“You see it, too?” Sidney asked, and Fletcher nodded. Sidney winced, seized with a sudden pity: how crushed, how tormented would he himself feel, in Fletcher’s place? But it was impossible for Fletcher to return to England, at least now. Perhaps later, if this new vision lasted—if when Elizabeth died, as die she must, James could continue to balance Catholic and Protestant one against the other—perhaps then Fletcher could return, and know he himself had helped to make possible that homecoming. It was too cruel a hope; he did not dare voice it, though he could feel the possibility strong as magic in his bones.
“Well, I’m pleased enough in Flushing,” Fletcher said, with suspicious brightness, the voice of a man speaking to convince himself. “I am happy there.” The false pleasure faded from his voice then, and he turned to face the older man. “And did we do well?”
Sidney frowned, confused. “Do well?”
Fletcher stared through him, seeing something else, his lips twisted into a frown. “No, I know. You did what you were sent to do, and there’s no denying you rid the world of a very dark menace. But at what price?”
The note of anguish touched Sidney on the raw. Must you bring all that—all my earliest, worst fears—to haunt me now, when it’s done, and I was free of them, and at peace with myself, my power, and my God? Somehow, he kept his tone light, and said, “Whatever I did, was done with your help. And Marlowe’s.”
“A not completely reassuring combination, Sir Philip,” Fletcher answered, with a ghost of his earlier quiet humor. “What has happened, sir, is entirely your doing. I cannot feel—yet—that it is a good thing. I may be wrong, I pray I am, but I am troubled.”
“Be plain, please,” Sidney said, and only just kept himself from snapping.
“I mean to be,” Fletcher said, and spread his hands helplessly. “Sir Philip, I know how much you respect the Pléiade’s magics, the reverence you have for Doctor Dee’s, and the good use to which you’ve put his teachings. But those magics are circumscribed, held in by elaborate rules, rituals, shrouded in mystery, if you like…”
“Not unlike the Mass,” Sidney interjected drily, but his eyes were still fixed on the scholar.
Fletcher bowed his head, acknowledging the point. “Precisely because power is common—but the ability to use power properly is less common. Witness some of the things we have seen here.”
“I have seen Bothwell, who possessed and was possessed by powers and demons not of the common run,” Sidney agreed. His voice sharpened. “But I have also seen a woman hounded almost to her death by those without power, merely because she possesses the same skills you and I possess, and lacks the learning to make it palatable. And she, in gratitude—in justice, perhaps—warned me against an attack.” He stopped then, and gestured his apology. “Say on, I interrupt you.”
“Power is still a dangerous thing. Yet now…” Fletcher lifted his eyes to the ceiling, as though he would find constellations in its shadowed heights. “Magic is loose in the world, Sir Philip, and never again will we be able to circumscribe its use. Mistakes will be made, people will still damn themselves, and it is all so easy now…” His voice trailed off, and Sidney smiled gently.
“I think, fewer than might have.” He shook his head. “The powers were always there, Master Fletcher. It’s arrogance and selfishness and fear that causes scholars—like ourselves—to bind them up for themselves in their elaborate rituals. It’s not that the rituals have lost their meanings, their importance—I could not have defeated Bothwell without them, or without God’s favor—but they are not all magic, or the only method. Evil men can master your methods as well as mine, as we have seen, Master Fletcher. Evil men will always find a way to work their wills, and yes, they will take and use this unbound magic we feel about us now—but they would in any case. Only now, perhaps more of us will have a defense against it. More people may find it in themselves, and need not fear it—we should be in agreement over this, Master Fletcher, for magics and wizardry have long had a place in your faith.”
“But well restricted,” Fletcher demurred, “guarded as all things so dangerous should—must—be.”
“Of course it’s danger,” Sidney said, impatient now. “Life is fraught with peril, we know it and God knows it, and we do what we can with what we’re given. But there’s no use in regrets. What’s set free cannot be called back again—nor do I think I would, even if I could.”
After a pause, Fletcher said, almost sadly, “No, Sir Philip. I don’t believe you would.”
He turned almost blindly, seeking refuge in the crowd, but Sidney caught his arm. “Answer me one thing, Master Fletcher. Would you?”
For a moment the scholar kept his face averted, but then, when he finally turned to look at Sidney, he was smiling, though there were tears in his eyes. “God in heaven, I cannot say. But I miss England.” Then he pulled away, and Sidney let him go, sighing. He could just imagine the reaction if he were to plead the Catholic cause to Elizabeth now, even for Fletcher, whom she as well as James owed so much. No, he thought, I’ve learned that much discretion. I know she can do nothing, not without denying her own sovereignty, and, God help me, that would be a grievous sin. James, now…
“He can taste it in the air, and fears it like the reformed drunkard fears wine,” said a voice at Sidney’s shoulder.
The older man smiled a little sadly, and turned to face his protégé. “I think so. And I also think he, of all men, has little reason for fear.”
The new air, the new light that filled the room seemed to have touched even Marlowe’s dark soul. His smile was warmer than it had been, and held even a touch of sympathy, of understanding, for Fletcher’s plight. But there was still a shadow about his eyes, a hint of loss: in winning this great new freedom, Marlowe had rejected—what? “Mephistophilis,” Sidney said quietly, and saw the younger man shy away as though from a touch. He winced himself, recognizing an almost physical pain. The wound was healing, certainly, the greater part of the bullet wrenched away from flesh and bone, but there were fragments still to trouble him, and a scar. “He was so much your own creation,” he began, and stopped, trembling on the verge of heresy. Perhaps it isn’t heresy, blasphemy, though, not now—perhaps in this new world, devils truly are only as powerful as we make them... He put the thought aside, for later, wiser consideration, and touched the poet lightly on the shoulder, wishing he could offer more.
