“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