“If I were to give you a note for Philip Henslowe, he would surely hire you to play odd parts in the theater. Not big parts, mind, only this man’s servant, that man’s mute friend. Yet you’d be paid from the common take.”
As Kit spoke, he leaned in, to look at Will’s room. He leaned now this way and now that, discerning the inside of very poor lodgings.
The wooden floor was strewn with rushes, in the old-fashioned country way. But these rushes looked old and dusty. The table, upon which an ink-stone, pens, and paper rested, was old and sagged upon one leg shorter than the others.
Nowhere could Kit see a trace of the fair stranger, the woman with the dark hair, the body of an angel, that he’d glimpsed all too briefly.
Had his mind played tricks on him? Did the memory of his elven love, coming upon the shocks of the last hour, make him suffer illusions?
It couldn’t be. Kit had done much in the way of madness, but never yet dreamed a woman out of the whole cloth of his mind.
Were he ever to do that, they might as well come and take him to Bedlam.
Yet, as if to tantalize him with his own possible madness, a smell of lilac wafted to his nostrils—the smell of the magical fairykind, the smell of Kit’s lady love in that distant summer, the memory of which still quickened his blood and sped his thought.
He shook his head to clear it.
Will Shakespeare, who’d done no more than open his mouth as if to make some answer, closed it again.
Trust the clod to think the head shake applied to him.
“Speak, good Shakestaff, speak,” Kit said.
Will took a deep breath and inclined his head briefly. “I thank you, good Master Marlowe, I thank you. To own the truth . . . I dare not lie to you, as I could use a job and the coin it brings. But I had just latterly . . . that is, today, on the way home, I saw a man . . . . I believe there’s plague in the city, and I believe the theater might close again.”
Oh. Plague.
Plague again, after the plagued winter. The plague, a summer disease, had ravaged all through the cold winter in London and seemed to have vanished early spring. Let it not be back again. Kit hated the plague, the stench of death wafting through the narrow streets, the miasma of rotting bodies blanketing London as it were a vast, open graveyard.
Yet, plague or not, Kit must make sure that Imp was safe of the stalking danger of the secret service, that other plague that moved through this twilight of the Queen’s realm plucking at will the innocent and the guilty alike.
And to save Imp, Kit must sacrifice Will Shakespeare.
To sacrifice Will, Kit must know him better. Every play necessitated research. Yes. Kit would make himself Will’s friend.
“You must not fear,” he heard himself say, and with eager hand he clutched at the rough stuff of Will’s sleeve. “There will be no plague. You must try the theater. You have talent for poetry—talent such as the gods give, such as must be used for the good of all humanity. Trust not vile fate. Make your fate. Take your destiny in your own hands and mold it. Here, Will Shakespeare, let me give you that note of which I spoke. Let me get paper.” Saying this, he tried to push his way past Will and into the room, toward the table, where pens and papers lay in disarray. From that room wafted the smell of lilac, the smell of elvenkind, the smell of the only woman Kit had ever loved. The only woman and, aye—Kit remembered as the blood rose, bold, to his cheeks—the only man. The elf of Kit’s worship had been both by turns, now Quicksilver of the moonlight-bright hair, the broad shoulders, and the moss green eyes, now Silver with her rounded body and her metallic eyes.
Could it be Silver, now within that room? Kit pushed forward.
“No,” Will yelled, his face contorted in anguish, even as his solid, country-boy body blocked Kit’s access to Will’s rooms. “No. I pray, wait. I’ll get the paper myself.” And taking a deep breath, Will flung the door closed.
Hearing the latch slide to, Kit blinked.
Will would lock the door? Why?
After all the good Kit had done to Shakespeare—well, all the good Shakespeare thought Kit intended to do for him—Shakespeare would shut the door?
Was Shakespeare perhaps not what he seemed? Was he so sophisticated that he saw through Kit’s deception?
