“It’s Richard,” Madeleine said.
“Imp?” All plots vanished from Kit’s mind. The thought of Imp brought a flinching inside, as though thoughts and memories skittered away from a raw wound.
“Imp,” Madeleine said, for the first time calling the child by that name, and taking her handkerchief to her lips, and covering her mouth with it. From beneath the handkerchief, she spoke, with a voice that trembled and fluttered. “Have you . . . have you seen Imp yet today, Kit?”
Make that two firsts, for his given name hadn’t crossed her lips in many years.
“No. I’ve not seen him. Is he ill?” Alarmed, Kit advanced toward her, hands extended, meaning to shake sense out of her.
But she backed away from him, step by step, and he remembered his gory condition, and that he was naked.
He backed away from her. “Speak, woman. What has happened to our son?”
Her eyes veiled, she sniffled her righteous sniff, and for a bare breath Kit thought she would chastise him for calling Imp his son.
She did not. Instead, she let out a sob and said, “I’ve not seen him this morning. His bed is unslept in. And all over London people are talking of animal attacks, of beasts who savage people. And you come home . . . . all over blood. I thought . . .”
Now Kit thought, too. His head spun. That feeling of dread, that curious flinching that his mind effected when he pushed the memory of last night to the fore, now seemed ominous.
The need for life force within him. The taste of blood on his tongue.
He had a vague idea of bodies: of apprentices and prostitutes, of incautious people caught out of doors and devoured.
Devoured by Kit?
“Go woman, go,” Kit yelled. And in a frenzy that mirrored more than masked his internal strife, he pulled on clothes, blindly, and rushed like a madman out of the house.
Scene 32
A London street market, ending in a copse of trees. Tents flutter in the street. Peasant women display bread and fruit within them. A man walks through advertising pamphlets.
To Will’s accustomed eye, the street market in Hollywell Lane looked half-empty, just as the streets between Hog’s Lane and there had looked still sleepy and vacant.
It was the plague, making her rounds, Will supposed.
Yet, with it all, there was a sense of excitement in the air. Perhaps a sense of fear.
“A bear, I tell you, a bear,” a portly gentleman screamed as Will passed.
Will ducked past the gentleman and his interlocutor, whose conversation he’d obviously interrupted, and walked past bread and fruit uninterested.
His destination was the copse of trees, as it was old enough to, maybe, harbor elvenkind.
Will couldn’t believe he was looking for Silver, yet remembering their last conversation, he felt anxious for the sovereign of Elvenland.
He’d gone out and paid his overdue rent early morning and, by means of a pedlar, sent money to Nan.
Now he should be writing, but he couldn’t sit still. His anxiety for Silver would not abide.
What she had said about female goddesses and Sylvanus was too close to the half-remembered fragments of Will’s own dream. He must find her.
“A fox,” an older man, with white whiskers, pontificated. “It will be a fox. With the crops as bad and the weather as perturbed as it’s been, foxes must find their rabbits few and far between.”
“But a fox maul a human? And to death?” a younger man asked, facing the older.
What did they talk of?
How excited everyone looked, how red of face, how fleet of tongue. And on every tongue, the same words maul, death, animal, attack.
Though sparser by half again than usual, people were more animated than ever.
It was the same combination that Will had ever noticed during bad plague years. Despite the boarded doors, the taverns and ale houses emptied by the plague, yet people laughed louder and talked in higher voices.
Will had thought it the bravery of life in the face of death. But maybe it was something else.
And there were those disturbing words. Maul. Attack. Animal.
Animal attacks in London?
“Ten people mauled in the night in London,” a pamphleteer called, waving papers. “A demon dog roams the city, punishing our sins and eating the entrails of sinners.”
Could this have anything to do with Silver?
No.
Now that Silver was gone, now that her presence didn’t make itself offensive, her seduction inescapable, Will found it hard to even believe Silver had started a fire.
