“The Devil is an ass,

I do acknowledge it.”

         Ben Jonson

Venice, 1604

A coil of scarlet round the sweet boy’s neck: swan-white he lay, his whiter smock outspread as snow, his hand—O piteous!—imploring still. Venetia dead. Above her stood her lord and lover, still as if he held the loop of cord. A silence—

Mummery, thought Ben, remembering. The play was trash. Unworthy of the getting up, the less at court. ’Twas tailor-work: a deal of bombast and a farthing lace. And yet these shadows haunted him, foreshadows of an act unseen: the boy, not feigning now; the sullied smock; the cord. The Slip-Knott drew him in, inwove him in a play of shadows; now had tugged him halfway to Byzantium in its service. Enter Posthumus: a player-poet with a hand in Fate. Though he’d a quarrel to his fellow maker, History: that it wanted art. To lay a scene in Venice, helter-skelter—! Bah. The unities—But soft. On stage, the tyrant speaks.

O! That nothing that hath made her nothing. Aye

Hath wounded in her stifling Air itself.

Wrong’d Venice . . .

Faugh, the stink of her. ’Twould make a maggot puke, this excremental reek, merdurinous, this stew of charnel house, this gallimaufry of dog and rat. The Thames is Pierian to this, unsullied, and the Isle of Dogs Hesperides. A prod of pole lets matter as a surgeon’s probe. The vent of Popery, said a cold voice in his head. A priestly pus. He could write that speech and rail it down, as puppet buffed at puppet in a show. The quarrel made his faith.

A stinking courtesan.

He’d kept his hand to hilt this while. Had kept his wits: the city treacherous. Her body was a-crawl with vermin: thieves, assassins, fireships.

And yet—how beautiful her nighted mask, her play of fires on the deep. Her torches all her stars. All planetary. Qualmish as he was, yet he could gaze with pleasure on the spangling of her watery gown. Fie, poetastery.

Not midnight yet. He eased his Pelion of flesh, but warily: the wharf was rotten by its give and groaning. Naught gained by his tumbling in; though he floated like a tun yet he would rot.

“Fat weed . . .” What line was dogging him? “That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf . . .” Will’s. Damn him for a country crowder, he could fiddle tragedy extempore, from some old playbook and a backless Ovid, make celestial music of the “Carman’s Whistle” and a dancing master’s kit. Of Hamlet’s ghost.

A darkened boat slid by, as might be Charon in his gondola. A white face—like the moon her skull—peered out at him. And moonlike, drew him on. Not yet, he’d not embark—

Wrong’d Venice. Ah, the boy had played her rarely, little Whitgift. And would never play a man. They’d forked him from the Thames, stewed livid, like a collop from the devil’s cauldron. Ben had seen him laid on Southwark shore, the eager curs whipped back. Not so the groundlings: they had thronged the player’s boy as if he were a new bear or a Jesuit to hang. The Men had known him by his ring, a lording’s gift.

Not robbed?

The bells were striking now.

So many gone: dead queens and witty pages, all the pretty boys who changed their hose for petticoats, their masquing petticoats for breeches. Brief as rime. Within this year, betwixt the old Queen and the King of Spades (Death trumps), two player’s boys—no, three—were gone: this Peter; quick Salathiel, who spoke his lines; his Ben, his poetry itself.

And Ben remembered how as Prologue to his Cynthia’s Revels, he had made three boys, his puppets, quarrel for the Prologue’s part. While he, who set them on, had scolded their unruly speech; and they, in his words, spoiled (Stop his Mouth) his play. Their voices not their own. He’d made them rivals for possession of a cloak (what, will you ravish me?): the speaker’s all-enfolding garb, black velvet as this night. How fiercely they had snatched at it (I’ld cry a Rape, but that you are Children), as if they quarreled for oblivion.

The last deep stroke on strokes died muffled in a rising fog.

The player’s wish: to be obliterated in a part, unselved; to shine in it, at once the overshadowed and the star. So they’d cast lots for the player’s cloak—O blasphemy unmarked by Revels—as if for Christ his mantle. And Salathiel had won and lost: his cloak would be his shroud.

O, you shall see me do that, rarely; lend me my Cloke.

Another: Soft, Sir, you’ll speak my Prologue in it.

No, would I might never stir then.

So the boy had sworn. And so had forfeited. His death—and Benjamin’s—would Ben endure as Job did, with complaint: God’s will. But something, that walks somewhere had killed Peter Whitgift: cut his thread. Who knew that dreaded Atropos was puppet-master?

“Maestro Giansono?” An unearthly voice, as of a spirit prisoned in a tree.

Ben swung his lantern round.

A shadow, eyeless, in a cloak of night.

Southwark, All Hallows 1603

The player’s boy was buried north and south, beyond the glutted churchyard in a patch of no man’s land: tipped in unsanctified, unboxed, unclean. Past praying for. At his graveside stood a cronying of upstart crows, unfeathered popinjays: King’s Men.

Ben lingering at the grave, spoke silently; then hurried on to where his rival players gathered in an alley. Glancing back, he saw a figure kneeling by the new-turned earth: a boy. Not with the Men. He held a something to his breast with both hands, bowed his face to it—a kiss?—then laid it on the grave. An orange.

Strange. And paganish: to leave an offering, as if the dead could eat. It glowed in the unwilling day, November’s daylong dusk. A lamp for the underworld.

He would have turned and spoken with the mourner; but his fellows pulled him on. They wanted company. They wanted drink. So did he.

At the playhouse door they parted severally.

Will’s grieving was distracted, and his mourning ink. He had this next week’s plays to fit with one less boy. So needs must write a paltry for the tyrant or the wit to speak—a patch of nothing—while the boy, sent off upon an errand to himself, was changed, came out new-gendered, and sailed on. Enter the Lady. Will could fit a metamorphosis within a fool’s soliloquy, and to a line.

And being Will, ’twould all be Mabwork. True, his ecstasies were brave in show—good silk expended on bad tawdry—but they wanted cutting. And his quibbles! Glovery, lithe words turned inside out.

Ben laid stone on stone, well cut and justly set: would leave behind him, like the Romans, Works. An Amphitheatre. Even now he saw it rise. But the English poets made themselves a gypsies’ camp amid the ruins: thieveries and gauds.

All was Troy-town at the Globe, in uproar. Hurly-burly. They had lain the most part of the year in quarantine, becalmed. And now to catch a wind of scandal, they unfurled: would run before it—but for tempest—into Martinmas. Uncertain seas. Yet, like sailors on a ship in storm, they knew their compass and their craft. They pulled together. One overboard? and so another to the sheets. He watched, as he would watch a gang of workmen for a quarter hour: carpenters or printers, smiths, musicians. How it was done. Their faults.

Three or four were at swordplay: which least of all can be unstudied. Any fool could temporize—sing, sneeze, fart, fill in with Gorboduc—an eyeless player begged. Still others roughed a scene, each player with his piece of it: hooked cue with speech, framed passages, and so the house was raised. And down it fell, unpegged. Unequal in its timbers. Colloquy. A shortening.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t, said his earwig.

Sneck up, Will.

Again it rose and was dismantled. Done undone, like the knot of swords that Northern hobnails make in dance. A third attempt. Upheld. And now the boy stepped in their circle: Hesperus and prey.

Ben cast a shrewd eye upwards on the O of cloud: a coming storm? A loss of coin, a breathing-space.

But now his inquiry was to the tiring-house.

Within was all a fume of vile tobacco and a passion of tears. Smalter the tireman sat stitching on a coffin, any king’s, and wept. He the rain; and Figgs, who kept the properties, the lightning and the cloud.

“Morn t’ye,” said Ben.

“Good morrow,” said the tireman. Figgs quirked his pipe, and leaned a little faster to the wall. “Yet not good neither. Did you see our little Whitgift laid in earth?”

“I did.”

“No rite? No passing bell?”

Ben shook his head. “The coroner—damned Pharisee—held fast to his contempt. Had Heminges not bribed him, it would have been the crossroads. He would drive the stake himself.”

“O the wickedness! The pretty innocent!” The tireman wiped his tears with Gertrude’s petticoat. “Hath Hell then swallowed him?”

“Afire and whole,” said Ben. “Flapdragoned for a devil’s revelling.” Oh, he could spit Beelzebub for this, storm hell. “Thirteen. What harm in him?”

“Boys,” said Figgs. “Is monkeys. Lapdogs else.”

“And which was he?” said Ben.

“A moonish boy,” said Smalter.

“Mad? Distracted?”

“Waterish. It comes o’ playing ’Phelia.”

“No vi’lets here on Bankside. Mud,” said Figgs.

Restless, Ben was pawing through the properties. He tried a blunted dagger on his palm; held up a stomacher to his expanse.

“Here, put that down,” said Figgs. “’Twould not fit thee.”

“’Twill thee,” said Ben abstractedly. “Ha! Osric’s bonnet.”

Smalter spat his pin. “What, the Oyster? Any gallant’s. Out o’ fashion now. The better sort do weary of it, but the groundlings stamp and cry, halloo! We bring it on whene’er some droning tragedy begins to lag.”

Like mine? My Sejanus? Still gnarring on that bone.

A stitch. “We had it of my lord of Oxford’s man.”

“Did you now?” A scent. He dropped the bone. “Doth he cheap with ye?”

“Aye. Yon goose-green doublet but this week. ’Twill make a smirking courtier, recut. So I told Will.”

“Another Osric? What, to prank in Oxford’s frippery? You dare?”

“’Twas ’Gustin’s impudence to play him so, before his lordship’s eyes.”

“I heard. And was not slain?”

“By Vere his men? He knew not he was mocked, I think.”

“Like an Ape who sees his image in a glass, and mocks it for another.” How went that satire Harvey made on Vere? His Speculum? So: fisnamy smirking / With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward. Flourishing just so, he mimed it. “Ah, ’twas then his lordship vented, bowing to the Queen: which afterward she did recall to him: My lord, I had forgot the fart.” Ben twirled the bonnet on his fingertip, and grinned. A little Apish flat couched fast to the pate like an oyster. English hexameters, in long and short. ’Twas barbarous conceited in old Gabble-ratchet, twisting sense to the measure; yet he bit. If mumbling dogs had teeth. Himself? Would satyrise in brief: not vanity but hinder eloquence:

One lord fair-fortuned was

Whose fame is rotten;

His fart remembered is

Because forgotten.

He perched the thing on Figgs’s gunstone of a noll, where it sat like a dejected egret. Ha. “Thou look’st like Antichrist in that lewd hat.” A good line: he noted it.

“There’s an angel o’ plumes left yet on her.” Figgs doffed it, stroked it tenderly. There now, my dandling. Did the man affront thee? “She’ll do for Ercles in a wooing vein.”

As if in idleness, Ben asked, “And Venetia?”

Smalter sighed. “There is great clamor for’t. While there is light, we’ll play it, even to the snuff. The piece distastes me: ’tis unseemly now. But some—our men and boys—do whisper of it as ill-fortuned.”

“What, do they boggle at it?”

