Ink and Steel

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.”

“Indeed,” Will answered. He dropped the pages on his knees and picked up the crumpet. Walsingham had applied butter, but the pastry wasn’t warmed enough to melt it. He bit into it anyway, at pains not to scatter crumbs. “He has a lovely hand, your secretary. It was your secretary who transcribed this for you?”

Walsingham smiled at him around the rim of his glass. “He said we couldn’t fool you, he said, setting his cider down.”

Will closed his eyes. If Walsingham lives, why should not Marley?

“Oh, tell me I am not dreaming, Sir Francis. Tell me where he is, that I may rest mine own eyes on him.”

“Here,” Kit said through the doorway. Will stood up, pages scattering unheeded by his feet, and crossed the richly tiled floor, and pushed the panel open on its hinges, and took Marley by the wrists, and pulled him into the parlor and the light. Will regarded Kit for a moment a compact man with a pouting lip and fine fair hair, wearing a tomcat strut and tilted his head, and finally, carefully, he smiled.

“Not unscathed after all, then, Christofer.”

“No,” Kit answered, crossing the sitting room. Not unscathed at all. He knelt, the plume on his hat bobbing over his shoulder, and began shuffling the scattered pages of manuscript together. “Ah, all this work just to conceal my hand. I told you he’d catch us out,” Kit continued, speaking to Walsingham, who impaled another cake on his toasting-fork.

Will sniffed, then leaned against the wall. “This smells pleasant enough fora room inhabited by two dead men.”

Kit laughed, stood, and set the pages of Titus on the mantelpiece, weighing them down with a thick stump of candle on a gilded dish. A wry and wicked grin.

“Die? I have died most verily, and two or three times since I bespoke thee last.”

“An you’re alive, then, what need have these of me?” Will looked at Walsingham guiltily, but the old man seemed not to hear.

Instead, he closed spidery fingers on one arm of his chair and struggled to stand for a moment, the toasting-fork still in his other hand. Kit crossed to him without thinking and lifted him to his feet, a strong hand on Walsingham’s knobby wrist, and then he blushed and stepped back as if in apology. Sir Francis snorted and handed Kit the toasting-fork and its burden.

“I know I’m old. You won’t offend me.” He looked from Will to Kit, and settled his robes with a shrug. “Kit, you could explain better to Will what we need of him than I.”

“Aye, Sir Francis.” Will wasn’t sure he understood the look that passed between the other two. A moment of silent understanding, and then Kit twisted his lips in a slow, arrogant smile. “I can educate him well, I warrant.”

Love me little, love me long.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of Malta

The door closed tight behind Walsingham, and Kit let his head roll down to rest against his chest. Another borrowed shirt, though this one fit him better. He propped the toasting-fork, cake and all, back in the rack and returned to Will. Will, his dark hair oiled in curls and his blue eyes brilliant over handsome cheekbones, his dogged nose wrinkled in consternation, his neatly trimmed beard not thick and not obscuring the line of his jaw.

Will, who looked gutted and hung in the silence that followed the click of the latch, but Kit knew him enough to see he’d find his feet in a moment. Not Will. Kit glanced at the manuscript on the mantel, the earnest eyes of the man confronting him. There was brandywine on the sideboard, and hand-blown glasses from Cornwall which might have made Kit laugh, if he had been in a laughing mood.

“Did you want that cake?”

“I want answers, Kit.”

Ah, there it was. The spike of stubborn under the man’s quiet demeanor. This time, Kit did smile, and crossed the room to raise the decanter. Delicate glasses, with a soft blue spiral design, the bottom center rising like a whirlpool in reverse. Homely and humble, compared to Faerie’s crystal bubbles. He slid his palm around one while it filled.

“I’m drinking,” Kit said, watching Will in a looking glass hung on the wall. His hand trembled and his eye was unsure. Brandywine, the rich gold of amber, splashed the marble of the sideboard. Kit turned with the glass in his hand. “Art thou?”

