Her Last Assassin

by Victoria Lamb

  It was less plain to onlookers now that she was the older of the two, and she was sure Will preferred it that way. Burning with curiosity, she wondered again how old his wife was and whether her looks were dark or fair, for he had flatly refused to speak of her.

  Perhaps it was best not to dwell on his marriage. For while they were together like this, Lucy could almost forget that Will was not hers, that she had merely borrowed him from another woman.

  To be in love was surely the cruellest fate, she thought, and closed her eyes against the light.

  It had been Cathy’s suggestion that she find an excuse to leave court for a few days. ‘Go, dearest Lucy, do what is in your heart,’ her maid had insisted, dragging her away from the high window where she had been leaning, bored and listless, watching the crowds gathering in the streets below.

  Cathy had been her friend for years, one of the prettiest and most popular court dancers until she left court to get married. With her husband dead in the war, and never able to dance again after an accident which had snapped her ankle, Cathy now served as her maid.

  ‘The Queen won’t miss you, not with all these madcap celebrations. The only time you’re ever happy is when you’re at the theatre with that good-for-nothing Shakespeare. So go, wipe off that lovelorn face and enjoy yourself for a few days.’

  ‘But what if the Queen should send for me?’

  Cathy had smiled, helping her into a simple gown of coarse linen, a gown that would allow her to pass unremarked through the crowds in the city. ‘Then I shall tell her ladies that Mistress Morgan is sick with a headache and will attend Her Majesty as soon as she can rise from her bed. And indeed you will be sick if you do not go, for I know that look.’ Her smile had made Lucy squirm, aware that she had betrayed herself. ‘You are pining for your player.’

  Shakespeare stirred beside her, disturbing her thoughts. Drowsily his hand groped for hers in the grass and squeezed. ‘Lucy? Still here?’

  ‘Where would I go?’

  He turned towards her, nuzzling into her bare throat. ‘You might have slipped away like a faery in the greensward. I was asleep.’

  ‘You snore.’

  ‘Forgive me, dearest, sweetest Luce.’

  Lucy smiled, and let him kiss her. His lips made no demand, yet desire kindled in her like a too eager flame, scorching her starved body. She felt blind in the bright sunshine, her face turned up towards the sun. Their fingers intertwined, then she felt him roll away and sigh, loosing her hand.

  ‘If only I could lie here for ever by your side,’ Will muttered, staring up at the blue sky just as Lucy had done. ‘But I am called to work. I must tour with the other players. And I must stop a sennight in Stratford at least, to see my family …’ His voice tailed away. ‘I must do my duty by them.’

  ‘And I must return to court before I am missed.’

  ‘You risk yourself for me. And what can I ever give you in return but a kiss and a farewell?’

  She smiled drily, sitting up and beginning to pick grass from her loose, uncombed hair. ‘You are not on stage now, Will. Come down out of the clouds and speak plainly.’

  Will sat up beside her, his dark eyes watchful. She knew there was a restless intelligence behind them, but neither understood it nor wished to share it. Sometimes she felt his brain must burst with all the wild, teeming ideas it held, and that was not a comfortable thought. It ate away at her to know he belonged to another woman, to lie with him in this secret disgrace and dishonour, to steal him from his wife. Yet her passion for him could not be contained. It was as wild and dangerous as his brain.

  ‘And yet there are no clouds today,’ he murmured, indicating the wide blue sky above London with one of his stage gestures. ‘So I am already plain.’

  She glanced up and her mouth twitched. ‘What’s that, then?’

  His keen gaze followed the line of her pointing finger. ‘I fear that is no cloud, mistress, but your sultry displeasure. Come, let me blow it away,’ he told her, and seized Lucy by the waist, pushing her down again into the grass.

  She laughed, trying to push him away. His mouth found hers, and then she was lost, her body prickling and hot, twisting beneath him in the most telling of silences.

