Scene 27
Will’s room. He sits at his table, writing. His hands are covered in ink stains, as is the top of his tottering writing table. The papers in front of him are an unsteady tower, displaying scrawled writing and checks and crosses aplenty. He has pushed back the sleeves of his black doublet. His eyes are circled in dark, bruised rings, and sweat drips from his forehead.
Will paused in his writing and looked up at his reflection, dimly seen as a ghost upon the grimy surface of his window.
His eyes looked back at himself, full of fear.
Fear, he realized, had installed itself at the back of his mind when he wasn’t thinking, and from there mocked all his endeavors at poetry.
He surveyed his work, his crossed-out sentences, his poor constructions, his unreliable storytelling.
No, this would not do at all. Will couldn’t seem to work poetry and sense into a single piece.
And yet, Will had been given money for this piece in advance. What would happen if he displeased the nobleman who’d so financed him?
Nothing good. Worse yet, Will would see himself without disguise, and know that he truly was no poet, no smooth weaver of words.
And yet Kit Marlowe made it all look so simple.
Perhaps Will should ask Marlowe’s help. He’d been so kind so far. Yes, Will thought, he would ask Marlowe.
Will had no more than stood up and started toward his door when someone knocked on it.
With his hand on the latch, Will thought he smelled, through the door, a smell very like Silver’s. He hesitated.
The thought of Silver—of how forward, how brazen the elf lady had been—still made Will tighten his fists in anger.
That Silver thought he would be an easy mark. She dared . . . . She’d endangered Nan. Oh, the idea galled him.
The knock sounded again, impatient.
It could not be Silver, after all.
Silver would have come in by now, through her magic means.
He opened the door.
Marlowe stood on the precarious perch atop the steep staircase.
“Ah, the man himself,” Will said, and smiled at Marlowe’s slightly startled expression. “I would have gone see you.”
“You would?” Marlowe asked.
He sounded eager, anxious, perhaps a little too eager and anxious. Yet, he smiled smoothly and his grey eyes sparked with humor.
Will could swear that the heavy smell of lilac came from Kit. Was this the new fashion in London? Perfuming oneself like the fairykind?
No, normal people didn’t know of the fairykind. Will forced a smile, pushed thoughts of the supernatural world to the back of his mind, and told himself he wasn’t worried about Silver.
“Truth is,” Marlowe said and grinned, “I need your help, friend Will.”
Friend. The great Marlowe had called Will his friend.
On this word, Will forgot his misgivings at Kit’s strange smell.
Kit had called Will his friend, and on this friendship, Will dared fund his hopes. Certainly more than on any world of fairy.
“I will gladly help you with whatever you need,” he said, and smiled. “Provided you lend me your help.”
“Surely, you may have it. But I need your help, Will, with attending me to Deptford tomorrow, where I am to pay some creditors a debt I owe them. I would fain have a friend to witness my payment. Would you do it, Will?”
Will looked up. “Gladly,” he said, and smiled. As he said it, he thought of all the times he’d been cozened in London, of how easily he’d so often lost money and purse and all.
But surely, he had no reason to fear this from Marlowe. Marlowe had already proved himself Will’s friend so many different ways.
Will had been afraid that Kit wanted him to second Kit in a duel or to help him with a rhyme, or something else for which Will was wholly unqualified. But to witness something, Will would do well enough.
His eyes were as keen as the next man’s.
“And you wish my help with . . . ?” Kit prompted.
Will sighed. He explained his interview with the Earl of Southampton and how unwarrantedly the earl had thrown money at Will’s untested poetical skill.
“I’ve never tried anything this long before,” Will said. “All my poetry has been sonnets, and I find that when it comes to this, I am wholly unprepared.
“No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor can I woo fame in festival terms. As for the subject, well . . . Leander the good swimmer, Troilus the first employer of panders, and a whole bookful of these quondam carpet-mangers, whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse, why, none of them will do for my verse.
“Marry, I cannot show wit in rhyme; I have tried: I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby,’ an innocent rhyme; for ‘scorn,’ ‘horn,’ a hard rhyme; for ‘school,’ ‘fool,’ a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings.”
Kit laughed.
He touched Will’s arm, and in that touching, Will saw the palm of Marlowe’s hand and upon his palm a mass of bubbling blisters and burst blisters that showed raw flesh.
He stared at Kit’s hand till Kit looked down at it. Will would swear Kit looked surprised.
But how could a man take such injury and not notice?
Kit grinned at Will, a forced grin that showed all his teeth and made him look, for a second, like a wolf, a carnivorous animal. “Aye, a burn, a burn, ’tis but a burn I got, upon my spit.” He grinned, but his grin seemed hollow. A baring of teeth against the world and little else besides.
After Kit had left, that grin haunted Will’s thoughts.
How strange it all seemed.
Will had wanted to come to London and be just like Marlowe, and now he wondered if Marlowe was as Marlowe wished to be.