Quillifer

by Walter Jon Williams

  There was a great deal of declamation and striding about—it seemed more a pageant than a play—but the long, thundering speeches were at least relieved now and again by the nonsense of the clowns. It required an effort of the imagination to view as female the boys who played the women’s parts, especially as this was a rehearsal and they were not dressed or painted as women. By the end of the play, King Emelin of Fornland had conquered the two warring royal cousins of Bonille, along with a late-arriving pretender from Loretto, and united the realm of Duisland to bring about a generation of peace. Which union had been preserved for the last four hundred years, at least until now, when the bastard Clayborne had succeeded in uniting most of Bonille against the Queen.

  The unification of the realm, I saw, was a most pertinent topic for a play at this present unsettled time. I mentally congratulated Blackwell for his political acuity.

  Blackwell played Prince Alain, one of Emelin’s two Bonillean rivals, posing and declaiming with the rest. The author had awarded himself a graceful speech upon his surrender to Emelin, after which the historical Alain was marched off to a dungeon to be quietly murdered, though the patriotic play tactfully passed over this last.

  By the time the rehearsal was over, the rain had ceased to fall, and a golden sun warmed Emelin’s final speech about peace, amity, just rule, and the glory that is Duisland. But I paid little attention to the words, because watching an earlier scene had made me consider how this drama might be made more amusing.

  After the last speech, the actors fell out of character, shambled about, and awaited the corrections of the director—which, when they came, were brief and to the point. After which I mounted the stage and greeted Blackwell.

  “Normally, we charge a penny to see a play,” the actor said.

  I reached into my purse and dropped a penny into his palm. “Well worth the expense,” I said. “Though if I am paying, I should also be entitled to offer my opinion of the work.”

  He spread his hands gracefully. “I willingly accept all praise.”

  “Might it still be possible to expand a little the parts of the clowns?”

  He smiled. “I know not if more japes will please the Queen, but they will certainly please the clowns.”

  “While I was watching, I thought of some dozen or sixteen lines which might improve their comedy.”

  Blackwell looked over his shoulders at the lead clown, who was slouching about the stage in a false belly and a frizzled wig. “Improving the comedy is not so very hard,” he said. “But I wish not to give them license, for then they go straight to gigues and bawdy, and this is not a vulgar play. No vulgarities before the Queen, not in a play about her royal ancestor.”

  “I can write the lines down. You can keep your clowns on the book, can you not?”

  “I can try. But Quillifer.” His deep blue eyes turned inward, as he considered his most tactful response. “If you intend to turn playwright, I think it only fair that you contribute in other ways to the welfare of the company.”

  I laughed. “My silver is at your service! But see the lines first, and if they improve the play, you will use them to your greater glory, and I should not pay. But if my lines do naught but mar your production, then I will open my purse, and pay you for your trouble.”

  “That is just,” he allowed.

  “Can you give me some ink and sheets of paper? I’ll have my dinner at the inn, and show you my work this afternoon.”

  He agreed, and I went into the inn and ordered a glass of beer and a bacon pie, which arrived pleasantly flavored with cinnamon, cloves, and thyme. With this inspiration I set out to improve the tale of Lord Antonius Bellicosus.

  As written by Blackwell, Bellicosus was a braggart soldier who, with his henchmen Sir Slope and Lord Craven, followed the Bonillean King Rolf about, bragged about their great deeds, made rude jokes, and fled the scene as soon as the heroic King Emelin’s banners appeared on the horizon. At the end, Emelin forgave them and sent them home much cowed.

  I improved this by giving Bellicosus a plot of his own, what Blackwell would call a sub-story. I had Bellicosus raise a company and march off to join King Rolf, intending to win such glory on the field that he would be offered the crown himself, of Fornland if not of Bonille. But he dawdled too long and found Rolf dead and Emelin already in triumph. So, he turned around and marched off to join Prince Alain, formerly his enemy, but on the route was subjected to a bandit attack, fled, and was captured by the bandits along with his little army. Having ruined himself by paying his ransom, he turned up in time for the final scene, where he joined in the general acclamation for King Emelin, and wanly expressed futile hopes of obtaining office.

  I gave Bellicosus speeches that were prose burlesques of the poetical speeches given by the other players, and made his open greed and hunger for power a comment on the ambitions of the rival kings. Once I had begun, I found I had a lot to say, and ended up by filling four pages of crown paper. By this time, I was finished with dinner and well into my second glass of beer.

  I returned to the stage, where the actors were blocking the final combat between Alain and Emelin, and during a break in the action I showed the sheets to Blackwell. He read them quickly, his face set in a frown, and then looked up.

  “This will do very well. So pressed for time was I to produce this play that I had not the time to perfect the clowns’ parts, and this I think will please both the clowns and the audience.”

  “So, need I open my purse?” asked I.

  Blackwell feigned disappointment. “Alas, you do not.”

  “May I offer another suggestion, as long as you are in a receptive frame of mind?”

  The actor raised a hand in a gesture of blessing. “You may.”

  “I notice that one of Bellicosus’s henchmen is called Slope. Perhaps he should be seen by the audience to visibly slope—his shoulders, for example.”

