“Ten years we’ve slept in adjoining rooms,” Ariel protested.
“With the door closed against what you did not wish to know.”
Ariel drank her ale. She didn’t wish to think about it. She’d come to Nan for comfort. She’d come to Nan to be told that she didn’t deserve this calamity of dissension in her hill, a revolution brewing, Quicksilver’s servant turned upon them, and Quicksilver himself unfaithful to her. And Nan would make out that it was all Ariel’s fault.
“He betrayed me,” Ariel said. “Silver did. With a stranger.”
Nan sighed. “And yet, had he been allowed to be Silver, now and then, would not Silver have been kept under control? And would he not come to you, Quicksilver again, at day’s end? Isn’t Silver part of who he is? Shouldn’t you at least befriend her, if you love him? Think of her as a sister of your husband? Would you not wish to know her, had she shared his childhood and his growing up secrets? Yet she shares more than that, the mind and heart of your lord. And you know her not, but treat her as his Mistress that must be kept hidden and away from you. Who betrayed whom first, milady? And who is the worse abused?”
Ariel opened her mouth to reply, but found no words. Tears fell from her eyes.
She wasn’t sure she agreed with Nan, yet Nan seemed to speak the truth. And Nan said Will still loved Nan, though he live as far away as London.
Ariel couldn’t trust her husband outside the palace.
“Now, it’s late,” Nan said, collecting the empty cups and setting them atop the cooking table. “And I’ll to my bed. If you believe what I tell you, or even if you don’t, but you wish to remain married, you’ll to your husband and beg his forgiveness, and learn to know him.”
“But the rebels,” Ariel said. “And the wolf.... If there is a wolf....”
Nan shrugged. “Alone you cannot face them. And without your love I think neither can your husband. I think you’re right and his weakness is that lack of support from those who should give it. So hie to him and with him make peace. You cannot save the world while you live in a marriage that is no marriage with a man you know not.” She banked the ashes around the glowing coals, and turned to Ariel, and waited till Ariel got up, and escorted her to the door.
At the door, she smiled, and pulled Ariel into an unexpected, friendly embrace and, brushing her dry lips against Ariel’s cheek, in the reassuring gesture of an older friend or relative, she said, “Oh, and when you see Will, tell him I’d like him to visit before Michaelmas, or his son will forget his name.”
With that, she pushed Ariel gently out the door, much as she’d pushed Hamnet towards the hallway, and closed the door behind her.
Ariel heard the bolt shoot home.
"When she saw Will.” The nerve of the woman! What made her think that Ariel would be going to London and seeing Will?
Standing outside, in the cold of night, Ariel thought of going back to the hill and facing the duplicitous Malachite, the threatening centaurs, all on her own. Or going to harsh, iron-cluttered London, and from there fetching Quicksilver.
The thought of Quicksilver made her feel warm, like a gentle fire in a stormy night.
Oh, curse it all. She’d go to London. And there, following her lord’s magic, track him down and try to salvage the unsalvageable.
Scene Nineteen
The street outside Will’s rented lodgings. Though it’s still night, a sliver of pink shows in the east, and the taverns are all closed and the whole street silent, save only for those stirrings of the people who tidy up after the amusement of others: tavern wenches, bear keepers, horse dealers. It is, in fact, one of the very few times when all is silent in Southwark, that short moment between the time when revelers retire and the time the day’s workers rise to do their working. Once more, Marlowe loiters beneath the sign across the street.
If Will had thought to fool Kit Marlowe, more the fool he.
Kit Marlowe thought this, but he did not feel gloating, nor victorious over Will’s low cunning or attempt at deception. Instead, facing Will’s lodgings, Will’s lodgings, where the fair Lady Silver had just opened the door to allow Will into the room, Kit felt tired, and old, and used and abused by those circumstances of time and of affection that had made the provincial of Stratford preferred above him.
