The Proofreader of the First Folio

• Chapter 1 The Stench of Lampblack
• Chapter 2 The Barbican Warehouse
• Chapter 3 Missing from the Case
• Chapter 4 Jaggard’s Wrath
• Chapter 5 A Shadow on the Fleet
• Chapter 6 Foul Papers and Fair Copies
• Chapter 7 The Apprentice’s Whisper
• Chapter 8 At the Sign of the Half-Eagle
• Chapter 9 The Vanished Isle
• Chapter 10 St. Paul’s Churchyard
• Chapter 11 Scraps of Caliban
• Chapter 12 Ink in the Blood
• Chapter 13 The Stationers' Guard
• Chapter 14 The Broken Chase
• Chapter 15 A Player’s Debt
• Chapter 16 Watermarks on the Thames
• Chapter 17 The Midnight Forme
• Chapter 18 A Rival Press
• Chapter 19 Words Swallowed by Sea
• Chapter 20 Cold Proofs
• Chapter 21 The Warehouse Rat
• Chapter 22 Red Ink and Ruin
• Chapter 23 The King’s Men Arrive
• Chapter 24 The Recovered Folio
• Chapter 25 Setting the Final Lines
• Chapter 26 Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

The smell of boiled varnish and scorched soot had a way of settling at the back of Nicholas Crane’s throat like a coating of cold tallow. It was an odor that belonged strictly to the print shop of William and Isaac Jaggard, hard by the church of St. Giles-without-Cripplegate, where the Barbican met the sour damp of the city ditch. On this mid-October morning of 1623, the fog off the Thames was thick enough to chew, but inside the printing house the air was heavier still, soured by stale urine used to soak the pelt-balls and the acrid breath of three coal braziers fighting the autumn draft.

Nicholas stood at his stool with his spectacles balanced on the crooked bridge of his nose, squinting through the tallow-smoke at a sheet of damp Crown paper. His fingers, stained so deeply with ink that the skin of his thumbs looked like bruised damson plums, held a bodkin—a slender awl used to pluck wrongly set metal sorts out of the chase.

Behind him, the great wooden press groaned its rhythmic, two-stroke lamentation. Clack, thump. Pull the bar, push the carriage, clack, thump.

"Mind the spacing on the second column, Nicholas," Isaac Jaggard shouted over the clatter of the platens. Isaac was thirty-three, possessed of all his limbs and most of his hair, but he carried himself with the pinched urgency of a man whose father had gone blind and left him holding the reins of the most expensive folly in London. He stood by the ink-bench, wiping his forearm with a rag that only redistributed the grime. "Master Condell will be here before the bell rings noon, and if we are still picking pie out of the Comedies, he will threaten to take the copy over to Thomas Cotes."

"Condell wouldn't take a laundry slip to Cotes, and well you know it," Nicholas muttered, not looking up. "Cotes doesn't have the paper. Nor the pica sorts. We have nine hundred reams of the French rag upstairs, and if Condell takes the copy elsewhere, he pays the demurrage on the lot."

"He has temper enough to burn the rag for firewood," Isaac snapped. "Just read the sheet, man. We have two boys turning the tympan and an apprentice waiting on the wetting-trough. Every hour the tympan sits dry, my purse leaks silver."

Nicholas didn't answer. He was fifty-one, which made him an old man in the printing trade. His knees popped when he climbed the stairs to the garret, and his right shoulder was permanently dropped two inches lower than his left from thirty years of leaning over the compositor’s case. He had corrected proofs for old William before the cataracts ate the master’s eyes; he had corrected them when the shop printed playbills for the Globe, the sermons of Bishop Andrewes, and royal proclamations that threatened hanging to men who spoke ill of the Scots. Words were not sacred to Nicholas; they were merely lead rectangles that either fitted snugly against their fellows or tumbled into the dust to be swept up by the devil-boys.

Yet this monster of a volume—the great gathering of Master William Shakespeare’s plays—was different. It was an unruly, sprawling beast of nearly a thousand folio pages. Most days, Nicholas felt less like a craftsman and more like an undertaker trying to wedge a bloated corpse into a cedar chest that was three inches too short.

The sheet on his desk was from the second gathering of The Tempest, the play chosen to lead the entire volume. It was an odd choice to head the book, given it was among the writer's last works, but John Heminge and Henry Condell, the two players who had gathered the papers, insisted upon it. They claimed it had made a splash before the King’s daughter sailed for Heidelberg, and so it had to stand at the very threshold, like a liveried porter at a nobleman's gate.

