Текст книги "Hell and Earth"
Автор книги: Elizabeth Bear
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She looked up at him and shook her head. “Can’t fool old Tom Watson’s sister, Kitling. Shall I kiss each of thy scars to prove I know thy body well?”
She dropped her gaze from his eyes and seemed to be looking past him, but he didn’t turn to see where. “Mary–”
“Hush, Kit. I’m grateful. And Robin is too. He’s courting his master’s daughter, you know. She’s to go in service at the end of the year, but I do think he’ll marry her when she returns and his apprenticeship is done.”
“He seems a fine lad.”
“For all his looks, Kit, he’s a sweet soul. More like thee than my husband, damn him to hell.”
“I’m working on it,” Kit answered dryly. She laughed, and closed her hand around his arm. “Thou hast nothing to justify to me, Mary.”
“Not all men would see it so. Why didst thou not get me word thou hadst lived? I hope it was not that thou hadst no trust in Robert Poley’s wife.”
“I told no one. I was on the Oueen’s business.”
“And now art home?” There was hope in it, like a razor dragged lightly over Kit’s skin. He lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. She blinked. “Christ. Thou hast aged not an hour.”
“Not home,” he said. “Christofer Marley is as dead as Tom Watson, I fear.”
“Then why hast thou returned?”
The railing was rough against his back. He turned to lean forward, looking down over the Mermaid, the bustle of poets and players and drunks. He rubbed fingers over the time‑polished dark wood of the railing and lost an argument with a frown. “To say good‑bye.”
“Ah.” She stepped up beside him and snuggled close, a compactly elfin warmth. No great beauty, Mary Poley, but a comforting sort of fey. He bent and kissed the top of her head; there weren’t many women Kit was tall enough to perform that office upon. “Wilt pass Will somewhat of interest for me, Kitling? I’ve had no luck in cutting him out of the crowd for a privy conversation.”
“Aye, I will.” Will.A name that still had the power to stop his breath. Aye, and I’d traffic with Hell for thee all over again, for moments such as this.Kit searched the crowd below, but there was no sign of Will. Or, come to think of it, Burbage. There stood Edmund Shakespeare, talking with Henslowe and Alleyn, John Fletcher watching with interest. Ben Jonson had finally arrived and was carrying on a conversation with Chapman that looked at once animated and hushed, involving much waving about of hands.
Mary gulped breath; he felt it swell her slight body where she curled under his arm. “Robert’s about something.”
“Not Robin your lad?”
“No, Robert my husband – ”
“‘–damn him to Hell.’ ”
“Precisely.”
“What is he about, Mary?” She had Kit’s complete attention now but he maintained the casual pose, a man in flirtation with a likely woman, both of them watching the flow and ebb of the gathering below.
A grunt, her little noise of frustration. “I know not. Mistress Mathews at the Groaning Sergeant is a friend of mine, and she says Robert and Richard Baines were in there of a morning, well pleased and talking of duping some Earl.”
“That could be important. What Earl, and how duped? Dost know more?”
“The Queen’s old favorite, I think, from what Mistress Mathews overheard. Essex, I mean. Robert Devereaux. I do not know what it is they mean to have him do, but she said that Baines was positively gloating about compelling such a man to do his bidding.”
Kit shuddered, having some experience with Baines’ compulsions. Even the quiet ones. “What else did she say?”
“Only that men and prentices came and went and met with the two of them all the morning, and a good deal of silver seemed to change hands – ”
She stopped speaking suddenly. Kit knew from the way her breath halted that his own body had gone entirely rigid in her offhand grasp. It could be but a resemblance,he cautioned himself. Especially from this angle.“Mary,” he said carefully. “What is the name of that man, the blond one coming out of the back room beside Will and Dick?”
“Why, Robert Catesby,” she answered, all innocence.
His left hand tightened on the railing. His right pulled her close. “Oh, holy Hell,” he blasphemed. “Mary, thou’rt a princess among women, and a canny one at that. I’ll carry my affection for thee to a second grave, if I get one. So please, please, do not take it amiss that I needs must talk to Will on this instant, my dear, and that I may not have the chance to bid thee farewell again.”
He stepped back. She caught his coarse linen shirt collar in her reed‑fine hand and tugged him down to lightly kiss his mouth. “Go with God.”
He laughed as he turned away. “Oh,” he said. “If only.”
