Ink and Steel

The chamber was large enough for a royal audience, bare but for fresh rush matting on the floor and the figured richness of the red gilt leather walls. Will wouldn’t have wanted to sit, and it satisfied him to have the excuse to pace, tumbling his shilling through ink-stained fingers. “Will I, nil I,” he muttered, staring up at the dark beams vaulting the underside of the roof, and grinned. That wasn’t half bad

“Master Shakespeare.”

Will stopped and turned, hopping a little when his right foot dragged on the rush mat and tripped him. He blushed, and stammered a greeting.

“Sir Robert.”

Cecil smiled, sharp brown goatee bristling over his carefully pressed ruff and increasing his startling resemblance to his father. His robes fell in rich, simple black folds to his knees, his shoes and stockings as black behind them. His beautiful hands were ringless, the thumb of the left one hooked as if by habit behind the broad maroon ribbon from which depended his only jewelry, a finely detailed golden lion’s head, mouth yawning to show it spointed teeth. He came to the center of the room, limping slightly, and Will went to meet him, slipping the shilling into his sleeve and stilling the trembling in his hand as best he could, but limping as well. Cecil noticed. A frown at suspected mockery became a raised eyebrow of interest.

“Art injured, Master Poet?”

“No, sir. A weakness in the leg is all.”

“It doesn’t impede thee on the stage?”

“The stage is smooth,” Will said. He didn’t ask after Cecil’s limp: rumor had the man born with a twisted spine, and Will could see that one shoulder rode higher than the other. “You wished to instruct me, Sir Robert.”

“Instruct? It had been mine intent rather to seek answers of thee.” Cecil’s voice lowered as the two men came together, almost shoulder to shoulder, far from any wall. Will understood Cecil’s choice of the room, now. “How proceeds thine investigation of Master Richard Baines?”

“Surely you have men better equipped for such than I?”

Cecil’s mouth twisted, and he lifted his chin. “I have few men who have worked neither with nor for Baines nor Poley.”

“Ah,” Will said. “I see. Why has Her Majesty not had him hanged, Sir Robert?”

Cecil stopped his pacing and looked Will square in the eye. “The letter of the law must be upheld,” he said, “and Her Majesty persists in seeing our struggles with these vipers in her own bosom, as it were, as the sort of squabbles among snotty boys upon which she has built her power, her reign, and her control. She has ever maintained and strengthened her power through the skillful manipulation of factions, and perhaps …” Cecil’s voice trailed off, as if he examined all the ways he could say what he needed to say, and came up wanting. “She is Gloriana,” he said at last. “She has not failed us yet.”

“Ah,” Will said, when the silence began to drag. “I can prove nothing on Poley, Sir Robert. Less on Baines. They are as scrupulous as anyone could wish. Or unwish, in this case.”

Cecil straightened, and Will heard the click of his bones as he pulled his shoulders back. “Then invent something,” he said. “As soon as thou mayst, but not too hasty; it must hold up on inspection. I will be waiting.”

Ben Jonson’s shoulders almost filled the doorway he ducked through. Young, barely bearded, scarecrow-thin despite his height and frame, he looked more like the soldier and bricklayer he had been than the playmaker he’d become, with a face like a mutton-chop. He straightened, tugging the grayed collar of his shirt and wrinkling his broad, broken nose at the steady drizzle. He shifted a bundle on his shoulder. “Will,” he said. “I can imagine kinder sights, but not many.”

Will fell in beside him, boots slipping on filthy cobbles in the rain, not willing to answer his unspoken questions just yet.

“If thou couldst only circumspect thy pen,” he said, and then shook his head. “Then thou wouldst bear some other name than Ben.” And grinned, as Ben clouted him on the shoulder.

“And let the first thing I hear as a free man be rhyming doggerel? O terrible Shakespeare.” He scratched with broad hands at hair gone shaggy, and cursed.

“I’m crawling. May I prevail.”

“Of course, Master Jonson,” Will said. “Is there a barber thou preferest?”

“At the sign of the black boar’s as good as any. You could do with abarbering yourself. Unless you mean to make up for the hairs falling on top by growing them at the bottom.”

“It’s the damned satires,” Will answered. “And the humors comedies. I go, I clutch my hairs in horror, and they unravel from the top and hang a fringe about my neck. I’ll have to find some goodwife to knit them up for me again, like a stocking cap.”

The rainswept street was empty; Will contemplated ducking into a church or cookshop, but it didn’t seem half worth it.

“Will, why did you stand my bail?”

“I’m collecting favors owed.” Ben hesitated. “Some playmending you’d as soon elude?”

“No,” Will said. “Come, Ben. We’ll see thee barbered, deloused, and fed. Then we’ve an appointment with the crown.”