“No, Kit,” Quicksilver said.
Bending in a fluid movement, the elf gathered up clothes where they lay -- Kit’s discarded hose, his breeches, his fine lawn shirt, his well-cut boots -- and, with cold efficiency, set them on the bed. “You must dress,” he said. “And go.”
Kit couldn’t believe he’d heard right. Even before, when Quicksilver had dismissed Kit, he’d never been that curt, never that facile. “But why?” Kit asked. “In whose name should I leave now?”
“In mine,” Quicksilver said, and something like a somber shadow descended upon his face, like the darkness of eclipse defacing the moon. The moss-green eyes seemingly turned one shade darker, and the soft mouth, so well suited to pleasant smile, shrunk upon itself and closed more firmly, before opening to say, “In mine. It was a mistake all, and I do regret it. It was only my loneliness.... Silver’s loneliness, these many years when she’s not even been allowed to exist.” The perfect face flinched in momentary pain, then smoothed itself out. “Ah. It matters not. What matters is that you must go, Kit. I bring danger on you. Nothing better than danger.”
Kit opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He knew he looked like a fish, newly pulled from Neptune’s blessed abyss and drowning in the air that sustains other creatures.
He felt like such a fish, too, and knowing it, felt angry at his weakness and his mistreatment. He felt angry on behalf of this poor Kit, this much-abused sometime scholar and present playwright, who loved only once and that once truly, only to have his love twice turned on him, twice rejected, twice flung in his face like refuse. Twice.
This Kit who was threatened by powerful, dark personages, and had naught to defend himself with. This Kit who had, despite himself, betrayed his own best feelings, his own best conscience and had not even the consolation of his own honor to take with him into dark loneliness.
He felt it as if this Kit were someone quite other, a dejected, sad being not himself.
Himself was still caught, breath suspended, from the impossibility of his dismissal.
From the moment he’d first glimpsed Silver in Paul’s Yard, the day had turned into a dream, a mad dream, a dream now turning dark and dreary and foreboding, as dreams do when the sleeper turns in bed and startles at his own movement.
Kit closed his eyes, heard the mad drum of his own heart, entrapped within his chest and seeking escape. He bit his lips hard, seeking pain and the taste of his own blood that might awaken him. But even the pain and the blood wouldn’t bring him to his full senses, and nothing would undo these last few hours.
He was trapped in this nightmare like a sprite that once conjured by a dark magician must remain sewn to someone else’s schemes and unable to beat the air free with his wings.
Kit opened his eyes again, and Quicksilver stood there, his back to Kit, all the way across the room, seemingly entranced in the view from the window, the nightlife of Southwark in full swing.
Faint sounds of that nightlife reached Kit. As from a long distance off, came a bawd’s high, insane laughter, and a horse’s mad gallop, and someone singing a bawdy drinking song.
Oh, to be out there, in that life and know nothing better. Oh, to be in the real life, of real, mortal men. To smell the reek of urine and vomit and human sweat that pervaded these streets nightly, and not to long for the scent of lilac that came from the elves, nor for their immaculate, light-filled world, or the luxuriating of their touch.
Oh, to never have known this love that now kept Kit as if apart from all others, separated by a sheet of something as hard and clear as diamond, and as impossible to shatter.
Blinded by tears, Kit reached for his hose, with trembling hands, pulled them on, and then, standing, pulled his breeches on and fastened them. He tried to do it all without looking at the bed where his clothes sat.
Each of the creases and folds on the sheet, marking as they did the path of his recent delights, now choked him with resentment. The cloying sweetness that had filled his heart rose to the back of his throat like bitter bile.
There Silver had sat, and there reclined, offering her tender, white body to his mercies. Where that wrinkle, there, folded the sheet over, she had pulled away and laughed at his too-rough attentions. And there, there, where the imprint of her body still marked the mattress, he’d cupped her breasts in his hands, and straddled her soft body.
And all for naught.
