When she had closed the door, he turned the letter the duke had given him over and continued reading.
.… a hidden play.
The portrait is firm evidence of Shakespeare’s religion, the only firm evidence we have, though of course it lets in very little light upon his actual beliefs, which may have been, for all we know, atheistic. It has been observed that his work does not read as that of a zealously pious man.
The passion of my recent years has been to find the play that accompanies the portrait. The letter was destroyed by my great-great-grandfather, but we still have the portrait. Should I fail, you know now from our extensive conversation this morning all that I know: foremost, that the answer lies in my picture, which will of course be yours. In it rests, as you know, the part of the riddle that I have yet to solve. I hope that you have committed it to memory.
I make two requests of you as I pass on this knowledge, Clarence. The first is that you keep it as private as conceivably possible. Nobody—in short—must know of the existence of this portrait. We are its protectors. Because of the clue it contains to the whereabouts of the play, it must not become public until after the play is found. Once the play is found, obviously, it would be our honor to present the picture to the King; or to keep it, but allow it to be publicly displayed, as befits its subject.
Why does all of this matter so much to me? Because I gaze upon a portrait of William Shakespeare—a real oil portrait. Nobody can stand prouder than you in his position, after I am gone, but others may be equally proud; this, on the other hand, is ours alone, and we must treasure it, and guard it, if need be, with our lives.
Your father, Thomas,
13th Duke of Dorset
Beneath this was the stamp of a signet ring with the Dorset arms on it, and after that a lengthy postscript.
To add a word, Clarence: I would be well and truly ashamed if a son of mine, or a son or daughter of his, were to subscribe to the heresy that Shakespeare did not write his own plays. He did. Every word I have read, every ancient widow I have spoken to in Stratford-upon-Avon in my travels, every document I have traced with my fingertips, every fact I have collected, confirms as much.
As you know, the primary contender for the authorship of the plays after Shakespeare is the Earl of Oxford, whose absurd family is insistent upon their forebear having “secretly” written the plays. Their argument is that Shakespeare could not have had the range of education to have composed the plays. This is a demonstrable inaccuracy. Malone tells us very clearly that Shakespeare’s elementary education in Latin and religion would have been as good as yours or mine. Consider, too, that among Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Spenser was the son of a clothmaker, Middleton a bricklayer, and Kyd a scrivener. Nashe was a sizar at Cambridge—a servant to the other students—and never recovered from the ignominy of it. Class was not an obstacle to literary greatness in the Elizabethan world.
As for the Oxford case—that the earl was a secret genius—it conveniently leaves out that he died in 1604, meaning that in addition to his extensive courtly and baronial duties, he would have had to pre-write plays such as Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest. Which ran out, conveniently, just when the real William Shakespeare died.
It also relies on the idea that he would have written a great deal of mediocre poetry under his own name to further the concealment, while under his pseudonym becoming the greatest genius of his or any age. An idiotic thought. Dismiss it forever, if you respect your father’s opinion.
This was the end of the letter. Lenox smoothed down the creases of the pages carefully against the table. Then he read it again, this time much more slowly.
At the end of the reading he felt strangely stirred. This wasn’t simply because of the long-dead duke’s pride, nor because of the present duke’s fanatical faith in it, which had convinced him to do no less than feign his own kidnapping and shoot a man.
It was because he thought he had found two clues. The first was in this house itself.
He rang the bell, and Ward appeared. “Ringing for me now, are you?” said his old schoolmate.
Lenox smiled. “Sorry. I didn’t want to venture out of the room and get lost.”
Ward looked at a fine portrait of a woman, gazing with now immortal distaste upon all she surveyed, above a nearby sideboard. His thumbs were hooked in his waistcoat. “Wish I’d never taken this bloody job,” he said.
“It’ll turn out for you. Listen, Theo, could I have a moment in the duke’s study?”
Ward turned back to him. “By all means. His Grace said we should accommodate you however possible. I warn you that there is still blood there—and three footmen the duke has ordered to stay in the room at all times, on rotations like a ship’s. The largest footmen, blast them.”
“I understand.”
Lenox pocketed the letter and they went up by a back staircase he didn’t know. Soon they were inside the duke’s study.
Lenox approached the painting, briefly attracting the attention of the three immensely tall, cow-eyed footmen standing in the middle of the room, their numerousness apparently the duke’s final idea of a defense for the portrait. But Ward waved them off, and Lenox, leaning in close to the portrait, for the first time read the poem that floated in an extremely fine serif hand next to the head of William Shakespeare. How foolish of him not to have looked at it more closely to begin with. He would add that to the notebook he kept of the errors he made—a document that gave him great joy.
Ward watched him curiously, though he betrayed no particular interest in what Lenox was doing. As for the young detective, his hazel eyes were just inches from the elegant gold scroll. He read the words:
Forty miles from Charing Cross,
then back one further apple’s toss,
under fields of wheat-grown gold,
doth laze a buried story told.
Lenox read the poem twice more, committing it to memory.
Beneath it was a confused squall of black ink, like the elaborate scrolled marks that sometimes appeared at the bottom of poems in fine old books.
He stepped back, so that he was nearly leaning against the duke’s desk chair, and turned his attention to Shakespeare’s face. It was very difficult not to see brilliance in the little daubs of brown, specked with white, that were his eyes. The genius of his and every age.
Only now, though, did he notice that in Shakespeare’s right hand, held carelessly, was a lily. In faint handwriting beside it were the words Nomen Mariae, BV.
He wrote these words down in his notebook.
There were brand-new braces at the corners of each portrait’s frame and also on each side, six in total, bolted into the wall. Anyone who wanted to remove this painting would either have to spend a great deal of time on the task or cut the canvas out. It was no longer a matter of simply removing it from a hook, as it had been with the missing portrait.
What exactly had Alexander Arnold Craig been doing?
Lenox saw that there were indeed two screws gone from the new brace. He looked to the ground, stooped, and picked them up, next to the great roped-off stain of blood. Tiny brass things, the screws. They weighed close to nothing in his palm; had cost Craig his life.
He went into the hall and wrote several pages in his notebook at a rapid rate—he was bursting with ideas—then closed it with a satisfied snap.
“I will visit the duke in the morning, if you don’t mind,” he told Ward.
“Not at all. In fact I could pick you up—I have to bring some papers to him. Eight?”
“Perfect,” said Lenox. They shook hands. “Chin up. You’ll still be Prime Minister one day.”
The fastest path to a high place in Parliament, should you be unlucky enough not to have a close relative with a seat to give away, was the kind of job Ward had now, secretary to a great gentleman.
“Ha. Chancellor of the Exchequer would be enough for me,” Ward said. “I’ve always liked numbers.”
Lenox smiled. “I shall remember that if the selection is ever in my power. Actually, I once thought I would go into politics. Impossible, of course, now that I have embarked upon all this bother.”
“But you have Edmund just by,” said Ward.
“True enough. I can always lean on him if I have a mind to invade France. And in the meanwhile”—he was allowing himself to feel just slightly pleased, because he was sure he was on the right trail now—“being a detective isn’t all bad.”