Interred with Their Bones

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  I looked at Ben, hoping for a denial.

  A small muscle moved in his jaw. “I needed you to trust me.”

  “What Benjamin Pearl is, Katharine,” said Athenaide, “is a trained killer. A warrior, I might say, if he deserved the implied honor. He has, at least, the outward trappings of honor. He’s been awarded the Victoria Cross—not a medal that the queen hands out every day. For heroism in an SAS raid in Sierra Leone that saved eighty civilians but cost twelve British special-ops agents their lives. Questions have since been raised, however, as to whether he might have been responsible for the dying rather than the saving. There was a small fortune in diamonds involved. Isn’t that right, Mr. Pearl?”

  Sir Henry’s face was alight with anger, but Ben’s was empty, reptilian in its focus. Everything I knew about them rose in a whirlwind and fell back down into place in a new shape. Between them, they had killed Roz, Maxine, Dr. Sanderson, and a nice woman at Wilton whose only “crime” had been to see them come in the door. And they had used me as hunters use hounds, to scent their prey.

  I saw what was coming a split second before it happened. With a growl, Sir Henry leapt at Athenaide. In the same instant, Ben hurled his chisel at Matthew, knocking the gun from his hand. And then he lunged for me, a look of cold fury in his eyes.

  In the center of the chancel, Athenaide’s flashlight clattered to the floor and went out. Darkness rushed back around us, and I dodged Ben.

  “Run, Kate,” yelled Matthew. I sent my chisel spinning through space, shin high, in Ben’s direction. With a grunt, he hurtled to the floor. Slipping past him in the dark, I headed back toward the nave.

  Behind me, I heard a struggle, and then the high whine of two quick silenced shots.

  And everything went still.

  Who had been shot?

  “Kate!” It was Ben’s voice, resounding around the church.

  I pressed back against the choir stalls.

  “Find her,” he said in a clipped voice.

  Had both Athenaide and Matthew been killed? A deep howl began to rise inside me; I pressed my hand against my mouth to keep it in.

  “The only working door is the one we came in. At the rear of the nave,” said Sir Henry, panting a little.

  If they reached the door before I did, they would trap me inside.

  I was tiptoeing through the crossing, when I sensed movement off to the side. Ben and Sir Henry were still behind me; it couldn’t be them. Matthew or Athenaide? I crept sideways.

  Athenaide was standing just inside the carved wooden screen fronting the chapel set into the south side of the crossing. I slipped in next to her, and she squeezed my hand as we crouched behind the lower panels of the screen. If Ben and Sir Henry found us, they’d have us cornered. If they did not, we had the sliver of a chance to hide until morning brought people back into the church.

  We hunched there, straining to hear through the darkness. Where was Matthew? Dead, or bleeding to death on the floor? Stealthy footsteps entered the crossing and then edged past the chapel into the nave.

  Athenaide stood, pulling me up with her. Taking me firmly by the elbow, she drew me back out into the crossing and back into the chancel. She seemed to know where she was going. Maybe there was a space behind the High Altar somewhere up ahead. Behind or beneath it. I thought churches sometimes had hollows there—or trapdoors into crypts.

  At the rear of the nave, a flashlight switched on. Footsteps began walking swiftly back up the aisle toward the chancel. We sped up—but instead of heading for the altar, Athenaide pulled me to the southern wall of the church. Just past the choir stalls was an arched door that had once led to an ossuary, a small crypt for holding bones. But the ossuary had long since been torn down, and the door sealed. We’d be caught against the heavy oak door. I pulled back, but Athenaide’s grip tightened.

  The footsteps reached the crossing. The beam of the flashlight swept around the chancel, still ten or fifteen feet short of us. But reaching the altar was now out of the question. We pressed up against the south wall—and the door opened outward on well-oiled hinges.

  We were outside in the night.

  Matthew. I turned back.

  But Athenaide shut the door behind us and pulled me out among the tombstones. Zigzagging among the graves and twining mist, we ran east past the end of the church. I stopped suddenly as the ground simply dropped away. We’d come to the riverbank. But Athenaide kept going, clambering down through the reeds.

  Behind us, the door opened and the flashlight beam shot through the night.

