Ink and Steel

Act I, scene x

Malvolio:

… Thy Fates open their hands;

Let thy blood and spirit embrace them;

and, to inure thyself to what thou art

Like to be, cast thy humble slough and appear fresh.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Twelfth Night

For once, Burbage knocked before he entered. Or possibly, he tried the handle and found it latched. A new habit. Will rose from his seat against the chimney—his room had no hearth, but the heat from the ground floor’s giant fireplaces kept the corner nearest the bed tolerably warm except in the coldest hours of morning—and carefully laid his quill aside before crossing the wide floorboards to answer. His fingerless gloves made his grip on the wooden doorpull uncertain, but he fumbled it open after a moment’s struggle. December cold flushed Burbage’s cheeks as he came into Will’s drafty single room. He unwound and dropped his muffler on the table next to Will’s squat lamp and the papers, where it shed a few flakes of snow.

“Will, I have word from the lord Chamberlain. He’s spoken to lord Strange, and the playhouses will open in January. We’ll start rehearsals for Titus, and see if we can break the plague once and for all.”

Will leaned back against the wall, stretching limbs, stiff from too long hunched over his writing. “Will it suffice?”

“I don’t know.” Burbage laid his hands against the chimney bricks, warming fingers tinged white. “There’s more. The Queen requests a comedy for Twelfth Night. The word through Burghley is that she wishes to see weddings and beddings in no particular order. Have you something?”

Will handed Burbage the first two or three of the folded sheets scattered across his table.

“Almost the last words I heard from poor Kit Marley were that I should not short myself for comedy.”

“Katharine, eh? A likely name. Why Padua?”

“In the cold months, a man likes to dream of warm places.” Will shrugged. “She’s a shrew no man will marry, and well, tis a metaphor. As a wise and gentle woman respects her lord, so must a land bow to its sovereign. I’ll finish it in time for Oxford and Walsingham to dig the nibs of their spells between its lines, and then for mine own hand to correct their scansion.”

Will picked up the page he had been working on, judged it dry, and held it closer to the poor light.

“Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,

Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,

And for thy maintenance commits his body

To painful labor both by sea and land,

To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,

Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;

And craves no other tribute at thy hands

But love, fair looks, and true obedience;

Too little payment for so great a debt.

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,

Even such a woman oweth to her husband.”

Will glanced up. Burbage was smiling.

“Twill serve?”

“Twill please the Queen: she has little use for women.” Tis a trick I had from Kit

“Will.” Burbage shook his head. “You know Strange won’t hear Marley spoken of, and has forbidden us to rehearse his plays. It is a risk to so often speak his name. He’s dead, man, and there’s little you can do to stem the tide of scandal now.”

“He was your friend, Richard.”

“Aye, and dead, I say again. And you are my friend as well, and quick. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Will answered, but rebellion soaked his heart. Not so dead after all, he wanted to retort. But he remembered Kit’s words: ‘One among usis a traitor.’ It could be Burbage. It could be anyone. A chill settled into Will’s bones. He tossed the scribbled leaf upon his table and stepped back beside Burbage, against the warmth of the chimney wall.

“Twelfth Night,” and then he paused, another dread setting in. “I promised Annie I would come to Stratford for Christmas. I was to leave on Monday morn.”

Richard tugged his mittens back on. “Send her a letter. Bid her to London: quote those lines you just quoted to me. Surely they will stir a woman’s heart to understanding. Are these ready for Oxford?” A gesture indicated the pages on the table.

“They are.” Will edged one sheet a little farther from the lamp with a forefinger. Oil from his fingertip glistened on the paper. “Take them from my sight.”

“Will.”

“What?”

“I had supper with Ned Alleyn at the Mermaid last night. Most of the players, lord Strange’s Men and the Admiral’s Men have been whiling away an idle hour there now and again while the playhouses are shuttered. It wouldn’t do you any harm to be seen more often: you re missed, and some wonder if you’re well. But aside from that,” Burbage raised a hand to forestall Will’s interruption, “Ned said if I saw you, to tell you this: Robert Poley’s been looking for our Will, and in the company of a great oaf of a tradesman, blond as a Dane.”

Burbage mimicked Alleyn’s sonorous tones perfectly. Will would have laughed if he hadn’t recognized the description.

