All Night Awake (9 page)

His soul?

Will had never understood elves. Old legends heard when he was young had said elves were ghosts or demons or a long-lost people.

Did Silver truly want Will’s
soul
? Oh, he’d lost much, but he’d not give that up.

Were elves, then, the demons some legends claimed they were? Or the unquiet dead seeking revenge on life?

Will pulled his arm away from her, and stepped back. He remembered the lying dream that spoke of elves, but he could not remember the details.

It had been a mad dream, a dream that promised Will greatness, only to let waking reality disappoint him.

He remembered the time he’d fallen into the tangled affairs of elves and how Silver’s seduction then had been naught but an attempt to involve him in killing the fairy king, her brother, and stealing the throne from him.

Had Silver succeeded, indeed, Will would have been dead long ago.

Would not her plots now be similar to her traps and schemes then? Self-serving plans that bode Will no good.

And did Will believe this immortal creature would have shed a tear for him, had he died in fulfilling her plans?

He looked at the reflective, shining silver eyes that, overshadowed by a rich canopy of black lashes, stared so enticingly into his own eyes.

His body’s weak senses longed to be overwhelmed by all her beauty and to lay complyingly within her enticing arms. But his mind knew better and whispered to him of treason and mistrust.

He stepped away from her. The movement wrenched at his own heart. He shrank away from the reach of her soft, white hand, though he needed that touch more than he needed the air he breathed.

He stepped back till he found, behind him, the decaying wooden wall of the house where he lodged. “When has elf been friend to man, milady? When have you been my friend? You would use me for your purposes, nothing more.”

Silver shook her head, the silken sheaf of her hair rustling in the too hot, too still, too humid night air that was as bad breath, tainted with the odors of London and its wastes.

“You use me ill,” she said.

Her face, frantic with some passion, her eyes narrowed and blinking to keep tears away, she looked human and frail and without cunning. “You use me ill and you should not use me thus. For I come in great important business, not just for me, but for mankind entire.”

The thought of Silver caring about humanity seemed incongruous enough, unlikely enough to keep Will from the depths of desire and awaken in him a shocked interest. “Mankind?” he asked.

She nodded.

Will shook his head and swallowed hard. Her beauty had its effect upon his heart, like the flame of a candle that, shining upon wax, will soften it. Yet he could resist the melting warmth and the molten beauty that gazed upon him from those shimmering metallic eyes. But the thought of Silver concerned with low, ephemeral humans puzzled him so that he could not walk away from
that.
If she lied not, then here was wonder indeed.

“Please, lady,” he said, both voice and words less resolute than he’d hoped. He wanted to know why she cared for humans, and yet he wanted her to leave him alone. “Please, lady. I am but a fool, but not such a fool who doesn’t know the havoc your kind can wreak. Please go. Be gone. For you must mock. You, care for humans?”

The lady trembled. From the melting eyes, two tears dropped, rolling down her curved cheek like twin crystalline globules, upon which Will saw all his future.

He’d die in London, a lonely, desperate man. He’d never again see a glimmer of magical beauty. Never again would he touch something like the silk of Silver’s skin. Never.

“Humans and elvenkind, in this conjoined,” she said. “Will meet twin dooms if you help me not.”

This was fantastical and unbelievable. “Lady, you have to go.”

Silver looked down at him, her eyes like a wet day, all rainy where it was wont to be bright. “I have nowhere else to go,” she said. “I cannot—

“I cannot go,” she screamed. She covered her face with her pale hands and the whole of her slim body trembled.

She reached for his arm, and encircled his wrist with her small hand. The touch of her hand, soft upon his skin, made her seem human, frail, in need of protection. It made her seem like the Silver he remembered.

“To whom will I go if you don’t let me abide?” Tears chased each other down her face. “I’ve
had
to come to London.” She stomped her foot and bit her lip, but resolution crumpled upon her face and her eyes filled with tears. “In London I have to remain till I find my brother Sylvanus.”

“Your brother?” Mention of the deposed King of Fairyland, the same mention that the three creatures had made upon his dream, riveted Will’s attention. He remembered Sylvanus as even more scheming than the run of elves. Sylvanus had tried to steal Nan before the Hunter took Sylvanus. Sylvanus would have had Will killed to leave Sylvanus’s path free to wooing Nan.

“Your brother? Is your brother in London? Why would he be?” Creatures of glade and dale, elves both good and bad, did not belong in London’s reek, in London’s crowded, teeming streets, with their tall houses that obscured the daylight.

“My brother . . .” Silver sighed and cried, tears chasing each other down her little rounded cheeks to drip upon her bosom, where they ran down in rivulets between the twin globules of her breasts like a mountain stream disappearing into a deep crevice. “My brother has . . . . He attacked the Hunter. He . . .”

“But your brother is in
thrall
of the Hunter,” Will said. His astonishment made him forget his hunger, his fear of Silver, his desperate straits. “The Hunter’s slave. The Hunter’s dog. Can a slave thus attack his master?”

He tried to keep his eyes away from the destination of those drops of water that left her eyes only to travel to more intimate locations, and yet his eyes traced their path down her cheeks, to her velvety bosom, and imagined the course beyond, beneath her perfumed garments.

He forced his gaze up as one who forces an errant child back to his books. He made himself meet her gaze. “When last we met, you told me that the Hunter was stronger even than elf and that no elf could escape his thralldom. Now you tell me Sylvanus has escaped?”

Silver trembled, and could do no more than multiply the soft progression of her tears.

She nodded, though, and sighed, her sighs like a gentle spring breeze.

This close to her, with her body touching him, Will didn’t smell the rot and garbage of London’s least fashionable district, but the warm scent of lilac from Silver’s skin.

