Ink and Steel

Act II, scene xvi

O absence! what a torment wouldst thou prove …

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 39

October, 1597

I should have burned this letter. I should write no more. I know now I’m writing not to thee, but to myself. Still I imagine I might see thee again. But I am a poet, & poets are liars, as Ben Jonson—you would have hated Ben, sweet Kit—reminded me over supper at the Mermaid yesterday. Still, I’ve managed to hold my peace a year. Perhaps I am learning independence after all. That was what sent thee back to Faerie so hastily, wasn’t it, my friend? The worry that Tom & I wouldn’t stand alone. Thou wert probably right. There is the usual news, fair & foul. Mary & Robin are well. Robin tall as a weed, & Mary we’ve found work as a seamstress with the lord Chamberlain’s Men. We’re the lord Chamberlain’s Men again, George Carey lord Hunsdon has taken his father’s old place in the wake of Cobham’s death, God rest his eternal soul, merrily, & in a place where entertainments are shown daily, much may it chafe him. Oh, Kit, the litany of the dead grows long. The gossip might as well grow on trees. Gabriel Spencer, who I mentioned when I wrote you last, killed a man in a duel before Christmas. And he and Ben Jonson were arrested in July. Ben says Spencer’s a secret Catholic, not that that means overmuch, but it doesn’t ease my suspicions that he’s Promethean. James Burbage died in February; Richard & his brother Cuthbert head the company now. We had to tour last summer, & next summer again likely. There’s lease trouble with the Theatre: we shall have to relocate & though they have purchased the indoor theatre at Blackfriars (the one that was used by Chapman’s boy company, from whence so many of our apprentices on the common stage did come) a lawsuit by the neighbors there keeps us from using it. I suspect Baines. Or Oxford, more likely. Not that there’s a blade’s width between them. Annie bought me only the second-biggest house in Stratford, after all: she’s moved the whole family therein. My father was awarded arms in London last fall. Life seems to go on most merrily, & yet I find nothing in it to put my teeth in. Perhaps because I have lost one or two. Ned Alleyn has left playing, for good he says, & truly he has everything a man could want from it. I think he finds the modern masques & satires as wearying as I do, & misses thy pen & thy wit, sweet Christofer. Truly, he & thee were a match. Half the new satires have no play behind them but a series of jibes. Or perhaps I am old & out of fashion. Although my plays do very well. I include my Midsummer Night’s Dream, a foul copy, forgive me on the thought it might amuse thy mistress a little. Thou shalt judge if it is fit for her eyes. Thou wilt however be amused to know Ned’s still wearing that cross and since mine encounter with the Devil claiming he appeared at Faustus (I had heard the story but never credited it) September last, I’m inclined to wear one of mine own. The other news is not so cheerful. Thou wilt however laugh, I can see thee laughing to know that Her Majesty clouted Essex alongside the head recently when Essex turned his back on her. She created your old patron, the lord Admiral, Earl of Nottingham after Cadiz, & Essex was outraged that he, the Queen’s favorite, should be passed over. Burghley says he nearly drew his sword on the Queen, & the lord Admiral, now Nottingham pinned him to the floor before he could clear the scabbard, thus saving Essex’s life. Pity. My Richard II has been pirated, & I recognize the draft of the manuscript I circulated through mine old patron Southampton & his friends. I shall not make that mistake again. Sleeping, waking, heart beating or cold in earth, tis all the same. I’ve no taste for anything of late but putting words on paper. Kemp claims I must have taken a pox, I have so little will for sport. Mary’s a relief. The plays go well. I write better when I’m unhappy. There’s comfort in that of a sort. I fear I am growing old. Four & a half years ago I was young, Kit. The age most men are when they marry. My career ahead of me, London bright, Gloriana strong. Thou wert alive, & we were rivals and chambermates. The poetry we were going to write, each of us outdoing the other!

Now I am famous & a gentleman with a fine house. Edmund my brother is with us in London now: he said he could not bear to stay in Stratford. He’s a hired man with another company not with the Chamberlain’s, he said he wished to make his own way & I cannot grudge it &

Well. I’ll leave this on the mantel tonight, again, and again you will not take it. Nay, enough. More later, perhaps. As the spirit moves me.

