Even Southampton’s smile was greasy. “And if I like it not?”
“Then may it please the Queen.” Bandy word not with me, cockerel. I may be a nodding invalid and a common player, and you an Earl. But I fence with the likes of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and you limit yourself to sycophants and tyros.
Honesty forced him to, And Queens,but Will couldn’t imagine Southampton had ever won a round with Her Majesty.
An oily ferret, perhaps, but as dogged as a weasel. The Earl stepped back, a little further into the light, so it gleamed on his careful curls. “Dost expect it might?”
“Lies it within my power. ” Will found his shaking hand tightening on the sheaf of playscript; he raised the pages against his breast like a buckler, like a talisman. He glanced over Southampton’s shoulder, across the room to where Burbage and two of the Wills bent Titian curls and dark over their part‑scripts. Burbage posed between the taller, browner players so that they leaned over him like framing trees. He must have felt Will’s gaze, because he glanced up; for a moment their gaze bridged the darkness from one puddle of light to the next.
“I rather hoped thou mightst have missed my patronage, Master Shakespeare.”
Will’s eyes asked a question. Burbage’s lips pursed, a gesture meant to be read. He glanced at the back of Southampton’s head and shrugged once, softly, as if to say do what thou must, I trust thee.And then Burbage lowered his head again, and Will loosed a breath he hadn’t realized he’d trapped, and fixed Southampton on an arch look that would have done Ned Alleyn proud.
“I am content,” Will said, covering his cough with the back of his hand. He was aware that those three words were as bold a declaration of war as any he had penned into the mouth of an upstart lord. He bowed, but would not look down until Southampton nodded, slowly, and withdrew in a cloud of civet and rosewater.
The show must go on.
* * *
And go on it did, disrupted only slightly by the storm whining against the shutters and by Her Majesty’s rattling cough, which diminished–Will thought–as the acts proceeded. She laughed at Touchstone the clown, and at Will’s own appearance as a countrified version of himself, speaking direct to the audience for a moment’s wit. He thought that boded well, and hoped perhaps he had been mistaken that the enemy had overcome the power of his words, although he wished her lead paint gone so he could see if her cheeks were flushed with fever or with delight.
It would in any case have been hard to tell by candlelight.
Spring wound into summer and high heat brought a resurgence of the plague and a cessation of the cough that had haunted Will all through the cold months. The winter’s rain presaged a breaking of the long drought, and though the theatres were not closed for the inevitable plague, Will circulated sonnets and Ben staged poetical dinners. Under their influence the famine eased with the early crops and the fat spring lambs.
It was well it did, for in June Will heard the first rumors that the Spanish had landed at the Isle of Wight. Rumors he might have discounted if Elizabeth hadn’t sent Essex and his men to Ireland to suppress rebellion abetted by Spanish Catholic troops.
Will himself stood and watched as rattling chains with links a man could wear as bracelets were draped from shore to shore across the Thames, the inconvenience to shipping judged slight against the threat of the Spanish. There was talk in the nervous streets that the city might be defended by a bridge of boats, if the Spanish sailed up the mighty river; the city gates were locked and curfew enforced as it had not been in Will’s memory, and all London breathed shallowly under threat of invasion. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed Alarum for London,transparent fearmongering – but if Baines, Oxford, Southampton, and Essex’s faction had hoped to use the threat of Catholic conquest to raise emotions against the Queen, Will was satisfied that he and Burbage had done what they could to thwart the plot.
My darling friend–
I send with great news, and some of it ill. Much of it, to tell you true, for oh, how I regret our old masters. Though Sir Francis labored under many a failure, and though he was as much a prince of lies as any Lucifer, still I did not doubt his loyalty. Now, I know not which spymaster nor weasel‑keep to turn to in any extremity.
Sir Robert Cecil finally came forth with the order to raid the London home of a certain Richard Baines, my dear Mercutio. And I find my eyes big with wonder at the timing, for who did Cecil’s men find a‑slumbering in the deadly bed but Nicholas Skeres? And so it was Skeres arrested for counterfeiting, though he swore he knew not from whence the pewter coinings arose.
The house was searched on this evidence, but– worse luck–no bodies were discovered, buried in the earthen cellar or otherwise. Ben was beside himself with wrath, and had strong words with Tom Walsingham, as you might imagine. Tom, of course, had naught to do with the delay; so he says and so I believe him. Cecil, I fear, plays one of his double games.
Will rested the quill on the stand and frowned, rubbing his aching hand. He could tell Kit about young Robin Poley’s golden hair–and why hint to the man that the boy he’d cared for as his own was the scion of the knave who helped to murder him?–or he could tell him about seeing Richard Baines in the crowd watching poetry, broadsides, and playscripts all burned in the bookseller’s yard at St. Paul’s, under the supervision of none other than that selfsame Sir Robert Cecil, the Queen’s Secretary of State.
That last, yes. Kit should know.
Will leveraged his pen once more.
There is some small joy. Essex has returned from Ireland disgraced and defeated: the Queen would not see him. Ben is writing for the boys’ companies. He grows stout and quarrels with everyone. It would include me, if he could raise my ire. Since I will not take the bait, he turns his venom on Chapman and Dekker and Marston–and especially Dick Burbage.
But Cecil’s duplicity is manifest in what he burns, dear Mercutio. He is the very consuming flame, leaving only charred scraps of knowledge for those who come after. We attended his book‑burning, Dick Burbage and I, and it was Dick who whispered in my ear, ‘and now we are on our own in troth, gentle William.’
I fear me he is only right. We cannot rely on princes and their agents any longer, gentle Mercutio. We must act by the strength of our own hands, if we are to preserve what we have won.
Come to London. Meet us at Tom Walsingham’s study. We will craft our Bible no matter who says us nay.
And at the end of the long, fat, flyblown summer, Burbage and I and the others will open the Globe.
May it be our final weapon.
With love, my friend.
Your Romeo
Act IV, scene x
Lucifer: Tut Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight.
–Christopher Marlowe, Faustus,Act II, scene ii
Kit leaned against the wall beside a bright window in Tom Walsingham’s salon and watched Tom pace, and Will nod, and Ben trim the nib of a pen and smooth its shaft with a knife Kit thought was likely sharp enough to shave with. Which reminded him of his own need for a barbering, and he brushed his hand across rasping cheeks. Unlikely as you are to be kissing anyone that cares. Or anyone at all, for that matter.He sipped his wine and swirled it in the goblet, wishing bitterly that he could close the distance to the little coven by the fire and be one of them again. Wishing he could remember the touch of Will’s hand, the press of Tom’s mouth, without tasting the enormous soft emptiness that threatened to open like black wings and enfold him.