It reminded Will of spring in Stratford, that hometown he despaired of ever seeing again.

He marshaled all his power to resist her, but all his power broke like a dam, carried away by her flood of tears. How could he be her enemy when she was thus, soft and broken and defenseless? How could he call on the iron of his will against an enemy whose weapons were gentle words and desperate pleas? How could he turn harsh and savage when she cried and begged his help?

Yet she was no more, no less than the other aspect of the king of elves and that Quicksilver was neither soft nor defenseless. But knowing this didn’t help. What Will saw overwhelmed what he knew, his eyes reaching for his heart and past his mind.

It didn’t matter what Will’s reason said, when argued against the persuasive argument of his vision.

What mattered it if Quicksilver’s muscles lay hidden beneath this silky skin, these tender charms? It was the Lady Silver whom Will beheld. It was she who cried.

He found his arm, as though of its own accord, encircling those shoulders that felt so frail.

And all the while—while Will’s mind censured him his easy giving in and what would be yet another betrayal of Nan—Silver’s hair tickled his cheek, her perfume filled his nostrils and her beauty dazzled his mind.

He felt giddy. Giddier than hunger alone could make him.

This wasn’t love. Oh, Will knew that.

He knew what love was—Nan’s companionship, her loyalty, her sleeping form warming him through the night.

That was love. That, and the respect that came from knowing and believing in another’s mind and reason as in his own—that alliance of two beings against the madding world.

But this quickening of the blood, the sudden pulses that thrilled upon his veins like perdition; this whispering of a reason older than man that spoke not to the brain but to the eyes—this was much like being drunk, like being crazed, like being a babe, innocent, and led here and there in the arms of a loved nurse.

It was like iron pulled by a magnet, like rain falling helplessly to earth, like a boat drifting on a current, like praying and trusting a higher power.

Will let his body act and let it go, arm over Silver’s up the rickety steps to the door to his room.

Standing on the tiny platform, outside his door, his arm around Silver to balance her, Will slipped the key in the lock and opened it.

And all the while his hands trembled, and it was like an ague, like a fever—like anything which mere man can’t help.

He knew what he wanted, what he craved, the longing for her that drove all his senses. But even to himself he could not confess it, lest removing his denial would render him her too easy prey.

In his room, he wrapped his arms around the immortal creature that trembled and sobbed within his embrace.

His sagging, small bed, with its worn blankets, the lopsided old table that served him as a desk, even his better suit which he threw down as he came in, all looked shabbier, older in her presence.

His room smelled of old meals, of dirty clothes, of dust.

The taper he lit smelled of burnt bacon and smoked, casting only a timid and dismal light.

Her perfume filled his nostrils, and his mouth ached to feel the soft caress of her skin, to taste the exquisite wine of her tongue.

He closed his eyes and pulled her tight. He lowered his mouth to hers.

Her mouth tasted like wine, her skin felt like madness, his heart beat like the rhythm of a youthful dance.

The knock upon the door startled them both. They sprang apart. She laughed, a high silvery laugh.

But the knocking had awakened Will’s reason.

With no money, he couldn’t even afford to pay his back rent, much less the standard fine for adultery, which would be levied should his pious landlord denounce him to the Church.

And Will’s landlord, who was bound to be at the door, having been awakened by their movement, their talk, would want the back rent and, finding this dazzling lady here, in Will’s quarters unchaperoned,
would
denounce Will for adultery.

Trembling with fear now, all lust dispersed, Will shoved Silver into a corner of the room, where she couldn’t be seen from the door. He whispered fiercely, “Hush, milady. Don’t move and not a sound, if you ever prized my friendship.”

On such flimsy warranty, and fearing very much what she might not do, Will ran his hand back through his hair, smoothing the imagined mark of her hand.

And he opened his door.

Scene 8

The tall, closed carriage trundles by, not far from Will’s lodgings. Inside it, Kit Marlowe looks rumpled, sweaty, and very scared. He stares from Henry Mauder to the other man, his eyes twin mirrors of despair.

K
it Marlowe was scared.

From outside the carriage, the softer fall of the horses’ hooves told him that they’d left behind the paved area of town and moved now at the outskirts of London.

Were they headed to the tower?

Kit almost smiled at the thought.

Kit was but the son of a Canterbury cobbler, with neither title, nor connections, nor fortune. How could he be taken to the tower like a nobleman? It would almost be an honor in itself, were it true.

Yet the death that would find him in the tower’s stony rooms would be as silent, as worm-eaten, as perpetual, as a humble death in a cottage.

The smile faded from Kit’s lips.

Dark prospects loomed before him as he stared at Henry Mauder’s yellow teeth, Mauder’s disdainful smile. He could see himself dead, and worse, he could see Imp dead beside him.

From the racing river of his fear, words issued, spoken in a cringing, lost voice that reminded Kit of his own father talking to an important customer.

“Your honors, I am a playwright. This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, evolutions.”

As always with Kit, panic betrayed itself in a running of the mouth in incessant, high-sounding, little-meaning words. He tried to check the words but he couldn’t, they would go on flowing from his mouth—a river of incontinent explanation.

“These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of
pia mater
, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.” By an effort of will, he managed to arrest the flow, his words checking upon a deep breath, something like a ghostly sigh.

Mauder and the other man look puzzled.

Kit bit his lip, and found his Cambridge diction once more. “That’s all I am, all. Just a playwright and a poet. Nothing more. Too much for me these intrigues, too high for me these philosophical opinions. How can you accuse me of being an atheist? Atheist, I? I studied divinity, your honors. Would an atheist undertake such study?”