  “Kate!” Ben roared.

  I scrambled after Athenaide. Bobbing on the water below was a boat, half-hidden in the reeds. We slid into it, lying flat.

  Matthew. I tried not to think of him bleeding on the floor of the church. The only reason he’d been here was to help me, and now he was dying or dead. Again the howl rose through me, and I held it in.

  We listened to Ben crashing and cursing over our heads, searching for us among the graves. Gradually, he worked his way around to the other side of the church. Still Athenaide made no move to cast off.

  Above, quiet footsteps crept toward the bank overhead, stopping at the edge of the reeds. We both tensed, and Athenaide raised one arm, aiming her gun up the bank.

  “Vero,” a voice whispered.

  “Nihil verius,” answered Athenaide.

  The reeds slithered and squeaked, and Matthew slid down into the boat. His hand slipped across my shoulder with a brief squeeze as Athenaide finally unmoored us. Then he grabbed the oars and began rowing upstream.

  He kept the boat near the bank, almost invisible beneath overhanging trees and reeds. The pattering of the rain hid both the sound of oars and the ripple of our passing. Past the park, we came to the rope ferry. Matthew quickly tied up, and we slipped into the trees.

  Up ahead, a car pulled out into the street. As it drew alongside, a door opened. Without waiting for it to stop, Athenaide ducked into the backseat, and I followed her. Matthew slid in after me.

  “Coventry,” said Athenaide, and the driver nodded.

  I looked back. There were no running footsteps. No car. Nothing moved in the silent streets.

  “The grave,” I whispered. “That’s why they’re not following.”

  “Probably,” said Athenaide, pulling a thermos of coffee from a compartment in the door.

  “But they’ll dig up the grave.” I squirmed, reaching across Athenaide for the door handle.

  Athenaide laid a hand on my knee. “Let them.”

  “You don’t understand,” I wailed. “They’ll find whatever Ophelia left. If it’s not what they want to see, they’ll destroy it.”

  “No, they won’t,” she said, fishing around at her feet. Pulling up a small inlaid box of rosewood, she set it in my lap with a smile. “We’ve been there first.”

  INTERLUDE

  August 1612

  FOR SIX LONG years, she had bided her time. Now, the moment she’d been waiting for was about to arrive.

  Earlier in the evening, Henry, prince of Wales, had feasted his royal parents and the entire court in a summerhouse of green boughs built on a hilltop in the park at Woodstock. As starlight had pricked through the branches, the tables had been drawn, the king and queen had departed, and the younger courtiers had begun to dance on the lawn.

  A line of ladies swayed and curved, their ruffs undulating like gauzy wings as they circled around the prince. In their midst, a glove fell to the floor. It was a thing of astonishing beauty, pale ivory kid edged with lace, its fingers impossibly long and slender, its wide cuffs embroidered in gold thread, pearls, and rubies.

  In the shadows at the side of the arbor, the dark-haired woman in green tensed, watching. As instructed, the man she’d handpicked, a new arrival eager to make his mark, had swooped down upon the prize. She saw him recognize the monogram—an elaborate jeweled H—and his hand arrested midreach. For a moment, she thought his courage might fail him. The glove, after all, belonged to Fran
ces Howard, countess of Essex, and no one interacted with the Howards lightly.

  Against just such a chance, the woman had made sure, in a roundabout way, that this gentleman, even so new to the court, had heard the rumors about the prince and the flaxen-haired, teasing countess. He’d seen for himself how greedily the prince’s eyes followed her.

  The gentleman’s courage held. He scooped up the glove but did not return it to the lady. Instead, he offered it, plumed hat in hand and eyes fixed on the floor, to the prince.

  Around them, the music faltered. Conversation sputtered and fell silent. In spite of long drills on etiquette, the courtier glanced up. The prince was staring at him as if he’d offered up filth scraped from the floor of a sty. Releasing him, the royal eyes came to rest on the countess. She sank into a small curtsey, two spots of color kindling in her cheeks. “I would not touch it,” said the prince with cold distaste. “It has been stretched by another.” Turning on his heel, he strode from the arbor, his friends scurrying to catch up.

