Ink and Steel (21 page)

I'LL need to find a Looking glass
. He wasn't worried: he thought he might have two or three days before the pain set in, and if he couldn't visit Will—because Will would be watched—there were other errands Kit could busy himself upon.

Once night fell.

In the meanwhile, he crouched against the wall in a garishly painted box at James Burbage's Theatre, first to be so named, and concealed his face, and watched men who had been friends rehearse a play. Several of his own poor scribblings had made their mark upon these boards—those sanded scorches were from an overturned firepot during a miscarriage of
Faustus
, some years since—and by this current rehearsal, Kit judged that Will Shakespeare had made a fair mark of his own.

The play progressed. The shadows slid, and Kit slid with them, his eye stinging and a smile on his lips. He sighed and settled down on the floor cross-legged, peering around a bench, his left arm going numb from elbow to wrist while he leaned his chin on his arm. He didn't dare blow his nose, and so sniffled quietly—and uncomfortably—into the rough wool of his cloak.

And then the truth of what he was seeing sank in, and he sat back against the wall, rapier sticking out to the side like a stiff, unwieldy tale.
Two warring houses and their children Lost—coming to their senses too Late,
uniting when the future they might have defended is Lost to them. Not Catholics and Protestants, but Capulets and Montagues.
Kit bit down on his finger to keep from laughing out loud.

Injustice and undue accusations—your simpering Hero and her slander, your stern Beatrice and your clever Benedick united over all their own protestations— You'LL work our trickery even on the Queen, won't you? And Burghley and the rest can go to Hell with their persecutions and their factions and—
Kit's grin turned downward and he tapped a thumb on his lip, only half aware of the excited babble of the players on the stage below.

Kit sat up straighter and then scrunched into the darkness as a tall, beskirted figure, her gray-streaked hair—almost the same mousy shade as Kit's—bound up on her head and her dress sagging at the bindings as if it had been worn for hard travel. She scanned the galleries imperiously; he caught a breath in his teeth and held it, didn't let it slip until her eye was past.

One last voice—Will's—rose above the abruptly stilling clamor from the stage.
He must have his back to the yard.
But Kit didn't drop his eyes from Annie Shakespeare's face to see Will turn. Didn't look away from the Amazon's form as she set her heel and laid each palm softly on the curve of a hip. Tilting her head, the smile in her eyes never touching her lips.

Will must be looking by now, by the utter silence in the stage and yard. By the way Annie angled her chin up, to command a glance across the packed earth and cinders and up the five-foot lift of the stage. She drew a breath—Kit saw her shoulders settle as her bosom rose—and opened her mouth—and never got a word into the air, as a whooping Will Shakespeare piled off the stage and swept her off her feet and spun her up in the air.

And that's as good a distraction as I'm Like to get,
Kit thought, and slipped away down the stair into the drawing twilight, whistling to himself when his elf-booted foot met the dusty cobbles of the road.

Some hours later, footsore and sweltering, he stepped back into the doorway of a shuttered cookshop across the alley from a tavern he'd stay away from if he had any sense at all: the Groaning Sergeant, Mistress Mathews' sole domain. He leaned into the shadows, trusting the cloak to hide the outline of his body against the brown wood of the door, lifting the pommel of his sword to tip the scabbard straight so it wouldn't tap the wall.

He sighed.
Francis could help me. If I had the wit to go to his house from Faerie, and speak to him straightaway. I'LL never find my way in now.

Men came and went. Kit stretched against the wall as the hours drifted by, keeping himself awake through force of will and force of habit. Traffic was steady; the Sergeant's clientele stayed awake late. When the lights within flickered out—longer after curfew than the law, speaking strictly, allowed—and the custom left, he did permit himself to slide down against the door frame and doze. But no more than doze; even if no enemy found him, it would profit him little to be taken and jailed as a vagrant, a masterless man.

