And then Jonson cursed, moving forward, and bent over some dark shapes outlined on the floor. Kit moved away from Frazier and the wall, deciding there was no need for quiet and that he was damned if he’d let Ingrim rattle him badly enough that Kit wouldn’t turn a shoulder on him with five other men there to ward his back. Kit crossed to where Ben crouched. “Master Jonson?”
“Too late,” Jonson said, and used the blade of his rapier to prod a pile of sad‑colored cloth. “Monk’s habits. Theatre costumes, I think, and quite abandoned. Are those your robed men, Master Marlowe?”
“Fuck me for a whore,” Kit said, turning his head to spit on the floor. “I just played right into his god‑be‑damned hands. Again.”
Tom turned to search his face, and Kit forced himself to meet the expressionless gaze. “What meanst thou, Kit?”
“I mean this was a feint as well, a trap laid for any that might have followed Baines or sought to scry after him. And while we were here, and the Oueen’s troops distracted by Essex, and Will struck down sick in his bed, Baines and his fellows have been about whatsoe’er they wished to be about, utterly undisturbed.”
“Ah.” Tom braced his hands before himself and settled back against the wall. “So what do we do now?”
Jonson, strangely, clapped a hand on Kit’s shoulder–and drew it back again, quickly, as if scorched. “We go back to your house, Sir Thomas. And we fight like cats to save our Will, and pray we make more of a success of it than we did with saving Spenser.”
Kit flinched. “And Lord Strange. And Walsingham.”
Act IV, scene xxi
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 121
In his fever, Will dreamed that Elizabeth attended him. He dreamed her long fair hands, her hair like ruby glass when the light shone through it. He dreamed Elizabeth, but her breath was sweet as a maiden’s and her eyes as much green as gray.
His flesh burned until he thrust the blankets aside, and then he shivered with the cold. He was distantly aware that he whined like a child and fussed at the tender hands restraining him, while voices gentle, cajoling, and bitterly frustrated by turns spoke over him. One voice – “Annie?” It could have been Annie–and then a second.
There was a rhythm to that other one: halting, hiccuping, but a meter and a tenor he knew. “It’s not the King’s Evil,” the voice said pettishly. “The touch of a Oueen’s hand won’t heal him – ”
Linen abraded his skin like coarse wool. His muscles ached as if knotted. Sickly sweet fluid trickling past his teeth made him gag, and he batted the hands that wrung a damp rag into his mouth and other, stronger hands that held him down. He screamed when they covered him, but it was a mew weak as a kitten’s, and he shivered when they did not. He clawed at a blanket with a texture that puzzled him, for it was sometimes velvet soft and sometimes silk‑slick under his hands.
The rag was withdrawn. Someone leaned into his ear and whispered poetry. A thread of logic and meter and beauty wound through the madness of the fever and the visions and the knotting pain –
“Come live‑with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove–”
“As hills and–dammit. Dammit, William, thou’lt not be quit of me so easy. These words thou knowest. There’s virtue in them. Say them with me, damn you to Hell, just a little breath–”
Dear voice, and so frightened, so thick with frustration and hurt. He reached for it, or tried to reach, tried to do what it bid him and shape the words, find the power behind them. There was nothing, no movement, no reach.
Such a dear voice.
And so far away.
There will I make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle.
– Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Kit pressed the heels of his hands to his eyelids to keep the tears locked in. A terrible odor rose from Will’s papery skin. Kit wiped his nose on his cuff and looked up at Morgan hopelessly. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Keep fighting.” Succinctly, and not looking up from whatever she was steeping by the fire. She stood and came toward him, the steaming cup held in her hands.
Kit reached to restrain Will’s hands, so Morgan could again trickle her medicines into him. Will’s skin felt thin enough to crackle to the touch, hot as the side of a lantern.
Morgan shook her head. “Kit, ‘tis for thee.” She held the mug out and he took it, cupped it in hands too tired to lift it to his mouth.
“Thou wert wrong about me, Morgan.”
She nodded, straightening Kit’s cloak across Will’s breast as he tossed and shivered. They did not know if its magic would help Will, but there was no harm in trying. “I underestimated thee.”
Somehow, Kit got the cup to his mouth. Perhaps even the steam was fortifying. It tasted of bitter earth and summer sun and the unshed tears still clogging his throat. “What if he dies?
“What if he dies now,thou meanest?” She bent and kissed Kit’s hair as if he were a child. “We endure.”
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own …
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 121
Will fell deeper. Sometimes it seemed those hands held him, caressed him, cooled his brow. Sometimes he thought he plunged through darkness eternally and heard nothing but the Devil’s amiable laughter, and knew nothing but the heat of his own Hell. Nothing could touch Will in the void; he knew somehow that he needed poetry, needed the power of his words, but in his jumbled consciousness he could not put one line of a poem with another.
But through the darkness came that dear, distant voice again, and that voice gave him poetry. “Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain, full charactered with lasting memory…”
Will turned to the faint glimmer of sound, if turning it could be called. Heat cupped his body, pressed his skin. He writhed away from it, sure that there were flames and that the flames had seared his eyes from his head, because surely there could be no such agony in darkness.
The pain left him amazed.
“Which shall above the idle rank remain, beyond all doubt ev’n to eternity–”
Iambs.
Not blank verse though, and blank verse was important. Blank verse, the enjambed line, the rhythm of natural speech carrying an incantation’s power.
“Or at the least so long as brain and heart