Ink and Steel (25 page)

Will, watching, covered his mouth and smiled into his sleeve. Still weary with the brutal coach ride, he must have dozed before the fire, because a knock on the door startled him awake. “That will be your brother Edmund,” Anne said, crossing in a sweep of skirts. “He's come to take Hamnet to fetch the Yule log—”

“Uncle Edmund!” The boy bounced up even as Will dropped his feet on the floor. His youngest brother—a mere twice seven years— shook snow off his cloak and hefted an axe. “Ready to go out and slog through the snow with the men, puppy— Will!”

“Ted.” Will stood, a broad grin stretching his cheeks. “You've grown.”

“You're home.” Edmund looked him up and down. He was already almost Will's height, and his shoulders half filled the doorway. “Well, get your boots on, then.”

Hamnet bounced on his toes. Will looked at Annie. Annie didn't quite nod—that would have been too much like permission—but she smiled. “Bring more ivy if you find it, or bay,” she said. “Christmas eve supper shall be at your father's house; the girls and I will meet you. I promised to help cook.”

The sun turned the western horizon to flame-colored taffeta while the three of them—Hamnet, Edmund, and Will—leaned into the traces and sledged an enormous log through ankle-deep snow. Or, in fairness, Will and Edmund sledged. Hamnet ran rings around them, the winter sunlight glimmering on his hair—now a hare, now a hound, now—“Uncle Edmund, look!”—a lumbering bear.

Edmund looked, and laughed, and Will looked at Edmund and understood, with a moment of bitterness he didn't deserve, who was raising his son. Will covered the hurt with a player's smile, and caught Edmund's eye before he ducked under the traces to chase his bear-cub down the lane, growling like a hound.

They floundered through a snowdrift and into a deserted pasturage, Will half a step behind the boy. “Run, bear cub! The hounds are on you!”

Hamnet turned at bay against a hurdle, and Will drew up. “I'm Sackerson,” the boy growled. “The strongest bear in Britain! I'll eat up any hound that comes after me!”

Will laughed and crouched down, hands spread, watching his boy coil to leap at him. That Hamnet would trust Will to catch him cracked his grin to show his teeth in more than mockery of a hunting dog's snarl.

“Hounds are smarter than bears—” He gasped as
something
took him, as if the snowy grass under his feet were yanked like a carpet, and he found himself flat on his back with Hamnet crouched over him, small fists clenched on the neck of his jerkin, roaring triumphantly. “Lad—” Will coughed. “Off!”

Hamnet jumped back, and suddenly Edmund's hands were on him, the Yule log abandoned in the lane, a worried brother brushing snow from his collar and hair, pulling him to his feet. “What happened?”

“Fell,” Will said, and shoved his right hand into the slit in his jerkin and the pocket beneath so Edmund wouldn't see it shake. He wouldn't say more in front of Hamnet, but Edmund's lips pursed and he kept a hand on Will's elbow until they were back in the lane, and did the lion's share of the drawing.

Another half-hour's labor brought them through the festive streets of Stratford to the front door of Will's childhood home. Edmund pushed the door open to the parlor where the great bed stood, halloing unnecessarily as the whole family—Joan; her husband, Will; Gilbert; Richard—and guests turned with applause. The rich smell of brawn roasting and bread baking, of mince pie and fruit pie and plum porridge, was almost as sustaining as food itself. There would be no cold pottage in the Shakespeare house tonight. In the hall, where the hearth roared in readiness for their burden, some of the guests were playing at snapdragon, picking raisins from a bowl of flaming brandy. Will saw one man dressed in almost Puritan severity quench scorched fingers in his mouth.

