And then he broke down into uncontrollable tears, the sobs racking his body as if each one was an arrow sinking into his flesh. Gresham did not stop Jane from going to him, putting her arms around him. She was holding him like a baby, rocking him back and forth. She was someone who knew what it was to have the products of one's imagination for ever claimed by someone else. She liked Ben Jonson, loved him in her own way. Yet what did it cost her to know that so much of his Volpone was her own work?
Gresham's voice came like a sudden cloudburst damping summer fire, ‘I think if anyone has the credit for your writing, Master Shakespeare, it should be you. I will see it is so.'
Shakespeare looked up. He wanted to laugh out loud, yet something stopped him from doing so. Something implacable, quite fearsome in nature.
'Where are the manuscripts stored?' asked Gresham very quietly.
Stunned, Shakespeare told him. 'They're all in the thatch of the Lord's Gallery. I hid them there after Marlowe raided the bookkeeper's room. I gambled he'd never think of my taking them back to The Globe.'
'Do you have a separate copy of all the plays? A fair copy? Kept somewhere else? Not in The Globe, I mean.'
'Yes, for almost all of them,' said Shakespeare.
'And when is the performance they're putting on to allow Marlowe to reveal himself?'
Two days from now. All Is True' said Shakespeare. 'The actors call it Henry VIII. It doesn't matter what you call it. It's the play written by the King. It's dreadful. But it's got lots of spectacle, lots of show. They decided it's the one that would drag the most people in.'
'Do you trust me to restore to you what Marlowe and the others are threatening to rob you of? The right to your work?' asked Gresham.
Shakespeare looked at the man who had been his sworn enemy, his tormentor, and had now offered to be his friend. 'Quite frankly, I don't,’ said Master William Shakespeare. 'I doubt the devil himself could do it.'
Sir Thomas Overbury sat slumped on his bed in the Tower of London. The other prisoner sat opposite, on a chair Overbury had arranged to be carried over from his apartments. He was a poor figure, his fellow prisoner. Someone Overbury would not have paused to spit at only a few weeks before.
'I was right to refuse the King!' Overbury said bitterly. The other prisoner nodded, taking a gulp of the putrid wine that was all Overbury had managed to get into The Tower. 'Me! To go as ambassador to some godforsaken frozen hole! Oh, I know what they all wanted. The plan's clear as day. Get me posted overseas and then, with my brains gone from the scene, get rid of Robert Carr.' Overbury lurched to his feet, taking a swig of his own wine. 'My friend Carr wouldn't last weeks in the… cess-pit of the Court once I was safely posted overseas!'
'You were offered an ambassadorship? By the King?' asked Overbury's companion, who had damned the King without ever actually seeing him, and might well die without seeing him too. He was not sure whether to laugh at Overbury or bow before him.
'I refused it! Of course! Who is the King to tell me what to do?'
The other prisoner blanched at that. He knew who the King was. The person in whose name he had been arrested. The person in whose name he would most likely be tortured, executed or left rotting in this place. A trace of fear swept into his mind. Was this person, this Sir Thomas Overbury, a wise man to drink with?
'This imprisonment won't last! It was necessary. The King has to do it, for the form's sake! Carr will weedle and charm James into releasing me soon enough.' Overbury was pacing the narrow room now. 'And then there'll be revenge for those who put me in this stinking pile of stone. Carr needs me. The King needs me!’
This man is mad, the other prisoner thought. He put his cheap cup down and started to edge towards the door.
'Damn this imprisonment!' Overbury raged, hardly noticing the other man. The Court was a whirlpool of intrigue, current and cross-current, and here he was with his vessel swept into a backwater, land-locked with no oars and no sail. The inaction was intolerable!
A few miles away, Henry Gresham felt a quiet satisfaction at the way Overbury had been neutralised. Yet even he did not realise that when one man causes a prey to stop alive in its tracks, he opens up a route for others to give it the death blow.
24
29th June, 1613 The Globe Theatre
'the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind.'
‘Ready for the big day?' John Hemminge grinned at Henry Condell.
'Are you sure this is… the right thing?' Condell answered.
'Look,' said Hemminge patiently, as if explaining to a child, 'we're actors, aren't we? We deal in drama. Kit Marlowe was a legend in his lifetime — for what he wrote, what he did and for who he was. There's been God knows what rumours about his death ever since it was meant to have happened. This revelation that the great Kit Marlowe didn't die in 1593, that we've been watching his work for twenty years — this is going to be the greatest defeat of death since Jesus! It's the most dramatic moment of our lives. Of anyone who's alive now! Remember poor old Will's speech in Henry V? About all those who would rue the day they weren't there at Agincourt? What will people give to have been there on the day when Kit Marlowe revealed himself at The Globe? In front of The King's men, with The King's Men putting on his cursed play a day later! Henry…' Hemminge moved over to Condell, put his arm around his shoulders. 'Sometimes history asks you a question, and you have to say yes.'
Condell thought for a moment. 'But it's not the truth!' he said. 'You know what those scripts Marlowe sent in were like — Richard II, Richard III, Julius Caesar. Oh, I know they had good bits — but most of them were raving, ranting gibberish! We know it was Will who turned them into plays that the likes of us could perform. Is it right to ditch Will in favour of a man who was nothing but trouble in his first incarnation, and who seems to have brought nothing but trouble in his second? We're denying our friend his inheritance, John. We're taking Will's art away from him.'
'Art!' Hemminge snorted. 'Sod art! What are we players to do with art? We're to do with whatever gets them flocking over the river to see us perform. I know we fancy ourselves. We don't put on bear-baiting or cock-fighting after a play,' and he started a mincing walk, affecting a high-pitched voice, 'not like some of those other low brow theatres. But we would, if it meant the difference between living like gentlemen or starving, wouldn't we? Would you starve for art? Would you?'
'Probably not,' said Condell with a long sigh, 'but if I was a king negotiating a treaty, I'd rather do it with Will Shakespeare than Kit Marlowe.'
'Forget it!' said Hemminge. 'We'll make it worth Will's while in money, and it's not as if he doesn't have enough of it already.' 'But 1 still worry-'
'Don't! He's claimed the credit all his life for stuff other people sent him. Now someone else wants a share. It's poetic justice. He's got his property and his business in Stratford. Not bad for a terrible actor. Don't worry about it! We'll be drinking with him and having a laugh about it in six months' time!'
Condell doubted that but did not show it. He had a part to play in the performance that was even now limbering up. His mind would not be on the show, he knew. It would be on the revelation that would follow it, at the point where the audience might have been expecting a jig. Christopher Marlowe. Killed in a bar-room brawl twenty years ago at the peak of his dramatic powers. Yet not dead. Alive, here in The Globe. And managing to talk to his audience these twenty years past as if from the grave. Dammit, they had to make Marlowe do a sequel to Doctor Faustus, before he really did die. Only a matter of time, and short time at that, given the look of him. It had to be a sell out.