Ink and Steel

Act II, scene xviii

Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,

Take thou what course thou wilt!

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar

The chamber was large enough for a royal audience, bare but for fresh rush matting on the floor and the figured richness of the red gilt leather walls. Will wouldn’t have wanted to sit, and it satisfied him to have the excuse to pace, tumbling his shilling through ink-stained fingers. “Will I, nil I,” he muttered, staring up at the dark beams vaulting the underside of the roof, and grinned. That wasn’t half bad

“Master Shakespeare.”

Will stopped and turned, hopping a little when his right foot dragged on the rush mat and tripped him. He blushed, and stammered a greeting.

“Sir Robert.”

Cecil smiled, sharp brown goatee bristling over his carefully pressed ruff and increasing his startling resemblance to his father. His robes fell in rich, simple black folds to his knees, his shoes and stockings as black behind them. His beautiful hands were ringless, the thumb of the left one hooked as if by habit behind the broad maroon ribbon from which depended his only jewelry, a finely detailed golden lion’s head, mouth yawning to show it spointed teeth. He came to the center of the room, limping slightly, and Will went to meet him, slipping the shilling into his sleeve and stilling the trembling in his hand as best he could, but limping as well. Cecil noticed. A frown at suspected mockery became a raised eyebrow of interest.

“Art injured, Master Poet?”

“No, sir. A weakness in the leg is all.”

“It doesn’t impede thee on the stage?”

“The stage is smooth,” Will said. He didn’t ask after Cecil’s limp: rumor had the man born with a twisted spine, and Will could see that one shoulder rode higher than the other. “You wished to instruct me, Sir Robert.”

“Instruct? It had been mine intent rather to seek answers of thee.” Cecil’s voice lowered as the two men came together, almost shoulder to shoulder, far from any wall. Will understood Cecil’s choice of the room, now. “How proceeds thine investigation of Master Richard Baines?”

“Surely you have men better equipped for such than I?”

Cecil’s mouth twisted, and he lifted his chin. “I have few men who have worked neither with nor for Baines nor Poley.”

“Ah,” Will said. “I see. Why has Her Majesty not had him hanged, Sir Robert?”

Cecil stopped his pacing and looked Will square in the eye. “The letter of the law must be upheld,” he said, “and Her Majesty persists in seeing our struggles with these vipers in her own bosom, as it were, as the sort of squabbles among snotty boys upon which she has built her power, her reign, and her control. She has ever maintained and strengthened her power through the skillful manipulation of factions, and perhaps …” Cecil’s voice trailed off, as if he examined all the ways he could say what he needed to say, and came up wanting. “She is Gloriana,” he said at last. “She has not failed us yet.”

“Ah,” Will said, when the silence began to drag. “I can prove nothing on Poley, Sir Robert. Less on Baines. They are as scrupulous as anyone could wish. Or unwish, in this case.”

Cecil straightened, and Will heard the click of his bones as he pulled his shoulders back. “Then invent something,” he said. “As soon as thou mayst, but not too hasty; it must hold up on inspection. I will be waiting.”

Ben Jonson’s shoulders almost filled the doorway he ducked through. Young, barely bearded, scarecrow-thin despite his height and frame, he looked more like the soldier and bricklayer he had been than the playmaker he’d become, with a face like a mutton-chop. He straightened, tugging the grayed collar of his shirt and wrinkling his broad, broken nose at the steady drizzle. He shifted a bundle on his shoulder. “Will,” he said. “I can imagine kinder sights, but not many.”

Will fell in beside him, boots slipping on filthy cobbles in the rain, not willing to answer his unspoken questions just yet.

“If thou couldst only circumspect thy pen,” he said, and then shook his head. “Then thou wouldst bear some other name than Ben.” And grinned, as Ben clouted him on the shoulder.

“And let the first thing I hear as a free man be rhyming doggerel? O terrible Shakespeare.” He scratched with broad hands at hair gone shaggy, and cursed.

“I’m crawling. May I prevail.”

“Of course, Master Jonson,” Will said. “Is there a barber thou preferest?”

“At the sign of the black boar’s as good as any. You could do with abarbering yourself. Unless you mean to make up for the hairs falling on top by growing them at the bottom.”

“It’s the damned satires,” Will answered. “And the humors comedies. I go, I clutch my hairs in horror, and they unravel from the top and hang a fringe about my neck. I’ll have to find some goodwife to knit them up for me again, like a stocking cap.”

The rainswept street was empty; Will contemplated ducking into a church or cookshop, but it didn’t seem half worth it.

“Will, why did you stand my bail?”

“I’m collecting favors owed.” Ben hesitated. “Some playmending you’d as soon elude?”

“No,” Will said. “Come, Ben. We’ll see thee barbered, deloused, and fed. Then we’ve an appointment with the crown.”

“Her Majesty?” Ben tripped on a cobblestone and caught himself, checking his stride so he didn’t outpace Will.

“Well,” Will said. “Her Majesty’s servant. But so are we all, in the end.”

