The Secret of the Rose

  In eleven months my contract would be over. By then my hand would be healed, I’d have my wages in my purse, and I would leave the playmaker’s service for good. Perhaps—and even in my pain the thought of Will Green brought a blush to my cheeks—perhaps I could find a place where I could leave behind my breeches and doublet and be Rosalind again.

  Until that time I would do as Master Marlowe, and Master Watson, and even Will had told me—shut my eyes, stop my ears, and pay no heed to Christopher Marlowe’s affairs.

  Mistress Stavesly took one look at my hand and another at my face and ordered me upstairs to bed. Some minutes later she brought me a cup of burnt wine, which she said would do more for the pain than all the willow bark tea in the world. It was harsh to the taste and seemed to scorch the back of my throat, but it did indeed help the pain, for it sent me straight to sleep.

  I do not know how much later it was when I was roused by the sound of Master Marlowe’s footsteps on the stairs. I sat up on my pallet as he came in, struggling clumsily with the blanket that seemed to have tangled itself around my legs.

  Master Marlowe had not spoken, even to greet me. I might have thought his manner odd as he stood by the door, looking as if the room were unfamiliar to him. But my wits were still muddled by wine and sleep, and I thought of little but my message.

  “Sir, there is a letter.” My tongue felt thick and dry, as though a furry coating had grown on it while I had slept. I pointed with my uninjured hand. “There, on the table.”

  Still without speaking, Master Marlowe took up the letter. He turned it over in his hands, touching the broken seal with careful fingers, before he unfolded the paper. A moment later he was crouching by my pallet to look me in the face.

  “Who gave thee this?” he demanded. “Who was it?” When I only blinked at him, startled and sleepy, he seized hold of my shoulder. “Richard, wake up. Who gave this to thee?”

  “Your friend, sir,” I said, working my tongue loose. “Tom Watson.” I waited for more questions, but Master Marlowe only sat back on his heels, staring at the letter in his hand. I noticed, for the first time, a dark brown stain the size of a shilling on the top right corner of the paper.

  I should have remembered my recent vow to pay no heed, to shut my eyes and ears. But my master looked as though he’d just been stabbed and was waiting now to die.

  “Is all well, sir?”

  Master Marlowe seemed to find he was not dying after all. He folded the paper quickly, smoothing the creases with his long, ink-stained fingers. “Well enough with me,” he answered, getting to his feet. “But not at all well with Tom. He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1592

  When Master Marlowe arose the next morning, he found me sitting at the table, struggling to write with a hand that was stiff with bandages and dried blood and starting to ache with a tender pain that told of infection beginning. I had already burned the sheet of paper I’d ruined by trying to write with my left hand. With a sigh, Master Marlowe leaned over my shoulder to take the pen away from me.

  “Richard,” he said wearily. “Do not waste my good paper, please.”

  I slipped off the stool to stand respectfully, biting my lip as I looked at the awkward, straggling, uneven lines I’d taken such pains with, lines that would do no credit to a child of seven years. “I am sure my hand will heal in a few days’ time, sir,” I said hopefully.

  Master Marlowe snorted, crumpled up the sheet of paper, and tossed it toward the fireplace. “Thou’rt sure? Art now a surgeon as well as a scribe?”

  I held my breath. Had I reached the end of his patience at last? Would he tell me to take my pitifully thin purse and go?

  Master Marlowe seemed to guess what I was thinking. “If I’d been of a mind to turn thee out, Richard, I’d have done it two nights ago,” he said impatiently. “Thou needst not fear losing thy place.” He sat down heavily on the stool I had left empty and placed both elbows on the table, running his hands through his hair.

  “Should I fetch breakfast, sir?” I suggested. I could manage ale and bread with my left hand.

  “I’ve no stomach for it.” He sighed, and I remembered, belatedly, that his friend was dead. “Fetch me some sack, Richard, from the tavern.” I did not mean him to catch my quick glance at the sun on the windowsill. It still lacked some hours until noon. But he did see it, and frowned. “And none of thy papist looks,” he said, suddenly angry. “Between a papist and a Puritan, indeed, there is not much to choose for pinch-lipped, prune-faced hypocrisy….” But I was already scrambling out of the room and down the stairs, lest he take a mind to go on talking like this where somebody else could hear him.

