Ink and Steel

“No such luck.” Burbage shut the door, then hooked a battered stool from beside Will’s unmade bedstead with one booted toe and perched without waiting to be asked. He grunted as he leaned forward, elbow on knee, and tugged his doublet straight. “Tis early for wine, and I’m in no mood for a public house and ale with my bread. So—” he thumped a pottery bottle on the trestle —“it’ll have to be spirits.”

“Morning?” Will set down the handkerchief with which he’d been dabbing his sleeve and looked up at a shuttered window. Beside his elbow, a fat candle guttered, and his commonplace book was propped open before it.

“Morning. You’ve worked the night through. And your chamber-mate … won’t be returning.”

Will shrugged. He hadn’t noticed the hour, though the absence weighed on him. Or not the absence—Kit was often at the beck of patrons or conquests— but the irrevocability of it.

Burbage accepted his silence. “Have you cups?”

Will stood and moved to a livery cupboard, patched shoe scuffing rough boards. “What ails you, friend?” He turned with two leather tankards in his hand and came around the front of the table.

Burbage dragged the cork from the bottle with his thumbs and poured. “To Kit.”

Will lifted the second cup and held it, wincing, below his nose. “To Kit.” He closed his eyes on an image of a man smug as a preening cat and soaked in his own red blood. Will drank, leaning a hip against the table as if it were too much effort to reclaim his chair. “You’ll have heard the rumors he was working for the Papists, or the Crown.”

“I would not hazard myself to hazard a guess,” Burbage replied, hooking a boot heel over a rung. “It’s noised about that it was a drunken brawl, and Kit’s been in his cups of late, as poets sometimes go when they’ve had a little triumph…” Jokingly, he reached as if to pull the tankard from Will’s hand, and Will shielded it deftly. “But”, Burbage continued, “Kyd gave evidence against him, and Kit was still at liberty, as Kit seemed to stay no matter the charge levied against him. So there’s something there. What’s the manuscript?”

“Titus Andronicus.”

“Still? The plague will have us closed into winter, Will. It’s five thousand dead already. And Titus a terrible story. We need comedy, not blood. If we ever see a stage again.”

“It’s not the story,” Will answered.

Burbage was a shareholder in the troupe lord Strange’s Men and as such he was half Will’s employer.

The brandy tingled on the back of Will’s throat and his tongue felt thick. Still, he reckoned even harsh spirits a more welcome mouthful than blood. Kit killed. Would he risk everything … ? But Kit had been rash. And brilliant, and outrageous, and flamboyant. And young. Two months older than Will, who was just barely twenty-nine. He sipped again.

“They can’t all be genius.” Burbage laughed and tipped his mug. “Did you ever pause to wonder why not?”

Oh, the brandy was making Will honest. “Heady stuff,” he commented. “If my skill were equal mine ambition, Richard” Will shook his head. “What will we do for money if the playhouses can’t open? How long will lord Strange champion players who cannot play? Anne and my children must eat.” He’d picked up the quill. He turned it over, admiring the way candlelight caught in its ink-spotted vanes.

Burbage waved the bottle between his nose and the pen. “Have another drink, Will.”

“I’ve a play to write.”

“Which opens tomorrow, doubtless?”

“ And poor Kit undeserving of a wake? Unfair!” But Will lifted the tankard and breathed the smoky fumes deep, feeling as though they seared his brain. “Poor Kit… ”.

“Indeed. Would serve your Queen so, Will? Serve her to the death?”

That brought him up short. “Is that what poor Marley did? Not stabbed for treason, or murdered by his conspirators before he could name their names. Nor killed for his,” Will lowered his voice “—atheism, and the talk of …” He drank again, but held his hand over his cup when Burbage would have filled it. “I can’t write.”

“Drink will fix it.”

Will did not uncover his tankard. “Drink fixes little, and what it doth fix can oft be not unfixed again.”

“Ah.” Burbage shifted his attention to his own cup as Will stood and paced. “In vino veritas. Is a Queen worth risking your life for, Will?”

“Why ask you these things of me?” Splinters curled from the wainscot shelf. Years of dry heat and creeping chill had cracked the wood long and deep between cheap plaster. Will picked spindled wood with one ink stained fingernail. He’d papered the walls with broadsheets, which also peeled. A Queen. The idea of a Queen… .

“The reality not worth your time?”

Burbage leaned on the wall, brandy-sharp breath hot on Will’s cheek. He thrust Will’s cup into his hand; Will took it by reflex.

“It’s her got Kit killed, isn’t it? Blood and a knife in the face. That’s what Queens get you.”

“Treason,” Will whispered.

Burbage’s face was flushed, his cheeks hot, red-blond hair straggled down in his too-bright eyes. Like a man fevered. Like a man mad.