The place on the Mermaid’s weathered door where a hand might rest to make it open was refined smooth and fair, the wood so oiled with the grease of men’s palms that it retained a fine polish although its sea-blue paint was worn into the grain.

Will found the spot and pushed, holding it wide to let little Mary slip through before him. A few ragged voices greeted them, rising from an enclave of players in the corner by the fire, half under the gallery. The October afternoon was gone chilly as the sun slipped behind a layer of overcast unlikely to bring desperately needed rain. Mary headed for the publican as Burbage waved Will to a cluster of benches maintained by the other Wills, Sly and Kemp, along with the amiable, red-goateed playmender John Fletcher, whose unbuttoned red doublet made him look like a fashion-conscious demon, and Kit’s old collaborator Thomas Nashe with his ridiculous curls.

Will limped close enough to speak in a normal tone.

“Wills. Jack, Tom, Richard.” They embraced and kissed him before he sat, which eased Will’s sore heart. He hadn’t the spleen to be angry when they treated him like Italian glass; it was, he knew, a measure of their love.

“A spare crowd tonight. Tom, you’re neither in the country nor in jail.” It had been a play called The Isle of Dogs that had seen Nashe flee London before he could be locked away on suspicion of sedition; Will glanced around the Mermaid for its second author, Ben Jonson. These satirists sailed very close to the wind. Admirable but the wind changed frequently.

“Not jailed, and drinking to it. Chapman claims he’s close to ending his revisions on Master Marley’s Hero, and he’ll be along when tis finished.” Fletcher’s eyes sparkled above his freckled cheeks, a comment on the likeliness of that.

Nashe snorted into his wine. “Kit’s four years dead. I think he would have had the poem finished in a month at most”

“Chapman has to be sure he’s eradicated all the bawdy bits. It takes a while to find them all, it being Kit’s work,” Will replied, dropping into a chair as laughter rose around him. He waited for the pause, and filled it to an approving roar, “and for George, longer than most. Where’s the bricklayer, Tom?]

Nashe tapped a pipe out on the edge of the table and twisted a knife in its clay bowl. “Ben? Still jailed.”

“No one stood his bail?”

Burbage, stretching until his shoulders cracked. “Henslowe loaned him four pound to eat on.”

“Four pound? At what rate?” Will raised an eyebrow.

Fletcher laughed. “Better than borrowing from Poley.”

“Aye, at least with Henslowe you’ll see the money and not a pile of lute strings you re supposed to sell to recoup.”

Mary came to the table balancing two mugs of thick ale, and Nashe let whatever else he might have been about to say about Robert Poley’s moneylending practices die in his throat. Mary perched on Burbage’s knee and kept one mug for herself, sliding the other neatly to Will. He cupped it, too cheerfully tired to think of fighting to swallow. The mug was cool from the cellar.

“I’ll stand Ben’s bail. How bad can it be?”

“Fifteen pound.” Nashe drained his wine.

“Significant. I’ll go tomorrow. I want him to owe me a favor.”

“You’ll have him teach you satire?” Will Sly was sly enough, on the rare occasions when he troubled himself to add to the conversation.

Will snorted. “Something like that. Richard, especially for you I come with fair news to tide us through a cold winter.”

Burbage’s head came up. “The playhouses. Yes, my merry men.”

“Hah!” That from Burbage, who slammed his fist on the trestle and kissed Mary hard enough to spill her ale.

Every man in the room looked or jumped, but Will followed the motion of one fellow in the corner, who started to his feet as if expecting a brawl, feeling for his swordhilt; Will’s cousin, the Earl of Essex’s friend, the golden-haired recusant Robert Catesby.

Will blinked: he knew both of the men at Catesby’s table. One was Gabriel Spencer, who had also been jailed for Isle of Dogs as one of the principal players, and whom Will would have expected to be sitting with the players: he raised his mug to Will as Will turned. The second, in a plain brown jerkin, was the Catholic recusant Francis Tresham. Interesting. If Sir Francis Walsingham was alive. There was not a chance that Will would inform Burghley and Robert Cecil of the same. There was comfortably Protestant and conforming in the name of the Queen, and then there were the Cecils and their mad-dog desire to see every Catholic whipped from England, and every priest hung.