  When I came back with the wine, steaming hot and heavily sugared, he was sitting exactly as I had left him. He hardly stirred as I put the tankard at his elbow.

  “Sir? Master Marlowe?” He glanced sideways at me, so I knew he was aware of my presence. My first instinct was to let him be, but he had been kind to me when my father died. I owed him something, now that death had touched his own life.

  “Sir, I am sorry for his death,” I said clumsily. “I am sorry, sir, for your friend.”

  “Thou’rt one of few, then,” he said gloomily.

  I should have left him, but something kept me there. Perhaps it was only a ghoul’s curiosity, the kind that will keep people standing in a circle three deep around a duel or a public hanging.

  “Was it an accident, sir?” Master Marlowe had not given me any more details, indeed, any more words, yesterday. And since the pain in my hand had kept me awake, I could not help wondering what had happened to Tom Watson. Had he been stuck by a cart or a wagon? Had it been something bloodier—a fight in a tavern, a blow given in wrath? A thief with a knife or a garrote in the dark?

  “The plague, ’tis said.” Master Marlowe took a long swallow of his sweet wine, but when he heard me gasp, he glanced at me in surprise over the rim of the tankard.

  My hands were at my mouth. I had spoken to Tom Watson. We had breathed the same air. He had certainly looked strange, not himself—had it been illness that had made him look so pale? And suddenly, in a whirl of fear, I remembered that libel pasted up on the playhouse wall—PLAYS CAUSE PLAGUE—and thought that perhaps I’d brought this on myself, spending time at a playhouse, consorting with players and tiremen and…

  Master Marlowe wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and burst out laughing.

  It was brief and not particularly merry. “Never fear, Richard,” he said when he had finished. “If thou keepst thy wits about thee, thou needst have no fear of catching what Tom Watson died of.”

  That afternoon I peeled an onion and left it by my bed, to absorb any pestilential vapors. It was best to err on the safe side. But even before Master Marlowe laughed at my fears, I’d had enough time to realize my mistake, and to remember that a man dying of the plague would not be wandering the streets of London, looking no worse than drunk. Or deathly afraid.

  The nights were cold in earnest, and by the time my hand had healed enough to let me write again, the darkness had nibbled away much of the afternoon light. The first task Master Marlowe set me was to make a clean copy of The Massacre at Paris for him to deliver to the playhouse.

  It gave me no joy to write out that play, and Master Marlowe knew it. Since the day after Tom Watson’s death, he had made no mention of my religion. But there was the slightest mocking glint in his eye as he handed me the stack of pages, scrawled all over in his ragged black script, that showed me he had not forgotten.

  If he expected objections or argument, he was disappointed. I set myself to the work without a word, thinking grimly that this was part of the bargain I had made—wages and food and a warm place to sleep in return for a year’s silence. So I ground my teeth and copied out scene after scene where Catholics were traitors and murderers and the streets of Paris ran with innocent Protestant blood.

  Most days Master Marlowe would go out on his own affairs. But on
the day I was writing the final scene, he stayed, sitting by the fire. “This play will make a new name for me,” he said as I dipped my pen in the ink. “And a new name is a new world.”

  There was a tankard of sack on the floor beside his stool, steaming slightly in the chill air. Perhaps that had loosened his tongue, for he spoke idly, lazily, as if hardly aware that I was listening.

  He leaned against the wall, stretching out his feet toward the hearth, and began to trim his fingernails with the ivory penknife. “A new world,” he said thoughtfully, more to himself than me. “They sail off and discover new lands, dripping with jewels and pearls, and that’s the least of it. A new church, now, there’s a new land, an unexplored country.”

  “Will Green says there are savages in the New World,” I offered, hoping to redirect the conversation. If we must talk, I would much rather it was about undiscovered lands than about religion. “They eat men’s hearts.”

