Ink and Steel (4 page)

“Ah,” Burghley answered. “Would it were so meet and simple. Aye, that's half what we need of you. The other half is a sort of science, or philosophy—” Will saw the deaf old man's eyes trained on his lips as he waited for Will to answer.

“Black Art? You can't be seriously . . . My Lord Treasurer,” Will finished, suddenly aware that the nobleman was eyeing him quite seriously indeed, a small smile rounding Burghley's cheeks under the white carpet of his beard. Will raised a hand to press to his breast, realized his action half completed, and let the hand fall again.

“Oh, I can,” Burghley responded. “And not Black at all. Just the gentle art of persuasion, my shake-spear.”

A sharp scent of citron filled the walled garden, a drift of coolness brushing Will's hand. Citrus oil: Walsingham had driven a thumbnail sharp as a knife into the rind of the lemon. He tugged, revealing white pith and bright pulp. The pearls of oil in the rind burst and misted, hanging on the soft moist air. “Like persuading lemons to fruit in May,” Walsingham said, offering half the rent fruit to Will.

Will took it numbly. The skin was still warm with the touch of Walsingham's hand, and Will followed the gesture of that hand toward the espaliered tree. He blinked.

Lemons hung along one branch in late-summer profusion, olives on another. The third grew heavy with limes. “Just an art,” Walsingham said. “Like grafting and gardening. In London, you can make surprising things grow.”

“You want me to hide spells in my plays? As Marley is said to have done in
Faustus
?”

“We want you to change hearts and raise the rabble to the old tales of kings and princes and ladies fair. To show the danger of damnéd ambition, and the virtue of keeping one's troth. As Kit did.”

“I cannot write as Kit did.”

“You will,” Lord Hunsdon promised. “You've a gift in you, man— in your
Comedy of Errors
, and your
Henry VI
. You'll write as Kit did, and better.”

“And wind up like Kit as well, no doubt, with a knife in the eye.”
Henry was half Marley's,
Will thought, but didn't correct the Lord Chamberlain. Juice dripped over Will's hand, but Will did not raise the fruit to his mouth.

“There is that risk,” Oxford allowed. A light wind ruffled his fine hair as the day brightened and warmed. A dove greeted the sunlight with cooing, and starlings fluttered on the grass.

“We have enemies.” Lopez's accent was less than Will had imagined. He tucked his hands inside the drooping sleeves of his black robe, posture imperious, expression cold. “Mistake it not. Our society was quite infested by traitors, loyal to Spanish Philip or to themselves. We've picked them from the ranks, but Kit is not the first of our number to fall to their machinations.”

Perhaps it was the chill in Lopez's manner, the dismissal. But Will rallied against it, when he might have bent under greater sympathy. “It's whispered in the kitchens, Doctor, that your swarthy hand was behind the poisoning of Walsingham.”

“Aye,” said Lopez. “And who spreads the whispers, playmender?”

“Will,” Burbage whispered.

“Won't.”

Burbage took a step back. Will felt six men lean toward him. “Won't wind up like Kit,” he amended. “I mean to die in mine own bed, warm and comforted. There's no way out of this once I've accepted, is there?”

“There's no way out of it now,” Walsingham said kindly. “I won't lie to you: we stand only for Elizabeth, and nothing else. No Church or love of God or man may come between us and the love of our Queen. Our enemies stand against us with weapons fouler than a knife in the eye.”

“What? Cannon? Sedition? Gunpowder?”

“Plague,” Hunsdon answered. “Poison. Sorcery. Politics. The wiles of men who should be removed from secular things; the Catholic and Puritan factions who plot against the Queen are their dupes.”

“Puritans and Sorcery? Odd bedmates indeed.”

“I've seen odder,” Walsingham replied, a shadow darkening his brow. “They are puppeted by shadowy hands. Including, it seems, hands I have trusted in the past.” Walsingham's gaze dropped to the lemon in his hand. He raised it to his mouth, lips pursing tight when he tasted the juice.

Will contemplated his own half fruit. “And all I must do is write plays?”

“All you must do,” Burbage answered when no one else would, “is write plays. And love Gloriana. Welcome to the Prometheus Club, Master Shakespeare.”

