License to Quill (36 page)

“I don't want to hurt you!” the poet groaned while hobbling after her. “Please, Walsingham is my friend! Tell him I'm here! My name is Christopher Mar—”

The secretary shoved a pitcher of flavored hippocras into the poet's mouth, smothering his noxious breath under the scent of cinnamon and fruits. Once the jug was empty, Marlowe wiped his face in such a stupor that he did not even notice Penny had already robbed him of his belt. She was wearing it off one hip.

The windows darkened with the eclipse, and the lady secretary's eyes appeared to sparkle.

*   *   *

“I thought such behavior was beneath you,” Thomas Walsingham interjected shortly after. “Not directly under you.” The angered spymaster slammed his crimson door while the interrupted couple leaped out of each other's arms.

“Please forgive me!” Penny pleaded as she hurried into Walsingham's office. “It was in defense, master! He stabbed me!”

“I did no such thing!” Marlowe stumbled in while holding up his pants. “Thomas, if this woman is your wife or daughter, I—”

“You be quiet! Lady Percy, keep such behavior outside this mansion as long as you are a part of it. Do you understand?”

“God save you!” The lady secretary curtsied in the tattered remains of her dress.

“I can save myself. That will be all.”

A grateful Penny rose and shot Marlowe a playful glance as she left the office.

The mutually enchanted poet bowed and watched his belt walk out the room. “So!” Marlowe opened, pivoting on his boots to his former friend. “It is good to see you again, Thomas! I love what you've done to the place.”

The spymaster, like his pipe, was fuming. “Are you seriously so determined to get killed all over again?”

“If you're talking about what I'm talking about, I swear that was all her doing!”

“We have more important matters to discuss, if you don't mind.” W pointed the resurrected spy to an empty seat. “Welcome back.”

Marlowe exhaled with exhaustion as he collapsed into the spymaster's chair. After admiring his new surroundings, the poet asked: “Just so I know, what exactly am I now?”

“A dead man.”

The poet whimpered. “Still?”

“You can only die once. Otherwise, people stop believing it.” The spymaster refilled his pipe. “We can come back to that later. As for now, I need you to tell me everything, starting with the massacre in Venice.”

“Can we please settle my question first? That silver vixen outside your office had no idea who I was. She could have killed me! Twice!”

Penny agreed. She always kept a dagger at her desk, just in case.

“The current state of Christopher Marlowe is the least of our concerns,” said W.

Marlowe snorted. “Maybe it is to you and the rest of England, but I want to live again! I want to publish books and plays and poems! If you don't think that's always been on my mind, well, then … maybe I should just work for someone else!”

The spy-chief removed his pipe. “Utter one more phrase like that and you will never leave this mansion.”

Unaffected, the poet smiled and shook his head. “Thomas, we've known each other for a long time. Never, in all our years, have you not planned ahead. I know you have something to motivate me with. To entice me with. Something to keep me under control and to threaten me with.
Please
just tell me what it is! The less I wonder about it, the more I can focus on your dilemmas.”

Walsingham narrowed his eyes and blew two long ribbons of smoke through his nostrils. “If you insist. Your real name and identity will be on moratorium for one year, starting November fifth. Until then, you will be a Johannes factotum in word and function. You will work for me, and you will live here. A room is waiting for you in the mansion. As long as you complete the tasks I give you and stay out of trouble, I will go through the necessary paperwork to bring you back from the dead.”

Marlowe raised his eyebrows. “One year's work and good behavior?”

W nodded. “That's nonnegotiable. We need your help.”

The poet shrugged. “Sounds fair. So! What's so special about November fifth?” Marlowe helped himself to a cup of wine.

“What do you know about gunpowder?” Walsingham asked from behind his pipe.

Marlowe looked up from his tankard. “I know that it explodes.”

Penny smiled with satisfaction as she wrote that.

 

Chapter XL

The Last Supper

“It is a pity we will miss your play,” a saddened Robert Catesby sighed. “But as you know, most of us will be needed north.”

