“Wilt stay by me tonight? Wilt flinch when I touch you?
Kit couldn’t look at Will, but he could imagine the expression on his face.
“And what will I do for peace now, now that this is lost to me too?”
It seemed an ungrateful question, given what he had traded that chance of peace for. Power. The ability to protect Will. And his children. The strength to do something about Richard Baines.
He tossed his doublet aside and stripped his shirt off over his head. And heard Will’s sucked-in breath and remembered his own dramatic gesture with the candles and the brilliance of the lighting a moment too late. Kit, you’ve a bruise… . Kit reached up and over, felt down the sprung plane of his shoulder blade. His left arm with its old injury wouldn’t flex so far; he reached with the right. Blood-gorged flesh heated his fingertips. He could feel, almost, the outline of each perfect tooth, the roughness of a seeking tongue. Right where someone might bite a lover taken from behind Right where a wing would take root, if he had wings. His burn scars pained him suddenly, a low, sweet ache like the ache inside him. A longing that almost made him reach for the wine bottle again.
“It’s a witch’s mark,” Kit said without turning, and pulled on his nightshirt with a grimace. “Lucifer’s unclean brand. Come, Will. Get ready for bed.”
“Kit.”
“Will, no.”
“Kit. What was it that thou didst in Hell?” Kit read the play of emotions across Will’s face: fear, grief, concern.
I don’t want him to know. I want anything but for him to know. And if I pretend I do not understand what he’s asking, I’ve lost not only a lover, but the trust of a friend.
Kit swallowed. He doused the candles with a snap of his fingers, feeling the power move to his whim as if he tugged a dozen tiny threads. The room fell into near darkness; starlit from the window, a glow like the blue light of Hell except where it cast shadows. He reached up over his head and knotted his fingers in his hair, pulling; the pain felt good. Clean. Will’s words, again: for them both, it always came back to the blasted words. And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil by telling truth: tell truth and shame the devil
He smiled at Will, a smile no more thick than gilt on a page, and said, “I whored myself out to the Devil.” And was surprised when it felt good to say it, another good pain like ripping a scab back from the wound. “I let, God. Don’t touch me. Please. I can’t.”
Will drew back the hand he had been about to lay on Kit’s shoulder. “For me,” he said softly, and jerked back in surprise when Kit shook his head.
“Nothing so noble,” Kit answered. “I had thee back already by then.” He turned and looked Will in the eyes. “I love him still, for all I can’t so much as lay my damned hand on his arm. Aye. Damned indeed.”
“Then what?”
Kit shrugged. “Baines. Poley.”
“You could just out wait them. Outlive them.”
Placating. A pleading voice, and he hated to see Will beg.
“Elizabeth is over, Will. Walsingham and Burghley are gone. Whatever happens next is ours. Ours, or De Vere’s and Essex’s. Would you see that come to pass?” Kit smiled.
Will drew back from something: the fervor in his eyes, the glitter of his teeth.
“And now I can melt their Godsrotted eyes in their heads, if I’m lucky. Besides, it’s too late now to give the gift back. I took the shilling, so to speak. Up the arse. Christ, Will.”
“No,” Will said, quietly. His blue eyes were black in the darkened room. “Do you know what Lucifer told me?”
Kit shook his head; whatever he felt was too complex to speak through. “Nor do I want to know.”
“He told me who killed Hamnet. And showed me how to use my poetry to get vengeance on them.”
“Oh.”
“As long as I gave him mine allegiance.”
“Will, I…”
“I didn’t write a word,” Will said. “Fifty years and more I spent in his damned birdcage. Alone. Without books, without conversation. I didn’t write a word for all that time. And then something changed.”
Kit nodded. Will wouldn’t look away, for all Kit must have been barely a shadow in the starlight. Kit could see Will perfectly well, out of his righ teye at least. Could see in the dark like a demon. “What happened, then?”
Will smiled, and clapped Kit on the shoulder too quickly for Kit to flinch away, stinging his flesh beneath the thin lawn of his shirt. “My faith was rewarded, he said softly. My savior came. Come to bed, Kit; you don’t have to armor yourself in nightshirts and dressing gowns like a maiden.” Will turned away, moving through the darkness to their bed, peeling the covers back, leaving a trail of clothes like breadcrumbs behind him on the floor. “Don’t give up hope. I know for a fact that someday your savior will come as well.”
“How do you know it?” Kit ran a comb through his hair in the darkness, scattering crushed beech leaves on the floor. He peeled the nightshirt off again and slid into bed beside Will, tugging the cloak up close to his chin and inhaling the complex scent saturating the petal-soft velvet collar.
“Because,” Will said quietly, stretching against the far edge of the bed.
“That’s how all the best stories end.”
Not Romeo and Juliet,Kit thought. But he couldn’t bring himself to break the warm darkness to say so.
With this ring I thee wed:
with my body I thee worship:
and with all my worldly goods, I thee endow.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Ghost. Amen.
The Book of Common Prayer, 1559
Annie Shakespeare touched the breast of her bodice with two fingers, paper rustling between her chemise and her skin. Her second-floor sitting room was quiet and gleaming with sunset; her needle paused before her frame, glinting in the cold winter light. It had hovered so for minutes as she leaned forward in her chair and looked out the window, and now she sat back with a sigh, and pressed her bosom again. He won’t be here. He won’t.A clatter of hoof beats on the road. Only one horse, and no creak of wheels. A messenger, then, and not my Will.She tucked the needle through the cloth and stood, stretching before the window with her hands against the small of her back, to see who came to her house too late to be sent along to the tavern for supper. She couldn’t see his face for the broad wings of his cap, but he sat his horse as awkwardly as a sack of barley, and the animal shook his head in complaint.
He reined up before the gates of the New Place and tilted his head back, looking up at the facade and the five gables. Annie pressed her hand against the glass: if Will had described the ramshackle century-old dwelling he’d bought for her, that she’d bought under his signature, to be truthful the messenger was unlikely to recognize it, whitewashed and gracious now as a bride in her mother’s remade wedding dress.
The rider pushed his hat back on his forehead, looking up from the shadow of the roadway into the light that still gleamed on the wall, and Annie’s hand on the window rose to her mouth. She turned, tripped on her hem, knocked the embroidery frame sideways with her hip and dove down the stairs pell-mell, calling for Susanna and for Judith and for Cook.
Will went to put the girls to bed with a story, a little child’s treat, and perhaps not fitting for young women nearly old enough to go into service or off to wed and Annie turned the mattress and the featherbed and tucked the covers straight. Will found her, she guessed, as much by the spill of candlelight into the hall as by knowing where the bedroom lay.
“The house has changed, wife,” he said. He shut the door behind and, trembling softly with his palsy, set his own candlestand on the shelf beside it. “Tis much improved. As it was uninhabitable when we bought it, I should hope.”