Nicholas ran the dull iron tip of his bodkin down the lines.

Boatswain! Here Master: What cheere? Good: Speake to the Mariners: fall too't, yarely...

His eye caught a comma turned upside down, looking like a tiny, suspended teardrop. He marked the margin with his lead crayon, using the curled delete-loop he had used ten thousand times. Three lines below, the compositor—young John Leason, an idiot who thought more about the tavern-wenches in Moorfields than his ligatures—had set an n where an u ought to be.

Nicholas sighed, a dry sound like dry paper rattling in an autumn wind. "Leason," he called out without turning around.

A boy of seventeen, his leather apron smudged with dried paste and his face mottled with red pimples, poked his head out from behind the tall case of double-pica. "Aye, Master Crane?"

"If you must drink small beer until midnight at the Windmill, have the Christian decency to wash your eyes with vinegar before you touch the type-case. You have printed thou with an inverted n, so the poor shipwrecked King is addressing his courtier as thon. Is it a Saxon king, do you think? Or perhaps a Dane?"

Leason flushed. "The script was foul there, Master Crane. The hand was all scrawled and crabbed, like spiders dipped in ink."

"The hand was Ralph Crane’s fair copy, you knave, and Ralph writes an Italian hand so clear an infant could read it by candlelight," Nicholas said, though he knew the boy was half-right. Ralph was Nicholas’s second cousin, a scrivener who worked for the King’s Men, and while Ralph’s legal hand was as neat as an iron grating, his transcriptions of the plays were full of strange elisions and parentheses that made the compositors curse him in the dark. Ralph liked hyphens where no hyphens belonged; he loved parentheses as an old maid loves her cats.

Nicholas set the bodkin down and picked up the manuscript leaf to verify the correction.

The original sheets provided by Heminge and Condell were kept in a heavy iron-banded chest beside Isaac Jaggard’s small office in the corner of the pressroom. They were a miserable, mixed lot. Some plays, like Titus Andronicus and Richard the Third, had been cobbled together from old, battered quarto editions that had circulated among playgoers for twenty years, their margins scribbled over with actors' cuts and stage directions. Others were foul papers—rough drafts in the playwright’s own notoriously difficult, looping secretary hand, full of blotted lines, crossed-out speeches, and names of actors written in where the character's name ought to be.

The Tempest, however, was different. Because it had never been printed before, Heminge had paid Ralph Crane to prepare a clean, literary transcript for the press. It was written on fine Dutch paper, with stage directions so detailed they read like the itinerary of an Italian masquerade.

Nicholas picked up the leaf marked Actus Primus, Scena Secunda.

He remembered when Ralph had brought the stack of paper into the shop three months ago, bound with green silk ribbon. Take care of these, cousin, Ralph had told him in the tavern across the ditch, wiping the froth of March ale from his lip. They are all that remain of the prompt-book. The Globe burned ten years back, and half the old scrolls went up in smoke like bacon in a chimney. If these sheets go, the Duke of Milan vanishes back into the sea.

Nicholas held the manuscript sheet up to the meager gray light filtering through the oiled-linen window.

The page should have contained the end of Prospero’s speech to his daughter Miranda—the part where the old sorcerer explains how his brother cast him out upon the water in a rotten carcass of a butt, not rigged, nor tackle, sail, nor mast.

Except the page in his hand was not the page he had laid on his desk before dinner yesterday.

Nicholas frowned. He lowered the paper, adjusted his spectacles, and brought it nearer to his nose.

The ink was black enough. The writing was secretary hand, rapid and spidery, but it was not Ralph Crane’s hand. Ralph used an upright, elegant script influenced by the law clerks of Chancery, with wide, looping ascenders and sharp little tails on the ds. This hand was older, messier, with ink that had bled slightly into the fibers of the paper.

More than that, the watermark was wrong.

Nicholas held the leaf against the tallow lamp. The Jaggards bought their paper through a stationer named Man in St. Paul’s Churchyard, who imported bundles directly from Normandy. The paper for The Tempest all bore the watermark of a jug with a single handle and a crescent moon above it—the mark of the mills at Troyes.

This leaf bore no jug. It showed the faint, ribbed wires of an older laid paper, and near the torn gutter of the margin, the faint wire-mark of a bunch of grapes. German paper. Cheap, coarse, the sort used for broadside ballads and almanacs printed twelve years ago.

