Rotten at the Heart Read online

  Bartholomew Daniels

  ROTTEN AT THE HEART

  BEING WM SHAKESPEARE’S ACCOUNT OF HIS FIRST ADVENTURE AS AN UNWILLING INTELLIGENCER IN SERVICE TO THE CROWN, AS RELAYED FROM HIS RECENTLY DISCOVERED JOURNALS BY BARTHOLOMEW DANIELS.

  Praise for Wm Shakespeare

  “The great master who knew everything.”

  Charles Dickens

  “England’s Homer.”

  John Dryden in the Essay of Dramatick Poesy

  “The Soul of the age, the applause, delight, the wonder of our stage.”

  Ben Jonson

  “That King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible.”

  Thomas Carlyle

  “I will praise any man that will praise me.”

  William Shakespeare

  For Brian Etheredge, my late good friend who, I think, would have been amused.

  INTRODUCTION

  Being a brief account of how Bartholomew Daniels came to be in possession of these earth-shattering historic documents written by the late William Shakespeare.

  An estate sale in Evanston, one of the big old houses along Asbury. I was looking for chairs, really. Should have known better than to shop for furniture in that neighborhood, even used. But the place had books, a lot of books. I am a sucker for books.

  I could just make out the chalky ghost of white paint stenciled on the lid of the olive steamer trunk wedged into the corner of the room:

  Lt Thomas McBride, US Army

  8th Air Force, 482nd Bomb Group

  Alconbury, Huntingdonshire, England

  The trunk was full of books, old ones. Leather bindings, some of them with raised bands across the spines, the Coptic method. I took out a few, paged through them. They weren’t mint. The whole trunk gave off a musty smell. Some of the covers had a little mildew. I could see some mold along the edges of the pages here and there. They covers weren’t warped, though. They hadn’t been soaked, just gotten too damp. Wherever this trunk had been stored, it hadn’t always been dry. Basement maybe.

  All the books were from British publishers: Chapman & Hall, Methuen, some smaller houses. A couple from the nineteenth century, but most of them from the Twenties and Thirties. Not first editions, at least not famous ones, but, by a quick count, forty-some books, in decent repair. Seal them up with some kitty litter and baking soda; that would take care of the smell. I could deal with the mildew. These could be worth something.

  “Great-grandpa’s.” The girl in the glasses. She’d been by the door when I came in, sitting at a card table, reading The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene. I was predisposed to think well of her.

  “Lieutenant McBride?” I asked, pointing at the stenciling on the lid.

  She nodded. “He was a new literature professor at Northwestern, just married. He knew how to fly. He signed up when the war started. Great-grandma, she begged him not to, but…” her voice trailed off, she shrugged. “Anyway, he never came home. The army shipped his stuff back, including a trunk full of books. I guess maybe she couldn’t deal with them at the time, maybe she never could, maybe she just forgot about them. But the trunk’s been down in the basement forever.”

  I looked around the room. A library, clearly, and built as one. Floor to ceiling bookcases on three walls. A bay window facing the front with a small desk tucked into the alcove. All the shelves were crammed with books.

  “Not like she needed more books, I guess,” I said.

  The girl smiled a little. “No. She’d been one of his students his first year. A little bit of a scandal about that the way I hear it. But they married. She was pregnant when he was killed. She was an English professor at Northwestern, too, for decades. Unusual for a woman, at least when she started.”

  The girl pointed to a picture on the desk. A handsome woman: dark haired, partly gray, pulled back. In her mid-forties I’d guess, sitting on the corner of a desk in front of a room full of students, her hand in mid-gesture, her passion plain on her face. Most of the kids were in Leave it to Beaver togs, but there were a couple in jeans, a few guys with long hair. The Sixties, just as things were changing.

  I looked around the room, out the doorway into a living room that was bigger than my apartment and furnished with antiques mostly.

  “I guess the professor thing used to pay better.”

  The girl smiled. “She came from money. And her son, my grandfather, well, he didn’t go the professor route. He was all about business. Him and my father.” A little distaste in her voice at that. She looked around the room, wistfully, it seemed. She held up the Greene novel in her hand, a finger marking her place. “I guess I got the recessive gene.”

  “That’s one of my favorites,” I said.

  “You’ve read Greene?”

  I nodded. “The scene at the beginning, when Scobie comes home and tells his wife he’s been passed over, then gets her to pick at some meat–”

  The girl interrupted. “ʻIt had always been his responsibility to maintain happiness in those he loved. One was safe now, forever…’” she looked at me expectantly.

  “ʻ…and the other was going to eat her lunch.’” I said.

  She smiled, but a sad smile. For anyone who understood that passage, it would have had to be.

  “I was fifteen,” I said. “That was the first time a book broke my heart. They’ve been doing it ever since.”

  Her smile got a little happier. “Are you a professor too?”

  I shook my head. “Writer.”

  “And you want to buy great-grandpa’s trunk of books.”

  I shrugged. “Probably can’t afford them. I was hoping I could afford a couple of chairs.”

