“Master Shakespeare?”
“Yes, Mistress Sidney?”
“Did you really see the Devil by my father’s deathbed?”
He sorted and discarded answers long enough that her eyebrow rose. He gave it up for a bad business and spread flat the hand that did not hold his cane. “Yes, madam.”
She tilted her head charmingly. Her eyes were large and dark, dewy and doelike: the eyes of a young and beautiful girl. “Hmm,” she said, turned her back on him, and walked away without another glance.
Will sighed on a long ragged breath, and turned to Kit as he came up. “Is that what Tom Walsingham does to you?”
Kit grinned and shook his head, very slightly. “Hedoes it without trying, damn his eyes. Come on–” He tugged Will’s sleeve, very slightly.
“What?”
“I contrived to eavesdrop, and make sure no one else was doing so. You have a play to perform. And we have an appointment with history, my love.”
The performance, to neither poet’s reassurance, went off without a bobble. When the body of the players retired to the Mermaid Tavern, Will–coughing–pled pain and exhaustion and Kit excused himself with an invention about a long ride home to Canterbury on the morrow. Later that evening they presented themselves to Sir Thomas Walsingham with news that all three men deemed of interest to the Queen.
“Thank you, my dears,” Tom said, and seated himself right before them in order to pen a hasty message to Cecil.
Accounts varied as to whether three hundred men rode through London with Essex or only one hundred, but Robert Catesby and the Baron Monteagle were indubitably among them. Will himself could not attest. Kit had returned to Faerie via the mirror in Tom Walsingham’s study, and Tom–over Will’s feeble protests–had put the playmaker to bed in a spare room. Will’s brother Edmund came to help nurse him in the morning, for there Will remained, sick with a fever and a heavy cough.
Act IV, scene xx
View but his picture, in this tragic glass,
And then applaud his fortunes as you please
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great,Part I, lines 7‑8
Kit had come to think of the Darkling Glass as a sort of convenience, reliable as a faithful hound, and it annoyed him to no end to find the thing suddenly misbehaving. He’d long ago ascertained that it couldn’t be used to spy over the shoulders of Richard Baines or Robert Poley, who must have warded themselves from its power somehow. Nor was it useful in the Presence of Elizabeth herself, or in any of her palaces–a wise precaution, he thought, and one he wished to apply himself to solving when he found a quiet moment.
He was accustomed to its vagaries, and resigned to them. But today, when he needed it most, the thing’s damnable unwillingness to hold a single steady image frustrated him to swearing, and he had to restrain himself when he would have driven his fist against the glass. He hit the wall instead, which was less satisfying and hurt more, but had the advantage of not putting a priceless magical artifact at risk.
A priceless magical artifact which gave him nothing,except the useless information that Will was still abed in a darkened room, and Edmund and Jonson and Tom talking quietly in the withdrawing room hard by it. He looked for Baines, Catesby, Poley–and got only flickering darkness and useless pictures. A flock of ravens circling the Tower of London–a cold chill touched him at the image so reminiscent of his dreams–the sound of chanting men, and a swirling flicker that resolved into the streets of London strangely silent, every ear tuned to the ringing hoofbeats of some hundred or hundred and fifty horse. Essex, all in white, was unmistakable at their head.
They vanished as they headed for the palace and the Queen, and Kit’s vision resolved on the old monastery, later playhouse, currently vacant hall of Blackfriars on the west end of London, just inside the city walls. Men filed into it, men in monk’s robes, as they should not have been in Protestant London. As they should not have been in the second playhouse owned by the sharers of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which those Men had never been able to use as a theatre because of the opposition of its neighbors, although Ben Jonson’s plays were performed regularly by the boy players at Paul’s.
And isn’t that a little odd?Kit asked himself. That there was no such opposition to another such establishment almost across the street?Kit pressed both hands against the glass as the image swam again. He pushed it back toward Blackfriars, but it slid through his control like the reins of a fractious horse, leaving him grasping after nothing.
Baines must be there. This is whatever Essex’s stupidity is intended to conceal. It is a juggler’s flourish: while all eyes are on the Earl, Richard Baines sweeps a treasure into his pocket. And odd that Will should come down hard sick this day of all days.
And anything at Blackfriars, which should be closed tight and all but abandoned, is another chain linking the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to Essex. Layers and layers deep, this: better than anything Poley could have managed on his best day.
God in Hell, I wish I knew what wad going on. Who does any of this benefit? Not Essex, not Southampton. Baines?
There had been eight or ten robed men, he thought, although he’d only had a glimpse of them. There was no way one lone Elf‑knight and sometime poet could manage so many, but Walsingham’s London residence wasn’t far from Blackfriars, and there were Tom, and Ben, and Edmund too– if Edmund can be trusted. If Ben is not a member of two conspiracies at once.
Kit shrugged at his own suspicions, and pushed through the Darkling Glass.
It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Edmund–obviously already nervous in the presence of a knight–stood blinking by the window as Kit appeared in the center of the room, and Jonson broke off midsentence, glowering, reaching across a belly grown as mountainous as his self‑importance to grasp his swordhilt. But Tom turned away from the two of them and smiled. “Welcome back,” he said.
Jonson grudgingly released the handle of his weapon as Edmund found his voice. “T‑tom Marlowe? What sorcery–”
“No time to explain,” Kit said, his eyes on Tom Walsingham. “Does it seem strange to you that Will should be taken so ill yesterday, immediately afterhe gave the performance he had to give to suit the Promethean’s plans?”
“God,” Tom said. “Yes. Essex rides–”
“I know–”
“–What must we do?”
Kit swallowed and glanced from Ben to Edmund. Edmund looked at Jonson, who nodded. “Baines is at Blackfriars,” Kit said. “With eight or ten magicians. Whatever happens, happens now–”
“And thou mean’st to interrupt?”
“Aye, Sir Thomas. If I can request a few able‑bodied men.”
“There’s that in this room,” Jonson said. “All this keeping secrets is hard on the use of hirelings.”
“That it is.”
“I’ve a few sturdy souls about the house who would suffice. Kit–”
Edmund glanced over his shoulder once, at the door into Will’s sickroom. His head snapped back at the name Tom used, and his eyes widened. Kit bowed, his arms spread wide under his cloak. “At your service, Master Shakespeare. There’s still no time to explain. What seems to be the problem, Sir Thomas?”
“The sturdiest of those souls is one Ingrim Frazier.”
Kit’s stomach clenched. From loose readiness for action to seasick horror in a second, but he gritted his teeth and kept his voice level. “As he’s earned your forgiveness, Tom, I’ll live with it. But–” But I want to talk to him first.Except there was no time for recriminations now, was there? Not with Will’s life and Elizabeth’s crown on the line. “I’ll endure,” he said, and ended whatever comment Tom might have made next with an abrupt flip of his hand.