Any Man So Daring

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  For here was the puzzle, here the coincidence that haunted Will’s mind like a bad dream standing in wait through a sleepless night.

  Will Shakespeare had never written much worthy of note up to the night of Kit’s Marlowe’s death. And then, as though through a transference of power, a magical transfusion of the poetical vein, he’d found himself able to write: to write words like Marlowe’s.

  But were these Marlowe’s words, grafted onto Will Shakespeare like an alien strain onto the homely vine? And if so, did Will deserve one coin of the money he’d earned? Or should he cease writing and let Marlowe rest in Peace in his unmarked grave in Trinity churchyard in Deptford?

  The need to write, the need not to write, the words trying to emerge, the fear that these were not his words, blazed behind Will’s eyes in pounding headache. Impulses dwelt within him, locked in close fight like relentless duelers, with his writing as a prize.

  He was late with his writing. It had been more than a month since he’d promised Ned Alleyn, the chief investor and share holder in Lord Chamberlain’s men, that he’d have a play for him. More than a month since that play had been set to open up on the boards of the Theater.

  But no more of the play was written than that one sentence upon the page, and now, thinking about it, Will knew — knew — that he could never write it. For this play would be about a man betrayed by a woman into giving up his power.

  Even the theme was Marlowe’s and not Will’s. Marlowe had written about war and masculine courage and the danger of love and feminine gentleness. Women were either near onto inanimate objects in Marlowe’s plays — bargaining chips in the games of male power -- or vile seductresses.

  And here Will was--Will, who’d been married since he was nineteen and who loved his absent Nan as tenderly as man could love woman. Why should he echo Marlowe’s themes and Marlowe’s philosophy, save that Marlowe’s ghost was in his brain and infected his thought?

  Will put his hands over his eyes and groaned. It seemed to him, for just a second, that his groan was echoed in Marlowe’s tones from just behind him and to his left.

  If he opened his eyes and turned, would he see Marlowe standing there? Russet hair pulled back into a pony tail, one large, almond-shaped gray eye watching Will with weary amusement, while his other eye trickled the blood and brains extracted from it at dagger point?

  Instead of turning, Will closed his eyes and called to the still room behind him, to the mundane sounds of the wakening streets outside, “Stay, illusion,” he said. “If you have any sound or use of voice, speak to me. If there be any good thing to be done, that might do you ease and grace to me, speak to me. If you are privy to fate which, happily, foreknowing may avoid, oh, speak! Or if you have uphoarded in your life, extorted treasure in the womb of earth, for which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, speak of it. Stay and speak.” And hearing a slithering and a sound like the door opening, he called out. “Stay, Marlowe.”

  “Will?” a voice asked.

  Will jumped, overturning both the stool upon which he’d perched and the inkwell.

  The inkwell bled upon his sleeve and poured its rich black liquid on paper and table, dripping its excess onto the floorboards.

  Will, his heart at his throat, the lace of his sleeve dripping with ink, realized all too late that the voice he’d heard was the uncertain, shy voice of Ned Alleyn, theater entrepreneur, insecure financier of plays and poets.

  “Will, to whom talk you?” he asked again. “And why did you call Marlowe? I knocked upon your door, but you answered not, and so I came.”

  Feeling like a fool, Will turned and lifted his hand to pull back his hair.

  He felt the moisture on his hand too late, and realized that he’d painted a black streak onto his forehead.

  “Er...” Will said and, once more, nervously, he ran his hand back upon his forehead and hair. “Er.”

  “All you playwrights are mad,” Ned said.

  Ned Alleyn was a medium-sized man, with medium-colored hair and medium-colored skin. He wore his suit shabby and much rubbed, the green velvet faded in spots and, in other spots, showing the weave beneath.

  Ned could have walked unremarked into any assembly in this town. In fact, the only thing at all remarkable about him was his brown eyes. Not for their color which, like the rest of Ned’s person, showed that eagerness not to be noticed, that urge to blend in that made Ned Alleyn so commonplace. But in those normal, unremarkable eyes something burned, something urgent and immediate, so urgent and immediate that it seemed to hold in itself the flickering flame of madness.

