The little Fae turned his head and spat. “That for my mistress, Kit. Slave I am, bound in her hair, and so I may not defy her. We are all her slaves, all but Morgan, who is too strong for binding, and besides, I think me that Morgan knows the Mebd’s name, and the Mebd knows not Morgan’s.”
“So how is it that you do oppose her? If she holds thee in thrall?”
“She never thought to forbid me of the deaths of mortals not taken in her service,” Puck said, and shrugged. “If you tell her what I’ve done, she’ll punish me.”
“And if I kill you myself? ” Kit made no effort to pick up his sword, and Puck made no effort to move away from him on their impromptu bench. Kit buried his head in his hands, fingers knotting in the dirty tangles of his curls.
The Fae leaned back, kicking his toadlike feet. “She might be displeased. Of course, you could prove I conspired against her.” He laid a hand on the crease of Kit’s elbow and squeezed; Kit shied away, twisting from the waist and leaning back. “And yet I imagine you of all people, Kit Marlin, would understand.”
Kit nodded, savagely. “Aye. I know her glamourie. And Morgan’s too, and would not feel the touch again.”
“Imagine thou couldst not fight it,” Puck replied. “What then wouldst do to be free?”
Kit had no answer. He shook his head. He bent down between his knees and picked the hilt of his sword off the earth. “What if I told Will?”
“What of it? Would he ask thee to take his vengeance, in his name?”
“I know not,” Kit answered. He turned the blade over and over in his hands, watching dappled light ripple on the temper marks. “Thou hast done what thou hast done in accordance with thy nature and understanding. And thou hast preserved my life and freedom. Aye. And I do understand the freedom which thou dost seek. What, thee and Geoffrey too? Who else?”
“I cannot disclose to thee–”
“Never matter. I understand. And yet thouwilt understand that I cannot be thy friend, Master Goodfellow.”
“ ‘Twas thee thyself that saidst thou wouldst liefer lose thy life than thy liberty of speech, Sir Poet.”
Aye, ” Kit said, standing. These are not people. Lest you. ever forget. The Fae are not people. And who am I to judge someone who has done what he has done because he did it?“I do recall saying it. And I do recall dying for it too, Master Puck. Good day to you.”
“Wilt speak to thy Shakespeare?”
“Probably…” Kit answered, sheathing his sword and walking away. “Not,” he finished, halting for a moment where the willow’s ring of branches touched his hair. “Nor am I like to tell my Prince of thy machinations. And thus I am a traitor again to every soul I name friend.”
“A traitor? Or a man?”
“Is there a difference?” Kit asked, and turned toward the palace again, and the mirror, and the pain of old injuries. And a conversation and a lie that he did not want to have to tell.
Act IV, scene ix
Edgar: The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale. Hoppdance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring. Croak not, black angel; I have no food for thee.
–William Shakespeare, King Lear,Act III, scene vi
On the last day of 1599, in a receiving room at Greenwich Palace, Will leaned into the glow of an inconveniently placed lamp and frowned over his own atrocious penmanship, one of several players camped singly or in clumps in the puddles of light around the great dark hall. The windows were shuttered against a March storm, but the Queen was said to be in renewed spirits with the turning of the year, and the show must go on. He bent over his lines again, cursing the tremor in his hand that made the words shiver on the page, and trying not to think of his last, strange conversation with Kit and the long silence since, broken only by hasty letters.
A cultured voice interrupted his concentration. “Hast thought upon our offer, Master Shakespeare?”
Will glanced up from his part‑script and frowned before he remembered to bow. He’d thought the contact would come from Oxford, perhaps in a form as simple as a note. He wasn’t prepared to meet the ferrety countenance of Henry Wriothesly, the Earl of Southampton. The Earl was clad in snowy velvet, trimmed in white lace at the wrists. Whatever beauty the man had had in youth had dissipated, though he still wore his hair long enough to drape his shoulders and oiled in lovelocks like a girl’s under his hat. His one visible hand was silk‑soft, long, and white; he idly tapped its back with the cuff of the embroidered glove he held in the other. Will frowned to see the ring on Southampton’s smallest finger: black steel, edged in a band of gold.
