Who had told him he could be a poet? Who had told him to come to London?
On that thought, he heard a cheerful voice, with a cultivated Cambridge accent. “Holla, Will. Will Shakeshaft.”
He turned.
A smiling Kit Marlowe walked toward Will, cutting through the dusty, dark-dressed crowds of Southwark like a ray of sunshine through grimy glass.
Marlowe wore a bright sky-blue doublet, figure-molding blue stockings, fine velvet breeches, and his beautiful gloves and boots.
And he grinned like a man who has eaten enough and has money in his pocket.
He clapped Will on the back familiarly, and cast a casual, uninterested glance at the door of the theater. “Closed. Oh, the luck. Never mind. We’ll find you something else. Let me buy you dinner.”
Will would have followed Marlowe into the very mouth of hell on that promise.
Scene 15
An Elizabethan tavern, furnished with long pine tables and benches that have seen better days. The walls are dark with the soot of torches, yet more torches burn in the metallic holders that protrude from the walls. Their burning smoke smells of rancid bacon grease, and it mingles with the smell of mutton and pork from the broad cooking fire. Men, most of them in the workaday dark clothes of laborers, crowd shoulder to shoulder at the vast tables, and eat meat. No natural light penetrates beyond the immediate area around the door. Will and Kit enter, and Kit, assuredly, leads them to two open spaces, side by side at a table near the broad fireplace, around which five cooks labor over the carcasses of dead pigs and cows and sheep.
As they entered the tavern, Kit glanced at Will, taking in Will’s swollen eyes, his pale face, his whole look like that of a man condemned to die an ill death on the gallows.
At the thought Kit shivered, thinking that he, himself, might very well end up being the one who would die such a death.
No. Better turn in Will. And look at the hapless fool, in his old doublet and with no money. Kit would warrant that the man hadn’t eaten in more than a day.
What good was he doing? None, losing time and money and happiness in London.
And as for Will’s poetry, Kit still winced at the thought of it.
No. No. Will was, at any rate, doomed. That much bad luck could not be fought. Kit might as well help Will to a quick end.
He escorted Will to the empty broad bench at a table by the fireplace. Will sat down beside Kit.
Almost immediately, the wench came. Kit knew she would. He was a customer here and well known for his liberal purse. Besides, this middle-aged woman hadn’t yet given up on attaining Kit’s love. And Kit’s purse, too.
What fools women were.
Feeling superior, he gave the faded blonde, with her much-mended shirt, her pale, reddish-looking brown kirtle, orders for two full dinners of mutton and bread.
When the plates came, filled with steaming portions of boiled mutton and large pieces of bread, Kit allowed Will to eat a little first, to fill his mouth.
The silence in which Will greeted his food, his haste in eating, the gratitude in his voice as he turned to Kit and said, “I am not able to pay you, Master Marlowe,” all of it gave Kit a measure of the man’s hunger, all of it convinced Kit that Will was doomed.
Doomed, doomed, before Kit ever stepped into his life, before Kit had need of Will as the moving piece in the plot that would save Imp and restore Kit to the world of honest men.
If Will were a conspirator, he was a poorly paid one.
“Pay?” Kit asked. “Pay? Why, good Shakestick. It is a matter of courtesy, almost a matter of duty, for a poet to feed another. Other professions have leagues and guilds. Tinkers and weavers and even players, all have someone to resort to when their luck runs out, but not poets. When I came into town, I was like you, starving and poor.” For a moment, in his mind rose the image of the despair he’d felt when he’d been forced to pay for his lodging in Southwark with his presence in his landlady’s bed.
Who would know that such despair would lead to Imp? Still smiling, Kit took a piece of his meat upon his knife, and tore a bit of his bread. “I’ll feed you now and someday, mayhap, you’ll feed another starving poet.”
Will shook his head. Stuffing the stale, dry bread in his mouth as it were manna of the gods, he shook his head. “Nay. I’ll be gone come morning. Gone back to Stratford.” He paused in his eating for a moment, then said, “Mayhap I can send you the money to pay for the meal then. If I don’t starve on the road.”
