Will stood, a bit unsteadily, and came up beside him. “And then what happened?”
“The magpies died. Every one. And turned into gray‑feathered doves as they fell. Damned if I know what to make of that for a prophecy.” Kit’s shoulders rose – slowly – and then dropped.
“I do,” Will answered, shaking his head just a little, remembering the weight of a pouch of coins in his fingers on the eve of the Essex Rebellion. Remembering Robert Catesby’s considering glance as Will took it from his hand. “The plague. And that sickness that almost killed me, four winters back.”
“And did kill Spenser and Walsingham. Aye.”
“Coins. It’s spread on coins, Kit. Ensorcelled silver, that taints any hand that touches it.”
Kit turned to him and blinked, candlelight cupping his cheek like a hand. “By God,” he said. “Thou’rt right. Thou must be.” And then he stopped and crossed his arms before his breast, and visibly swallowed. “How does a man fight something like that?”
Will just shook his head. “I do not know.”
Act V, scene v
But while I have a sword, a hand, a heart
I will not yield to any such upstart.
– Christopher Marlowe, Edward II,Act I, scene i
She’s asking for you,” Murchaud said from the doorway, and Kit laid down the book, open to a page he’d read three times over and never seen.
He stood and twisted his rapier back into place in its carrier. “The Mebd’s awake?”
Murchaud didn’t answer, only beckoned. Kit came to him and they passed through the corridors side by side, not speaking until they reached the threshold of the Mebd’s privy chamber. He paused, his hand on the doorknob, and glanced over his shoulder at the Prince. “Thou’rt not coming in?”
“No,” Murchaud said. “My royal wife said Kit, and Kit alone. So alone thou goest.”
“What does she want of me?”
“Thy company, I presume.” He smiled a worried smile, one that made the corners of his pale, soft eyes turn down.
“It’s the teind year. Sixteen naught Five, and less than a month to choose the sacrifice – ”
“No.” Murchaud’s headshake was slow. “Thy William went willing, Kit. Even though thou didst retrieve him – mad poets, the both of you–the debt is paid for seven times seven years. Go on, my love.”
Kit shivered at the endearment, set his jaw, and opened the door.
A cool breeze ruffled silk curtains, admitting sunlight on dancing rays. The chamber smelled of lavender and peppermint, and thick rush mats muffled Kit’s footsteps.
The Mebd lay on a daybed by the window’, embroidered pillows behind her shoulders and her thin violet gown draped over one bent knee, a bare graceful foot showing beneath the hem. Her head was turned, her gaze trained out the window, her hair down on her shoulders in a thousand braids as fine as golden wire.
Kit bowed, then straightened when she summoned him with an airy wave.
“Sir Kit.”
“Your Highness.”
She smiled as he came closer, her eyes as violet now as twilight, matching the shadows that surrounded them and lay under her cheekbones. The lines of her collarbones glinted like knives, and he could see the rings of her larynx through the translucent skin of her throat. He thought the bones of her fingers might crumble if he simply reached out and took her hand; even her amazing hair was lusterless and dry in its floor‑long braids. “Sit,” she said. “I’m healing at last. England’s King is secure upon his throne. Faerie will endure.”
“Was it wise of you to risk Faerie so far?” Kit asked, because he felt secure enough in his Bard’s patched cloak to do it. He reached out softly, and took a few of her long yellow plaits in his hand. “There are many lives braided here, my Queen. Lives that would be lost if you were.”
“The war’s not over,” she said. “I understand thou hast been speaking with Morgan, yet.”
“Aye.”
“Her politics?”
“What are her politics, you mean, Your Highness?” When she nodded impatiently, he continued. “She says she wants peace.”
“She does,” the Mebd said. “But she’s never understood that compromises can be required to assure it, and sometimes the Devil you know is to be preferred to the Devil you don’t.” She smiled into his eyes as he leaned forward, and turned her gaze out to the garden again. “I have a task for thee, one that shall burden thee a while, and one which I cannot ask my bounden subjects. And one which thou wilt never speak of, Sir Kit. I charge thee.”