  “What have you done?” the courtier moaned.

  “Paid you well,” the woman answered, and then she slipped out in the wake of the prince.

  It had seemed the perfect revenge. Her daughter had been stripped of a name by the countess’s great-uncle and father. In return, she meant to trawl their daughter’s name—and theirs—through the mud.

  It had been easier than she’d expected, in the end. All she’d had to do was pass on the truth. Frances Howard, countess of Essex, had done the rest by herself. Married to an earl she abhorred and pushing for an annulment, Frances Howard had been set by her family to play for the prince. It was an outrageous bid, for Frances’s hated husband had long been one of the prince’s closest friends. Her success was a testament to the purity of her beauty and the strength of her charm. Gradually, Essex and the prince had parted ways. While other eyes had watched the prince’s intensifying warmth with growing unease, however, the dark-haired woman had watched Frances. And what she’d seen had proved useful.

  Outwardly, the girl had done her duty. More circumspectly, she was flirting on the side with someone else—the man the straitlaced prince despised above all others: his father’s beautiful young lover, Robert Carr.

  Slowly, inexorably, the woman had laid a trail of evidence that roused the prince’s suspicions. Just that morning, she had pulled the strings that brought him, at the end of one of his early-morning rides, to a place where he might see for himself the spectacle of Carr slipping from the countess’s rooms.

  He had been in a foul temper all day. Now, outside the summerhouse, the woman listened to the prince’s friends talking him back from the brink of folly. The earl of Essex, Frances’s spurned husband and the prince’s boyhood friend, stepped into the torchlight, leading up a horse, its tack jingling like small silver bells. “Be as angry as you like. But don’t blame Frances alone. She was spawned by a family of vipers. She’ll have been following orders.”

  The prince mounted. “When I am king,” he said savagely, “I’ll not leave one of them alive to piss against a wall.” Spurring the horse, he galloped off. The others hastily gave chase.

  The woman waited until the night had emptied to step from the shadows. But no sooner had she emerged into the open than she heard someone else behind her and whirled. Another listener stepped into the torchlight. A white-headed man with a close-clipped white beard and cold, glittering eyes. The earl of Northampton, patriarch of the Howard clan.

  She froze. He had withdrawn with the king and queen; she had made sure of it. How had he come to be here?

  “My lady,” he said, escorting her, trembling, back to the dance. “Perhaps you are lost.”

  What had she done?

  To attack the prince in the open would have been suicide. Still, the Howards could not let the stain on their daughter’s honor go unanswered. The revenge they designed was exquisite. They would flood London with stories and songs of a woman loyal to her husband, slandered and ruined by a prince who had been her husband’s friend. They would name no names, but the references would be clear. The centerpiece was to be a play penned by London’s finest playwright: Mr. William Shakespeare.

  He regretted to say that he did not take personal commissions.

  The family quite understood, but under the circumstances, they were sure he could make an exception.

  After reviewing those circumstances, he agreed. They made sure of that; as lord chamberlain, the earl of Suffolk was in the position to make good on theatrical threats. But it was the carrot, not the stick, that secured Mr. Shakespeare.

  “Quixote?” Theophilus, Lord Howard de Walden, was incredulous. “Why should Cervantes be such a lure?” The book had just been translated, dedicated to Theo, and given that it was the talk of every literate creature in London, he was taking something of a proprietary interest.

  “The bait is not Cervantes,” his great-uncle replied in tones emphasizing his contempt for Theo’s lack of subtlety.

  “Then who?” asked Theo.

  “The translator,” his father, the earl of Suffolk, snapped.

  That evening, Theo forced a confession from a thoroughly cowed Thomas Shelton. Thomas had not made the translation himself, though the flattering prologue dedicating the book to Theo was his. The translation was the work of his brother William, but it could never have been published under his own name. He was persona non grata—a Jesuit, living in Spain, as Theo’s great-uncle knew very well.

  “How?” demanded Theo.

  “Lord Northampton sent him there,” stuttered Shelton.

  As usual, Theo’s great-uncle proved right. In a house in the Blackfriars district of London, Mr. Shakespeare buried himself in Cervantes’s masterpiece.

