THE WOOD WAS dark, plucking and nipping at us as we labored uphill after Ben, trying to keep up with his pace. My feet squelched in wet shoes; in the distance I could still hear fireworks fizzing, whistling, and booming. Somewhere closer, men charged upward through the bracken; now and again one of them shouted.
The ground leveled out and then tipped downward. At the foot of the hill, we came to a wall thick with moss and lichen. Passing swiftly along it, Ben kept on till he found a stone bench set against the masonry; above it a decorative medallion—memorial to a hound loved long ago—offered finger-and toeholds. Between us, Ben and I helped Sir Henry up and over, and then we tumbled over after him, crouching in the underbrush in a woody lane.
Two police cars raced by, sirens wailing. I was standing up when we heard a thumping in the distance. “Down,” gasped Ben. Falling to the ground, we followed his lead, wriggling back toward the wall and stretching lengthwise against it beneath the undergrowth. Through the trees, we saw a police helicopter fly by, shining a wide spotlight along the road.
Still as rabbits caught in headlights, we waited. The beast flew by, followed by another, slower cop car. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw DCI Sinclair’s face inside.
Then they were gone. Slowly, Ben pushed himself up. Crouching low, he crept through the undergrowth to the road and rose to stand on the verge. With a jerk of his hand, he motioned for us to follow.
Just across the way was a newish subdivision. Crossing the road, we turned into a street that wound among the houses. Ben walked swiftly, as if he knew where he was going, turning once and then again. Dark gold parking lights flashed once, briefly, in a car up ahead.
It was Sir Henry’s Bentley. Ben opened the back door, and we scrambled in.
Without a word, Barnes started the engine and pulled out into the street. Ben leaned forward and spoke to him quietly. A few more turns, and we pulled out onto a narrow lane running between hedgerows, with wide, flat fields flooded with moonlight on either side. As the sound of sirens faded in the distance, Sir Henry began peeling off wet shoes and socks, drying himself with a towel that Barnes produced; I followed suit.
“The letter,” said Sir Henry hoarsely, still pressing his handkerchief to his face.
As the road rose and dipped and rose even higher, coming out on one of those English rises that give the dizzy sensation of standing at the top of the world, Ben pulled the pages from his pocket and set them in my hands.
To the Sweeteste Swan that ever Sailed upon Avon.
Beside me, I heard Sir Henry’s intake of breath, but he said nothing. I kept going.
Drifting longe on a tide of doubt and disquiet, I have att last washed ashore to find myself in full accorde with you. Something of the cloud castles—or in deede as you name them, the toys and trifles—which our chimericall beast once conjured up should not altogether melt into the shadows of Devouring Night.
The Spanish play only I except.
“Cardenio,” said Ben. With wide eyes, I nodded.
It has kindled fires enough, besides which the countess, still hemmed in the Tower, beggs to be spared any renewal of her troubles. As the ladie is almost family now, I am bound to honor her wish, as my daughter daily findeth opportunity to set before my remembrance. I take upon myself the duetie of writing to excuse this our silence to St. Alban.
As the boar can no longer chafe, you have only the hogg left to fatten. For the ant’s busie task of gathering and sorting grain from chaff, Mr. Ben Jonson may proove as good a fellow as any, and no doubt better than most—tho’ never so excellent as he accompts himself. He has at the verry least had practice, having laboured at the task before for the author whom he worshipps above all others—himself. Like the daw, though, he will chatter as he works, not minding what untoward quips and coils spill from his beak. If you can direct and endure such a one-man choir, so be itt.
That decision I leave in your capable and most sweet hands.
“The First Folio!” whooped Sir Henry. “He’s talking about getting Jonson to edit the First Folio.”
“And about leaving Cardenio out,” I said.
Your frend ever and most assured,
I pointed at the signature. In large clear letters, the initial given a flourish of curlicues worthy of a king, it sat in the center of the page, three quarters of the way down:
Will.
Surprise reverberated through the car.
To the sweetest Swan that ever sailed upon Avon…from Will? If the letter was about the First Folio—surely one of them was Shakespeare…but which one?
“There’s only one Swan of Avon,” said Sir Henry after a moment. “Whereas Wills are common as clay. William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, for one. The elder of the Incomparables. The Golden Youth of the sonnets, for another.”
“And William Turner for another,” said Ben, looking at me. “But if Shakespeare’s the swan,” he objected, “this letter should have gone off wherever all the rest of William Shakespeare’s papers went. Why would it be at Wilton?”
