Ink and Steel (35 page)

And through it all, Richard Baines, hands as sure as irons pressing him to the table, a soft voice in his ear encouraging him, making a mockery of comfort, calling him
kitten
and
puss
as it bids him be brave, good puss, it will all be over soon.

And he cannot even scream.

God didn't seem to be listening. Again.

When they release him he rolls to the floor and lies there, drools blood as fast as it fills his mouth, mumbles through the agony, amazed his tongue will shape words at all. His knees curve to his belly. His chin curves to his chest. The bloody earth of the floor clings to his bloody flank.

“You're for the Queen's destruction,” he rasps.

The priest nods, unafraid of him. Unsurprising: Kit couldn't stand if the roof were on fire. “We are.”

“You hate her so much? I'm not inclined to trust you right now, poet. But you've earned a quick garroting; I'm not an unreasonable man.”

“Was not—” He spits again, smearing at his bloody mouth with a bloodier hand. “Was not Job tested in his faith?”

The priest watches, unimpressed. Kit rolls prone, whimpering as his left arm touches the floor. He shoves himself upright with his right, drags forward, more on his belly than his knees. He slumps down on the chill earth and kisses the man's boot with his broken mouth.

“I—beg you. Let me help.”

It isn't enough, and he knows it. He closes his eyes. Both of them.

“If we have a chance to complete the wreaking in London,” Baines says, over the sound of the well-pump he works to wash his hands, “it would help to use the same vessel. Even more if he were willing, of course. Although mayhap our little catamite liked it, considering his tastes. Did you like it, puss?” He crouches beside Kit almost congenially, and tousles the poet's blood-matted hair with clean, wet fingers. A look passes between Baines and de Parma that Kit does not understand, does not wish to understand.

De Parma turns away. “Then let him live.”

This
Kit covers his face with the hand he can move, curling like an inchworm at the touch, and
that
Kit finally managed to wake, whimpering, clinging to a pillow wet with sweat and red with the blood from his bitten tongue.

“God in Hell,” he said under his breath, checking guiltily through the darkness to be sure Murchaud still slept. Kit rolled against the Prince-consort and buried his face in Murchaud's hair until his gorge settled and his heartbeat slowed.

A nightmare.
Nothing but Queen Mab running her chariot over your neck.
He'd
Lived
. And three weeks later he had stood in front of Sir Francis Walsingham, his arm still useless in a sling, and reported that the Queen's enemies were resorting to sorcery and had fully infiltrated Essex's service. And that he, Kit, had engineered a connection to one of them and the guise of a double agent.

He'd worked shoulder to shoulder with Baines, ostensibly as a turncoat on the Walsinghams—like Baines himself—until 1592, in Flushing, where he had somehow slipped and given away the game and Baines had nearly gotten him hanged for counterfeiting.

The only thing that had kept him sane those five years was the knowledge that one day he would look Richard Baines in the eye as a hangman slipped a noose around his neck. And the determination that nothing—
nothing
—that had happened at Rheims would
change
Kit Marley.

And what a fabulous Lie that was, sweet Christofer.
Because he had walked away from his chance at Baines in London, so terrified of the man he couldn't have looked him in the eye if it meant his salvation.

Murchaud smelled of clean sweat and violets. Kit lay against him in the darkness and tried without success to chase the reek of frankincense from his lungs.

Act II, scene xvi

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 39

The place on the Mermaid's weathered door where a hand might rest to make it open was refined smooth and fair, the wood so oiled with the grease of men's palms that it retained a fine polish although its sea-blue paint was worn into the grain. Will found the spot and pushed, holding it wide to let little Mary slip through before him.

A few ragged voices greeted them, rising from an enclave of players in the corner by the fire, half under the gallery. The October afternoon was gone chilly as the sun slipped behind a layer of overcast unlikely to bring desperately needed rain.

Mary headed for the publican as Burbage waved Will to a cluster of benches maintained by the other Wills—Sly and Kemp—along with the amiable, red-goateed playmender John Fletcher, whose unbuttoned red doublet made him look like a fashion-conscious demon, and Kit's old collaborator Thomas Nashe with his ridiculous curls. Will limped close enough to speak in a normal tone. “Wills. Jack, Tom, Richard.” They embraced and kissed him before he sat, which eased Will's sore heart. He hadn't the spleen to be angry when they treated him like Italian glass; it was, he knew, a measure of their love. “A spare crowd tonight. Tom, you're neither in the country nor in jail.”

It had been a play called
The Isle of Dogs
that had seen Nashe flee London before he could be locked away on suspicion of sedition; Will glanced around the Mermaid for its second author, Ben Jonson. These satirists sailed very close to the wind. Admirable—but the wind changed frequently.

“Not jailed, and drinking to it.”

“Chapman claims he's close to ending his revisions on Master Marley's
Hero
, and he'll be along when 'tis finished.” Fletcher's eyes sparkled above his freckled cheeks, a comment on the likeliness of that.

Nashe snorted into his wine. “Kit's four years dead. I think he would have had the poem finished in a month at most—”

“Chapman has to be sure he's eradicated all the bawdy bits. It takes a while to find them all, it being Kit's work—” Will replied, dropping into a chair as laughter rose around him. He waited for the pause, and filled it to an approving roar. “—and for George, longer than most. Where's the bricklayer, Tom?”

Nashe tapped a pipe out on the edge of the table and twisted a knife in its clay bowl. “Ben? Still jailed—”

“No one stood his bail?”

Burbage, stretching until his shoulders cracked. “Henslowe loaned him four pound to eat on.”

“Four pound? At what rate?” Will raised an eyebrow.

Fletcher laughed. “Better than borrowing from Poley.”

“Aye, at least with Henslowe you'll see the money and not a pile of lute strings you're supposed to sell to recoup.”

Mary came to the table balancing two mugs of thick ale, and Nashe let whatever else he might have been about to say about Robert Poley's moneylending practices die in his throat. Mary perched on Burbage's knee and kept one mug for herself, sliding the other neatly to Will. He cupped it, too cheerfully tired to think of fighting to swallow. The mug was cool from the cellar. “I'll stand Ben's bail. How bad can it be?”