Текст книги "Ink and Steel"
Автор книги: Elizabeth Bear
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“Let me see your wounds, Sir Christofer,” she answered, not cruelly. “Draw off your bandages.”
His fingers fumbled when he tried. The room spun, and he laid his palm flat on the edge of the steps to keep from tumbling down them. Morgan came up beside him and lifted the coils of linen with gentle fingers, and the Faerie Queen sucked air between her teeth like any woman would at what she saw.
“Hist, let me lay hands on thee,” she said, leaning forward on her throne to probe with cool fingers. “I cannot heal the scar or give you back your vision, poet. But I can seal the cut. Have I consent?”
“Yea,” he answered. Morgan’s hand on his shoulder, only, kept him upright. The Queen stroked the wound again, and the pain ebbed, and the floor and the walls blurred and spun. She muttered a word or two he did not hear.
Well,Kit thought when she leaned back, I’ve benefited from sorcery and had dealing with the fair folk. If there’s a hell after all, no chance of avoiding it now.He thought of Faustus and managed a smile as Morgan and someone on his other side—Murchaud—helped him rise.
“Art dismissed.” The Mebd turned her attention away.
To complete Kit’s disgrace, Murchaud had to carry him back up the stairs to Morgan’s chamber. The knight took his leave, and Morgan stripped Kit over feeble protests and placed him in bed. Sometime before morning, she drew the hangings back and crawled under the coverlet, and he found to his delight that a little rest had restored him more than he’d expected. There was something to be said for living after all, and for being alive, and the simple joy of a woman who threaded strong hands through his hair and touched the seamed white scar across his face as if it were merely another thing to be caressed like his nose, his ears, the lower lip she nibbled into silence when he would have whispered fair words in her ear.
She left again by dawn, wriggling from under his arm, and though he lifted his head to see her slip through the door, he did not turn when the door reopened and he thought she returned. A warm body slid beside him as he drowsed. He startled from sleep to wakefulness in a moment, stifling a cry;the hands on his shoulders were dry and calloused with bladeplay, big enough to close a circle around his upper arm, and the lips that touched his throat and the teeth that caught at his skin were framed with a tickling rasp of beard. A flutter of breath trickled through his teeth. He forced the words to follow it.
“I’m unfit for wrestling, Sir Knight.”
Murchaud chuckled, his mouth growing bolder as his long hands tightened on Kit’s shoulders, around Kit’s chest. “Come, come, Sir Poet, he answered. “I’m understanding of your plight. Needs do nothing but sigh just like that, and I shall see your sighs well answered on this morn.”
Mercutio:
Thou art like one of those fellows that when he
enters the confines of a tavern claps me his sword
upon the table and says God send me no need of thee!
and by the operation of the second cup draws it on the drawer,
when indeed there is no need.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet
June stretched through the heat of summer into August, until Will leaned against the wall beyond Oxford’s patterned study door, a sheaf of poems clutched in his hand, and fumed. Oxford’s words rang in Will’s head.
“Walsingham has Titus. It’s good for what you have of it. Pray for an end to the plague, and write me an end to the play.”
“I didn’t give the play to Walsingham,” Will fumed. “I gave it you for comment, good my lord”
He bit his tongue against a curse and realized his hands were bending the paper his poems were scribbled on. Hastily, he smoothed them against his knee, and eyed Oxford’s penmanship on the page, tidier than his own spiraling squiggles when his brain outran his hand. Will folded the papers once in his hand. God send me no worse patron than a frustrated poet, he murmured, and headed out. A housemaid opened the side door for Will. Satisfied that the ink had dried, he tucked the pages into his doublet, rubbing his eyes against brightness as he stepped into the street. He bought a pasty from a market stall and ate it standing in the lee of a half-timbered house, beside the garden wall. A ribsprung calico peered at him from a roof angle and dared to mew. The plague chasers will be on thee, Will observed. Mind you hide your face, Malken, or your kits will starve without a mother. He worried a bit of mutton loose from his lunch and tossed it to the tiles beside her paws: she flinched, expecting a stone, then grabbed the morsel and was gone.
Kits and kits, Will whispered, cramming the rest of the pasty into his cheek and dusting the crumbs into the gutter. Errant rays of sunshine stroked his face. He raised a hand as if he could catch and hold them. Paper crinkled between his doublet and his shirt. Marley, if your ghost can hear me, I bidyou good grace. Whatever you may have done.He stopped and cocked an ear, but heard only a distant mewing that might have been the calico’s kittens.
