Ink and Steel

“Francis, may I look at Will’s play again? I think Oxford’s made some poor suggestions, and it is some hours yet until dark. And I think I cannot well go abroad by day.”

Walsingham laughed. “There’s more wine. I’ll have a fair copy made before I show it to Will.”

“Wine would be welcome. And then I’ll tell you of the Faerie Court and its Queen.”

Walsingham stopped with the wine bottle in his hand, staring at Kit as Kit appropriated his chair. The ink was fresh, the pen well cut.

“You re serious. As treason. Huh.” Walsingham came closer, to peer over his shoulder. “And even now, you can’t resist a manuscript?”

Kit shrugged and dipped the pen. “What poet could?”

   Act I, scene vii

Moore:

If that be called deceit, I will be honest.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Titus Andronicus

Lord Hunsdon never answered Will’s request, but on the fifith of October, very early, a note was delivered to Will’s lodgings, inscribed to Mr. W. S. It directed him to the home of Francis langley, and it was signed F. W. Come at once. Titus needs you. Does that mean unseemly haste, Will wondered, shrugging a brown woolendoublet over his shirt and tending to the lacings, or just all due speed? Titus needs you. At least Walsingham has a sense of humor.

An anticipatory tickle of dread pressed his breastbone like a thumb. It had been so long. There was no telling what horrors they’d wreaked on Will’s poor words. Will stomped his boots down, jarring puffs of dust from between the floorboards. At the door he paused, casting a final eye around his chamber to find all in order. Behind him, he tugged the panel tight.

It was a fine autumn morning, sharp and cool, still pink with sunrise. The moneylender’s house was close. Will hesitated by the garden gate—the only door he had been shown through and rattled it testingly. It was unlatched. He glanced over his shoulder. The street lay empty, and Will shrugged and lifted the handle.

Not cut out for espionage. He blushed as he remembered his confrontation with Baines. The rumors about Kit had only grown more scurrilous since, and he suspected Baines and Poley were behind them. He slipped through the gate, aware that any observer would have seen a drably clad skulker with no right to be there.

The lemons and olives were long over, yellowed leaves drifting from the grafted tree espaliered to the gray garden wall. Will shrugged his doublet higher on his shoulders and kept on, hoping he didn’t surprise a maidservant whiling away the early morning hours with a cellarer. As it was, the gardener dropped his pail as Will rounded a curve in the gravel path.

“Master Shakespeare!” He must have leapt almost out of his boots, because he staggered in the spilled manure, and then whipped his cap off, covered his face with it, and laughed. “Oh, you startled me. Sir Francisis expecting you. He’s had breakfast laid. Shall I tell the steward you’ve arrived?”

“By all means, Master Gardener.”

Walsingham was already seated in an armchair before a long hearth banked to embers. The spymaster gestured Will seated and handed him a toasting-fork, indicating a plate of crompid cakes. “I shan’t stand on ceremony,” the old man said, waving one hand as if to include the wainscoted walls and the chambered ceiling in his invitation.

“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.”