“My dear lady, if anyone has acted dishonorably in this matter, then ‘twas certainly not I!”

“Oh, indeed? Are you implying then that I am the one who has acted dishonorably?” She simply could not believe the sheer gall of the man! She was so angry, it was all that she could do to hold herself in check.

“Well, what do you call it when someone makes an agreement with you and you break it?”

“I? ‘Twas I who broke the agreement?” She stared at him with disbelief. “You astonish me, sir. You truly do. Your arrogant effrontery seems to know no bounds!”

The carriage, driven by the despicable Drummond, followed them slowly down the street. Within moments, however, a carter and a coach had come up behind them, both drivers shouting angrily at being blocked. Drummond immediately started shouting back at them and a furious argument ensued.

“Drive on, Andrew!” Gresham waved Drummond on before a fight could erupt. “I shall escort Miss Darcie home and meet you there!”

“I may not wish to be escorted by the likes of you, sir!”

“Be that as it may, I shall escort you nonetheless,” Gresham replied, taking her by the arm as Drummond used his whip and the carriage passed them, pursued by the oaths of the following drivers. “ ‘Tis neither safe nor proper for a young woman to be abroad all by herself.”

“Please let go of me, Mr. Gresham,” she said, twisting her arm out of his grasp. “You are entirely too familiar for a man who impugns my integrity.”

“As you wish,” he said, holding up his hands as if in a gesture of surrender. “However, if my familiarity offends you so, I must admit to being somewhat puzzled as to why you would wish to marry me.”

“Marry you!” She stopped, staring at him wide-eyed. For a moment, her mouth simply worked as if of its own accord as she struggled vainly to find speech.

“Aye, marry me. The very thing you had told me that you wanted to avoid, if you will recall our discussion at the playhouse.”

“Indeed, I do recall it very well, Mr. Gresham! Good day!” She turned and walked away from him, forcing him to run several steps to catch up to her again.

“It would be good evening,” he replied, “and the hour grows much too late for you to be walking home alone, howsoever undesirable my company may seem to you.”

“Rest assured that it is as undesirable as it is possible for it to be.”

“So you say. Nevertheless, I fear that I must inflict my company upon you for a while longer, long enough, at least, to see you safely home and perhaps receive the explanation that I came for.”

“An explanation? You ask me for an explanation?” Elizabeth replied, in a tone of outrage. She felt so furious she was trembling.

“You think that an unreasonable request?”

“Unreasonable, unwarranted, and utterly unfathomable!” she replied.

“Understood,” he replied. “Which is to say, I understand that you feel that way. What I do not understand is why.”

“Why?” She rounded on him with astonishment, startling him so that he almost tripped. Involuntarily, he stepped back away from her, apparently genuinely puzzled by the intensity of her response.

“Indeed,” he replied, looking confused. “Why?”

“You dare to ask me why?”

“Apparently, I do,” he said, wryly. “I wonder if you dare to answer.”

She shook her head and took a deep breath, then lit into him like an alley cat pouncing on a rat. “Oh, this is intolerable! This is simply not to be borne! You make me out to be a liar, come to my home and utterly humiliate me, deny the agreement you have made, and pretend that we had never even met, so that even my own mother is convinced that I have made the whole thing up, and then you have the unmitigated gall to act as if I were the one who broke faith with you\ How in God’s name can you stand there and look me in the eye and pretend to be an innocent when ‘twas you all along who set out to undermine my honor and my reputation, to make me out to be some shrewish liar and manipulative prevaricator whom no man in his right mind would wish to marry, so that my father, fearing to see all his efforts come to naught, would then increase the size of my dowry, paying you a small fortune to take me off his hands!”

As she railed at him, she kept advancing, backing the astonished man away from her, until they had approached a narrow alleyway. She didn’t even notice. She simply could not hold her temper anymore and she kept at him relentlessly.

“But, milady… but… Elizabeth!” he kept saying, over and over, vainly trying to get a word in edgewise as he kept backing away from the unexpected onslaught.

“You knave! You worm! You miserable cur dog! You lying… faithless… dishonorable… misbegotten… loathsome guttersnipe! If there were any justice in the world, then by God, you would be struck down where you stand this very instant!”

Gresham gave a sudden, sharp grunt and his eyes went very wide. He gasped and fell forward into her arms, dragging her down. She cried out with alarmed surprise and fell to her knees, unsuccessfully trying to support his weight. Then she noticed the dagger sticking up out of his back, the blade buried to the hilt between his shoulder blades. Shocked, she released him and he dropped lifeless to the ground. Elizabeth screamed.

The insistent hammering on the door and the shouting woke them both from a sound sleep they had only recently fallen into, aided by copious celebratory pints of ale. Shakespeare was the first to rouse himself, though he could not quite manage to raise his body off the bed. It seemed to take a supreme effort just to raise his eyelids.

“God’s wounds,” he moaned, “what is that horrifying row? Tuck? Tuck!”

There was no response from the inert form beside him in the bed.

“Tuck, roast your gizzard! Wake up! Wake up!” He elbowed his roommate fiercely. Just outside their door, the noise was increasing.

“Wha’? Whadizit?” came the slurred and querulous response.

“There is a woman shrieking at the door,” said Shakespeare.

“Tell her we don’ want any,” Smythe said, thickly, without even opening his eyes.

“What?”

Smythe grunted and rolled over. “Tell her t’ go ‘way.”

“You damn well tell her!”

“Wha’? Why the hell should I tell her?”

“Because she is screeching your damned name!”

“Wha’?”

“Get out of bed, you great, lumbering oaf!”

It began to penetrate through Smythe’s consciousness that he was being beaten with something. It took a moment or so longer for him to realize that it was Shakespeare’s shoe, which the poet was bringing down upon his head repeatedly.

“All right, all right, damn you! Stop it!”

He lashed out defensively and felt the satisfying impact of his fist against something soft. There was a sharp wheezing sound, like the whistling of a perforated bellows, followed by a thud.

“Will?”

There was no response. At least, there was no response from Shakespeare. From without, there was all sorts of cacophony. Smythe could hear frenzied hammering on the door, voices, both male and female now, raised in angry shouts, running footsteps, doors slamming open…

“Will?”

He sat up in bed and the room seemed to tilt strangely to one side. “Ohhhhh…” He shut his eyes and brought his hand up to the bridge of his nose. Somewhere right there, between his eyes, someone seemed to have hammered in a spike while he’d been sleeping.

“Tuck! Tuck! Oh, wake up, Tuck, please!“

He recognized the voice. It was Elizabeth Darcie. And she sounded absolutely terrified. He shook off the pain in his head, not entirely successfully, and lurched out of bed.