“Will I have need of it?”

“Yes.”

“Then no.” Will winked; he’d scored in the familiar game.

“I might have overfilled the glass.” But no. Kit didn’t spill any more. “Come on,” Kit said. “We re going to the kitchen. Sir Francis takes little breakfast and almost nothing at dinner, and keeps no cook. The servants will likely be done with their repast and gone about their duties.”

“The kitchen?”

“I’ve something to show thee.”

Kit held the door for Will. He led them through Walsingham’s well-appointed hallways and down a half flight on the servant’s stair, near blind in the darkness, careful not to stumble. They came into a room that was both close and dark.

“Hold my glass,” he said, and found the latch. There were always secret ways in Walsingham’s houses, and before Francis had survived the poison that had left him so ill he had chosen to pretend he had died of it, Kit had known most of them. “Voila. The kitchen.”

As predicted, the room was deserted, dark, and close. A banked fire glowed on the hearth; the yeasty thickness of rising bread spread under oiled cloths made him sneeze. “A homely place. For now.”

He retrieved his glass and noticed that the level had dropped. “Ah, Will.”

“What?”

“It’s like Faustus, isn’t it? The scent of charred flesh. The heat of the ovens of Hell.”

A table along one wall held heavy knives and kitchen axes, a chopping block and hooks for fowl and roasts. An unfortunate hen graced the center peg. Destined for soup: Walsingham could manage little else.

“Kit, what are you about?”

But he didn’t answer. The taste of the liquor nauseated him, but he swallowed anyway. A fat hen on a hook. Not Will.

Will cleared his throat. “I need to know how to do what you did. How to write plays that Change things?”

“Aye.”

“I do not think my teacher understands what he says he understands.”

“Know you the Earl of Oxford? Edward,” Kit said. The firelight made the room dim, but he could see the ripples shaking through his glass.

“Aye, we are acquainted. That is to say, he is beknownst to me, and I to him.”

He glanced over his shoulder the long turn for his missing eye to make sure Will took his meaning.

“Have you noticed how he treats his wife?”

“I have not had occasion.”

“Ah.”

Kit turned and leaned against the table beside the chopping block, the hard edge pressing his back. The sensation quickened his breath in memory.

“Her name is also Annie. She’s Burghley’s daughter: Oxford was raised Burghley’s ward, as was Essex. Essex, who is not fond of Sir Walter.”

Kit brushed the black silk of his breeches, knowing Will would take his meaning: the habitual black of Raleigh’s disciples, matching the doublet Walsingham loaned him, which Kit had left in his room. The School of Night. Sir Walter Raleigh’s group of freethinkers and tobacco-smokers, opposed to Essex’s group as the men each sought favor with the Queen. To which Kit had been associated. The alliances are complex.

“Oxford wishes his daughter married to Southampton, Essex’s friend,” Will said quietly.

“Your little conspiracy has members on both sides of the game, then.”

“The Prometheus Club, I gather, is us.”

“The Prometheus Club is both factions,” Kit said. “It was one conspiracy, now sundered at the root.”

“One conspiracy of the Queen’s favorites? Sir Walter and Essex?”

“Oh, older than that. From the earliest days of her reign, before you or I were even conceived of, sweet William. The schism came later, and there are those in the other faction who place their own advancement above the Queen’s or England’s well-being. I believe myself that Good Queen Bess takes some pleasure in playing Essex and Raleigh for rivals and I wonder a bit if it was Essex who saw fit to have me removed, as I was Sir Walter’s friend.”

“I faith, Kit, is there any man in Elizabeth’s court you haven’t let buggeryou?”

“There’s a few I’ve buggered instead.” Kit waited for the chuckle. Will did not fail him. “Will. I said, friend. In any case, Oxford and Burghley have not been on good terms since Oxford decided that Anne was not to his liking.”

“Your doing.”

