Ink and Steel (3 page)

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Othello

Will".

"What?” The leather-bound planken door swung open; the playmaker lifted his head from the cradle of his fingers. He cursed as the hastily cut quill snagged lank strands, spattering brown-black irongall across his hand, his cuff, and the scribbled page. “Richard, you come hand in hand with fortune tonight. You did perchance bring wine?”

“No such luck.” Burbage shut the door, then hooked a battered stool from beside Will's unmade bedstead with one booted toe and perched without waiting to be asked. He grunted as he leaned forward, elbow on knee, and tugged his doublet straight. “ 'Tis early for wine, and I'm in no mood for a public house and ale with my bread. So”—he thumped a pottery bottle on the trestle—“it'll have to be spirits.”

“Morning?” Will set down the handkerchief with which he'd been dabbing his sleeve and looked up at a shuttered window. Beside his elbow, a fat candle guttered, and his commonplace book was propped open before it.

“Morning. You've worked the night through. And your chamber-mate . . .”
. . . won't be returning.

Will shrugged. He hadn't noticed the hour, though the absence weighed on him. Or not the absence—Kit was often at the beck of patrons or conquests—but the irrevocability of it.

Burbage accepted his silence. “Have you cups?”

Will stood and moved to a livery cupboard, patched shoe scuffing rough boards. “What ails you, friend?” He turned with two leather tankards in his hand and came around the front of the table.

Burbage dragged the cork from the bottle with his thumbs and poured. “To Kit.”

Will lifted the second cup and held it, wincing, below his nose. “To Kit.” He closed his eyes on an image of a man smug as a preening cat and soaked in his own red blood. Will drank, leaning a hip against the table as if it were too much effort to reclaim his chair. “You'll have heard the rumors he was working for the Papists, or the Crown.”

“I would not hazard myself to hazard a guess,” Burbage replied, hooking a bootheel over a rung. “It's noised about that it was a drunken brawl, and Kit's been in his cups of late, as poets sometimes go when they've had a little triumph. . . .” Jokingly, he reached as if to pull the tankard from Will's hand, and Will shielded it deftly. “But,” Burbage continued, “Kyd gave evidence against him, and Kit was still at liberty, as Kit seemed to stay no matter the charge levied against him. So there's something there. What's the manuscript?”

“
Titus Andronicus
.”

“Still? The plague will have us closed into winter, Will. It's five thousand dead already. And
Titus
a terrible story. We need comedy, not blood. If we ever see a stage again.”

“It's not the story,” Will answered. Burbage was a shareholder in the troupe—Lord Strange's Men—and as such he was half Will's employer. The brandy tingled on the back of Will's throat and his tongue felt thick. Still, he reckoned even harsh spirits a more welcome mouthful than blood.
Kit killed. Would he risk everything . . . ?
But Kit had been rash. And brilliant, and outrageous, and flamboyant. And young. Two months older than Will, who was just barely twenty-nine. He sipped again. “They can't all be genius.”

Burbage laughed and tipped his mug. “Did you ever pause to wonder why not?”

Oh, the brandy was making Will honest. “Heady stuff,” he commented. “If my skill were equal mine ambition, Richard—” Will shook his head. “What will we do for money if the playhouses can't open? How long will Lord Strange champion players who cannot play? Anne and my children must eat.” He'd picked up the quill. He turned it over, admiring the way candlelight caught in its ink-spotted vanes.

Burbage waved the bottle between his nose and the pen. “Have another drink, Will.”

“I've a play to write—”

“Which opens tomorrow, doubtless? And poor Kit undeserving of a wake?”

“Unfair!” But Will lifted the tankard and breathed the smoky fumes deep, feeling as though they seared his brain. “Poor Kit. . . .”

“Indeed. Would serve your Queen so, Will?”

“Serve her to the death?” That brought him up short. “Is that what poor Marley did? Not stabbed for treason, or murdered by his conspirators before he could name their names. Nor killed for his”—Will lowered his voice—“atheism, and the talk of . . .” He drank again, but held his hand over his cup when Burbage would have filled it. “I can't write.”

“Drink will fix it.”

