The Vanishing Man Read online

  But on the heels of his rise came his fall. It began when the courts prosecuted him for two separate crimes, first the illegal trade of large quantities of wool, and second, usury. (This may be the crime I most abhor, as it preys on the poor and the credulous. A murderer may at least be said to have lost his ability to calculate right and wrong. Usury is done as coolly as shearing a sheep.) By 1576, this man had to forfeit his public office. There is almost no trace of him in the town records after that until his death.

  This may seem like a dreary biography, with its minor apogee and depressing sequel. Certainly it would have been forgotten wholly, and I would not be recounting it to you, were it not for one of the man’s children. Not Gilbert, not Mary, not Joan. No; you will have likely guessed this child’s name; William. The market town was Stratford-upon-Avon, the glovemaker was John Shakespeare, and the son, our nation’s greatest artist, William Shakespeare.

  Even Malone knows very little (and as you know, in my modest way I have contributed to the scholarship on this subject) of the playwright’s youth. Most famously, there is no record of his so-called “lost years,” between 1582, when he was married at the age of 18, and 1592, when he began to make a name for himself in London. It is traditional to say that he fled to London to escape charges of poaching. I could go further into this notion (the family of Sir Thomas Lucy cling to it). But here instead I will begin a second strand of our story.

  The title that I am humbled to bear, and which will one day pass to you, originated, as you know, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a crucial figure in this tale. I have personally never cared all that much about the schism between England and Rome. In our ancestor’s time, however, religion was a choice with consequences of life and death.

  You will remember the saga of Henry VIII from your schooldays. He left Catholicism and founded the Protestant church, that he might obtain a divorce. Then his daughter Mary restored the crown to the Catholic cause, before finally Elizabeth, during her long rule, made it Protestant again, a decision that her successor, King James, who gives his name to our Bible, helped finally to consecrate.

  During the reign of that awful Mary, our family remained Protestant. We were rewarded for it with the title you will inherit, an extension of our lands, and a place in history’s, and, we may hope, God’s, graces.

  Conversely, during the reigns of Elizabeth and James many men remained, at great personal risk, members of the Catholic faith.

  Their reward has been more doubtful than ours. (The everlasting fires of hell, in the first place, if you wish to believe the curate at Dorset Chapel.) Foremost among these men was the rather romantic figure of Sir Edmund Campion, who took his life in his hands by returning to England from abroad with pamphlets preaching the Roman faith, dodging in and out of inlets along the coast in order to deposit them with members of the faith. He was finally caught by priest hunters—these were a cruel band of men, even we must own—and, after turning down the chance to be Archbishop of Canterbury if he would only convert, was hanged, then drawn and quartered, at Tyburn.

  When Elizabeth died, in 1603, there was hope for the Catholics that they might have more freedom, but in fact Elizabeth’s successor, James, took a very hard line with non-conformists. Some lived in peace; some conformed; some were banished and reprieved; some, alas, were executed.

  And it is here, with hopes that I retain your patience through these twisting lanes, that my stories merge.

  John Shakespeare’s household was broken up and sold upon his death, two years before his Queen’s, in 1601. This father had regained some of his position with his son’s success, and both were, in all outward respects, good Protestants.

  What is known only to a few people, however, now including you, is a truth that has long been rumored but never confirmed: The Shakespeares remained Catholic.

  One hundred and fifty years ago, five years after William Shakespeare’s death, there was a raid upon the house. Anti-Catholic sentiment was high in London, and they had word from an informant.

  That informant, I am at once chagrined and proud to say, was an emissary from that age’s Duke of Dorset, my great-great-grandfather. He was a man of iron will. He ordered and supervised the raid, and the bailiffs who conducted it found, cleverly bricked away behind the hearth, a chest full of all the markers of the secret sacrament: vestments, a chalice, the wafers and wine that papists to this day believe constitute the body and blood of Christ. Most deadly of all, they found a bundle of Campion’s pamphlets.

  The owner of the house could have been executed for the possession of any of those. At a minimum, his property would have been forfeit and he might have been banished.

  Your ancestor was merciful, however—because he had his own motives. The Protestant church’s lower officers were rude, rough men, who would have been contented to have found evidence of secret Catholicism. It was the duke who suppressed their record-keeping, because of his alternative purpose, which is a secret to this day. He was a benefactor of the theater; and discovered, as he had thought he might, more than simply artifacts of the Catholic faith: his men found the painting that I showed you this morning.

  And with it, among the dusty odds and ends stored in the small bricked-off keep, a letter. It described a single hidden play.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Lenox stopped reading.

  If what the letter said was true, all this had just increased dramatically in significance. He had been involved in cases of murder, and to be sure, nothing could matter more than those. But this was an issue of public magnitude upon a different order. If a lost play by Shakespeare were discovered, England would stop; the portrait would be a footnote to it. No greater treasure, shy of King Arthur’s sword, could be discovered within the isle.

  Protect it—the Duke had said, with a meaningful look—protect it and find it.

  He may have meant in these last words not the portrait, but the play.

  There was a knock at the door. He didn’t know how much time he had passed in contemplation, but even as he rose he saw that the duke’s daughter, Lady Violet, was entering the room. He turned the letter facedown.

  Even at this moment, her posture and bearing were unmistakably aristocratic. She wore a plain blue house dress, and a row of dazzling emeralds pinned back her hair—though even this lightly worn fortune could not, alas, make her beautiful.

  “May I have a word, Mr. Lenox?” she asked.

  “Of course, Lady Violet,” he said. “I am at your service.”

  She sat upon a plush settee near the window, so soft that she sank into it as if into a meringue. Outside there was the brisk sound of a horse passing, and Lenox remembered that there was a world beyond these walls.

