Chapter 1

 

 

 

 

Paris, the present day

 

Then it dawned on me, like a missing six letter word in a crossword puzzle. I had been staring at family pedigrees for weeks now, without taking particular note of a curious juncture of two genealogical trees that had been right there in front of my face. How could I have failed to see it until now?

My mind was on overdrive, and I must have been talking so fast that I wasn’t even allowing myself enough time to take a breath, let alone pausing long enough for Hank to get a word in edgewise. We were seated at a small table in the back of an Irish pub – of all places – on the rue des Ecoles, a couple of long blocks down from the Sorbonne and two short blocks up from the Seine, on the left bank, across from Notre Dame. I needed to get it all out - everything that had been swimming around in my head for the last two days and nights, but Hank just sat there smiling, the slight lines around her puffed lips emphasising the ease and comfort with which she always smiled.

“Hank” is short for “Henrietta”, Henrietta Claudia Wells, an old friend from graduate school, who had never forgiven her parents for giving her two such names to carry like burdens through school. Whether to escape the moniker or to pursue her destiny, she gave up a promising academic career to open up a second hand book store, just down the street from where we had agreed to meet for a couple of beers. We hadn’t seen each other for ten years, since she had left for what was supposed to have been a three week European vacation, and I wasn’t sure if she would be willing to put up with the old Michael Devon she had left behind.

We’d kept in touch over the years, by telephone and e-mail. I was always promising myself to take a break from teaching and writing and go to see her, but I never managed to pull myself away from my work. I’m not sure if it was my passion for literature or just a convenient excuse, but I’d always managed to be too busy for an extended vacation.

So what had she been doing while we were, so to speak, just out of reach all those years? Interspersed with her accounts of her impassioned, I would say, obsessive search for the illusive rare and neglected second hand book, she also confided in me about a couple of brief affairs, most recently with a constable at the local Prefecture of Police, whom she had met in the course of an inspection, with regard to the security apparatus protecting her shop.

“That’s been over a long time,” she was telling me, although she insisted on pointing out that this guy apparently had a forensic specialist’s love for the kind of information you could find out about people from the books they read and handled.

I didn’t want to talk about him or how he analysed documents using infrared spectroscopy. I had come here for a specific purpose, but I didn’t know where to begin. For some reason, I found that the prospect of gaining Hank’s approval was important to me.

“It all started innocently enough. I told you about the book I’m writing, something different from the flood of speculative drivel that’s been coming out about the Earl of Oxford to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare. You see, while most of us hold that the actor, William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon and the poet, William Shakespeare are one and the same person, the “Oxford” school maintains that a large body of evidence points to Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, as the author of the plays and poems of Shakespeare. Personally, I thought it was all just a load of elitist crap. Just the idea that the capacity for greatness comes from breeding, exclusive education and the like, is an idea I found, well, offensive. That was my opinion, anyway, but I had to take the time to study the ‘Oxfordian’ arguments and examine their evidence with as open a mind as I could muster.”

“Do you still feel that way?” Hank’s head tilting to one side, allowing her still shoulder length red hair to cascade softly over half of her face, in a way that I had always found extremely distracting.

“That they are elitists, certainly, but that there might very well have been another voice, speaking through Shakespeare’s lines, I really can’t say.”

I shook my head as if to dismiss some arguments that were still playing out in my mind. “I had spent the better part of two months in England, much of it with faculty members at Brunel University in West London, where they offer a Masters specialisation in the Shakespeare authorship question. I made the acquaintance of Doctor James Bennet. By day, he’s a famous author and lecturer in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, but he also belongs to a group of scholars, actors and such who called themselves, ‘The De Vere Society.’”

Hank’s response was a derisive grunt and another swing of her copper-red hair to emphasis the point. “You mean an ‘old boys’ club, an excuse for stuffy old prigs to sit around drinking gin and weaving conspiracy theories!”

“Actually, Doctor Bennet turned out to be a delightful, down-to-earth sort of guy, and thoroughly knowledgeable in his field. Much to my surprise, I found the other society members, with whom I consulted on some small points, all very serious and completely respectable scholars. Still, after looking through underlined bibles and examining family trees until the lines seemed to blur before me, I found the case, while compelling, to be circumstantial and painfully inconclusive.”

