by Jane Feather
“It sounds as if we’re on the move again. Stay up with me this afternoon, if your horse has the strength.” He was climbing swiftly as he spoke.
“She can stay the course.” Rosamund spoke with confidence. An afternoon with no romantic interludes would be a pleasant change, two a day seemed more than enough. Now she was ready to enjoy just the simple pleasure of riding fast to hounds.
Kit Marlowe was on his own at the theatre. Thomas was off on some business with the unsavory Frizer, and Kit was not sorry to be excluded from that encounter. His own present assignment was unpleasant enough, working with Walsingham’s man Gilbert Gifford to prod a naive and impassioned young man who went by the name of John Savage to declare himself openly for the Scots queen’s cause. Once he’d made an unequivocal declaration, then he would instantly be open to arrest whenever it suited Walsingham to move.
Kit resented the necessity for his involvement with Walsingham’s secret world, yet he was honest enough to admit that he enjoyed its fruits. His garments today were all his own. Each of the fourteen gold buttons marching down each deep brown velvet sleeve of his doublet represented his own labor in the service of his country. He relished the orange taffeta lining of his doublet showing through the slashed sleeves, and the delicate cobweb lawn of his shirt collar and cuffs. An affectation taken from Thomas, he freely acknowledged, but it looked good and marked a man as one of status.
He drank deep at the tavern hard by the Curtain before making his way, a welcome visitor, backstage to commune with the actors as they readied themselves for the stage.
“Eh, Kit, that’s a whore’s color you’re wearing,” Ned Alleyn declared, painting his face at a small silvered mirror. “Is it a whore’s work you’ve been about?”
Kit buffeted Ned’s shoulder, rather harder than was strictly necessary. “My tastes do not run in that direction, as well you know. Besides, I see nothing of a whore in brown velvet.”
“ ’Tis the orange beneath, he means,” Burbage said from his stool at the side of the tiring room. “Where’s Thomas?”
“He had business.” Kit straddled a stool and felt in his pocket for a coin. “Hey, lad . . .” He crooked a finger at one of the indentured apprentice actors whose fresh faces graced the female parts in the plays. “Fetch a pitcher of ale, Robby.”
“Yes, Master Marlowe.” The lad snatched the coin and ran off.
“There’ll be no drinking until after the play is done,” Burbage announced. “ ’Tis hard enough to have decent takings when the audience is in its cups. My actors will be sober until after.”
A chorus of groans greeted the proscription but they were not in earnest. Kit said, “Ah, well, I shall drink now, and if there’s any left, it shall go to the rest of you.”
“There’ll be none left,” one of the actors said sotto voce. He glanced at Kit, hoping he hadn’t heard him. Master Marlowe’s uncertain temper was now well-known among the theatre folk. But if Kit had heard him, he appeared untroubled by the comment. The arrival of Tom Kyd distracted him, and when the lad brought in the pitcher of ale, he flung an arm around Kyd’s shoulders and said they should take their stools on the stage and sample the ale, while Kit pointed out some infelicitous verse in The Spanish Tragedy that he had long been intending to bring to Master Kyd’s attention.
Tom Kyd did not look best pleased at this, but he followed the ale like a horse following a nose bag, and they took their places onstage.
Kit drank from the pitcher and passed it to Tom. He let his gaze roam around the filling theatre. The groundlings were packed into the pit before the stage, and the galleries looked as if they would buckle under the weight of the audience. His eye fell on a fresh-faced youth, leaning on the rail at the front of the gallery. Pink cheeks, delightfully rounded, a lock of russet hair falling onto a white forehead from beneath the brim of his hat.
Kit smiled, contemplating the sweetness of a fresh youth just out of boyhood. He had tumbled with a young stable lad a couple of days earlier, which had reminded him of the pleasures to be had apart from the full-grown passion he shared with Thomas Walsingham. There was all cut and thrust, violent conjugations, glorious triumph and equally glorious submission, but a man needed a taste of honey on occasion.
