Aegypt

by John Crowley

  Arcady. What on earth would she have done, she thought humbly, if she hadn’t had Arcady to come to, great dull brown Arcady with its big flagged veranda and its wicker chaise longue where she could lie with a book in the sweet coolness, as she had as a child, a library book into whose pages crept the summer outside and the far hills; what would she have done? How did people bear it, who had no place to go, when something dreadful had to be done and they weren’t ready yet to do it?

  ‘You notice,’ Boney said, seeing her turn back to Bitten Apples, ‘how he uses little dashes instead of quote marks, when people talk.’

  ‘Yeah. I think that’s sort of confusing.’

  ‘Well I think so too. Hard to read. But now do you know why he does that? He explained it to me once. He said he just couldn’t bring himself to claim that all these historical figures really said, quote quote, what he has them say. They never really said these things, he told me; not really. And the little dashes make it not seem so much like people are really talking. Sandy said: It’s more like you’re dreaming of what they must have said, if they did the things they did.’ He looked down slowly, unmoving, at Sam, who had approached him just as slowly. ‘That’s all,’ he said gravely. He and Sam looked at each other, her blond head bent up, his lizard’s head bent down. ‘Hello, Sam.’

  Rosie received the bundle of her daughter in her lap with a grunt, Sam fleeing from Boney’s intimacy. She turned the pages of Bitten Apples, which had fluttered closed, to find her place again.

  Boney, his hand on the screen door to go out, paused. ‘Rosie,’ he said. ‘May I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll be needing to talk to a lawyer?’

  ‘Oh. Oh, Boney . . .’

  ‘I only ask because.’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t think so, yet.’

  ‘Tell me if you do,’ Boney said, ‘and I’ll call Allan Butterman. That’s all.’

  With a small smile, he went out the door, and down the wide shallow steps as though they were steep.

  Sam, watching him go, got up all of a sudden and went after him, slipping out the door before it could close on its old slow pneumatic closure, and going down the steps which were steep to her too; Boney noticed her following, but took no notice.

  And the wide afternoon still remained; long, long till lawyers, please, please. Young Will went home along Henley Street, past the shambles and the market cross, up to his father’s door, his heart beating hard, with an invitation to be one of the Earl of Leicester’s Boys from Master James Burbage to lay before his father.

  There was no one in the leather-odorous glover’s shop on the first floor. Will mounted to the chamber above, hearing voices speaking in low tones. The room was dim, shutters half-closed, and with the August day still sparkling in his eyes Will could not at first make out who stood there behind his father’s chair.

  His father wiped his eyes with his sleeve; he seemed to have been weeping. Again. In the far doorway his mother stood, hands beneath her apron, her thoughts unguessable but troubled. The man behind his father’s chair, tall, lank-haired, was his teacher of last year, Master Simon Hunt.

  —Will, Will. His father gathered the boy toward him with a two-handed gesture. Will, my own son. We have just now spoken of you.

  They were all looking at him; in the old smoked darkness all their eyes seemed to him to be alight. Will felt a tremor of apprehension that chilled the sweat on the back of his neck. He did not go to his father.

  —Will, here is Master Hunt. We have prayed long together. For you, for all of us. Will, Master Hunt undertakes a journey tomorrow.

  Will said nothing. Often lately he had found Hunt the schoolmaster here with his father, his father in tears; Hunt and he talked of the old religion in low voices, and of the sad state of the world now, and how nothing ever would go right until true religion came again into this land. Hunt had taken him, Will, aside too, and talked closely and intently to him, and Will in a paralysis of strangeness had listened, and nodded when that seemed required, understanding little enough of what was said to him but feeling Hunt’s intensity almost as a physical touch that he wanted to shake off.

  —I’m going over the sea, Will, said Master Hunt. To see other lands, and to serve God. Is not that a fine thing?

  —Where do you go? Will said.

  —To the Low Countries.

  To a famous college there, where there are learned and pious men. Brave men too. Knights of God.

  Why were they speaking to him in this way, as though he were a baby, a child to be won over to something? Only his mother had not spoken. She held herself stiffly at the door, half in and half out of the room, in the way she did when her husband reprimanded or beat her children, not daring to intercede for them and yet unwilling to be party to their punishment either. They waited, Hunt waited, for him to speak, but he had nothing to say, except for his own news, which was not now to be said: that he knew.

  —Come, boy, come.

  Tears were gathering in his father’s voice. Will reluctantly went to him; Hunt was nodding solemnly, as though yes, this were the next thing to be done. His father took him in his arms, patting his shoulder.

  —I will tell you what. I have decided – Master Hunt and I have decided, with God’s help – that you should go away with him tomorrow. Beyond the sea. Listen to me, listen.

  For Will had begun to draw away. His father would not release him. A horror was growing in his heart: they meant to deliver him to Hunt, an endless schooling, Hunt’s voice and touch always. No.

  —Oh, son, oh, son. You have a good wit, a good wit, a better wit than I. Think of it, think. There is learning there, holy learning you cannot have here, listen, Will, that is a treasure to search world’s ends for. Listen. You are a good boy, a good boy.

