All Night Awake (11 page)

“Dear Wigglespear,” Kit started.

“No, please, Master Marlowe, do me the honor of not stepping into my abode, for like onto the abode of the Roman centurion, it is unfit for your presence.”

Kit blinked, stopped by such a heavy metaphor. “I’m neither God in man, nor are you . . . . No, Master Wigglestaff. I thought to do you a kindness, but I will not write on mine own knee while perched on this unsteady platform of yours.” His hand that held the pen gestured toward the precipice, unguarded and deep, on the side of the stairs that didn’t lean against the house.

“No.” He handed Will both quill and paper. “If this is how you treat your benefactors, Master Tremblelance, I can see well enough that you wish for no benefice. I shall be gone.”

A flush, like a dark red tide, climbed Shakespeare’s thick neck to tinge his cheeks. He swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple rising and falling above the frayed, dingy lace collar of his shirt.

“If that’s how you see it . . . . If that’s how you must do, Master Marlowe, I understand. Though I, myself, appreciate the attempt at helping me and wish you’d not take offense so easily. But I see . . . . I see it’s useless and I thank you for the good deed you would have done, even if averted.”

Kit turned his back and took two steps down the narrow stairs. Two steps, and he stopped, looking down at the smelly, muddy alley below. He expected Will to change his mind, to beg him to come back, to beg him to come in.

Then Kit would see the woman Will hid, and maybe learn what plot lurked behind Will’s innocent look.

But looking up, he saw that Will had started shutting the door slowly and reluctantly, as a man that sees opportunity vanish down the staircase of misfortune.

“Wait,” Kit yelled. “Wait. God’s death, man, you’re more stubborn than I.”

He forced a grin upon the creases of anger and frustration that plied his skin. “You’re more stubborn than I and that has to be good. That has to bode well for your chances to make a living in this madhouse we call London, in this plague-infested bedlam we call the theater. Here, man, here, here.” Climbing the steps in a hurry, Kit stood on the narrow perch at the top, and pulled paper and quill from Will’s hands.

“Stand not amazed,” Kit said as he squatted and set the paper on his knee, half closing one eye against the precipitous drop on one side of him. “Stand not amazed. Reach me that ink horn.” And yet, as he sat there, uncomfortable and dangerously balanced, he cast an eager eye inside the room, at the comfortless bed, the draggled stool, the precarious table.

But nowhere did he catch another fleeting glimpse of skin like cream, of hair like midnight spun, entire, from the dreams of man. Or yet of golden hair and broad shoulder and the regal bearing of the elf prince that was the Lady Silver’s other aspect.

Will knelt and offered the ink horn.

Kit dipped his quill in it and wrote quickly, with the practice and ease of one accustomed to such task.
And to none other,
he thought, making a face at remembering how clumsy he had been with his father’s cobbler tools, in his far-off, despised childhood. He remembered his father’s frustrated rage at what he viewed as Kit’s intentional clumsiness, and Kit’s mind skittered away from further memory.

Philip Henslowe,
he wrote.
I beg you as a favor and a consideration, if you wish me to bring you my next play first, that you look upon my friend, Will Shakespeare, of Warwickshire for a role in the play you currently present. It need not be a great part. A mute servant, a silent friend will do, provided he gets paid at the end of the day.

He underlined the last line three times, well acquainted with Henslowe’s occasional lapses from honesty, with the actors that never got paid until they cornered the theater owner and, by the force of fists and daggers, demanded their share of the day’s take.

But if you would, of your kind heart, do my friend a favor, this poor playwright would feel indebted enough not to show his next play to milord of Pembroke’s men first.

He signed it with a flourish, writing his name with the same spelling he’d used at Cambridge,
Christopher Merlin.

The more ancient spelling of his patronymic appealed to Kit’s sense of being a wizard, a supernatural being, in control of his destiny. Of being other than a poor cobbler’s son, circled by plotters, a long way from home and terrified.

He remembered the dark, swaying carriage, the threatening voices all the more threatening for rarely rising above a whisper. Sweat sprang upon his brow.

Fearful that his fear, his sudden recoil, would show in his face, he handed the paper to Will and started, quickly, down the steps, not waiting for thanks, not trying to force his way into the room again.

It was not until he was on firm ground that he realized, by the thin light of the distant moon, that he’d stained his fine new gloves with ink. The left one had a spot of ink near the index finger.

He rubbed at it to no avail as he hurried home through darkened streets.

Home to Imp, whose life depended on the cunning of his undeserving, unknowledged father.

Will would do for baiting Kit’s trap, but now the trap remained to be built.

And could Will indeed be made to appear the mastermind of a great plot?

Kit shook his head. Hard to tell. For who knew what hid in the hearts of men? Kit had always been good with words and the building of fiery illusions with his rhetoric. And he’d ever been bad—bad indeed—at guessing what other people knew or felt.

What if Will was truly a mastermind? What if he had secret contacts of his own?

Scene 9

Will’s room. Amazed, Will closes the door and turns to Silver, who stands at the farthest corner of the room, leaning on the dingy wall.

“W
ill?” she asked, and her voice trembled in asking it. Silver bit her lip, but it didn’t help. It would not keep the tremor at bay, and her voice trembled again as she piped uncertainly, “Was that Kit Marlowe? Was it Kit Marlowe at the door?”

Through her mind ran memories she thought long forgotten, memories of Kit Marlowe as a shy, demure divinity student.

At least half the fun of seducing him had come from that shy way of his, his uncertainty about how to act, how to behave, his conviction that he was doing something horribly wicked and out of bounds for a Christian soul.

Which—Silver knowing precious little of mortal souls, Christian or else—he might very well have been.

But she remembered Kit’s eager enthusiasm, once his hesitation had vanished.

