The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  When Will and Southampton at last emerged, Southampton walked glidingly and seemed dazed. His eye kept returning to Emilia—and at supper, he spoke of the loves of poets and shepherds, their free and graceful loves. He wondered that lords should be so chaste while men and maids played wanton. Will spoke not at all. He had an air of thinking and thinking and ever coming back to the same bleak point.

  That night, Mistress Bewley presented the company with a mask of Vice, horned, warped, and black, which she awarded to Montague for his drunken lechery. Montague neglectfully tossed it at Danvers, who instantly threw it in the fire. Southampton leapt and snatched the mask from the flames. He raised it, smoldering and smoking, then hastily dropped it and stamped it out.

  “’Tis like a painted cloth,” Mistress Bewley said, “of Virtue’s triumph over Sin. My lord hath trampled Vice beneath his heel.”

  And when Emilia crept to the wood that night, it was Southampton waiting under the trees, his auburn tresses dull, diminished, by the overcast moon. He wore Will’s cloak. He was grim, he was hesitant; she knew then, with an outraged, humiliated certainty, he was gay. She must fuck him so he didn’t have to know he was gay. Will had sent him with the cloak because Will wasn’t gay; and a man couldn’t give his body that way, from generosity or pity, to appease a great lord. He couldn’t be a man and a whore.

  So Emilia did what a whore must do, like a fool that rides a caparisoned cow and leaps into a barrel for her lady’s entertainment. She lay down, and the occasional stars seemed tangled or strangled among the groping boughs. An owl cried and she hated the owl. She wanted the owl to free her. She helped Southampton with her hand, and the moist, warm skin of his penis was a horror, even though it wasn’t anything. Skin. He shut his eyes, and his face was a study of loathing. She shut her eyes. It didn’t have to be real.

  And in her mind, “Tom o’Bedlam” muttered, singing its refrain:

  While I do sing, any food, any feeding

  Feeding, drink, or clothing

  Come, dame or maid, be not afraid

  Poor Tom will injure nothing

  When it was done, he left her without a word. She rose from the dirt alone. She walked back through the empty gardens, where the cat hunted silently, creeping under hedges and furling its tail. There was a chill, light rain, and she took off her cloak to feel it on her arms as she walked to the house. She was alone like a cat, like an owl, as if she walked, unobserved, out of her human life.

  The next day, waking to it. An hour when she wept into the sheet, the sheet translucent and dim across her face, Mary’s sleeping weight against her arm. Then at breakfast, Southampton appeared at her side and was suddenly a teenaged boy, unsexually pretty, at sea. He led her to the Great Hall and handed her a perfumed sonnet, written in the prickly workaday hand of a man who did much writing—Will’s hand. It read:

  In the old age blacke was not counted faire,

  Or if it were it bore not beautie’s name:

  But now is blacke beauties successive heire …

  And she could see how Southampton must have woken Will in the night to talk about his exploit, needing a man to tell him it was right, that it was what men did. Will laughing in the necessary way and hunting out a pen and suggesting the poem. She forced herself to scan the page, feeling hot and faraway. The whole of it was a backhanded compliment, a teasing dig at her blackamoor looks. Will had known she would know who had written it. It was a wink behind Southampton’s back.

  And she remembered a time at her cousin’s house at Horne, when she had played the virginal and Will sang a pitiful ballad about a maid, dishonored beneath a tree, who had hanged herself from that tree’s limbs and thereafter the tree flowered all winter long. He sang it with such falsetto wails and grimaces he made all the company roar with laughter.

  Watching her, Southampton was afraid. He was a child.

  She said, “I am sorry, my lord. I like it not. It praises brownness, but is itself a painted poem. It hath not your accustomed purity.”

  The earl blushed. She turned by instinct and he took her arm. They walked back together, the rain trembling at the windows, the light gray and secretive. As they came to the stairs, he paused and said, “Yet I do love thee. That was not false. And if thou wilt have it, I would keep thee well.”