Or had he decided that Kit was insane or drunk and took this opportunity to thus rid himself of an inopportune visitor? Or was Will’s visitor that important that Will must hide her at all costs? Oh, Kit must devise a watch upon Will’s house, to wait for this woman’s return.
Imp might do it. Anything to get Imp away from that house where the councilmen might seek him out.
Kit stared at Will’s unpainted, splintered door rancorously, wishing to know the secrets it hid.
Would Will ever come out again?
But the latch slid back, and Will handed Kit two sheets of rough paper and a quill, and held an ink horn in his hand, ready for the dipping.
“I thank you, Master Marlowe, for your pains. Indeed, I find not the words to express my gratitude.”
Kit forced a smile to form upon his face, a smile that hurt his muscles with forcing it—like aching legs will hurt with one further step, like an aching head will rebel at the prospect of one more thought.
If so grateful, why not innocently honest? If not honest, then why did he look it and torment Kit’s conscience thus?
Did Will conspire? Indeed, it seemed so.
Oh, that Kit could uncover this plot. Tomorrow night, he must get Imp to watch Will’s door. One more urchin wouldn’t be noticeable in the melee of Shoreditch at night and Imp was ever good at escaping his bed and his mother’s vigilance.
Kit struggled to think, struggled to speak, in his honeyed tones, in his most polite patter. “Good Shakesstick, I treasure your gratitude, but this . . .” He lifted the quill and the paper in his hand. “This will hardly do for writing, and I would more appreciate if your gratitude were translated into a ready table upon which to write.”
Kit thought he heard a muffled giggle answer his words and again tried to walk in past Will, who without seeming to do it, adroitly blocked Kit’s path with simple stubbornness and wide countryman shoulders.
“Dear Wigglespear,” Kit started.
“No, please, Master Marlowe, do me the honor of not stepping into my abode, for like onto the abode of the Roman centurion, it is unfit for your presence.”
Kit blinked, stopped by such a heavy metaphor. “I’m neither God in man, nor are you . . . . No, Master Wigglestaff. I thought to do you a kindness, but I will not write on mine own knee while perched on this unsteady platform of yours.” His hand that held the pen gestured toward the precipice, unguarded and deep, on the side of the stairs that didn’t lean against the house.
“No.” He handed Will both quill and paper. “If this is how you treat your benefactors, Master Tremblelance, I can see well enough that you wish for no benefice. I shall be gone.”
A flush, like a dark red tide, climbed Shakespeare’s thick neck to tinge his cheeks. He swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple rising and falling above the frayed, dingy lace collar of his shirt.
“If that’s how you see it . . . . If that’s how you must do, Master Marlowe, I understand. Though I, myself, appreciate the attempt at helping me and wish you’d not take offense so easily. But I see . . . . I see it’s useless and I thank you for the good deed you would have done, even if averted.”
Kit turned his back and took two steps down the narrow stairs. Two steps, and he stopped, looking down at the smelly, muddy alley below. He expected Will to change his mind, to beg him to come back, to beg him to come in.
Then Kit would see the woman Will hid, and maybe learn what plot lurked behind Will’s innocent look.
But looking up, he saw that Will had started shutting the door slowly and reluctantly, as a man that sees opportunity vanish down the staircase of misfortune.
“Wait,” Kit yelled. “Wait. God’s death, man, you’re more stubborn than I.”
“Stand not amazed,” Kit said as he squatted and set the paper on his knee, half closing one eye against the precipitous drop on one side of him. “Stand not amazed. Reach me that ink horn.” And yet, as he sat there, uncomfortable and dangerously balanced, he cast an eager eye inside the room, at the comfortless bed, the draggled stool, the precarious table.
But nowhere did he catch another fleeting glimpse of skin like cream, of hair like midnight spun, entire, from the dreams of man. Or yet of golden hair and broad shoulder and the regal bearing of the elf prince that was the Lady Silver’s other aspect.
