Saturday morning (continued)
Oliver found his brother once again among the tourists in the chancel of Holy Trinity, gazing at the Shakespeare burial site with its doggerel curse.
“Will’s will,” he said in Toby’s ear.
“Will’s will’s what?” Toby seemed sleepy and irritable. His clothes were muddy from the dig, and he pulled awkwardly on the oversized cricket sweater he insisted on wearing despite the warm weather.
“You know what I’m talking about,” Oliver went on in a low voice. “The last will and testament of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, which you brought up the other day. It mentions a famous second-best bed and quite a lot of other things. Including the crucial evidence that links Stratford Will to London Will. Evidence that you claim doesn’t exist.”
“Go on.”
“London Will had three great friends, his lead actor Richard Burbage and the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, who assembled the First Folio of his plays after his death.”
“What about them?”
“They’re mentioned in Stratford Will’s will!” Oliver’s voice echoed off the stone walls. A group of Japanese tourists looked at him with curiosity. He continued quietly. “He left them each twenty-six shillings to buy memorial rings. You must have known that. It completely undermines your thesis that there’s nothing to connect Stratford Will to the London playwright.”
“Contrariwise, it’s a key piece of evidence that supports it.”
“Explain.”
“That bequest was written into the will between the lines, in a different handwriting and at a later date. It wasn’t initialed by Stratford Will or by the witnesses, which was the usual practice. As you say, these were London Will’s greatest friends—the actor who first played Hamlet, Lear, Othello, and Richard III, and two men who devoted themselves to preserving his Complete Works for posterity. And they’re merely an afterthought, in a will made just a month before Shakespeare’s death? Isn’t it more likely that this is yet another clumsy postmortem attempt to dress the upstart Stratford Will in London Will’s feathers?”
Oliver could not resist a glance up at the memorial on the wall. The polychrome effigy of Shakespeare, quill in hand, gazed into the mid-distance.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” Toby added. “The will has another late bequest. Hamnet Sadler’s name was written in, replacing the name of another man. Now, this Sadler was a friend of Stratford Will’s parents. Will had known him all his life and even named his only son after him. Sadler was also a witness to the will. So you’d think Will, of all people, would know how to spell the name Hamnet. But in the addition to the will’s text, it’s written as ‘Hamlet.’ Rather a crude and, if I may say, obvious attempt to forge a connection to the playwright.”
“Yes, but in that First Folio of London Will’s plays, there’s a poem by Leonard Digges. It mentions this memorial, to Stratford Will.” Oliver pointed to the effigy. “Doesn’t that prove that Heminges and Condell knew the author of the plays came from Stratford?”
Toby laughed softly. “No, the only question is what did Heminges and Condell know and when did they know it. Digges, interestingly, was the stepson of one of the will’s overseers.”
“Are you suggesting they were all part of the conspiracy to elevate Stratford Will?”
“Maybe it suited their purposes, for some unknown reason.”
“Careful, you’re getting perilously close to my Alan Smithee theory.”
“As if I wouldn’t remember that London Will was real enough to be a Groom of the Chamber to King James,” Toby snorted. “Along with Burbage, Heminges, and Condell, incidentally.”
Oliver gazed down at the tomb. A rope barrier swagged across the chancel a foot or so in front of the altar rail. Toby’s shoulder bag was slumped against a brass pole at one end.
“Why didn’t you mention the suspicious amendments to the will at the dinner party?” he asked.
“What am I guilty of now—précis? You remember the audience that night. Most of them couldn’t follow your little essay on bananas.”
“Did you discuss these issues with Dennis Breedlove?” Oliver continued, hoping to make the transition sound casual.
“Yes. He didn’t keep interrupting the way you do.”
“When you had these chats, did Dennis ever ask you anything about the family? Mother, the brigadier, Uncle Tim, or Aunt Phoebe? Even me?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Olivia, but I don’t remember your name coming up. Nor any other relative.”
“So Breedlove didn’t get you to admit something that, in retrospect, you wished you’d kept quiet?”
“Nothing that he’d blackmail me for, since that’s clearly where you’re going with this.”
“But there was something he got out of you?”
Toby glanced around the chancel. There were no tourists within earshot, apart from an old, balding man with his back to them, who was studying the choir stalls. Toby didn’t seem to notice him.
“The last time I spoke to Uncle Dennis,” he whispered, “we’d just discovered that priest-hole in the cellar across the river. I may have let it slip that we were keeping it a secret from the Town Council. But if he’d threatened to sell us out, we’d probably have called his bluff. Today’s our last day on the project anyway, and we haven’t found anything interesting.” He pulled ruefully on his muddy cricket sweater. “As you can see, I’ve been doing my fair share of digging the dust.”
What had the blackmail letter said? Oliver asked himself. You don’t want others to dig up the past.…It fits, but as Toby said, scarcely worthy of blackmail. And where, then, is the “family secret”?