The bread felt drier and even less appetizing in Marlowe’s mouth. No. Will couldn’t go to the country . . . . Or more likely starve on the way.
Kit needed Will. Penry—he thought with a pang of his sometime colleague—Penry would not hold the questioners that long.
Soon the torturer would find out that though Penry was a heretic, he had no such knowledge as Kit had claimed for him.
And yet—perhaps Penry did.
But Kit dismissed such hope out of hand. Life had never, in her kindness, handed Kit any favors.
Everything Kit had achieved had been hard won, step by step and inch by inch, like a climber working his way up a narrow slope by the strength of his frayed nails, his skinned hands.
No.
Kit needed Will Shakespeare in London, near Elizabeth’s court.
He needed to weave a web of deceit and conspiracy around Will. He must make Will seem like an archvillain, part and parcel of that rolling machinery of conspiracy that was London.
Then the maw of the secret service would swallow Will alone, and let Imp and Kit go free.
Then would Kit be able to consider whether to marry Madeleine or just take Imp and go with him somewhere—France, or Italy, or another country where Kit Marlowe could start anew.
Looking at Will Shakespeare devouring his food with well-mannered hunger, Kit thought all this, and lies came to his tongue in facile speech. “You’re a poet, Will. I can’t allow you to go back to Stratford or wherever it was, and there pasture your father’s cows or run your butcher shop. Stay in London.”
“Not a butcher shop.” Will looked at him, his forehead wrinkled. “There is no theater in London,” he said. He held a slice of mutton, dripping greasy water, above his plate on the tip of his dagger. The grease dripped on Will’s dingy lace cuff and stained his gloves. “There is no employment for poets in London now.”
Kit looked away. He smiled. Funny how, if you allowed them, people had a way of playing into your hands and establishing just what you wished them to establish. He’d wanted to give Will connections to the Essex field, so that he could hold Essex hostage on this poet’s incrimination, just as Raleigh was being held hostage by Kit’s involvement.
And here was Will, obligingly asking if there was some other way a poet could earn a living in London.
“You could follow my own example,” Kit said, and seeing a combative look in Will’s eye, added, “I don’t mean the theater. I mean, lately I have got the patronage and the very great favor of my lord Thomas Walsingham. These young noblemen like long poems that speak of some ancient theme, something that evokes learning like Greece and Rome and yet describes a pleasing couple engaging in that which pleasing couples do.” He caught Will’s amazed eye and grinned. “And then the nobleman gives the poet coin and keeps him in style, in exchange for the poet’s writing one or two lines of dedication, extolling the nobleman’s great learning and generosity.”
Kit grinned at Will, till his face felt like it would crack. “These noblemen will have their pet hounds and their pet peacocks and their pet poets, perforce.”
Will looked back.
He had yellow-brown eyes, golden and clear as a hunting bird’s eye.
Eyes like that, Kit thought, made a man feel discovered and seen-through, as though he wore a glass-front window that Will Shakespeare could penetrate with his intellect.
Never having been transparent, not even to himself, Kit Marlowe very much hoped he was not transparent to Will either.
�
�I don’t know any noblemen,” Will said.
The game was played as Kit had anticipated.
Step on step, as if in a game of chess, did Will Shakespeare fall into Marlowe’s trap and, without cunning, put his head in the noose.
Why, then, did Marlowe’s stomach hurt and why did Marlowe feel as though a great, nameless doom hung suspended over his own head?
Was he growing a conscience? Oh, Kit could not afford a conscience now.
“There’s Southampton. Henry Wriosthesley, third earl of the name. He’s young. He’s vain. He fancies himself a patron of the arts. I was mid-courting his patronage when Walsingham—an old friend—succeeded to his family’s title and offered me his own.” Kit pushed away the plate which he’d scarcely touched. “Here, I vouchsafe that if you offer Southampton a long poem on such an heroic theme as lovers parted or united.” He did his best to leer at Will’s amazed expression. “I warrant if you do that, he will give you his kind patronage and enough money to remain in London.”