“You’re wearing iron, my lord.”
“And thou art not.” A tilt of the head and a carefully elevated eyebrow.
Will did not press his fingers to his doublet to feel the iron nail in its soft leather pouch against his breast. Southampton drew his glove between his fingers. He switched it, Will thought, like a cat switching her tail.
“Master Shakespeare. Thy play today, what is it called?”
“Ad You Like It,my lord.” And Will had thought hard about performing that one before the Queen, it was true, and deemed it not unmeet to prick Her Majesty’s conscience a little. And if Essex were offended, or Oxford, so mote it be.
Even Southampton’s smile was greasy. “And if I like it not?”
“Then may it please the Queen.” Bandy word not with me, cockerel. I may be a nodding invalid and a common player, and you an Earl. But I fence with the likes of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and you limit yourself to sycophants and tyros.
Honesty forced him to, And Queens,but Will couldn’t imagine Southampton had ever won a round with Her Majesty.
An oily ferret, perhaps, but as dogged as a weasel. The Earl stepped back, a little further into the light, so it gleamed on his careful curls. “Dost expect it might?”
“Lies it within my power. ” Will found his shaking hand tightening on the sheaf of playscript; he raised the pages against his breast like a buckler, like a talisman. He glanced over Southampton’s shoulder, across the room to where Burbage and two of the Wills bent Titian curls and dark over their part‑scripts. Burbage posed between the taller, browner players so that they leaned over him like framing trees. He must have felt Will’s gaze, because he glanced up; for a moment their gaze bridged the darkness from one puddle of light to the next.
“I rather hoped thou mightst have missed my patronage, Master Shakespeare.”
Will’s eyes asked a question. Burbage’s lips pursed, a gesture meant to be read. He glanced at the back of Southampton’s head and shrugged once, softly, as if to say do what thou must, I trust thee.And then Burbage lowered his head again, and Will loosed a breath he hadn’t realized he’d trapped, and fixed Southampton on an arch look that would have done Ned Alleyn proud.
“I am content,” Will said, covering his cough with the back of his hand. He was aware that those three words were as bold a declaration of war as any he had penned into the mouth of an upstart lord. He bowed, but would not look down until Southampton nodded, slowly, and withdrew in a cloud of civet and rosewater.
The show must go on.
* * *
And go on it did, disrupted only slightly by the storm whining against the shutters and by Her Majesty’s rattling cough, which diminished–Will thought–as the acts proceeded. She laughed at Touchstone the clown, and at Will’s own appearance as a countrified version of himself, speaking direct to the audience for a moment’s wit. He thought that boded well, and hoped perhaps he had been mistaken that the enemy had overcome the power of his words, although he wished her lead paint gone so he could see if her cheeks were flushed with fever or with delight.
It would in any case have been hard to tell by candlelight.
Spring wound into summer and high heat brought a resurgence of the plague and a cessation of the cough that had haunted Will all through the cold months. The winter’s rain presaged a breaking of the long drought, and though the theatres were not closed for the in
evitable plague, Will circulated sonnets and Ben staged poetical dinners. Under their influence the famine eased with the early crops and the fat spring lambs.
It was well it did, for in June Will heard the first rumors that the Spanish had landed at the Isle of Wight. Rumors he might have discounted if Elizabeth hadn’t sent Essex and his men to Ireland to suppress rebellion abetted by Spanish Catholic troops.
Will himself stood and watched as rattling chains with links a man could wear as bracelets were draped from shore to shore across the Thames, the inconvenience to shipping judged slight against the threat of the Spanish. There was talk in the nervous streets that the city might be defended by a bridge of boats, if the Spanish sailed up the mighty river; the city gates were locked and curfew enforced as it had not been in Will’s memory, and all London breathed shallowly under threat of invasion. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed Alarum for London,transparent fearmongering – but if Baines, Oxford, Southampton, and Essex’s faction had hoped to use the threat of Catholic conquest to raise emotions against the Queen, Will was satisfied that he and Burbage had done what they could to thwart the plot.
