‘The Spanish slattern?’ Bruce said. ‘She may have slipped you, Shakespeare, but not me. You won’t find her because I have her.’
Shakespeare’s calm did not last. He eyed Bruce as if he would happily murder him. ‘What do you mean, Mr Bruce — how can you have Ana Cabral?’
‘I took her. Had her arrested by honest English pursuivants as she left the courses. She now resides with my friend.’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere safe, Shakespeare. Somewhere you can’t get your tender, milk-fed little hands on her. Unless, of course, you wish to do some sort of trade for Glebe…’
Shakespeare turned to Mills. ‘Do you know about this, Frank?’
Mills shook his head, but a little too slowly.
‘Frank?’
Mills sighed heavily. ‘She is a guest of Topcliffe at Westminster.’
‘Topcliffe! God’s blood, what has Topcliffe to do with any of this? He is more unclean than the lice of Limbo.’
‘Oh aye,’ Bruce put in. ‘He speaks most highly of you, too. Calls you a Papist-swiving, stranger-hugging sheep turd.’
Shakespeare ignored Bruce and looked directly at the thin, spidery figure of Mills, who seemed to sag ever deeper into his bony shoulders. ‘Frank, does Cecil know of this?’
Mills’s eyes swivelled to Bruce and back to Shakespeare. He said nothing.
Shakespeare turned to the Scotsman. ‘Well?’
‘Do you think I give a fishwife’s piss what Robert Cecil knows or doesn’t know? I am answerable to the King of Scots, not to an English cripple.’
‘Mr Bruce, Ana Cabral may hold the key to the riddle of this Scots prince. But she is also a guest of this realm, here with the train of Don Antonio Perez and under the protection of the Vidame de Chartres and his father, all of them envoys from Henri of France. She cannot be lifted off the streets and consigned to Topcliffe’s torture chamber without order of the Privy Council. Do you think Her Majesty would thank us for starting a war with France?’
Bruce leant forward in his chair. The generous cloak of his kilt flopped low across his chest. ‘Well, Shakespeare, you get her out of there — if you can.’
Shakespeare rose from his chair, knocking it to the floor, and strode for the door.
Mills was up instantly. He grabbed Shakespeare by the arms to hold him back. ‘Wait, John, there are other matters we must talk on. We must work together.’
Shakespeare shrugged off his restraining hands. He was shaking with rage.
Mills unfolded himself to his full height. ‘John, listen to me. Cecil is right: we have a common enemy. We cannot afford this hostility between us.’
‘Do we have a common enemy?’ He jerked his chin in the direction of Rabbie Bruce. ‘ He seems like the enemy.’
Bruce was stone-faced. ‘Is that so, Shakespeare? The world blows apart, an assassin stalks my sovereign and you retire to your bedchamber. Should I wait on your pleasure in this?’
Reluctantly, Shakespeare took his seat again. Behind his anger, he knew they had to sort this out. Mills and Cecil were right. Mr Secretary Walsingham had said it so often that his words were imprinted on Shakespeare’s brain like the royal seaclass="underline" The farm that is riven will fall into disarray, its crops will fail and its beasts sicken and die. We fight a common enemy. We have no time to fight one another.
‘The question we must answer,’ Mills said firmly, ‘is what this conspiracy is about. Topcliffe knows he cannot apply the rack or gyves to the woman, but he can scare her well enough — and that is what he is presently engaged on. Let us see what she reveals.’
Bruce had his dirk in his hands, flipping and spinning it. It was a mean weapon with an eighteen-inch double-sided blade and a hilt of deer horn. To Shakespeare it looked more like a short sword than a dagger. Bruce idly ran his finger along its keen edge and brought forth a thin line of blood, which he put to his mouth. ‘One thing is certain,’ he said. ‘There is a death plot here. She and her conspirators will try to kill King James. His death is the key to both kingdoms.’
‘But there is more than that. There is the powder… the attack on the strangers.’
Mills looked doubtful. ‘I am not certain there is a connection, John.’
‘Of course there is a connection. Cecil accepts it. Glebe is the link. One day he publishes seditious discourses against the strangers, the next he has the tale of the Scots prince. This can be no coincidence. And who is this Laveroke who brought him these tales?’
Bruce suddenly sat up straight. ‘Did you say Laveroke?’
‘Have you heard the name before?’
‘Oh aye, we know Luke Laveroke well enough.’ He thrust his dirk hard into the table. It stood there, embedded and quivering. ‘He is a man I would happily slice to dog meat with my little blade. There was a time he pretended to work for us, but all the time he has worked for the scarlet whore and his friends in Spain. You must know him well, for he has spent much time in England.’
‘I have never heard the name before.’
‘No? How about Baines? Richard Baines. That’s one of his aliases. In Rheims or Rome, they’ll know him as Father Benedictus, ordained priest. Changes his name, changes his appearance. A great player, he is. You never know who he is today, or who he’ll be tomorrow. Most recently, he was the middleman for Errol and Angus, carrying sedition between Edinburgh and Spain. We heard the truth about Laveroke from his servant, under torture. But by then he had gone. So now he’s in England, is he?’
‘Baines tried to kill me not two hours since. I thought he was working for Essex.’ Shakespeare looked at Mills in disbelief. ‘Did you know he was Laveroke?’
Mills seemed as stunned as Shakespeare. He shook his head, his jaw tight shut.
‘Mr Bruce,’ Shakespeare said. ‘Are you certain of this? How is it that the Scots have never mentioned the connection to us before?’
Bruce laughed. ‘Do you tell us all your secrets, Shakespeare?’
‘But Baines has been consistently anti-Papist. He tried to poison the well at Rheims while posing as a Roman Catholic exile. They even slung him in gaol for a twelvemonth.’
‘And did he succeed in poisoning any of the fathers? I think not. A fine ruse that was, then. Take it from me, Shakespeare. Baines is Laveroke and he’s a greased priest.’
‘And he was the one that said Marlowe’s mouth should be stopped. What in the name of God is his connection to Marlowe in all this?’
Bruce gave an indifferent shrug of his shoulders. ‘I know nothing of that, nor care. What I want to know is where he is now. Glebe must know. Take me to him and you can have the woman.’
Suddenly, Shakespeare remembered something — the stench of Baines when he arrived at Gaynes Park following his ride from London. That had been no ordinary stink of sweat and dirt, but the smell of rotting cabbage — the smell of brimstone, otherwise known as sulfur, an ingredient of gunpowder.
The door to the room opened. Sir Robert Cecil had returned. A slight, dark presence. He nodded to the three men assembled around the table. ‘Gentlemen, do we have progress? Can I tell Her Majesty that this pretender will be found, seized and brought to trial as an impostor without delay?’
‘Baines is Laveroke, the man who brought the stories to Glebe,’ Shakespeare said. ‘The Scots know him as a Papist spy.’
‘Well, that is news, but I am not sure that it surprises me.’ Cecil’s expression did not alter. ‘My father had doubts about Baines before, said he had never been certain of his loyalties. We were considering bringing him to Star Chamber for questioning on certain matters — letters passed to Spain through the French embassy which the code-breaker believed might have been in his hand. But he was under Essex’s protection — and then he wrote that denunciation of Marlowe and that seemed to prove his trustworthiness. I fear we took our eye off him.’ Cecil turned to Rabbie Bruce. ‘I suggest you bring him in, Mr Bruce. Have we any idea where he might be?’