‘Off you go, young ladies,’ she ordered, and they scuttled away. ‘Now then, Mr Shakespeare, I am exceedingly pleased that you have come. Did you know that your talented brother is here?’
‘I have seen him already, my lady.’
‘He has promised me the role of the beautiful Titania in his new masque, if my husband allows me to play her. But I fear we shall have to wait some little while, for the earl is in poor health.’
‘Is it a sickness of long standing?’
‘It came on very suddenly, a vomiting sickness of most violent nature after he returned from the hunt yesterday. I would wonder whether it was something he ate, but no one else in the household is ill, and there are more than a hundred people here, including servants, family, players and guests, so it surely cannot be that. My lord believes himself bewitched, but that is the fever talking. The physicians are with him.’
You must save Strange, sir. I beg you, save Strange.
Shakespeare tensed once more at the recollection of the priest’s final words. Save Strange from what?
The countess touched his arm. ‘I am sure all will be well, Mr Shakespeare. My lord is always as fit as a hare and will withstand any small sickness. He will be up at the chase again in no time.’
‘Do you think I might see him, my lady?’
She gave him a wan smile. ‘You believe there is some mischief here, don’t you, Mr Shakespeare?’
‘I pray not. But, yes, it was the first thing that occurred to me.’
There was silence between them. ‘I fear I know what you are thinking.’
He tried to keep his face neutral. ‘I had, indeed, heard some suggestion that the earl was threatened.’
Silence again. And then she sighed. ‘Yes. It is true. There was a letter …’ The countess broke off, seeming to think better of it.
‘A letter?’ Shakespeare pressed her. ‘What did the letter say, my lady?’
‘It said … it said my husband would die in the most wretched manner if Richard Hesketh went to the gallows. It seems we are to be cursed by evil letters.’
Richard Hesketh had brought a letter, too. Hesketh, a name that tainted the Earl of Derby and would haunt him for as long as he lived. Shakespeare mentally rehearsed what he knew of him. Hesketh was a Lancashire cloth merchant whose large, extended family had for many years been close friends and retainers of the earl and his forefathers. By all accounts, Hesketh was a stout, yellow-haired fellow, who seemed to have led a largely blameless life. He was probably a Catholic, but that was hardly unusual in these parts. His life changed dramatically in the year 1589 when he became involved in a local dispute over cattle, in which a landowner named Thomas Hoghton died.
Forty men were arrested. Hesketh had been at the centre of the fight, but he had evaded capture and fled to Prague. There he fell in with other English exiles, including Jesuits and renegade members of the Stanley clan, the Earl of Derby’s family. It was a city Shakespeare had never visited, but one he felt he knew well from the reports received by Walsingham and, more recently, Cecil. The place was thick with Protestant spies and riddled with Catholic plotters from Spain and the Vatican. Into this volatile mix, of course, were added the curious figures of the alchemist Dr Dee and his friend and scryer Edward Kelley, along with a few dozen more of the malign, misguided and beguiled. And now a new name had to be added to the cauldron of Prague intrigants: the mysterious and beautiful figure of Lady Eliska Nováková, friend to Heneage and now a guest of Derby. Who exactly was she and what she was doing here?
Before leaving Nonsuch, Shakespeare had pressed Cecil for more information, but none was forthcoming. ‘I wish you to meet her without prejudice, John,’ was all he would say.
The Earl of Derby must have gone cold as he read the letter Hesketh had brought from Prague, thought Shakespeare. As the earl was a direct descendant of Henry VII, and under the terms of Henry VIII’s will was a prime claimant to the throne, the letter entreated him to become a figurehead for England’s Catholics, and to snatch the crown for God and the Pope. Become a figurehead for England’s Catholics? God’s teeth, how could the earl not have recalled the grisly fate of the last Catholic figurehead – Mary Queen of Scots? That proud head had been lopped off at Fotheringhay Castle in a drenching of blood.
The earl did not seem the stuff of such martyrdom. He loved life too much. Poetry, plays, the hunt, gaming, his beautiful wife and daughters: that was where his devotion lay.
But as he read the Hesketh letter, he must have realised he was in an awful trap: if he even talked the contents over with the wretched Hesketh, he would be condemning himself in the eyes of the Queen and the Cecils. If he did not hand Hesketh over to the Privy Council as a traitor, then he, Derby, would be the traitor.
And if he did denounce Hesketh? Then he would make enemies of the whole Catholic world and of Hesketh’s kin.
In the end, Derby had had no option: to have any chance of survival, he handed the letter over to the Queen and had Hesketh taken into custody. Under questioning by the relentless William Wade, clerk to the Privy Council, Hesketh maintained that he never knew the contents of this letter. He had collected it, sealed, from a contact near London and had then ridden for Lancashire. Eventually, however, he confessed his guilt to high treason and was executed by hanging, drawing and quartering at St Albans last November.
Derby had been left badly wounded by the affair. Many Catholics now believed him a betrayer for bearing witness against Hesketh and sending him to the scaffold, while many Protestants were still not convinced that he was not, himself, a Catholic with designs on the crown of England.
Now the earl was on his sickbed. Could any man believe this to be mere coincidence?
‘This threatening letter, my lady … do you know who it was from?’
The Countess of Derby’s proud head did not fall, nor did her shoulders slump. ‘An enemy, of course.’
‘May I see the letter?’
‘It has been destroyed. We have no idea who sent it. One of Hesketh’s family, perhaps, or an enemy at court. Any number of people. Sometimes I think we are hated by the whole world, Mr Shakespeare, and I do not understand why. We are Christians and have led Christian lives, cultivating the arts and literature and learning. Never has Ferdinando strayed into politics or joined a grouping to seek power.’
What was it Sir Thomas Heneage had said to him in Cecil’s chambers at Nonsuch Palace? Lord Derby has few enough visitors these days. He did not press the issue, but asked the question he most wished answered.
‘Does the name Lamb mean anything to you?’
The countess hesitated, as the constable had done.
Shakespeare waited for her.
At last she smiled, as if suddenly remembering. ‘Why, yes, I have met Mr Lamb. He came here at Christmas, with some of the townspeople, to celebrate the birth of our Lord. Such occasions are not uncommon. My husband sees it as his duty to provide such entertainments for the local gentry and merchants.’
‘You were not at court last Christmas?’
‘Are you sent to spy on us, Mr Shakespeare? You seem to have a great interest in affairs that cannot possibly concern you.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I am not here to spy on you. But, yes, this does concern me, as I shall explain.’
‘Very well. My husband considered it unfitting to go to court at Christmas, following the recent stir. He was not sure how welcome we would be.’
Shakespeare understood. ‘What do you recall of Lamb?’
‘I did not mark him much, but I do recall I was introduced to him and thought him a pleasant man. He had an easy manner. Why, what makes you ask about him?’