Ink and Steel

Kits and kits, Will whispered, cramming the rest of the pasty into his cheek and dusting the crumbs into the gutter. Errant rays of sunshine stroked his face. He raised a hand as if he could catch and hold them. Paper crinkled between his doublet and his shirt. Marley, if your ghost can hear me, I bidyou good grace. Whatever you may have done.He stopped and cocked an ear, but heard only a distant mewing that might have been the calico’s kittens.

He tried again to picture the scene at Eleanor Bull’s house, a drunken Kit drawing Ingrim Frazier’s dagger, attacking the other man, without warning, from the rear and failing to kill him. Failing so miserably that Frazier took the knife out of his hand and drove it without further ado into Kit’s eye. While Robert Poley and Nick Skeres stood by helpless to intervene? Is it that it’s too pitiful and crass a dying for a man like that? But great men die in pitiful ways. No,he decided, as the pasty settled into his gut like a kick. It’s that if Kit were to stab a man, he’d look him in the eye when he did it. And he wouldn’t miss.Will nodded, chewing his knuckle, unaware that he’d begun walking again until a curse and a blow alerted him to the horseman who had nearly run him down.

Will needed to know what about Kit’s plays had cost him his life. That had his name dragged through the streets as a traitor and a criminal, and the Queen herself covering his murder. He needs must know his enemies. Before he wound up with a knife in his own eye. Ignoring for the moment that the Queen didn’t want it cleared, Will wondered if he might redeem Kit’s name. He brightened as he turned toward the river and the looming presence of the Great Stone Gate. Southwark, and home. If Oxford wouldn’t answer his need, then perhaps lord Hunsdon would. But in the meantime…

I think I’d like to speak to Master Robert Poley.

Poley frequented a tavern near his house on Winding lane, where Will had played at tables with Kit once or twice. He glanced at the shadows lying across the street: just time for a man to be thirsty for a bit of ale and hungry for a bit of bread and cheese. He wondered if Poley would recognize him. He wondered if the man might be encouraged to drink

Her Majesty has signed a writ forbidding all inquiry into the events in Deptford on 30th May, 1593. But, Will reasoned, she hadn’t forbidden the buying of drinks for Master Robert Poley.

He whistled as he swung out, each nail-studded boot landing square on the cobblestones, strides clattering. The public house was called the Groaning Sergeant. Will stopped inside the door to let his eyes adjust, although the shutters stood open. The Sergeant bustled with a dinnertime crowd, only a few benches open closest the fire, where it would be uncomfortably hot. But the aroma of beer and baking bread enticed, and he smiled into his beard as his gaze swept the common room and he saw Robert Poley’s blond head bent toward a darker man’s in the quietest corner.

Poley, like langley, was a moneylender, and a far less scrupulous one. He waswell known as a cheat and an informer, and he was one of the three men who had been witness, in the little room where Kit was murdered.

Will resettled the rustling pages under his doublet and took the uncomfortable seat by the fire. As the evening cooled, the benches would fill in around him, and in the meantime he’d keep an eye on Poley and use the firelight for working on his sonnets. But first. He hailed the tavern’s sturdy gray-haired mistress, who brought him small beer and warm wheat bread smeared thickly with sweet butter and a pot of ink and a quill that wasn’t too badly cut, on loan for a penny more.

Will mopped the table with his sleeve and spread his crumpled sheets on softwood where they would catch most of the light. A breeze riffled the fine hairs on his neck as he ate the last bite of bread. He drank the beer leaning backward so the drops from sloppy drawing would fall onto his breeches and not the poems, and he did what he thought was a passable job of not looking like he was watching Poley.