  She laughed softly, her smile brightening a little. “Forget the chairs. When I said she came from money, I meant it. Most of the furniture ought to be in a museum. And dad got valuations on every stick of it, trust me on that.” Her smiled faded a little. “But I guess it’s hard for him to imagine much value in books. He just wants to get rid of those. The trunk has a yellow sticker – best offer. I’d rather see those go to someone who has a heart they can break.”

  I pulled out my wallet, took all the bills out of it. “I can give you a hundred and twenty seven dollars,” I said. I dug into my front pocket. “And thirty-seven cents.”

  Her smile brightened again.

  “Deal.

  I got the trunk home, horsed it up the stairs, unpacked the books.

  I almost missed the box – the broad, flat wooden chest under the moldering blanket that was folded under the books. The box was maybe four or five inches deep, rectangular, almost exactly as wide as the chest, maybe half as long. It fit snuggly in the bottom and it was heavy. Even when I turned the trunk on its side, it took a bit to work it loose. When I did, I could hear something sliding around inside.

  The wood was almost black with age – and dirt. The corners were capped with bronze gone green with tarnish. The chest latched closed in the front, not a lock, but the latch was rusted in place. I tried to force it with a screwdriver, slowly adding pressure, but I didn’t want to damage the mechanism. The chest might be worth something.

  I sprayed some WD-40 on a cloth, rubbed as much as I could into the latch, the rust turning the rag an ugly brownish orange as I did. Once the cloth started coming away clean, or close to it, I tried the latch again. A hint of movement maybe? Or wishful thinking? I rubbed in more WD-40 and left that to work for a while.

  Got another rag, some lemon oil went to work on the wood. Ten minutes and the rag was almost solid black, but the wood was a little lighter. Another rag, another ten minutes, and I could see the wood pretty clearly. Oak, and with a very fine
grain. Fine enough to get me a little excited.

  Funny thing, being a writer, you’re always looking up some kind of obscure crap for some reason. A few years back, I had some half-assed idea about somebody stealing a Stradivarius. Story never worked out, but I learned that part of the reason for the unique quality of the sound from those instruments was the density of the wood. Something about the climate at the time, the little ice age, and how trees grew more slowly, making very fine grained wood.

  Could be nothing, but it could mean that I was looking at a chest that was at least a few hundred years old.

  I felt the writing before I saw it, just one line carved into the lid of the chest, very worn, very faint. I took the lampshade off , held the light at a shallow angle, tried to make out the words. No? Non maybe? An s, something that started with a D. Three words, it looked like. I got a pencil and a piece of paper off the desk, tried to make a rubbing. No or Non, then Sanz Dr and then a portion I couldn’t read, but whatever the Dr word was, it ended with a t. A quiet alarm was going off somewhere back in my writer brain, something I’d read. I got up to grab the laptop, ready to start Googling.

  But then the latch on the front of the chest fell open, just like that.

  Papers. The chest held papers. On top, a letter dated October 13, 1943.

  Dear Marion,

  I’ll continue my superstition. It is my firm belief that God will not take me so long as I have an unfinished letter to you. We fly tomorrow, so I will start this tonight, certain that I will return to it.

  Some excitement I hope. I got into London for a couple of days, so of course I had to find a bookstore. The one I found was heartbreaking. It had been hit during the Blitz and lay torn open, a women and two young children sitting in front of makeshift shelves on the sidewalks selling what stock they’d been able to salvage. I found some lovely titles, well, dozens of them, actually.

  Then I spotted the box. A wooden chest of apparently old manufacture. I didn’t know what was in it, as the latch on it was intricate and frozen with age. The women claimed never to have seen its contents. But she was anxious to be rid of it, calling it the fountain of her sorrows. Something her husband, who had owned the shop, had found. Something he had risked his life to save, running back into the shop only to be killed in its collapse. The box survived, he did not. It took some doing to get that latch open, I can tell you that.

  I’m going to save the surprise of what’s inside (or at least of what I hope it is) until tomorrow night. Surely fate will not prevent my sharing such news! I will give you this hint. Three words are carved into the lid, faint now with age, barely able to be read, and they are in French. (As bright as you have always been, that may be hint enough for you.) It’s crazy, all of this. What I’m thinking can’t possibly be true. I overpaid, I suppose, for the box and the books. It’s probably nothing. But we all need distractions, and the war makes so many things seem so meaningless.

  Good night, my love. I go to sleep dreaming of your embrace.

  Then just a few scrawled lines, written in haste.

  It’s morning and I only have a moment. Jesus, it’s Schweinfurt. I know you can’t hear me, I know you haven’t read this yet, and when you do, I pray that it’s because I’ve mailed it, not because you’re opening this box. But pray for us. Pray for us all.

  OK, I’ll finish tonight. I swear to God I will.

  He didn’t of course. Neither did six hundred other airmen.

  The feeling of eavesdropping, of trespassing, of my eyes being the first to see the last words of a man now almost seventy years dead, dead more than three times longer than he’d been alive, that invested the box with a more sacred weight as I set the letter aside and lifted the first, large sheet.

  The paper itself sent a tremor through me before I’d even read the words on it. Minutia from the attic of my writer brain again.

