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Dogs—though it was no island, being surrounded on just three of its sides by the Thames—a frightened man sat, stripped to the waist, on a high-backed wooden chair. His wrists were strapped to the chair arms and he clenched his hands in fists. His upper arms and shoulders were bound tight to the back struts. He was a strong, muscular man but he could not move. He shivered uncontrollably, though the day was sweltering. Sweat poured from his thinning black-gray hair and forehead into his eyes, and piss trickled down from his breeches to a puddle on the floor.
    Slyguff stood in front of him, holding a pair of tanner’s shears—powerful iron clippers that cut through leather with ease. The man on the chair shrank into himself, terror in his wide brown eyes. He was about thirty, with the honed body of a mariner. Slyguff prized apart the clenched fingers of the man’s left hand. With practiced art, he pushed the blades of the shears over the soft, sinewy web of flesh between the thumb and forefinger. With his one working eye, he looked into the man’s eyes for some sign of cooperation, then snipped.
    The blades sliced through the flesh, splitting the two digits yetfurther apart. The man screamed. He would not be heard, for no honest beings came near this desolate place on the marshes, save wading birds and the feral dogs that roamed here free. Blood shot out from the man’s cut hand onto Slyguff’s apron and face. He wiped it with the sleeve of his shirt, then moved the shears to the next arc of webbing between the forefinger and the middle finger.
    “Mr. Slyguff, please, I beg you in God’s name. I do not know where Bramer is. I have not seen him these five years.”
    Snip. A deep groan of pain and terror. It was an unnatural noise, a roar of despair. Slyguff pulled back the clippers and looked into the man’s eyes again. Still he did not see what he wanted. He moved the shears back to the bloody morass of gore that was the man’s left hand, on to the next arc of webbing, the flesh between the third and fourth finger. The cry of seabirds and the distant barking of dogs and the man’s fevered breathing were all he could hear as he carried on with his morning’s work.
    In the corner of the room, a man looked on impassively, his hand on the hilt of his glittering sword of finely honed Spanish steel.

Chapter 7

    S HAKESPEARE AND CLARKSON MANAGED THE fifteen-mile ride in under three hours. The going was hot through the clogged north London streets, but then a little cooler once out in the open countryside, where they could break into a light canter and enjoy the breeze in their faces. The heat had been oppressive over the past few days and weeks, and the fields and woods they passed were dry and crops were already failing.
    A short distance north of Waltham Cross, they turned their mounts left along a well-worn road, then slowed to a trot along the last two hundred yards through a formal avenue of elm and ash, ranged alternately along a raised path, up to the main archway of Theobalds.
    The house was magnificent, thought by many to be the finest palace in all England. Lord Burghley, Elizabeth’s most trusted minister throughout her long reign, had started building it twenty-eight years earlier, within the first year of his son Robert’s life. Since then he had spent many years and much silver improving and expanding it into a pile fit to entertain his beloved sovereign.
    After grooms took their horses away to be watered and fed, Clarkson led the way into the first of the two great courtyardsaround which the house was constructed. The whole palace was set within pleasure gardens so extensive and exquisite that one could walk for miles without tiring of the scene.
    Sir Robert Cecil was in the Privy Garden to the north of the house, where the heat was less intense and the plants had been watered. Shakespeare was struck at once by how small and neat and still Cecil was; an extraordinary contrast to Essex, the bustling