“Aye.” He bit his thread. “But there’s silver in’t. The commons love a moral death as they do love a maypole. An they cannot gaze upon the broadside walking, they will crowd to see his double.”

“Who’s to play Venetia’s fetch?”

“Here’s great ado. There’s little Timmins hopeful, but an egg as yet. ’A plays like a candle in gutter, up and down.”

“The Fool’s page, he that sang?” A cade-lamb, fit for Cupid in a masque.

“Aye, he.”

Here’s fox, grain, goose for Will. Shall the page sing to the lady, himself to herself? Paradoxical. Then at her window? No: for she must in and pop out again, like Death in a town clock. Ludicrous. Cut the song? No: those who psalmed it in the streets came but to hear the owl cry, Hu! Tohu! So then: the Owlglass to entreat the owl. Let Robin Armin sing, and farewell, page.

A knot. “Jenks hath it word for word by heart, aye, and business; but his voice is cracking.”

“Let him to the barber then, and cut his lamentations short.”

“Timmins hath it,” said Figgs. “Will’s hearsing him his lines.”

“Is there not a third?” said Ben.

“A green boy, lately prenticed. Plucked—” Smalter sniffed. “—on our late country progress, from a hedge.”

“What, the crow? Venetia’s waiting-woman?” Not a score of lines and yet well-played. Struck home.

“A very shrewish peevish boy. A malapert. You’d think his mother’s paps were sloes.”

“And so? Can he not act?”

“’A queens it rarely. Or will play you any ranting girl. But die? ’Tis not his humor.”

Wit and fury. He must know this boy.

“Whose prentice?”

“Calder? Ruddock’s boy.” He signed himself. “With Peter Whitgift. They were—Ah. But here’s my lady to be fitted.”

Smalter beckoned to the new Venetia: the boy whom Ben had seen rehearsing. Fitted? No: to wed the devil, by his look. Aghast, yet sensible of elevation.

Now the tireman unfolded from his perch, and bustled, pulling out a chest. “Here’s deaths by jealousy.” He knelt and opened it, pulled out its cloth of silver, silks and velvets, rich with embroidery and rank with sweat. Sleeves, stomacher, gown, petticoat—He sat back on his heels, and clicked his tongue. “Did I not fold it here?” And then he looked again, and yet again, unfolding, fanning out: in this trunk and the next, in all the trunks, and everywhere. At first the man seemed baffled, vexed; then frantic.

“Figgs!”

“Aye.”

“Hast seen Venetia’s smock?”

“Naught leaves here.”

“O ’tis wicked, wicked. Half an ell of Venice lace to either sleeve-hand, and the square on’t wrought with gold—”

“What, stol’n? From our house?” said Figgs. “That’s hanging nine times o’er.”

And Smalter wrung his hands and wailed, “Bone lace! She cannot die without. O masters, here is tragedy itself at end.”

And Figgs, “What, stol’n?”

“Cord and all.”

A pretty thing, that smock: the Queen had wept for it. At Whitehall, but a brief month since, where Ben had seen it first and last—aye, and the paltry mumming it adorned. Like snow it lay about the dead Venetia. Above her stood her tyrant lover, great with speech. A silence, keeping measure; then: “O! That nothing that hath made her nothing—”

But a voice called out of shadow, shrill complaint that overtopped the player, even at the katastrophê: “Enough. ’Tis stale.”

Lord Oxford, as it would be. None had marked him for an act at least. Ben shrugged. My lord (for all his long eclipse) could never yet endure the shadows. Must ever be cynosure.

“What, lights!” Overpitched. De Vere had not the manage of his voice; it swooped and squalled, a hautboy with a parching reed; but lights brought lorded him: his man was all of silk. Ben standing by the stage—between that other world and this—made his anatomy. His suit would be a manor wasted—folds, barns, meadows in its broidering—its buttons downfall even to the rafters, slate-stripped, and their lead by alchemy turned gold; each glove a hamlet; aye, the very perfume on’t a living. Skirted like a spaniel bitch, pated with an oyster shell—if oyster ere had plumes—and ruffed like Winter in a masque. More rings than teeth. So much his swathing. But the man himself a puckfist: nothing, closed in kidskin. But a whiteness and a smoke.

He rose, his latest boy at elbow. Court alone: none followed in his train.

A rumour in the audience, the shadow of a hiss.

And in the tiring-house, a sort of strangled mewling from the poet, who’d been mouthing his own ecstasies, self-handling as it were.

The players held their mastery. The dead Venetia, red as any rose, choked back his giggling—sufflaminandus erat—though he shook with it. Would spurt. Silenzio thus thwarted in his frenzy, yet leashed in his deep annoy. Setting forth his leg once more—the black became it—he upheld his empty hands. The poet prompted: “O that nothing. . . .”

So the play went on.

At Tom Ruddock’s only Doll was in, with six or seven of her gossips and a bowl. A throng, Ben saw: a pity, for the room would scarce hold both of them alone. Besides all, there were three or four of Ruddock’s brats, a hobby-horse, a drum, three stinking demi-spaniels, and the cat in disputation with the pudding bag. Ailurallantomachia. But Doll, sublimely deaf to comedy, reigned over all. Not Burbage could have held a stage beside her, nor Hecuba have queened it so: bereft and avid and ennobled with disaster. “Ah, sweet boy. And would ha’ made a man, a tyrant—” And she wiped a pinguid tear. “God ’a mercy. Here’s one can tell us of his end.” The Moirai simpered. Ben was importuned with burnt offerings and spondaic sack, which he twice refused. Regretted taking: yet he drank.

“O come, good Master Jonson, come, you saw him fished.”

“Was he not swoln as—”

“—a toad?”

“—a tympany?”

“As any mooncalf. Blue, he was. His face . . .”

“They say his—save your reverence—his cockerel . . .”

A tugging at Ben’s jacket. “Tell the frog, nuncle.”

“Tell the fox.”

“Peace, Jug. Tace, Peglet. Master Aesopus is dry. Here’s barley sugar.” And his fist pried open, empty, he let fall a shower from the other hand.

So his Ben had played.

There sat the gossips, weeping as a whore would piss. Nay, fluxy in their facile grief: a glut and purge. He felt himself grow cragged and surly. Doggish as Diogenes embarrelled. So: a curt nod round the circle. “Goodwives, I condole. But I have business. Is your other boy within? Rafe Calder?”

“Will I not call him down?” As banket to their Roman feast.

“Stay you. Gabble. I will mount.”

Pursued by loud bewailings and the reek of slops and sack, wet ashes and burnt pease, Ben huffed and hauled himself upstairs: a dogleg, a tottering volute, something near a ladder. And a low door, narrow as a parable.

He knew this room, he thought; had fled its double.

Silence to his knock. He opened.

And he stood amazed.

From the rafters, bright-leaved as a wood in fall, unfallen, hung a company of players, masque and anti-masque. In little: mere idolatries, no greater than his hand. A puppet show. Some cut from ballad sheets; some drawn by a childish hand; all painted: knights, gods, shepherds, witches; bears and dragons, Mab and Merlin and the rapt Prosperina. Fantastical, this meddled work—aye, Willfully—to graft such hedgerow Englishry on ancient stock, imp out the laurel with the hawtree. Scene: A wood near Athens. Crinkum-crankum. He would have mocked them as a pack of cards; but in the drowning light, they seemed like spirits. Shades of—Bah! a cheat of fantasy. Bad glass, as green as standing water, and an ill-fit frame, no more: a wind in here. But whispering, they stirred.

A voice, neither man’s nor woman’s, spoke from the air. “. . . tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore . . .”

Low thunder. “Veni!”

A boy hunched in the rafterage dropped down, unfolding neatly in a bow. No courtship in it, only training. The quarrelled light cast diamonds on him: a motley of air.

“Your servant.” But he could not mask the face he lifted, restless desolate. A wind in sand.

The boy who made the offering. By his carriage; by his tawny doublet. By his grief. Venetia’s waiting woman. Aye, Ben minded her. How gazing on her mistress’s body, she had touched a lock of hair. Had tift it. Well enough for heaven. It had struck. Amid a clutter of obsequies—trash. Give him woodrights and an axe, and he would lop it to the timber.

He could use such a boy.

Fourteen, perhaps. Impubis. A year or two in him to boy it, to be signed a journeyman or cast away. A good voice, but a Marcher accent, with an uplift in it. Not so pretty as his fellow had been. He needs must paint: a pale, sharp, white-brown face—not perfect blackthorn but embrowned—and crowblack hair, upstarting. His eyes, were they not red with weeping, good: a winter sea. A fury in them.

Ben must stoop to enter, brushed by demi-puppets. “Thy pardon. I intrude upon thy mourning.”

That sea cast back his pity.

“They lie. By Christ’s nails, he is innocent. Is slandered. He would not—”

Bluntly. “Murder himself? I am not Providence and cannot weigh his soul; yet I doubt the law in this.”

“You believe me?”

Ben spoke lower. “When the spades had gone, I spoke the service for him.”

“Are you priest?”

“An actor. But my prayers as true as any man’s.”

“I know your work, magister. I have seen your Poetaster. And Sejanus—”

Aposiopesis. (The rest is silence.) Whether out of awe or policy, he could not tell. “And they lacked of giants?”

“No, sir. For you serve the Giant Seneca, and have stolen his boots. Then axe to the beanstalk, and down falls harp and all.”

“Thou insolent chit.” But he was pleased and the boy knew it; yet cared not.

“I am of your party, sir. By lying, we speak true.”

A clever imp. Could see him starving by his wits. “Might I look about?”

Mute assent. A shrug. What could he?

Aye, this room he knew. A stark bare place beneath its canopy of dreams. Black-thatched, ill-plastered. All the timbers wried, as if in flinching as from a blow. Gapped floorboards. You could lose a shoe between. And all their little furnishings worth not a groat. A straw bed, linenless. A box or two for ease. A candlestick. A pot. A half-a-dozen nails. Their store? No borrowed playing-clothes: he noted that. Lath swords. A pipe and tabor. Scrawlings on the daub in charcoal, on the door in chalk. So. And on a shelf, a little workshop: stumps of pencil, scraps of paper, pinches of bright minerals, deep earths, a brush or two, a row of eggshells stained within. He turned these in his great blunt fingers, set them down. A pretty alchemy. And here their library: five or six play-quartos—Shakespeare again—unbound; parts for study, not the one he sought; snipped ballad sheets; a song or two pricked out. Ah. A foxed and blotted Virgil, missing a signature. An Ovid, water-warped.

“Pulled from a grammar school, wert thou? At Shrewsbury?”

“Ludlow, sir. Born in Clun. My father was a joiner.”

And his mother Welsh, I’d lay. One of Glendower’s hatchlings. A dragon in egg. “And Whitgift’s?”

“A weaver, he thought. But othertimes would say, the King of Fairy. He was one the masters of children stole, and set to playing ere he’d left off petticoats. He was Titania’s boy the old Queen praised, they say; they called him Changeling.”

“Aye. I mind,” said Ben. “The little chimneysweeper.” That start of down-white hair, that look of shining terror. Pretty as a candle, and as easy snuffed.

