Rory Clements: The Heretics

‘Mr Winnow, does the name Garrick Loake mean anything to you?’

‘No.’

‘Anthony Friday?’

‘Yes, I was there at his death. It became clear to Roag that Friday had realised what we intended to do with the play he had written. He had to be silenced.’

‘There was a paper there, one you left. It had three words on it: They are cousins . What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What of Wisbech Castle and the priests imprisoned there? Men such as William Weston and Gavin Caldor? Do you know of them?’

As he asked the question, a sudden thought occurred to Shakespeare. He would look more closely into Loake’s family background. .

‘Again, no. I repeat, Mr Shakespeare, I know nothing of Wisbech nor the origins of the plan. All I know of this is what little I was told in Spain and what we did when we landed.’

‘Ah, yes, the raid on the Cornish villages. What was the purpose of that?’

‘We had to come into England as one and stay together. It was Roag’s suggestion to attack Cornwall as a cover for our landing. The casa seized on the idea and provided a small fleet. I think it amused them to burn parts of the west country from where so many of their tormentors hailed — Drake, Hawkins, Grenville, Ralegh. They were astonished by the lack of defence put up against them. Why, we even said mass on the cliff top and the Spaniards promised to build an abbey there when they returned.’

Shakespeare shook his head. He would take this information to Cecil without delay; Cornwall must be reinforced.

‘Who helped you in England?’

‘Sloth again, but also the girl Beatrice. They had everything organised for us. We avoided inns and slept in the open air as we came to London.’

‘Did you stay at a great house in Cornwall? Trevail Hall?’

Winnow shook his head. ‘We had a tent. Sloth provided it for us and made us appear a genuine company of players. He had commissioned a play for us to say, and costumes and masks to wear. He used his influence with certain ladies to arrange our performance before the Queen.’

‘Did you have any contact with Lady Trevail?’

‘No. I know nothing of her.’

The suspicion was like an angry wasp in an enclosed room: impossible to ignore. Perhaps he had been taught too well by Mr Secretary Walsingham. Always looking for the plot behind the plot. Shakespeare could not get away from the doubts he harboured. Why did Lucia Trevail go down to Cornwall? Why did she go with Beatrice Eastley? And yet Lucia had been held by Roag at the point of a sword and was now the heroine of the day.

‘What did you know of these ladies?’

Winnow was shackled by neck irons. He shook his head and his mouth opened in a rictus of pain. ‘Nothing. I believe they knew Roag from his days at the Theatre, but we were to meet them only on the day of the performance.’

‘Tell me more. Confess your crimes. Beg forgiveness of your maker before you meet him and hear his judgment. There were two more deaths. .’

Winnow closed his eyes and grimaced with pain. ‘I heard that a man and a woman were killed. Beatrice told the story to us. She said they were naked in bed together and she laughed. They had been Cecil’s spies, she said. All his intelligencers were to be eliminated.’

‘Their names?’

‘She told us, but-’

‘Mills? Was it Frank Mills and his wife?’

‘Yes, that name sounds familiar. Mills. She told me Mills. .’

Shakespeare sighed. Mills had indeed been innocent all along. The murders of his wife and her lover had been a matter of mistaken identity.

So much death and pain, and for what? Far from easing the lot of England’s Catholics, these conspirators had probably made their lives much harder. Somehow they all needed to cross the divide, as he had once done, when he married Catherine. They had to realise they shared the same God and the same holy book; only the politics of vain, angry men divided them.

The bed in Shakespeare’s chamber was hot and damp with lust. Two bodies sprawled upon it, one tall and angular and adorned with bandages, the other slender and soft. Lucia Trevail turned over on to her front and exhaled deeply. Shakespeare sat up against the bedhead, catching his breath, all spent.

There was no tender dealing here. Their couplings were nothing but wanton greed and hunger. A brutal, desperate collision of bodies. There had been no time for small murmurings and fragrant kisses; they had merely pulled off each other’s clothes in a frenzied tearing of stays and seams.

She reached out her slender arm and touched the bandages that still decorated his chest and shoulders. Her hand was light and warm.

‘The wounds are healing well,’ he said by way of conversation. ‘I have my energy back.’

Food and plenty of water, along with herbal preparations from Dr Forman, had helped him recover more quickly than he might have dared hope.

‘So I see.’

He laughed. She had been showered with diamonds by the Queen and feted by courtiers. All had expressed awe and wonder at her courage when dragged away at swordpoint by a murderous savage.

‘You know, Mr Shakespeare, you might have saved everyone a great deal of trouble and fear if you had allowed us ladies some intellect. Had you but entrusted us with information about your inquiries — your search for Mr Roag and Mr Sloth — we would have known straightway that there was something rotten about their plans to stage a masque for the Queen. But no, you would not have it, so how were we to know anything was amiss? None of you men will credit us with any wit.’

It seemed that her little group, her School of Day, as Lady Susan liked to call their intellectual gatherings, had been used most cynically by Ovid Sloth. And yet, at the end, it was this very same group that had proved the conspirators’ undoing.

In particular, it had been the good sense of Margaret, the Countess of Cumberland, that had been decisive. There had been something about Roag that had roused her suspicions when they met him rehearsing at his pavilion in the park of Nonsuch.

‘Instinct, sir,’ she had told Shakespeare later when he called on the group at the house in Barbican Street. ‘As a wild animal senses a hunter, I smelt it on him. He had the unholy stench of impending death. That, allied to the fear raised by the powerful military presence, alarmed me greatly.’

The intense feeling had stayed with the countess all day, but she had not acted on it. It was only as the evening drew on, and as fear gnawed at her, that she had confided in Emilia Lanier.

Emilia had known exactly what to do. She had gone straight to Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon and told him of the countess’s fears. By this time, Roag and his group were inside the palace, closeted in the tiring room where they were putting the finishing touches to their costumes, donning masks of gold and checking their weapons in readiness for their blood-drenched performance.

Hunsdon did not waste a moment. He called out the Queen’s Lifeguard. The confrontation between the guards and the would-be assassins had been a moment of high drama: enjoyed immensely by Her Majesty but less so by her chief ministers, Burghley and Cecil.

In the fray that followed, a young Lifeguard had suffered a cut to the ribs from the assault by Roag, but his life was not in danger. The only other blood shed was that of Regis Roag’s mercenaries. All had died on the stage. A hue and cry had immediately been set up for confederates and Winnow had been caught within the hour.

Shakespeare had asked Cecil in vain that he be spared the rack. ‘He will die horribly, Sir Robert. Is it necessary to have Topcliffe break him first?’