Where was the help that Ben had been so sure of? Had I somehow knocked the chip from the brooch somewhere deep in the cave?
“Sir Henry,” I pleaded. “Please. That letter might tell us, once and for all, the truth about Shakespeare.”
“If it’s not Shakespeare who wrote the plays, then it’s not a truth I want to know. It’s not a truth I want known.”
That’s what all the killing was about? Defending Shakespeare of Stratford? Was that how he understood what he’d done? Waged some kind of protectionist war in the guise of a Shakespearean Defender of the Faith?
Sir Henry looked at the letter in his hand. “Irony of ironies. I would have given anything for the play Granville found, but what I end up with is the letter I’ve worked so hard to keep hidden.”
I had to convince him to let me stay near the cave’s opening, for the transponder in the brooch to work. So I bought time with the one currency he valued—Shakespeare. “But you do have the play,” I said. “Tucked into the volume of Quixote. Same handwriting, I think. I can read that if you’d rather.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Enter the squire Sancho and Don Quixote,” I said. “That’s how it started, but I got no farther.”
“Show me.”
I pulled the book from the pouch and drew out the sheaf of papers, carefully unfolding them.
You keep the gold, friend Sancho. I’ll keep the book….
Greed kindled in Sir Henry’s eyes. “Shakespeare’s lost play,” he murmured. And then he smiled. “Read,” he commanded.
It was the hardest thing I had ever done, to read that story of love and betrayal aloud, all the while watching Sir Henry, waiting for a moment when he might let down his guard. Hoping that I was close enough to the open sky…that the police were searching…and that Ben’s life was not ebbing away too quickly in the dark.
I finished the first act and started on the second. I am now become the tomb of my own honour. A dark mansion for death alone to dwell in.
I faltered. No one was coming, I suddenly realized. If anyone was listening, I was still too far inside the cave to be heard.
A narrow ledge trailed out from under the overhang, clinging to the cliff face for a while before dwindling to nothing. Before Sir Henry could react, I leapt over him, scrambling outward along that ledge, balancing against the cliff with one hand, clutching the play and tugging on the chain around my neck with the other.
“Kate,” said Sir Henry with real anguish. “Come back.”
I kept tugging.
“There’s no reason to risk either the play or your life like this.”
“I thought my life was already forfeit. The play’s just to keep you from killing me.”
“Come back, and we’ll negotiate,” he pleaded. “You can direct the play, and I’ll be your Quixote.”
“You think Ben will agree to that?”
He fell silent.
“I see. He’s where I’m supposed to compromise. You give up killing me, and I give up saving him. And we both get the play.”
“He’s dying anyway, Kate.”
The chain finally snapped, and the brooch came loose in my hand. I tucked it in a small crack in the cliff. Part of the ledge crumbled, sending shards of rock tumbling down into the river. I swayed and regained my balance. At my feet, a crack opened up between the ledge and the cliff.
“Kate. Come back.”
“Get rid of the gun.”
He hesitated, and another section of the ledge crumbled. The pistol sailed out over the canyon, arcing down into the white water.
A great groan came from the cliff face. I began edging inward.
“Jump,” cried Sir Henry. And I jumped, just as the ledge split away from the cliff, tumbling downward with a roar and sending a tower of white spray upward.
Just inside the cave, I lay gasping, still gripping the play. Sir Henry took a step toward me.
“Stay back.”
He stopped.
“Drop the saddlebag, and kick it toward the back of the cave.” I didn’t want him getting any ideas about what he might do with that still-unread letter folded inside.
Sir Henry dropped the bag, but he didn’t send it sliding to the back of the cave. Instead, he withdrew himself to the opposite wall. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
Leaving the saddlebag where he’d dropped it, I pulled the book of Don Quixote toward me and folded the play, tucking it once more in the back. “What does it matter who Shakespeare was? Why are you so afraid of the truth?”
Leaning back against the wall, he slid to the floor, his face in his hands. “ ‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Bacon’s phrase.” He lifted his head. “I don’t fear truth, Kate. I fear facts. The tyranny of petty facts. The Truth, with a capital T, is what ought to be. Not simply what was, or what is. As a storyteller, a director, you should know that.”
His voice grew richer and more seductive as he spoke. “Whatever some moldy old letter may say, what’s true is that Shakespeare was everyman, a man of the people. Not an earl or a knight, a countess or a queen, and not, for God’s sake, a whole bloody bureaucracy. Why are so many people unwilling to allow that a boy from nothing and nowhere could make not just good, but great? I’ve done it, after all, in little—risen from nuffink to knighthood on the stage. Why couldn’t Shakespeare of Stratford rise to immortality?”
“It’s the plays that matter, Sir Henry. Not his parentage.”
“You’re wrong, Kate. Like your Abraham Lincoln in his log cabin, the Stratford boy’s story illustrates a point that matters a great deal: Genius can strike anywhere. Anyone can be great. Shakespeare once helped me pull myself up from the gutter, and I’ve spent a lifetime glorifying him in return. He can do the same for others. That’s what I’ve always thought, at any rate. It’s what’s given me my second wind, brought me back to the stage…. By the time I’ve finished with the ghost of Hamlet’s father, with Prospero and Lear and Leontes, Shakespeare’s legacy will be safe for another generation. If the collectors of petty fact will just leave well enough alone.”
