I felt a nudging glance. I waited until Rebecca and Bridget were out of sight before I turned to face Christopher Marlowe.
“Mistress Roydon.” Kit’s voice was hoarse, and he looked like death. “Walter told me you were leaving tonight.”
“I asked him to tell you.” I forced Kit to meet my eyes through an act of sheer will. This was another thing I could fix: I could make sure that Matthew said a proper goodbye to a man who had once been his closest friend.
Kit looked down at his feet, hiding his face. “I should never have come.”
“I forgive you, Kit.”
Marlowe’s head swung up in surprise at my words. “Why?” he asked, dumbstruck.
“Because as long as Matthew blames you for what happened to me, a part of him remains with you. Forever,” I said simply. “Come upstairs and say your farewells.”
Matthew was waiting for us on the landing, having divined that I was bringing someone home. I kissed him softly on the mouth as I went past on the way to our bedroom.
“Your father forgave you,” I murmured. “Give Kit the same gift in return.”
Then I left them to patch up what they could in what little time remained.
A few hours later, I handed Thomas Harriot a steel tube. “Here is your star glass, Tom.” “I fashioned it from a gun barrel—with adjustments, of course,” explained Monsieur Vallin, famous maker of mousetraps and clocks. “And it is engraved, as Mistress Roydon requested.”
There on the side, set in a lovely little silver banner, was the legend n. vallin me fecit, t. harriot me invenit, 1591.
“‘N. Vallin made me, T. Harriot invented me, 1591.’” I smiled warmly at Monsieur Vallin. “It’s perfect.”
“Can we look at the moon now?” Jack cried, racing for the door. “It already looks bigger than St. Mildred’s clock!”
And so Thomas Harriot, mathematician and linguist, made scientific history in the courtyard of the Hart and Crown while sitting in a battered wicker garden chair pulled down from our attics. He trained the long metal tube fitted with two spectacle lenses at the full moon and sighed with pleasure.
“Look, Jack. It is just as Signor della Porta said.” Tom invited the boy into his lap and positioned one end of the tube at his enthusiastic assistant’s eye. “Two lenses, one convex and one concave, are indeed the solution if held at the right distance.”
After Jack we all took a turn.
“Well, that is not at all what I expected,” George Chapman said, disappointed. “Did you not think the moon would be more dramatic? I believe I prefer the poet’s mysterious moon to this one, Tom.”
“Why, it is not perfect at all,” Henry Percy complained, rubbing his eyes and then peering through the tube again.
“Of course it isn’t perfect. Nothing is,” Kit said. “You cannot believe everything philosophers tell you, Hal. It is a sure way to ruin. Look what philosophy has done for Tom.”
I glanced at Matthew and grinned. It had been some time since we’d enjoyed the School of Night’s verbal ripostes.
“At least Tom can feed himself, which is more than I can say for any of the playwrights of my acquaintance.” Walter peered through the tube and whistled. “I wish you had come up with this notion before we went to Virginia, Tom. It would have been useful for surveying the shore while we were safely aboard ship. Look through this, Gallowglass, and tell me I am wrong.”
“You’re never wrong, Walter,” Gallowglass said with a wink at Jack. “Mind me well, young Jack. The one who pays your wages is correct in all things.”
I’d invited Goody Alsop and Susanna to join us, too, and even they took a peek through Tom’s star glass. Neither woman seemed overly impressed with the invention, although they both made enthusiastic noises when prompted.
“Why do men bother with these trifles?” Susanna whispered to me. “I could have told them the moon is not perfectly smooth, even without this new instrument. Do they not have eyes?”
After the pleasure of viewing the heavens, only the painful farewells remained. We sent Annie off with Goody Alsop, using the excuse that Susanna needed another set of hands to help the old woman across town. My goodbye was brisk, and Annie looked at me uncertainly.
“Are you all right, mistress? Shall I stay here instead?”
“No, Annie. Go with your aunt and Goody Alsop.” I blinked back the tears. How did Matthew bear these repeated farewells?
Kit, George, and Walter left next, with gruff goodbyes and hands clamped on Matthew’s arm to wish him well.