Ink and Steel (18 page)

The Puck laughed. “Because you need a friend, Sir Kit.”

Kit looked up. He set his knife aside. “Do I?”

“Aye.”

“Well, then I wot I do.”

"Eat,” Puck said. “You'll need strength when you tell your poetry.”

Act II, scene ii

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Romeo and Juliet

The second letter arrived in cold, wet April a week or two before Will's christening-day, after the playhouses were reopened from a Lent that Will had hoped—and failed—to spend in Stratford. It was in Kit's hand, or a clever forgery, and written with some care: no words were scratched out or blotted, and the ink was black as jet on creamy parchment. The tone was much as the first letter.

Gold to dross,
Will thought, refolding the letter and examining the seal once more though he was growing late for his meeting with Lord Hunsdon. The seal was of brittle green wax, imprinted with an image of a goose feather. All carefully chosen to lead Will to an inevitable conclusion.

Will Shakespeare had been a country lad, where the reek of frankincense and superstition—of Papism—still clung. Even if he hadn't seen in manuscript a few cantos of Spenser's poem in praise of England's own Faerie Queene, he would have known the signs as well as any man, although a rational—a properly
Protestant
—mind might reject them.

Easily enough done, and no more risky than reporting to Walsingham himself. Which Will still intended. But—

But it would be noticeable to carry it downstairs and slip it into the fire, and there was no hearth in Will's room. After some consideration and a few false starts, he lifted the ticking off the bed and tucked the letter between the ropes and the frame, where it stuck quite nicely. Completely concealed, even with the ticking off: Will crawled under the frame to be sure. Then he got his arms around the rustling ticking and wrestled it back into place, poking the flannel to settle the straw inside the bag. He sneezed at the dust, wiped watering eyes on his sleeve, and twitched the bedclothes smooth.

Mid-April was still sharp enough that Will layered a leather jerkin over his doublet. He hurried through the streets, mindful of slush in the gutters, and crossed London Bridge with the sun still high in the sky. There was no concealment of this meeting: Will reported to the scowling gray Tower itself. He presented himself to the Yeoman Warder at the main gate, struggling to hide the uncertainty of his glances toward the prison while assuring the guards that he was expected. After showing his letter from the Lord Chamberlain, he was ushered through, and walked down the long, rule-straight lane within. The inside of the massive knobbed stone walls was no more comforting than the exterior had been, and he considered uneasily what the murders and covenants of ravens along the edges of the rooftops dined upon. Legend claimed that should the ravens leave the Tower, England's fall would not be far behind.

Will was not expecting the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Treasurer to be waiting for him, apparently at their leisure, a half-played game of chess set on a small cherrywood table between their chairs along with wine and glasses. The footman who opened the door did not accompany Will into the opulent little chamber.

A hearth blazed, and a brazier as well—the room dryly hot in deference to old men's bones. Will spared a glance for the figured leather on the walls as the door clicked shut behind him. Burghley and Hunsdon looked up in unison; Burghley turned a chesspiece, a white rook, in one crabbed hand.

“My lords.” Will bowed with a player's flourish.

“Master Shakespeare,” Burghley said, flicking Will upright with irritable fingers. The hand that pinched the ivory castle indicated a third chair. “Drag that over, won't you?”

Will obeyed, and sat where he was bid to be seated: a little back from the table, well within the cone of warmth from the hearth. He tugged his mittens off, an excuse to look down at his hands. “My lords. From the summons, I had expected we should all be present for this interview.”

“Ah, yes.” Burghley returned the rook to the little army of white pieces haunting his side of the table. The only indication of Burghley's deafness was by how close he watched Will's lips, and a slight tinny loudness when he spoke. “We will speak to Master Burbage individually. Master Shakespeare—”

The hesitation in his voice was all the warning Will needed. “My lord,” Will said. “Not the Earl of Oxford?”

“No.” Hunsdon leaned forward and picked up his goblet. He refilled it from the bottle, then extended the cup as if not noticing the dignity he did Will. Will accepted it and sipped.

It could be poisoned,
he thought, too late, as heady fumes filled his senses. The wine was red and sharp, not sweet, but with a tannic richness that made him bold. “If your lordship would have pity—”

“Shakespeare,” Hunsdon said. “Your master, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, is dead.”

It was as well that Will had finished the wine in the cup, for it tumbled from his nerveless fingers and bounced off a rich hand-knotted carpet, spilling a few red drops on the dark red wool. “Dead.”

“By poison,” Burghley answered. “Or, some say, sorcery. Ten days to die, in terrible agony—”

“Will.”

Hunsdon's voice, his given name. Will blinked and realized he was standing, his hands knotted on the relief that covered the gilded arms of his chair. “My lords.”

“Master Shakespeare, sit.”

Will sat. “Good my lords—”

“There is more.”

Will leaned forward to hear Burghley's weary voice more clearly. “Our Queen is threatened, Master Shakespeare. I have ordered the Irish aliens to present themselves and make explanation of their presence in England. And Essex has accused the Queen's own physician of treason and conspiring to poison her—”

“Lopez,” Will said. And then quoted sardonically, “The vile Jew.”

“Lies,” Burghley said flatly. “Essex's machinations. More and more, I believe Essex—and Southampton—dupes of the enemy. If anything other than the black half of the Prometheus Club, it was a Papist plot. But Lopez has confessed.”

“Confessed? Topcliffe?” It was the name of the Queen's torturer, the man who had broken Thomas Kyd, and Will spoke it softly.

“William Wade.” Hunsdon breathed out softly through his nose. “Clerk of the Privy Council. Instrumental in bringing low Mary, Queen of Scots, and exposing her treachery. He . . . showed Lopez the instruments.”

“Ah.” Will gulped, remembering the sear of a red-hot iron by his face.