“I worried much how he might live, sir, when he grew a man; for all his art was in his innocence. His part was ever to die. I thought—” And the boy looked at the shelf of books.

“To starve with him?” No answer. “So he had no kin to come wailing and prying?”

“A friend.”

Who loved Venetia, knowing all his frailties.

Ben touched the rustling company of shades. “His? Thine?”

“Both. The art of hand was his, but I made them stories. Plays.” The boy looked upward and away, as if at clouds. “A game of Arcady. ‘The Queen’s Men.’”

A grunt. “Out of fashion.”

“Out of time. Not great Eliza but old Mab.”

“My son . . .” He knew not why he spoke. “My son had a tawdry puppet, which he begged me at Bartholomew. Named him Caesar Augustus, and did laurel him with cresses. In ’s histories, he slew giants, and did rule the moon.”

“You might have learned his art.” The boy was smiling. Yet for all his skilled impudence—a page in a comedy—there was a mist now on those eyes.

Ben’s own were dry. A myriad of children—innocents—were dead this year of plague. Why rail at this one death, this scatterling’s? Aye, that comes pat: because the murderer usurps death’s crown and ministry, mocks providence. Scapes justice. So? And art thou law?

Above him, turning on a string, a knight of shadows rode, lance levelled at the air. I summoned am to tourney. ’Twas a child’s dream out of balladry, a Bedlam quest. Not his. Cry Murder? Tilt at wickedness? What cause have I? His cold voice catechized: For that thou canst not bring thy war on heaven. Ben could—with anguish—set his own Ben’s death, his soundless grief, in measure: here doth lye / Ben. Jonson his best piece of poetry. Could square his agony with heaven’s metric: call it just. Could rhyme. Not so with this boy player’s death. No elegy in this, but act.

Now, now his opening. He tapped the knight. “Those colors must have cost. Here’s lapis.” Not a word. “How came he by that?”

Stumbled back. No parry.

“Did he act the Ganymede? Ceverene solebat?”

A hit, by his turning cheek. Wave-white then red, a deep carnation welling up, as if a man were stabbed in water. Boarded. Yet no quick-denying oath, but answer.

“With no man that I know, sir. He hath been—he was—my bedfellow, this year and more.” A silence. “Only . . . he was fond of praise. Of . . . cosseting. I cannot fault him. All our study is to please.”

“And before this year? Some masters cosset.”

Calder bit his lip on smiling. “Master Ruddock? He hath wenches. We have heard old coil below.”

An eyebrow.

“Past midnight, creeping in, he clashes with the pot our mistress set for him, athwart the stair. Nails! he cries, and stands aswim in it. Now Trip and Trey rouse up and bark in antiphon, and worry at his calves; pot-shod, he thumps and morrises and yelps; the mistress drubs him with her broom, and rails. Down, bitches, is it? Was it not, Up, cock and On, whore!”

Ben fell against the timbers in a great Y—they shook as if the house would fall—braced and laughing. Samson-Silenus. “Strayed Odysseus is worried by the she-cur Hecuba. I will make an epigram. O most excellent boy. Thou hast given me my ale tonight.” He wiped his glowing face, and sat on one of the boxes, gingerly. It creaked and swayed. Now, while he is smiling. “And of late, did any man attempt him? Coy his cheek? Or whisper, tongue in ear? Give trifles, sweetmeats?”

“None, sir. That I know.” That hopeless honesty. “’Twas all old women, honeying and fondling.”

“And the ring?”

“From my lady Howard for his singing in her masque of Eros.”

“Yet by covenant is not that gold his master’s?”

And again, the blush. “Gold, yes: which our master bade him wear, as brag of patronage. But other toys we kept.”

“He worked privily?”

“We all do, we boys. We may not; but there is stolen pleasure in’t. And sweetmeats oftener than coin.”

“Oranges,” said Ben. He tapped the chalking on the door. “Back. Oranges.”

“That was another night.”

“So there were many?”

“I have thought—” said Calder, staring at the wall. “I know not, but I think he went because it frighted him. He feared the dark, and murderers, and ghosts. He flinched from ruffians. I think he did it for the coming home. The candle.”

“And that night it burned to snuff.”

“I waked for him,” said wretched Calder. “He was coming back.”

“From whence?”

“If I knew—” The fury at himself. “Yet he did seem in great spirits. And I—was vexed with him. I did not stay him.”

“What figures did he paint the last?”

Calder thought. “This, Ariadne. And the Minotaur.”

“We will spell this out from Sibyl’s leaves.”

Lumbering to his feet, Ben tapped the dangling toys. They trembled. “Good paper this. No market stall.” He twitched them down and turned them. Verses, of a sort. Indited in a fair large hand, Italianate: no playhouse scrivener’s crabbed and thorny scrawl. Broad margins like a monument.

But oh, that paper. Irresistible as ivory, stiff as breastplate: fitting for a lord’s impresa. Was the boy told, Burn this? Could he not bear to give it up?

The text was snipped about of course; but here, in the bull’s shoulder (where the sisters weep) was verse enough to judge. “What think you? As a part in tragedy?”

Calder read. “No cues.” He mouthed the lines. “Unspeakable. Not one of our trade?”

“No. No poet. Yet would mount his tragedy.” A turn. “The ancientest of theatre is a sacrifice. Thus: for his tragoedia—his goat-song—he did want a kid.”

“Sir?”

“The crowner hath no love for players. Here’s a naked child laid out, at which a guildsman Herod’s very dog must weep; and Master Barebones Fear-the-Lord must rant above him for a quarter-hour on sodomy and profanation. There was in some sort . . . protestation.” Hand on hilt, a grim look. “But as thou know’st, I am felon”—and he crooked his Vulcan’s thumb—“and I may not speak. I broke the bailiff’s pate that did turn me out.” A flare at bellows; then a sinking down, a glowering. “’Twas ruled the boy had slain himself by hanging, for the shame of whoredom—”

A cry.

“—and then—for the concealment of his crime—by drowning.”

“He would not—”

“Conspiracy, twice murder and—’twas argued—self-sodomy.”

“He did not.”

“I know,” said Ben. “Someone had bound him, hand and foot. I saw the marks.”

Calder dropped the Minotaur as if it were a coal. “This . . . monster?”

“I cannot prove it.”

“Tell me his name. I will kill him.”

He would: Ben saw that in his face. Could not. “No. His servants would kill thee, as they would a rat. Small vengeance, to be buried in a dunghill, to a psalmody of flies.” He took the boy by the shoulders, held them. How he shook. “I am for surety, then justice. An I prove this death, thou wilt have vengeance. Not with steel: this war is of the theatre. He will eat his words.”

Cheapside, Advent 1603

In a corner of the Mermaid, Ben drank with his crony, Robin Armin, late of the Goldsmith’s Company. The King’s Men’s Snuff. A gill to Ben’s quartpot: his slight quick tumbler’s body in a mole-gray scholar’s gown, mischief as justice. He’d an ill-matched face—a fortune in a fool—two faces in one coin, like moon and dark of moon. Himself his guising. He’d a trick of turning, overturning what you saw in him. Now mirth, now melancholy: child; confessor; lunatic. His hands, unlooked-at, toyed incessantly, with salt, knives, oranges. And now with gold, a quarter angel: tumbling it down and down a Jacob’s ladder of his fingers, juggling, spinning, rolling it, occulting and disclosing it: now Michael, now the Ship.

With his pensive side to Ben, he listened to the thundrous bombard of opinion, his descanting upon sack, policy, stage-traffic, wits, lackwits, roaring girls, the Scots king’s minions, Martial’s epigrams, Will’s damned facility, Bess Broughton’s smock; all rival poets and their flaws; masques, stratagems, boys’ companies, the Queen’s paps jigging as Hippolyta—so much for Art—the Unities in Aeschylus (Snuffed, by an eyebrow), the goose pie before them (tried and executed), broken music, and by such labyrinthine turns, at last the court.

“—and whining Oxford? What rumor of him?”

“Light, by a scruple.” A flick and the angel vanished. “How, my lord Leapfrog? Signor Fanfaranado? Not forgot: for he keeps his trumpeter.”

Ben snorted. Armin sipped. He’d drunk a half stoup of wine, unsugared, in the evening; had nibbled at a seedcake and a sucket of quince.

“I knew him ere the Ark had sailed, and when our old Queen (Jesu bless her) had her teeth. The Moon was not yet round.” A pinch at salt, let fall. “’A had of my master Lonyson a gold ring of an ounce (troyan): who had naught of him. Being prentice then, I made a ballad ont: ‘O for O.’ ’Twas sung to the tune of ‘Halfe Hannikin.’”

“A ring? For a Ganymede?”

An eyebrow. “’Twas not for his Countess. She might sit i’ th’ ashes and cry, O for a hobbyhorse. They say his daughters among them had one petticoat, as the Sisters one eye.” The dark face turned; the light. “A pretty ring, quaint-fashioned, with two stones. His mistress, they say, is in’s mirror. Self-wed.”

“No master-mistress, then?” Damn Will. “No cosset?”

“What, should he make sonnets to his pisspot? ’Tis philosophy with him: what is, is for his use.”

“And yet no Epicure to live in poise of pleasure. What he occupies he scorns.”

“Set it down, Ben. Thou want’st copy of words.”

“Sneck up.” A bearish cuff, which Armin—seemingly unmoving—ducked.

“Yet there was one, a mistress mastered him. And then an ingle that—I will tell it as I heard at bellows. Then was the round world in her swaddling. It had not rained twice since Adam made him galligaskins of a hedge. Armada was an acorn. Thou, great Ben, wast in thine absey-book, and hadst no more Latin than a bishop—”

“Thy tale, boy.”

“Vere took to him a whore in Venice—”

Down stamped the can. “Dearer than Thaïs (for so I heard) and spent in her a thousand plough of land—horse, company, and all his towers—which she swallowed up like earthquake in her crack.” Aye, set it down.

“Hide and hair. And cried, More meat! More meat!”

“A very termagant—” A good theme, and Ben roused to it. “—and taller in her chopines than a Whitsun giant. Aye, a Moll, a cutpurse of your codpiece knave. She brags beneath her smock his breeches, such as Venice punks do flaunt.” His lumbering Pegasus aloft, he spurred.

Where now is Kit to volley forth her dread?

Each epithet a blaze and thunderstone?

Or glozing Will, to rhyme this tyranny

In cloth-of-gold, this cloven Tamburlaine,

This Tartar farthingaled, bestriding—O!

His little empery.

A silence, and the fall and fade of squibs.

“Have we a boy could play her?” said Armin.

“Boy? Ranting Alleyn could not carry her. Yoke oxen to her pageant-car, they could not draw her. She out-queans the world.” Ben doused his eloquence in ale, as would a smith a sword. “Her vengeance? Tell.”

“She gave him that he cannot spend: a pox.”

A stamp. “O rare Tisiphone!” And a frighted potboy hastening up with ale, Ben flicked a drop of it to slake her lust. Then sank his fury, hissing, in the draught. He settled to expound.