  When he had first met Alleyn, when Will had first started writing plays for Lord Chamberlain’s men, Will had flattered himself that the keen expression in Alleyn’s face was genius and passion for theater.

  But over the next couple of years, Will had identified the true cause of Alleyn’s expression: it was fear.

  The financier had convinced Ned’s father-in-law, Phillip Henslowe, to allow Ned to finance the start of this new theater company. Perhaps Ned truly loved theater and what went with it. But Ned hadn’t realized, perhaps still didn’t realize, what it took to make money in theater. Phillip Henslowe’s own forays into the theater had been well financed, by brothels and gambling businesses.

  But Ned was an honest man, and he was going at it with clean hands. Often the funds felt short, and, on occasion, the actors had to storm his office and demand payment before their shares were disbursed.

  The look in Ned’s eyes was sheer, manic fear that his acting company would fail and that he’d be ruined. And today it seemed to Will it burned with heightened strength.

  He stepped farther into Will’s room, on tiptoe, as though he were afraid of waking someone. His face looked pale enough to be that of a ghostly apparition.

  Will cleared his throat. “Morrow, Ned,” he said. “What brings you to my abode so early?”

  Because it was not normal for Ned to be here, it was not normal for Ned to come into his employee’s rented rooms thus, without a knock, without a by-your-leave.

  The entrepreneur’s eyes widened, as though he were an intruder caught in an unlawful incursion, and his hand went to his throat, as though feeling the noose with which thieves were hanged. His voice issued from his lips small and frighted.

  “Er...” he said. “Your play. You said you’d have a play for us in a week. That was three weeks ago. Where is your play, Will? Can I look at it, can we have it, in foul papers if it needs be? For the rehearsal.” His brown eyes rolled madly about the room as though trying to find, in the spare, carefully made bed, in the neat trunk, in the desk with its piles of clean paper, a hidden play, a stowed-away manuscript.

  Finding none, his gaze returned to Will and bore with mad panic into Will’s own eyes. “Will, the receipts are down. Everyone has seen your Merchant of Venice.” Ned wrung his hands together, as though one of them were a wet rag and the other one the washerwoman’s hand. “An excellent play, Will,” he assured, confidentially. “But all the other companies are presenting it now, and we have nothing new for to bring in the people, and our coffers are empty. Winter will come soon, Will, and I don’t know how we’ll survive through winter.” His gaze dwelt, amazed, on Will’s lace, peeking at sleeve and collar. “I know your long poems, Venus and Adonis, and the other, the one about the rape, give you some protection from the miserable conditions of the theater. And, at any rate, your plays are worth all we pay for them. Only we need another one, Will. Is it ready?”

  The panicked cascade of his words having finished tumbling from his lips, Ned stared at Will, the intelligence of his gaze sharpened by galloping fears. Behind his ordinary brown eyes marched armies of despair, brandishing flags of hunger and privation.

  Will felt color climb to his cheeks, for the play should have been ready, could have been ready, more than a week ago, but for that he’d delayed, because he felt Marlowe’s words trickle through his incapable fingers onto the waiting paper.

  Will f
elt himself nothing but a vessel for the doomed genius of the late Kit Marlowe and he wanted to be more. He wanted to write his own plays. He wanted to be applauded for his own work.

  Yet, how to explain this to Ned, whose very blood ran with ciphers and figures, whose fear was fueled by a tide of red ink upon the company books, whose very life depended on the take of the theater on any given afternoon.

  “The play will be done... er... very soon,” he said. He would have to write it. He would have to write it no matter whose it turned out to be, he thought, staring at Alleyn’s eyes and feeling Ned’s fear like a palpable thing, like a living creature, sniffing about the room and looking for an escape route. “The play will be done.”

  “Do you have part of it?” Ned asked. He stood on one leg, an anxious stork. “Do you have part of it, some papers I can give the men to rehearse? They are as dispirited as... well, they are dispirited. They see no end in sight to empty theaters. You may well imagine. If you can give me a little, a few words...”

