All Night Awake

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  The most marvelous transformation had taken place in Silver, more wondrous than her change between male and female forms, because that was natural for Silver and this was quite different.

  Silver had sat up, all in one movement, feebleness and exhaustion seemingly forgotten, shed like an ill-fitting dress. Sitting up in bed, her eyes animated, her cheeks and lips tinted with a faint blush, she said, “Kit Marlowe? Kit Marlowe, the playwright? He’s in London?”

  Will all but groaned. Even in the realm of faerie, apparently Marlowe, the muses’ darling, held sway and made sovereigns and servant fairies alike swoon.

  Will’s voice, as he responded, came out sharp, edged all around with professional envy. “Yes. He’s in London. Why? Do you perchance know him?”

  Silver opened her little heart-shaped mouth, as if she were going to speak, then shook her head, and when she did speak, her voice sounded not faint and yet so far away that it might be coming from the faerie realm itself.

  “No,” she said. “No. I thought I did. But it was a dream. A dream I dreamed, a long time ago.” And then, rallying with sudden animation, she sat up and smiled at Will. “Just give me asylum here, and assist me in looking for any signs of my brother, Will. You can look by day and I by night, since we fairies run in the night, by the triple Hecate’s team, from the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream. You search by day and I by night, and though we share a home, you’ll scarcely see me.” She smiled at Will, a melting smile, sweet and hollow like a confect built around an empty nutshell. “Day and night awake, evil will not surprise us.”

  Scene Eleven

  Night has fallen over Southwark. The many small workshops close, the bawdy houses open. If anything, the area is more animated than ever during the day. Gentlemen in fine clothing and of fine manner stream towards its narrow, crowded streets. And in one of those streets Kit Marlowe stands, in the shadow of a closed workshop. He moves out of passerby ways seemingly without noticing them. His eyes and his whole being are riveted on a window of a garret facing him, a window through which the faint light of a candle shines.

  Kit stood at the corner, and looked up at the window of Will’s lodging.

  He’d seen Will depart. When the door had first opened, Kit’s heart had sped and, breath suspended, Kit looked across a street alive with dandies and their light women; loud with shouting and greeting and joyous, wine-induced singing.

  But only Shakespeare came out, old Shakespeare, with his harried look of one raised in a family mired in debt, his receding hair, his suit of old velvet, plain and black, well cut but worn through and of poor fabric, making war on fashion and taking no quarter.

  Kit’s heart, which had risen to a fever pitch of crazed beating, subsided, like a disappointed child. And like a child at a big celebration, where he is ignored and forgotten, Kit now followed Will’s retreating back with anxious gaze, and now turned to the distant window and its flickering, distant light, like the same child wishing for a forbidden treat, placed out of reach.

  Should he make bold to go up the steps? And why not? Who was there to see his humiliation, but the elf? The elf who already knew Kit lost to all care, forgotten to all decency. Forsooth, he would know so, as he knew Kit, and he knew Kit and had drawn Kit’s heartstrings like an easy bow, aimed at a target once and then dropped.

  But yet, to face the same scorn twice.... Fearing the elf’s scorn, Kit poured scorn on his own cowardice. Was his liver so weak he would thus be, yoked to his fear where he might emerge victorious?

  Kit Marlowe had faced men in lethal fights and had tinged his sword in blood. And now he’d stand, like a schoolboy, at a street corner, hoping for a token from his maid fair. His elf fair....

  He sighed, a deep, drawn sigh, and the sound of it, plaintive, escaping through his half-parted lips, woke him to his longing, his desperate craving.

  The shame of it, the shock of it, more than any new found courage, propelled him, up the stairs, and up and up and up.

  The rickety steps swayed under Kit’s feet, as his well-cut suede boots, a gift from his cobbler father, landed solidly on the stairs. No guardrail protected Kit on the right side, which was left open over the abyss all those stories below. One sudden step and he’d have been lost, gone over the side, to splatter all over the dandies and their well-arrayed horses, aye, and their well-arrayed mistresses too.

  But the abyss he faced was much deeper, the death he feared much stronger than a mere drop a few feet down, to the muddy street and the indifferent spectators.

  Yet, his feet carried him, with winged force, and with winged fear, with sweat dripping from his hands, with his heart beating, beating madly beneath his fine lawn collar, and making his velvet doublet tremble with its beating force.

  Kit’s hand hit the rough wood of the door, once, twice, hard, and yet, sounding timid compared to the deafening beat of Kit’s blood rushing through his veins, turning his thoughts to nothing but rushing water, rushing, rushing towards an unknown ocean.

  There was a little window there, invisible from the street. It stood at the left of the door, a tiny window, no more than four squares of glass, held together by a cross-shaped frame of lead. Big enough that the person within could see who knocked at his door. A good precaution and fair, when living in Southwark, outside the city proper, where patrols were rare, where the apprentices often rampaged, and where such dubious element came to roost as jugglers and bawds and profligate noblemen attracted by the bear pits, the bawdy houses, the gambling in the taverns.