He kept his eye on the youth as the players assembled onstage, enchanted by the lad’s wide-eyed delight. Was he alone? But, no, a man was beside him. Kit’s eyebrows lifted as he recognized Will Creighton. He had never thought that that young man shared his own predilection for the delights of a young boy, but there was something proprietorial in the way his hand rested on the youth’s shoulder, as if he saw himself as a protector. Maybe there was another explanation. Maybe the lad was a relative of some kind.
Kit resolved to discover for himself when the play was done and turned his attention to the action onstage.
Rosamund could hardly believe she was here in the gallery of the Curtain. It had been astonishingly easy to fake a pain in her belly so severe she couldn’t leave her bed. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that a maid of honor would willingly forgo the delights of a trip on the river to Greenwich in one of the royal barges, followed by a state banquet and dancing, and a night spent in the almost palatial accommodations made available to them at Greenwich.
A sympathetic Joan had conveyed news of Rosamund’s indisposition to the Countess of Shrewsbury, who had decreed Mistress Walsingham was to remain abed so that she would be sufficiently recovered to return to her duties when the queen and her household returned to Whitehall on the morrow. Rosamund had waited, watching from the high window in the dorter, until the last stragglers had reached the river and boarded the last of the long line of barges. The silence in the palace had seemed almost eerie, and on the high attic floor it was so silent she could hear the mice scratching behind the walls.
Will had been waiting as arranged at the foot of the stairs with a bundle of clothes. In urgent silence he had handed her the bundle and she had disappeared upstairs, reappearing a short while later in the black homespun doublet and hose of a page, her hair knotted securely beneath a flat cap, shoes with pewter buckles on her feet.
She smiled now remembering Will’s wide-eyed expression as he’d taken in her appearance. They’d left the palace, with Rosamund riding pillion behind Will on his chestnut gelding. It was too risky for her to draw attention to herself by taking Jenny. Now here she was in the gallery of the Curtain, relishing the sights, the sounds, even the powerful smells of packed bodies around her.
She had not seen the play before, but she recognized the actors. She saw Kit Marlowe on a stage stool, but there was no danger of encountering him. There would be no mingling with the actors after this play.
Will leaned in beside her and said into her ear, “Don’t move. I’ll be back in a minute.” He stepped away and she felt instantly vulnerable. People flowed like lava into the space left by Will, and she was suddenly overpowered by the stench of humanity pressing around her, rotten breath, stale beer, raw onions, and ancient sweat. The voices were rough and raucous and someone pushed heavily into her back, forcing her forward against the gallery rail. She pushed back, trying to breathe, and then Will was there again, somehow managing to re-create sufficient space beside her.
“I thought you might be hungry.” He handed her a meat pie as he took a hungry bite of his own, gravy spurting onto his chin. He wiped it off with the back of his hand and gave her his wide grin.
Rosamund felt instantly better. She was here with Will and no one knew it. She was part of this boisterous crowd, and she could revel in her anonymity. She took a big bite of her pie and, when the gravy spurted, followed Will’s example and swiped it away with the back of her hand. The pie was manna. She didn’t think she had ever tasted anything so succulent and toothsome. She looked across at Will and grinned like the urchin she felt herself to be.
The play as always unfolded before her, laying out its riches as if onto a magic carpet, transporting her to a world far from her own. At its end, she applaud
ed wildly, her eyes dazed with wonder.
“You enjoyed it.” Will stated the obvious with a pleased smile. He couldn’t take his eyes off her radiant countenance and her light-filled green eyes. The page’s costume excited him with a sense of the forbidden. It revealed the lines and contours of her body in a way that thrilled him. She was so small and shapely, her hips and buttocks curving in a soft swell in the trunk hose, her bosom a mere hint beneath the doublet.
“What are you looking at?” Rosamund had never seen that hungry, lustful look on a man’s face before. She had seen appreciation, but it had been almost decorous compared with the look in Will’s eye now. It made her feel hot, her skin tight and prickly, but it excited her too, gave her a feeling of power even as her body stirred beneath it.
“You.” Will shook his head as if he could thus dispel his disturbing fantasy. “Sweet heaven, Rosamund, if I’d known what those clothes would do . . .” He broke off abruptly. “Let us get away from here before we’re engulfed.”
