Ink and Steel

Injustice and undue accusations, your simpering Hero and her slander, your stern Beatrice and your clever Benedick united over all their own protestations. You’ll work our trickery even on the Queen, won’t you? And Burghley and the rest can go to Hell with their persecutions and their factions. And Kit’s grin turned downward and he tapped a thumb on his lip, only half aware of the excited babble of the players on the stage below.

Kit sat up straighter and then scrunched into the darkness as a tall, beskirted figure, her gray-streaked hair almost the same mousy shade as Kit’s bound up on her head and her dress sagging at the bindings as if it had been worn for hard travel.

She scanned the galleries imperiously; he caught a breath in his teeth and held it, didn’t let it slip until her eye was past. One last voice, Will’s rose above the abruptly stilling clamor from the stage. He must have his back to the yard.

But Kit didn’t drop his eyes from Annie Shakespeare’s face to see Will turn. Didn’t look away from the Amazon’s form as she set her heel and laid each palm softly on the curve of a hip. Tilting her head, the smile in her eyes never touching her lips. Will must be looking by now, by the utter silence in the stage and yard. By the way Annie angled her chin up, to command a glance across the packed earth and cinders and up the five-foot lift of the stage. She drew a breath. Kit saw her shoulders settle as her bosom rose and opened her mouth and never got a word into the air, as a whooping Will Shakespeare piled off the stage and swept her off her feet and spun her up in the air.

And that’s as good a distraction as I’m like to get, Kit thought, and slipped away down the stair into the drawing twilight, whistling to himself when his elf-booted foot met the dusty cobbles of the road.

Some hours later, footsore and sweltering, he stepped back into the doorway of a shuttered cookshop across the alley from a tavern he’d stay away from if he had any sense at all: the Groaning Sergeant, Mistress Mathews sole domain. He leaned into the shadows, trusting the cloak to hide the outline of his body against the brown wood of the door, lifting the pommel of his sword to tip the scabbard straight so it wouldn’t tap the wall. He sighed. Francis could help me. If I had the wit to go to his house from Faerie, and speak to him straightaway. I’ll never find my way in now. But then I wouldn’t have seen the play.

Men came and went. Kit stretched against the wall as the hours drifted by, keeping himself awake through force of will and force of habit. Traffic was steady; the Sergeant’s clientele stayed awake late. When the lights within flickered out longer after curfew than the law, speaking strictly, allowed and the custom left, he did permit himself to slide down against the door frame and doze. But no more than doze; even if no enemy found him, it would profit him little to be taken and jailed as a vagrant, a masterless man. Toward morning, he crept from his vantage and forced the cellar on a house which had been boarded up for the summer, abandoned to the threat of plague as the residents guested with some relative or country friend. He stole a meager supper from a few forgotten pots of preserves, and slept. Curfew found him again lurking in the shadows with a clear view of the Sergeant.

Kit’s patience was rewarded sometime in the blessedly cool hours before matins, as he shifted the cloak and his sweat-lank hair off his neck. The smells of morning baking filled the air, and his stomach grumbled. Tis been too long since you went hungry, Marley. You re soft.

But then a figure emerged from the alleyway beside the Sergeant and with an unconcerned glance at the apparent derelict in the doorway opposite slipped inside. A tall man, hair platinum in the pre-dawn, hands broad even for his frame.

Richard Baines.

Kit unwound his fingers from the hilt of his rapier. He checked the sky, cocking an ear for church bells, and decided discretion might serve better than boldness. At least clouds were gathering: a not-unexpected stroke of luck, given the chill wetness of the summer, but it would make his cloak less unlikely and Baines easier to shadow.