Stuart, Mary : (Mary, Queen of Scots) Mother to James VI of Scotland. Dead.

Stubbs, Philip : A Puritan, dismbbered for treasonous writings

Taliesin : A legendary bard Tam lin: A legendary noblban kidnapped by Faeries

Thomas the Rhymer : A legendary bard

Topcliffe : The Queen’s torturer

Tresham, Francis : A Catholic recusant A troll

Tudor, Elizabeth : (Elizabeth I, Bess, Gloriana) The Queen of England, or perhaps Pretender to its throne

Tudor, Henry : (Henry VIII of England, Great Harry) Dead

de Vere, Elizabeth : Daughter of the seventeenth Earl of Oxford

Wade, William : The Queen’s other torturer, clerk of the Privy Council

Walsingham, Etheldreda (Audrey) : Wife to Thomas

Walsingham, Frances : (Frances Sidney, Frances Devereaux) Daughter to Sir Francis, widow of Sir Philip Sidney, wife of the Earl of Essex

Walsingham, Sir Francis : A Promethean. Spymaster to the Queen. Formerly, her Secretary of State.

Walsingham, Thomas : Cousin to Sir Francis, Patron to Christofer Marley

Watson, Thomas : A poet and intelligencer. A Promethean. Dead.

Divers demons, ifriti, faeries, prentices, goodwives, publicans, recusants, damned souls etc as required.

And since we all have suck’d one wholesome air,

And with the same proportion of Elements

Resolve, I hope we are resembled,

Vowing our loves to equal death and life.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1, Act II, scene vi

And since my mind, my wit, my head, my voice and tongue are weak,

To utter, move, devise, conceive, sound forth, declare and speak,

Such piercing plaints as answer might, or would my woeful case,

Help crave I must, and crave I will, with tears upon my face,

Of all that may in heaven or hell, in earth or air be found,

To wail with me this loss of mine, as of these griefs the ground.

EDWARD DE VERE, 17TH EARL OF OXFORD, loss of Good Name

Christofer Marley died as he was born: on the bank of a river, within the sound and stench of slaughterhouses.

The news reached London before the red sun ebbed, while alleys fell into straitened darkness under rooftops still stained bright. It was a bloody end to the penultimate day of May, in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of the excommunicate Elizabeth.

The nave of the Queen’s chapel at Westminster lay shadowed when, at the secluded entrance of a secret room, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford hesitated. Edward de Vere pushed his hood back from fine hair and wiped one ringed hand across his mouth. The panel slid open at his touch, releasing the redolence of oil. The sputter of candles along the walls reassured him that he was not the first. Four men waited within the stifling chamber.

“Marley is dead in Deptford.” Oxford tossed the words on the table like a poacher’s take. “Stabbed above the eye by your cousin’s man, Sir Francis. And we are lost with him: have you so thoughtlessly betrayed your Sovereign?”

“Marley dead?” Sir Francis Walsingham’s chair skittered on stone as Elizabeth’s hollow-cheeked spymaster lurched upright. Seated beside Walsingham was Henry Carey, lord Hunsdon the lord Chamberlain who blanched white enough that it showed in uncertain candlelight. Beyond him was the Queen’s physician and Walsingham’s Doctor Rodrigo Lopez. A final man stood by the wall, round, short, but of undeniable presence: the player Richard Burbage, famous already at twenty-six.

“Not on my orders,” Walsingham said.

“Is it certain? We are undone.” Oxford pulled a chair forth from the table and sat heavily, a dark metal ring on his thumb clicking. “The magic we—can perhaps manage that without Kit. I taught him what he knew, and it was not all I learned at Dee’s left hand.” Oxford concealed a tight smile; that learning ranged from the science of astrology to the arts of summoning succubae.

Lopez, a swarthy Portugall and well-known a Jew, whatever his protests of conversion, leaned forward over folded hands. He stared at Walsingham with significance and said, “This is not the first attempt on one of our number.”

“Our aims may have diverged,” Walsingham answered, “but the others have not forgotten our names.”

“And there’s plague in the city,” Lopez said. “Think you tis unrelated to those other Prometheans? Can you discern a native plague from a conjured one, Physician?”

“Some would argue there are no native plagues, but only devil’s work.” Oxford cleared his throat and his memories. “But with Marley, we lose the lord Admiral’s Men, leaving us without a company.” “There is my company,” Burbage put in, but Oxford’s voice rose over the player’s effortlessly. “—and without a playmaker under whose name to perform our works.”

“Never mind Kit’s ear for a verse.” Walsingham extended a long, knotty hand, bony wrist protruding from dusty’velvet, skin translucent as silk over gnarled blue veins. “Oxford.”

But Oxford shook his head. “I have not Kit’s grasp on an audience, Sir Francis.” Hunsdon’s hands lay flat on the scarred tabletop. He closed his eyes. “It risks Elizabeth.” Walsingham’s chin jerked sharply. “We’ll find another way.”

He stared down at his hands until his attention was drawn outward again when Burbage coughed. “What is it, then?”

Burbage drew himself up. “I know a man.”

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Othello

“Will”.

“What?” The leather-bound planken door swung open; the playmaker lifted his head from the cradle of his fingers. He cursed as the hastily cut quill snagged lank strands, spattering brown-black iron gall across his hand, his cuff, and the scribbled page. “Richard, you come hand in hand with fortunetonight. You did perchance bring wine?”

“No such luck.” Burbage shut the door, then hooked a battered stool from beside Will’s unmade bedstead with one booted toe and perched without waiting to be asked. He grunted as he leaned forward, elbow on knee, and tugged his doublet straight. “Tis early for wine, and I’m in no mood for a public house and ale with my bread. So—” he thumped a pottery bottle on the trestle —“it’ll have to be spirits.”

“Morning?” Will set down the handkerchief with which he’d been dabbing his sleeve and looked up at a shuttered window. Beside his elbow, a fat candle guttered, and his commonplace book was propped open before it.

“Morning. You’ve worked the night through. And your chamber-mate … won’t be returning.”

Will shrugged. He hadn’t noticed the hour, though the absence weighed on him. Or not the absence—Kit was often at the beck of patrons or conquests— but the irrevocability of it.

Burbage accepted his silence. “Have you cups?”

Will stood and moved to a livery cupboard, patched shoe scuffing rough boards. “What ails you, friend?” He turned with two leather tankards in his hand and came around the front of the table.

Burbage dragged the cork from the bottle with his thumbs and poured. “To Kit.”

Will lifted the second cup and held it, wincing, below his nose. “To Kit.” He closed his eyes on an image of a man smug as a preening cat and soaked in his own red blood. Will drank, leaning a hip against the table as if it were too much effort to reclaim his chair. “You’ll have heard the rumors he was working for the Papists, or the Crown.”