Ben laughed. “But something that could bring thee real harm? Never, my friend.”
“That’s bad,” Will answered. “Because if it was not thee, then Chapman has spoken more than he should, and where the wrong ears could hear it.”
Ben grunted, tugging his hood up higher. “I would not be startled to discover it. In any case, I think thou shouldst consider what the Catholics offer,” he said with a wink. “Thy family will thank thee for supporting the old faith. And with such men as Catesby and Tresham, and Guido Fawkes–who thou wilt meet tonight. He was a soldier in the Low Countries when I was, that last.”
“Fighting for the Queen?” Will asked, and Ben shook his head.
“Fighting for the Spaniards. A man of strong convictions. They call him the soldier‑monk, of all things.”
There was a throb of admiration in Ben’s voice; Will sighed to hear it. Nothing worse for an intelligencer than to come to admire the men he will betray.
Aye, and nothing more vital for his credibility with those men.“I’ll make thee proud enough, for a soldier‑bricklayer,” Will said, and Ben laughed at the subtleties behind that statement as they passed under the sign of the Irish Boy.
The tavern’s common was bigger than the Mermaid’s, but not over crowded. Will counted eleven men drinking by the fire, a hum of cheerful conversation flagging only a little when he and Ben entered. Catesby stood, his golden‑blond locks glowing like the sun, and came across the rush‑strewn planks to greet them. Another man rose as well, a walrus‑mustachioed redhead Will had seen somewhere before, not quite so handsome as Catesby but broad‑shouldered and nearly as big as Ben, though not so portly.
Catesby introduced the redhead as Fawkes. Will shook his hand–switching his cane to the left to do so–while Ben dragged a bench over and repositioned a table to make room. Will was seated and introduced about; he was amused to note he’d come far enough as an intelligencer in twelve years that he felt secure in remembering each name and each face without the need to scribble notes.
The evening’s entertainment was much as promised, the playmaker finding himself wined and dined by men who were–for a change – more interested in his personal and political leanings than in his celebrity, and who gave very little away. The role came to Will with enough ease to unsettle him, and it unsettled him more when he remembered that some of the men he sat beside were relatives, acquaintances.
Acquaintances who plot against the throne,he reminded himself. And then he sighed, and thought of Edmund or Annie hanged for no more sin than clinging to the Catholic faith, and wondered if he had chosen the right side after all.
It’s not the side that’s right,he reminded himself. It’s the side you’re on.
And thank you, Kit, for that piece of intelligencer’s wisdom.Will felt queasy with more wine than he was accustomed to drink. He looked up at Ben, who was regarding him with a knowing sort of pity, and Ben nodded and stood.
“Gentlemen, thank you,” Ben said. “I fear Master Shakespeare is a bit poorly, and perhaps I should escort him home.”
“No, Ben,” Will said, although he accepted help to stand. “I’ll manage. You stay for the evening. I’m just tired and in pain.”
“Art certain?” As Ben led him toward the door. “The streets are not as safe as they were.”
Aye, which is saying something, as they were never in particular safe. The King’s Peace doesn’t hold much sway in London any longer.“I’m certain,” Will said.
Fifteen minutes later, when unseen ruffians dropped a bag over his head and hustled him into a carriage, he had wit enough left to find a measure of irony in those words.
He kicked rather helplessly, but whoever held him –a big man smelling of mutton and damp leather –had every advantage, and Will found himself shoved unceremoniously to his knees, his fingers numbed from a thin cord wrapping his wrists. Helpless as a jessed and hooded hawk, damn them all.
The carriage lurched and rattled on for a little while, and he was just as casually carried out of it and up a flight of stairs, and deposited on a mattress. Still blindfolded, Will heard another scuffle, but was able to do little about it with his wrists bound behind his waist and his vision baffled. He knew Kit’s voice when he heard it, however, and shouted, trying to shove himself to his feet and measuring his length instead on the rush‑covered stones.