“Of course,” replied the playwright. The conspirators had told him weeks ago that they planned on making nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth the new queen of England—which required kidnapping her from Coombe Abbey. “You will be missed. You will all be missed,” the bard said, turning to all the men at the table.

In truth, Shakespeare had only met Francis Tresham, a veteran of the Essex rebellion, and horse breeder Ambrose Rookwood that evening. Nevertheless, the men raised their cups alongside all the other doomed conspirators in the Duck and Drake.

“It will be a bloody masterpiece!” Guy Fawkes lauded, shaking Shakespeare by his shoulder.

“We all know that yours will be the better one,” Shakespeare teased. “I will make sure to stay
very
far away from the House of Lords.”

“I would pay to see those fireworks.” Jack Wright leered behind his cup.

“As would I. Especially since we're paying for them,” chuckled Catesby. “Guido, tell us all what we'll be missing! How will our enemies meet their infernal makers?”

“Tell us!” the drunken chorus cheered. “Speech! Speech! Speech!”

All eyes turned to Fawkes. Deep down, even the bard was curious.

The conspiracy's swaggering demolitions expert sat up with a smile and set down his stein. “My dear friends. My fellow soldiers. My band of brothers.” He nodded to Shakespeare, who returned it in kind. “You see this here?” he opened, tapping on his pewter cup. “Picture thirty-six barrels pointing upward, just like this stein, each one filled with precisely fifty weight of musket powder.”

“Are you sure that will be enough?” asked Catesby.

“Eighteen hundred weight of powder? I could blow the walls off the House of Lords with half that!” Guy Fawkes grinned with gleaming eyes. “The barrels will explode through their weakest point, their tops, and then outward once their iron hoops give way. Ordinarily, this would kill anyone around them, but within the undercroft of the House of Lords? Well, that's where things get interesting! The undercroft is surrounded by stone walls nine feet thick. These walls will not give as easily as the barrels' hoops. They will hold against the blast, forcing the explosion upward as if the undercroft were an enormous cannon! The explosion will knock through the floorboards of the House of Lords as effortlessly as the barrel lids, only this time with the king, his ministers, and all of Parliament on top of them!”

“What will be left standing?” asked Robert Keyes.

“Nothing!” replied the expert. “The entire building will be destroyed. Its roof, its walls; everything. We'll have blown the Scottish buggers all the way back to their native mountains! It will be raining body parts for blocks. Oh, if only you could see it!”

“And where will you be throughout this dire combustion?” the playwright probed.

“Actually…” Fawkes hesitated. “I was hoping you could help me with that.”

Shakespeare raised his eyebrows. “What do you need, brother?”

“I plan to light the barrels with a fifteen-minute fuse. That should give me enough time to cross the river into Southwark before the powder detonates. Bankside is your territory, Will. It is where the Globe is. I imagine you will be at the theater on Tuesday morning?”

“Of course, brother. Do you wish to hide there?”

Guy Fawkes smiled. “No. A ship will be waiting for me past London Bridge, ready to sail for Flanders. When I cross the Thames, will you wait for me on the riverbank with a horse?”

The actor smirked and put his arm around the plotter. “Two horses,” he promised. “I will ride with you to the dockyard.”

The conspirator's eyes were watering. “You would do that for me?”

“Of course. How else do you expect me to say good-bye to you? Over cups?”

Deeply moved, the conspirator rose from his seat and stared adoringly at the playwright he had come to trust in these sixteen months. Maybe it was the lateness of the hour. Maybe it was the double beer. But at that moment, Fawkes knew that his life was in safe hands, and he loved William Shakespeare for it.

Sensing this, the bard rose from his chair, and the men embraced.

“God bless you, brother,” Guy Fawkes whispered.

“God bless us all!” Robert Catesby lauded.

“Amen!” everyone but the playwright cheered.

 

Chapter XLI

Showtime

Monday, November 4, 1605: a day that all of London had been looking forward to and would just as soon forget.

