Ink and Steel pa-3

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Well, I can’t very well wear the one pair of riding boots every day for eternity. Even my father’s nailing won’t stand up to that,” he said out loud, with a little bitterness behind it. John Marley had not been kindly disposed to Kit’s choice to leave Corpus Christi without taking holy orders. A priest in the family … There had been five other mouths to feed, and a man might hope his eldest son would be in a position to provide for his dotage. A poet living on the largesse of other men was unlikely to manage that. Or respectability either.

  You said you had a calling, Father, I did. Which had been half the problem.Kit dressed carefully, combed his damp hair, buttoned his buttons, laced his points. He wished he had a mirror to check the effect, although he didn’t mind that the shoes gave him an extra inch of height. He squared his shoulders, tucked his hair behind his ears, and went downstairs to meet his fate.

  The great hall bustled. Kit moved through Fae both less and more familiar, already missing the click of bootnails on marble floors and the protection of forged iron. He paused at the doorway, but the herald saw and announced him, and as he moved forward, looking for a place below the salt, his eye was drawn by a jaunty wave from the high table.

  Robin Goodfellow, the Puck, who sat beside what must by its chair and cushions be the Mebd’s chair of estate, held open a position on his left. Kit strode toward him, conscious of how recently he’d made a spectacle of himself in this very hall, more conscious of the ripple of hushed conversation that followed. Murchaud sat at the Queen’s right hand, his mother further right, and Kit’s stomach clenched and twisted with unkind recollection. But Morgan looked up at him and smiled as he walked before her. He returned the nod, and knew he blushed crimson when she stood to reach across the table and caress the velvet of his sleeve. “A lovely color on you, she said. Is the fit well?”

  “My lady,” he answered, with a nod that mayhap concealed his desire to catch her black hair in both hands and scour his face with it. “Your gift?”

  “You can’t go about clad in castoffs,” she said. We’ll see about a wardrobe tomorrow. And outfitting your chambers.”

  “My lady is too kind.” He searched for the marks of violence on her skin, near the deep narrow neckline of her gown. There might have been a bruise, powdered over, but he wasn’t absolute. The looking left him sick, and he could not look away. “Your lady is not kind enough. Go, take your place.”

  “Will I See you tonight?”

  Her smile was the flex of a mayfly’s wings. “Perhaps, she said,” and froze him with her dismissal. Murchaud said nothing, but acknowledged him with a wink. He went to take his place between the fool and another Fae whose name he did not know.

  “Sir Kit.”

  “Master Robin.”

  “Ah.”

  “You remember my name better, then I apologize,” Kit said, and stood beside his chair rather than trouble himself to sit only to rise and sit again. “I was overwrought.”

  “It is understandable. How fared you in the mortal lands?”

  “Miserably,” Kit said, which was an answer. One cut short by the flare of trumpets. The Mebd entered, and was made courtesy to, and took her chair. She did not seem to notice Kit, though her long sleeves and her mantle of pure white silk brushed his leg as she passed. Kit seated himself as Robin did, and invisible footmen attended their chairs.

  “I’m bid to tell you,” Puck said, “you’ll be called upon when the meal is done. There’s poetry in your future.”

  “Something new?”

  “Impress us, is the word.”

  Kit bit his knuckle, thinking. I could manage a stanza or two of blank verse between then and now.There was an oiled cloth on the table, and he sketched a few letters in it with the hilt of his blade. He’d had a thought before. ‘That most perfect creature under heaven, The moon full in the arms of restless night’— but the second line limped, and he wasn’t sure this was a time for pretty flattery and praising one lady over another. He smiled. Proserpine and Hades. Oh, can I get away with it?

  Kit stole a glance at the Mebd and past her to his master and his mistress. Morgan saw him; he raised his brows in question. Her eyes sparkled as she tilted her head. Yes. They delight in being shocked. The question is, can I manage more than a half-dozen lines by the time the subtlety’s presented?

  He leaned toward the Puck as the meats were passed, and the Mebd made her selections.

  “Why am I seated at the high table, Master Robin?”

  Robin’s bells jangled, a scent of peppermint arising. “Because it amuses someone to see you here.” Twig-fingers tapped the back of Kit’s hand as the poet broke his bread into tidbits. “Your manners are dainty for someone who is not accustomed to eating with nobility.”