“I’m no Queen’s Man.”

“You will be.” Will grinned. I hear thou wentst Catholic in prison. That’s useful, if thou’rt loyal.”

“I heard a sermon or two,” Ben admitted. “But a conversion is news to me.”

“See, it’s familiar news.”

“Will,” Ben said, in the gentle tone he could take between tirades, “what’s the enmity between you and Robert Poley?”

“Who told thee about Poley?” Ben’s eyes were cleverer than they had any right to be under a glowering Cyclopean brow. “Richard Ede,” he said, lowering his voice further. “A keeper at the Marshalsea. Not a bad man, I think. They put Poley in with me, Will.”

“Poley’s no prisoner.”

“Aye, an informant. There to prove sedition or treason on me. Ede warned me. What are you playing at, Will?”

A sudden question. And an unnerving one, following on the heels of Poley.

“He was curious about you. Very much so.” Ben’s concern turned to a pleased sort of mockery as he began walking again. “Which I might have attributed toy our undeserved fame, you ill-educated lout, but then with Ede’s warning…”

“What toldst thou him of me?” Even over the sound of the rain, Will knew by the way his voice shivered at the end that he’d misread the line.

Ben almost reached out to lay a filthy hand on Will’s shoulder, but caught himself and withdrew it. I should be grateful for the rain, he said, wiping streaked dirt from his face on a grayed linen sleeve. [I told him naught, Will. Well,”

“What?”

“I had to tell him something, or he’d assume I had something to hide.”

“So?”

Ben’s eyes flickered sideways, and his heavy jowls twitched with humor. I told him the William the Conqueror story.”

“Christ on the cross,” Will swore. “And I was hoping that one would die a deserved death.”

“If you’d seen the disconsolate look on Burbage’s face when he wandered in to the Mermaid alone, you’d think it worth it.

“There are greater challenges than to out charm Richard,” Will said. “And the citizen in question a comely lass. But tis not the gentlemanly thing to spread tales.”

Ben choked. “Not gentlemanly at all,” he agreed. “And yet some spread them anyway ah, here we are.”

Will opted for the barbering after all, and saw Ben decently clothed and fed at a tavern by the time the rain began to taper. Ben ate with the appetite Will associated with stevedores, while Will picked through a mincemeat pastry, choking down what he could. Finally, Ben wiped his mouth on his new, clean kerchief and sat back with a sigh. “Unwell, William?”

“In pain,” Will answered, rinsing his mouth on the dregs of the wine. “I shall be fine in a bit.” He tucked his hand into his pocket and stood. “Art content?”

“Aye. Ben pushed his bench back. “Whence?”

“Upstairs,” Will said, turning away. “He’s waiting for us.”

“He?” Will nodded. “Sir Thomas Walsingham.” He turned his head and glanced over his shoulder. The well-worn shilling was between his fingers. On an impulse, he drew it forth and tumbled it through the air on a high, lamplit arc.

Ben was quicker than he looked. Blunt fingers plucked the shilling at the apex of its climb; he frowned. “What’s that?”

A grand gesture,Will thought, and smiled. “Come on, Queen’s Man. Thou hast a craft to learn.”

“Do I have an option?” But Jonson fell into step beside him, although Will took his elbow to lead him up the stairs.

”Not if you expect to write plays like that and live.”

Eleven months and two weeks later, Tom Walsingham leaned against the shutters in Ben’s lodging, which were closed against an unseasonable late-September chill, and tossed a gray kidskin pouch idly in his hand. Something jingled within it. By Tom’s smile, Will had a pretty clear idea what. He rose from his perch on a three-legged stool beside the hearth and crossed to where Ben crumpled his tallness over a trestle, papers unrolled and weighted at the corners with an ink horn, a candlestick, and a pot of sand. Will leaned over his shoulder.

“What’s Tom brought us, then?” Ben’s thick finger tapped the middle of the paper, shifting it under theweights. It was a plan of a house and garden, well drawn in black lines, with a steady hand Will envied. Ben raised his eyes to Tom, who was still fighting that inscrutable smile. Richard Baines house and garden, Ben guessed. “How did you come by these?”

“Bribery,” Tom said succinctly. “Catch.”

He tossed his bundle through theair; Will fumbled it, and it landed on the map with a clunking sound entirely unlike the fairy jingle of silver or the sharp clean sound of gold. Will struggled with the knot, the fingers of his right hand momentarily failing to answer, and got it untangled. He upended the pouch and dragged it, whistling as it spawned a river of coin. “There must be a hundred pound here.”

“Hundred fifty,” Tom said. “Or a few pounds worth of pewter,” he said, that grin returning. It seemed appropriate, somehow, given Baines has used the trick himself. “I thought it best to attend to Cecil’s, pardon, Sir Robert’s demands regarding the inestimable Master Baines while he was still occupied with the affairs of his late father.”

