Who could kill the Queen? Who could get past her bodyguards, her menservants, even her ladies?
But he heard again the conversation he’d heard in Southampton’s study, the talk of how the Queen wandered abroad, mistrusting her counselors, spying and cheating on those who should keep her safe.
“It can’t be,” he said. “It can’t be that Sylvanus would mean to kill Queen Elizabeth.”
Scene 35
Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. He stands alone, still blood-spattered, in the middle of his room. The bed remains in disarray, the basin blood-stained. His bloodstained suit lies crumpled by the door. From beneath the floorboards come the sounds of women mourning. Kit holds his dagger.
“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” Kit spoke to the empty room, the dagger in his hands, the bloodied suit. His own voice, little more than a whisper, startled him.
He tested the dagger tip upon his finger.
He’d thought of this from the moment he’d first found Imp dead. But the thought hadn’t fully bloomed upon his tired mind until he’d left Imp with his grieving mother and come here, to his room, to the bloodied suit, the mute witness of his crime.
If he could no longer control himself, if his body would wander the night killing even the one dearest to him, then Kit must die. It was the only way to avenge himself upon himself.
Feeling the dagger tip, wondering how he would take the pain of its entry into his body, when he could barely stand a cut taken upon shaving, Kit sighed.
For how could he, who had so often written about death and murder and terrible events, in fact, be afraid of death? He who had sent others to the gallows, yet recoiled from an easy end. And why did he? What had he to live for?
He spoke, his words hardly moving the cold fear in his mind. “By my troth, I care not: we owe God a death: I’ll never bear a base mind.” But he didn’t believe in God, and yet, from the darkness of his mind other thoughts issued. He’d murdered, he’d killed, he’d betrayed.
If there were a God—oh, what vengeance would not that God wreak upon Kit after death?
He thought of John Penry. God have mercy on us all.
Oh, if Kit only believed upon a merciful God.
But if he tried to picture God, Kit always saw his father, and he could not imagine mercy there.
“To die, to sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub for in that sleep of death what dreams may come?” Would he dream of Imp? Or forever be shunned by the beloved shade? Oh, heaven if there was heaven, judge upon Kit’s unworthiness for all but eternal torment and damnation.
He shook his head.
Holding his dagger gingerly, he looked at his own reflection in the polished round that served him as a shaving mirror.
What good was earth, when Imp was gone from it? What good living, when the future had died?
It was time Kit should brave the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.
If nothing else were earned, at least Kit would not remain upon earth to be guilty of other deaths.
Holding the dagger gingerly, he stretched his neck and took a light swipe across his skin.
The skin parted, a line of blood appeared. Not deep enough to kill, not deep enough to bleed much, in fact not much more than a cut in shaving.
The sting from it protested along Kit’s nerves, but he would not listen.
“It will not hurt,” he told himself. “Or if it does, I’ll scarce be alive to feel it. Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once.”
He raised his arm, meaning to bring his dagger down and cut his throat, and let that blood flow freely for whose continued existence so much blood had been shed.
But his hand stayed in midair, suspended, the dagger glinting in reflection upon the polished metal round.
Kit tried to pull it down, but it would not move. He tried to bring the edge of the blade down on his skin, but his arm would not obey him. “What wonder is this?” he asked. “What wonder? Am I such a coward, then, that my own limbs rebel at the thought of death, and won’t do the deed?”
He tried harder, his hand barely moving.
In the metal upon the wall, he saw his mouth open, and though he meant not to speak, a voice issued through his lips. “You cannot kill yourself, Master Marlowe, for killing yourself would kill me also. I’ve been with you through a sunset. We are entwined, enmeshed, so far involved, that your body and my soul are one. And I don’t wish to die.”
For just a moment, Kit thought that it was himself talking, his other half, the dark, secret half that had turned in John Penry, that had killed Imp.
Then he remembered where he’d heard that voice.
The elf in the alley, that night.
Kit looked at his blistered hand and remembered the burn of the iron gate in that alley. He remembered elves hated iron.