  Master Marlowe snorted. “Thou needst not cross the ocean to see men eating one another’s flesh. The court at Greenwich will do for that.” But he was not to be diverted from his musings for long. “And a new monarch, now, there’s a new world as well,” he went on. “Unknown and perilous. Wild beasts and volcanoes at every turn.”

  My hand jerked a little and nearly made a blot. Carefully I lifted the pen a few inches above the paper and made sure it would not drip before I spoke again. “A new monarch?”

  “Thou’rt such an innocent, Richard. Aye, a new monarch. Didst think Gloriana, the most blessed, most regal queen of all England, would live forever?”

  I was startled by this idea. Elizabeth had been on the throne of England since well before I was born. Of course, if I had thought of it, I would have known that she could not reign forever. But somehow I had not thought of it. She was the heretic daughter of a heretic king, and yet…England without Elizabeth?

  “She is not so aged,” I objected. “Surely there are many years yet.”

  “She has nine-and-fifty years. ’Tis only white powder hides her wrinkles now.”

  “But…” My pen was still suspended in the air above my paper. “But who will rule after her?”

  Elizabeth, of course, was the Virgin Queen. She had no children.

  “If there were any prophet who knew, his fortune would be made,” Master Marlowe said dryly. “She’s too sly for that. The minute she names an heir, every hanger-on at the court would be off to dance attendance on him, and who would care for an elderly queen tottering on her throne? She keeps them all in suspense, as she’s ever done.”

  “But who might it be?” I was puzzling over it. The queen had no children, and neither her brother or sister, both of them dead now, had gotten an heir for England. Who did that leave?

  Master Marlowe did not answer me at once. He finished trimming his nails and sat, staring into the fire, lightly and carefully stroking the ball of his thumb over the sharp little blade until I thought he had forgotten the question. But then he said suddenly, “James of Scotland.”

  “Who, sir?”

  His sigh was a prayer for patience. “Hast not been listening? James VI, King of Scotland, her cousin a few times removed. Many think he’ll be the next king. He’s Protestant, and of the right age, and wise enough. Of course, there is the trifling difficulty that Elizabeth cut off his mother’s head. ’Tis just possible he may bear England a grudge for that.”

  “Mary, Queen of Scots,” I said slowly.

  “Aye, of course. Scots,” Master Marlowe pointed out, “live in Scotland.”

  I thought you were working for the Queen of Scots, Master Marlowe had said to his friend Pooley. I glanced up at him quickly, but he seemed to be thinking of something else.

  “And there are others,” he continued. “The Stanleys and the Seymours; they’re English and her cousins as well. But they’re also cousins to Jane Grey, and when she made a bid for the throne, she paid for it with her head. That might dissuade a man from making the attempt. And of course…”

  “Sir?”

  “There’s the Infanta,” Master Marlowe answered. “King Philip’s daughter by his third wife. Or his second, I forget. The Spanish princess.”

  “But Spain is our enemy,” I objected, baffled. Five years ago Philip of Spain had sent a fleet of ships to England’s shores, bent on conquering England and returning it to the true faith.

  I would rejoice to see England Catholic again, but I’d no wish to see it happen at the points of Spanish swords. I had cheered with the rest when I heard that God’s winds and English courage had turned the Armada back. How could the daughter of our would-be conqueror lay a claim for the throne?

  “Aye, Spain is our enemy now. But Philip has English blood as well as Spanish, and he is still Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, do not forget. He was her sister’s husband. That might bring him or his daughter closer than a cousin in Scotland. Particularly if the claim comes backed with enough Spanish troops.”

  I sat up straighter, as a shiver, both cold and warming, ran up my spine. “But she is…”

  “She is Catholic. You begin to grasp it now. So…Scotland, England, or Spain? Protestant or papist?” He held out his hands, palm up, with the knife in one, and weighed them like a scale. “A man might become anything when the world changes.”

  “We might be Catholic again?” I had never thought it was possible. And yet, had it not happened once, before my birth, when Elizabeth’s older sister, Mary, held the throne?

  “Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Moslem,” Master Marlowe said airily, “for all I know, or anyone else either.” He got to his feet and tossed the penknife on the table. “I’m off. Have that done when I return.”

