Ink and Steel (10 page)

“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 for a 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.”

—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 black 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 bugger you?”

“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?

“ 'Tis a complicated story, but it suffices that all thought me dead, except perhaps Her Majesty, and I might have been dead indeed. All but Sir Francis still believe it.” He put a hand out, pleased with its steadiness, and clapped Will on the shoulder. “Art a true friend to me, Will. How it pleases my heart, I hope you know.”

Will's lips thinned around a smile. “Is there some message I could pass your parents in Canterbury?”

“My . . . No. Since I left Cambridge to become a vile playmaker, they've regarded me as a cuckoo's egg. Better leave me dead.”

“I must tell you—”

“That is?”

“I ran afoul of Poley and Baines at the Sergeant.”

Despite the warmth in his belly, Kit's mouth ached around the words he couldn't quite say.
Oh, not Will. Not Will.
“Poley. And Baines together. Did they see you?”

“They threatened me.”

“Ah, no. Will, you have to break with Oxford and Walsingham now. Burbage too—”

“Now that you're returned, they can do without me. But I am pleased to defend my Queen, and if you teach me what you know, the art of your plays—”

“Don't choose sides in this.” Kit wanted to take the other man by the shoulders and shake him, but he gave him pleading instead. “Flee. Take your Annie and get away. I'm not returned, man. I'm dead, and you'll be dead with me if you stay.” He caught himself worrying his eyepatch, and forced his hand down. Put it on Will's arm, instead, and clutched the broadcloth of his sleeve. “Some one of us is a traitor. Some one of us betrayed me, and will betray you. I trust only Walsingham. You cannot choose sides, Will: they'll eat you.”

Will looked at him for a long moment, and then shook his hand off and moved away, close to a broken-backed chair pushed up beside the hearthstone. “Run if they've broken you—”

“
Broken
me!”

“—I'll not be called a coward.”

It stung as much as if Will had spoken the accusation plain, and Kit flinched and looked down.

In the dark kitchen that was very like the dungeon that Kit had come here to remember, William Shakespeare shook his head. “I mean to choose the side that's right.”

Langley's kitchen grew hot and close while Will leaned against the arm of a broken chair and listened to embers crack on the grate. It was a long time before Kit answered. “ 'Tis not what side is right. 'Tis what side you're
on
.”

“Elizabeth and the Protestant Church—”

“The third or fourth time you're raped by a priest, you may start to regard the Church's moral pronouncements with a jaundiced eye.” Kit turned away, still cupping that glass, and ran the other fingers over the scarred wood of the block.