"As you say, your Excellency." Guzm?n's servant sounded reproachful, which, as usual, did him no good. Lope wondered if he would slam the door to show his annoyance, but Enrique had more subtlety than that. He shut it with exaggerated care, so it made no noise at all.

Captain Guzm?n noticed that, too. Chuckling, he said, "He's got his nose out of joint again. Because he's clever, he thinks he ought to be important, too."

"Better a clever servant than a dolt like my Diego, who'd forget his own name if people didn't shout it at him all the time," de Vega said.

"Oh, no doubt, no doubt, but Enrique will make too much of himself." Tapping the report with hisforefinger, Guzm?n got down to business: "Overall, this is a good piece of work, Lieutenant. Still, I need to remind you again that you visit the Theatre as his Majesty's spy, not as his drama critic."

"I'm very sorry, your Excellency," Lope lied.

Guzm?n laughed again. "A likely story. You're a lucky man, to be able to enjoy yourself so much at your work."

"I would enjoy myself even more if the benighted English let women take the stage," Lope said.

"Indeed. It frightens me, Lieutenant, to think how much you might enjoy yourself then." Baltasar Guzm?n tapped the report again. His fingernails were elegantly manicured. He looked across the desk at de Vega. "I note that you met this Marlowe back in the tiring room after the presentation."

"Yes, your Excellency." Lope nodded. "He was talking shop with Shakespeare. A good bit of the time, he was telling him how he would have done things differently--and, in his opinion, better. This is, you understand, sir, something playwrights do."

"No doubt you would know better than I," Guzm?n said. "But Christopher Marlowe is a dangerous character. He knows too many of the wrong people. Knowing so many rogues makes him likely a rogue himself. I am given to understand the Inquisition has taken several long, hard looks at him. They do not investigate a man merely for their amus.e.m.e.nt."

"While I was there, he and Shakespeare spoke of nothing but their craft."

Guzm?n ticked off points on his fingers. "First, Lieutenant, you do not know this for a fact. They could have hidden any number of coded meanings in their talk, and you would have been none the wiser.

Second, who knows what they said after you left the Theatre? They do, and G.o.d does, and no one else.

You do not."

That he was right made his supercilious manner no less annoying: more so, if anything. Lope protested: "Say what you will of Marlowe, but Shakespeare has always stayed with the stage and fought shy of politics."

But his superior shook his head. "Not necessarily. At the recent auto de fe, one of the men relaxed to the Inquisition for punishment--a notorious sorcerer and counterfeiter--saw Shakespeare in the crowd and called out for him to testify to his good character. This fellow, a certain Kelley, was also an intimate of Christopher Marlowe's. So Shakespeare is not above suspicion. No man is above suspicion," he added, sounding as certain as if he were reciting the Athanasian Creed.

Though the news shook Lope, he did his best not to show it. He said, "A drowning man will clutch at any straw."

"True," Captain Guzm?n agreed. "Or it may be true. But I find it interesting that this Kelley should reckon Shakespeare a straw worth clutching." Without giving de Vega a chance to answer, he rolled up the report, wrote something on the outside, and tied it with a green ribbon. Holding it out, he said, "I want you to take this to Westminster, to an Englishman there who has worked closely with us for a long time.

He already knows of the business with the sorcerer, and he is well suited to judge just how important this meeting between Shakespeare and Marlowe may be."

"Very well, your Excellency." Lope took the report. "An Englishman, you say? Am I going to have to translate my work here? I would want a secretary's help with that. I speak English well enough, but I cannot say I write it."Captain Guzm?n shook his head. "No need for that. He's fluent in Spanish. As I say, he's been with us since Isabella became Queen."

"All right. Good. That makes things simpler. This is the fellow's name here?"

"That's right. Get a horse from the stables and take it over to him right away. Vaya con Dios." The farewell was also a dismissal.

A wan English sun, amazingly low in the southern sky, dodged in and out from behind rolling clouds as Lope de Vega rode through London toward Westminster. When he went past St. Paul's cathedral, he scratched his head, wondering as he always did why the otherwise magnificent edifice should be spoiled by the strange, square, flat-topped steeple. Not so much as a cross up there, he thought, and clucked reproachfully at the folly of the English.

The horse, a bay gelding, was no more energetic than it had to be. It ambled up Ludgate Hill and out through the wall at Ludgate. London proper didn't stop at the wall; de Vega rode west along Fleet Street past St. Bridget's, St. Dunstan's in the West, and the New Temple, the church of the Knights Templars before the crusading order was suppressed. They all lay in the ward of Farringdon Without the Wall.

Lope couldn't tell exactly where that ward ended and the suburbs of the city began. He had thought Madrid a grand place, and so it was, but London dwarfed it. He wouldn't have been surprised if the English capital held a quarter of a million people. If that didn't make it the biggest city in the world, it surely came close.

Westminster, which lay at a bend in the Thames, was a separate, though much smaller, city in its own right, divided into twelve wards. The apparatus of government dominated it much more than London proper. Isabella and Albert dwelt in one of the several castles there. Parliament--Lope thought of it as the equivalent of the Cortes of Castile, though it was even fussier about its privileges than the Cortes of Navarre--met there. Westminster Abbey was an ecclesiastical center, though the senior archbishop of England, for no good reason de Vega could see, presided at Canterbury, fifty miles away. And the clerks and secretaries and scribes who served the higher functionaries also performed their offices in Westminster.

By the time he finally found the man he was looking for, Lope felt as if he'd navigated the labyrinth of the Minotaur. He'd spent most of an hour and most of his temper making his way through the maze before he knocked on the right door: one in the offices of the men who served Don Diego Flores de Vald?s, the commandant of the Spanish soldiers stationed in England.

"Come in," a voice called in English.

Lope de Vega did. The fellow behind the desk was unprepossessing: small, thin, pale, pockmarked, bespectacled. As de Vega walked in, he flipped a paper over so the newcomer wouldn't be able to read it. Lope caught a brief glimpse of pothooks and hieroglyphs--some sort of cipher. Maybe the man made up in brains what he lacked in looks. Peering down at the report, Lope said, "You are Thomas . . .

Phelippes?" He'd never seen the name spelled that way before--but then, the vagaries of English spelling could drive any Spaniard mad.

"I am," Phelippes said in English, and then switched to good Spanish: "You have the advantage of me, se?or . Would you sooner use your own tongue or mine?"

"Either will do," Lope replied, speaking English himself. After giving his name, he went on, "My superior, Captain Baltasar Guzm?n, ordered me to bring you my report on possible suspicious business at the Theatre the other day, and so I give it you." He held it out as if it were a baton.Phelippes took it. "I thank you. I am acquainted with Captain Guzm?n. A good man, sly as a serpent."

Lope wouldn't have used that as praise, but the Englishman plainly intended it so. He also spoke of the Spanish n.o.bleman as an equal or an inferior. How important are you? Lope knew he couldn't ask.

Phelippes went on, "Is there anything he desires me to look for in especial?"

"Yes--he desires your opinion of the trustiness of the two poets, Marlowe and Shakespeare," de Vega said.

"I had liefer put my hand in the wolf his jaws than put my trust in Christopher Marlowe," Phelippes said at once. "He companies with all manner of cozeners and knaves, and revels in the doing of't. I fear me he'll come to a bad end, and never know why. Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs die in earnest."

Lope smiled. "You are a man of learning, I see, to bring Plutarch forth at need. Now, what of Shakespeare?"

Feature for feature, Thomas Phelippes' face was in no way remarkable. Somehow, though, he managed a sneer any aristocrat might have envied. "Shakespeare? He knows no more than a puling babe of great affairs, and cares no more, either. All that matters to him is his company of players, and the plays he writes for 'em."

