Ink and Steel (5 page)

“ 'Twas Walsingham's men did this to you.”

Kit shook his head and regretted it. “Sir Francis, not that book-chewing rat of a Thomas, who had the gall to call himself a friend to me.” He wondered if she could hear the grief in his tone. From the way her head cocked, birdlike, she did. “I must advise Sir Francis that I live.” Sensation was returning to the right side of his face. It would have hurt less if it had been carved clean away.

“He's dead himself, Kit. Hast the blow to thy head addled thee? Gone from thy Queen's service these five years, and gone to his reward these three. However Queen's spymasters are rewarded. Unjustly, if earth models heaven.” She stepped away, leaving his flesh burning where her hand had pressed it.

So she doesn't know all my secrets. Lacrima Christi.
He let his breath trickle out, relieved and enflamed.
The Privy Council, the Queen must have interceded, to bring me here and under care.

Morgan's black braid flagged against her shoulder like a banner. “You'll want to scrub that wound with soap once you're in the water.”

“Is that wise?”

Her hem whispered over stone as she vanished around the screen. “It's all that could save you. If the wound goes bad—so close to the brain—well, it's not as if we can amputate. Soap will cleanse the wound.”

“And hurt.”

“Not so much as when I sew and poultice it. As I'll have to if you want a neat, straight scar and not a mess of proud flesh.” He winced at the thought, then unlaced his breeches and tested the water on his wrist.

“Do you care for a man in an eyepatch, my lady?” No answer, but he thought he heard a chuckle. The water came to his chin and was hot enough to make his heart pound once he settled in. A deep ache spread across his back, thighs, and shoulders as tight muscles considered relaxation. He leaned against the carved headboard and stretched his toes to meet the foot.

“Scrub,” she reminded. He sighed and picked up the soap.

When he was half dressed again, she washed the cut with liquor until white, clean pain streamed tears down his face. But it throbbed less after, and his head felt cooler. The stitching was worse, for all she fed him brandy before. The needle scraped bone as she tugged his scalp together and sewed it tight; he whined like a kicked pup before she finished.

“Brave Sir Kit,” she whispered when she'd tied the final knot. He leaned spent against a bedpost. “Braver than Lance was over his wounds, when I dressed them. He spat and swatted like a cat.” She gave him more brandy and bound a poultice across the right side of his face. When he set the cup aside she leaned down and licked the last sweet drop from the corner of his mouth.

He startled, gasping, but regretted it when she leaned back, eyes narrowed at the corners with her smile. “My lady, I am not at my best.” And then he worried at the knot in his gut, the fascination with which he followed her.
This is not Like me.

“Welcome to Hy Bréàsil, poet.” She balled up the cream silk hanging on the pale oaken bedpost and threw it against his chest. “Put your shirt and doublet on. It pleases the Queen to greet you.”

He dressed in haste: the shirt was finer stuff than he'd worn, and the dark velvet doublet stitched with black pearls and pale threads of gold, sleeves slashed with silk the color of blued steel. “What royal palace is this?” he asked as she helped him button the fourteen pearls at each wrist.

“The Queen's.”

“They're all the Queen's. Westminster or Hampton Court? Whitehall? Placentia?” He scrubbed golden flagstones with a toe and noticed that someone had polished his riding boots until they shone like his shirt. The pressure of bandages across his face calmed the pain; he hazarded a smile.

“Call it Underhill.” She tugged his collar straight. “Or Oversea, and you won't be far wrong. Names aren't much matter, unless they're the right name. There.” She stepped back to admire her work. “Fair.”

“Art my mirror, then?”

“The only mirror you'll get but a blade.” She'd changed her dress while he was bathing and wore gray moiré: no less plain than the green dress, but of finer stuff and stitched with a tight small hand. Slippers of white fur peeked under the hem, and he stole a second glance to be sure.

Ermine. He was glad he hadn't taken advantage of what the mad-woman offered, and resolved not to absentmindedly thee her again. “Her Majesty does me honor.”

Morgan offered him her arm. He held the door open as she gathered her skirts. “She has an eye for a well-turned calf.”

“I've an eye as well,” Kit admitted. “Only one anymore, alas. But it serves to notice a fair turn of ankle still—” His voice faltered as they came through the doorway. His knees and his bowels went to water, as they hadn't when Morgan showed him the gaping wound across his face. As they hadn't when she kissed his mouth.

The door opened on a narrow railed walkway over a gallery that yearned heavenward like the vault of a church. The whole structure was translucent golden stone, carved in arches airier than any gothic-work, the struts blending overhead like twining branches. Between those branches sparkled the largest panes of glass he'd seen. Beyond the glass roof, through it, shone a full moon attended by her company of stars. People moved in eddies on the stone-tiled floor several lofty stories below; they passed through a guarded, carven double door two stories from threshold to lintel. Even from this vantage Kit could see not all were human. Their wings and tails and horns were not the artifice of a masque.

He licked his lips and tasted herbs and brandy, and a kiss.

“Fairy wine,” he said, half-breathless with awe and loss and betrayal. “I drank fairy wine. I cannot leave.”

Morgan le Fey stepped closer on his blind side, resting her strong hand in the curve of his elbow. “I warned you about the tisane. And as long as you're tricked already, we may as well see this ended so we can get dinner. Come along, poet. Your new Queen waits.”

Act I, scene iii

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
As You Like It

May became June, and Burbage's prophecy held: the plague carried off another thousand souls, rat- and cat-catchers roamed the streets with their poles of corpses and their narrow-eyed terriers, and the playhouses stayed closed. Will's new lodgings were over the tavern Richard Burbage favored, north of the River and closer to James Burbage's Theatre. They were considerably more luxurious, possessing a window with north light for working by and a bed all to Will's own use. But
Titus
grew a scant few manuscript pages, and Will swore to Burbage that they might as well have been written in his own dark blood.

