The queen looked up at the moon for comfort, but it was smudged and nearly hidden by the fog. She felt very small and alone, and the time left to them was almost gone.
Alice was wise enough not to look too closely at the gifts of food left by her admirer, at the scrubbed hearth and mended clothes. Over the weeks she had become used to such things, almost dependent on them. The day never seemed long enough for everything she had to do and, unlike most of the stationers, she had no wife to cook and clean for her.
Edward Blount had once suggested she find an apprentice, but none of the men eager to learn the bookseller’s trade had seemed willing to take orders from a woman. Often they would ask to speak to her husband when they applied for a job, and while she could let that go, understanding their confusion, she never felt that they would in time come to think of her as an employer. She’d kept the young assistant John had hired, but he was a little simple, unable to learn any but the easiest tasks.
So when she came out into her kitchen and did not see her usual breakfast of bread and beer she felt disappointed. Perhaps, she thought, she had offended in some way. Then she saw something move near the hearth.
It was of medium height and man-shaped, though she would have wagered her soul it was not a man. Fur the color of nutmeg covered everything but its broad seamed face. Its ears were pointed, and it wore a small red cap shaped like a triangle. Its feet—But some ancient superstition kept her from looking at the feet. She was afraid that she would find them hoofed.
The thing was asleep, she saw now, and she stepped back, not wanting to wake it. Almost she made the sign of the cross, the way her mother used to do when she was frightened or startled. It stirred and opened its eyes. They were a clear brown, like cow dung, and somehow strangely comforting. “Ho!” it said. “Wood and rock, what a night we had together in the fields. I met a screech owl coming home—”
Hearing it speak brought her out of her daze. She should run, get help, call George or Edward. But her movement seemed to frighten it, as if it suddenly recalled who and what she was. It curled back toward the hearth, trying to hide. Amazed at the thought that it might be as fearful as she was she stopped and held out her hand. “Are you the one I should thank for the labor done here?”
“No,” it said.
The old women in her village had told stories of such a creature, she remembered now. It would come into your home and do your work, milk your cows and churn your butter, but on no account should you thank it. If you did it would leave.
She nodded to it, trying to be matter-of-fact. “Good day to you then,” she said, and turned and left. The old women had called the man a brownie. They had been wise, but Alice thought she had a friend who was wiser. She would have to seek out Margery and tell her what happened: it had been too long since her last visit.
As she went from her house to the churchyard she smiled to think of her friend. Margery wore a ring on every finger, each with a different jewel, and had a drop of stone at her ear, like a man’s, and her long black hair was unfettered by any cap. She lived in a crowded cottage out beyond the city walls. Inside the cottage a fine patina of cat fur lay over everything, and the smell of tobacco smoke hung in the air, for Margery also smoked like a man. Aye, certainly Margery would know what to do.
Paul’s was filled with people as always, but at noon the crowd emptied out to hear a proclamation read on Cheapside Street. She closed her stall and went over to talk to George. “Care to take your dinner with me?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said.
As they walked together she wondered if she should tell George about the brownie. But before she could decide he said, “I have something important to ask you.”
“Aye?”
They reached the cookshop and he directed her to one of the tables. She could not remember ever seeing him so solemn.
“I have given much thought to what I am about to say,” he said as they sat down. “As I have told you, I do not believe it is right for a woman to live alone. And I care for you, Alice, and will always wish you well. I wonder if—well—if you would marry me.”
“Marry?”
“Aye. Is it such a surprise, then? I had thought we were friends.”
“Aye, we are. But marriage … I had not looked to marry again.”
“Truly, I believe you could do no better than to marry me, immodest though it sounds to say it. We have known each other a long time, and I believe our shops would thrive together. You have certain copyrights, and the monopoly on the playbills—Do you think I speak in jest, then?” he asked, for she had started to laugh.
“Oh, George,” she said. “My dear, sweet friend George. I am sorry, but you make it sound so much like a trade agreement.”
“Aye, and so it is, partly. I don’t like to see you struggling for want of knowledge of the stationer’s craft. It is as I have said—I care for you. By marrying you I can watch over you, I can see that you have everything you need.”
“I’m sorry, George. But I do not think that I am ready to marry.”
“You needn’t give me an answer so soon. I know you will have to think about it. When you are ready—”
“I have told you—I’m not ready to marry again. But I thank you very much for your concern.”
He moved back a little, away from her. Something happened to his face; it seemed to harden slightly, to become less pliant. Was he angry with her? But surely he would want her to speak her mind on something so important.
“I’m like the queen in this,” she said. “I do not think I will ever marry again.”
“And now you compare yourself to the queen?” he said. “Really, you have got above yourself. Perhaps you would like some jewels for your gown, or ladies-in-waiting?”
“Please—this doesn’t become you.”
“It’s not I who have declared myself England’s new sovereign.”
