The sun was sinking fast, though clouds and smoke-more of the former and less of the latter than he'd seen the day before. Most of the time, he would have gone to the Widow Kendall's and then to his ordinary for supper. He'd already been to the lodging-house. The excitement with de Vega had chased sleep from him-and there stood the ordinary, its door open and inviting.
When he walked in, Kate was setting candles on the tables and lighting them with a burning splinter. One man had already taken his place near the hearth. He was cutting up the beefsteak that sat on a wooden trencher in front of him. "Will!" Kate exclaimed, and dropped the candles she was holding. She ran to him, took him in her arms, squeezed the breath out of him, and kissed him. "Sweet Will! God be praised I see thee whole and hale!" She kissed him again.
"A right friendly dive, this," said the man with the beefsteak, a grin on his greasy face.
Shakespeare ignored him. Holding Kate, kissing her, he forgot about Cicely Sellis. No, that went too far.
He didn't forget about her, but did put her in perspective. She was a temptation: a sweet one, but no more. Kate. Were he not tied to Anne back in Stratford, he would gladly have made her his wife.
He pushed that thought aside, as he had to. "As you see me," he said, "and passing glad to see thee."
Now he kissed her. The fellow by the hearth whooped. Neither of them paid him the least attention.
At last the kiss ended, but they still clung to each other. Kate asked, "What wouldst thou, my darling?"
"Thou knowest full well what I would," Shakespeare answered. "What I will, what I can, what I may. "
He shrugged. "Thou knowest likewise the difficulties, the impediments, the obstacles before me. I have not lied to thee." He took a certain forlorn pride in that. Kate nodded. He went on, "An I be able them to thrust aside, I'll do't in a heartbeat."
"May it be so. Oh, may it be so! With all in flux, who can say this or that shall not come to pass? If Elizabeth be free o' the Tower-"
"She is," Shakespeare said. "With mine own eyne I saw her leave it, borne on Sir Robert Devereux his shoulders."
"Well, then," Kate said, as if that proved something. Maybe, to her, it did. "Who could have dreamt such a thing, e'en a week gone by? So great a miracle being worked for England, why not a smaller one, for us twain alone?"
"Ay, why not?" Shakespeare agreed, and kissed her once more. That he remained alive and free to do it struck him as more than miracle enough right now.
When one of Lope de Vega's lovers caught him with another outside the bear-baiting arena in Southwark, he'd thought the round wooden building, so like a theatre in construction, would remain forever the scene of his worst humiliation. Now here he was back at the arena, and humiliated again: the English were using it to house the Spanish prisoners they'd taken. He squatted glumly on the sand-strewn dirt floor where so many bears and hounds had died.
The beasts were gone, taken away to another pit. Their stenches lingered: the sharp stink of the dogs and the bears' ranker, muskier reek. With so many captives packed into the place, the commonplace smells of unwashed men and their wastes were crowding out the animal odors.
Gray clouds gathered overhead. If it rained, the arena floor would turn to mud. Lope knew he would have to find himself a place in one of the galleries. I should have done that sooner, he thought. But he hadn't had the energy. He'd been sunk in lethargy since taking the blow that almost broke his skull, and especially since failing to avenge himself on Cicely Sellis. After that failure, nothing seemed to matter.
Not far away, one of his countrymen asked another, "In the name of God, why does no one rescue us?"
"Those who win, rescue," the other Spaniard said. "If we are not rescued, it is because we do not win."
That made much more sense than Lope wished it did. The first Spaniard said, "But how can we lose to this English rabble? We beat them before-beat them with ease. Are they such giants now? Have we turned into dwarfs these past ten years?"
"Our army is scattered over the country now," the other man answered. "English soldiers were supposed to do much of the job for us, so a lot of our men could go back to the Netherlands and put down the rebels there."
"Oh, yes. Oh, yes!" the first captive said. "The English did a wonderful job of holding down the countryside-till they turned on us like so many rabid dogs."
Lope said, "And the Netherlands have risen in revolt again, too, or so the English say. Just when we thought we had them quiet at last. " He wanted to shake his head, but didn't. Even now, more than a week after he'd been struck down, such motion could bring on blinding headaches. After a moment, he continued, "And who knows what Philip III will do once word of this finally reaches him?"
Neither of the other men answered for a little while. At last, one of them murmured, "Ah, if only his father were still alive." His friend nodded. So did Lope, cautiously. Philip II would have had the determination to fight hard against an uprising like this. That, of course, was not the smallest reason the English had waited till he was dead to rebel. And everyone knew all too well that Philip III was not the man, not half the man, his father had been.
That night, cannon fire off to the east interrupted Lope's rest. He wondered what it meant, but no one inside the bear-baiting arena could see out. He'd just dozed off in spite of the distant booms when an enormous explosion, much larger than a mere cannon blast, jerked him upright and make him wonder if his head would burst as well. After that, the gunfire quickly diminished. An almost aching silence returned.
Having nothing else he could do, he lay down and went back to sleep.
When the sun rose, the Englishmen who came in to feed their captives were jubilant. "Some of your galleons essayed sailing up the Thames," said the fellow who handed Lope a bowl of sour-smelling porridge, "but we sent 'em back, by God, tails 'twixt their legs."
"How, I pray you?" Lope asked. He shoveled the porridge into his mouth with his fingers, for he had not even a horn spoon to call his own.
"How? Fireships, the which we sent at 'em from just beyond London Bridge," the Englishman answered.
"The current slid the blazing hulks against your fleet sailing upriver, the which had to go about right smartly and flee before 'em: else they too had been given o'er to the flames. As indeed the San Juan was-heard you not the great roar when the fire reached her magazine?"
"The San Juan?" Lope crossed himself, muttering an Ave Maria. He'd come to England in that ship.
"And the San Mateo de Portugal lies hard aground," the fellow added, "hard aground and captured. I doubt not e'en you cock-a-hoop dons'll think twice or ever you try the like again." He went on to feed someone else.
"What does he say?" a Spaniard asked Lope. "I heard in amongst his English the names of our ships."
De Vega translated. He added, "I don't know that he was telling the truth, mind."
"It seems likely," the other man said. "It seems only too likely. Would a lie have such detail?"
"A good one might," Lope answered, though he knew he was trying to convince himself at least as much as the man with whom he was talking.
Day followed day. No Spanish force fought its way into London. At least as much as anything else, that convinced Lope the Englishman had told him the truth. The longer he stayed in the bear-baiting arena, the plainer it grew that the English uprising was succeeding.
With the arena still full of prisoners, some of the Londoners' usual sport was taken away from them.
Escorted by armed and armored guards, they began coming in to view the Spanish captives. Lope suspected it was a poor amusement next to what they were used to. Maybe they'll set mastiffs on us instead of on the bears, he thought. He took care never to say that aloud. When it first crossed his mind, it seemed a bitter joke. But the English might do it, if only it occurred to them.