SHAKESPEARE’ SECRET

by Elise Broach

  What would your readers be most surprised to learn about you?

  It’s funny, but I don’t think there’s much about me that would surprise my readers. One way or another, it’s all in my books.

  What do a lonely ten-year-old-boy named James, the great Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer, and a beetle with excellent night vision have in common? Find out in Masterpiece by Elise Broach, coming in 2008.

  That night, when the house was quiet, Marvin and Elaine sorted through the treasure box while their parents played a game of Staples in the other room. Staples was the beetles’ modified version of the human game of Horseshoes, in which two teams threw staples at broken toothpicks stuck in the floor. Because each beetle could throw as many as four staples at once, using his front four legs, the air was filled with sharp whizzing objects, and the grown-ups preferred to sequester the children in another part of the house before they began.

  “Watch out, Albert!” Marvin heard his mother cry. “We have enough holes in the wall as it is.”

  Marvin and Elaine peered into the treasure box, looking for the perfect gift for James. “There’s the nickel,” Marvin said.

  “Oooo, a buffalo nickel!” Elaine cried. “He’ll like that, don’t you think? They’re rare. He can sell it and buy something better. That’s what I’d do.”

  Marvin touched the dull surface of the coin. “I guess it’s the best thing in here,” he said. “But I’d rather give him something to keep.”

  “Well, maybe he will keep it,” Elaine said cheerfully. “Boys save the silliest things. Look at you with your tack collection. What will you ever use those for?”

  “Those are weapons,” Marvin protested.

  Elaine laughed so hard she fell off the edge of the box and lay on her back, feet waving in the air. “Oh! Help me! Marvin, turn me over.”

  But Marvin ignored her. He burrowed under the nickel and used his shell to flip it out of the treasure box. Then he heaved it upright and rolled it through the hole in the wall into the black expanse of the cupboard.

  “Marvin!” Elaine called. “Come back!”

  The journey through the dark apartment to James’s room was an arduous one. Rolling the nickel across the kitchen tile went relatively smooth, but hoisting it over the door sills left Marvin exhausted and panting. He had to watch for trouble every step of the way, not just night-roving Pompadays, but the booby traps of forgotten gum or Scotch tape on the floor, or worse yet, a foraging rodent. When he finally reached James’s bedroom, he had to sit for a minute to catch his breath. A streetlamp outside the window cast dim light across the walls, and in the bluish blackness, Marvin saw the mountainous silhouette of James, asleep under the blankets. He heard the boy’s deep sighs.

  Marvin thought about the birthday party. Had it been a good day for James? The boys at the party weren’t his friends. The presents had been an uninspired mix of electronic games and designer clothing. Mrs. Pompaday was as fussy and self-centered as always, and even James’s father, whom Marvin liked a lot, hadn’t come up with a present that seemed to please his son. Marvin glanced down at the worn face of the buffalo nickel. Would the coin make up for everything else? Probably not.

  Suddenly, Marvin felt so sad he could hardly stand it. A person’s birthday should be a special day, a wonderful day, a day of pure celebration for the luck of being born! And James’s birthday had been miserable.

  Marvin rolled the nickel to a prominent place in the middle of the floor, away from the edge of the rug where it might be overlooked. James would see it here. He looked around the dark room one last time.

  Then he saw the bottle of ink. It was high up on James’s desk, and it appeared to be open. Curious, Marvin crawled across the floor to the desk and quickly climbed to the top. James had spread newspaper over the desk, and two or three sheets of the art paper his father had given him. On one page he’d made some experimental scribbles and had written his name. The pen, neatly capped, rested at the edge of the paper, but the bottle of ink stood open, glinting in the lamplight.

  Without really thinking about what he was doing, Marvin crawled to the bottle cap and dipped his two front legs in the ink that had puddled inside the cap. On his clean hind legs, he backed over to the unused sheet of paper. He looked out the window at the nightscape of the street: the brownstone opposite with its rows of darkened windows, the snow-dusted rooftop, the streetlamp, the naked, spidery branches of a single tree. Gently, delicately, and with immense concentration, Marvin lowered his front legs and began to draw.

  The ink flowed smoothly off his legs across the page. He kept glancing up, tracing the details of the scene with his eyes, then transferring them onto the paper. He’d never done anything like this before, but somehow, it seemed completely natural, even unstoppable. It was as if his legs had been waiting all their lives for this ink, this page, this lamp-lit window view. There was no way to describe the feeling. It thrilled Marvin to his very core.

  He drew and drew, losing all sense of time. He rushed back and forth between the bottle cap and the paper, dipping his front legs gently in the black ink, always careful not to smear his previous work. He watched the picture take shape before his eyes. It was a complicated thatching of lines and whirls that looked like an abstract design up close, as Marvin leaned over it. But as he backed away, it transformed into a meticulous portrait of the cityscape: a tiny, detailed replica of the winter scene outside the window.

