seventeenth-century priest.”
Impatiently, I read on:
You will remember what those days were like, sweet and hot, and that last afternoon we spent in the grassy dell, an eagle soaring overhead, the men laughing and splashing in the stream just around the bend.
Let me tell you what I remember. After waiting fifteen years, in the space of one afternoon, I learned what it was to love and be loved. I know it is not possible, but I saw white roses falling around us like scented snow.
Riding back to town that evening, they were met by a rescue party, even more heavily armed, and escorted back to town. The night before, they learned, the Apache leader Geronimo had escaped, walking off the reservation into the darkness with every man, woman, and child of his clan. Another warrior fighting north of Sonora had left a wide swathe of New Mexico in ruins.
Ophelia and Francis had only one claim left to explore—the Cleopatra. But overnight, the world had changed. Now, no one would take them a mile beyond town, never mind up to the mountains. They could not even hire horses and go on their own. “Waste of good horse,” one man had spat. Their search was over.
After a quiet dinner, Ophelia had lain awake all night. Before dawn, she rose and dressed herself. She left the Folio where her landlady would find it, with a note. “For the yellow-haired woman.” Outside the professor’s door, she laid a single dried rose. And then she left.
Abruptly, the tale ended. “Turn the page,” said Athenaide.
A single sentence floated on white emptiness:
There will be a child.
The words danced and swayed before my eyes. “She never told him,” said Athenaide quietly. “She went back to England, adopted a new name, and began to lecture, as Delia once had, and she, too, became something of a success. But she never went back to Jem’s claims, and she never contacted the professor. She couldn’t bear to be looked on as she’d looked on the blond woman, she said, or stand the thought of the professor’s wife feeling for him what she’d felt that first evening for Jem.”
I looked up.
“She wrote one last section,” explained Matthew, “in 1929.” He rustled to the end of the diary, where writing again filled up the paper. I read the last page:
…long since grown to a lovely woman. When she asks about her father, I have always told her that she is Shakespeare’s daughter.
So I might have guessed she would go on the stage. She has played London and New York to triumphant success—though even that, now, belongs to the past. I used to wonder, sometimes, if you ever saw her, whether your heart thrilled in your chest, without knowing why.
I named her for Shakespeare, and for the roses beloved of her father: Rosalind.
Rosalind Katherine Howard.
“But that is Roz’s name,” I said, feeling suddenly hollow. “Yes, dear,” said Athenaide.
At the bottom of the page was one last sentence:
Journeys end
in lover’s meeting, every wise man’s son doth know.
I leaned against Matthew’s shoulder and wept.
39
I WOKE STILL curled up against Matthew’s shoulder on the sofa; he was still asleep. Across the cabin, Athenaide sat at the table reading a book in the dim glow of a lamp. I sat up, careful not to disturb Matthew. “You knew her,” I said softly. “Roz.”
A sad smile settled over Athenaide. For a moment, she looked like an old crone, her skin draped loosely over her skull. But her eyes were still bright. “I did.”
Slipping from the sofa, I moved to the table. “The Rosalind in the book—Ophelia’s daughter. She can’t have been my Roz.”
“No.” She smiled and closed her book. She’d been reading Ophelia’s diary. “Not without a fountain of youth. She was your Roz’s grandmother. Our grandmother.” She took a sip of water, setting the glass down so carefully that it made no sound. “Roz was my cousin. And Ophelia—under the name of Ophelia Howard—was our great-grandmother.”
I dropped into the chair next to her. “I saw a picture of you. With a hat.”
For an instant, her smile flashed wider. “That was a happy day. When she still looked up to me.” She folded her hands atop the book. “We were similar in many respects. But we came to have different ideas about the right path to the good life. She wanted me to go on the stage—a dream we’d shared as girls. Our grandmother, after all, was a great stage actress. A famous name in the 1910s, mostly forgotten now. I had her looks.” She sighed. “Roz did not. What she refused to see was what she did have, that I did not: the talent. I don’t have the mental or emotional stamina to wander through other lives with conviction. I am not a vagabond, a happy wanderer. All great actors are, you know. I need a home. Deep roots.” She looked at me wryly. “And I like money. For better or worse, I am a businesswoman.
“Money-grubbing, Roz called it. And other things, more cruel. Between us, maybe, we could have made a single great artist. Divided, we made a professor and a businesswoman. Both successes, but not the success we dreamed of as girls.
“I saw her at the Folger a few days before she died. I gave her that hat. As a memory of old times. A bridge back to them, I hoped. I thought she might put it on a shelf and look at it. It was high fashion circa 1953, for Christ’s sake. But I should have known she might wear it. It makes sense, in a Roz sort of way, to have worn it to her theatrical debut. Even if that was just a rehearsal.”
Her debut, I thought, and her final exit.
“It’s how I found you,” said Athenaide.
“The hat?”
She laughed. “No. The Folger conference. I knew she was giving a paper on Delia Bacon, so I read up on Delia too. We’d been competing with each other for years, you know. Tit for tat. Dr. Sanderson showed me the letter from Ophelia to Emily Folger right before he left to find you at the Capitol. The grave scene was fresh in my mind; and, as it happened, it was the only clue I could interpret. And then he showed up dead, and both you and the letter showed up missing. I scooped up Matthew, who was worried sick about you, and we flew to Stratford and waited. Gave us a turn, when you phoned and it seemed you’d gone somewhere else.
“That’s when I decided to go into the grave. To make sure…with the results you have seen.”
For a moment, we both stared at the diary, sitting on the table.
“She adored you, you know,” said Athenaide. “Adored you and envied you in a heady mix I’m not sure she was prepared to handle. Not many people would be. You were someone who might go where she’d never dared. It’s probably why she sent you running from the ivory tower.”
