Still our grip held steady, & I felt it safe to return to Annie & my children for lent when the playhouses were closed; I had seen to Robin and Francis comfort, & all in London quiet. & I thank the lord my God for the grace that I did that thing. Oh, Kit. London is terrible. I cannot know what has changed, or how what we have done was broken, but I feel the power gone out of our mighty lines & I feel Oxford must have poets to oppose us. Spenser is returned to London: lord Hunsdon has informed me that Edmund is one of ours & always has been (I wonder at the secrets kept & the acts of one hand kept hidden from the other, but who can truly trust whom in a game where crowns are hostage?), but I fear he is not well; although he struggles to complete his Faerie Queen I cannot feel but that we will soon lose his light. There is famine in the streets: it is all I can do to provide for Annie, as so many starve that there are carts come to collect the bodies as in a plague year. Babes swim not in their mother’s blood, but rather starve & sicken for there is no milk at the breast no, I will write no more of it. On Easter Sunday, Burghley saw men taken into service through the timely expedient of impressing those able-bodied who attended Easter service for communion, as is of course required by law. England’s stronghold at Calais is fallen to the Spanish: I see thy Fray Xalbador’s hand in this event. Drake’s ship has returned: Drake has not, & it has very much taken the heart out of our Queen that her other Sir Francis is dead. Essex won some favor, the knave, taking a fleet to Cadiz by leave of thine old patron the lord Admiral, where they sacked that Spanish city. There is a new playmaker in London, a University man & the son of a bricklayer or some would have it the posthumous son of a priest. I have enclosed some of his pages: he fancies himself a comedian. His name is Jonson, & I have some thought of bringing him into the fold if I can prove he is not Essex’s man. Not easy to do, as I myself have served Southampton a man’s patron does not show his heart. Chapman is too pompous to trust. Also there is a man Spencer, Gabriel is his Christian name, who is not related to Edmund the poet & who seems to wish to attach himself to lord Hunsdon’s Men. I have spoken to Richard of it. There are players & there are players, & I suspect this one is both. Thou wilt laugh to learn that I am under interdict with Francis Langley, owner of the Swan, by a Southwark justice of the peace, one William Gardner, who says we have threatened him bodily. I have not done so, but thou mayst be assured I will see to it does he trouble us further. These are petty lawsuits, & I, thou seest my hand is fairer now, & I write this by candlelight in the Davenant’s Inn where I rest my night before resuming my pell-mell flight on the morrow but I believe this Gardner is one of the whoresons in Poley’s employ. Of course if Oxford no longer believes the players under control such petty harassments can only continue. & since the death of Henry Carey & his son George’s accession to his place as lord Hunsdon we are less secure. The new lord Chamberlain, Cobham, is of Puritan sympathies, & he would the playhouses closed, torn down, & I think the players & playmenders hung, drawn, & quartered. Or at least whipped through the town. I wonder at how much of our famine is his doing, he must be Theirs. It is down to Burghley now, & the Queen still loves him, but he is ill, Kit, & in his dotage he grows enamored of oppressing the Catholics rather than defending his Gloriana. I am desperate. Soon it shall be only Tom, lord Hunsdon, Robert Cecil, & myself. We are not the men our forerunners were… . No. I will not send thee this letter. I will write it for mine ease of spirit & I will burn it, for I will not tempt thee with troubles to return to a world that thou hast sanely left. We starve & we bleed & we die. & yet the only grief in my heart that is too deep for speaking, the thing that I must write now & never send to thee. The reason I am again in thy Tom’s coach rattling over unsanded roads & Roman ditches, & yet there is no haste that can carry me home in time. I cannot write these words. Kit, I am going home to Stratford because my son is dead. Dead seven days now of this writing. Dead & in the ground before I knew of it. Kit, what have I done?

She wore no gloves, for neither sun nor wind

Would burn or parch her hands, but to her mind,

Or warm or cool them: for they took delight

To play upon those hands, they were so white.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Hero and leander

Kit and Amaranth strolled together through the airy corridors of the Mebd’s palace, her coils dragging behind like the train of a queen. He walked with a flute in his hands, practicing the fingerings, keeping the lamia on his left side where he could see her hair writhing.

“You should make a start on your cloak, she said. I would help you sew the patches.” He wondered how she spoke so clearly, when her forked tongue flickered with every breath. Magic and more magic.

“Cairbre says I must stitch them myself. Tis part ofthe protection.”

“Then I will teach you to sew.” Lightly scaled fingers demonstrated a minnowlike dart. Kit frowned, not looking up. “I am,” he said with asperity, “a cobbler’s son. I can handle a needle very well indeed.”

“So I’ve heard rumored.” She laughed when he shook his head. “Tell me of this protection. I haven’t heard the tale.”

“The Queen’s Bard wants me for an apprentice, I think. A true one, and not a hanger-on. It seems to involve rather a lot of memorizing antique ballads. They were great memorizers of all things, the Druids. They would have gotten along well with my latin tutor. I wonder if the Druids also believed in the recollective power of birchings.” He slid the flute into its case on his hip opposite the rapier, and stretched his fingers one against the other. “I am restless, lady Amaranth.”

“You have seemed less anguished of late, Sir Poet.”

“I have. I am busy playing the student again, and making poems to please the Mebd. Morgan leaves me alone, more or less. Is pleasant when I report to her, and gives me no hint to what use she puts mine information, or if it is of use at all. Will not answer my questions about Murchaud, and neither will the Queen. And there is no news from England.”

“leave it, Christofer. England is done with thee, and thee with she. How is it that writing for royals is not so rewarding as the bloody rush of the common stage?”

“I should be writing,” he said, aware as he spoke that Amaranth’s last few comments had fallen into silence unanswered, and he could not recall them.

“Ah,” she said. Something in her cool, melodious voice caught him; he turned to study her eyes.

“Such a lovely man,” she said, stroking his cheek. Her fingers felt like cool leather, the scales catching his rough-shaven cheek. “Pity about your scars.”

“There’s nothing to be done for it,” he said. “Many a man’s survived worse than half a blinding, and to more sorrow.”

“What would you do for your sight returned?” she asked, as if idly.

“Can you do such a thing?” She shook her head. “There might be those that could. It’s in the songs: If I had known, Tamlin, that for a lady you would leave, I would have taken your eyes and put in dew from a tree.”

“I do not know that song. Cairbre has not taught it me.”

“We do not sing it here.” She smiled, a curve of bloodless lips.

His footsteps padded beside the rustle of her belly sliding on stone. “It has not been written yet. And what would you write, if you were writing?”