Ruled Britannia (42 page)

The door to the ordinary opened. Shakespeare didn't look up in alarm, as he'd had to whenever it opened while he was working on
Boudicca
. He'd seldom dared write any of that play here, but even having it at the forefront of his thoughts left him nervous—left him, to be honest, terrified. If Spaniards or priests from the English Inquisition burst in now, he could show them this manuscript with a clear conscience.

But the man who came in was neither don nor inquisitor. He was pale, slight, pockmarked, bespectacled: a man who'd blend into any company in which he found himself. The poet hardly heeded him till he pulled up a stool and sat down, saying, “Give you good den, Master Shakespeare.”

“Oh!” Shakespeare stared in surprise—and yes, alarm came
flooding back. He tried to hide it behind a nod that was almost a seated bow. “God give you good even, Master Phelippes.”

“I am your servant, sir,” Thomas Phelippes said, a great thumping lie: the dusty little man was surely someone's servant, but not Shakespeare's. Did he rank above Nick Skeres or under him? Above, Shakespeare thought. Phelippes, after all, was the one who'd brought him into this business in the first place.

Kate came up to the table. “Good even, sir,” she said to Phelippes. “The threepenny supper is kidney pie, an't please you.”

“Monstrous fine, too,” Shakespeare added, spooning up some more of his.

Phelippes shook his head. “I have eat, mistress,” he said. “A stoup of Rhenish wine'd please me, though.”

“I'll fetch it presently.” Kate hurried away and, as she'd promised, returned with the wine at once. Phelippes set a penny on the table. She took it and withdrew.

“What would you?” Shakespeare asked. “Or is't, what would you of me?”

“Seek you a scribe?” Phelippes inquired in return. “So I am given to understand.”

Shakespeare frowned. “I grow out of patience with others knowing my affairs ere I learn of them myself.”

“I know all manner of strange things,” the dusty little man answered, not without pride.

He would never be a hero on the battlefield, nor, Shakespeare judged, with the ladies, and so had to make do with what he knew. Twitting him about it would only make an enemy. “Ken you a scribe, then?” Shakespeare asked. “A scribe who can read what's set before him, write out a fair copy, and speak never a word of't thereafter?”

“I ken such a man, but not well,” Phelippes said with a small smile.

“That will not serve,” Shakespeare said. “If you cannot swear he be trusty—”

Phelippes held up a hand. That small smile grew bigger. “You mistake me, sir. I but repeat a Grecian's jest when asked by someone who knew him not if he knew himself. I am the man.”

“Ah?” Shakespeare was not at all convinced Phelippes was trusty. After all, he worked at the right hand of Don Diego Flores de Valdés. And yet, plainly, Don Diego's was not the only right hand at which he worked. Wanting very much to ask him about that, Shakespeare knew
he couldn't: he would get back either no answer or whatever lie seemed most useful to Phelippes. But he could say, “I'd fain see your character or ever I commend you to Master Vincent.”

“Think you my claim by some great degree outdoth performance?” Thomas Phelippes sounded dryly amused. His mirth convinced Shakespeare he likely could do as he claimed. Even as Shakespeare started to say he needed no proof after all, the pockmarked little man cut him off: “Have you pen and paper here?”

“Ay.” Shakespeare left them on the floor by his feet while he ate, to keep from spilling gravy on them. He bent now, picked them up, and set them on the table.

“Good. Give them me, I pray you,” Phelippes said. “I shall see what I make of your hand, and you will see what you make of mine.” He looked at some of what Shakespeare had written, then up at the poet himself. “This is Philip, sending forth the Armada?”

“It is,” Shakespeare answered. “But for myself, you are the first to see't.”

“A privilege indeed,” Phelippes murmured, and then began to read:

 

“ ‘Rough rigor looks outright, and still prevails:

Let sword, let fire, let torments be their end.

Severity upholds both realm and rule.

What then for minds, which have revenging moods,

And ne'er forget the cross they boldly bear?

And as for England's desperate and disloyal plots

Spaniards, remember, write it on your walls,

That rebels, traitors and conspirators

Shall feel the flames of ever-flaming fire

Which are not quenched with a sea of tears.' ”

 

Looking up again, he nodded. “ 'Twill serve—'twill serve very well. And a pretty contrast you draw 'twixt his Most Catholic Majesty's just fury here and the mercy of her life he grants Elizabeth conquered.”

“Gramercy,” Shakespeare said automatically, and then, staring, “How know you of that?”

Phelippes clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Your business is to write, the which you do most excellent well. Mine, I told you, is to know. Think you . . .”—the pause was a name he did not say aloud—“would choose me, would use me, did I not know passing well?”

Had he named that name, would it have been Sir William Cecil's or that of Don Diego Flores de Valdés? Or might he have chosen one as readily as the other? Shakespeare wished the question hadn't occurred to him. Phelippes openly avowed being a tool. Might not any man take up a tool and cut with it?

Phelippes tore off the bottom part of the sheet of paper on which Shakespeare had been writing. Shakespeare stifled a sigh. The other man surely would not pay him for the paper. Phelippes inked a pen. He began to write. Shakespeare's own hand was quick and assured, if not a thing of beauty. But his eyes widened as he watched Phelippes. The bespectacled little man's talents weren't showy, but talents he unquestionably had. The goose quill raced over the paper at a speed that put Shakespeare's best to shame.

“Here.” Phelippes handed him the scrap he'd torn off. “Will it serve, think you?”

He'd copied out the bit of King Philip's speech he'd read before. Shakespeare stared. He himself used the native English hand he'd learned in school back in Stratford; his writing had grown more fluid over the years because he did so much of it, but had never changed its essential nature. Phelippes' studied Italian script, by contrast, was so very perfect, an automaton might have turned it out. And he'd written in haste here, not at leisure.