“Edward’s doing. Anne was blameless as poor Isabella, and kept her blamelessness better. And I’m not Gaveston. Tis not meet a good woman should suffer for no greater crime than a bad marriage.” He felt Will’s eyes on his face, and forced himself to match the gaze. “Tis true.”

“I believe you,” Will answered. Tremendous tension came out of Kit with the breath he had been painfully holding.

“Thank you.”

“But then why art thou dead, or playing at it? And why have you concealed yourself these months?” Will was angry, and the thought warmed Kit. How few true friends have you had since you entered this life? Only Walsingham.

“Tis a complicated story, but it suffices that all thought me dead, except perhaps Her Majesty, and I might have been dead indeed. All but Sir Francis still believe it.” He put a hand out, pleased with its steadiness, and clapped Will on the shoulder. “Art a true friend to me, Will. How it pleases my heart, I hope you know.”

Will’s lips thinned around a smile. “Is there some message I could pass your parents in Canterbury?”

“My … No. Since I left Cambridge to become a vile playmaker, they’ve regarded me as a cuckoo’s egg. Better leave me dead.”

“I must tell you …”

“That is?”

“I ran afoul of Poley and Baines at the Sergeant.”

Despite the warmth in his belly, Kit’s mouth ached around the words he couldn’t quite say. Oh, not Will. Not Will. Poley. And Baines together.

“Did they see you?”

“They threatened me.”

“Ah, no. Will, you have to break with Oxford and Walsingham now. Burbage too.”

“Now that you re returned, they can do without me. But I am pleased to defend my Queen, and if you teach me what you know, the art of your plays …”

“Don’t choose sides in this.” Kit wanted to take the other man by the shoulders and shake him, but he gave him pleading instead. “Flee. Take your Annie and get away. I’m not returned, man. I’m dead, and you’ll be dead with me if you stay.” He caught himself worrying his eyepatch, and forced his hand down. Put it on Will’s arm, instead, and clutched the broadcloth of his sleeve. “Some one of us is a traitor. Some one of us betrayed me, and will betray you. I trust only Walsingham. You cannot choose sides, Will: they’ll eat you.”

Will looked at him for a long moment, and then shook his hand off and moved away, close to a broken-backed chair pushed up beside the hearthstone.

“Run if they’ve broken you”

“Broken me! I’ll not be called a coward.” It stung as much as if Will had spoken the accusation plain, and Kit flinched and looked down.

In the dark kitchen that was very like the dungeon that Kit had come here to remember, William Shakespeare shook his head. “I mean to choose the side that’s right.”

Tamora: So should I rob my sweet sons of their fee;

No, let them satisfy their lust on thee.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Titus Andronicus

Langley’s kitchen grew hot and close while Will leaned against the arm of a broken chair and listened to embers crack on the grate. It was a long time before Kit answered.

“Tis not what side is right. Tis what side you’re on. Elizabeth and the Protestant Church. The third or fourth time you’re raped by a priest, you may start to regard the Church’s moral pronouncements with a jaundiced eye.”

Kit turned away, still cupping that glass, and ran the other fingers over the scarred wood of the block.

“Kit, from you of all people?” Will left the chair, came close enough to lower his voice and murmur through tightness. “Sodomy’s accounted a sin worse than any.”

“What? What two men do willing is a sin worse than rape or usury? Than murder? Than denying God? I know Church doctrine.” A deprecating tilt of his head to show how well he knew it.

Uncomfortable words through a stiff throat.

“Equal to witchcraft, they say. Then burn me for a witch and a playmaker. I thought better of you. ‘The unspeakable Christofer Marley, may he rot in Hell, and he got less worse than he deserved.’ Say it if you think it! It’s what the Puritans will write. Although by their own doctrine, and I understand it aright, I’ve as good achance of election to Heaven as any of them, for if all our acts and our salvation are predetermined, how can you condemn any man?”

