Kit’s patience was rewarded sometime in the blessedly cool hours before matins, as he shifted the cloak and his sweat-lank hair off his neck. The smells of morning baking filled the air, and his stomach grumbled. Tis been too long since you went hungry, Marley. You re soft.
But then a figure emerged from the alleyway beside the Sergeant and with an unconcerned glance at the apparent derelict in the doorway opposite slipped inside. A tall man, hair platinum in the pre-dawn, hands broad even for his frame.
Richard Baines.
Kit unwound his fingers from the hilt of his rapier. He checked the sky, cocking an ear for church bells, and decided discretion might serve better than boldness. At least clouds were gathering: a not-unexpected stroke of luck, given the chill wetness of the summer, but it would make his cloak less unlikely and Baines easier to shadow.
Kit emerged from the doorway, tipping his rapier straight again so the outline wouldn’t show, and staggered around the corner to the alley. It didn’t take as much effort to move drunkenly as he would have preferred: two nights propped in a doorway left his neck and back complaining, the muscles of his thighs stiff as if they’d been nights in the saddle.
Thunder crackled; Kit skulked behind empty barrels under a second-story overhang. He kicked a dead starling aside and settled himself to wait, but a few moments later the sky pissed rain like a drunken Jove. He tugged the hood of his cloak higher, wet wool slicing his limited vision in half. Inside the cookshop, pots clattered, onions browned. Christ wept.
Never trust to luck.In a quarter hour, Baines cloakless, ears hunched into his collar left the Sergeant. Poley walked alongside, better equipped for the rain in a gray oiled cloak and high boots. Kit swung in behind them, fifty feet or more.
Baines’ shoulders, clad in a brown leather jerkin that grew slowly darker with the rain, bobbed through a crowd, and Kit for once was glad of the other man’s height. The men wended north. The grit between his soles and the cobbles turned to mud, but Kit’s feet stayed snug in Faerie boots and he never slipped. Poley and Baines led him down alleys and through mires more wallow than highway. A bloated rat corpse swept down the gutter. Pedestrians ducked into taverns and doorways, but Baines and Poley continued. And Kit followed. Baines never looked back. Poley did, but Kit was careful to vary his distance and his walk, and one shrouded, sodden figure looked much like another.
He got lucky: they took the Bridge rather than a wherry south across the Thames. The two men stepped down another side street and into an intersection. Kit recognized their destination: a well-favored establishment known as the Elephant, a Southwark tavern whose sign peeled artistically rather than from simple neglect.
Kit checked his step as they continued around the building to where, he knew, a ramshackle stairway led to a warm and comfortably appointed room. He stepped under an overhang and leaned into the corner by the garden wall, gasping like a hooked fish. His stomach clenched on emptiness, but he forced himself to straighten and walk silently through the rain.
His hand itched on his sword hilt. Not his left hand, to keep the blade tuckedunder his cloak, but his right, ready to draw the blade whickering into the air and cast that cloak aside, to run Baines and Poley down, shouting. To run them through before they could climb those stairs.
Where’s Nick Skeres?he thought, picking his way over litter and startling a feral pig nosing through garbage. It fled in a clatter of trotters, and Kit held his breath lest the sound should bring investigators. But the rain probably covered it. Where’s Frazier?The name brought a twist of coldness into his belly, and kept him from thinking about who might be already waiting in that room.
He released the rapier’s hilt and thrust the lank strands of hair out of his eye. They stuck to his cheeks and forehead; he stifled a sneeze and swore. Morgan will put me in a hot bath again.It was her cure for everything, insane as it sounded, but it hadn’t killed him yet.
Baines and Poley had just reached the landing as Kit glided around the corner and slipped beneath the whitewashed frame of the stair. They did not shut the door. Kit looked up at the timbers and sighed, knowing from experience that the landing and much of the stair were visible through that entryway.
Perhaps I can’t make the climb in a cloak. The sword would be enough trouble, but he wasn’t leaving that behind. He circled through puddles, using a few wan flickers of lightning to get an idea of the strength of the crossbracing holding the stairs, wishing he had a bit of leather to bind his hair. It drifted again into his eye and mouth as he lifted his face. He drank in the unclean savor of London rain, blinked a particle of soot away. A pang of hunger left him dizzy for a moment; he sighed and took hold of the thickest timber. Quickly, Kit, or you’ll miss what you’ve come to hear. You don’t know who’s in that room. ALL you have is a very nasty suspicion indeed.
And one that could mean a great deal of danger to Will, especially if his friend’s secret plan to undermine the ill-feeling between Protestants and Papists came to light.
Kit dropped his cloak in the driest corner and ran each hand up opposite sides of the rough-hewn timber, glad the edges had not been planed to corners and the bark was only haphazardly smoothed away. He grabbed as high as he could, locked fist around wrist, and half hopped, half pulled himself into the air. He wrapped his legs around the pillar, the rough surface burning skin through clothes so much for these hose and breathed. One. He reached as high as he could, coiled his arms around the pillar, and dragged himself a few inches, cursing rain and splinters.
Something stabbed his thigh, working deeper as he shimmied up. He kept his grip and pressed the scarred side of his face against the timber. Another flicker, and a halfhearted growl of thunder. Kit struck his head on a crossbrace and flinched, but held on. The stars he saw were brighter than the lightning. A slow hot trickle winding through his hair was soon lost in all the swift, cold trickles; he hoped the thump would be as lost in the sound of the storm.
The voices he strained to hear almost vanished under the pattering of droplets; Kit chased them, hoisting himself onto that crossbrace and straddling it. His arms and legs trembled. The crossbrace dug into his back, and the splinter burned in his thigh. Good work, Marley. And how get you down?He wiped his hair out of his face again and saw dilute blood on his fingers, though the bump on his head seemed superficial. He closed his eye and listened through the rain: first to the commonplaces of intelligencers in the tones of Baines and of Poley, reports of Catholics and Puritans Kit dismissed as no longer relevant to his service.
Until … “no, I haven’t seen Nick today, but he intended to attend. He must have been delayed at some trouble, my lord. I can tell you until he gets here that your Shakespeare’s been well behaved,” Poley said in his sharp, sardonic tones. “He spent the night in his room with his wife. Had supper sent up, and the candle went out shortly after. Not a peep: he seems apt to take the Queen’s penny and write his plays as he’s told.”
And then the third voice. Precise, a little pinched. As pompous as his peascod doublets: the voice of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Kit covered his face with his forearm, blocking the incessant drip. “Have your men see he stays under control, Master Poley. I’d not waste another playmaker. Though so long as he seems biddable, there should be no danger; lord Burghley relies on me to guide his production, and there have been no incidents such as those that provoked us to deal so harshly with Master Marley.” Kit almost lost his grip on the beam.