“He was beautiful,” Marlowe murmured, almost unaware of Sidney.
“Possibly,” Sidney said, and hardened his voice. “You are a poet, a brilliant one. You of all men know beauty, and how to mourn its loss. And how to find it again. Life is not ashes, Kit, we’ve come through.”
Marlowe’s eyes strayed almost involuntarily to a knot of players, and Sidney realized that Stephen Massey was among them. If it will wean you from demons, Kit, he thought, surely that’s the lesser sin.
“Do you really like my poetry?” Marlowe asked abruptly.
Sidney looked at him, startled. “Yes, very much.”
“And you seem to have more than a nodding acquaintance with my plays, for all you’ve been my patron for two years only.”
“I spend a lot of time in London. I could hardly not be familiar with them. “ Sidney frowned. “You’re a fine writer, Kit, and you’ve always known it. Where does all this lead?”
“It’s more than the magic, Sir Philip,” the poet went on, unheeding. “There’s the plays, mine, and Kyd’s, and William’s, and all the rest of the inferior lot—we’ve remade the form, broken all the unities—as you yourself were once so kind as to point out.”
Sidney raised an eyebrow. “Did you never say anything in your youth you wished to retract in age?”
Marlowe blushed faintly, and hurried on. “And there’s Raleigh, and Drake and Hakluyt—and Dee, for that matter, with his books on navigation. And God knows how many others that I don’t know, all remaking their various arts and sciences. And now you. My God, what times we live in.”
A world re
made. Sidney shied away from the idea, even as he tasted the truth of it. Magic was loose, with everything else…
“What times,” Marlowe said again, and there was a strange, fierce joy in his voice.
Oh, trust you to take such pleasure in them, Sidney thought, but could not deny his own, more cautious excitement. What times, indeed. Dear God, I thank you for this blessing, this new-found, other world. Help us to use it wisely.
“Philip.” Frances stood before him then, her hands folded demurely against her skirts as she made her deepest reverence. There was a new light about her, too, a new ease and comfort, and Sidney caught her in his arms. She returned the embrace willingly, crumpling her skirts, before putting him aside.
“I came to ask you to dance,” she said, and gave a breathless laugh.
“Gladly,” Sidney answered, and offered her his arm. Yes, he thought, we should dance, tread out the simple pattern so we may learn to tread a greater, and all in joy—humility, and joy, and love. He smiled then, lifting her hands, and they moved together into the dance.
AUTHORS’ NOTE
The events of this story are true; they just never happened.
Sir Philip Sidney died in October, 1586, of wounds received a month earlier at the battle of Zutphen. He had been serving with the English armies sent to support the Protestant Dutch in their rebellion against their Spanish Catholic overlords. The Dutch offered to bury him in Holland at the States’ expense, a signal honor, but the English refused. Sidney was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, with an outpouring of public mourning unlike anything seen in England before. He had been tutored in his youth by Queen Elizabeth’s astronomer, John Dee, and by the greatest scholars of Europe; he had been offered (at least according to reports current after his death) both the crown of Poland and marriage to Europe’s greatest heiress, Marie of Nassau. His death, or so his contemporaries unanimously believed, deprived England of one of its greatest soldiers, poets, and courtiers.
Christopher Marlowe was murdered in June, 1593, by Ingrim Frizer, a steward in the household of Marlowe’s patron Thomas Walsingham, officially in a quarrel over who would pay the bill for the day’s drinking. The story was corroborated by the other two diners: Robert Poley, a known government agent, and Nicholas Skeres, a compatriot of the others later arrested for fraud. The story told at the inquest and in the pardon for the murderer is not entirely clear, and a sizeable minority of scholars hold that Marlowe, who had himself been a government agent, was murdered in order to prevent him from betraying government secrets. Certainly Marlowe was being questioned by the Privy Council at the time of his death, in regard to his blasphemous and therefore potentially seditious utterances.
In 1595, James VI of Scotland (who, eight years later, would become James I of England as well) faced the last in a series of conspiracies formed by Francis, Earl of Bothwell, also known as the Wizard Earl. Like all the others, this conspiracy combined witchcraft (directed against the king’s person) with armed attack; it failed, and Bothwell fled Scotland never to return. We have taken the liberty of moving the so-called Gowrie Conspiracy, which took place in August, 1600, to the autumn of 1595, and of making the Master of Ruthven (born in 1580) somewhat older than his actual years, though there is no real evidence that Ruthven was one of James’s many minions. James’s fondness for, and amazingly bad taste in, his male favorites is well documented; his contemporaries agreed that enough was done in public to raise grave doubts as to the king’s private behavior.
A final note on the Elizabethan attitude toward magic is perhaps in order. While some educated persons might question the existence and efficacy of popular magic (though the majority believed firmly in its reality, and in the witches who manipulated it), no one would have doubted that some form of the supernatural did exist and could act in the natural world. A belief in a supernatural of some kind was an essential part of their understanding of the universe, as crucial to contemporary science as our own understanding of atomic theory is crucial to our perception of the world. In fact, the majority of Elizabethans probably viewed magic much as the majority of our own contemporaries view atomic science: they were exposed to a version of the theory at some point in their lives, but never encountered—and hoped never to encounter—any of the more spectacular manifestations of its reality. Still, a belief in magic was the underpinning of a quite sophisticated understanding of the universe, and no Elizabethan would have been particularly surprised to see it demonstrated before his eyes.
Terminat hora diem; terminant authores opus.
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