  Catholic again. I might be free one day to pray for my father’s soul in church, as should be done. To light candles to my saints and say the old prayers without fear, without the constant worry that someone might be listening, spying, waiting to betray me.

  And yet—a Spanish queen? A foreign monarch on the throne? I was a Catholic, but an English Catholic. To see England subject to her enemy…

  My mind spun. Catholic and Spanish? English and Protestant? Why was there no third way? Why could I not pray in Latin and still remain an honest subject of my English queen?

  It was too hard a problem for me. And in any case, why should I trouble my mind about it? The succession would be as it would be, without the least help from me. Someone would take the throne after Elizabeth, and all I could do was wait to see who.

  And in the meantime, I had work to do. I settled myself back to my copying, but had not finished half a page before I was interrupted by Mistress Stavesly’s voice from below.

  “Richard! Come down, lad!” Carefully I wiped the pen clean, laid it aside, put the cork in the ink bottle, and ran downstairs to see what was needed.

  I found Sam from the playhouse with Mistress Stavesly in her shop. Simple Moll, in a fit of shyness, was peeking at him from around a corner. I patted her on the shoulder as I went by. “’Tis only a ’prentice player, Moll. Yes, mistress?”

  “Richard, knowst where thy master is?” Mistress Stavesly asked.

  “No, truly,” I answered.

  “This lad says he’s needed at the playhouse.”

  “Master Henslowe sent me,” Sam confirmed. “He said to bring him at once, even if he was drinking or whoring.”

  Mistress Stavesly aimed a slap at him and he hopped back out of range, grinning impudently. “Mind thy manners, imp! Richard, go and fetch thy master.”

  “But I know not where he is,” I protested.

  She laughed. “Hast served him this long and knowst not where to look for him when he’s lost? The taverns, i’faith. Now be off out of my shop, I’ve customers to mind.”

  So Sam went back to the playhouse, and I set out to search the taverns of London.

  Master Marlowe was not in the Black Bull, or the Four Swans, or the Crown. But the tapster at the Mermaid advised me to try the Green Dragon, and there indeed he was, at a table in the far co
rner, sitting with his back to the door. The man he was speaking to was hunched over with his elbows on the table. A dark red velvet hat shadowed his face, a white plume on it swaying gently as he shook his head. The feather almost looked like a live thing, alert and suspicious, on watch for its master.

  And the man’s voice, when I heard it, made me shiver.

  “Nay, Kit, prithee, listen. As thy friend, I tell thee, ’tis not wise.”

  Smooth, gentle, affectionate. Melting butter. Oil flowing over honey.

  “I’ll do it no more!” snapped Master Marlowe. His voice was low, but almost desperate. “You may tell them. With what I know, they cannot touch me.”

  “’Tis not a good time, Kit, to be forming new allegiances.”

  “Master Marlowe!” I said quickly, loudly. I had been warned, and more than once. They must neither of them turn and find me listening. By calling loudly for their attention, I would look all innocence.

  Master Marlowe’s head jerked up as if he’d been touched by a whip. The other man barely moved. Only his eyes shifted to me.

  “You’re wanted at the playhouse, master,” I said, hoping that the faint quiver in my voice was only audible to my own ears. “Master Henslowe sent Sam to fetch you.”

  “Did Henslowe say what he wanted?” Master Marlowe asked.

  “No, sir. Sam only said ’twas urgent.”

  “I must go, then,” he said, and reaching into a pocket, he pulled out a few coins and scattered them across the table. “Farewell, Pooley,” he added as he rose, without looking at his companion.

  “Farewell, Kit,” Pooley said, still gently.

  Outside the tavern Master Marlowe turned to me. “Didst hear aught of what was said in there?” he asked, jerking his head toward the door.

  Unbidden, my fingers went up to rub my left ear. “No, master, I heard nothing,” I said earnestly.

  He eyed me carefully and then nodded. “Good. Well done.” He took his way toward the playhouse and left me wondering if what had been well done was my failure to hear, or my lying.