  Before the 1800s, almost all paper was made from cotton, not wood pulp. Fabric would be soaked and treated until it broke down into individual fibers. The fibers then would be lifted from the soaking solution in a kind of trayed sieve. The mesh of the sieve left marks on the paper called chaining. I could see the chaining marks here. Deckle edging, inclusions, papermaker’s tears – all the hallmarks of old, hand-laid paper.

  And then I read the words.

  It wasn’t easy at first. The ink was old, often faded, the writing sometimes barely legible. Some of the language was archaic and the spelling had the random, quasi-phonetic nature common before the nineteenth century, complete with the odd silent letters added as a homage to a word’s Latin or Greek roots.

  It was more like translating than reading. I sat on the floor with a notebook, working my way through the first page. The writing was large, centered, formally spaced, almost like a cover sheet.

  These pages being a true account of my adventures as an unhappy intelligencer in service to Lord Carey, the Second Baron Hunsdon and Lord Chamberlin to Her Majesty Elizabeth Regina, kept so that these troublesome truths might have a home should e’er I need their record for my protection.

  And then a signature. The signature was easy. I had seen it before. So have you.

  Wm. Shakespeare

  There’s more, of course. Experts are checking the paper, the ink, the chest. Shakespearian scholars are pouring over the syntax. Lawyers from the girl’s family are suing me.

  But I’ll let all that shake out as it may. That’s not my province.

  My province is stories. I know a good one when I read it. This is one hell of a story. And this Shakespeare guy, he can write a little.

  So, I give you his tale, crudely wrenched by my undeserving hands into this more accessible form. A tale of murders done to serve both God and Mammon, of crowns and capital, of banal deeds and heroic sacrifices. Of friends and hearts both betrayed and embraced.

  A tale of a time more than three centuries distant, but a time, I fear, too much like our own.

  A tale I have entitled, stealing from the Bard’s own work, Rotten at the Heart.

  Bartholomew Daniels

  ROTTEN AT THE HEART

  by

  William Shakespeare

  As edited by Bartholomew Daniels

  An evil soul producing holy witness

  Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,

  A goodly apple rotten at the heart.

  The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene III

  CHAPTER 1

  The theatre is my only solace, the warm, unclean bosom of the stage. To write, there is joy in that. But it is a kind of possession, a transient madness and always pursued alone. It leaves me spent as though used, and roughly, by the Muses that others imagine to be my servants.

  When I have finished a night’s work, and it is almost always the night’s work due both to life’s usually day-lit demands and the sense that my fictional imaginings are best pursued alone and in the hours of dreaming, I find myself thus. Unkempt, my clothes sweated and askew, my fingers stained with the fluid of this endeavour, and my breath often coming in heaves and starts. I am like a woman after a man has fulfilled himself, has emptied his seed into her and then rolled away, leaving his stink on her sheets and his sweat to dry on her skin, the matter for him finished but for her, sometimes just begun. That same sense that a miracle may have transpired, that I will issue forth into the world something new and complete that no other could author, but whose authorship comes only at the solitary cost of long labour and suffering.

  Such is the cost of my writing. But at the theatre I am one with my fellows. I find in those drawn to the stage a kinship of spirit that thins that fog of thought and imagining in which I am too oft enveloped. A fog that blinds me to the easy commerce most men seem find in one another’s company and that makes me feel apart and unwelcome in their society.

  At the side of the stage on the gentle afternoon of a summer’s day, neither over-hot nor stormy in its temperament, but fair and graced with breeze.

  How I wish I could return to that moment fro
m this side of the gulf that now divides my life between the days before and the days since. For having in the interim witnessed horrors previous unimagined, and having been made party to schemes of such cruel cost and aimed at such innocent subjects and for such banal reasons, I find my previous philosophies useless. Any thoughts I held concerning the world’s goodness or its capacity for love, for charity or even for mercy, have proved too fragile against these stern lessons. I can only hope to create some world anew in which those too-scarce graces can prove strong enough to stand.

  On that last day of an easier lived life, I was leaning on the wall at the edge of the stage, comfortable with my fellows and feeling light and careless, even with James Burbage, the company’s leading player, in both his cups and his temper.

  That July day was Dick Jenkins’s first in rehearsals, Jenkins being the new boy player the company had hired to replace Henderson for the woman’s parts, as Henderson’s voice had finally dropped in timbre even if in face and form he was still the comeliest woman on the London stage. Henderson had been Burbage’s favourite, so Burbage all that day had carried on as though Henderson’s inevitable adolescence were somehow the product of Jenkins’s nefarious agency. Finally, Jenkins, so discomfited by Burbage’s constant pique, misspoke a line.

  “Am I to feign affection to this?” shouted Burbage, waving at Jenkins. “He opens a mouth that I am, in but a few lines, expected to kiss, and vomits out gibberish. At least Henderson’s ass was hairless. Look at this woolly carbuncle. Even a Sodomite would balk at saddling this mare.”

  Burbage stomped to the side of the stage for another cup of sack. Jenkins stood centre stage, his face quivering.

  “Mind not Burbage,” I called from the wing. “Rehearsals offend his vanity. His pride is swollen even larger than his talent, and he believes his every utterance deserves an audience. It is ever so with actors.”