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Revenger

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The story

Summer 1592. Queen Elizabeth grows frail, irascible, isolated and vulnerable. Her trusted spymaster and protector Sir Francis Walsingham is dead. Conspiracies multiply.

In this turbulent atmosphere, intelligencer John Shakespeare is approached by the dashing Earl of Essex to investigate a curious event: the sighting of a woman named Eleanor Dare.

Eleanor is one of the so-called lost colonists of Roanoke, the New World settlement founded five years earlier at the instigation of Sir Walter Ralegh. When supply ships returned after three years there was no trace of the hundred or more colonists. Their disappearance is a mystery that intrigues all England. It seems impossible that one of their number could be spotted in London, across three thousand miles of ocean. Is it a case of mistaken identity or something more sinister?

Shakespeare does not want to get involved but refusing the mission is not easy. Essex has a strong-arm enforcer, a brutish Irishman named Charlie McGunn, who tells Shakespeare that saying No is not an option. But who exactly is McGunn – and what is his interest in Essex and Roanoke?

In the shadows is the quiet, intense figure of Sir Robert Cecil, son of the great Lord Burghley. Compared to the charismatic courtiers Essex and Ralegh, he is small, ill-favoured and physically weak - but he is mentally strong and clever.

Secretly, he summons John Shakespeare. He wishes him to take on Essex’s commission, not because he is interested in the lost colony, but because he suspects Essex of plotting treachery. He believes the earl plans an illicit marriage to the young Arbella Stuart, a prime claimant to the throne of England. Such a union would allow Essex to snatch the crown for himself – an ambition, Cecil believes, that he has long harboured. The wedding must be stopped.

Reluctantly, Shakespeare accepts. Above all, he is loyal to Queen and country. Yet he has another motive, too: he needs Cecil’s protection, because his implacable enemy, the blood-soaked torturer Richard Topcliffe, is on the rampage, seeking to destroy him and those close to him.

As Shakespeare enters the glittering, debauched world of the Essex faction, one of his tasks is to seek out Walsingham’s papers, which disappeared when he died. They are believed to contain secrets vital to the security of the realm.

Essex’s world is a revelation to Shakespeare. Though the earl is the brightest star in the firmament and woos his Queen as if she were a girl forty years younger, he is also openly disloyal. Where once Elizabeth was revered, many now laugh at her, not least the beautiful Lettice Knollys, Essex’s mother.

There is a deep, mutual loathing between Elizabeth and the woman she calls ‘the She-wolf’. It goes back many years to Lettice’s secret marriage to the man Elizabeth loved, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The Queen has now banished her younger rival from the royal court.

Lettice, in turn, considers herself as regal as any monarch and presides over her own glittering court, urged on by her lascivious daughters Penelope and Dorothy, the Earl of Southampton, the ambitious Francis Bacon and a dazzling array of the mad, bad, dangerous and artistic. Southampton has even taken a young poet under his wing, the promising William Shakespeare, drawing him into a deadly web.

Lettice and her clique do not flinch from using poison, sorcery and sex to achieve their ends.

If Shakespeare and his faithful assistant Boltfoot Cooper did not have enough to contend with, a tragic case turns up which cannot be ignored: the bodies of a teenaged girl and boy have been found in the woods. It has been made to look like a suicide pact, but is almost certainly murder. Shakespeare’s interest is roused because the girl was the daughter of one of Essex’s knights and the boy was a vicious debt collector for Charlie McGunn.

As the plot unfolds, it dawns on Shakespeare that the ruthless McGunn is at the hub of an infernal wheel whose spokes touch on every aspect of his investigations.

He finds himself in a perilous maze of forced marriage, honour killing – and the dubious dealings of a Puritan named Winterberry, an investor in the Roanoke expedition and a man who is not what he seems. He also finds himself being seduced by two striking women – the world-weary but sensuous Cordelia Le Neve (mother of the murdered girl and a woman with a past of her own) and Lady Penelope Rich, sister to Essex and acclaimed the most beautiful woman in the land.

Delving deeper, Shakespeare realises with horror that his own family is in grave and immediate danger. Topcliffe, McGunn and the Essex clan are foes who believe themselves above the law: men and women who kill and maim without compunction to get what they want. Shakespeare even begins to wonder how far he can trust his new master, Sir Robert Cecil.

The story races from plague-infested London to the beautiful Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire, the glorious Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire and the spectral ruins of Jervaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire, building to a violent climax. At last, Shakespeare discovers the dark secret of Roanoke.

The England of the early 1590s is a country of fading glory, drained by religious strife and warfare and laid waste by famine and pestilence. A country where the virtuous face obliteration while the likes of Topcliffe thrive. But there is hope, too, for this is also the time of men like the Shakespeare brothers. Very different in so many ways, yet alike in their courage and humanity.