  Blackwell nodded. “Plausible,” he said.

  “And the other fellow, Lord Craven—could he perhaps wear a forked beard?”

  The actor was puzzled. “Why should he?”

  “For two reasons. First, forked beards are comical. Second, it will distinguish his character for the audience.”

  Blackwell absorbed this idea with an inward expression. “Interesting,” he said. “I will consider the suggestion.”

  “Have you also reviewed my suggestion regarding the purple-haired lady?”

  He laughed. “She remains under consideration.”

  I left the inn very pleased with my hour’s labors. I didn’t know if Blackwell knew enough of the court and its politics to understand the significance of my additions; but when the play was performed before the Queen and her court, many would recognize in Bellicosus the Marquess of Stayne, not to mention his minions Fork-Beard and Slope-Shoulder. The bold cavalier and his friends who meant to overthrow a kingdom, but who were routed and taken prisoner by a bandit—and who now would be the subject of mockery by the entire court, and shunned by the Queen as an unproven rebel.

  And whose wife I would be quietly enjoying, in my little apartment above Chancellery Road.

  I returned to my rooms and found a messenger from Amalie saying that Mistress Freeman could come that afternoon. She was always careful with her messengers, and used no-one from her husband’s household, and never used her own name. Instead, she would venture in the morning to court or to visit a friend, and from there choose a messenger from the various hangers-on always to be found in the street. Then she would hire a litter to carry her to my apartment, and when it was time for her to leave, I would find another litter to take her home.

  I gave a crown to the messenger and readied myself for Amalie’s visit, building a fire, bringing out two of my silver cups, and filling them with moscatto. She arrived after half an hour, having come straight from court. When I helped her free of the cloak and hood she had worn to remain unrecognized, I saw that her court gown was scarlet satin, frogged across the front in her personal style, and s
he wore a collar of rubies about her throat and strands of pearls in her tawny hair. I kissed her just below the ear, and she smiled with her little white teeth.

  “Much ado at court this morning,” she said. “It was announced that the new Master of the Hunt would arrange a great hunting party for the first week in November, at the Queen’s lodge in Kingsmere.”

  I dropped the bar on my door, and checked that the pollaxe was where I had left it—I had no intention of my afternoon being interrupted again. Then I hung Amalie’s cloak from a hook.

  “Will you go to this party?” I asked.

  “I shall now. For no sooner had the announcement been made, and the Queen publicly congratulated Viscount Broughton on his arrangements, than Broughton’s wife appeared along with her father. She’d been kept out of the way at Hart Ness, but her father must have ridden there to let her know of the Queen’s interest in her husband, for she came fully armed to the battle in a gown painted with serpents. She walked to where her husband stood by the throne, and kissed him full on the lips before turning to acknowledge the Queen.”

  “Did the Queen send her to a dungeon, or hack off her head?”

  A smile tugged at the corners of Amalie’s languid long eyes. “No, she did not.”

  “We have a civilized monarch, to be sure. What did her majesty do?”

  “Sat in that cold way of hers, nodded to the viscountess and her father, and then turned away to speak with her mother.”

  “Who was laughing and cackling in obscene triumph?” For Leonora hated Broughton and was thought to favor the Loretto alliance, or so Amalie had told me.

  “She managed,” Amalie said, “to screw her face into something like an attitude of sympathy.”

  “That must have taken great strength of will.” I picked up the wine-cups and sighed. “Yet I want the lovers to find happiness—want all lovers to find happiness.” I kissed Amalie and offered her a cup. She took it.

  “All lovers may find some happiness,” she said. Her hand played with the laces of my doublet. “But we must know the proper moment to take it.”

  * * *

  At times, she seemed much older than seventeen. Perhaps carrying a child did that, or it was simply her upbringing, brought up in a house full of servants and treasures and the political schemes of her family.

  Or so it seemed an hour later, reclining on a pillow with Amalie’s head on my shoulder, and my senses aswim with the scent of her hair and the wine and our coupling. The pearls she wore in her hair had come partly undone, and lay across my arm. She was telling me her latest efforts to raise Stayne’s ransom.

  “Do you truly want him back?” I asked.

  She gave a serious frown. “I must do some things, and be seen to do them,” she said.

  “You do not speak of him with any great affection.”

  Again she frowned. “I’ve known him all my life. I do not despise him.” Her long, lazy-lidded eyes gazed up at the beams of the ceiling. “My expectations of marriage were never sanguine. My mother told me that in service to my family, I would be expected to lie with a man I did not like, and have children by that man, and that I would love the children if not the man, and provided there were children, I could then do what I liked.” She kissed my cheek. “So, I will have a child, and in the meantime I am doing what I like.”

  For the first time, I felt sadness for the glittering noblewomen who paraded through the court in their glittering satins. Sadness for Amalie, sadness for the Queen and the viscountess, victims alike to the ambitions of one pretty man.

  Butchers’ daughters, I believe, are permitted to marry for love, if only because there is so very little at stake; but for the daughters of the wealthy, there is too much money and influence in the business for affection to overrule calculation.