Act IV, scene xix
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all too precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 86
This can only end ill,” Kit said. Will, hurrying fresh‑barbered and clean‑scrubbed through the streets to the bank where he meant to hire a wherry to Southwark and the Globe, glanced over at his friend and nodded. “Aye, there’s no clean way clear of this mess, love. But then, we knew the truth of that when we stepped into it.” Sudden worry diverted his conversation. “Kit, this is thy second day out of Faerie–”
Kit smiled, a steadying hand on Will’s elbow as they clambered down the steps to the bank. The Thames had never frozen over, this winter, and the banks were clear of ice by now. A sign, perhaps, that Baines’ Prometheans were losing ground at last.
“I’ve one more at least before it troubles me. What concerns me more is that I’ve dreamed of Catesby–my ill dreams–and I’ve verily seen him in a room, talking privily with Baines. I can’t think but that his presence on this errand with Lord Monteagle means that there will be trouble over this play.”
“Trouble for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men–” Kit handed Will into the boat as if Will were a lady in a farthingale, and Will glowered at him but didn’t resist. Mind thy Limitations, Master Shakespeare. Or like as not thou’lt tumble into the muddy brown Thames and drown.
“Aye,” Kit continued once they were seated, leaning close that the boatman wouldn’t overhear. “And intentionally so. They know your strength now.”
They were silent then, as the river flowed under them.
“Kit,” Will murmured, and coughed to ease the scratch in his throat. “I cannot think but there’s more to it than that. If Baines is gloating that Essex has done something foolish–”
“Something foolish that Baines has directed him to do,” Kit amended, paying the boatman as they reached the opposite bank. “It must be more than a play.”
“Aye. It must. And we must find out an answer quickly. Before it finds us out.The earth was thawed beneath a layer of frost, crunchy‑sticky underfoot. Kit helped Will up the bank and made no comment when Will struggled.
Kit had not seen the Globe before, and Will paused to let him tilt his head back and take in the scope of the massive whitewashed polygon. “It’s built on timbers over a ditch to keep the footings dry,” Will explained. “I stayed in that little house beside it a while last year. ‘Tis very snug.”
“Clever,” Kit said. “There were times I swear the groundlings at the Rose were to their knees in mud and worse things. The south bank’s very wet – ” He paused and lifted his chin in the direction of a tall woman swollen with her babe, her hair modestly covered and her skirts kilted to the ankle to keep them out of the mud. She was making for Will and Kit with grave determination, and her stride was not that of a workworn good‑wife. “Marry, Will. That woman hurrying to meet us–”
“Aye?”
“I know her.”
And a moment later, Will did too, for all he had met her only once before, in a little room where her father lay rotting alive. “Frances Walsingham Sidney Devereaux,” he said under his breath. “I never did understand what Walsingham’s daughter and Sir Philip Sidney’s widow could see in that strutting popinjay Essex.”
Kit gave him a sidelong look. “She married him to inform on him to her father, Will. Shortly after Sir Francis faked his death. There was rather a lot of suspicion in our group that it was Essex behind the … ‘poisoning’ attempt. Much as he was behind the hideous death of the Oueen’s physician, poor Doctor Lopez.”
“She married the man she thought tried to kill her father?” Will felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wind or the half‑frozen earth underfoot settle into his belly.
Kit shrugged. “She’s a Walsingham, Will.” Will stared at him, and Kit folded his arms and continued, “Tom’s no different when you scratch him deep enough. All for Queen and country, and not even honor for themselves. Perhaps thou shouldst see what she wants, thinkst thou not?” And Kit clapped him on the arm and moved away, leaving Will leaning on his cane and awaiting the attentions of the Countess of Essex.
She came before him bare of face and with her luxuriant dark brown hair coiled in demure spirals below a stolidly middle‑class headdress. The style reinforced the prominence of the Walsingham nose: a convincing portrait of a housewife, but she didn’t remember to curtsey. “Master Shakespeare.”
“Mistress Sidney,” he answered, and was rewarded by a sparkle of a smile. He stepped closer and bent his head down beside her bonnet, leaning propped on his cane. “If your purpose is to warn me off the misguided performance upon which I am about to embark, by all means, Madam, consider that I am as forewarned as a man might be. And as entrapped–”
She took his elbow lightly and walked with him toward the playhouse. Will was conscious of Kit a few steps behind and several yards off to the side, seemingly out of earshot and varying his distance to look unassociated. “My father thought highly of you. And I have been unable to speak to my cousin–”
Tom, of course.Will nodded, brushing beads of sweat from his forehead with his gloved left hand. “You know something the Queen needs to hear?”
