“There’ve been a dozen attempts on Queen Elizabeth’s life in as many years: your Kit’s sharp wit helped foil two of them, and he was friendly with Essex’s rival, Sir Walter. Now we have neither a hand close to Essex, nor one close to Sir Walter. Intolerable, should what I fear come to fruition. Essex has links to the…” He stopped himself.
Will observed calculation in that pause. “What you fear, my lord, or what fears Walsingham?”
Surprise and then a smile. “The two are not so misaligned. We were one group, the Prometheus Club, not too long since. All of us in service of the Queen. But Essex and his partisans are more interested in their own advancement than in Britannia. So, Will. Wilt woo for me, and win for my daughter?”
Will swallowed, shifting on the hard bench. “I was to write you plays, my lord. And you would show me how to put a force in them to keep Elizabeth’s subjects content and make all well. I was not to spy for you.”
Oxford tapped a beringed finger on the table. “I’m not asking thee to spy, sirrah. Merely to write. Not plays No. The playhouses are closed, Will, and they’ll be closed through the New Year. We’ll try our hand there again, fear not: but in the current hour, the enemy has the upper hand.”
“The enemy. This plot against the Queen. Closing the playhouses is a sort of a skirmish? An unseen one?”
Oxford smiled then softly. “You begin to understand. They know what we can do with a playhouse. Art is their enemy. Puritans. Naught but a symptom. Walsingham and Burghley are ours, after all.” Oxford drained his cup. “I offer you a poet’s respect. Nothing is so transient as a play and a playmaker’s fame. Except a player’s.”
Will looked at Burbage, who sat with his hands folded between his knees, thumbs rubbing circles over his striped silk hose. Burbage tilted his head, eyes glistening. Twas true.
“The poem’s the thing, then,” Will said, when he thought he’d considered enough. “Give unto me what you would impart, and I will wreak it into beauty with my pen.”
Oxford twisted his palm together, fingers arched as if to ease a writer’s cramp. “Excellent.” Another intentional hesitation. “Your play. Titus Andronicus. Send it me. I fancied myself something of a poet in my youth. Perhaps I can be of some small aid.”
My lord,” Will answered, covering discomfort. “I shall.”
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul; see, where it flies!
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Faustus
Kit’s heartbeat rattled his ribs inside his skin. He clutched the balustrade in his left hand, Morgan steadying him on his blind side as she led him down the sweeping marble stair and into the midst of creatures diabolic and divine. His riding boots clattered on the risers: inappropriate to an audience with the Queen of Faeries, he thought inanely. But it was homely and reassuring that they hadn’t had time to make him boots and that the doublet, for all its fineness, bound across his shoulders.
“Breathe,” the ancient Queen whispered in his ear. “You’ll need your wits about you, Sir Kit, for I can offer thee but small protection, and my sister the Queen is devious.”
He turned his head to glimpse her; the movement brought a twisting sharpness to the savaged muscles of his neck and shoulder, which were stiffening again. Morgan must have seen him wince, for her fingers tightened. “Thou’rt hurting.”
“Fair face of a witch you are,” he answered with a stab at good humor. “Without herbs or simples better than brandy to dull a man’s pain.”
She paused on the landing above the place where the stair began to sweep down and made a show of fussing right-handed with her skirts. He leaned on the rail and on her other arm while the pale gold-veined stairs reeled. “I’d dull your pain,” she answered, glancing at him before ducking her head to flick the soft moir one last time. “And thick your tongue, and set you rhead to reeling. Which canst ill afford when you go before the Mebd, Sir Poet.”
Her hair moved against the back of her neck, a few strands escaping the braid. He stopped his hand before it could brush them aside. A blade of guilt dissected him at the impulse, and he embraced the pain, gnawed at it. He had nothing left to be unfaithful to, save Elizabeth, now that his sweet Tom had discarded him. Kit welcomed the cold, the distance that came with the thought. Nothing like ice for an ache. She’s very like Elizabeth would be, had she leave to be a woman and not a King. “Queen Mab?”
“The Mebd,” Morgan corrected, steadying his arm again. Below, faces turned up like flowers opening to the sun. “Queen of the Daoine Sidhe.” She pronounced the name maeve, the kingdom theeneh shee. “She has a wit about her Ah! Sir Kit. Come and meet my son.”
“Mordred?” Kit asked, putting the smile he couldn’t quite force onto his lips into his voice.
“Dead at Camlann,” Morgan answered. “He was fair. Fair as thou art, ashen of hair and red of beard. A handsome alliance. Come and meet Murchaud the Black, my younger.”
Something in her tone made him expect a lad of thirteen, fifteen years. But the man who met them at the foot of the stairs, a pair of delicate goblets in his hand, was taller than Kit by handspans, his curled black hair oiled into a tail adorned with a crimson ribbon, his beard clipped tighter and neater than the London style against the porcelain skin of his face. Kit’s palms tickled with sweat as he met the man’s almost colorless eyes, saw how the broad span of his neck sloped, thick with muscle, into wide shoulders. It was a different thing from the inexplicable warmth he felt for Morgan. More raw, and less unsettling. He’d like to see those black curls ruffled.
“Mother,” the lovely man said, extending a crimson glass of wine. His voice was smooth, at odds with the power in his frame.
She unwound her hand from Kit’s elbow, but let her fingers trail down his arm before she stepped away. Her son pressed the second goblet into his hand, taking a moment to curl Kit’s fingers about the delicate stem. The touch lingered, and Kit almost forgot his pain.
“Your reputation precedes you, Master Poet.”
“Sir Poet, Morgan corrected. I knighted him while no one was looking.”
“You did? Mother, bravely done!”
She laid a possessive hand on his shoulder. Kit looked after her in confusion, and she gave him only a smile.
“Things are different in Faerie, she told him,” and dusted his cheek, below the bandage, with a kiss. “Now drink your wine and go ye through those doors and court and win a Queen.”
“You’re not coming with me?”
“Kit. Show them strength, not a cripple leaning on a woman’s arm.”
He met her loden eyes, then nodded, tossed back the wine, and set aside the glass. Rolling his shoulders under the too-tight doublet, he stepped into the rivulet of courtiers threading toward what must be the Presence Chamber. Frank stares prickled Kit’s skin as he followed the crowd, conscious of the antlers and fox-heads, the huge luminescent eyes and the moss-dripping armor of those who moved around him.
Masques, he told himself, and didn’t permit himself at first to return the curious glances. Hooves clattered on the floor on his blind side: he flinched and turned to look, and a naked satyr caught his eye and bowed from the waist. Kit blushed and stepped back, looking at the floor.
As if I had an idea of precedence here.The rose-and-green tiled floor rolled under his boots like the rising, falling deck of a ship. He hesitated and put a hand on the paneled wall. A woman brushed his arm, elegantly human except that the diaphanous robes which stroked her swaying hips and breasts seemed to grow from her shoulders like drooping iris petals.
Then his attention was drawn by an antlered stag, richly robed in velvet green as glass, resting one cloven hoof on the jeweled hilt of a rapier and walking upright like a man. Kit’s pulse drummed in his temples and throat.