"This was also my thought." Lope did his best not to show his relief. "And I'd not have mentioned his name, save only that Captain Guzm?n noted a certain Edward Kelley had called out to him on his way to the Inquisition's cleansing fire."

"Ah, Kelley. There was rubbish that wanted burning, in sooth," Phelippes said with another fine sneer.

"But he was no intimate of Shakespeare's: that I know for a fact. Only a wretch seeking succor with none to be had." The Englishman proved to own a nasty chuckle, too. "I mis...o...b.. he affrighted Master Will like to stop his heart."

"I should say so!" De Vega wouldn't have wanted an inquisitor noting his connection to a man about to die. He inclined his head to Phelippes. "You do set my mind at ease, for which I thank you. I'll take your word back to Captain Guzm?n."

"Your servant, sir." Phelippes tapped the report with a fingernail, much as Guzm?n had done. "And I'll put this in brief for Don Diego. You know the tale, I'm sure: the greater the man, the less time hath he wherein to read."

"Not always," Lope said. "There is the King."

"What? Albert? I would not disagree with a new acquaintance, se?or , but--"

"No, not Albert," de Vega said impatiently. "Philip. The King, G.o.d preserve him." He crossed himself.

So did Phelippes. The way he did it told Lope he hadn't been doing it all his life. "Amen," he said. "But what hear you of his health? The last news I had was not good."

"Nor mine," Lope admitted. "He hath now his threescore and ten. He is in G.o.d's hands." He made the sign of the cross again.

"He always was, and so are we all." Phelippes signed himself again, too, no more smoothly than he had before.

Lope nodded approval. He hadn't thought the Englishman so pious. "I'm for London, then," he said. "Ihope to see you again, sir, and my thanks once more for setting my mind at rest."

"My pleasure, sir." Even before Lope was out the door, Phelippes returned to the ciphered message on which he'd been working.

WHEN REHEARSALS WENT well, they were a joy. Shakespeare took more pleasure in few things than in watching what had been only pictures and words in his mind take shape on the stage before his eyes. When things went not so well, as they did this morning . . . He clapped a hand to his forehead. "

'Sdeath!" he shouted. "Mechanical salt-b.u.t.ter rogues! Boys, apes, braggarts, Jacks, milksops! You are not worth another word, else I'd call you knaves."

Richard Burbage looked down his long nose at Shakespeare. He was the only player in Lord Westmorland's Men tall enough to do it. "Now see here, Will, you've poor cause to blame us when you were the worst of the lot," he boomed, turning his big, sonorous voice on Shakespeare alone instead of an audience.

He was right, too, as Shakespeare knew only too well. The poet gave the best defense he could: "My part's but a small one--"

"Ha!" Will Kemp broke in. "I never thought to hear a man admit as much."

"Devils take you!" Shakespeare scowled at the clown. "Not recalling your own lines, you aim to step on mine." He gathered himself. "If we play as we rehea.r.s.ed, they'll pelt us with cabbages and turnips enough to make soup for a year."

"We'll be better, come the afternoon. We always are." Burbage had a wealthy man's confidence; the Theatre and the ground on which it stood belonged to his family. Though several years younger than Shakespeare, he had a prosperous man's double chin--partly concealed by his pointed beard--and the beginnings of an imposing belly.

"Not always," Shakespeare said, remembering calamities he wished he could forget.

"Often enough," Burbage said placidly. "There's no better company than ours, and all London knows it."

He eyes, deep-set under thick eyebrows, flashed. "But you, Will. You're the steadiest trouper we have, and you always know your lines." He chuckled. "And so you ought, you having writ so many of 'em. But today? Never have I seen you so unapt, as if the very words were strange. Out on it! What hobgoblins prey on your mind?"

Shakespeare looked around the Theatre. Along with the company, the tireman and his a.s.sistants, the prompter, and the stagehands, a couple of dozen friends and wives and lovers milled about where the groundlings would throng in a few hours. Musicians peered down from their place a story above the tiring room. He had to talk to Burbage, but not before so many people. All he could do now was sigh and say, "When troubles come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."