He’d seen the lady clearly, as she’d opened the door and stepped out, for a brief moment, to let Will in. And he’d seen Will, too. Though too far away to see his expression, he guessed at Will’s eagerness by the way he clutched the lady’s shoulder and pulled her in.
Standing there, Kit felt as though his whole world had shattered, this time irremediably.
Will’s actions were not those of a puppet mesmerized by faerieland magic.
Kit should have killed Waggstaff while he had a chance. But he’d believed the truth of his words. He’d thought, foolishly, that Silver must have used her magic on this creature and that Will, poor clod that he was, had failed to see her, or, having seen her, to remember her.
Kit had been fooled.
Not for the first time.
Kit clenched his fist around the handle of his dagger. A thin streak of light dawned in the east, but as yet the night was dark and secret, and a cold, cold breeze picked up as if out of nowhere, bringing with it a loathsome reek, like the smell of an opened tomb.
Two houses down from where Kit stood, a door was firmly closed and, across it, a nailed board proclaimed that the tavern was a haunt of the plague and that any entering it would not only be risking contagion but breaking the law as well.
The sign over the door swung forlornly in the wind, showing a man in a blue cloak, holding an harp. The Words beneath read: The Minstrel.
The brightly painted sign coupled with the plague notice mirrored Kit’s state of mind.
He too went about well dressed and with a smile fit to attract, and yet what corruption lurked inside, and how much danger did he not pose to the unwary entering into his sphere?
The thought came again that he should have killed Will, and he knew -- in the end -- that part of what had stayed his hand had been the memory of all those he’d betrayed, all the men he’d sent to their deaths on the block and gallows: the Catholics he’d turned in over the Babington conspiracy -- which had probably been as much an invention of Walsingham’s as anything else, and his protestant, nay, his fanatic puritan friends whom he’d likewise betrayed to the inhuman arm of state religion.
A voice in him, a meek, small voice, the voice of the child who had grown up as a cobbler’s son, in the shade of the great cathedral at Canterbury, piped up to say that he’d had no choice, that had he not betrayed he would have been betrayed, his motives and reasons as certainly questioned as his companions’. And they would have found more to condemn in him than in any other, as they were about to find more now.
Because Kit Marlowe, with his mind that had ever been his one pride, and his pride in the workings of what he prided himself in thinking his excellent reason -- Kit Marlowe had always strayed too near the dangerous edge of atheism, always stepped too close to the abyss of the dangerous thought, the lonely doubt of the man who walks alone, away from the protective walls of faith.
And now Kit had taken it too far. He’d die for it.
But Silver would go on living.
Looking up at the window where the candle light winked, obscured by bodies that crossed between it and the windowpane, Kit wondered if Silver and Will were making love -- her perfect body entwined in his too-homely one, his great balding head leaning over her black silk hair, her white silk thighs.
Soon Kit would be arrested, and tried, and probably executed.
If things were allowed to go that far, he thought, if his sometime friend and patron, Thomas Walsingham didn’t kill him first, in some street corner, in some carefully faked brawl, to avoid Kit’s revealing under torture all the dealings of the Walsinghams. Dead, Kit could reveal nothing about all the times that the service of the Queen’s majesty had been more excuse than purpose
, and the true purpose had lay in the lining of the Walsingham purse, the enriching of the Walsingham family.
So Kit would die. Soon. No use deceiving himself any longer.
Again, as before, when Quicksilver had dismissed him, Kit Marlowe felt sorry for this Kit, this urchin of the lower middle class who’d climbed under his own impulse and by his own power to be a scholar, and mingle with the great ones of the land. To save his own life, he had betrayed others. To save his own life, he had tainted his own soul.
But which man, being human, wouldn’t do likewise, and hold onto sweet life, while others lost theirs? Surely no one could expect more of Kit than this loyalty to his own person.
For he who doesn’t hold himself dear, who does he hold dear, and what loyalty swerves his path?