How do you intend to pass it to them? Plant, not pass. Tom drew his dagger and picked at a cuticle with the point, not quite as idly as Will thought he meant to make it look. Interesting, Will said. I don’t see you clambering in windows The clambering is Ben’s part.

“Sir Thomas.” Ben looked up from arranging the debased nobles and sovereigns in tidy rows across the face of the map.

“You re youngest, Ben. And,” a circular gesture of the knife, “strongest.”

Ben sighed, his brow wrinkling like that of a bull-baiting dog. “Aye. And once the coins are placed, Sir Thomas, how do we make sure Baines spends them rather than dispensing with them?”

“The property will be searched.” Tom sheathed his knife and picked up a silvery coin, turning it in the light. “Leave that to me. These are better than some I’ve seen.” Will wasn’t sure what drew his attention to the window; a shadow across theshutters or the faintest of sounds. Ben, he said in Jonson’s ear, is there a stair out your window?

“A drainpipe,” Ben answered in an undertone, following his gaze. “Over the kitchen garden.”

“Sir Thomas, you were followed but far from the best.”

“I’m minded of a time in France,” Tom continued, never missing a beat as he drew his sword and moved to the window in silent footsteps. Ben came around the board, catching his sword from the back of the chair it hung on and easing it from the soft leather sheath. He caught Tom’s eye, and Tom nodded as Will hastily scooped the jingling counters of a hanging offense back into their bag. Ben hurled the shutters open and Tom lunged, reaching, cursing softly and jerking back a moment later.

“Missed him,” he said, over a rustling crash and then the sound of running footsteps. “Ben, go after.”

Jonson didn’t hesitate. He dropped his rapier inside the window and planted one hand on the sill, vaulting over with a grace that belied his height. Will winced at the thump from ten feet below, but Ben sounded unhurt as he calledup “BLade! He must have stepped aside as Tom snatched the sword up and dropped it, point-first so it would stick in the earth.

“Tis Gabriel Spencer.” Tom was already moving for the door. Will grabbed his sleeve as he went by. Tom couldn’t: too much chance of being spotted and recognized, even in that nondescript, unfashionably blue doublet that was too broad across the shoulders.

“No.” A moment’s startled regard, and then

“Will?” Tom’s voice was suddenly his cousin’s, his eyes as full of cold necessity as Sir Francis had ever been.

“Make sure Ben understands.”

“Oh, Christ on the Cross.” Will nodded and stuffed the coins inside his doublet, hitching his stubborn right leg as he stumbled for the stairs. He wasn’t about to catapult out a window like a man eight years younger, but Will was surprised how fast his halting gait, assisted by a grip on the banister, brought him into the courtyard.

Ben must have caught up with Gabriel Spencer by the innyard gate. He had the smaller man lifted off the ground by the collar, Spencer’s hand and a dagger pinned high against the timbers.

I’m about to order a man to kill.Will swallowed, as best he could, conscious of the clunk of the coins insidehis shirt. Tyburn hanging,he thought, and then he thought about Kit in a hearth-warmed kitchen, trying so hard and so falsely to smile.

“Ben,” Will said. Let him down.

Ben turned over his shoulder, startled. Will nodded, and picked up the blade that Ben must have dropped when he manhandled Spencer against the wall. Will held the rapier toward Ben, hilt-first, careful of the edge. Ben dropped Spencer, more tossed him to his feet and stepped back far enough to grasp it, keeping a questioning sideways attention on Will.

“He heard everything,” Will said in an undertone, hearing a different voice in the place of Spencer’s sudden, comprehending pleading. “This is what a Queen’s Man is. This is what a Queen’s Man does. Why, so it is.”

Ben stared for a moment, aghast. And then a soldier’s composure settled over the rough features, and he stepped to block Spencer’s rabbity bolt for the gate.

“Draw, Gabe,” he said tiredly, as his blade came up and he turned to extend the line of his arm.

Spencer glanced from Will to Ben, and back. He slipped his main gauche into the proper hand, and reached across his belt to his rapier hilt. “This is murder, Ben. It’s a hanging.”

“Right of clergy,” Ben said, piggy eyes narrowing under the cave of his brow. “I read latin. It’s a branding. Counterfeiting is a hanging.” Draw your blade, and you’ve got a chance.

He didn’t, of course: quick as Spencer was, Ben was half again his size, half again his reach, and almost as fast, with a soldier’s nerve. The blades rang silver on silver, with a purity of tone the debased coins burning Will’s chest couldn’t hope to match. Spencer lunged and shouted above, at the window, a cry of ‘murder!’ went up Ben parried, riposted, the passage too fast for Will’s eye, trained only to stage combat, to follow. The big man moved in, Spencer’s main gauche tearing his sleeve but not the arm beneath, and a moment later blood stained eight inches of steel at the tip of Ben’s blade. Shouting and running footsteps rang down the street. Will never saw how it happened. Ben wiped the blade on his kerchief before he sheathed it, while the witnesses and then the watch crowded close around them. You tell Tom he’d better stand my bail, Ben muttered, and Will nodded as Ben was led away.