“Baines. Looking for me? Did Poley say why?”

“As it was Poley, I assumed you owed him money and he’d come to take it out of your back in one-inch strips. Chapman’s still in debt to the usurious bastard.”

“No. It’s not money. Thank you, Richard, and I’ll come by the Mermaid tonight and thank Ned myself.”

“Ned said the second man was near as big as Ned himself.” Burbage’s voice fell. There’s more on Strange, as well. Burghley as it happens, lord Strange was contacted by a Catholic conspiracy. They wished to see him as pretender to the Throne, and Elizabeth … done with.”

“Strange? Accused of treason?” Will’s voice too dropped to a murmur, as he thought of skulls painted red by the afternoon sun. “Surely not.”

“No, he reported the conspiracy to Burghley, and Burghley who has no fondness for Catholics of any stripe will use the information as best befits the Queen. All is well.”

What of the loyal Catholics who will be punished as well as the guilty?But Will didn’t say it, although he counted the silence more of a betrayal than failing to defend Kit. There was no way to raise Kit’s supposition that the Catholic enemy were not Catholic at all, not at their deepest roots. Because the man was, as far as Burbage knew, six months dead. Will comforted himself that Walsingham should know it, if Burbage didn’t.

“But by that action,” Burbage continued, “Strange has made of himself an obstacle to the plotters. Have a care, Will, and keep an ear to the wall.” He tapped the boards.

“Oh.” Will ordered the pages before he handed them to Burbage. “I will.”

Flakes of paint came away on Will’s fingertips as he pushed the Mermaid’s peeling plank door open. Edmund Spenser’s pointed visage and dull brown beard greeted Will’s eye, framed in a lace-tipped falling collar. And what does Spenser in London? Will had heard he was in Ireland, avoiding lord Burghley’s wrath. But no one man in London could keep track of the politics that attended his own name unless that name were Walsingham, never mind the ones that trailed like cloaks and hat-plumes about the shoulders of every man who was any man at all.

A coterie had gathered around England’s greatest poet. Spenser held forth, one hand curled around the base of his wine cup and the other moving through the air as if he drew strands of wool for spinning. Will paused, not to interrupt the tale, but he did not miss the broad-shouldered gentleman beside Spenser, greased black hair hanging over his untied ruff, slumming it amidst base players and poets and pamphleteers. It was not a usual thing for a patron to move among his servants in the theatre. The customary arrangement was for him to loan out his livery for whatever status or notoriety the players could provide; in exchange, the players were not classed masterless men, criminals, but servants to a lord.

Ferdinando Stanley, lord Strange, turned only slightly as Will entered, offering the playmaker bare acknowledgement. But his dark eyes drifted past Ned Alleyn, big as a chalk giant, who had taken up the thread of conversation now, bony hands moving like angel’s wings. Will followed Strange’s glance and nodded, skirting the crowd wooly-faced. Chapman jostled his elbow in silent greeting and went to fetch a bench. Will kicked rushes aside so they wouldn’t snag under the wooden legs when he dragged his prize back. The other men gave him room to sit beside his patron. Strange himself waved for the wine, never disrupting the flow of Ned’s monologue.

“My lord.” Will poured two cups as the door swung open on a frigid blast. The breeze blew Kemp and two Burbages, Richard and his brother Cuthbert, into the room; Cuthbert shut the door firmly.

“Tis an unusual pleasure to see you here.”

“You are to perform for the Queen.” Strange leaned so close Will could smell his hair pomade. A stout man, Strange, and soft around the middle despite bad teeth but his hands showed tendon. The right one moved in a manner Will memorized as a character detail, turning like a leaf moored to the stem.

“We are.” Strange hid his mouth behind the rim of his cup, the interior belling back his voice. “Thou knowest Southampton is the enemy’s dupe.”

It was only a player’s presence of mind that kept Will’s startlement from his face. He was glad attention was focused on Richard Burbage and Ned Alleyn, circling one another like a terrier and a mastiff who might decide to be friends and who also might not.

“The enemy, my lord?” Will sipped his wine.

