Ink and Steel

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 moir : 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

Touchstone:

When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a

man’s good wit seconded with the forward child

Understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a

great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would

the gods had made thee poetical.

Audrey:

I do not know what “poetical” is. Is it honest in

deed and word? Is it a true thing?

Touchstone:

No, truly, for the truest poetry is the most

feigning; and lovers are given to poetry, and what

they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign.

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 piles 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 ink bottle 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.