He didn't have to look up anxiously whenever someone new came into the ordinary, either. Being able to concentrate on his work meant he got more done. It also meant he did look up, in surprise, when a man loomed over him. "Oh," he said, setting down his pen and nodding to the newcomer. "Give you good even, Constable."
"God give you good Eden as well," Walter Strawberry replied gravely. "May you obtain to Paradise."
"My thanks," Shakespeare said. "Why come you hither?"
Before answering, Strawberry grabbed a stool from a nearby table and sat down across from the poet.
"Why, sir? Why, for that I may hold converse with you. But converting's thirsty work, and so"-he raised his voice and waved to Kate-"a cup of wine, and sprackly, too!"
"Anon, sir, anon," she said, and went back to whatever she was doing.
When the wine didn't arrive at once, Constable Strawberry sent Shakespeare an aggrieved look. "
"Anon,' saith she, yet she comes not. Am I then anonymous, that she doth fail to know me?"
Shakespeare scratched his head. Was Strawberry garbling things as usual, or had he made that jest on purpose? Probably not, not by his expression. Shakespeare gave Kate a tiny nod. She rolled her eyes, but brought the constable what he'd asked for.
"I thank you," he said grudgingly. "I'd thank you more had you come sooner."
"There's the difference 'twixt our sexes," Kate agreed, her voice sweet.
"Eh? What mean you?" Strawberry demanded. Kate pretended not to hear him. Shakespeare stared down at the tabletop so the constable wouldn't see his face. Strawberry muttered to himself, then spoke aloud: "I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offenses."
"Just so, sir," Shakespeare said. "Why are you come? I asked aforetimes, but you said not."
Strawberry frowned. Maybe he had trouble remembering why he'd come to the ordinary; Shakespeare wouldn't have been surprised. But then his heavy features brightened. "Methought you'd fain hear the report from mine own lips."
"Better the report from your lips, sir, than from a pistol," Shakespeare said gravely. "But of what report speak you?"
"Why, the one I am about to tell, of course," the constable replied.
"What is the point? The gist? The yolk? The meat?"
" 'Tis meet indeed I should tell you," Strawberry said.
"And as for the point, it lieth 'neath his hat," Kate muttered.
"What's that? What's that? Am I resulted? 'Swounds, no good result'll spring from that, I do declare."
"Spell out your meaning plain, then," Shakespeare urged.
"And so I shall, by bowels and constipants," Constable Strawberry said. "You have denied acquaintance with the felonious cove hight Ingram Frizer."
"I do deny it still," Shakespeare said. Yes, the two men he knew Frizer had killed had died at the order of Sir Robert Cecil or his father. Yes, Sir Robert sat at Elizabeth's right hand these days. But who could say how many others Frizer had slain? Who could say how many he'd robbed or beaten? Anyone who admitted knowing him was either a fool or a felonious rogue in his own right-Constable Strawberry, for once, hadn't misspoken in describing Frizer so.
As if the poet had avowed knowing Frizer rather than denying it, Strawberry said, "Belike you will rejoice to hear he is catched."
"If he be the high lawyer and murtherer you say, what honest man would not rejoice?" Shakespeare said.
"May he have his just deserts."
"Nay, no marchpane, no sweetmeats, no confits for that wretch," the constable replied. "He lieth in gyves in the Clink, and lieth also, in's teeth, in declaiming he hath done naught amiss. An I mistake me not, there's plenty a miss he hath done could give him the lie, too."
"I know not. If truth be known, I care not, neither," Shakespeare said. "And in aid of misses, I care but for one." He smiled at Kate. She came over the stand behind him and set her hands on his shoulders.
"Ah? Sits the wind so?" Walter Strawberry asked. Shakespeare and Kate both nodded. He reached up and put his right hand on hers. Strawberry beamed. "Much happiness to you, then-and may you know no misfortune, Master Shakespeare."
Again, Shakespeare wondered whether he used his words cleverly or just blindly. Before he could decide, Kate said, "Style him as is proper, Master Constable: he is Sir William."
