Ruled Britannia (2 page)

'Twould make a splendid tragedy
, Shakespeare thought,
were setting so little as a single line of't to paper not worth my life—and a hard, cruel death I'd have, too
. Written or not, though, those scenes began to shape themselves in his mind. He shook his head like a fly-bedeviled horse, trying to clear it.

More than a little to his relief, a murmur in the crowd brought his attention back to the parade. Behind the Protector of the Inquisition stalked Robert Parsons, the Archbishop of Canterbury. His cold, thin
features made Neville's look genial. He'd spent a generation in exile, struggling from afar against English Protestantism.

After the prelate marched another company of guardsmen. These were wild Irishmen, brought over to help the Spaniards hold England down. Most spoke only Irish; the few who used some English had brogues so thick, it was hard to tell from the other tongue.

The crowd stirred and buzzed. A couple of men pointed. A woman exclaimed.
After the sallet comes the main course
, Shakespeare thought. A couple of dozen men exhibited life-sized pasteboard images of those convicted by the Inquisition who had either died in gaol or had escaped its clutches and were being outlawed. More servitors carried trunks that bore the bones of the former. The sides and tops of the trunks were painted with hellfire's flames.

Then came the prisoners themselves. First was a group of about a dozen men and women with conical pasteboard caps fully a yard high on their heads. Most of the caps had
HERETIC
written on them in large letters in English and Latin. One said
ALCHEMIST
, another
SODOMITE
. In the first years after the triumph of the Duke of Parma's men, Shakespeare remembered, the words had been written in Spanish as well. These days, though, the English Inquisition operated on its own, with little help from its former teachers. Each of the condemned had a rope around his neck and carried a torch in his right hand.

More prisoners, also carrying torches, followed the first lot. They wore sanbenitos—coarse yellow penitential tunics without sleeves—with the cross of St. Andrew painted on the back in red. Some of them, after their condemnation at the ceremony, would return to imprisonment. Others would be released, but sentenced to wear the sanbenito forever as a mark of their crimes. “More ignoble and more humiliating than death itself,” a fat man near Shakespeare said. Two familiars of the Inquisition accompanied each of them.

And after them tramped the dozen or so who had been condemned to the flames. They wore not only sanbenitos but also pasteboard caps, all of which were painted with flames and devils. Along with the familiars of the Inquisition, four or five monks accompanied them to prepare their souls for death.

One prisoner, a big, burly man, shook off all attempts at consolation. “I go gladly to my death,” he declared, “knowing I shall soon see God face to face and rejoice in His glory for ever and ever.”

“You are wrong, Philip Stubbes,” a monk said urgently. “If you confess your sins, you may yet win free of hell to Purgatory.”

“Purgatory's a dream, a lie, one of the myriad lies the Pope farts forth from his mouth,” the Puritan said.

The monk crossed himself. “You will also win an easier death for yourself, for the executioner will throttle you ere the flames bite.”

Stubbes shook his head. “Elizabeth cut off my brother's hand for speaking the truth. Torment me as you will, as the Romans tormented the martyrs of old. The flames will have me for but a little while, but you and all your villainous kind for an eternity.”

Another man, a red-bearded fellow with a clever, frightened face and cropped ears, spoke urgently to a somber monk: “I'll say anything you want. I'll do anything you want. Only spare me from the fire.”

A vagrant drop of rain landed on the monk's tonsured pate. He wiped it away with his hand before answering, “Kelley, your confessions, your renunciations, are worthless, as you have proved time and again. You
will
return to your alchemy, as a dog returneth to its vomit. Did not the heretic Queen's men petition you for gold wherewith to oppose the cleansing Armada?”

“I gave them none,” Kelley said quickly.

“And did you not die for this,” the monk went on, inexorable as an avalanche, “you surely would for coining counterfeit money in base metal.”

“I did no such thing,” Kelley insisted.

“Each lie you tell but makes the flames of hell hotter. Compose your spirit now, and pray for mercy from a just God Whose judgments are true and righteous altogether.”

And then, to Shakespeare's horror, Kelley's eyes—green as a cat's, and showing white all around the iris—found his in the crowd and locked on them. “Will! Will! For the love of God, Will, tell 'em I'm true and trusty!”

Shakespeare wondered if he turned white or red. He felt dipped in ice and dire, both together. He'd met Edward Kelley perhaps half a dozen times over as many years, enough to know he'd lost his ears for making and passing false coins. The alchemist moved in some of the same circles as Christopher Marlowe, and some of Marlowe's circles were also Shakespeare's.
Wheels within wheels, as in the epicycles of Master Ptolemy
. But for Kelley to point him out to the Inquisition . . .

Before he could speak, either to curse Kelley—which was what he
wanted to do—or to praise him, the monk said, “Where your own words will not save you, why think you any other man's might? Go on, wretch, and die as well as you may.”

But he looked in the same direction the alchemist had. And his eyes, too, met Shakespeare's. He nodded thoughtfully to himself.
He knows my face
, Shakespeare thought with something not far from despair. Other people saw as much, too, and moved away from him, so that he stood on a little island of open space in the ocean of the crowd. He'd come down with a disease as deadly as smallpox or the black plague: suspicion.
Devils roast you black, Kelley, and use your guts for garters
.

On went the procession. Other voices drowned out Edward Kelley's whining claims of innocence. Behind the condemned prisoners rode the Grand Inquisitor, somber in a purple habit, and several members of the House of Commons, their faces smug and fat and self-satisfied. Another company of soldiers—Spaniards and Englishmen mixed again—and the parade was done.

As it went past, the pikemen who'd been holding back the crowd shouldered their weapons. Some folk went on about their business. More streamed after the procession to Tower Hill, to watch the burnings that would follow. Shakespeare stepped out into the muddy street. Along with the rest of the somber spectacle, he wanted to see Edward Kelley die.

