Hell and Earth pa-4

by Elizabeth Bear

  Annie soothed his forehead with a cloth, her grayed brow wrinkled with concern. Will opened his eyes as a second shadow fell across him. Kit, bringing a basin cool from the well.

  Will sighed. “Was ever man so unworthy, so well loved?”

  “Unworthy?” Kit scoffed. “Who’s worthy of love? It makes us worthy by loving, I wot.”

  Annie said nothing, but Will knew the twisted mouth she gave Kit for approval.

  Will coughed again, too weak to raise a rag to his lips. Annie did it, and when she lowered the cloth it was spotted red. Will did not miss the look she traded with Kit, or the way Kit looked down and to the left. “Do you suppose I’ll be damned for sorcery, like poor Sir Francis?” Which wasn’t quite what Will had planned to say, but talking weakened him too much to retract the question and start over.

  “You must not think such things,” Annie said. “Tomorrow’s thy birthday, husband. Surely thou’lt heal?”

  Kit met her eyes again when Will did not manage an answer, and set the basin aside. Annie cleared her throat and turned hastily away. “Sorcery was the least of Sir Francis’ sins, ” Kit said, stroking Will’s hair back from his brow.

  “I’ve lost my ring, Kit,” Will said. “At Judith’s wedding–” His trembling fingers tried to tighten, and Kit took them in a savage grasp.

  “You won’t need a ring with Annie and I to hold your hand.”

  Will turned his head to regard the smooth line of Kit’s jaw behind the beard. “Thou didst age nary a day, my love.”

  “The price for dying young.” Kit stepped away to make room for Annie as she came back with a cleaner rag.

  “Love,” she said. “Thou shouldst rest. Thou shouldst sleep, and thou wilt heal–”

  Will closed his eyes. The cold water did help, but his thoughts were startlingly clear for a fevered man, and from what he knew of deathbeds, that was no hopeful sign. “I don’t want to go to Hell, as Sir Francis did.”

  “Thou dost wish not the Promethean Heaven, either. You’d know not a soul.” Kit, still joking, but his fine‑fingered hands were knotted in the sleeves he had folded them over.

  Will forced a wavering chuckle. “Nay… . Oh, there’s going to be such poetry, Kit. I am sorry that I will miss it.”

  Annie cleared her throat. “You’re not going to Hell, gentle William,” she said, and wet her cloth again. Kit rose when she gestured him away and left the fireside to lean against the wall. Will saw his face, and turned his face away. Oh, Kit. Were you ever privileged to love where love was not given first elsewhere? Even once?

  “Annie. Kit will tell you–”

  “Kit told me,” she said, and Kit cleared his throat and looked down at the floor. “Will, the priest is here.”

  “Priest?”

  “A Romish priest,” she said firmly. “If after thirty‑four years of marriage, you think I’m going to Glory without you, you’re a bigger fool than I imagined, Will Shakespeare!”

  Kit, leaning against the wall, stood suddenly upright, turned his head, and laughed. “Annie, you’re brilliant.”

  “Hardly,” she said, taken aback. She twitched her hair over her shoulder and turned.

  Kit’s expression practically shone with excitement. “A Romish priest. Whose doctrine is that bodies must be buried in hallowed ground, and that the soul remains with the flesh until the End of Days.” He paused, and looked down at the rushed floor, laughing harshly. “Apparently, God can’t be arsed to check under the cushions for the souls that slip out his purse.”

  “Aye,” she said. “It’ll give you a chance to get what you owe Will sorted out before Judgement Day, and find this kinder God you’ve been pratting about for the last three days. Lord knows, Kit Marlin, it’s likely to take so long, for thee.”

  Will huddled under his muffling blankets, sick with stubbornness. Repent of your sins and be forgiven.No. He would not. He would not repudiate Kit, on his deathbed or for any reason. “Nay. I shall not repent of thee.”

  “Will‑“

  “Wife,” he said. “Do not ask it.” He looked to Kit for support, but Kit, looking as if his heart were squeezed in a bridle, shook his head.

  “Do you,” Kit commanded, and Will flinched–not at the command, but at the distancing–and saw Annie look away. “Do you repent of me, and you are Heaven bound. Thou didst brave Hell for me one time. ‘Twill serve.”

  Will glared. “And wilt thourepent, Kit?”

  “I will not.”

  “I will not leave thee alone in Hell.”

  “You will. Imprimus, I have no plans to die. Secundus, you married Annie. You willhonor your loyalty to her.”

  “The world…” Will said, frustrated. And turned his face aside. He would not see Kit weep. Kit would not care to have him do so. The list of what the world would not allow was long for mourning over.

  Kit, his face strangely taut, turned to Annie and clapped her on the arm. “Only a woman would think to stall God to her convenience. Well‑reasoned, chop logic.”

  She nearly smiled, and touched Kit on the shoulder lightly. And Will almost imagined he heard, nearby, the flicker and settle of massive wings.