"You, sir, a knight?" Strawberry said.
"I am," Shakespeare admitted.
"Marry, I knew it not." Constable Strawberry looked from him to Kate and back again. "And marry you shall, meseems. Well-a-day! I do congregate you, and wish you all domestic infelicity."
Kate growled, down deep in her throat. Now Shakespeare forestalled her. Patting her hand, he said, "I thank you in the spirit with which you offer your kindly wishes."
"Spirits? Not a bit of 'em, Sir William-'tis wine before me." Strawberry got to his feet. "And now, having come, I must needs away. Good night, good night." He lumbered out of the ordinary.
The poet stared after him, confused one last time. Was that Good night, good night or Good night, good knight or perhaps even Good knight, good night? Shakespeare decided he didn't care. He stood up, too, and kissed his intended, and forgot all about Walter Strawberry.
Historical Note
For the Spanish Armada to have conquered England in 1588 would not have been easy. King Philip's great fleet would have needed several pieces of good fortune it did not get: a friendlier wind at Calais, perhaps, one that might have kept the English from launching their fireships against the Armada; and a falling-out between the Dutch and English that could have let the Duke of Parma put to sea from Dunkirk and join his army to the Duke of Medina Sidonia's fleet for the invasion of England. Getting Spanish soldiers across the Channel would have been the hard part. Had it been accomplished, the Spanish infantry, the best in the world at the time and commanded by a most able officer, very probably could have beaten Elizabeth's forces on land.
Had the Spaniards won, Philip did intend to invest his daughter Isabella with the English throne; through his descent from the house of Lancaster, she had a claim to it. He also did intend to marry her to one of her Austrian cousins; Albert is the one she wed in real history. In his plots leading up to the sailing of the Armada, Philip was willing to seek the death of most of Elizabeth's advisers, but wanted Lord Burghley spared. Thus I thought it legitimate to preserve him alive for purposes of this novel.
Nicholas Skeres and Ingram Frizer are two of the men who, in real history, killed Christopher Marlowe in what may (or may not) have been deliberate murder rather than a brawl over the bill at Eleanor Bull's ordinary at Deptford on May 30, 1593. Frizer was the one who actually inflicted the deadly wound.
Skeres, by his record, preferred con games to out-and-out violence. The date above is Old Style; the difference between England's Julian calendar and the Gregorian (which in real history was not adopted in the English-speaking world until 1752) plays its role in the story here.
Edward Kelley, counterfeiter and alchemist, was an associate of John Dee's-and also, like Skeres and Frizer and Marlowe himself, belonged on the fringes of the murky world of Elizabethan espionage. So did Anthony Bacon, Francis' older brother, who was indeed involved in a scandal pertaining to what the Elizabethans called sodomy in France before the time of the Armada. Francis himself had similar tastes, though in real history they did not come to light till well into the seventeenth century.
Very little of what is supposed to be Boudicca and King Philip is my own work; I am not a true Elizabethan blank-verse beast, as George Bernard Shaw called Marlowe. Most of Boudicca is taken from John Fletcher's Bonduca (a variant on the name of the Queen of the Iceni, who is also widely, though incorrectly, known as Boadicea). Fletcher was Shakespeare's younger contemporary, and probably though not certainly his collaborator in Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and the lost Cardenio. A prolific dramatist, Fletcher collaborated most frequently with Francis Beaumont. My Boudicca does not follow his Bonduca in plot; he had his purposes, which are far removed from mine. I have taken his lines out of order and out of context, and have adapted them as I found necessary. He did not give Boudicca/Bonduca's younger daughter a name; I have supplied one. He called Judas the Roman soldier I have named Marcus-I do not believe Shakespeare would have been so unsubtle as to use that particular name. Other bits of the fictional drama here come from Henry VIII and Shakespeare's King John, from Marlowe's Tamburlaine (both the first and second parts), and from William Averell's An Exhortacion to als English Subjects, the last of which I confess to casting into blank verse.