Will had no answer. It was different, to know generally enough for coarse laughter what men and boys did in small rooms and shared beds, and to look into the face of his friend and see a rough, kind sort of honesty that begged him to understand it. He moved some steps as if Kit’s sin could taint him. Kit picked at the mortar between stones with a fingernail, eyes downcast.

“More get at it than you might imagine, Will. Some hypocrites touch and kiss and clip and never call it what it is. But I am a lover of discourse, good William, and as I have said before, I would liefer lose my life than my liberty of speech.” A pause, and Kit chuckled. “And as I prophesied it, so it has come true.”

“No. But I would hear you say you’ve never enjoyed the pleasures of a beardless boy, who cries rape now.”

“Never one who took no enjoyment in return.” Kit met Will’s gaze a moment, then turned his head and spat upon the floor. “Oh, unfair, Shakespeare. What do you take your Marley for?”

The cellar stone was cool as Will pressed his hand against it. He thought of his friend’s beautiful hands and lips turned to acts his stomach coiled to think on, and struck out savagely to deny the image. “Is that why you refused holy orders? Because you couldn’t trust yourself around boys?”

Kit half turned back. He shrugged, and Will saw the bitter edge of a smile, as if Kit had expected no less. “Call it an unwillingness to practice hypocrisy, and another—unwillingness to abandon the pleasures of the flesh. I should not expect anyone to understand who does not know for himself; and there was Rheims. Richard Baines was at Rheims.”

“Rheims? Where the Romish seminary is?

“I went to France for Walsingham and Burghley, and made pretence to study among the Papists while they plotted. It almost got me barred from my Master of Arts at Cambridge, but the Privy Council interceded. They knew what I had done to preserve our Gloriana. I did not tell them all I suffered.”

“This same Baines who has slandered you since your death?”

A transparent attempt to turn him aside, but Kit was inexorable.

“Tis not surprising. Gloriana has said that she would rather a loyal Catholic than a Puritan: our Queen is a freethinker, for all Burghley and his son Robert Cecil would like to see every Catholic hanged.” Kit looked up, folding one hand into the crook of his elbow as he lifted his glass to his lips.

“Some of them are Prometheans. Ours, theirs. Does Baines accuse me of atheism and sodomy? Of blaspheming and railing?”

“He does, and puts about the word that you died drunken, cursing God after a knife-fight in some filthy alley.”

Would that I were drunken at Rheims, when they put the irons to my skin. There’s an art to it, did you know? You burn a little, and a little more. A finger’s breadth at a time, and never so deep as to numb sensation.” Kit’s voice was level and soft as a tutor’s, his eye unfocused. “And sodomy? Aye, and five men by turns, and one an Inquisitor. As for cursing God? Baines should know how I blasphemed in Rheims, before Baines stopped my mouth with a black scold’s bridle. Baines was there, also acting as an agent for the Crown. I could never prove treason against him, though I professed it: he swore he thought I was the Pope’s own man and not the Queen’s when he betrayed me. All lies. He belongs to them, though he pretends service to the Queen; but what man cares that outrages are perpetrated against a catamite, or a heretic, or a poet?” Kit scratched his wrist, half idly, a cat attending to its paw.

And Willtasted bile. He wished he could stop his ears with his fingers, but he swallowed and stepped toward his friend. “Sayst thou he knew of this? An Englishman?!”

“Oh, Will.” Marley worried his eyepatch with nervous fingers. Will, he held me down.”

A dark, too-knowing eye. A sliver of an earnest smile. Will looked down, looked away. Anywhere but at his friend. “Kit ….”

“It wasn’t so much different than Cambridge, all in all. I have been told I was a lovely boy.”

“Oh, sweet Christofer.” Will’s knees folded and he sat down on the floor. One hand landed on the edge of the half-mended chair. He hauled himself into it, shaking. Kit squared his shoulders, leaning against the wall, one hand circling in the dim room like a white moth near a flame.