“And what task is that, Your Highness?”
And she smiled again, never looking back, and handed him a comb.
Act V, scene vi
These late eclipses in the sun and moon portendno good to us: though the wisdom of nature canreason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itselfscourged by the sequent effects: love cools,friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities,mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces,treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father.
–William Shakespeare, King Lear,Act I, scene ii
Just before dawn on September 17, 1605, Will was dragged from a companionable reverie in the garden of the Silver Street house by an urgent hand on his sleeve, reaching awkwardly backward. “Will,” Kit said. “Look at the moon.
They were huddled under blankets, back to back on the bench. The wine was finished; the night’s conversation drifted into sitting and dozing, watching the night. Will turned over his shoulder and gasped; the full pewter disk was eaten away on one edge, as if someone had taken a bite from the disk, and a dim red glow shone through it. “An eclipse.”
“Not a full one, I think,” Kit answered. “Remember old Doctor Dee, Gloriana’s astrologer?”
“I remember his beard,” Will said, picturing its white luxuriance. “The Queen used to ride out to his house on horseback and scandalize the court. He’s still alive, you know, though James won’t have aught to do with him.”
“Is the old bastard?” Kit’s smile shone through his voice. “I always liked him better than Northumberland. And he was right more often, too. Thou knowest his horoscopes for Elizabeth were sealed as state secrets?”
“Out of favor now, though.”
“We could ride out and see him, as Elizabeth would have – ” Kit’s voice swelled, a momentary flight of fancy on what a pageant that would be. And then he stopped himself, and shivered. “Nay. Unwise at the extreme.”
“So what would he say about that?” The moon continued to darken, even as the eastern sky grew pale. A third of the disc had vanished into shadow, and Will caught his breath at the beauty of it, and the danger. “That’s a portent, Kit.”
“The sky is full of portents.” Kit stood, and walked from one wall of the garden to the other, studying the sky. “But that’s an especially bad one. The moon is devoured in the dragon’s tail, or so the expression goes–the moon, astrologically speaking, equates the psyche.”
“What does it mean?” Will’s voice, still and small. He moved to stand beside Kit, as if the warmth of another body in the chill fall air would make a difference to his pounding heart.
“It means,” Kit said, “that the Mebd is right. And the war is nearly on us. And everything we have believed in, fought for – Gloriana, England, Faerie–is coming to an end.” He dropped his eyes from the sky; Will could see the yellow witchlight gleaming behind his right eye when he turned. “Will, just remind me. What day did Elizabeth die?”
“March twenty‑fourth,” Will said. “Very early. Or perhaps late the night before.”
“The last day of the year,” Kit said softly. “The sun would have been at fifteen Aries when she died if she had held on one day longer. The brave old bitch almost made it.” Tears clotted whatever he would have said next.
“Kit?”
Nodding, a sniffle in the darkness as the moonlight reddened and dimmed.
“I don’t know what that means,” Will said at last, plaintively, and was relieved
when Kit laughed and threw an arm around his shoulders, as if they both needed the support.
“Fifteen Aries is when you sacrifice a King,” Kit answered. Whispered, really, though it had almost the quality of a pronouncement to it. “So that his blood may replenish the land, and make it strong. ”
“Oh,” Will said, only half understanding the shiver that rocked Kit’s body. “You’re saying she died for England.”
“I’m saying she tried her best.” Kit folded like a dropped marionette and sat down on the ground, his knees drawn up and his arms “wrapped around them to pull them close. “I’m saying we’relosing, and there’s our proof. That” – a shaky hand waved at the setting, half‑eaten moon – “means the end of an old way, and violence, and upheaval.
Will sat down too, and cleared his throat. “Couldn’t the end of an old way mean the Prometheans, just as well?”
“It means Elizabeth,” Kit said with quiet conviction, both his fists pressed against his chest as if his heart might burst right between his ribs, and there was no arguing then.
