George slaying a dragon, hung from a massy gold chain around his shoulders.
"Well met, Master Shakespeare," he said, his voice a deep rumble without much force behind it. "I have for some while now thought well of your plays and poems."
"You are generous beyond my deserts, your Grace," Shakespeare said, still bemused. Surely he hadn't been summoned for pretty compliments alone. He shook his head, annoyed at himself for being so foolish as even to think such a thing. Thomas Phelippes' hand lay somewhere behind this. Phelippes, whatever else he was, was not one to waste time on inessentials.
"Sit. Sit." Lord Burghley waved Shakespeare and Nicholas Skeres to a pair of plain wooden stools in front of his chair. He coughed wetly a couple of times as they perched-Shakespeare nervously-then went on, "Now is the winter of our discontent." Shakespeare stirred. Burghley's smile showed several missing teeth, and another one broken. "Ay, I heard Burbage, as Richard, mouth your words. They hold here truer than they did for the Plantagenet. Know you that King Philip fails?"
"I've heard somewhat of't," Shakespeare answered cautiously, thinking Sir William Cecil himself did likewise.
No sooner had that crossed his mind than the nobleman let out a rheumy chuckle. "We race each other into the grave, he and I. But when the worms take us, mine the victory, for my son is greater than his sire, his far less. Belike you'll treat with Robert ere this business end-but, for now, with me."
"I am your servant, my lord," Shakespeare said, as Nick Skeres had before him. But Skeres had only been greasily polite. Shakespeare could not imagine disobeying Lord Burghley-and did not want to imagine what would happen to him if he did.
"My servant?" Sir William Cecil shook his head. The flesh of his cheeks wobbled like gelatin, as no healthy man's would have done. "Nay. You shall be my good right arm and the sword in the hand thereof, to strike a blow for England no other man might match."
Shakespeare thought of Christopher Marlowe, and of Kit's fury at being excluded from this plot. He also thought he would gladly have given Marlowe his role. But if it were to be done, the best man had to do it.
Shakespeare and Marlowe both knew who that was. "By your leave, sir," Shakespeare said, "I tell you the chance of all going as we would desire. " His voice trailed off. He could not make himself tell Burghley how bad he thought the odds were.
The gesture served well enough. Lord Burghley chuckled again-and then coughed again, and had trouble stopping. When at last he did, he said, "Think you not that, on hearing of Philip the tyrant's passing, our bold Englishmen will recall they are free, and brave? Think you not they will do't, if someone remind them of what they were, and of what they are, and of what they may be?"
Shakespeare bared his teeth in a grimace that was anything but a smile. "Am I Atlas, your Grace, to bear upon my shoulders the burthen of the whole world his weight?"
"I'll lighten somewhat the said burthen, an I may." Lord Burghley picked up the book. Even though he set a pair of spectacles on his nose, he still had to hold the volume at arm's length to read. He flipped through it rapidly, then more slowly, till at last he grunted in satisfaction. Then, to Shakespeare's surprise, he switched from English to Latin: "Know you the tongue of the Romans, Magister Guglielmus?"
Remembering Thomas Jenkins, the schoolmaster who'd made sure with a switch that his Latin lessons stuck in his mind, Shakespeare nodded. "Yes, sir, though it is some while since I used it aloud. You would do me a courtesy by speaking slowly."
Nicholas Skeres looked from one of them to the other. A slow flush rose in his cheeks. Sir William Cecil said, "He understands us not, having no Latin of his own."
"Are you certain?" Shakespeare asked. "He seems a man who shows less than he knows."
Burghley nodded heavily. "In that you are not deceived. Beware of him in a brawl, for he will always have a knife up a sleeve or in a boot. But you must believe me when I say Latin is not among the things he conceals."
"Very well, sir." It wasn't very well; Shakespeare trusted Nick Skeres not at all. But he'd taken his protest as far as he could. "What would you say to me that you will not say in his understanding?"
"If you were a scholar of Latin, you must surely have gone through the Annals of Tacitus?"
"So I did." Shakespeare nodded, too. "I made heavy going of it, I confess, for he is a difficult author."
"Recall you the passage beginning with the twenty-ninth chapter of the fourteenth book of the said work?"
"Your pardon, sir, but I recollect it not. Did you tell me to what it pertains, my memory might be stirred."
"I shall do better than that. Attend." Peering down at the book now on his lap, Burghley began to read the sonorous Latin text. After a couple of sentences, he glanced at Shakespeare over the tops of his spectacles. "Do you follow?"
"I take the meaning, yes, though I should not care to have to construe the text."
"Meaning suffices," Lord Burghley told him. "You are a scholar no longer, and I am not your master. I will not whip you if you mistake an ablative for a dative. Shall I continue?"
"If you please, sir."
Sir William Cecil read on to the end of the passage. To Shakespeare's relief, he went more slowly after the poet admitted having some trouble following the grammar. When he'd finished, he eyed Shakespeare once more. "See you the dramatic possibilities inhering to that section?"
"I do indeed." Shakespeare had to pause and go slowly and put his thoughts into Latin. The possibilities Burghley had mentioned boiled inside his head. He wanted to talk about them in the plain English in which he wrote. Even more than that, he wanted to flee this fancy house in Drury Lane, get paper and pen and ink, and sit down in his ordinary or some other tolerably quiet place and get to work.
Maybe Lord Burghley saw as much, for he smiled. "And see you how I would have the drama springing from this passage be shaped?"
"Yes." Shakespeare nodded. "You would have the audience construe the Romans here as. shall we say, some more recent folk speaking a tongue sprung from Latin. From this, it would follow-"
Burghley held up a hand. "You need say no more, Magister Guglielmus. I see you have nicely divined my purpose. Therefore, to my next question: can you do it?"
Shakespeare fell back into English, for he wanted to be sure he made himself clear: "My lord, I can do't; of that, there's no doubt. But may I do't? There lies the difficulty, for even the first scratch of pen on paper were treason, let alone any performance based thereon."
"You can say that in English, sure enough, for I already know it," Nick Skeres said.
William Cecil also returned to his native tongue, saying, "One performance is all I expect or hope for."
"By Jesu Christ, God His Son, I do hope so!" Shakespeare said. "For after the first, never would there be-never could there be-a second."
But Burghley shook his head. "Not so. If the first shape events as we hope, think you not that your works will endure not of an age, but for all time?"
"There's a weighty thought!" Nick Skeres' bright little eyes glittered. "I'd give a ballock to be famed forever, beshrew me if I wouldn't."
That such fame might be his had never crossed Shakespeare's mind. Any player who dreamt of such things had to be mad. By the nature of things, his turns on stage were written in the wind. The youngest boy who saw him would grow old and die, and then what was he? A ghost. Worse-a forgotten ghost.
He dared hope his plays would last longer than memories of his performances, but hope was only hope.
The one playwright he knew who expected to be famous was Marlowe, and Kit owned arrogance for an army, and to spare.