“Long live the Queen.” When he bit down, Will tasted shocking sour and bitterness, and the salt of Walsingham's hand.

Act I, scene ii

—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
Faustus

Kit awoke in darkness, confirming his suspicions. Secretly relieved not to find himself in a lake of fire, he would never have admitted it to a theologian.

It was dark, aye, and the right side of his face felt—

Oh. “Oh,” he said and tried to sit. Nausea and vertigo swept him supine again. He groaned; cool hands pressed a cloth across his eyes. Long hands and calloused with work, but tapered: a woman's, redolent of rare herbs and roses.

“In faith, Rosemary,” he said, so he would not hiss in pain. “I hope I'm not dead. I thought death was meant to be an end to worldly cares, and here I find rather less release than might be hoped from a knife in the eye. Tell me then, be I dead, or in Cheapside?”

“Neither dead nor in Cheapside, sir knight,” an amused voice answered. “And you'll find the legend of your wit precedes you. Drink, if you'll risk it.” The cool fingers touched his lips, and water dripped into his mouth. Water? No, some tisane, sweet with honey and tart with lemons. Rosehips and catmint. “Better?”

“No knight,” he answered. “But a playmaker. Yes, better by far than the taste of my oversleeping. Was I fevered?” He put a hand up to cover hers, but his trembled and hers was strong.

“Bards are honored as much as knights here,” she answered. “And you're a Queen's Man, which makes you more a servant of the crown than many entitled to a
Sir
. You are lucky to be alive.”

That did open his eyes—his eye, as the right one seemed swollen shut. He remembered a knife in the hand of his master's man— Poultice or no, he sat, pulling the wet cloth aside. His ring was missing, the gold-and-iron ring Edward had given him. “Where did you hear such deviltry, woman?”

She was tall. Hair black and coarse as wire, gray at the temples, strong and fine of feature with an aristocratic nose. If she'd not had her hair twisted into a simple straight braid and been dressed in gray-green linsey-woolsey, he might have said she was like enough his Queen to be Elizabeth's own cousin.

“From Gloriana,” she replied, straightening her spine like a Queen herself. “And before you ask why you live, Kit Marley, Queen's Man— call it a favor from one Queen to another.”

She plucked the cloth from his hand, and he winced to realize that it was daubed with clotted blood and a few red streaks that were fresher. And that he was shirtless as well, and the skin of his chest was damp. His head pounded at the assault of the light. Kit decided he'd as well err on the side of caution. “Beg pardon, my lady—”

“Head wounds are bloody,” she said, turning away. “Art pardoned. What?”

“Your name, that I may repay this service?”

She stopped with a fresh soaked cloth in her hand. And smiled. “May a man serve two Queens?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but she waved him still. “You'd know me as Fata Morgana.” She held out her cloth. He took it, and she turned away again. “But you may call me Morgan. Welcome to the Blesséd Isle, Christofer Marley, like many a bard stolen before you.”

He blinked, and his head felt so much better for closed eyes that he kept them that way. “You speak a fair modern tongue for a wench a thousand years dead.”

“One strives to be current.” Her hands on his again, and a smell of wine as she pressed a goblet on him. “Drink.”

“And have you drug me?”

“Would have done it with the tisane, Sir Kit, had I mind.”

“Again you sir me, Rosemary. Or is your name Rue?” he said, but he drank. It was black currant wine, or perhaps elderberry: sweeter than the grape, and more potent. He tasted herbs in it, and sandalwood and myrrh. “Yppocras.”

“To strengthen your blood. You were hurt. Stabbed and left for dead. And buried without a wake.”

“How badly?” He opened his left eye. “May I see a glass?”

The chamber was homely, despite rich furnishings that did not match the plainness of her gown or hairdressing. He judged it hers, though, by the dress laid across the clothespress and the comfortable way she moved about, barefoot over golden flagstones and heavy patterned carpets in place of rushes—an enormous luxury. A cool breeze blew in, the shutters standing open to the night. It did not feel like May. “We've no steel,” she answered. “But here.”

From her belt she drew a silver blade, a dagger twice the length of his hand, polished like a looking glass. She held it up; he tilted his head to get the lamplight at a likely angle.

The right side of his face was seamed with dried blood, for all the lady's bathing, and as ugly a cut as he'd seen laid bone plain from brow to a cheekbone almost lost in a welter of puffed flesh and purpling bruises.

“ 'Sblood, I can see why they left me for dead.” He frowned when she flinched at the oath. “Pardon, my lady.” She might be mad, but she had been kind.

“It's not the cursing. It's the oath.”

“Your pardon in any matter,” he answered as prettily as he could. “For if I have your pardon, it cannot matter what fault enjoined it, and if I have not your pardon, then I shall have to facet my flaws to the light until you find one that sparkles prettily enough for forgiving.”

She snorted. “Not a knight indeed.” Ferret-quick, she lifted the poignard in her hand. Before he could flinch, she slapped him hard with the flat on each shoulder, numbing his left arm from shoulder to wrist. “There. That's done it. I dub you Sir Christofer. I'd make you a Knight of the Table Round, but if my brother ever wakes I'd hear of it. So you'll have to settle for Cornwall and Orkney and Gore. 'Twill serve?” She studied his face intently, birdlike. “ 'Twill serve.”

He made as if to stand, sliding his legs over the edge of her bed. She'd left his breeches where they belonged, at least, but her frank appraisal as she drew the curtain aside pulled a blush across his cheeks and made his swollen face ache.
With a smile Like that, were I Less hurt, I'd try my Luck with her. No blushing maiden, this.
“My lady—”

“It will scar,” she replied, as if he'd asked the whole question. “And badly. But a Queen's Man's the better for a few of those, earned with honor.”

He flinched again.
So much for any secrecy I might have been Left. But I can't fault her herbwifery. And at Least she hasn't mentioned blasphemy. Or sedition.

He wondered if she might be one of Queen Elizabeth's rumored bastards. The longer he looked, the stronger the likeness grew. “Will I keep the eye?”

“No,” she said flatly. “Not a chance. You could let it scar closed, but there's less chance it will take a taint and kill you if you wash with clean boiled water and let it drain.”

“Oh.” He sat back against the bed, his bare feet flat on her carpeted floor. “Sir Kit One-eye.” She spiked him a frown, and he grinned in return, although it stung.
Oh, Tom. After everything—
It was an ache in his chest as if cold fingers closed over his heart, stopped his breath. He laughed past it. “Could have been Kit-in-his-Coffin, though.”

“By the breadth of a finger. Finish your wine. When you're dressed, if you can walk, you'll see the Queen.”

The Queen,
he thought, and breathed out in relief as he raised the cup.

Morgan showed him a white-painted wooden tub behind a screen, with flannels and cakes of scented soap attending steaming water. The screen was a delicate lacework of pale stone. “Soapstone,” she said when she saw him running curious fingers over it. “From the Orient. You have clever hands, Sir Christofer.” She caught one and studied it, then lifted direct gray eyes. “How many have you killed with them?”

Despite the silver in her hair, her face was no older than his; her thumb traced circles on his palm. Every sentence from her lips was a fresh assault on his practiced masks, and he swayed between stepping forward and stepping back. “More than I wanted.” His plain tone was its own surprise. “Fewer than I should. I must get a message to Walsingham.”

She touched his face lightly before letting her hand trail across his collarbone and the bruise her dagger had left. “Your murderers know not that the corpse they planted was but glamourie, and gone by sunrise of the day following—and in a year, who could find the grave? They buried you in a winding sheet, without a marking stone. They said you died blaspheming. Not the first knight to fall so.”

“I did? I remember Ingrim, the great oaf, slinging me about by a hand in my hair, and with a dagger in his other. And Poley and Skeres—”
Held me down
. There were other memories in that, old ones Kit wanted not, though they came up anyway on a spasm like bating wings. “Then pain, and great blackness. Blaspheming? No truth in the accusation, but vilest contumely! I do attract it: my wit and good looks.” He touched his ruined face lightly, came away with gummy blood on his fingertips. “Can you get a message to Walsingham?”