His Dark Lady (43 page)

Will dipped his quill in the lidded glass inkwell he had brought with him, inked out the name ‘Shakespeare’ next to Lucy’s and wrote ‘Goodluck’ beneath.

Kit watched with his brows raised. ‘Not Master Goodluck of the prophetic beard, surely?’

‘The very same.’

‘I heard the rogue was dead.’

‘So did I,’ Will agreed. ‘Strange how some matters fall out, is it not?’

‘And others in,’ Kit mused. He finished his ale. ‘Well, I have work to do.’

‘I wish you well with it,’ Will said drily.

‘My thanks.’ Kit stood and looked down at the debris of empty pots and scraps of torn parchment littering the table. ‘Do you live here now? Should I address all future letters to you “For Master William Shapely Shaft, courtesy of the Three Tuns”?’

Will frowned over a couplet. ‘Cheeks or visage?’

‘Does it concern a lady?’

‘I do not have room enough on this parchment to do my answer justice.’

‘Ouch.’ Kit grinned. ‘In that case, my advice would be “visage”. It is just French enough to be a touch insulting, and is a good iamb besides, to swell out a line of pentameter.’

What a blessing a Cambridge education was, Will thought, and wrote ‘her cheeks’ instead of ‘visage’. He himself had been forced to give up school at the age of fourteen, when his father’s debts had begun to mount up. After that, there had never been any question of his becoming a scholar at one of the universities.

Will glanced up curiously as Kit gathered his own papers. ‘Still working on that new tragedy?’

‘Yes, though the end eludes me. But I am determined to finish it this year and see it played next. It is on the theme of the mighty Tamburlaine, so should draw the crowds well enough.’ Kit hesitated, an odd look on his face. ‘What did you think of Kyd’s new piece?’

‘
The Spanish Tragedy
? An excellent play for the groundlings, but too dark for my own taste. Though I may lean that way myself if I fail to …’ Will laughed and shook his head, putting Lucy’s name aside. Kit might be young and known for his strange passions, but he was not a man with whom one shared one’s heart. Some said Kit Marlowe was a spy, and indeed he had that look at times, the face of a man who had heard too much and knew his name was on the hangman’s list. ‘As for me, I have been paid to rewrite a merry old comedy from the days of Good King Harry.’

‘The irony is amusing, if nothing else,’ Kit remarked, and touched two fingers to his cap in a mock salute. ‘
Vale, mi amice
.’

Will watched him go, then glanced into his empty ale pot. Did he want another?

The name ‘Lucy Goodluck’ mocked him from the parchment.

He called out to the landlord for an eel pie and another jug of ale, hoping he had enough in his purse to cover the cost. Lucy Morgan. With those dark, exotic looks, there was not a woman in the whole of London to match her. Yet she was faithless. Did he want to see her again? It had been nine … no, ten days since he had found Master Goodluck naked on her bed, and Lucy herself cold and distant.

Will dipped his quill in the inkwell again and gouged a deep inky line through her name, tearing the parchment and leaving only Goodluck’s behind to haunt him.

He had hoped to extinguish all thoughts of Lucy from his mind by drinking himself into a stupor every day, yet she burned on inexorably. Her name was a dark flame even in the midday sun, bringing night to noon and despair to his heart.

Meanwhile, Kit Marlowe was writing a grand new tragedy for the playhouse, while all William Shakespeare could do was rework old comic pieces for a few shillings a week.

Furiously, Will cast about for another clean piece of parchment, but had none left. Undeterred, he pulled a small, vellum-bound volume from his bag – a new book of sonnets he had been studying – flicked it open, and began to make a fresh draft of his own poem on the blank verso sheet, correcting it as he wrote.

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head
.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white
,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks
.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare
.

Will left the Three Tuns in the early evening, drunk and intending to head home for a sleep. Instead, he found himself threading his way through the narrow city streets as though on some vital errand. As he headed west, bathed in the warm, summery light of the setting sun, he turned over the plot of a new history play in his head, forming a plot from an excellent story he’d found in Holinshed. It would be a chronicle play concerning King Henry the Fourth and the aptly named Hotspur, with several good battle scenes to test Burbage’s new cannon. Only when he came to a halt outside the dark, shuttered house in which Lucy lived with her guardian did Will realize what he intended.

He knocked but there was no answer.

Tentatively, he pushed at the door, and it swung open. Going inside, he found the downstairs room empty, the fire unlit.

Will hesitated, then crept unsteadily upstairs, not knowing whether Lucy was at home but determined to look.

She was lying on the bed in the upstairs chamber, her eyes closed in sleep, wearing a day gown and stockings but with her shoes and cap removed. One bare forearm dangled towards the floor, her hair fanned out around her head in luxurious abundance like a black halo.

There had been no sign of Master Goodluck downstairs. Perhaps he was dead. The fellow had looked half-dead the last time Will had seen him. Perhaps he’d been arrested again and taken back to the Tower. Or perhaps he had tried to make love to Lucy and she’d told him to get out.

Still a little drunk, Will stood at the foot of the bed for a few moments and stared down at her body. Lucy was dreaming. He watched her eyelids shift restlessly from side to side, and the gentle rise and fall of her chest. Apart from those tell-tale movements, this was how Lucy might look if she were dead.

The macabre nature of his thoughts disturbed him. Will knelt beside her. ‘Lucy?’

She stirred, then sat up, suddenly alarmed. ‘Will? What are you doing here?’

‘Hush,’ he said, and leaned forward to kiss her.