The fall knocked the wind from him, a spasming pain that wouldn’t let him fill his lungs. He wheezed, worming forward on scraped knees and bruised chest, and then grunted once as someone dropped a knee between his shoulders and pinned him hard. “None of that, old man.”
The scuffle ended abruptly enough that he knew it was not Kit who’d won it. Oh, bloody hell,he thought. Damn‑fool Kit, when wilt learn to bring friends on these missions of mercy?Will did not hear Kit’s voice again, but he heard a man grunting with effort as if he lifted something unwieldy, and then the slamming of a heavy, strap‑hinged door. Damn it. Damn it. Damn it to Hell–
Act V, scene vii
This dungeon where they keep me is the sink
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls.
–Christopher Marlowe, Edward II,Act V, scene v
Kit woke in absolute blackness, with a ringing head, and tried to remember how he had gotten there and why he was lying on a dank, lumpy surface with the taste of earth on his lips. He summoned a witchlight first, wondering that the darkness was so complete that even he could not see through it, and when the hoped‑for blue glow failed to materialize around his fingers he swore softly and rolled onto his back.
He lay on earth, he decided, burrowing his fingers into it. Packed earth, and foul; it reeked of sweat and filth and the long tenancy of terrified men. He cast his right hand out, and his left, and found stone blocks on either side. The walls of his cell, if it was a cell. He snapped his fingers again, to spark light, and nothing answered his murmured incantation except a strange clatter and a heaviness, a constriction on his fingers. His head throbbed as if John Marley were on the inside, banging Kit’s skull with his tacking hammer, and Kit hunched forward between his knees and tried to take some inventory of the situation.
Feet, bare. His head swollen as a broken fist, and oozing blood from a welt on the left side. His cloak was missing, and his sword – he chuckled under his breath in recognition of what was gone. No external sound reached him–
–No. Not quite true. Somewhere far above, he heard… not so much the sound of footsteps as the echo of the sound. “I might as well be at the bottom of a well,” he said out loud, to hear something besides the half‑panicked rasp of his own hurried breaths. His voice echoed too, peculiarly: from above, rather than from any of the sides.
Carefully, wary of his head and his dizziness, Kit stood in the darkness and extended his arms. His palms lay flat against the walls on either side – masoned stone, he thought–and whatever rings encircled his fingers clanked on the blocks. A harsh, heavy clank, and not the ring of silver or the clink of gold.
He lowered his hands, feeling the moist earth under his feet – heels, ball, toes–and drew another deep breath. The stench of a place men have died in, aye.
And something else.
Thick and raw, the stench of the Thames.
“The Pit, ” he said, and sat down on the floor again, shaking his head. “I dreamed this.”
He knew where he was now, and he knew who had him. He was in the oubliette at the Tower of London, and he was in the power of Robert Poley. And by extension, of Richard Baines.
In absolute blackness, Kit paced the cramped circle afforded him. His right hand trailed on the damp stones of the wall. He had no fear of tripping; his feet knew the path, and the dank earth was where he slept when he grew too tired to walk. Wasting energy,he thought, but he could not sit still. “The sink wherein the filth of all the castle falls,” he mumbled, but it wasn’t, quite. More an old, almost‑dry well, lidded in iron as much to keep light out as the prisoner in, for the sides were twenty foot and ste
eply angled.
He had paced forever.
He would be pacing forevermore.
The iron rings–or so he thought them, groping in the darkness –on his hands wouldn’t come off. He’d tried, and all he’d gotten for his trouble was a clicking pain as if he were trying to yank each finger individually from its socket. Upon pulling harder, there had been the stretch of tearing flesh and a slow, hot trickle of blood, but the rings had not shifted.
A strange sort of irritation, first an itching and then a raw, hot pain, grew in patches on his torso and his thighs. To pass the time and to stave off whatever sorcery Baines might be working, so far out of reach above, he told himself stories. Bits of verse –Nashe’s plays, half memorized, Kyd’s Tragedy,Will’s Titus,and Kit’s own words. The Greeks and the Romans and the Celts. The Bible.
