Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (12 page)

Loud laughter came from beyond the corridor. Someone sang, and there was a great crash that sounded like a table or chest being turned over. Suddenly everything fell silent. He waited for a long moment but could hear nothing. Curious, he rose and went down the corridor to the room he had visited the morning before.

He was in time to see a man come out of the room and close the door behind him. Christopher could not be sure, but he thought the man was the one who had offered him the bottle yesterday. And now, as the other man set off down the corridor, Christopher noticed that he carried the same squat bottle with him, tucked under his arm.

Christopher followed, careful to stay out of sight. They went down the stairs and into the gallery, and then the man turned toward the apartments Christopher had seen before. The man knocked once, paused and knocked again, and the door opened to let him in.

The door closed before he could see inside. He stayed a while, listening, but he could hear nothing and finally turned to go. Then someone laughed loudly. “I say, ‘The weather is fine for April,'” a voice said.

Christopher wondered if he had heard correctly. Had the man given some sort of password? He eased back against the wall near the door and listened cautiously.

“Nay,” another man said. “The servant comes with our supper. He pours the wine—”

“Aye. I pour the wine, then return with salad and mutton.”

“I say, ‘This mutton is excellent.'”

Christopher listened in disbelief. This surpassed even the lunacy of the day before. They seemed to be rehearsing a play, but it was a play so tedious that audiences would rise up in a body and revolt if he tried to put it on the stage.

“Then I say, ‘The weather is fine for April.'”

“Aye. And your wife comes into the room, and you say, ‘Good evening, my lady.'”

The voices beyond the door continued to trade commonplaces back and forth. They seemed less giddy than the day before; he thought that this time they were engaged in a matter that concerned them deeply. Could it have something to do with what the woman had mentioned, their ancestral rights? He imagined the strange folks quietly acting out some mad ritual, passing the bottle back and forth among them.

The phantom supper ended. A new voice said, very quietly, “Another week, then.”

Christopher had heard that voice before. Who was it?

“Aye,” said the man who had spoken most often—the leader, probably. “April, with his showers sweet.”

These were literate madmen, Christopher thought. The leader could quote Chaucer, at any rate.

“I'm certain this play will not be necessary,” the new voice said. Christopher had to strain to hear him. “… will revolt against her, or so I've heard.”

Against whom? The queen? Had he stumbled on a conspiracy after all? The voice was tantalizingly familiar. Could it be one of the men he had heard the day before? Nay—he was almost certain that it was not.

Christopher searched his memory, trying to put a face or a name to it, and nearly missed hearing the men rise and bid each other good day. They were leaving the meeting, he realized, and he slipped into an empty room just in time to avoid them.

“Did you see that?” a man said from the corridor. “Someone was here, listening.”

“Nay—I saw no one. You're too fearful.”

“He's probably still here. We should search—”

“Stay and look if you want. I'm leaving. Don't forget your part.”

The men's voices diminished as they went down the hallway. They had apparently decided not to stay. By the time Christopher left the room he could see no one.

He hurried back to the stairs, hoping to catch them. Who were they? What had they been doing? And what on earth could he say to Poley?

He was stopped by a group of well-dressed people milling about at the foot of the stairway. Those at the back, near where he stood, were laughing and pointing at something he could not see. He strained to look past the brilliant colors of the court, gold and purple and peacock-blue. A woman in front of him raised a feathered fan, blocking his view entirely.

Then she moved. “Oh, God,” Christopher said. Two people stood on the stairs, the woman tall and red-haired and imperious, the man stout and flustered, his clothing nearly coming undone. The man was obviously his supposed employer, Philip Potter. The woman, just as obviously to everyone but poor Sir Philip, was not Queen Elizabeth.

Potter attempted to bow, probably an awkward business for him at best, now made even more difficult by the stairs. His leg came out clumsily in front of him. The crowd laughed again. Philip looked around him uncertainly, and the woman, her voice deeper than Elizabeth's said, “Rise.”

Christopher studied her carefully. The actor was a man, he saw now, his face heavily made up, his fine red hair a wig. Probably some courtier or other had planned a masque for an afternoon's entertainment, complete with a queen. The actor had been caught outside the tiring-room and had seen an opportunity for amusement.

Philip attempted to say something. “Not now, my sweet man,” the actor said. Surely Potter could not be so witless that he still believed this person Queen Elizabeth. But Potter murmured something in reply, and the actor gave him an answer that seemed to satisfy him. Potter bowed again and continued up the stairs.

What now? The courtiers began to talk excitedly among themselves; probably they had not been so entertained by anything in a long time. Christopher pushed his way through them to the stairs. He thought that the actor had promised Potter an audience, and he had to see to it that the appointment was not kept. If this foolish man met the queen, full of some story about her promises to him, his own employment as Philip's secretary would come to an abrupt end.

He found Potter in his bedroom, gazing into a full-length mirror. He entered without knocking. His reflection appeared in the mirror and Potter looked up quickly, startled. “Who are you?”

“Who? I'm your secretary.” He sat, uninvited, at the man's writing table and looked around him. Potter had been as ill served in his furnishings as in everything else. Besides the writing table the room held only an empty row of bookshelves and a bed with a sagging canopy. A faded tapestry hung between two windows, something bloody and classical, Actaeon or Adonis being torn to pieces.

Potter frowned. “Ah, my secretary. I'm going to have to dismiss you soon, you know. Can you find other employment? I'll give you a good reference, of course.”

“I—” Christopher said. He felt an odd stirring of pity and admiration for the man, who had taken the time to worry about his secretary at the moment he considered his greatest triumph.

“I'm going home, my business here nearly finished,” Potter said. “The queen has as good as promised me the monopoly I asked for.”

“That person—” Christopher said, but the other man did not hear him.