  ‘Blow or kiss?’ she managed huskily, her lips freed as his mouth sought her throat. Her laughter died when his mouth moved lower, tracing the swell of her breasts cupped high in the coarse linen gown, untrammelled by the ruff she would have worn at court. For she was in disguise today, a mere woman of the streets, out with her lover to celebrate the fall of the Spanish Armada. ‘Master Shakespeare!’

  ‘Mistress Morgan?’

  Lucy groaned as he tugged a nipple from her gown. ‘Someone will see!’

  ‘There are none up here at Spitalfields but apprentices and their girls, or young men practising their swordplay. Now hush, and let me practise mine.’ He suckled hard on her nipple and she closed her eyes against the dazzling sunshine, her face hot. ‘My sweet black Luce, your body is a dream of pleasure. May I never wake up from it.’

  The cries of the young men from across the field shattered the illusion that they were alone. Lucy dragged her bodice up to conceal her breasts, then sat up, not looking at him. ‘I should go back.’

  ‘To court?’

  ‘Not yet.’ With shaking hands, she attempted to tidy her hair, repinning her cap across its unruly curls. They had slept at Goodluck’s empty house the night before, and she felt guilty at having left the place that morning without cleaning it. ‘I must spend a few hours at my guardian’s house before I return to my duties. I do not know when I will be free to leave court again, and there is food left out that will attract vermin.’

  Will looked at her, his face unreadable. ‘Still no word from the man himself?’

  ‘He is often away for long months without word. I have known years to pass …’ Lucy moved his hand, which was creeping stealthily along her ankle. ‘Will, we must go!’

  ‘What is it? I thought we had put the past away. Now you seem troubled again.’

  ‘What decent woman would not be troubled in my place?’ she muttered, but shook her head when he would have kissed her. ‘Forgive me, I accepted your terms, and knew what was offered me. Now I find those same terms chafing at my heart. Love, but no marriage. Always to love in secret, sharing you with another woman. It is hard.’

  ‘You share me with no one,’ he told her shortly. ‘I have told you how it is between me and Anne. I have not lain with her since she told me of her love for another man. But she is still my wife, and mother to my three children.’

  ‘I know,’ she agreed.

  ‘I cannot simply put my wife away, as though I were the King of England and cared nothing for how people might talk. I am a man and she is the woman I married.’ He stood and held out his hand. ‘Come, let us go before the afternoon turns sour. It is a long way back to Moorgate.’

  She allowed him to pull her to her feet, shaking out her full skirts, checking them for grass stains. The grass was flattened in a rough circle where they had lain together, two bodies on the greensward. Yet even as she watched, the long blades of grass began to spring up again, like an army of slender green soldiers springing to attention. Soon there would be no sign that they had ever been there.

  For a moment she watched the heavy white arms of the windmill turning in the distance as the breeze increased, a creaking sound floating across the fields.

  Will stooped and picked something up, a white ribbon, one of the lacings from her gown. ‘Mistress Undone,’ he murmured, and handed it over with a wry smile.

  She tried not to laugh but could not help it. ‘You are a fool, Master Shakespeare.’

  ‘And if I am, what does that make you?’ he asked drily. ‘A fool’s fool, which is to say nothing at all. The shadow of a shadow.’

  She shivered and looked up. The sun had gone behind a cloud for a moment, the wide blue skies above suddenly dotted with white. He took her ungloved hand and kissed it, then together they b
egan to wander down Finsbury Fields towards the city wall. The clouds moved on, casting sun and shadow alternately across the long grasses. A group of men in green were practising their archery where the ground levelled out, watched by women waiting for their laundry to bleach in the sunshine. The bushes round about were strewn with the white outstretched arms of shirts, like dozens of penitents begging for mercy.

  Bells had been ringing all day in the great churches of London, a strange discordance that jangled on the air. Even from that distance she could see crowds thronging the river banks as small sculls and barges continued to sail back into the port from where they had been blocking the Thames against the feared Spanish invasion. Some of the poorer boats had been hung with brightly coloured rags, in the absence of standards and flags, and men were standing along the decks of the barges, waving at those on the banks.