Toward morning, he crept from his vantage and forced the cellar on a house which had been boarded up for the summer, abandoned to the threat of plague as the residents guested with some relative or country friend. He stole a meager supper from a few forgotten pots of preserves, and slept. Curfew found him again lurking in the shadows with a clear view of the Sergeant.

Kit's patience was rewarded sometime in the blessedly cool hours before matins, as he shifted the cloak and his sweat-lank hair off his neck. The smells of morning baking filled the air, and his stomach grumbled.
'Tis been too Long since you went hungry, Marley. You're soft.

But then a figure emerged from the alleyway beside the Sergeant and—with an unconcerned glance at the apparent derelict in the doorway opposite—slipped inside. A tall man, hair platinum in the pre-dawn, hands broad even for his frame.

Kit unwound his fingers from the hilt of his rapier. He checked the sky, cocking an ear for church bells, and decided discretion might serve better than boldness. At least clouds were gathering: a not-unexpected stroke of luck, given the chill wetness of the summer, but it would make his cloak less unlikely and Baines easier to shadow.

Kit emerged from the doorway, tipping his rapier straight again so the outline wouldn't show, and staggered around the corner to the alley. It didn't take as much effort to move drunkenly as he would have preferred: two nights propped in a doorway left his neck and back complaining, the muscles of his thighs stiff as if they'd been nights in the saddle.

Thunder crackled; Kit skulked behind empty barrels under a second-story overhang. He kicked a dead starling aside and settled himself to wait, but a few moments later the sky pissed rain like a drunken Jove. He tugged the hood of his cloak higher, wet wool slicing his limited vision in half. Inside the cookshop, pots clattered, onions browned.
Christ wept. Never trust to Luck.

In a quarter hour, Baines—cloakless, ears hunched into his collar—left the Sergeant. Poley walked alongside, better equipped for the rain in a gray oiled cloak and high boots. Kit swung in behind them, fifty feet or more. Baines' shoulders, clad in a brown leather jerkin that grew slowly darker with the rain, bobbed through a crowd, and Kit for once was glad of the other man's height.

The men wended north. The grit between his soles and the cobbles turned to mud, but Kit's feet stayed snug in Faerie boots and he never slipped. Poley and Baines led him down alleys and through mires more wallow than highway. A bloated rat corpse swept down the gutter. Pedestrians ducked into taverns and doorways, but Baines and Poley continued. And Kit followed. Baines never looked back. Poley did, but Kit was careful to vary his distance and his walk, and one shrouded, sodden figure looked much like another. He got lucky: they took the Bridge rather than a wherry south across the Thames.

The two men stepped down another side street and into an intersection. Kit recognized their destination: a well-favored establishment known as the Elephant, a Southwark tavern whose sign peeled artistically rather than from simple neglect.

Kit checked his step as they continued around the building to where, he knew, a ramshackle stairway led to a warm and comfortably appointed room. He stepped under an overhang and leaned into the corner by the garden wall, gasping like a hooked fish. His stomach clenched on emptiness, but he forced himself to straighten and walk silently through the rain.

His hand itched on his swordhilt. Not his left hand, to keep the blade tucked under his cloak, but his right, ready to draw the blade whickering into the air and cast that cloak aside, to run Baines and Poley down, shouting. To run them through before they could climb those stairs—

Where's Nick Skeres?
he thought, picking his way over litter and startling a feral pig nosing through garbage. It fled in a clatter of trotters, and Kit held his breath lest the sound should bring investigators. But the rain probably covered it.

Where's Frazier?
The name brought a twist of coldness into his belly, and kept him from thinking about who might be already waiting in that room. He released the rapier's hilt and thrust the lank strands of hair out of his eye. They stuck to his cheeks and forehead; he stifled a sneeze and swore.
Morgan will put me in a hot bath again.
It was her cure for everything, insane as it sounded, but it hadn't killed him yet.