“And I'm anxious to get back. I've just received a letter from home—my wife's given birth to a girl. Not an heir, of course, but still a pleasant thing. A very pleasant thing. What do you think I should wear for my audience with the queen?”

“Listen,” Christopher said, almost savagely. The more Sir Philip spoke the more Christopher felt bound to protect him. The man would never survive among the wolves of the court. Look at him now, preening about his daughter as though it weren't just any man who could father a child. “That person was not the queen.”

“Not the queen?” Potter laughed. “Why, man—”

“He was an actor got up to look like the queen. You've been played for a fool.”

“An actor?”

“Aye. You've heard of such things, surely, even in the north.”

“But this—this is treachery—”

“Ah, then you've heard of that too. But treachery, like acting, is subtler in the south. No one plotted this, I assure you. The court saw a chance to be entertained, nothing more.”

“What—what should I do now?”

“Do what many another courtier has done—keep silent and dress like a gentleman. They'll expect you to be there for your appointment, and they'll expect to hear all about your embarrassment as well. Stay in your rooms for at least a week, until all this is forgotten. And for God's sake, don't go to the masque. You'll give them greater entertainment than the actors will.”

“Will the queen hear of this—this incident?”

She had already heard of it, of that Christopher felt certain. But he could not bring himself to say so to this innocent. “Nay—the queen has more important matters on her mind.”

“Well, I—I thank you. You've proved invaluable to me.”

Once again Christopher felt a grudging admiration for Sir Philip. Anyone else would have been humiliated by what the court had done, but Potter seemed to have come through with all his flustered dignity intact. “One more thing,” he said. “Don't wear that doublet again.”

“This?” Potter said, looking past his chins to his stomach.

“Aye. Do you know what that color's called?”

“White? Dirty white?”

“In London we call it Isabella. After Queen Isabella, who vowed never to change her petticoats until the Moors were driven from Spain. You don't want people to laugh when they see your clothes—and you don't want to remind Elizabeth of another queen, and a queen of Spain at that.”

“Ah. Ah, I see. It's all far more complicated than it looks, isn't it?”

“Aye,” Christopher said, and left before the man could call forth more pity from him.

Christopher sat at his desk again later that day, staring absently at the confusion of paper in front of him. He had gone back to the stairs after his talk with Potter, hoping to see the actor again, but the man had disappeared. Someone there told him that the masque would not take place for another week, that the actor playing the queen had been so taken with his costume he had gone wandering through the halls against the advice of the other players.

Were the strange men he had overheard rehearsing a masque? It seemed unlikely. If that was the sort of performance given at the queen's court then he should hasten to offer his services; he could do better in his sleep.

Thoughts of the masque reminded him of the play in his travel bag. He took it out, pushed aside Sir Philip's correspondence and read over what he had written so far. Someone knocked on the door.

He covered the play with a book. “Come,” he said.

To his surprise Geoffrey Ryder entered. “How did you find me?” Christopher asked.

“I asked. It wasn't difficult.”

Christopher looked at him in amazement. The man hadn't the faintest idea what he was doing; not for the first time he wondered why the earl of Essex had chosen him for this sort of work. Anyone who could reason logically would realize now that Christopher was no mere secretary but a friend of Geoffrey's, who was in turn a friend of Essex's. If enough people became suspicious he might just as well go home.

It couldn't be helped. “Is Will here?” he asked.

“He's in the gallery, talking with some friends.” Geoffrey looked around him, then down at the papers on the desk. “They could have given you a larger room, at least. Do you know what Philip Potter is supposed to have done?”

Christopher sighed. “Of course I do. He's my employer, after all. Did you come here only to pass along rumor? I have work to do.”

“I wanted to see how you were getting on. To exchange information. We agreed to work together, after all.”

“And what information do you have?”

Geoffrey hesitated. “Nothing, to be honest. That's why I came. I hoped you had discovered something.”

“The season for gift-giving is past.”

“I'm not asking for a gift. We should be working together for our queen. Time grows short and we're no closer to discovering who's behind this conspiracy. In two days it will be April already. April with his showers sweet, they say, but will we enjoy them if the queen is dead?”

Christopher looked at him sharply. Could the voice he had heard have been Geoffrey's? Was that why it had sounded so familiar? And did Geoffrey ask him for information now because he wanted to see if his plot had been found out? The man did not seem the sort to quote poetry.

“What do you know about—” Christopher began, but at that moment someone opened the door behind Geoffrey and came into the room.

“Kit!” Will said. The room seemed almost too small to contain both brothers. “They've made you a scrivener, I hear.”

“Aye.” Did the whole world know his business? He might just as well have posted a sign at Paul's.

“What's Philip Potter like?”

Now Will would want to hear the whole story behind Potter's disgrace. Geoffrey seemed about to make certain he knew it. “The man's an ass,” Geoffrey said. “He met an actor dressed as the queen on the stairs—”

“Oh, I heard all about that downstairs,” Will said. “He won't keep his appointment, I hope.”

To Christopher's surprise the other man seemed to care about what happened to Potter. None of the courtiers had been at all concerned about poor Sir Philip.

“Come, Will—why shouldn't he?” Geoffrey said. “No one at court could write a more amusing comedy.”

“For one thing, if he kept his appointment I would have to leave,” Christopher said. “I told him not to go.”

“Don't scowl, Geoffrey, the man's right,” Will said. “Kit needs a reason to be here. He couldn't very well walk in the door the way we do.”

For the second time in as many sentences Will had surprised him. He cared about Potter, true, but he had not lost the unconscious arrogance of the nobility. Looking at him now Christopher could see that he had no idea how offensive he had been; he had as good as said that anyone at court would be able to tell Christopher was no gentleman.

“You were about to say something before Will interrupted,” Geoffrey said. “What do I know about what?”