It was a realistic fear, Rosamund realized, forgetting what he had said as they battled their way to the stairs at the corner of the gallery. She stumbled on the way down, people pressing her forward while others in front of her were for a moment unable to proceed themselves. Then the throng heaved, surged, and she was catapulted down the stairs and out into the air like a cork from a bottle.
She stood, gasping for breath, trying to get her bearings as the mass of humanity heaved around her. She couldn’t see Will anywhere. At first she took no notice of the feeling of someone behind her; she had been shoved and touched so much in the rush to leave the gallery that this seemed no different. Only slowly did she realize that something deliberate was going on at her back. A hand was moving lightly over her backside. Instinctively she reached a hand behind her in a vigorous chopping motion. In response a soft laugh whispered against her ear, and a voice murmured, “Gently, gently, ladikins. You’re too sweet a morsel for such unfriendliness.”
Rosamund froze. Slowly she turned and looked into the laughing face of Christopher Marlowe.
Kit’s laugh died with his smile as he stared at her. “God in heaven . . . Rosamund, what in the devil’s name . . . ?”
“I might ask the same of you,” she returned, trying to cover her embarrassment with a snappy riposte, but she knew her face was scarlet, and she remembered Will’s words up in the gallery, and the look on his face. Was this disguise that provocative?
Kit held up his hands in a gesture of submission. “I saw what I thought was a delicious morsel just waiting to be plucked. I did what any red-blooded male would do in the circumstances.”
“Hardly any red-blooded male,” she muttered.
“You may have a point there.” He had regained his composure and now was both amused and intrigued by the situation. “Are you with Thomas? No, of course you’re not. He’s busy on Master Secretary’s business. I saw you with Master Creighton. Is he your escort?” He looked around and came eye to eye with Will Creighton.
“Master Marlowe.” Will bowed awkwardly. He’d been frozen in horror, his stunned gaze not missing a single one of Master Marlowe’s roving pats on Rosamund’s delightfully outlined bottom.
“Master Will. I saw you earlier in the gallery.” Kit glanced at Rosamund and smiled. “So that’s the way the wind blows. I see it all now. Where better for two lovers to tryst than in the gallery of the theatre among the unwashed?”
“It’s not . . . it’s not a tryst,” Rosamund protested. “Will knows how much I miss the theatre, and we contrived this together. The court has gone to Greenwich and I am at Whitehall on my sickbed.” She realized how silly that sounded only when she’d said it.
Kit laughed. “Well, you look well recovered, Mistress Rosamund, and your secret is safe with me, whatever it may be. I suggest we find a pleasant hostelry where we can eat, drink, and be merry together. What say you?”
“Not with the players. Rosamund’s brother must never know of this.”
Kit regarded Will with a half smile. “Oh, I think Thomas’s objections would only apply if his sister’s escapades reached the ears of Master Secretary and his cohorts. I doubt he has the will to fret otherwise. ’Tis highly unlikely that Ned Alleyn and the rest of ’em rub shoulders with courtiers, apart from Thomas himself, and our friend Master Watson, that is.”
Will looked askance at Rosamund, who suddenly tossed the last vestiges of caution to the four winds. What could it possibly matter now? “Master Marlowe is right. Thomas will not care as long as his own life is not affected adversely by what I do. And the court is disporting itself at Greenwich. So do let us go, Will.”
“I think we should give you a name more suited to your costume,” Kit said solemnly. “Ganymede would be most appropriate. But I think something a little less flamboyant. How about Pip? You look like a Pip to me. As fresh and green as a pippin.” He was highly amused by Rosamund’s escapade and, he had to admit, deliciously aroused by the image she presented of a barely fledged youth.
Rosamund made a face. Kit was making jest of her, but it didn’t have the malice of court mockery, and after Will’s reaction to her costume she could see his temptation. She looked at Will, who was looking uncertain.
Will was torn. He didn’t wish to share Rosamund with the rowdy players and the so lascivious Kit Marlowe on this precious evening alone, but he was drawn to the players himself, and he knew how much Rosamund wanted to join them. “Of course,” he said finally. “We’ll just hope that it never comes to the wrong ears, I’ve no wish to fight a duel with your brother on Finsbury Field.”