  Will swallowed and shook his head. “Not yet, but I will. I promise you I’ll have it ready soon. It’s called Vortigern and Rowena and I have all the scenes laid here.” He tapped his head. “I have all the scenes, and I know what to do. I just have to write it. A simple matter.”

  Ned’s eyes widened again, surprise and confusion in them. “But you’ve had two extra weeks,” he said. “And you wrote nary a word? What is wrong?” Ned’s small, sensitive nose sniffled at the stale air of the room, as though looking for something — alcohol? Or vestiges of madness? He advanced into the room, approached Will, with every step drawing closer and yet giving the impression of cringing away, as if afraid of giving offense or causing harm. “What is wrong?”

  Will shook his head and shrugged.

  “Oh, it scares me. Much does it scare me,” Ned said, and his hand, again, went to his throat, as though feeling the constriction of a noose. “Your face just now, your expression. Oh, it misgave me and made my heart turn on itself, for it was Marlowe’s expression that last month before he was killed — it was the look of a man with a devil at his heels and burning fire before him. Are you in trouble, Will? Trouble like Marlowe’s?”

  Now the frighted rabbit that Ned normally personated became something other, something different — an eagle, impassive of eye, undeniable of voice — his gaze narrowing upon Will like the gaze of an angel seeking out sin, his voice the voice of an avenging preacher demanding confession.

  Will drew back. Did Ned have to mention Marlowe? Did he have to pronounce Marlowe’s name? Did he have to compare Will’s expression to Marlowe’s?

  “If you mean I’ve gone all fond of boys and tobacco, as Marlowe claimed to be, then no. I suffer from no such ill.” But as he said it, it seemed to Will he heard Marlowe’s light laughter, Marlowe’s careless voice declaiming, All that don’t like boys and tobacco are fools.

  And Will knew, knew with a deep certainty as never before that Marlowe’s outrageous statement was foolishness, designed to get attention and little else. Designed to put a soothing balm in Marlowe’s aching soul, Marlowe’s aching heart by shocking other people.

  Because Marlowe had loved neither boys nor tobacco. Marlowe had loved the king of fairyland. Or at least the king of fairyland in his female aspect as Lady Silver. Will had never wished to know how Marlowe felt about Silver’s male aspect, the king proper, King Quicksilver of the Realms Above the Air and Beneath The Hills Of Avalon.

  Just thinking on Silver it seemed to Will that he saw her white skin, her jet-black hair, felt her silk-soft skin upon his weathered cheek, the petal-tender touch of her lips on his lips.

  He jumped, startled.

  Oh, he hated fairyland and all that went with it.

  Marlowe had died because of his love for the cursed elf. But Will had other loves — his wife, his daughters, his only son — he would not be caught unawares. He would not die for such a foolish thing as a bit of magic, a twist of glamour, the illusory love of elves, those creatures colder than moonlight, eternal as time, and more insensitive to human suffering than impenetrable granite.

  Did Marlowe follow him, did Marlowe’s words echo through him because Will alone knew that Marlowe had died as a hero, not as debauch?

  Will touched the tips of his fingers to his lips, where he’d felt as if the shadow of the elf’s touch, and looked guiltily at Ned Alleyn.

  “And there you go,” Ned Alleyn said. “There you go, jumping at shadows and blushing at nothing. Thus did Marlowe act too, and then, the next thing we heard, he had died of the plague, and then this was not true, and he’d died in a duel in a bawdy house. And then again, there are rumors, rumors that go afoot in the night and hide themselves in daytime — rumors that Marlowe worked for the privy council and it was by them that he was killed.” Ned, this new Ned that was more father than cowering entrepreneur, fixed Will with a cold eye, and put his hands on his hips and asked. “Are you involved in secret work, Will? Do you plot?”

  At this Will laughed. He laughed before he could contain himself. Did he plot?

  Oh, what were plots? He’d been involved in plots and counterplots, in the warp and weft of fairyland politics and murderous intrigues.

  Fourteen years ago — was it that long? — when his Susannah was a new born babe and Nan but a new bride, they’d both been stolen by the then king of fairyland.

  To reclaim them, Will had waded into fairyland politics and drunk deep the fountain of intrigue.

  Did he plot?