"Isaac," Nicholas said.

His voice was quiet, but something in its timber cut through the monotonous thump-pull of the press.

Isaac Jaggard stopped wiping his ink-ball. "What is it now? Another turned sort? Tell the boy to reset the line and don't halt the puller. We are already behind the schedule we promised the partners."

"Leave the puller," Nicholas said, turning around on his stool. "Come here."

Isaac scowled, tossing the greasy rag into a box of sweepings, and wiped his black-stained fingers on his breeches. He walked over to the proof-desk, his boots grinding type-metal dust into the floorboards. "If you tell me we have run out of capital Ws again, I shall tell Heminge to change the name of the wizard to Peter."

"Look at this leaf," Nicholas said, holding it out by its corners as though it might stain his skin.

Isaac took it carelessly, squinting down through the gloom. "It’s the second scene. Prospero and the girl. What of it? The text matches the chase Leason is setting."

"The text does not match," Nicholas said softly. "Look at the ink. That is gall-ink from an iron pot, mixed with vinegar, not our soot-varnish. And look at the hand. Whose hand is that?"

Isaac shrugged, his impatience visible in the twitch of his jaw. "One of the players, likely. They all scribble on their sides. Master Shakespeare himself was notorious for never blotting a line, which meant every line he blotted looked like a pig’s breakfast. Ralph probably copied it from an old paper that was torn, and slipped this original in its place."

"Ralph Crane did not write this," Nicholas insisted, tapping the dry surface with the hilt of his bodkin. "And Ralph did not slip it in. He gave me twelve leaves for this play, sewn through the fold with green thread. Look at the margins, Isaac. Where are the needle-holes?"

Isaac’s eyes darted to the inner margin. The edge was clean. Rough, slightly deckled, but showing no signs of the three stitch-holes that Ralph put into every gathering he bound.

"Where is the leaf Ralph brought us?" Nicholas asked.

Isaac turned the paper over. The verso was covered in the same hurried, crabbed hand, ending with Ariel’s first song: Come unto these yellow sands. But where the fair copy had contained the full text of Prospero’s exchange with his spirit, this version had three speeches compressed into one, with several lines struck through with thick, furious ink-strokes that had nearly cut the paper.

"This is not a copy," Nicholas murmured, the hair on his arms prickling despite the heat of the braziers. "This is an original foul paper. A draft. Look at the corrections—those were made by the man who made the play, not by a clerk copying it."

"Then it is worth ten times the other," Isaac said with a dry, nervous laugh. "Heminge should pay us extra for finding it."

"You don't understand," Nicholas said, leaning forward until he could smell the stale beer on the young master's breath. "The fair copy Ralph made was the approved text from the Revels Office. It had Sir George Buc’s license note on the guard-sheet. If we print from this, we are printing uncorrected lines, speeches that were cut before the King ever saw the performance. And worse—look at the bottom of the page."

Isaac held the leaf closer to the candle.

At the very foot of the sheet, half-obscured by a brown thumb-print that looked twenty years old, was a line of writing in a different hand altogether. It was a clerk's hand, small and tight:

Exemplar vetus. Restituat in cista.

"Old copy," Nicholas translated softly. "Return to the chest."

"Whose chest?" Isaac asked.

"Not ours," Nicholas said. "Our iron box has no lock that this key doesn't fit." He pulled a small brass key from his waistcoat pocket and held it up. "The original leaves from Ralph Crane were in my desk last night when the apprentice bolted the shutters. When I came in at six bells this morning, the lock was turned, but the drawer was shut."

Isaac’s face lost some of its ruddy press-shop color. The Jaggards were already walking a thin wire with the Stationers' Company over this book. They had partners who watched every farthing: Edward Blount, a respectable bookseller who had the rights to several plays; John Smethwick, who owned Hamlet and Romeo; and William Aspley, who held Much Ado. These men were not friends; they were an uneasy syndicate formed because no single printer in London had the capital to lay out three hundred pounds for paper and labor on plays that half the town had already seen for a penny at the Bankside.

"If a leaf of the fair copy is gone," Isaac whispered, looking around the shop as if the shadows between the drying-lines might be listening, "who put this rubbish in its place?"