  “I fear what might happen if you are discovered here,” I said.

  Again amusement creased her long eyes. “Very little will happen to me, I think. I am concerned more for you—your birth does not give you the kind of immunity my own confers upon me.”

  I tried to shift the conversation away from the implications of this. Her husband, I remembered, had raised half a troop from among his friends, well-armed and well-disposed to violence. I wondered how vengeful he might be.

  “Your husband will not lock you in a tower?”

  “He is notoriously careless with his possessions—I don’t think he cares enough for me to do such a thing. After all, he rode off to war and rebellion and stranded me here among his enemies.”

  I picked up the pearls that draped my arm, dandled them from my fingers. “I have wondered about King Stilwell’s death, coming at a moment that seemed so propitious for his bastard son.”

  “You imagine a plot?” She gave a little shake of her head. “Were there a scheme to do away with the King and put Clayborne on the throne, my husband and father would have been neck-deep in it. Yet they were as surprised as everyone else when the King died, and were away from court when it happened, with the salt sea between them and Clayborne. I think the plot was hatched when Stilwell fell ill, and thrown together in great haste with as many conspirators as were already at hand.”

  Amalie took the strand of pearls from my hand, and twirled it lazily in the air.

  “The light gives the pearls a rosy cast,” I observed. “As if they were blushing.”

  She was amused by that. “Let them blush for me, then,” she said. “For I do not blush.”

  “I have seen the color rise in your cheeks,” I said, and caressed her cheek with the backs of my fingers. She ran her jaw along my fingers, like a cat. My hand sought her breast. “And I have seen you blush elsewhere,” I said.

  Amalie turned to me, her body warm and languorous in my arms. She draped the pearls carelessly across her throat, an act that made her throat more desirable than ever it had been.

  “I do not believe that I blush,” she said. “And I do not believe that you can make me.”

  I felt myself smile. “Hardly a challenge I can resist.”

  She gave me her lazy smile and stretched her arms above her head, as might an athlete readying herself for a contest.

  “Sir,” she said, “you have my leave to try.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  * * *

  met in the morning with Kevin Spellman, and brought with me my folder containing the privateering commissions, plus a legal document I had drawn up after Amalie had left late in the afternoon. In it, Kevin and I became partners in a nautical venture, from which the income was to be divided equally. I signed one of the commissions over to Kevin, so that his ship, Meteor, could act henceforth as a privateer, half the prize money coming to me after the taxes and crew’s share were taken out. The remaining nine commissions would be taken by Kevin to Ethlebight, who would award them to likely candidates at the price of one-third of moneys received from all prizes.

  Thus we stood to win a share of the profits from those nine commissions, and without risk or expense to ourselves. Ethlebight’s smaller ships, the pinnaces and so forth, were ideal privateers, since what was required to capture merchant ships was speed and aggression, not large broadsides of great guns.

  We would be making money for ourselves, but would also serve the Chancellor’s larger objective, which was to bring wealth to Ethlebight. I would use my profits to rebuild my family home, and Kevin would ransom his family, build ships, and expand the Spellman business.

  Since Kevin met me at the Mercers’ Lodge, where men of business met daily, it was easy enough to find a notary to review our agreement, and others to witness our signatures. Then Kevin left to prepare Meteor for the outward journey, including the purchase of the fine corned gunpowder that I had suggested the day before, and I made my way back to Selford very pleased with my morning.

  No messenger awaited from Amalie, so I put on my apprentice cap and went up Chancellery Road to the various Moots, in hopes of obtaining my certification as a lawyer. None were willing to take my word that I was ready to prac
tice, which was nothing less but what I had expected. I hoped to be able to enroll as an apprentice, but as I did not come recommended by any lawyer of their acquaintance, this ambition was also dashed. Carefully I explained that my master had been taken by pirates, and that my letter of recommendation from Judge Travers had been captured by bandits, but this obtained me no leniency.

  “You seem a careless person to have so misplaced your master and your recommendations,” said one little clerk. “We desire no careless lawyers in the Yeomanry Moot. Good afternoon.”

  I was now at a loss. I had come to Selford to make my reputation as a lawyer, but that was now impossible. I had no hope of office, no prospects for employment. My only occupation, if you could call it that, was to be the covert companion to the Marchioness of Stayne—which, viewed as employment, was hardly flattering.

  I wondered what my father would have said if he could have viewed me now. Nothing good, I thought, and in a downhearted spirit I left the Yeomanry Moot.

  Yet, I thought, I had friends, some high-placed. My privateering prospects were good. Perhaps I should become a man of business, like my friend Kevin.

  I walked down Chancellery Road to the sound of bells ringing, and guns being fired from the Castle. I asked someone on the street what had caused the celebration, and was told that “Old de Berardinis hath held Longfirth for the Queen.” I knew not who Old de Berardinis might be, but I knew that Longfirth was a large port city on Bonille, just across the sea from Selford, and that its declaring for the Queen meant that the war would begin there, either as Clayborne sieged the place or as the city was used as a springboard for the Queen’s invasion of Bonille.