  And she went back to her chamber, where Mary waited jubilant—knowing about Southampton as servants know all hidden things. From triumph, Mary showed her new fool’s tricks: turning somersaults in the rushes on the floor, chewing rushes like an ass. Then she sat obediently at Emilia’s feet to have the wisps of hay picked out of her hair. Emilia said, “I would not part with thee, imp. Of all foolish things, I would not lose thee.”

  Mary said drowsily, “Why, how should we be parted?”

  “Shalt thou not be a great lady’s fool and go away?”

  “Nay, I would be your fool and your maidservant both. So you will need no other girl.”

  Then Mary leaned back against Emilia’s knees and shut her eyes. Emilia plucked more straws from her hair, and for a while Mary chattered about the unknown language God spoke to Adam in the garden, wondering if it were a tongue the beasts knew, so Adam might chide the wolf when it would not peaceably lie with the lamb. “Blotona lona,” Mary said, guessing its sounds. “Which meaneth: Bite him not, wolf.”

  Emilia smiled at the crown of her head and petted her until Mary began to drowse. Then Emilia gazed into the fire and saw the flickering shape of the terrible city, its sky that flowed with dull aurorae, its ashes and dust that floated like breath. It was familiar and closer than before. It was a place. It was a day that would be. At the same time, she was cozy in the room, Mary dozing against her knees, the rain companionably bleak on the window. So went an hour of Emilia’s last day; she stroked Mary’s head and thought of giving her a jewel or a gown for a keepsake. But a servant fetched Emilia to the gallery before Mary woke, and so the whim was lost.

  All that day it rained and darkened until it seemed a rain of shadows. The company gathered in the rain-lit gallery and played at fortunetelling with a volume of Virgil. All the same faces: fair Rutland and hatchet-faced Danvers; Montague, red and drunk and neglecting his diminutive, moonfaced wife; Florio who’d shaved his beard and had a look of tender, bald surprise; Will Shakespeare. And the Earl of Southampton, as pretty as a dragonfly, who now avoided Emilia’s eye, who was absorbed by Will.

  Will stood at Southampton’s elbow. He avoided Emilia’s eye. She was alone.

  And it fell into a pattern, black and white. From the time she’d first met Will, she had been the tool of Master Shakespeare’s greatness. She had helped him win Southampton’s favor. She had warned him from his early death. She had puzzled and planned, but at the end of the day, Will had needed and she had done. Now she’d given her body like a worthless thing, so that Will might comfortably keep his patron. Will had needed and she had done.

  And still the world burned. She looked at him and hated him and wished him in hell. He would not look at her.

  The cover of the volume of Virgil was embroidered with Southampton’s arms. To find your fortune, you opened the book at random. The verse on which your finger landed told your future. They all knew Virgil well, and cheated by angling for a flattering passage; the gentlemen fished heroic feats for themselves and the ladies noble loves. Emilia fished, too, but her finger mistook. She opened to the fall of Troy.

  She read the Latin with calm self-deprecation, then translated: “I saw all Ilium sink in flames, and Troy uprooted from its base.”

  The others smiled with a suppressed, pleased malice. There was something unstable in the air.

  Emilia said, “Well, my lords, this undoes all. It seems the country must fall in flames whilst you perform your happy destinies. Belike, they shall be sooty triumphs.”

  “Nay, thy verse standeth not for us,” said Danvers tetchily. “Each chooseth for himself.”

  Southampton said politely, “Mayhap, it presages that the Spanish will now sack
London.”

  “The flames may stand for love,” said Lady Montague. “Love is a woman’s calamity.”

  Emilia looked back at the page of Virgil—and the neat lines of words changed subtly. Blurred. They became a familiar broken skyline, a cinder skyline with no sky. And the static in her head. It was a noise that wasn’t noise. For a moment she was in the blackened city, with the husks of dead beetles that had gathered in drifts, with the ice and eternal time. The world’s end.