  “Not unaccustomed to it,” Kit answered. “I’ve done my share of dining above my station.”

  “And what is your station, Sir Poet?”

  Kit stopped, a buttered morsel of bread to his lips. There was more to the question than the obvious: the glitter in the Puck’s huge soft eyes, wide and wicked as a goat’s, made that plain.

  “It varies with the weather,” he said at last, picking up a cup he had no taste for just to feel the wine swirl within it. “Cobbler, preacher, poet, spy. Which would you have me?” The Puck chewed noisily, dipping greasy fingers in a bowl of rose-water after setting a leg of swan aside. He swallowed, enough of a mouthful that his throat distended. “Lover, killer, playmaker, thief…”

  “Never a thief. But all the others, if that’s the one that stings. Only a vile playmaker in the end,” Kit answered, with a shrug he himself wasn’t sure was acknowledgement. What turns a cobbler into preacher, Kit? Or a preacher into a Queen’s Man? That too.Kit opened his mouth on a glib lie and shut it. He glanced over Robin’s shoulder, where the Mebd sat, and beyond her, her husband, and beyond her black Morgan le Fey.

  “When I was thirteen,” he said, “my father beat his apprentice so badly he was fined by the Guild. I thought I’d rather a scholar’s beatings than a prentice’s. I entered King’s School at fifteen.” The words came quietly, and he was proud of that. “I was too old. They took me anyway. I went to Cambridge on a scholarship. My family were proud. Some years later, I came to find that the vocation I thought I had was a lie, for the Church’s God was no God of mine. Or if it was true, then I was called by mistake. If God makes that sort of mistake.” Kit stopped and sat back in his chair.

  The Puck slid a bit of roast meat before him. Kit lifted his dagger and poked at it, but did not eat.

  “And then?”

  “And then it was live by my wits or live not at all. Tis easy to starve in London. And unlike the Church, the only thing Gloriana asks of her servants is that they love her above breath and fortune. Why am I telling you this?”

  The Puck laughed. “Because you need a friend, Sir Kit.”

  Kit looked up. He set his knife aside. “Do I? Aye. Well, then I wot I do.”

  “Eat, Puck said. You’ll need strength when you tell your poetry.”

  Act II, scene ii

  Mercutio:

  Oh, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet

  The second letter arrived in cold, wet April a week or two before Will schristening-day, after the playhouses were reopened from a lent that Will had hoped and failed to spend in Stratford. It was in Kit’s hand, or a clever forgery, and written with some care: no words were scratched out or blotted, and the ink was black as jet on creamy parchment. The tone was much as the first letter. Gold to dross, Will thought, refolding the letter and examining the seal once more though he was growing late for his meeting with lord Hunsdon. The seal was of brittle green wax, imprinted with an image of a goose feather. All carefully chosen to lead Will to an inevitable conclusion.

  Gold to dross.

  Will Shakespeare had been a country lad, where the reek of frankincense and superstition of Papism still clung. Even if he hadn’t seen in manuscript a few cant
os of Spenser’s poem in praise of England’s own Faerie Queene, he would have known the signs as well as any man, although a rational a properly Protestant mind might reject them. Kit’s with the Faeries. Or he’s mad: there’s always that. But he somehow knows mine acts almost as soon as I perform them. And he repeats his plea that I inform him, through Walsingham, of politics and players, and anything else that might befall.

  Easily enough done, and no more risky than reporting to Walsingham himself. Which Will still intended. But

  I should burn this letter.

  But it would be noticeable to carry it downstairs and slip it into the fire, and there was no hearth in Will’s room. After some consideration and a few false starts, he lifted the ticking off the bed and tucked the letter between the ropes and the frame, where it stuck quite nicely. Completely concealed, even with the ticking off: Will crawled under the frame to be sure. Then he got his arms around the rustling ticking and wrestled it back into place, poking the flannel to settle the straw inside the bag. He sneezed at the dust, wiped watering eyes on his sleeve, and twitched the bedclothes smooth.

  Mid-April was still sharp enough that Will layered a leather jerkin over his doublet. He hurried through the streets, mindful of slush in the gutters, and crossed London Bridge with the sun still high in the sky. There was no concealment of this meeting: Will reported to the scowling gray Tower itself. He presented himself to the Yeoman Warder at the main gate, struggling to hide the uncertainty of his glances toward the prison while assuring the guards that he was expected. After showing his letter from the lord Chamberlain, he was ushered through, and walked down the long, rule-straight lane within.

  The inside of the massive knobbed stone walls was no more comforting than the exterior had been, and he considered uneasily what the murders and covenants of ravens along the edges of the rooftops dined upon. Legend claimed that should the ravens leave the Tower, England’s fall would not be far behind.

  Will was not expecting the lord Chamberlain and the lord Treasurer to be waiting for him, apparently at their leisure, a half-played game of chess set on a small cherrywood table between their chairs along with wine and glasses. The footman who opened the door did not accompany Will into the opulent little chamber. A hearth blazed, and a brazier as well the room dryly hot in deference to old men’s bones. Will spared a glance for the figured leather on the walls as the door clicked shut behind him. Burghley and Hunsdon looked up in unison; Burghley turned a chess piece, a white rook, in one crabbed hand.

  “My lords.” Will bowed with a player’s flourish.

  “Master Shakespeare,” Burghley said, flicking Will upright with irritable fingers. The hand that pinched the ivory castle indicated a third chair.

  “Drag that over, won’t you?” Will obeyed, and sat where he was bid to be seated: a little back from the table, well within the cone of warmth from the hearth. He tugged his mittens off, an excuse to look down at his hands. “My lords. From the summons, I had expected we should all be present for this interview.”

  “Ah, yes.” Burghley returned the rook to the little army of white pieces haunting his side of the table. The only indication of Burghley’s deafness was by how close he watched Will’s lips, and a slight tinny loudness when he spoke. “We will speak to Master Burbage individually. Master Shakespeare …” The hesitation in his voice was all the warning Will needed.

  “My lord, Will said. Not the Earl of Oxford?”

  “No.” Hunsdon leaned forward and picked up his goblet. He refilled it from the bottle, then extended the cup as if not noticing the dignity he did Will. Will accepted it and sipped. It could be poisoned, he thought, too late, as heady fumes filled his senses. The wine was red and sharp, not sweet, but with a tannic richness that made him bold. “If your lordship would have pity …”

  “Shakespeare,” Hunsdon said. “Your master, Ferdinando Stanley, lord Strange, is dead.” It was as well that Will had finished the wine in the cup, for it tumbled from his nerveless fingers and bounced off a rich hand-knotted carpet, spilling a few red drops on the dark red wool. “Dead.”

  “By poison,” Burghley answered. “Or, some say, sorcery. Ten days to die, in terrible agony, Will.” Hunsdon’s voice, his given name.

  Will blinked and realized he was standing, his hands knotted on the relief that covered the gilded arms of his chair.

  “My lords.”

  “Master Shakespeare, sit.” Will sat. “Good.”

  “My lords.””

  “There is more.” Will leaned forward to hear Burghley’s weary voice more clearly.

  “Our Queenis threatened, Master Shakespeare. I have ordered the Irish aliens to present themselves and make explanation of their presence in England. And Essex has accused the Queen’s own physician of treason and conspiring to poison her.”

  “Lopez,” Will said. And then quoted sardonically, “The vile Jew.”

  “Lies,” Burghley said flatly. “Essex’s machinations. More and more, I believe Essex and Southampton dupes of the enemy. If anything other than the black half of the Prometheus Club, it was a Papist plot. But Lopez has confessed.”

  “Confessed? Topcliffe?” It was the name of the Queen’s torturer, the man who had broken Thomas Kyd, and Will spoke it softly.

  “William Wade.” Hunsdon breathed out softly through his nose. “Clerk of the Privy Council. Instrumental in bringing low Mary, Queen of Scots, and exposing her treachery. He … showed Lopez the instruments.”

  “Ah.” Will gulped, remembering the sear of a red-hot iron by his face.

  “My son Robert attended the hearing,” Burgley said. “He and Essex have been dueling in the Queen’s favor for Lopez for months, you understand. We had a hope of saving Lopez until Strange died. Eight times Essex pressed her to sign the writ, and eight times she refused. But now … Essex will prevail, and Lopez will die. Would that Gloriana were a man, and not turned by a pretty man’s face.”