Will dropped the traces and kicked snow from his boots against the threshold before stepping over onto rushes scattering the blue limestone floor. He and Edmund dragged the log in with Hamnet's interference. Then Will left it to his brother's labor, turning away from the precipitous stair on the left and into the hall, with its walls hung in holly and painted cloth. He could hear Hamnet and Edmund untying the Yule log, and he realized suddenly that they'd forgotten the ivy—or bay—and then his father's arms were around him, John Shakespeare stumping forward on a bentwood cane and wrapping his oldest son in palsied arms, leaning as much as embracing, clinging to his boy gone to London and mouthing words about Will come home in velvet and silk taffeta like a fine gentleman. His father's words were slurred, one running into the other, and Will knew from the stern, proud look on his mother Mary's face that he was not to remark on it.

The cousins close and distant huddled in a room hot with their bodies and the leaping flames of the hearth, among them men and women Will had never seen.

“Bring it in, bring it in,” John Shakespeare said. “The feast is upon us.”

Mary waited for her husband to step back before she came forward and looked up at Will. Her eyes were blue: she had the aristocratic cheekbones and the high brow she'd willed to all her children, the living and the dead. Will saw her noticing the snow and the earth staining his cloak and the knees of his breeches, but she met his eyes and held out a tankard of mulled cider, and only smiled. “Welcome home, Will.”

“Mother,” he said, and took the wine, searching the crowd for Annie and Susanna. Judith would be with the younger children. “God bless you.”

Her kiss was roses and homecoming, and he let it drive the memory of balance lost and a lurch into a snowdrift away.

“How is Father?” An undertone, mumbled around his cider.

“Not much worse,” she said, and shrugged. “And you?”

“My plays have been performed before the Queen,” he answered, as he had imagined himself answering, and accepted her gasp and smile and delighted outcry as his due.

Annie found him before he finished the cider, and drew him through a low timbered archway into the crowded hall by a warm arm around his waist. “The brawn is almost ready,” she said.

He breathed deep: cloves and crackling and the rich aroma of roasting pork. “Annie,” he said. “Something happened today—”

“Not to Hamnet?” She crouched by the fire in the big bricked hearth, tucking her skirts in close as she ladled dripping over the roast. She wore neither bumroll nor farthingale, but a broad country skirt under her apron, and Will bit his tongue at the way those skirts draped between her haunches. Three children, and still—

“I fell,” he said. “I think—”

“Fell?” She set the battered copper ladle aside and stood, turned, frowning. She took his wrists and drew his hands forward, glowering down at them—broad knuckles, long fingers, the last digit of the middle finger on the right one calloused on the inner edge and warped sideways from the pressure of the quill. The right one—

—trembled. “Oh, Will.”

“Years yet,” he said. “I swear I'll come home to you—”

“Broken and old so I can nurse thee through thy dotage? What good will you be to me then?” Her voice low, the bitterness hidden under the commonplace tone of wife to husband. “Pray it pass Hamnet by—”

“Annie, hush you. I—”

“There's a priest here tonight,” she said suddenly, interrupting. “For Christ's birth. After the neighbors leave, there will be a midnight Mass.”

A priest
. She meant
a Catholic priest
.

A Catholic Mass.

A hanging affair.

Will swallowed dryness. “Annie, you must not tell me such things—”

“—Will—”
You were raised to it.
He knew.

He met her pale eyes and shook his head, tasting salt and sour like a reminder. “Anne. Wife. I'm a Queen's Man now. Do you know what that is?”

She shook her head.
No.
He drew a stool out from the table and sat, gesturing her to the bench. “Hast ever seen a Tyburn hanging, Annie?”

She blanched. “No.” Not seen, perhaps. But heard.

“It is as well.”
If I have my will,
he thought,
you never shall see one.

Especially mine.
“I'll take Judith and Hamnet home after supper,” he said. “You and Susanna may stay.”

She did not argue.

Act II, scene ix

—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
Dido, Queen of Carthage

In the ten days or fortnight it took for Kit to sort out the social order of the low tables, he learned many things that had escaped his notice when he sat by Murchaud's side. The talk was freer, although his—Kit's—presence was greeted with sidelong glances at first. But when Murchaud left court, and Morgan was not seen, and Kit traded his green and violet and silver for the black velvet he truthfully preferred, the conversation flowed more free. Especially as he was seen in the company of the Mebd's Bard and her Puck, or sitting alone.