  Three years ago, with Marlowe, he’d rescued the king and queen of fairyland — and the whole mortal world with them — from a power darker than any dreamed by cloistered monks in their worst nightmares, or the darkest visions of mystics who saw apocalypse and destruction in the shadowed years ahead.

  Oh, Will plotted, had plotted and now he wanted to plot no more. He wanted to remain a mortal among mortals and to know no more of fairyland and its dark corners.

  His laugh halted, abruptly, on something like a hiccup, and Will read alarm in Ned Alleyn’s scared features.

  Ned’s eyes looked like they’d drop out of his face, and their panicked look had become something else, a stare of great cunning, an examining glare, like that of a physician with a very ill patient. “If it’s not plots,” he said. “If it’s not plots, then perhaps it’s witchcraft, friend Will.” Ned’s hands grabbed Will’s sleeves and held tight -- white, thin fingers grasping the black velvet, like spiders clinging to the sides of a gallows. “Perhaps it’s witchcraft. Perhaps you’ve been charmed.”

  Will felt blood respond to his cheeks, though his lips remained mute. Had he been charmed? Who knew? Once you’d been touched by the fairyworld, would you ever be clean again? Had not the fairyworld sought Marlowe out, thirteen years after Marlowe’s last involvement with them?

  Will shook his head to Ned Alleyn’s question deferring answer.

  Ned sighed impatiently. “You actors and playwrights are all the same — those of you who keep your wives far away. Looking for young ladies to still your pain and idle away your solitude, you scant notice if the lady is good or means you evil. And most such bawds, perforce, mean you evil. I, myself, always thought that was what brought Marlowe down — an evil word pronounced by some hag in some black midnight.” Now Ned pushed his face close to Will’s and asked in a confidential whisper, “Did you, perhaps, Will, disappoint some woman, lie to some bawd, and bring on yourself the cooking of bats and dead man’s fingers in a spell that makes your blood boil and your mind race?”

  Will tried to shake his head, but what if his problem were truly enchantment? For Marlowe had died in a horrible manner, killed by a supernatural being. Perhaps Marlowe walked the Earth, full of hatred or need for revenge. Perhaps Marlowe...

  Again, Will felt as though Marlowe stood just behind him, Marlowe’s grave-cold breath brushing his neck and making the hair there stand on end.

  Should Will turn he would see Marlowe standing there, staring at Will with amused pity in
his one remaining eye.

  The feeling was so intense that Will did not dare turn and instead stared at Ned’s face and remained still feeling like a hunted animal brought to ground and unable to move.

  “That is the problem, is it not?” Ned said, softly. And, without waiting for an answer, added, “Get yourself to Shoreditch. There, beside the sign of the snake, you shall find a small brown door, which, when knocked upon, will reveal a mistress Delilah. Mistress Delilah will remove the ill that’s been done to you quickly enough and then can you write my play.” Ned smiled, the sweet smile of the completely deranged who, having obsessed on something, care for nothing else. “And have it ready a week hence.”

  Will swallowed and made a sound that might be interpreted as assent. Was Marlowe’s ghost truly standing behind him? And if he were, would Ned Alleyn see Marlowe?

  Ned looked only at Will, and spared no look at the shadows behind Will. “Good. Get you to Mistress Delilah. She will not disappoint.” Thus, with a tap on Will’s shoulder, he turned on his heel and left the room, never turning back.

  Will wanted to scream for him to turn back, wanted to yell that Ned should turn back and look — look behind Will and see if Marlowe’s ghost stood there.

  Mistress Delilah, Will thought. Beside the sign of the snake in Hog’s Lane.

  Well did Will know Hog’s lane, having lived there, hard by Hollywell, in Shoreditch, where the Rose theater had been located in which Marlowe’s plays had found abode and applause.

  It was a hard-scrabble district, full of raw, shoddy construction and the people who could afford nothing better: recent migrants to the city, lost souls, vagabonds and those living just outside the law. A fit place for a witch.

  Going to see a witch was against the law, a minor act of sacrilege and heresy that, depending upon the law’s mood, could warrant either penance and a fine or jail, or even death.