My darling friend–
I send with great news, and some of it ill. Much of it, to tell you true, for oh, how I regret our old masters. Though Sir Francis labored under many a failure, and though he was as much a prince of lies as any Lucifer, still I did not doubt his loyalty. Now, I know not which spymaster nor weasel‑keep to turn to in any extremity.
Sir Robert Cecil finally came forth with the order to raid the London home of a certain Richard Baines, my dear Mercutio. And I find my eyes big with wonder at the timing, for who did Cecil’s men find a‑slumbering in the deadly bed but Nicholas Skeres? And so it was Skeres arrested for counterfeiting, though he swore he knew not from whence the pewter coinings arose.
The house was searched on this evidence, but– worse luck–no bodies were discovered, buried in the earthen cellar or otherwise. Ben was beside himself with wrath, and had strong words with Tom Walsingham, as you might imagine. Tom, of course, had naught to do with the delay; so he says and so I believe him. Cecil, I fear, plays one of his double games.
Will rested the quill on the stand and frowned, rubbing his aching hand. He could tell Kit about young Robin Poley’s golden hair–and why hint to the man that the boy he’d cared for as his own was the scion of the knave who helped to murder him?–or he could tell him about seeing Richard Baines in the crowd watching poetry, broadsides, and playscripts all burned in the bookseller’s yard at St. Paul’s, under the supervision of none other than that selfsame Sir Robert Cecil, the Queen’s Secretary of State.
That last, yes. Kit should know.
Will leveraged his pen once more.
There is some small joy. Essex has returned from Ireland disgraced and defeated: the Queen would not see him. Ben is writing for the boys’ companies. He grows stout and quarrels with everyone. It would include me, if he could raise my ire. Since I will not take the bait, he turns his venom on Chapman and Dekker and Marston–and especially Dick Burbage.
But Cecil’s duplicity is manifest in what he burns, dear Mercutio. He is the very consuming flame, leaving only charred scraps of knowledge for those who come after. We attended his book‑burning, Dick Burbage and I, and it was Dick who whispered in my ear, ‘and now we are on our own in troth, gentle William.’
I fear me he is only right. We cannot rely on princes and their agents any longer, gentle Mercutio. We must act by the strength of our own hands, if we are to preserve what we have won.
Come to London. Meet us at Tom Walsingham’s study. We will craft our Bible no matter who says us nay.
And at the end of the long, fat, flyblown summer, Burbage and I and the others will open the Globe.
May it be our final weapon.
With love, my friend.
Your Romeo
Act IV, scene x
Lucifer: Tut Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight.
–Christopher Marlowe, Faustus,Act II, scene ii
Kit leaned against the wall beside a bright window in Tom Walsingham’s salon and watched Tom pace, and Will nod, and Ben trim the nib of a pen and smooth its shaft with a knife Kit thought was likely sharp enough to shave with. Which reminded him of his own need for a barbering, and he brushed his hand across rasping cheeks. Unlikely as you are to be kissing anyone that cares. Or anyone at all, for that matter.He sipped his wine and swirled it in the goblet, wishing bitterly that he could close the distance to the little coven by the fire and be one of them again. Wishing he could remember the touch of Will’s hand, the press of Tom’s mouth, without tasting the enormous soft emptiness that threatened to open like black wings and enfold him.
“Master Marlowe, if you are sufficiently refreshed, we could resume?” An otherwiselight swirled from the tip of Ben’s pen as he dipped it and bent over the papers spread on the table before him, never looking at Kit.
Kit set his wine well aside and came back to the musty‑smelling book, gently sliding the ribbon aside to resume his place on the page. “Matthew?”
“Thereabouts, ” Ben answered.
Kit bristled at the big man’s tone, backing down chiefly because Will turned enough to catch his eyes. Kit angled the Bible for better light and began to read aloud, in Greek, with, he thought, fair facility. Ben scribbled a literal and far from poetic translation, and Will read over his shoulder. Kit tried not to watch the casual camaraderie between the two, or the way Tom lounged by the fireplace, smiling his pleasure at the poets hard at work in his salon.