The workweek opened with the city's quarantine being lifted. People breathed with relief knowing the plague that had haunted London for three long years finally appeared to be over. Businesses prospered, fortunes were made, and a triumphant crowd of Londoners flocked to Southwark by the tens of thousands to indulge in its many pleasures. There was bear-baiting, bull-baiting, dog fights, gambling, drinking, and whoring from one end of Bankside to the other. And farther inland, along Maiden Lane, enthusiastic crowds lined up outside the Globe for a rare late-night performance of Shakespeare's as-yet unnamed play. The city was abuzz over it: Why the secrecy? What was its subject? Was the play new or old? Why was it being performed outdoors in the cold at night? What surprises did its author, William Shakespeare, and the King's Men have in store for London?

More than three thousand people packed the torchlit Globe to find out. Huddled together for warmth and with excitement, the chatter grew louder than it ever had in the theater's history.

And then the music started. The people cheered. The play began.

Richard Burbage, the greatest actor to ever grace the English stage, emerged from the Globe's velvet curtains and stomped across its timber soil. The crowd delighted and showered their local favorite with adoration, and the master showman basked in every moment of it. He lifted his head and outstretched his arms, embracing everyone from the groundlings to the galleries. All the world was still a stage, and Richard Burbage was still its king.

Finally, after enough applause to last the king unto his death, Richard opened his hands and quieted the crowd with his palms. The audience hushed and held its breath, and the Globe's star player opened his mouth:

RICHARD

Now is the winter of our discontent …

There was a buzz; a muted babble of confusion. And then the audience broke into whistles and cheers. Shakespeare's secret play was an old favorite, a timely choice to commemorate the passing of the plague and the reopening of London's theaters.

Once more, Richard Burbage ruled the world as Richard III.

The playwright grinned.

Unbeknownst to Fawkes and his conspirators, the bait had just been switched.

 

Chapter XLII

Midnight, November 5, 1605

Guy Fawkes passed the evening beneath the House of Lords with nothing but his lantern, a pocket watch, and thirty-six barrels of gunpowder to keep him company. The timepiece was a last-minute addition, something Robert Keyes handed him at Temple Bar at the behest of Thomas Percy. The watch would make the wait more bearable, but instead, the slow-moving timepiece made its watchman more impatient. Fawkes was an anxious man; he was energized, alert, and very much awake. His motivation was the revolution that he knew history would forever connect him with. The world was crossing into a new threshold with that hour hand that night: an age when kingdoms could be undone by a lone man with a match. It would be a baptism by fire, and Guy Fawkes was proud to be its godfather.

Finally, the hour crossed into XII, and the bells of Westminster Abbey sounded November 5, 1605.

It was Judgment day. Guy Fawkes Day.

The bells were Gabriel's horn to Fawkes's ears.

The conspirator pulled his hat down, threw his cape across his chest for warmth, and leaned against the payload stacked behind him beneath a mound of firewood and coal. As Fawkes glanced one more time at his pocket watch, he began to wish that Percy had sent him a deck of playing cards instead.

But then, he heard something.

Fawkes turned his head and looked toward the undercroft's archway opening. A figure was walking through it! Prepared for this, the conspirator lowered his head and pretended to be asleep.
My name is John Johnson
, he rehearsed once more in his head.
I was sent here by Thomas Percy, a member of the Honourable Band of Gentlemen Pensioners. He is a dutiful man sworn to protect the king's life and—

“Guido!”

Fawkes looked up in disbelief. “Will?” he whispered.

The bard entered with a lantern. “How are you, brother?”

Fawkes's face transformed itself before the playwright's eyes. “Will! My … brother!” The conspirator laughed unconvincingly as he got up and sheathed the dagger beneath his cape.

The two embraced. “How goes the watch?”

“All is well, but … Will, what are you doing here? We are supposed to meet in the morning. Across the river.” Where Guy Fawkes had planned to kill him.

The bard shook his head. “I am sorry, brother, but this could not wait. I have news about the play!”

“
Macbeth
?”

Shakespeare nodded.

Fawkes wrinkled his forehead, unable to decipher if the news was good or bad. “What is it?”