“You sound almost disappointed that they were not able to convince you,” observed Hank, with another playful smile forming around her mouth and eyes.

“Well, I couldn’t get over how much the oldest and most influential families had intermarried over the years. Of course, they were using these alliances to accumulate wealth, property and titles, always a string of titles. It was all a big power game. Blood lines and political positioning were all-important, and loyalties were sealed and assured at the matrimonial altar. Many controversial figures got away with questionable behavior and opinions because they were connected to this or that person by marriage...That’s when you contacted me, to entice me down here with your little piece of news.

Hank flashed one of her self-satisfied grins. “I’m happy to be of service!”

“No, I mean it. Thank God you called! I was completely bored out of my mind, actually nodding off to sleep at the desk in my hotel room, rummaging through my notes on which families were on the rise or falling out of favour for various and sundry reasons. I was getting ready to call it quits for the day, when the phone jolted me back to the real world. The next thing I heard was the welcome sound of your voice.”

“You didn’t sound particularly happy to be interrupted.” Hank was using that gentle, scolding tone that I suppose I never really minded so much.

“All right, I was a little grumpy and stir crazy, but hearing your voice was exactly what I needed to pull me out of my mood. You always sound the same, somewhere between empathy and mockery. You teased me about not coming to see you and your precious books, and then you made some kind of crack about how I spend all my time ‘researching those dull Elizabethan sonneteers’. It was only then you told me about the book you found.”

Hank straightened in her chair. She knew that the small talk was over. Her playful looks were gone, now. “Well,” she began, launching her own rapid narrative, eyes wide with the remembered excitement of it. “I knew as soon as I opened it that I had happened upon something that might make it worth your while to visit me. The little thing was in a carton of books that had evidently been dumped in the attic of the parish house of Saint Germain. It claims to be the diary of one Henry Howard of Reigate Manor in Surrey. I made out the date on the title page to be the year 1557.”

“And that was it,” I burst in, no longer able to keep down my excitement. “You had stumbled on the link, the missing word without which the puzzle remains…incomplete. One of the most prominent early Tudor poets, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was married to Lady Frances de Vere. The Earl of Surrey and Frances de Vere had two sons, the younger one named ‘Henry’, like his father.”

“At least they didn’t name one of their daughters, ‘Henrietta.’ Hank’s lips were pursed, but the smile lines around her eyes betrayed her amusement.

“The Howard children were first cousins of Edward de Vere, the object of so much scrutiny by Doctor Bennet and his associates.”

“You have been looking at too many family trees.” Hank tried to look severe, but I could detect the old playfulness returning to her child-like blue eyes.

“Don’t you see?” I couldn’t help myself, even though I could see that I was amusing Hank the more I got carried away in my earnestness. “A plausible literary connection in the de Vere heritage comes from the Howard side, a poet among a family of statesmen and soldiers.”

“Where are you headed with all of this?” Hank asked, her academic scepticism coming out to counterbalance my enthusiasm.

“Maybe, just maybe, Edward de Vere DID introduce the world to what we call the works of Shakespeare, but what if the plays and poems were actually written by someone else, someone Edward de Vere knew personally and who was somehow indebted to him ? “

“That’s quite a leap, even for you,” cautioned Hank.

“What about the Howards?” I was now arguing my case as if my failure to convince Hank would have stopped me from pursuing my idea. “Has anybody looked at the connection with the Earl of Surrey’s descendants? The Howards were arguably the most prominent family in England at the time, claiming royal ancestry, back to the 13th century. They certainly had the education and the court position that the ‘Oxford school’ thought so pivotal to their man’s candidacy.”

“I still entertained the idea that you wanted to see me and not just your Henry Howard journal,” protested Hank, puffing her lips in an endearing little pout.

“Yes, yes , of COURSE I did,” I added, knowing that she could see in my eyes how much I wanted to get my hands on the book, while she continued to play with me.

