“Kit Aretine could have had everything, Campion, everything. He could have been an earl! The old King offered him an earldom, and Kit threw it all away.”

He paused, sipped more wine, and Campion leaned forward. “Threw it away?”

Lopez smiled. “You have to understand, my dear, that King James was like Sir Grenville Cony. He preferred his lovers to be men. I think he fell in love with Kit, but Kit would have none of it. None. The King offered him everything, and in return Kit gave him a poem.” Lopez smiled. “It was printed anonymously, but everyone knew Kit Aretine was the author. He even boasted about it! He described the King in the poem as ‘that Scottish thistle of ungendered prick.’” Lopez laughed, pleased to see the same from Campion. The old man shook his head ruefully. “It was a bad poem, a bad idea, and it could only have one result. Kit ended up where you were, in the Tower. Everyone said he’d die, that the insult was too great and too public to go unavenged, but I managed to get him out.”

“You did?”

Lopez smiled. “I owed Kit a great debt, and the King of England owed me a small one. I forgave the King his debt, and in return he gave me Kit Aretine. There was a condition. Kit Aretine was banished, never again to set foot in England.” Lopez picked the book up from his lap. “He stopped being a poet then, if he ever had been one, and became a soldier instead. Here,” he held the book out. “That’s him.”

The book felt odd, as if the leather covers were too big for the pages. Campion understood when she opened it. Someone had ripped the pages from the spine, leaving only two behind. One was the title page. “Poems, &c. Upon Severall Themes. By Mr. Christopher Aretine.” On the opposite page was a woodcut, framed in a complex design, that showed the poet. It was a small, lifeless drawing, yet the artist had conveyed arrogant good looks. It was an imperious face, staring at a world it would conquer.

She turned the title page to find the empty space where the binding threads hung ragged. Something was written here in a bold, dashing hand. “To my friend, Mordecai, this much Improved Booke. Kit.” Campion looked at Lopez.

“He tore the poems out?”

“Yes. And burned them. In that very fireplace.” Lopez chuckled at the memory, then shook his head sadly. “I think he knew he could never be a great poet, so he decided to be no poet at all. Yet I don’t think he ever knew what an extraordinary man he really was. Kit Aretine, my dear, was a terrible waste of enormous talent.” Mordecai Lopez sipped his wine. He was looking at the seal, but as he put the wine down he lifted his eyes to Campion and said the words which, somehow, were no surprise, yet which turned her soul inside out. “He was also your father.”