RACING FOR THE Tube, I called everyone I could think of who might know anything. No luck. I was dumped straight to voice mail every time. Then I was pelting down stairs, deep into the London Underground, where cell phones were useless.
In my rush to meet Roz after rehearsal, I’d cut short my end-of-day routine. Had I forgotten to switch off the lamp on the table I was using as a desk? Knocked it over, leaving my rat’s nest of notes to smolder and curl, waiting until everyone had gone to wink into flame? The theater had burned once before through carelessness, near the end of Shakespeare’s life. That time, if I remembered it right, everyone had got out except one small child.
My God. Had everyone got out?
Don’t be the Globe, don’t be the Globe, I chanted silently to the rhythmic clatter of the train. By the time I raced up out of the St. Paul’s station, two steps at a time, night had fallen. Darting through an alley, I emerged into a wide cross street. The entire bulk of the cathedral hunched like a Sphinx in front of me, blocking my way to the river. Turning right, I began to run, skimming past the iron spikes that caged the building in its churchyard, past trees that clawed at its walls. Left around the pillared main entrance and the statue of Queen Anne glaring west down Ludgate Hill. Left again, swinging around the south front in a wide arc toward the walkway newly carved through the jumble of medieval London, clearing a wide vista all the way from the cathedral down to the river. I rounded the corner and stopped.
The path tipped downhill; at the bottom lay the Millennium footbridge, arcing over the Thames toward the squat brick fortress of the Tate Modern on the south bank. I couldn’t yet see the Globe off to the museum’s left; I couldn’t see any more than the central section of the Tate, still looking more like the power station it had been built to be than the temple of modern art it had become. Its old smokestack speared the night; its new upper story, a wide crown of green glass and steel, glowed like an aquarium. All backlit by a lurid orange sky.
After dark, this part of London—the City proper, the financial heart of Britain—should have been nearly empty, but people were streaming around me, scurrying downhill. I set off among them, weaving through the thickening crowd. Flower beds fled past, and benches. A Dickensian pub on the right; modern offices on the left. Victoria Street, cutting across the path, was a parking lot. Dodging between bulbous black taxis and double-decker red buses, I ran on.
A few yards ahead, the path narrowed. A solid, steamy mass of pulsing humanity was squeezing onto the Millennium Bridge to see the blaze. My heart sank; I’d never push my way across. I looked back. The crowd had already closed in around me; without wings, there was no way I was going anywhere.
A deep shuddering roar sped across the water, and smoke scudded across the sky from the left, chased by a shower of sparks. In a great wave, the crowd moaned and surged toward the bridge, carrying me with it. An opening yawned off to the right, and I glimpsed shallow stairs leading downward. I bored my way to the edge and shot free at last, half tumbling, half skidding down the steps.
I came to rest on a small landing ten feet underneath the bridge, gaping at the opposite bank. The Globe was on fire. Smoke poured like black blood down its sides; more spewed skyward. Through this, spires and streamers and fountains of flame—red, orange, and yellow—spurted into the night.
The phone jangled in my pocket. It was Sir Henry Lee, one of the graying lions of the British stage, then gracing my show as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. “Kate!” he cried as I flipped the phone open. “Thank God!” In the background, I heard the spiraling wail of sirens. He was there.
My anxiety pushed to the surface. “Did everyone get out?”
“Where—”
“Did everyone get out?”
“Yes,” he said testily. “Everyone’s out. You’re the last to be accounted for. Where the hell are you?”
I realized with irritation that tears of horror and relief were pouring down my cheeks. I smeared them away with the back of my hand. “Wrong side of the river.”
“Bloody hell. Hang on.” He muffled the phone, and the background noises blurred.
Just past sixty, Sir Henry had been famous on stage and screen for well over three decades. In his prime, he’d played Achilles, Alexander, and Arthur; Buddha and Christ; Oedipus, Caesar, and Hamlet. Like an aesthete of the old school, he favored Savile Row, Veuve Clicquot (“on the subject of champagne, my dear, that many czars can’t have been wrong”), and chauffeur-driven Bentleys. His roots, though, were rougher, and on occasion he flaunted them with relish. He was a scion of Thames watermen; the burly arms of his forebears had plied the river for centuries, ferrying goods and people up, down, and across. Cut him, he liked to say, reverting to the broad dockyard accent of his youth, and he’d bleed green Thames river murk. Deep in his cups, Sir Henry could still brawl like a footballer.