Will knelt and offered the ink horn.
Kit dipped his quill in it and wrote quickly, with the practice and ease of one accustomed to such task. And to none other, he thought, making a face at remembering how clumsy he had been with his father’s cobbler tools, in his far-off, despised childhood. He remembered his father’s frustrated rage at what he viewed as Kit’s intentional clumsiness, and Kit’s mind skittered away from further memory.
Philip Henslowe, he wrote. I beg you as a favor and a consideration, if you wish me to bring you my next play first, that you look upon my friend, Will Shakespeare, of Warwickshire for a role in the play you currently present. It need not be a great part. A mute servant, a silent friend will do, provided he gets paid at the end of the day.
He underlined the last line three times, well acquainted with Henslowe’s occasional lapses from honesty, with the actors that never got paid until they cornered the theater owner and, by the force of fists and daggers, demanded their share of the day’s take.
But if you would, of your kind heart, do my friend a favor, this poor playwright would feel indebted enough not to show his next play to milord of Pembroke’s men first.
He signed it with a flourish, writing his name with the same spelling he’d used at Cambridge, Christopher Merlin.
The more ancient spelling of his patronymic appealed to Kit’s sense of being a wizard, a supernatural being, in control of his destiny. Of being other than a poor cobbler’s son, circled by plotters, a long way from home and terrified.
He remembered the dark, swaying carriage, the threatening voices all the more threatening for rarely rising above a whisper. Sweat sprang upon his brow.
Fearful that his fear, his sudden recoil, would show in his face, he handed the paper to Will and started, quickly, down the steps, not waiting for thanks, not trying to force his way into the room again.
It was not until he was on firm ground that he realized, by the thin light of the distant moon, that he’d stained his fine new gloves with ink. The left one had a spot of ink near the index finger.
He rubbed at it to no avail as he hurried home through darkened streets.
Home to Imp, whose life depended on the cunning of his undeserving, unknowledged father.
Will would do for baiting Kit’s trap, but now the trap remained to be built.
And could Will indeed be made to appear the mastermind of a great plot?
Kit shook his head. Hard to tell. For who knew what hid in the hearts of men? Kit had always been good with words and the building of fiery illusions with his rhetoric. And he’d ever been bad—bad indeed—at guessing what other people knew or felt.
What if Will was truly a mastermind? What if he had secret contacts of his own?
Scene 9
Will’s room. Amazed, Will closes the door and turns to Silver, who stands at the farthest corner of the room, leaning on the dingy wall.
“Will?” she asked, and her voice trembled in asking it. Silver bit her lip, but it didn’t help. It would not keep the tremor at bay, and her voice trembled again as she piped uncertainly, “Was that Kit Marlowe? Was it Kit Marlowe at the door?”
Through her mind ran memories she thought long forgotten, memories of Kit Marlowe as a shy, demure divinity student.
At least half the fun of seducing him had come from that shy way of his, his uncertainty about how to act, how to behave, his conviction that he was doing something horribly wicked and out of bounds for a Christian soul.
Which—Silver knowing precious little of mortal souls, Christian or else—he might very well have been.
But she remembered Kit’s eager enthusiasm, once his hesitation had vanished.
Silver remembered Kit’s lips searching, seeking, attempting to drink her very soul, his lust such as only a young man can feel in the early spring of his years.
She remembered their bodies entwined beneath the ancient copse of trees in the abandoned monastery at the outskirts of Canterbury.
Once he’d lost his reserve, how he had loved, and how the love of elvenkind had maddened him, beating upon his heated blood like the smith’s hammer upon red-hot iron.
Kit had loved Silver and Quicksilver both, the elf in both aspects, not caring under which form the elf embraced him, so long as the elf did.
Silver herself hadn’t loved Kit, couldn’t pretend to. As for Quicksilver, as much as Silver could understand that side of her nature, Quicksilver had nurtured for Kit a tender infatuation that yet fell as short of true love as the light cast by a firefly fell short of the shine of a star.
