Part 33 (1/2)
”I was rescued from 1821,” Keats said dismissively. ”I bear some sympathy for your panic.”
”Ah.” Kit stepped behind the curtain to dress. He flushed hot when the other poet helped him with the closure on the trousers, but once Kit understood this device-the zipper-he found it enchanting. ”I shall have much to study on, I wot.”
”You will.” Keats looked as if he was about to say more. The thin fabric of the s.h.i.+rt showed Kit's small b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He hunched forward, uncomfortable; not even sweet Tom Walsingham had seen him so plainly.
”I would have brought you a bandage, if I'd thought,” Keats said, and gallantly offered his jacket. Kit took it, face still burning, and shrugged it on.
”What-what year is this, Jack?”
A warm hand on his shoulder; Keats taking a deep breath alerted Kit to brace for the answer. ”Anno domini two thousand one hundred and seventeen,” he said. The words dropped like stones through the fragile ice of Kit's composure.
Kit swallowed, the implications he had been denying snapping into understanding like unfurled banners. Not the endless changing world, the towers like Babylon or Babel beyond his window. But-”Tom. Christ wept, Tom is dead. All the Toms-Walsingham, Nashe, Kyd. Sir Walter. My sisters. Will. Will and I were at work on a play, Henry VI-”
Keats laughed, gently. ”Oh, I have something to show you, Kit.” His eyes shone with coy delight. ”Look here-”
He drew a volume from his bag and pressed it into Kit's hands. It weighed heavy, bound in what must be waxed cloth and stiffened paper. The words on the cover were embossed in gilt in strange-shaped letters. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Kit read, once he understood how the esses seemed to work. He gaped, and opened the cover. ”His plays ...” He looked up at Keats, who smiled and opened his hands in a benediction. ”This type is so fine and so clear! Marry, however can it be set by human hands? Tell me true, Jack, have I come to fairyland?” And then, turning pages with trembling fingers and infinite care, his carefulness of speech failing in exclamations. ”Nearly forty plays! Oh, the type is so fine-Oh, and his sonnets, they are wonderful sonnets, he's written more than I had seen-”
Keats, laughing, an arm around Kit's shoulders. ”He's thought the greatest poet and dramatist in the English language.”
Kit looked up in wonder. ”T'was I discovered him.” Kit held the thick, real book in his hands, the paper so fine and so white he'd compare it to a lady's hand. ”Henslowe laughed; Will came from tradesmen and bore no education beyond the grammar school-”
Keats coughed into his hand. ”I sometimes think wealth and privilege are a detriment to poetry.”
The two men shared a considering gaze and a slow, equally considering smile. ”And .” Kit looked at the bag, the glossy transparent fabric as foreign as every other thing in the room. There were still two volumes within. The book in his hands smelled of real paper, new paper. With a shock, he realized that the page-ends were trimmed perfectly smooth and edged with gilt. And how long must that have taken? This poet is a wealthy man, to give such gifts as this.
”And what of Christopher Marlowe?”
Kit smiled. ”Aye.”
Keats looked down. ”You are remembered, I am afraid, chiefly for your promise and your extravagant opinions, my friend. Very little of your work survived. Seven plays, in corrupted versions. The Ovid. Hero and Leander-”
”Forsooth, there was more,” Kit said, pressing the heavy book with Will's name on the cover against his chest.
”There will be more,” Keats said, and set the bag on the floor. ”That is why we saved your life.”
Kit swallowed. What an odd sort of patronage. He sat on the bed, still cradling the wonderful book. He looked up at Keats, who must have read the emotion in his eyes.
”Enough for one day, I think,” the red-haired poet said. ”I've given you a history text as well, and”-a disarming smile and a tilt of his head-”a volume of my own poetry. Please knock on the door if you need for anything-you may find the garderobe a little daunting, but it's past that door and the basic functions obvious-and I will come to see you in the morning.”
”I shall amuse myself with gentle William.” Kit knew a sort of anxious panic for a moment: it was so necessary that this ginger-haired poet must love him, Kit-and he also knew a sort of joy when Keats chuckled at the double entendre and clapped him on the shoulder like a friend.
”Do that. Oh!” Keats halted suddenly and reached into the pocket of his trousers. ”Let me show you how to use a pen-”
The slow roil of his stomach got the better of Kit for an instant. ”I daresay I know well enough how to hold a pen.”