“You’re confusing his legacy with your own.”
He looked at me with reproach. “I thought you would understand.”
“You thought I would agree with you?” Still holding the book with the folded pages of the play, I jumped to my feet. “Do you think he would?” I cried, propelled by sudden volcanic fury. “Do you think Shakespeare, whoever he was, would appreciate the fact that you’ve killed in his name?” As quickly as it had heated up, my anger turned to ice. “I understand, all right, Sir Henry. I understand that you’re a killer and a coward who fears the face of truth.”
He lunged for the book in my hand. I twisted away, and again he came after me. This time he caught me, pinning me against the cave wall. “Plain Kate, and bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the cursed.”
The whisper slid out of him in a voice that was unmistakable. An American voice. The stalker in the library.
I am an actor, he’d said.
Matthew had claimed to be the man in the library. But Matthew had lied. Matthew had certainly been prepared to transform me into Lavinia—but the threat had been Sir Henry’s idea. The script had been his. With a yell, I spun around, slamming him into the side of the cave. He let go. Regaining his balance, he came at me again. I ducked.
Unable to check his force, Sir Henry hit the floor of the cave hard and slid over the edge.
Racing forward, I peered over.
Just beneath the lip of the cave, he was clinging to an outcrop of stone with both hands. One foot had found a narrow toehold, the other was scrabbling for purchase against the crumbling rock. Jamming one foot into a crevice as anchor, I reached over the side. I could not hold him with one hand. Dropping the book and with it the play, I grabbed his wrist, first with one hand and then with the other. For a moment, I thought he would pull us both over. From the look in his eyes, he halfway meant to.
Then we heard the helicopter.
“The cops,” I said. “Whatever happens to you and me, Sir Henry, they’ll find the play. And the letter.”
At that moment, something in him surrendered. Slowly, and with his help, I pulled him up and over the edge to safety.
“I’m sorry.” He gasped. “I’m sorry, Kate. I never meant to hurt you. But you wouldn’t get out of the way.”
“Save it,” I said coldly. “You’re going to prison for a very long time.”
“The modern face of revenge,” he said. “You’ve become Hamlet, Kate. Can you see that?”
He said it with bitter admiration, but all I could think of was the pile of bodies left onstage at the end of the play. “What does that make you?”
A ways up the canyon, lightning split the sky in a wide, spidering arc of blue light. Thunder split the canyon, and below, the water surged skyward, carrying boulders and trees raging past us. The rhythmic beat of chopper blades grew louder.
Sir Henry pushed himself to his feet. Throwing back his head, he sent his magnificent voice roaring over the wind:
I have bedimmed
The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And ’twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war.
Before my eyes, he became Prospero, the magician who calls tempests into being and sets into motion the wheels of justice. Slowly, with majesty, he raised his arm and pointed at me.
Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, opened, and let ’em forth
By my so potent art.
“Graves have filled at your command, Sir Henry,” I shot back. “Not opened. Six of them. Seven, if Ben dies.”
Some vital force swirling around him wavered and dwindled. Suddenly, he was an old man again, tired and a little sad. He dropped his arm.
But this rough magic
I here abjure….
Across the canyon, the helicopter roared into view, the whir of its blades echoing off the cliffs. As it edged closer, spurts of water and dust rose from the cave floor. In the open door stood Sinclair and Mr. Jiménez, pointing.
Reaching past me, Sir Henry scooped up the saddlebag with its letter that might or might not say who Shakespeare was. Scraping the book from his reach, I clutched it, with the play, to my chest, but he made no effort to take it. Pitching his words only to me, he spoke as a wayward father might excuse himself to his daughter. No performance, just apology.
I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
Too late, I realized what he was doing and darted forward, but he’d already reached the cliff’s edge.
“Remember me,” he said. He then leaned back and fell, Icarus plummeting from the sun, staring upward with a smile of rapture, his arms outspread like tattered wings.
Far below, I saw a small silent splash. The river tossed him up once.
And then he was gone.
INTERLUDE
July 1626
HE HAD THOUGHT to die by fire and sword, or at least by fire and the knife, before a jeering crowd. Not alone in the dark.
The stench of death had thickened to the point that every breath gagged in his throat, and yet it was the silence that was most terrible. At first, the priest had welcomed it. The sergeant—a markedly brave man—had been delirious the last two days before he died, and his moaning and howling had been almost as hard to take as the sound of his hands scrabbling at the boulders that blocked their exit. The man had pawed at the rocks until his fingers were bloody shreds with the bones clacking through, but he could not be induced to stop until all his strength had drained away into the dark. And the sergeant had been a strong man.
Perhaps both the noise and the silence, the priest thought, were his penance for polluting the air with lies.