“Don’t blanch so. I would not be Burbage’s and thy master if I did not know some things.” Strange’s slick hair broke in locks as he turned a lopsided smile on Will. “Have a care. I may not be able to protect thee, but Burghley will. As long as thou dost remain useful to him.”

“Burghley? Not Oxford?”

Strange lifted one shoulder eloquently, appearing to watch the verbal sparring between rival players ride the edge between wit and acrimony.

“Oxford was a mistake. Oxford thinks Southampton can be convinced. Thou wouldst get better odds on Raleigh.”

“Noble rivalries, my lord?”

Burbage had caught Alleyn’s elbow and drew him away from the fire. The taller man bent his head to hear the smaller’s arguments. The cross Alleyn had worn ever since a particularly disastrous performance of Faustus dangled from its cord as he leaned down.

“If you like.” Fingers against the table, a nervous, rilling tap. “Don’t trust Edward de Vere, Master Shakespeare. And don’t trust too much in the patronage of Southampton, for all thou dost flatter him with thy poetry. He’s a boughten man.

“You know this, my lord?” Will noticed the dark line furrowed between Strange’s dark eyes. “Aye. You know it.”

“I know too much.” Strange finished his wine. He inverted his cup and pushed himself to his feet; the other men at the table jumped up as a lord stood. “I am expected home to sup. Finish the bottle, Master Shakespeare.” Strange threw coins on the table.

His tired smile struck Will hard. There was too much resignation in it. “Don’t give up hope on your poor players, my lord,” Will said, hoping that Strange would hear both his words and the meaning under them. “The playhouses will be open soon.”

Lord Strange turned back from the door and smiled. “See that you make me proud, Master Shakespeare. Masters Burbage, Master Kemp.” And with that, Ferdinando Stanley collected his hat from the peg by the door, and went.

Will’s letter to Annie dispatched the following morning netted only a stony silence in reply. He meant to send a second one a week after the first, but good intentions were lost in the whirl of rehearsal and rewrite and frenzied preparation of two plays at once: the tragedy Titus Andronicus, for which Will need not only learn his roles but also face down Oxford in a series of hour-murdering meetings; and a light-hearted comedy which was finally, after much argument, entitled The Taming of the Shrew.

The clownish Will Kemp was appointed lord of Misrule chief of Christmas festivities for lord Strange’s Men, thus ensuring that drunkenness and disorder would ride sovereign over the frantic preparations for the Twelfth Night play. And between a tailor’s visit or three, rehearsals all day and all night (and drinking at the Mermaid), occasional church services and the Twelve Days festivities, the first time Will had a moment’s silence between his own ears was on January 5. And only because a thin-lipped, towering Ned Alleyn, who, plied by Burbage with liquor and conversation, would perform with lord Strange’s Men this once, threw the entire company out of the Mermaid Tavern and into the street to ‘go home, the lot, and rest your heads so as not to lose them before Her Majesty!’

Will’s stomach had been too sour for much drinking, and now, as he lay in his bed against the warmth of the chimney, it was too sour for much sleeping.

Perform before the Queen.

He sat up in bed and let the bedclothes slip aside. A draft came between the floorboards as he set his feet down; he stood anyway, shivering with his coverlet wrapped around his shoulders, and crossed to light a candle. After unrelieved darkness, the glow warmed him as much as a fire. Perform before the Queen and her rival favorites, and remind them that their duty is to their sovereign, and not to their quarrels. Oh, I wish Annie were here to see this.

He set the candle on the sideboard and opened an oaken cupboard, drawing out the soft wine red velvet drape of his new doublet. Kit would have loved it: it fit like a second skin, snug at the waist and broad at the shoulders, slashed in peach taffeta and buttoned with knotted gilt. Kit would have been much calmer, Will thought, as he picked up a clothes brush and polished the nap of the already spotless velvet. The steady rasp of the brush on the cloth helped him think: his racing, exhausted thoughts rocked instead of spinning, and Will forced himself to breathe and contemplate.

Put on the role, and play it. Turn a trembling hand into a swordsman’s confidence, and quivering voice into an arrogant sneer. I’m a player, if I’m not a Burbage. I can manage a role indifferent well. So tomorrow I’ll be a role. And then the day after tomorrow, I will write to Annie, and see if she’ll have me home for lent.

