Kit flinched. “And Lord Strange. And Walsingham.”
Act IV, scene xxi
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 121
In his fever, Will dreamed that Elizabeth attended him. He dreamed her long fair hands, her hair like ruby glass when the light shone through it. He dreamed Elizabeth, but her breath was sweet as a maiden’s and her eyes as much green as gray.
His flesh burned until he thrust the blankets aside, and then he shivered with the cold. He was distantly aware that he whined like a child and fussed at the tender hands restraining him, while voices gentle, cajoling, and bitterly frustrated by turns spoke over him. One voice – “Annie?” It could have been Annie–and then a second.
There was a rhythm to that other one: halting, hiccuping, but a meter and a tenor he knew. “It’s not the King’s Evil,” the voice said pettishly. “The touch of a Oueen’s hand won’t heal him – ”
Linen abraded his skin like coarse wool. His muscles ached as if knotted. Sickly sweet fluid trickling past his teeth made him gag, and he batted the hands that wrung a damp rag into his mouth and other, stronger hands that held him down. He screamed when they covered him, but it was a mew weak as a kitten’s, and he shivered when they did not. He clawed at a blanket with a texture that puzzled him, for it was sometimes velvet soft and sometimes silk‑slick under his hands.
The rag was withdrawn. Someone leaned into his ear and whispered poetry. A thread of logic and meter and beauty wound through the madness of the fever and the visions and the knotting pain –
“Come live‑with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove–”
“As hills and–dammit. Dammit, William, thou’lt not be quit of me so easy. These words thou knowest. There’s virtue in them. Say them with me, damn you to Hell, just a little breath–”
Dear voice, and so frightened, so thick with frustration and hurt. He reached for it, or tried to reach, tried to do what it bid him and shape the words, find the power behind them. There was nothing, no movement, no reach.
Such a dear voice.
And so far away.
There will I make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle.
– Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Kit pressed the heels of his hands to his eyelids to keep the tears locked in. A terrible odor rose from Will’s papery skin. Kit wiped his nose on his cuff and looked up at Morgan hopelessly. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Keep fighting.” Succinctly, and not looking up from whatever she was steeping by the fire. She stood and came toward him, the steaming cup held in her hands.
Kit reached to restrain Will’s hands, so Morgan could again trickle her medicines into him. Will’s skin felt thin enough to crackle to the touch, hot as the side of a lantern.
Morgan shook her head. “Kit, ‘tis for thee.” She held the mug out and he took it, cupped it in hands too tired to lift it to his mouth.
“Thou wert wrong about me, Morgan.”
She nodded, straightening Kit’s cloak across Will’s breast as he tossed and shivered. They did not know if its magic would help Will, but there was no harm in trying. “I underestimated thee.”
Somehow, Kit got the cup to his mouth. Perhaps even the steam was fortifying. It tasted of bitter earth and summer sun and the unshed tears still clogging his throat. “What if he dies?
“What if he dies now,thou meanest?” She bent and kissed Kit’s hair as if he were a child. “We endure.”
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own …
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 121
Will fell deeper. Sometimes it seemed those hands held him, caressed him, cooled his brow. Sometimes he thought he plunged through darkness eternally and heard nothing but the Devil’s amiable laughter, and knew nothing but the heat of his own Hell. Nothing could touch Will in the void; he knew somehow that he needed poetry, needed the power of his words, but in his jumbled consciousness he could not put one line of a poem with another.
But through the darkness came that dear, distant voice again, and that voice gave him poetry. “Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain, full charactered with lasting memory…”
Will turned to the faint glimmer of sound, if turning it could be called. Heat cupped his body, pressed his skin. He writhed away from it, sure that there were flames and that the flames had seared his eyes from his head, because surely there could be no such agony in darkness.
The pain left him amazed.
“Which shall above the idle rank remain, beyond all doubt ev’n to eternity–”
Iambs.
