Ruled Britannia

by Harry Turtledove

  Kate, unfortunately, saw he was holding back. "You're telling me less than you might," she said, more in sorrow than in accusation.

  "Telling you aught is more than I should," Shakespeare said, and then, "Telling you that is more than I should."

  He paused, hoping she would take the point. She did. She was ignorant, but far from stupid. "I'll ask no more, then," she said. "Go on. Curfew draws nigh." She lowered her voice to add, "God keep thee."

  "And thee," Shakespeare answered. He rose from the stool where he'd perched most of the evening, bowed over her hand and kissed it, and left the ordinary for his lodging.

  The night was foggy and dank. The moon, not quite two weeks after what the Catholic Church called Easter Sunday, was nearly new. It wouldn't rise till just before sunrise, and wouldn't pierce the mist once it did. A stranger abroad in the London night would get hopelessly lost in moments. Shakespeare intended to go back to the Widow Kendall's house more by the way the street felt under the soles of his feet and by smell than by sight.

  His intention collapsed about a dozen paces outside the ordinary. Somebody came hurrying up from the direction of his lodging house. The fog muffled sound, too, so Shakespeare heard only the last few footfalls before the fellow bumped into him. "Oof!" he said, and then, "Have a care, an't please you!"

  "Will! Is that you?" The other man's voice came out of darkness impenetrable.

  Shakespeare knew it all the same. He wished he didn't. "Kit?" he replied, apprehension making him squeak like a youth. "Why come you hither?"

  "Oh, God be praised!" Christopher Marlowe exclaimed-a sure danger sign, for when all went well he was likelier to take the Lord's name in vain than to petition Him with prayer. "Help me, Will! Sweet Jesu, help you me! They bay at my heels, closer every minute."

  Ice ran through Shakespeare. "Who dogs you? And for what?" Is it peculiar to you alone, or hath ruin o'erwhelmed all?

  "Who?" Marlowe's voice fluttered like a candle flame in a breeze. "The dons, that's who!"

  "Mother Mary!" Shakespeare said, an oath he never would have chosen had the Spaniards not landed on English soil. He realized that later; at the moment, panic tried to rise up and choke him, so that he almost turned and fled at random through the shrouded streets of London. Something, though, made him repeat,

  "Why seek they you?"

  "You know I fancy boys," Marlowe began, and some of Shakespeare's panic fell from his shoulders like a discarded cloak.

  "Belike half of London knows you fancy boys," Shakespeare answered; the other poet had never figured out the virtues inherent in simply keeping his mouth shut. But if the dons wanted him because he fancied boys.

  They did. Marlowe said, "Anthony Bacon was but the first. They'd fain rid the realm of all sodomites and ingles, and so they'll put me on the gallows if I into their hands do fall. But how could I be otherwise?

  Nature that framed us of our elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, did shape me so."

  Even on the brink of dreadful death, he struggled to justify himself. That constance left Shakespeare half saddened, half amused-and altogether frightened. "What would you of me?" he asked.

  "Why, to help me fly, of course," the other poet answered.

  "And how, prithee, might I do that?" Shakespeare demanded. "Am I Daedalus, to give thee wings?" He didn't know himself whether he used thee with Marlowe for the sake of intimacy or insult. Exasperated, he went on, "E'en had I wings to give thee, belike thou'dst fly too near the sun, another Icarus, and plummet into the briny sea."

  "Twit me, rate me, as thou wouldst, so that thou help me," Marlowe said. "For in sooth, dear Will"-he laughed a ragged laugh-"where's the harm in loving boys? Quoth Jove, dandling his favorite upon his knee,

  "Come, gentle Ganymede and play with me;

  I love thee well, say Juno what she will.' "

  Shakespeare burst out laughing. He couldn't help himself. Only Marlowe could be vain enough to recite the opening lines from one of his own plays in such an extremity. With pleasure more than a little malicious, Shakespeare used a high, thin, piping voice to give back Ganymede's reply from Dido, Queen of Carthage:

  " I would have a jewel for mine ear,

  And a fine brooch to put in my hat,

  And then I'll hug with you an hundred times.' "

  Marlowe hissed like a man trying to bear a wound bravely. "And here, Will, I thought you never paid my verses proper heed. Would I had been wrong."

  "Would you had. " Shakespeare shook his head. "No, never mind. 'Tis of no moment now. You must get hence, if they dog you for this. Want you money?"

