If the Protestant orthodoxy was the tyrant in Reformation England, then the English Jesuit priests of the Counter-Reformation were its dissidents. Educated in exile, they began returning to England around 1580 to preach the “Old Faith” to their hidden flock. Their movements were conducted in cloak-and-dagger secrecy, for they were officially heretics, traitors, and outlaws. Several were also neighbors and acquaintances of William Shakespeare.
The rest of William’s day at the New School had been uneventful, with the exception of Oliver Gasper’s sudden gusher of a bloody nose, the treatment of which left a deep, scarlet stain on William’s white sleeve. He was closing the schoolhouse door, preoccupied with libidinous thoughts of the girl he was rushing off to meet, when a horse splattered up the muddy, straw-strewn street and checked up next to him, steaming and huffing.
“Good den, sir,” its rider said, and dismounted. “I seek the schoolmaster of Edward the Sixth’s New School.” His clothes were stained and torn, his horse muddied. He had long black hair and a wispy black mustache, but no beard. His eyes, too, were dark, black on black, and there was an intensity to them that put William on edge.
“You’ve found it, at the end of the day,” said William warily.
“I bear a gift for schoolmaster John Cottom.”
William thought quickly. Alexander Aspinall was attending to administrative duties inside. “Whence comes it, and who bears it?”
“I am Simon Pray, clerk to a lawyer, Master Humphrey Ely of London. He got it of John Cottom’s brother, Thomas.”
“Master Cottom is master here no longer,” William replied. “He vanished some weeks past.”
“Vanished?” said the horseman, and his face fell. “Has he no relations here?”
“None in Stratford. He was of Lancashire.”
“Lancashire . . .”
William could see him calculating: another two days’ ride. The horseman looked to the east. His horse stamped impatiently.
“I have urgent business in Shottery . . .” he said, half to himself, then turned to William. “And my Master Ely would have me whipped upon returning so tardy to London.” The horseman’s cutpurse eyes appraised William, up and down. His glance lingered at the bloodstain on William’s sleeve, and then again at his throat.
Finally the horseman looked William deep in the eyes, and said deliberately, “I would ask thee, young sir, if there be an inn of Stratford where a man might — in the blessed embrace of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three Persons and one God, and of the Blessed Virgin Mary — rest secure?”
William understood the code.
“The Bear,” said William. “Not the Swan.”
The horseman nodded as though he already knew the answer. “I give you gramercies, good sir.” Then he hesitated for another beat. “Know you John Cottom?”
“Ay,” William answered. “In sooth, I love him as a father, and am greatly discomfited by his sudden absence.”
“Then I would ask a further boon of you, and a greater.” The rider took a parcel wrapped in a rough cloth from the horse’s saddlebag. “I am charged to deliver this to Master Cottom, yet I have other cares which crave my attendance. As one who loves John Cottom, who knows his family and their whereabouts, might I prevail upon you to complete the delivery? It is a precious lading.”
The horseman looked up and down High Street, and as no one was paying them any mind, he unwrapped the parcel to reveal a fine mahogany box. Bigger than a tinderbox but smaller than a hurdy-gurdy, it was inlaid with ivory delicately fashioned in the shape of a St. George’s cross — a symbol of the Old Faith on the Continent.
“What does it contain?” William asked.
The horseman hesitated for a moment, then replied, “It is locked.”
“Is there no key?”
“None. Nor was there any when Thomas Cottom gave it unto Master Ely.”
William took a deep breath, and looked at the inlaid cross glittering in the late afternoon sun. He couldn’t have explained why, but somehow its very brightness frightened him.
“Will you take it to John Cottom?” the rider asked quietly.
“Nay,” said William, shaking his head. “I cannot. My teaching here is my family’s sole support, and the term has just begun.”
The horseman dropped his voice even lower. “It would aid the cause,” he said, dark eyes aflame.
William hesitated. Between the shining cross and the horseman’s unnerving stare, he felt nearly bewitched. But suddenly the schoolhouse door slammed open. The horseman covered the box again as Aspinall emerged and looked at them suspiciously.
“What, William, hast thou lingered to practice thy declensions?” Aspinall stepped around the corner of the building, opened his breeches, and began to piss. “Master Cottom also warned me of thy difficulties in Latin. And who is this, thy tutor?”
“Merely recommending, magister, a reputable inn to this weary traveler,” William responded with a slight bow.
Aspinall looked back and forth between them as he piddled against the wall, steam hissing and rising. “The Swan,” he said to the rider. “Not the Bear. The Swan’s the only tavern for a virtuous man.” He gave his prick a lusty shake. “If you be not virtuous, then you may drown yourself at the Bear, though in recompense you will hang in this life, and burn in the next!” Aspinall laughed at his own wordplay as he tucked his tool away and hiked his trousers.
“I thank you for your words of caution,” the horseman replied with a twitchy smile to Aspinall, who was headed back for the door. “One must indeed exercise care in one’s faith,” he added with a glance to William.
Aspinall grunted and, with a last dark look at the rider and the bundle in his arms, returned to the schoolhouse.
The horseman waited a moment, then addressed William. “If you are of the true faith,” he said quietly, “to perform this office may be your family’s salvation.”
William took a step back as though he were being hounded by a beggar. “Nay. I and my family care little for faith and not at all for causes. I prithee go to.”
“See, then, how I go,” the rider said, replacing the box and mounting his horse. “Fare thee well, boy.”
He splattered away down the street toward the town’s two largest inns, leaving William standing in the cold fall air with Alexander Aspinall’s urine trickling past his feet.