Ink and Steel (37 page)

“Cairbre doesn't have it.” Robin laid his hand in his lap, and curled cross-legged on the arm of the chair. “ 'Tis rare, even among bards. Taliesin had it, if you know that name.”

“Nay—”

“Merlin?” The Puck smiled at Kit's expression.

“The slip of a clerk's pen nearly—metamorphosed—this Marley into a Merlin in younger years,” Kit said, remembering amusement at the name misrendered on his scholarship papers. And his sisters' good-natured cruelty over the mistake.
Merlin's going to university, Father—

“A turn of prophecy, then. Make your cloak, Sir Kit. You're close on becoming a bard: you'll need it.”

“So hang thee me in thy rags of honor,” Kit said after a considering pause. “In the tatters of Autumn's fair fastness clothe me in patches of moss-shag'd boulders that all who attest shall know thy banner, thy brand, thy choice, thy mark in this vastness for all the world, thy witness: my shoulders—bah. It needs internal rhyme. And banner/honor, that's not so good.”

“Pretty,” Robin commented. “What is it?”

“Slightly less than the back half of a very bad sonnet. The Italian form. The scansion limps outrageously and it doesn't close properly; I was never very good at them. But that—Oxford could do better. I am most foully drunk, Master Goodfellow.”

Puck laughed, and turned on the arm of the chair so he could lean back on Kit's shoulder, as Kit had leaned on Murchaud. Kit shifted to make the creature more comfortable; his rapier hilt jabbed floating ribs, and he lifted his chin to clear the Puck's half-floppy ear from his field of view. They settled into companionable silence while the room grew brighter.

“There are many sorts of bindings,” Puck said. “I myself am knotted in the Mebd's hair, and have no choice but to serve her loyally inasmuch as she commands me. I feel your grief, Kit.”

“There are bindings and bindings,” Kit said, as the sun peeked the horizon and Kit's wine-soaked dizziness receded like the tide before morning.

“Have you heard from your playmaker in England?”

“No—” Kit sighed. “I thought it best to make a clean break, after all.”

“His son has died.”

Kit blinked. He arched his neck and angled his head to get a look at the Puck, who snuggled closer on Kit's blind side. The words hung in the air, unaltered. “I beg your pardon?”

“His son. A year past now, of a fall from an oak—”

Kit heard a Queen's voice, a smiling rhyme.
Ellum do grieve; Oak he do hate; Willow do walk if yew travels Late—

“Hamnet,” Kit said. “Dead.”

“Aye.”

“Oh, God.” Numbly, remembering an undelivered letter—
a year past, though I am no judge of time in Faerie
. And then hugged the Fae close as Robin flinched, covering his ears with his spidery hands. “I beg your pardon, Master Robin Goodfellow.”

“ 'Tis nothing.” Robin hopped up, his moist eyes dark. “I must to mine own tasks, Sir Kit. I hope you find your surcease.”

“Perhaps,” Kit said, a little soberer and sadder. He grasped the arms of his chair and pulled himself to his feet to walk Robin to the door. They exchanged a handclasp, and Kit closed and latched the door behind the Fae.

He turned and leaned his back against it, eyeing the smooth-tugged counterpane of his broad, empty bed. A few rays of sunlight lay across it, but the bedcurtains would see to those—

Decisively, he turned again, steady enough if he did not bend or stand, and pulled his door open. Mouse-soft footsteps carried him up the stairs and through the gallery, to a door he had not tapped in quite some little while. His knock wavered more than he liked; he was about to turn and walk away, almost with a sense of relief, when it swung open and Morgan stood framed against the morning, blinking, in a white nightshirt and a nightgown of apricot silk, barefoot, no nightcap and her hair a wilderness of brambles on her shoulders.

“Madam—” Kit said, shifting from one foot to the other.

She stood aside, and let him enter.

Act II, scene xviii

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Julius Caesar

The chamber was large enough for a royal audience, bare but for fresh rush matting on the floor and the figured richness of the red gilt leather walls. Will wouldn't have wanted to sit, and it satisfied him to have the excuse to pace, tumbling his shilling through ink-stained fingers. “Will I, nil I,” he muttered, staring up at the dark beams vaulting the underside of the roof, and grinned. That wasn't half bad—

“Master Shakespeare.”

