“On a darker day,” she said, crouching and resting her back against the wall, but not sitting, “I might give ye that Kit was killed for my sins.” She balled fists reddened with scrubbing against her eyes, whipcord muscle flexing across skinny forearms.

“But it wasn’t Robert wielding the dagger.”

Will suddenly felt very tired, as if the space of a few feet across the floor between himself and Mistress Poley were a rushing river that must be swum. “Do you see your husband often, Mistress?”

She pulled her hands down. “Never an I can cross the street in time. But there might be yet a thing or two I may aid you with, Master Shakespeare.” She nodded, a sage oscillation of her head, and then she grinned. Will blinked in the dazzle of her smile as she squared her shoulders and rose against the wall without setting a hand on the floor, realizing that she was no older than he. Not that you re quite the beardless boy any more.

“Aye, Will Shakespeare, then. A friend of Kit Marley’s is a friend of mine.”

Barabas:

Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of Malta

Kit’s eye never shifted from the unrippled surface of the Darkling Glass, his fingertips hooked under the lip of the carved flower petals marking the frame. So long as his hand rested among the cold, sculptured blossoms, he heard the words of the players clearly: Burbage’s metered, resonant voice declaiming, ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound’, Burbage and Kemp, and Will, and the rest of the company moved about the shaded stage before an empty house, on an early autumn afternoon. Sunlight glared on the packed earth of the yard, outlining a not-quite-perfect circle with the bite of the stage taken from it, its margins defined by the gallery roofs. Kit leaned closer, tracing the action behind the mirror, where small forms moved sharp and crisp in the cold, polished blackness of the glass. But it was cold. Cold as a scene viewed through a rippled casement.

Kit drew his brown woolen cloak tighter, tugging the hood up to hide his hair and the black band of the eyepatch crossing his face. He settled his sword at his belt with his left hand, hiding it under a fall of cloth, glanced over his shoulder, and finding himself unobserved thought very carefully about a dark corner of the Theatre’s second gallery, in the private boxes above and behind the stage. It came into view, a familiar concealed corner behind a pillar and a bench where lovers might steal a kiss. Or where a cloaked man might linger and in his own person overhear the voice of Richard Burbage speaking beautiful words:

‘By a name,

I know not how to tell thee who I am:

My name, dear Saint, is hateful to myself,

Because it is an enemy to thee.

Had I it written, I would tear the word’

A warm breeze brought Kit the scent of the streets and the distant barking of a dog, and the contrast to Faerie’s cool air and birdsong came home with a pang. He sweated in his cloak, and saw that the players sweated as much in their costumes, and thought, how much I miss thisonly a few moments before he realized that he could not, in fact, step back to Faerie as simply as he’d stepped away. I’ll need to find a looking glass.

He wasn’t worried: he thought he might have two or three days before the pain set in, and if he couldn’t visit Will because Will would be watched there were other errands Kit could busy himself upon. Once night fell. In the meanwhile, he crouched against the wall in a garishly painted box at James Burbage’s Theatre, first to be so named, and concealed his face, and watched men who had been friends rehearse a play.

Several of his own poor scribblings had made their mark upon these boards those sanded scorches were from an overturned firepot during a miscarriage of Faustus, some years since and by this current rehearsal, Kit judged that Will Shakespeare had made a fair mark of his own.

The play progressed. The shadows slid, and Kit slid with them, his eyes tinging and a smile on his lips. He sighed and settled down on the floor cross-legged, peering around a bench, his left arm going numb from elbow to wrist while he leaned his chin on his arm. He didn’t dare blow his nose, and so sniffled quietly and uncomfortably into the rough wool of his cloak. And then the truth of what he was seeing sank in, and he sat back against the wall, rapier sticking out to the side like a stiff, unwieldy tale.

Two warring houses and their children lost coming to their senses too late, uniting when the future they might have defended is lost to them. Not Catholics and Protestants, but Capulets and Montagues. Kit bit down on his finger to keep from laughing out loud.

I’d almost forgotten. His family is Catholic.

Injustice and undue accusations, your simpering Hero and her slander, your stern Beatrice and your clever Benedick united over all their own protestations. You’ll work our trickery even on the Queen, won’t you? And Burghley and the rest can go to Hell with their persecutions and their factions. And Kit’s grin turned downward and he tapped a thumb on his lip, only half aware of the excited babble of the players on the stage below.

Kit sat up straighter and then scrunched into the darkness as a tall, beskirted figure, her gray-streaked hair almost the same mousy shade as Kit’s bound up on her head and her dress sagging at the bindings as if it had been worn for hard travel.

She scanned the galleries imperiously; he caught a breath in his teeth and held it, didn’t let it slip until her eye was past. One last voice, Will’s rose above the abruptly stilling clamor from the stage. He must have his back to the yard.

But Kit didn’t drop his eyes from Annie Shakespeare’s face to see Will turn. Didn’t look away from the Amazon’s form as she set her heel and laid each palm softly on the curve of a hip. Tilting her head, the smile in her eyes never touching her lips. Will must be looking by now, by the utter silence in the stage and yard. By the way Annie angled her chin up, to command a glance across the packed earth and cinders and up the five-foot lift of the stage. She drew a breath. Kit saw her shoulders settle as her bosom rose and opened her mouth and never got a word into the air, as a whooping Will Shakespeare piled off the stage and swept her off her feet and spun her up in the air.

And that’s as good a distraction as I’m like to get, Kit thought, and slipped away down the stair into the drawing twilight, whistling to himself when his elf-booted foot met the dusty cobbles of the road.

Some hours later, footsore and sweltering, he stepped back into the doorway of a shuttered cookshop across the alley from a tavern he’d stay away from if he had any sense at all: the Groaning Sergeant, Mistress Mathews sole domain. He leaned into the shadows, trusting the cloak to hide the outline of his body against the brown wood of the door, lifting the pommel of his sword to tip the scabbard straight so it wouldn’t tap the wall. He sighed. Francis could help me. If I had the wit to go to his house from Faerie, and speak to him straightaway. I’ll never find my way in now. But then I wouldn’t have seen the play.

Men came and went. Kit stretched against the wall as the hours drifted by, keeping himself awake through force of will and force of habit. Traffic was steady; the Sergeant’s clientele stayed awake late. When the lights within flickered out longer after curfew than the law, speaking strictly, allowed and the custom left, he did permit himself to slide down against the door frame and doze. But no more than doze; even if no enemy found him, it would profit him little to be taken and jailed as a vagrant, a masterless man. Toward morning, he crept from his vantage and forced the cellar on a house which had been boarded up for the summer, abandoned to the threat of plague as the residents guested with some relative or country friend. He stole a meager supper from a few forgotten pots of preserves, and slept. Curfew found him again lurking in the shadows with a clear view of the Sergeant.