  Closed in his father’s arms, Will had grown weirdly calm; a cunning almost seeming not to belong to him, a whisper in his ear, made him still; and when his father felt it he released him. And held him then before him by the shoulders, smiling at Will with his mouth while his wet eyes searched his face.

  —Good lad. Brave lad. Will you not speak?

  —I will do as you like. Father.

  The tears welled in his father’s eyes. Will counseled himself: say yes, yes, only yes. His mother drew up her apron over her face.

  —There was secrecy required, Hunt said. It had to be so. We could not tell you till the last. For fear of the powers of this world.

  —Yes.

  He knelt by Will and looked into his face.

  —An adventure, boy. Going secret by dawn’s light. I will be knight, and you my page, and we will fight every devil the world shows us. For the world is full of them now.

  —Yes.

  His smile was somehow worse than his solemn face. Will’s face smiled into it.

  —Oh, there will be singing there. There will be singing there as you have never heard, and plays, and churches full of splendors made for God’s sake. As wonderful as in any book. Not like this darkened land where they hate beauty and figured song. And truth, Will. Truth to learn.

  Will took a step back from him.

  —At dawn? he said.

  —Yes, said Hunt. I go now to make all ready. Bring little, now. Everything will be provided.

  He rose, anxious and intent again, his common face, and sat at the table, where Will now saw there was money being counted out and a leather pouch. Hunt and his father put their heads together.

  —There will be lodging in London, Hunt said. My careful friend there. He is apprised of this. But the wherry thence to Greenwich must be hired . . .

  They turned again as one to watch him when Will stepped farther away.

  —I’ll go prepare, he said.

  —Do, said Hunt, with a wink. I’ll return about the middle of night. You won’t sleep?

  —No.

  —See to him, see to him, John Shakespeare said to his wife. See to him.

  But he was gone up the s
tairs to his garret room, and had latched the door before his mother could reach it.

  A fissure had opened in the world, huge, and he had found himself all in a moment on its edge. On the opposite side were his father, and Hunt, asking him to leap in; and his mother, asking him to come to her.

  But he could not. He could feel nothing but his sudden danger, he could only think fast and calmly how he could abandon them and save himself; and his mind whirred like the gears of a clock about to strike.

  —Will? his mother said softly; Will didn’t answer. From a secret niche in the wall he drew out paper, he had a fondness for paper and saved clean scraps of it when he found them; and a little horn of ink. His hands shook steadily with the beat of his heart, and only by an act of will he steadied them. He propped the paper on the sill of the tiny window, and by its light he began to write; he spoiled one sheet, and began another, more calmly, the words flying to his mind’s tongue as though his father really were speaking them: or if not his own father, then some father; a believable father, a father whose voice he could hear.

  Just after dark, he took the bundle of shirts and hose his mother had made up, and the little purse of coin his father gave him, and the new kid gloves he had made himself, all up to his room: to think and pray there, he said, and wait for Master Hunt. And when he thought his brother and sister were well asleep, and his father below at his wine, he went out the window and down the side of the house by a means he had long perfected for getting out on just such a summer night as this one was.

  Master James Burbage was in a great hurry to get out of town. A member of his company had got into a brawl with a local boy over some wench or some piece of money, and the swain had got the worst of it and might die. Burbage, furious with his man, had however no intention of waiting to see local justice done, and himself fined or worse, and at ten o’clock was seeing to the strapping-down of the last of his stage properties on the wagon, to leave by moonlight, when the boy startled him into crying out by sidling up and tugging at his sleeve.

  Did he believe the note the boy gave him? Signed, and attested by a Master Simon Hunt. Trusting he will treat with my son the said William in good faith and honestly and train him up in the trade, business and arts of player in my lord of Leicester’s company. My beloved son whose person and fortune I entrust to the said Master Burbage and the said. There was no mention of any fees; Burbage had never and would never meet this man John Shakespeare; in the dark, the redhead’s face was a mask, a mask saying I have done what was asked of me and here I am ready. No, Master Burbage did not believe it, not for a moment, any more than he believed the boy’s face. But he thought a magistrate would, if it came to that; or would anyway forgive Burbage for having believed it; and he was in a very great hurry; and the imp had an angel’s voice.

  —Get up then! he said, giving Will a boost that was nothing to the flight he had given to the boy’s full heart. Get up on the seat. No – not on the seat, then – get down in there. Well down. Good. Now, young Master Shakespeare, gone for a player, you will keep to that place until we are past Clopton Bridge, and farther on than that too. No g’yup! G’yup!

  And the little wagon train, with Master Burbage riding post and the rest perched about the wagons or riding two to a horse or walking behind trading songs and speeches (and a leathern bottle too) went out of Stratford over Clopton Bridge and south on the road to London; and Will down in the wagon turned a property crown in his hands and listened, his ears seeming to grow huge as bells, to the talk outside and the night, his heart unwilling to cease beating hard and loud.

  The note he had left for his father to find said that he had gone for a sailor to Bristol, there to take ship for the New World and make his fortune on the sea, or die in the attempt.

  ‘Telephone,’ said Mrs. Pisky, putting her head out the veranda window. ‘Telephone for you.’

