Ink and Steel (49 page)

“He'd be fine as Achilles—”

“He'd be brilliant as Achilles.” The pen wasn't flowing well; Will dried the nib and searched out his penknife to recut it. He couldn't quite forget the stiffness and hesitance in his muscles, but simply being
better
was such a blessing he couldn't bear to question it too closely.

“We should give Dian a stronger role. Mayhap an archery contest— Don't cut yourself, Will.”

“Very funny.” But he looked up and saw Kit's concern was genuine, and looked down again quickly. “Archery would give us a chance to bring Hercules in earlier, and show him at play with his arrows.”

“Aye. Will—”

The tension in Kit's voice drew Will's head up. “We could still do Circe, instead.”

“Nay,” Kit answered. “There's a thing that happens here, every seven years. A tithe—”

“The teind. Morgan told me.” No, no mistaking that flicker of Kit's lashes when Will said Morgan's name. Nor was there any mistaking the relief on Kit's face when Will continued. “She said I am a guest, and needn't worry; hospitality protects me.”

“Then you'll stay; 'tis settled.” Kit braided his fingers in his lap for a moment, stood abruptly and began to pace, almost walking into a three-legged stool that Will had absently left out of its place. “We'll be like Romeo and Mercutio: inseparable. What happens after the archery, Will?”

“Mayhap a philosophical argument. Chiron and Bacchus. We could trade off verses, give each a different voice.”

“And I suppose I am meant to versify Bacchus?”

The sharpness of Kit's tone halted Will's bantering retort in his throat. “If you prefer the noble centaur, by all means— Kit, what ails thee?”

Will saw the other man pause before he answered, the moment of contemplation that told him Kit was framing some bit of wit or evasion. But then Kit looked him in the eye and frowned, and said straight out, “I'm jealous.”

“Of Morgan?”

“Dost love her, Will?”

Will picked up his cold tisane and gulped it, almost choking. “Love is not a seemly word, where vows are broken.”

Kit's lips thinned. “Grant I forgive thee for Annie's sake.”

Will stood and crossed the room, crouched by the cold, dead fire. “Kit—yes. I love her.”

“Then I
am
jealous. Of thee, not Morgan. And canst swear thou feelst nothing of the like?”

Will stopped. Thought. Closed his eyes.
I could Lie.
Could he? “What I feel frightens me. I love thee—”

“Is my love for thee less than thine for me, that I would kiss thee? You've not held a rose unless pricked by a thorn, sweet William.”

Will shot Kit a hard look; Kit's eye shone with his silent cat-laugh. Will spread his hands wide and swore, then: “Here.”

He kicked the stool toward Kit, and tossed a roll of papers tied with ribbon at him. Kit more batted them out of the air than caught, but wound up holding the roll securely.

“What?”

“Read.” He turned his back on Kit, and the stool, and the golden Faerie sunlight that poured over both. The light illuminated Kit's flyaway curls with the sort of halo usually registered in oils, dry-brushing the dark mulberry velvet of his doublet, making the crumpled sheaf of papers in his hands shine translucent.

Will slapped wine into a cup perhaps overquickly. “You may skip the first”—he counted on his fingers—“seventeen. Or so.”

“Starting from
Shall I compare thee . . .
?” But then Kit's voice trailed off into the rustle of thick pages, and Will stared out the window over Kit's shoulder and drank his wine without tasting it, small sips past the tightness in his throat, until enough time went by for the sun to shift and warm the rug between his boots. He didn't dare look directly at the young man reading—surely Kit hadn't aged a day in six years— but the calm expression of concentration on his face dizzied Will more than rejection or horror would have.

Finally, Kit looked up. “There must be a hundred of these.”

“One hundred and two. So far. Not counting those terrible ones I wrote for Oxford.”

“One hundred and two.” Kit cleared his throat, and read—

“—that says a dozen things, all different, half of them bawdy. These are wonderful, Will.”

“They're yours,” Will answered carelessly. He brought a second cup to Kit. “I have perhaps been cowardly.”