  He stopped, as if hearing himself on the brink of treason. “Lopez has been a valued ally, and preserved Sir Francis when we had thought all hope lost. But it may be that now we must sacrifice him.”

  “Like Kit,” Will said. If he had intended the words to cut Burghley, they were futile. The old man only nodded. “After a fashion.”

  Will coughed against his hand. “How may I serve Her Majesty?” He thought Burghley smiled behind his beard.

  “We’ll have Richard revive The Jew of Malta”

  “Is Kit not out of favor?”

  “Favor or not, we have no other play that may distract the masses and offer a channel to their wrath. Until you write one.”

  “My lord?”

  “Master Shakespeare. Give me a play about a Jew. Before there are riots in London. Essex’s plot will see innocent persons lynched, and there is naught we can do to prevent it.” Hunsdon covered his mouth with his hand. “I am not a Jew-lover, but it is not they who must be blamed for this outrage.” Burghley tapped the edge of the chessboard in exasperation. Put your damned hand down, Carey, if you want me to understand what you say.

  “My lord, Will said. I have never known a Jew.”

  “I have one for you,” Burghley answered. “I must warn you. Like Marley’s—” and Will noticed no reluctance in Burghley’s naming of the forbidden poet’s name,—“ your Zionist may not be charming: the groundlings I think would not understand it, were he. But neither must his enemies be. Lord Strange dead. Murdered. And Lopez to hang for it.”

  “As my lord wishes,” Will said, and bent to pick his fallen goblet off the floor.

  Act II, scene iii

  Love is not full of pity, as men say,

  But deaf and cruel, where he means to prey.

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Hero and leander

  Summer bled to autumn, autumn to winter, winter to the first cold trickle of spring and then through summer until the cycle repeated itself. The seasons in Faerie did not proceed quite as Kit was used to them, but rather each one smoothly into the next without fi
ts and starts, each day a sort of idealized image of what a day in summer, or autumn, or winter should be. He concealed his iron-nailed boots in the bottom of his clothespress in the spacious quarters he was given, and he soon found himself moving through the court, at first as a curiosity and then as a fixture. And while he saw the Mebd often enough at court functions, he was not again summoned before her, or given to understand any purpose in his presence at her court.

  Murchaud kept him at arms practice outside, in the slick scattered leaves of the beech wood behind the palace and then in courtyard snow; then in the Great Hall and the armory when that snow drifted over their knees. Kit filled the time between as best he could. He was not accustomed to idleness, and he chafed, and paced, and read and wrote when he had the patience, though all his words seemed hollow and he woke alone most mornings. Some of those mornings, the shape of Murchaud’s or Morgan’s body lay already cold in his bed, an ache filling his belly and a hopelessness behind it. He never lost himself again, as he had after his visit to Sir Francis, but the threat of it hung over him always like black wings. He took to courting Morgan with a practiced distance that seemed to please her very well, while the Elf-knights and ladies treated him as some exotic pet. Like Elizabeth’s wizened little devil monkey on its chain.

  One cold February morning, Kit lay against his pillows and watched a dry snow coil and blow beyond the diamond-paned windows. He turned on his side, blew a jet-black hair and days barren of scent from the other pillow. The coverlet of silk and down on his bare skin, the fur-trimmed tapestries on the bed, the transparent diamond panes themselves were luxuries lost on him as he stood and went to the window. He didn’t notice the cold, and only half noticed that the glass did not lay his reflection over the snow.

  He was leaner and harder, for all of Faerie’s rich food. Murchaud drove him hard. Kit’s breath frosted the glass. You should have known when you swore off love that you would only tempt fate to bind you in her wicked chains. Still he reached out and idly drew a lance-pierced heart in the misted window, amused by the obvious symbolism, then glanced over his shoulder as if someone might have seen him. When he raised a guilty hand to wipe it clear, he saw the flurry was tapering away, and saw as well a silhouette wrapped in a figured cloak making her way across the drifts below. Ebony locks rustled unbound across her shoulders; something whiter than the snow fluttered in her milk-white hand.