January the sixth Twelfth Night dawned with a cold that settled over London like the locking of a chest, but even in winter of a plague year, festivity could be found. A solemn sort of merriment fought with nausea as Will peered through a gap in the draperies, amazed at the splendor of Westminster Palace bannered in holly and ivy and ablaze with more candles than a church. The great Gothic hall echoed with the busy footsteps of players and tirers, servants flitting like shadows through the bustle on any pretext to get a glimpse of the great Richard Burbage, of the famous Edward Alleyn. Alleyn was easy enough to mark: broad-shouldered as a monolith, his lips moving silently as he reviewed his cues. Burbage vanished twice for not above half an hour each time, and each time Will noticed a serving girl went missing simultaneously. One sweet dark-haired lass caught his own eye, and if it hadn’t been for fear of rumpling his doublet, he might have sought a kiss.

Just for luck.

But it was past time for that, and time to be tending to paint, reddening boys lips with carmine and lacing them into their corsetry. A black wig for Katharine and a blond wig for Bianca. Will swallowed his own fear: the younger boy, also named Edward, was trembling as Will made a mirror for his paint.

“Tis only a Queen you perform for,” Will said in the boy’s ear, tidying his kohled eye with a cloth. “Surely that’s happened before.”

Edward giggled, for all his cheeks stayed white as a bride s. Will patted Edward on the shoulder above his bodice before walking away. At least your name’s not under the title. He went to have Burbage mend his own painting. And found the round little player pacing five short steps, back and forth and back again.

Richard considered. “Too much on the lips.”

Too much indeed, Will thought, standing what seemed a moment later just out of the audience’s view.

There was the Queen, her chair surrounded by her admirers. Sir Walter Raleigh, glossy in his black, leaned to murmur in Her Majesty’s ear. Her hand came up to brush his shoulder, and the loosely sewn pearls on his doublet scattered at the snap of a thread. Will could plainly see the Queen’s condescending amusement at her favorite’s expensive conceit.

On her other side, ferret-faced Henry Wriothesley Southampton frowned at the dashing Earl of Essex in his white-and-gold, who frowned more deeply still at Raleigh, while Raleigh affected not to notice. Will noticed for all their posturing that it was Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, to whom the Queen most often bent, and spoke, and smiled.

All fell silent as the prologue began. What would Marley do?The expected confidence did not burgeon Will, although Burbage stepped close enough to bolster him with a shoulder. But Marley was dead, or as good as: Will on his own, and‘boy: let him come, and kindly’— There’s my cue.

Will swallowed a painful bubble, let his hands fall relaxed to his sides, and stepped out on stage amid a swirl of trumpets, half convinced his voice would fail him.

“Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well my hounds:

Brach Merriman the poor cur is embossed;

And couple Clowder with the deep-mouthed brach.”

This is the stupidest thing I have ever written. She’ll have me whipped around town for stepping above my station.

A nothing part, a pompous lord, and Will had been playing on stage six years now. Still, his hand shook. The Queen. I am no Richard Burbage, to collect hearts like so many butterflies.

“Sawst thou not, boy, how Silver made it good

At the hedge corner, in the coldest fault?

I would not lose that dog for twenty pound.”

But the Queen was leaning forward in her chair, the last three fingers of her left hand moving in a faint, dismissive gesture when Essex tried to draw her attention. The Earl looked down sulkily, fiddling something in his lap. Over his shoulder, lord Burghley standing near to his son and a little further from the Queen caught Will’s eye. The boards creaked under Will’s foot. He upstaged the huntsman, forcing him to turn, so Will could follow Burghley’s gaze and catch a glimpse of Essex’s task. The Earl riffled the pages of a little book, an octavio, of a size for tucking in a sleeve or a pocket. He couldn’t be reading the playscript; it wasn’t published. And Southampton was leaning forward over Essex’s shoulder, his lips moving.

Interesting.

“Thou art a fool,

Will said.

If Echo were as fleet”

There was something, a pressure. Almost as if a stiff wind sprang up. But the Queen was laughing, and Will leaned on that, camped his dialogue, airy turn of a sleeve to offset a pompous thundering. The scene was almost all his, and he carried it. The prologue ended, and Will beat his retreat with a glance across the audience.