He tried again to picture the scene at Eleanor Bull’s house, a drunken Kit drawing Ingrim Frazier’s dagger, attacking the other man, without warning, from the rear and failing to kill him. Failing so miserably that Frazier took the knife out of his hand and drove it without further ado into Kit’s eye. While Robert Poley and Nick Skeres stood by helpless to intervene? Is it that it’s too pitiful and crass a dying for a man like that? But great men die in pitiful ways. No,he decided, as the pasty settled into his gut like a kick. It’s that if Kit were to stab a man, he’d look him in the eye when he did it. And he wouldn’t miss.Will nodded, chewing his knuckle, unaware that he’d begun walking again until a curse and a blow alerted him to the horseman who had nearly run him down.
Will needed to know what about Kit’s plays had cost him his life. That had his name dragged through the streets as a traitor and a criminal, and the Queen herself covering his murder. He needs must know his enemies. Before he wound up with a knife in his own eye. Ignoring for the moment that the Queen didn’t want it cleared, Will wondered if he might redeem Kit’s name. He brightened as he turned toward the river and the looming presence of the Great Stone Gate. Southwark, and home. If Oxford wouldn’t answer his need, then perhaps lord Hunsdon would. But in the meantime…
I think I’d like to speak to Master Robert Poley.
Poley frequented a tavern near his house on Winding lane, where Will had played at tables with Kit once or twice. He glanced at the shadows lying across the street: just time for a man to be thirsty for a bit of ale and hungry for a bit of bread and cheese. He wondered if Poley would recognize him. He wondered if the man might be encouraged to drink
Her Majesty has signed a writ forbidding all inquiry into the events in Deptford on 30th May, 1593. But, Will reasoned, she hadn’t forbidden the buying of drinks for Master Robert Poley.
He whistled as he swung out, each nail-studded boot landing square on the cobblestones, strides clattering. The public house was called the Groaning Sergeant. Will stopped inside the door to let his eyes adjust, although the shutters stood open. The Sergeant bustled with a dinnertime crowd, only a few benches open closest the fire, where it would be uncomfortably hot. But the aroma of beer and baking bread enticed, and he smiled into his beard as his gaze swept the common room and he saw Robert Poley’s blond head bent toward a darker man’s in the quietest corner.
Poley, like langley, was a moneylender, and a far less scrupulous one. He waswell known as a cheat and an informer, and he was one of the three men who had been witness, in the little room where Kit was murdered.
Will resettled the rustling pages under his doublet and took the uncomfortable seat by the fire. As the evening cooled, the benches would fill in around him, and in the meantime he’d keep an eye on Poley and use the firelight for working on his sonnets. But first. He hailed the tavern’s sturdy gray-haired mistress, who brought him small beer and warm wheat bread smeared thickly with sweet butter and a pot of ink and a quill that wasn’t too badly cut, on loan for a penny more.
Will mopped the table with his sleeve and spread his crumpled sheets on softwood where they would catch most of the light. A breeze riffled the fine hairs on his neck as he ate the last bite of bread. He drank the beer leaning backward so the drops from sloppy drawing would fall onto his breeches and not the poems, and he did what he thought was a passable job of not looking like he was watching Poley.
Poley, who was drinking wine without water and eating beef like a man of prosperity. And who seemed to have set up shop in that particular corner of the Sergeant, given the number of men who came and went near him in ones and twos and sometimes threes. Some sat for a game of tables or draughts or diced a bit, while some merely quaffed a drink and spent a few moments in quiet conversation. Will wasn’t sure quite when, but after the third or fourth visit, he started jotting descriptions and the one or two names he knew Gardner, Justice of the Peace for Southwark. Oh, really? on the reverse of a sonnet that began ‘Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye’. He kept another sheet handy to drag across the paper. He and Kit had run in different circles, away from their connection to the theatre and the financial straits that had occasioned sharing lodgings and companies, the Admiral’s Men and lord Strange’s Men, for whom they both wrote plays.
Will didn’t know most of Poley’s associates. But Poley was one of the men who had been in that small room where Kit had died.
