“Kit, so do I.” Walsingham shook his head. “Something’s altered in you.”
“A knife in the eye will change your perspective.”
“Kit, cruel.” Walsingham’s face went white, and his mouth worked, and Kit saw him as if for the first time: old. “I would have protected you,” he said, and then quoted words that might have broken Kit’s heart in his chest. “Wouldst thou be loved and feared? Receive my seal, save or condemn, and in our name command, what so thy mind affects or fancy likes.'
“Nay!” A hiss, not a shout. Kit’s hand stinging flat on the polished desk, cupped to explode the air beneath it, and Walsingham leapt at the sound and the rattle of the ink pot. Edward II, and Kit couldn’t bear it. “Nay, sweet Francis. I wrote those words not for thee, and I’ll not have you filthy your mouth on them!”
“Not to me? To an age, surely. It’s put about that you were killed for them, by Essex’s men, or those who took them as an affront to Scottish James, a satire on his love for his exiled minion lennox.”
“No,” Kit answered, drawing breath to slow his racing pulse. Him they were writ to, knows it. Sweet Walsingham, who else should I trust with this? I must be… Another breath, a calmer one. I must be released of mine oath. To the Queen.”
Kit would have gambled that the old man’s face could grow no whiter behind the gray in his beard. He would have lost the bet.
“Kit, why?” A tilt of the head to bring his scar into the light. “The Faerie Queen who rescued me demands it.”
Walsingham held his gaze a long minute, then shook it off like a work-worn old stallion shaking away a fly. “Kit. I cannot release thee. You must plead with your Queen.”
Kit had known. He nodded, lightheaded and cold. Eleven years, that oath had held him. And now it could be gone on a breath. Like his life.
“Arrange it, Sir Francis. Will not thy Queen hear thee?”
“My Queen,” Walsingham answered, “has never forgiven me her royal cousin’s death. But, aye. She will hear me if I ask. What will you tell her?”
“That by her own coroner’s hand, I am dead. And a dead man can give no service to a living Queen.” He ignored the irony in Walsingham’s quick smile. “You will care for her in my name?”
“Kit.” Just his name, and all the answer he needed.
“There is another thing. More vital.”
Walsingham caught the tone, and long acquaintance made him nod, gaze level, and come so close that Kit could taste the wine on his breath. The spymaster didn’t speak, but he bent his head to listen. Such trust,Kit thought, shocking even himself. I could have a knife in that belly before he drew another breath. As Frazier put a knife in your eye, Christofer Marley?
“No one knew where to find me but our little conclave of playmakers. I was staying with Tom and his wife.”
“I know your arrangement.”
Kit ignored the disapproval. “Not Raleigh’s people. And the message summoning me to Deptford came under Burghley’s seal, phrased as a Royal command.”
Walsingham had not become Walsingham because he couldn’t follow a trail.
“We were betrayed from within.”
“Yea. Verily. More than by Tom. By someone who knew who could summon me, and make me run.” Kit put enough dry irony in it to make Walsingham laugh, but laughing made him cough. Kit went to Walsingham and laid a hand on his shoulder, but the older man shook him away until the fit ended. Then Walsingham raised too-bright eyes and continued as if uninterrupted,
“Who do you think betrayed you?”
“The orders came from Her Majesty, under Burghley’s seal. But there are forgers aplenty.”
“And if it’s Her Majesty’s hand ordered your death?”
Going to her for succor were dangerous. Kit let the implication slide off with a ripple of his neck and shoulder. “My life was ever hers to dispose of. I make no exception for my death. When the Queen says go-and-die…”
Walsingham shifted on his feet. Kit glanced at the crack of light between the shutters.
“Francis, may I look at Will’s play again? I think Oxford’s made some poor suggestions, and it is some hours yet until dark. And I think I cannot well go abroad by day.”
Walsingham laughed. “There’s more wine. I’ll have a fair copy made before I show it to Will.”
“Wine would be welcome. And then I’ll tell you of the Faerie Court and its Queen.”
Walsingham stopped with the wine bottle in his hand, staring at Kit as Kit appropriated his chair. The ink was fresh, the pen well cut.
“You re serious. As treason. Huh.” Walsingham came closer, to peer over his shoulder. “And even now, you can’t resist a manuscript?”
Kit shrugged and dipped the pen. “What poet could?”
Act I, scene vii
Moore:
If that be called deceit, I will be honest.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Titus Andronicus
Lord Hunsdon never answered Will’s request, but on the fifith of October, very early, a note was delivered to Will’s lodgings, inscribed to Mr. W. S. It directed him to the home of Francis langley, and it was signed F. W. Come at once. Titus needs you. Does that mean unseemly haste, Will wondered, shrugging a brown woolendoublet over his shirt and tending to the lacings, or just all due speed? Titus needs you. At least Walsingham has a sense of humor.
An anticipatory tickle of dread pressed his breastbone like a thumb. It had been so long. There was no telling what horrors they’d wreaked on Will’s poor words. Will stomped his boots down, jarring puffs of dust from between the floorboards. At the door he paused, casting a final eye around his chamber to find all in order. Behind him, he tugged the panel tight.
It was a fine autumn morning, sharp and cool, still pink with sunrise. The moneylender’s house was close. Will hesitated by the garden gate—the only door he had been shown through and rattled it testingly. It was unlatched. He glanced over his shoulder. The street lay empty, and Will shrugged and lifted the handle.
Not cut out for espionage. He blushed as he remembered his confrontation with Baines. The rumors about Kit had only grown more scurrilous since, and he suspected Baines and Poley were behind them. He slipped through the gate, aware that any observer would have seen a drably clad skulker with no right to be there.
The lemons and olives were long over, yellowed leaves drifting from the grafted tree espaliered to the gray garden wall. Will shrugged his doublet higher on his shoulders and kept on, hoping he didn’t surprise a maidservant whiling away the early morning hours with a cellarer. As it was, the gardener dropped his pail as Will rounded a curve in the gravel path.
“Master Shakespeare!” He must have leapt almost out of his boots, because he staggered in the spilled manure, and then whipped his cap off, covered his face with it, and laughed. “Oh, you startled me. Sir Francisis expecting you. He’s had breakfast laid. Shall I tell the steward you’ve arrived?”
“By all means, Master Gardener.”
Walsingham was already seated in an armchair before a long hearth banked to embers. The spymaster gestured Will seated and handed him a toasting-fork, indicating a plate of crompid cakes. “I shan’t stand on ceremony,” the old man said, waving one hand as if to include the wainscoted walls and the chambered ceiling in his invitation.
“Isn’t this Francis langley’s house, Sir Francis?”
That smile turned the corners of Walsingham’s eyes up. “The front half. Closed for the winter now, and langley has never hesitated to earn a few crowns in whatever closemouthed way he can. Pay no mind to the details of my subterfuge. Oxford gave me your work, with some scribblings on it. I took the liberty of making a clean copy,” he gestured to a pile of papers neatly sorted in the basket between the chairs, “and I was hoping you’d consent to look it over.”
Will retrieved his breakfast from the banked embers and inspected it, knowing it couldn’t be nearly warm yet. He set it on the dish and picked up the pages so quickly that Walsingham chuckled, ‘One poet
is very like another.’
It was not the manuscript he had given to Oxford, so that Oxford could doctor it with his magic scenes. Not Will’s own looping, hurried script, but a fine university italic, formal as the Queen’s. His own text in a center column, neat as if ruled, and running down the right margin notes and suggestions. A corner of his lip curled as he recognized Oxford’s overwrought phrasing. A suggestion here was better though, a sharp-ended pun and an enjambed line that ran a ragged stanza smooth. It almost, Will thought, captured a rhythm of normal speech, but left the formal power of the blank verse intact. His mouth went parched and he reached without thinking for the cup of cider next to the dish, feeling Walsingham’s eyes upon him.
“Some of this, he said, when he had wet his tongue enough to free it from his palate, is very helpful, Sir Francis. You have a good ear: I know this is not Oxford’s doing, this radical line.”
“Nor mine. A poetical friend.”
