All Night Awake

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  The memory of the night past had guided him here, fogged and twisted though it was. He knew he’d gone down one road and then the other, and there it was the alley where he’d walked, the very gate he’d touched.

  Though his steps shied away from it, he went into the alley, step by step, each step pushed against the instinct to stop.

  His mind slid sideways away from full recollection, yet he knew this mud, these buildings. He remembered the hunger and the need, and the hot blood upon his tongue.

  Imp’s body lay in the mud that his dried blood had turned glossy black.

  The boy might have been asleep, save only for his rent and tattered suit and the undeniable fact that the body had been gutted.

  And yet Kit felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  He advanced, step on step, sure this was a nightmare, sure it must soon end.

  A high, keening scream of someone nearby disturbed him. He wished it would stop and looked around for the screamer.

  But his throat hurt, raw and aching, and he realized that he was screaming.

  He checked his scream on a deep sigh and in that sigh he heard his own grief and was shocked by it. A half-startled sob followed the sigh. Kit pressed his fist to his half-open mouth, surprised that such a sound should come from it.

  He stood over Imp’s body and met the sightless gaze of those grey eyes. Imp looked puzzled in death. As if he could not understand this visitation.

  Kit’s knees went slack. He sank to the mud of the alley. He reached gingerly, and lifted Imp’s rigid, cold hand.

  Only yesterday the child had come to him. Only yesterday. Kit’s mind remembered, with remorseless clarity, Imp standing in this alley, saying, “Kit, you were late coming home. Kit, you promised you’d tell me a story.”

  And instead, what had Kit given him?

  Kit stared, in dim-witted incomprehension, at the dead child. How could Kit have done this? How could he? What evil lurked in him? How dark was that dark side of his soul? How could Kit’s nature have separated so—the poet and the spy thus divided?

  And how could Imp be caught in Kit’s internal struggle?

  Only yesterday, the child had been alive, Kit told himself, as though by telling himself this he could turn back the clock and undo the damage. Alive, he’d been and now he was dead, and this transformation was too sudden and too final.

  How could such a thing as life be lost forever in such a moment?

  He held the cold little hand in both of his, and wished it warm and moving.

  “No, no, no life!” he whispered. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and you no breath at all?”

  The glazed grey eyes stared at him but saw him not.

  “You’ll come no more. Never, never, never, never!”

  From outside the alley, just steps away, came the sounds of the city, the cries of fish sellers, a woman’s high, sweet laughter, a man’s hurried steps.

  How could life go on like this? How could no one notice that Imp was dead? Kit trembled with the force of the grief and guilt that rose, battling, within him.

  “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stone: Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack,” Kit said. “Look, how he stares at me and all unmeaning. He stares at me as he so often did, those grey eyes so reproachful and so knowing. Well did he know and well should he have reproached. Look what my keeping from the right hand the deeds of the left has wrought. Look.”

  Steps had entered the alley and approached.

  “Marlowe? Kit?” Will Shakespeare stopped steps away from Kit. “I heard your voice and I—”

  “Oh.”

  Kit saw Will’s worn boots through his tear-distorted vision, and glanced upward, and up and up and up, at Will’s face.

  How Shakespeare had blanched. How shocked he looked. Or how surprised, as though he thought Kit insane.

  And well he might.

  “What grief was here?” Will asked hesitantly.

  Kit held Imp’s hand and caressed it.

  “My poor fool is dead. He’s gone forever,” Kit said. “I know when one is dead and when one lives. He’s dead as earth.”

  Will’s well-meaning face looked like something carved in marble and worn down by time. He looked with horror on the scene before him. “But dead how? How did the child die?”

  Kit shook his head. Hot tears ran scalding down his face and his throat tasted bitter with salt.

  How had Imp died? How could Kit explain such horror to Will, the good burgher of Stratford-upon-Avon?

  “Murder, stem murder, in the direst degree,” Kit told Will’s impassive face. “All several sins, all used in each degree, throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty! guilty! I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; and if I die, no soul shall pity me: Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?”