  Author’s Note

  First and foremost, I would like to thank Mr. Tony Toller, trustee of the Rose Theatre Trust, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the remains of Bankside’s first theatre, the Rose. It was through the kindness of Mr. Toller that I was able to visit the site of that theatre, and stand – quite literally– where Ned Alleyn, Philip Henslow, and Christopher Marlowe stood, although the Rose was not then an archaeological site housed in the damp, breathing darkness under a modern skyscraper.

  Plans are afoot to preserve the site and continue excavations and research, and as of this writing, fundraising for these projects is under way. If you are interested in learning more about this important historical and archaeological work – or in supporting it –details may be found at www.rosetheatre. org.uk.

  This pair of novels has been a labor of years, and over the course of that time a lot of people have offered comment or listened to me whine. I also wish to thank first readers, bent ears, inspirational forces, and others both on and off the Online Writing Workshop (and the denizens of its invaluable writers’ chat) and various other online communities: Kit Kindred, Matt Bowes, Lis Riba, Sarah Monette, Kat Allen, Stella Evans, Chelsea Polk, Dena Landon, Brian and Wendy Froud, Liz Williams, Treize Armistedian, Rhonda Garcia, Leah Bobet, Chris Coen, Ruth Nestvold, Marna Nightingale, Hannah Wolf Bowen, Amanda Downum, Rachele Colantuono, John Tremlett, Gene Spears, Mel Melcer, Larry West, Jaime Voss, Walter Williams, Kelly Morisseau, Andrew Ahn, and Eric Bresin. I would also like to thank Ellen Rawson and Ian Walden, who graciously opened their home in England to me when I visited on a research trip in 2006. I’d also like to thank my editor, Jessica Wade, and my agent, Jennifer Jackson. Most sincere gratitude to my copy editor, Andrew Phillips, who is not only something of an Elizabethan historian in his own right, but also meticulous and intelligent. And I’m sure I’ve forgotten several people who deserve to be here, but as I’ve been writing this book since Christmas of 2002, I hope they will forgive me.

  The present work would have been impossible to complete without the recent outpouring of popular scholarship concerning the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and in particular Mssrs. Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe. In addition, I consulted the work of multifarious authors, dabblers, artists, and historians. I have never met Park Honan, Anthony Burgess, Stephen Booth, Peter Ackroyd, Charles Nicholl, Michael Wood, Liza Picard, Stephen Greenblatt, David Riggs, David Crystal, Constance Brown Kuriyama, Peter Farey, Jennifer Westwood, Antonia Frazier, Alan H. Nelson, C. Northcote Parkinson, Elaine Pagels, Jaroslav Pelikan, Lawrence Stone, Gustav Davidson, Richard Hosley, Alan Bray, Michael B. Young, Peter W. M.. Blayney, Katharine M. Briggs, or any of the other wonderfully obsessed individuals whose work I consulted in preparing this glorious disservice to history. However, I owe them all an enormous debt of gratitude, and I spent i
mmeasurable pleasant hours in their company while in the process of writing this book.

  A couple of historical and linguistic quirks for the reader’s interest: the Elizabethan year began on Lady Day, in late March, rather than January 1. In result, Christofer Marley was, to his contemporaries, born at the end of 1563 and William Shakespeare at the beginning of 1564. To a modern eye, their birth‑dates would be in February and April, both of 1564.

  I have chosen to preserve this quirk of the times, along with a characteristic bit of English in transition: at the time to which the writing refers, the familiar form of the English second‑person pronoun (thee) was beginning to drift out of use, but had not yet lost the war, and the plural pronoun (you) had–under French influence–come to be used as a singular pronoun in more formal relationships, but was not exclusive. As a result, conversation between familiar friends showed a good deal of fluidity, even switching forms within a single sentence, depending on the emotion and affection of the moment.

  I have not availed myself of such transitional forms of address for nobility as were in use at the time, under the belief that it would cause more confusion than it would be worth; instead, I’ve tried to limit courtesy titles to one per customer, for clarity. Also, I have discarded the Elizabethan habit of referring to oneself in the formal third person (“Here sitteth –”), with the exception of sparing use in correspondence, etc. As well, during the time period in question, that same older third‑person verb conjugation ‑eth (She desireth, he loveth, she hath, etc.) was being replaced by the modern ‑s or ‑es, so that in some cases words were written with the older idiom and pronounced in the modern one. In the interests of transparency–this is a work of fiction, intended to entertain, after all – sincere attempts have been made to preserve the music of Early Modern English while making its vocabulary transparent to the modern eye and ear, but what is rendered in this book is, at best, nature‑identical Elizabethan flavoring rather than any near approximation of the genuine animal.

  I recommend David Crystal’s excellent books Pronouncing Shakespeareand Shakespeare’s Wordsfor an accurate picture of the speech of the times.