“With my lord ’tis alchemy inverse: his gold transmuted into mercury. (The fume of which hath mounted to his brain: naught else explains his verse.) From gold to mercury, and thence to tin: was he not ever at the old Queen’s doorstep, like a surly beggar, whining for monopoly?”

“Nuncle, so he was.”

“’Twas in him Jovial, high god of catamites and tin. And thence—” A darkness fell and fleeted. Nothing: but a shadow on the wall, hawk nose and urchin back: the hirpling boy who made the fire swept the ash. A bugbear. Yet he shuddered. Even in that tavern frowst and roar, a black frost in his bones. And thence to lead. Old Saturn who devours his children. In that eye of winter, in the fume of mercury—a lickerous, flickering blacksilver—sat Lord Oxford, cold and saturnine, a shadow of the king of shadows. Damned fantasy: but still Ben saw it, clear as on a stage. All but extinct: his fire ash, he fed it with a hekatomb of boys, a bonefire of their flesh.

“Nuncle?”

His hand, palm outward: hold.

Time’s vengeance: death-in-life. Is’t not enough? said Reason.

So: to die at last, as all men die in time? Not all. Not as Ben his son had died, untimely. Not as Peter Whitgift died. Those innocents were laid in earth; the sacred monster lived to feed his dying lust on boys. Cut branches still in flower. Let hell rekindle him, and endlessly consume.

Bah. Air and sophistry. He had no proof. Would not trust visions.

And how many would be killed while conscience wrangled with itself? There was not time.

He set the tankard down. “But the boy? The Ganymede?”

“That tale was old when Solomon was yet a breeching boy, and Arthur whipped his top. Come back from his Italian travels, Vere brought with him a singing-boy for use, a rarity of Venice glass to spend in. They say ’a chained him like a pouching monkey in his chamber. Shook the chain to make him scold. They say the old Queen bid him sing, and praised his voice, and gave him silver: which Vere took. A queer name—now what was it? Orry Cockcrow.”

“And?”

“He ran away.”

“Is’t all?”

“Is’t nothing to have scaped the minotaur? Brave Thessyus himself had failed, were it not for Arianty’s garter.”

“He alone?”

“Am I the moon, to see all mischief? Here’s Dame Durden’s Bet took half a pair of stockings and a silver thimble, for that her mistress boxed her ears. Did I see her snick the door behind?” Snuff sang, “Up the ladder and down the wall . . . An if I were the old moon, hath he spoken yet of what he sees?”

“But lives he yet, thinkst thou? This boy of Vere’s?”

A shrug. “And if? As good sieve th’Ocean for an elver.” He leaned a little in and plucked from Ben’s left ear the angel. Showed it: obverse; face. Not lancing Michael now, but Dionysus; nor the Ship, but Arion.

Maze-drunk, thought Ben. He shook his head to clear it. “Nothing missed?”

The gold was now a heap of silver, dwindling in Armin’s hand to two small coins. Cracked testers: which on tossing in the air, were vanished. “Nothing worth. But one or two light trinkets of his lordship’s . . . privy purse.”

Ben crowed and stamped, called out for ale; and for a time drank silent. Brow on fist. “Did not his lordship keep a company of boys?”

“To act for him? Aye, pretty marmosets, and Vere himself wrote musty interludes for them to play.”

“Did he so?” A spark on tinder.

“My nuncle Tarleton—he was not yet in the Fool’s Cap then, the stars were not yet seven—Dick he kept to wake ’em after with a jig.” The young fool touched his eyes—what, rain? He smiled. “Ah, long ago, sweet fool. The moon’s his tabor now, the stars his Bergamask; the very sun now rises to his pipe.”

Long ago, aye. Ben remembered. He, the bricklayer’s prentice—great lubberly fellow, tall amid the groundlings, with his patched coat and ragged Aeschylus, too greasy for the baker’s ovens—stood and roared. Unwillingly: ’twas Doric stuff, this clowning, all unworthy of the Theatre in her great descent. Yet irresistible. The dwarfish antick with his dub and whittle held them all, the very eye and O of admiration: he the earth round which the sun, moon, stars revolved. A very Ptolemaic fool.

“But Oxford?”

“He loved above all thing—beyond all venery, drink, quarrelling, conspiracy, or grudge—to make them act his comedies. In eight and six. As stale as Bartholomew gingerbread, Dick said, but brave in gilding. Kept his servants but to mouth his. . . .” A tilt of face. “. . .poetry. ’Twas played in camera.”

“And?”

“Thou know’st fools, our part: see all, say nothing but by elsewards. But this much ’a riddled me.”

“And these mouthing boys, none lost?”

“Peace, brock. Not every hole hath weasels in’t.” He beckoned for a cup of wine; was served. He drank. “My nuncle Dick, thou know’st, was a Master of Fence. He did challenge Oxford once—”

“Why?”

“For his gingerbread.” Snuff drank. “In play. As if in play. Vere said he parried not with apes. And had him beat.” A flicker on Snuff’s face: the fire, as someone stood. “And so the company dissolved.”

“I see.”

Now Robin’s voice changed instrument. “Here I lay aside all fool. As Burbage hath his crown: an hundred times. ’Tis artifice in me, and studied: not anointed.” Still that face at odds with itself, ill-matched—man? woman? spirit? That he could not doff.

“This tale is new. ’Twas in that winter that the Globe itself was new; they played at Richmond to the Queen. I, Curtained yet, did wait upon my lord of Oxford with a Christmas play—”

“I hear.”

“At Hackney. ’Twas his own device, unsullied by the common breath. As well: that commons would have mocked it halfway to the moon. It would have rained old herrings, rotten oranges; hailed nuts and eggs. The company was boys.”

Ben’s fist thumped, softly, on the board.

“Unworthy of his table, I did lurk in his buttery—”

“Ubique nullibique.”

“—like a dish for the banket, to be served up capering. And there did feast myself on quiddany and tattle.”

“Thou art my Truepenny. O excellent old mole.”

“His servants do fear him. Do avoid his eye, lest he make choice of them: for he hath delicates. ’Tis bending; or the whip and road.”

“Yet more?”

“His other weapon’s steel. At seventeen, he broached an undercook.”

“And roasted?”

“In a sort. ’Twas judged self-slaughter—”

“Oh—”

“Aye: ran himself upon the sword. As little pigs do in Cockaigny. His widow, great with child, turned beggarstaff upon the road.” Robin drank. “They do say Tom Brincknell walks, will not be laid. And others, glancing o’er their shoulders, sign themselves and mock their master: as children do who dread a bugbear. They do call his lordship sorcerer—”

“What? How?”

“Speaks with air. They say, to rouse his—spirits.” Armin drank. “But no more: for here the play begins.”

“A comedy?”

“Tragical mirth.” His outward hand to Ben. “All eyes.”

He brooded wearily: a man of lead. “Here sits my great Lord Oxford in his chair, and gazes on his squeaking puppets. Yet as they speak, he rouses.” Now a lifted face, a lightening. “Mouths his own words, as they were ambrosia. O ’twas monstrous stuff! Cambyses is not mustier.”

Ben cast his eyes to heaven. “No. Fourteeners?”

“In part. Methinks ’twas a gallimaufry of all his youthful verses, gobbets ladled up o’erspiced, like thrice-cooked mutton. Or a suit of old snippets: here a sleeve he thought became him once; there buttons. ’Tis his only thrift.”

Here the fool’s voice changed to piping: “‘My life, through ling’ring long, is lodg’d in lair of loathsome ways . . .’”

Ben stopped his ears.

“What, sirens?”

“Umbrae. The unquiet ghosts of poetry that sinned against the Muse and fell.”

But pitiless, the fool spoke on:

Help man, help beasts, help birds and worms

  that on the earth doth toil!

Help fish, help fowl that flocks and feeds

  upon the salt sea soil!

Ben could not pipe, but like a bombard overblown, he squawked:

Help plague, help pest, help pox of might

  that in my bones doth lodge—

The one I caught in Southwark stews from

  Tom, Dick, Joan, and Hodge!

“Who caught the trick of an Athenian—” The pipe now a rackett.

Help ye that are to wail ay wont, ye howling hounds of hell!

    O Fates, come, come,

    Cut thread and thrum;

    Quail, crush, conclude, and quell!

Ben snorted. “‘This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad.’” Bless Will, pox rot him, for his all-serving lines.

The fool looked soberly. “‘Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man.’” Swirling his cup, Armin said, “And mistrust him. Foppish verses, yet—” He downed it. “The story of it liked me not. Of himself, I doubt, though in a crooked glass. A youth of great nobility, despised and outcast—Oxford wept for him, I saw his tears—the scorn of lesser mortals. His triumph. His revenge. A disdainful lover—”

“Who repents, disguises as a page to follow him—”

“And is repudiated. Our fishwives scold more wittily.”

“Most tragical mirth,” said Ben. “And she dies? Remorseful?”

“By her own hand.” A silence. “The boy was beautiful. And played—O ’twas a stump, this play, too rotten for the burning, and its fruit a midden-heap of withered crabs; yet when he sang, you thought it blossomed.” He turned down his empty cup.

“At Childermas, they found him hanging. In a garland and a smock. There was a letter in’s breast—”

“What hand?” said Ben.

The fool shrugged. “I saw it not. The crowner cared not. Two or three of his fellows, the boy’s master swore a melancholy in him, rising to an ecstasy. ’Twas ruled self-slaughter. The rope worth twopence.”

“Hang him.”

“Oxford? For a preening ass?”

“A Paphlagonian. A Moloch of minions.”

“Didst thou cast his water, like an empirick? Wouldst thou anatomize?”

“Hang first.”

“On what evidence? Bad poetry? Wind winds no rope.”

“I will make one.”

“Of his face? His manners?”

Enter the Fool. Snuff, gazing at a glass of air, admired: simpering; then scowling. “‘Vanitie above all—’” So. “‘Villanie next her.’” So. “And in comes Retribution, like an old morality?” Nothing in the face, so poised between two faces: empty as a glass. He held his nothingness to Ben. The fool looked quizzical. “No? Yes?”

“’Twill not play. The horse is dead.”

Clack! went Snuff’s clapper. “Stand up, Dick!” A nod and shudder, and a four-legged bow—how did he that on two? And then a fearful fleshless girn. Death’s nag.

Ben—even he, old warlike badger in his bloody coat—flinched back. No word.

“The skull hath teeth.” The mad horse dwindled to a fellow in gray. The fellows who had turned and stared sunk back to drinking. Robin and his pranks. “What wouldst thou, Ben?”

“Justice.”

“That is heaven’s. Law?”

“Cannot touch him: he skulks in his rank, as ’twere his labyrinth.” Ben’s tankard stood near full: no stomach for it now. Drunk anyway. “So thou wouldst temporize? As I do? Even as boys die?”

“I drive not the action; the fool is commentary.”

“Oracle sometime; or sibyl.” She misleads: he knew that. He defied her. Lion-drunk. “If heaven will not strike, then I call upon the player’s god—”

“Dionysus? O be wary!”

“Then his English fellow. I conjure Oberon: avenge thy children.”

His challenge echoed from the walls. Talking, they’d drunk down the moon: the Mermaid empty now but for the boy who swept.

