Phelippes tore off the bottom part of the sheet of paper on which Shakespeare had been writing.
Shakespeare stifled a sigh. The other man surely would not pay him for the paper. Phelippes inked a pen.
He began to write. Shakespeare's own hand was quick and assured, if not a thing of beauty. But his eyes widened as he watched Phelippes. The bespectacled little man's talents weren't showy, but talents he unquestionably had. The goose quill raced over the paper at a speed that put Shakespeare's best to shame.
"Here." Phelippes handed him the scrap he'd torn off. "Will it serve, think you?"
He'd copied out the bit of King Philip's speech he'd read before. Shakespeare stared. He himself used the native English hand he'd learned in school back in Stratford; his writing had grown more fluid over the years because he did so much of it, but had never changed its essential nature. Phelippes' studied Italian script, by contrast, was so very perfect, an automaton might have turned it out. And he'd written in haste here, not at leisure.
"You know full well 'twill serve, ay, and more than serve," Shakespeare answered. "I yield you the palm, Master Phelippes, and own I have not seen so fine a character writ so swift in all my days. The writing masters who show their art before the general could not outdo you."
He'd meant it for praise, but Thomas Phelippes only sniffed and looked at him over the tops of his spectacles. "Those disguised cheaters and prating mountebanks," he said scornfully. "Thread-bare jugglers, the lot of them. They write to be writing. I write to be read, and need no great show towards that end."
He prides himself in his very obscurity, Shakespeare realized. He'd liefer be a greyhen, unseen against the heather, than a strutting peacock flashing his feathers for all to admire. That struck the poet as a perverse pride. Most Englishmen-and Spaniards, too-gloried in display, so much so as to make deliberate self-effacement seem unnatural.
But that was wide of the mark. "I shall give Master Vincent your name," Shakespeare said. Phelippes nodded complacently. The poet asked, "How shall he inquire after you?"
"Never mind," Phelippes said. "So that he hath my name, it sufficeth me. Come the time, we shall know each the other." He rose from his stool. "Farewell." With no more flourish than when he'd come in, he slipped out of the ordinary.
"What a strange little man," Kate said a few minutes later-she seemed to need so long to realize Phelippes had gone.
"Strange?" Shakespeare considered that. After a moment, he shook his head. "He is far stranger than simply strange."
The serving woman frowned. "Will you speak in riddles?"
"How not, speaking of one?" He didn't explain himself. He wasn't sure he could have explained himself, poet though he was. But he knew what he meant.
When he went to the Theatre the next day, he told Thomas Vincent of Phelippes. The prompter nodded, but asked, "Hath he the required discretion?"
"Of discretion he hath a surplusage," Shakespeare answered. "He wants some of the goodly qualities framing a man of parts, but discretion? Never."
"I rely on your judgment, as I needs must here," Vincent said. "An you be mistook-" He broke off, as if he didn't even want to think about that.
Neither did Shakespeare, but he said, "Therein, I am not."
"God grant it be so," Vincent said. "And when may I look for King Philip?"
He was as pushy as a prompter should be. "Anon," Shakespeare told him. "Anon."
"Anon, anon," Thomas Vincent echoed mockingly. "Are you then metamorphosed into a drawer at the Boar's Head, ever vowing to cure ails with ale and never bringing the which is promised?"
"You'll have't, and in good time," the poet said, letting a little irritation show. "King Philip breathes yet, mind you. We stray close to treason, treating of his mortality ere it be proved."
"Don Diego hath given you his commission," Vincent said. "That being so, treason enters not into the question."
"The question, say you?" Shakespeare shivered, though the day was mild enough. When he thought of the question, he thought of endless hogsheads of water funneled down his throat, of thumbscrews, of iron boots thrust into the fire, of all the fiendish ingenuity Spaniards and home-grown English inquisitors could bring to bear in interrogating some luckless wretch who'd fallen into their clutches.
And he had no trouble at all seeing himself as a luckless wretch.
"How may I find this Master. Phillips, said you?"
"Phelippes," Shakespeare corrected. "He told me he would make himself known to you in good time."
"He told you that, did he?" Vincent turned his head a little to one side and brought a hand up to his ear, as if imagining he were listening to a conversation at which he hadn't been present. "Quotha, a€?I shall make myself known to him in good time.' " He sounded preposterously pompous. "And then you would have nodded and said, a€?Let it be so, Master Phelippes.' " Suddenly he stabbed a forefinger at Shakespeare. "But if he fail to make himself known to me?"
"Then we are betrayed, and God have mercy on our souls," Shakespeare said. Thomas Vincent asked him no more questions.
He wished the same would have been true of the players. He'd had to sound them out, one by one, knowing a wrong word in the wrong ear would bring catastrophe down upon them all. He felt as if he were defusing the Hellburner of Antwerp each time he spoke to one of them. At his nod, Richard Burbage had eased a couple of devout Papists from the company-both of them hired men, fortunately, and not sharers whom the other sharers would have had to buy out. Some of those who remained, and who knew what was toward, seemed to think it certain no one not of their persuasion was left in the Theatre. They were careless enough with what they said to make Shakespeare flinch several times a day-or, when things were bad, several times an hour.
It would have been even worse had they seen their parts for Boudicca and begun throwing around lines from the play. That would come soon enough-all too soon, Shakespeare feared. Even now, a robustious periwig-pated fellow named Matthew Quinn got a laugh and a cheer by shouting out that all Jesuits should be flung into the sea.
"Only chance, only luck, Lieutenant de Vega came not this morning, else he had been here to catch that,"
Shakespeare said to Burbage in the tiring room after the company gave the day's play.
"I have spoke to Master Quinn," Burbage answered grimly. "The rascally sheep-biter avouches he shall not be so spendthrift of tongue henceforward."
Will Kemp came up to the two of them puffing on a pipe of tobacco. Still nervous and irritable, Shakespeare spoke more petulantly than he might have: "How can you bear that stinking thing?"
"How?" Kemp, for a wonder, took no offense. "Why, naught simpler-it holds from my nostrils the reek of yon affectioned ass." He pointed with his chin towards Matt Quinn. "And they style me fool and clown." He rolled his eyes.
"They call you by the names you have earned," Burbage said. "The names Master Quinn hath earned for this day's business needs must be named by Satan himself, none other having the tongue to withstand the flames therefrom engendered."
"Better Quinn were dis gendered," Shakespeare said. "The fright he gave me, I'd not sorrow to see him lose both tongue and yard."
"You're a bloody kern today," Kemp said.
"Nay." Shakespeare shook his head. "I thirst for no blood, nor want none spilled-most especially not mine own."
"Master Quinn will attend henceforth," Burbage promised. "He stakes his life upon't."
"The game hath higher stakes than that," Shakespeare said, "for his I reckon worthless, but I crave mine own to keep."
"And they style me fool and clown," Will Kemp repeated. Shakespeare left-all but fled-the tiring room a moment later. He knew this plot was all too likely to miscarry, but wished Kemp hadn't reminded him of it quite like that.