We’d met six months before, when I’d jumped at the chance to direct a show in a dubious corner of the West End; at the last minute, he’d reluctantly agreed to take on the lead for two weeks, to repay an unspecified debt to the playwright. Within days, he’d taken to referring to me as “that brilliant American child,” a phrase that—when used as an introduction—had a tendency to make me stutter and spill something, generally coffee or red wine, down my front. The play was wretched and had lasted for exactly two weeks; three days later, though, I’d gotten the call from the Globe. Not unrelated, I suspected, but Sir Henry had never admitted to pulling strings.
He came back to the phone with a roar. “Codswallop. I told you, she’ll be there…. Sorry about that,” he said to me, his voice softening from steel to silk. “I’ve just been told the bridges are all hopeless. Can you make your way down to the river walk?”
“If that’s where these stairs under the Millennium go, it’s my only choice.”
“Under the—?…But that’s brilliant! Foot of the stairs, darling, and head east. First gap in the wall leads to an old pier. Cleopatra will fetch you there in five minutes.”
“Cleopatra?”
“My new boat.”
The river walk was eerily empty. The moon threw long shadows before me; behind, the cries and hoots of the crowd overhead seemed far off and insignificant. I jogged east, the massive river wall brushing my right shoulder, disappointed gray flats lumbering by on my left. Light swelled softly from lanterns set into the wall. Not too far down, a slimmer stone wall bulged out from the main concrete bulwark. Stairs led up and over this dainty wall, into a doll’s garden filled with pale straggling flowers. In the main wall opposite, a gap opened onto nothingness. Fighting off sudden dread, I walked forward to the edge.
Dank air tanged with salt slipped upward. I shuddered and drew back. If this was the right place, though, Sir Henry was due any moment. I forced myself forward to the edge once more. Steep wooden stairs, slippery and black with algae, descended into the dark. There was no railing. Gripping the wall on either side, I set one foot on the first step. The wood creaked, but held my weight. I peered downward. The staircase seemed to be held to the wall with nails that might have been culled from Roman crucifixions. There was no pier to be seen; fifteen feet below, the stairs simply sank into the water.
I strained to see across the river to the southern bank. Just below the Globe, a splinter was moving on the dark surface of the water. The Cleopatra? Surely it was a boat. Yes—it turned straight for me. This had to be right.
One slick step at a time, I inched downward until I stood only three feet above the water, its surface as smooth as dark glass. Now and again, some rank, unknown shape bobbed past from left to right, which meant that the tide must be rising. Fighting dizziness, I stood still and lifted my eyes across the river. Out in the center, the water caught and shattered the lights from both city and fire. Then I glimpsed another movement. Sir Henry’s boat, streaking across the river. Even as relief plumed through me, though, the boat swept into a wide turn, revealing the black-and-white checks of a police boat along its hull. Not the Cleopatra, after all. It sped away, disappearing under the Millennium Bridge.
Its wake had reached the lowest step, idly sloshing back and forth, when I heard a small sound in the other direction. A scrape that might have been a footstep, up at the head of the stairs. Once again, the heat rash of watching eyes needled down my back. Maybe Sir Henry had tied up at some proper pier, I told myself, and had now come to look for me by land. I turned to look.
Nothing was visible on the stairs or through the gap in the wall but flittering moonlight. “Hello?” I called, but nobody answered.
Then I heard a sound I knew from the stage: the cold ringing hiss of a blade being loosed from its sheath.
I backed down one more step. And then another. The next was underwater.
I peered back across the river. No other vessel broke the surface of the water. Where the hell was Sir Henry? And why, in God’s name, had I come to such a godforsaken spot alone? I wouldn’t have dreamed of it in New York or Boston. What had I been thinking?
