Page 82

But he merely muttered softly, “Your room here—is it private?”

Moments later we were upstairs in my tiny, shabby room, about which I would have felt shame except that the Poet barely looked at the dirty walls or meager straw mattress, but rather commenced kissing me and tearing the shirt from my back, kissing my neck, my armpits, my belly. I undid his doublet, removing it and then his shirt, leaving only his starched collar around his neck. I remembered seeing him that first time bare-chested at his writing table, and how I’ve longed for him since. My body shook with want and I was uncertain how I was to return his kisses to my neck. I also didn’t want to pause too long for fear it was a dream, certain to end.

When it was clearly my turn to respond, I kissed the divot at the base of his neck and then licked my way down to his hairy belly, before falling to my knees and, with shaking hands, undoing his pants. When I pushed down his britches, his staff, firm and excited, leapt from its nest of black hair. It was like an amorous snake waiting for me, its pink head pushing from its bishop’s hat, its mouth spitting. There was a clean smell to his usual scent of ink and sawdust. Did he bathe himself, knowing this was to happen? Does this mean he truly wanted this to happen?

I looked up, and he was smiling down at me—not in some ravenous way, but in a way that reflected my own heart. There was a dampness to his eyes. He was doing this, like me, as an act of love. He pulled me up and kissed me again and then laid me on my back on the mattress, yanked off my britches, and threw them to the floor. I lay there fully naked, my own staff reaching for him from its tuft of golden hair. In the year and a half since last he’d seen me, I had changed greatly, and for a moment I worried he missed the effeminate youth I had been. But then he rubbed his hand through the scant hairs on my chest, grasped my cock, and smiled hungrily.

“I had always expected you to grow into a fine man, but I had no idea you’d turn into a beauty such as this.”

Then he climbed atop me, our nakedness pressing against each other, and kissed my mouth, my neck, my clavicle. He then licked from my nipples, down to my belly and thighs. He did not take my rod into his mouth as Kit had done but instead moved my legs until my knees pressed down beside my ears and my arse pointed up. The point of his sword poked at its target, sending shocks of lightning shooting into my belly. He spit into his hand, and then onto my hole in order to ease his entry, though his cock was already wet enough. I began to suspect this was not his first time with a man in this way, and I was grateful.

“Do you want this, Hughes?” he whispered.

“Only if you call me Willy again,” I whispered. “That way we can both be Wills, and all the more nearer—nay, larger.” I was referencing one of his secret sonnets at which I had stolen a look, one of those he had written about Rose and me when she and I were together. I then quoted it by memory, “So thou being rich in Will add to thy Will / One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.”

He looked startled at first that I knew of it, but then smiled with a blush, seeming to excuse my thievery. “I’ve never stopped thinking about you. Even while I wrote of her—”

“Hush, love,” I whispered, using my hand to return his slippery self to its desired spot, causing my guts to tingle once more. “Please join with me.”

It was then with another kiss he entered me, making of the two Wills just one.

Thirty-EightVeni, Vidi, Vici

Wherein Willy Hughes and the Poet at last are together … in secret.

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted

Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion.

–Sonnet 20

Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,

And by and by clean starvèd for a look;

Possessing or pursuing no delight

Save what is had or must from you be took.

—from Sonnet 75

In the days and months that followed, the Poet’s and my friendship grew even more intimate than I had hoped. Every evening after we left the playhouse, we’d each feign going our separate ways. I’d then circle round back to Silver Street and go to his rooms unseen. We made love every night. Always, when we had released our spirit, we would cuddle in each other’s arms and he would regale me with whatever new ideas had come to him for his plays. When I’d start to doze—for they were long days—he would say, “I see my bedtime story has made my young man sleepy. Off to bed, lad.” Then I’d sneak out the back door and return to my own rooms with Little Goat in the Liberty of the Clink, just near the prison. It was a bit of a walk, but we knew it would be too dangerous to spend the whole night together. While our life together was more hidden than that which I’d shared with Kit, I felt I was the Poet’s beloved in all the most important ways.

Thereafter, I looked at my life with new, more positive eyes. Even the memories of lost loves became tinted rose pink. I did not wish to forget my brief but tragic affection for Kit Marlowe, for it was that friendship that made me know an enduring love with another man was truly possible. Nor did my shimmering passion with the Poet discount my childish love for Barnaby Stubb. True, I had discovered that Barnaby had never truly loved me the way I loved him, nor did he, apparently, even recall what had transpired between us behind the blacksmith’s shed that one summer. But still I would honor that love, for it was my first. I would not even foreswear my misbegotten affection for Rose—in that it made me even more certain as to what and who I was. In truth, I needed each one of these loves, false or true. I grew into the opinion that any affection of note, no matter how wounding or incomplete, should be honored and encased in the mind’s amber. For these childish romantic adventures prepare our hearts for that one future love, which is the greatest of all.

Being who I was, a worrier who knew he had a knack for turning silk purses into sow’s ears, I set about ruminating about the true nature of my love for the Poet. Was he merely another step on the stairway toward my “greatest love,” or was he, in fact, the greatest love already achieved, as I had hoped? I began to analyze every word, every action, every hmm and umm he uttered.

“When you write your plays,” I asked one evening, as he lay on his back, breathing heavily after our coupling, “do you think first of me and then of a character, or do you think of a character and then write the words in a way I will be able to speak well?”

“When I write a play, I conjure a woman who looks like you, then I simultaneously make the character serve the play, but write her in a way I know you will excel at playing.”

“So, it’s me you think of first?”

“Hmm,” he thought, staring at the ceiling as I played with the puddle of spirit in his navel. “It’s at the same time. You draw the character from me, and as that happens, I hear your voice in my head, and I fashion the lady so you shall shine.”

One day, many months later, we were performing in one of his comedies and realized how much its plot, like our secret love, turned tortuously upon mistaken identity and capricious passions. Had his plays mimicked our love or had our love dressed itself in his plots? And if we were one of his plays, were we destined to be Beatrice and Benedick or Romeo and Juliet? Or worse—Othello and Desdemona?

I began to worry. Would our love be a comedy or tragedy?