“Indeed,” Will answered. He dropped the pages on his knees and picked up the crumpet. Walsingham had applied butter, but the pastry wasn’t warmed enough to melt it. He bit into it anyway, at pains not to scatter crumbs. “He has a lovely hand, your secretary. It was your secretary who transcribed this for you?”
Walsingham smiled at him around the rim of his glass. “He said we couldn’t fool you, he said, setting his cider down.”
Will closed his eyes. If Walsingham lives, why should not Marley?
“Oh, tell me I am not dreaming, Sir Francis. Tell me where he is, that I may rest mine own eyes on him.”
“Here,” Kit said through the doorway. Will stood up, pages scattering unheeded by his feet, and crossed the richly tiled floor, and pushed the panel open on its hinges, and took Marley by the wrists, and pulled him into the parlor and the light. Will regarded Kit for a moment a compact man with a pouting lip and fine fair hair, wearing a tomcat strut and tilted his head, and finally, carefully, he smiled.
“Not unscathed after all, then, Christofer.”
“No,” Kit answered, crossing the sitting room. Not unscathed at all. He knelt, the plume on his hat bobbing over his shoulder, and began shuffling the scattered pages of manuscript together. “Ah, all this work just to conceal my hand. I told you he’d catch us out,” Kit continued, speaking to Walsingham, who impaled another cake on his toasting-fork.
Will sniffed, then leaned against the wall. “This smells pleasant enough fora room inhabited by two dead men.”
Kit laughed, stood, and set the pages of Titus on the mantelpiece, weighing them down with a thick stump of candle on a gilded dish. A wry and wicked grin.
“Die? I have died most verily, and two or three times since I bespoke thee last.”
“An you’re alive, then, what need have these of me?” Will looked at Walsingham guiltily, but the old man seemed not to hear.
Instead, he closed spidery fingers on one arm of his chair and struggled to stand for a moment, the toasting-fork still in his other hand. Kit crossed to him without thinking and lifted him to his feet, a strong hand on Walsingham’s knobby wrist, and then he blushed and stepped back as if in apology. Sir Francis snorted and handed Kit the toasting-fork and its burden.
“I know I’m old. You won’t offend me.” He looked from Will to Kit, and settled his robes with a shrug. “Kit, you could explain better to Will what we need of him than I.”
“Aye, Sir Francis.” Will wasn’t sure he understood the look that passed between the other two. A moment of silent understanding, and then Kit twisted his lips in a slow, arrogant smile. “I can educate him well, I warrant.”
Love me little, love me long.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of Malta
The door closed tight behind Walsingham, and Kit let his head roll down to rest against his chest. Another borrowed shirt, though this one fit him better. He propped the toasting-fork, cake and all, back in the rack and returned to Will. Will, his dark hair oiled in curls and his blue eyes brilliant over handsome cheekbones, his dogged nose wrinkled in consternation, his neatly trimmed beard not thick and not obscuring the line of his jaw.
Will, who looked gutted and hung in the silence that followed the click of the latch, but Kit knew him enough to see he’d find his feet in a moment. Not Will. Kit glanced at the manuscript on the mantel, the earnest eyes of the man confronting him. There was brandywine on the sideboard, and hand-blown glasses from Cornwall which might have made Kit laugh, if he had been in a laughing mood.
“Did you want that cake?”
“I want answers, Kit.”
Ah, there it was. The spike of stubborn under the man’s quiet demeanor. This time, Kit did smile, and crossed the room to raise the decanter. Delicate glasses, with a soft blue spiral design, the bottom center rising like a whirlpool in reverse. Homely and humble, compared to Faerie’s crystal bubbles. He slid his palm around one while it filled.
“I’m drinking,” Kit said, watching Will in a looking glass hung on the wall. His hand trembled and his eye was unsure. Brandywine, the rich gold of amber, splashed the marble of the sideboard. Kit turned with the glass in his hand. “Art thou?”
“Will I have need of it?”
“Yes.”
“Then no.” Will winked; he’d scored in the familiar game.
“I might have overfilled the glass.” But no. Kit didn’t spill any more. “Come on,” Kit said. “We re going to the kitchen. Sir Francis takes little breakfast and almost nothing at dinner, and keeps no cook. The servants will likely be done with their repast and gone about their duties.”