  Near the river, a fire had been carelessly started not far from the gate to London Bridge, its smoke drifting thickly above the city. She hoped it would be put out soon, for the path of a fire could run swiftly among so many timbered houses, especially after a dry summer like this one.

  ‘What is she like?’ she asked shyly, not wishing to anger him with her questions but unable to contain her curiosity any longer.

  He had been whistling a tune under his breath as he too studied the rising smoke. It was one of the soldiers’ marching songs that were heard everywhere in the city now, the words crude but memorable.

  ‘What is who like?’

  ‘Your wife.’

  He stopped whistling. There was a long silence. Behind them she heard the thud of an arrow finding its target. She looked at him, seeing the taut lines about his mouth, and wished she had not spoken.

  His gaze searched the horizon as though hunting for the answer. ‘I cannot …’ A moment of hesitation. ‘Forgive me.’

  It was not the first time she had asked about his wife, the woman he had left behind in Stratford. He had given no answer before either. Lucy felt her temper rise but clamped her lips tight on her reply, swearing to herself this would be her last time of asking. He was a keeper of secrets, this man she had taken as her lover, a player like her guardian. Though he did not possess Goodluck’s iron core, a straightness of nature that somehow enabled her guardian to speak the truth even when he lied. Not that Will was crooked. But he was cunning; he knew how to stretch a silence out, and tender it as his answer.

  If only Will Shakespeare had been honest and true from the start, she would never have become his lover. But now that she was in, there was no climbing out. Not without leaving her heart behind.

  But what of her soul?

  Will stopped walking and turned to face her. He had dropped her hand when she asked about his wife, but gripped it again now, that restless intensity back in his face. ‘Listen, when I am in London, I am sworn to you. There is no other woman for me. But what you see here, this man, this player, this is not all I am. We are all bound by our choices, whether made in error or with full knowledge. When I was too young to judge it a fault, I got a good woman with child and was forced to marry her. I was in love, yes, but it was a boy’s love, and a marriage made blindly. Now I am a man, a father, and I must stand by those choices. But this,’ he brought her hand to his lips and kissed it, his eyes closed, ‘is also my choice. Forgive me for what I cannot change, though it must hurt your heart to do so, and trust me when I tell you, you are truer and dearer to me as my mistress than if you were my wife.’

  ‘I do trust you, Will,’ she whispered. But it still hurts, she thought in anguish, leaving the words unsaid.

  What would it avail her to speak of the pain in her heart, how she wept some mornings on waking early, racked with loathing for what she had become? His kisses were true enough, he loved her as any man loves a woman; perhaps even as he loved his wife, or better. But it did no good to close her eyes to his consummate skill as a player.

  Will Shakespeare could bring the groundlings to silence with a single word. He knew which words would stir and which deceive. She had no such skill, nor any way to tell his truths from his falsehoods. Nor, in her most secret heart, did she wish to know, for fear of what she might discover of his character.

  Sometimes she felt like a plaything in his hands, spun this way and that, while he took what he wished from her.

  ‘But?’

  Could he read her thoughts? She tugged her hand free, staring at Shakespeare. His dark head. His eyes. His mouth. Then smiled wearily, remembering that she loved him. What else mattered?

  ‘But you are too subtle for me. I must disappoint you.’

  Will laughed then, relief in his face. The clouds shifted and the sun poured around them, balmy and golden. ‘You? Lucy Morgan? Disappoint me?’

  He walked on down the path, turning to look back at her, beckoning her after him with a schoolboy’s wink and open hands. He was a magician, she thought, and began to follow, jerked along by the invisible cord between his heart and hers.

  ‘Impossible!’

  Will left her outside Goodluck’s house, suddenly more sombre now that the time for his departure had come at last. His arm was tight about her waist as they kissed in the cool shade between houses. ‘Do you go back to St James’s after this?’

  ‘The court has moved to the Palace of Whitehall. The Queen was restless.’