"Someone who knew we needed copy to keep the second press from standing idle," Nicholas said. "Someone who knew that if the puller has no forme to beat, he sits and drinks Isaac Jaggard’s ale while the wages run on."

A loud bang echoed from the foot of the wooden stairs that led down to the Barbican entrance.

Both men jumped. Across the pressroom, the apprentice Leason dropped a handful of metal spacers, which scattered across the ink-blackened floor with a dry, musical clatter like lead hailstones.

"Clumsy whelp!" the pressman cursed, hauling back on the heavy ash lever of the platen. "Pick 'em up before they get trodden into the planks!"

Heavy boots climbed the stairs, the treads groaning under the weight of a man who did not care who heard him coming. A tall figure emerged into the smoky light of the upper room, shaking rain from a broad-brimmed beaver hat that cost more than Nicholas earned in three months of proofing.

It was Henry Condell.

He was sixty, his hair salted with silver, but he carried his chest out and his head high, with the easy arrogance of an actor who had played courtiers before the Queen and murderers before the rabble. He was dressed in a doublet of dark green camlet, damp at the shoulders, and his sword-hilt peeked through the slit of his cloak.

"Jaggard!" Condell’s voice boomed through the shop, vibrating the paper suspended from the drying-ropes above. "Tell me the first gathering is dried and folded. Heminge says the binders at the Blackfriars are already asking when they may expect the Comedies."

Isaac moved with sudden speed, his body blocking the proof-desk. He forced a smile that looked like a cramp. "Master Condell. You are early abroad. The fog is foul enough to rot a man's lungs."

"The fog is nothing to the air in this den," Condell said, stepping over a pile of damp off-cuts. He stopped by the stone table, his sharp player's eye taking in the press, the sweating boys, and finally Nicholas Crane, who stood motionless beside his bodkin. "Well, Nicholas? Have you purged the play of your cousin’s excessive commas? Ralph cannot write a sentence without four brackets to hold up its breeches."

"We are working on the second gathering, Master Condell," Nicholas said evenly, his hand quietly sliding a sheet of blank waste paper over the strange, brown-inked manuscript leaf.

Condell didn't notice the gesture, but he noticed the silence of the second press. The smaller press near the window was entirely cold, its tympan turned back like the jaw of a dead horse.

"Why is the second frame empty?" Condell’s tone changed, the professional geniality dropping away to reveal the hard skin of a theatrical manager who had spent twenty years counting pennies at the Globe doors. "We agreed on two presses going together. One for the Comedies, one for the Tragedies. If you are only pulling on one, we will not have copies bound for the winter term."

"A broken screw on the spindle," Isaac lied without blinking. "Nicholas was just examining the proofs for the first signature while we wait for the smith to bring the new iron."

Condell looked at Isaac, then at Nicholas. He walked over to the desk, his spurs jingling softly against his leather boots. "Let me see the sheet."

Nicholas did not move. "It is uncorrected, sir. Full of the boy’s blunders. It will only vex your eyes."

"I have spent thirty years reading papers written on knees in the tiring-room by men who were drunk, Nicholas. I can stomach a turned n." Condell reached out a gloved hand and pushed the waste paper aside.

He did not look at the printed sheet. His eyes went immediately to the old, yellowed leaf of manuscript lying beside it.

Condell froze.

The shop seemed to lose all its noise—the creak of the press, the sizzle of the tallow, the shouting of the carters down in the street outside—all of it faded behind the sudden, sharp intake of the actor’s breath.

Condell reached down, his gloved fingers trembling slightly, and lifted the manuscript leaf by its upper edge. He stared at the dark, blotched lines, at the crossed-out words, at the furious, impatient loops of the script.

"Where did you get this?" Condell asked. His voice was no longer booming; it was thin, sharp, and cold as a razor.

"It was in the case," Isaac said quickly, his hands fluttering. "Among the papers Ralph brought."

"That is a lie," Condell said. He looked directly at Nicholas. "Ralph never had this. This leaf was not in the packet we gave you. I know where this leaf was kept, Nicholas Crane, and it was not in a stationer’s shop."

Nicholas kept his hands flat on his table. "Then where was it, Master Condell?"

Condell’s face had gone the color of skimmed milk under his actor’s paint. "It was in the library of the King's Men at the Blackfriars. Locked in the cypress chest that holds the papers we do not show the Master of the Revels."

He looked down at the writing again, his thumb brushing against the brown stain at the bottom.