The wheels and cogs in my brain seemed to be turning very slowly. The dead woman’s face kept getting in the way. Behind us sirens were fanning out across Wiltshire, and somewhere out there was the man who could strangle Mrs. Quigley and scatter her with feathers. “There’s another candidate for the Sweet Swan,” I said thickly. “One that would make sense of the letter being there…Mary Sidney. The countess of Pembroke. Mother of the Incomparables.”
Sir Henry snorted, but I shook him off, gripping the paper in my lap as if it might vanish if I blinked. A woman had died for this letter. So it had to make sense. It had to. “After her brother’s death, the countess kept the Sidney name and the official Sidney device: an arrowhead, sometimes called a spearhead. But she also kept Philip’s private emblem too: the swan. Given to him by the beleaguered Protestants in France, who adored him….” I looked up to find Sir Henry’s eyes boring into me. “Sidney pronounced in French sounds a little like cygne.”
“French for ‘swan,’” said Ben, his eyes alight.
“French for preposterous,” snapped Sir Henry.
The car slowed. We had come back, in a wide circle, to the main road toward London. Turning onto it, we headed east. “Maybe,” I said. “But there’s an engraved portrait of the countess of Pembroke in old age, a tribute to her literary achievements. She wears a wide lace ruff, and picked out in the lace, over and over again, is the figure of a swan.”
“That was the River Nadder whose water you are dripping on my leather seats,” protested Sir Henry. “Not the Avon. The Avon runs through Stratford, in Warwickshire.”
“Avon just means ‘river’ in Welsh,” I said. “There are lots of Avons in Britain. One of them runs through Salisbury. And in the seventeenth century, when the Wilton estate was larger, it ran right across Pembroke lands.” I shook my head. “If you want to be really weirded out, there’s even a village called Stratford-sub-Castle not far away. And it’s right on the Avon.” I put my face in my hands.
“I take it that’s not all,” said Ben.
I shook my head. “The countess also wrote. She’s most famous for translating the Psalms into English poetry. But she also wrote drama.”
There was a pause.
“She wrote plays?” asked Ben incredulously.
“A play. A closet drama, meant for private readings among friends, rather than for acting on the stage.” I looked up. “She wrote The Tragedy of Antonie, the first dramatic version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra in English.”
“Anton—” exclaimed Ben, but Sir Henry cut him off. “Are you saying Mary Sidney was Shakespeare?”
“No,” I shot back in irritation. “I haven’t suddenly transformed into Delia Bacon. But I think we have to consider the possibility that Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke, might be this letter’s ‘sweetest swan.’” I sighed. “And I think we have to follow that possibility out to its logical conclusions. The letter’s pretty clearly about the First Folio, which dates it to 1623 or before. But if the countess was the sweet swan pushing for publication, the letter has to have been written before the end of September of 1621, when she died of smallpox.”
“Leaving the First Folio to be sponsored by her sons,” said Ben.
“Which brings us back to the Incomparables.” Will and Phil, I thought: William, earl of Pembroke, and his brother Philip, earl of Montgomery, who married the earl of Oxford’s daughter and lived to inherit both the Pembroke earldom and Wilton House. The same Philip who’d built the room where we found the letter—and the same Philip who stood guard over Shakespeare in Wilton’s entry hall.
He had not stood guard over Mrs. Quigley. Once again her bloated face floated across my memory.
Sir Henry bent over the letter, his eyebrows bristling. He stabbed at the page with a finger. “The writer also knows that Ben Jonson had edited his own volume of complete works. That book came out in 1616, the same year that Shakespeare died. So it’s possible that this Will is Shakespeare of Stratford,” said Sir Henry. “If he wrote the letter in the last year of his life.”
I shook my head. “Not if the ‘Sweetest Swan’ is Mary Sidney.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s no way that a common playwright, no matter how famous, would write a familiar letter like this to a countess in an era when rank—and differences in rank—were taken seriously. Players and playwrights were one step above pimps and hucksters, but everything about this letter says that Will—whoever he was—was the Sweetest Swan’s equal. A commoner—especially a commoner indebted to the lady he’s writing—would open with something really obsequious like ‘To the Right Honorable and my Right Good Lady, the Countess of Pembroke, the Sweetest Swan….’” I bit my lip.
“Even the signature in the center of the page is wrong. A commoner writing to a countess would be expected to abase himself by squeezing his signature as far down in the bottom right-hand corner as possible. I don’t like this any more than you do, Sir Henry, but if the Sweetest Swan is Lady Pembroke, then Will can’t be William Shakespeare, playwright of Stratford.”