Will sat picking at a supper of mutton and ale in the coolest corner of the common room, his trencher shoved to one side and
Titus
spread on the table, the ink drying in his pen. The food held no savor, but he set pen in inkbottle anyway and worried at the meat with his knife so he wouldn't sit there only staring at the mottled page. How long did one go without writing before one stopped calling oneself a playmaker?

It wouldn't be so bad if the
pressure
to have the stories out would relent. Instead of nagging after him like a lusty husband at a wife just delivered of the
Last
babe.

The image made him smile, and then it made him frown.
How Long since you've seen Annie Last? If you can't write plays, you could go home and watch your son grow.

He picked the pen up, and a fat drop of irongall splattered a page folded in four for convenience of writing. But his grimace of irritation was interrupted when Burbage walked out of the warm summer twilight, crossing to Will's table after a quick examination of the room. A taller man might have had to duck the thick beams—Edward Alleyn would have been stooped just crossing—but Burbage strutted through clots and eddies of drinkers like a rooster through the henyard. A flurry of conversation followed as the custom recognized London's second-most-famous player. Will gestured Burbage to the bench.

“Good even, Will. I'll not sit: had your fill of mutton?”

“Since what you have to say will no doubt rob mine appetite.” Burbage shrugged, so Will smiled to take some of the sting from his words. “Whither?”

“We'll to Oxford.” Burbage offered Will a handclasp. This time, Shakespeare took it to stand.

“A long walk,” he said, though Burbage's grin alerted him.

“Just across London Bridge,” the player continued, softening his voice. “We're stayed for at the Elephant, Cousin. Step quick!”

Will gulped the last of his ale and hung the tankard at his belt, then gave the landlord's son a ha'penny to run his papers and pen up to his room. The leftover mutton and trencher would be given as alms to the poor or—more likely—go into the stewpot. He wiped moisture from his palms onto the front of his breeches and took Burbage's arm. “I feel as if I'm summoned by a patron, and I shall have to confess so little done on
Titus
—”

“
Titus
this and
Titus
that.” Burbage led him north. “Vex me not with
Titus
. What thorn is in your paw on that damned play?”

The houses and shops lining London Bridge came into view. Will checked his stride as the foot traffic clotted, keeping one hand on his purse. Stones clattered under hooves and boots. Will squared his shoulders, hooked thumbs in his belt, and charged forward so abruptly that Burbage struggled to pace him, bobbing like a bubble in an eddy in his wake.

“Will!”

Will shook his head as Burbage caught his elbow.

“Will, what is it?”

Will jerked his chin upward, and Burbage's eyes followed the motion. The Great Stone Gate loomed over them, cutting a dark silhouette across a sky pink and gray with twilight. The last light of a rare clear sunset stained the Gate—and all its grisly trophies—crimson, and dyed too the elegant wings of wheeling kites and the black pinions of the Tower ravens.

“If Kit hadn't been murdered in an alehouse,” he said low, steps slowing, “his head could be up there among the traitors.”

“What heard you about the Privy Council proceedings?”

“I heard that Kyd and that other fellow—Richard Baines—named him as the author of heretical documents. That he stood accused of atheism, sodomy, and worse.”

“Kyd under torture,” Burbage amended, tugging Will's arm. “Baines—someday I'll tell you about Baines.”

Will had almost to be dragged several shuffling steps before he was walking on his own. “I've writ not a good word since.”

It was Burbage's turn to stumble. “Will.”

Will rested a hand on Richard's shoulder. “What?”

“You know what Kit was charged with. Sayst thou you know something of the truth of those allegations?”

Will knew his eyes must be big as the paving stones underfoot, his face red as the sunset painting the Gate. “Regarding Kit's alleged sins, I'll not doubt it. But no, I'm not likely to be charged the same. We shared the room for prudence's sake.”

“Then what?”

A shrug and a sigh. “We were friends. His hand was on my
Henry
VI
, thou knowest, and mine in his
Edward III
. If he can come to such an end, whose Muse dripped inspiration upon his brow as the jewels of a crown drip light—what does that bode for poorer talents?”

“Poorer talents?” They were swept up in the tide of pedestrians before they had gone three steps, in the stench of the Thames, in the rattle of coach-wheels and the blurred notes of poorly fingered music: the sprawl and brawl of London. “Not so, Will. You've an ear on you for cleverness and character better than Kit's. And you're funnier.”

“I can't match his technique. Or his passion.”

“No. But technique can be learned, and you won't, perchance, end your life drunken and leaking out your brains on some table in a supperhouse. If Kit had the patience and sense of a Will—” He raised his hand to forestall Will's retort.

Will's shoulders fell as the air seeped from his lungs. “I listen, Master Burbage.”

They came out of the shadow of the Gate and its burden. “The Privy Council would have cleared him, Master Shakespeare. As it's done every time before: with a wave of the hand, words behind closed doors, and a writ signed by five or seven of the Queen's best men, Kit Marley goes free where another man would go to Tyburn. How many men charged with heresy and sedition are free to rent a mare and ride to Deptford, and not on a rack in the Tower? And you'll be afforded the same protection.”

“And the same enemies.” But it wasn't just the danger of his own position, or the unwritten things twisting in his brain. He plainly missed Kit.

“You'll make enemies any way you slice it, with your talent. Ah, here we are.” Burbage pointed to the scarred sign hanging over a green-painted door, and then led Will down a dim, stinking alley toward the back, where a wobbling wooden stair brought them to the second story. Will clutched the whitewashed railing convulsively, despite the prodding splinters. Although, if the whole precarious construction tumbled down, a death grip on the banister couldn't save him.