Ink and Steel

Prologue

And since my mind, my wit, my head, my voice and tongue are weak,

To utter, move, devise, conceive, sound forth, declare and speak,

Such piercing plaints as answer might, or would my woeful case,

Help crave I must, and crave I will, with tears upon my face,

Of all that may in heaven or hell, in earth or air be found,

To wail with me this loss of mine, as of these griefs the ground.

EDWARD DE VERE, 17TH EARL OF OXFORD, loss of Good Name

Christofer Marley died as he was born: on the bank of a river, within the sound and stench of slaughterhouses.

The news reached London before the red sun ebbed, while alleys fell into straitened darkness under rooftops still stained bright. It was a bloody end to the penultimate day of May, in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of the excommunicate Elizabeth.

The nave of the Queen’s chapel at Westminster lay shadowed when, at the secluded entrance of a secret room, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford hesitated. Edward de Vere pushed his hood back from fine hair and wiped one ringed hand across his mouth. The panel slid open at his touch, releasing the redolence of oil. The sputter of candles along the walls reassured him that he was not the first. Four men waited within the stifling chamber.

“Marley is dead in Deptford.” Oxford tossed the words on the table like a poacher’s take. “Stabbed above the eye by your cousin’s man, Sir Francis. And we are lost with him: have you so thoughtlessly betrayed your Sovereign?”

“Marley dead?” Sir Francis Walsingham’s chair skittered on stone as Elizabeth’s hollow-cheeked spymaster lurched upright. Seated beside Walsingham was Henry Carey, lord Hunsdon the lord Chamberlain who blanched white enough that it showed in uncertain candlelight. Beyond him was the Queen’s physician and Walsingham’s Doctor Rodrigo Lopez. A final man stood by the wall, round, short, but of undeniable presence: the player Richard Burbage, famous already at twenty-six.

“Not on my orders,” Walsingham said.

“Is it certain? We are undone.” Oxford pulled a chair forth from the table and sat heavily, a dark metal ring on his thumb clicking. “The magic we—can perhaps manage that without Kit. I taught him what he knew, and it was not all I learned at Dee’s left hand.” Oxford concealed a tight smile; that learning ranged from the science of astrology to the arts of summoning succubae.

Lopez, a swarthy Portugall and well-known a Jew, whatever his protests of conversion, leaned forward over folded hands. He stared at Walsingham with significance and said, “This is not the first attempt on one of our number.”

“Our aims may have diverged,” Walsingham answered, “but the others have not forgotten our names.”

“And there’s plague in the city,” Lopez said. “Think you tis unrelated to those other Prometheans? Can you discern a native plague from a conjured one, Physician?”

“Some would argue there are no native plagues, but only devil’s work.” Oxford cleared his throat and his memories. “But with Marley, we lose the lord Admiral’s Men, leaving us without a company.” “There is my company,” Burbage put in, but Oxford’s voice rose over the player’s effortlessly. “—and without a playmaker under whose name to perform our works.”

“Never mind Kit’s ear for a verse.” Walsingham extended a long, knotty hand, bony wrist protruding from dusty’velvet, skin translucent as silk over gnarled blue veins. “Oxford.”

But Oxford shook his head. “I have not Kit’s grasp on an audience, Sir Francis.” Hunsdon’s hands lay flat on the scarred tabletop. He closed his eyes. “It risks Elizabeth.” Walsingham’s chin jerked sharply. “We’ll find another way.”

He stared down at his hands until his attention was drawn outward again when Burbage coughed. “What is it, then?”

Burbage drew himself up. “I know a man.”