Kit was not an elf. But he was elf-possessed.
Kit’s hair rose at the back of his neck as he realized what had happened. The elf had possessed Kit, taken over Kit’s limbs.
Kit was a prisoner in his own body.
Scene 36
Will’s room. Ariel and Will stand facing each other, looking shocked, scared.
“Oh, if only Kit weren’t so immersed in grief,” Will said. “If he could speak to me, and understand what I ask him. He’s the only one I know who has acquaintance at court, and who might tell us which of the courtiers might be harboring the wolf.”
“Kit?” Ariel asked. “Kit Marlowe?”
Will sighed. Even the fairy queen knew Kit Marlowe. That was fame as a poet. “Do you know him, milady?” he asked.
Stepping forward, he felt something under his foot, something soft, quite unlike the rushes that covered his floor.
“Not know him, no.” Ariel shook her head. “But Milord Quicksilver did. I mean . . .” She blushed.
Will looked away from her, well understanding what she meant, by the high color of her cheeks. He remembered how he, himself, had known Silver, ten years ago, and felt heat upon his cheeks.
Looking down, to hide his embarrassment, he saw, beneath his feet, a grey object.
Bending down, he picked it up. It was a suede glove, well cut, with fringes upon the wrist and an ink stain on the index finger. Kit Marlowe’s glove.
“When Quicksilver was younger and Kit Marlowe . . .” Her blush increased and she lowered her eyes. “And Kit Marlowe also.”
Kit Marlowe? Kit Marlowe was Quicksilver’s lover? And why not when Will, married and with more reason to abstain had fallen to Silver’s charms?
In his mind, Will heard Quicksilver saying that those who’d been touched by Fairyland would be more vulnerable to Sylvanus, but he shook his head. It was an insane thought.
Yet, this glove proved that someone had consorted with Silver in Will’s absence. And it proved who it was. Did it not?
He smoothed the glove in his hand.
“You say Kit Marlowe knows people at court?” Ariel asked. “Could he . . . Could he be the one that’s been taken over by the wolf?” she asked. “I remember Quicksilver said that Kit was smart and socially adept. Could Kit contrive to kill the Queen?”
Will shook his head. The idea was bizarre. The idea was unbelievable. It was but a dark cobweb of horrible thought stretching tendrils onto sunny reality. “No, no,” he said. “A thousand times no. I’ve known nothing from Kit but kindness.” He looked at Ariel, to meet her skeptical gaze. “Milady, his own son was murdered.”
“Yes, and how came that child to be with that man, so late at night? Will, what does Marlowe look like?”
Will shrugged. “It cannot be.”
“Just tell me, Master Shakespeare, please.”
Will shrugged again. Ariel would see it was nothing. She would see it meant nothing. “He’s a small man,” he said. “Shorter than I. With auburn hair, and an oval face, a s
mall moustache, and grey eyes.”
Ariel’s gaze sharpened. Her breathing quickened. “He is the one, Master Shakespeare, he is the one.” She looked at the glove in Will’s hand. “Is that his glove?”
“Why, I believe . . . But how could you know?”
“There’s a lingering mind print upon it, one that is not yours. I shall home in on that mind print, and I shall rescue my lord. Even if he’s taken over by the wolf, the wolf won’t be so powerful in daylight.”
She put a dainty finger forward, and touched the glove.
In the next breath she was gone, leaving nothing behind, but only a spark and afterglow in the air.
Will looked at the glove in his hand.
Kit Marlowe, a murderer? The murderer of his own child? The harborer of the wolf? Kit Marlowe plotting to murder the Queen?
Will could not credit it. Kit Marlowe was a good man, the best poet Will had ever heard. And he’d helped Will so, finding him patronage that would allow Will to live.
But Will remembered St. Paul’s, and the amusement in Kit’s gaze at Will’s poetry. Why would Kit help a poet in whose words Kit held so little faith? And who had been those men who took Kit away? And how had Kit got free of them?