Snuff plucked his angel from the air, and scattered it: it fell as leaves. “I’ll see thee to bed, Ben.”

Ben stood asway. But dead sober. As if his oath had been a great wind and a frost, his mind was clear. Below, the smithy of his rage began its hammerwork upon his sword. “I’ve a mind to a pilgrimage,” he said. “Venice in Lent.”

The Moorfields, Midwinter 1603

On a hill beyond London wall there is a labyrinth, a foxway trodden deep in mud. In summer, maids do walk it as a charm, thrice three to lock a love; or backward, to undo a bloodknot in the womb. It coils upon itself, earth’s nave. But now at winter dusk, the ground is rimy, crisping with December. There the player’s boy casts Merlin to the wind, afire and flying. Go, he whispers. Tell him that I love.

A glory, withering to ash. A dragon follows, and a bear, a company of nymphs. The air is full of momentary comets. Brightness falls.

I serve.

Great Oberon; poor Tom, his Maudlin after; Polyphemus, many-eyed with sparks; black Hecate; Dian of the bow, its silver swallowed up in flame. The last is Mab. Her chariot sails on, leaf-light. It dwindles to a spark. He watches, willing it to loft the hedge. Unseen at last.

I come.

A whorl of smoke arises from the furrow. Troy is burning. Calder does not weep, but stands, choked, whited with the ash of romance. All around, the flinders of his army fade.

He does not see the countryman in green—a hedger? but he bears no hook—who glances, smiling, and walks on.

Venice, Ash Wednesday, 1604

In the shadows of a courtyard brimmed with wavering light, is hid a fragment of a boy in bronze. In ecstasy: his limbs outflung in tatters from his trunk. His clustering hair leaf-curled about his will-gill face. His bondage flight. His dance is scattered now. The old ones, hornéd, pricked, and fluted, wait: at thresholds, in the shoals of fountains, set on bridge-ends and in niches, drowned in silt: the keepers of the isles. Immortal, they decay: are smutted, streaked with mutings of millennia of birds; cracked; maimed. The patient gods.

They wait the ass, god-bringing; for the green to whelm the stone.

Toward light, a rumor in the stones, a rustling in the trash of carnival. A crying out amid the bells. And high to the eastward, in a wind above the mist, a wheel and flash and falling, like the sparks whirled from a brand. They crown a viewless ship with fire.

And looking up, the sootblack boy who sweeps the courtyard, the glassmaker’s servant—he is ash entirely, eats coal; his font, they say, a furnace—Settiano crows; and hirpling, he unlocks the gate.

By the White Lion, Venice, Lent 1604

“Maestro Giansono?”

Ben swung round.

A pale-faced shadow out of shadow: eyeless, grim as justice. Even as he gripped his sword, he knew that steel was powerless: cum mortuis non nisi larvas luctari. None but hobgoblins use to fight with the dead. Yet would he face the thing.

“Stay.”

His lantern flared. A cloaked man stood within its wavering circle, hands upward turned. “See. I go alla bauta: I may bear no weapon.” The dreadful larva a mask.

Ben had thought to be the thunder-bearing shadow; he had planned to say, Sono della vostra Fede. I am of your faith. Stood mute. Then spoke in words of conjuration:

  “dic” inquit Thessala “magna,

quod iubeo, mercede mihi; nam uera locutum

inmunem toto mundi praestabimus aeuo

artibus Haemoniis . . .”[1]

“Signor? Do you bless me? Are you priest?”

“Poet. Acolyte of poets.”

“Sèr?”

“Your pardon. I am stranger here; I know not your Venetian manners.” Nor his tongue: la lingua thoscana he had learned of Florio would have to do, eked out with Latin. He raised his light. “Orazio Coquo?”

“Sciao.” A leg, most graceful. And he lifted up the mask.

Not the ruined angel Ben imagined, or the rogue, defiant in his filthy gauds and tatters; not the boy at all—for he was older than Will was, than Kit would be: no, a neat small fellow, like a parish clerk. But when he doffed his ghost, beneath it was a vixen. Sleeked and fatted on good market geese, to be sure: but there was the three-cornered face, insouciant, the sharp white teeth. The face was lined now, lively with time’s annotations; but the fox-red hair scarce dimmed, still curling to his shoulders. He’d a darker beard, the red of earth. Burnt amber. Though his belly paunched a little, he was slight and limber still. And now that he’d slung back the mask, in which he’d buzzed and boomed like a fly in a kettledrum, his voice was unmistakable: a child of the chapel. Tumbled out of heaven into baritone: but still exquisite.

It spoke a buridda of Italian, the Venetian tongue, and English. “Come, sèr, it is being whoreson cold. The air is bad by night here. Tale aria cattiva! It is ill to venture in sta moràda buràna—Beg you. In toscana, nebbia. Inglese—?

Ah, nebula. “Fog.”

“So. Fog. Evil at the throat.”

A crookback bridge, a maze of alleys, fog and stench. A city built of stone on slough, yet seemingly afloat, a bauble of its own glass. Gilded. Foundering. Syrenical. (A school of Nereids cried out to him, bare even to the tuft.) And to the far north, legendary here, swam London, great Leviathan: a monster all of daub and wattle. Older still than Venice, if the Troyan Brute were proved. Of Neptune’s brood. Yet seemed a hobnoll to this painted courtesan.

Time’s paradox a glove, he thought. Young old turned inward out. Here I am, that was raw and passionate in Marlowe’s age: grown tetchy. There’s Kit, his Lucan still unfinished, plays unthought of. Overtaken: and would never now be thirty. Zeno’s poet. An I were that witch of Thessaly, I’d conjure Kit and say: translate me.

Mazed, he saw only they were in the porch of some great building. They entered by a wicket; and still musing on the lost Pharsalia, he dipped and sained himself. A church. A great church, by the chill and echo. He looked up—

Sweet Christ.

—at the empyrean, the sphere of fire. Shadowed not as with the night but in his understanding, darkly through his glass. βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾽ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι.[2] Far below, he walked amid a wood of candles, honey-breathed: a starry heavens, poor and sparse beneath the glory of the roof.

And at that moment came a little thunder of rising, and the rustle of pages: and the heavens sang. It was piercing with a knife of diamond. Matins.

Ah, Ben knew this work of theirs. God’s company and His great theatre of one play: Christ actor in His passion, audience of praise. It drew forth his soul in awe, it ravished him; and he recoiled. All this beauty, power, meaning, art? Was masquing. Trumpery. And he thought of your bare-boards English theatre, of the ink in Paul’s churchyard, argument and counterblast: words, all words to conjure with. Fretted with golden fire. O brave Will. He weighed them, scale and scale: the empyrean; the Globe. An apple in each hand. The one of gold; the other, green and russeted: a windfall of the little gods.

I am of your faith—but was he?

“Here?” he whispered. (And when did Ben whisper?)

Orazio nodded, quirked his chin at an image in a simpering ecstasy: “She knows.” His knee to her. (Ben’s knee to no one. He was stiffnecked; he was slow of rising. And his faith was argument.) “But in my room, where we are intimo.” And turning in the aisle, he clicked his tongue. “That Jijo, he is flat.”

Here the jangle of keys at a little door. A haven from transcendence. A tiring-house: an overspill of robes, crowns, candles, music. Everything but swords. A workroom. Ben felt much at home.

Orazio gestured at the muffled ecstasy without. “San Marco. I am not (of course) il maestro di cappella but I practice the boys. Malvasia?” From a cupboard, he took wine and glasses, and a box of sandy little cakes. “You are liking our Venexia?”

“I have not seen her. I have been seeking you.”

First of all in the marketplace, for news: all rumor and distraction. Gulls jeering, as ’twere Marston and Dekker. Shitting satire on the throng. The slab of inchling demons in a fishmonger’s stall: Beelzebub’s get, toads’ scaffolding, hobgoblins by the pound. A turbaned Moor who picked among the lemons, breathing them; held silver for his choice: moon for sun. Jews discoursing in a row of bookstalls—O ye Sirens!—in a sort of Ebreu Spanish. One, a lovelocked boy of theirs, stood reading what? Enraptured with it, by his glowing cheek. Here, courtesans bare-breasted cried their bodies, mocking at him from an upper window. Liofànte! Sér Naxón! Ti xe drio levàrse? One fed a monkey on a golden cord, with lumps of marchpane from her lips. Her sister, bending to caress her, pinched her pap. (His will rose, knocking. Would enter: but his purse denied.) Here, a beaked and prancing mountebank. A stalk of Jesuits; a leash of gaunt and eager friars on the hunt. A juggler swaying on a slack of rope: he danced, up-raining fire. His attendant thieves. Urchins. Harlequins.

“Mi piace molto.”

He’d lingered half an hour to watch a man blow glass. A fiery metaphysic, that: enspiriting dead salt, as if a second Adam were an Oberon, of air and fire; as the first is clay. Donne. Overdone. The exhalations of this place had turned his wits. And yet—he laughed for wonder—how it trembled on the rod, now ardent as a Seraphim, now pale.

“My Julietta, she is dead five years.” A grief resigned, renewed and fading at a breath. “Three daughters living. Two are sisters, one wife. And by Micola, our Paolo, my good pupil. Thirteen.” A sip. “When I return—a great way, by Fiandra, Anversa, Savoia, Cremona—when I return I am, meno male, too old to be made castrato, thank the Virgin. But I may not have my old place at Santa Maria Formosa. I bring scandal.” A sip. “But my voice, my musicale: they are sopraffino. Should not be lost. So I busy myself, I get favors. The Patriarch—”

Ben stared.

“I flee this bad man’s servitude, you say. Another? And why? He does not cheat me. He is dangerous, but he is kind. He pleasures me.” He shrugged. “And only—you understand—the grazing. La passa pecora. That is not sodomy.”

“You are—open.”

“I am na mołéca.”

“And that is?”

“Un granchio? Cancer?”

“Crab.”

“So, crab. I cast my shell. I change: soft then; hard now. I go a sghimbescio—” With his hand, a sideling scurry. “Quick. I have my little claws. I pinch.”

Ben eyed the malmsey. No. He had work. “So you fled—?”

“Millort d’Voxfor.” The horns. “He is now Il Pantalone?”

“No: rich no longer.”

“Bene.” He spat. Rising, he listened at the door. “Halfway,” he said. Did not sit down again, but fidged with his beads, not telling them but twisting. “It is Giovedì Grosso. I am after coming from the church; he is before me in the way. He speaks me fair at first: I should be his page and sing to him, not God. So I ask mio pare, mia mare, who say, ‘This milord will make thy fortune.’ Five sequins, he gives them. But they have no joy of it: they die nella gran peste. I learn when I come back.”

A turn. He paced.

“And then he shows his hoof. There is a great storm on the sea; I think the ship will split, as he split me.”

Another turn.

“Your England is cold. Your food is barbarous, always the flesh.”

Ben thought of his supper. Sepe al nero, said the boy who slapped it down. Mermaid’s abortions a-swim in ink. They stank of canal.

