Free The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller by Robert Olen Butler

for nearly four hundred years. His identifying it only by its esoteric name in the question struck me as part of what was likely to be a subtle, ongoing test of my Germanic credentials.
    “I should read it more often,” I said. “I do all right, but it still strikes my eye oddly.”
    He smiled. “Of course. Were your parents born in their homeland?”
    “Yes. They came to the United States when I was very young.”
    “My family background is German as well,” Stockman said. “As is the case with a great many Englishmen.”
    “Your present royal family . . .” I began, hesitating only for a fraction of a second.
    He finished my sentence. “Is Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.”
    He looked at me for a moment. Though it was very brief, I felt certain it was filled with a serious, subtle, rapid assessment of me. He made a decision and said, “Some might say that a royal family by any other name would be a different royal family.”
    “Would not smell as sweet,” I said, bringing his sly joke closer to the Shakespeare quote and to the political point we were quietly deciding to share.
    He laughed out loud, a bright, sharp bark of a laugh.
    He flipped his chin at the book in my hand. “Do you know von Herder?”
    “I don’t.”
    He smiled. He nodded to the shelf behind me. “May I?”
    I stepped aside. He moved forward and removed a volume of von Herder and searched its pages for a moment. He found the passage he wanted and handed the book to me, taking Die Vorwelt from me. “Beginning of the second paragraph on the right-hand page,” he said.
    I read it. Another little test. I struggled with the wildly angled letters of the Fraktur and then with the German itself. He watched patiently. But he did not let me off the hook. A few moments along he said, “Apropos of our recent observations.”
    Then I had it. Though it probably took less than a minute, it felt like a very long time. But I knew that for the circumstances, I’d done this fast. I lifted my face from the page and smiled at him. Just in case he was open to the suspicion, I let him think for a moment that I’d overstated even my modest declaration of proficiency in German and I was about to confess. It would be all the more impressive when he realized I was, indeed, far better than I’d claimed.
    “Shall I translate?” I asked.
    “Please,” he said.
    “The heart of it,” I said.
    “I’d be interested in your selection.”
    I let go of the literal enough to make it read smoothly in English and I went to the heart of the message: “The English are Germans, and even in recent times the Germans have showed the way for the English in the most important matters.”
    Stockman slowly unfurled a small, one-sided smile. I could easily read approval into it. For a clever boy passing a tricky test.
    He said, “Can I have your assurance that my personal views and sympathies will be strictly omitted from any story you write?”
    Though the context was almost mellow in tone, I’d never heard the word “strictly” spoken with such bite. It leaped from the sentence as if he’d flashed a pistol and threatened to use it. Perhaps he had.
    “Of course,” I said. “I understand the delicacy of your position. I often feel it myself.”
    I sounded convincing.
    He made one more brief, evaluative pause.
    I’d passed another test.
    “I have a few minutes,” he said. “Perhaps the only ones for the rest of this day. Would you like to sit for a time?”
    “Of course,” I said.
    He led me across the room and into a cluster of modern overstuffed reading chairs before the bay window. Beyond were a hundred yards of dense, manicured grass. Very simple. No garden. A fieldstone path to a waist-high stone fence. I wondered if that was where Lady Stockman went over.
    Beyond the fence lay the wide stretch of the Strait of Dover, its surface gray starting to mitigate, becoming the vague blue of slate now, as the clouds were beginning to break.
    Stockman pointed to one of the