“Is all my hope turned to this hell of grief?” he asked aloud, in bitter, querulous tones born of his pain on behalf of that poor Kit who still seemed to Kit’s confused emotions to be someone else, some poor, deluded fool he hardly knew. “On seeing you after all these years, I thought, fool that I am, that you remembered me, that you had cared, cared enough to know where I lived and what I did after that cursed day when you pushed me, ice cold, from your sight.”
He fastened his shirt, whichever way, then pulled his doublet on and started buttoning it, noticing halfway through that the button was in the wrong hole, and that the doublet pulled askew on his body, rising at a tilted angle at his neck and protruding oddly below his waist.
It didn’t matter. His hair -- he forbore to even run his fingers through it, matted and tangled as it must be -- and instead, concentrated on keeping the snivel from his voice, the catch from his breath, the tears from his eyes. He was a man, and damn it, no longer the boy of seventeen who’d cried shamelessly at first losing his elven love. Men must forego the consolation of tears.
It was the only pride he had left, and a sore-tested pride it was. The unthinkable thought had come and installed itself in Kit’s brain, and he would speak it though he died in uttering the words.
“If it was not for me that you came to London, for whom, then?” Despite Kit’s best efforts, his voice echoed shrill, like a fishwife’s asking her man for account of his time and ill-spent affections. “Is it for Will Shakelance?”
Quicksilver answered not, turned not.
Kit forced himself to laugh, a hollow laughter that seemed to rake his throat like a pestilent cough. “Surely not Will, the very married burgher of Stratford. He’ll never make it, you know? Not in London. Not in the theater. He could, I suppose, make it as a wool merchant in London. But for a playwright, he lacks the fire, the verb, the glory that could be made something of on stage.
“He’s like all other country boys and will spend his meager money upon London for a few years, only to go back home to his wife and die, many years hence, prosperous and bitter, talking ever of how great his plays were that London has forgotten.” Kit’s voice lost force as he spoke, till his very last words came out as little more than a whisper supported only by bitterness and bile. Because halfway through the words, Kit had realized how he envied those young men who, indeed, had something to go back to in the country.
What should Kit do, and where be if he attempted such? His father’s cobbler shop was closed to him. From the age of ten or eleven when he should have been learning leathers and cuts and how to fit a shoe to an unwieldy foot, he’d spent his time with Latin and poetry and abstruse theological argument.
As for his spying work....
Well, and a fine thing that was. An avocation born in blood, to which he’d come like Judas by turning in his friends and those who’d thought to do him good.
It had continued in blood, too. Step by step, by insensible step, like a man that stumbles in the dark down an unknown alley, Kit had grown numb to the thought of all those people -- one minute alive and breathing and happy in their estate, and burning with their faith or with their beliefs -- the next minute bleeding under the torturer’s tools, or hanged high up on the gallows -- in Tyburn, and Westminster and, aye, even in Paul’s yard.
All so that Kit could live and have fine garments and play the gentleman.
Now, himself betrayed, feeling low and empty of purpose, Kit fancied that each of his victims’ long-dead eyes were turned to him in an accusing glare.
There was Peter Watson, ascetic Peter, who’d gone to Rheim
s and come back as a preaching Jesuit, only to be caught because Marlowe had denounced him as going to Rheims.
His dark eyes seemed to glare at Marlowe out of his faith-consumed countenance.
And there was John Whateley, still lost somewhere, still evading the law that would have his life for being a papist.
And William Cox, a puritan of extremist leanings, hanged and disemboweled because Kit had accused him of partiality for the king of Scotland. Had Cox actually said aught to justify being turned in?
Kit couldn’t even remember it, anymore.
Oh, curse the day Kit had come to London. Curse the day he’d earned a scholarship to Cambridge. Curse the petty schoolmaster who had singled him out for his intelligence and quick wit and told Kit’s father that here was a son who could be more than a cobbler or an honest burgher.
But most of all curse the day, that damned day, when Kit had first seen Silver in the closed, abandoned garden of that manor house in Canterbury. That garden that Quicksilver had told him was a remnant of the primeval forest and, as such, had an equivalent, a parallel in faerieland, where Quicksilver lived.