Will stopped and turned, hopping a little when his right foot dragged on the rush mat and tripped him. He blushed, and stammered a greeting. “Sir Robert.”

Cecil smiled, sharp brown goatee bristling over his carefully pressed ruff and increasing his startling resemblance to his father. His robes fell in rich, simple black folds to his knees, his shoes and stockings as black behind them. His beautiful hands were ringless, the thumb of the left one hooked as if by habit behind the broad maroon ribbon from which depended his only jewelry, a finely detailed golden lion's head, mouth yawning to show its pointed teeth. He came to the center of the room, limping slightly, and Will went to meet him, slipping the shilling into his sleeve and stilling the trembling in his hand as best he could, but limping as well.

Cecil noticed. A frown at suspected mockery became a raised eyebrow of interest. “Art injured, Master Poet?”

“No, sir. A weakness in the leg is all.”

“It doesn't impede thee on the stage?”

“The stage is smooth,” Will said. He didn't ask after Cecil's limp: rumor had the man born with a twisted spine, and Will could see that one shoulder rode higher than the other. “You wished to instruct me, Sir Robert.”

“Instruct? It had been mine intent rather to seek answers of thee.” Cecil's voice lowered as the two men came together, almost shoulder to shoulder, far from any wall. Will understood Cecil's choice of the room, now. “How proceeds thine investigation of Master Richard Baines?”

“Surely you have men better equipped for such than I?”

Cecil's mouth twisted, and he lifted his chin. “I have few men who have worked neither with—nor for—Baines nor Poley.”

“Ah,” Will said. “I see. Why has Her Majesty not had him hanged, Sir Robert?”

Cecil stopped his pacing and looked Will square in the eye. “The letter of the law must be upheld,” he said, “and Her Majesty persists in seeing our struggles with these vipers in her own bosom, as it were, as the sort of squabbles among snotty boys upon which she has built her power, her reign, and her control. She has ever maintained and strengthened her power through the skillful manipulation of factions, and perhaps . . .” Cecil's voice trailed off, as if he examined all the ways he could say what he needed to say, and came up wanting. “She is Gloriana,” he said at last. “She has not failed us yet.”

“Ah,” Will said, when the silence began to drag. “I can prove nothing on Poley, Sir Robert. Less on Baines. They are as scrupulous as anyone could wish. Or unwish, in this case.”

Cecil straightened, and Will heard the click of his bones as he pulled his shoulders back. “Then invent something,” he said. “As soon as thou mayst, but not too hasty; it must hold up on inspection. I will be waiting.”

Ben Jonson's shoulders almost filled the doorway he ducked through. Young, barely bearded, scarecrow-thin despite his height and frame, he looked more like the soldier and bricklayer he had been than the playmaker he'd become, with a face like a mutton-chop. He straightened, tugging the grayed collar of his shirt and wrinkling his broad, broken nose at the steady drizzle. He shifted a bundle on his shoulder. “Will,” he said. “I can imagine kinder sights, but not many.”

Will fell in beside him, boots slipping on filthy cobbles in the rain, not willing to answer his unspoken questions just yet. “If thou couldst only circumspect thy pen—” he said, and then shook his head. “Then thou wouldst bear some other name than Ben.” And grinned, as Ben clouted him on the shoulder.

“And let the first thing I hear as a free man be rhyming doggerel? O terrible Shakespeare.” He scratched with broad hands at hair gone shaggy, and cursed. “I'm crawling. May I prevail—”

“Of course, Master Jonson,” Will said. “Is there a barber thou preferest?”

“At the sign of the black boar's as good as any. You could do with a barbering yourself. Unless you mean to make up for the hairs falling on top by growing them at the bottom.”

“It's the damned satires,” Will answered. “And the humors comedies. I go, I clutch my hairs in horror, and they unravel from the top and hang a fringe about my neck. I'll have to find some goodwife to knit them up for me again, like a stocking cap.” The rainswept street was empty; Will contemplated ducking into a church or cookshop, but it didn't seem half worth it.

“Will, why did you stand my bail?”

“I'm collecting favors owed.”