“Aye,” she said. “The Earl of Essex plans a rebellion tomorrow. He means to ride through London in a grand procession, if you can credit it, and exhort the people to rise and make him King. Your play, of course, will make them ready to accept his glorious reign–”
Will snorted laughter, and regained himself only with effort. “And he thinks this will work?”
“He thinks it will work. Southampton, Richard Baines, and Robert Catesby convinced him it would work. That their– magic”–as if the word filthied her mouth– “would ensure it.”
“Christ on the cross,” Will swore. “That’s insanity. He’ll be beheaded.”
“I know,” she said. “And you will be imprisoned at the least, and very likely hanged, unless you have resources of which I am not aware.”
“I have Tom,” Will said, and turned his head to cough thickly.
The Countess of Essex squeezed his arm. “Tom might suffice. And you might have Cecil as well, and perhaps the Lord Chamberlain. I’d say you have me, but as I am shortly to be widowed a second time”–there was no regret in her voice when she said it, only a kind of military firmness, and Will remembered her iron control as she bent over her father’s deathbed– “I believe mine energies will be quite well spent in keeping mine own head.”
“See that you do,” Will answered, feeling a sudden rush of affection for this woman. “Do you know what Baines and so forth are about?”
She shook her head, already moving away. “My husband’s downfall is a blind for something; he’s a stalking horse, as well as a peacock. Where, and what, I have no better information than I have given you. And now, Master Shakespeare, I have three children and one unborn who very much need not be in London when the sun rises.”
“Godspeed,” he said, because there was nothing else to say. She turned and walked away, and stopped a few short strides up the verge.
“Master Shakespeare?”
“Yes, Mistress Sidney?”
“Did you really see the Devil by my father’s deathbed?”
He sorted and discarded answers long enough that her eyebrow rose. He gave it up for a bad business and spread flat the hand that did not hold his cane. “Yes, madam.”
She tilted her head charmingly. Her eyes were large and dark, dewy and doelike: the eyes of a young and beautiful girl. “Hmm,” she said, turned her back on him, and walked away without another glance.
Will sighed on a long ragged breath, and turned to Kit as he came up. “Is that what Tom Walsingham does to you?”
Kit grinned and shook his head, very slightly. “Hedoes it without trying, damn his eyes. Come on–” He tugged Will’s sleeve, very slightly.
“What?”
“I contrived to eavesdrop, and make sure no one else was doing so. You have a play to perform. And we have an appointment with history, my love.”
The performance, to neither poet’s reassurance, went off without a bobble. When the body of the players retired to the Mermaid Tavern, Will–coughing–pled pain and exhaustion and Kit excused himself with an invention about a long ride home to Canterbury on the morrow. Later that evening they presented themselves to Sir Thomas Walsingham with news that all three men deemed of interest to the Queen.
“Thank you, my dears,” Tom said, and seated himself right before them in order to pen a hasty message to Cecil.
Accounts varied as to whether three hundred men rode through London with Essex or only one hundred, but Robert Catesby and the Baron Monteagle were indubitably among them. Will himself could not attest. Kit had returned to Faerie via the mirror in Tom Walsingham’s study, and Tom–over Will’s feeble protests–had put the playmaker to bed in a spare room. Will’s brother Edmund came to help nurse him in the morning, for there Will remained, sick with a fever and a heavy cough.
Act IV, scene xx
View but his picture, in this tragic glass,
And then applaud his fortunes as you please
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great,Part I, lines 7‑8
Kit had come to think of the Darkling Glass as a sort of convenience, reliable as a faithful hound, and it annoyed him to no end to find the thing suddenly misbehaving. He’d long ago ascertained that it couldn’t be used to spy over the shoulders of Richard Baines or Robert Poley, who must have warded themselves from its power somehow. Nor was it useful in the Presence of Elizabeth herself, or in any of her palaces–a wise precaution, he thought, and one he wished to apply himself to solving when he found a quiet moment.
He was accustomed to its vagaries, and resigned to them. But today, when he needed it most, the thing’s damnable unwillingness to hold a single steady image frustrated him to swearing, and he had to restrain himself when he would have driven his fist against the glass. He hit the wall instead, which was less satisfying and hurt more, but had the advantage of not putting a priceless magical artifact at risk.
A priceless magical artifact which gave him nothing,except the useless information that Will was still abed in a darkened room, and Edmund and Jonson and Tom talking quietly in the withdrawing room hard by it. He looked for Baines, Catesby, Poley–and got only flickering darkness and useless pictures. A flock of ravens circling the Tower of London–a cold chill touched him at the image so reminiscent of his dreams–the sound of chanting men, and a swirling flicker that resolved into the streets of London strangely silent, every ear tuned to the ringing hoofbeats of some hundred or hundred and fifty horse. Essex, all in white, was unmistakable at their head.