Bitter with dejection he stood, looking at Quicksilver’s taut back, wanting to touch his shoulder and ask fully why, or yet to cry and snivel and go down on his knees and beg -- plead -- for one more hour, one more minute, one more pretense of affection.
What else had Kit to live for? For the theater? The theater, indeed. For poetry? Sometimes theater and poetry both seemed to him a vain pastime, something he did to recapture in the weak magic of words the voice of Silver, her smile, the smell of her magic body, the movement of their love, so long ago. And that too was vain.
“Is it Will you love?” he asked, this time plainly, his voice even to his own ears cold and emotionless, like the voice of one long dead who comes back to ask the cause of his murder.
And Quicksilver, his back turned, spoke as if from a long distance off, in words dried and cold-cut, like a long cooked and cooled piece of mutton, with all its grease congealed upon it, unappetizing and solid and gagging to the taste. “I am no longer a Prince, Kit, nor a youth. I’ve come of age within my own sphere, and in my own race I’m a king, and within my estate there are duties and ranks and obligations, as there are in mortal life. I’ve a kingdom to run, and I have a wife. To my wife I owe what I promised her and that already sullied by.... But no, it’s not your fault.”
Quicksilver turned and set a hand on Kit’s arm, only to withdraw it, too quickly. “It’s not your fault. It is mine. I did remember you, Kit. Much too well. Memory entangled in my speeding heart led us both to trip.” He glanced at the bed, then at Kit.
“But I promised my wife there would be no others -- as mortals do at their weddings -- and all I can do now is hope she forgives my transgression. I have a duty to her. As for what brought me to London.... A darker errand than I intend to tell you about, Kit. An errand bound with kingdom and elven breed, and the safety of both spheres. Indeed, you are in danger while you are near me.” While speaking, Quicksilver looked down and, as if his gestures were disengaged from his voice, frowned at Kit’s doublet.
Unbuttoning it with nimble fingers, he buttoned it again, the proper way, and patted it into place, like an adult making sure a child’s attire answered to the rules of proper appearance.
Looking up at Kit’s face, he started a smile that turned to an intent frown. “Go, you fool, go, before you force me to commit I don’t know what madness. Go before the forces that I came to do battle with smell you out and come for you.”
Kit felt a surge of hope. He raised his eyebrows. Quicksilver wouldn’t let him stay because he wished him safe. Did not that mean that the elf still cared?
He straightened himself, anxious, eager, ready to die if needed to keep his tenuous hold on this worshiped creature’s heart. “I’ll fight beside you, if that is needed,” he said. “I’m not afraid of anything that comes for you. I’m not a child any longer, Quicksilver; I have worked for the secret service. I have fought, I am not afraid of a fight or of killing or dying. I have -- ”
But Quicksilver shook his head, quietly. “It is the stain of what you have done, your betrayals, your compromises, that makes you all the more vulnerable to this attack. Go, Kit. And don’t come near me again.”
Like that, the elf marched to the door, in easy strides of his long legs, and opened it wide, and displayed a swath of night outside, a dark night lit only by the blood-tinged brilliance of the full moon.
Kit, feeling as though he floated above his body -- above this poor Kit who had been sent away like a starving child dismissed from a banquet -- walked through the threshold and out the door, all the while not knowing how his legs supported him, or how his heart didn’t break.
All too soon he found himself outside, on the narrow, unprotected landing at the top of the rickety wooden stairs.
From beneath came laughter and song; the sound of voices, male and female and all ages laughing and shouting and enjoining each other to greater madness, snatching heartily at a second’s pleasure, no matter what it might cost in pain and sorrow later.
Kit looked at the sturdy oak door closed behind him and at the little window, near it. But the window was closed and not a shadow hinted that the elf looked through it.
Kit thought if only he could have made himself as pleasant to Quicksilver -- in his male form -- as he was to Silver, maybe he’d not have got dismissed. He’d thought he accepted Quicksilver well enough, yet maybe this dual creature noticed a chill, a coolness towards him. Maybe that was why --
And for a moment, Marlowe hesitated, his hand poised to knock at the door and a thousand different apologies running through his mind.
