All Night Awake (10 page)

“You studied divinity before someone corrupted you. It is the name of the corrupter we want, and you may go, if you promise to reform,” Mauder said with the careful certainty of the self-righteous.

If only it were that simple. If only, indeed, Kit told all and were allowed to go. Even turning in kindly, learned Sir Walter might be worth it, to keep Imp safe.

But it wouldn’t be so. Kit would not be allowed to go that easily. Imp would be in danger, either way. For like a wolf, ravenous and confined, these intriguers, once fed the morsel they craved, would demand more and more until they’d devoured Kit and Imp also.

Yet even through Kit’s despair, a plan formed in his mind. Or if not a plan, a shadow of it, the bare bones and architrave of a plan as like onto a plan as the painted scenery on stage was like the place the playwright hoped to evoke.

He was a playwright, a maker of illusions.

If he couldn’t turn in Sir Walter Raleigh, then Marlowe must be able to turn in someone else and, with that someone else, buy time, until Raleigh turned the plot away from himself, or until Marlowe could find something else with which to hold doom at bay.

“I do know something,” he said, his voice low and hesitant and fraught with thought, as though he couldn’t quite bring himself to speak.

“Ah,” Mauder said, and sat back. “I knew you would be reasonable, Master Marlowe.”

“Yes. I meant to be, but . . .” He shook his head. “What I know is more complicated than what you meant. After all, what would it be to you, if I said that this person or that taught me heresy and atheism?” He waved his hand in the air. “It can no more than give the Queen momentary displeasure, but she will not be likely to take action against one highly placed for such a simple offense, will she now?” He flicked the fingers of his naked hand dismissively. His gloved hand still gripped the other glove tightly. “She cares not a fig for religion, does she, sires, when the heretic can defend her realm or . . .” He forced a smile. “Or bring home ships overflowing with gold.”

In his mind he cast about for a likely victim, around whom to weave his web of deception.

Outside, the horses raced, their hoof-falls muffled against soft ground.

Will Shakespeare. Was that not the name of the would-be poet at Paul’s? He’d seemed unprotected, unconnected. A country boy just come to London, full of fire and ambition and little else.

Will. Yes, he might do very well.

“But there is a conspiracy I know. Indeed, I’ve been following it for weeks. It touches the highest heads of the kingdom.” Kit wove his intrigue with facile speech. “I need but a few more days to be sure,” he spoke on, improvising, like an actor upon the stage, spinning seeming truth from his lying words.

From the quickening of Mauder’s eye, the sharp look of Mauder’s silent friend, Kit could tell indeed that the trout came to the tickling hand. He spoke fast and persuasively, as if this were a speech declaimed on the stage.

As it happened, they were so enthralled that they didn’t stop Kit when he twitched the curtain aside and saw that they trundled along a narrow street. From the signs on the shops, Kit recognized Hog’s Lane in Shoreditch. Did Shakespeare not live here?

“Would you let me out, gentlemen?” he asked. “I’ll look for you anon with more information.”

And unbelievably, Mauder gave his signal and the carriage stopped. The door opened, and on trembling legs, Kit stepped onto a muddy street in Shoreditch.

The carriage splattered Kit with mud and filth as it started up again.

He didn’t mind. It took him two breaths of the dank air, tainted with smoke and cooking smells, to realize he was still alive. Surely, no after-death smell could be that bad.

He was alive, but at what cost?

Could he run now? But run where? If it were only himself, he would escape this instant, board a ship to France or Spain, and there live by his wits and his work. But he could not leave Imp behind, to suffer the revenge of Kit’s enemies.

Nor could Kit take Imp with him without being sure they’d have lodging and food and ready friends on the other side.

Kit looked at the retreating carriage and thought he would have to concoct a plan now, a plot as elaborate as any ever discovered, a plot that would implicate Essex and thus let Raleigh, and Kit, and Imp go free.

He walked down an alley, and up another, to where his memory told him a hatter’s should be.

Across the street from him stood a tall, narrow, dark building with a hatter’s sign. Two people climbed a precarious staircase to the fifth floor, over the shop.

The man was Will Shakespeare. The woman, dark-haired, beautiful, wore cloth of silver and was . . .