“You think she wanted me to end up in the theater?” Bitter laughter rose in my throat. “She could have offered career advice.”
Athenaide cocked her head. “Would you have listened?”
I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I would just have assumed she was sabotaging my career.
An intercom buzzed discreetly, and Athenaide picked up a phone. We would be landing in an hour. She sent me back to one of the bedrooms to freshen up; one glance in the mirror and I saw why with a groan. “Freshening up” was the mother of all understatements. What I needed was something more akin to an extreme makeover. My eyes were red and swollen; there was a bruise and a scrape along one cheekbone. The rain had made my hair dye run in dark zebra streaks down my neck and onto the jacket, which looked, under the stripes, like it had been wadded into a tight ball at the bottom of a laundry basket for three weeks.
But the suitcase Sir Henry had provided what seemed like years ago now, and which had followed me from London to Boston to Utah, from New Mexico to the Folger in D.C. and then to a plane outside Stratford, sat at the end of the bed, and the bathroom had a full-sized shower. I fixed the suitcase with a baleful eye. Making me feel better was the first baby-step in the reparations I meant to pull from Sir Henry.
In the shower, I watched the dark dye swirl into the drain. Had Roz, as Athenaide suggested, meant to send me running from academe? If so, she’d gotten what she wanted. There was such a thing as building bridges in front of one’s protégée, rather than burning them behind me.
Even as I had run from Roz and everything she had touched, though, bridges had materialized before me. Six months ago, Sir Henry had magically appeared at just the right time to land me a job on the West End, and then at the Globe. And there had been other moments like that before, turning points in a young career that I had put down to the unfathomable luck of standing in the right place at the right time.
I had been so proud of blazing my trail through life on my own, even as I had been filled with wonder at the luck that seemed to fall before my path like a rain of rose petals. Had Roz been helping me in silence all along? I would never know.
I put on jeans, a black T-shirt, and some sneakers, and looked in the mirror again. Better. My hair was still short, but at least it was dark red again. And my cheek was still bruised, but at least I was clean. In the bottom of my suitcase, I found the chain that I’d bought on the Nevada–Arizona border. Threading it through the brooch, I hung it around my neck and walked out.
In the main cabin, Matthew was awake, sipping coffee. The three of us gathered around the table and went over what we knew.
“They were all in on it,” said Matthew. “The earls of Derby and Oxford, the countess of Pembroke, Sir Francis Bacon, and Shakespeare of Stratford.”
“Yes,” I said, leaning back and rubbing my eyes. “But how?” Jem Granville had known, I thought. With any luck, we’d find the map he’d left to his treasure, X marks the spot, by morning. Glancing out the window, I saw several lines of lights trailing into the distance. Runway lights.
We landed in Lordsburg, New Mexico, around three o’clock in the morning. Sheet lightning flickered in the distance. The monsoons were building early. Graciela was waiting; a few minutes later we drove through the rough buildings of Shakespeare to pull into Athenaide’s garage—the old powder storage cave hollowed into a hillside. A few moments after that, we were trailing Athenaide at a brisk pace through the labyrinth of Elsinore.
Warm golden light swelled as we walked into the Great Hall. “Last time, you knew at once that this room was not Elsinore,” Athenaide said to me. “Do you recognize it now?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a copy—a very careful one—of the Banqueting Hall in the Norman keep of Hedingham Castle. The earl of Oxford’s ancestral home in Essex, northeast of London. One of the finest surviving examples of Norman architecture.”
For a moment, I stood on the threshold taking the place in, this time, the earl of Oxford’s home. Oxford’s Hedingham, inside Hamlet’s Elsinore, inside the ghost town of Shakespeare. A perfect little nest of buildings for an Oxfordian billionaire to toy with.
Not that it was grandiose in appearance—after the baroque excess of Wilton House, the medieval simplicity of this place stood out all the more starkly. There wasn’t much furniture save the table in the middle, a
few chairs and cushions, and the display cases against the far wall.
Graciela arrived with a cold supper of salad Niçoise with smoked salmon, along with freshly baked rolls and a slightly chilled bottle of peppery Pinot Noir. The goblets she carried were blue-and-white blown glass that looked to be authentically seventeenth-century Venetian.
Handing Ophelia’s diary to me, Athenaide went straight to the locked cabinet and put her hand against the scanner. The case opened with a click, and she pulled out a book. The paper boards had warped in the desert heat, and the red cloth cover was frayed and faded.
Graciela finished pouring the wine and marched out.
Athenaide set the book down on the table. “Vero nihil verius,” she said. “Nothing truer than truth. Whatever that may be.” Then she slid the book across the table to me. “Open it.”
40
JEM’S FOLIO OPENED easily to the title page. Opposite Shakespeare’s disapproving stare were two signatures: Ophelia Fayrer Granville, small, neat, and deliberate at the top, and below that, larger and looser, Jem Granville. Beneath that was the sonnet from the Valladolid Folio, in Ophelia’s hand.
“It has to be something in this copy and this copy only,” said Matthew. “Jem said ‘my Jacobean magnum opus.’”
Beyond the poem and the two signatures, there was no other writing on the page. The paper, though, was scorched and rippled with water damage. Someone—Ophelia?—must have tried to reveal the hidden cipher by means of both water, or some other liquid wash, and heat. Since some invisible inks will appear when heated, and disappear again when they cool, Athenaide lit a candle, and we tried heating the page once more. Nothing.
I riffled the pages, looking for marks elsewhere. The only place I found them was in Hamlet—and those looked to be notations for Jem’s performance. Try as I might, I could not wrangle them into other kinds of sense. I paced around the table with my wine, thinking. The ciphered message had to be here. It had to be.