“So, three times now I’ve escaped him and his masters. In Rheims, when he referred me to the Catholic plotters though I have some satisfaction in knowing that truer Papists caught him out before he left France, and they put him to the question in the strappado. Then in the low Countries, when he forged a charge of counterfeiting upon me. And in England, now, and a knife in a hand I thought a friend’s.”

“Can you prove it was Baines?”

“I can prove it was Thomas Walsingham. And Baines will do as a sop to my rage, can I not find the grace to beard his master. But yet the Crown sees in them both loyal men. I must have proof, or his death. Elizabeth can lack stomach for blood.” Kit stopped as if his voice ran dry. “But I see I shock you.”

Will unclenched his hands from the chair arms and stood.

“No. Tell me more. Tell me about these shadows we oppose. Tell me how you escaped.”

Kit threw his brandy back like a man intending to get drunk, and quickly. Glancing at the glass in his hand as if he meant to hurl it into the hearth, he shook his head and after three quick steps set the fragile thing lightly on the mantel. He crouched before the fire and held his hands out. “You re expecting the story of a daring escape.”

Will nodded. Close heat made his beard itch.

“I swore Bess and the Church of England blue and bloody. I vowed I’d see her headless corpse dragged through the London gutter. I vowed I made them think they had broken me. Hell, they did break me. I would have crawled, and gladly, but I hid my loyalty to our Queen.”

A sound almost like a hiccup, so Will averted his gaze.

“It doesn’t matter. I lied. And I lived. And later a few were hanged. Hast seen a Tyburn hanging?”

God help Will, he had. Slow strangulation, but not to the death. With the criminal cut down living, disemboweled living, emasculated living, hacked into bloody chunks. God have mercy, by then almost certainly dead.

“That’s what a Queen’s Man is, Will. It isn’t for you.”

Will raised his hand from Kit’s shoulder, brushed his fluff of hair aside. He half expected a flinch, but Kit turned the long way round to look upon him square. “Christofer.”

“How plainly can I tell you? Get out. This is not for you.”

“How old were you?”

“How ? I was twenty-three. It wasn’t so long ago.”

“You survived.”

“Lucky me. Unlucky Edward the Second. Or,” with an airy wave of his hand “—that Gaulish or Saxon commander. Whatever his name was. The one the Romans cut slits in, so more could go at him at once. Or was he a Roman raped by Gauls? Still, an Inquisitor. I’m tempted to count it some species of honor.”

He’s drunk after all,Will realized, and almost laughed that the only reason he had known it was that Kit couldn’t remember the name of an obscure historical figure.

“Not the tactics the Inquisition normally approves.”

A tilt of Kit’s head, and that fleeting smile, shy as a girl’s.

“It does seem a touch unprofessional, doesn’t it? These Catholics at Rheims were no true Catholics. They did not seem overly concerned with what the Church bids or unbids. I can’t but say I agree, somewhat: had God not wished us to savor meat and enjoy drink, he would have given us tongues too numb for tasting. Had he not intended us to enjoy companionship, would he have given us tongues so facile for conversation … or such a taste for it? The Church is not God.”

“Kit, that’s heresy.”

A smile bent around his scars. “I died for it.”

Will opened his mouth. Embers in the banked hearth popped. Kit rested his hands on Will’s shoulders, leaned his forehead against the bridge of Will’s nose. “These are very bad people, Will. Get out. Go to the Continent. Join a nunnery. Save yourself.”

Will set him back at arm’s length and studied his face. Flushed, maybe, but his gaze was sharp and he stood steady on his feet.

“You haven’t run.”

“I’m Kit Marley.”

“And I’m Will Shakespeare. Dammit, Marley, an you’d ward me, tell me truth!”

“The truth?”

Will took a breath. “Aye.”

Kit gestured to the chair and hooked a peeling stool over with the toe of his boot. “If you can’t be dissuaded, he said, then by what’s holy, Will, sit down.”

