AT THE END of the street, I looked back. The curtains were gone; moonlight glimmered on the windowpane. No shadow was visible within. Had I dreamed it? My hand tightened around the brooch in its box.
“So you do not wish to go home, after all?” asked the cabby.
“No.”
“Where to, then?” he asked.
I shook my head. If the man of shadows had found his way to my flat, nowhere was safe. I pulled both jackets tighter around me.
“Claridge’s,” said Sir Henry.
As we rolled down into the wider streets of Mayfair, I started to speak, but he shook his head ever so slightly. I followed the flicker of his eyes, and caught the curious stare of the cabby in the rearview mirror. As soon as he saw me catch his glance, he looked away.
At Claridge’s, Sir Henry paid the man quickly, helped me out, and steered me inside to a grand hall mirrored like Versailles, its floor a sleek black-and-white Art Deco chessboard. The concierge slid forward with concern. “Hello, Talbot,” said Sir Henry.
“Always a pleasure to see you, sir,” the man replied. “What can we do for you tonight?”
“A discreet place to wait, if you please,” answered Sir Henry. “And an even more discreet car and driver. The driver of the taxi we’ve just left was a bit of a gawker. He may be back.”
“He may return as much as he pleases,” said Talbot blandly, “but unless you wish it, he will find no trace of you.”
We were installed in a small sitting room full of deep chairs and sofas covered in chintz. While Sir Henry prowled the room, inspecting the Lalique crystal scattered about, I stood fixed in the center, brooding over the brooch in my hand. Once, I opened my mouth to speak, but again Sir Henry shook his head.
A few minutes later, Talbot reappeared to whisk us down a hallway, out through a service entrance, and into a small private garage where a car with tinted windows waited, its engine purring. The cabby, it seemed, had indeed turned up again, claiming that we’d left something behind in his taxi. Talbot’s face twitched in an enigmatic smile. “He will not disturb you further tonight. I let him discover a few bits of evidence that might plausibly add up to the notion that you will be staying the night with us, in one of the suites. I believe that he may have locked himself in a janitor’s cupboard, while prowling near the service stairs.”
“I won’t ask how that happened,” said Sir Henry with satisfaction as we climbed into the car.
“Good luck, sir,” said Talbot softly, shutting the door behind us.
As we pulled away, I looked back. The concierge stood impassively at attention, growing smaller and smaller as we drew away, until he vanished in the night.
This time, Sir Henry doled out his directions gradually, so that we zigzagged through the streets of Mayfair, purring past Berkeley Square and out into Piccadilly. Swinging around Hyde Park Corner, we trundled along Knightsbridge, lonely and dark at this hour, turning off at last into the leafy lanes of Kensington. We were headed to Sir Henry’s town house.
The streets were empty, but I couldn’t shake a sense of menace swelling up through the darkness. The farther we sped from the hotel, the stronger it became, until the very trees seemed to be snatching greedily at the car. We were almost to Sir Henry’s when lights flared behind us, and another vehicle swung into the road. Instantly, the panic that I’d been fighting all night surged up in a clammy wave and closed over my head. My heart racing, I gripped the edge of the seat but could barely feel it through tingling hands. We turned left and then quickly right, but the other car stayed close behind.
At last we crunched into a short gravel drive; I was out of the car and racing for the house before the wheels came to a halt. The great carved door in front of us yawned open, and I bolted inside, Sir Henry right behind. I had one glimpse of red taillights disappearing down the street, and then the door swung shut. I stood panting in the grand hall of Sir Henry’s town house, facing his startled butler.
“Check to see that all doors and windows are closed and locked, if you please, Barnes,” Sir Henry said smoothly. “And arm the alarm. Then we’ll have cognac—the Hine Antique, I think—and a fire in the library.”
The library was upstairs, thick with burgundy velvet and the wild green meadows of William Morris designs. Light skated off the polish of marble busts, oak shelves, and leather bindings, and glinted in the gilt tooling of the books. Two deep armchairs stood before the fire; Barnes had laid out the cognac and snifters on a table between them.