  A roar rose from that night life down on the street, a threat like that from the serpent in the garden that, having slept all hot, livelong day beneath a moist, dark rock, rises and strikes and, with maddened force, seeks out some to tempt and some to kill.

  But to Kit all the roar and the noise of the nightlife was as nothing, no, less than nothing -- the twittering of birds, in a garden far away, far removed from him in both time and space.

  He heard nothing, and he saw nothing, save the quick steps inside the room, the shadow that obscured the small window, the vague shape of a face that shone through the distorting glass.

  He knew that the person in there was Silver, Will having left. There was no escaping from it.

  And Kit wondered how he looked through that glass, to Silver’s magic eyes. As dirty as the glass looked, a human would have had to open the window to look out. But an elf would see differently. What could an elf see? In his short time with Silver, Kit had learned that the elf could stop the rain from wetting them or command the trees not to rustle in the wind. What else could she not do?

  Kit heard an exclamation from inside, too muffled and distant for him to be sure it had been anything more than a voice.

  Too early to tell what form the elf took. It didn’t matter. Marlowe’s heart, once given, had been given to both forms and he felt as helpless to withdraw it from the possession of one as he’d been to give it to the other.

  The door opened.

  Silver stood there, the elf’s female form, her black hair falling unfettered down her back, every strand seemingly charmed into place. And her broad silver skirt had been slashed to display a diaphanous white fabric beneath, that revealed , in its transparency, the length of Silver’s white legs. That inner gown that, beneath her bodice, cloaked her arms in long sleeves, was yet so molding, so transparent, that he could see all of her revealed, save for the narrow waist hid beneath the silver bodice. And that mattered little as her breasts, rounded and pale like twin moons rising above a silver sea, were more than half exposed, rising with her every deeply drawn breath that matched Kit’s own aching, slow, painful breaths, and played a dancing tune to Kit’s mad, beating heart.

  “Kit,” she said, her voice little more than a breath, taken by the wind as soon as it was pronounced. “After all this time! Kit.”

  He touched her hand. In touching it she trembled.

  Love deeply grounded hardly is dissembled. These lovers parled by the touch of hands. Tru
e love is mute, and oft amazed stands.

  Thus, while dumb signs their silent hearts entangled, the air with sparks of living fire was entangled.

  Kit’s breath, drawn, brought him her perfume. Her perfume swelled his heart in further breath. Not knowing why, nor how, nor when, they closed the door behind them and, still no more touching than their hands met, stumbled inside the dim, shabby room.

  “I thought you away,” she said then, still rushed and wind-driven, as if passion pushed breath and hurried it through the red lips. “I thought -- ”

  He touched her lips with his, not so much kissing her as a pilgrim acknowledging his reaching the shrine of his desire. “Away?”

  “Away from London. In Lord Thomas Walsingham’s estate. Scagmore. I thought you living there and away, and safe, from all the madness that might come.”

  But Kit, his ears love-stopped, heard no more than that she’d informed herself of his place of residence, and known, known with certainty where he should be at this time. That was enough, that was plenty.

  He’d never thought she’d have allowed a stray thought to venture his way, and here she was, confessing that she knew his current state.

  He kissed and kissed, and again he kissed, those lips of whose taste he’d dreamed, those lips like liquor that no mortal vine could ever equal.

  With his love he assayed her, till in his twining arms he locked her fast, and then he wooed with kisses and, at last, her on the bed he lay, and, tumbling upon the mattress, he often strayed beyond the bonds of shame, being bold.

  And craving, joint craving ignited, that which, lonely, might have stayed itself for eternity. It ruled them and held sway.

  The mattress protested beneath them, the bed shrieked and complained like the much-abused thing it was.

  Kit, surrounded by the lilac smell of faerie kind, her taste on his tongue, the smoothness of her skin traveling like alcohol through his own skin into his veins, to intoxicate his brain, thought to die and knew he lived, and knowing he lived knew he died of bliss.

  Why did he love this creature and no other?

  Why this elf, this fleeting creature of moonlight and shadows and deep forest? Why this creature, neither man nor woman -- neither and both -- and not a mortal chained by the thrall of time?

  Why love here, not elsewhere?

  Why one especially does the heart affect, of two gold ingots, like in each respect?

  No more was there an answer to this riddle than to Kit’s heart-pounding, driving need.

  The reason for it all, no man knows. Let it suffice that what we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, love is slight.

  Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

  Scene Twelve

  Will disembarks from the ferry on the river shore in front of a grand house -- the townhouse of the earl of Southampton. Two iron gates stand open to a small quay, and past them, broad marble stairs disappear into the green shade of a large garden. At the quay someone in rich livery -- presumably a footman -- waits. He steps forward as Will is delivered to the quay.

  Will stepped out of the river-crossing barge, glad to be on solid ground once more. Keeping his balance on the flat-bottomed boat had made him feel nauseous and he could well tell that the ferryman, a small, rodent-faced creature, wondered what business such a man as Shakespeare could have in this place.

  And yet, Will had put on his best suit -- dark velvet, hardly mended at all -- although mended by the hand of his Nan who’d never been fully conversant with needle and thread.