They vanished as they headed for the palace and the Queen, and Kit’s vision resolved on the old monastery, later playhouse, currently vacant hall of Blackfriars on the west end of London, just inside the city walls. Men filed into it, men in monk’s robes, as they should not have been in Protestant London. As they should not have been in the second playhouse owned by the sharers of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which those Men had never been able to use as a theatre because of the opposition of its neighbors, although Ben Jonson’s plays were performed regularly by the boy players at Paul’s.
And isn’t that a little odd?Kit asked himself. That there was no such opposition to another such establishment almost across the street?Kit pressed both hands against the glass as the image swam again. He pushed it back toward Blackfriars, but it slid through his control like the reins of a fractious horse, leaving him grasping after nothing.
Baines must be there. This is whatever Essex’s stupidity is intended to conceal. It is a juggler’s flourish: while all eyes are on the Earl, Richard Baines sweeps a treasure into his pocket. And odd that Will should come down hard sick this day of all days.
And anything at Blackfriars, which should be closed tight and all but abandoned, is another chain linking the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to Essex. Layers and layers deep, this: better than anything Poley could have managed on his best day.
God in Hell, I wish I knew what wad going on. Who does any of this benefit? Not Essex, not Southampton. Baines?
There had been eight or ten robed men, he thought, although he’d only had a glimpse of them. There was no way one lone Elf‑knight and sometime poet could manage so many, but Walsingham’s London residence wasn’t far from Blackfriars, and there were Tom, and Ben, and Edmund too– if Edmund can be trusted. If Ben is not a member of two conspiracies at once.
Kit shrugged at his own suspicions, and pushed through the Darkling Glass.
It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Edmund–obviously already nervous in the presence of a knight–stood blinking by the window as Kit appeared in the center of the room, and Jonson broke off midsentence, glowering, reaching across a belly grown as mountainous as his self‑importance to grasp his swordhilt. But Tom turned away from the two of them and smiled. “Welcome back,” he said.
Jonson grudgingly released the handle of his weapon as Edmund found his voice. “T‑tom Marlowe? What sorcery–”
“No time to explain,” Kit said, his eyes on Tom Walsingham. “Does it seem strange to you that Will should be taken so ill yesterday, immediately afterhe gave the performance he had to give to suit the Promethean’s plans?”
“God,” Tom said. “Yes. Essex rides–”
“I know–”
“–What must we do?”
Kit swallowed and glanced from Ben to Edmund. Edmund looked at Jonson, who nodded. “Baines is at Blackfriars,” Kit said. “With eight or ten magicians. Whatever happens, happens now–”
“And thou mean’st to interrupt?”
“Aye, Sir Thomas. If I can request a few able‑bodied men.”
“There’s that in this room,” Jonson said. “All this keeping secrets is hard on the use of hirelings.”
“That it is.”
“I’ve a few sturdy souls about the house who would suffice. Kit–”
Edmund glanced over his shoulder once, at the door into Will’s sickroom. His head snapped back at the name Tom used, and his eyes widened. Kit bowed, his arms spread wide under his cloak. “At your service, Master Shakespeare. There’s still no time to explain. What seems to be the problem, Sir Thomas?”
“The sturdiest of those souls is one Ingrim Frazier.”
Kit’s stomach clenched. From loose readiness for action to seasick horror in a second, but he gritted his teeth and kept his voice level. “As he’s earned your forgiveness, Tom, I’ll live with it. But–” But I want to talk to him first.Except there was no time for recriminations now, was there? Not with Will’s life and Elizabeth’s crown on the line. “I’ll endure,” he said, and ended whatever comment Tom might have made next with an abrupt flip of his hand.
Edmund seemed still at a loss. He tapped his fingers on the window ledge, his voice level and calm. “Will’s told me a bit of these poet‑wars, and that they have been quiet of late. His sickness is related?”
“To these sorcerous doings? Aye.”
“Then I will come.” He paused. “If I may consider your presence an invitation.”
Kit laughed and turned to follow Tom as Tom moved toward the door. “Stuff your Warwickshire politeness, Ted. It’s time to go to war.”