"Will's own hand," the old player whispered. "The draft he wrote before the court took offense at the wizard's books. We were ordered to burn this scene twelve years ago, Nicholas. By the King's own chamberlain."

He looked up, his dark eyes wide with a fear that seemed ludicrous in a man of his standing.

"If this is here," Condell said, "then where is the copy Sir George Buc licensed? Where is the text we gave you to print?"

Nicholas picked up his bodkin and turned the slender point in his fingers. "That, Master Condell, is precisely what Isaac and I were discussing before you walked through the door."

The damp had a way of turning paper into pudding if a man neglected his fires, but down in the Barbican warehouse, paper was the least of the casualties. In that cavernous undercroft beneath the printing house, where the stone foundations dated back to some forgotten Roman ditch-work, the air smelled of wet malt, stagnant ditch-water, and the sweet, fatty decay of dead tallow. It was here that Isaac stored the heavy ballast of his enterprise: hogsheads of linseed oil, bundles of dried sheepskin for the pelt-balls, barrels of stale lie, and ream upon ream of unprinted rag.

Nicholas descended the stone steps with a horn lantern in his left hand, holding his skirts out of the muck with his right. Henry Condell followed close on his heels, muttering curses every time his polished French leather slapped into a puddle of greasy seepage. Behind them both came Isaac, his breath hissing through his teeth like an angry gander.

"Keep your voices down, for God’s pity," Isaac whispered, glancing nervously back toward the narrow slit of daylight at the head of the stairs. "The carters are outside unloading birch-bark for the tanners. If one of them hears us talking of suppressed papers, it will be across the wall to the Stationers' Hall before the midday bell."

"Let them hear," Condell rasped, though he lowered his voice all the same. The actor’s bravado had curdled into the bitter agitation of an investor who smells smoke in his counting-house. "If the King's commissioners catch wind that we have the unpurged lines in our possession, a fine at the Hall will be the least of your cares, young Jaggard. You'll sit in the pillory at Cheapside with your ears nailed to the timber, and Heminge and I will lose the patent for the Globe."

"No one is going to the pillory," Nicholas said flatly, his boots crunching on a scattering of dry lime. "Not unless someone talks out of turn to the apprentices. Master Condell, hold your lantern toward that timber stack. The bay under the east vault is where the incoming crates were set down."

The lantern-light washed across pillars of bundled paper, wrapped in coarse brown packing-sheets and bound with tarred hemp. Each stack was marked with the merchant’s cipher—a merchant's mark shaped like an inverted four, signifying direct consignment from the quays at Queenhithe. There were hundreds of them, piled higher than a tall man’s reach, silent and heavy as tombs. Between the pillars, the narrow lanes were choked with disused equipment: an ancient, worm-eaten platen from William Jaggard’s early days; broken iron chases tied with twine; and three hogsheads of printing ink that had gone hard as stone during the Great Frost five winters back.

Condell held his beaver hat against his stomach, squinting into the gloomy corners. "Ralph swore the bundle was delivered whole. Twelve gatherings, wrapped in oiled lambskin, tied with green sarcenet ribbon. He said he handed it to you directly, Nicholas, in the presence of your master."

"And so he did," Nicholas said. "Three months ago, on the feast of Saint James. I took the parcel myself, checked the seal of the Revels Office upon the wrapper, and brought it straight down to this undercroft. We had no room upstairs; the compositors were still neck-deep in the leaves of the English chronicles, and the tables were smothered in historical woodcuts."

"Then who had the key to this vault?" Condell asked, his eyes narrowing until they were like slits in a leather mask.

"Every soul with business in the Barbican," Isaac admitted, rubbing his nose with a greasy wrist. "The boys come down twice a day for fresh sheets to lay in the wetting-trough. The carters have a key hanging by the street door so they can roll the oil-butts in out of the rain. We don't keep silver down here, Master Condell. Who would steal five tons of unprinted French rag? A thief would need four drays and six stout porters just to carry off enough to buy a pot of sack."

Nicholas held his lantern low, following a trail of dry gray dust that led past the barrels of oil toward a low recess built into the ancient masonry. In that alcove sat an iron-strapped sea-chest of Danish oak, reinforced with heavy iron bands and secured by two hasps. A heavy padlock hung from the center staple, its brass face green with verdigris.

"This is where Ralph's package was laid," Nicholas said. He set his lantern on the lid and reached down to lift the padlock.