“These—” Kit lay the papers on the floor and his cup on the windowsill, expression neutral as Will sank down on the floor nearby. Shades of red colored Kit's cheek in waves. “I am not accustomed to being the subject of poetry.”

“Are we not as brothers? Like Romeo and Mercutio—”

Kit stood with a young man's nimbleness and knelt—in the same movement—on the floor before Will, who set his cup aside.

“I should not use a brother thus,” he said, and knotted his right hand in Will's hair, meeting Will's gasp with a wet, swift kiss. A kiss that bore Will over, slowly, with perfect control, until he lay flat on the carpet, Kit straddling his hips. Kit's lips moved on his lips, his cheek, his eyelids: a little tickle of mustache, the lessened ache and stiffness in Will's muscles forgotten as he raised his hands to encircle Kit's waist. Kit leaned forward, slick mouth wanton on Will's ear and then his throat, until Will felt the flutter of Kit's heart, the bulge of his prick, and the pressure of his thighs. The velvet covering his body was warmer than the sunlight—

“What of thy Prince?” Soft, afraid to startle Kit away.

“He is in no position to bargain for fidelity,” Kit answered, between kisses, deft fingers unfastening Will's buttons in a manner that presumed no argument. “And I would rather thee than he, my heart, on a thousand stormy afternoons. Ask me to choose, Will.”

“I've no right,” Will answered, and swallowed around pain.

“Fear not,” Kit said, drawing back as if he saw the discomfort twist Will's face. “No harm will touch thee at my hand.” He stroked Will's breast as if he could feel the rigidity in those muscles, locked so tight they trembled. Finishing the buttons, he began to unlace Will's points. “Love,” and Will closed his eyes as Kit quoted his own words back to him—“
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best / Ev'n to thy pure and most most Loving breast.”

Kit was bent over him, Will saw when he opened his eyes again, and Kit's hands were nimble at their undressing. “This will require conversation, William.”

With a little shiver, Will identified the emotion that pinned him to the floor: it was fear, a cold knot of terror that blended with the honeyed rush of longing to render him helpless. “I am not certain I am capable.”

“Well”—Kit opened Will's doublet and slid one rough hand under his shirt, letting his warm palm rest under the arch of Will's ribs— “Will, you're too thin.”

“Aye,” he answered, at last able to laugh. “Too thin, undereducated, set above my station, and disinclined of writing the sort of masques and humors in fashion in London, for all Faerie loves me. Chapman or Jonson will be happy to tell you more of my failings—”

But there was a sort of magic in that unmoving hand. Its warmth spread through him and unlocked the chains that held him taut, unknotted the fear in his belly. Will let one hand slide down Kit's leg, thumb caressing the inside of his thigh.

“Undereducated?” Kit leaned forward to claim another kiss. “I
had
promised to improve your understanding of classics. Shall we start with some Latin, then, before we move on to the Greek?”

“Think you my Latin insufficient?” Will opened his mouth for the kiss.

Kit hadn't touched his wine. His mouth was flavored with traces of pipe tobacco and the fainter bitterness that was just Kit. He stroked Will's hair as if gentling the wild thing Will suddenly felt himself to be.

Kit stretched like a cat while Will unlaced his collar—and then stopped, as sunlight caught the shiny unevenness of old scars. Will pushed the edges of lawn apart and reached up to brush Kit's breast with his fingertips, outlining a shape that had the look of a sigil in some arcane alphabet.

“Christ, Kit.”

“Ancient history,” Kit said, and kissed Will's fingers. “Thou'rt trembling. Art certain . . . ?”

“Aye,” Will said, and put his fingers through Kit's hair. “I hate to think of thee—”

“Peace, Will. There's less that's pretty, I'm afraid.” Kit shrugged out of his shirt, biting his lip, refusing to meet Will's eyes while they made a fresh inventory of his scars. And then Will reached for him, and it was all right, after all.