Shaking his head, he lowered his hand, turned away. No. No. Kit loved Quicksilver much as he could, with his mortal nature. And Quicksilver perforce knew that. So, while Kit could not believe the talk of dark forces, something other must keep him away from the elf he loved well.
“And yet,” he told himself. “I love in vain, he’ll never love me.”
Starting down the stairs, he looked down at the unprotected left side, down which, if he were to throw himself, he might find swift death upon landing on the hard ground below.
From where he stood, death seemed like a wonderful rest. No more to fear the rack and the torments of the torturer. No more to think of the family in which he no longer fit, of his lost honor and the myriad betrayals that had kept him alive in the dangerous world of politics where two religions warred for supremacy. No more thinking of love.
He stared at that abyss there, at his left side, and yet lacked the strength, the power to jump. “Death ends all, and I can die but once,” he told himself.
Yet that once seemed so final. No more a chance of crossing paths with Silver, no more a chance to enjoy wine and silk and pleasant accommodation. No more, at Scagmore, Sir Thomas Walsingham’s estate, to enjoy the company of nobility, the praise they bestowed on Kit, his pleasure in it.
It would not happen. Kit could no more kill himself now than had he been able to when Quicksilver had first turned him away in hasty sorrow.
No. He must find Will and know from Will’s mouth exactly what Quicksilver meant by dark forces, and what kept Quicksilver from staying with Kit. Was it true that Quicksilver was married and a king?
Would Will know? Well, it stood to reason Will knew something.
With a pang, Kit remembered the way Silver had leaned upon Will’s shoulder.
Oh, Will knew enough and Kit would soon find out what that was. And if he found that Will stood as the sole obstacle to Kit’s possessing of Quicksilver and Silver, the elf’s heart and soul, then may Will be protected by those gods who turned a deaf ear to Kit’s pleas.
At the bottom of the stairs, Kit hesitated. Shakestaff had dined with the earl of Southampton. He would soon be coming home. Kit would to the strand, and there wait for the barge to dock that brought Will to his reckoning.
With light step, he started, plasterin
g a smile upon his face. But beneath his smile and the careless walk, his heart was an anvil for sorrow, which beat upon it like Cyclops hammers, and with the noise turned his giddy brain and made him frantic.
In such a mood, he went to search for Wagglance.
Scene Fifteen
Will disembarks from the ferry. It’s late at night and the strand is deserted. If furtive figures move in the darkness, by the row of warehouses at the edges of the quay, they’re the sort of figures no one would wish to go near: there’s a suggestion of the furtiveness of thieves, the light stepping of assassins about them. Will pays the ferry man and gets out.
From the moon, suspended at the very top of its nightly arc, it must be midnight or nearing it.
Even in Southwark, it would be getting quiet, as the fine gentlemen went back to their homes, their beds and their wives, and the bawds back to their houses.
Will felt tired, pleasantly tired with just the slightest edge of wine-befuddled satisfaction.
Those words. Those golden words that had flowed, irrepressible from his lips, in front of all the fine gentleman, the earl himself.
Will had never been that eloquent. Never had he found his voice like that. It was as though his voice were a newborn lamb, unsteady and insecure in its footing, that all of a sudden, on a patch of sun and sweet meadow grass finds his footing and runs with the freedom of a wild thing, amid the sweet spring grass, the heavenly flowers.
He grinned to himself. How his poetry had changed his standing too. How the fine lords had suddenly vied to be the ones to talk to him, to ask his opinions.
And the Earl had asked him to the banquet table, and sat beside him. The earl -- that noble creature who looked so much like the king of faerieland.
Will shook his head.
Yet now, as he walked amid the warehouse shadows, setting his feet on the alley that would take him home, to his room and well-deserved rest, the glow of warmth and triumph ebbed away from Will.
All Night Awake Page 42