I looked back. I pressed my eyes into the dark, but whoever was up there had gone still and silent—if anyone was there in the first place. Maybe my nerves were playing tricks on me. Maybe.
At the edge of my vision, I caught a movement much lower down, near the water. On either side of the stairs, chains clanked gently against the wall. On the eastern side, a small rowboat was tied up, bobbing in the current. If I could get to it, I could row to safety.
Then I saw that it was not tied up. Its mooring uncast, the boat was inching out from the wall toward me.
I whirled to scan the other bank. I’d been caught in a vise; the only way out was the river. Looking down at the water rippling just below my feet, I wondered about the current. Could I swim across? Or would it be better to slip silently into the water and let myself drift along the wall till I came to another set of stairs?
Again, I glanced over my shoulder toward the river wall. I could barely make out the rowboat’s outline, but that was enough. It had pulled closer. I glanced around the steps at my feet and felt through my pockets, but found nothing remotely useful as a weapon. Not a loose stick or stone; all that my pockets held were a few coins and Roz’s golden box. Her secret.
Keep it safe, she’d said. Did that mean that it wasn’t? Or that I, so long as I held it, was not?
Screw the damn box.
I heard a roar—and out from under the Millennium shot the sleek white arrow of a private pleasure boat. The Cleopatra! Careful of my shaky balance, I raised one arm in a stilted wave more like a salute. For a long moment, no one answered. Then Sir Henry stood up in the middle of the boat and waved back.
Behind me and to the left, I heard rather than saw the rowboat stop; the water slapped differently against its hull. The Cleopatra roared closer, washing out all other sound until Sir Henry’s pilot cut her motor back. In that instant, I heard the creak of weight on the top step. Glancing backward, I caught the glint of steel.
I hurled myself into the Cleopatra and tumbled onto the deck in a heap at Sir Henry’s feet.
“Are you all right?” shouted Sir Henry.
Hauling myself back to a stand, I waved him off. “Go.” At a nod from Sir Henry, the pilot threw the motor into reverse. “Where were you?” I gasped as we swung back around. “I thought you were at the theater.”
“What made you think that?” asked Sir Henry, drawing me into a seat by his side.
“I heard sirens. On the phone.”
He shook his head. “Every siren in London’s been wailing for the last hour, child. No, I was at a drippingly dull soiree upriver. Useful in the end, though,” he said, surveying the crowd on the bridge. “Most people have forgotten, but the river’s still the finest road through town.”
When the river trade began to dwindle after the Second World War, Sir Henry’s father had taken to deep drinking, oscillating between rage and regret, until one night the river had silenced his misery by swallowing him whole. Young Harry—as Sir Henry had then been known—had taken to something else: using the pliant beauty of both voice and body to please. He’d begun with sailors, worked his way up to slumming lords, veered through a stint in the Royal Navy—he liked hinting that he’d won his place there via blackmail—and ended up theatrical royalty. No one alive knew the range of Shakespeare’s characters from strumpet to king, or the chiaroscuro of their morals—the flicker from glory to grime and back—better than he did, which was perhaps why he played them with more cunning and compassion than anyone I’d ever seen.
He’d been more or less retired from the stage for a decade. Drying out, said some. Pickling himself, said others. Whichever it was, he’d got bored doing it, and now he was coming back. He’d refused the larger roles of Claudius—the villain—and Polonius—the fool—for the smaller role of Hamlet’s father, loved and lost. In short order, he’d move on to Prospero and Lear, under directors as august as he was. But he’d chosen to appear as the ghost in my show first, as a way to wet his feet in the role of an elder statesman. A choice that still astonished me.
The Cleopatra straightened and rose to skim the surface of the water. I took another look back at the stairs. No one was there, and the rowboat was once again tied up against the wall. Had I dreamed that it moved?
In the gap in the wall up at the top of the stairs, the silhouette of a man slid into view. A knot tightened in my belly. There had been someone there. But who? And why?
Behind me, a deep groan split the night, and I spun to see the Globe disappear in a cloud of steam on the far bank. When I glanced back at the receding shore, the man of shadows had melted back into the night.