Someone's foot scattered papers across the jewel-red wool rug, and mismatched scraps of parchment and foolscap crinkled and adhered to skin. Will laughed, and Kit bit his shoulder gently, sliding up to cover him. “Skinny
and
furry,” he said. “I apologize for the state of the poetry.”

“I needed to make a fair copy anyway.”

“The words could hardly be fairer.” A lingering kiss, fraught with intricacies.

Will ran a slow hand up Kit's spine, enjoying the abandoned expression that followed his touch. Fear filled his throat, but he said, “Thou offerèd to instruct me—”

“ 'Tis not often I'm privileged to instruct
thee
.”

“Other than blank verse and buggery?”

Kit choked, turning his face aside until he mastered the giggles that warmed Will's throat. “Buggery,” he recited, lips twitching with the effort to maintain a bored pedant's tone. “So-called in reference to the purported practices of the Bougres, gnostics of France, who held the world so evil that procreation was a sin—”

“Kit,” Will interrupted, “surely you are the most erudite of sodomites.”

Kit wheezed laughter. “Been said.”

“Art . . . willing?” he asked when Kit's shoulders stopped shaking.

“Willing and more than willing—”

Will caught his breath. “Work thy will on thy William, then.”

Kit, regarding him seriously, touched the tip of his nose. “Still frightened?

“Not enough to matter,” Will answered, and let Kit lead him to the bed.

Act III, scene xii

—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
Edward II

Much later, they dressed and trussed and sorted the scattered sonnets in silence and the morning light. Kit was concerned to see Will moving with stiffness as he crawled beneath a bench to reach out papers. “Will . . . have I hurt you?”
Possibly we could have exercised more restraint—
but Kit's lips twitched as he went to help.
Carpe noctem,
after all.

Will sat back on his heels, holding a bit of foolscap in a hand that shook enough to flutter the edge of the paper. He laid his left hand over the right, as if to silence the trembling. “ 'Tis just a palsy,” Will said. “Such as my father suffers, and one of his brothers had. It comes with aches and clumsiness, worse when I'm tired.” He smiled, then, and pushed himself to his feet. “And I am—very delightfully tired. And thank you for it.”

“You're young to be trembling, Will. Thirty-four is not such a great age—” The words seemed to swell until they stopped Kit's throat, and he could neither swallow nor speak past them. His fingers tightened on the sheaf of poems in his hand as the meaning of the words came plainer.
Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain, / Thou gav'st me thine not to give back again.

Will handed papers to Kit, which Kit took to the table they shared.
Shared. 'Tis a fancy, Marley. He Leaves thee soon. To return to London and his wife, and even here, he is not thine alone.
Oh, but it was a pleasant fancy—

“Will you lie to me?”

“Fear not. Morgan's helping me. And I've decades left,” Will answered, and let his shoulders rise and fall in a shrug as he stood. “More, if like my father— Well, 'tis not a bad death. The trembling grows, and the body perishes in the end for want of breath. Sir Francis died far worse. And I might still, on the path I walk. If Oxford has his way.”

Your poems don't speak of decades, Love.
“If I have mine,” Kit replied, and lifted a candlestick to weight the poems. “Gloriana will protect you. But come. This is not an hour for such thoughts.”

“No,” Will said thoughtfully. “It's an hour for breakfast, I think. And perhaps I owe Morgan a little groveling—”

“Does she expect your attendance
every
night?” Kit regretted the words as soon as they left his lips, and fetched Will's boots to cover his discomfort.

Will laughed, paying with a kiss as he took them from Kit's hand. “No. But I rather suggested I would meet her for supper.”

And she no doubt thought to find me this morning.
There
had
been a tapping at the door a little after sunrise, which had not awakened Will and which Kit, roused by dreams, had ignored as unworthy of the price of lifting his head from its throne on Will's shoulder. “Well, we can't hide here forever, living on love.” Kit sighed and shrugged, his doublet settling onto his back like duty. “I suppose 'tis brave the day and regroup when the enemy gives up an advantage.”