Engaged. Alive, at least. He gulped ale through a tight throat and leaned against a pillar, listening. It was a mistake to recruit Alleyn he’s too overblown for comedy, no, he’s managing it. Oh, this may work.He fretted his hands, one over the other, feeling the power rise up in opposition to his work. Feeling the play itself, its rhythms and stresses, the connection between player and playgoer. The surge of emotion and thought that bound the audience to the performance, and the energy that ran between them, like lovers giving one another all.

I should have taken out the jokes about tongues and tails. Not before Her Majesty.

But Elizabeth laughed again, a provoked and provoking sound that carried over the sedate chuckles of her courtiers, and Will grinned despite himself.

Tis no different before the Queen. But there’s a power here.

It was a heady thing, and he finished the ale and straightened against the wall as he grasped it. This is what Kit was trying to show me. This. This power. This consensus. This is the thing we manipulate. I can do this thing.

Will toweled the paint from his face, tossing the spotted cloth onto a pile. Someone thrust a cup into his hand. He quaffed it, choked when he found wine instead of ale, and turned to Burbage’s grin.

“You re a success. We re a success.” Will embraced Richard. His own shirt was transparent with sweat when he stripped it over his head, and he wet a cloth and wiped the salt from his chest.

Burbage, of course, looked pressed and dapper. “Hand me my clean shirt, wouldst thou? We must go be charming and earn our bread.”

“As long as tis Kemp singing for his supper, not thee.”

“What? I am a very nightingale.” Will tucked the shirt into his breeches and pulled his doublet on.

“In that thou shouldst sing only after dark, when they cannot see thy face to hunt thee, aye.” Burbage clipped Will about the shoulders while Will was still fussing with laces, and steered him back out into the hall. The Queen had risen from her chair to lead a galliard. Will let his gaze sweep the room, wondering if he could catch the eye of that dark-haired girl again, but instead found Essex’s gaze. Will bowed to the Earl, who affected a habit of white silk that contrasted sharply with Raleigh’s glossy black. Burbage, still holding Will’s elbow, caught the bow and echoed it in unison, making Will smile. Richard was many things. And the best at most of them. The players straightened as the Earl turned away, his brow thundering, his arms crossed as if he slipped something into a sleeve pocket. “He does not approve,” Will murmured.

“More intrigues. He’s of the other camp, and I no longer doubt it. Did you mark his ring?”

“Nay.”

“Some of the Prometheans wear them. But then again, so too do some mere mortals who meddle with magics. An iron ring on the finger, or steel in the ear. Who is that he spoke to?” Burbage arched his neck, as if searching the crowd. “The tall fellow with the lovely hair? In gold pinked with white. The very one.”

“The one coming toward us?”

“Why Will,” Burbage said, “that’s Master Thomas Walsingham.” A glance aside to Burbage, and Will swore under his breath.

Burbage’s color was high. Will noticed a drinker’s vein or two blossoming on his cheeks, that hadn’t been there a year before and his smile set.

“Kit’s … patron.”

“Kit’s betrayer, and ours, as I have it from Oxford. But yes, they shared a house and rumor says that isn’t all, though Master Walsingham a married man. That’s his wife, Etheldreda they call her Audrey, there. The gingery one.”

The lady was breathtaking in a rose-colored gown, cut low across her bosom, a mass of hair, Will thought, was probably nearly all her own, tired high. He shifted his attention back to Tom Walsingham, whose progression toward the players was slow but inexorable.

“Waste of a fine old Saxon name.”

“She rather looks like a Saxon Queen, doesn’t she? Ah,” Burbage said. “Will you have wine?”

“You re leaving me to his tender mercies?”

“He wants you. I’m only in the way. Drag him for information if you may: he’s got his hooks in Chapman too, and has a taste for poets, I’ve heard.”

“Chapman?” Will blinked to clear the unlikely vision from his head. “Oh, you mean his patronage.”

Burbage laughed and clapped Will on the shoulder as he moved away. “Just don’t mention Marley and you can’t go far wrong. I’m going to collect our payment from the steward.”