“Who is, then?” he demanded.
“The chimerical beast?” asked Ben, training his eyes on the roof of the car.
I looked back at the letter. Our chimericall beast, the words ran. The cloud castles—or in deede as you name them, the toys and trifles—which our chimericall beast once conjured up.
Sir Henry lowered the handkerchief from his face. “Do you mean to suggest,” he said darkly, “that Shakespeare is no more than a figment of four hundred years of overactive imagination?”
I frowned. A chimera could mean, in the abstract, something extravagantly imaginary or fantastical. But in Greek mythology, it was a particular beast, a mythical fire-breathing monster made from many parts: the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon. The letter had a swan—and seemed to refer to a boar and a hog as persons as well. Maybe the chimera was a group of people—collectively a beast of many parts.
“Bollocks!” roared Sir Henry.
“That doesn’t mean that the beast is Shakespeare—or that Shakespeare is the beast.”
“The damned letter’s about Shakespeare,” huffed Sir Henry. “You said so yourself.”
I shook my head and tried to explain. The chimera could just as well be a group of patrons who had conjured trifles from him in the sense of commissioning works—and thought them good enough to save from oblivion. At least thinking of the chimera as a group of people made sense of the swan, the boar, and the hog. Not to mention the industrious ant.
“So if Mary Sidney’s the swan, who are the boar and the hog?” asked Ben.
I looked warily at Sir Henry. “The earl of Oxford’s crest was a blue boar.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Sir Henry, flinging himself back against the seat.
Ben ignored him. “And by 1616, he was dead. So he could no longer chafe. I like it.”
“That leaves the hog,” growled Sir Henry. “The elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog. Exactly which of Elizabeth’s peacock-proud courtiers do you suggest allowed himself to be saddled with the unglamorous device of crookbacked Richard the Third? The original Tricky Dick?”
“Promise not to detonate,” I said.
“I will promise no such thing.”
I sighed. “Bacon.”
“Sir Francis Bacon,” groaned Sir Henry.
A quick laugh shot from Ben, muffled in a cough.
“It was really another boar,” I explained. “But the Bacons preempted a lot of bad jokes by calling it a hog themselves. Sir Francis told a story of his father, a judge who was fat as a house, being addressed in court one day by a prisoner who claimed kinship on the grounds that his name was Hog. ‘You and I cannot be kindred unless you be hanged,’ said the old judge. ‘For Hog is not Bacon until it be well hung.’” I did not dare look at Ben; I could feel him shaking with tamped-down amusement. “For what it’s worth, Shakespeare repeated the joke.”
“In The Merry Wives of Windsor,” sighed Sir Henry, “hang-hog is Latin for Bacon, I warrant you.”
Ben’s laughter welled over.
Sir Henry ignored him. “And where does this chimera get us? It’s St. Alban that Will—whoever he is—writes to.”
“Bacon again,” I said. “Early in 1621, King James created him Viscount St. Alban.”
Ben stopped laughing.
Sir Henry leaned forward again. “So Bacon is the only person the swan has left to sweeten, and Will promises to write Bacon himself.”
I nodded.
“Where did Bacon live?”
“A manor called Gorhambury. Just outside the city of St. Albans.”
“Barnes,” said Sir Henry softly, “head for St. Albans.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said impatiently. “Gorhambury—the manor house Bacon built as a pleasure palace of the mind—has been in ruins since fifty years after he died.”
“There must be something left,” said Sir Henry.
I drummed my fingers on my knees. “There’s a statue in his parish church in St. Albans, sort of like Shakespeare’s statue in Westminster, but that’s been pored over and prodded by Baconians for the last hundred and fifty years.”
“So not likely.”
Ben took the letter. “If Will’s writing to St. Alban,” he said, “why tell the swan that she must charm the hog?” He looked up. “It sounds to me like St. Alban and the hog are different people.”
We bent over the letter. He had a point.
“Is there another horrible hog?” asked Sir Henry.
“Not that I know of.”
“So where are we going?” asked Ben.
“Somewhere I can think.”
Five minutes later we pulled off the motorway and into the parking lot of an unassuming Days Inn. While Ben and Sir Henry checked in, I sat with Barnes in the car.
Pulling out the brooch, I opened the back cover. The hotel lights cast an orange glow over the portrait. “Where next?” I asked the young man silently.
Holding out his crucifix, he looked amused, almost taunting; his eyes seemed to glint with both mischief and contempt.