Kit stopped. It couldn’t be the Lady Silver.

What would an elf do in London?

Kit stared as the couple disappeared through a door into the fifth floor the shabby building.

What could Will be doing with such a woman? Would this be Will’s wife?

Kit smiled at the thought. How could Will, with his much-mended wool suit, his receding hairline, his meek look, procure a wife like that exquisite creature?

How lovely she’d looked, even from the back, with her dark silky hair, her gown of silver cloth, her steps like a soft, hypnotic dance.

She reminded Kit of his first love, that elf lady that he’d loved perhaps not wisely, but too well.

Again, the thought of someone like Will winning the hand of one such as she made Kit smile.

But why would a woman have Will for a lover, who wouldn’t have him for a husband? And if not his lover, why would she go into his room alone with him?

Or was there some conspiracy already here?

Did this woman—by her looks, a great noble lady, or a great whore—seek Will for something other than his looks and his homely charms?

More likely she sought him for secret messages, secret plotting, secret maneuvering. London was as rotten with plots as a stray dog with fleas.

Relief washed over Kit like a breath of fresh air. The conscience he’d not been aware of disturbing ceased troubling him.

Maybe he was not concocting a plot unaided. Perhaps Will was not the sweet innocent he appeared to be.

Perhaps Kit would find true guilt where he’d thought to find gullible innocence.

Maybe Will’s involvement with this court lady spelled doom for Essex—deserved doom—relieving Kit of the dread guilt of entrapping someone as innocent and unsullied as Imp himself.

Kit climbed the rickety wooden stairs with a light step. Every step creaked beneath his boots and the banister shook like an unsound tooth.

Kit would find out what the good burgher was up to.

Knocking on the door, Kit waited. He could hear rustling on the other side of the door, then an urgent whisper.

He’d just raised his hand to knock again when the door opened.

A flushed Will stood in the doorway, raking his scant hair back from his domed forehead with the gloved fingers of one hand, and wiping his mouth on the back of his other glove.

Shakespeare looked as embarrassed and surprised as a cat caught at the cream.

Kit smiled at him, his slow, practiced smile. “Good eve, good Shakestaff.”

Kit couldn’t, of course, just ask Shakespeare who the woman was that Will had hidden in his room.

Shakespeare would lie or, worse, not answer, not even giving Kit the benefit of guessing the truth behind a lie.

No. Kit would use other bait to work his way into the house, to work his way into Will’s confidence, to find out all there was to know about this man that he might more easily entrap him.

The man was desperate for a job, any job. Kit remembered seeing Will in St. Paul’s standing in front of the Si Quis door. A job in the theater would seem to him his heart’s desire, a very dream come true.

“I thought on your plight,” Kit said, and smiled at Shakespeare, who looked more than a little bewildered. “I thought on your plight, good Wigglestick, friendless and jobless in London, and I thought on your poem and your excellent taste in playwrights.

“If I were to give you a note for Philip Henslowe, he would surely hire you to play odd parts in the theater. Not big parts, mind, only this man’s servant, that man’s mute friend. Yet you’d be paid from the common take.”

As Kit spoke, he leaned in, to look at Will’s room. He leaned now this way and now that, discerning the inside of very poor lodgings.

The wooden floor was strewn with rushes, in the old-fashioned country way. But these rushes looked old and dusty. The table, upon which an ink-stone, pens, and paper rested, was old and sagged upon one leg shorter than the others.

Nowhere could Kit see a trace of the fair stranger, the woman with the dark hair, the body of an angel, that he’d glimpsed all too briefly.

Had his mind played tricks on him? Did the memory of his elven love, coming upon the shocks of the last hour, make him suffer illusions?

It couldn’t be. Kit had done much in the way of madness, but never yet dreamed a woman out of the whole cloth of his mind.

Were he ever to do that, they might as well come and take him to Bedlam.

Yet, as if to tantalize him with his own possible madness, a smell of lilac wafted to his nostrils—the smell of the magical fairykind, the smell of Kit’s lady love in that distant summer, the memory of which still quickened his blood and sped his thought.

He shook his head to clear it.

Will Shakespeare, who’d done no more than open his mouth as if to make some answer, closed it again.

Trust the clod to think the head shake applied to him.