Ben hesitated. “Some playmending you'd as soon elude?”

“No,” Will said. “Come, Ben. We'll see thee barbered, deloused, and fed. Then we've an appointment with the crown.”

“Her Majesty?” Ben tripped on a cobblestone and caught himself, checking his stride so he didn't outpace Will.

“Well,” Will said. “Her Majesty's servant. But so are we all, in the end.”

“I'm no Queen's Man.”

“You will be.” Will grinned. “I hear thou wentst Catholic in prison. That's useful, if thou'rt loyal.”

“I heard a sermon or two,” Ben admitted. “But a conversion is news to me.”

“See, it's familiar news.”

“Will,” Ben said, in the gentle tone he could take between tirades, “what's the enmity between you and Robert Poley?”

“Who told thee about Poley?”

Ben's eyes were cleverer than they had any right to be under a glowering Cyclopean brow. “Richard Ede,” he said, lowering his voice further. “A keeper at the Marshalsea. Not a bad man, I think. They put Poley in with me, Will.”

“Poley's no prisoner—”

“Aye, an informant. There to prove sedition or treason on me. Ede warned me. What are you playing at, Will?”

“A sudden question. And an unnerving one, following on the heels of Poley.”

“He was curious about you. Very much so.” Ben's concern turned to a pleased sort of mockery as he began walking again. “Which I might have attributed to your undeserved fame, you ill-educated lout, but then with Ede's warning—”

“What toldst thou him of me?” Even over the sound of the rain, Will knew by the way his voice shivered at the end that he'd misread the line.

Ben almost reached out to lay a filthy hand on Will's shoulder, but caught himself and withdrew it. “I should be grateful for the rain,” he said, wiping streaked dirt from his face on a grayed linen sleeve. “I told him naught, Will. Well—”

“What?”

“I had to tell him something, or he'd assume I had something to hide.”

“So?”

Ben's eyes flickered sideways, and his heavy jowls twitched with humor. “I told him the ‘William the Conqueror' story.”

“Christ on the cross,” Will swore. “And I was hoping that one would die a deserved death—”

“If you'd seen the disconsolate look on Burbage's face when he wandered into the Mermaid alone, you'd think it worth it.”

“There are greater challenges than to outcharm Richard,” Will said. “And the citizen in question a comely lass. But 'tis not the gentlemanly thing to spread tales.”

Ben choked. “Not gentlemanly at all,” he agreed. “And yet some
spread
them anyway—ah, here we are.”

Will opted for the barbering after all, and saw Ben decently clothed and fed at a tavern by the time the rain began to taper. Ben ate with the appetite Will associated with stevedores, while Will picked through a mincemeat pastry, choking down what he could. Finally, Ben wiped his mouth on his new, clean kerchief and sat back with a sigh. “Unwell, William?”

“In pain,” Will answered, rinsing his mouth on the dregs of the wine. “I shall be fine in a bit.” He tucked his hand into his pocket and stood. “Art content?”

“Aye.” Ben pushed his bench back. “Whence?”

“Upstairs,” Will said, turning away. “He's waiting for us.”

“He?”

Will nodded. “Sir Thomas Walsingham.” He turned his head and glanced over his shoulder. The well-worn shilling was between his fingers. On an impulse, he drew it forth and tumbled it through the air on a high, lamplit arc.

Ben was quicker than he looked. Blunt fingers plucked the shilling at the apex of its climb; he frowned. “What's that?”

A grand gesture
, Will thought, and smiled. “Come on, Queen's Man. Thou hast a craft to learn.”

“Do I have an option?” But Jonson fell into step beside him, although Will took his elbow to lead him up the stairs.

“Not if you expect to write plays like that and live.”

Eleven months and two weeks later, Tom Walsingham leaned against the shutters in Ben's lodging, which were closed against an unseasonable late-September chill, and tossed a gray kidskin pouch idly in his hand. Something jingled within it.

By Tom's smile, Will had a pretty clear idea what. He rose from his perch on a three-legged stood beside the hearth and crossed to where Ben crumpled his tallness over a trestle, papers unrolled and weighted at the corners with an inkhorn, a candlestick, and a pot of sand. Will leaned over his shoulder.