  “But you’d never have done any such a thing,” Will said. “Your guilt is misplaced, your grief distorts all. Who was this child?”

  “It is mine only son!” Kit said, and as tears multiplied upon his face, he stroked Imp’s blood-soaked hair. “Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee, throw up thine eye! See, see what showers arise, blown with the windy tempest of my heart, upon thy death, that kills mine eye and heart.”

  “Courage,” Will said. “Courage. You’ll get other children.”

  But Kit shook his head. How could he explain to Will that love of elven kind had cleft him from humans, that spying had separated him from reason, that his multitudinous treasons, multiplied, had turned him into this thing—this divided thing, a half of which had just killed the one love the other had to live for.

  Looking up at Will through the distorting veil of tears, Kit wailed, “Oh, can’st thou minister to a mind diseased?”

  But Will only shook his head and, practical and kind, put his hands on Kit’s arms, helped him rise. “Get up,” he said. “Get up. We must take the body to his mother, must give him Christian burial.”

  And covering Imp with his doublet, blocking the sight of those piteous open, surprised eyes, Will made as if to pick up the child.

  “No,” Kit said. “No. I must do it. For he is my son, and the burden no burden.”

  How strange that now, when it was too late, he could recognize Imp and call him son.

  Lifting Imp, Kit felt hot tears roll down his cheeks. “Alack. Poor Madeleine. Harsh she is, but she deserved not such a blow. And I bring her this grief. And yet I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done unto myself? O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself for hateful deeds committed by myself! I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.

  “Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter. My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain. Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree.”

  Will gave him a piteous look, no doubt thinking that Kit raved from his grief.

  Kit could not explain it. Oh, yes, it was grief and mourning, but it was guilt, yet stronger than both and well deserved.

  Kit had feared so much and dared so much, he’d got involved in so many schemes and deceptions. He’d flaunted his meager knowledge, he’d braved hell itself, in betraying others for his son’s sake.

  And now, watch how from his own corruption his son’s death had bloomed like a rank flower from an abominable stalk.

  His gloved hand stroking at Imp’s auburn hair, Kit felt his tears renew and spoke louder, as though to drown out the cold, implacable voice within his brain. “O, pity, God, this miserable age! What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, erroneous, mutinous and unnatural, this deadly age daily doth beget! Oh boy, thy father gave thee life too rashly and hath bereft thee of thy life too soon!”

  Grief washed over Kit’s mind, bringing with it thoughts and images that might be unconnected, but that in his heart seemed to fit with this most mournful occasion.

  Kit remembered his childhood in his father’
s small workshop: his clumsiness with the leathers and needles, the easy gallop of his mind in school.

  He remembered the masters who had praised him, the neighbors who had envied him, the father who had scolded him for daring his mind to stray beneath the bonds of decent piety.

  He remembered his scholarship and how hard he’d worked for his masters at Cambridge. He remembered his plays and what acclamation they brought, the recognition and the wild bouts of drinking and discussing poetry with the fashionable youth and other poets in the Mermaid.

  And Kit had spied, and Kit had betrayed, and Kit had turned himself from what he was so that like a sleeve made of coarse stuff but lined with satin, he’d turned himself inside out to become something that he was not: a spy and a dandy, a knower of lies, a friend of corrupt aristocracy.

  And through all this like a thread of gold in the base stuff of Kit’s heart, Imp had run. Imp’s innocence, his simple trust.

  From the moment of Imp’s birth, from the moment that Kit had beheld his own face sculpted small in another soul’s possession, Kit had done everything for his son’s sake.

  The love Kit’s father had denied Kit and that natural pride that did stem from having begotten his like and his successor, all that he had invested in Imp’s skipping grace, Imp’s quick mind, his irreverent wit, his daring ways.

  And all for this. Bloodied meat in the mud of an alley. Nothing more.

  Carrying the child, he walked slowly across London streets.