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute. And now and then stab, as occasion serves.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Edward II

The fire burned low. Kit found a black iron poker beside the hearth, a long bit of rod stock with a looped handle, the tip spiraling to a point like some black unicorn’s horn and poked the coals idly, knocking sparks and cinders up the chimney. An orange flame licked in the crevices, and Kit wedged the poker there, resting the loop on his knee. Will coughed once against the back of his wrist. Kit at last folded his arms one over the other and smiled. “You re tangled over Titus.”

“I’m horrified,” Will answered with a shrug. “I’ve got to lavinia mutilated, ravished and next I must have the Moor’s treachery to Titus, and I find myself as tongueless as lavinia, and as bottled full of tales. Hands cut off, tongue torn out. How does a man make that real?”

“You haven’t her rage to put in it.”

Will nodded. “Her rage and her hurt. Tis not something that can be set right in an act.”

“Tis not something that can be set right. That’s what makes it a tragedy.”

The coals had gone dark near the poker’s tip. Kit leaned forward and puffed air until they flared blue and orange, casting disconcerting heat across his face.

“The plays, your plays have the power to make people believe. Some of it—this craft lies in what I did to Titus. Some of it is in your own vision and tongue. Oxford writes some scenes and words, but he only knows what I taught him. It’s Plato’s magic; you make an ideal thing, and if the people believe that thing, the world itself must be beaten to the form.”

“Plato. Like love, then.”

“Aye,” Kit said dryly. “If you believe in love. And then the performance. Alleyn was good enough to carry the spell. Burbage and Kemp are strong as well.” He twisted the poker in the fire, one boot propped on the hearthstone. “There’s an art to that too: to giving the audience belief in a dream as real as the touch of hand. The Senecan structure won’t work for it, and blank verse is too static. Fourteeners are a loss, too formal. A Platonic ideal. And people will live for it. It seems too simple, doesn’t it?”

Kit looked away from the embers. The loop of the poker grew warm against his knee. He shifted its resting place from his stocking to his breeches. “But give them men who could grasp heaven, and who turn away through willfulness and greed. Give them strong kings, or give them the truth of what happens when kings are not strong. Make them grieve for men they would hate, but it must be fresh, not stylized: words spoken trippingly on the tongue. Reality is drama.” He paused, and watched Will chew his mustache. “Like that lemon tree of Sir Francis . If you can convince enough eyes they’ve seen a thing, if you can convince a man or a beast he is a thing better than he is, more loyal, more true—that thing holds.”

“I have often thought,” Will said carefully, for this was a heresy too, “—that a man given half a chance might act morally. Because he knows what morality is.”

“Not Robert Poley.”

“No. But another man.”

“What man?”

“Myself. You. Her Majesty. You don’t believe in God. And yet you were never but kind to me.”

“Oh,” Kit said. “I believe in God well enough. It’s the Church I take issue with. But who would believe Kit Marley, monarchist?”

“A King we must have.”

“A man might prefer a strong woman who temporizes to a weak man who beheads.” Kit looked at his nails.

Will cleared his throat after a time. “And … you say Titus is formal.”

“And finish it formal. You’ve an ear for a scansion and a fair eye for an image, and there’s this in you: thou fearest not to own the myth. But now you must put the fire in it, and not shy away, and bring them under the spell of your words. You’ve played my Jew.”

“I have.” Will smiled. “Tis strong. But the third act I know.” It wasn’t all the play he would have had it be.

“Write thy plays about people. You’ve a way of spinning height and depth I envy. All I’m fit for is making light in darkness, and spreading blood and bitter farce acros sthe planks.”

“Foolishness, Kit. I’ve read your leander.”

“Pretty, isn’t it? I’m partial to Tamburlaine myself: still my best work, I think.”

Will choked, and laughed, and turned back on himself nimble as a ferret. “Where’s this danger?”