“My son Robert attended the hearing,” Burgley said. “He and Essex have been dueling in the Queen's favor for Lopez for months, you understand. We had a hope of saving Lopez until Strange died. Eight times Essex pressed her to sign the writ, and eight times she refused. But now . . . Essex will prevail, and Lopez will die. Would that Gloriana were a man, and not turned by a pretty man's face—” He stopped, as if hearing himself on the brink of treason. “Lopez has been a valued ally, and preserved Sir Francis when we had thought all hope lost. But it may be that now we must sacrifice him.”

“Like Kit,” Will said.

If he had intended the words to cut Burghley, they were futile. The old man only nodded. “After a fashion.”

Will coughed against his hand. “How may I serve Her Majesty?”

He thought Burghley smiled behind his beard. “We'll have Richard revive
The Jew of Malta—
”

“Is Kit not out of favor?”

“Favor or not, we have no other play that may distract the masses and offer a channel to their wrath. Until you write one.”

“My lord?”

“Master Shakespeare. Give me a play about a Jew. Before there are riots in London. Essex's plot will see innocent persons lynched, and there is naught we can do to prevent it.” Hunsdon covered his mouth with his hand. “I am not a Jew-lover, but it is not they who must be blamed for this outrage.”

Burghley tapped the edge of the chessboard in exasperation. “Put your damned hand down, Carey, if you want me to understand what you say.”

“My lord,” Will said. “I have never known a Jew.”

“I have one for you,” Burghley answered. “I must warn you. Like Marley's”—and Will noticed no reluctance in Burghley's naming of the forbidden poet's name—“your Zionist may not be charming: the groundlings I think would not understand it, were he. But neither must his enemies be.”

"As my lord wishes,” Will said, and bent to pick his fallen goblet off the floor.

Act II, scene iii

—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
Hero and Leander

Summer bled to autumn, autumn to winter, winter to the first cold trickle of spring—and then through summer until the cycle repeated itself. The seasons in Faerie did not proceed quite as Kit was used to them, but rather each one smoothly into the next without fits and starts, each day a sort of idealized
image
of what a day in summer, or autumn, or winter should be. He concealed his iron-nailed boots in the bottom of his clothespress in the spacious quarters he was given, and he soon found himself moving through the court, at first as a curiosity and then as a fixture. And while he saw the Mebd often enough at court functions, he was not again summoned before her, or given to understand any purpose in his presence at her court.

Murchaud kept him at arms practice—outside, in the slick scattered leaves of the beech wood behind the palace and then in courtyard snow; then in the Great Hall and the armory when that snow drifted over their knees. Kit filled the time between as best he could. He was not accustomed to idleness, and he chafed, and paced, and read—and wrote when he had the patience, though all his words seemed hollow—and he woke alone most mornings. Some of those mornings, the shape of Murchaud's or Morgan's body lay already cold in his bed, an ache filling his belly and a hopelessness behind it. He never lost himself again, as he had after his visit to Sir Francis, but the threat of it hung over him always like black wings. He took to courting Morgan with a practiced distance that seemed to please her very well, while the Elf-knights and ladies treated him as some exotic pet.
Like Elizabeth's wizened little devil monkey on its chain.

One cold February morning, Kit lay against his pillows and watched a dry snow coil and blow beyond the diamond-paned windows. He turned on his side, blew a jet-black hair and days barren of scent from the other pillow. The coverlet of silk and down on his bare skin, the fur-trimmed tapestries on the bed, the transparent diamond panes themselves were luxuries lost on him as he stood and went to the window. He didn't notice the cold, and only half noticed that the glass did not lay his reflection over the snow. He was leaner and harder, for all of Faerie's rich food. Murchaud drove him hard.

Kit's breath frosted the glass.
You should have known when you swore off Love that you would only tempt fate to bind you in her wicked chains.

Still
—he reached out and idly drew a lance-pierced heart in the misted window, amused by the obvious symbolism, then glanced over his shoulder as if someone might have seen him. When he raised a guilty hand to wipe it clear, he saw the flurry was tapering away, and saw as well a silhouette wrapped in a figured cloak making her way across the drifts below. Ebony locks rustled unbound across her shoulders; something whiter than the snow fluttered in her milk-white hand. His flinch caught Morgan's eye; she looked up. Even from this distance he could see her smile and the movement of her hair across tapestry brocade.

He imagined what he looked like framed naked in the window, lust stirring as he recollected the scent of her, and stepped to one side, his face burning.
She'LL be here in a moment,
he thought, and considered for an instant meeting her naked and shameless at the door. She'd laugh—

If his blushes wouldn't set him on fire.

Kit,
he admonished.
For a brazen Libertine, an adulterer, a sodomite, an atheist, a fornicator, rakehell, heretic, godless playmaker and debaucher of
innocents, you're a sorry state of affairs
. Self-mockery turned his mouth awry as he found a clean shirt, the yoke wrought with whitework, and the green breeches and pale gray woolen stockings that matched a green and silver velvet doublet. Morgan's favorite colors. He judged it would take her a quarter hour or so to come inside, shed her cloak, and make her way through the palace, but he was still running a hurried comb across his hair when a tap rattled the door.

He opened it a moment later, surprised to find not Morgan waiting beyond the door, but a broad-shouldered, black-bearded man: the Mebd's bard Cairbre, snow still clotting the tops of his boots. “I happened to chance upon your mistress in the Great Hall,” the bard said abruptly. “As I was on my way to my rooms, she asked me to bid you come to hers.”

Kit straightened the lacings on his doublet, pulled his swordbelt from the rack, and stepped into the corridor. “Thank you, Master Harper.”

“Think nothing of it.” The bard's cheek crinkled beside his eye, his lopsided smile disappearing into his beard. “When are you going to show me your poetry?”