Though he had meant well. Not too long after they’d set out, they’d come to a river in spate after three days of rain. Had they waited three days, the water would have gone down—floods disappeared almost as quickly as they arose in this strange and sudden country—but the captain was not a patient man. Under the lash of his tongue, they had crossed that afternoon, to the loss of three mules and everything packed on their backs. The captain regarded the loss of his personal wine cask as the greatest tragedy and ordered the muleteer flogged. The men bore that as they bore most of the captain’s cruel stupidity, with glowering patience. But the discovery that the priest’s Bible had also been lost lit fires of panic in their eyes.
They were ignorant peasants, most of them, and their piety was closer to superstition than enlightened devotion, or he might have tried to reason them out of their fear. As it was, the priest had pulled from his saddlebag the volume of Don Quixote, squat and richly bound, passing it off as his personal Bible, which he would now be happy to share with the troop.
The panic had subsided. Thereafter, he “read” the Gospel by opening, for example, to the chapters about Tilting at Windmills, and declaiming, by memory, the parable of the prodigal son. There had been a time when such a predicament would have made him hoot with laughter. But that seemed, now, to belong to another life.
The men had seen, of course, the sheaf of papers he kept tucked in the back. They had assumed this was a sermon, a work of private prayer, and teased him about it. His great work. His masterpiece. In a way, he supposed, they had been right. But what kind of prayer was it?
I am now become
The tomb of my own honour, a dark mansion
For death alone to dwell in.
The sergeant had looked at him sharply once or twice, but whatever the man suspected, he kept it to himself. Unlike the captain, the sergeant was a fine leader of men.
Following the river, they had come down from the mountains into a wide brown plain deceptively like home, for those from Castile. A few days afterward, some men straggling near the rear of their column had found the two Indian women and their children. By the time the priest discovered what lay at the heart of the small knot of hooting men, the children were dead and the women worse. It was part of soldiering; at first he had turned away. But five or six of the men took their pleasure so roughly and so continuously, that the priest had at last jogged ahead on his mule to complain to the captain. The captain had cantered back, dismounted with a flourish, and waded into the throng with the flat of his sword until the men cleared away. For a moment he had stared. One of the girls was dying already. But he took the other right there, in full view. And then he spitted her on his sword.
Then he had mounted and spurred his horse to a run, back to the front of the column. They had not even stopped long enough to bury the bodies.
That night, walking off alone to pray for the lost souls, he had seen the eyes in the tree, watching. The captain had screamed at the priest, calling him a coward and a fool, but the sergeant had quietly doubled the guard on their camp.
It had not mattered; the next morning, one of the men was found on his hands and knees in the grass twenty yards from the camp, his eyes gone, a bloody hole where his genitals used to be. After that, every last man who had touched the women had been singled out and butchered, one by one, in ever more ingenious and agonizing ways, like mute bison being culled from a herd by silent wolves. A man would simply disappear, and a few hours or days later, they would find him, still alive, decorating the trail.
Dying, many of the men had wanted to kiss the Holy Book. The priest had wondered whether continuing the charade of the Bible at that point had been wrong. But anything that could give serenity in the last few minutes of agony and fear—he decided that must be closer to grace than to sin.
They never saw their enemy, only his carvings. The men began to mumble about demons. But the captain, his eyes fixed on cities of gold, seemed not to notice the blood or the thickening scent of fear. He urged the men onward with the sword and the whip. He also seemed not to notice that he
became, one day, the last survivor among the men who had touched the Indian women.
Three days later, the captain had not appeared from his tent in the morning. They found him on the ground, his guts draped around the tent like bunting. Eyes, hands, and tongue were missing. His throat had been slit, and his genitals stuffed into his mouth. No one had seen or heard anything in the night.
They had buried him without mourning. And then they’d turned for home. Or at least for the Presidio in Santa Fe.
Too late. The Indians had come down upon them in the night. Most of the troop had been slaughtered in their beds, but the sergeant had shepherded the survivors together, fighting a defensive action, retreating to the hills, and then into a canyon. Still, they had steadily been picked off. There had only been eight men and two horses left by the time they had reached the little round dell. They had thought it defensible—not realizing the Indians could climb almost as well as the mountain sheep.
So they had taken refuge in the cave, thanking God and good fortune for the dark opening they discovered leading in to a large shadowy room cut into the cliff. Too late, they had realized that their find had not been accidental; they’d been herded there. But by then, the rocks were already falling. Two of the men had run back into that rain of boulders and had been crushed. The rest had hunkered inside until the noise subsided. And the waiting in the dark had begun.
And then the dying, until the priest was left alone with the sergeant. And then truly alone.
A dark mansion for death alone to dwell in.
He had stopped urinating two days ago; his lips were cracked and his mouth so dry that swallowing had become agony.
And then he had been alone no longer: Faces floated up in the darkness, undulating a little, like the hair of mermaids. A dark-haired woman in a green gown. A middle-aged man with mischief in his eyes—mischief, and cynical wit, and the quiet sorrow that fills the eyes of those who have seen that the world’s brightest lights and deepest shadows are inextricably entwined.