'Look what I found crawling out of the woodwork!' said Mannion proudly. 'Thought I'd just go and check up on our man outside The Globe, the one keepin' an eye on things. Lo and behold, this woman comes out of the play. 'Cept no woman I've ever met walks like that. So I goes up to him or her, curious, and the rest's history. Very fetching, he was, in his little bonnet. Got swept away, that did, in the river.'
'You great fat fool! You total idiot!' This was another new Shakespeare, standing eye to eye with Mannion, his rage seeming to run through his every fibre. For the first time in his life, Gresham saw someone actually physically shaking with rage. 'I was coming to see your master!'
Even Mannion was stunned by the intensity of the stupidly dressed man in front of him. What an extraordinary figure Shakespeare was, thought Gresham. He must have kept this rage in check for the boat journey over to The House and then unleashed it just now as he was thrust into the room. Could this man store moods, like others stored food, and bring them out of his emotional pantry on demand?
Shakespeare turned to Gresham. ' It's all over!' He was calming down, but like a boulder that has tumbled down a huge scarp and is now on more level ground, his range still had momentum and power.
'What is all over?' asked Gresham, beginning to feel his own anger rise within him. If this damned man had had the decency to be either an artist or a fraud then perhaps lives would have been saved, the sum total of human terror reduced if only by a little. Yet he had to be both a supreme artist and a fraud, complicating things beyond belief.
'Marlowe. Your friend Marlowe.'
Gresham felt rather than saw the tide of revulsion, the gasp of fear from Jane at the mention of the dread name.
'He went to Burbage, Hemminge and Condell. My friends! My friends who at the clink of coin and sight of a manuscript were willing to betray me!'
The tears were of anger, not self-pity. Gresham motioned Shakespeare to sit down, Mannion to bring wine. Shakespeare looked for a moment, then sat, suddenly deflating like a stuck bladder.
'How to betray you?' asked Gresham quietly.
'They told him where the manuscripts were kept. The original manuscripts. In the handwriting of the King, Andrewes, Bacon, Oxford, Derby, Rutland, Raleigh — ' there was the tiniest of flickers across Gresham's face — 'the Countess of Pembroke, you name it… and, of course, Christopher Marlowe. They knew, the three of them. Always have known. Encouraged me in the fraud…'
'And did they know that most of the original manuscripts were hugely enhanced when you put your hand to them? Did they know that the ideas came from others but that the real genius came from you, Master William Shakespeare? Did they know that most of these plays would be just another afternoon's entertainment if it weren't for the poetry you have in your soul?' Gresham's voice cut like a saw.
Shakespeare had wine in his hand now. It was forgotten. Two, three huge tears formed in his eyes, rolled down his muddy cheeks, carving a little wobbling path of white in the brown. 'They knew. And they were prepared to sell me out. My friends. My lifetime friends. That was the deal, you see. Marlowe would get all the manuscripts, after giving Burbage, Hemminge and Condell a great lump of money. There'd be a performance, a big one. And then Marlowe would appear. It's what he's always wanted, don't you understand? The biggest dramatic moment of his, of anyone's, life. Christopher Marlowe, the great Christopher Marlowe, the founder of the Elizabethan stage, the master of the blank verse line… and not dead after all! Here, alive, on stage. His great enemy Cecil vanquished by death.'
Something cold and still had entered Gresham's mind, speeding his thoughts as a sledge with razor-sharp edges cuts through snow, silent, powerful and vicious.
'And after he appears like a Jack-in-the-Box, and the audience is gasping with wonder and amazement,' said Gresham, 'then he makes his second announcement. That while they, his loyal public, thought he was dead, he was dead only in name. His writing continued, almost to the present day. They know the plays of William Shakespeare? Did they really think that such plays could be written by a poor country boy from Stratford with no education? No! He, Christopher Marlowe, in the long, long years of his exile, had used Shakespeare as other noble minds had used Terence thousands of years ago.' Gresham had risen to his feet now. He stood in the centre of the room and flung his arms wide in the manner of the great Burbage in a great tragic lead.
'I AM MARLOWE AND I AM ALIVE! I AM SHAKESPEARE, AND HAVE LIVED ALONGSIDE YOU IN THIS THEATRE AS HIM FOR TWENTY YEARS PAST! MY ENEMIES-ARE DEAD! THE MASTER HAS RETURNED!'
There was silence in the room.
'My God,' said Mannion, 'wouldn't the little bastard love that? ‘Wouldn't he really, really love that?'
Jane was struggling to overcome her revulsion, desperately seeking to prove to herself that she could think logically about Marlowe. 'But wouldn't the other authors complain? Claim the credit?'
'Don't you see?' said Shakespeare, almost in desperation now. 'He's cleverer than all of us. Many of the authors don't want to be revealed. They'll stay silent. Someone like the Countess of Pembroke will be laughed out of Court if she claims authorship — a woman, for heaven's sake, able to write like that? What a joke! Either that, or it will herald a very different attitude to women, for life. And without the manuscripts, and with half the original authors dead, where's the proof? If Hemminge, Condell and
Burbage are prepared to betray me — and they are — then he claims my plays as easily as a hawk cuts out of the sky and catches a newly born rabbit.'
'Are you sure they will betray you?' asked Gresham. This time he got up and poured anew measure of wine into the goblet of his old enemy.
'Yes. They've been different, strange with me recently, but that's not how I know. They did the deal with Marlowe in The Globe, over a meal they had brought in. They forgot the servant who served them the meal. Said enough to make him suspicious. He came to me. "Sorry, Master Shakespeare," he said. "Very sorry to intrude. But it sounds to me as if Masters Burbage and Condell and Hemminge are going to let someone else take the credit for all those plays what you wrote. And that ain't right…" Pathetic little man,' said Shakespeare with a sad and bitter laugh. 'His sense of justice was outraged by what he heard so he listened at the door. Didn't know it was Marlowe, of course.'
'Do servants often talk to you?' asked Gresham, remembering the grumpy old man at the Dominican Priory.
'All the time, actually,' said Shakespeare, rather wistfully. 'Don't know why. They always have. Remember that speech in King Lear’. ‘ About poor wretches who bide the pelting of the pitiless storm?'
Gresham nodded his head.
'That came from the same man who warned me about Burbage and the rest of them. He came in drenched one day. Said as how wretches like him had no defence against the rain. Pitiless it was, he said.'
'And from that you wrote what you did?'
Shakespeare looked surprised, his grief forgotten. He also looked confused. 'Why… of course I did. I mean, he virtually wrote it for me, didn't he?'
'No, he didn't actually,' said Gresham, looking at Shakespeare with new eyes. 'He gave you the raw material. Very raw material. God — if he exists, which I very much doubt — gave you the poetry.'
There was a long silence.
'Well, that's it, isn't it?' Shakespeare had changed again. He was now the Stratford grain merchant, rather plump, needing to go about his business because time waits for no man. i suppose he'll leave me alone at last once he's made his grand declaration and claimed my work as his own. No one will listen to plain old William Shakespeare, uneducated old William Shakespeare.' He turned to Jane. 'Do. you know, I shouldn't wonder if he claims my sonnets. And my Venus and Adonis. And The Rape of Lucrece. Why shouldn't he? He's got all the rest…'