“I like not your cortigiani. I tell these men, He locks me. And they laugh. I am his monkey. I amuse.” A turn. “And yet—there is much good music in your court, Italian. We hear mass. I learn fagotto. And your great Queen, Elisabetta—ah, fulgida! Her rings are worthy of il Doge. I sing to her: of Sèr Cupido, how he his arrows break. And of his bow, la casta Diana bents her moon. La regina speaks with me most excellent Italian, like Petrarca. She strokes my fox’s head. Like hers, she says, and calls me Voxfor’s—cup?”

Cup-bearer. “Cub.”

“She wishes me to take her faith, the English heresy, and gives me silver for my nameday: which milord is taking. He is debt.”

“And otherwise—forgive me—he abused you?”

“Il cazzo di Voxfor?” A storm of Venetian, a blaze and sputter, like those goblin fish dropped living into boiling oil. “L’inquisizione, they ask me of milord. I am careful, lest I damn myself. I do not say, he kept me prisoner. They ask of much else. So: on fast days, did he give you flesh? No, sirs. Not: did he put his flesh in you? and did you eat? did he make you woman? They know; it does not concern them.”

Ben looked the manuscript half-written on the desk, a Miserere—paper gave him strength—and said, “He is killing boys. Like you. Like Paolo.”

“I believe.”

“And I cannot prove it.” Fist on palm. “He is too great to hang, but for treason. The gallows tree bears no such fruit.” He turned about, penned elephant. “And having killed, he will go on. He has no measure in his wants.”

“I know.” The blaze had settled; would not quench. “He thinks I am his shoe: he puts his foot in me, he kicks me off. Il suo cinedo. But I see him. I hear. He is naked with me. He cries out.” And lower voiced. “I know his secrets.”

“You will tell me what you know?”

No word of assent. But Coquo, recollected, spoke. “Il Voxfor con il Voxfor?” He stroked his cheek. “He loves. Innamorato. All else—tutto il mondo—is a table set for him: un banchetto di delizie. Maids. Paggi. He will say”—in Oxford’s prinking voice—“When women were unsweete, fine (yonge) boyes were in season.”

Cherry-ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry, thought Ben. An Epicurean. Now Kit was used to say: All they that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools, and it set not his teeth on edge (though angels wept). Kit’s little bacca-pipes came willingly to mouth. He had not plucked.

“He makes for me the plays—” Coquo took the glass Ben poured for him. “Often I will be a virgin, I must weep and plead him. He will say—” A draught, a silence. “He will say, Thy father sold thee—” For a space he cannot speak. “He makes thee whore.”

“He will command me to his table in La Paduana’s gown, in sight of all the company, great lords. They stare at me: all white, the face, the neck”—he touched his breast—“all bare. The paps—rossetti?”

“Painted.”

“He would kiss them, he would taste my shame.”

A growl from Ben.

“And—” He spoke very low. “L’inquisizione must not know this, or I burn. You will tell no one?”

Ben held his knife, hilt forward. “I swear by Christ’s wounds.”

Orazio spoke softly in Ben’s ear. “By his sword he made me do this: I was Maddalena bending, I must wipe his feet with my long hair.”

A year of this? thought Ben. And not madded?

But lightened of confession, Orazio sat back. A little knife-flick of a smile. “He likes plays? Ha! I play Arlecchino to him.”

He poured Ben a glass, and took himself a cake. Held out the box.

“So: he would be a stregone. Inglese, vizard? Il Maledetto Milord. He brags—O to all his compari—of his negromanzia. Sbruffone! He can call forth spirits—”

From the vasty deep, thought Ben, and groaned.

“But he lies. It is magia to raise his own poor spirit.”

“Stand up, Dick,” said Ben in English.

“Sèr?”

“Go on. I am bewitched.”

“He will lie with la pagana dea—Elena?”

“Helen. It’s been tried. Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!”

“Your incanto is better than his. More musical.” Another little cake. “There is much stregoneria: candles and chalkings. He is naked in his robe. Veni! he cries. Soft music, out of nowhere (that is Matteo occulto). What trembling! What orgoglio! Again, he cries, Veni! And a wind blows all his candles out—Hooh, hooh—but one (that is Marco with—un soffietto?).” He mimed a bellows. “And a third time, Veni! I approach, Sant’Elena. I am in milady Voxfor’s gown: he would not know it. O madòna! He is awe at me, this vixión. He kneels to me, he worships. Incantata. And his baccalà—his stockfish—stands. Adorat, surgit. I must bite my lip. But am I real? Fantasma? So at last he lifts my petticoats (in riverenza, sèr, believe me: as a holy relic) so to lick my mona”—the fig with his left hand—“and he knows that I am—” The fist with his right.

“Pricked out for women’s pleasure.”

“Sèr?”

“A boy.”

“And he beats me. But the trick is good.” Another cake. “And after, here in Venice, I ask mé nona, and she asks her sister, and they know a grima. And I buy a magic, but a little one: Xe mejo che non copa. It is better I not kill.” He crossed himself. “You tell me if the spell is good: there will be rumor?”

He pushed the box of cakes toward Ben. “The last? No? Then I will.” He ate it in three bites, and licked the sugar from his fingertips.

“His spirit will not come.”

At the Sign of the Goat and Pipes

This would be the shop, this cave of shadows. On the shelves rose sphere on sphere of crystal, Bruno’s worlds. Ben muttered his Venetian, waiting; watched a new world pale and glow. At the hellmouth crouched the boy at bellows, naked in a smutched red cap and clout. A sootblack, salamandry imp. He beckoned, fleering, and unclosed his eft’s hand on a—what? a sparrow’s heart? O hangman! He tossed it and Ben caught: a clot of glass, hot ice, a gout of witch’s blood. A charge.

London, Whitsun 1604

Light now, in the long May evenings: after a new tragedy, the loitering couples strayed into the grass, the green ways braided even in the city deeps. The hawthorn shook its linen out along the Moorfields. Smocks fell. The morris jangled. Arrows quivered and struck true. Great London played.

Ben, returning from his voyage, skulked and loured in the alleys. A diet of revenge and cuttlefish had left him gaunt-eyed, great-boned as a cart-horse, with his upstart mane. Ere he could speak, he’d fallen on a tun and fleshmeat, Whitsun ox, outfaring Falstaff in his trencherwork, Homeric in his feast—Achilles’ self could not have wielded so victorious a knife; then called for puddings. With his first new breath, he spoke an execration upon Neptune, cursing all his finny tribe, save Mermaids. Yet his spirits drooped. His London seemed a thing of paper, like the rustling company in Calder’s roof.

He’d a message to the boy. He went, as if the wherryman were Charon.

At the door, Rafe’s mistress was effusive. A tincture of Ruddock will suffice: Boy? Harry—our new prentice, and a likely boy, a sweet Nerissa—had leave to play. A part for Calder? Moping in his garret.

Up went Ben.

The rafters now were stripped. Bare ruin’d choirs.

“Praise be to Neptune for your swift returning.” Calder, leaping up at once, spoke low. “I have been watching at his rat hole. He is ill.”

“Then he will die?” A choke of frustration; a blaze of hope.

“No: he must kill, and presently; must drink to revive himself.”

“Their blood?”

His cheek carnation. But no nicety of speech: “I think their seed.”

“That he may procure in Moorfields; or might take at home, if he hath spitboys still.”

“In ordinary. For a great dish, he is dainty.”

“Thou knowest this?

“He hath a pander: one Nightborn, fond of plays. A politic creature. No face of his own—or any man’s—but wears a guiling mask.”

“Aye,” said Ben. “I know his back to me.” A fury swelled. “’Fore God, he sat upon the crowner’s jury.”

“Then he serves the devil well.” A turn and pace. “He spoke with Hugh Timmins.”

“When?”

“After Easter, when the plays began. He took a week or so to mark his leveret. Late in April.” Calder’s voice was honey. “Ah, a witty boy. Would he sing for my master? A great lordship (though I may not speak his name), a high prince, but hath fallen into melancholy. Could not sleep but he could hear sweet music at his bedside.” Now gall. “And the pretty fool would have trysted with him, but that he blabbed to me.”

An eyebrow.

“No, I told him nothing of his peril, but distracted him with play.”

“How, a cogging game at dice? A brace of whores? Brave roguery.”

“A play at marbles. I was Troy: he sought to win of me great Helen, and bring down my walls.”

A child. “So green a boy? Small harvest in the threshing out.” Ben thought. “Or does his lordship glut on seed in posse?”

“On innocence. On fear. He kills us on the threshold, and we keep his door. Our dying his rebirth.” The boy spoke softly in Welsh, which Ben knew not. I have been a grain of corn. Turning, he looked out beyond the smoke of London to the unseen hills. “Peter was afraid of dark. You saw I left an orange for him on his grave. For his journeying. Lucerna in Averno. And afterward, made sacrifice.” Ben looked up at the rafters. “Their ashes for his company.”

Mad?

But turning back, the boy said, “So. We know what bait our great fish rises to. I will lie and tickle for him: hook him by the gills.”

“Is it not vice versa?”

“It hath been; but here the grayling fishes for the cat.”

“So I put the cat’s foot in the fire to draw my chestnuts out? I am no craven.” Here was the ulcer: what gnawed at him. “By Christ, I would unman him, make him eat himself, eyes, cock, and cullions, in Venetian sauce; but in the marketplace. As man to man. But to send a boy—”

“A whore. An epicœne. Puellus. The greater his dishonor to be slain by dross.” Salt words; his eyes Atlantic, January. “I loved Peter, and I failed him. By the gods, I will avenge.”

Ben threw up his hands. “I yield; but on persuasion. I abhor all practice; I abominate device.” A sigh. “At least, I prithee, carry a stiletto, as do Venetian whores. Thou knowest its use.”

“I will be naked: not the knife but scabbard. If our plan miscarry—if it comes to sheathing—”

“God forbid.”

“—I will have means to end myself. So: the plot is laid.” Calder knelt to his chest, unlidded it; he lifted up a panel, and took out a quire of papers. “I told you that I made a pyre of fantasy; but these I kept.” The Minotaur and Ariadne. “This I got: from that same Nightborn.” And he handed both to Ben.

A play. Or by its brevity, an interlude. Unsigned. And in the same fair hand. The same play that Whitgift acted, but unmutilated—and the worse for that. A poison apricock unpared. Ben read it, kindling. An atrocity: not only for the verse.

“This wants revising.” He took the phial from his breast: a thumb’s end of crystal, stopped with wax. He’d bought it of a witch in Venice, Coquo’s aunt. “Here’s ink.”

“I will inscribe with it his epitaph.” Rafe set it on the shelf with Whitgift’s colours. All at once, a mischief glittered in his face, though he spoke solemnly. “As you have prophesied”:

An emperor, only in his lusts. Retired,

From all regard of his own fame, or Rome’s,

Into an obscure island; where he lived

Acting his tragedies with a comic face . . .

Sejanus. His own words: no idle flattery nor mock in Calder, but a pact. His hand. “He is our monster.”

“Forfeited to vice.” His hand to it.

“Is there a tryst?”

“In a month’s time.”

“So late?”

“He did consult the stars, and found the day auspicious.”

“At his house in Hackney?”

“Aye.”

