Smythe picked up the dagger, already knowing it to be his uncle’s work. He swallowed nervously. “I take your point, Sir William.”

“I think you miss it,” Worley replied, seeing the expression on his face. “I am not threatening your family, Smythe. I could, of course, but that was not my purpose. I wanted to find out more about you. That day on the road, I saw something in you that I do not see in men very often. I saw a remarkable forthrightness, and a complete lack of fear. Those are very admirable qualities. Admirable and rare. And they should be encouraged.”

“I am not fearless, Sir William,” Smythe said. “In all honesty, I was a bit afraid to come here.”

Worley shook his head. “I do not believe you were, else you would not have come. I have no doubt you felt some apprehension, some uncertainty, to be sure… but fear? You are not the sort. You do not seem to have it in you. I sat astride my stallion with a pistol aimed straight at your chest and you did not blink an eye. You exercised the proper caution that the situation called for, yet you kept your head and even bantered with me. I admired that in you. It reminded me… of me. And you know, as enjoy-ably diverting as it may be to be Black Billy, the infamous highwayman that every schoolboy sings about, a large part of that joy is lost in not having anyone to tell about it. Well… now I have you.” He smiled. “So, what say we take a quick look at that forge I promised you before sitting down to supper? You still owe me a sword, you know.”

The play, thought Shakespeare, was appallingly inept. Its failure to draw a decent audience at the Theatre was not due to any particular failing of the actors, although from what he’d seen, the only really good performer in the company was Ned Alleyn, and he had just quit. Things were not looking very promising for the Queen’s Men, but despite any flaws in the company’s performance, the main fault lay in the play itself.

Part of the problem was that it was not a new play, but one that had been adapted from other sources and rewritten many times, so that he no longer had any idea who the original author was or precisely what had been intended. This particular version was credited to Greene, and it had his stamp all over it. The Honorable Gentleman was full of literary references and high-flown academic speech which suffered from the same pretensions that it aimed to satirize, and in those cases where these allusions did not go straight over the heads of most people in the audience, they were explained awkwardly by other characters, who were simply leaden in their coarseness and derision.

The honorable gentleman of the title was a prosperous merchant of the rising middle class, with pretensions to gentility, and throughout the play, he was held up as an object of cruel mockery and ridicule. His employees stole from him, his suppliers cheated him, his wife cuckolded him, and throughout, the main character remained blissfully unaware and foolishly convinced of his own genteel superiority. It was, thought Shakespeare bleakly, crass pandering to the groundlings and as unoriginal as sin.

The speeches were all grandiose and peppered with crude jokes, which seemed to be there for no other purpose than to break up the monotony of the declamation by allowing some character or other to play the fool and caper for the audience. At some point, perhaps, there was a cohesive story that somehow got lost along the way as a result of too many cooks pissing in the stew. And now, he was going to piss in it, as well. He was not at all convinced that his efforts would improve the flavor, either. Still, he had to try.

He had been up all night, working on it. At first, he had thought that he could simply polish a bit here and improve a little there, and tighten some things up a little overall, but it soon became apparent that nothing less than a complete rewrite would do. And that would not save the next performance, because there would simply be no time in which the members of the company could learn all their new lines. The task seemed utterly impossible, especially given the time constraints he had to work under. Had he begun from scratch, with a completely new, original play, it would have been much easier, but that was not what he had been asked to do. His job was to rescue this one. The trouble was, he could not generate any enthusiasm for the project, because he simply hated it.

Nevertheless, this was going to be his chance to show what he could do, and if he failed to deliver something much improved, he had little doubt that there would ever be another opportunity to prove himself, at least to this company. Somehow, before he could even entertain the notion of submitting his own plays for consideration, he had to make a start and convince them that he knew his business, that he could turn a phrase adroitly.

The main problem, aside from the awkward writing, which clearly, at least to his eyes, showed an author whose talents were well and truly on the wane, was that the characters were not very well delineated. They were stock characters, and nothing more. They had no complexity and were not drawn with any imagination. There was nothing to differentiate them from any number of similar characters in similar situations, which the audience had seen many times before. They were crude rather than subtle, snide rather than clever, bitter rather than ironic, and loud rather than brash. In short, every brushstroke throughout the play was broad and heavy-handed. And Shakespeare was not sure how to fix it short of simply tearing it all up and starting over. Unfortunately, that was not an option.

After agonizing over it for hours, he had finally decided on a course of action that might, perhaps, allow him not only the chance to prove he could improve this play, but gain more time to do so in the process, while still managing to meet the deadline. The trick, he thought, would be to improve the play in stages.

They had already committed to the next performance; the playbills had all been posted. The company could, if absolutely necessary, decide to put on another play at the last moment, but that might not sit well with the audience. Therefore, he decided to select certain scenes throughout the play where the alteration of a line or two, or even a short speech, would effect a slight improvement or produce a bigger laugh, so that the actors would not find themselves in the difficult position of having to learn too many new lines in only a few hours, at best. Then, he would spread the changes out in such a manner that they would gradually move the play along in a new and hopefully improved direction. But to do this, he would have to map out all the changes first, before deciding on the stages in which they would progress. He had spent most of the night and early morning doing so, and now he was exhausted.

He had been working by candlelight when Smythe went to sleep and he was still working in the morning when Smythe got up and went out to see Sir William. Shakespeare wondered how that was going. He felt a bit concerned for his friend, but reasoned that Smythe seemed to know what he was doing. Shakespeare still found it difficult to believe that Sir William was actually Black Billy, the legendary highwayman, but Smythe seemed certain of it and he had learned by now that his roommate was not given to idle flights of fancy. He was anxious for Smythe to return, so that he could hear all about their meeting. It would surely be a great deal more interesting, he thought, than working on this miserable play.

He put down his quill, removed his light, close-fitting, deerskin writing glove, which had no mate for he had made it himself to keep the ink off his fingers, and rubbed his eyes, wearily. For a moment, his tired gaze focused on the quill, which he had laid flat on the table, and the well-worn, ink-stained writing glove beside it. The parchment, quill, ink pot, and glove looked rather like a still-life composition, the sort of thing that art students would practice at before they moved on to the more advanced techniques of portraiture. And, coincidentally, it also made, in a sense, for a portrait of his life… what it had been, and what it could yet be. The product of the glovemaker, next to the product of the poet. He could go in either one direction or the other. And this present task might well establish which direction that would be.