Ink and Steel (9 page)

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 up and 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 workworn 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.

“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?”

Act I, scene vii

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Titus Andronicus

Lord Hunsdon never answered Will's request, but on the fifith of October, very early, a note was delivered to Will's lodgings, inscribed to
Mr. W.S.
It directed him to the home of Francis Langley, and it was signed—
F.W. Come at once. Titus needs you.

Does that mean
unseemly
haste,
Will wondered, shrugging a brown woolen doublet over his shirt and tending to the lacings,
or just all due speed? Titus needs you.

At Least Walsingham has a sense of humor.
An anticipatory tickle of dread pressed his breastbone like a thumb. It had been so long. There was no telling what horrors they'd wreaked on Will's poor words. Will stomped his boots down, jarring puffs of dust from between the floorboards. At the door he paused, casting a final eye around his chamber to find all in order. Behind him, he tugged the panel tight.

It was a fine autumn morning, sharp and cool, still pink with sunrise. The moneylender's house was close. Will hesitated by the garden gate—the only door he had been shown through—and rattled it testingly.

It was unlatched.

He glanced over his shoulder. The street lay empty, and Will shrugged and lifted the handle.
Not cut out for espionage
. He blushed as he remembered his confrontation with Baines. The rumors about Kit had only grown more scurrilous since, and he suspected Baines and Poley were behind them. He slipped through the gate, aware that any observer would have seen a drably clad skulker with no right to be there.

The lemons and olives were long over, yellowed leaves drifting from the grafted tree espaliered to the gray garden wall. Will shrugged his doublet higher on his shoulders and kept on, hoping he didn't surprise a maidservant whiling away the early morning hours with a cellarer.

As it was, the gardener dropped his pail as Will rounded a curve in the gravel path. “Master Shakespeare!” He must have leapt almost out of his boots, because he staggered in the spilled manure, and then whipped his cap off, covered his face with it, and laughed. “Oh, you startled me. Sir Francis is expecting you. He's had breakfast laid. Shall I tell the steward you've arrived?”

“By all means, Master Gardener.”

Walsingham was already seated in an armchair before a long hearth banked to embers. The spymaster gestured Will seated and handed him a toasting-fork, indicating a plate of crompid cakes. “I shan't stand on ceremony,” the old man said, waving one hand as if to include the wainscoted walls and the chambered ceiling in his invitation.