Ink and Steel

Act I, scene v

Mercutio:

Thou art like one of those fellows that when he

enters the confines of a tavern claps me his sword

upon the table and says God send me no need of thee!

and by the operation of the second cup draws it on the drawer,

when indeed there is no need.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet

June stretched through the heat of summer into August, until Will leaned against the wall beyond Oxford’s patterned study door, a sheaf of poems clutched in his hand, and fumed. Oxford’s words rang in Will’s head.

“Walsingham has Titus. It’s good for what you have of it. Pray for an end to the plague, and write me an end to the play.”

“I didn’t give the play to Walsingham,” Will fumed. “I gave it you for comment, good my lord”

He bit his tongue against a curse and realized his hands were bending the paper his poems were scribbled on. Hastily, he smoothed them against his knee, and eyed Oxford’s penmanship on the page, tidier than his own spiraling squiggles when his brain outran his hand. Will folded the papers once in his hand. God send me no worse patron than a frustrated poet, he murmured, and headed out. A housemaid opened the side door for Will. Satisfied that the ink had dried, he tucked the pages into his doublet, rubbing his eyes against brightness as he stepped into the street. He bought a pasty from a market stall and ate it standing in the lee of a half-timbered house, beside the garden wall. A ribsprung calico peered at him from a roof angle and dared to mew. The plague chasers will be on thee, Will observed. Mind you hide your face, Malken, or your kits will starve without a mother. He worried a bit of mutton loose from his lunch and tossed it to the tiles beside her paws: she flinched, expecting a stone, then grabbed the morsel and was gone.

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.

Poley, who was drinking wine without water and eating beef like a man of prosperity. And who seemed to have set up shop in that particular corner of the Sergeant, given the number of men who came and went near him in ones and twos and sometimes threes. Some sat for a game of tables or draughts or diced a bit, while some merely quaffed a drink and spent a few moments in quiet conversation. Will wasn’t sure quite when, but after the third or fourth visit, he started jotting descriptions and the one or two names he knew Gardner, Justice of the Peace for Southwark. Oh, really? on the reverse of a sonnet that began ‘Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye’. He kept another sheet handy to drag across the paper. He and Kit had run in different circles, away from their connection to the theatre and the financial straits that had occasioned sharing lodgings and companies, the Admiral’s Men and lord Strange’s Men, for whom they both wrote plays.

Will didn’t know most of Poley’s associates. But Poley was one of the men who had been in that small room where Kit had died.

Poley never passed more than a glance in his direction in the brief gaps between guests. Will noticed that such patrons as did not seek Poley avoided him; he surmised that this was as much to do with Poley’s own reputation as the company he kept. The visitors seemed to come and go at regulated intervals. As the sun set and the moon rose, Will gathered up his courage and took a single deep breath. He spindled his poems lengthwise preparatory to tucking them back inside his doublet. That accomplished, he was making his way to the landlady to purchase ale for himself and wine for Poley when he saw a face he did recognize, and froze.

Richard Baines. A tall, fair man with a saddler’s forearms, a cleric’s smile, and a poison pen. Blessing his dull brown doublet and the darkness of his hair, Will stepped back into the shadows beside the bar, watching as Poley rose to meet his newest guest which Will had not seen him do before until the two heads leaned together, fair and fair. They embraced, and Will saw the glitter of a band on Baines thumb, a gold circle surrounding an inset of some darker metal, like the one Oxford wore. The flash of it drew Will’s eye to an odd-shaped scar on the base of the thumb, a string of pale knots like pearls.

Baines, Will knew through Kit and Thomas Kyd, and Baines would recognize him. But the men weren’t looking, so Will turned as if watching the landlady go shutter the windows, ducked to swing his hair across his profile, and started for the door.

Why is Robert Poley, who stood by when a knife went in Kit’s eye, talking to Richard Baines, who puts a knife to his reputation now that the man is dead?

For it was Baines who had written a note to the Privy Council that might have seen Kit hanged for heresy.

Salty sourness filled Will’s mouth, and he hesitated a moment and stole one final glance, thinking it safe enough with Baines back to the room.

But he found himself staring directly into Poley’s eyes, as if the man had been tracking his motion across the room. Will froze like a doe at the crack of a twig as Poley’s hand went out to rest on Baines thick forearm. Baines turned, and both men began to stand, and Will took one more hasty step toward the door before Baines mocking baritone arrested his motion like a bullwhip flicked at his nose.

“Well, well.” The big man swung a leg over his bench as he turned and stood. “William Shake-scene. Come sniffing after better company now that yourfancy-boy’s dead?”

Will stepped diagonally toward the door. “I was after supper,” he said, wishing himself better armed than with a handspan beltknife. “And I’ve had it. Good even to you, Master Baines, and I’ll thank you not to idly insult me.” Some impulse made him step forward and add, “Or slander my friends, sirrah.”

Benches scraped on planks as the Sergeant’s custom recognized a brewing fight.

“Friends,” Baines answered with a sneer. “That’s not what they call it that I ever heard. What will you do for a living now, you poor excuse of a playmaker? Without that drunken sodomite Marley to doctor your work and bugger…”

Will opened his mouth to interrupt, but a determined, feminine voice overrode the first rumble of his retort.

“Master Poley.” The landlady stepped between Will and Baines, ample hands on her ample hips, and tilted her head to glare around Baines broad shoulder at Poley. “You will control your friend. I’ll not have any man driving off custom.”

“Mistress Mathews,” Poley said, and he laid a hand on Baines arm. “As you wish it.” But his eyes met Will’s quite plainly, and the glare that followed Will to the door said, ‘And don’t come back.’

Well, Will thought later, barring the door of his own room behind him before tossing his much-battered sheaf of sonnets on the table, that could have ended much worse.