I went straight to the fire. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
Sir Henry eased himself into one of the armchairs. “It was no ghost come from the grave, my dear, that pricked Roz with a needle. Or paid that cabby to keep tabs on you.”
I turned in surprise. “Is that why we changed cars at Claridge’s?”
“Omniscience,” said Sir Henry, pouring out the brandy, “is an excellent quality in God, but suspect in everyone else. You told that cabby neither your street nor your house number. Nor did I. But he knew them both.”
Feeling my way backward, I perched on the edge of the other chair. The cabby had known my street—had slowed and nearly stopped at my front door. His voice, tense with—what? disappointment? anxiety? fear?—slid once again through my mind. So you do not wish to go home? And I’d been so preoccupied that I hadn’t noticed. I shuddered. “There was someone in my flat.”
Sir Henry handed me a snifter. “Was there? It wouldn’t surprise me. The cabby was a delivery boy, my dear. Not a kingpin. And he was most unhappy to find his package refusing to be delivered as ordered. Which suggests that there is a kingpin. Or at least a petty tyrant he knew he must answer to.” Cupping his glass in both hands, he slowly swirled the amber liquid. “You’re in danger, Kate. That’s real enough.” He inhaled deeply and then took a small sip; his whole body sighed with pleasure. “Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men: but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy. Samuel Johnson wrote that, wise old tramp that he was…. Let’s have another look at that brooch.”
I pulled it out. It lay demurely in its box. “It’s not exactly a yellow brick road, is it? How do you think I’m supposed to follow where it leads?”
Sir Henry smiled. “The ruby slippers might make a better analogy. Perhaps you should start by wearing it. May I?” As he lifted the brooch from the box, a card fluttered out, turning end over end, sailing toward the fire. Sir Henry shot forward, plucking it from danger and setting it in my hands.
It was a small rectangular card of thick cream-colored paper, with one hole punched in the bottom. Above that ran a few lines of loose, flowing script. With a pang, I recognized Roz’s handwriting. As Sir Henry pinned the brooch to my lapel, I read it aloud:
Congratulations, Quicksilver Kate, on wiping away dull piety to lay bare bright truths long buried within our favorite Jacobean magnum opus. I trust the public will soon be equally filled with admiration.
Sweets to the Sweet,
R.
“Jacobean?” Sir Henry asked sharply.
“That’s what it says.” Jacobean from Jacobus, I thought. Latin for James. As in King James, sovereign of England for the second half of Shakespeare’s career. All fine, except that the play Roz was supposedly talking about was Hamlet, and while Hamlet has impeccable credentials as a magnum opus, it isn’t Jacobean. It’s Elizabethan—the last and greatest of all Elizabethan plays, written while the obstinate old spinster queen slipped fretfully toward death, refusing to name her young cousin James—or anyone else—as her heir. To most people, Elizabethan versus Jacobean no doubt seems a fine point of distinction, damn near invisible. But to Roz, it had been a chasm, a divide as fundamental as the difference between sun and moon, male and female. She would not mistake one for the other any more than she’d mistake her brother for her sister, or her own head for her hand.
Sir Henry began reeling off Shakespeare’s Jacobean plays. “Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, Lear…Did she have a favorite?”
“Not that I know of.”
“She goes back to Hamlet in the end, at least,” he mused. “Sweets to the sweet. Gertrude, scattering flowers on Ophelia’s grave. Fits neatly with her gift, at any rate.”
“There’s more,” I said, holding it up to the light. At the bottom, she’d scrawled a sort of poetic p.s. in the form of four lines of verse in faint blue pencil, separated into pairs by a dash:
But wherefore do you not a mightier way
Make war upon this bloody tyrant time?
—
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.
Sir Henry started. “That’s it,” he said hoarsely. “Your Jacobean magnum opus.”
I frowned, riffling through my memory for those lines. “They’re Shakespeare. I’m sure of it. But from where? Not Hamlet.”