“The kitchen?”
“I’ve something to show thee.”
Kit held the door for Will. He led them through Walsingham’s well-appointed hallways and down a half flight on the servant’s stair, near blind in the darkness, careful not to stumble. They came into a room that was both close and dark.
“Hold my glass,” he said, and found the latch. There were always secret ways in Walsingham’s houses, and before Francis had survived the poison that had left him so ill he had chosen to pretend he had died of it, Kit had known most of them. “Voila. The kitchen.”
As predicted, the room was deserted, dark, and close. A banked fire glowed on the hearth; the yeasty thickness of rising bread spread under oiled cloths made him sneeze. “A homely place. For now.”
He retrieved his glass and noticed that the level had dropped. “Ah, Will.”
“What?”
“It’s like Faustus, isn’t it? The scent of charred flesh. The heat of the ovens of Hell.”
A table along one wall held heavy knives and kitchen axes, a chopping block and hooks for fowl and roasts. An unfortunate hen graced the center peg. Destined for soup: Walsingham could manage little else.
“Kit, what are you about?”
But he didn’t answer. The taste of the liquor nauseated him, but he swallowed anyway. A fat hen on a hook. Not Will.
Will cleared his throat. “I need to know how to do what you did. How to write plays that Change things?”
“Aye.”
“I do not think my teacher understands what he says he understands.”
“Know you the Earl of Oxford? Edward,” Kit said. The firelight made the room dim, but he could see the ripples shaking through his glass.
“Aye, we are acquainted. That is to say, he is beknownst to me, and I to him.”
He glanced over his shoulder the long turn for his missing eye to make sure Will took his meaning.
“Have you noticed how he treats his wife?”
“I have not had occasion.”
“Ah.”
Kit turned and leaned against the table beside the chopping block, the hard edge pressing his back. The sensation quickened his breath in memory.
“Her name is also Annie. She’s Burghley’s daughter: Oxford was raised Burghley’s ward, as was Essex. Essex, who is not fond of Sir Walter.”
Kit brushed the black silk of his breeches, knowing Will would take his meaning: the habitual blac
k of Raleigh’s disciples, matching the doublet Walsingham loaned him, which Kit had left in his room. The School of Night. Sir Walter Raleigh’s group of freethinkers and tobacco-smokers, opposed to Essex’s group as the men each sought favor with the Queen. To which Kit had been associated. The alliances are complex.
“Oxford wishes his daughter married to Southampton, Essex’s friend,” Will said quietly.
“Your little conspiracy has members on both sides of the game, then.”
“The Prometheus Club, I gather, is us.”
“The Prometheus Club is both factions,” Kit said. “It was one conspiracy, now sundered at the root.”
“One conspiracy of the Queen’s favorites? Sir Walter and Essex?”
“Oh, older than that. From the earliest days of her reign, before you or I were even conceived of, sweet William. The schism came later, and there are those in the other faction who place their own advancement above the Queen’s or England’s well-being. I believe myself that Good Queen Bess takes some pleasure in playing Essex and Raleigh for rivals and I wonder a bit if it was Essex who saw fit to have me removed, as I was Sir Walter’s friend.”
“I faith, Kit, is there any man in Elizabeth’s court you haven’t let buggeryou?”
“There’s a few I’ve buggered instead.” Kit waited for the chuckle. Will did not fail him. “Will. I said, friend. In any case, Oxford and Burghley have not been on good terms since Oxford decided that Anne was not to his liking.”
“Your doing.”
“Edward’s doing. Anne was blameless as poor Isabella, and kept her blamelessness better. And I’m not Gaveston. Tis not meet a good woman should suffer for no greater crime than a bad marriage.” He felt Will’s eyes on his face, and forced himself to match the gaze. “Tis true.”
“I believe you,” Will answered. Tremendous tension came out of Kit with the breath he had been painfully holding.
“Thank you.”
“But then why art thou dead, or playing at it? And why have you concealed yourself these months?” Will was angry, and the thought warmed Kit. How few true friends have you had since you entered this life? Only Walsingham.
Ink and Steel pa-3 Page 7