Silver was malicious and often a prankster. But her pranks were in the manner of a child who played practical jokes upon his elders. She might be irresponsible, and trample, with immortal feet, mortal morality and mortal tradition.
But when had Will known her to be evil and seek the death of mortals? No. Not Silver. Nor Quicksilver either.
And her manner had been so odd, so disconnected—Quicksilver’s voice whispering dire warning in Will’s ear, even while Silver’s body pressed itself on him.
Something was wrong.
As a Sunday child, able to feel what passed beyond the curtain of mundane events that hid the supernatural from other men, Will could feel something wrong, could sense it as a disruption.
Something disturbed time and space alike. Something moved between this world and the elven world. Something . . .
He’d tried to ignore it. He’d still ignore it, if he could.
But something was rotten in London, and Will’s intuition whispered to his reason that he should not have turned Silver away, that he should have listened to Silver.
What if Silver were dead now?
But how could she be dead? Silver was immortal or as near it as made no difference.
Will neared the trees, shaking his head.
“A wolf, I tell you, man, it was a wolf,” another man shouted. “I caught a glimpse of it, early morning, a grey thing with bristling fur.”
“Bahh. Wolf, this far in London. When have you seen a wolf, sirrah? Dog, more like, gone feral,” the man’s interlocutor argued.
But in Will’s mind, an image formed, of a wolf-dog with a square head, powerful jaws, and a squat, low-slung body.
Sylvanus. Hadn’t Silver said something of it?
Will must find Silver. Without thinking, almost without trying, Will followed his instinct to the only place in London where he could imagine an elf hiding.
It was a large abandoned garden.
There, beneath the centenary trees, lovers would go to tryst, poets to write, and youths to practice archery.
Its green shadows hid all, and kept all safe, save sometimes from the stray arrow.
Bending his steps to it, thinking it was the only place in London where Silver might be hid—at least if she were still alive—Will crossed Hollywell Street market and soon found himself at the edge of the trees.
And smelled something soft, sweet—a lilac smell. No such plants grew hereabouts.
He thought of Silver.
Looking through the trees, he saw a glimpse of white, a shape that, from this distance, looked as feminine and imbued with grace as Silver’s.
Should he continue? Silver needed him. He knew that as he knew himself alive. Yet, how offensive Silver’s behavior had been; how she’d tried to trick him into an affair.
Silver might well have caused the Stratford fire that had almost killed Will’s family.
No. Silver would do no gratuitous evil and some reason there must be for her odd almost-seduction.
Approaching the vague white form in the garden, he called out, “Milady?”
The woman who turned to face him looked too slim and blond and too delicate to be Silver.
Will recognized fair Ariel, Quicksilver’s indomitable lady, who’d dared marry and try to tame the King of Fairyland.
“Milady?” Will asked again, his voice rising on a note of his own uncertainty.
That Sil
ver would come to London to seduce him made sense, or at least Silver sense in that Silver—or Quicksilver for that matter—was a cold, magical being never much interested in anything beyond its own good, and its own wishes.
But Ariel? Ariel had ever been better than the other elves, who often resembled immortal spoiled children who went about the world throwing tantrums and flinging their toys about.
Possibly Ariel had come to London in pursuit of her errant husband. Possibly, Will’s assessment of Silver’s intentions had been right. Possibly, Quicksilver had argued with Ariel, and as a revenge, Silver ran rampant through London, intending to seduce balding poets of dubious genius.
Yes, and possibly the animal attacks were nothing but that—attacks by a bear tired of serving for human amusement and being flogged for human entertainment.
And yet, up and down Will’s spine a chill worked, like an icy finger moving and pointing and moving on, an icy finger that forecast other things colder and more terrible than what had already happened.
“Milady?”
Ariel turned. She looked drained and pale, her eyes sunken and dull, and leaking tears. “Who—” She wiped her eyes on the back of her white sleeve that, now that Will thought about it, looked more frayed and far greyer than an elf’s sleeve should look. Her mouth formed a slow oh, as her eyes showed signs of recognition. “Nan’s husband,” she said.
