Sentence The Sixhundredandthirtyseventh

February, 1496: in the Upper Room, Leonardo and his assistants were hard at work transferring his drawings of The Last Supper to the wall, and the models could lounge about or go for drinks, play
dice or kiss the serving wenches; among them, the group of travellers who had suddenly arrived and seemed at first so out of place, by their dress, their speech, their mannerisms, had now been absorbed and mingled, tangled, jingled, wangled like Milanese, and after they had had enough of futzing, the women had found work in the taverns, the men had contrived to put whatever trades or skills they had to some use, either in the Monastery, the fields, or around the town; Uncle Tom Cobley had been a farrier in England and so was here; Roxy Davidova had shown Peter Lorre the copy of Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares, with Leslie Howard's autograph and they had found him, coaching the spoilt daughter of a merchant in elocution and persuaded him to form a theatre troupe, and so it was that, with the aid of Peter Boo, formerly a solicitor in Edinburgh and Roxy, who had been the leader of the Unionist Party in Holyrood, as joint managers and producers, Laszlo Licinic as set designer and maker, drawing on his experience in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and a company which included not only Howard and Lorre, but also Geli Raubal and Unity Mitford and Roxy's lover Maria, they produced comedies and dramas, entertainments for all ages and interests, with Howard's memory providing them with scripts, using several local scribes, of plays which William Shakespeare (who would be only a babe in arms at the time) had not yet written – this would become part of the confusion about the authorship, in centuries to come, when several printed copies of All's Well that Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Winter's Tale. were discovered in Milan and dated to just a few years after Shakespeare's birth) and within a short period of time they were taking sufficient money to support them all in a modest way of life; despite being used to fame in their previous lives, there was no rankism in the Company – unlike the Artist's studio where the Master really was Master! and now Howard and Lorre wanted to build a dedicated theatre and Leonardo drew up the plans for one which the Duke agreed to finance; they were content, had all but given up any faint hope – or dread – of returning to their former lives, were happy and fulfilled, until the day that a Scottish nobleman, Sir Ptarmigan MacFarlane, and his valet, Damien Doubleday, came to see the show and afterwards emerged from the umbra and introduced themselves to the company: and little did our friends know how soon they would come to imprecate that day!