Will had cause to remember those words a fortnight later on October the second, when broad noon turned to darkness over London Town as if a tarnished silver coin had been slid across the disk of the sun. A strange twilight strangled the city’s voice to desperate murmurs as every foot paused, every voice hushed, every eye lifted and then quickly fell again, unable to bear the light of even a half‑occluded sun.
Will shaded his eyes with his hand, pressing his forehead to the rippled glass and lath of Tom Walsingham’s casement window and tilting his face to the side. “It seems a year for ill omens, ” he said softly, and did not look down until Tom came to draw him away from the window.
“What, a cloud across the sun?” Kit came up too–the three of them were alone, Ben and George having been left home from this particular council of war – and glanced through the window. “Ah. I don’t suppose I missed a rain of fire while I was away? ”
“Nay,” Will answered, and pulled Tom toward the door. ‘That’s a terrible sight.”
“Don’t look upon it,” Kit warned. “Wilt burn thine eyes. Tom, have you smoked glass?”
“Nothing so useful,” Tom answered as the three men emerged from the garden door into a world that seemed to Will even stranger and more alien than Faerie. In those places where gold and auburn leaves still clung to the trees and bushes, the dappled shadows moving underneath them formed diminishing crescents, layer on layer of moving images.
Will thrust his hand under the branches of an oak, watching the gleaming crescents shrink upon his skin. The air seemed thicker in its darkness, and hung with sparkles like a summer night. “Camera obscura,” he said, gesturing Kit and Tom to join him. Somewhere beyond the garden wall, he heard someone sob and the sound of a window breaking. “Look at this. The leaves make the pinholes.” He almost fancied he could feel the light brushing his skin as the leaves tossed in time with the breeze.
“Sweet buggered Christ,” Kit said. “I need my books.”
“What books?” asked Tom alertly.
“Oh, I had – ” He paused, as if considering. “A Ptolemy, and Brahe’s Die Stella Nova,an Agrippa, some of Dee’s work – ” Kit stopped and looked around, realizing that Tom and Will were staring. “Research,” he said. “Faustus.In any case, I loaned them all to Sir Walter and he never gave them back. A most notorious thief of books, that one–”
Tom coughed into his hand. “I have some volumes of Ficino.”
“Please?” Kit looked up, exactly as he had admonished Will not too, and closed his left eye. He seemed to pay no notice as Tom returned to the house.
Will cleared his throat, the unease swelling in his belly. “Kit?”
Kit looked down and smiled at Will. “Fear not,” he said. I doubt an eye that won’t be damaged by a knife will be blinded by the light of a half‑dimmed sun.”
“What art thou seeking?”
“The way the moon moves,” Kit said, taking the book from Tom’s hands when Walsingham returned with it. He angled the pages to catch what light he could, but read with ease words that Will would have found incomprehensible in the unnatural twilight. He watched as Kit riffled pages, seeming to know what he was searching for even if he did not know quite where to find it.
“Sidereal,” Kit murmured, and some other words that meant nothing to Will. Tom watched with interest, hands on his hips, head cocked to one side and the wind ruffling his silver‑streaked auburn hair. The strands too made pinholes as they rose and fell; as the eclipse ground toward totality, Will watched the tiny crescents scattering Tom’s face first fade to nothingness and then reemerge as twisting rings of light.
Will risked a glance upward and caught his breath at the image of the sun occluded, a jet‑black round crowned in twisting fire that reminded Will of Lucifer’s writhing, shadowy tiara in reverse. “Sweet Christ,” he swore, but it was more of a prayer, really.
“Ah,” Kit said, and clapped the book shut like a pair of hands. “No,” he said. “Not good at all.”
“It’s an omen, then?”
“Yes, and as ill as you’d like to make it. ‘Tis, again, a marker of the end of things, and an overthrow of balance and harmony. If Elizabeth and her famous temporizing were a force to keep England in symmetry, and in accord with God and nature–”
“Aye?” Will’s feet would not quite hold him steady.
Kit shrugged, and handed the book back to Tom. “You are witnessing the end of her power, gentlemen. And the death of whatever peace our sufferings, and those of the poets and intelligencers who came before us, and the Queen’s cool brilliance at the chess of politics, bought for Mother England.” Kit swallowed and looked down. “The sun will be in Sagittarius at the end of this month and the beginning of the next.”