He would, too, if Kit could make enough rumors fly ahead of Will, of Will’s ease with a sentence and the way his words could set the blood aboiling.
And Kit could do that, having enough acquaintances and even well-disposed friends amid the servants and retainers, the hangers-on at Southampton House.
“Here,” he said. “Here. I know there’s a party at Southampton House today.” There was a party at Southampton’s house every day. And Southampton was a devotee of Essex, as close to him—many said—as man could be.
Kit lifted his hand and gestured to the serving wench, mimicking the action of writing midair.
The serving wench hurried over, carrying ink horn, paper, and ink well. She lay it all upon the grease-stained table in front of Kit, and Kit grinned, and handed her a couple pence as a thank-you.
“I am known here,” he told Will, seeing Will’s amazed stare.
“Would that I were known thus,” Will said. “Would that I were known to need pen and ink anywhere.”
Kit elbowed him gently and grinned. The thought crossed his mind that he looked like his own father with his guild friends in the tavern, late at night. Kit had never had friends like that, never experienced the supportive, quiet security of male friendship.
One brief moment of intense desire, intense love, with the elf so long ago, and since then the whole world had gone drab and grey-looking so that nothing mattered, nothing. And human affection, human friendship even, also was taken to mean nothing.
“There will be a time,” he told Will. “There will be a time when you will find your reputation as a poet flying ahead of you.” Dipping the pen in the ink, Kit wrote rapidly. What he wrote didn’t so much matter, as long as it identified the bearer as Will Shakespeare. Before Will ever got to Southampton House, Kit must lay the groundwork that would make Will’s name known there.
He would do that, promptly, as soon as Will was gone.
For now he wrote an introduction, and he sealed it with the wax brought to him by the wench.
Handing the paper to Will, Kit felt as though he were handing the country man a death sentence, sealed and ready to be delivered by the condemned man himself.
Not that it would be that easy.
Will must still say, in that august company, things that would incriminate him—best if they would incriminate Southampton also and, through Southampton, Southampton’s protector, Essex.
“Make sure you deliver that to Gildenstern,” Kit said. “He is the Lord Southampton’s secretary and he knows me passing well. He will admit you to his lordship’s presence.”
Will ducked his head, while he slipped the paper into his sleeve. “I thank you, Master Marlowe. I thank you as I cannot express. Why you’d take so much trouble with such as I . . . .”
Kit smiled magnanimously and patted him on the sleeve, but looked away, looked into the far distance, finding that Will’s easy gratitude made even hardened Kit feel guilty.
He’d thought his conscience more jaded. He’d thought himself harsher. He turned away from Will and said, “Well, and well. It is what I can do. And call me Kit. Aren’t we much of an age and aren’t we in the same profession?”
Will gave him a quick, amazed glance, as though shocked at hearing himself admitted to the lofty company of Kit’s own status.
Before he could pour forth more thanks that would further make Kit feel like a two-face Judas, Kit spoke. “So, tell me of yourself. Your tongue proclaims you from Warwickshire and you mentioned Stratford, a fine market town, if I remember. You said your father was a merchant there . . . did you not?”
“A glover,” Will said. “A glover.”
Kit felt a sudden pang, identifying with Will more than he wished.
A glover was much like a cobbler, a skilled worker with a small workshop. He could well imagine that Will, like himself, had grown up with the smell of tanning hides, the cutting of the hides, the fashioning of them, and aspiring to poetry the whole while. He made a face. “Ah, the smell of tanning leather, the suede, the fine chervil.”
Will looked up surprised and smiled, the first genuine smile that Kit had seen from him. He’d finished his food, picked the ribs of the lamb clean, and now held his tankard of ale within the clasp of his two hands as if warmth came from the ale to his hands.
Noticing the tankard mostly empty, Kit gestured for the wench to refill it. “My own father was a cobbler,” he said. Something he’d not admitted to strangers in a very long time. Bad enough how they’d taunted him with his origins at Cambridge.
The wench refilled Will’s tankard and topped off Kit’s.