“I’m surprised you didn’t take the next plane out.” She was trying desperately to look cross with me.

“There were a couple of things I had to do first,” I said, ignoring her pretended jealousy. “I hung up the phone and headed for the Tube to the British Library, where I was able to find a manuscript, dated 1583, part of a recently acquired private collection. It’s a tract, entitled, ‘Preservative against the Poison of supposed Prophesies’, written by this younger Henry Howard. After I dropped a few well-chosen names, I was even permitted to photocopy several pages for myself. I found more material on the Howards and how they continued to contribute heroes and the occasional traitor to their country’s history. (Did you know that the commander of Elizabeth’s fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada was a Howard?) Then I was ready for my next call. I set out for Brunel to meet with my new friend from the De Vere Society.”

“Oh yes, the famous Doctor Bennet,” joined in Hank, still pretending to be resentful of my new obsession. “Where else would you go to trot out your latest theory?”

“You were the one who had just finished telling me about a potential primary source,” I protested, too involved in my story to remember she was playing with me.

“Anyway, I found Doctor Bennet in his office, behind teetering stacks of papers. I spotted his shiny bald head in the reflection given off by the spot light, which was angled toward his desk like a halo.”

“’So, Michael, what have you found that is so earth shattering?’ He looked amused at my having rushed in all huffing and puffing.

“’Have you considered the Howards, I mean the Earl of Surrey, who married Lady Frances de Vere?’ I didn’t bother to sit down in the chair opposite him, to which he pointed.

“’Surrey’s not a candidate. He was beheaded by Henry VIII in 1547, three years before Edward de Vere was born. There’s no connection there, and Surrey died too early to have possibly been Shakespeare. The poor bastard was only thirty years old when they executed him on Tower Green...trumped up charges, as I understand.’

“’What about Surrey’s sons?’ I countered, not to be so easily discouraged.

“’You mean Thomas Howard, who became Duke of Norfolk, when his grandfather died, only to get himself beheaded by Elizabeth, in 1572 for trying to marry the Queen of Scots? No, no,’ he continued making a dismissive ‘chirping’ sound with his tongue and teeth. ‘They were a great family who lost everything in three generations, because they ended up on the wrong side of the religious question.’

“’But what about the second son, Henry?’ I had hit my stride and was getting to the very core of my theory. ‘He survived and prospered under James I. De Vere and he were first cousins, so it’s fair to assume they had contact.’

“Doctor Bennett knitted his eyebrows while searching his memory. ‘They had a falling out, in 1582, over religion and politics, I think. They didn’t have anything to do with each other during the two and a half decades when Shakespeare’s plays first appeared.’

“I settled myself in the seat opposite Doctor Bennet’s desk, and continued talking, mostly to myself. ‘I was reading about that incident this afternoon at the library. It seems that de Vere denounced his cousin, reviving some old charges about his being a papist and a traitor. It threatened to embroil Howard in quite a bit of trouble, but Howard made an impassioned written appeal to the Queen herself, and the charges were, just, dropped. Why do you suppose that de Vere wanted him out of the way, at that particular time, and why did the Queen intervene in Howard’s favour, especially with the history that the Howards had with the Tudors?’

“‘I don’t know,’ answered Doctor Bennet, who had, himself, written extensively on the religious divisions that had helped bring down the Howards. ‘Elizabeth had every reason to be ambivalent on the subject. Her mother, the Boleyn woman, after all, was a Howard on her mother’s side, but what has any of this to do with the Shakespeare authorship controversy?’

“‘Perhaps nothing,’ I admitted, ‘but it bears looking into.’”

“It was clear that Bennet was not about to endorse or lend credence to my Howard theory. We agreed to keep in touch, and I got out of there. I immediately made arrangement for a Friday evening departure across the Channel.”

Hank flashed her eyes at the waiter and paid for our beers, while I was still spewing out my story. “I think we should get going.” When she pushed her chair back from the little square table and raised herself to her full height, I noticed that the flowers running down the long, slender lines of her jeans matched the bright floral pattern of her Mexican peasant styled blouse. “The book is in my shop, just down the street.”