  And then the light changed. The sky turned from black to dark blue to gray, the streetlamp shut off, and James’s room was filled with the noise of the city waking. A garbage truck groaned and banged as it passed on the street below. James stirred beneath his bedcovers. Marvin, desperate to finish his picture before the boy awakened, hurried between the page and the bottle cap, which was almost out of ink. At last he stopped, surveying his miniature scene.

  It was finished.

  It was perfect.

  It was breathtaking.

  Marvin’s heart swelled. He felt that he had never done anything so fine or important in his entire life. He wiped his ink-soaked forelegs on the newspapers and scurried behind the desk lamp, bursting with pride, in a fever of anticipation, just as James threw off his blankets.

  James stumbled out of bed and stood in the center of the bedroom, rubbing his face. He looked around groggily, then straightened, his eyes lighting on the floor.

  “Hey,” he said softly. He padded over to the nickel and crouched, picking it up.

  Good for James, thought Marvin. Of course they had no reason to worry that he’d overlook it.

  James turned the coin over in his palm and smiled. “Huh,” he said, walking toward his desk. “I wonder where this came from.”

  Marvin stiffened and retreated further behind the desk lamp.

  James stopped and gasped.

  “What...?”

  Marvin watched his pale face, his eyes huge, as he stared at the drawing. He quickly looked behind him, as if the room might hold some clue that would explain what he saw on the desk.

  Then slowly, brows furrowed, James pulled out the chair and sat down, leaning over the picture.

  “Wow,” he said. “Wow!”

  Marvin straightened with pride.

  James kept examining the drawing, then the scene through the window, whispering to himself. “It’s exactly what’s outside! It’s like a teeny tiny picture of the street! This is amazing.”

  Marvin crept around the base of the lamp so he could hear the boy better.

  “But how...?” James picked up the pen and uncapped it, studying it. He lifted the bottle of ink and frowned, screwing the bottle cap back on. “Who did this?” he asked, staring again at the picture.

  And then, without planning to—without meaning to, without ever thinking for a moment of the consequences— Marvin found himself crawling out into the open, across the vast desktop, directly in front of James. He stopped at the edge of the picture and waited, unable to breathe.

  James stared at hi
m.

  After a long, interminable silence, during which Marvin almost dashed to the grooved safety of the wainscoting behind the desk, James spoke.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” he said.

  Marvin waited.

  “But how...?”

  Marvin hesitated. He crawled over to the bottle of ink.

  James reached across the desk and Marvin cringed as enormous human fingers swept tremblingly close to his shell. But the boy avoided him, carefully lifting the bottle and shaking it. He unscrewed the cap and set it down next to Marvin.

  “How?” he asked again.

  Marvin dipped his two front legs in the ink cap and walked across the page to his picture. Unwilling to change the details of the image, he merely traced the line that framed it, then stepped back.

  “With your legs? Like that? Dipping them in the ink?” A wide grin full of wonderment and delight spread across James’s face. “You really did that! A bug! That’s the most incredible thing I ever, ever, ever saw in my whole entire life!”

  Marvin beamed up at him.

  “And with my birthday present, too! You couldn’t have done it without my birthday present.” His voice rose excitedly, as he leaned closer to Marvin.

  “It’s like we’re a team. And you know what? I didn’t even want this birthday present before. I thought, what am I going to do with this, I’m not like my dad, I don’t even know how to draw. But now, it’s like the best thing I ever got. This birthday is the best one ever!”

  Marvin smiled happily. He realized that James could not for one minute see his expression, but he suspected somehow that the boy knew anyway.

  Just then, they heard a noise in the hallway and the sound of Mrs. Pompadays voice. “James! What are you doing in there? Who are you talking to?”

  Marvin dove for cover, narrowly squeezing under James’s china piggy bank just as Mrs. Pompaday entered the room.

  An Imprint of Holtzbrinck Publishers

  SHAKESPEARE’S SECRET. Copyright © 2005 by Elise Broach. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Square Fish, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Broach, Elise. Shakespeare’s secret / Elise Broach.–1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Named after a character in a Shakespeare play, misfit sixth-grader Hero becomes interested in exploring this unusual connection because of a valuable diamond supposedly hidden in her new house, an intriguing neighbor, and the unexpected attention of the most popular boy in school.

  1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616—Authorship—Juvenile fiction. [1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616-Authorship-Fiction. 2. Great Britain-History-Henry VIII, 1509-1547-Fiction. 3. Great Britain-History-Elizabeth, 1558-1603-Fiction. 4. Mystery and detective stories. 5. Neighbors—Fiction. 6. Maryland—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B78083Sh 2005 [Fic]-dc21 2004054020

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37132-6 / ISBN-10: 0-312-37132-2

  Originally published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company, LLC

  www.squareiishbooks.com

  Permission for use of the following is gratefully acknowledged:

  Portrait of Edward de Vere on page 246 courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library.

  “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson, reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright© 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.