Will swallowed the last acid taste of the wine and pretended engagement with the dance. Gloriana’s grace was legend, her long oval hands raised high as she let her partners move her. Even in her sixtieth year, she moved as if the mass of her skirts and jewels and her gold-red jeweled tire weighed nothing. She dined alone by habit, Will knew, and imagined it was as much to conceal the unladylike appetite her exertions must give her as for fear of poison.

“Master William Shakespeare?” It was a smooth voice, a touch of Kent in it, and Will turned and met Thomas Walsingham’s querying gaze. Will had to lift his chin; Tom had a hand on him, at least, in height and half that across the shoulders, and might have been wearing heeled shoes for court.

“Master Walsingham.”

“An excellent performance.” Walsingham lifted a glass; the wine it held was clear dark yellow in torchlight. “I’m sorry we haven’t met. I’ve seen one or two of your plays from the galleries, and been impressed. Master Marley first commended you to mine attention, and after him George. You know Chapman.”

“Very well,” Will answered, glad he hadn’t a glass of his own, lest he choke on the contents. and you can’t go far wrong. Oh, excellent advice, Richard. Excellent advice.

“Master Marley? Of a truth?”

Walsingham’s lips seemed to vanish for a moment. “Though he was never a one to cast broad credit.”

“No,” Will said, and thought interestingagain. “I had understood you ended on bad terms.”

“Aye,” Walsingham answered, “in that he ended badly. But tis not a topic I wish to dwell on overmuch. That was a fine play, by a fine group of players performed.”

“I will convey your compliments.”

“Convey more than that.” Walsingham reached out, and Will almost flinched from his calloused, elegant hand. Will studied it, Burbage’s comments on rings fresh in his mind, but contrary to fashion Walsingham didn’t affect any. Instead he slipped a paper into Will’s doublet, smoothing the nap of the velvet before drawing away. “Convey that note to mine exchequer. He’ll see your company rewarded for lightening the Queen’s burden.”

“It is our joy and duty, and we are already well compensated, Master Walsingham.”

The galliard ended; the dancers made courtesy to the musicians and called for drink. Will joined the polite applause.

“So I understand.” Walsingham smiled; it rounded the angle of his cheek and turned him from handsome courtier into dashing rogue. Even forewarned, Will felt himself charmed. “But a man should be of a mind to make friends where he may, and players are fair friends to have. Sometimes. And summer is coming, and my house at Chislehurst is not too far from London for a play.”

“Ah,” Will said. “Yes,” he said. “Carefully made friends are a good thing to have, if they return the care.”

Walsingham’s eyes darkened. “An excellent play. May you write many more, and be as careful in your friends. Sometimes their care can have an unexpected source. Do contact me. Oh, here is Doctor Lopez. Do wish to counsel this fine playmaker on his health, good Doctor?”

“A moment of his time, if you can spare it,” Lopez said in his accented voice. Walsingham, nodding, withdrew.

“Master Shakespeare, I wish to congratulate you on the success of your work tonight.”

He did not mean the play. As Will turned to him, he was as certain of that as he was of the mockery behind Lopez’s arch expression.

“The Ambassador honors my poor efforts,” he said. Lopez rubbed the tip of his nose.

“Honor puts no beef on the table,” he said, and dropped a clinking purse in the rushes at Will’s feet, where Will would need to stoop to retrieve it. “I’ve a word from Burghley. The word is well done.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Will said. Lopez patted him on the arm, a ruby ring worn over his glove glittering with the motion.

“You’re more biddable than the last one,” he said, as he turned away. “That can only bode well.”

Will’s shoulders tightened; his arms hung numb. Five heartbeats later he took a breath, and ducked down to retrieve the purse. However callously offered, a shilling was a shilling, and the purse had clinked like a great many of them. It had the aspect of a dance, he thought, as he stood and found himself facing Essex. “My lord,” he said, and bowed low.

“Take your ease,” Essex answered. He was alone, for a wonder, with neither courtiers nor the simpering Southampton in attendance.

Will relaxed incrementally. “What is my lord’s pleasure?”

“A word of warning,” Essex said. “Have a care in handling the coin of a poisoner, Master Shakespeare. You know that damned Portugall was Sir Francis Walsingham’s doctor when Sir Francis breathed his last, in agony.”

“I have heard it so bandied, my lord,” Will agreed.