  I was unable or unwilling to avoid the use of some words that have a well‑defined meaning in Modern English, but are slipperier in EME, and to which our own cultural assumptions do not apply. Those who were spoken of as Atheists did not necessarily deny the existence of a God, though they denied God’s goodness and agency in intervening in mortal lives, for example. Likewise, the word “sodomy” covered a lot of ground, and it was legally punishable in proportion to witchcraft and treason… but the practice of male same‑sex eroticism seems to have been largely winked at, or at worst satirized. You can explore two conflicting takes on the homoeroticism of the day in Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance Englandand Michael B. Young’s King James and the History of Homosexuality;feel free to draw your own conclusions, as I have. At the very least, the modern ideas of homosexuality or heterosexualiry as the foundation of one’s persona did not have much currency to the Renaissance mindset; however, we can be fairly certain that, the social demands of reproduction aside, the desires of men (and the less‑well‑documented desires of women) no doubt inhabited the usual sliding scale of preferences.

  Of course, even Platonic Elizabethan same‑sex friendships

  could be very intense, passionate in modern terms, and one can find examples in Shakespeare and other chroniclers of the times of the vocabulary of love used casually between friends and nothing thought of it. However, some squeamish criticism to the contrary, it is this reader’s opinion that the language of Shakespeare’s sonnets is homoerotic rather than homosocial, and I have chosen to run with that reading. It also seems to me that, while those poems were at first only privately circulated, he does not seem to have believed his friends would be too shocked. Of course, this leaves open the question of whether any biographical analysis of those selfsame sonnets can be considered reasonable; they may very well have been an interesting work of fiction.

  Much as this.

  Back to cultural drift. On the family front, a cousin was not the child of an aunt or uncle, but merely any relative close enough to be considered kin, but not a member of the immediate family – a niece or a third cousin twice removed as easily as what we might consider a “cousin.”

  Some historical events have herein been consolidated for the sake of narrative clarity, and a few dates altered (notably moving the construction of the Globe back a year to ease narrative clutter, moving the Essex rebellion by a day for purposes of pacing, and removing Master Richard Baines to France some few years afterhis historically documented tenure at Rheims to put him there when Marley might have theoretically been in residence). Several taverns of historical interest have been condensed into the famed Mermaid, which I have made the haunt of poets and playmakers some years before its historical heyday. Certain notable individuals have been dispensed with entirely, or prematurely, or their lives extended somewhat. In addition, Robert Poley’s daughter, Miss Anne Poley has received both a sex and a name change, and Mistress Poley, is the recipient of a first name chosen only for unobtrusiveness in the milieu, as her own is lost to history. The relationship of that same Mistress Poley, born “one Watson’s daughter,” to our old friend Tricky Tom Watson is strictly a matter of conjecture. And that is merely the most glaring alterations listed… .

  As I was trained as an anthropologist rather than a historian, and as the preceding is a work of fiction, I have chosen to apply the standard that absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence, and I’ve chosen to make free with some conjectures frequently presented as absolutes (such as Anne Hathaway’s alleged illiteracy) which are not documented but rather a part of the common legendry and educated guesswork. In addition, certain questionable bits of tradition relating to the authorship of various notable works of sixteenth‑ and seventeenth‑century literature (Edward III,the King James Bible)and the original ownership of certain objects (notably the Stratford churchyard “W.S.” signet ring) are treated as fact rather than rawest speculation. And I must admit that my interpretation of intentions behind the post‑Lopez revival of The Jew of Maltaand The Merchant of Veniceis, at best, bogus–though not quite as bogus as my chronology of Shakespeare’s plays.

  History is not narrative, alas. And Elizabethan political and theatrical history is less narrative than most. To paraphrase Velvet Brown, the facts are all tangled up together and it’s impossible to cut one clean.

  This is a work of fiction. While there are any number of actual factsenmeshed in the web of its creation, it should not be treated as representative, as a whole, of my opinion on any particular historical theories or opinions. Nor should my suggestions regarding additions to the seemingly endless litany of Christopher Marlowe’s suspected lovers be taken seriously. It’s vilest calumny, all of it.

  Well, except the part about Edward de Vere’s proclivity for transporting choirboys across international boundaries for immoral purposes. That’s the gospel truth.

  The choirboy in question was sixteen at the time of the transportation; his name was Oracio Coquo. “I knew him, Horatio – ”

  … okay, that was uncalled‑for.

  To sum up, I consider this novel to be a grand disservice to antiquity in the tradition of those innovators whose Fictionalized Histories linger in vogue to the present day, and don’t consider it necessary to be any more faithful to Kit and Will than they were to assorted British Sovereigns not of the Tudor persuasion.

  Really, considering what they wrought upon various Edwards and Richards and maybe the occasional Henry or so, Kit and Will deserve whatever the Hell they get from me.

  It’s been a deep and abiding joy telling lies about them, however, and I’m pleased they came into my life. I do, however, hope that they are sharing a fine laugh at the irony of it, wherever they are.

  After all, we’re each storytellers here.

  About the Author

  Originally
from Vermont and Connecticut, Elizabeth Bearspent six years in the Mojave Desert and currently lives in southern New England. She attended the University of Connecticut, where she studied anthropology and literature. She was awarded the 2005 Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

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