Lucy struggled, but he held her down, anchoring her strong thighs with his own and bearing down on her wrists to keep her safely
beneath
him. Her body arched as she tried to wriggle away, exposing her warm black throat. He kissed her there too, with slow intent, all the way down to her bodice.

‘I need you more than the ripe wheat needs the sun,’ he muttered against her throat. ‘Don’t fight me, Lucy. You kill me with your coldness.’

‘Let me go!’

‘Where is your guardian?’

‘He will be back any moment. Let me go. If Goodluck catches you here—’

‘Goodluck was in no fit condition to fight when I saw him last.’

She was begging him. ‘Please, Will. I cannot do this.’

He drew her wrists together above her head and reached down with his right hand, slowly raising her skirt. ‘Can you not?’

Lucy closed her eyes as he stroked between her thighs, as if to shut out the truth of what they were doing. But it was impossible to hide her readiness from his searching fingers.

Desire flooded him like a dark well, bringing him swiftly to erection, and it was all Will could do not to mount her there and then, like a tethered mare. But he forced himself to go carefully, leaning forward to take her mouth again, his fingers working inside her as they kissed.

She groaned.

It was the sound he had been waiting for. Releasing her wrists, Will knelt between her thighs, loosening his clothing. A moment later, he pushed inside and groaned himself, thrusting swiftly and urgently as he began to take his pleasure.

To his surprise, Lucy did not lie passive this time but moaned and rocked with him, raising her buttocks off the bed and rolling her hips to his rhythm.

She was such a beauty. All woman, too. Pleased by her response, he dragged down her bodice and sucked on her breasts. They felt fuller than he remembered, ripe like dark fruit and eager for his mouth. Her hips rose to meet his, and she moaned his name. She wanted him!

Throwing back his head, Will drove into her, the cot creaking beneath them, his body demanding, and hers answering just as forcefully.

He looked down and found her eyes open, her face shining with sweat. ‘I love you,’ he gasped.

It was true, too. Not just words to keep her heart willing. He did love her. Yet saying it made it somehow more true than ever before. It was a revelation and one which lifted him swiftly towards the end.

Dazed, he repeated, ‘I love you,’ and renewed his thrusts.

Lucy did not reply but groaned and locked her powerful thighs behind his back, grinding herself greedily against him. At last she gave a wild cry, her body suddenly stiffening, and he knew she had reached her peak.

His own desire could not be held back any longer. Will buried himself inside her, crying her name as he filled her. It was only afterwards that he realized whose name he had cried.

She sat up as soon as he rolled away. ‘What did you call me?’

His eyes had been closed in ecstasy as his body climbed slowly down from that high mountain, but now Will opened them. Anne. He had called her by his wife’s name. What kind of fool was he?

‘What?’

Play for time, he thought. It was possible she had not heard exactly what he had said. All things were possible in love. Which poet had said that? He wiped his hot forehead with the back of his hand and shifted on the bed, wondering how to explain his way out of this mess.

Lucy was standing now, tidying her bodice where he had dragged it down, her gown already hiding those beautiful thighs again. Such strong sturdy legs, made for a man to climb up and lose himself between.

‘Who is Anne?’

He felt his cheeks flush, just as though he were a small boy caught stealing from the pantry by his mother.

His lie was instinctive. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You called me Anne!’ Lucy half-screamed, then backed away from him as though he was somehow poisonous. She came up against the wall and stopped there, staring at him. A moment later she had snatched up her discarded cap and run down the stairs.

‘Lucy, no!’

Will stumbled wildly to his feet and went after her, losing his
footing
on the narrow stairs and ending up on his hands and knees at the bottom.

Both hands clasped to her cheeks, Lucy was staring at the man, his face scarred and battered under a dark cap, who stood watching from beside the fire.

It was Master Goodluck.

Seventeen

LUCY’S FEET REFUSED
to move. She saw the anger and disappointment in her guardian’s face and shrank from it. Goodluck had come home while the two of them were upstairs, and must have heard everything. And she had sworn to him that she would never lie with Will Shakespeare again. What must he think of her now?

Goodluck had seen her despair as soon as he was well enough to sit up in his bed, and she had told him what she could, hot-faced and stammering. That Will Shakespeare had come to court and tried to seduce her, that she had refused at first, then allowed him into her bed, that little by little she had fallen in love with Will, and still he had not married her.

Goodluck walked past her and looked her lover in the face. ‘You are Will Shakespeare,’ he said flatly.

‘I am, sir.’

‘Lucy has spoken of you. You were only a boy when she met you at Kenilworth. Is your father still living?’

‘When last I saw him, yes.’

‘Then, by Christ,’ Goodluck exclaimed bitterly, ‘he should have whipped you as a boy to teach you the difference between good and evil. You have shamed my ward without making her the slightest promise of marriage, and not once, but many times. Now that game is at an end, and you will marry her.’

Will looked at him steadily. ‘I cannot.’

‘How dare you defy me in this? You have had your way with Lucy and now you must—’

‘I cannot marry her,’ Will interrupted him, ‘because I am already married.’

Lucy drew her breath in and turned to look at Will. Already married? He was already married?

She said nothing though, her gaze dropping before the violent intensity in his face. What was there to say to him? She had begun to suspect weeks ago that Will was not free to marry, but by then it had been too late. Already desperately in love with the man, she had lied to Cathy and even to herself, imagining other reasons why he could not marry – but never the most likely one. And now she would pay the price for her blind and trusting faith, as many women had paid it before her.