“ The danger’s in the men who don’t want the plays written. Men like Baines, and Sir Walter’s rival, the Earl of Essex.”

“Raleigh is an ally?”

“Raleigh is someone I cultivated a bit, but he is not one of ours. Robert Devereaux, though Essex is one of theirs. Though both sides still use the same name, and trade alliances like chessmen.”

“What do they want?”

Kit marshaled half-drunken thoughts. “As I think it? Elizabeth off the throne, for one thing. A ruler in her place without such personality. Gloriana is the Faerie Queene. The other Prometheans, their goal is the elevation of man. Admirable. They want safety and an end to poetry, Will. An end to greatness of spirit, and all men made equal. They want to own God, and use him to make all men subject. I should liefer lose my life than my liberty of thought.”

“And our half? Our half, is it still?”

“Elizabeth and England, we stand for. Tis rough work. Even for a rogue like myself, whose works drip with gore, unacquainted with gentle thoughts.”

“Can the man who wrote Hero and leander claim to be unacquainted with gentle thoughts?

“Acquainted and yet unacquainted.” Kit shifted before the iron could scorch his leg. The tip was not yet glowing. “Tis a quaint small thing, a poem about passion Kit, it’s a poem about leander’s arse.” The iron slipped: Kit caught it right-handed and hissed, juggling a twist of sleeve around the metal to shield his hand.

How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly,

And whose immortal fingers did imprint,

That heavenly path, with many a curious dint,

That runs along his back, but my rude pen

Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men.

Will’s long nose dented sideways with the twisting mouth. “I faith, I think betimes you purpose to shock. You underestimate the wit in your pen, rude as it may be, or so I’ve heard tell. From those with more interest in the loves of men than I.”

“Rude enough for most purposes.” It was his last chance to impress upon the man the severity of his choices. Is this pen enough to write with? He lifted the poker until the smoking end hovered a finger’s width from Shakespeare’s eye. “Will. Move not.”

“Kit, what are you about?”

There was a little squeal in Will’s voice, good. And a tremor under it as Will pressed his head back hard against the wall. Ah, there was a red glow at the tip after all, like a pen dipped in blood. Excellent.

“Look on it well,” he said, watching Will’s shoulders rise as if that could protect his face from the cherry-hot iron. Kit swallowed bitterness when it rose up his throat one more time, but couldn’t quite get the taste down. A thunder in his chest like beating wings prevented it. Will’s eye was gray-blue and looked very soft; he didn’t blink, and the dark pupil swelled as if it would encompass the whole of the iris in velvet black. Will’s eyelashes curled from the iron’s heat; Kit drew it back a little. “That could be thy final vision. Imagine it. Can you imagine? Image yourself unhanded like Stubbs, or racked like Kyd, or branded and blinded like me. Damn you, William Shakespeare. See it.”

The apple in Will’s throat bobbled. He dared not nod.

“Tell me once more you mean to do this, and I’ll let it lie.”

Will’s mouth worked. “I mean to do this thing.”

“Bloody hell.” But Kit said it tiredly, and turned and strode to the table, and drew back his arm. The poker was heavier than a rapier, but he managed well enough to be pleased: the strength wasn’t out of his shoulder. A thump first, and close on its heel a sizzle. Kit thrust the fireplace poker through the body of the unfortunate hen off-center, his aim untrue with his missing eye and into the mortar of the wall. It didn’t hold: he stepped back from the clatter as it fell. “Damn you to hell, William Shakespeare.”

“Oh.” Will stood. “I can probably manage that for myself.” He came and threw an arm over Kit’s shoulder, and Kit dropped an arm around his waist. “I knew you wouldn’t put my eye out.”

Kit heard an edge of hysteria in his own laugh, and wished he could afford to get drunker. Clearheadedness was the last thing he wanted. “I wouldn’t rely on that knowing too much, my friend.”