And yet now Kit would die, for this sin he had in common with all humanity, and, after his dying, Silver would go on living, and Quicksilver too, one person in two bodies, and both bodies immortal and uncorrupted, like finely wrought gold, and sweet-polished silver.
Silver would go on living, and so would Will, and through the sweet, perfumed springs, the hot, invigorating summers, they would go on loving, their bodies entwined, their souls rejoicing, while Kit moldered beneath a slab in some forgotten church, or in the dirt of a pauper’s grave, somewhere.
Silver and Will would love and live.
The thought pounded upon his mind like madness proper, and rolled along his veins with screaming fever.
It must not happen.
Kit would kill Will.
He must kill Tremblestick. If nothing else, if Kit couldn’t save his own life, then he must, he must prevent Will from living on. If Kit couldn’t have Silver, then he must prevent Will from enjoying Silver and life, and all that Kit had lost.
Clenching his teeth so hard that they ground, one upon the other like millstones, Kit imagined himself climbing the stairs, taking step by step the steps to the top, and there knocking at the door, there demanding to see Silver, there putting an end to Will’s life, in that one fell instant.
But if he climbed the steps, would Silver not intervene, and cast a veil of magic over Kit and, perhaps, make her lover invisible or all powerful?
No, Kit thought, as the wind whistled through the quiet desolate street. No. He would wait till the morrow and near the door surprise Will and kill him, making a fast measure of it.
Yet Kit remembered the way Will had fought, and he hesitated. He wasn’t so sure he could take the provincial married man from Stratford, hand to hand, in combat.
This night, at least, he’d proven himself able to defend his life, and not averse to using force to do it.
Kit remembered the blows he’d endured.
And he remembered Will in the tavern. If that hadn’t been friendly companionship, it had been a close counterfeit. Whatever Will thought, he hadn’t meant ill to Kit.
Yet Kit must kill Will. He had to kill Will Shakelance, or never have rest, in grave or meadow, in life or death. Will must stop breathing and be prevented from enjoying Silver’s favors, from which Kit was barred.
The light went out within Will’s lodgings, and Kit held breath while his hatred, like a living thing, spilled out of its tight confines, and seized hold of his soul.
Oh, for a stronger soul, a stronger body, a dark, winged, evil intensity that could seize Will and drag him down with Kit into Kit’s own pit of torment.
The smell of the graveyard became heavier around him, as the chill wind picked up. A foul taste rose in Kit’s mouth.
He felt as though a cold, furry body rubbed against his ankles.
Scene Twenty
Will’s room, with everything clean and tidy and a few additions. On the bed, there’s a multicolored blanket, woven through with gold threads. The candlestick is gold. The glass in the windows sparkles. Lady Silver, in a filmy white dress sits on the bed. Will, standing, paces the room.
“You had no right,” Will said. He’d been received at the door by the Lady Silver, who’d pulled him into the room with every evidence of delight. But he’d pulled away from her encompassing arms, her soft rounded breast, the warmth of her body, and he’d rounded on her with his indignation. “It is my lodging, and you had no right.”
She laughed, a musical sound, woven through with delighted seduction, a sound that suggested fields in full flower and the red-blooded rites of May when country boys took their girls out to pick flowers and in so doing picked their flower as well.
“But my dear, it was squalor such as rats would disdain.”
“I am not your dear,” Will said. Seeing his room thus transformed had sobered him. The soft haziness of his drunken camaraderie with Marlowe was replaced by indignation, and the gentle glow of ale in his stomach with a burning, acid coldness. Not even Nan, with her blunt ways, would think to change Will’s living space like this, without asking him. Why, Nan didn’t even mend her suits without telling him she intended on doing it.
And this elf, with her laughing ways, her soft voice, would think to manipulate him, to control him, to make him into that which he was not.
That Silver had taken his room and changed it to be her own reminded Will of the high-handed nature of these creatures, who’d take your very life and redo it, ten times over, with hardly a thought, taking and twisting your words, your purpose and your intent to their own ends.