Not blank verse though, and blank verse was important. Blank verse, the enjambed line, the rhythm of natural speech carrying an incantation’s power.
“Or at the least so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to razed oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be missed.”
A sonnet.
It’s a sonnet.
A sonnet he knew, although he could not remember from where. He swam through blackness, pushed and pulled, following the thread of that voice –a voice that cracked with weariness or emotion, and in cracking broke Will’s heart and made him strive the harder, because he knew, somehow, that the pain he heard could somehow be healed if he –
“That poor retention could not so much hold,”
– could only –
“Nor need I tallies thy dear… dammit. Thy dear love to,
to score,”
–pierce –
“Therefore to give them from me was I bold,”
–that –
“To trust those tables that receive thee more.”
–blackness.
The heat was more. The pain, the burning. Will pressed at it, and it was not like walking through flames, because flames cannot push back. His body trembled, and he understood that it was his body, suddenly, soaked in sweat, cloyed under blankets in a room where the fire roared beyond all sense and the bed was pulled so close beside it that the bedclothes smelled scorched where they weren’t soaked in sour sweat and stinking fluids. And he was cold, shivering cold, and Kit was bent over a book beside the bed. Kit was wiping away the sweat that must be stinging his sleepless eyes, then angling a tablet in dim light to read the poem in a voice that creaked with overuse.
Will’s hand darted out like a snake, all his reserves gone in one flash of motion, and he caught Kit’s wrist, and Kit’s eyes came up, widening.
“To keep an adjunct to remember thee,” Will finished, or tried to finish, because coughing racked him into an agonized crescent. Kit steadied his head, pressed a handkerchief to his mouth, which filled with ropes and clots of something that had the taste of iron and the texture of boiled brains. Will choked, coughing until he would have vomited if there were anything in his belly but bitter yellow froth, until he sobbed, half wishing for death.
He would have curled up again in misery, but Kit held his shoulders until he finished, and wiped his mouth again, and touched his forehead, which was slick and wet.
And then Kit smiled, and said, “Were to import forgetfulness to me, ” which Will understood was the end of the invocation, the end of the poem. And then Kit finished, “Thy fever’s broken. Praise God,” and hugged him hard enough to make his bones creak.
“I’m hot,”Will said petulantly, and Kit burst out laughing with relief and got up to knock the fire apart until it died down a little, all the while shouting for Morgan.
A gown made of the finest wool
/> Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckled of the purest gold.
–Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
After the fateful ride, the Oueen’s men escorted Essex, a wounded and dignified Catesby, a profusely apologetic Monteagle, the estimable Francis Tresham, and a few dozen others to their temporary quarters in the Tower of London, from whence they would be tried. The revolution ended, most said, more or less as ineffectually as it began. And it was Richard Burbage who brought the news to Tom Walsingham’s house, where he had come in search of Will.
“It’s good that thou’lt live,” Burbage said, perched on the stool at Will’s bedside as Audrey Walsingham spooned broth into the sick man, out of mercy for his shaking hands. The bed had been pulled back from the fire and Kit’s cloak aired and returned to him. Will himself was sitting up against pillows, the crusted lesions at the corners of his mouth almost healed and his eyes their normal calm blue, not dull with fever.
Kit leaned back on a settee against the wall and cupped between his palms the mulled wine that Morgan had given him. His voice at last had failed him utterly, and he drooped, inches from sleep, in a warmly contented state of exhaustion that was too pleasant to abandon for bed. Beside that,he thought, I’d rather sit in a corner and watch that man make faces over unsalted bouillon than ever sleep again. Even if the whole room draped in red cloths to combat fever does make of thy place a scene out of Dante.
Morgan and Tom and Ben Jonson had crowded into the tiny sickroom now, Tom by his wife’s shoulder, Morgan not far from Kit, and Jonson as geographically distant from the slumping Marley as the closet’s confines would allow.
Will, concentrating on swallowing the soup without choking, did not answer.