Burbage clapped Will on the shoulder, drawing his attention to the table. “Oh, yes, bail Ben for that. I’ll stand half the fee. I’ll buy that Bankside property.”

“Buy?”

“No more landlords.” Burbage spat into the rushes. Kemp muttered assent.

“What about the timbers?”

Burbage shrugged. “Tis small carpentry, but great labor. We’ll pull the Theatre down.”

“And cart it over the Bridge?”

“Float. Or wait for the ice to set and skid it over.”

“Won’t your landlord have something to say on that?” Nashe asked, hunched over peppery warmed wine. He was lucky to be free of the Marshalsea. Kit and Tom Watson had spent time in Newgate themselves, an experience Will envied not.

“We’ll do it at Christmas,” Burbage said. “Betimes, I know an inn yard or two would be glad of us.

The Mermaid’s blue door rattled a little on its hinges when it opened. Will turned to see who had come in, and understand why Burbage’s voice had stopped so abruptly that it still seemed to hang in the air around them.

Sir Thomas Walsingham stood for a moment framed against the door, resplendent in a ruff starched pale yellow to compliment the canary slashes on his doublet of sanguine figured satin. A touch of gold at the buttons, the hilt of his sword, the clasp that held his cloak askew, and the pin in his hat. He’d come from court, quite obviously, and quite obviously in a hurry; his horse’s sweat stained the knees of his breeches and the insides of his hose, and his clothes were quite unsuited to riding.

“Master Shakespeare, he said from the door. If you would be so kind.”

Will stood, pushing his still-brimming tankard at Mary, and followed Walsingham out into the hubbub of the autumn afternoon. “You look like you’ve had a hard ride, Sir Thomas.”

“A fast one, in any case. And have I stopped being Tom in private through some offense, or…”

“A public thoroughfare is hardly private.”

Tom dismissed it with a tip of his well-gloved hand. “Robert Cecil sent me. After a fashion.”

“On what case?”

“Have you any progress on the Inquisitor?”

“God’s blood, man.” Will looked up as Tom’s eyebrows rose. “I forget myself, Sir Thomas.”

“I like that in a friend. You were about to say you had been on tour.”

“Aye.”

“But the playhouses are opening.”

“Aye. Oh!”

“Yes. And Cecil wants his results half yesterday.” Oh, that Walsingham smile. As if Tom looked right through you, and weighed what he saw, and was amused. A softer voice, almost too quiet to be heard over the street: “Any word of Kit?”

“No. You?”

“No.” Tom swallowed. “He always was marvelously good at making a threat stick. Will, bring Poley’s head at least to Cecil if you can, preferably Baines or de Parma. His father’s health is failing, I think,” and Will sighed, following Tom’s smooth stride over the cobbles almost without a limp. “And tis down to me and you, and Dick.”

“I’d thought of recruiting Ben Jonson. If anything happens to me, you’ll need a poet. Things are not good, Sir Thomas.”

“Nay, not good at all. No one can remember such a drought. Jonson’s rumored a recusant, isn’t he?”

“And he seems to spend most of his time in jail.” Will shrugged. “But he has talent.”

“Cecil won’t hear of it.”

“Then Cecil won’t hear of it.”

Tom coughed, and smiled. “He wants you at Westminster tonight. Privily.”

“You re a most discreet messenger. In your court suit.”

“A more usual one follows. I thought you deserved warning.”

“By Sir Thomas Walsingham.”

“William Shakespeare, Gentleman. How does it feel?”

“Like ashes rubbed between my hands,” Will said bitterly. “I’ve never written better in my life.”

The way forked. The two men glanced at one another, and turned back in the direction they had come, annoying a goodwife with a basket full of greens.

“Is there more?” Will asked.

Tom shook his head, and they continued in silence to the Mermaid’s door.

“I’d offer you my horse, but it would be a little obvious.”

“I don’t ride,” Will answered. “I’ll just slip inside and await the messenger.”

“And do try to look surprised.” Tom stopped and laughed at the expression on Will’s face. “Very well, Master Player, I shan’t teach you tricks that were old when you were a new dog too. Have a care tonight. He’s a very devil, Robert Cecil.”

“I think,” Will said, “it goes with the name.”