Burbage tossed his head like a horse troubled by flies. "Pretty. It tells naught, of course, but pretty nonetheless."

"Give over, if you please," Shakespeare said wearily. "I'm not bound to unburden myself before any but G.o.d, and you are not He."

Kemp's eyes widened in well-mimed astonishment. "He's not? Don't tell him that, for I warrant he did not know't."A flush mounted to Burbage's cheeks and broad, high forehead. "Blaspheming toad."

"Your servant, sir." Kemp gave him a courtier's bow. Burbage snorted.

So did Shakespeare. The clown would mock anyone, and refused to let any insults stick to him.

Shakespeare said, "Shall we try once more the scene that vexed us in especial, that in which Romeo comes between Mercutio and Tybalt fighting? We've given this tragedy often enough ere now, these past several years. We should do't better than we showed."

"Too many lines from too many plays, all spinning round in our heads," Kemp said. " 'Tis a wonder we can speak a word some scribbling wretch did not pen for us."

Shakespeare had rarely felt more wretched. As Mercutio, he crossed swords with Burbage's Tybalt. The other player had fought against the invading Spaniards, and actually used a blade; Shakespeare's swordplay belonged only to the stage. And Burbage fenced now as if out for blood; when the time came for him to run Mercutio through under Romeo's arm, he almost really did it.

"By G.o.d," Shakespeare said, arising after he'd crumpled, "my death scene there came near to being my death scene in sooth."

Burbage grinned a predatory grin. "Nothing less than you deserve, for havering at us before. Satisfies you now this scene?"

"It will serve," Shakespeare said. "Still, I have somewhat to say to you on the subject of your swordplay." And on other things as well, he thought. Those, though, would have to wait.

The other player chose to misunderstand him. Setting a hand on the hilt of his rapier, he said, "I am at your service."

If they fought with swords in earnest, Shakespeare knew he was a dead man. What had Marlowe said about fanning quarrels? Surely not Burbage, Shakespeare thought, not when we've worked together so long. That such a thing could even occur to him was the measure of how many new worries he carried. I'll be like Kit soon, seeing danger in every face.

"Let it go, d.i.c.k," Kemp said. "An you spit him like a chine of beef, what are you then? Why, naught but a ghost--a pretty ghost, I'll not deny, but nonetheless a ghost--left suddenly dumb for having slain the one who gave you words to speak."

"There are other scribblers," Burbage rumbled ominously. But then he must have decided he'd gone too far, for he added, "We, being the best of companies, do deserve that which we have: to wit, the best of poets." He turned toward Shakespeare and clapped his big, scarred hands.

When the afternoon came, the play went well. Thinking about it afterwards, Shakespeare shook his head.

The performance had gone well, but there was more to it than that. A couple of the gentlemen sitting at the side of the stage smoked their pipes so furiously, the thick tobacco fumes spoiled the view for the groundlings behind them. The rowdies, having paid their pennies, were convinced they were men as good as any others, and pelted the offenders with nuts and pebbles--one of them, flying high, incidentally hitting the boy playing Juliet just as he was about to wonder where Romeo was. They didn't quite have a riot, but Shakespeare had trouble figuring out why not.

"Ofttimes strange, but never dull," he said in the tiring room. "Pa.s.s me that basin, d.i.c.k, if you'd be so kind."

"I'll do't," Burbage said. Shakespeare splashed water on his face and scrubbed hard with a towel to getrid of powder and rouge and paint. He looked in a mirror, then scrubbed some more. After the second try, he nodded. "There. Better. I have my own seeming once again."

"I shouldn't be so proud of it, were I you," Kemp said slyly.

"Were you I, you'd have a better seeming than you do," Shakespeare retorted. People laughed louder than the joke deserved. The biter bit was always funny; Shakespeare had used the device to good effect in more than one play. Will Kemp bared his teeth in what might have been a smile. He found the joke hard to see.