It wasn’t any easier to turn his back on Ingrim than he’d thought it would be. And Ingrim was keeping a weary weather eye on Kit as well, and Tom’s broad shoulders between them. Kit thought, if Frazier could manage it, he might have turned invisible, or hidden himself behind Ben Jonson’s bulk completely.
Ben, bless him for a foul‑tempered young mule, was having none of it. He walked alongside Kit, an outward show of alliance that left Kit puzzled and looking for the trap, but the possibility existed that Jonson saw in Kit a more likely ally than Walsingham. Or possibly he just didn’t care to run shoulder to shoulder with the servants, and wanted the buffer of Kit’s velvet doublet and hooded cloak.
Kit sighed and turned away from another sidelong glance of Frazier’s. And the whole world knows Kit Marley lived. Thou couldst just have hired a herald to cry it through the streets, Kit.
Seven men, including two servants whose names Kit had failed to overhear, walked swiftly west on Cheapside, which had begun to bustle again in the wake of Essex’s dramatic ride. It didn’t matter, to Kit’s way of thinking; it wouldn’t be long before Essex was riding back again. He overheard talk in the crowd: witnesses reported that Essex, due to a delay over choosing his outfit for the revolution, failed to prevent Sir Robert Cecil from publicly proclaiming the insurgents traitors, and that the people of London likewise failed to rise and make Essex their King.
The crowds made way for the seven afoot; Tom’s height and Ben’s sheer bulk were impressive, and Kit expected they all had the look of men with intention.
They were almost in sight of Newgate (‑where Kit had once spent an unpleasant two weeks, detained on charge of murder) when their route turned south; in a matter of minutes they drew up under an overhang a few hundred yards from the playhouse. Kit stripped his glove off his right hand carefully, lest it interfere with his grip on his rapier.
“Well,” Jonson said in his incongruous tenor, “time’s a‑wasting – ”
“Aye,” Kit answered. “Shall we be clever about it?”
“You’re too clever by half, if you ask me – ”
“Which no one did.”
“Gentlemen.” Tom didn’t bother to glare, but Kit subsided like a chastised schoolboy and Jonson fell silent too. They both had cause to know that tone. “The time for subtlety is past,” Tom continued, and drew a snaphaunce pistol from his belt. I wish we had Will or Dick here. It would give a little more credence to the story that we shot ten men for looting if one of us had somewhat to do with the property.”
Kit shrugged. “Forgiveness is cheaper than permission. And we’re unlikely to shoot more than one or two at the most unless you’re handing out petards, Tom.”
“Aye,” Tom answered. “Sadly, I’ve but the one. Come on then; let’s bloody our hands.”
It wasn’t exactly a charge: more a concerted rush. Jonson reached the door first and–to Kit’s surprise–merely tried the handle. Tom, nervy as a colt, jumped when the hinges creaked, and Ben stopped with the portal open no more than a quarter inch. “Dammit, Ben – ”
“We’ll be silhouetted against the street when we open the door,” Jonson said with a soldier’s calm. He braced the door with his toe to hold it in place while he drew, cocked, and primed his own pistol. “We have to enter quickly, divided to each side, and fan out in case they have firearms within.”
Edmund shot him a glance with a question behind it, and Ben shook his head. “Fought in the Low Countries,” he murmured. “Ready, lad?”
“Aye.”
“Good. Stay at my shoulder. Keep moving. Master Marlowe? Sir Thomas?”
Kit nodded tightly, not sad to see Jonson take control. As much as he bragged on his brains, Kit thought, drawing his sword, Jonson was very much in his element as a man of action.
“Go, Ben,” Tom said over the hammering of Kit’s heart, and Jonson shoved the door open and went in, head down and shoulders hunched like a charging bull. The rest rushed through behind, slipping aside like court dancers into the dimly lit interior. Somehow, Kit wound up pressed against the wall beside Frazier, shoulder to shoulder, but neither had a glance for the other now as their eyes strained into uncandled dimness, searching for a flicker of movement that might reveal the shift of a pistol or a blade. To Kit’s otherwisesight, the figures of any conjuring sorcerers should have stood out plainly, but he saw nothing in that breathless moment but a few dust motes hung on a crack of light.
And then Jonson cursed, moving forward, and bent over some dark shapes outlined on the floor. Kit moved away from Frazier and the wall, deciding there was no need for quiet and that he was damned if he’d let Ingrim rattle him badly enough that Kit wouldn’t turn a shoulder on him with five other men there to ward his back. Kit crossed to where Ben crouched. “Master Jonson?”