“‘Tis good thou hast survived,” Burbage repeated, “because Her Majesty would be most wroth with me if thou hadst not.”
“Her Majesty?” Will’s voice was weak but clear. He laid a hand on Audrey’s wrist to restrain her when she would have poured more sustenance into him, and turned to Burbage. “Richard, what meanest thou?”
Burbage sighed. “She requests the Lord Chamberlain’s Men perform for her on the twenty‑fourth of the month. Shrove Tuesday. That’s thirteen days hence; thou hast lain fevered for three. And the play she wants is Richard the Second,and she very especially mentioned your name among the company of players she wishes to see perform it. I was half afeared” – Burbage’s hand on Will’s thin shoulder belied the brusqueness of his tone – “I would have to send word you were detained in a churchyard.”
“Not dead yet,” Will answered before taking more soup. “Thirteen days. Richard the Second.I may be able to do it.”
“I won’t have you killing yourself over a play, Will.” Jonson, forgetting himself, moved from his nervous post by the door and then stopped. He cast a wary glance at Kit, who knew his chin had started sagging to match his eyelids, and Kit struggled with a half‑formed understanding.
Christ. Ben Jonson is scared of me. Scared I’ll deduce him? Or scared I’ll overpower him and have my way with him?
Now therewas an image incongruous enough to send an exhausted poet giggling, and giggling touched Kit’s ravaged throat and turned to a hacking cough, which drew the worried glances of everyone in the room.
“Kit, thou’rt sickening–” Will, ignoring Jonson’s command.
Kit saw another measure of hurt cross the ugly young man’s face, and the half‑formed understanding crystallized into pity. Oh. Ben–
But there was nothing to be done for it, was there?
“No,” Kit managed, a stage whisper that almost started him coughing again. “Just talked raw. Will, Ben is right.” Morgan brought Kit more wine, and he drank it, enjoying Ben’s surprise at his intercession.
Will shook his head, looked up at Burbage. “Richard, why the twenty‑fourth, precisely? ”
The room got very quiet. Kit glanced from face to face, and realized everyone assembled knew the answer but for him. Like Will, he waited, calm enough in the knowledge that they would live. It was satisfying enough that he and Morgan and Tom–and Audrey and Jonson and Burbage and most of all, Will–had beatenBaines’ worst. No answer could trouble him.
It was Tom who cleared his throat, and answered, “Because Essex is to be executed on the twenty‑fifth, and Her Majesty wishes to see the play before she has her old friend drawn and quartered.”
Silence, as Kit struggled upright against the sugared grip of gravity, and his gaze met Will’s across the room. “Oh,” Will said. “Oh, poor Elizabeth.”
Act IV, scene xxii
The play’s the thing,
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
–William Shakespeare, Hamlet,Act II, scene ii
The Queen in her goodness commuted Essex’s sentence from hanging and torture to a simple beheading; it was rumored that he had been reproved to choose his wardrobe the night before, and Will imagined he might be about his task even as Richard the Secondwound to its close. Will’s hands shook as he sponged the makeup from his face.
The dates of the other executions had not yet been set, and Will wondered if they would be, when news from across the Irish sea had Spanish Catholic troops again landing in alliance to the Catholics of that emerald isle.
A genteel cough at Will’s shoulder alerted him to the presence of a page. Will turned. “Yes?”
“Her Majesty wishes to see you, Master Shakespeare. In the red withdrawing room. Her Majesty said you would know it.”
“Aye, ” Will said, wiping his hands again to be sure he was free of paint, and reaching for his cane. He should have felt apprehension, he knew. But when he reached for emotion, there was nothing there at all. “Please tell Her Majesty I’ll be along presently. My balance is not what it was.”
Which was the curse of this disease; his strength didn’t leave him, or his intellect. Just his ability to make his body obey his lawful commands.
When the page opened the door and gave him admittance, Will was startled to realize that the Queen was alone. The page slipped out behind him and the door latched shut. Will suffered a second realization that hewas alone with the Queen.