Poley never passed more than a glance in his direction in the brief gaps between guests. Will noticed that such patrons as did not seek Poley avoided him; he surmised that this was as much to do with Poley’s own reputation as the company he kept. The visitors seemed to come and go at regulated intervals. As the sun set and the moon rose, Will gathered up his courage and took a single deep breath. He spindled his poems lengthwise preparatory to tucking them back inside his doublet. That accomplished, he was making his way to the landlady to purchase ale for himself and wine for Poley when he saw a face he did recognize, and froze.
Richard Baines. A tall, fair man with a saddler’s forearms, a cleric’s smile, and a poison pen. Blessing his dull brown doublet and the darkness of his hair, Will stepped back into the shadows beside the bar, watching as Poley rose to meet his newest guest which Will had not seen him do before until the two heads leaned together, fair and fair. They embraced, and Will saw the glitter of a band on Baines thumb, a gold circle surrounding an inset of some darker metal, like the one Oxford wore. The flash of it drew Will’s eye to an odd-shaped scar on the base of the thumb, a string of pale knots like pearls.
Baines, Will knew through Kit and Thomas Kyd, and Baines would recognize him. But the men weren’t looking, so Will turned as if watching the landlady go shutter the windows, ducked to swing his hair across his profile, and started for the door.
Why is Robert Poley, who stood by when a knife went in Kit’s eye, talking to Richard Baines, who puts a knife to his reputation now that the man is dead?
For it was Baines who had written a note to the Privy Council that might have seen Kit hanged for heresy.
Salty sourness filled Will’s mouth, and he hesitated a moment and stole one final glance, thinking it safe enough with Baines back to the room.
But he found himself staring directly into Poley’s eyes, as if the man had been tracking his motion across the room. Will froze like a doe at the crack of a twig as Poley’s hand went out to rest on Baines thick forearm. Baines turned, and both men began to stand, and Will took one more hasty step toward the door before Baines mocking baritone arrested his motion like a bullwhip flicked at his nose.
“Well, well.” The big man swung a leg over his bench as he turned and stood. “William Shake-scene. Come sniffing after better company now that yourfancy-boy’s dead?”
Will stepped diagonally toward the door. “I was after supper,” he said, wishing himself better armed than with a handspan beltknife. “And I’ve had it. Good even to you, Master Baines, and I’ll thank you not to idly insult me.” Some impulse made him step forward and add, “Or slander my friends, sirrah.”
Benches scraped on planks as the Sergeant’s custom recognized a brewing fight.
“Friends,” Baines answered with a sneer. “That’s not what they call it that I ever heard. What will you do for a living now, you poor excuse of a playmaker? Without that drunken sodomite Marley to doctor your work and bugger…”
Will opened his mouth to interrupt, but a determined, feminine voice overrode the first rumble of his retort.
“Master Poley.” The landlady stepped between Will and Baines, ample hands on her ample hips, and tilted her head to glare around Baines broad shoulder at Poley. “You will control your friend. I’ll not have any man driving off custom.”
“Mistress Mathews,” Poley said, and he laid a hand on Baines arm. “As you wish it.” But his eyes met Will’s quite plainly, and the glare that followed Will to the door said, ‘And don’t come back.’
Well, Will thought later, barring the door of his own room behind him before tossing his much-battered sheaf of sonnets on the table, that could have ended much worse.
Bernardine:
Thou hast committed…
Barabas :
Fornication. But that was in another
country, And besides, the wench is dead.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of Malta
A better awakening than the last, though Kit was surprised to sleep so deeply in a stranger’s bed, with a stranger’s arm around him. His right cheek pressed a pillow that smelled of Morgan’s rosemary, and he remembered before he opened his eye that it should hurt. It didn’t. He remembered as well Morgan snipping and pulling bloody stitches after the Mebd had healed it, and her lips and body drawing out the agony the Faerie Queen’s sorcery had darted in him.
But it wasn’t Morgan’s arm around his waist, her hand splayed possessively across his belly though the dark hair drifting across his face in unbraided waves did not belong to Murchaud. Kit, thou hast outdone thyself. He couldn’t recall Morgan returning, which frightened him: a man with enemies didn’t live long if he slept too heavily to hear an opening door. But Morgan le Fey probably had her own ways of moving quietly. And Kit couldn’t remember when he had last wakened with this silence still in him, the clamor of fear and rage and duty and bitterness and memory stilled.