“Reckless. I would guess his need past secrecy. But then, my lord hath ever had his will. Cannot conceive of his undoing.” Ben turned the paper. “Wast thou told to come alone? No servant?”

“To let no man follow.”

“Thou wilt need a sword at thy retreat. If he cry out, his servants will take thee.”

“You do love a quarrel.”

“As a cur does. Thou art greedy to let fall no scrap of hazard.”

“God’s tree! An armed ruffian, bristling like a wounded boar, and snorting blood-frothed vengeance? You would not get in his door.” A pace. And then a dancer’s cadence and a clap. “So you must be my bawd. Mother Silence.”

Astonishment. Mouth open: but the roar is laughter. “Hast thou seen a rhinoceros in petticoats?” But he remembered now a print he saw in Flanders, when he trailed a pike: Dull Gret goes forth to harrow hell. A great virago striding with her sword, a cullender upturned for morion, her apron full of spoil. He’d bought a copy for his mother; lost it in retreat.

They spoke.

And after, Ben went cityward. To Bread Street: he’d a mind to disputation and a dish of capons; then a city-wife he knew. A Whitsun holiday. He breathed the honest stench of London, strode her filth. And as he stood on the Southwark jetty, he found himself singing in his bombard bass, a snatch of nonsense:

But those that cross Tom Rhinoceros

Do what the panther dare not

The boatman Charon, ambitinerant, hove to.

“Eastward ho!”

Hackney, Midsummer Eve 1604

Door beyond locked door, the servant Nightborn led the player’s boy still inward. In a closet, now unlocked, a coffer; in the coffer, next undone, a thing of folded linen, stained: Venetia’s smock. He shook it out. And Calder closed his eyes and breathed it, dizzying. O it smelled of Peter, Peter: of his bed. And of his fear. And fainter, mingled with his scent, were waifs of other bodies, ghosts unlaid. How many boys had worn this to their sacrifice? But overlaid on all, the monster’s civet: he had marked it for his own. “This,” said Nightborn. “He would have you in this.” And Calder turned from him to strip himself, put on his lover’s death.

Shaken, he turned back to re-assume his petticoats; but the pander’s foot was on them. “These stay.” He stirred them with his sword. “Nothing brought within.” He turned the player’s hands for rings, took even his silk earring. Naked thou came into this world, and naked shalt depart. The servant opened a great chest. “These.” And he tired Calder as a child in mourning, deftly. Oh, he knew this work. “Thou know’st thy part, girl? Speak as written. Silence else.”

In lawn, in lace, in cypress, in a dying house, through room on empty room, the silent Nightborn for a guide, the boy walked to a certain death. His enemy’s, his own: but one of them at least would be in Hell that night. Stripped rooms, unarrased; eyeless walls from which the paintings had been wrenched. Dark rooms that spiralled ever inward to the Minotaur: his thread of blood.

So Peter must have walked, his dark-drowned eyes aglance, from mirror to half-shrouded mirror, fearful of his own pale shadow. Calder looked for him in each, the rushlight of his hair. He’d dreamed of pulling him through shattered glass, of being pulled, at once the midwife and the birth: he knew not if he rose or drowned. They swam, ingeminate, in blood. But in each glass, he saw himself alone. And not himself: a child bride, widowed ere she bled.

Nightborn halted, putting back a heavy curtain; he unlocked a door, as if the lord were prisoner here: kept in, or Theseus kept out.

A chamber cold, high, splendid, with a great bed hung in scarlet. There in white and gold, his monstrous adversary waited: great-boned, saturnine, centaurian. Even in midsummer’s kindly night, he wore a heavy bedgown of branched velvet, deeply furred. A firestorm was in his chimney. Yet he shivered. Older than his fifty; painted as a lovely youth. And chancred.

Calder sank: a deep, deep courtesy, most perfect in submissiveness.

“In black?” A weak voice, petulant, short-breathing.

“For my brother’s death, my lord.”

Nightborn pinched. “Hold thy tongue.”

The hand with its weight of rings beckoned. They flared in the firelight. The eyes, despairing in their mask of lead, looked up at Nightborn, as a dying man to his physician: not for poppy but a drachm of life.

His master-servant bowed. “The Queen, my lord, hath praised your interlude.”

“Hath she?” An ember yet amid the ashes. “Gloriana?”

“Even she.”

The old Queen? Doth he game?

In the sooted eyes a flicker and a fading: which a breath would fan. “For conceit and brevity, my lord; for quaint array; and passing all, for your galliard. Your leap an admiration. She would have it played before th’Italian embassage.”

“I must have gloves.” A quickening: he’d caught. “Go, wake my broiderers. The perfuming”—a turn of hand—“shall be of ambergris and orris.”

Mad.

“The boy—the Venice boy—”

“Orazio, my lord? Hath arrows. Will be Love.”

“Must sing my Echo.”

Stark mad. He lives among his ghosts.

“It will be done. But now—” A glance at Calder, and her cue: another reverence. “Your cordial. To raise your spirit for so great a work. A maid of Thessaly, my lord, her mother lately dead.” A stirring. Now the dark eyes turned to Calder, to the child in black. “Her father sold her.”

His adversary gazed at him like something on a butcher’s stall; then chose. “Show me.”

“Come, madam.” Nightborn disrobed the boy: turned him this way, that. Now priest. As acolyte, as offering, the boy played his part: the shamefast maiden, trembling at each disclosure. But as Calder endured, he studied. So: the chimneypiece upheld by satyrs. The arras of Lucrece. An Aretino open at the bedside. A table, with a golden casket. And in that?

He was trembling like a hare: no act. It is a play. I can rework it as I will. A play.

Having skinned his hare, the servant held it for display: a shivering virgin, naked in the smock. Avidity, a cold appraisal in those heavy-lidded eyes. “She will do.” He undid his cock. “Go.”

And Calder heard a key turn in the lock. O gods. That other door would be a closet. Windows shuttered fast. His blood was snow.

His captor led him to a mirror, stood behind.

“What see’st thou, girl?”

“My brother’s face. His death.”

“That is not in thy part.” And Vere slapped him, so his ears rang. “So?”

“As you will, my lord.”

He slapped again. “My words. What see’st thou, girl?”

“A whore.” The great eyes filled with tears. A trick he had of Timmins.

O pity me who pipes and pleads

  for mercy at your mouth

My maidenhead mine honor is—

  O reverence! O ruth!

His lordship walked about and fiddled with himself.

Calder wept and thought. Now he should begin to speak his own lines, Ben’s. And yet was thwarted. Yet the play must go otherwise: or he was dead.

Shrinking from the tyrant’s gaze, head bowed, his captive crossed her arms across her childish breasts. “O fulgent foe . . .”

“What’s here?”

She cowered like a hare. No refuge but her smock.

He caught her wrist, bent back her arm until she whimpered. “No. . . .”

“I told thee silence. Thou shalt pay for that.” And he bared her breasts. Rouged paps.

A gasp. His resurrection.

Glee. Vere had broken his own spell; she could change the measure. Call the tune.

“My lord, I am new-budded. Touch me not.”

“Thou whore.”

And yet unstained. No man hath breathed

Corruption on my stainless glass.

“She-fox.”

He had pinned her fast. So close: she saw the runnels in the white lead of his face. The pox beneath. His stench of civet and decay near choked her. He pressed his revenant against her thigh. Full-glutted. Rubbed it up and down. She must not think of that in Peter, bound and splitting; she must yield to win. He pinched her buds. No acting: she cried out. Shuddering with thirst, he kissed them. Hard, to bruise.

Let him not bite. Dear gods.

But he shook free at last. His mouth, her breast incarnadined as if with blood; and slobbered. With the venom? Had he tasted? “Witch.” His breath raled and shuddered. “Lupa.” He unlocked his casket, and put back the lid. A bunch of scarlet cords—I saw the marks—a knife.

Not acting. Why is it not acting? He is dead, yet walks.

My lord took up the knife, a loop of cord about his arm; leaned in. Calder flinched but stood. A play. The cold knife at her throat would sever voice and breath and all. A play. “Off with that.” And steel cut string. Her Venetian smock slipped from Calder’s shoulders, falling down about his feet.

Full nakedness.

The knife hand slipped a silken cord about his throat; the other groped for his privities—

And stopped. Astonishment, the hand still curved where nothing was. Or anything. At last, the sweat. The cord slipped loose, the fumbling dagger slithered in his hand. A whisper. “What are you?”

A voice, neither man’s nor woman’s, spoke from anywhere.

    I and my fellows

Are ministers of Fate: the elements,

Of whom your swords are temper’d, may as well

Wound the loud winds, or with bemock’d-at stabs

Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish

One dowle that’s in my plume

And Calder laughed. A spirit played about their body, light as on a ship in tempest: here now, anywhere and nowhere, unconsuming. Helen’s fire. They saw it dazzle in the monster’s eyes—in each a midnight, and the steeps of air—as if a tree burned, roots to crown a lightning; yet was green.

“I have acted in that play, a world away from here, and half a thousand years from now; I will have seen it at the stars’ beginning. It played to Lucifer before his fall.”

Knees, ground. Hoarse breath and clouding eyes. The tetter had begun to spread. But, “I—I will be—”

“Forgotten. Thou born of carrion, thou momentary gilded fly: proud only in thy generation. Buzz.”

A frothing when he spoke. “Write this—in stone—he—”

But now the agony. He toppled, writhing like a kid glove on a fire. “Hel—Hel—”

The spirit looked in horror. Even he.

Eyes open on an empty house. “Help, worms.”

Down in Oxford’s buttery, fat Mother Silence held court. A watchful idleness: she drank less than she feigned, spoke more than she heard. A pity: for the devil kept good cellarage and knavish servants. How they gaped, how they tittered, as she railed upon her custom: gulls, knaves, conies all. ’Twas good as a play.

Then to a catch, and clash pans. “Hey! we to the other world, boys . . .”

Enter Nightborn in a black-ice fury. “Are you mad? or what are you?”

The cook: “Why, master, we do wake the sun.”

“Drink down the moon,” the pantler said.

“All one. Methought his cheek was pale.”

“Aye, sickly. He will die o’ love.”

“Illicit, o’ the pox. All one.”

Nemesis in falling bands advanced on Ben. “Thou. Chancre. Out.”

“And why? There’s fire here below, to ease my poor old woman’s bones. And eight nine”—a counting finger—“ten black devils to wait upon me with eel pie.”

He could palter as Will did, and to purpose: keep Nightborn, while my lord was metamorphosed into nothing and my lady changed. Enter: Boy.

“Come, wouldst thou learn a new catch? Or wouldst hear an old ballad? There’s one in dispraise of Pluto’s kitchen—Saturn’s rather, ’tis a fault in grammar.” And she sang—sweet Jesus, what a voice! as if a crow had swallowed frogs alive:

There I took up a cauldron,

Where boiled ten thousand harlots,

Though full of flame I drank the same,

To the health of all such varlets.

My staff has murdered giants,

My bag a long knife carries,

For to cut mince pies from children’s thighs . . .

From above, a great shriek. “Plague! O masters, he is dying!”