“And?” Tom and Will, as one voice.
“And,” he said. “The best date for a sacrifice would be November fifth, I think. Fifteen Sagittarius.”
“That’s when Parliament is to meet,” Will said, as the sun began to emerge from its enshadowment. “They were–”
“That late in the year? That’s–”
It was Tom who finished, both hands raised and bound tight in his hair. “They were prorogued,” he said. “The session bound over. On account of plague.”
“Plague,” Kit said, looking at Will for confirmation.
“Aye,” Will said, abruptly sick with exhaustion. “I heard the King discuss it with Robert Cecil, not two months since.”
It was a week later, only, that a sturdy tapping at his door drew Will’s attention and he rose. “Who’s there?”
“Echo the Nymph,” Ben answered deadpan. Will lifted the latch and stood aside to let the big man into the room.
“Thou lookst more like a Narcissus to me,” Will said. “What brings thee to my humble doorway, Ben?”
“Thou’rt invited to a gathering,” Ben answered, shaking rain from his cloak. “A party of sorts.”
“Tonight?” Will gestured to the leaves of paper spread over his table, where they would catch the watery light from the window. “I’ve too much work.”
“Thou’rt only the most‑sought playmaker in London,” Ben answered, careful not to drip on the papers as he bent to inspect them, his massive hands laced behind his back. “Surely thou canst pass a night with friends.”
“I owe Richard a fair copy by Monday.”
“Five days,” Ben said. “Thou dost work too much, Will. And how canst thou refuse an invitation from Robert Catesby, to dine with him and his recusant friends on a cold Wednesday night?”
Will set the latch with a click. “I beg thy pardon?”
Ben turned, his homely face unimproved by his grin. “Call it luck or call it happenstance. I’ve been working on Catesby and Tresham six months now, Will. And been overheard to mention once or twice that thou–and thy brother Edmund – had once or twice missed out loud the more permissive “ways of Warwickshire, with regard to the old religion. If tho
u takest my meaning. And they did.”
Will pinched his lower lip between his teeth and ran his tongue across it, forcing himself to stop when he remembered it would chap. “Catesby is one of Baines’. He’d never believe I’d welcome any Promethean plot. Not after twelve years fighting them, and all the advances I’ve spurned.”
“Not to hear him talk about it.” Ben shrugged. “Not Promethean, anyway. Catesby’s aims are strictly political, and he’d love the great William Shakespeare to come in under his banner of revolution. I suspect if he knew the sort of black sorcery his friends get up to he “would be even more appalled by them than he is – for all he’s willing to compromise and let politics make what bedfellows they will, he’s a good Catholic, and wouldn’t be damned for sorcery. I think they mean to use him as they used Essex before him, as a sort of stalking horse. Come, get thy cloak.”
“Thinkst thou to educate him, then?”
“I’ll tell thee more on the way to the tavern,” Ben said, and handed Will his shoes. “No, I don’t think so at all. Not that he’s uneducable. If anything, he’s a good man, strong in his faith, willing to die for it. A fighter for freedom, and his two chief lieutenants are also quick and true.”
“And they’re plotting against the Kang.” Will latched the door behind them when they went. “What way are we going, Ben?”
“To the Irish Boy. Age before beauty, gentle Will. Lead on.”
“Then we shall have to wait for a handsome passerby, or we shall never get anywhere,” Will noted, but he did not tarry. The afternoon was cold, the rain something more than a drizzle. “Ben, it pains me to ask this of thee–”
“Aye, Will?” The banter fell from Ben’s tone like the stagecraft it was; Will could feel the weight of his expectancy.
“It wasn’t thee told Salisbury about our Bible‑crafting, was it? When thou wert so unhappy with me?”
“Nay, I’d never do such a thing. Slather thy name in mockery and eat it with relish, aye–”
“It was mustard, not mockery,” Will said. “And the coat of arms was my father’s conceit, in any case.”
Hell and Earth pa-4 Page 20