The food here was passable, but the ale, sweet and tangy, was worth coming in for, worth whatever the price.
Kit drank it, savoring it. “So you have no great relatives either, no one with power and money, that would justify your aspirations as a poet?” he asked.
Kit had no hope. Chances were that Will didn’t have, even at a remove, the sort of relatives that would be involved in any court intrigues.
Though rural families were peppered through with gentility, as full of noble relatives, as sprinkled with bastards of lords and royal retainers, as a rabbit peppered with shot—yet, Will Shakespeare would be the one who had none.
Again and again, life would make Kit find his own way, do everything on his own.
Nothing would be free, nothing freely handed to him.
Will shrugged, the movement straining the worn-out fabric of his doublet and showing the shirt beneath. “No. My mother comes from gentry. Local gentry. The Ardens.” He drank his tankard dry. “Robert d’Ardennes, her ancestor, owned all the land thereabouts and the wide forest in it.”
Kit again gestured for the wench, and leaned forward, waiting for Will to say more, waiting for Will to reveal more of these Ardens. Local gentry were good. Local gentry often placed maids in the Queen’s court, or married them to soldierly lords who were much at court.
“But they’re Catholics,” Will said as soon as the wench, having refilled his tankard, walked away. “Recusants. One of them was even involved in the Babington plot. We . . .” He shrugged. “We would not associate ourselves with them. My father is a good Protestant.” He made a face and looked as if he would bite his tongue as he added, “He was an alderman, when I was very young.”
Kit grinned, finding in this again a resonance of his own life, one he’d not expected to find with this provincial clod. “My father was a constable,” he said. And grinned. “I mock you not. Marry, a provincial constable, full of his own importance and misapprehended words, who thought being called an ass was high praise, and often used words too large for his mouth, sentences whose meaning he didn’t know.”
Kit remembered the last time he’d met his father in that capacity, the last time he’d met his father. “He arrested me, once. When someone attacked me and a friend, and my friend killed one of the attackers.”
Kit remembered his father’s brutality when questioning Kit, and how he’d preached on dis
honor and shame. Kit could no further worm his way into Will’s confidence. Not tonight. The Ardens and whatever connection they might have had to the Babington plot would suffice. Suffice to put a veneer of truth on Kit’s contriving of Will’s guilt.
He looked at Will, sidelong, “And here in London, where the theater is, friend, Will. Who have you met who might help you?” He grinned and again plied his elbow conspiratorially against Will’s ribs. “A man like you and alone. Any great dame taken you in for her leeman?”
Will’s eyes opened in surprise. “Oh, no,” he said in shock. “Oh, no.” A dark red tide flowed up his neck to his ruddy cheeks, making them ruddier. “Oh, no. I am a married man, you see, and I do love my wife, my Nan in Stratford. We have two daughters and a son.” Suddenly, Will’s golden eyes lit up as though a sun shone inside his very soul. “My son is seven. He’s the smartest, most devilish little scamp you ever wish to see.”
In Kit’s mind, Imp’s image formed. Imp, whom he’d scared away with harsh words, Imp, the most devilish little scamp who’d ever lived.
Tears filled Kit’s eyes, distorting his view of the tavern, his view of the assembled men eating and drinking.
Will was like him. Just like him. The son of an artisan who craved fame and fortune such as fate didn’t hand to those lowly born.
Turning Will Shakespeare in would be too much like turning himself in.
Kit grasped his tankard with eager hands, drank down its contents with an unquenchable thirst that ale itself would not cure. He longed for friendship such as even his father had enjoyed. He longed for love such as natural humans couldn’t give. He longed for a life as Imp’s father, a life he would never have.
He drank and he drank till his head swam. He ordered more mutton and more ale. For a few hours, he’d pretend he was a common man, sitting beside his friend in a common tavern.
A few hours later, maudlin and lost, Kit heard Will singing softly. “When that I was and a little tiny boy, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain,” he sang, his voice picking up strength. “A foolish thing was but a toy, for the rain, it raineth every day.”
All Night Awake Page 13
