“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 work-worn 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. As Frazier put a knife in your eye, Christofer Marley?

“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?”

Moore:

If that be called deceit, I will be honest.

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 woolendoublet 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 Francisis 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.

“Isn’t this Francis langley’s house, Sir Francis?”

That smile turned the corners of Walsingham’s eyes up. “The front half. Closed for the winter now, and langley has never hesitated to earn a few crowns in whatever closemouthed way he can. Pay no mind to the details of my subterfuge. Oxford gave me your work, with some scribblings on it. I took the liberty of making a clean copy,” he gestured to a pile of papers neatly sorted in the basket between the chairs, “and I was hoping you’d consent to look it over.”

Will retrieved his breakfast from the banked embers and inspected it, knowing it couldn’t be nearly warm yet. He set it on the dish and picked up the pages so quickly that Walsingham chuckled, ‘One poet is very like another.’

It was not the manuscript he had given to Oxford, so that Oxford could doctor it with his magic scenes. Not Will’s own looping, hurried script, but a fine university italic, formal as the Queen’s. His own text in a center column, neat as if ruled, and running down the right margin notes and suggestions. A corner of his lip curled as he recognized Oxford’s overwrought phrasing. A suggestion here was better though, a sharp-ended pun and an enjambed line that ran a ragged stanza smooth. It almost, Will thought, captured a rhythm of normal speech, but left the formal power of the blank verse intact. His mouth went parched and he reached without thinking for the cup of cider next to the dish, feeling Walsingham’s eyes upon him.