Will did not uncover his tankard. “Drink fixes little, and what it doth fix can oft be not unfixed again.”

“Ah.” Burbage shifted his attention to his own cup as Will stood and paced. “In vino veritas. Is a Queen worth risking your life for, Will?”

“Why ask you these things of me?” Splinters curled from the wainscot shelf. Years of dry heat and creeping chill had cracked the wood long and deep between cheap plaster. Will picked spindled wood with one inkstained fingernail. He'd papered the walls with broadsheets, which also peeled. “A Queen. The
idea
of a Queen. . . .”

“The reality not worth your time?” Burbage leaned on the wall, brandy-sharp breath hot on Will's cheek. He thrust Will's cup into his hand; Will took it by reflex. “It's her got Kit killed, isn't it? Blood and a knife in the face. That's what Queens get you.”

“Treason,” Will whispered. Burbage's face was flushed, his cheeks hot, red-blond hair straggled down in his too-bright eyes. Like a man fevered. Like a man mad. “You speak treason.”

His hands were numb. The tankard slipped out of his fingers, and the brandy made a stream that glistened in the candlelight like liquid amber as it fell. The stink filled his room, sharp as the bile rising up Will's throat. “That's treason, man!”

“Treason or truth? A ragged old slattern, belike. Bastard, excommunicate daughter of a fat pig of a glutton, a man who might have invented lust and greed he liked them so well—”

Will's hand acted before his mind got behind it; he struck Burbage across the face, a spinning slack-handed blow. Drunker than he'd thought, he overreached; the fallen tankard dented under his knee as he landed on it. “Fie!” Brandy soaked his stocking. At least he thought it brandy, and not blood. “Get from me!” Will pointed at the door with a trembling hand, though the player towered over him. “I'll find another company an those are your sentiments!”

But Burbage, pink-cheeked from the blow, extended his own hand to help Will to his feet. Will could only stare at it. “Your eloquence does desert you when you're drunk enough. On your feet, man. You've passed the test.”

“Test?” Will wobbled up, one hand on the wall, refusing Burbage's aid. “You've maligned the Queen.”

Burbage winked stagily, while Will limped to his abandoned stool. “Her Majesty would smile on it. Come.”

“I'll go nowhere with you until you make yourself plain.” A burning sting told Will the brandy
had
found a cut under his stocking. “You've bloodied me.”

“I'll pay the danegeld,” Burbage answered. “I can't
tell
you, Will. You have to come meet them.”

“Who?” Blood soaked through light-colored wool, but only a drop. Will winced and picked cloth away from the cut.

“Your coconspirators.”

Will looked up as Burbage rested a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Didst not hear me say—”

“I heard thee clear,” Burbage answered. “Since thou'rt so loyal then, come on with me and find why Marley was killed. The rumors are true, Will: he was a Queen's Man, sure.”

Will blinked. His skull was still thick with drink, though the pain cut through it somewhat. “What do you need me for?”

Burbage smiled, and Will thought he saw the edge of pity in it. “Will. To take his place.”

Will followed Burbage into a cool, overcast morning. The gutters hadn't yet begun to stink, but Burbage picked his way fastidiously, one arm linked through Will's to steer the still-unsteady playmaker across a maze of slick cobbles and night soil. “Why not go home to Stratford-upon-Avon?” he asked. “Go back to merchanting. Look at this place: half the shops shuttered, the playhouses closed.”

“I'm a player. And a playmaker. Besides—” They passed a hurrying woman in russet homespun, her skirts kilted up and a basket over her arm. She clutched a clove-studded lemon to her nose, and Burbage snorted as she shied away from them. “I have a wife and children in Stratford.”

“A player? Might as well be a leper, for all the respect they give us,” Burbage pointed out companionably, turning to watch the servant or goodwife pass. Her shoulders stiffened and she walked faster. Burbage looked down and grinned, then tilted his face up at Will.

“I'd die there. Suffocate under dry goods.”

“You'll suffocate under vermin here.” Burbage tugged him out of the path of a trio of rangy yellow and fawn dogs in low-tailed pursuit of a sleek, scurrying rat. “If the money concerns you, go home.”

