All Night Awake by Sarah A. Hoyt

was . . .
    Kit stopped. It couldn’t be the Lady Silver.
    What would an elf do in London?
    Kit stared as the couple disappeared through a door into the fifth floor the shabby building.
    What could Will be doing with such a woman? Would this be Will’s wife?
    Kit smiled at the thought. How could Will, with his much-mended wool suit, his receding hairline, his meek look, procure a wife like that exquisite creature?
    How lovely she’d looked, even from the back, with her dark silky hair, her gown of silver cloth, her steps like a soft, hypnotic dance.
    She reminded Kit of his first love, that elf lady that he’d loved perhaps not wisely, but too well.
    Again, the thought of someone like Will winning the hand of one such as she made Kit smile.
    But why would a woman have Will for a lover, who wouldn’t have him for a husband? And if not his lover, why would she go into his room alone with him?
    Or was there some conspiracy already here?
    Did this woman—by her looks, a great noble lady, or a great whore—seek Will for something other than his looks and his homely charms?
    More likely she sought him for secret messages, secret plotting, secret maneuvering. London was as rotten with plots as a stray dog with fleas.
    Relief washed over Kit like a breath of fresh air. The conscience he’d not been aware of disturbing ceased troubling him.
    Maybe he was not concocting a plot unaided. Perhaps Will was not the sweet innocent he appeared to be.
    Perhaps Kit would find true guilt where he’d thought to find gullible innocence.
    Maybe Will’s involvement with this court lady spelled doom for Essex—deserved doom—relieving Kit of the dread guilt of entrapping someone as innocent and unsullied as Imp himself.
    Kit climbed the rickety wooden stairs with a light step. Every step creaked beneath his boots and the banister shook like an unsound tooth.
    Kit would find out what the good burgher was up to.
    Knocking on the door, Kit waited. He could hear rustling on the other side of the door, then an urgent whisper.
    He’d just raised his hand to knock again when the door opened.
    A flushed Will stood in the doorway, raking his scant hair back from his domed forehead with the gloved fingers of one hand, and wiping his mouth on the back of his other glove.
    Shakespeare looked as embarrassed and surprised as a cat caught at the cream.
    Kit smiled at him, his slow, practiced smile. “Good eve, good Shakestaff.”
    Kit couldn’t, of course, just ask Shakespeare who the woman was that Will had hidden in his room.
    Shakespeare would lie or, worse, not answer, not even giving Kit the benefit of guessing the truth behind a lie.
    No. Kit would use other bait to work his way into the house, to work his way into Will’s confidence, to find out all there was to know about this man that he might more easily entrap him.
    The man was desperate for a job, any job. Kit remembered seeing Will in St. Paul’s standing in front of the Si Quis door. A job in the theater would seem to him his heart’s desire, a very dream come true.
    “I thought on your plight,” Kit said, and smiled at Shakespeare, who looked more than a little bewildered. “I thought on your plight, good Wigglestick, friendless and jobless in London, and I thought on your poem and your excellent taste in playwrights.
    “If I were to give you a note for Philip Henslowe, he would surely hire you to play odd parts in the theater. Not big parts, mind, only this man’s servant, that man’s mute friend. Yet you’d be paid from the common take.”
    As Kit spoke, he leaned in, to look at Will’s room. He leaned now this way and now that, discerning the inside of very poor lodgings.
    The wooden floor was strewn with rushes, in the old-fashioned country way. But these rushes looked old and dusty. The table, upon which an ink-stone, pens, and paper rested, was old and sagged upon one leg shorter than the others.
    Nowhere could Kit see a trace of the fair stranger, the woman with the