“That was but an example.”
“A treasonous example. And blasphemous too—only God can appoint a monarch.”
“Now you’re being foolish. I said only that I am like the queen in this one thing.”
“The queen is free to choose in this matter because she has been appointed by God. We who are her subjects cannot judge her actions. You are only a woman, chosen by no one. It’s not right for you to remain unmarried.”
“If that’s all you have to say to me,” she said, “then I’ll go back to the churchyard. Good day.”
By the time she had shouldered her way through the crowd to her station she wondered if she had made the right decision. George had been right; he could teach her much about the stationer’s trade. And it was hard being a woman and living alone; George could help her there too.
“Have you had ill news?” Edward Blount said as she opened her stall. “You look melancholy.”
“I feel well enough,” she said, not quite sure if she lied or not. “Only—George has asked me to marry him.”
“And do you want to marry George?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Well, then,” he said, as if that settled the matter.
She would have talked longer with him, but at that moment a man came by asking for a copy of Holinshed’s Chronicles and by the time she had directed him to the right stall Edward was deep in conversation. Could it be as simple as Edward made it seem? She didn’t think so; she thought that George might end their friendship because she preferred to live alone, and she was loath to give up one of the few friends she had made in the churchyard. And perhaps it went deeper than that; perhaps she had struck at his pride. Whatever happened she knew she could not go back to the old comfort that had existed between them. She could only go on as best she could, the way she had gone on after John died.
Edward was motioning her over to his stall, and when she came he indicated the man he had been talking to. “This is Walter James,” he said. “The new member of our company.”
Membership in the Stationers’ Company was limited t
o fifty-three people. She found herself angry that they had never elected a woman; it would have been good to have someone in the churchyard she could open her heart to. But had any woman ever applied for membership? She felt in a foul mood today. Edward had been wrong: the humor that possessed her was not melancholic but choleric.
She nodded to Walter James, not feeling civil enough to speak. He was small and thin, and seemed to be put together out of knobs: nose, chin, Adam’s apple, knuckles. His straight brown hair made a sharp angle across his forehead. She thought he was about fifty, her age.
“As I was telling Master Blount, I’ve changed my profession late in life,” he said. “I ran an inn before I learned the bookseller’s trade.”
She felt surprised; she had never known anyone besides herself to learn a new trade at so late an age. “So you must come to my aid if I falter in my new profession,” he said.
Was he having a jest at her expense? No one had ever asked for her help before. But he was smiling winningly at her, and she realized that he had not intended to joke. A flatterer, she thought. She would have to watch out for his cozening ways.
George finished his dinner and headed back to his stall. Now that Alice had gone he felt more puzzled than angry. Why had she refused his suit to her? She would not get a better one, and he knew how hard it was for her to live alone. Did she reject him only because his offer had more of commerce in it than of love? But he felt that great things could come from a marriage of their two stalls. He had never understood why poets and ballad-makers wrote and sang so much about love; he had been in love once, as a youth, and he hadn’t liked it. It had made him feel as if he were in the grip of a powerful illness, and since that time he had avoided most strong feeling the way his fellow Londoners avoided the plague.
He would ask her again, he decided. Surely she would not be so self-willed as to refuse him a second time.
A man waited by his stall. “How may I help you?” he asked.
“You should ask, rather, how it is that I may help you,” the man said. “I have something I think you will want.”
“And what is that?”
“You wish to win a lady’s favor. What I have—”
“How do you know that?” George asked. Hearing his private life talked of in this manner threw him off balance, but his surprise quickly gave way to anger. “Who are you?”
“My name is Anthony Drury. How I learned your secrets is of no importance. I—”
“It is of importance to me. I won’t have men sniffing around my affairs, listening to conversations that don’t concern them.”
“I don’t come by my information that way. Someday you may be allowed to know how I learned about your desires, but not today. What I have is a way to win her.”
“How?” George asked, interested in spite of himself.
“Ah,” Anthony said. “It’s not so easy. Surely you’ve seen the new play where a man makes a bargain with the devil. I am no devil, but like him I will not give away my wares for nothing.”
“I don’t go to plays. And I will not traffic with the devil.”
“Good. That shows a serious mind.”
“Aye, indeed I have a serious mind. And I am of a mind not to like what I am hearing. Talk of the devil, of information ill-gotten—”
“Nay, wait a moment. Think of your lady, yielding to you, eager to do your bidding. She has refused you once, but no longer. Whatever you command her to do will be done.”
“This smells of the spirit world.”
“I’m not so foolish, my friend. What I offer you has a sound basis in the theory of medicine. I can make you up a potion that will put her completely under your sway.”
“Can this be?”
“Certainly. Each of us is influenced by the four humors, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. And this influence extends not just to our bodies, but to our minds as well. An excess of some of the humors, a lack of others, and she will dance to any song you choose to play.”