Will, who had been known by worse epithets, bowed and smiled.
Nan herself, who, ten years ago, had spent some time captive in Fairyland, had told Will that of all the multitudinous, changing, possibly evil creatures she had met, Ariel was the best, the most humanlike.
The daughter of a human and a high duke of Fairyland, Ariel was an orphan whose only brother, Pyrite, had been killed ten years ago.
Now Ariel advanced on Will, hands extended, looking as threateningly enthusiastic, as animated of purpose, as Silver. Only her purpose didn’t look like seduction, her enthusiasm extended not to Will’s body.
Her small pink lips strived to form a smile, against the downward pull of her grief, as she closed the distance between them. “My dear Will,” she said. “Have you seen my husband?”
Will blushed, as naturally he would, in remembering how he’d last seen Quicksilver and under which guise.
“Two days ago, milady, two days ago and she . . . Silver . . . She . . .” He floundered, neither his pronouns nor his language equal to telling Ariel what he thought Quicksilver’s intent had been, or Quicksilver’s purpose, or even why Will had thrown him out. “I asked him to leave, and he did, for I thought his purpose ill,” Will said.
At this, Ariel withdrew her hands, and a fresh burst of tears issued from her eyes, fountainlike, while her small foot, in a muck-covered slipper that looked like it had once been mother-of-pearl, stomped the dirt of the garden. “Oh, cursed be this,” she said. “Cursed.”
Will took a step back, because when elves cursed things, it might very well be more than just an expression of distaste.
But Ariel’s cloudy-day eyes lifted toward him, as fresh water issued anew from the wellsprings of her grief. “I believed so, too, milord, I believed so, too, save that I . . . . Since coming to London I’ve started to think otherwise, and then yesterday . . .” On these words and whatever recollection they evoked, tears ran down her face in such a flood that they drowned out her voice, and make it squeak with uncertain accents. “I saw Sylvanus in an alley and he said . . . He said he had sent Quicksilver to Never Land.”
“Never Land?” Will asked.
“A place . . .” Ariel struggled, her lips working to form words that human language didn’t accommodate. “A place that never was, never will be. A land of shadow. A cold land. Any elf lost in it will die by his second sunset there, his energy and magic dissipated beyond recall.”
A fresh burst of tears issued from Ariel’s pansy blue eyes.
Will, not believing himself that he was doing this—encouraging an elf—offered Ariel his arm.
“Milady, you’re not well,” he said. “If you wish to come to my quarters, you may rest there.” He thought of his landlord, briefly, as Ariel’s hand clasped on his arm, but then he threw caution to the winds.
Ariel, with her restrained, high neckline, was no more likely to invite assumptions of her being a harlot, than was Will himself.
Should the landlord complain, should he ask, Will would say that Ariel was his widowed sister, come to town to consult with him on some family business.
Surely, Ariel’s crying eyes, swollen with tears, gave the truth to recent widowhood. Will shivered. He hoped Ariel wasn’t widowed.
Silver was in Never Land? Oh, he should never have sent her forth, should never have repelled her. Would she die so soon?
By sunset this day, he thought. But she’d tried to seduce him. Yet she’d warned him also.
And how could Sylvanus catch her unawares? Didn’t she know his tricks and accustomed ways?
She’d said she was going to someone who’d help her. She’d said . . .
Will’s head reeled with guilt and worry.
Ariel’s hand upon his arm felt light, ethereal. The creature looked half alive. Something was indeed wrong, something that extended to Fairyland.
“How can Sylvanus be free, though?” he asked Ariel. “Was he not in thrall to the Hunter?”
Ariel shook her head, then nodded. “Aye, he was, and aye, how he came to be free I know not. Only, there was a menace, an alarm, and my lord went to look at it, and my lord returned not.” She took her hand from his arm to wipe her tears on the back of her fragile-looking hand. “And Sylvanus says Quicksilver helped free him.”