Silver remembered Kit’s lips searching, seeking, attempting to drink her very soul, his lust such as only a young man can feel in the early spring of his years.

She remembered their bodies entwined beneath the ancient copse of trees in the abandoned monastery at the outskirts of Canterbury.

Once he’d lost his reserve, how he had loved, and how the love of elvenkind had maddened him, beating upon his heated blood like the smith’s hammer upon red-hot iron.

Kit had loved Silver and Quicksilver both, the elf in both aspects, not caring under which form the elf embraced him, so long as the elf did.

Silver herself hadn’t loved Kit, couldn’t pretend to. As for Quicksilver, as much as Silver could understand that side of her nature, Quicksilver had nurtured for Kit a tender infatuation that yet fell as short of true love as the light cast by a firefly fell short of the shine of a star.

But she remembered that fevered love of Kit’s, that adoration that had perfumed her nights like incense.

Remembering it, her heart beat faster, her heart beat kindly for the man she’d just seen—his face pinched by some unnamed worry, his smiles all cynical pretending and his generosity a strange, imposing one that made no sense and seemed to strike against the normal way of courtesy.

“Was that Kit Marlowe?” she demanded, grabbing Will’s sleeve and holding it until the man, seemingly waking, blinked at her.

“Kit? Yes, it was Kit,” he said. “And look you here, he has given me an introduction to the theater owner and told me if I go early, I’ll surely get a job. Look, and he signed it with his own hand.”

Looking over Will’s shoulder, Silver read the signature and felt a sick turn in her stomach.

Merlin.

Oh, Kit was of that race well enough. It had been the unused elven magic burning in him, the unaware icy power hidden beneath the eager human fire that first had called her to him. But his being of Merlin’s race meant not that he had Merlin’s power. With Sylvanus raging free, Kit’s heritage was a dangerous flag that he should not wave.

She wished Kit would not blazon forth that name as a shield, when it would shield him from precious little.

When it could well call the attention of Sylvanus, Sylvanus who fed on death and suffering, Sylvanus . . . .

Silver felt as though she’d swallowed a lump of ice whole and it had nestled in her stomach, leeching her limbs of strength. She’d thought she cared not for Kit and yet, at the thought of what might happen to the man should Sylvanus find him, both her heart and Quicksilver’s outraged feelings rose in alarm.

She had thought she cared not for Kit, but still something in her did care for him or for that memory of their joint youth so conjoined with the tender memory of his love for her.

Once more, Silver fell short of true elven ice and detachment. Sylvanus would have laughed at her.

But she’d thought Kit away from London. She’d thought him safe. She’d kept track of his movements over the years. Some protective quality remained after the lust had burned out.

And she’d thought Kit away from London. She’d thought him safe. She’d never thought to worry for him as she worried for Will.

Now panic quickened and outraged dormant affection. It was as though her youth itself were threatened and her tender memories under siege.

“Why is he in London? What brought him here?” She felt something like a premonition, though her power didn’t run to prophecy. She felt a cold despondent fear, a thing somewhat like what humans talked about when they said as if someone walked over their grave.

Will waved her away. “It matters not. Look here, it gives me the power, it gives me a chance to get a job in the theater. Look here, it gives me a chance to learn how to write plays by watching them acted and how the audience reacts. And you heard what Kit Marlowe said, about my talent. You heard what he said, he who is the very Muses’ darling.”

“What
did
he say?” Silver asked, not caring, feeling only that though elves had no graves, their stuff melting into the magic and fire that had first created the universe, something had touched her and foretold . . . 
death.
For her or for whom? For Kit? For Will? For the whole cursed world?

Though Kit was vain and shallow, though Kit had grown older and pinched, yet Silver remembered him in the warm heat of his youth. And though there was to Will that meanness which tightened his eyes and focused him only on his wife and brood, yet Silver had loved him once, loved him truly. Perhaps—she thought, as she looked on those golden falcon eyes, the intensity of the emotions that showed on his face—perhaps she loved him yet with some corner of her being, some particle of her magical might.

As for the world, she would fain save that, too, if for nothing else because human and elven worlds were linked and a blight on one was a blight on the other. And because Quicksilver had loosened this doom upon the world.

She thought of the withering crops, the mist of magical plague spreading as Sylvanus’s dark might swept over the fields toward London. The plague had been birthed by Sylvanus’s monstrous corruption of his state.

What was the equivalent of that withering, in the elven world?

She couldn’t contact Ariel with her mind. Not without Ariel’s finding out more about Silver than Silver wished Ariel to know. She hoped the hill was well.

Will was telling her about what Kit had said, and what he had implied, about Will’s wish to succeed.

“Listen, listen, Will, you must listen to me,” she said, possessed of renewed energy and attempting to make the mortal hear her as he had not before. “You are in danger. That is why I came here. I didn’t know that Kit was in danger also. But he is, and you must listen. My ill-begotten brother has hurt the Hunter and thus made the world rock upon its foundations—the plague, you mentioned it to Kit—the plague is the effect of what my brother did to the Hunter.”

Will looked up from his paper and swept her with an unattending, uncaring gaze. “The Hunter? What am I to the Hunter or the Hunter to me? Why come you to London to tell me that woodland divinities are threatened?”

“The Hunter is not a woodland divinity. The Hunter is . . .” Silver’s words failed her. She put both of her hands on Will, one on each shoulder.

She looked intently into his eyes. “The Hunter is ancient and important and I did not know he could be injured, and he says, he says if—”

She shook her head, stopped. She did not wish to tell Will about the fire in Stratford.

She could well imagine how he would react to such a threat to his family.

Even less did she wish to acknowledge Quicksilver’s guilt in what had transpired.