“Hmph.” Essex regarded Will down the length of his nose, expectantly, and Will cringed like a bumpkin. There was something to be said for having the face for comic parts. “Moreover,” said Essex, “it’s well-known that Sir Francis papers vanished from his chamber at his death, and Lopez was among the few with access to the same.”

And you so upset by it, my lord, for you would have wrested control of his agents after his death?“I shall be entirely cautious, my lord.”

“See you are.” And now Essex in turn was withdrawing, after a short glance over Will’s shoulder. “Lopez is a traitor, and I do not doubt he’ll hang. It would be a shame to hang a poet with him. Good day, sirrah.”

“Good day, my lord.” Will counted three, and turned from Essex’s receding back and into the orbit of Her Majesty, the Queen. Her gown was figured silk, white on white, her mantle thick with ermine against the January cold that even the press of bodies couldn’t drive from the hall. Sir Walter Raleigh in his black hung at her shoulder, a raven to Elizabeth’s gerfalcon, all devilish beard and tilted cap, eyes sharp as a mink’s over his impressive nose, an air of pipe-tobacco and dissolution on his shoulders in place of a cloak. Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, God is merciful, was now nowhere in evidence.

“You, Your Majesty.” Will dropped a hasty bow, wondering if his face would tumble to the floor and shatter like a mask if all the blood really did drain from it. “At your ease, Master Shakespeare,” she said. Raleigh stayed a step behind and to her left. He caught Will’s eye as Will stood, sure he was about to faint, and he winked. Her Majesty never saw it, but the slight gesture calmed Will enough to get a breath, and as the air filled him, the panic retreated. “Your Majesty is very kind”

“Rarely.” Her gray eyes crinkled at the corners, irises dark in the alabaster of her paint; it was the only trace of her smile. By her breath, her teeth were rotten, and Will pitied her that. “And only when it suits me. Do you serve England, Will?”

“With a will, where I may,” he said daringly, remembering that she had laughed at his dirtiest jokes. Raleigh’s nose twitched. “An it please Your Majesty.”

“Clever lad,” she said. “You’ll do well, if you play the games of court as well as you played your art tonight. Of which art speaking, I understand we have common friends.”

“Surely, I could not claim equal to the title of friend to any who Your Majesty might grace with that station.”

She turned to Raleigh, amused. “He’s got a courtly tongue in him, at least. Sir Walter.”

“Your gracious Majesty.” The pearls on his doublet glimmered like moonlight as he bowed under her attention.

“What think you of this one, stepping into the place he must fill?

“Walsingham likes him. That’s never a good sign.” But it was said wryly, one black eyebrow arched, and Raleigh’s eyes held Will’s as he spoke.

“So long as Robin of Essex doesn’t like him as well. Tell me, young William, what factions do you favor in our petty dickering?” A direct, bright question, her voice mild and interested, the turn of her neck like one of her swans within the elaborate serpentine of her ruff.

“Oh, that is one question that is many questions, Madam. The Earl of Southampton is my patron, Your Majesty, and lord Strange the patron of my company. But my loyalty is given to my Prince, and she alone may command my heart.”

She seemed to wait expectantly, and he permitted himself a bold bit of a grin. “That portion my good wife permits me the use of, in any case.”

Gloriana laughed, showing the powdered curve of her throat, and stopped as abruptly. “Don’t teach this one to smoke, Sir Walter. Tis a filthy habit. Master Shakespeare, good evening.”

“Your Majesty. Sir Walter.” Will bowed, watching jeweled skirts soar away. A firm hand clapped him on the shoulder and he glanced up, into Raleigh’s glittering presence.

“Sir Walter.”

“Good to show her spunk, William.” That wink again, before he too took his leave. “We’ll see you at court again, I expect.”

Will stood shivering as they left him, and almost jumped out of his clicking court shoes when Burbage appeared beside him, holding a cup of wine.

“I see I danced away just in time. How was your pas de deux with Her Majesty?”

“More a pas de trois, I think. A game was just played over me, Richard, and I do not know the name of it.”

“As long as you didn’t lose,” Burbage said, and thrust the cup into his hand. Will took it, fingers half insensate. “Tom Walsingham likes me? I thought he just made a threat on my life.”