Will fished in his sleeve for his rumpled, clean kerchief and pressed it into her hand.
Ariel took it and wiped her eyes, with an almost impatient gesture. “Ever since Quicksilver left, the hill has been blighted, power draining from it like grain pouring forth from a slit sack.” She was quiet a long time. “The servant fairies, the winged ones, have died. Almost all of them. And the changelings . . . .” She spoke in a whisper, a low whisper, for which Will was glad since, all about him, people walked, and there were people who lived in the area they crossed, only two streets away from Will’s own lodgings, only too close, and neighborly enough to take an interest in Will’s affairs.
Ariel’s lips trembled. “Oh, Master Will, you do not know how we suffered.”
Her little face—yet oval and pale and perfect—hardened. The lines of her delicate bones became more solid, more square, her little lips firmed into something like a straight line of disapproval.
She swallowed once, as though she swallowed things she wished to say but could not. “I thought it was Quicksilver’s absence that did it. I thought . . .” She wiped her eyes, with decisive swipes of his handkerchief. “I know that he was unfaithful, that he disported himself with someone, that he . . . I thought it was that, nothing more, causing the blight in the hill, and I came to London to call my lord to his senses. But midway here, I heard him cry, as if in my mind, I am betrayed. And then I could not find him.
“Then, last night, in an alley, I saw Sylvanus, the evil one.” Her voice trembled, and her arm also, within his grasp. “And he told me he’d sent Quicksilver to Never Land. And he told me that my husband had helped free Sylvanus from the Hunter and that Sylvanus meant to destroy both male and female elements—the fundamental essences of the universe that compose all that is male and female in both elven and human realms—and in their place weave himself, and thus master and control all.”
Male and female elements from which all was woven. Will thought of his odd dream, the three women saying they were that of which all females were made. Was his dream then right? Was his dream more, then, than the foolishness that his mind spun in his sleep?
While Will’s mind reeled at the thought, Ariel’s small, determined voice went on, “And there was a child, the remains of a child, that this creature—this creature that was Sylvanus and yet not him but a mo
rtal man—had eaten. Oh.” Fresh tears burst forth, and Ariel covered her eyes in the handkerchief.
A child had been eaten. The animal attacks. The animal must have been a wolf-dog, a creature that Will had seen once, in unhallowed circumstances. In Will’s mind, the square muzzle formed, remembered, with its cruel, massive teeth.
Will heard again Quicksilver’s words, while Silver’s sweet breath tickled his ear. He’d spoken of possession, of elves possessing humans.
So, Sylvanus had possessed someone.
Will thought of his impression that he’d seen the wolf in Southampton’s garden. Had he been so near danger, and not known it?
But who could Sylvanus be possessing? And why? Even Quicksilver didn’t seem to know that.
They had arrived at the bottom of Will’s staircase and clambered up. Atop the narrow platform they squeezed, one against the other, while Will opened his door.
No one on the street below seemed to notice them, Will thought, and his landlord, duly paid from the Earl of Southampton’s purse, now seemed less interested in following Will around and pursuing him. Or perhaps Will, his conscience appeased by the payment of his debts, imagined his landlord’s prosecution of him less, and disdained to see the man in every shadow.
Inside the room, he led Ariel to the bed, and bade her rest.
As for him, he must find the reason for all these mysteries, and his poor mind was not up to all of it. It would take a genius.
Will thought of Kit Marlowe. Kit Marlowe, worldly Kit Marlowe, might not believe Will. Aye, he might even think Will was insane. But Will had to try. Kit was the only kind person Will had met in London, and kind Kit would have to help Will save human and elf worlds.
Will could always show him Ariel for proof of his words, and thus bid Marlowe believe in the impossible.
Scene 33
The alley where Imp’s body lies. It’s undisturbed, abandoned in this isolated spot. Kit runs in, looking bedraggled, and drops to his knees on the mud.
All Night Awake Page 23