  Beneath the suit, his best shirt, with a broad collar, neither as fine nor surely as expensive as Kit Marlowe’s, and yet the best Will had ever owned.

  But the ferryman looked at him oddly and even when Will handed over his money -- and a shocking price it was to ferry someone across the river -- the man no more than doffed his hat and grumbled something.

  No bowing at the legs, no whisper of thanks. No. Well, he must know that Will was no gentleman, much less a nobleman such as most who visited here.

  Will turned his back on him, and, climbing the stairs all in a rush, started towards the house that could barely be seen through the trees: a giant structure of stone, not like the humble wattle and daub Shakespeare house. And yet, beholding the house, thus, through the trees, Will remembered his dream and his house, seen from the bottom of his parents’ garden.

  In that dream as in this moment, some windows of the distant building sparkled with the reflected light of distant candles. In that dream as in this, Will was alone at the bottom of the peaceful garden, while storm clouds gathered above.

  Well, at least here he was not wholly alone.

  The footman in sparkling blue and silver velvet livery spared him a look and a raised eyebrow.

  “I’m Master William Shakespeare,” Will said, feeling his voice break and crack, and feeling heartily ashamed of himself. If he could not face the footman, how could he face the lord? “Master Richard Field, the printer, has recommended me to your master and he -- ”

  “Ah, one of the players,” The footman said, disdain dripping from every syllable. “You may go.”

  As Shakespeare went he saw, drawn up on either side of the long walk, carriages ready and equipped with horses, to welcome other guests more refined and less likely to be sent wandering down this dusty drive.

  Thinking this, Will wished to laugh at himself, at his pretensions. Would he be received by nobility as if of equal birth?

  Ah, fool Will, the grammar school graduate, the country boy of Stratford, the foolish poet.

  Was Will even a poet? Or just a fool who thought that he could rhyme?

  He thought of Marlowe, and Marlowe’s easy jest on the subject of dreams. Oh, to have a way with words, to use language like that. Oh, it would almost be worth one’s mortal soul.

  Walking the dusty drive, beneath the whispering trees, he heard dogs bark in the distance and stayed, for a moment, every sense alert, every gesture stopped, listening with straying ear and fearful sense for the sound of a hunting horn. But the horn didn’t sound and Will laughed an uneasy laugh that echoed hollowly back to him in the still air.

  The bark came from many dogs, each with a different sound but none had the primal, blood-chilling bark of the Hunter’s dogs. This was a noble house, after all, and the dogs would be the lord’s kennels.

  He wondered what this Southampton would be like. Richard Field had said he inclined to the theater. Will remembered hearing Lord Strange say that Henry Wriothsley, Earl of Southampton was both very rich and very young and no more foolish than those two circumstances warrant, whatever that meant in Lord Strange’s sometimes cryptic parlance.

  Will looked at those lit squares in the night, those lights shining where the house windows were and tried to imagine going into that house. He’d go into that house, and be snubbed by countless footmen, and perhaps handed on and on to see the lord.

  And then, what would he say to this young, rich and only vaguely foolish gentleman?

  Will remembered his audience with Lord Strange, much too well.

  How Marlowe had laughed at Will’s laboriously worked poem. Will’s face warmed up at the memory.

  Since then Will had written his three plays that no one, save him remembered. Henry VI, Richard III, and the blood-soaked Titus Andronicus, his attempt at stealing the spotlight from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.

  But the truth was, the truth was, the theater company had only wanted Will’s plays when there was no new one of Marlowe’s.

  Will trudged along the walk, in the dark, his feet weighing much too much, his mind heavy with self-doubt.

  The sound of hooves behind him made him turn, in time to behold a carriage heading towards him. He jumped, deeper into the shade of the giant oaks on either side of the walk. Just in time to avoid the wheels of the carriage, that nonetheless splattered him with dirt clods. Sighing, Will dusted his good velvet suit, as he walked forward.

  Why didn’t he turn and go back now?
Why didn’t he leave?

  Will knew his poetry to be bad, or, if not bad, so lackluster that no nobleman would want to give him money to pursue it.

  What was the use and why not return to Stratford, to the glover trade, to Nan’s arms?

  Something in him rebelled and stood up and said that only had he Marlowe’s mastery of the language and of the forms and fashions of the ancients as understood by today’s scholars, Will would fare better than even Marlowe himself. Had Will not more of an understanding of the human heart?

  He thought of Marlowe’s smirk and sighed, impatient. Well, Will had, at least, a human heart, while Marlowe was nothing more than words, words fashioned into man, expensively suited, walking abroad in the light of the day. He was one such, nothing more.

  If you boiled Marlowe down to his words, what would you find behind, but more words?

  And if Will could indeed boil Marlowe down, and reduce him to words, perhaps that potion would give Will the nimble-footed meter he needed to woo Lords and impress them with his agile tongue.

  He was thinking so, resentment towards Marlowe flaring, when -- ahead -- a form appeared, made of air and woven of moonlight, a form clear and yet ethereal, immaterial and yet dark like lost dreams. Sylvanus. Once the king of faerie land.