“Usually,” Kit murmured, when the hand that clipped him slid down to stroke his flank, “men whisper the delights of bedding sisters. Or mother and daughter.”
“Art anyway satisfied?” Murchaud answered, cuddling closer. Kit turned to see him
“Twill serve,” and Morgan chuckled on his blindside.
“Your Highness.”
She rose into his field of view, hair spilled acrossher face. The break in his vision was worse than he’d expected, especially close in. She stopped his lips with a finger, eye corners crinkling, then touched his scar. It felt as if she stroked a bit of leather laid on his skin. “Aren’t we beyond that, my lord? Does this pain you still?”
“Only my heart,” he answered. “But if I may look upon a sight as fair as you with but one eye, I’ll count the other well lost. What, what did she do to me? Your Mebd?”
“Always the flatterer,” Morgan answered. “And my Mebd she isn’t, and what she did on thee was old sorcery, deep glamourie, to turn a man into a mindless, rutting stag.”
Her fingers caressed his throat, and a low moan followed. “I’ve used it myself,” she admitted. “You feel it still.”
“Yes.”
Murchaud’s hands tightened on his hips; Murchaud’s teeth closed on the nape of his neck like a stallion conquering a mare. He cried out, but Morgan’s mouth muffled the sound.
“You re wondering,” she whispered, her cheek pressed by his cheek as her son pulled him close, “when I’ll give thee a mirror to see how the Mebd healed thee. You re wondering how she realized it, and you’re wondering that she englamoured thee of an evening, and at how you strode through sorcery where another would have been lost. And why I have taken an interest in you. Art not?”
Murchaud nibbled the place where Kit’s neck ran into his shoulder, and his hands were adventurers.
“Aye,” Kit whispered against Morgan’s lips. His fingers brushed breasts like heavy’velvet, skin like petals. She pressed close, guiding his hands to her waist and the abutting curves. Her fingertips traced an old scar on his chest, another on his belly, a third along the inside of his thigh. They were puckered and white, old burns that he tried not to think on.
“Time here answers the will of the Queen,” Morgan said. “She took a few months from your wound, is all: their passage dizzied and drained you. If thou hadst not been so brave in the cleaning, it would not have gone so well for thee. Lye soap.”
“I should thank you.”
“There’s one mirror in all the Bless’d Isle,” Murchaud said. “You’ve bought the use of it, although releasing the secret Walsingham’s un-death migh tprove a high price.”
Morgan’s lips moved on Kit’s. “Meanwhile, consider how you might repay me for returning your wits, that you might bandy words with the Mebd.”
Remembering the white flame the Mebd had kindled in him with a mere smile and a turn of her hand, Kit shivered.
“Anything, so long as it is mine to give, the lady may claim as her own. Only how did you protect me, madam?”
“Your boots,” she murmured, wickedly, “have iron nails.”
He stopped. And then he laughed, delighted at the simplicity of it, and stretched against her as he took her in his arms. She wrapped him in silk, and Murchaud enfolded him in steel, and he could have wept at the silence they gave him, and the forgetting, that when they drew him down between them nothing whispered remember. Instead, the whisperer was Morgan, speaking against his ear: “Things are different in Faerie.”
Christofer Marley closed tight his eye. The mirror was not hidden in a private chamber or guarded under lock and key. Rather, it stood at the end of a blind corridor, in an oval frame of tarnished silver tall as a door wrought with lilies and spirals. The stand was swathed in velvet. The polished glass could have been obsidian.
It’s called the Darkling Glass, Murchaud said when Kit hesitated. He stepped closer, laid one hand on cool crystal polished without a ripple. His palm left no print; his reflection was more a matte sheen than an image.
And I step through it.
Morgan came up beside him. A tall white candle he did not recollect having seen her light, burned in her right hand. She raised it beside his face, illuminating the dark band of his new eyepatch crossing a pale seam of scar. Flecks of blood and scab showed where Morgan had pulled stitches free, but the ridged white line was straight from his hairline to where it vanished under the eyepatch. Morgan touched a finger to his mouth and he dressed it in a kiss.
His lips had been called voluptuous by men and women both, his dark eyes enormous, exotic with the fairness of his hair. The heavy diagonal of eyepatch exaggerated the softness of his mouth. Not as good as an eye in his head, and he knew he’d have work to make up the lack, but it had a rakish dignity. And it might win him Walsingham’s sympathy.