Elizabeth stood by the far archway, a single candle warming her ice‑white ceruse. “Master Shakespeare,” she said, as he began to bow awkwardly. “Rise. ‘Twill be enough of that. And find a chair, young man: I can see thy legs are about to desert thee and I have no mind to pluck thee off my carpeting.”
“Your Highness,” Will said, and sat awkwardly although the Queen did not. I, she said, and not we. How interesting.“I am honored to be in your presence.”
Her lips assayed a smile and almost managed it. “I’ll kill a man tomorrow.”
“Yes, Your Highness.” Trying to keep his Christian pity for Elizabeth from his face, and, he suspected, failing.
“I waged rather a grand battle to save him, Master Shakespeare, and failed. Why do you suppose that is?”
“Why you did try to save him, Your Highness? Or why you did fail?” Greatly daring, he thought, but she seemed to invite it. Indeed, she inclined her head under its great jeweled tire and made a come‑along gesture with one gloved hand. Will watched her face, trying to judge how bold he might be, but her ceruse made a mask. “I think you did try to save him for you loved him. And he failed to be saved because he loved himself.”
“Ah,” she said. “Thou art a poet indeed. When I am gone, wilt make a play of me as thou didst my royal father?”
“No mere play could capture Your Highness, and no boy could play you. As well set a pussycat to play a princely lion.”
“Flattery.” But she smiled, a real smile this time. Her voice was low and very sweet. “So in honesty, as a poet, and with no ears to hear but mine–what think you of this latest string of murders upon which I will filthy my hands?”
Will examined her face, and knew by the way she stood that she meant to se
em only a woman. He could not trust that, however. Kit would be proud.“Monteagle’s just a foolish young gallant, Your Highness. Southampton–” Will shrugged. “Led astray, perhaps. Perhaps leading. I don’t know that they deserve to swing. Unlike Essex.”
“Who won’t. Swing, that is. He’ll get a clean death. My last gift. Perhaps I’ll spare the other two, if it pleases thee.” She cast about herself for a chair; Will hastened to rise and fetch her one, and she pinned him down with a look. “Obey thy sovereign.”
“I was there when they hanged Lopez,” Will said, once she had settled herself. “I was there when Sir Francis died.”
“Meaning?” Perhaps dangerous, those folded hands, that softly arched brow.
And what will she do? Cast thee in the Tower?“It seems, if it please Your Highness, that your enemies sometimes get the gentler side of your hand than your loyal friends. My Queen.”
“It does not please me,” she said. They faced one another across the dark red pattern on the carpet, faces dim in shifting candlelight. Will forced his hands to stay smooth on his thighs and swallowed against his worry that he had overstepped. “But it is true. And thou art correct in other things as well. I am sick of politics, Master Shakespeare. I am deathly tired.”
It was an understatement. He saw it in her face, heard it in the timbre of her voice. An old woman, Queen before Will was born and–he realized with a shock–not likely to be Queen much longer. Elizabeth had been eternal. Elizabeth was England.
Elizabeth was deathly tired. Perhaps this was Baines’ goal all along,Will realized. To force her hand to kill Essex, whom she loved for all his faults. It’s broken her at last.
“Your Majesty–”
“Aye?”
“Did anyone among your servants ever love you as much as you loved him? Or did they all betray you?” Will almost clapped a hand over his mouth when the words came out, but it was too late and they were flown. He watched them hang there in the candlelight, wishing them recalled, and did not look at the stunned placidity of Elizabeth’s face.
Until she laughed. She threw back her head and roared like a sailor, one hand clutched to her breast, her eyes squinted tight and tears of mirth smearing her kohl into her ceruse. Her mouth fell so far open in her laughter that Will saw the wads or batting that padded out her cheeks where her teeth were gone. “Oh, William,” she said. “Oh, you ask the finest questions. I should have made thee my fool–”
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