He stared at the glove in his hand. It was Kit’s glove, indeed. Will remembered the ink stain upon the index finger.
But Kit had never come into this room while Will was here. Once he’d stayed at the door by Will’s choice, and once by his own.
So, he must have been here when Will was not. Kit must have been in while Silver was in here alone.
Will remembered Silver saying she was going to someone who would help her. And Silver had come no more. She’d been transported to Never Land.
Will squeezed the glove. If he could not trust Marlowe, whom could Will trust?
Yet Silver had gone to someone she trusted. And found Sylvanus in that guise.
Scene 37
Marlowe’s room. He holds the dagger in his hand, and looks, amazed, now at the dagger, now at the hand that holds it, and now at his own face, reflected, haggard and shocked-looking, from his mirror.
Kit stared at his reflection, disbelieving.
Was it his imagination that prefigured another’s will where his own cowardice prevailed?
Again he tried, with renewed fury, to bring the blade to his waiting throat. His hand moved not. His mind raced.
Was an elf within him, controlling his every thought? Not Kit’s own damned soul at all, not his darker half, but something like this, something evil, come from the darker reaches of the under world to plague him.
“Ah no,” the voice of the elf spoke through Kit’s mouth, in more pedantic accents than Kit had ever used. “Ah no, you won’t lay all the blame on me. For it was your own dark soul that called to me, your tainted heart that held me fast.
“Twice, before you, did I try to possess those touched by fairykind. The first died before I’d fully installed myself. He died at the thought of blood, the thought of killing. The second rebuffed me before ever I got near.” Kit’s mouth twisted upward and smiled at him, in a suave, superior way that reminded him of the dark elf in the night. “But in you I found my match and my mark, and you will serve my turn.”
Before Kit’s tongue rested, a scream in his own voice tore through his lips. It surprised him as much as the voice of the elf, and yet he knew it was his own, his own anger and injured grief screaming out of his grief-bruised throat. “Oh monster, oh creature from the abyss, I will avenge me.”
Laughter echoed through Kit’s mouth, stopping the grief there with bitter gall, and smooth words poured out. “Vengeance? What? Thyself upon thyself? How will you contrive such, Master Marlowe? When your own hand plays you false and will not ply your dagger to seek your death?”
Kit’s eyes looked at the mirror, horrified.
“Yet will you do my bidding and attain my goal, like a good servant who does his master’s will.” Kit’s lips smiled at his blank, shocked stare in the mirror. “Ah, good Kit, you shall be tame, a common household Kit. Your evil called to mine, your darkness bound me to you. You shall reign with me upon the earth once we have conquered. And to that end, we must only kill a Queen. A Queen ephemeral and passing as is the common run of mortals. And she is old. We’ll be robbing her of a few years. Nothing much.”
Kit thought of the Queen, of his plan of gathering all warring courtly camps, and the Queen, too, in Deptford.
Had that been the wolf’s doing all along? Kit had thought himself free. Kit had thought it his own clever plan. He’d thought he’d contrived it to free himself of Poley.
Oh, how cunning, how marvelous a genius Kit had believed himself, seeking to lure the Queen to Elinor Bull’s. How great he’d believed the workings of his mind to be.
And all the time, there had been another, within his mind, spinning his own plans.
If Sylvanus took Kit to Deptford, if Kit allowed himself to be controlled thus far, then would Sylvanus kill the Queen.
And war would rage, bloody, over fields and towns. England would erupt in fighting and blood, should Elizabeth die without an heir.
To the murder of Imp, Kit would add the murder of England.
A frozen terror clasped Kit’s heart in a band of icy panic.
Kit didn’t know, didn’t fully understand, why the elf wished this, but he could see the deaths, many deaths.
All those Kit knew, Will and Tom Kyd, and even cursed Robin Poley, dying side by side in senseless fray.
And Madeleine, and Kit’s family too: that uncaring father, Kit’s soft-eyed mother, and Kit’s three younger sisters, in far-off Canterbury. All would be caught in the maw of the disorder to come.