Keats shook his head and grinned, pulling a slender black tube from his pocket. ”Dear Kit. You don't know how to do anything. But you'll learn soon enough, I imagine.”
Satyavati paced, short steps there and back again, until Balda.s.sare reached out without looking up from his workstation and grabbed her by the sleeve. ”Dr. Brahmaputra-”
”Mr. Balda.s.sare?”
”Are you going to share with me what the issue is, here?”
One glance at his face told her he knew very well what the issue was. She tugged her sleeve away from him and leaned on the edge of the desk, too far for casual contact. ”Marlowe,” she said. ”She's still crucial to our data-”
”He.”
”Whatever.”
Balda.s.sare stood; Satyavati tensed, but rather than closer, he moved away. He stood for a moment looking up at the rows of portraits around the top margin of the room-more precisely, at the white s.p.a.ce where the picture of Marlowe had been. A moment of consideration, and Satyavati as much as saw him choose another tack. ”What about Master Marlowe?”
”If I publish-”
”Yes?”
”I tell the world Christopher Marlowe's deepest secret.”
”Which Professor Keats has sworn the entire Poet Emeritus project to secrecy about. And if you don't publish?”
She shrugged to hide the knot in her belly. ”I'm not going to find a third tenure-track offer. You've got your place with John and Dr. Haverson, at least. All I've got is”-a hopeless gesture to the empty place on the wall-”her.”
Balda.s.sare turned to face her. His expressive hands pinwheeled slowly in the air for a moment before he spoke, as if he sifted his thoughts between them. ”You keep doing that.”
”Doing what?”
”Calling Kit her.”
”She is a her. h.e.l.l, Mr. Balda.s.sare, you were the one who was insisting she was a woman, before we brought her back.”
”And he insists he's not.” Balda.s.sare shrugged. ”If he went for gender rea.s.signment, what would you call him?”
Satyavati bit her lip. ”Him,” she admitted unwillingly. ”I guess. I don't know-”
Balda.s.sare spread his hands wide. ”Dr. Brahmaputra-”
”h.e.l.l. Tony. Call me Satya already. If you're going to put up that much of a fight, you already know that you're moving out of student and into friend.”
”Satya, then.” A shy smile that startled her. ”Why don't you just ask Kit? He understands how patronage works. He knows he owes you his life. Go tomorrow.”
”You think she'd say yes?”
”Maybe.” His self-conscious grin turned teasing. ”If you remember not to call him she.”
The strange spellings and punctuation slowed Kit a little, but he realized that they must have been altered for the strange, quickspoken people among whom, apparently, he was meant to make his life. Once he mastered the cadences of the modern speech-the commentaries proving invaluable-his reading proceeded faster despite frequent pauses to reread, to savor.
He read the night through, crosslegged on the bed, bewitched by the brightness of the strange greenish light and the book held open on his lap. The biographical note told him that ”Christopher Marlowe's” innovations in the technique of blank verse provided Shakespeare with the foundations of his powerful voice. Kit corrected the spelling of his name in the margin with the pen that John Keats had loaned him. The nib was so sharp it was all but invisible, and Kit amused himself with the precision it leant his looping secretary's hand. He read without pa.s.sion of Will's death in 1616, smiled that the other poet at last went home to his wife. And did not begin to weep in earnest until halfway through the third act of As You Like It, when he curled over the sorcerously wonderful book, careful to let no tear fall upon the pages, and cried silently, shuddering, fist pressed b.l.o.o.d.y against his teeth, face-down in the rough-textured coverlet.
He did not sleep. When the spasm of grief and rapture pa.s.sed, he read again, scarcely raising his head to acknowledge the white-garbed servant who brought a tray that was more like dinner than a break-fast. The food cooled and was retrieved uneaten; he finished the Shakespeare and began the history, saving his benefactor's poetry for last.
”I want for nothing,” he said when the door opened again, glancing up. Then he pushed the book from his lap and jumped to his feet in haste, exquisitely aware of his reddened eyes and crumpled clothing. The silver-haired woman from yesterday stood framed in the doorway. ”Mistress,” Kit said, unwilling to a.s.say her name. ”Again I must plead your forbearance.”