  His appearance and bloodied face and hands made passerby recoil, but he noticed not.

  He would go, like one on penance.

  If another had done this, then Kit would have killed the other.

  Yet, he himself had done it though he remembered it not, or only as through a glass darkly—the darker, secretive half of him was a murderer—and upon that must Kit take revenge.

  At the door to his lodgings he hesitated, delaying the moment of grieving Madeleine, and almost laughed at his own scruples.

  How considerate of others he had grown, now that there was so little to consider. He saw Will standing by, Will looking at him. Will had followed him here, and would follow him further.

  Will, whom Kit had sought to implicate in his own treasons, in his dark plots. Will, who would have died, as surely as John Penry, to keep Kit and Imp safe.

  Only there was nothing to keep safe anymore.

  The motor of the world had come to a stop, and in this halt, by the sudden clarity of his grief, Kit realized that there was nothing left anymore, and no reason to tie Will, who was also a father, to the ill-fated coils of his fallen plan.

  Kit put his bloodied hand out and surrounded Will’s wrist with his cold fingers. “Leave me now, friend, leave me now.”

  Will said something of which the word “Deptford” emerged.

  Remembering his plan and recoiling from it, Kit shook his head. “There’s nothing to go to Deptford for now,” he said. “Pray, friend, Will, stay away from it. Even if . . . . Even if I should, myself, entreat you. Do not go there.”

  And leaving Will amazed on the doorstep, Kit turned and went in to discharge his fell duty.

  Scene 34

  Will’s room. The fairy queen sits upon the shabby bed, her torn skirt neatly arranged, her muddy shoes demurely together. Will comes in, looking stunned.

  “Did you find him?” Ariel asked.

  The question took Will by surprise. “Find whom, milady? Whom should I have found?”

  “The man to help us,” she said. She stood up. “You said you knew someone.”

  Will sighed. He closed his door slowly. His mind was full of what he had just seen. Too full.

  He thought of Kit and the boy. Had Kit ever acknowledged his paternity? Will could not credit that, yet how fully did Kit reap the grief of the child’s death.

  How dubious the joys of fatherhood. Will’s mind returned again and again to his children, Susannah, Judith, and Hamnet, who, in Stratford, might meet an evil fate at any moment and no one know.

  “He won’t help us,” Will told Ariel. “His son has died. I couldn’t ask his help now. He’s insane with grief.”

  “His son?” The Queen of Fairyland stopped her pacing and stared at Will.

  She trembled. Her eyelids fluttered, as though in the gale of memory. “His child? The child I saw . . . last night?”

  Will nodded. “Possibly. It was a boy. If only there would be a way . . .” he said. He knew he spoke nonsense, knew he spoke out of a heart too full and a mind too drained. Yet he spoke. “Could not the magic of Fairyland . . . . Couldn’t the child live again?”

  Ariel shook her head. Tears from her eyes fell down her face. “No, Will. That is beyond my power, beyond Quicksilver’s even, even when the hill is at its most powerful. And now . . . . And now Quicksilver himself is in Never Land and will be dead before this day is through, his magic drained by nothingness. And once he’s dead, not all the magic of Fairyland, and not all my wishing, can get him back. We have limits also, Will.”

  “Oh, you magical creatures and your limits,” Will yelled. He paced back and forth across his room.

  Ariel watched him, her eyes wide, looking every wise shocked and alarmed.

  He did not know whence his rage came, but he felt angry, an anger without measure. How odd this world, how odd this magic, that magical beings had to ask Will for help and depend on Will’s good grace for shelter. How strange that these same beings who turned Will’s life upside down and played upon him as upon a fiddle knew not how to save themselves.

  “First the Fates, the three women, in my dream, telling me they needed me to save them,” he said. “Then Silver coming to me in search of help, though she didn’t seem to know what help she needed or why, and now you!” He flung the words at the queen’s little drained face, her swimming blue eyes. “What good is magic if you must come to me, poor man that I am, a poor poet, a man without words or power, without magic, or money, or knowledge.”