  "Nay. What I have sufficeth me," Marlowe answered.

  "Then what think you I might do that you cannot for yourself?" Shakespeare asked. "Hie yourself down to the river. Take ship, if any ship there be that sails on the instant. If there be none such, take a boat away from London, and the first ship you may. So that you outspeed the hue and cry at your heels, all may yet be well, or well enough."

  "Or well enough," Marlowe echoed gloomily. "But hark you, Will: a€?well enough' is not. Even a€?well' is scarce well enough."

  Nothing ever satisfied him. Shakespeare had known that as long as he'd known the other poet. Marlowe had a jackdaw's curiosity, and a jackdaw's inability to hold a course when something-or someone-new and bright and shiny caught his eye. Shakespeare stepped forward and reached out in the fog. One groping hand grazed Marlowe's face. He dropped it to Marlowe's shoulder. "God speed you, Kit. Get safe away, and come home again when. when times are better."

  Marlowe snorted. "I hope I must not wait so long as that." He hugged the breath out of Shakespeare, and kissed him half on the mouth, half on the cheek. "You give good counsel. I'll take it, an I may."

  "I'll pray for you," Shakespeare said.

  "Belike 'twill do me no lasting harm," Marlowe answered. Having got the last word, he hurried away. The fog muffled his footsteps, and soon swallowed them. Shakespeare sighed. He'd done what he could. If nothing else, he'd talked Marlowe out of his blind panic. That mattered. It might matter a great deal.

  "It might," Shakespeare muttered, trying to convince himself.

  He made his way through the thick, swirling mist to the Widow Kendall's house. His landlady sat in the parlor, poking up the fire. "I wondered if we'd lost you, Master Will," she said as he closed the door behind him. "Thick as clotted cream out there."

  "So it is," Shakespeare agreed. Beads of fog dotted his face and trickled from his beard, as sweat would have on a hot day.

  "Will you waste my wood, to give you light wherewith to write?" his landlady asked.

  "An it serve my purpose, madam, I reckon it no waste," Shakespeare said with dignity.

  "Nay, and why should you?" the Widow Kendall replied. " 'Tis not you buying the wood you burn."

  "Not so," Shakespeare said. "I buy it with the rent you have of me each month." She sent him a stony stare. Not wanting her angry at him, he added, "Be that as it may, I need no wood tonight. I finished a play at my ordinary, by the fine, clear light of the candles therein."

  "I am glad to hear it," Jane Kendall said, "both for the sake of my wood and for the sake of your rent. So long as you keep writing, so long as your company buys your plays, you'll pay me month by month, eh?"

  "Just so," Shakespeare agreed. Where Marlowe was pure, self-centered will, the Widow Kendall was equally pure, self-centered greed.

  "And what call you this one?" she asked. "Will't fetch you a fine, fat fee?"

  "Very fine, God willing," he said. As he had with Kate, he fought shy of naming Boudicca for her.

  "Good, good," she said, smiling. His money, or some of it, was destined to become her money. "Is this the play on the life of good King Philip, then? That surely deserveth more than a common fee, its subject also being more than common."

  He shook his head. "No, that will be a history-a pageant, almost a masque. The play I just now finished is a tragedy." That much, he thought he could safely say.


  "I'll tell you what's a tragedy, Master Shakespeare," the Widow Kendall said. "What I needs must pay for firewood-marry, 'tis the bleeding of mine own life's blood. "

  She went on complaining till Shakespeare took advantage of a brief lull to slip away to his bedroom. Jack Street lay on his back, his mouth wide open, making the night hideous. Me? I snore not, the glazier had insisted. Shakespeare laughed quietly. Street might not be able to hear himself, but everyone else could.

  After a moment, the poet's laughter faltered. So far as he could tell, Street recalled nothing of the argument they'd had at Easter. Whatever Cicely Sellis had done to him, its effect lingered. Maybe it wasn't witchcraft. Shakespeare had yet to find another name that fit half so well, though.

  He put his papers and pens and ink in his chest, and made sure the lock clicked shut. Then he pulled off his shoes, shed his ruff, and lay down on the bed in doublet and hose. His eyes slid shut. Maybe he snored, too. If he did, he never knew it.