“Speak, good Shakestaff, speak,” Kit said.

Will took a deep breath and inclined his head briefly. “I thank you, good Master Marlowe, I thank you. To own the truth . . . I dare not lie to you, as I could use a job and the coin it brings. But I had just latterly . . . that is, today, on the way home, I saw a man . . . . I believe there’s plague in the city, and I believe the theater might close again.”

Oh. Plague.

Plague again, after the plagued winter. The plague, a summer disease, had ravaged all through the cold winter in London and seemed to have vanished early spring. Let it not be back again. Kit hated the plague, the stench of death wafting through the narrow streets, the miasma of rotting bodies blanketing London as it were a vast, open graveyard.

Yet, plague or not, Kit must make sure that Imp was safe of the stalking danger of the secret service, that other plague that moved through this twilight of the Queen’s realm plucking at will the innocent and the guilty alike.

And to save Imp, Kit must sacrifice Will Shakespeare.

To sacrifice Will, Kit must know him better. Every play necessitated research. Yes. Kit would make himself Will’s friend.

“You must not fear,” he heard himself say, and with eager hand he clutched at the rough stuff of Will’s sleeve. “There will be no plague. You must try the theater. You have talent for poetry—talent such as the gods give, such as must be used for the good of all humanity. Trust not vile fate. Make your fate. Take your destiny in your own hands and mold it. Here, Will Shakespeare, let me give you that note of which I spoke. Let me get paper.” Saying this, he tried to push his way past Will and into the room, toward the table, where pens and papers lay in disarray. From that room wafted the smell of lilac, the smell of elvenkind, the smell of the only woman Kit had ever loved. The only woman and, aye—Kit remembered as the blood rose, bold, to his cheeks—the only man. The elf of Kit’s worship had been both by turns, now Quicksilver of the moonlight-bright hair, the broad shoulders, and the moss green eyes, now Silver with her rounded body and her metallic eyes.

Could it be Silver, now within that room? Kit pushed forward.

“No,” Will yelled, his face contorted in anguish, even as his solid, country-boy body blocked Kit’s access to Will’s rooms. “No. I pray, wait. I’ll get the paper myself.” And taking a deep breath, Will flung the door closed.

Hearing the latch slide to, Kit blinked.

Will would lock the door? Why?

After all the good Kit had done to Shakespeare—well, all the good Shakespeare thought Kit intended to do for him—Shakespeare would shut the door?

Was Shakespeare perhaps not what he seemed? Was he so sophisticated that he saw through Kit’s deception?

Or had he decided that Kit was insane or drunk and took this opportunity to thus rid himself of an inopportune visitor? Or was Will’s visitor that important that Will must hide her at all costs? Oh, Kit must devise a watch upon Will’s house, to wait for this woman’s return.

Imp might do it. Anything to get Imp away from that house where the councilmen might seek him out.

Kit stared at Will’s unpainted, splintered door rancorously, wishing to know the secrets it hid.

Would Will ever come out again?

But the latch slid back, and Will handed Kit two sheets of rough paper and a quill, and held an ink horn in his hand, ready for the dipping.

“I thank you, Master Marlowe, for your pains. Indeed, I find not the words to express my gratitude.”

Kit forced a smile to form upon his face, a smile that hurt his muscles with forcing it—like aching legs will hurt with one further step, like an aching head will rebel at the prospect of one more thought.

If so grateful, why not innocently honest? If not honest, then why did he look it and torment Kit’s conscience thus?

Did Will conspire? Indeed, it seemed so.

Oh, that Kit could uncover this plot. Tomorrow night, he must get Imp to watch Will’s door. One more urchin wouldn’t be noticeable in the melee of Shoreditch at night and Imp was ever good at escaping his bed and his mother’s vigilance.

Kit struggled to think, struggled to speak, in his honeyed tones, in his most polite patter. “Good Shakesstick, I treasure your gratitude, but this . . .” He lifted the quill and the paper in his hand. “This will hardly do for writing, and I would more appreciate if your gratitude were translated into a ready table upon which to write.”

Kit thought he heard a muffled giggle answer his words and again tried to walk in past Will, who without seeming to do it, adroitly blocked Kit’s path with simple stubbornness and wide countryman shoulders.