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.