  When he woke the next morning, Jack Street's bed was empty. Sam King was dressing for another day of pounding London's unforgiving streets looking for work. "God give you good morrow, Master Will,"

  he said as Shakespeare sat up and rubbed his eyes.

  "And a good morrow to you as well," Shakespeare answered around a yawn.

  "I'm for a bowl of the widow's porridge, and then whatever I can find," King said. The porridge was liable to be the only food he got all day. He had to know as much, but didn't fuss about it.

  Shakespeare couldn't help admiring that bleak courage. "Good fortune go before you," he said.

  King laughed. "Good fortune hath ever gone before me: so far before me, I see it not. An I run fast enough, though, peradventure I'll catch it up." He bobbed his head in a shy nod, then hurried out to the Widow Kendall's kitchen for whatever bubbled in her pot this morning.

  Shakespeare broke his fast on porridge, too. Having eaten, he went up to the Theatre for the day's rehearsal. He worried all the way there. If inquisitors came after Cicely Sellis, would they search everywhere in the house? If they opened his chest and saw the manuscript of Boudicca, he was doomed.

  And another question, one that had been in the back of his mind, now came forward: even with Boudicca finished, how could the company rehearse it without being betrayed? The players would have to rehearse. He could see that. When word of Philip's death reached England, they would-they might-give the play on the shortest of notice. They would have to be ready. But how? Yes, he saw the question clearly. The answer? He shook his head.

  He was among the first of the company to get to the Theatre. Richard Burbage paced across the stage like a caged wolf-back and forth, back and forth. He nodded to Shakespeare as the poet came in through the groundlings' entrance. "God give you good day, Will," he boomed. "How wags your world?"

  Even with only a handful of people in the house, he pitched his voice so folk in the upper gallery-of whom there were at the moment none-could hear him with ease.

  "I fare well enough," Shakespeare answered. "And you? Wherefore this prowling?"

  "I am to be Alexander today," Burbage reminded him. "As he pursues Darius, he is said to be relentless."

  He waved a sheet of paper with his part and stage directions written out. "Seemed I to you relentless?"

  "Always," Shakespeare said. Burbage pursued wealth and fame with a singlemindedness that left the poet half jealous, half appalled.

  Laughing, Burbage said, "It is one of Kit's plays, mind. A relentless man of his is twice as relentless as any other poet's, as an angry man of his hath twice the choler and a frightened man twice the fear. With his mighty line, he is never one to leave the auditors wondering what sort of folk his phantoms be."

  Shakespeare nodded. "Beyond doubt, you speak sooth. But come you down." He gestured. "I'd have a word with you."

  "What's toward?" Burbage sat at the edge of the stage, then slid down into the groundlings' pit.

  In a low voice, Shakespeare said, "Marlowe is fled. I pray he be fled. Anthony Bacon, belike, was but the first boy-lover the dons and the inquisitors sought. An Kit remain in England, I'd give not a groat for his life."

  "A pox!" Burbage exclaimed, as loud as ever-loud enough to make half a dozen players and stagehands look toward him to see what had happened. He muttered to himself, then went on more quietly: "How know you this?"

  "From Kit's own lips," Shakespeare answered. "He found me yesternight. I bade him get hence, quick as ever he could-else he'd not stay quick for long. God grant he hearkened to me."

  "Ay, may it be so." Burbage made a horrible face. "May it be so indeed. But e'en Marlowe fled's a heavy blow strook against the theatre. For all his cravings sodomitical-and for all his fustian bombast, too-he's the one man I ken fit to measure himself alongside you."

  "I thank you for your kindness, the which he would not do." Shakespeare sighed. "We are of an age, you know. But he came first to London, first to the theatre. I daresay he reckoned me but an upstart crow.

  And when my name came to signify more than his, it gnawed at him as the vulture at Prometheus his liver." He remembered how very full of spleen Marlowe had been when Thomas Phelippes passed over him for this plot.

  "Never could he dissemble," Burbage said, "not for any cause." In an occupied kingdom, he might have been reading Marlowe's epitaph.

  "I know." Shakespeare sighed again. "I sent him down to the Thames. I hope he found a ship there, one bound for foreign parts. If not a ship, a boatman who'd bear him out of London to some part whence he might get himself gone."

  "Boatmen there aplenty, regardless of the hour." Richard Burbage seemed to be trying to convince himself as much as Shakespeare. After a moment, he added, "What knows Kit of. your enterprise now in train?"