  ‘What woman is ever not?’ His kiss found the warmth of her throat, nuzzling there with passionate intent. ‘Dearest Lucy, I can hardly bear to leave you. I will not see you nor lie with you again until the autumn. I do not wish to leave London, but—’

  Her heart ached with a pain she could hardly bear. She hushed him, laying a finger on his lips. ‘I pray you, no more farewells.’

  ‘I love you, Lucy Morgan.’ He kissed her once more, then backed slowly away, studying her as though imprinting her face on his memory. His voice was uneven. ‘I shall dream of you every night until I return, sweet Luce. Do not forget me. Remember Will Shakespeare in your prayers.’

  She could not help but suspect that he would too easily forget her once back with his wife and family in Stratford. Yet how could she complain? That respectable woman had borne his children; she had more right over Will than Lucy would ever have as his mistress, sharing his bed in this shameful, covert fashion whenever she could escape from court. She should finish this affair and swear herself to chastity again. But it was impossible. She loved him so much, never to see him again would feel as though part of herself had been torn away. Even now, just losing him for a mere month or two, she found herself as weak-hearted as a girl in her first flush of love.

  Clutching the wall for support, she watched in silence until Will Shakespeare reached the corner, his hand raised in a last salute as he disappeared round it.

  So he was gone, and it felt as though her life was over. How would she survive until his return?

  Wearily, she turned to unlock the door to Goodluck’s house, only then realizing that she was being watched herself.

  There was something familiar about the shambling figure leaning against the wall a few doors down. An odd-looking man, his shoulders were hunched, cloak drawn up around his chin and hat pulled down despite the summer’s heat.

  Instinctively, she backed away, fearing to be attacked. It was not unknown for the neighbours here to spit at her in the street, knowing her to be without any male protector when Goodluck was away. Nor could she entirely blame them, for they all knew she had taken a lover. Indeed, Will was becoming so well known as a player in the city, some even knew his name and profession, and whispered the louder for it. No doubt they saw her as a player’s whore, and felt she should not be dwelling on this street among more respectable folk.

  ‘Mistress Morgan!’ he croaked, shuffling forward in muddy boots fastened with knotted lengths of string. ‘Stay a moment, mistress. I would have speech with you.’

  She looked more closely. ‘Master … Mistress Jensen?’

  It was the strange ragged woman who had come to tend her two year
s ago after she had lost her baby in a fall, dragged downstairs by Goodluck’s enemy, Master Twist. Lucy remembered that she had smelt of fish, and looked uncomfortably more like a man than a woman, yet she seemed to have the gift of healing and Lucy had soon learned to trust her gentle hands on her badly bruised hip and spine. But she had not seen Mistress Jensen since she had healed enough to walk again, and Goodluck had said the woman had gone back to her river barge.

  ‘Jensen,’ her visitor corrected her gruffly. ‘That’s how I’m called. May I step in?’

  ‘Surely.’ Lucy opened the door and moved aside. ‘Can I offer you ale?’

  ‘Thank you, no. I’ll not keep you. Only, the thing is,’ the barge woman shuffled inside, glancing about cautiously, her hat still pulled down, ‘I’ve your man aboard and need you to take him away.’

  ‘My man?’ Lucy did not understand. Then she inhaled, seeing the woman’s sharp gaze and suddenly understanding only too well. ‘Master Goodluck?’

  ‘Aye, Goodluck.’

  ‘On your barge?’

  ‘Aye, mistress, that’s it.’

  Lucy looked out at the street. The sun was beginning to dip, and the shadows were lengthening between the high timbered buildings. It was well over a year since she had last seen her guardian. What trouble was he in that he could not walk back to his house from the river?

  She found this woman’s masculine garb unsettling, and the odd way she was prowling about the room now in muddy boots, peering into every dark corner. Yet if Goodluck trusted her, Lucy might as well put her faith in his judgement too, for all he had been mistaken in his old friend Master Twist.