It would all come through Kit, yet Kit could do nothing to prevent it. Carried like a lamb bound for the slaughter, he would be both victim and sacrificer, see his world destroyed, his present as obliterated as his future had been by Imp’s death.
“This is hell,” Kit whispered, his lips barely moving. “Nor are we out of it.”
Yet what could Kit do? How could Kit prevent it?
He stared at his own wide-open grey eyes that gazed upon him from the mirror.
And in the mirror, he saw a flash.
In that moment, without his thought, without his saying so, Kit’s body turned.
The elf’s voice returned to his throat, the elf’s roar of surprise, of anger erupted from his lips.
“Dare they?” the elf said.
Kit’s hand, still raised, dropped his twelve-pence dagger.
It fell, point down, and stuck a-quiver on the floorboards.
Kit’s heart sped up. Was this Silver? He couldn’t let this elf hurt Silver.
But the elf who’d materialized in the burst of light looked slighter than Silver had ever been, a blond girl-elf, blue-eyed, with a child’s wide-eyed innocence, a child’s wide-eyed despair.
She stared at Kit with anger and disgust. “Sylvanus,” she said.
Grasping her skirt all into her right hand to uncover thin legs in white stockings, she marched forward in broad strides. “Sylvanus. Give me my husband.”
She raised her hand also, the mirror image of the gesture Kit’s body made.
“Milady,” Kit Marlowe said, amazed. “Milady. I have not the pleasure—” And then, before his lips fully closed, before he gathered his dispersed breath, a voice spoke through his lips, a cold, cold voice that chilled him to the soul. “Ariel. Well met. I’ll be more than glad to help you along to Quicksilver’s company.”
Ariel stomped her foot. “You’ll not find me as unprepared as Quicksilver,” she said. “You will not find me so easy to defeat.”
Raising her own hand, she did something, and a shimmer like diffused light from a candle played up and down her pale, slim figure.
“You oppose me with that?” Sylvanus asked through Kit’s mouth. “Think you that the waning power of the hill can withstand my power? Did I not show you otherwise but yesternight?”
“That
was the night,” Ariel said. “This is the day. And you’ll not have such full control of your body under the blessed mortal sun.”
Sylvanus laughed. “You’re wrong, milady. I fed long and well, and the strength thus gained, on sweet mortal lives, more than compensates for the loss of magic that the day brings.”
A tingle ran along Kit’s lifted hand.
All of a sudden, Kit realized what that meant. Magic would issue from that hand.
Understanding seared into his mind. This elf had done something to Quicksilver, and would now do it to Ariel, whom Kit deduced to be Quicksilver’s wife.
With roaring intensity, Kit awoke within his own body. He threw all his willpower at his hand. With all his strength, he commanded it down.
Down and down and down, by slow, measured inches. He closed it, too, though the tingle continued, running through his arm, up and down.
“Milady, run,” he said, forcing his words past the wolf’s incensed roar that would have used up all Kit’s breath. “Milady, run. Be gone. He has the power to send you somewhere—I know not where, but I know there you’ll die.”
Ariel shook her head. She looked amazed, hesitated, as if noticing the difference in the voice, but not sure who spoke. “To Never Land, he’ll send me, aye, where my lord is, where no elf can survive a second sunset. To Never Land, where my lord is dying.” Tears drowned out her blue eyes. She lowered her hand to wipe them.
“You will obey me,” Sylvanus’s voice screamed through Kit’s mouth, and Kit’s hand, breaking free of his control, raised itself.
In vain Kit struggled to pull it down. In vain did he try to regain control of his own body.
The anger of the elf surged through Kit. Kit’s hand lifted. The tingle on Kit’s arm was unbearable, a scouring pain.
“Slave, vassal, vile villain, you will obey me,” Sylvanus roared, and as his hand lifted, a burst of light erupted and engulfed the blond and fragile fairy queen.
All Night Awake Page 25