  "That such an enterprise is in train, the which is more than likes me," Shakespeare answered. It was also less than the truth, he realized, remembering the copy of the Annals Marlowe had given him. But he said no more to Burbage. What point to worrying the player? If the Spaniards or the English Inquisition caught Marlowe, he knew enough to put paid to everyone and everything. And what he knew he would tell; he had not the stuff of martyrs in him.

  "They seek him but for sodomy." Yes, Burbage was trying to reassure himself. Sodomy by itself was a fearsome crime, a capital crime. Next to treason, though, it was the moon next to the sun.

  "The enterprise"-Shakespeare liked that bloodless word-"goes on apace. Last night, or ever I saw Marlowe, I wrote finis to Boudicca."

  "Good. That's good, Will." Burbage set a hand on his shoulder. "Now God keep Boudicca from writing finis to us all."

  A squad of Spanish soldiers at his back, Lope de Vega strode along the northern bank of the Thames, not far from London Bridge. Not so long ago, he'd taken a boat across the river with Nell Lumley to see the bear-baiting in Southwark. He kicked a pebble into the river. He'd crossed the Thames with his mistress-with one of his mistresses-but he'd come back alone.

  He straightened, fighting against remembered humiliation. Hadn't he been getting tired of Nell anyway?

  Now that he was in love with Lucy Watkins, what did the other Englishwoman matter?

  One of the troopers with him pointed. "There's another boatman, seA±or."

  " Gracias, Miguel. I see him, too," Lope answered. He shifted to English to call out to the fellow: "God give you good day."

  "And to you, sir." The boatman swept off his ragged hat (which, in an earlier, a much earlier, life had probably belonged to a gentleman) and gave de Vega an awkward bow. "Can't carry you and all your friends, sir, I fear me." His gap-toothed smile showed that was meant for a jest.

  Lope smiled back. Some wherrymen took their boats out into the Thames empty to keep from talking to him. He'd do what he could to keep this one happy. With a bow of his own-a bow he was careful not to make too smooth, lest it be seen as mockery-he said, "Might I ask you somewhat?"

  "Say on, Master Don. I'll answer."

  Better and better, de Veg
a thought. "Were you here on the river night before last?"

  "That I was, your honor," the boatman replied. "Meseems I'm ever here. Times is hard. Needs must get what coin I can, eh?"

  "Certes," Lope said. "Now, then-saw you a gentleman, an English gentleman, that evening? A man of my years, he would be, more or less, handsome, round-faced, with dark hair longer than mine own and a thin fringe of beard. He styles himself Christopher Marlowe, or sometimes Kit."

  He looked for another pebble to kick, but didn't find one. He did not want to hunt Marlowe, not after spending so much time with him in tiring rooms and taverns. But if what he wanted and what his kingdom wanted came into conflict, how could he do anything but his duty?

  The wherryman screwed up his face in badly acted thought. "I cannot rightly recollect, sir," he said at last.

  "That surprises me not," Lope said sourly, and gave him a silver sixpence. He'd already spent several shillings, and got very little back for his money.

  Nor did he this time. The boatman pocketed the coin and took off his hat again. "Gramercy, your honor.

  God bless you for showing a poor man kindness. I needs must say, though, I saw me no such man." He spread his oar-callused hand in apology.

  A couple of Lope's troopers knew some English. One of them said, "We ought to give that bastard a set of lumps for playing games with us."

  Maybe the boatman understood some Spanish. He pointed to the next fellow with a rowboat, saying,

  "Haply George there knows somewhat of him you seek."

  "We shall see," Lope said in English. In Spanish, he added, "I wouldn't waste my time punishing this motherless lump of dung." If the boatman could follow that, too bad.

  The trooper who'd suggested beating the fellow said, "This river smells like a motherless lump of dung."

  He wrinkled his nose.

  Since he was right, Lope couldn't very well disagree with him. All he said was, "Come on. Let's see what George there has to say." Let's see if I can waste another sixpence.

  Gulls soared above the Thames in shrieking swarms. One swooped down and came up with a length of gut as long as Lope's arm in its beak. Half a dozen others chased it, eager to steal the prize. De Vega's stomach did a slow lurch. A pursuing gull grabbed the gut and made away with it. The bird that had scooped it from the water screeched in anger and frustration.