Anything to keep from thinking of his own predicament, and worse. To keep from remembering how he had failed Will. Because when the throbbing in his head had subsided, he’d remembered how he’d been surprised.
Coming to Will’s rescue.
Just as Baines would have known that he would, having seen it before. Stupid, Kit, to leave anyone alive who know what William means to thee–
He’d stepped from the Darkling Glass, his sword in his hand and witchcraft on his lips –and straight into a sorcerer’s trap.
He slept twice more. His belly cramped with fear more than hunger, and his dry throat turned his recitations into a mumble. He dragged his ringed fingers along the stone, and thought to dig through the floor with his fingers, but all he did was tear his nails and score his fingertips on buried rocks. He came to know his domain intimately, an oval four feet by five feet, with a slimy, echoing drain that stank even worse than the earth but at least ensured he wasn’t sleeping in his own piss.
The cramping belly reminded him of something, and he smiled. If Baines plans to use me for whatever blackness he had planned on the fifth–
–won’t he be surprised when Faerie kills me for my absence in a couple of days?
Kit closed both eyes. It made no difference: he walked, and turned, and walked, and turned in a blackness as deep as if his eyes had frozen into ice. He hadn’t seen real darkness since Hell; he barely remembered it, but whatever bound his magic bound his otherwisesight as well.
Mehiel’s brands burned on his chest and sides. “All very well,” Kit said to the angel, a whisper like a rasp dragged over his throat. “Couldst speak to me, thou knowest. Would help to pass the hours. And ‘tis not as if we’re unacquainted.” A cracked‑lip grin, blood paying for a pun. And not a good one at that.
The chafe of unoiled hinges served his warning of the shaft of light that seemed to boil his eyes from his head. Kit covered his face in his hands, swearing, and hated it that he knew who saw him cringe.
“Art yet hungry, puss?”
Sweet God in his heaven.Kit could never speak loud enough to be heard from the depths of the oubliette, with the fire in his throat. And damned if he would plead and whisper. He stood, looking up, and shaded his left eye with his hand. Nay,he thought, wishing he had the wherewithal to speak. But could use a drop of wine, hast it to spare–
Things dropped. A cloth wrapped bundle, a wineskin– praise Christ–something round and heavy that Kit’s blurry eyes could not quite make sense of. The objects variously thumped and clanked; Kit blinked back tears. “Good puss,” Baines said. “Make it last a day or two. I’ll be back for thee when I can.”
Dignity, Kit.It was what he could do to walk to the edge of the pit rather than scramble. He reached for the wineskin and paused, fingers trembling like Will’s.
The scold’s bridle lay beside the skin, tilted on its side, a maniacally grinning iron skull face that gaped open, unlocked.
Ignoring it, Kit reached for the skin. It sloshed, and he hoped it was water or ale, and nothing stronger. Still, he wouldn’t drink in front of Baines. A few more minutes.His hands ached with desire.
“Puss, be brave.”
Oh, that turned his stomach enough to give him strength. He looked up again. Baines–resolving now as Kit’s eyes adjusted to the light–leaned down, his hand on the enormous lid of the oubliette. “Hast made the acquaintance of thy friend Edward the Second’s ghost yet, pussycat? They tell me he still screams.”
Stupid bastard. Edward died at Berkeley.
Kit made a rude gesture and swore without breath. Baines grinned–a white flash of teeth–and lowered the lid silently, without even the catharsis of a ringing slam. The silence lingered. Kit lowered his head in the darkness. His laugh came forth a voiceless sob.
He sat on the floor and drank half the lukewarm small beer, rationing it, then laid his face down on his arms and cried.
I have to get out of here. The bastards have Will.
Act V, scene viii
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, inform and moving how express and admirable, in action how Like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.
–William Shakespeare, Hamlet,Act II, scene ii
It was Robert Poley who unhooded Will, much later, in a candlelit room with an arrow slit that showed only blackness but admitted the stink of the Thames. There was a narrow pallet on the floor, a straw tick and some blankets, and a single sweet‑smelling beeswax pillar flickering in the embrasure.
