"Now, yes. Easy enough for you. You're a groom of the bedchamber, a sort of royal officer."

"This is no jape?"

"This is by no manner of means a jape, God help us. Go. I am, thank God, safe enough here. Cecil will understand all that, why I wish to be shut away. I am safe enough here till he has them."

"I will write them down, then."

"Do, quick. Then go."

"So," Will said. "Kit is truly your master. Though look where his spying got him. A reckoning in a little room. Keep off it, Ben. Playwork is duller and pays less well. But it is safer."

"Go now. He will be up. He does a day's work before breakfast."

Will sat, in groom's livery, too long in the anteroom. He had spoken of his business to secretaries of progressively ascending status, and none would come alive to the urgency of it. One had even said: "If you would speak of plots for new plays, then must you go to the Lord Chamberlain. Here be grave matters in hand."

"You will be at no graver work than the scotching of this that I tell you of." Weary, three hours gone by, Will took to sketching of a drinking song he had been asked for by Beaumont, something for a comedy to be called Have at You Now Pretty Rogue or some such nonsense:

Red wine it is the soldier's blood

And if it be both old and good

So take a rouse

And let's carouse

And

Strange, he had been infected by Ben's feigned unreformed eucharisticism. No, it was tother way around. Blood turned to wine, not wine to. His head was spinning with lack of sleep, he needed much sleep these days, past his best, looking westward. He began to calculate his fortune in real estate, but that led him to things needful to be done in Stratford. The load of stone still encumbering the grounds of New Place and neither paid for yet by the Council nor taken away. His brother Gilbert had written of some odd useful acres he might – He was shaken to here and now by the top secretary, who said: