And Willtasted bile. He wished he could stop his ears with his fingers, but he swallowed and stepped toward his friend. “Sayst thou he knew of this? An Englishman?!”

“Oh, Will.” Marley worried his eyepatch with nervous fingers. Will, he held me down.”

A dark, too-knowing eye. A sliver of an earnest smile. Will looked down, looked away. Anywhere but at his friend. “Kit ….”

“It wasn’t so much different than Cambridge, all in all. I have been told I was a lovely boy.”

“Oh, sweet Christofer.” Will’s knees folded and he sat down on the floor. One hand landed on the edge of the half-mended chair. He hauled himself into it, shaking. Kit squared his shoulders, leaning against the wall, one hand circling in the dim room like a white moth near a flame.

“So, three times now I’ve escaped him and his masters. In Rheims, when he referred me to the Catholic plotters though I have some satisfaction in knowing that truer Papists caught him out before he left France, and they put him to the question in the strappado. Then in the low Countries, when he forged a charge of counterfeiting upon me. And in England, now, and a knife in a hand I thought a friend’s.”

“Can you prove it was Baines?”

“I can prove it was Thomas Walsingham. And Baines will do as a sop to my rage, can I not find the grace to beard his master. But yet the Crown sees in them both loyal men. I must have proof, or his death. Elizabeth can lack stomach for blood.” Kit stopped as if his voice ran dry. “But I see I shock you.”

Will unclenched his hands from the chair arms and stood.

“No. Tell me more. Tell me about these shadows we oppose. Tell me how you escaped.”

Kit threw his brandy back like a man intending to get drunk, and quickly. Glancing at the glass in his hand as if he meant to hurl it into the hearth, he shook his head and after three quick steps set the fragile thing lightly on the mantel. He crouched before the fire and held his hands out. “You re expecting the story of a daring escape.”

Will nodded. Close heat made his beard itch.

“I swore Bess and the Church of England blue and bloody. I vowed I’d see her headless corpse dragged through the London gutter. I vowed I made them think they had broken me. Hell, they did break me. I would have crawled, and gladly, but I hid my loyalty to our Queen.”

A sound almost like a hiccup, so Will averted his gaze.

“It doesn’t matter. I lied. And I lived. And later a few were hanged. Hast seen a Tyburn hanging?”

God help Will, he had. Slow strangulation, but not to the death. With the criminal cut down living, disemboweled living, emasculated living, hacked into bloody chunks. God have mercy, by then almost certainly dead.

“That’s what a Queen’s Man is, Will. It isn’t for you.”

Will raised his hand from Kit’s shoulder, brushed his fluff of hair aside. He half expected a flinch, but Kit turned the long way round to look upon him square. “Christofer.”

“How plainly can I tell you? Get out. This is not for you.”

“How old were you?”

“How ? I was twenty-three. It wasn’t so long ago.”

“You survived.”

“Lucky me. Unlucky Edward the Second. Or,” with an airy wave of his hand “—that Gaulish or Saxon commander. Whatever his name was. The one the Romans cut slits in, so more could go at him at once. Or was he a Roman raped by Gauls? Still, an Inquisitor. I’m tempted to count it some species of honor.”

He’s drunk after all,Will realized, and almost laughed that the only reason he had known it was that Kit couldn’t remember the name of an obscure historical figure.

“Not the tactics the Inquisition normally approves.”

A tilt of Kit’s head, and that fleeting smile, shy as a girl’s.

“It does seem a touch unprofessional, doesn’t it? These Catholics at Rheims were no true Catholics. They did not seem overly concerned with what the Church bids or unbids. I can’t but say I agree, somewhat: had God not wished us to savor meat and enjoy drink, he would have given us tongues too numb for tasting. Had he not intended us to enjoy companionship, would he have given us tongues so facile for conversation … or such a taste for it? The Church is not God.”

“Kit, that’s heresy.”

A smile bent around his scars. “I died for it.”

Will opened his mouth. Embers in the banked hearth popped. Kit rested his hands on Will’s shoulders, leaned his forehead against the bridge of Will’s nose. “These are very bad people, Will. Get out. Go to the Continent. Join a nunnery. Save yourself.”

Will set him back at arm’s length and studied his face. Flushed, maybe, but his gaze was sharp and he stood steady on his feet.

“You haven’t run.”

“I’m Kit Marley.”

“And I’m Will Shakespeare. Dammit, Marley, an you’d ward me, tell me truth!”

“The truth?”

Will took a breath. “Aye.”

Kit gestured to the chair and hooked a peeling stool over with the toe of his boot. “If you can’t be dissuaded, he said, then by what’s holy, Will, sit down.”

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute. And now and then stab, as occasion serves.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Edward II

The fire burned low. Kit found a black iron poker beside the hearth, a long bit of rod stock with a looped handle, the tip spiraling to a point like some black unicorn’s horn and poked the coals idly, knocking sparks and cinders up the chimney. An orange flame licked in the crevices, and Kit wedged the poker there, resting the loop on his knee. Will coughed once against the back of his wrist. Kit at last folded his arms one over the other and smiled. “You re tangled over Titus.”

“I’m horrified,” Will answered with a shrug. “I’ve got to lavinia mutilated, ravished and next I must have the Moor’s treachery to Titus, and I find myself as tongueless as lavinia, and as bottled full of tales. Hands cut off, tongue torn out. How does a man make that real?”

“You haven’t her rage to put in it.”

Will nodded. “Her rage and her hurt. Tis not something that can be set right in an act.”

“Tis not something that can be set right. That’s what makes it a tragedy.”

The coals had gone dark near the poker’s tip. Kit leaned forward and puffed air until they flared blue and orange, casting disconcerting heat across his face.

“The plays, your plays have the power to make people believe. Some of it—this craft lies in what I did to Titus. Some of it is in your own vision and tongue. Oxford writes some scenes and words, but he only knows what I taught him. It’s Plato’s magic; you make an ideal thing, and if the people believe that thing, the world itself must be beaten to the form.”

“Plato. Like love, then.”

“Aye,” Kit said dryly. “If you believe in love. And then the performance. Alleyn was good enough to carry the spell. Burbage and Kemp are strong as well.” He twisted the poker in the fire, one boot propped on the hearthstone. “There’s an art to that too: to giving the audience belief in a dream as real as the touch of hand. The Senecan structure won’t work for it, and blank verse is too static. Fourteeners are a loss, too formal. A Platonic ideal. And people will live for it. It seems too simple, doesn’t it?”

Kit looked away from the embers. The loop of the poker grew warm against his knee. He shifted its resting place from his stocking to his breeches. “But give them men who could grasp heaven, and who turn away through willfulness and greed. Give them strong kings, or give them the truth of what happens when kings are not strong. Make them grieve for men they would hate, but it must be fresh, not stylized: words spoken trippingly on the tongue. Reality is drama.” He paused, and watched Will chew his mustache. “Like that lemon tree of Sir Francis . If you can convince enough eyes they’ve seen a thing, if you can convince a man or a beast he is a thing better than he is, more loyal, more true—that thing holds.”