Rosamund tucked her hand into his arm and squeezed. “I won’t let that happen, Will. If necessary, I’ll cut Thomas’s throat in his sleep.”
“Oh, what a bloodthirsty lad it is,” exclaimed Kit, leading the way backstage.
Chapter Sixteen
BACKSTAGE, THE PLAYERS were counting the evening’s takings, and Burbage was grumbling as usual as he took the leather pouch from the doorkeeper and shook out its contents. “Five bad coins. Thieves, God rot ’em.” He looked up as Kit and his companions entered the tiring-room. “Eh, Master Marlowe, any complaints today as to the versifying?” His tone was sour and challenging.
Kit was untroubled, understanding the worries that plagued Burbage. He merely chuckled. “Not to speak of, Burbage. But I bring companions. Will Creighton you know, but I doubt you are acquainted with young Pip here.” He pushed Rosamund forward with a hand between her shoulder blades.
“Another ladikins, eh, Marlowe?” Ned pulled off his wig, laying it carefully over its hanger. “I’d have thought you’d enough to keep your sword busy at home without going a-hunting.”
“I plead innocence on this occasion.” Kit perched on a stool. “Our friend Will has first option.”
Will opened his mouth to protest as the men in the tiring-room turned with interest to look at Rosamund, who, deciding she would play this part to the hilt, tugged at her doublet and set her hat at a rakish angle, striking a pose with one hand on an outthrust hip.
Laughter rocked the rafters as the men recognized in this cocky youngster Thomas Walsingham’s usually timidly reclusive little sister.
Will relaxed, his protests unborn. If Rosamund wanted to play this game, then he too would play. He bowed with a sweeping flourish of his plumed hat. “If you gentlemen would permit the company of a pair of young gallants for the evening, we would gladly furnish the feast with a pitcher of burgundy.”
“Well said, Will.” Kit slapped his shoulder. “Come, gentlemen, let’s repair to the White Horse, and Pip here shall put pen to paper and re-create the scenes of this afternoon. I have some suggestions to make as to the staging of the lovers’ tryst. I will demonstrate more easily with a sketch for reference.”
Rosamund remembered little of that evening. At some point she saw Will and Burbage in earnest discussion and hoped they were talking of Will’s play and hoped more fervently that Burbage was giving him encouragement. Will didn’t look
downcast at least, but she had no opportunity to talk to him privately until finally they staggered out of the White Horse in the company of the others, all of whom were far from sober, but in good enough mood, laughing, tossing lines of verse at each other, while Kit, prancing like a pony down the street, burst into ribald song, waving his hat in time.
They reached a corner and Will nudged Rosamund to the left, while the rest surged drunkenly to the right, following Kit as if he were the Pied Piper. “We must go this way, Rosamund. I have to collect my horse from the livery stable.”
His voice was slurred and Rosamund giggled as she looked at him. “I think you are overdrunk, Will.”
“I may be, but so, my dear Pip, are you.” He caught her arm as she swayed against a wall. “Come, we have to get you back into the palace.”
That made sense to Rosamund, and she clung to his arm as they staggered together down the lane, with Will trying to remember where he’d left his horse. “I think it was this way . . . no, that way . . . Oh, sweet heaven, Rosamund.” He leaned against a wall, closing his eyes. “I don’t know where the hell I left him.”
Rosamund squinted as if it would somehow concentrate her memory. It was very dark, even the stars offering little enough light from the overcast sky. And she knew, as did Will, despite their uncertain state, that the streets of nighttime London were no place for two well-to-do drunken stragglers.
“That way.” She pointed decisively to the right. And, indeed, she could just make out the turrets of the Curtain theatre at the end. “The stable is close to the theatre.”
Will seized her hand and together they plunged down the lane. Footsteps sounded behind them. Will put his free hand on his sword, urging her forward. She was almost running when the footsteps were joined by others. Will suddenly dived sideways, dragging her with him, into pitch-darkness. He clanged a heavy door behind them and stood leaning against it as the footsteps outside stopped. The door heaved as someone pushed hard against it.