Morgan leaned against his shoulder. He caught a pale glimmer like the moon over his left shoulder: Murchaud’s reflection, further back.
“Step through any mirror to return. I put that power in thee. And there’s something you need to know.”
“I’ve tasted the food of Faerie.”
Her gown gapped at the collar when she inclined her head.“It will draw you back. A few days, a week. A passing of the moon. It is impossible to predict.”
“And if I do not come?”
Her cool cheek brushed his ear; her dark hair spread across the black velvet of his doublet. “You will suffer, Christofer Marley,” she said with a luxurious smile. “And when you have suffered more than you can imagine, you will die. Look there is your Walsingham now. Dost see him?”
The old spymaster’s accustomed image swam into the glass. He bent over his desk examining a document with a lens held between bony fingers. Light streamed over Walsingham’s shoulder in a swirl of dust motes, limning his hair and beard silver-gilt like a cloud.
“Now we know he lives, we can find him,” Morgan whispered. “Have a care.”
Kit opened his mouth to reply, but a firm hand pressed the small of his back. He stepped forward and tripped through the mirror, and fell with ill grace into a stunned silence and Sir Francis Walsingham’s arms.
That silence lasted moments, as Walsingham studied him, and turned as if to see what door in the air he’d fallen from, and then studied him again. And then knotted fingers like ribbons of steel in his hair and turned his face upand kissed him hard, as a brother might. Before jerking back suddenly and stepping away, the long sleeves of his robe falling across his knuckles.
“Marley,” he said, touching his lips and speaking between the fingers. “Not a ghost, I wot. Hell threw you out?”
“Hell wants me back when you’ve done with me, Sir Francis.” The smile came up from somewhere under Kit’s breastbone, and it bubbled through his chest and throat until his lips could not contain it. “But I have secured a visitation.”
Walsingham turned away, shuffling his papers into a pile and weighting them with the lens. He stole a glance across his shoulder, and Kit tried the smile again. “Sir Francis. You re fussing.”
“Kit, thine eye.” He turned again as Kit came forward, his right hand rising to touch the terrible scar. “Plucked out?”
“Cut through.” Kit looked down. “Your cousin Tom had a hand in it, I’ll grant. How am I living? Do you know?”
Walsingham crossed to the arched window and shuttered it; he crossed again, and barred the door. “Will you drink wine with me, Christofer? Thomas and the Queen’s Coroner identified your body. I’ve broken with Thomas over it. He maintains his men were innocent, your death the result of some unhappy double-dealing you revealed in the course of the conversation that day, but what were you doing in Deptford, and where have you been the past four months and more? Why did you leave me thinking you dead?” It wasn’t said, but Kit could taste the betrayal.
“Four months?” He put a hand on the desk to steady himself as his belly contracted. “Four months and a night. Long enough for that to heal.”
Walsingham touched his face again. “Oh, that grieves me, Kit. But not so much as the thought of your body cold in an unmarked grave. I’d have pricked thee out for a lover, not a fighter.”
“Cannot a man be both?]
“And a poet as well. Where have you been?”
“Stolen away by Faeries. I have what day is’t, Francis?
“Then don’t answer me, man. October the third. Good Christ! Your wound is well healed.” Walsingham poured the wine after all, though Kit had never answered him, and let Kit choose his glass. “And you stepped into my rooms as if from thin air.”
“I told thee. Stolen by Faeries. Would I lie?” Kit tasted the wine, rolled it on his tongue. He set the glass down by the papers, and the handwriting drew his eye. An angled look, a gesture for permission, and Walsingham’s nod, and Kit reached across the sand tray and took up the sheaf.
“Will’s improving. But then this is Oxford’s hand … Oh, Francis. Not Will.”
Walsingham covered his eyes with his hand, the other one with the glass in it dropping to his side. “We needed someone.”
“Will’s…” Kit set the papers back on the desk and weighted them with his now-empty wineglass. “Naive.”
“Will’s as old as you. Older than when you came to me.”
Kit turned to regard Walsingham square from his one good eye. “Francis, the man has children.”
Which was a body blow. He’d never married, and Walsingham knew why. He wiped the taste of wine from his mouth. Never married. Now he never would. Too much to risk. To much to fear for. Too much to give up for a nuptial bed.