Snap! went the mousetrap.

Ben grinned like a fox. Not his bulk but his spirit rose dancing, like a vixen on clicket: fire in greenwood. He poured himself a cup.

“O pity on us! Come and help him!” Not they. Each for himself, they ran, shrieked, prayed, and gibbered, snatching up what they could lay their hands to: napkins, brandwine, silver, sausages. They ran like curs.

Such charity would make Christ puke.

And still the nighthag sat at ease. “Where kept my lord his tobacco? For my pipe is out.”

“Go. There is death in this house.”

“I trade in it. My profession and thine. Pander.”

“Insolence. Go.” His sword.

Her sword. “Anon. There’s a reckoning to settle.” And rising exultantly, Ben laid about him. An unequal brawl: Ben was hampered by his petticoats, so merely outreached the man. Brief and furious: he backed the villain to the pantry wall.

The pander drew his knife. Dagger and sword now, cross-parrying attack. Ben’s sword was flung upward.

Breaking free, the other lunged.

A parry. Ben feinted and fell back. And fell. A midden underfoot.

The other man bestrode him, dropping his poignard: sword in both hands for a downward-driving stroke. Formality betrayed him.

Ben kicked.

A yowl, a slither, and a compensating hop. That stroke went far awry.

And ponderous Ben rolled upward like a harlequin. With his sword he swept the shelf above him, and a hail of pewter fell on Nightborn, setting him aback. He staggered, shook his head: amazed. Ben seized a frying pan—O noble Gret!—and with a great clang, downed his mark.

Kneeling on the pander’s chest, he said, “Now, thou fallst on thy dagger.” And he reached for it, half-buried in the rushes. “I will say thy speech for thee: O untimely! And so forth.”

The servingman spat. “Player.”

Ben drove it in between the ribs.

Blood welled from the mouth. The eyes still recognized. And hated.

“Thy master waits for thee in hell; go, wait on him.”

Extinct.

Ben took his keys; he closed the dead man’s hand upon his hilt.

“God ha’ mercy.”

Then he went to find Calder. A bawd and her punk had entered. Exeunt: Posthumus and Boy. As they left, he chalked the door.

Southwark, All Hallows Eve 1604

Two boys were talking in a great room, bare as any garret. Timmins, in his nightgown, said: “Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?”

Walk by a churchyard? Climb such a tree? So children talk, to find the compass of their world, its outermost: the O of I. Wouldst kill a man? If he were killing boys?

And Calder, with his comb and mirror: “Why, would not you?”

“No, by this heavenly light!”

The other smiled. “Nor I neither by this heavenly light; I might do’t as well i’ the dark.”

Ben watched from the tiring-house: Will’s play of the Moor of Venice. Flawed, of course. That cheat with the handkerchief! Yet ’twas favored: on the morrow, ’twould be played at Whitehall for the King. Hedgework. And yet—ill-managed thicket that it was—the thing had flowers, it had thorns. It caught at him. Sing willow, willow, willow—But that was the boy. Not an angel’s voice, invulnerable: its beauty lay in frailty. That brief aspiring candle that a man could snuff.

He would leave, he thought, before that business with the pillow.

But Desdemona having died in play, would live, arise, take plaudits gracefully. Eat syllabubs. (For that, young Timmins loved to play at court. Would end as Falstaff, did he not take care.) He would enlarge his world, the circles of it spreading outward. He could lie with whom he willed or love in vain; could sicken, quarrel, or rejoice; hate, learn, grieve, travel—aye, and grow as round as Ben himself: until the circles ended on a farther shore.

That much he and Calder had done: to leave one fate to providence.

And Rafe? Had been shriven (though equivocally, Ben feared). Kept his garret, like a worm in a nutshell. Read much; acted passing well; began to patch old plays. Showed none as yet. Said only that he had bad dreams.

In secrecy that rank wet summer Ben had brought a priest to Peter’s corner of the no man’s land. His patch of graveyard stank of cats’ piss and decay. But Rafe had raked and weeded it, had made a Cairn of pebbles. He was mourned. This ground cannot be hallowed, said the priest. Nor can my doublet, though I lie in it, said Ben: I prithee bless the soul within.

No stone was raised to unregretted Oxford, though he lay in seemly ground. Yet Ben would pray for him, in justice—aye, even for one Nightborn.

Lumbering as discreetly as he might through upturned faces, he stopped and bought a sixpence of the crier.

The morrow was the eve of All Souls: he would pray at midnight for the soul of Peter Whitgift, and for all lost innocents. But on this night of Hallows Eve, he’d go to Peter’s ground, and lay an orange on his grave.

Whitehall, May Eve 1606

“Unsex me here,” said Calder. The bearded man—a lord, a soldier—stared in horror. Yet compelled: as if he looked into a furnace heart wherein an alchemy is born. The very light of it was in his face. A backward step, the blast upstirring in his hair. Its passion withering his man.

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty: make thick my blood,

Stop up th’ access, and passage to remorse . . .

A listening, out there in the light-made dark: amid the candles, many-branched, consuming, there was one whose spirit burned undwindling.

Not this king.

The lady touched his gown as if the nighted velvet of it were a shadow on her body: snow and blood on snow

    Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall. . . .

’Twas gone. The visitation, presence, tang.

Yet it wreathed about the cauldron; when he played Macduff’s wife, light hand to the other’s dark, the thing hobgoblined in her son.

A megrim coming on, he thought: its harbinger this frost of fire in one eye, this blinding green. They came now oftener. He willed it: hold.

With Actus Quartus done, there was an interval for viols and cand-ling: the catastrophe withheld a space.

In the tiring-room, already in the lady’s nightgown, the player’s boy stood muttering her lines. He had them—thought he had them. Hoped he did. He’d lost her name. Aye, and the poet’s name. The king’s name and his company’s. This country’s. And his own. How strange the world seemed now, as if he stood upon a tower: far and clear and silent as the moon. As if he held, beheld it in an O of crystal.

Properties called out: “Boy? Art ready?”

“Changing.”

He willed himself to wake; stamped, pinched himself, rehearsed the players’ names. In a fulmination of tobacco: Robin, Nick, Augustine. Burbage, shrugging all his joints like a pull-string puppet. Bom, he sounded, like a church-bell. Bom. The Witches had enspelled themselves: were now a wood. Young Harry that was called an egg and shivered, had remade himself unflawed; he danced triumphant on a table, crowing. He would fall again. And Will, white-powdered for a ghostly king—’twas he that bore the glass—was everywhere, distracted.

“Rafe?” Will touched his shoulder, felt his brow. “Canst play, boy?”

“Ay, sir.”

From across the room: “Will? Will, the branches . . .”

“Thy taper? Good lad.” And the poet, having much ado, hurried away.

Now.

The player’s boy drew breath. I split. A lightning at his crown, an ecstasy. The spirit bound within him—light in body—woke.

No other saw the courtier in green. But in his sight, the room was filled with hawthorn: with its writhenness, its shade, and yes, its vixenish rank scent. And in the wick of it, his master was, and it was of him: still renewing as a cold green fire. It was rooted elsewhere.

Master? And he louted low.

A silence.

    I have done thy will.

That monster who hath slain thy changeling boy

Is dead.

A glint, a lifting of the leaves: What boy?

And even in astonishment, the spirit thought: I am a fool. And said: ’Twas not for Peter’s sake, thy fury? But in play: a black ice on the Thames; a snow like velvet, lightning-slashed; a whirlwind, blinding as it flayed with ice; an earth so adamant with frost that graves in it could be not howked, to cover what it killed.

The green was winding on the spindle of itself: became the figure of a hornéd king. Who shrugged. I have coyed so many children. Mortals fade. This one?

Thou didst win him of Titania.

Ah, that. A pretty toy. A turn. And now a thunder in his smiling August. But I did hate that lording who usurped mine impery of boys. A mock of me. And thou didst work a pretty mischief in his taking-off. He mimicked. “I have given suck.” And laughed. The candles cowered. And for that will I remit thy service.

I thank thee, master. At a word, I fly.

Oberon held up his hand. But stay. I bound thee to the moon, to knot thyself within a woman’s secrets: who did die of thee.

I mind, the spirit said. As Calder’s son—that other I—could not.

Thou hadst of her thy carnal suit, but as a lending: forfeit.

What, this body? For the tiring-house. Scarce worn.

And of me, thy fatal skein, thy clew of sun: which now I do revoke. Give back thy sun.

A silence. Then: The orange? Spent.

Twelve quarters?

On a mortal boy. To light his way from hell.

A boy? They grow as thick as brambles here: the dew yet on them, to be picked, enjoyed, not let to wither kept. They die. Go, pick another.

It is Peter I love. The spirit bowed his head. Ah, master. I am meddled now, as dew is, falling onto blood. There is a taint in me of soul. Of mortal longings. I have hoped and grieved.

What, fly-blown? That was incorrupted?

Sir, I am equivocal.

Again, the candles dipped. A thunder shook the hall. Unkindly spirit. Go, love then and be damnéd.

    Thou best know’st

What torment I did find thee in

Ay, sir.

Over and again. In Sycorax her pine; ere that, in Nimue’s involving thorn; in rowan, alder, ash, and sloe. In hell ’twas oak, a harpy riving and befouling me—O Peter, canst thou hear this tale? Didst know leaves bled? They are my voices and my eyes. No listener in the dark. No warmth, no weight, no breath of him. No bed. And still this bondage: to be mewed in carrion, enthralled of memory and desire.

And Ariel cried out, O, I am bound in willow. Sweet the prisoning of flesh; and bittersweet, of spirit.

Wouldst thou stay and mourn? Take mummy for thy lovesick thought? Possess his memory as an apricock a worm?

A silence.

Or is it thou wouldst catch this soul of his? this will o’ wisp, this echo’s echo of a boy?

When I am bloodfast? Even if I die—

And thou wouldst die—

Unsouled. I cannot follow him.

Yet I can give unbinding. And forgetfulness.

Then what of Calder?

A knocking with a staff. “Boy? Devil take the boy.”

Thy stump? Is thunderstruck. Will fall.

The spirit doubled up, as if in laughter or in mortal pain. “The Queen, my lord, is dead.” I prophesy.

And I: as thou wert bound in him, his clay, so was he captive in thy spirit, fire and air. Unbound from thee, he yet may journey.

Even to that farther shore?

“Boy!”

Go now. ’Tis thy cue.

Wax fell. Time woke. His moveless candle spired. Her shadow following, the player’s boy walked out upon the stage.

A voice. “How came she by that light?”

Another voice. “You see, her eyes are open.”

“Yet here’s a spot.” His shadow’s voice.

He walked now on the bare boards through a wood of self. His company his leaves, each a leaf a word. The air was full of voices.

come,

       come,

       come,

      come,

        give me your hand.

A wind uplifted, whirling him away. He flew, the Will-words scattering behind him.

  . . . done . . .

    . . . undone . . .

And all to do.

[1] “Speak,” said the witch of Thessaly, “as I shall bid thee; great shall be thy gain if thou tell’st true: unbinding ever from all arts of sorcery.”

[2] “For now we see through a glass, darkly . . .”