Sir Henry leapt up and crossed to a tall shelf presided over by a bust of Shakespeare. “No, ridiculous child, not Hamlet,” he cried. Running a finger along the books, he muttered, “Third shelf down. Fourth book in, I should think. Yes—here we are.” He drew out a slim volume in dark brown leather tooled with gilt. Returning to the fire, he set it in my lap with a flourish.
There was no title on the cover. Setting the card down on the table between us, I opened the book to the first page, smoothing out paper that was thick and supple, the color of coffee ice cream. In a design at the top, cherubs were riding flowers that seemed also to be dragons. I read the first two words aloud: “SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.”
“I’d have titled it An Autobiography in Riddles,” said Sir Henry. “But nobody asked.”
I looked back at the page:
Never before Imprinted.
At London
by G. Eld for T.T. and are
to be solde by William Aspley.
1609.
I glanced up in astonishment. “But this is an original.”
“A Jacobean original,” said Sir Henry with a wicked twinkle in his eyes. “And a magnum opus, too, some would say. One hundred and fifty-four poems usually viewed as separate small jewels—Roz has quoted from two of them—but their true magnificence only appears when they’re strung together into a single story. Such a fantastic dark tale flickering between the lines: the Golden Youth, the Dark Lady, and the Poet. Shakespeare was the poet, of course, but who was the youth, and how’d he wind up in the arms of Shakespeare’s dark-haired, darker-hearted mistress?” The whole house seemed to lean inward to hear him. “Why did the poet beg the young man to beget children—and why did the young man refuse?”
He shook his head. “Full of love, jealousy, and betrayal, the sonnets are—all the deep, doom-ridden stuff of myth. All the more gripping because they’re true.”
A log collapsed in the grate. “Filled, also, with a certain pathos for an aging queen of the stage,” quipped Sir Henry in sudden self-mockery. “But wherefore do you not a mightier way make war upon this bloody tyrant time? Did Roz ever feel that way about you?”
I nearly spit out my brandy. “What, that I should marry and bear many small carrot-topped Kates?”
Sir Henry leaned forward. “That you should take a lover and re-create yourself, forever young. That’s what this first quote is about, you know. Making war on time by making children.” He took the book back, riffling through the first few pages. “From—where is it? Here.” He stabbed a finger at the poem on the page. “Sonnet Sixteen.”
He flipped a few pages on and stopped. “That’s bad enough, but the second quote—that’s enough to make you weep, if you think about it. What sort of man could toss off Romeo and Juliet but fear to say I love you to his own beloved? So much, that his only defense from some honey-tongued bastard of a rival is to plead, Read my books?—
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.”
His voice filled the room with longing that sharpened to a point just shy of unbearable, and slowly faded.
In its place drifted a fine silting of doubt. The brooch was a gift, no more. I contemplated the small card facing away from me on the table between us.
“Now, that’s tragedy, trimmed to the length of a sonnet,” said Sir Henry. “Only twenty-three poems in, and he’s already drawn—”
The brandy burned in my throat. “What did you say?”
“He’s already drawn—?”
“No. The number.”
“Twenty-three. Here.” He held out the book.
“It’s not the words that matter,” I said, suddenly jittery. “However wonderful they are. It’s the numbers. The numbers of the sonnets.”
“Sixteen and twenty-three?”
I reversed Roz’s card so he could see it upside down and pointed to the postscript. “See her scribble at the bottom?”
He frowned as he saw what I’d seen: The incomprehensible squiggle that we both supposed to be the s of p.s. revealed itself as a neat a, followed by a d.
“A.D.” he read aloud. “Anno Domini. In the year of Our Lord…I’m still not sure where we’re going with this.”
“Back in time,” I said shortly. “Run those numbers together as a date.”
“Sixteen twenty-three…But where does that get us? Besides six—no—seven years after Shakespeare’s death? We are still talking Shakespeare, aren’t we?”
“His Jacobean book of books,” I nodded. “The magnum opus that contains all his others. Dated 1623.”
“My God,” Sir Henry said. “The First Folio.”