“From overseas?”
“Not so much overseas as under them,” Kit said cryptically. He glanced at the window, measuring the light, and fanned the folded sheets upon the desk.
“Shall we work on these a little, before I must disguise myself for Her Majesty?”
“Will Sir Francis loan you a cloak?”
“A hood should suffice in a carriage.”
“Keep the doublet: you’ll want to look pretty for the Queen. Otherwise she won’t believe you re Marley.”
“At least I don’t dress like a Puritan,” Kit answered, with a scornful glance for Will’s brown broadcloth, and reached across the desk for a pen.
Dido :
What stranger art thou that doest eye me thus?
Aeneas:
Sometime I was a Troian, mighty Queene:
But Troy is not, what shall I say I am?
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Dido, Queen of Carthage
‘You’ll want to look pretty for the Queen.’ Kit caught himself examining his fingernails in the light of the candles burning on a gilt wooden table, and let his hands fall to his sides. There was ink along the knuckle of his forefinger, but that was nothing unusual, and at least he was tidier than Shakespeare. Will took no pride in his appearance or his scribing whatsoever.
And writing lines such as his, he does not need false pride. Anyway, tis Sir Walter’s duty to look pretty for his Queen, and not mine. Queens will jus thave to take me as they find me.
Gallant thoughts, for a man alone in a small white marble room with no escape, when anything could be coming down the narrow passageway he’d entered through. A long table and a few narrow windows dominated the room, lit between flickering shadows by a rack of candles like stag’s antlers. He wondered if he were quartered in a priest’s closet, or some stranger appurtenance and how riddled the walls of Winchester might be. Walsingham had led Kit through a secret passage within a chapel at Winchester Palace, and then taken Kit’s dagger and abandoned him. Kit wasn’t sure what garden the small, tight window looked over, but it admitted a breath of air, and over the flowers he could smell the river. At least it wasn’t an abattoir, as in Deptford. The Queen was letting him cool his heels. He examined the ink stain on his fingertip again: it resembled a map of Italy. He pressed back a mousy handful of hair. At last, soft footsteps sounded beyond the panel, and Kit turned with a question on his lips, hoping it would be Walsingham come to retrieve him but fearing it could be another sort of visitor altogether one armed with sharp steel and a quarrel. The panel slid open, and Kit stepped forward. And met, open-mouthed, the masterful gaze of his Elizabeth. Alone and without escort.
“Highness!” he stuttered, and bent a knee somewhat credibly, for all his head-kicked foolishness. His breath hurt his throat, but he held it and kept his eyes on her shoes. Gold cloth, sewn with pearls. Toe-pointed slippers clicked daintily on the marble as she stepped forward, her hem so stiff with lace that it made a sound brushing the threshold like a curry down a horse’s back. The scent of herbs and musk as she hesitated, and Kit wondered for a moment if she might strike him. She was not unknown to lay her wrath on those who displeased her.
“Sir Christofer Marley,” she said, after a while. He choked on that, held breath and looked up at her despite himself. Into a prescient smile under the crimson tower of her wig and eyes wide with mockery and amusement. Yes, we know something of your adventures. Stand up straight, lad: even Queens tire of bended necks when they haven’t an axe to hand. He stood. “Your Highness is well-informed.”
“We pay a great deal for the privilege,” she answered. “In gold and coin, and in the flesh and blood of our loyal subjects. Has she claimed thee?”
“Your Highness?”
“The Queen of Faerie,” she said, with a lift of her chin. She shut the panel behind herself and claimed the center of the narrow chamber. Kit’s pulse fluttered in his throat: a different sort of awe than what the Faerie Queen produced. This was the awe of temporal power, of strength and age and a wit equal to any man’s.
“She is the pillar the sky is hung from. The beautiful pitiless lady. Has she claimed you?”
“She wishes to, madam,” he answered. “But her sister, called Queen Morgan, was the one who knighted me.”
“And bedded you? Oh, don’t blush like that. For all tis engaging. We know something of the ways of the Fae. So. Stolen by Faeries, Queen’s Man. And yet you seek an audience with your Sovereign, and we are disposed to grant it. Speak.”
“Your Highness.” Her eyebrow arched under its paint as he sought for words.
“Do women always fluster you so badly, Kit?”
“Only when they’re Queens.” He genuflected again, straightening hastily when she coughed.
“Sir Poet,” she said, not unkindly. “We are pleased that our subtleties have preserved you, and well-pleased are we to see you well. But now our good Walsingham tells us you beg release of your oaths of service. Your Queen would know why, and what adventures befell you. Our intimate Spirit, Burghley, had you buried, and those were of a certainment not our orders.”
“My Queen.” He would have gone to one knee again, but her worn, irritated fingers caught his elbow and held him on his feet. He couldn’t look Gloriana in the eye, though she put her fingers under his chin and tilted his face like a maiden aunt with a wayward boy. “What choice is left me?”
He saw her lips purse under the masque of her paint, smelled the marjoram and ambergris and civet that clothed her. She tilted her head to examine his eyepatch and the scar that ran beneath it. “What befell thee, Queen’s Man?”
“Your Highness knows.”
“Your own words, man, and be quick about it.”
“A dagger in the eye, Your Highness.” He choked. “Thomas Walsingham’s men.”
“Your death was to be an illusion, Christofer Marley,” she said, seeming not to notice when her words rode over his. “A false body put in your place, and you spirited overseas. As was arranged in the letter you should have had under our seal. You have given much, and demanded little. We thought to make recompense.”
“It was not so, Your Highness.”
“We see.” Her hand left a trace of scent on his skin as she stepped away, her gaze steady on his scar. “I’ve witnessed worse, but it is not pretty. And earned in our service. You are a poet, she continued without a breath. Give us a poem.”
That was a challenge. She smiled when he drew himself up.
“And yet before I yield my fainting breath,
I quite the killer, though I blame the kind,”
Kit whispered, amazed at his own audacity.
“You kill unkind, I die, and yet am true,
For at your sight, my wound doth bleed anew”
“Falsely said, but pretty. Like all sentiments of poesy. As a poet myself, I’ll forgive it. Our subterfuge Burghley’s, Thomas Walsingham’s, and mine was to have saved you.”
Kit nodded. A cramp knotted his stomach; he had to brace his knees or they would have failed.
“Dead men are hard-pressed to die again. My Queen. I knew you could not prove false to me, for all you are a Prince, you are a woman as true as any woman, and the mother of a son.”
She stepped back as if stung, and then shook her head in admiration and rue.
“Hist! Kit Marley, you’ve got a tongue in you. Wilt convert me to atheism now?” She leaned close, voice confidential. “You are privileged in your loss this once and once alone. Unmarried Queens do not have children, sir.”