It came away in his fingers without resistance. The shackle was not through the staple at all; it merely hung there, balanced on the lip of the iron plate to give the appearance of being shut.

Isaac let out a thin squeak. "It was locked on Saturday. I checked it myself when the paper-merchant came to measure the ullage."

"Then you checked it with your eyes shut," Nicholas said dryly. He flipped back the heavy oak lid. The hinges shrieked with a dry, metal scream that set their teeth on edge.

Inside the chest, resting on a bed of dry straw intended to ward off the rising damp, lay the physical remnants of Master William Shakespeare’s stagecraft. There were quartos dog-eared and split along the spines, their paper yellowed to the shade of old horn; bundles of playhouse parts written on narrow scrolls of paper, each containing only an individual actor's speeches with the three-word cues scribbled in the margin; and thick sheaves of fair copy, all penned in the uniform, clerkly Italian hand of Ralph Crane.

Nicholas leaned over the tub, his fingers sorting through the bundles with the practiced delicacy of an old wool-stapler grading fleece. He touched the spine of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, neat and undisturbed; he moved past The Merry Wives of Windsor, its blue ribbon intact.

At the bottom of the right-hand corner, an empty space showed like a missing tooth in an old man’s jaw.

A single square of oiled lambskin lay crumpled against the oak side. Beside it lay the sheared ends of a green ribbon, cut through cleanly with a sharp blade.

Condell made a sound in his throat, halfway between a sob and an oath. He thrust his hands into the straw, scattering dry stalks across the flagstones, lifting other packets and tossing them aside. "Where is the text? The whole gathering—twenty-four leaves! It cannot have simply dissolved into the stones!"

"The rest of the play is still here," Nicholas said, his calm voice cutting through the actor’s panic. He lifted a thinner stack of papers from the shadows beneath the hinge. "Look. Here is the third act, the fourth, and the fifth. All in Ralph’s hand, all with the margins intact. Only the first two gatherings are gone—the shipwreck, the storm, and the whole opening exchange between Prospero and his child."

"And in its place," Condell whispered, his knuckles white against the rim of the chest, "someone went to the trouble of climbing the stairs to your shop, opening your desk, and leaving that devil's draft on your stone."

"Not to my desk," Nicholas said softly, turning the cut ribbon between his calloused fingers. "To the compositor's case. The thief didn't take the draft from here. Whoever brought the foul paper knew that Leason was ready to set the second scene. If they had simply stolen Ralph's leaves, the press would have stopped. The boy would have cried out that he had no copy, Isaac would have come down to the undercroft, and the hue and cry would have been raised before the ink on the floorboards was dry."

Isaac stared at him, his mouth slightly open. "You mean they wanted us to print it?"

"They wanted the press to run," Nicholas replied. "They wanted the forme locked and the platens beating. If Leason hadn't turned that letter upside down, I might have checked the margins against the chase without looking closely at the hand. We would have pulled five hundred sheets of that banned scene before noon, drying on the lines for anyone to read."

"God’s teeth," Condell breathed. "It would have been high treason. The speeches in that original draft—Will had taken lines straight from the secret reports of the Virginia Company. Things about the mutiny on the islands that the Council took extraordinary pains to bury under the earth. If the King’s censors saw those lines in print, under Jaggard’s imprint and our names..."

"It would not merely be the pillory," Nicholas finished for him. "It would be the Fleet Prison, and the seizure of every press in the Barbican. The Folio would be broken up and burned in the churchyard by the common hangman."

Isaac slumped against a ream of Normandy paper, his fingers digging into the wrapper until the coarse paper tore. "Who would do such a thing? John Bill? Thomas Walkley? They have always envied our patent for the plays. Walkley still swears he should have had the printing of Othello."

"Walkley has not the wit for this," Condell said, his theatrical instincts reasserting themselves. "He is an idiot who sells broadsides to country squires. This was done by someone who knew what was in the Blackfriars library. Someone who knew which box to open, and which draft would bring down the hammer of the Council."

Nicholas held up his lantern and walked away from the chest, his eyes fixed on the greasy floor of the vault.

The floor was a mosaic of damp earth and broken paving stones, slick with the runoff from the city ditch that ran along the outside wall. Most of the footprints were recent and obvious: the broad, square heels of the warehouse boys, the deep marks left by the carters’ iron-tipped clogs, and his own distinctive tread, where his dropped shoulder caused his right foot to drag slightly on the outside edge.

Near the small grated window that opened into the ditch-side alley, however, there was a different mark.

It was slender, long in the toe, and the leather had been stamped with a pattern of small rosettes along the welt—the mark of an expensive cordwainer, probably from the shops near the Royal Exchange. The impression was fresh; the edges of the mud had not yet slumped into the hollow.

"Did Master Blount come down here this week?" Nicholas asked, pointing down with the iron tip of his bodkin.

Isaac blinked. "Edward Blount? He hasn't set foot in the Barbican since Michaelmas. He stays in his shop at the Black Bear in Paul’s Churchyard, sipping wine and complaining about the cost of our paper. He says the Barbican smells like a kennel."

"Then we had a visitor with more silver in his purse than any printer in London," Nicholas said. He knelt, ignoring the damp that soaked through his breeches, and brought the flame within an inch of the footprint. Beside the rosette pattern, pressed into the gray slime of the floor, was a tiny yellow grain.

Nicholas picked it up with the tip of his finger and brought it to his tongue.

"What is it?" Condell demanded, leaning over him so closely that the fringe of his cloak brushed Nicholas's ear. "Poison?"

"Mustard seed," Nicholas said, spitting into the straw. "And not the common wild mustard from the meadows. It is prepared with white wine and tarragon, the way the French cooks make it for the ordinaries around the Strand."

Condell’s face darkened. "The Strand? That is where the embassies keep their stables. And the playhouse gentlemen dine at the Nag's Head there."

"It tells us one thing at least," Nicholas said, rising stiffly while his knee-joint gave a sharp, wet crack. "The man who took Ralph Crane's copy did not climb over the ditch from Cripplegate. He came from the west end of town, where men eat French sauce and wear Spanish leather on their toes."

"We must go to the magistrate," Isaac said, his voice rising toward the rafters. "Sir Thomas Bennett is at the Guildhall today. We can swear an information—"

"Swear an information about what?" Nicholas interrupted, his cold gray eyes fixing his master with a look that made the younger man shrink. "That we have in our possession an illegal manuscript of a play that mocks the King’s policy on the plantations? That we have lost the only licensed text, and that our press is standing idle while we look for it? Bennett would impound the whole shop before you finished your preamble. He hates printers. He says every pamphlet against the Spanish marriage comes off our presses, which is half-true anyway."

"Then what are we to do?" Condell cried. "The press cannot stand! We have three hundred pounds invested in this venture, Nicholas! If we do not deliver the first sheets to the binders by the feast of All Saints, the partners will dissolve the agreement. Smethwick will take his tragedies back, and the whole work will fall to pieces!"

Nicholas looked at the empty space in the Danish chest. He could hear, even down here through two feet of oak and stone, the muffled, heavy rhythm of the upper shop: the clack-thump of the first press still working on the front matter, the faint shout of an apprentice being cuffed for spilling ink, the distant rumble of London waking up to its business.

"We have two days before Leason finishes the first signature and needs the sheets for the second," Nicholas said. "I know how fast that boy works; he is slow as an ox and twice as clumsy. If I tell him the chase has sprung a lead, I can delay the setting until tomorrow night."

"And what happens when tomorrow night comes?" Isaac asked miserably.

"By tomorrow night," Nicholas said, slipping his bodkin back into its sheath at his belt, "I will have Ralph’s leaves back in this box, or I will know which river-ditch they were thrown into."

Condell looked at the old proofreader with a mixture of doubt and desperate hope. "You are a printer, Crane. You are not a constable. What makes you think you can find a thief who wears French leather?"

Nicholas wiped a smear of lampblack from his spectacle-lenses with the hem of his greasy apron.

"Because, Master Condell, whoever took those leaves knew the printing trade, but he did not know paper. He left the German foul paper on my desk because he thought one old script looked like another. But a man who buys paper in Troyes and sells it in St. Paul’s knows that every sheet carries its own pedigree, like an alderman’s horse. That scrap of German laid-paper came from a specific press, and there are only four shops in this city that ever bought stock from the Frankfurt merchants."

He turned back toward the stone stairs, holding the lantern high so the light cut through the rising fog of the Barbican ditch.

"Shut the chest, Isaac," Nicholas commanded, not looking back. "And lock it this time. If any man asks for me, tell them I have gone to the paper-house at the Fleet to see about our credit for the ink."