  Ariel’s mouth hung open. She sought to close it, looked as though she’d speak, but her eyes betrayed fear of Will’s sudden rage.

  “Oh, speak, tell me what a fool I am, why don’t you?” Will said. “Tell me what a fool I am, because I’m not immortal, not one of your charmed circle. Milady, I wouldn’t want to be immortal if in all my immortal years I learned so little and were so helpless as to need Will Shakespeare to protect me.” He stood in front of her, his hands open as if to denote his impotent rage. “Will Shakespeare, forsooth?”

  “Three women?” Ariel said. She reached a hand for Will’s sleeve and grasped the rough wool between thumb and forefinger, as if she meant to hold him and yet were afraid of his reaction to her touch. “Three women? Pray tell, Will, when did you see three women?”

  “In my dream,” he said.

  His rage left him suddenly, but something else remained. Anger still, at this fairy world, that so enmeshed itself in his world and yet would not help him, and could do no good. An impotent magic it was, a vain enchantment.

  “In my dream, I saw three women. They said they were the three aspects of the feminine, part and parcel of all that’s female in the universe. That humans had created them—created them—from their thoughts and dreams and their mad need to order reality.”

  In Ariel’s eyes, something like hope quickened. Her breath came fast, through half-parted lips. She swallowed, and spoke again in a trickle of voice. “What did they tell you, Will, in your dream?”

  “They told me they wanted me to save them,” Will cackled. “I, Will Shakespeare, should rescue them from Sylvanus, who meant to murder them. But lady, it was all a dream, a dream and nothing more.” He stopped. Sylvanus was free. Sylvanus had injured the Hunter. Will remembered Quicksilver saying so. Was it only a dream?

  “Murder the female element? Yes, Sylvanus spoke of it. I thought it was vain bragging.

  “But if they felt it, if they came to you in your dream, then perforce he can truly do it. Will, what else did they say?�
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  “They said if I rescued them, they would make me the greatest poet ever alive,” Will said, his voice drawing out, and drowning itself in empty despair. He made a face.

  But Ariel stared at him, serious and solemn. “Then I say it’s time you earned your fee, Will,” she said. “Sylvanus is abroad and possessed of a human body, which he must be using in some way. Why would Sylvanus need a human body, Will? He could kill well enough without it. The pestilence, alone, that he unleashed upon the world, the blight of power that drained Fairyland, could have decimated half a continent. So, why did Sylvanus need a human body? To kill one of the female aspects, you say, but how?”

  In his mind, Will heard Silver babbling about the female elements and sympathetic magic. He could feel Silver’s hands upon him, her breath hot and sweet on his ear, and he could hear Quicksilver’s urgent, businesslike voice speaking to him.

  Will stopped his pacing, faced Ariel. “Milady,” he said. “What’s sympathetic magic?”

  “Oh,” Ariel said. “Oh.” Her eyes grew big. “It’s when you take an object and, prefiguring upon it a person, maim or wound the first object, to hurt the being symbolized. Did the three aspects speak to you of this? You must tell me, Will.”

  In a panic of anxiety, she grasped at his doublet.

  He shook his hand. “No, lady, no. Silver—Quicksilver—told me about this. He told me that Sylvanus must be trying to perform sympathetic magic, and asked if we had a female priestess or a great female figure that could incarnate the female aspects, or one of them.”

  Ariel’s mouth half-opened. “And do you?”

  Will took a deep breath. His mind was clearer than it had been with Silver’s arms around him, Silver’s breath upon his face.

  He thought about the maiden, the matron, and the crone.

  There was only one woman in all of Britain who could figure one of them: the Virgin Queen worshiped by her subjects as much for her royalty as for her virginity.

  “No,” he said when he could get breath. “No. It’s monstrous.”

  In his mind he saw the Queen, in her barge on the Thames, gliding regally over the black water, oblivious and impervious to her subjects’ sufferings and the plague that ravaged the land.