  Rosie closed the book, her finger at her place. Trying for a certain calm deliberateness she got off the chaise. ‘Okay,’ she said; she sighed, what a bother, but really it was to breathe out the sudden darkness that swarmed in her – and just then over the lawn and the veranda too, what was it, oh: the heavy clouds that had brooded so long in the next county had come at last overhead. A wind was rising too. Rosie followed Mrs. Pisky through the fast-darkening house to the phone.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Rosie.’

  ‘Hi, Mike.’

  A lengthy pause, and Rosie knew that from now on, not forever maybe but for as long as made no difference, all their conversations would begin with one.

  ‘First of all,’ Mike said. ‘First of all you’ve left Sam’s nighttime diapers here. Three boxes of them.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you want to come get them?’

  ‘I think I’ve still got a couple around. In the travel bag.’

  Another silence. The ‘first of all’ had staked a claim that Rosie was satisfied to let him prosecute. If he had a list, she would respond to each item as it came up.

  ‘I’ve also found,’ he said, patient archaeologist working the midden she had left, ‘what looks like the rear-view mirror of the wagon.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I was going to epoxy it on, but I couldn’t find any epoxy.’

  ‘Epoxy?’

  ‘That’s what Gene did, only maybe he didn’t use enough. I thought we had some in the toolbox, but we don’t.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, it’s not doing you much good here.’

  She refused to answer that. It wasn’t part of the list. She waited for more. She heard him sigh, in a prefatory, brass-tacks sort of way. ‘Do you want to tell me,’ he said, ‘what your plans are, if any?’

  ‘Well,’ she said. She glanced up; Mrs. Pisky was busy, or not busy, with something in the butler’s pantry off the dining room. Rosie could see her large pendulous ear.

  ‘Do you want to try to tell me . . .’

  ‘Well there’s nothing just right now to say, Mike,’ she said softly. ‘I mean not just right now this afternoon.’ There was a sort of huff, that maybe stood for head patiently shaken, or even patience tried. ‘I mean . . .’ You were warned and none of this is any kind of goddamn surprise: that’s what she meant. Mike’s capacity always to begin the old conversations, the old negotiations, afresh from square one was inexhaustible, probably it came from having to do it in therapy. He seemed to thrive on it, as Rosie withered, became tangled and speechless, unable to finish sentences.

  ‘You mean?’ He waited. She seemed to see him shift the phone to his other ear, settle down. She knew this so well, Mike growing quiet and large and patient, waiting, exuding what Rosie called the Cloud of Power. And as she saw it it dissipated, she knew herself to be outside and beyond it, that being outside and beyond it was her reason for being here in Arcady now and not in Stonykill.

  ‘I mean I don’t have anything to say.’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  She realized her middle finger had gone numb inside the book she had been gripping tightly. She released it. There was a long soft roll of thunder like a groan of relief. She put the book down, it fluttered closed, she put her hand on it just as the title page was falling.

  ‘Well, so what are you up to?’ he said. Start fresh, new tack.

  ‘Reading.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘A book.’

  Beneath the title was the quotation from which the title was taken: These are the youths that thunder at a playhouse, and fight for bitten apples. From Henry VIII.

  ‘Rosie, I think I really deserve just a little bit of openness. I think you don’t feel I can imagine what you’re feeling, but . . .’

  ‘Oh, Michael, don’t, just talk normal, please.’ During his silence at that she made a decision. ‘I just don’t have anything to say now for a while. I don’t have anything to say that I can say. I mean it. If you really have to talk all about it right now then well you can call Allan Butterman.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Allan Butterman. He’s a lawyer.’ />
  The house had grown dark as night. There was a more authoritative roll of thunder; in the pantry Mrs. Pisky clucked and turned on the light. ‘His number’s in the phone book, I suppose.’ Great volumes of warm wet air were blundering through the rooms; Mrs. Pisky bustled quickly around the dining room, closing the windows whose light summer drapes were tossing like startled hands. ‘Listen, Mike, it’s starting to rain, I have to go find Sam. Goodbye.’

  She hung up.

  She glanced at her watch. The lawyer’s office would be closed, she’d call first thing in the morning before Mike did. If he did.

  It’s all right, it’s all right, she counseled herself, feeling calm except for the dreadful lump in her throat. It’s all right; because only the I-feel-you-think stuff, the big gasbag words, could pass between them now any longer without hurting; every common word carried too much terrible weight to be spoken, diaper, wagon, house, toolbox. Sam. We.

  So he could talk to Allan Butterman, who wouldn’t mind.

  She went out to the veranda. Furry gray clouds moved fast over the valley; the trees were pulled at and lost leaves as though it were autumn. Across the lawn Sam hurried, her hair windblown over her stricken face, and Boney shuffling behind her pulling her wagon. Dry insect-riddled leaves rose in a whirlwind around them.

  Blow it all away, Rosie prayed; blow away summer, bring the hard clear weather. She had had enough summer. She wanted a fire, she wanted to sleep under blankets, she wanted to walk in sweaters under leafless trees, clear and cold inside and out.