Alice said nothing. What would it be like to lose all your power? To give up that power, however reluctantly, for something you believed in?
“Do you remember what I told you, that day we talked about black and white magic?” Margery said. “I said that magic was all around us, to be seen by everyone. But that’s no longer true. I tried for reconciliation, and I failed. But you, I think, will succeed.”
“What—what do you mean?”
Margery drew on her pipe. “Have you talked to Walter yet?”
“What?” Alice asked, thrown off balance by the change of subject. “Nay, I—I don’t—I haven’t spoken to him since that day—”
“Why do you wait so long?”
“I’m not waiting. Walter would as soon talk to a demon as speak to me. To be honest, I think he’s afraid of me. All the stationers are afraid of me.”
“I shouldn’t wait much longer, Alice.”
“Don’t you listen to anything I say? And why should I speak to him? What would I say?”
“Ah,” Margery said. “You’ll have to talk to him and find out.”
Walter was putting his books away when she returned to the churchyard. Perhaps Margery was right; perhaps she should talk to him. She went up to his stall before she could change her mind.
“Good day, Alice,” he said when he saw her.
“Good day,” she said.
They stood awkwardly for several moments. Their old ritual, the plays they had seen together, would not serve them this time: most of the acting companies had still not returned to London for fear of the plague, and she and Walter had seen all the ones that had remained. What does he think of me? Alice thought for the hundredth time. And then, Does he wonder the same thing about me?
“I would—I would like to speak with you,” she said finally.
He nodded. “Just let me close up here.”
After he closed his stall they left the churchyard and began to walk aimlessly. Despite what she had said she could not think of anything to say to him. It seemed to her that they were each several people: the friends who had gone to plays together, the intimates who had spoken so closely to each other in the tower, the woman who had fought for Oriana and the man who had watched the battle with thoughts she could not imagine. Now she could not tell which of those people she would speak to if she attempted conversation, and so she remained silent.
Finally Walter began to talk, hesitantly. “Folks say,” he said, “that the man on that horned animal in the battle—the king, I suppose—that he was your son Arthur.”
“Aye, he was, in a way.”
“In a way? You have not lost your old habit of secrecy, I see.”
“Nay,” Alice said, protesting. “I’m not being secretive. I—It’s a long story, and complex, and I would not want to burden you with it—”
Walter stopped and looked at her. “I care about you, Alice—have you forgotten that I said so? I would like to hear your story. And I think you would like to tell it, more, that you need to talk to someone.”
She did not want to tell him. If he knew the truth about her, how she had consorted with the Fair Folk, he would surely never speak to her again. But he seemed kind, willing to listen; he had never looked at her with disapproval the way George had. And she knew that in one thing he was right: she did need to talk to someone, if only to make sense of the story herself.
And so, haltingly at first and then more and more certainly, she began to tell him the whole strange, fantastic tale. Arthur’s disappearance, and Brownie, the faerie revels and the birth Agnes had seen, Arthur’s capture and the exchange they had, made for her true son Art. They stood in the street near Paul’s, and the sun set over the rooftops of London as she spoke, and opposite it the moon began to rise.
She saw that he did not disbelieve her or attempt to judge her but heard her through with a look of amazement on his face. “Who would have thought it?” he said once. “There’s more to you than one would think, Alice.”
They had begun to walk again. As they came to back to Paul’s Alice stopped, her gaze caught by the tree near the gate. Was it the same one she had seen the night she came back from the faeries’ court? The myriad fruits that had hung from its branches were no longer there, but perhaps the glamour had gone from it now that the roads had closed for good. She looked up into its weave of interlocking branches, and she thought that she understood something for the first time.
Reconciliation, she thought. Margery had indeed been right; she, and everyone she knew, had attempted to put everything about this strange business into one box or the other. But here in front of her was the truth, this multibranching tree that would carry first the sun and then the moon as fruit among its leaves, this intricate thing growing and changing and dying. All divisions disappeared before her, and she knew then what Margery had tried to teach her.
She turned to Walter, wanting to tell him what she had learned, and found that she could not manage to put it into words. The vision, if that was what it was, began to fade; she wondered if she had realized anything at all. And yet the tree still stood before her, dense, solid, a real thing.
Walter must have seen something in her eyes, because he moved closer and put his arms around her. He asked her a question. The transport of the moment had not yet left her, and so he was forced to ask again.
“Aye,” she said, whispering. “Oh, aye.”
All the stationers came to St. Faith’s for their wedding. Art sat near them, smiling at everything and everyone, and her surly printer took up a spot a little apart from the body of people. Margery was there, and Agnes, both looking a little out of place in the sanctity of the chapel. And Tom Nashe had made it too; she felt glad to see him.
In the middle of the ceremony she became aware that other guests had entered the chapel. Once or twice she thought she saw a light in the air of the church, and when she closed her right eye the light grew stronger. Not all the Fair Folk had returned when the roads had closed, she guessed.
Afterward the stationers came up to congratulate her, and several of them took her aside for talks in which they could not seem to come to the point. “You know that I—well, I never trusted George—and even when—you understand—” She had watched them go from feeling distrust of her to treating her almost with awe, but it was the idea of her doing something as normal as marrying that made them think of her as one of their own. She found, strangely, that she could not hate them for it, that she could only accept as she had been accepted. Perhaps that made her weak-willed, but if that was true she could not seem to bring herself to care.
When she and Walter opened their gifts, she found that her guess in the chapel had been correct. For someone had given them a knife and spoon made of golden filigree, with glowing jewels set where the strands of gold met. None of her friends could afford such a fine present; it must have been the Fair Folk, thanking her at last.
The next year Art got married, to a strong sensible woman who took him to her family’s farm. He proved to have an aptitude for growing things, and the farm prospered. Alice gave them the faeries’ gift when they married. They passed it in their turn to their daughter, and their descendants have it to this very day.
Acknowledgments
Tempting as it may be to have the reader think I did it all myself, I have to admit that this book would not exist without the help of the following people and institutions: the Main, Moffitt and Bancroft Libraries at the University of California, Berkeley, and their wonderfully helpful staffs; Dave Hartwell, editor extraordinaire; and my agent, Lynn Seligman. My husband, Doug Asherman, went with me to plays and lectures, played madrigals for me on the guitar, cheered me up when things got rough, and listened patiently and with good humor to what must have seemed like an endless series of tedious Elizabethan facts. It is to him, with love and gratitude, that this book is dedicated.
About the Author
Lisa Goldstein has published ten novels and dozens of short stories under her own name and two
fantasy novels under the pseudonym Isabel Glass. Her most recent novel is The Uncertain Places, which won the Mythopoeic Award. Goldstein received the National Book Award for The Red Magician and the Sidewise Award for her short story “Paradise Is a Walled Garden.” Her work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. Some of her stories appear in the collection Travellers in Magic.
Goldstein has worked as a proofreader, library aide, bookseller, and reviewer. She lives with her husband and their overexuberant Labrador retriever, Bonnie, in Oakland, California. Her website is www.brazenhussies.net/goldstein.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1993 by Lisa Goldstein
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7360-1
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon Page 30
