“Why not, I ask you?” said the playwright. “I am sure there is a ready wit in that face, and if she has a quick apprehension, there is no reason why she should not learn the part in a week. Besides,”—the poet began to pace the room in the stress of the excitement the idea was generating in his brain—“it would be a means of bringing her to the Queen’s notice.”
Richard Burbage, however, lent no countenance to this fantastic idea. He knew Anne’s tragic story. But he had a sufficient awe of the Queen’s displeasure to have a grave regard for the peril of such a course.
“No, no,” he said, “I pray you dismiss so wild a thought. No one knows better than you the temper of the Queen. And if she took this matter amiss, it would bode as ill for us at it would for Mistress Feversham.”
But already the idea had sunk deep. The playwright was alive also to its possibilities from another point of view. It might prove a means of gaining the Queen’s sympathies for Gervase Heriot.
“Dick,” he said, “do not forget that now we hold a proof of Mr. Heriot’s innocence. And should we adduce it in the right season, as I have good hope of doing, there is every reason to suppose that Gloriana, who at heart is a just woman, will view the matter tenderly.”
“I beg leave to differ from you there, William Shakespeare,” said Burbage. “As far as I can see, there is precious little reason to believe anything of the kind. No one has yet fathomed the Queen’s caprices. And it ill behooves us of all men, who exist by favor of the public, to be mixed up in treasonable matters. Besides, after what happened last night I for one have no longer a stomach for them.”
The poet, however, was not to be deterred by these counsels of prudence. His sympathies were too deeply engaged. He had taken this ill-starred pair to his heart. Assured that Gervase Heriot was the victim of a callous conspiracy, he was fully determined not to rest now until his wrong had been redressed.
Like Burbage, however, he was fully alive to the peril of mixing in matters that could so readily be construed as treason. And none realized more clearly than he the danger that lurked in any affront to the Queen. Poet as he was, and a dreamer of dreams, he owed his position among his fellows primarily to the fact that he was a remarkably able man of affairs. His was the vision that could see, the wit that could mold, the tenacious power of will that could compass the design.
Thus in spite of his friend’s caution, the playwright went presently in search of Anne. Ultimately, he found her in the inn garden sitting by the side of Gervase Heriot, within the shade of its single yew tree. Taken by surprise, she had barely time to disengage her arms from about the young man’s neck, let alone to check the tears that were flowing down her cheeks.
Gervase, it seemed, was bent on going to London that day. Now that he had learned Sir John Feversham’s peril, he felt it impossible to stay longer in hiding. To do so would surely cause the Constable’s life to be forfeit.