“And what do you want in return?”
“In return? Only a trifle. I would like you to discover what became of her son.”
This must be Alice’s man in black, George thought, realizing it at that moment. He wore a doublet and hose of dark brown today, but like the man Alice spoke of he had the look of someone with an intense purpose about him. “Why?” he asked.
“It is not part of our bargain that you ask questions, nor that I answer them. Only that you tell me if you agree or no.”
“I’ll have to consider it,” George said slowly. “Come back tomorrow for your answer.”
“Tomorrow, then. Good day.”
George stood at his stall and watched him thoughtfully. Then the crowd moved between him and the strange man, and he turned back to his books.
By evening he was still thinking about the offer. He remembered one thing the man had said clearer than the rest: “She will dance to any song you choose to play.” The idea of Alice dancing for him, and the larger idea of her doing his bidding, giving over her willful ways, was intensely pleasing to him. And what was her son to him in any case? The boy was probably dead, just as he had said to Alice in the cookshop.
He would agree to the offer, he thought. By the time Anthony realized that Arthur had disappeared, George and Alice would be married.
Alice left the churchyard early and made her way slowly home. The house had been aired out, she saw, but even that failed to please her. She sat at the stool near the hearth and looked out her kitchen window. The light fell on the houses opposite, turning them pink, then red, and finally violet-gray, charcoal gray, black. The house filled up with darkness.
She was thinking of John. One day he had come home, thrown his cloak down on the bench and gone straight to bed. “I feel poorly,” he’d said, and that was how it had started, just those three words. She’d nursed him for a day and a half. The hard lumps had appeared under his armpits, but there had been little plague in London that season and she had refused to think about what the swelling might mean. Plague was something that happened to other people.
After he died she got up and wandered through their house. She had not left his bedside for hours, and she was surprised to see that light still shone outside, that people still went about their business. His cloak lay where he had dropped it, and it was only then, realizing that he would never pick it up and wear it again, never go off singing to work, that she began to understand what had happened to her. From now on, she thought, I’ll always be alone.
What would John think if he could see her now? Would he urge her to accept George’s offer? She was not even sure he would have wanted her to continue at his stall, but she had been unable to think of what else to do with her life, how to fill up the days and months without him. And how else was she to get her livelihood?
She and John had grown up in neighboring towns in the countryside around Cambridge and had met at a harvest festival. She’d known him by sight, of course, but she had never really been aware of him before then. That day she saw him throw back his head in laughter and something changed within her; she understood that she wanted that laughter, that energy, for herself, that she could very easily be in love with him. She’d chased him with a determination she’d never given to anything else, and when they married she knew that she loved him more than he loved her. But by the time he died she had the satisfaction of knowing that he’d come to love her deeply, and she knew too that marriage had turned out to be far more than merely possessing another person, an adventure she could not have guessed at observing it from the outside.
John’s father had apprenticed him to a blacksmith, but he’d felt the work didn’t suit him. Instead he’d spent his time watching the printers in Cambridge, the only place in England besides Oxford and London granted a license from the queen to print books. One day he’d come home and told her to pack. She had just set Arthur in his cot, and the excitement in his voice made her turn around to face him.
“We’re going to Lond
on,” he said. “One of the printers wants to sell his books in the city, and he’s agreed to take me on as an apprentice.”
That had been—how long ago? If Arthur had been a baby then at least twenty years had passed. So much had changed, so much had stayed the same. John had prospered as a publisher and bookseller: he’d a knack for knowing what subjects would catch the public’s fancy, and then he had been granted the monopoly to print playbills. But she had made few friends in the city, most of them other stationers who had only wanted to talk business with her husband. And then Arthur had run off, and John had died …
What would John think if he could see her now? “Stop pitying yourself,” he would say sternly. “Get up, there’s things to be done. You’re on your own now, so make the best of it.”
She stood. A noise from the doorway made her turn around. She wasn’t alone: the brownie came into the room, lighting candles as it went. It moved closer and she nearly backed away, but she could tell that it wanted something from her. “Come,” it said. “The revels have begun.” It looked eager, expectant.
“What?”
“Come with me. By tree and stone, by wind and rain, you’ll not get another chance like this one, no, not if you live as long as my queen.”
“Chance?” She felt slow, witless.
“To join us, dance with us.”
“I have to—I don’t—”
“Of course you do. It’s given to few mortals to see our celebrations. You’ll curse yourself all your days if you don’t come with me now.”
He smiled engagingly; he looked a little like Arthur had as a child, before Arthur had grown so strange. (And when had she started thinking of the creature as “he”?) She realized she was smiling too. “You looked unhappy,” he said. “It would do you good to get outside these walls, this prison. You can’t think clearly, packed in closely like this.”
She found she couldn’t resist him. She nodded slowly. “I’ll come with you.”
Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon Page 3