“Say what you will about the Spaniards, but they've brought us a fine show,” said a man at his elbow.

The fellow's friend nodded. “Better than a bear-baiting or a cockfight, and I never thought I'd say that of any sport.”

Tower Hill, north and west of the Tower itself, had been an execution ground since the days of Edward IV, more than a hundred years before. Things were more elaborate now than they had been. Stakes with oil-soaked wood piled high around them waited for the condemned prisoners. Iron cages waited for them, too, in which they would listen to the charges that had brought them here. More iron cages, small ones, awaited the pasteboard effigies of the folk who had died in gaol or escaped the Inquisition's clutches.

At a safe distance from the stakes stood a wooden grandstand. Queen Isabella and King Albert sat on upholstered thrones, surrounded by grandees both English and Spanish on benches. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Grand Inquisitor, and the other dignitaries from the procession joined them. The first group of soldiers fanned out to
protect the grandstand along with the men already there. The rest kept back the crowd.

After Philip Stubbes was locked in his cage, he began singing hymns and shouting, “Vanity and lies! Beware of Popish vanity and lies!” A monk spoke to him. He defiantly shook his head and kept on shouting. The monk unlocked the cage. He and several of his fellows went in. They bound Stubbes' hands and gagged him to keep him from disrupting the last part of the ceremony.

That worked less well than they must have hoped. When the charge of heresy was read out against him, he made a leg like a courtier, as if it were praise. More than a few people in the crowd laughed and clapped their hands.

Shakespeare didn't.
No way to know whose eyes may be upon me, and all the more so after that Kelley—damnation take him!—called out my name
. He nervously fingered his little chin beard.
A hard business, living in a kingdom where the rulers sit uneasy on the throne and their minions course after foes as hounds course after stags
.

He plucked out a hair. The small, brief pain turned his thoughts to a new channel.
In a play, could I place a man of Stubbes' courage?
he wondered.
Or would the groundlings find him impossible to credit?

One by one, the captives sentenced to more imprisonment or to wear the sanbenito were led away. Only those who would die remained. They were led out of their cages and chained to the stakes. As monks made the sign of the cross, executioners strangled a couple of them: men who had repented of their errors, whether sincerely or to gain an easier death.

Edward Kelley cried, “Me! Me!
In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti
, me!” But his Latin, his learning, did him no good at all.

The inquisitors looked toward the Queen. Isabella was in her early thirties, a couple of years younger than Shakespeare, and swarthy even for a Spaniard—to English eyes, she seemed not far from a Moor. The enormous, snowy-white ruff she wore only accented her dark skin. Swarthy or not, though, she was the Queen; Albert held the throne through his marriage to her. She raised her hand, then let it fall.

And, as it fell, the executioners hurled torches into the waiting fagots. They caught at once. The roar of the flames almost drowned out the screams from the burning men. The roar of the crowd came closer still. That baying had a heavy, almost lustful, undertone to it. Watching others die while one still lived . . .

Better him than me
, Shakespeare thought as fire swallowed Edward Kelley. The mixture of shame and relief churning inside him made him want to spew.
Oh, dear God, better him than me
. He turned away from the stakes, from the reek of charred flesh, and hurried back into the city.

 

L
OPE
F
ÉLIX DE
V
EGA
Carpio had been in London for more than nine years, and in all that time he didn't think he'd been warm outdoors even once. The English boasted of their springtime. It came two months later here than in Madrid, where it would have been reckoned a mild winter. As for summer . . . He rolled his eyes. As best he could tell, there was no such thing as an English summer.

Still and all, there were compensations. He snuggled down deeper under the feather-filled comforter and kissed the woman he kept company there. “Ah, Maude,” he said, “I understand why you English women are so fair.” He had a gift for language and languages; his English, though accented, was fluent.

“What's that, love?” Maude Fuller asked, lazy and sleepy after love. She was in her middle twenties, around ten years younger than he, and not merely a blonde—blondes were known in Spain—but with hair the color of fire and a skin paler than milk. Even her nipples held barely a tinge of color.

Idly, Lope teased one between his thumb and forefinger. “I know why thou art so fair,” he repeated. “How couldst thou be otherwise, when the sun never touches thee?”

He let his hand stray lower, sliding along the smooth, soft skin of her belly toward the joining of her legs. The hair there was as astonishingly red as that on her head. Just thinking about it inflamed him.
Since the weather here will never warm me, as well the women do
, he thought. Of course, the women back in Spain had warmed him, too. Had he sailed off to America instead of joining the Armada and coming to England aboard the
San Juan
, no doubt he would have become enamored of one, or two, or six, of the copper-skinned, black-haired Indian women there. Loving women was in his blood.

“What, again, my sweet?” Maude said around a yawn. But his caresses heated her better than the embers in the hearth could. Before long, they began once more. He wondered if he would manage the second round so soon after the first, and knew no little pride when he did.
Ten years ago, I'd have taken it for granted
, he thought as his thudding heart slowed.
Ten years from now . . .
He shook his head. He didn't care to think about that.
God and the Virgin, but time is cruel
.

To hold such thoughts at bay, he kissed the Englishwoman again. “Ah,
querida
—beloved, seest thou what thou dost to me?” he said. But lots of women did that to him. He had two other mistresses in London, though Maude, a recent conquest, knew about neither of them.

And she had secrets from him, as he discovered the worst way possible. Downstairs, a door opened, then slammed shut. “Oh, dear God!” she exclaimed, sitting bolt upright. “My husband!”

“Thine husband?” Despite his horror, de Vega had the sense to keep his voice to a whisper. “Lying minx, thou saidst thou wert a widow!”