  “How may I help you?” he asked.

  “We have just been informed by one of the constables that in fact my father will not be allowed visitors until he is processed into the Tower by the Keeper of Her Majesty’s Jewels, Charles Wyndham, who has been called from a hunt in the country. Absurd, of course. But it is tradition. I myself am not allowed to see him. He will be free to receive visitors from tomorrow morning.”

  “You have spared me a trip this afternoon, then—thank you.”

  She put her hands together and looked down at them. “You can imagine that Corfe and I are exceedingly worried.”

  She didn’t mention her composed and icy mother, Lenox noted. “Is your brother’s health improving?”

  “He is still low. But steady.”

  “Your father mentioned that he has refused to see a doctor. I know a very discreet one.”

  An odd, troubled look passed over her features. “He goes on refusing. But then he has always been stubborn as a rock. I thank you for the offer—I will pass it on to him.”

  “Of course.”

  “Above all, both he and I are mourning Craig, and despondent at our father’s misapprehension.”

  Lenox nodded. “Yes.”

  “You know better than most that he had been acting errat
ically. Sleeping in the study, carryings his pistol to meals. Corfe and I have heard that he was rude to you at White’s.”

  “That is forgotten, anyhow.”

  “Be that as it may, it is a behavior most unlike him.”

  She had a melodic voice, Lady Violet, its syllables as distinct as the facets of a crystal glass; the lone beautiful thing about her, perhaps, poor soul. Sitting here, fingers worrying at the scuffed silver ring on a gold chain around her neck, she reminded Lenox of a character from Shakespeare herself—wise older sister to a dashing younger brother (still abed somewhere nearby), devoted daughter to a capricious father.

  There was a reason Dorset had left her in charge of his affairs, not Corfe, Lenox realized.

  “And how may I help, Your Ladyship?”

  “You are working upon the … mystery, I suppose you would call it?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Have you made progress?”

  “Incrementally, Your Ladyship.”

  She gave him an even look. “When my father said Protect it—what was he referring to, Mr. Lenox?”

  “There I must refer you to him, I am sorry to say.”

  “It is a secret?”

  “I suppose you could call it that.”

  She accepted this calmly, little knowing what lay in the letter on the table. “Very well.”

  Lenox filled the silence, sensing that she wanted to discuss all of this further, this tremendous explosion of incident, but didn’t quite know how. “Is there anyone you can think of who might have stolen the painting?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No.”

  Lenox was quiet for a moment and then said, “Anyone who might wish harm to your father?”

  She looked him directly in the eye but did not speak, returning his silence. At last, she said, “Corfe wonders about … someone.”

  “If it helps you to feel more free to speak, I will not whisper a word of it to anyone.”

  She hesitated. “What about Lady Jane Grey?”

  “No.”

  He was not surprised that she asked, for they were known to be close. But he was surprised when she said, next, “Is it true she is having a garden party in two Saturdays?”

  “It is, yes.”

  “Oh! I am sure it will be lovely.” She looked down, knowing perhaps that she had given herself away. “I hope for her that the weather will hold as fair as it is now.”

  “Would you care to come as my guest?” Lenox asked.

  She looked at him. “You are very kind. May I consider it?”

  He bowed his head. “Of course.”

  Very suddenly she said, “Corfe thinks that it’s General Pendleton. I do not know whether I agree. But that is what he thinks.”

  “Why?” asked Lenox, just as quickly, for admissions like this one had momentum.

  “It is a long story.”

  “No, I know the story. Why now? Why the painting?”

  “Corfe doesn’t say—but he … he feels so sure! Perhaps he knows something I do not. I thought I would tell you. In fact—” She halted.

  “Yes?”

  “Corfe thinks that Pendleton shot Craig in a fit of madness—grieving madness—and that our father is covering up his crime.”

  “Goodness me. That is an extraordinary suspicion.”

  “I know. Yet he has one piece of evidence,” said Lady Violet.

  “What is that?”

  “General Pendleton is in London. He is almost never here, but he has been here for the past week.”

  Lenox took this in. “That is valuable information, Lady Violet. I thank you.”

  She nodded unhappily. “Yes.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “There is one thing, though I am sure it is unrelated. A servant of ours disappeared yesterday.”

  His eyebrows rose. “Disappeared!”

  “No—that puts it too strongly, I should not have used that word. Did not come to work, I should have said. She didn’t come this morning, either.”

  “Who is the servant?”

  “Her name is Maggie McNeal. She has been a day-maid with us here for about three months. She lives in the East End, in the large boardinghouse on Garnet Street. I only know that because she took the bed of a girl who returned to Ireland. She was homesick. The previous girl, not Maggie.”

  “I’m amazed your father didn’t tell me.”

  “I doubt he knows,” said Lady Violet.

  “Oh, I see.”

  “She always struck me as very reliable and obedient, Maggie. I have no reason to think ill of her. But I thought I should tell you.”

  “Quite. Is there anything else?”

  “Nothing.” She shook her head, as if she wished there were. “If you are able to bring our father home and this matter to a conclusion, you and your family will have the gratitude of our family and all its descendants. I do not say that lightly.”

  He nodded. “I believe you. I shall certainly try.”

  She rose. “Thank you, Mr. Lenox. Use the room for as long as you please. Though I suppose my father has already granted you that permission. Excuse me—I am not myself.”

  “I think you are far more composed than anyone would expect of you under the circumstances, Lady Violet.”

  She smiled. All human beings are beautiful when they smile, for however infinitesimal a passage of time, and Lenox saw the ephemeral beauty in this deeply fortunate, deeply unfortunate young woman. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Lenox,” she said, and left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  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.