“Kit, so do I.” Walsingham shook his head. “Something’s altered in you.”
“A knife in the eye will change your perspective.”
“Kit, cruel.” Walsingham’s face went white, and his mouth worked, and Kit saw him as if for the first time: old. “I would have protected you,” he said, and then quoted words that might have broken Kit’s heart in his chest. “Wouldst thou be loved and feared? Receive my seal, save or condemn, and in our name command, what so thy mind affects or fancy likes.'
“Nay!” A hiss, not a shout. Kit’s hand stinging flat on the polished desk, cupped to explode the air beneath it, and Walsingham leapt at the sound and the rattle of the ink pot. Edward II, and Kit couldn’t bear it. “Nay, sweet Francis. I wrote those words not for thee, and I’ll not have you filthy your mouth on them!”
“Not to me? To an age, surely. It’s put about that you were killed for them, by Essex’s men, or those who took them as an affront to Scottish James, a satire on his love for his exiled minion lennox.”
“No,” Kit answered, drawing breath to slow his racing pulse. Him they were writ to, knows it. Sweet Walsingham, who else should I trust with this? I must be… Another breath, a calmer one. I must be released of mine oath. To the Queen.”
Kit would have gambled that the old man’s face could grow no whiter behind the gray in his beard. He would have lost the bet.
“Kit, why?” A tilt of the head to bring his scar into the light. “The Faerie Queen who rescued me demands it.”
Walsingham held his gaze a long minute, then shook it off like a work-worn old stallion shaking away a fly. “Kit. I cannot release thee. You must plead with your Queen.”
Kit had known. He nodded, lightheaded and cold. Eleven years, that oath had held him. And now it could be gone on a breath. Like his life.
“Arrange it, Sir Francis. Will not thy Queen hear thee?”
“My Queen,” Walsingham answered, “has never forgiven me her royal cousin’s death. But, aye. She will hear me if I ask. What will you tell her?”
“That by her own coroner’s hand, I am dead. And a dead man can give no service to a living Queen.” He ignored the irony in Walsingham’s quick smile. “You will care for her in my name?”
“Kit.” Just his name, and all the answer he needed.
“There is another thing. More vital.”
Walsingham caught the tone, and long acquaintance made him nod, gaze level, and come so close that Kit could taste the wine on his breath. The spymaster didn’t speak, but he bent his head to listen. Such trust,Kit thought, shocking even himself. I could have a knife in that belly before he drew another breath. As Frazier put a knife in your eye, Christofer Marley?
“No one knew where to find me but our little conclave of playmakers. I was staying with Tom and his wife.”
“I know your arrangement.”
Kit ignored the disapproval. “Not Raleigh’s people. And the message summoning me to Deptford came under Burghley’s seal, phrased as a Royal command.”
Walsingham had not become Walsingham because he couldn’t follow a trail.
“We were betrayed from within.”
“Yea. Verily. More than by Tom. By someone who knew who could summon me, and make me run.” Kit put enough dry irony in it to make Walsingham laugh, but laughing made him cough. Kit went to Walsingham and laid a hand on his shoulder, but the older man shook him away until the fit ended. Then Walsingham raised too-bright eyes and continued as if uninterrupted,
“Who do you think betrayed you?”
“The orders came from Her Majesty, under Burghley’s seal. But there are forgers aplenty.”
“And if it’s Her Majesty’s hand ordered your death?”
Going to her for succor were dangerous. Kit let the implication slide off with a ripple of his neck and shoulder. “My life was ever hers to dispose of. I make no exception for my death. When the Queen says go-and-die…”
Walsingham shifted on his feet. Kit glanced at the crack of light between the shutters.
“Francis, may I look at Will’s play again? I think Oxford’s made some poor suggestions, and it is some hours yet until dark. And I think I cannot well go abroad by day.”
Walsingham laughed. “There’s more wine. I’ll have a fair copy made before I show it to Will.”
“Wine would be welcome. And then I’ll tell you of the Faerie Court and its Queen.”
Walsingham stopped with the wine bottle in his hand, staring at Kit as Kit appropriated his chair. The ink was fresh, the pen well cut.
“You re serious. As treason. Huh.” Walsingham came closer, to peer over his shoulder. “And even now, you can’t resist a manuscript?”
Kit shrugged and dipped the pen. “What poet could?”