"Magnificent, Master Will!" There stood Lieutenant Lope de Vega, a broad smile on his face. "Truly magnificent! . . . Is something wrong?"

He'd seen Shakespeare start, then. "No, nothing really," Shakespeare answered, glad his actor's training gave his voice a property of easiness: for his was, without a doubt, a guilty start. "You did surprise me, coming up so sudden."

"I am sorry for it," the Spaniard said. "But this play--this play, sir, is splendid. This play is also closer to what someone--a man of genius, of course--might write in Spain than was If You Like It . . . though that too was most excellent, I haste to add."

"You praise me past my deserts," Shakespeare said modestly, though the compliments warmed him.

He'd never known a writer who disliked having others tell him how good he was. Some had trouble going on without hearing kind words at frequent intervals. Marlowe, for instance, bloomed like honeysuckles ripened by the sun at praise, but the icy fang of winter seemed to pierce his heart when his work met a sour reception--or, worse still, when it was ignored. He fed on plaudits, even more than most players. Shakespeare knew he had the same disease himself, but a milder case.

And Lope shook his head. "Not at all, sir. You deserve more praises for this work than I have English to give you." He gave Shakespeare several sentences of impa.s.sioned Spanish. Hearing that language in the tiring room made several people turn and mutter--the last thing Shakespeare wanted.

"I say again, sir, you are too generous," he murmured. Lieutenant de Vega shook his head once more. He did, at least, return to English, though he kept talking about plays he'd seen in Madrid before the Armada sailed. This work of mine likes him well, for its nearness to that which he knew before-time, Shakespeare realized. That took some of the pleasure from the praise: what woman would want a man to say she was beautiful because she reminded him of his mother?

After some considerable time, de Vega said, "But I do go on, is't not so?"

"By no means," Shakespeare lied. He couldn't quite leave that alone, though. "Did you write with celerity to match your speech, Master Lope, you'd astound the world with the plays that poured from your pen: you'd make yourself a very prodigy of words."

"Were my duties less, my time to write were more," the Spaniard answered, and Shakespeare thought he'd got away with it. But then de Vega reminded him that he was in fact Senior Lieutenant de Vega: "In aid of my duties, sir, a question--what acquaintance had you with Edward Kelley, that he should call to you when on his way to the fire?"

I never saw him before in my life. That was what Shakespeare wanted to say. But a lie that at once declared itself a lie was worse than useless. Marlowe was right, d.a.m.n him. De Vega is a Spaniard first, a groundling and player and poet only second. Picking his words with great care, the Englishman said, "I shared tavern talk with him a handful of times over a handful of years, no more." Though the tiringroom was chilly, sweat trickled down his sides from under his arms.

But Lope de Vega only nodded. "So I would have guessed. Whom would Kelley have known better, think you?"

Marlowe, Shakespeare thought, and d.a.m.ned his fellow poet again. Aloud, though, he said only, "Not having known him well myself, I fear I cannot tell you." He spread his hands in carefully simulated regret.

"Yes, I see." Lope remained as polite as ever. Even so, he asked another question: "Well, in whose company were you with this rogue, then?"

"I pray your pardon, but I can't recall." Shakespeare used his player's training to hold his voice steady. "I had not seen him for more than a year, perhaps for two, before we chanced to spy each the other in Tower Street."

The Spaniard let it drop there. He went off to pay his respects to a pretty girl Shakespeare hadn't seen before, one who'd likely got past the tireman's a.s.sistants because she was so pretty. Whoever she was, de Vega's attentions made her giggle and simper and blush. Shakespeare could tell which actor she'd come to see--one of the hired men who played small parts, not a sharer--by the fellow's ever more unhappy expression. But the hired man had no weapon on his belt, while Lieutenant de Vega not only wore a rapier but, by the set of his body, knew what to do with it.