Baines and Poley had just reached the landing as Kit glided around the corner and slipped beneath the whitewashed frame of the stair. They did not shut the door. Kit looked up at the timbers and sighed, knowing from experience that the landing and much of the stair were visible through that entryway.
Perhaps—

I can't make the climb in a cloak.
The sword would be enough trouble, but he wasn't leaving that behind. He circled through puddles, using a few wan flickers of lightning to get an idea of the strength of the crossbracing holding the stairs, wishing he had a bit of leather to bind his hair. It drifted again into his eye and mouth as he lifted his face. He drank in the unclean savor of London rain, blinked a particle of soot away. A pang of hunger left him dizzy for a moment; he sighed and took hold of the thickest timber.
Quickly, Kit, or you'LL miss what you've come to hear. You don't
know
who's in that room.

And one that could mean a great deal of danger to Will, especially if his friend's secret plan to undermine the ill-feeling between Protestants and Papists came to light.

Kit dropped his cloak in the driest corner and ran each hand up opposite sides of the rough-hewn timber, glad the edges had not been planed to corners and the bark was only haphazardly smoothed away. He grabbed as high as he could, locked fist around wrist, and half hopped, half pulled himself into the air. He wrapped his legs around the pillar, the rough surface burning skin through clothes—
so much for these hose—
and breathed.

One.
He reached as high as he could, coiled his arms around the pillar, and dragged himself a few inches, cursing rain and splinters. Something stabbed his thigh, working deeper as he shimmied up. He kept his grip and pressed the scarred side of his face against the timber.

Another flicker, and a halfhearted growl of thunder. Kit struck his head on a crossbrace and flinched, but held on. The stars he saw were brighter than the lightning. A slow hot trickle winding through his hair was soon lost in all the swift, cold trickles; he hoped the thump would be as lost in the sound of the storm. The voices he strained to hear almost vanished under the pattering of droplets; Kit chased them, hoisting himself onto that crossbrace and straddling it. His arms and legs trembled. The crossbrace dug into his back, and the splinter burned in his thigh.

Good work, Marley. And how get you down?
He wiped his hair out of his face again and saw dilute blood on his fingers, though the bump on his head seemed superficial.

He closed his eye and listened through the rain: first to the commonplaces of intelligencers in the tones of Baines and of Poley, reports of Catholics and Puritans Kit dismissed as no longer relevant to his service. Until—

“. . . no, I haven't seen Nick today, but he intended to attend. He must have been delayed at some trouble, my lord. I can tell you until he gets here that your Shakespeare's been well behaved,” Poley said in his sharp, sardonic tones. “He spent the night in his room with his wife. Had supper sent up, and the candle went out shortly after. Not a peep: he seems apt to take the Queen's penny and write his plays as he's told.”

And then the third voice. Precise, a little pinched. As pompous as his peascod doublets: the voice of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Kit covered his face with his forearm, blocking the incessant drip. “Have your men see he stays under control, Master Poley. I'd not waste another playmaker.

“Though so long as he seems biddable, there should be no danger; Lord Burghley relies on me to guide his production, and there have been no incidents such as those that provoked us to deal so harshly with Master Marley.”

Kit almost lost his grip on the beam.

“Have you aught else to report? Anything of Thomas Walsingham?”

Baines' voice, the first part lost under the rumble of the thunder and the sudden agony of Kit's throat constricting.
You broke it off, Kit. You were young. You Learned. You never—

“. . . Thomas Walsingham's trust is secure. I've made evidence that Marley was involved with enemies of the Queen, and Thomas has accepted Master Poley's judgement. With some tearing of the hair. I gather they were—bosom friends.”

Kit straightened his arms against the beam overhead. Cold water dripped onto his forehead and ran down his arms as he let his head loll back. It mingled with slow heat leaking down his cheek, dripped burning against the back of his throat. He tasted salt and didn't lower a hand to wipe it dry.

“Edward,” he mouthed. “Oh, unhappy Marley.” He'd blamed poor Thomas for his murder all unfairly, and it was fickle Edward all along.

Baines said, “Walsingham suspects nothing, my lord.”