“You know full well 'twill serve, ay, and more than serve,” Shakespeare answered. “I yield you the palm, Master Phelippes, and own I have not seen so fine a character writ so swift in all my days. The writing masters who show their art before the general could not outdo you.”

He'd meant it for praise, but Thomas Phelippes only sniffed and looked at him over the tops of his spectacles. “Those disguised cheaters and prating mountebanks,” he said scornfully. “Thread-bare jugglers, the lot of them. They write to be writing. I write to be read, and need no great show towards that end.”

He prides himself in his very obscurity
, Shakespeare realized.
He'd liefer be a greyhen, unseen against the heather, than a strutting peacock flashing his feathers for all to admire
. That struck the poet as a perverse pride. Most Englishmen—and Spaniards, too—gloried in display, so much so as to make deliberate self-effacement seem unnatural.

But that was wide of the mark. “I shall give Master Vincent your name,” Shakespeare said. Phelippes nodded complacently. The poet asked, “How shall he inquire after you?”

“Never mind,” Phelippes said. “So that he hath my name, it sufficeth me. Come the time, we shall know each the other.” He rose from his stool. “Farewell.” With no more flourish than when he'd come in, he slipped out of the ordinary.

“What a strange little man,” Kate said a few minutes later—she seemed to need so long to realize Phelippes had gone.

“Strange?” Shakespeare considered that. After a moment, he shook his head. “He is far stranger than simply strange.”

The serving woman frowned. “Will you speak in riddles?”

“How not, speaking of one?” He didn't explain himself. He wasn't sure he could have explained himself, poet though he was. But he knew what he meant.

When he went to the Theatre the next day, he told Thomas Vincent of Phelippes. The prompter nodded, but asked, “Hath he the required discretion?”

“Of discretion he hath a surplusage,” Shakespeare answered. “He wants some of the goodly qualities framing a man of parts, but discretion? Never.”

“I rely on your judgment, as I needs must here,” Vincent said. “An you be mistook—” He broke off, as if he didn't even want to think about that.

Neither did Shakespeare, but he said, “Therein, I am not.”

“God grant it be so,” Vincent said. “And when may I look for
King Philip
?”

He was as pushy as a prompter should be. “Anon,” Shakespeare told him. “Anon.”

“Anon, anon,” Thomas Vincent echoed mockingly. “Are you then metamorphosed into a drawer at the Boar's Head, ever vowing to cure ails with ale and never bringing the which is promised?”

“You'll have't, and in good time,” the poet said, letting a little irritation show. “King Philip breathes yet, mind you. We stray close to treason, treating of his mortality ere it be proved.”

“Don Diego hath given you his commission,” Vincent said. “That being so, treason enters not into the question.”

“The question, say you?” Shakespeare shivered, though the day was mild enough. When he thought of the question, he thought of endless hogsheads of water funneled down his throat, of thumbscrews, of iron boots thrust into the fire, of all the fiendish ingenuity Spaniards and
home-grown English inquisitors could bring to bear in interrogating some luckless wretch who'd fallen into their clutches.

And he had no trouble at all seeing himself as a luckless wretch.

“How may I find this Master . . . Phillips, said you?”

“Phelippes,” Shakespeare corrected. “He told me he would make himself known to you in good time.”

“He told you that, did he?” Vincent turned his head a little to one side and brought a hand up to his ear, as if imagining he were listening to a conversation at which he hadn't been present. “Quotha, ‘I shall make myself known to him in good time.' ” He sounded preposterously pompous. “And then you would have nodded and said, ‘Let it be so, Master Phelippes.' ” Suddenly he stabbed a forefinger at Shakespeare. “But if he fail to make himself known to me?”

“Then we are betrayed, and God have mercy on our souls,” Shakespeare said. Thomas Vincent asked him no more questions.

He wished the same would have been true of the players. He'd had to sound them out, one by one, knowing a wrong word in the wrong ear would bring catastrophe down upon them all. He felt as if he were defusing the Hellburner of Antwerp each time he spoke to one of them. At his nod, Richard Burbage had eased a couple of devout Papists from the company—both of them hired men, fortunately, and not sharers whom the other sharers would have had to buy out. Some of those who remained, and who knew what was toward, seemed to think it certain no one not of their persuasion was left in the Theatre. They were careless enough with what they said to make Shakespeare flinch several times a day—or, when things were bad, several times an hour.

It would have been even worse had they seen their parts for
Boudicca
and begun throwing around lines from the play. That would come soon enough—all too soon, Shakespeare feared. Even now, a robustious periwig-pated fellow named Matthew Quinn got a laugh and a cheer by shouting out that all Jesuits should be flung into the sea.

“Only chance, only luck, Lieutenant de Vega came not this morning, else he had been here to catch that,” Shakespeare said to Burbage in the tiring room after the company gave the day's play.

“I have spoke to Master Quinn,” Burbage answered grimly. “The rascally sheep-biter avouches he shall not be so spendthrift of tongue henceforward.”

Will Kemp came up to the two of them puffing on a pipe of tobacco.
Still nervous and irritable, Shakespeare spoke more petulantly than he might have: “How can you bear that stinking thing?”

“How?” Kemp, for a wonder, took no offense. “Why, naught simpler—it holds from my nostrils the reek of yon affectioned ass.” He pointed with his chin towards Matt Quinn. “And they style
me
fool and clown.” He rolled his eyes.

“They call you by the names you have earned,” Burbage said. “The names Master Quinn hath earned for this day's business needs must be named by Satan himself, none other having the tongue to withstand the flames therefrom engendered.”

“Better Quinn were
dis
gendered,” Shakespeare said. “The fright he gave me, I'd not sorrow to see him lose both tongue and yard.”