  When the room came back, no time had passed, but she was saying in a harsh, frail voice, “Nay, I know it. It tells of the end of days.”

  Will flinched and the others frowned. Danvers said coldly, “It does not.”

  “May it not?” said Lady Montague fearfully.

  “It does,” said Emilia (and her voice rang hollow), “for is it not foretold in scripture: ‘Lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun was as black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon like blood. And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, and heaven departed away, as a scroll when it is rolled.’” She added, “I have seen it in dreams. As I know, another here has seen it also.” She looked frankly at Will. His face was white.

  “Yet it does not,” said Danvers.

  “Madam,” said Florio. “I pray you will spare us these anabaptistical heresies of the murder of creation. ’Tis a poor recreation for a wet day.”

  Lady Montague said, “But Mistress Lanier speaks truly. For England is now much troubled with plague. In Revelation, doth God not send a pestilence?”

  “’Tis not the first plague in England,” said Florio. “‘To be sure, it is a grievous thing, but no prodigy.”

  “And we are well here, far from the city’s infectious airs,” said Rutland. “If there be a plague, we scarcely know.”

  “Nay, but here we are plagued by a walking infection that pursueth us to our very beds,” said Danvers.

  An uncomfortable silence fell. Some glanced surreptitiously at Emilia.

  Rutland said helpfully, “He means the cat.”

  All the company laughed, already very far away. Will was watching Emilia, he was white. The windows seethed and moved with rainlight. Everything unpleasantly alive. A deep well. And she said straight to Will, with an edge of hysteria, “Yet there shall be such a city, and its people destroyed. There shall be Sodom, and all that lives must burn.”

  Will turned abruptly and strode from the room. The others startled and straightened, like trees shocked upright by a gust of wind. Southampton rose abruptly and went out after Will—and the world wheeled. It seemed that a breeze wafted Southampton out and flung the door shut. It blew out the light and the scene rolled up like a scroll. It dropped, like a great heart skipping a beat

  She and Will were ahorse in a chill gray morning. Alone: and for the first time, Emilia didn’t know where she was. The weeds growing in the road looked unnaturally green beneath the lightless sky. Small grasshoppers sprang from beneath the hooves of the horses, flew up in a pattern like splashing. She knew they had left Cowdray, but she didn’t know why.

  And it skidded through a time without any detail: the grasshoppers splashing and the green in the road, something happening just out of sight. They’d stopped. It was a wood. Will led her as Emilia was accustomed to be led. It was the cloak and the shapes of twigs underneath, their angles beneath her back. She drifted in and out and made the cries women make.

  And stopped. It was real: his sweat on her sweat, the trembling cold where her leg was bare. He shifted his weight from her and left her bright, bare cunt in the air. He sighed and he was talking, as any lover might. He was telling her about his life.

  He said, in the days of his youthful dreaming, he had thought his dreams might deliver mankind. But he dreamed and woke, and all things flowed perversely and lost their sense and beauty. There was no thing that was not made worse. If a woman baked a pie and put it up for the night, Will could dream it bad by morning. His own memories were made false; his learning turned to a vaporous madness. “’Tis said that a bat, if he be struck by a leaf, will lose all his remembrance. So it was for me; life melted in a sleep. My very dreams passed in a sleep at last, and Alexander appeared to me no more.

  “All that lasted were the creatures of mine own mind, the fools and shrews and sad kings of my fancy. What I had written on air was more lasting than stone, than men and their kingdoms, than men’s gods. And I swear, it is of a more fearful greatness than all the red spears of the Grecian host, and I more great than Alexander for its making.

  “So, madam, I would that my plays might prosper. Thou wilt say it matters not; we will all be ash. But they are all I have seen to love.”

  Emilia tried to think. It was an effort like swimming against the tide of the world. Then Will’s eyes met hers, and she grasped it. She said, “And had Alexander such a wish?”

  “Belike,” said Will. “For he saw the ashes of Troy, and of the world. Yet he would conquer Asia as a child will play. He reached for his greatness like a toy.”

