there.
No wonder Master Marlowe had wanted a servant who could write a fair hand. The sheets scattered about were closely covered in a spiky writing that would have been hard to make out even if half the words had not been heavily scored through, blotted, or smeared. I didn’t dare touch the papers; Master Marlowe might notice if they’d been rearranged. But one in particular caught my eye.
It was tucked under another page so that I could see only a corner, but it was not written in a language I had ever seen. Not English or French or Latin. Might it be Greek? Was Master Marlowe so learned? I bent closer to peer at a jumble that looked like bird tracks and worm castings. And then I remembered the symbols that the player Nick had chalked on the stage floor yesterday. That was a play, a fiction, an illusion. Was this truth? WasMaster Marlowe worse than a Protestant? Did he, like Faustus, practice black magic?
In the next room, the ropes beneath the mattress creaked. I jumped away from the table and snatched at the broom. When Master Marlowe appeared in the doorway, running both hands through his rumpled hair, I was industriously sweeping the dirt from the floor into the fireplace.
“Ah, Richard,” he said, yawning fit to crack his jaw and squinting as though the light hurt his eyes. He was still wearing his hose but nothing else. I fastened my eyes on the floor. “Hard at work, I see. Fetch some water, then.”
“There, sir.” Without looking up, I pointed at the bucket in the corner.
“Thou mayst be worth thy keep after all,” Master Marlowe said, as if surprised. “Fill up that basin, so I can wash.”
I filled the wooden bowl with water, found soap and linen towels where he told me to look for them, and kept my eyes studiously elsewhere as he knelt on the floor of his bedroom to scrub his face and hands clean and run handfuls of water through his hair. Shaking his wet head like a dog, Master Marlowe got to his feet and looked at me curiously. “What, boy, art ill? Thou’rt red as a poppy.”
I dreaded his sharp eyes, but I could not keep the heatback from my cheeks. “Only a bit warm, sir,” I said feebly. This was a complication I had not thought of when I’d entered a gentleman’s service.
“Aye, ’twill be a hot day. Here.” Picking up his purse from where it lay on top of a heap of his clothing, he tossed me two pence. “Go downstairs and buy a loaf from Mistress Stavesly for breakfast. And some ale from the tavern on the corner. Enough for thyself as well.”
I must harden myself, I thought, as I seized two tankards off the shelf and made my escape. I must somehow learn to act as if the sight of a half-naked man was nothing new to me. Or Master Marlowe would surely start to wonder why his new servant boy blushed so easily.
To my relief, when I returned with the loaf of bread still warm in my hands, Master Marlowe was dressed, not in the magnificent velvet he had worn yesterday, but in a plain workaday doublet of dark green broadcloth, his wet hair pulled neatly back to the nape of his neck.
I need not have been so scrupulous about not disturbing Master Marlowe’s papers, for he simply swept them aside with one arm to clear a space on the table for the food. There was only the one stool, and I did not dare to claim a space, uninvited, at the table with my master. I took my bread and tankard of ale and sat on a corner of my pallet.
Master Marlowe was silent while he ate, the quick chatter of yesterday gone. Changeable as March wind, Mistress Stavesly had called him. I sat without speaking, so as not to disturb his mood, chewing the creamy yellow manchet bread with appreciation. It was fine and soft enough that it needed no butter to sweeten it.
“Well, then,” Master Marlowe said when his meal was over, and he got up from the table. “Let me see thee prove thy boast.”
I swallowed my last mouthful of bread hastily. My boast? I’d hardly said a word all morning. But when he nodded at
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