Kit’s shoulder itched under his doublet. He reached up and over without pausing in his reading–nearly a recitation by heart, to be truthful–and absently rubbed at the tenderness of the witch’s mark before he realized what he was about and forced himself to stop. As if in response, the scars on his torso and thighs flared white pain. He jumped and yelped, almost dropping the book. “Edakrusen o iesous! ” Damme, while Lucifer was healing things, he could have healed those too.
“Christ,” Ben growled. “Is there a cinder in your eye, now?”
“An old injury,” Kit said, straightening the hang of his rapier. “Shall we continue?”
“Can we do it without interruptions?”
“Gentlemen – ” Will, standing and moving between them. Kit cringed at the way his steps seemed hobbled, and set the Bible down, careful of its pages and spine.
“Your pardon, Will, ” Kit said, as Ben dropped his quill into the inkpot and turned over the chair back to face Kit.
“Tell me, Master Marlowe,” he said. “Is it true a witch kisses the Devil’s bunghole to pay for his powers?”
“Master Jonson,” Kit replied, letting his left hand fall from the hilt of his sword as he moved away from the wall. “Come, kiss mine and find out.”
“If I were to play the sodomite, I should choose, I trust, a less slant‑heeled paramour.”
“Gentlemen.” Tom Walsingham, this time, stepping away from the fireplace to lend the support of his stature to Will’s plea for peace.
“As a point of fact,” Kit said, through that same imperturbable smile, “that’s only part of the process. An enjoyable one, if performed faithfully”–ignoring Will’s livid blush, and Tom’s sudden coughing fit–“and I might offer to demonstrate, but I prefer my bedfellows agreeable in–”
“Christofer, so help me God – ”
“–body andtemperament, and you, dear Ben, are neither, and have neither – ”
“Kit!”
“Yes, Sir Thomas?” Sweetly, with his best and gentlest smile.
“Enough. Just enough, both of you.”
“Yes, Sir Thomas – ” Kit gasped and doubled over as another ripple of fire caressed his body. He went to one knee, pushed both hands before him to keep from collapsing to the floor, and bit down on a scream. “Will, my cloak.
Will was already moving; not fast enough, as Jonson levered his bulk from the chair and swept Kit’s cloak from the pile
in the corner. He threw it about Kit’s shoulders and tugged it tight. Kit leaned back on his heels, breathing again, gripping the collar in his left hand.
They crowded him, and he waved them back, wobbling to his feet with assistance and a warning glance from Tom. Kit looked from Tom to Will, and Will to Tom. “What, sweet Thomas, not devilish enough for thee?” But he gave himself over to the half a smile that bubbled up, despite his frustration, and offered it to Tom as an indicator of peace before turning back to Ben. “A kindness, Master Jonson,” he said. “I will not forget it.”
“What was that?” asked Tom, concerned.
Kit shrugged and reached for his wine. “The Prometheans seeking me through old scars, perhaps.”
Jonson’s mouth twisted as he nodded. “Then shall we continue?”
But Kit felt a hot wind ruffle his cloak, and saw Ben’s eyes suddenly widen.
:Come:
The light that streamed past Kit was brighter than that from the window. White, and not the pale gold of winter afternoons. Kit set down his cup and turned into it, facing a jeweled, starlit darkness that seemed to unscroll within the room. He tugged his cloak close.
“Kit.” Will and Tom, as one, and Ben a moment behind: “Master Marlowe–”
«Come, my love»
I have to go,” Kit said, turning over his patchworked shoulder to regard the other three. “He’s calling me.” He looked away with effort and squared his shoulders, and stepped into the light.
Angels singing, and cries–those cries that might be ecstasy or might be grief: he could not say. Broad arms, white wings, enfolded him in comfort; the last lingering burning of his scars faded into cool and calm as Lucifer held him close and stroked his hair.
“What have you done to me?” Kit asked, recovering himself enough to step away, for all the brush of those wings fanned the longing in him to a sharp, pale flame. He stood beside the Devil as if on nothingness, surrounded by stars. Despite himself, he threw back his head, his hair brushing his collar, and stared up into the vaulted, sparking void above.
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