  “And used thee for his greatness?”

  Will’s mouth narrowed. “Ay, he made the little matter serve the great. He was no Antony, that would lose a realm for love.”

  “Yet the realm must burn. The world must burn.”

  Then it seemed Will made an effort but said nothing.

  “Prithee,” she said, and her breath came short. “If we may by any means prevent this evil—”

  But Will had turned away. He was straightening his clothes. And he said he now remembered Alexander but poorly. Indeed, he wondered if any man remembered all he claimed, of dreams or waking. “One who seeks to remember, ’tis as if a man sailed upon the sea and commanded it to be still.”

  “And the wind goeth over it,” she said hollowly. “The place thereof shall know it no more.”

  “Art thou well, my lady? Shall we ride on?”

  “Nay, but tell me whither we go. My memory plays me false. It is as thou sayest; it is water.”

  He told her and she listened and stared like a silent bird. She was trying to breathe. She was afraid. She saw the horses tethered, their brown glowing silhouettes, broken and crossed by the lightless silhouettes of branches. Against the white sun. A black blink of the eyes.

  They were riding again, in a white light like a blank page. Surrey, that was where they were going. Horne, Surrey. They’d excused themselves from Cowdray by telling Southampton she wanted her baby. They were going to her cousin Andrea Bassano—Will a friend of the cousin, a companion for the road. She remembered it now, and it made plain sense.

  But for a moment she felt she, too, was a dream; that it was Will who had dreamed this world from air. He had sung their journey and told their days. He had written her out of bed and down the stairs in the soft black nights. She had no world. She was free to be a fool. This was nothing but a soap bubble Will had blown. He would burst it with his fingers and she would be free.

  But no, he knew nothing. He was nothing: just a man.

  It grew dark. She couldn’t breathe. They rode faster and faster. “Tom o’Bedlam” played, faster and faster, in her head. The night drew in and they were galloping. The clouds raced overhead, blue and black.

  And the neat brick manor showed now on the hill, its muddy yard spread before its door. The horses trotted. It was ordinary now. They stopped in the yard. The swing and fall of dismounting, it was flying in all directions. It held.

  Then her cousin Andrea and the greetings that passed in a glare, in a bloom of noise. She walked through the house, her boots thudding, squeaking, past where she’d first seen Will, where he’d appeared in his body and broken her life. Her baby was crying. The clucking of the nurse was like a metronome in its wavering scream. Will wasn’t behind her. It was almost gone. Emilia opened the workshop door.

  There were the sinuous, sinister shapes of half-made shawms and viols, the chisels on shelves and the dull, dumb light. The painted bassinet was there, the nurse perched on a sawhorse beside it.

  Emilia
came forward and the baby was a dream. It wiggled unnaturally, batting its false flat arms. The world went black.

  Kate woke in a high, exposed place. A wind was blowing with a stench of burning, uncanny and vertiginous beneath the blue sky. It was New York. Sabine’s rooftop. She knew it by its shape. She tried to sit up and met a heavy resistance, at once unfamiliar and well-known. Her belly woke, taut and twitching and enormous. Her back twinged. She was pregnant.

  On the horizon, there was a bloom of smoke that dwarfed the city beneath. It was beautiful, cat-gray smoke, but the air had a penetrating stink like a mattress fire. A dull pall covered the whole southern sky. The central plume seemed to loom at her precipitously, although she stared and stared and it remained at the same airy distance.

  But it wasn’t the apocalyptic city. It lived. There was still the mutter of traffic below. All the buildings she saw were whole. She hadn’t failed—or if she had failed, she wasn’t living in the failed world yet.

  It took her some time to get to her feet. Going down the stairs, she had to lean on the banister; the baby was kicking and her back was in a cramp. The top floor of the apartment was silent and untenanted: the beds stripped to the mattresses, the windows bare. Kate caught the faint jabber of a television set. She followed it to the floor below.