Chapter 27: The Play's the Thing

I: Zane

Walter Gates handed me the pages, from a yellow legal pad and so hastily written that they were rife with spelling errors.

“What is this, Walter Gates: ‘Vanquish Ed?’”

“‘Vanquished,’” he said. “There’s a hyphen, to show it’s pronounced ‘VANquish-EDD.’”

“This is a hyphen?”

“Zane.”

“Of course, it is fine. Very good.”

“Well, sure, you think so: You wrote it.”

“No, no,” I said. “A Walter Gates original. First folio.”

“So: two parts,” he said. “You, obviously, will do one part. And I’ll do the other?”

“Well, Miles, he is very unstable around women. He needs so badly to have their approval, you see. So, for the other part, we need a woman.”

“But the character is a man.”

“Often they did this in the Elizabethan theatre, Walter Gates. We will dress her as a man.”

“It was the other way around, Zane, in the Elizabethan theatre.”

“Oh yes, right. The other way around. Still. Must be a woman. It will not work otherwise.”