“Marley dead?” Sir Francis Walsingham’s chair skittered on stone as Elizabeth’s hollow-cheeked spymaster lurched upright. Seated beside Walsingham was Henry Carey, lord Hunsdon the lord Chamberlain who blanched white enough that it showed in uncertain candlelight. Beyond him was the Queen’s physician and Walsingham’s Doctor Rodrigo Lopez. A final man stood by the wall, round, short, but of undeniable presence: the player Richard Burbage, famous already at twenty-six.
“Not on my orders,” Walsingham said.
“Is it certain? We are undone.” Oxford pulled a chair forth from the table and sat heavily, a dark metal ring on his thumb clicking. “The magic we—can perhaps manage that without Kit. I taught him what he knew, and it was not all I learned at Dee’s left hand.” Oxford concealed a tight smile; that learning ranged from the science of astrology to the arts of summoning succubae.
Lopez, a swarthy Portugall and well-known a Jew, whatever his protests of conversion, leaned forward over folded hands. He stared at Walsingham with significance and said, “This is not the first attempt on one of our number.”
“Our aims may have diverged,” Walsingham answered, “but the others have not forgotten our names.”
“And there’s plague in the city,” Lopez said. “Think you tis unrelated to those other Prometheans? Can you discern a native plague from a conjured one, Physician?”
“Some would argue there are no native plagues, but only devil’s work.” Oxford cleared his throat and his memories. “But with Marley, we lose the lord Admiral’s Men, leaving us without a company.” “There is my company,” Burbage put in, but Oxford’s voice rose over the player’s effortlessly. “—and without a playmaker under whose name to perform our works.”
“Never mind Kit’s ear for a verse.” Walsingham extended a long, knotty hand, bony wrist protruding from dusty’velvet, skin translucent as silk over gnarled blue veins. “Oxford.”
But Oxford shook his head. “I have not Kit’s grasp on an audience, Sir Francis.” Hunsdon’s hands lay flat on the scarred tabletop. He closed his eyes. “It risks Elizabeth.” Walsingham’s chin jerked sharply. “We’ll find another way.”
He stared down at his hands until his attention was drawn outward again when Burbage coughed. “What is it, then?”
Burbage drew himself up. “I know a man.”
O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Othello
“Will”.
“What?” The leather-bound planken door swung open; the playmaker lifted his head from the cradle of his fingers. He cursed as the hastily cut quill snagged lank strands, spattering brown-black iron gall across his hand, his cuff, and the scribbled page. “Richard, you come hand in hand with fortunetonight. You did perchance bring wine?”
“No such luck.” Burbage shut the door, then hooked a battered stool from beside Will’s unmade bedstead with one booted toe and perched without waiting to be asked. He grunted as he leaned forward, elbow on knee, and tugged his doublet straight. “Tis early for wine, and I’m in no mood for a public house and ale with my bread. So—” he thumped a pottery bottle on the trestle —“it’ll have to be spirits.”
“Morning?” Will set down the handkerchief with which he’d been dabbing his sleeve and looked up at a shuttered window. Beside his elbow, a fat candle guttered, and his commonplace book was propped open before it.
“Morning. You’ve worked the night through. And your chamber-mate … won’t be returning.”
Will shrugged. He hadn’t noticed the hour, though the absence weighed on him. Or not the absence—Kit was often at the beck of patrons or conquests— but the irrevocability of it.
Burbage accepted his silence. “Have you cups?”
Will stood and moved to a livery cupboard, patched shoe scuffing rough boards. “What ails you, friend?” He turned with two leather tankards in his hand and came around the front of the table.
Burbage dragged the cork from the bottle with his thumbs and poured. “To Kit.”
Will lifted the second cup and held it, wincing, below his nose. “To Kit.” He closed his eyes on an image of a man smug as a preening cat and soaked in his own red blood. Will drank, leaning a hip against the table as if it were too much effort to reclaim his chair. “You’ll have heard the rumors he was working for the Papists, or the Crown.”
“I would not hazard myself to hazard a guess,” Burbage replied, hooking a boot heel over a rung. “It’s noised about that it was a drunken brawl, and Kit’s been in his cups of late, as poets sometimes go when they’ve had a little triumph…” Jokingly, he reached as if to pull the tankard from Will’s hand, and Will shielded it deftly. “But”, Burbage continued, “Kyd gave evidence against him, and Kit was still at liberty, as Kit seemed to stay no matter the charge levied against him. So there’s something there. What’s the manuscript?”
“Titus Andronicus.”
“Still? The plague will have us closed into winter, Will. It’s five thousand dead already. And Titus a terrible story. We need comedy, not blood. If we ever see a stage again.”
“It’s not the story,” Will answered.
Burbage was a shareholder in the troupe lord Strange’s Men and as such he was half Will’s employer.
The brandy tingled on the back of Will’s throat and his tongue felt thick. Still, he reckoned even harsh spirits a more welcome mouthful than blood. Kit killed. Would he risk everything … ? But Kit had been rash. And brilliant, and outrageous, and flamboyant. And young. Two months older than Will, who was just barely twenty-nine. He sipped again.
“They can’t all be genius.” Burbage laughed and tipped his mug. “Did you ever pause to wonder why not?”
Oh, the brandy was making Will honest. “Heady stuff,” he commented. “If my skill were equal mine ambition, Richard” Will shook his head. “What will we do for money if the playhouses can’t open? How long will lord Strange champion players who cannot play? Anne and my children must eat.” He’d picked up the quill. He turned it over, admiring the way candlelight caught in its ink-spotted vanes.
Burbage waved the bottle between his nose and the pen. “Have another drink, Will.”
“I’ve a play to write.”
“Which opens tomorrow, doubtless?”
“ And poor Kit undeserving of a wake? Unfair!” But Will lifted the tankard and breathed the smoky fumes deep, feeling as though they seared his brain. “Poor Kit… ”.
“Indeed. Would serve your Queen so, Will? Serve her to the death?”
That brought him up short. “Is that what poor Marley did? Not stabbed for treason, or murdered by his conspirators before he could name their names. Nor killed for his,” Will lowered his voice “—atheism, and the talk of …” He drank again, but held his hand over his cup when Burbage would have filled it. “I can’t write.”
“Drink will fix it.”
Will did not uncover his tankard. “Drink fixes little, and what it doth fix can oft be not unfixed again.”
“Ah.” Burbage shifted his attention to his own cup as Will stood and paced. “In vino veritas. Is a Queen worth risking your life for, Will?”
“Why ask you these things of me?” Splinters curled from the wainscot shelf. Years of dry heat and creeping chill had cracked the wood long and deep between cheap plaster. Will picked spindled wood with one ink stained fingernail. He’d papered the walls with broadsheets, which also peeled. A Queen. The idea of a Queen… .
“The reality not worth your time?”
Burbage leaned on the wall, brandy-sharp breath hot on Will’s cheek. He thrust Will’s cup into his hand; Will took it by reflex.
“It’s her got Kit killed, isn’t it? Blood and a knife in the face. That’s what Queens get you.”
“Treason,” Will whispered.
Burbage’s face was flushed, his cheeks hot, red-blond hair straggled down in his too-bright eyes. Like a man fevered. Like a man mad.