Will didn’t speak at first. Poley stepped back, a rough dark brown woolen sack dangling from his fingers, and gestured with his other hand to the oversized roaring boy holding Will’s elbow. Thick fingers released the knotted ropes at Will’s wrists; he gasped at sudden prickles, white‑hot pins and needles jabbing his fingertips and palms. “I beg your pardon, Master Shakespeare, for the undignified circumstances of your appointment here, ” Poley said.
“Appointment?” Will pressed his useless hands together, trying to squeeze blood back into the veins. “In absolute precision of language, Robert, thou must admit this is an abduction, and not a social call.”
Poley smiled when Will thee’d him. “As it may be.
Will swallowed and let his aching hands fall to his side. He wobbled, and the big man grabbed his elbow again to steady him. “Where’s Kit? What dost thou plan to make of me, thou cur?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” Poley answered. “You will be quite well and safe, Master Shakespeare. My lord Salisbury would never permit you to come to harm; you are one of England’s treasures in your very own person. But simply too much trouble to be left lying about until things are more certain.”
Will turned his head and spat, though it took him a moment to work enough saliva into his dust‑dry mouth to manage. “Cecil. I should have known–”
“You’d be surprised how little you know.” Poley rested his knuckles on his hips, the image of a fighting cock. “Then again, perhaps you wouldn’t. In any case, you’ll be safe and sound here until it’s possible to set you at liberty. You might try to get some sleep, and I beg your pardon for the rudeness of the accommodation. There are better rooms available, but I am not prepared to explain your presence there.”
Kit … ?” Will asked, and Poley shook his head even as he moved toward the door.
“There are things we’re not prepared to discuss,” he said. “That’s one. A pleasant night, Master Shakespeare. Anything you have need of, simply ask my friend Allan here. I’m sure you will have company from time to time.
Will looked up at the big, balding blond, who offered him an amiable and gap‑toothed smile. Allan, now named, turned to follow Poley from the room, leaving the candle behind.
The heavy door shut behind them, and Will turned to examine his cell. The room was cold through the unglazed window. He was glad of his winter cloak and doublet; some thoughtful person had tucked his gloves into his cloak pocket, and he drew them on. There were blankets enough on the bed, he thought, although he had not been laid a fire and the room, in fact, was hearthless. Perhaps they’ll permit me a brazier when it grows colder.
He pinched out the candle and composed himself for sleep.
Morning came slowly, after long hours of tossing and worry. He sat up and shuffled to the embrasure in stocking feet, unmindful of the chill. His bones ached of a morning, winter and summer, these days; it was only a matter of degree. “God protect the halt and the lame,” he muttered. “Also the purblind fools. And one Kit Marlowe, wherever he may be.”
The slit would have been just wide enough to get his head into. A black bird the size of a small dog perched inside the opening, eyes gleaming like jet beads pressed into the black cloisonnй of its plumage. “Good morning, Master Raven.”
It cocked its head at him as if it understood, and fluffed its wings. The right one hung at an angle, broken once and healed askew. Beyond it, Will could see sunlight on gray‑white walls, and beyond them the rippled expanse of the Thames.
“I seem to have a problem,” he remarked, and tightened his grip on the ledge. “I don’t suppose youhave any bright ideas?”
The raven tilted its head the other way, and then departed in a flurry of feathers and cawing when the door clattered and swung open behind Will. Its flight wasn’t quite level either, and Will frowned as he turned to face whatever the morning might bring.
While Thou art looking out for the halt and the stupid, Lord, let me put in a word for a crippled bird, as well.
And as the Earl of Salisbury limped into the doorway, Will laughed and amended his prayer. All right, Lord. Mayhap not all the lame.
“My lord,” Will said, more aware than he liked of his uncombed hair and stocking feet. He stopped himself from pushing a hand through his curls to settle them, and fumbled in his pocket for a coin to fuss instead. Not long now, and that trick won’t steady thy hand any longer.He could tell from the trembling in his fingers even as he rolled the shilling across their backs. “What is the purpose of this outrage?”
Hell and Earth pa-4 Page 21