“I need this, Richard. Your father's a playhouse owner. You've grown up with it. For me—”

“It's worth abandoning wealth and family?”

“I support them,” Will answered, ignoring the twist of guilt his friend's words brought. Slops spattered down behind them, and Will stepped into the shelter of an overhang, Burbage following with an arm still linked. “I'll bring them to London once I make a success.”

“Bring them to this?” Burbage dropped Will's arm, his gesture expansive. Will admired how Burbage framed himself against the darkness of a brown-painted door in a pale facade, sweeping his arm up beside his hat, every inch the unconscious professional. Will shook his head. Burbage was younger. Younger, but raised to the theatre and knowing in his bones things Will struggled to learn. “Keep them home, Will. Away from the plague and the filth. I'd go back to Stratford myself, if I could.”

“I cannot see you without London as a backdrop. As I cannot see myself on any other stage. And I need to write, Richard. The stories press me.”

“Then you're stuck.” Burbage led him out of the narrower streets of Southwark, toward a more open lane where a few trees straggled between massive houses. Will blinked as sunlight abraded his eyes.

“Well and truly. Where are you taking me?”

“To solve all your small problems and grant you large ones.” Burbage produced a heavy key and unlocked a round-topped wooden gate in the garden wall of a mortared brick dwelling.

Will glimpsed green leaves and blossoms beyond; a sweet scent put him in mind of a haymow. “This is Francis Langley's house. The owner of the Swan. The moneylender.”

Burbage ignored the comment, holding the gate to let Will pass. “You'll need to find a way to make it appear that the money comes from legitimate sources, and not be seen to be wealthier than the run of playmakers, at least here in London. Can your Annie run a business as well as a household?”

“Money? My Annie can run—
my Lords!
” The grass was wet with nighttime rain under his knee as his bow turned into a stagger and he swept his hat from his head. Will put a hand down and tried to make it look intentional. Burbage laughed behind him as he closed and locked the gate.

“Oh, that was unkind of me, Will,” Burbage said as a heavy hand fell on Will's shoulder.

Will angled his head. The hand wasn't Burbage's. Neither was the following voice. “On your feet, William Shakespeare: we speak as the Knights of the Round Table here. In defense of their Sovereign, all men are equal. And that's a little excessive even if we weren't.”

“My lord.” But Will got to his feet and looked into the downturned eyes of Edward de Vere. Over his left shoulder, William Cecil, the Baron Burghley and the Lord Treasurer, bulked large in embroidered brocade, side by side with the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon. Doctor Lopez, the Queen's Physician, loomed sallow and cadaverous a little behind them. And—

Sir Francis Walsingham stood narrow and ascetic on the right, leaning against the wall among the espaliered branches of a fruit tree. Heavy dark sleeves dripped from bony wrists; he tossed a lemon idly in one hand.

Will's jaw slackened, words tumbling from his tongue as he rose to his feet, looked to Burbage for reassurance. “A ghost—”

“Merely,” the Queen's dead spymaster and Secretary of State replied, wry sympathy informing his tone, “a startling resemblance to one, Master William Shakespeare. I'm both Walsingham and quick, I assure you. And lucky to be. I've been in hiding these three years past, that my Queen's enemies may think they succeeded in removing me. But Lopez here preserved my life.”

The doctor bowed, a heavy ruby ring glinting on his hand, while Walsingham drew a breath. Before Will could speak, the spymaster made a shift of direction quick and forked as lightning. “You know that Marley studied with John Dee, the astronomer.”

“There are rumors.”

“There frequently are.” Oxford stepped away as Walsingham came closer. Burghley, a massive shape in rustling brocade, folded his hands before his ample belly. Will felt their eyes running questions up and down his frame. “The rumors are true. Marley was— well, no magician. But a playmaker with an art for it, and a loyalty to Britannia.”

“I had heard he was associated with the Catholics—”

“Where a man goes, and what a man seems to do, are not always the truest indications of a man's loyalties.”

“You want an apologist,” Will said on a rush of breath he hadn't known he held. “I can do that, in service to Gloriana.”