  A little while later, Northampton at last got wind of his great-niece’s illicit dalliance with Robert Carr. “Not a dalliance,” a bruised and tear-stricken Frances flung at her great-uncle and her father. “A grand passion.”

  That claim made no impression upon either Northampton or Suffolk. An alliance with the king’s favorite offered nowhere near the prestige or certainty of an alliance with the king’s son. On the other hand, as a source of power and wealth, it was not to be sneezed at either. The king liked his favorites to marry; far from being jealous of their wives, he tended to be munificent. But the benefits would last only for the term of the king’s life. Any alliance with Carr would prove ruinous the moment the prince took the throne.

  Frances looked from her great-uncle to her father and stalked from the room.

  In October, as apples ripened and leaves fell, Prince Henry fell suddenly ill of a fever. Two weeks later, at the beginning of November, he died. As murmurs of poison eddied in the autumn air, Northampton fixed his great-niece with a dark stare. In silence, she gazed coolly back.

  The family’s path was clear. With the prince dead, they decided to settle for Carr and began pressing for the annulment of Frances’s first marriage with renewed zeal.

  Then, in December, the new play by Mr. Shakespeare, called Cardenio, crossed Suffolk’s desk, and they realized they’d created a problem.

  The title was a strange coincidence, but not an allowable one. In a play once meant to pillory the prince and exonerate Frances, the name Cardenio was far too close to Carr. To make matters worse, in the play, Cardenio was the romantic hero charged with rescuing the heroine from the venal prince. He had been meant to represent her first husband, Essex—but no one would see that now. Already, rumors were flying that Frances had cuckolded the prince with Carr. This play would only fan them to flames. And it wasn’t just a matter of changing the name. The entire world had been reading Don Quixote. The story of Cardenio would be recognizable, no matter what name was pasted on top of it.

  Mr. Shakespeare was told to withdraw the play.

  Before he could answer, someone had titillated royal ears with hints of a play from that new book, Quixote. The king demanded it, by name, for his daughter’s wedding festivities.

  Not even Su
ffolk could revoke a direct command by the king. In January, Cardenio played at court. Fuming in the background, Suffolk saw to it that the wretched piece was quickly forgotten. Oblivion, however, did not last long. In June, the King’s Men announced a revival of the play for public performance at the Globe. Mr. Shakespeare was told, again, to withdraw the play.

  For reasons he did not elaborate, Mr. Shakespeare refused.

  On a fine June afternoon, the dark-haired woman clasped the hand of her five-year-old daughter, dark as a little gypsy, and helped her up the stairs to the middle gallery of the Globe.

  “Whose?” Will had once demanded. “Whose is it?”

  “Her name is Rosalind,” the woman had replied. “Rose for short.”

  “An expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” he’d groaned. Words that still made her bristle.

  The girl was excited, sucking on an orange and looking about with wide eyes as the galleries filled. She had not been to the theater before. “Will we see him?” she asked for the umpteenth time. “Mr. Shakespeare?”

  “After,” said her mother.

  She had not been to the Globe herself in a long time. She had forgotten the boisterous smells of bodies and pomades, of sweetmeats and savory pies hawked by children not much older than her daughter. And the colors: the dull blue of apprentices’ smocks jostling side by side with the elegant glimmer of noblemen’s silks and the tawdry finery of whores trolling for business.

  Shakespeare would be in the place he loved best, among the actors in the tiring-house behind the stage. Watching the audience. Watching her.

  With a blare of trumpets, the show started, sweeping the crowd to Spain.

  Near the end of the first act, a note was thrust into her hand. She looked around but saw no one paying her any mind. She glanced down. I am now become the tomb of my own honour, someone had written, a dark mansion for death alone to dwell in. She did not recognize the words.

  A few moments later, one of the boys who played women so well wandered onstage as a young lady, raped and disheveled, wailing those words aloud. It was then that the woman felt the pull of watching eyes. She looked at the place where she knew Shakespeare liked to peer out from behind the stage, but that was not where the feeling was coming from. Slowly, her gaze was drawn to one of the Gentlemen’s Rooms off to the right. But every face was rapt in the play.