But she remembered that fevered love of Kit’s, that adoration that had perfumed her nights like incense.
Remembering it, her heart beat faster, her heart beat kindly for the man she’d just seen—his face pinched by some unnamed worry, his smiles all cynical pretending and his generosity a strange, imposing one that made no sense and seemed to strike against the normal way of courtesy.
“Was that Kit Marlowe?” she demanded, grabbing Will’s sleeve and holding it until the man, seemingly waking, blinked at her.
“Kit? Yes, it was Kit,” he said. “And look you here, he has given me an introduction to the theater owner and told me if I go early, I’ll surely get a job. Look, and he signed it with his own hand.”
Looking over Will’s shoulder, Silver read the signature and felt a sick turn in her stomach.
Merlin.
Oh, Kit was of that race well enough. It had been the unused elven magic burning in him, the unaware icy power hidden beneath the eager human fire that first had called her to him. But his being of Merlin’s race meant not that he had Merlin’s power. With Sylvanus raging free, Kit’s heritage was a dangerous flag that he should not wave.
She wished Kit would not blazon forth that name as a shield, when it would shield him from precious little.
When it could well call the attention of Sylvanus, Sylvanus who fed on death and suffering, Sylvanus . . . .
Silver felt as though she’d swallowed a lump of ice whole and it had nestled in her stomach, leeching her limbs of strength. She’d thought she cared not for Kit and yet, at the thought of what might happen to the man should Sylvanus find him, both her heart and Quicksilver’s outraged feelings rose in alarm.
She had thought she cared not for Kit, but still something in her did care for him or for that memory of their joint youth so conjoined with the tender memory of his love for her.
Once more, Silver fell short of true elven ice and detachment. Sylvanus would have laughed at her.
But she’d thought Kit away from London. She’d thought him safe. She’d kept track of his movements over the years. Some protective quality remained after the lust had burned out.
And she’d thought Kit away from London. She’d thought him safe. She’d never thought to worry for him as she worried for Will.
Now panic quickened and outraged dormant affection. It was as though her youth itself were threatened and her tender memories under siege.
“Why is he i
n London? What brought him here?” She felt something like a premonition, though her power didn’t run to prophecy. She felt a cold despondent fear, a thing somewhat like what humans talked about when they said as if someone walked over their grave.
Will waved her away. “It matters not. Look here, it gives me the power, it gives me a chance to get a job in the theater. Look here, it gives me a chance to learn how to write plays by watching them acted and how the audience reacts. And you heard what Kit Marlowe said, about my talent. You heard what he said, he who is the very Muses’ darling.”
“What did he say?” Silver asked, not caring, feeling only that though elves had no graves, their stuff melting into the magic and fire that had first created the universe, something had touched her and foretold . . . death. For her or for whom? For Kit? For Will? For the whole cursed world?
Though Kit was vain and shallow, though Kit had grown older and pinched, yet Silver remembered him in the warm heat of his youth. And though there was to Will that meanness which tightened his eyes and focused him only on his wife and brood, yet Silver had loved him once, loved him truly. Perhaps—she thought, as she looked on those golden falcon eyes, the intensity of the emotions that showed on his face—perhaps she loved him yet with some corner of her being, some particle of her magical might.
As for the world, she would fain save that, too, if for nothing else because human and elven worlds were linked and a blight on one was a blight on the other. And because Quicksilver had loosened this doom upon the world.
She thought of the withering crops, the mist of magical plague spreading as Sylvanus’s dark might swept over the fields toward London. The plague had been birthed by Sylvanus’s monstrous corruption of his state.
What was the equivalent of that withering, in the elven world?
She couldn’t contact Ariel with her mind. Not without Ariel’s finding out more about Silver than Silver wished Ariel to know. She hoped the hill was well.
All Night Awake Page 8
