Ink and Steel

Henry was half Marley’s, Will thought, but didn’t correct the lord Chamberlain. Juice dripped over Will’s hand, but Will did not raise the fruit to his mouth.

“There is that risk,” Oxford allowed. A light wind ruffled his fine hair as the day brightened and warmed. A dove greeted the sunlight with cooing, and starlings fluttered on the grass.

“We have enemies.” Lopez’s accent was less than Will had imagined. He tucked his hands inside the drooping sleeves of his black robe, posture imperious, expression cold. “Mistake it not. Our society was quite infested by traitors, loyal to Spanish Philip or to themselves. We’ve picked them from the ranks, but Kit is not the first of our number to fall to their machinations.”

Perhaps it was the chill in Lopez’s manner, the dismissal. But Will rallied against it, when he might have bent under greater sympathy.

“It’s whispered in the kitchens, Doctor, that your swarthy hand was behind the poisoning of Walsingham.”

“Aye,” said Lopez. “And who spreads the whispers, playmender?”

“Will,” Burbage whispered.

“Won't.”

Burbage took a step back. Will felt six men lean toward him. “Won’t wind up like Kit,” he amended. “I mean to die in mine own bed, warm and comforted. There’s no way out of this once I’ve accepted, is there?”

“There’s no way out of it now, Walsingham said kindly. I won’t lie to you: we stand only for Elizabeth, and nothing else. No Church or love of God or man may come between us and the love of our Queen. Our enemies stand against us with weapons fouler than a knife in the eye.”

“What? Cannon? Sedition? Gunpowder?”

“Plague,” Hunsdon answered. “Poison. Sorcery. Politics. The wiles of men who should be removed from secular things; the Catholic and Puritan factions who plot against the Queen are their dupes.”

“Puritans and Sorcery? Odd bedmates indeed.”

“I’ve seen odder, Walsingham replied, a shadow darkening his brow. “They are puppeted by shadowy hands. Including, it seems, hands I have trusted in the past.” Walsingham’s gaze dropped to the lemon in his hand. He raised it to his mouth, lips pursing tight when he tasted the juice.

Will contemplated his own half fruit. “And all I must do is write plays?”

“All you must do,” Burbage answered when no one else would, “—is write plays. And love Gloriana. Welcome to the Prometheus Club, Master Shakespeare. Long live the Queen.”

When he bit down, Will tasted shocking sour and bitterness, and the salt of Walsingham’s hand.

   Act I, scene ii

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one self place. But where we are is hell,

And where hell is there must we ever be.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Faustus

Kit awoke in darkness, confirming his suspicions. Secretly relieved not to find himself in a lake of fire, he would never have admitted it to a theologian. It was dark, aye, and the right side of his face felt

“Tom. Tom, how could you have betrayed me? Oh. Oh,” he said and tried to sit. Nausea and vertigo swept him supine again. He groaned; cool hands pressed a cloth across his eyes. Long hands and calloused with work, but tapered: a woman’s, redolent of rare herbs and roses.

“In faith, Rosemary,” he said, so he would not hiss in pain. “I hope I’m not dead. I thought death was meant to be an end to worldly cares, and here I find rather less release than might be hoped from a knife in the eye. Tell me then, be I dead, or in Cheapside?”

“Neither dead nor in Cheapside, sir knight,” an amused voice answered. “And you’ll find the legend of your wit precedes you. Drink, if you’ll risk it.” The cool fingers touched his lips, and water dripped into his mouth.

“Water?”

“No, some tisane, sweet with honey and tart with lemons. Rosehips and catmint. Better?”

“No knight, he answered. But a playmaker. Yes, better by far than the taste of my oversleeping. Was I fevered?” He put a hand up to cover hers, but his trembled and hers was strong.

“Bards are honored as much as knights here,” she answered. “And you re a Queen’s Man, which makes you more a servant of the crown than many entitled to a Sir. You are lucky to be alive.”

That did open his eyes—his eye, as the right one seemed swollen shut. He remembered a knife in the hand of his master’s man.

Poultice or no, he sat, pulling the wet cloth aside. His ring was missing, the gold-and-iron ring Edward had given him.

“Where did you hear such deviltry, woman?”

She was tall. Hair black and coarse as wire, gray at the temples, strong and fine of feature with an aristocratic nose. If she’d not had her hair twisted into a simple straight braid and been dressed in gray-green linsey-woolsey, he might have said she was like enough his Queen to be Elizabeth’s own cousin.

“From Gloriana,” she replied, straightening her spine like a Queen herself. “And before you ask why you live, Kit Marley, Queen’s Man, call it a favor from one Queen to another.”