He couldn't bear the silence of his rooms, and spent long hours walking in the beech wood or along the strand, practicing music poorly with Cairbre or reading in the library. Kit had Latin, Greek, fair French, and slight German, yet he found them inadequate to the books and scrolls and stories there. The lamia Amaranth found him puzzling over books in strange languages, and with her dapple-scaled tail coiled between chair legs and occasionally, unsettlingly, brushing his calf, she set about to teach him the backward writings of Hebrews (which informed Kit of the names of three of the five symbols Baines and his friends had burned into his flesh:
mem
,
he
, and
lamel
) and Mohammadans, and the brush-sketched characters of far Cathay. Although her smile was cool and she would not answer questions about herself, Kit thought she courted him.

He permitted it, expecting her purpose to be revealed hesitantly, but before too long. Wrong again: her silence and amusement remained, counterpointed by her flickering tongue.

And so he continued, restless and—although often in company— alone. His thoughts were clearer now that he had a goal, but the passive means of accomplishing it—and his lack of success as bait— flustered him. More unsettling, it wasn't any easier to keep track of the days when he was focused on it. He went so far as to carve notches in a candle, and stopped when he began to realize that the number of notches
changed
.

As his head cleared further, though, the craving in his belly grew. He had to talk to Morgan. Jilted lover or no.

He frowned, thinking that he would not trust himself with matters of import, as mooncalf as he had been.

Kit dressed—as Will would have it—like a cobbler's son: a shirt of cambric, a leather jerkin, and brown wool breeches. He slipped the iron bootnail from the pocket of the doublet he had been wearing and was about to drop it into a lacquer box on the stand beside his bed when he hesitated. He could almost fancy the sound of a cobbler's hammer, familiar from childhood, and smiled for a moment at the memory of his father with a mouth full of tacks just like this one. It might have been the scent of leather, or the way the light caught on the worn surface of the nail, but he suddenly couldn't bear to set it aside. He slipped it into his purse and let it clink against coins he'd had no occasion to spend.
Here is the palace, and the court. But there is no Faerie city. No tradesman, no farmlands, no ports for ships trading the wide and wandering sea . . .

How strange.
And then Kit smiled, because there was a lyric in it. He stomped into his boots, and left his cloak and his sword behind. Should anyone ask, he was only going for a ramble.

How far to Morgan's cottage, he could not estimate. Murchaud had said through the beech wood, but Kit's explorations had not found a farther edge. They
had
taught him that the wood changed from day to day; on one the brook might bend beside an enormous gray boulder like a menhir, caked with moss and lichen; on another it would run straight and tossing over rocks through the spraddled roots of a rogue oak, rough-barked and errant among the smooth-boled beeches, vast enough to build an Ark. Then again, there might be no brook at all, and the wood might sweep up the flanks of rolling hills, spacious and silent and lit like a green cathedral.

Kit followed a graveled trail through the palace's sprawling gardens. It became a sort of bridle path at the verge of the wood. He paused there for a moment to settle the leather bottle of water on his hip and get his bearings. Then—
Morgan's house
, he thought, and set his foot upon the path.

Today it was late summer under the trees, the day bright and serene, shade and a light breeze welcome in the morning's heat. He regretted the jerkin, but knew he'd want it if the sun set while he was in the wood. He didn't object to sleeping rough and hungry for a night, but he wasn't overfond of shivering in a pile of leaves until morning.

The trail tended east, gladdening Kit's heart, and it passed over the brook—there was a brook today, brown water dappled by sunshine— on a well-maintained footbridge. Kit was wise enough to step off the trail and leave prints down the muddy bank, crouching on gravel to cup water to his mouth. He drank deep to spare what he carried, smiling at the hop and splash of infant frogs the same bronze as the silt.