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Read the prologue of Mistress Shakespeare (Continued...) :

"Do we all?" he parried. "Mistress, I need straight answers from you. I have not hauled in the players themselves—yet—because I cannot abide prevarications or histrionics offstage. I have it on good authority you are forthright and have spoken your mind to the Globe's actors. And I will have you speak plainly here."

"Of course, my lord, but I cannot see why we must meet in such a place, away from others—"

"I did not think," he interrupted, "knowing Will Shakespeare as intimately as you do, a covert meeting was something new to you." My insides lurched. He knew about me and Will. How much did he know, from how far back? He must be punning upon the word knowing in the biblical sense and be aware that Will and I had met secretly off and on for years. And worse, that I had been questioned once before by someone from Her Majesty's government about where Will Shakespeare's loyalties lay.

I fought to compose my features. Our eyes met and held. His face was not uncomely, but he was so misshapen in bodily form it was said the queen called him her Pygmy. I knew of nicknames that could sting, for I was of half-Italian blood and had oft been called Gypsy or Egyptian.

Cecil's enemies called him simply the Hunchback, and during the rebellion, someone had scrawled on his front door, in a near quote from Will's description of the hunchback King Richard III, HERE LIES THE TOAD! I well knew that playwrights had been imprisoned, tortured and killed for slanders stuck on doors in London. "Let me speak plain, mistress," he said when I did not flinch under his gaze and did not respond again. "It is well known that Shakespeare and his fellow players performed The Tragedy of King Richard II, at the behest of the Earl of Essex and his dear friend-in-arms Southampton, just before the recent rebellion. I am certain I need not tell such a devoted friend of the playwright that scenes are in that drama that advocate the overthrow of a sitting monarch by a favorite of the English crowds."

"It's just a play, my lord, employing the past and hardly predicting the future." I saw where he was going now but had no notion of how best to navigate the dangers. "Indeed, the Lord Chamberlain's Men were paid a goodly sum for performing it," I continued. "They had no political statement to make, but simply needed the money, forty pieces of silver, so—"

"It should have been thirty pieces of silver!" he exploded, smacking his palm on his table, making it jump and shudder. "They are Judases, as much favor as Her Grace has shown them! And, yes, mistress, I hear you repeat the name of the Lord Chamberlain, as they bear the queen's cousin's name as patron. But," he said thrusting up both hands when he saw me ready to protest, "I know Will Shakespeare's bread is buttered on the other side too, for he's been cozy with Southampton for years, and the Shakespeare family has a convoluted, questionable past as Catholics and rebels!"

I was dumbfounded. He knew about Will's beginnings, family connections, his life from the earliest days. Then he could ruin Will with this—ruin me too.

"All I can tell you of my Warwickshire friend Will Shakespeare in all this," I said, fighting again to control my voice, "is that he prays that your lordship and Her Gracious Majesty will spare the life of his friend and sponsor the Earl of Southampton. He merely did a favor for him and for the needed money. He meant no political statement."

I was lying and I felt myself begin a fiery blush from the tip of my ears to my throat. I could only pray that the tawny hue of my skin hid that. And here I was fighting for Will when I could have strangled him with my bare hands but three days ago.

"Both earls' coming trials will decide all that," Cecil said, "but we can hardly claim that poets and playwrights are above such political frays, can we? Praying we forgive Southampton, that's what he's been up to, eh? More like, London's favorite playwright has been writing something else to stir up sedition. Ben Jonson went to the Marshalsea prison five years ago for a slanderous play," he went on, jabbing a finger at me like a scolding schoolmaster. "Thomas Kyd was questioned under extreme duress and, sadly, died soon after. Christopher Marlowe—"

"Was supposedly accidentally stabbed in a tavern brawl," I dared to interrupt. My Italian blood was up; I could not help myself. At least he seemed not to know of my past with Southampton or Marlowe either. "And," I plunged on, "it was said Marlowe was an informer for Sir Francis Walsingham, so I'm not sure what it behooves one to be an informer, as it's whispered his demise could have been an assassination and not an accident!"

"Ah," he said, and his mouth crimped in either annoyance or amusement. "The beauty does have hidden fangs as well as a clever brain."

We stared at each other in a stalemate but hardly, I thought, a truce. Air from an unseen source shifted a battle banner behind his head. One of Jaques' lines from As You Like It leaped through my mind to taunt me: "The worst fault you have is to be in love." With a shudder up my spine, I realized then what I said in the next few moments could save Will or damn him to torture, imprisonment or even death.

"But tell me," Cecil said, leaning on his elbows and steepling his long-fingered hands before his mouth, "before we go on, exactly what is William Shakespeare to you? Here you are, an exotic woman, a tempting vixen, when he has a wife and family back in Stratford- Upon-the-Avon. Tell me true, Mistress Anne Whateley, what is the man to you?"

That, I thought, was the question. For nearly two decades, since even before the day he'd publicly, legally wed Anne Hathaway, I'd not only loved but loathed William Shakespeare to the very breadth and depth of my being. What was he to me and I to him? God's truth, in my pierced and patched heart, I, Anne Rosaline Whateley, was above all else, the first Mistress Shakespeare, Will's other wife.

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