They were, he thought, like the child playing with insects, directing them hither and thither with a stick. The child might mean no harm and think not of killing the insect. Yet, neither does he think of the insect or of where the insect was headed before the stick came in his way.
It’s all a game for the child, a way of whiling away a boring afternoon, and in that game, played gamely, he might accidentally crush his victim without noticing. All in sport, and the child runs off laughing, but the insect, crushed beneath the careless boot, or the playfully tossed stick, has lost the only one of his brief lives, and is as dead as if death had been meant.
“It is my room. My room. My place, paid for with my money and maintained by me.”
Again the laughter. Though Silver sat still on the bed, her legs composedly drawn together, her hands resting side by side on them, yet her laughter contrived to color all of it with wanton abandon and put a spark in her shimmering silken hair, a glimmer of enticement in her silver eyes. “But you can’t maintain that you liked the way it looked. Surely, you must have meant to change it, had you had the money.”
“Had I had the money, yes, I would have changed it. Or maybe not, for it suited me well, and the money must be saved for Nan and for the children. It is still my room, not yours. You must not do things to my room, while I’m away. You must not do things to me for your amusement. You must not seduce me because you’re bored. You must not beguile me because you’re scared. I am my own man and have my own life, and my own wife, and my own true love.”
Silver sighed, and waved a dainty white hand around the room. The golden candlestick became again a chipped, much used clay one. The table that had been polished, gleaming rich wood, became the broken-down pine wreck it really was. And the window clouded once more with foggy grime.
Silver yawned, the lazy yawn of a cat, and covered her mouth with her pale hand, then stretched, also like a cat, in theatric manner. “Your boring room is back, Will. Do not fuss.” She lowered her arms, and smiled at him. “There, are you happy?”
But Will could not feel happy. His heart clenched with fear or something very like fear.
He cleared his throat. “No, I’m not happy.” How did he even know she’d told him the truth about anything? Had Silver truly come to town to rescue the world from Sylvanus’s ill intent? Or was all this a crazed game, a play devised by the elves’ eternal high spirits, seeking to call him once more into a mad round? Was this all a game designed to seduce Will to Silver’s soft eyes and softer body, her love that was no love, but a cold thing, and yet, as a cold thing, burned in multicolored splendor.
“Not happy?�
�� The dark arched eyebrows rose up the pale forehead, and the silver eyes opened in round amazement, as if to say that surely everyone would be happy, whom she dared touch with her magic glamour.
Her lilac smell filled the room, overpoweringly strong, making Will’s head more confused than any amount of ale could do.
She leaned backward, and threw her shoulders back, displaying her womanly figure in full bloom, and smiled. “And what can I do, Master Shakespeare, to make you happy?”
Will took in her cleavage, the top half of it soft, and white, and bare, the bottom half cradled by flimsy wanton lace, the top creamier even than the white bottom, and promising heat and shelter. In his younger days, this would have been irresistible. But now his indignation, even at this one gesture, was stronger than his errant attraction.
He looked away, and stared at the window, and walked that way, and looked down at the street.
Few people ventured out on the street, this late at night, before the early morning rush of working people. And yet, the man standing in front of the tavern across the street looked like Marlowe, and might well be him.
Yet, what would Marlowe be doing there? Surely Marlowe had been in no state to go stand about. And Will had seen him home.
He must be in his room and well asleep in his bed, as Will would be if his bed were his own. At this distance, one man looked much like another.
“You said you’d be gone at night,” Will said, turning around to face Silver. “You said at night my room would be my own. Yet, here you are, and night fully underway.”
Silver smiled. “Well, tonight you were absent most of the night.” Her smile curled around an indefinable insinuation, even as her sweet voice dripped honey over him. “So I thought it no harm being here. And, surely, there is no harm in talking to you this way. We are friends, are we not, Will?”
All Night Awake Page 47