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.
Lope Felix De Vega 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.