“Too late,” Jonson said, and used the blade of his rapier to prod a pile of sad‑colored cloth. “Monk’s habits. Theatre costumes, I think, and quite abandoned. Are those your robed men, Master Marlowe?”
“Fuck me for a whore,” Kit said, turning his head to spit on the floor. “I just played right into his god‑be‑damned hands. Again.”
Tom turned to search his face, and Kit forced himself to meet the expressionless gaze. “What meanst thou, Kit?”
“I mean this was a feint as well, a trap laid for any that might have followed Baines or sought to scry after him. And while we were here, and the Oueen’s troops distracted by Essex, and Will struck down sick in his bed, Baines and his fellows have been about whatsoe’er they wished to be about, utterly undisturbed.”
“Ah.” Tom braced his hands before himself and settled back against the wall. “So what do we do now?”
Jonson, strangely, clapped a hand on Kit’s shoulder–and drew it back again, quickly, as if scorched. “We go back to your house, Sir Thomas. And we fight like cats to save our Will, and pray we make more of a success of it than we did with saving Spenser.”
Kit flinched. “And Lord Strange. And Walsingham.”
Act IV, scene xxi
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 121
In his fever, Will dreamed that Elizabeth attended him. He dreamed her long fair hands, her hair like ruby glass when the light shone through it. He dreamed Elizabeth, but her breath was sweet as a maiden’s and her eyes as much green as gray.
His flesh burned until he thrust the blankets aside, and then he shivered with the cold. He was distantly aware that he whined like a child and fussed at the tender hands restraining him, while voices gentle, cajoling, and bitterly frustrated by turns spoke over him. One voice – “Annie?” It could have been Annie–and then a second.
There was a rhythm to that other one: halting, hiccuping, but a meter and a tenor he knew. “It’s not the King’s Evil,” the voice said pettishly. “The touch of a Oueen’s hand won’t heal him – ”
Linen abraded his skin like coarse wool. His muscles ached as if knotted. Sickly sweet fluid trickling past his teeth made him gag, and he batted the hands that wrung a damp rag into his mouth and other, stronger hands that held him down. He screamed when they covered him, but it was a mew weak as a kitten’s, and he shivered when they did not. He clawed at a blanket with a texture that puzzled him, for it was sometimes velvet soft and sometimes silk‑slick under his hands.
The rag was withdrawn. Someone leaned into his ear and whispered poetry. A thread of logic and meter and beauty wound through the madness of the fever and the visions and the knotting pain –
“Come live‑with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove–”
“As hills and–dammit. Dammit, William, thou’lt not be quit of me so easy. These words thou knowest. There’s virtue in them. Say them with me, damn you to Hell, just a little breath–”
Dear voice, and so frightened, so thick with frustration and hurt. He reached for it, or tried to reach, tried to do what it bid him and shape the words, find the power behind them. There was nothing, no movement, no reach.
Such a dear voice.
And so far away.
There will I make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle.
– Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Kit pressed the heels of his hands to his eyelids to keep the tears locked in. A terrible odor rose from Will’s papery skin. Kit wiped his nose on his cuff and looked up at Morgan hopelessly. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Keep fighting.” Succinctly, and not looking up from whatever she was steeping by the fire. She stood and came toward him, the steaming cup held in her hands.
Kit reached to restrain Will’s hands, so Morgan could again trickle her medicines into him. Will’s skin felt thin enough to crackle to the touch, hot as the side of a lantern.
Morgan shook her head. “Kit, ‘tis for thee.” She held the mug out and he took it, cupped it in hands too tired to lift it to his mouth.
“Thou wert wrong about me, Morgan.”
She nodded, straightening Kit’s cloak across Will’s breast as he tossed and shivered. They did not know if its magic would help Will, but there was no harm in trying. “I underestimated thee.”
Somehow, Kit got the cup to his mouth. Perhaps even the steam was fortifying. It tasted of bitter earth and summer sun and the unshed tears still clogging his throat. “What if he dies?
“What if he dies now,thou meanest?” She bent and kissed Kit’s hair as if he were a child. “We endure.”
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own …
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet 121
Will fell deeper. Sometimes it seemed those hands held him, caressed him, cooled his brow. Sometimes he thought he plunged through darkness eternally and heard nothing but the Devil’s amiable laughter, and knew nothing but the heat of his own Hell. Nothing could touch Will in the void; he knew somehow that he needed poetry, needed the power of his words, but in his jumbled consciousness he could not put one line of a poem with another.
But through the darkness came that dear, distant voice again, and that voice gave him poetry. “Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain, full charactered with lasting memory…”
